Page 33 of Bombshell

There was only one woman I wanted to touch me for the rest of our lives and she had green hair and a mean as fuck temper.

“Fine, I’ll keep you posted.” Art hung up the phone before I could say anything else and I was left stewing as I returned to Santi.

“Who was that on the phone?” the Del Mar asked as he played a video loudly on his phone. I peered around to find that he was watching cooking videos.

A laugh bubbled out of me. “Since when were you interested in cooking?”

Santi Del Mar was even worse in the kitchen than I was. The man was a fast food loyalist through and through.

But Santi just glowered up at me as he shut the screen of his phone off. “Kit likes it,” he muttered.

Ah. In all of the craziness I’d forgotten about the torch Santi still carried for the human bartender at The Dive. “And you want to cook for her?”

Santi shifted uncomfortably in his seat. “I want her to like me…”

I softened a bit before hiking one leg over the back of the couch so that I could slide down next to him. “Why wouldn’t she like you? You’re a very likable lad.”

“She likes the human me. Sure. But she still doesn’t know what I am.”

My heart twisted with sympathy for him. Like many two-skinned monsters, Santi struggled with his sense of self and it usually came at a cost. He hid his Del Mar nature from most of the land dwellers, pretending to be human for the sake of being accepted by them.

I’d always had to face my otherness head on as I hadn’t been blessed with a second skin and witch glamours only went so far and felt incrediblyuncomfortable.

“You’re not still doing that thing we talked about… right?” I asked hesitantly, watching as Santi’s cheeks darkened with a blush. “Oh, Santi, we talked about this.”

“I tried to stop! But once the waves started to turn weird I worried about her being out there without protection…”

Several months ago when Kit Carson first swept into Port Haven to take part in a free diving clinic, Santi had been obsessed. It was in his and many other supernatural creatures’ habit to fixate on things.

Gold, gems, fame—you name it and there would be a supernatural creature consumed with it.

Well, Santi had taken one look at Kit and decided that was what he was stuck on: her.

Which culminated in him stalking her through the water while she practiced her free diving.

“And I told you that all of the free diver boats are equipped with very sharp harpoons. What if they mistook you for a shark? You know Randy shoots first and asks questions later.”

Even if the merman could probably sense Santi’s presence, he was usually too drunk to make the choicenotto shoot at my friend.

“Iknow,” Santi groaned, sounding more like a kid than usual. “But I don’t get within range of the harpoon. I’m not stupid.”

“If you aren’t stupid then why won’t you just come clean about what you arebeforeshe spots you in the water and becomes terrified of you?”

Santi had no good answer for that so instead he just slumped back in his seat and crossed his arms over his chest. “Can we stop talking about me and get back to the ocean apocalypse, please? At this point I’d prefer to talk about that rather than my atomically bad love life.”

Right. I’d forgotten about the change in the ocean.

Reaching up to rub at the tension in my temples, I tried to organize my jumbled thoughts.

Between Effie and our relationship, the shop, Daphne’s pregnancy, the horny witch that wanted to harvest my ink, Arsenio pushing even harder than normal to get shops on the Wharf to sell,anda potential ocean catastrophe in the making…? I was just about ready to pull all of my people into this damn submarine and sail off into the horizon.

I was normally a fantastic multitasker but right now it felt a bit like I was trying to hold up fifty spinning plates that were also on fire. I have to admit that I’m a pretty shit juggler.

I just hoped that Art could figure out something with that witch because her coming to help would take about half of the items off of my list and potentially make me feel sane again.

Or as sane as a tentacle-faced man that ran a tattoo shop for monsters could be.

Chapter 10

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