Chapter 6 #2
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.
“Halfway,” Fisher panted.
Cormac spat, “You sure? Feels like halfway to hell.”
Fisher flicked a glance over, hair slicked back, eyes calm and impossible, that surfer serenity that looked like laziness until you tried to match it and discovered he was managing a dozen things at once, including Cormac’s own stupidity. “Hell’s warmer.”
He snorted. “Fair.”
Bear’s voice came again from somewhere behind them, carried by the wind. “Your battle isn’t with the ocean. She has a language. Learn it.”
Cormac would have rolled his eyes if he hadn’t been so tired. But part of him heard it differently now, through the rhythm of his own stroke. Fisher didn’t fight the water. He moved with it. When the ocean pushed, he yielded. When it pulled, he cut across. The guy had tuned himself to the tide.
Cormac tried it. He let the current lift him, rolling with it instead of against it. The drag eased. The rhythm smoothed. For the first time, the water stopped feeling like an enemy. Not surrender, but partnership.
Bear’s words came back, quiet but absolute. Stay together. Keep moving. Keep breathing.
He didn’t know if Bear had meant it as instruction or philosophy, but out here, it was both.
They hit the final leg, arms heavy, legs burning. The tide had turned against them, waves building, wind biting harder. The shoreline still looked impossibly far. Cormac gritted his teeth and grunted through the next stroke.
“Talk to me,” Fisher said. “You’re too quiet.”
Cormac laughed hoarsely. “You’re afraid of silence now? Thought that was Bear’s thing.”
“Yeah, but you go quiet, and I start worrying.”
“Worry about your own pretty ass.”
“I am. You’re attached to it now, genius.”
That got another ragged laugh out of him, but the sound dissolved into coughing. They pushed through it, two shadows crawling across gray water.
When the surf finally broke beneath them, they rode it in, exhausted, kicking just enough to stay above the foam. “Almost there,” Fisher gasped.
“Almost,” Cormac echoed, not sure if it was a promise or plea.
They broke the surface together, two heads in the waves.
The beach was a strip of gold under a low sky, the Grinder black as a healed scab above it, instructors speckled along the line like carrion birds, the low ring of the bell waiting for the quitters.
They hit the sand together, crawling past the waterline, fins dragging grooves in the wet earth. The world tilted. His lungs were molten glass. He rolled onto his back, staring at the washed-out sky, his pulse a drumbeat in his ears.
Fisher collapsed beside him, mask askew, laughing weakly. “Told you. Easy part.”
“Bite me,” Cormac wheezed.
“Maybe later. After Hell Week.”
A shadow fell across them. Brick. His gaze swept over the pair, taking in their ragged chests, the way they’d surfaced together. His voice was low, steady.
“Good work, gentlemen. You stayed connected.”
Cormac blinked up at him, every muscle trembling. “Did we pass?”
Brick’s mouth curved, barely a smile, more like the ghost of approval. “You’re in the running for first place…amongst your boat crew.” Cormac’s chest tightened. They had beat the class…the whole class? Now the competition was only between Bear’s Boys. “You didn’t drown. That’s a start.”
Fisher chuckled, low and rough. “That’s high praise.”
Brick’s eyes shifted toward the horizon as the bell started to ring. More men had decided that they weren’t one with the ocean. “Hell Week begins Sunday. Get your asses to the shower, lovers, and rest while you can. You’re going to need it.”
Then he walked away, this man who didn’t give out any praise, bent just a little, the surf curling around his boots.
Cormac let his head drop back, the tide whispering against the shore. He felt Fisher’s elbow nudge his.
“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.