Page 64 of Wedge

His tongue touches my hole, and I muffle a scream in the mattress. His tongue circles me a little, barely touching, and I feel myself flutter against him, like I want to open, but I’m afraid.

“Want me to stop?” he asks. “Mulligan?”

“No,” I manage. “Feels good.” I whimper. “So good.”

His hand wiggles under my leg to stroke my cock and then he flat out licks me, his entire tongue just flattening over my hole.

“Ah, fuck.” My voice sounds strangled. This is otherworldly, and I can’t do anything but succumb. I sink into the sensation, his hand on my cock, twisting as he reaches the head, using his spit and my pre-cum for lube. His tongue sliding up and down my crack, hot and wet. This is so sublime. I’ve never felt such bliss, felt so cared for. He isn’t even going to cum tonight, I can tell. He’s going to push me over into climax, then just hold me. And I’ll let him.

His licks are insistent, over and over, unrelenting, consuming. I’m pressing my ass up into his face and he hums in approval, not easing up. If anything, he licks harder, which is difficult to believe a tongue can be hard, but he flicks over my hole in one pass and I swear he slips it inside me. And I’m gone. Shooting into his fist, gasping. “Oh, fuck Stephen, oh fuck!” He doesn’t stop until I go quiet.

“There’s my man,” he croons in my ear as he snuggles behind me, big spoon. “Sleep, baby, I got you.”

Thursday comes up gray and thick. The air is so wet it beads on my water bottle before I’ve taken a sip. Fog sits low over the marsh, and the wind is already stirring the Spanish moss on the live oaks. The first tee at Heron Valley has ropes, a small grandstand, a scoreboard operator in a golf shirt. There’s a marshal holding a QUIET sign, and a guy with a camera on his shoulder is crouched off to the side. I’ve never had a real gallery before. My hands feel like they belong to someone else.

The tee shot on one wobbles right into the first cut, barely off the fairway. Not disastrous, just imperfect; my hands are a half-beat quicker than they should be on the takeaway. Polite applause ripples from the grandstand anyway, which is somehow worse. I recover to a two-putt par, and the whole day just kind of continues from there, a version of golf that isn’t broken but isn’t quite mine either.

Bogey on three, a wedge I leave short into a false front that spins right back down the slope Reyes warned me about last night, proof I knew the answer and still couldn’t execute it under pressure. I glance at Stephen after, half expecting a look, but he just hands me my putter and says nothing, which is somehow worse and better at the same time.

“Talk to me,” I mutter, walking to four.

“One bad swing isn’t a pattern. The false front got you, and you already know the fix. One more club, like we planned.”

Three pars, then a scrambled bogey on seven where I miss the green to the left, and by the turn I’m two over, further from the lead than I’ve been in any round all summer. Heron Valley’s living up to its reputation, tight and unforgiving. I’m not playing badly exactly, just not playing like someone trying to earn a card.

“Two over,” Stephen says at the turn, checking my card with no reaction on his face. “The rest of the field’s not exactly torching it out there either. Wind’s up, and it’s messing with everybody.”

“Feels bad.”

“Feels bad isn’t the same as is bad. Eat something.” He hands me a banana and a white electrolyte water.

“Fuck, I don’t want to eat something,” I snap.

He stops and looks at me, hard. “Is this a day you don’t want me taking care of you? Or are you just mad at yourself?”

I groan. He’s right. Always fucking right. Using the list. I hold out my hand for the banana and I eat it. Drink half the bottle in one go. Doesn’t help the way I want it to. Not a magic pill.

On the back nine, the wind comes in off the marsh in long, hard gusts, flattening the grass and whipping the moss sideways. I finally find something closer to a rhythm anyway: birdie on eleven, a good wedge that actually holds the green instead of spinning away from it, and for a few holes I’ve found the version of my swing that showed up at Desert Sky. Twelve and thirteen hold solid. Fourteen, a mistake off the tee ends in the marsh grass and costs me a double bogey, and I feel the whole round tilting sideways again, that old anxious voice creeping back in, the one that says I’m not built for a stage this big.

“Boring golf,” Stephen murmurs at fifteen, low enough only I hear it. “Doesn’t matter what happened. Matters what you do next. Bor-ring.” He draws it out long and comical. I breathe.

I birdie fifteen. Hold to pars through seventeen, grinding every one of them out. There’s nothing pretty about any of it. This is so much harder than Stage One. Eighteen, my approach catches the collar, and I chip to five feet and roll in the putt to save par, a small mercy at the end of an ugly day, and I sign for seventy-four, two over.

“Two over,” I say again, mostly to myself, doing math I don’t trust yet.

Stephen’s already got his phone out, scanning the leaderboard as it fills in. “Wind wrecked a lot of guys today. You’re sitting at eighteenth. A few groups still out. They won’t move you much.”

“Eighteenth.”

“Top twenty, Adrian. On your worst day in weeks.” He looks up at me, something steady in his face that I badly need right now. “That’s not luck. That’s what boring golf buys you when the good stuff isn’t there.”

I don’t feel like celebrating. It’s not top five. But I don’t feel like collapsing either, which, after a round like that, might be the actual win.

Coach Reyes texts this time, just a single text after seeing the round posted:

Coach

18th after a rough ball-striking day is exactly the kind of finish we talked about. Nothing to fix. Get some sleep.