HASALYNX PRESS
Read Romance Ebooks Legally — Anytime, Online, With a Monthly Subscription

Chapter 1. The Color of Water Before Sunrise

(Xenia’s POV)

The key stuck in the lock the same way it had every morning for seven weeks, like the shack was still deciding whether to let me in. I jiggled it—left, right, the particular sweet spot that made the tumblers surrender—and the door swung open with a groan that sounded exactly like an old man waking up and regretting it. Salt air rushed out to meet me, thick enough to chew, carrying the smell of board wax and dried paint and something green from the tidepools that had no business being this far from the water but was here anyway. I stepped inside and let the darkness close around me like a held breath.

The back workshop was worse than the front—no windows that mattered, just the one salt-hazed rectangle facing the alley where nothing grew except stubborn weeds and the occasional cat that stared at me like I owed it money. I flipped the light switch. The fluorescent strip buzzed once, twice, then flickered to life, casting everything in that particular shade of institutional green that makes fresh paint look diseased. My surfboard leaned against the back wall where I’d left it three nights ago, still unfinished, still staring at me with the patient accusation of something that knew I’d been avoiding it.

I ran my fingers over the teal base coat. Dry. Had been dry for weeks. The wave I kept painting—the one that started at the bottom left and arced toward the center like it was gathering courage—dissolved before it crested every single time. Not because I couldn’t paint it. Because something in my hand stopped when the wave was supposed to break, and I didn’t know if that was fear or honesty or just the particular stupidity of trying to finish anything when you’ve spent your whole life learning how to leave things mid-sentence.

“You’re still here,” I told the board. It didn’t answer. Boards never do. That’s why I liked them.

The brush was where I’d left it, standing in a jam jar of cloudy water that had started to smell like something that used to be alive. I pulled it out, wiped the bristles on my shorts—high-waisted, paint-stained, the ones with the hole in the left pocket that I kept meaning to fix and never did—and dipped it into the seafoam. The color was wrong. Too green, not enough grey, the shade of tourist-bait water instead of the real Atlantic on a cloudy morning. I mixed in a drop of something darker. Then another. Then I just stood there, brush suspended, staring at the place where the wave was supposed to crest.

And the staring became something else.

The airport in Kraków smelled like duty-free cigarettes and the particular despair of people who were leaving things behind. I was sixteen, my mother’s hand on my shoulder too tight, her voice saying “we’re starting over” in that flat Polish way that meant we have no choice, so stop crying, because crying won’t bring him back. The ground under my feet—linoleum, grey, scuffed—felt like it was shifting, like the whole building was built on a fault line no one had told me about, and I’d been waiting for the aftershocks ever since. Seven years. Twelve cities. Five apartments, three Airbnbs, two couches I’d crashed on for longer than I’d planned. The ground had never quite settled. I wasn’t sure it knew how.

“Shit,” I said to the board. It still didn’t answer.

I put the brush down. My hand went to my left pocket—the one without the hole, the one I’d reinforced with a patch made from an old band t-shirt—and found the aquamarine stone. Raw, unpolished, the size of a large grape, the color of shallow Baltic water on a day when the sky couldn’t decide between grey and blue. My grandmother had pressed it into my palm at the airport gate, no explanation, just that cool dry hand and the weight of something she wasn’t saying. I turned it once between my fingers, felt the rough-crystalline face catch on my calluses, and put it back. The ritual took three seconds. I’d done it ten thousand times. It still worked.

Annie arrived at nine, give or take. The door banged open—she never used the key, just shoulder-checked it like the shack owed her something—and she came in backwards, heels first, both hands wrapped around coffee cups that were definitely not from the shop down the street because that shop didn’t open until ten. Her hair was still damp from a dawn swim, platinum blonde plastered to her temples, and she was wearing the same linen pants she’d worn yesterday and the day before, because Annie treated laundry as a suggestion rather than a commandment.

“You’re here early,” she said, setting one cup on the workbench without checking what was underneath. “Did you sleep?”

“Define sleep.”

“Eyes closed, mouth slightly open, drooling on the pillow.”

“Then no.”

She handed me the coffee. It was black, strong, the kind that tasted like someone had brewed it through a dirty sock and decided that was character. I drank it anyway. “The board’s still not finished,” she said, looking at the surfboard with the same expression she used for tourists who asked if the water was warm in January—not judgment, just acknowledgment.

“The board’s never going to be finished.”

“That’s what you said last week.”

“And I was right last week.”

She didn’t push. That was why I trusted her. Annie had the rare gift of knowing when a thing wasn’t hers to fix, and she left it alone with the same casual grace she applied to everything except her ex-husband, who she mentioned only in the tone of someone discussing a mildly disappointing weather forecast. “Mateo’s coming this weekend,” she said, and her voice did something careful—a slight shift in register, like she was testing the weight of the words before committing to them. “He wants to learn to surf.”

“He’s ten.”

“Ten-year-olds surf.”

“Ten-year-olds also eat glue.”

“He’s my kid. He can eat glue and surf. It’s called multitasking.”

I laughed despite myself, and the sound echoed off the concrete floor and the jam jars and the unfinished board that was still staring at me. Annie smiled, quick and crooked, and we stood there for a moment in the particular silence of people who didn’t need to fill every gap with words. The fluorescent light buzzed. Somewhere outside, a gull screamed about something that probably mattered only to other gulls.

Diego appeared at noon with Cuban sandwiches and the specific energy of someone who had slept on a couch and was pretending he hadn’t. His hair was wet—fresh from the kayak rental, probably—and his linen shirt was unbuttoned one button too many, showing the top of the coqui tattoo on his chest. “I brought lunch,” he announced, dropping the paper bag on the workbench next to Annie’s abandoned coffee cup. “Also, I slept on my own couch last night, which means I have no excuse for looking like this, so let’s just pretend I got attacked by a jellyfish on the way over.”

