Page 10 of Final Drive

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.