CHAPTER SIX
Nerys
Phaedra's office is on the second floor of a converted row house in downtown Charleston, above a bakery that fills the stairwell with the smell of sourdough at six in the morning and rosemary focaccia by noon.
I have sat in this office through a divorce, a career transition, two tax disputes, and the strategic dismantling of a management contract that was costing me twelve percent of income I no longer earned.
Today I am sitting here reviewing the legal framework that will allow me to sleep with a client.
"Independent contractor agreement with guaranteed compensation for the remaining five trial events," Phaedra says, sliding the document across her desk.
"Compensation is non-contingent. Meaning if Tala fires you, demotes you, replaces you, or otherwise terminates the professional arrangement, you receive full payment for all remaining contracted events regardless of cause. "
"Including if I end the personal relationship."
"Including that. Clause seven, subsection B. Termination of any personal, romantic, or sexual relationship between the parties shall have no effect on the financial terms of this agreement. I wrote it in language a judge could understand at four in the morning."
I pick up the document. Thirty-one pages.
Phaedra's work is always thorough, but this is meticulous even by her standards.
She's written protections into protections, layered failsafes behind failsafes, constructed a legal architecture designed to ensure that if every possible scenario goes wrong — if Tala becomes vindictive, if sponsors intervene, if the media obtains the contract, if one of us simply changes our mind — both women walk away intact.
"Clause twelve," Phaedra says. "Either party may terminate the professional arrangement through written notice to the other party's legal representative.
Notice period of fourteen days, during which all compensation and professional obligations continue.
No in-person termination discussions are permitted without both attorneys present or on call. "
"You're preventing breakup conversations from becoming firing conversations."
"I'm preventing pillow talk from becoming a termination hearing. Yes."
She leans back in her chair. Phaedra is five-foot-four, which means she is perpetually looking up at me in a way that has never once made her seem smaller.
Her dark hair is pulled back. Her blouse is crisp.
Her expression is the one she wears when she's about to say something I need to hear and don't want to.
"You're sure about this."
"I'm sure about the contract."
"That's not what I'm asking, Nerys."
"I know what you're asking."
She folds her hands on the desk. "You haven't had a serious relationship in five years.
You haven't had a casual one in three. You took this contract because a twenty-seven-year-old golfer's talent reminded you of everything you lost, and now you want to restructure the professional agreement so you can pursue her romantically.
I need to hear you say, out loud, that this is not about wanting to feel needed again. "
The sentence arrives with the surgical precision Phaedra applies to everything. She does not soften. She does not hedge. She places the scalpel exactly where the tissue is weakest and waits for the patient to respond.
"She doesn't need me," I say. "She's extraordinarily talented."
"That's not what I asked."
No. It isn't.
I look at the contract. Thirty-one pages of protection against a future that hasn't happened yet.
Every clause a wall built between us and disaster.
And beneath the legal language, the real architecture — the attempt to create a space where two women can want each other without one of them losing everything if the wanting stops.
"After Saskia, I told myself I would never enter a relationship where someone depended on me for their stability.
I confused being needed with being loved, and when Saskia needed me to be present during the collapse, I withdrew because her need felt like evidence that I was failing. I will not make that mistake again."
"And Tala?"
"Tala doesn't need me to be stable. She needs me to be honest. Those are different demands."
Phaedra holds my gaze for five seconds. She's looking for the lie.
The rationalization. The dressed-up version of loneliness that I might be selling myself because the alternative — admitting that I want something badly enough to risk my professional reputation on it — is too frightening to say plainly.
She doesn't find it. Or she finds it and decides I'm aware of it, which for Phaedra is sufficient.
"There's one more clause," she says. "I added it this morning after reviewing Mora's proposal. Clause fifteen."
She turns to the page. I read it.
Both parties agree to maintain separate professional support systems, including but not limited to: independent psychological or therapeutic support, independent legal counsel, independent financial management, and independent career advisory services.
