Fisher shifted beside him. “You’re thinking complicated thoughts.”
“I’m thinking we’re going to have to find something we’ve had all along.”
“You’re thinking about Locklear.”
Cormac nodded. “You watched him stand still, and now your gut has stopped fidgeting,” Fisher went on, that lazy voice that hid a mind like a map. “Happened to me too.”
“He isn’t like the others,” Cormac said. It came out flat because he didn’t know where to put the awe. Awe embarrassed him. Awe didn’t survive in his family unless it was for a man with a bat and a good summer. “He’s not trying to win the room.”
“He is the room,” Fisher said.
Cormac let the words sit. He remembered Brick’s glare and Bear’s unbothered nod and the way the log got light when the quiet hit them right. He felt something shift low in him, not pride, not yet, but direction. He had spent a lot of years choosing the hardest thing in reach because he didn’t trust easy. Now he was starting to understand that hard and true weren’t synonyms until a man like Bear put his hand on them and made them relate.
“Bring on Hell Week,” Cormac murmured.
“Hoo-fuck-yah,” Fisher murmured back.
7
The sun had already begun to slip when Flynn paddled past the break, the Pacific stretching out like molten steel. Salt stung his lips, wind feathered his hair, and the board rose and fell beneath him with the slow, tidal pulse of something ancient. He told himself he’d go in after one more run, but he’d been saying that for an hour.
He wasn’t chasing waves tonight. He was chasing himself, and he was going in freaking circles.
California had never felt like home, not really. The ocean was the only thing that made sense anymore—a vast, indifferent god that didn’t ask questions about the boy from a ranch in Parker County who talked like he came from two continents and carried the ghosts of both.
He was cursed to remember every detail of his parents’ murders. He hadn’t been there, but he might as well have been. With his eidetic memory, the aftermath, and his grief, played in his head like a reel that never stopped, every retelling another cut, another scar.
His grandparents wanted him to come home. Apply to colleges. Find purpose the safe, sensible way. Maybe, they said, he’d discover his destiny through academics. But that didn’t appeal to him.
He’d already been accepted everywhere he’d applied after high school, including Harvard, MIT, and Princeton. He loved learning, but he loved motion more. Being outside. Doing, being on the cutting edge of both body and mind. Pushing himself until muscle burned and breath tore. The idea of classrooms and lectures made his skin itch. School would be easy. Too easy. Easy had never fixed a damn thing.
He straddled his board just beyond the break, waiting for the next set to rise out of the horizon. The board was a custom six-two Firewire he’d rebuilt himself, Epoxy core, carbon rails, double concave through the tail. Fast, light, wickedly responsive. A perfect balance between drive and control.
Flynn ran a thumb along the waxed deck, reading it the way another man might read a weapon. Every nick and scratch had a story. The twin fins had been sanded down by his own hands, and he’d glassed the nose after a reef bite off La Jolla. He’d tuned it until it matched him, restless, lean, tuned for risk.
He studied the water like he was built of sea and foam. He could read swell angles by eye, tell how far off the wind line had shifted, feel a rip start building under his legs before it ever pulled. The Pacific was the only thing that made sense to him because it obeyed rules even when it looked wild. You respected the math, and you earned the magic.
A new swell was building, a perfect right-hander curling out of the deep, long and clean. He paddled hard, muscles moving with smooth and sure precision, the water hissing off his fingertips. The swell lifted beneath him, the board tilting, and then he was up, feet finding their place like instinct.
Balance came easier on water than it ever did on land. Riding a wave was simple compared to walking through the world. Micro-shifts in weight, a breath forward, a lean back, the board became an extension of him, his equilibrium tuned to the roar of the ocean. He didn’t think. He adjusted, reacted, felt the pulse of the sea as if it were part of him.
The wave rose and hollowed, a perfect barrel forming ahead. He dropped into it, knees bent low, shoulders cutting a clean line through the tunnel of green, the tube closing over him, green and translucent. For a heartbeat, he was pure motion, body and board suspended in light. His left hand skimmed the lip of the wave, reckless and reverent all at once, fingers slicing through tons of rushing water. The curl shimmered under his touch, humming with power, wild and alive.
It was poetry, the kind that didn’t need words. A man and a force of nature, grace in defiance, control in surrender. For those few seconds, he was weightless, untouchable, part of something bigger than himself.
The wave lifted him higher, sunlight breaking across the glassy curve. He crouched low, muscles flexing in rhythm with the surge, the board an extension of his will. The ocean roared around him, thunder in motion, and the sound filled him until there was no room left for thought.
The storm he rode wasn’t locked inside him. It was in his chest. Out here, where the sea demanded everything and gave back grace in the same breath, he could meet it head-on. The grief, the rage, the hunger for something he couldn’t name, all moved through him like a current.
He ran his hand along the curling lip of the barrel, feeling the pulse of the wave under his palm. This was where he found peace, where control meant surrender and surrender meant survival. He was part of it, the sea and the fury inside him indistinguishable.
Far beyond the break, the horizon had already darkened. The wind had shifted. But he didn’t see it yet. The only storm that mattered was the one he’d finally learned how to ride.
He shot out of the curl and cut hard across the face, slicing into a graceful bottom turn before the wave collapsed behind him in a spray of white thunder. The ride left him breathless and grinning. He wiped salt from his eyes, laughing under his breath.
“Kowabunga, dude,” he muttered, turning the board back toward the horizon.
Out here, there were no ghosts. No expectations. Just him and the sea, and the rhythm that made sense when nothing else did.