“You don’t look like you got attacked by a jellyfish,” I said.

“That’s because I’m handsome. The jellyfish would have improved me.”

We ate in the back corner of the shack, the beaded curtain clicking behind us every time the wind from the coast road pushed through. The Cuban sandwiches were perfect—pressed flat, the bread crisp and greasy, the roast pork salty enough to make your lips pucker. Annie ate hers with her elbows on the table, which her mother would have hated and her son would have copied. Diego ate his in four bites, then stole half of mine when I wasn’t looking.

“Mateo’s coming this weekend,” Annie said again, this time to Diego. Her voice did the careful thing again, but softer, like she was practicing.

“Nice,” Diego said. “Are you going to teach him to surf, or are you going to make him watch you surf while you pretend you’re not showing off?”

“Both.”

“That’s good parenting.”

“I know.”

He laughed—too hard, at something that wasn’t that funny—and I noticed the way his hand went to his bracelet, the woven one in earth tones, and twisted it twice around his wrist before stopping. Diego had been doing that for weeks, ever since his ex had posted a photo from Costa Rica with a guy who wasn’t him and a caption that said “new adventures.” He hadn’t mentioned it. We hadn’t asked. That was the rule: we carried our damage in our pockets like loose change, visible if you looked but not something we spread out on the table.

I wondered what mine looked like to them. The rootlessness I called freedom. The way I packed my bags before I’d even unpacked them. The five ex-boyfriends in five cities, all friendly, all forgettable, all people I’d left before they could leave me. I was the common denominator. I knew this the way I knew the smell of rain on hot asphalt—not as a revelation, just as a fact of living in Florida.

Strangers came and went all afternoon. Tourists in bright sun hats who touched the boards without asking. A teenage girl who wanted to know if the turquoise in my hair was natural (no, obviously not, but the question made me want to bite something). A man who spent twenty minutes asking about the price of a longboard he had no intention of buying, his wife standing behind him with the expression of someone who had made peace with this particular form of marital disappointment. I was polite. I was cold. I watched them leave with relief so sharp it almost hurt.

Three days later, Annie found me mixing paint in the back workshop and said, “I need you to check the urchin population near the south sandbar. Before the morning lessons. The new instructor thinks the water’s too hot, but she’s from Ohio, so she thinks everything south of the Mason-Dixon is a Jurassic Park situation.”

“You want me to wade into the ocean at dawn.”

“I want you to wade into the ocean at dawn and count spiky things. Yes.”

“Because I’m the only one who knows what a sea urchin looks like.”

“Because you’re the only one who won’t scream when you see one.”

Fair point. I put down my brush—seafoam, still wrong, still not fixed—and walked to the water.

The Atlantic at dawn was the color of old pewter, flat and grey and holding its breath. The air was cooler here than at the shack, the salt sharper, and the sand under my feet was compacted and dark from the tide that had pulled out an hour ago. I waded in up to my knees, then my hips, the water warm on the surface and cold underneath, that particular Florida contradiction that never stopped surprising me. The waves were small—ankle-biters, practically—and the bottom was sandy with patches of rock that felt like petrified brains under my toes.

I stepped on something sharp.

The yelp came out before I could stop it—high and undignified, the sound of a person who had just been betrayed by the ocean. I stumbled, the water pulling at my knees, and my arms pinwheeled like a cartoon character who’d just realized there was no ground where ground was supposed to be.

And then he was there.

Hands on my arms. Fingers digging in hard enough to bruise. A voice—low, urgent, with something underneath that might have been panic or might have been training—saying, “I’ve got you, I’ve got you, don’t fight me.”

He dragged me to shore like I was drowning. I was not drowning. I was standing in three feet of water with a sea urchin spine in my heel and a very strong desire to punch whoever had just grabbed me without asking.

“Let go of my arm,” I said.

My accent was thicker than it should have been—the Polish coming up like a wave, flattening the vowels, sharpening the consonants. I hated when that happened. It made me sound like a spy in a bad movie, or worse, like someone who needed help.

He let go. His hands dropped to his sides, and he stepped back just enough for me to see him clearly. Gold chain. Dark hair, windswept, messy in a way that looked deliberate even when it probably wasn’t. Sunglasses pushed up on his head, revealing eyes the color of espresso, or maybe the bottom of the Matanzas River after a storm—dark, warm, paying attention in a way that made my skin prickle.

Lifeguard. Latin. Easy smile just starting to form, like he was already preparing the charming remark that would make me forget he’d just manhandled me out of the surf.

I knew the mechanism. I had seen it before. The Spanish exchange students at my university, the guys at the beach bars in Miami, the one who’d bought me a drink in Key West and looked at me like I was a puzzle he wanted to solve. They all had the same playbook. Smile, lean in, make her feel special, move on by Sunday.

“I’m fine,” I said, flat and cold, the way my mother sounded when she was about to say something that would leave a mark. “You can go back to your tower now.”

His face did something I couldn’t read—a flicker, there and gone, like a fish breaking the surface. “You stepped on a sea urchin,” he said.

“I’m aware.”

“They don’t always work themselves out. You should let me—”

“I said I’m fine.”

I walked back to the shack dripping wet, not looking back, and my hand was shaking when I reached for my pocket. The aquamarine stone was warm. Not from the sun—the sun wasn’t fully up yet—but warm anyway, like it had been holding its own heat, waiting for me to notice.

I didn’t know why that made me angry.

I was angry anyway.