“None of that was me,” I insisted. “That’s just what seagulls do.”
A noise drew our attention to El Soldado, who wasperched on my windowsill cleaning his feathers with an expression that said he had never done anything wrong, in his life, ever.
“Get some rest, chica. You are gonna need it.”
She kissed my forehead and shut my bedroom door behind her.
I rolled face-first into my pillow and didn’t move for a full minute. My whole body felt wrung out like an old towel stuffed at the bottom of a gym bag. It went beyond exhaustion, like every cell in my body was running on empty.
After the tournament every year I was tired in my bones, the good kind of tired, proof of effort. This was rawer—less earned. Or maybe the price was one I wasn’t sure I could keep paying.
I reached for my magic and found only a hollow feeling. Even less than what I normally had, like every usable drop had been squeezed out of me.
I shifted onto my back.
I didn’t think about him…but I did pick up my phone and opened Instagram.
I didn’t type anything into the search bar. I just happened to navigate to the Explore page. Which happened to be surf content—that was the algorithm, completely out of my hands.
I scrolled past a bleached blonde head once.
Twice
Clicked.
His account came up immediately—157k followers, a blue checkmark, and a bio that said:
Chase Perez | El Tiburón | Two World Titles
RipTide Affiliate - use my code “shark” for 10% off
Very on brand for him.
This was for research—know thy enemy and all that. I scrolled further back.
There was a lot of surfing, unsurprisingly. Competitions, training clips, slow-motion footage of him dropping into waves that were genuinely terrifying in size. A few branded posts, him holding a RipTide bottle. He was smiling, but it wasn’t the grin I couldn’t get out of my head.
This onewas?—
Wait.
Why was I thinking about his stupid grin like I knew him?
His crew showed up in a handful of shots, Tanner’s face obscured in most of them by either motion blur or his own hair. I wiped the smile that had spread across my face away.
I scrolled farther back.
More surfing. Older competition shots. He must have been twenty-one, maybe twenty-two, grinning at the camera with his real smile—unguarded.
I scrolled back to the top and found a new post, from only forty-seven minutes ago.
Him, on my beach at dusk, that specific gold-to-pink hour where everything looked better than it was. He was shirtless—because of course—leaning against a white wall, one arm behind his head, looking at the camera like it had said something mildly amusing.
His lip ring caught the light, and there was a line of muscle along his abdomen that my hands had, as of several hours ago, had direct contact with, which was irrelevant.
And his hair was perfectly mussed, just like after I had run my fingers through it?—
Wait.
