"I know," she says.
I take her hand. The right one. The scarred thumb. I hold it in both of mine and I look at the fire that isn't lit and I think about two women sitting in a cottage in Scotland while a storm rearranges the landscape outside, both of them carrying wounds inflicted by parents who loved them too much to see them clearly.
"Light the fire," I say.
She does. She kneels at the hearth and strikes a match and the kindling catches and the peat begins to glow, and the room fills with warmth and the sweet, ancient smell of burning earth.
We sit on the floor in front of it. The stone is cold beneath the wool blankets she's pulled from the bedroom. The fire pops. The rain continues. There is no golf today. No tournament. No strategy. No course maps or yardage books or wind flags.
Just two women and a fire and the sound of weather doing what it does without asking anyone's permission.
•
I take her hand again. The right one. I lift it and press my mouth to the scar on her thumb.
Then the inside of her wrist, where her pulse taps a steady rhythm against my lips.
Then each finger. One at a time. The knuckle, the pad, the tip. Her fingers are long and elegant and they tremble — barely, a vibration I feel through my lips rather than see — and I don't stop kissing them.
"Tell me what you want," I say.
Nerys opens her mouth. Closes it. She is a woman who has spent the last decade articulating strategy with inhuman precision, and she cannot find the words for this because this is not strategy. Strategy is the thing you use when you know the variables. What she's feeling now is the absence of known variables — desire without a framework, want without a plan.
"Nerys." I hold her hand against my cheek. "You told me to be specific. In Singapore, you saideverywhere is a cop-out.Your rules. What do you want?"
Something shifts in her face. The composure doesn't break — it opens. A door she's been holding shut with the full weight of her body, swinging inward because the person on the other side is using her own words to ask for entry.
"I want you to touch me without me directing it. I want to not be in charge."
I nod. I understand what this costs — the woman who has controlled every variable, every encounter, every interaction since the day her hands betrayed her, asking to surrender control to someone she's been training in patience for three weeks.
She's not giving me control because she trusts my skill. She's giving me control because she trusts me.
I undress her by the fire.
Slowly. Her rain jacket first — unzipping it, sliding it off her shoulders, folding it neatly because she would fold it neatly and I want her to see that I notice the things she cares about. Then the white polo — each button, one at a time, the fabric parting to reveal the collarbone, the sports bra, the lean muscle of her chest. The polo joins the jacket.
The firelight changes everything. Her fair olive skin turns golden. The silver streak in her hair catches the flames and glows copper — burnished, warm, alive in a way that fluorescent light and Singapore skylines never achieved. The contour lines along her ribs are shadowed in relief, and I trace them with my fingertip and feel her stomach contract under my touch.
I remove the bra. She lifts her arms to help and the motion is unguarded — no strategic calculation, no assessment of the angle, just a woman raising her arms so her lover can undress her.
Her trousers. I unfasten them. Slide them down her long legs. She lifts her hips off the blanket and I pull the fabric free, and then her underwear, and she's lying on the wool blanket in front of the fire, naked, and I'm kneeling beside her looking at the full length of her — six feet of lean, vulnerable, extraordinary woman illuminated by peat fire in a cottage where her father once mapped the courses that taught her to read the world.
She starts to say something. I can see it forming — an instruction, a suggestion, the reflexive need to manage the encounter from below.
I shake my head.
"My read tonight. Trust it."
Her breath catches. The phrase —trust my read— is the one she's given me on every course, beside every shot, in the murmur that arrives before every swing. I've heard it a hundred times. Hearing it returned to her, in bed, in this cottage, on this night, does something to her that I can see in her entire body. A softening. A release of tension so deep it looks like she's sinking into the blanket by an inch.
"Okay," she whispers.
I lower my mouth to her body and I take my time.
Not the desperate patience of a woman being forced to slow down — the genuine, earned patience of someone who has learned that a green read from sixty yards is a photograph, but from six inches it's a map. I read Nerys the way she reads terrain. With my mouth, my hands, my breath. I trace every slope. I find every contour. I learn where the surface breaks and where it holds, and I adjust my approach based on what her body tells me.
Her collarbones. The hollow between them. The rise of her small breasts — I take one nipple into my mouth and feel her hand land in my hair, then lift, uncertain, then land again when I don't stop. Her ribs, each one visible beneath the skin, the tattoo of contour lines that I follow with my tongue like a path through familiar landscape.
