Page 66 of Wedge

“You have hit this shot a thousand times since Steamboat. Better every time. This isn’t that day. This is today, and today you’re four under, and this shot doesn’t get to decide who you are anymore.” I put the club in his hand, deliberate, unhurried, my hands surrounding his for a beat, warm and strong around him. I let my face show my pride in him. It may show more than that, but that’s okay. I let it. “Same swing you’ve hit all summer. Pick the flag. Forget the water exists.”

“Forget it exists,” he repeats, breathing slowing. I want to kiss his forehead. I don’t.

“Forget it exists.”

He does. The ball flies high and soft, lands twenty feet left of the flag, safely on the dry side of everything, and he two-putts for a par that feels, in that moment, like a birdie would have felt any other day.

“There he is,” I murmur, squeezing his shoulder once we’re walking off. He blazes me with that smile. Yeah, I’m using the list. “That is the whole thing right there. That’s what six weeks of work buys you.”

“That was not nothing.”

“Not nothing. Wasn’t a disaster either. That’s how you win.”

He settles after that. The tightness drains out of him hole by hole, the afternoon light going long and yellow across the fairways, and the back nine turns into a show: birdie on fourteen, another on sixteen, and birdie on seventeen with a wedge so precise, I actually laugh out loud watching it land, raising my hand for a high-five. He signs for a sixty-five, seven under, and when the board fills in an hour later he’s tied for sixth with four other guys, Battoli included, all of them bunched together at the top of a leaderboard that’s about to get a lot more crowded and a lot more dangerous.

“Top ten,” he says, staring at his phone like he still doesn’t trust the number.

“Top ten,” I confirm. “And you survived the shot over water doing it.”

“Barely.”

“Barely still counts.” I pull him in, forehead to forehead, right there on the practice green. “Two more rounds, baby. You’re doing exactly what we came here to do.”

The invitation comes through Ben, forwarded to Adrian’s phone with a note attached. Sponsor mixer, hotel ballroom, seven PM. Player-only, but go. Free food, free swag, and half the guys who’ll be deciding your future sponsorship deals are in that room.

“You should go,” I tell him, already knowing what his face is about to do.

“I don’t want to go.”

“I know. Go anyway.” I toss him the collared shirt hanging in the closet, the nice one, not tournament gear. “This is part of the job too. Just the boring part.”

He grumbles the whole time he’s changing. He keeps the plugs out of his ears and brushes his mohawk smooth. Not that it looks much different. I walk him down to the ballroom entrance since caddies apparently don’t rate an invitation to this particular event. The hotel lobby is all marble and glass, a fountain murmuring in the middle of the floor, clusters of overstuffed chairs, a bar glowing amber at the far end, and the low roar of a party leaking through the ballroom doors.

“An hour,” he says, like he’s negotiating a hostage release. “Maybe less.”

“Take your time. Talk to people. Let them see the guy who’s tied for sixth.”

“I hate this part.”

“I know. You’re still going.” I kiss his forehead, quick, easy, nothing anyone in the lobby would look twice at anymore. “I’ll be right here when you are done.”

He disappears through the ballroom doors, and I settle into one of the lobby’s overstuffed loveseats with my phone, planning to spend the hour doing absolutely nothing more interesting than scrolling through nothing in particular, half-watching the front doors, half-watching golf highlights from earlier in the day. Easy. Uneventful.

I’ve switched to flipping through Geoff’s Instagram account, which is mostly full of videos of Jasmine. I laugh aloud as she smears banana right into his ear.

“Stephen?”

I almost don’t hear her.

“Oh my god, Stephen, it is you.” She slides onto the loveseat next to me, that familiar, hated perfume registering a moment too late. I look up into eyes I never wanted to see again. Big, lying blue eyes, red bee-stung lips, long blond hair… Vanessa has changed little since I kicked her out of my apartment off base.

“What are you doing here?” I bite out.

“Ooh, not very friendly,” she pouts, leaning forward to kiss my cheek. I lean as far back as I can, trying to evade her, trying to get further away. She runs a hand behind my neck, trying to pull me in, and I smell the tequila on her breath. “No hugs for an old love?” she says, breathily.

I peel her hand off the back of my neck like it is something contagious, standing fast enough that she has to catch herself against the arm of the loveseat. “Don’t.”

“Oh, come on.” She pouts, but there’s no real hurt behind it, just the practiced kind she always used to use when she wanted something. “It’s been what, ten years? Twelve?”