Page 25 of Final Drive

“You’re all insane.”

“Yeah.” I grin at her. “But we’re your kind of insane. If you’ll have us.”

Something changes in her face.

She looks past me at the six other men watching her, then back at Jackson beside her. For all the talk we just did about forms and claims and sixty-eight years, nobody says anything now.

“I’ll think about it,” she says, but she’s smiling when she does.

“Fair.”

She sits on the floor in front of the couch and cracks open her water. Beckett puts the TV on, Bo asks if anybody wants the rest of the jambalaya before he puts it away, and Tyler immediately tries to tell him how long it can safely sit at room temperature.

Within five minutes, the conversation has turned into nothing in particular.

I stay against the kitchen counter for a while, watching Reese steal Jackson’s spot against the couch even though he’s standing three feet away. He lets her. Cameron goes back to whatever he was reading. Gray isn’t saying much, but he’s stopped peeling the label off his beer. Nobody has solved anything.

Then Reese looks over, catches me watching, and pats the floor beside her.

I go sit down.

Sixty-eight years can wait until tomorrow.

CHAPTER EIGHT

Reese

Wednesday morning practice is the row that makes you forget anything else exists.

The lake is still and the air is sharp, and from the first stroke we’re locked in. Eight blades enter the water as one, eight bodies move through the drive with the same power, and the boat sings underneath me, that low hum of carbon cutting through glass at a speed it has no business holding.

“That’s it,” I call through the box, keeping my voice level while my heart goes. “Hold this pressure. Feel the run.”

We’re flying. Whatever moved in that house last night, in the conversations I was only half part of, has turned into something I can feel through the hull. The boat is long, clean, and fast enough that I stop checking the numbers every other stroke and just let them work.

“Power ten for the finish,” I call as the marker comes up. “In two. One. Two. Now. Legs down, send it!”

The boat surges, and for a stroke I’d swear we come off the water entirely. When we cross and I call them down, every one of them is gasping and grinning.

“Time?” Gray asks, chest heaving.

Tyler checks the monitor. “Two fifty-eight point seven.”

For a second, nobody says anything. Zane is the first to recover. “Bullshit.”

Tyler turns the SpeedCoach so he can see it. “It isn’t.”

That gets eight exhausted men talking at once. I sit in the stern listening to them lose their minds over breaking three minutes, trying not to grin as hard as they are. The sun’s up properly now and everything has gone gold and rose, and for a minute this is all there is.

This is what we are when nothing else is allowed in the boat.

Then my phone buzzes in my pocket and the rest of it comes back. I don’t check it because I know who it is.

“Let’s take her in,” I say. “Easy paddle. Save something for tomorrow.”

The row back is quiet. The high off that last piece is still in the air, but I can feel it thinning already, giving way to whatever is waiting on shore. Bennett meets us at the dock wearing the same giddy expression he’s had since the scouts turned up.

“Outstanding work. I could see the speed from the boathouse.”