On my waist first. Her palms against the curve above my hips, her fingers wrapping around to the small of my back. Then I move them. I guide them upward — over my ribs, the thin fabric of my T-shirt the only barrier, until her shaking hands are resting against the sides of my breasts.
"Feel me," I say. "I'm not a putter. I'm not a green. I'm not a camera or an interviewer or a gallery of people watching you miss. I'm not going to watch you shake and write about it. Feel me and let your hands do what they know how to do."
Something breaks in her.
Not composure — I've seen composure fracture. In the cottage. During the interview. In the putting room when she told me she wasn't good at receiving. Composure is the outermost layer, and by now I've seen it fall enough times to recognize the sound.
This is the layer beneath composure. The wall behind the wall. The thing she built after the yips, after the divorce, after her father's silence — the belief that her hands, having failed publicly, must be monitored constantly, managed perpetually, never trusted to act without supervision. The belief that any moment of uncontrolled motion is a precursor to the worst thing that ever happened to her.
It breaks. I watch it break. Her face changes — not softening exactly, more like a structure shifting from rigid to flexible, a material finding a different way to bear weight.
Her hands move on my body. Not strategically. Not with the calculated precision she brought to Singapore. Her fingers grip my ribs, release, grip again. Her thumbs press against my breasts. The tremor is still there — I can feel it against my skin through the shirt — but the quality has changed. It's no longer the tremor of suppression. It's the tremor of a body doing something it was told it couldn't do and discovering the prohibition was wrong.
I pull my shirt over my head. Drop it. Her hands are on my bare skin now — warm, shaking, learning the terrain without a map.
"I'm going to take control," I say. "You're going to let me. Not because you can't — because you don't need to be in charge right now. You've been in charge all day. In the studio, in the car, in this room. You've been managing yourself for hours. You're done managing."
I unbutton her blouse. One button at a time. My hands are steady — not because I'm braver than her, but because in this room, on this evening, my job is to be the ground she stands on. The blouse falls open. I push it off her shoulders. Unfasten her bra. Add it to the pile.
She's taller than me. I have to reach up to slide the fabric from her shoulders, and the geometry of the reach — my smaller body extending toward her larger one, my arms lifting to undress a woman who stands six inches above me — makes me feel not small but purposeful. I know what I'm doing. I know where I'm aiming.
I guide her to the bed. She sits. I push her gently backward. She lies down and I follow, settling my weight across her hips, my thighs bracketing her narrow waist. The size difference ispresent in every angle — my compact density against her lean length, my brown skin against her olive, my short dark hair falling forward as I lean down to kiss her throat.
I pin her hands above her head.
Gently. A request, not a restraint. My fingers circling her wrists against the pillow, holding them there the way she held mine in Singapore — present, firm, allowing escape.
She lets me. Her wrists settle into my grip. Her eyes close.
"You're shaking," I say.
"I know." Her voice is rough. The interview voice — the controlled, measured instrument — is gone. What's left is lower and less defended.
"I love it."
Her eyes open.
"I love that you shake. Not because of the yips. Because it means you're feeling something instead of managing it. You've managed every response you've had for ten years. Every tremor, every moment of fear, every time your body tried to tell you it was overwhelmed — you pressed it down and forced it into stillness and called the stillness strength."
I lean down. Press my mouth to her ear. "Shake for me. Let your hands do whatever they want."
I release her wrists. Her hands lift from the pillow.
They find my hair first. Threading through it, gripping at the roots, pulling in a way that is not strategic and not gentle and not anything she would have permitted herself in any previous encounter. Her fingers tighten and release. Tighten and release. The rhythm is raw and uncontrolled and honest.
Her hands move to my shoulders. My back. Her nails drag down my spine — not scratching, tracing, pressing, her fingers mapping my body the way she maps a course except there is no notebook and no strategy and no plan. Just hands doing whathands do when the governing intelligence stops supervising and the body takes over.
I kiss my way down her body. Not slowly — not tonight. Tonight I am not practicing the patience she taught me. Tonight I am using everything she taught me in service of something faster and more direct, because what Nerys needs right now is not a lesson in delayed gratification. It's proof that her body is capable of pleasure that exists outside the framework of control, that her hands can act without instructions and find something other than failure.
I pull her trousers down. Her underwear. She lifts her hips to help — the motion urgent, uncoordinated, nothing like the measured elevation of previous encounters. I settle between her legs and I look up at her.
She's looking down at me. Auburn hair spread across the pillow, silver streak glowing against the white cotton, hands gripping the sheets beside her hips. Her chest is rising and falling rapidly. Her skin is flushed from her collarbones to her cheekbones. Her eyes are wide and dark and unprotected.
"Tell me what you want," I say.
She takes a breath. "Your mouth. And your hands."
"Specific."
