34. Brian
CHAPTER 34
Caleb and I grab lunch after his second morning yoga class to hammer out a customer discount plan for each other. It’s going well, and I’m enjoying the fried apple cheddar stuffed French toast at the Easy Swallow until I see the headline of the weekend’s Nosy Pecker emblazoned across another diner’s newspaper.
Tee Time with Daddy Dearest: Gosling and Gander Return to the Nest!
Fuck.
“Brian? You okay? You’re white as a ghost all of the sudden.” Caleb’s concern goes over my head as I gape at the front-page article, wondering how on earth the whole town seems to know more about my social life than I do.
“Uh, I’m fine, just–”
At that moment, my cell rings in my pocket. I hold up a finger for Caleb, and check the caller ID.
Fuck. It’s Linda Gander. I’d finally added her number to my phone after Kodi insisted I stop ignoring her mother’s calls.
“Hello?”
“Hi Brian, it’s Marty Gander, Kodi’s father. I see here in The Nosy Pecker that you and I are due for a date on the green!”
“Um, the green?” I draw a blank.
“You know, the ol’ eighteen!”
A moment passes. I rack my brain trying to parse out his meaning.
“Golf, son. A game of golf.”
“Oh!” Duh. I really am clueless about most traditional sports. If it’s not martial arts or something we learned in gym class, don’t assume I know anything about it. “Right, yes, Linda mentioned something about that.”
“What do you say you and I meet at the Country Club ‘round seven next Sunday? Bright and early? You’ve got clubs, I assume?”
“Uh, no sir, I’ve never actually played.”
“Ah, no worries. We’ll have Jeff bring an extra set. You can meet the whole gang! Pretty important, after all, if you’re gonna be family.”
Caleb’s eyebrows raise at me as I melt into the back of my chair.
“Um, well, I don’t know if…” I pinch my nose, then sigh. “Thanks, Marty. I’m uh, looking forward to it.”
“See you then, Brian.”
The call ends, and Caleb waves his hand in front of my face. “Hello, Earth to Brian? You alright there, man?”
I blink myself back to the present, worry infusing my every bone. “Caleb, how much do you know about golf?”
“How is it you’ve gone your entire life, over thirty years, and never played a game of putt-putt?”
Nick, his girlfriend Tina, Kodi, and I walk up to the rental kiosk at Two In The Bush, a campground on the outskirts of town with a bunch of cheesy attractions, including a petting zoo and a mini golf course named Birdie in the Hole. Because of course it is.
I hand over my credit card to cover the four of us, and we each pick out a color-coordinated club and ball combo. I clutch my bright red ball and Nick takes the club from my hand, before replacing it with a slightly taller one.
“You’re gonna want one that works for your height.”
Kodi giggles behind her hand, which is holding a neon green ball. It clashes terribly with her cheery orange tank top and jean skirt, which is not exactly short-short, but enough for me to find distracting. I have to wrench my gaze away from her tan, toned thighs, which only serve to remind me of the way I had them wrapped around my head last week. Before I had to worry about meeting her Dad for a game of golf.
Tina’s ball is pink, and Nick went with neon yellow for his.
“So, are all golf balls bright colors?”
“No, just in mini golf. Out on the big course they’re usually white. Some people use different brands of balls, so you can usually keep track of whose is whose with the brand logos.” Nick holds open the rustic wooden gate for us as we round up at the first hole.
“There are multiple brands of golf balls? Like Nike and Adidas?”
“Not those brands in particular, but yeah.” Kodi squares up to a little rubber mat with three holes in it, drops her ball onto one of them and practices her swing a couple of times. I follow the ball as it falls, tracing my eyes down her long, lean legs. I correct my gaze to focus instead at the end of the straight fake-grass path, where a little wooden ramp with three tunnels running through it sits in the middle.
“Wait, you have to get the ball through one of those tunnels?”
“Or over the ramp. But the tunnels lead straight to the hole.” Kodi takes her swing, sending her green ball zipping down the path, directly into the left-most tunnel, where it disappears before emptying out and stopping about three inches from the depressed plastic cup that serves as the hole.
“Nice putt, Kodi!” Tina cheers, and the two high-five.
I swallow. She’s good.
Whereas before, I was embarrassed thinking about how unskilled I’d be compared to her dad, now I’m worried about how ridiculous I’m going to look when I can’t even keep up with my girlfriend at mini golf. Nick pats me on the back as Tina tees up her ball.
“Relax, Brian. It’s gonna be okay. Putting is just one part of the game.”
