Chapter 6
KONSTANTIN
The manager of Lakeside Putt-Putt has accepted my money, returned most of it and barred me from buying every ticket between noon and four.
Nora stands beside the counter while this humiliation occurs, wearing dark jeans with a red sweater fitted softly over her waist. Her brown hair is pulled high at the back of her head, exposing the slender line of her neck.
Small silver hoops catch under the bright ceiling panels whenever she turns toward me.
The clothes came from her apartment this morning, yet seeing her dressed inside her own life feels more intimate than the green knit did at the restaurant.
She has chosen white sneakers for the course. A narrow strip of ankle shows above each one.
My attention remains there too long.
"We agreed on a real date," she says. "Other people are a normal feature of those."
Behind her, a mechanical lake monster opens its painted mouth every few seconds while a bell rings somewhere near the ninth hole.
Children shout across strips of green turf divided by blue plastic water.
The heated air smells like pretzel salt and damp carpet, with a sweeter trace drifting from the machine that spins pink sugar near the birthday tables.
I turn to the manager. He sets the blue club on the counter, leaving me to defend the attempted buyout myself. "I didn't ask him to remove other people. I offered to compensate the business for temporary privacy."
"You offered to purchase an afternoon."
"It was available."
The manager shakes his head.
Nora sees it. Her mouth curves as she selects a red ball from the return tray. "Apparently it wasn't."
My security chief waits near the entrance in a dark coat, surrounded by a family arguing over blue golf clubs.
Two more men cover the rear exit and the corridor leading to the restrooms. A fourth stands beneath a papier-maché lighthouse while a toddler repeatedly hands him yellow balls from a wire basket.
Each ball is returned with the solemn attention he normally gives a loaded weapon.
The building has been swept. Ticket sales now require identification, cameras cover the public approaches, and every employee has been checked against the restaurant investigation. Nora has her crowd without sacrificing the perimeter.
She also has my men trapped among seven birthday groups.
"The course stays open," I tell the manager. "Keep the difference."
His relief lasts until Nora asks what my original offer would have covered. He names a number in a voice that weakens halfway through it.
Nora turns slowly toward me. "You tried to spend forty thousand dollars on miniature golf?"
"I wanted the afternoon to proceed without gunfire."
"Most people accomplish that for fourteen dollars and tax."
"Most people aren't marrying me tomorrow."
Her smile fades. Through the glass doors behind the counter, snow moves past the parking-lot lights in dry white sheets. Our safety rests on cameras, locked service access, armed men hidden among winter coats, and a woman at the entrance pretending to compare ticket stubs.
Nora reaches for a second red ball, then changes her mind and takes black. She places it in my palm. "Today you get to be one of the fourteen-dollar people."
The ball is warm from her hand.
I follow her to the first hole.
The course fills a former furniture showroom whose high white ceiling disappears behind suspended clouds painted with cheerful blue shadows.
Each hole turns a piece of the lakefront into cheap mythology.
A freighter blocks the second green, while a red lighthouse guards the third with rotating beams. Farther in, a foam cliff rises above a shallow pool where circulating water makes the coins below wink like treasure.
Nothing here attempts good taste. Every surface is scratched by children or faded from cleaning, yet the room carries the unruly pleasure of a place used exactly as intended.
Parents drink paper cups of coffee beside stroller parking.
Teenagers compare scores near a crooked windmill. Nobody lowers a voice when I pass.
Nora hands me a blue club. "This one reaches your hands without forcing you to fold in half."
"You examined the equipment?"
"I have eyes." She steps onto the first green, sets the red ball on its starting mark and then bends from the hips to line up her shot. Denim pulls taut across her ass. The sweater lifts at her waist, showing a slim band of bare skin above the jeans.
My grip tightens around the club.
Without looking back, Nora says, "You may want to study the obstacle."
"I am."
Her laugh breaks free before she strikes. The ball rolls cleanly under a little steel bridge, touches the far rail, and drops into the cup on the return.
The children waiting behind us cheer. Nora straightens with both arms raised, accepting their approval as her due.
