“Could you stop being so patient for once in your goddamn life, please?”
He laughed. “Listen to me. The money helped. I won’t insult you—it helped. And not just me. Mai’s here because of you.”
“Hi.” Mai waved her burrito.
“You think I watch you and feel gratitude? I watch a guy who used to surf like the ocean was his home smile like it’s painful, and I mute it.” He sighed, scrubbing a hand down his face. “So whatever it is you need to do, you have my blessing. You’ve always had it. If you needed to hear it aloud, then I’m sorry it took you three years to call, because I’d have said it three years ago. You never had to carry this for us. Put it down.”
“What he said,” Mai echoed.
“Mai, your treatments. I don’t think…I don’t think I’m strong enough to choose this over you.”
Her expression softened. “Real family would never ask you to. Look, I felt guilty after our last call, okay? Teasing you about paying. So Marcus and I have been looking into some options. Turns out there are charities related to allthese new shifter diseases popping up. Funded by good people, Chase. People who want to do right. So you should too.”
I couldn’t say anything.
Mai filled the silence like little sisters do.
“I bet it’s a girl. You finally find a nice girl, Chase?”
“Of course he found a girl.” Marcus smirked. “That’s the only reason any guy gets his act together.”
“Speaking from experience?” She winked at him, and a small part of my brain filed that away to be upset about later.
Didn’t have a lot of moral high ground right now.
“Also, if you torch your career on live TV Saturday, fair warning, I will clip it, and I will make it my pinned post,” she added.
“How do you know it’s?—”
“Shark instincts.”
Marcus’s mouth twitched. “Call more, you jackass. We have a lot to catch up on.”
“Bye, Chase! And send me a picture of her!” Mai grinned, and then the screen went black.
I slumped against the shack’s wall, my head spinning.
I’d never imagined it like that.
Absolution.
It should have felt better, should have felt like permission to set my career on fire for a girl and a beach and a home.
But the noise didn’t stop. I’d been El Tiburón too long now, and El Tiburón had his perks. He had championships and fame; he got pulled up on stage to DJ and had girls in his DMs; he traveled the world and smiled and always got what he wanted.
Except he had never known what he really wanted. He had never really wanted anything because wanting meant slowing down and letting the hurt catch up. But then a witch who tasted like magic had crashed through all of that.
She had looked at me and seen all the jagged teeth and edges, and she had smiled. She had embraced the part of me I’d been running from the longest. It was time to stop running.
I walked down to the surf and shifted, the world blooming into senses with no human equivalent. I swam straightout, past the break, past the bar, into the deep dark that had been my meditation and my peace since I was a kid. It had been my home, even if I’d tried to run from it.
I finally slowed down and let myself feel it, let it speak to me like before I’d tried to fold up the shark and lock it away.
The static was everywhere.
It wasn’t just a patch near the runoff, but woven through everything, like how magic was woven into the cove. Except this was the inverse, a wrongness threaded through the water.
The water had told me, but I’d blocked it out just like I’d blocked out so much these last few years.