“How big are the ramps and tunnels at the big courses?” The three of them laugh, and I stare at them. “What?”
I thought it was a reasonable question.
“The obstacles at real golf courses are more…natural. Think ponds, sand traps, tall grass, that kind of thing.” Tina swings, and her ball rolls up and over the ramp, bouncing off the back brick barrier and thunking against Kodi’s ball, sending both flying in opposite directions away from the hole.
“Hey!” Kodi shouts in mock offense. She puts her hands on her hips. Tina winks at her.
“What happens if you land in one of those?” I picture myself wading into a pond in my best pair of slacks and a dress polo, while Kodi’s dad looks on in disapproval.
“If you can’t find your original ball, then you just add a foul stroke to your score and hit a new one from the general spot you landed in.”
I pretend to understand as Nick sidles up to the rubber mat, plonks down his ball, and putts it gently and accurately into the center tunnel. It disappears, then rolls straight out from under the ramp and into the hole. “Woohoo! Hole in one!”
Everyone cheers their approval, except for me. I’ve been dreading my turn this entire time, feeling the weight of meeting Kodi’s parents like a leaden x-ray vest hanging on my shoulders. Then I feel a soft hand on the small of my back.
“Hey. It’s going to be okay. Seriously. It’s just a game,” Kodi says, leaning into my shoulder. She meets my eyes and gives me a soft smile. My chest swells. Nick snorts.
“Is that Kodi Gander saying that? Am I dreaming?” Nick laughs, and Tina snorts beside him.
“Oh, fuck off!” Kodi sneers, but I catch a twinkle in her eye as she does. I remember her and Lily’s fight, and everything she’s working through, and the fact that she’s still able to comfort me while dealing with all of her own stress amazes me.
If she can get through an entire season of cornhole, in Tuft Swallow, with all of the weight of a championship on her shoulders, then surely I can make it through one game of golf with her dad.
Right?
I tee up my red ball, and whack it with the putter. It flies into the air, bouncing once on the green turf before smacking into the ramp on the incline and ricocheting off into the bushes beside us.
Nick bursts out laughing, and Kodi stifles her own laugh as I slink off into the shrubbery to locate my ball.
“Maybe go a little gentler this time, there B.”
I sigh, dig up my ball, and try again.
An hour later, we’ve only gone through nine holes, and there’s a pileup of families and players behind us.
I’m on my seventh putt, and I’ve skated around or over the hole four times already. When the red ball once again wheels past the white plastic cup, I let out a frustrated sigh.
“Let’s just go already, guys. Clearly I’m not meant to be good at this.”
“Oh come on. You’re just figuring out how to aim. Don’t worry about them.”
Kodi gestures over her shoulder where a family of five skips the hole we’re on and moves straight to eleven. The youngest child, a little girl of about four, lines up her ball and putts it directly through the little chute next to the decorative windmill and cheers when she gets it in the hole on the first try.
I growl in frustration. “How the hell am I supposed to aim, then?”
“Here,” Kodi says, wrapping her arms behind me and placing her hands on either side of my wrists.
My pulse speeds up as I feel her slight body press against mine from behind, her breath passing over my shoulder blades in warm little puffs. The soft flesh of her breasts makes contact with my back through the fabric of our shirts, and suddenly I forget all about mini golf, focusing entirely on the sensation of her warm body and every point of contact it has with mine.
What’s gotten into me? I haven’t felt this worked up around a woman since I first started dating in high school. She leans her head around my shoulder, placing her hands on my forearms and moving her arms from side to side, swinging my putter inside my grip.
I swallow, staring at her strong hands clenching around me, as she whispers into my ear.
“First of all, you gotta be more gentle. It’s a tap, not a whack. You’re only sending the ball seven inches to the right.”
The words scrape their way out of my throat. “Seven inches. Gentle.”
“Right.” Her arms press into mine, and God help me, I revel in the pressure. “So just practice behind the ball for now, picture the line of the movement. Like you would for pool or croquet or anything like that, right? It’s motion transfer. From your arms, to your putter, to…”
She pushes my arms out ever so slightly, leaning in even closer against my back, and this time the swing connects, gently tapping the ball in a perfect line directly into the hole. Nick and Tina throw their hands up in victory.
Kodi keeps her arms wrapped around me, sliding them up and in around my ribcage before giving me a squeeze around my middle. My stomach does a little flip.
She kisses my shoulder. “See? Just like that.”
“Maybe you should come with me on Sunday,” I mutter, turning to face her and pulling her back in before she slips away. “Be my good luck charm. My little golf pro.”