"One," she says.
I take two strokes.
By the fourth hole, she leads by three. Nora plays without ceremony, using quick bank shots that look reckless until the ball reaches the cup. I approach each green expecting the painted rails to honor geometry, then discover another seam in the turf or a slope too shallow to see.
At the red lighthouse, a boy in a dinosaur coat watches me miss the turning gate twice.
"You're hitting it too hard," he tells me.
His father goes pale when he recognizes me. The boy remains unimpressed.
I place the ball again. "Show me."
He takes the club, taps the ball through the gate, and returns the handle with a serious nod. The shot stops beside the cup.
"Better," he says.
"Much."
Nora waits until they move away before pressing her lips together. Her shoulders shake. "You were corrected by a six-year-old."
"His advice was sound."
"Your security team may never recover."
Near the lighthouse, one of my men turns his back to conceal a smile. I remember his name, his salary, and the address where his mother receives a weekly delivery at my expense.
I also remember that Nora is watching to see whether losing dignity in public requires punishment.
The guard remains employed.
At the fifth hole, Nora sets her scorecard on the rail. "We need a wager."
The deliberate innocence in her voice makes my body respond before she says another word.
"What do you want?"
"The winner controls one rule for the wedding night." Her forefinger traces the edge of the little pencil. "If you win, you choose. If I win, I decide what happens to you."
A birthday group surges past the course divider carrying slices of pizza on paper plates. The smell of tomato sauce fills the aisle while someone near the arcade wins a shower of metal tokens. Nora waits beneath a painted sailboat, her gaze steady on mine.
"I want the rule stated before I agree," I say.
She steps close, taking the front of my coat between two fingers. Her voice drops under the machinery and the children shouting near the pool. "If you win, you can come inside me on our wedding night without a condom."
My cock hardens so quickly that the front of my trousers becomes painful.
Nora's breath moves against the skin below my ear. She releases my coat before I can put my hands on her and returns to the tee with color high across her cheeks. Desire has altered her breathing too. The sight gives me no relief.
"If you win?" My voice comes out rougher.
"I choose what happens."
"You could choose the same prize."
"I could choose something much worse." She bends over the ball again, leaving me with the curve of her ass and the fact that she means to carry this game into our bedroom.
"Agreed," I say.
Nora strikes. Her ball catches the side of a plastic anchor before rolling into the cup.
I take three strokes.
After the wager, every small movement acquires a private consequence.
When she reaches past me for the pencil, her breast brushes my arm.
At the pool, she crouches to retrieve her ball from beneath the rail while looking up through her lashes.
She licks salt from her thumb after tearing a soft pretzel between us, then offers me the piece she has already touched, her mouth curving because she knows I'll take it.
I know manipulation when it is performed against me. Nora makes no attempt to hide hers.
On the eighth green, I guide her away from the path of a running child with one hand at her waist. She leans back into my palm for a second longer than balance requires, carrying the scent of clean wool and the orange soap from my guest bathroom.
Her warmth reaches me through both layers under the red sweater.
My thumb presses lightly into the curve above her hip.
"Public course," she reminds me. "Our contract still applies."
"Your decision." I release her. Nora glances down at the front of my trousers before walking to the next hole with renewed satisfaction.
The ninth requires a shot through the open mouth of the lake monster. Its eyes flash when the ball enters, followed by a burst of cold air from vents hidden in its throat. Nora waits beside the teeth until I prepare to swing.
"I wonder whether the suite has mirrors," she says.
My ball strikes one painted tooth and rolls back to my shoes.
She moves aside, smiling. "The obstacle was directly in front of you."
"You'll answer for that after the ceremony."
"Only if you win."
I don't win.
The back half of the course narrows between painted docks, forcing my security team to trail at a distance while still covering every crossway.
Nora's teasing gives way to a story about her clinic, where a nine-year-old patient has begun bringing handwritten reviews of the waiting-room magazines.
She tells me about the apartment lamp her grandmother despises, bought at a street market because its orange shade makes everyone look sunburned.
