“Still think you can out-swim me?”
“Ask me after I grow fins and gills,” Cormac muttered.
“Copy that, partner.”
They stood under the weight of legs that had decided to forget the art of walking, and Fisher slapped his shoulder once, a little tap that said still here. They jogged up the berm because if you walked, it meant you were losers, and they were nothing but winners, every time.
Besides the obvious things that tied them together, purpose, gender, and determination, the brotherhood curled inside him, connecting two men who’d survived ninety-five minutes of the Pacific, and other than pain and brutality, had no idea what the next six days would bring.
Cormac closed his eyes, hearing the surf, the wind, and Bear’s distant voice carried through both. Stay together. Keep moving. Keep breathing.
He left the beach, showered, hissed at the raw blisters, the chafe, the fatigue dragging at him. Saturday slipped away into Sunday, and Cormac rested, slept, and rested some more. No bars, no women, no drinking, like some of the class thought was a good idea. He carb-loaded, tended to his body, and struggled with his emotions.
Staring into the mirror at his face, his cornflower blue eyes, his shaved head, he was the same man, but different. His throat tightened. He wanted this. More than anything he’d ever wanted in his life. He could see it, shape it with his hands, and understand what it meant.
Navy SEAL, special operator, Uncle Sam’s weapon, the tip of the spear…warrior. But more importantly…brother. BUD/S wasn’t even a quarter over, and it had changed him or had it polished off the excess? Showing him humility he’d never realized was there.
On Sunday evening, he entered the classroom with the others, some stupidly hung over. Soon to be quitters. He was sure of it. He met Fisher’s eyes, the man rolling them, agreeing with his swim buddy, and Cormac felt the connection between them tighten. Yeah. They were of the same mindset.
God help him, he found his core, his purpose, and fuck if it wasn’t the same as every one of these guys who was going through this hell with him. It galvanized him, fueled him, his motivation, his thirst for more, his need to prove it over and over again.
Nico would be so proud of him, and that was the reverse of what he’d thought when he’d slammed out of the house, boarded a plane, and landed in California. His attitude had been all about showing his big brother that he was wrong, shoving his achievements in his face, but that was all washed away in the surf now.
He credited it not only with his own fierce drive, but to the instructor who had singled him out to be part of the team he had assembled.
Petty Officer Dakota “Bear” Locklear didn’t yell. He never had to. He stood at the break where foam spent itself and watched them with a stillness that rearranged the space. Instructors barked up and down the shore, Brick’s voice tore at the wind, but when Bear looked at them, everything else became weather. Cormac would have laughed at himself for thinking it if he wasn’t trying to hold his shit together, but the truth was the truth. The man didn’t command the way a storm did. He commanded the way a tide did. Stubborn and inevitable.
In the warmth of the room, his full belly, and the anticipation of the upcoming moment when Hell Week began, threading through him like adrenaline spiking, he thought back to his experience here. He’d thought he’d come out of this pretty much the same as he went in. He’d been wrong. Log PT stood out in his mind.
Across the sand, Brick prowled. He needled Bear as he passed, half vice, half admiration. “You gonna make a sound or you running an interpretive dance with your Bear Boys?”
Bear didn’t look away from the crew. “Listening.”
“To what?”
“Where they break.”
Brick gnawed the toothpick. “I can tell you where they break. Under the log. In the shoulders. Behind the eyes up here.” He tapped his temple
Bear’s voice didn’t change. “Sometimes it is under the tongue.”
Brick barked a laugh and stalked on.
“Down,” Bear said quietly. “Hold.”
They held. The weight went from log to bone to the little spaces between thoughts. In those seconds, Cormac saw the line where he usually jumped to anger, where he usually served his fear as an excuse and called it hunger. He didn’t jump. He breathed. Fisher steadied the back half of the log with a shoulder that didn’t look like it could carry a house but did anyway. Chase whispered something obscene about marriage proposals from logs. Jameson huffed something that might have been a laugh in another life.
“Up,” Bear said, and the world gave the smallest mercy.
After, they sprawled on the sand the way men did when the ocean had taken every coin they brought and given them a few back out of pity. Bottles passed hand to hand. The sun dipped lower, throwing long bars of light across wet backs and raw hands and hair clotted with grit. Fisher lay with his head on the butt of the oar and hummed a line of some song the water had written for him. Panda talked nonsense, but there was power in his voice that hadn’t been there before. He wrote, Bear’s Boys in the sand.
“We’re all crazy,” Barnhardt said, which was his tone even when he slept.
“Together,” Panda said, and drew a little heart around the B.
On that beach, in that moment, Cormac closed his eyes and listened to his heart teach itself a slower drum. Hell Week sat out on the horizon like a storm line. You could taste it in the air, that metallic tang that meant lightning even when the sky pretended to be mild. He thought about the first day when Bear had said to trust each other, not the water, and he had thought it was poet nonsense. Now he wasn’t sure if there was a better rule for living through anything.
He cracked an eye open. Bear stood ankle deep where the foam lay down its lace and pulled it back. The man was wide through the shoulders and heavy through the chest and didn’t look built for grace, but the way he belonged in the edge was a kind of grace. He watched the line where waves met shore and didn’t blink like other men did. He got the sense the sea told Bear when she was about to cheat, and he reminded her of the rules. Cormac found himself waiting for a ghost of a smile when Panda drew another loop of nonsense in the sand. Bear didn’t smile, but his head tipped half an inch. Panda grinned like he had been crowned.
