Like I was nothing.
Underneath the anger, a much older hurt surfaced. The feeling of standing on a court with sand on my knees and the game already won, turning to look for a face in the stands.
Wanting to be seen being good at what I loved. Wanting to be enough.
I shoved it back down. I was very good at that.
But I wasn’t nothing. And I was going to prove it.
I thought about the stranger on the beach. How he had walked out of the ocean like he owned it, with his cocky grin, and how I had felt for hours afterward. My magic had been loud and buzzing, just waiting for me to seize it.
This doesn’t have to be a fight.
Oh, she had never seen a fight. A real fight.
I needed every advantage I could get.
I pulled into the lot at the public beach. I sat there for a minute. I looked at myself in the rearview mirror. My hair was wild in the salt air, my eyes were red, and I was, I noted with some surprise, smiling.
I was going to find him.
I was going to find him and I was going to use him.
I was going to use him in the ancient, witchy, chapter-seven-of-the-grimoire sense.
I was going to use his stupid grin and his stupid abs and his stupidyou want a closer look?teeth, and I was going to destroy this surf competition, no matter what it cost me.
CHAPTER NINE
Selena
“Am I overreacting?”
El Soldado tilted his head, unblinking.
“I mean.” I twirled a giant smoothie cup on the counter. “Objectively. As an outside observer.”
He blinked once, slowly, like he was deeply wise or thinking about french fries. With El Soldado, it was genuinely hard to tell.
The customer-service smile I’d slapped on for four hours of blending smoothies had done its job—filed the edges off the morning, replaced the raw feelings in my chest with something muted. I’d smiled at sunburned tourists and made change and said “enjoy the beach” approximately one million times, and somewhere in there, the part of me that had sat in my mother’s driveway crying had gone quiet.
“Here’s the thing,” I began. “The plan—and I’m using that word loosely—hinges on this guy being decent in bed. Which…”
I went silent, remembering a sharp grin and the shadow of a neck tattoo.
“But even after the best sex of my life, my magic was still mid at best. What am I actually going to do with a boost? Knock over their cameras?”
The seagull didn’t move—didn’t react at all, really. I let out an enormous sigh, setting my forehead on the counter.
“This is the help you give me after years of french fries? What kind of wingman are you?”
He squawked indignantly at that.
“Okay, okay, I’m sorry. You’ve been a loyal friend and confidant. It’s just…I’m really out of my depth here.”
Your small, beautiful things,my mother’s voice said, from somewhere I couldn’t evict it.
“The other thing…” I trailed off.
