Chapter 6 #3
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.
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.