I want nothing more than to abandon our clubs and balls and focus on sinking into an entirely different kind of hole with her, back in the privacy of my home. The heat in my stomach that smoldered to life when I first saw her in that denim mini skirt rises up into my chest as I tighten my arm around her back.
She scrunches her nose and shakes her head. But I don’t miss the flush of pink that colors her cheeks at the movement of my arm. “I wish. But I have to help mom cook for us.”
Nick plucks the ball out of the hole and calls out to us, breaking up the little bubble we’d lost ourselves in. “Come on, you two lovebirds. There are people waiting.”
Kodi slips her hand into mine as we head to the next hole with Nick and Tina.
Hole Eighteen is a par five, which Nick informs me means it’s the hardest hole on the course. I’ve learned quite a bit about the language of golf in the past two hours, even if my skill still leaves something to be desired. Despite Kodi’s coaching, my score is falling somewhere in the triple digits when we approach the final leg of the game.
“Okay, so this one is the water slide,” Kodi begins.
“The water slide?”
“Yes.” She smiles at me. “It’s actually super cool. So it’s kinda half Rube-Goldberg machine, half obstacle course. It starts with getting your ball to bounce through the bumpers of the first straightaway, then it sinks through a Plinko ramp and into the water wheel, where depending on when it enters, will spit you out onto one of three circles.
“The first circle is actually a bowl-shaped fountain that will just send you right to the final hole like a toilet flush. The second one is a spinning platform that you need to tilt with a crank to get it into a different water slide to the hole, and then the third one is actually a popper: you press on the big plastic bubble until your ball bounces into the the center, which is guarded by a bunch of bumpers, and leads to a third water slide which pours directly back into the check in kiosk.”
“Each press counts as a stroke.”
“Same with the crank on platform two–each full crank is a stroke.”
I gawk at the ridiculous maze of engineering before me. “This is insane.”
“Yep!” Tina grins. “Some mini golf courses have a pirate theme, some are glow-in-the-dark, but I’ve never seen another one with a game show-themed water slide.”
Tuft Swallow strikes again.
Just as they have with the other seventeen holes, Kodi, Tina, and NIck all go before me. As if they planned it, each of them end up on a different platform, so I get to see how they all work before I wind up at the tee.
It seems like the hardest part to get through is the first straightaway with all the bumpers. There’s no clear straight path to the other side, so you need a bit of luck to make it through, bouncing in the correct direction in one or two strokes.
For once, though, fortune seems to be on my side as I send up a Hail Mary swing and fly right over the rubber bumpers and directly into the Plinko ramp. Kodi’s face splits into a giant grin as she watches the arc of the ball, and I swear everything becomes technicolor in the glow of her smile. She sprints down the sidewalk to see my ball as it crashes into the Plinko board, and I follow her.
But just as my ball bounces and clunks its way to the entrance of the waterfall bowl, Kodi’s foot catches on the brick barrier at the edge of the green, and she tumbles forward into the giant plastic bubble popper.
I watch in slow motion as her full weight clicks the dome down. My eyes widen as the spring-loaded obstacle pops back up violently, shooting her body up into the air a few inches. She’s caught completely off guard, and when the dismount sends the toe of her foot directly into the same uneven bit of path that caused her to trip in the first place, her knee buckles. I watch in horror, hearing the hiss of her breath, as she collapses into the concrete of the sidewalk, smacking her knee directly into the unforgiving surface.
“Gah!”
“Kodi!”
I run to her, ball forgotten, and sink to my knees beside her. “Are you okay?”
My heart breaks as I see moisture gather in the corners of her eyes involuntarily. Fuck. I know what it’s like to get struck so bad that you can’t even hold back your body’s tears. She’s in serious pain.
Nick and Tina rush over and instantly start trying to help.
“Does she need an ice pack?”
“Here, let’s help get her up.”
“Did anything twist or sprain?”
“Guys, guys, I’m fine. Calm down,” Kodi grunts, attempting to shift back up onto her feet. But as she twists to put her bad leg onto the ground, she winces.
“No no, baby girl, I don’t think so.” Gently, I shift one arm around Kodi’s back and the other under her legs and scoop her into my chest, being mindful of her injury. “Let’s get you back to the car.”
Nick and Tina return the putters while I carry her to Tina’s SUV, which she left unlocked in the parking lot. Kodi curls into me as I do my best not to jostle her too much on the dirt trail out to the car.
“I’m sorry.”
Her voice is so small and muffled against my shirt, I don’t understand her at first. It’s only after I get her to the door of the car that I realize what she said.