When I ask which friend will stand beside her tomorrow, she names two women from work who still believe the wedding is an impulsive romance she failed to mention.
At the thirteenth hole, a wooden boathouse hides the cup behind two swinging doors. Nora leans against the rail while I wait for the mechanism to reset.
"Why miniature golf?"
She rolls the pencil between her fingers before giving me a fuller answer than I expected.
"Dinner is useful when you want to hear a man's biography.
I wanted to know how you behave when the stakes are too small to frighten anyone into agreeing with you.
This place has children, minimum-wage employees, bad machinery, and public failure.
Trying to buy the building before the first hole troubled me.
Then you listened to a little boy who corrected you without making his father regret bringing him here. "
The painted doors begin swinging again. I ignore them. "What else have you learned?"
"You watch every entrance even when your security chief has already checked it. You share food without ordering a replacement after I touch it. You also become very easy to manipulate when sex is mentioned."
Her smile returns as she steps around me to play the hole. I came prepared to provide Nora with an afternoon she had requested, and she has spent it watching me with the same attention I give every exit. No amount of authority can alter her conclusions.
The boathouse doors swing closed before I return to the friends she mentioned earlier.
"I had less than three days to invent a courtship," she says. "They think I lost my mind. One is offended I did it without asking her to hold my coat."
"They'll be brought to the estate before the roads worsen."
Nora looks at me over the scorecard. "They have their own cars."
"The roads are safe. The threat attached to you isn't."
For a moment, the course recedes behind the concern in her face. "If either of them becomes a target because I invited them into this, I need to know immediately. Don't decide I can be protected from the information."
The direct warning reaches beyond tomorrow. I've spent two days deciding what Nora may survive knowing, and she has spent the same time forcing that choice back into her own hands.
"You'll know," I tell her. "If the risk changes for anyone you named, I'll tell you before I move them unless immediate danger makes waiting impossible."
She studies me and then writes the promise beneath our scores and makes me initial it.
I do.
At the seventeenth hole, Nora leads by two. The course has curved back toward the birthday tables, where pink paper crowns now cover several small heads. My black ball rests near the edge of a ramp shaped like a drawbridge. Hers is already in the cup.
"You can still tie me," she says.
"You sound disappointed."
"I have plans." She moves behind me while I set my club. Her fingertips skim my nape under the collar of my coat. The contact lasts only an instant. Heat follows it down my spine, sending every muscle in my body toward the hand that is already gone.
My shot climbs the ramp too fast, strikes the far barrier, and vanishes into the shallow pool.
Nora laughs so hard she has to brace one hand on the rail.
I retrieve the ball beneath the sympathetic gaze of the dinosaur-coated boy, who has reached the eighteenth hole with his family. He advises me to hit more softly. Nora thanks him on my behalf.
The final green is a plain lane ending under a fiberglass ship's wheel.
I need a hole in one and several impossible revisions to the previous score.
Nora still takes her turn seriously. She lines up, sends the red ball along the right rail, and watches it curve around the wheel before stopping beside the cup.
Two strokes.
Her final score is forty-one. Mine is forty-four.
Nora writes both numbers in large black figures before signing the bottom of the card. She passes it to me for acknowledgment.
"You distracted me."
"I played under the same conditions."
"You weren't wearing those jeans."
At the register, Nora hands the card over with our putters. The attendant enters both totals, then drops the red paper into a drawer beneath the counter.
"History will record a fair victory," she says.
Around us, plastic gears turn while a child protests the return of a rented club.
My security chief receives the final all-clear through his earpiece.
Nobody has fired a weapon. No rival has crossed the doors.
For almost three hours, the world has required nothing darker of me than sending a black ball into six inches of blue water.
I want her prize. I also want another afternoon where defeat costs me nothing except Nora's laughter.
She reaches up to straighten my collar, leaving her fingers against my throat while the last birthday group passes behind us.
"Tell me what you chose," I say.
Nora's eyes lower briefly to my mouth. "You find out after we're married."