“You’re doing it again.”

“What?”

“Overthinking.”

Gidget scrunched her nose. “I’m just a little dizzy.” She sleeked her blonde hair back, squinting to the golden shore.

“You look pale.” It was an understatement, but not a very gentleman-y thing to point out. “Go home. The waves ain’t going anywhere.”

She twisted her head back. “Hey, Beck! My daughter is on the beach. Put your trunks back up, you creeper.”

I loved how she referred to her stepdaughter as her daughter. They’d only known each other for a few years, but this family was the realest thing I’d seen.

“What about you? Are you okay?” Edie moved her fingertips across the water.

“Never been better.”

“Still using a condom?” She arched a wet eyebrow. She’d been asking me this a lot ever since I decided I was open for business five years ago. I fought an eye roll and gave her surfboard a push with my foot. “You’re breaking the waves, Gidget. Surf or get the fuck out.”

I watched Edie paddling back to shore before I turned around to deal with Beck and Hale, only to find they were both straddling their surfboards mere feet from me.

“Show’s over.” I spat into the water. Beck jumped on his board—fucker had the core of a yoga instructor—and did the annoying groin-thrust dance douchebags do when they want to sexually harass everyone in their radius. He kind of looked like a young Matt Damon with long brown hair. He started singing “The Show Must Go On” by Queen, clutching his fist dramatically.

I’d taken Beck under my wing in hopes of making him the pro surfer everyone would drag their asses to competitions to see. He was Kelly Slater good, but he was also Homer Simpson lazy, so I was training him for his next competition in late September. I was pretty much the only person he was afraid of, so I figured if anyone could drag his ass out of bed every morning at five, it’d be me.

Hale shook his head. “Get a trim, asshole. Your crotch looks like Phil Spector.” He motioned to Beck’s dick. The latter laughed, his dong flipping like hair in a shampoo commercial. Hale turned back to me, and now the three of us were sitting like assholes, killing the waves. Peachy.

“This month’s my round, right?” The Round was what we called paying visits to the shops at the promenade, collecting protection money.

“Right.”

“Anything else I can do?” He plastered his abs to his stick. Hale had red hair, green eyes, and the soul of a self-destructive Holden Caulfield who’d been injected into the synthetic town of Todos Santos. Another thing he had that I didn’t: helicopter parents. He was getting close to finishing his master’s degree in philosophy and following his parents’ footsteps in becoming a professor. They wanted him to turn SoCal’s plastic souls into thinking individuals. But Hale didn’t want to be a professor, or even a teacher. He wanted to be a savage, like me.

“Be good and finish all your homework.” I laughed.

He splashed me like a five-year-old. “I want more responsibility. I want to be a part of SurfCity.”

Hale and I split the protection money fifty-fifty, which worked for me, because he did all the legwork. But he always pushed for more. SurfCity was my idea, my baby, my dream. I wasn’t going to share it with anyone.

“I’m serious,” he groaned.

“So am I.” I looked up and watched naked Beck paddling away, taking his hairy crotch with him. “I don’t need more help.”

“I have money. I can invest in SurfCity.”

“You can invest in getting the fuck out of my way and letting me surf.”

“Why not? You need the money, obviously. Did you find anyone yet?”

I wasn’t going to tell him about Darren and Jesse, because I wasn’t sure how shit was going to pan out, and anyway, I wouldn’t put it past Hale to try to fuck it up a little just for funsies. He was made out of the same cloth as the infamous HotHoles. Sometimes he liked to break shit for the simple reason of liking the sound of it cracking in his ears.

“None of your business.”

“It’s really hard to read you, Protsenko.”

“Or,” I tilted my chin down, smiling, “maybe you’re just illiterate at reading people, Hale.” His nostrils were comically wide. He took off on his surfboard, his own version of slamming the door in my face. I laughed. Beck appeared by my side a few minutes later, his chest rising and falling with adrenaline.

“What’s up with everyone? Gidget is acting like a chick, and Hale is acting like a pussy. It’s like you’re everyone’s abusive daddy.”

I smirked, staring at the disappearing figure of Hale, my mind on SurfCity.

“So. Same time tomorrow?” Beck pretended to punch my arm, but didn’t actually have the balls to do it.

“Yeah. Let’s make it early; I have a plan for the afternoon.”

My plan had a name, a description, and an end game.

My plan was a nineteen-year-old girl.

