The single most condescending gesture I had ever received from a living creature, and I’d been in a meeting with RipTide’s legal team last Tuesday.
“Don’t judge me, dude. I have to give the people what they want.”
I propped my phone up against a pillar, angled it, and stepped back to check the frame. Behind me in the shot, I could see the open-air bar and the ocean beyond it, which was exactly the effortless content that kept the followers happy.
I hit record. The seagull walked directly in front of the lens and stopped.
“You’re kidding.” It was not kidding. “Move.”
I waved it off. It didn’t move.
“Shoo. I may not look it, but I will eat you, dude.”
Nothing.
I groaned, hopping up to grab him when I heard a very concerning metallic click.
The seagull had my phone in its beak.
We made eye contact.
It bolted.
I was a professional athlete and a fucking tiger shark shifter, and I had once surfed a forty-foot wave off the coast of Nazaré, and I spent the next four minutes in a full sprint down a public beach unable to catch a fucking seagull.
It flew ahead of me, unhurried, leading me south along the waterline without ever gaining altitude.
It didn’t drop my phone or veer off course. It turned when the beach curved, waited when I stumbled, and eventually banked toward a little beachside shack set back from the sand with a hand-painted sign over the window that said SHARK BITES in sun-bleached letters.
It landed on the counter, set my phone down, and stared at me.
I lunged, but it flapped away easily, settling on the grass roof,completely unbothered. I was contemplating how to climb the side of the building to grab the bastard when I got a better look at the shack.
It was small. The sign needed repainting on one side where the salt air had been at it, but everything else was clean and tended, the menu board written out in careful chalk letters, a hand-drawn sea turtle in the corner wearing tiny sunglasses. Potted succulents lined the windowsill, and a wind chime made of shells and beach glass hung in the service window, gently dancing in the breeze.
Someone who cared for it deeply had built this place slowly.
I stood there looking at it for longer than made sense.
It sat in my chest, the same feeling as in my dream, of a place that was calm and meant to cradle you.
I traveled for a living. I had stayed in hotels on five continents, and I could not have described a single one of them after checkout. I didn’t build things. I didn’t tend things.
I got on the next flight.
This place felt like a home.
I didn’t know what to do with that thought, so I tucked it away and rolled my shoulders, and by the time I leaned on the counter I was El Tiburón again.
Easy as breathing.
Easier, lately.
“Hey.” I knocked on the wood. “Anybody?—”
She popped up from below the counter with a cup of ice in one hand and a dish towel in the other, hair up, shirt tied to show off a narrow waist and wide hips, moving with the ease of someone in her own space.
For one moment her freckled face was neutral.
