My entire body shudders. Not an aftershock — something else. Something that starts at the base of my skull and moves down through every vertebra and settles in the center of my chest with a heat that has nothing to do with sex and everything to do with being seen by a woman who does not say things she doesn't mean.
I bury my face against her neck. I breathe her in — soap, skin, the faint trace of salt, the particular warmth of the hollow behind her jaw.
"Again," I whisper.
"No." Her hand resumes its movement through my hair. "That one is rare. You'll have to earn the next one."
I smile against her neck. Close my eyes. Her heartbeat is steady under my cheek.
I sleep.
•
I wake alone.
The suite is quiet. Morning light through the Singapore windows. The bed beside me is empty but still warm — she hasn't been gone long.
On the pillow, a folded piece of hotel stationery. Her handwriting — small, precise, slanting left.
You played well today. Both rounds. — N
I read it three times. I fold it carefully. I get out of bed and find my trousers on the floor and my shirt draped over the desk chair and my underwear near the foot of the bed where she placed them after removing them with the same methodical attention she gives to course maps.
I dress. I leave the suite. I walk to my room three floors down.
In my golf bag, there's a zippered pocket meant for scorecards and pencils and spare ball markers.
I put the note inside. Between the scorecard from Kiawah and a pencil I stole from the practice green in Phoenix.
I zip it closed.
I go to the bathroom and look at myself in the mirror. Same face. Same scar. Same gold earrings. But my eyes look different — wider, or softer, or less defended. Something has rearranged behind them. Something that looks, if I'm being honest, like a woman who has just discovered that the most terrifying shot in golf is not the one with the highest risk.
It's the one where you stand still, trust the read, and let someone else's hands guide you home.
CHAPTER EIGHT
Nerys
I leave at five in the morning.
Not because I want to — because I need the forty-five minutes between the hotel room and the practice green to rebuild the architecture that Tala Sarmiento dismantled with the efficiency of a controlled detonation sometime around the moment she saidmy neck, start with my neckand I discovered that I am capable of touching someone with sustained attention for the first time in five years.
The Singapore dawn is thick and pink. The hotel gym is empty. I run on the treadmill for thirty minutes, not because I need the exercise but because the repetitive motion gives my brain something rhythmic to organize itself around while the rest of me tries to reprocess the previous evening.
I touched her.
I put my hands on Tala Sarmiento's body and I did not shake. My fingers found the geography of her — the warm bronze skin, the defined muscle, the specific softness of her inner thighs — and they were steady. Precise. Obedient in a way they haven't been since before the collapse.
I brought her to orgasm with my hands. These hands. The ones that couldn't draw back a putter. The ones the entire golfing world watched freeze on a three-foot putt. Those hands pressedinside her and felt her tighten and release and I did not lose my nerve and I did not lose my rhythm and I did not freeze.
The treadmill beeps. I've exceeded my target heart rate. I slow to a walk and grip the side rails and I breathe through the realization that last night was not just sex.
It was proof.
Proof that the thing my hands lost was specific and contained and did not metastasize into every form of intimate precision. They failed at one skill. They did not fail universally.
I step off the treadmill and stand in the empty gym and look at my reflection in the mirror. Flushed. Sweating. My hair is pushed back and the silver streak is damp against my temple and my expression is one I do not recognize because it belongs to a version of me I haven't accessed since before I retired.