“What? What the hell do you have to apologize for?” I set her onto the seat with her legs facing me, and she grimaces while I survey the damage.
“For fucking up my recovery. Again. For being so broken.”
Her face is red and splotchy from the tears that she couldn’t hold back, and as I take in her watery, brown eyes, the dappled sunlight reflecting off the droplets clinging to her eyelashes, I feel my insides squeeze. I release her leg from my grip and lift my hand to her face, where I wipe away the tear tracks with my thumb.
“Baby girl, you are not broken.”
She snorts, and I reach around to the nape of her neck with my other hand, tilting her face up until we lock eyes. She hiccups on a gasp, and I lean down until my forehead is touching hers.
With her face so close, I can practically taste the salt of her tears. I breathe in the scent of the sun in her hair. I hear her breath rattle as she takes a shaky inhale through her tears.
“Getting hurt by accident doesn’t make you weak,” I say slowly, emphasizing every word, willing them from my lips into her brain. I cradle her head in my hands, feeling the heat of her breath and the wetness of her cheeks as I hold her to me. “You are so strong. And I l–”
My throat catches, and I take in a breath. Fuck.
I was about to say that I love her.
But that’s not right. We barely know each other. We just met a few weeks ago. And sure, it’s been a crazy couple of weeks, and we’ve fooled around and kissed and had some pretty deep conversations, and yeah, I’ve been checking her out this entire day, but there’s more to love than that.
I should know.
Zeke and I hadn’t said the L-word to each other for almost nine months of dating. I pined after him, waffling for weeks before I finally said it. It was the longest I’d ever waited. Even so, after I said it to him, he still shied away from the word except in very rare circumstances, usually during sex: at the very height of passion between us.
This moment couldn’t be any less sexy. We just wrapped up the most pathetic game I’ve ever played in my life, where I embarrassed myself in front of half of the children of Tuft Swallow with my miserable lack of putting skills. Kodi’s face is streaming with tears and snot after she just pitched herself on the eighteenth hole. She’s in an extreme amount of pain. And this, this is the moment where I almost let slip the L-word?
What the hell is wrong with me? This isn’t a moment of romance or passion. Neither of us is sexy right now.
Except…that’s absolute bullshit. Because even with puffy eyes and blotchy, tear-stained cheeks, Kodi is the most beautiful woman I’ve ever seen. All I want is to wrap her perfect body in my arms, press her gorgeous face into the hollow of my throat and hold her and stroke her hair until her pain goes away. This amazingly strong woman, who’s been doing everything in her power to get past this injury of hers, only to get beaten down again and again by years of unresolved trauma and just some of the worst luck.
“You what?” She whispers.
“I–”
“We got you some ice,” Tina huffs, popping up beside me and handing Kodi a cold, wet bundle wrapped in a towel. She sounds like she ran here. “Sorry, they had to dig it out of the snack bar freezer, but this should keep you until we can get you to Brian’s place, yeah?”
“That’s probably the best plan. You can get her back on her feet, right, B? Miracle worker?”
Kodi and I pull away from each other, both of our faces red now from getting caught in the middle of a moment by our friends.
Not that we should be embarrassed. As far as they know, we’ve been dating for almost a month.
“Yeah, that’s a good idea.” I lift Kodi’s thighs a bit and turn her gingerly so she’s facing the front of the car, attempting to ignore the way her skirt rides up a few inches in the process. I tug the fabric back down carefully, then I take the makeshift ice pack and prop it under her knee. “Keep it there for a few minutes, and then let it rest. Just cycle it on and off until we get back into town.”
“Okay.”
I buckle her in and shut the door, turning to Nick and Tina before walking around to the passenger side.
“Never a dull moment with you two, is there?” Nick says, punching me in the shoulder.
“She’s lucky to have you around,” Tina says. “Never been one to take it easy, that Kodi.”
As we make it back into town, I hold Kodi’s hand in the middle of the backseat, slowly running my thumb over her knuckles, mulling over Tina’s words.
If it weren’t for me panicking about golf with her dad, she never would have tripped in the first place. Thanks to this stupid fake boyfriend business, she’s constantly needing to watch what she says around town, and is dealing with pressure from her friends and family about me. Meanwhile, I’m forgetting why we got into this arrangement in the first place. Instead of focusing on my business, or figuring out my personal life, I’m seducing her in her apartment. Getting caught up in the act and almost letting the L-word slip in a parking lot while she cries in pain. She needs me to be her doctor, not her fake boyfriend.
I was supposed to be doing her a favor. Not causing her more stress.
So how, exactly, am I lucky for her?