Chapter 4
CHAPTER FOUR
Bo
The lake is glass when we get the boat in the water, not a ripple on it anywhere. Late sun comes in low through the trees and turns the whole thing gold, and it’s the sort of afternoon that reminds a man why he fell in love with this sport to begin with.
“Hands on,” Reese calls from the stern. “And up, to shoulders, walk it out.”
We carry the shell down to the dock with eight sets of hands working as one.
It’s been three days since Lake Hartwell, three days since we stood on a dock and told our families where to go, but the boat still feels right in my grip.
Whatever’s broken between us as people hasn’t reached the muscle memory yet.
Gray takes stroke seat and settles into the footstretchers with the precision that makes him impossible to argue with.
I set myself in seven with his back an arm’s length in front of me, close enough to read every bit of tension he’s carrying in his shoulders.
He rowed like a man possessed at the championship.
Today he rows like a man who didn’t sleep.
“All eight, ready,” Reese says through the cox box. “Sit ready, and row.”
We push off, blades finding water with the clean entry that comes from drilling the basics until they’re written into your bones.
Behind me, Beckett and Tyler pick up the rhythm through the engine room.
Farther back, Jackson and Eli move in that unnerving way they have, like two halves of one brain.
Zane’s power comes steady out of four, and Cameron sits silent in bow, keeping us level with adjustments so small nobody notices him making them.
“Long and loose,” Reese calls. “Rate twenty, building by pairs. Let’s see what we’ve got.”
What we’ve got is the best the boat has felt all season.
Eight blades catch together and come out clean, and the run between strokes keeps stretching. I stay on Gray’s rhythm and let my body do what it knows. Legs, back, arms. Hands away, body over, slide. Nothing rushed, nothing forced. The shell runs underneath us like it wants to keep going.
“That’s it.” There’s wonder in the way she says it. “Feel that? Don’t force it. Let it happen.”
She takes us to twenty-four and the quality holds. Gray’s stroke stays metronomic, that steady pulse the rest of us build around, and every time he puts the blade in, I’m there with him.
“Beautiful. Tyler, watch your outside arm on the recovery. Jackson, little more length at the catch. Everybody else, keep doing what you’re doing.”
Tyler fixes it inside a stroke. Jackson reaches another inch without overdoing it, and the boat picks up under us.
“Power twenty,” Reese says. “Full pressure. Show me championship speed.”
We coil at the catch and Gray drives, and the boat jumps with him.
Twenty strokes at full pressure, hard enough that my lungs burn before we’re halfway through, but nobody loses the rhythm.
The catches stay together, the finishes stay clean, and when I glance down, the puddles are sitting in a straight, even line behind us.
“Time,” Reese calls. “Way enough.”
We let the boat run. I’m hauling air and sweat is cooling on the back of my neck, but nobody says a word because we all felt it. That rare stretch where eight men stop having to think about each other and the shell just goes.
“Split,” Tyler manages between breaths. He checks the SpeedCoach on his rigger. “One twenty-eight point four.”
Gray lets out a low whistle. “That’s faster than Hartwell.”
“That’s faster than anything we’ve done this season,” Eli says.
Reese stays quiet for a second. When she speaks, her voice isn’t quite steady. “That’s what we can do when we stop fighting the boat. Whatever else is going on, don’t bring it in here.”
She’s right about the boat and wrong about everything else.
I’ve been watching her since breakfast. When we got back from the gym this morning, she was on the couch with her laptop and shut it the second we came through the door.
I asked how her morning went and she said fine without looking up from her coffee.
Now she’s sitting in the stern with the cox box in her lap, looking at the water, the far shore, the trees, and every man in this boat except one.
She hasn’t looked at Gray once.
“Technique work,” she says, all business. “Pause drills. Pause at the finish, row.”
We reset and start the drill, holding for a beat at the end of each stroke before moving through the recovery.
It’s tedious work, the kind freshmen complain about and old men learn to appreciate.
Today I’m grateful for it because I could run this drill asleep, and the repetition leaves me room to think.
Reese isn’t telling us about her morning. Gray’s been walking around with his jaw wired shut since he got back from lunch with his father, and the two of them are each hauling a load they’ve decided not to set down, which leaves the other seven of us filling in the blanks.
Seven Alphas guessing is not a healthy arrangement.
“Bodies over,” Reese calls. “Row.”
We change the pause and keep moving. The boat sits level under us, Cameron cleaning up whatever the rest of us miss from bow, and I watch Gray’s shoulders while Reese’s voice comes through the speakers in front of me.
Neither one gives anything away.
“Half-slide. Row.”
I think about the plate I left on the counter this morning. She ate some of it. I know because the foil wasn’t sitting the way I left it when I came home. Normally that would be enough for me. Reese ate, and I’d move on.
Except she also lied to me.
Not a big one. Not that she’d call it one. I asked how her morning was and she said fine, and I’ve lived with enough people to know fine can mean anything from nothing happened to I’m going to need bail money later.
“Good,” Reese says. “Finish the drill, then we’ll build into a thousand at race pace. I want championship focus.”
We paddle around and line up with the far shore. The water runs gold in front of us, smooth enough that I can see the reflection of Gray’s blade when he squares it. In two weeks we’ll be racing the best crews in the country, and if we can row the way we did ten minutes ago, we’re contenders.
If we can hold together on land long enough to get there.
“Ready all,” Reese calls. “Sit ready. Attention. Row!”
We come off the start hard and settle at thirty-two. By halfway my legs are burning, but the boat still has the same run it had on the twenty. Gray creeps up a beat, Reese catches it inside a stroke, and two strokes later we’re long again.
“That’s it. Beautiful ratio. Five hundred to go.”
I put my head down and stay with Gray. The pain is familiar enough to ignore, and it’s almost a comfort to have one problem I know how to solve. Keep the length. Put the blade in. Push.
“Power ten in two,” Reese calls. “One, two, now. Legs down hard!”
We go. Whatever we spent at Hartwell, there’s more. The rate comes up without the boat getting short, and Reese rides us through the last hundred loud enough that I can hear her over eight men trying to breathe.
“That’s Sable Ridge! Five strokes! Four! Three! Two! One!”
We cross the line that isn’t there and fold over our oars. The shell runs out dead level beneath us.
“Way enough.” I can hear the smile in Reese’s voice now. “Time?”
Tyler checks the SpeedCoach. “Three oh four point two.”
Gray sits up despite looking like he has nothing left. “That’s a PR. Almost four seconds.”
“Hell yes it is.” Zane is grinning like a fool from four. “We’re going to crush nationals.”
“One practice doesn’t mean anything,” Jackson says, though even he sounds less funereal than usual.
“It means we can still do this,” Eli says. “Whatever else is going on, we can still row.”
Reese lets us have the moment until the chatter dies down on its own. “Take it in. Easy paddle. And gentlemen, that’s the standard now. Every practice between here and nationals. If we row like that when it counts, nobody in the country can touch us.”
We turn the boat and start the long paddle back. The knot I’ve been carrying between my shoulders since Saturday lets go a little. We did something good out here today, and for an hour nobody’s father or mother or lawyer or administrator got to touch it.
It felt like us.
By the time we come up on the boathouse, I’ve almost talked myself into letting it go. Then Reese pulls out her phone, checks the screen, and puts it away again inside three seconds. Her face goes smooth and empty the way it does when she’s decided nobody else gets a piece of it.
I watch her tuck the phone beneath her leg and call for us to drop the rate coming into the dock. She sounds like herself.
I’m starting to think fine didn’t mean fine.