CHAPTER THREE #2
She's right. It is lighter. The putter has not changed weight. My perception of it has, because Nerys has moved the contact points from my palms to my fingers and the club suddenly feels like something I'm guiding rather than controlling.
"Softer," she says.
The word lands against my neck. Her mouth is close enough that I can feel the consonants — the s and the f and the breath that carries them. My fingers loosen on the grip. Other things tighten.
"The putter does the work. You just have to let it."
My breathing has become a problem. It is too fast and too shallow and happening in the upper third of my chest, and I am suddenly grateful that she is behind me rather than in front of me, because if she could see my face right now she would see something I am not ready to show anyone, least of all the woman my sponsors hired to fix my short game.
I lean back.
It's a quarter of an inch. Maybe less. A movement so small it could be postural. It could be balance adjustment. It could be the natural sway of a body standing still for too long.
It is none of those things.
My shoulders press against her chest. I can feel the texture of her polo through the back of my tank top. I can feel the flat plane of her sternum and the warmth of her body and the subtle, involuntary catch of her breath when the contact registers.
She holds the position for two seconds.
One. Two.
I count them because counting is the only thing keeping me from turning around and doing something that would make both of us unemployable.
Then she steps back. Clean. Precise. Hands at her sides.
The air where she was standing is cooler than the air everywhere else, and I feel the absence of her like a door closing.
"Better," she says. Her voice is controlled. Completely controlled. Not a single frequency out of place. "Again. Alone this time."
I look down at my hands on the putter. My grip has changed. The pressure is in my fingers now, not my palms, and the club feels different — responsive, articulate, alive in a way it wasn't before she touched me.
I set up over the ball. Twenty-two feet. The double-breaking putt I nearly made earlier.
My hands are shaking. Not from nerves. Not from the yips. From the ghost of her fingers on my knuckles and the word softer still vibrating against the side of my neck.
I stroke the putt.
It rolls over the ridge, takes the second break, and drops into the dead center of the cup.
I look at Nerys.
"Good," she says.
One word. No smile. No elaboration. She writes something in her notebook and moves to the far end of the practice green to set up the next drill.
Good.
That single syllable burns hotter than every compliment I've received in the last three years of professional golf.
Hotter than incredible, fearless, electric, unstoppable.
Hotter than the praise I get from sponsors who love my face and commentators who love my swing and fans who love the version of me that attacks everything and never looks afraid.
Good.
Said by a woman who is not easily impressed. Directed at a putt, not a face. Earned by mechanics, not spectacle.
I want to hear it again.
I want to hear it in a different context entirely.
I line up the next putt and try to focus on my fingers and not on the memory of hers.
·
She works me for three more hours.
Short game. Chipping. Bunker play. Course-management scenarios with a whiteboard she's brought in the back of her rental car — a portable whiteboard, like a high school teacher who golfs, which should be absurd and is instead oddly compelling because she draws course layouts from memory with a precision that suggests her brain contains satellite imagery.
She asks me to choose between two shots on every scenario.
I choose correctly about seventy percent of the time.
The thirty percent I get wrong are always the same type: situations where the safe shot is clearly superior but requires patience, and the aggressive shot offers a lower probability of success but a higher probability of looking spectacular.
"You choose the aggressive line when the reward is visible," she says, capping the whiteboard marker.
"Birdie from a recovery. Eagle from an impossible lie.
A finish that would make a broadcast reel.
You choose correctly when the reward is invisible — a well-managed par, a bogey that could have been worse, a lay-up that sets up the next shot. You don't value invisible rewards."
"Because nobody sees them."
"You see them. Isn't that sufficient?"
I don't have an answer for that. Or rather, I have an answer, and the answer is no, it isn't, it has never been sufficient, I need to be seen being brave because if no one watches then the bravery might not exist, and that answer is so raw and embarrassing that I'd rather snap another club than say it out loud.
Nerys watches me not answer. She doesn't push.
"Enough for today," she says. "Tomorrow we do on-course work. Nine holes. I'll have a strategy for each one. You follow the strategy or you explain why you're deviating before you hit. Not after. Before."
