"On my mark," the instructor commanded, his eyes scoring them. "Hit the surf!"
They ran toward the water together, an icy sting as it moved up his legs, a crescendo of pain that peaked when the frigid ocean slapped his balls. They sat in the water to pull their fins on. “You like this part, don’t you?” Cormac asked.
“I was born in the water and have been surfing my whole life. This is the easy part. The hard part is to get your ass to move as fast as mine, Mac.”
“Fuck you,” Cormac said. But it was the truth. The guy swam like a lightning bolt.
Suddenly, Bear was there. "Stay together." His calm voice cut through the water, a constant reminder of their mission. "Keep moving and keep breathing.”
“Hoo-yah!” they called in unison as they rose.
“Try to keep your smart mouths locked down."
“Second-hardest part,” Fisher said with a grin.
They punched through the first break together, surfacing in sync before stroking for the horizon. Cormac tasted salt on his tongue, and seawater needled the open blisters until they burned, and he thought, not for the first time, that the ocean had a personal grudge. It chewed them flat at dawn, gnawed on their egos at noon, and tucked them into the surf at dusk like the world’s meanest nurse.
They hit the break zone hard, ducking under a wall of whitewater before it could throw them back. Brine burned his throat, and the cold made him gasp. Fisher cut through it like he belonged there, smooth and easy, while Cormac fought the surge, fins beating a fraction too high until Fisher’s hand found his shoulder and shoved him lower.
“Combat stroke, not a damn flail,” Fisher muttered.
Cormac adjusted, forcing the rhythm into muscle memory, reach, pull, glide, kick. The Pacific heaved under them, gray and endless, every swell a mountain. Ninety-five minutes felt like a death sentence.
He glanced sideways. Fisher’s head broke the water in even intervals, calm and precise, his body rolling with the wave instead of against it. The guy made it look like art.
“You teach fish to swim,” Cormac gasped.
“Better than I could teach you,” Fisher shot back, voice muffled.
They found the rhythm again, moving as one length of muscle with Cormac working to keep abreast of his swim buddy, a man he was beginning to…love like a brother, tension only when a wave tried to separate them. Cormac hated how easy he made it look. The guy wasn’t fighting the ocean. He danced with it.
Bear’s voice carried faintly over the wind. “Keep your buddy close. Breathe with the sea, not against it.”
Cormac bit back a curse. Breathe with the sea. Sure. He was Boston born and bred, but his ancestors floated above the sea and didn’t try to become one with it. The sea didn’t care if you breathed. It swallowed pilots, sank the unsinkable, yanked destroyers off course, and turned cocky men into ghosts. This vast, endless expanse wasn’t a thing to conquer. It was a force to survive.
But that was the difference, wasn’t it? Anyone could survive it once. SEALs had to do it every day. They didn’t just live with the ocean. They learned its moods, read its pull, moved with its temper until it stopped being an enemy and became muscle memory. The water was their element, their proving ground, their camouflage.
He kicked harder, syncing with Fisher’s pace, the burn in his thighs a clean kind of pain. Respect was necessary, yeah, but ownership was nonnegotiable. That was what BUD/S hammered into them. Every mission started and ended in saltwater, infil, exfil, insertion, extraction. If he feared the sea, if he fought with it, there would be no mastery, and he was determined it would answer to his name.
Cormac rolled his head to the side, caught Fisher’s silhouette rising and falling with the swells, calm and sure, like he belonged here. That was mastery. That was the thing Bear was trying to drill into them, not the arrogance to think they could beat the Pacific, but the confidence to belong to it.
He dug his chin down, jaw taut, lungs burning. Own it, he told himself. Don’t let it own you.
The water flattened, shimmered, then rolled again, endless gray stacked on gray.
Fisher’s fin tips cut clean lines beside him. Every few strokes, Fisher looked over, their eyes meeting through masks, just a quick check, but it carried more weight than words.
A swell lifted them both. Cormac coughed, caught a mouthful of salt, and went under for a heartbeat. Cold slammed into his chest. Then Fisher had him gripped by the back of his wetsuit, yanking him up.
“You good?”
“Peachy.” His teeth chattered even through the word. “You planning on drowning me before the halfway mark?”
“Too much paperwork,” Fisher said, deadpan, before diving back into rhythm.
Cormac couldn’t help it. He laughed, a burst of air that burned on the way out.
Time lost meaning after that. The water changed moods, growing darker, colder, heavier. The current pulled at them sideways, testing their partnership. Each time it did, Fisher angled slightly, adjusting for drift. Cormac followed, matching the pace, the distance, the breath. At the buoy, they surfaced to sight the next marker. The coastline looked miles away, the instructors on their boats just black silhouettes against steel sky.
