"I know." She moves her fingers. Slow strokes that press the front wall with each withdrawal. Her thumb finds my clit and circles it in the same unhurried rhythm. "I know exactly where you are. Stay with me."
She builds it. Layer on layer. Her fingers inside me, her thumb on my clit, her mouth moving between my breasts, my neck, my jaw. She kisses me while she works me, and I taste her breath and feel her fingers and hear the wet sounds of what she's doing to me and every input arrives simultaneously and I cannot process any of it fast enough to maintain control.
"Nerys—"
"I'm here. You're close."
"I can't—"
"You can. You're almost there. You've been so patient. You've been so good."
That word.Good.Said against my mouth while her fingers press deeper and her thumb circles faster and my body locks around her hand and I come.
Not the way I usually come — hard, fast, over in seconds, already reaching for the next thing. I come the way she taught me to play the sixteenth at Kiawah — slowly, fully, trusting the trajectory even after I've released the shot. The orgasm moves through me in waves. Long, rolling, devastating waves that start where her fingers are and radiate outward through my hips, my stomach, my chest, my throat. I hear myself saying her name. Not screaming. Saying it. Quiet and wrecked and so far from the woman who walked into this room forty minutes ago that I'm not sure I can find my way back.
I don't want to find my way back.
She holds me through it. Fingers still inside me, other hand in my hair, mouth against my temple. When the waves subside, she withdraws slowly and wraps herself around me — her long body curving against mine, her chest to my back, her knees tucked behind my knees. She holds me the way she holds a putter — gently, with her fingers rather than her palms, with precisely enough pressure to maintain contact without force.
I lie there. Breathing. Feeling the aftershocks move through my muscles like weather systems clearing.
Her hands. Her long, scarred, extraordinary hands. One resting on my hip. One still in my hair.
I turn in her arms. Face her. She looks at me with an expression that makes me understand what Keoni meant about three weeks — because if this is what the first week feels like, Iunderstand why people would do anything to stay in this space and why walking away from it could destroy you.
"Your turn," I say.
"Not tonight."
"That's not — you can't just—"
"It's not about fairness." She traces my jaw with her thumb. The scarred one. The one I've dreamed about. "It's about me wanting to give you something that has no conditions. You don't owe me a reciprocal orgasm tonight. You don't owe me anything. I wanted to touch you. I touched you. That's complete."
I stare at her. "No one has ever—"
"I know."
"That's not how this works."
"It is with me. Tonight it is."
I don't argue. Not because I agree — because I'm lying in the arms of a woman who just dismantled every defense I've built since I was fourteen and reassembled me into someone who can receive without performing, and arguing right now would be the old Tala. The one who turns generosity into negotiation because receiving freely feels more dangerous than earning.
I rest my head on her shoulder. She pulls the duvet over us. Singapore's skyline pulses through the windows — blue, gold, white, the city performing its own kind of spectacle for no one.
Her hand moves through my hair. Slow strokes. The rhythm is hypnotic. I feel my body cooling, settling, becoming quiet in a way it never becomes quiet after sex. Usually I'm already planning the next thing — the departure, the morning, the distance that prevents the afterglow from becoming obligation.
I don't want distance. I want to crawl inside this woman's ribcage and live there.
"That word you used in Arizona," I say. My voice is sleepy. Wrecked. Barely there. "When I made the putt. You saidgood."
"I remember."
"Say it again."
She's quiet. I feel her breathing change — a deliberate intake, held for a moment, released slowly. Her hand stills in my hair.
"Good girl."