What I didn’t know was my plan was about to blow up in my face in a spectacular fashion, making the same breaking sound that made Hale’s balls tingle.

The first thing I did was learn Jesse Carter’s routine. I use the term “routine” loosely, because weirdo wasn’t hot on leaving her house, or room, or…bed. Her name gave me déjà vu, but I didn’t think much of it. It was a small town. I’d probably run into her at some point. Maybe I was even in her at some point.

That would be a whole other brand of awkward.

Darren told me Jesse’s dad had died when she was twelve and that had fucked her up even before those boys finished the job. He also said that meeting her seemingly spontaneously was going to be a task akin to teaching a pig how to waltz.

“You’re going to have to worm your path into her world, becauth she doethn’t leave here often,” he said on the phone. “She goeth to therapy every Thurthday, that’th in downtown Todoth Santoth, and runth the track around El Dorado every noon and every night at around three.”

Twice a fucking day? Still, none of my business.

“Interesting hours,” I commented, my eyes on the paper.

“Leth human traffic.” Of course.

I wrote everything down on a piece of paper, trying to figure out where in the fresh hell I fit in.

“What else?” I snapped my gum in his ear.

“She visith our neighbor, Mitheth Belforth, often. Eighty-thomething. Thufferth from Alzheimer’th.”

Jesse Carter sure led an interesting lifestyle. And I was the lucky bastard who was going to lure her back to the outside world.

“That’s it?” I asked.

“That’th it.” He sighed.

“No one else? Boyfriend? Best friend? Shopping sprees with Mommy at Balmain?” It left me very little room for action. I couldn’t exactly drop by her neighbor’s house unannounced and pretend to bump into her. Well, I could, if I was in the mood for getting arrested.

“Nothing.” Darren gulped. “She’s got no one.”

I squinted at the paper I held in my hand. At how little I had to work with. It’s like the girl didn’t want to exist outside the realms of her house. There was one more thing I needed from Darren. He’d already signed the contract, and everything was set and in motion. There were two clauses he insisted on, that were highlighted in bold letters. One—Jesse Carter should never, ever, ever in her life know about this deal. And two—I would never, ever, ever have a sexual relationship with her. “Break one or both, and the deal is off.”

Truth was, I skimmed the motherfucker, because Darren struck me as such an impotent man, I didn’t really think he was capable of hurting a fly.

“Email me a recent picture of her. I need to know what she looks like, you know, so I don’t hit on a rando.”

“You’re not hitting on her,” he enunciated. “You’re helping her.”

Semantics, the western society’s favorite mistress. It didn’t matter how I did it—all that mattered was that Jesse Carter would leave her fucking house. I didn’t bother to search for her online. If I read this chick correct, and I thought I did, she wouldn’t have a Facebook, Snapchat, or an Instagram. She wanted to disappear from earth, so she had.

I was about to drag her back to society.

She could come alone, or with her demons.

I really didn’t fucking care.

The photo Darren sent me was grainier than Tobago Beach and I couldn’t make much of Jesse. It looked like he’d taken a picture of her when she wasn’t looking, which made my Creep-O-Meter ding a few times. She was sitting on a tapestry bench, a copy of The Captain’s Daughter by Alexander Pushkin clasped between her hands. Her face was buried inside. All I could make out was her raven hair, snowy skin, and long lashes. I had a weird feeling that I’d already seen her, but I shoved it to the back of my mind. Even if I had, she was business now.

Strictly business.

The kind of business I didn’t want to lose.

Especially after using five hundred thousand dollars of the three million Darren had transferred to my account for importing Italian furniture to my new boutique hotel. Oops.

I decided the best course of action was to corner Jesse when she visited her therapist. I waited across from the glitzy building where the clinic was located. I sat in a coffee shop at Liberty Park and gawked through the glass wall. She parked her Range Rover in front of the building and stepped out. Her slumped shoulders looked like broken wings; her overcast eyes were where your soul went to fucking die.

My first thought seeing her was that she was nowhere near Quasimodo-ugly. She was beautiful, and that was the understatement of the fucking century.

The second thought was that I’d already seen her. I didn’t need her to gather those inky strands of hair up to see the Pushkin tattoo. A girl like that, you don’t forget. It was years ago, on the beach, but I remember how carnal the need to conquer her had been. How pissed I’d been when I’d seen her pasty-ass teenage boyfriend fondling her as soon as she’d collapsed on the sand in her little red bikini next to him. Luckily, I’d held myself back from stealing her out from under his nose.