Neither party shall serve as the other's sole emotional or psychological resource.
"This isn't standard in an employment agreement," I say.
"This isn't a standard employment agreement. This is a contract between two women who are going to have sex with each other while one of them carries a golf bag in front of television cameras. I want it documented that you are not her therapist and she is not your recovery project."
"That's blunt."
"I'm your attorney. Blunt is billable."
I read the clause again. It's the most important one in the document, and Phaedra knows it, and she wrote it not for the legal record but for me. For the part of me that has historically conflated being useful with being worthy of love.
"I'll sign," I say.
"Not yet. Her side needs to review and countersign. Mora is sending it to Sarmiento today. Give it the weekend."
I nod. Stand. The contract remains on Phaedra's desk. Thirty-one pages. A framework for something I haven't allowed myself to have in five years.
At the door, Phaedra speaks again. "Nerys."
"Yes."
"For what it's worth — you deserve this. Not the contract. The willingness to try."
I don't respond because the honest response would involve an emotion I am not prepared to express in a law office above a bakery at eleven in the morning.
·
I drive home through Charleston's narrow streets. July heat turns the old city into a furnace lined with pastel plaster — the buildings sweat, the tourists wilt, the horse-drawn carriages move at a pace that suggests the horses have also read the weather forecast and are protesting.
My house is on a quiet street near the marsh. Two stories. White clapboard. A porch that faces east, which means mornings are bright and evenings are cool, and the marsh sounds reach the rocking chair where I do most of my thinking.
I am thinking now. Not about the contract. About the corridor.
About my hand on her jaw and her hands on my waist and the sound she made against my mouth — a small, wrecked thing, half gasp and half surrender, that bypassed every defense I've built in the last decade and landed somewhere I haven't been touched in years.
I pull into the driveway. Turn off the engine. Sit.
I kissed her.
I can rationalize every choice I've made since accepting the trial. The notebooks are research. The attraction is biological. The decision to caddie is professional. The contract restructuring is ethical.
The kiss is none of those things.
The kiss was the moment I stopped being the controlled woman who watches from beside the bag and became the woman who puts her hand on a twenty-seven-year-old's face and presses her mouth against the scar on her lower lip and feels, for the first time in five years, the specific variety of want that has no strategic value and no exit plan.
I wanted her. I kissed her. And then I stopped, because stopping is the one skill I have left that separates me from the woman who couldn't stop her hands from shaking on a three-foot putt.
But in the half-second before I stopped — when Tala pulled me against her and I felt the compact heat of her body through the silk shirt and her fingers gripping my waist like a woman who climbs things for survival — in that half-second, I did not want to stop.
I wanted to push her against the corridor wall and put my mouth on her throat and feel her pulse under my tongue.
I wanted to pull the silk shirt free from her trousers and spread my hands across her stomach and learn whether the muscle definition I've been studying through polo shirts feels the way it looks.
I wanted to take her into my room and close the door and spend the remainder of the evening discovering what sounds she makes when no one is watching and no strategy is required.
I grip the steering wheel. My hands are steady. They are always steady now, except when they aren't, and the unpredictability of my own reliability is a cruelty I have learned to accept without discussion.
I go inside. I put the kettle on. I sit on the porch and I wait for the wanting to settle into something manageable.
It does not settle.
·
My phone rings at four in the afternoon. The number is unfamiliar. The area code is Sacramento.
"Ms. Quillan? This is Keoni Valdez."
Tala's cousin. Her former caddie. The man she humiliated publicly and discarded privately and who, according to every piece of background research I've conducted, loved her through all of it and left not because he stopped caring but because caring without reciprocity had become corrosive.
"Keoni. Thank you for calling."
"Bisi gave me your number. She said you might want to talk before Singapore."
His voice is warm. Not guarded — warm in the way that people are warm when they've made peace with a painful situation and no longer need to perform neutrality. He sounds like a man who has done his grief and emerged with something more useful than anger.
"I would. How much did Bisi tell you?"