"And if my explanation is good?"
"Then we adjust together. This is not obedience, Tala. It's communication."
She packs the whiteboard into her car. I watch her move — efficient, long-limbed, unhurried. She lifts the whiteboard with one hand and slides it into the back seat, and the ease of the motion makes something curl low in my abdomen.
"Nerys."
She straightens. Turns. The light is behind her now, mid-morning, and it outlines her silhouette — the height, the lean shoulders, the silver streak glowing copper at the edges.
"The grip adjustment. You could have just told me where to put my hands."
"I could have."
"But you didn't. You touched me."
"I demonstrated a physical correction. The proprioceptive feedback is more effective than verbal instruction for grip changes."
"Is that why you did it?"
She holds my gaze. Three seconds. Four. I watch a microexpression cross her face — the tiniest contraction around her eyes, not quite a flinch, more like the muscular equivalent of a sentence begun and then abandoned.
"Yes," she says. "That's why."
She gets in her car. Closes the door. The window is down, and she looks at me through it.
"Six forty-five tomorrow. Don't be late."
"I wasn't late today."
"You were four minutes late. I simply chose not to mention it."
She drives away. The dust settles. I stand in the practice facility parking lot with my bag over my shoulder and the Arizona sun making my scalp prickle and the word softer tattooed on the inside of my skull.
·
The hotel room is dark. I've closed the curtains because the Scottsdale sunset is beautiful and I don't deserve beautiful things right now.
I deserve to lie on this bed and stare at the ceiling and reckon with the reality that I am developing a catastrophic fixation on the woman hired to save my career.
I shower. The water is too hot. I stand under it and press my palms against the tile and try to think about golf.
I think about golf for approximately eight seconds.
Then I think about Nerys's hands over mine, and the way the scar on her thumb felt against my knuckle, and the sound of the word softer arriving against the skin of my neck like something placed there with intention.
I think about the height difference. Six inches. Her chin above the crown of my head. Her forearms bracketing mine. The architecture of being enclosed by a taller body without being restrained.
I think about what would have happened if I'd leaned back more than a quarter inch. If I'd pressed fully against her. If I'd turned my head and found her jaw — her mouth — right there, inches away, angled down toward me.
The water runs over my shoulders. My breathing is the problem again. Too fast. Too high. I press my forehead against the cool tile and let the shower beat against the back of my neck and I do not touch myself.
I want to.
Specifically, precisely, with an urgency that feels medical, I want to slide my hand between my thighs and replay the moment her fingers settled over mine and find out what happens when I let the memory finish without interruption.
I don't.
Not because I'm virtuous. Because I'm furious. I'm furious that this woman — this controlled, silver-streaked, infuriatingly calm woman who reads courses like they've personally offended her and says good like she's handing down a verdict — has occupied my body this completely after two days.
I am Tala Sarmiento. I have slept with beautiful people on four continents. I have been desired by athletes and influencers and one very determined sports-marketing executive who sent me flowers for six weeks straight. I do not develop fixations. I generate them.
Nerys Quillan has reversed the polarity in forty-eight hours, and she did it with a grip adjustment and a single syllable.
I turn off the water. Wrap myself in a towel. Sit on the edge of the bed with my hair dripping onto my shoulders.
I pick up my phone and text Bisi.
She's insane.
The response takes fourteen seconds.
She's exactly what you need.
I stare at the screen. Type three different replies. Delete each one.
That's what I'm afraid of.
Bisi doesn't respond to that. She doesn't need to. We've known each other long enough that silence is its own commentary.
I set the phone on the nightstand. Lie back. The ceiling is the same featureless white as last night, and it offers the same absence of guidance.
Tomorrow I play nine holes with Nerys Quillan walking beside me.
Her voice in my ear before every shot. Her hands in my sightline when she points at targets.
Her body three feet from mine for four hours on a golf course where nobody will know that the reason I keep looking at my caddie is not strategic curiosity.
I close my eyes.
Softer, she said.
And my entire body listened.