CHAPTER SEVEN
Tala
Singapore is trying to drown me.
The humidity wraps around my body like a wet towel the moment I step off the plane, and by the time I reach the hotel, my polo is plastered to my back and my hair has doubled in volume and I look like a woman who just walked through a car wash rather than an international airport.
I don't care.
Three days. I've waited three days since Nerys signed the contract and texted me patience like a woman who doesn't understand that patience is not a virtue I possess. It's a skill I'm borrowing from her on a temporary and highly conditional basis.
Day one of the tournament. The course is carved out of rainforest — dense tropical vegetation, manicured fairways that feel like carpet under the heat, greens that hold everything because the humidity keeps them soft.
It's the opposite of Phoenix, the opposite of Kiawah. Every variable is different.
Nerys has accounted for every variable.
Her strategy document for Singapore is forty-three pages.
She has humidity-adjusted carry distances for each of my clubs.
She has green-speed data that accounts for the moisture in the grass.
She has notes on how the ball will fly differently in thick air — shorter carry, more roll, and a tendency for draws to turn into hooks if I don't reduce my release.
I follow the plan. Every shot. Every hole. Not because I'm performing obedience — because the plan is right, and I've learned in the past two weeks that being right feels better than being spectacular when the woman next to me notices the difference.
I shoot sixty-eight. Tied for eighth. Solid, intelligent, unspectacular golf in conditions that have already claimed three players to heat exhaustion and one to a penalty for an illegal drop.
After the round, Nerys walks beside me to the clubhouse.
Her polo is damp at the collar. A strand of auburn hair sticks to her temple.
She looks less composed than usual — the humidity has softened her edges the way nothing else has, and I find myself fixating on the fact that her neck is flushed and her sleeves are rolled higher than normal and I can see the flex of tendon in her forearms when she adjusts the bag on her shoulder.
"Solid round," she says.
"Solid is a word for furniture."
"Solid is a word for a player who executed a strategy under difficult conditions and didn't deviate once. I'll take solid."
We separate at the clubhouse entrance. Professional. Two colleagues completing a workday. She goes left toward the practice green. I go right toward the locker room.
I shower at the course. I go back to the hotel. I shower again. I change into the dark silk shirt — the same one from Kiawah, because it's the shirt I was wearing when she kissed me and I am not above superstition — and loose black trousers and bare feet.
I look at myself in the hotel mirror. Bronze skin. Damp hair. Gold studs in my ears. The sampaguita tattoo visible in the open collar.
I look like a woman who is about to walk three floors up to another woman's suite and say something she can't take back.
I look terrified.
Good. That means it's real.
·
I knock.
Eight seconds. The door opens.
Nerys is in a soft gray T-shirt and dark trousers, barefoot.
Her hair is damp — she's showered too, and without product or styling, the auburn falls around her jaw in loose waves.
The silver streak is darker when wet, more pewter than chrome.
Her face is clean. No armor. No composure architecture.
She looks like a woman in a hotel room in a foreign city at the end of a long day, and the domesticity of it — the bare feet on the carpet, the reading glasses perched on her head, the course notebook open on the desk behind her — makes something expand behind my ribs.
"This visit is personal," I say. The words I agreed to say. The delineation between work and want. "I'm not here about golf."
"Come in."
I step past her. The suite is larger than mine — Nerys negotiated her own accommodations, one of many things the new contract guarantees.
It's orderly. Course notebooks stacked on the desk.
A glass of water. A single lamp casting warm light across the bed.
Floor-to-ceiling windows showing Singapore's skyline — Marina Bay, the light show, the city blazing against the dark.
I turn to face her. She's closed the door. She's leaning against it, arms at her sides, watching me with an expression I haven't seen before. Not controlled. Not strategic. Something closer to hunger that has decided to stop pretending it's analysis.
I cross the room toward her. Fast. My default. Close the distance, take what's offered, accelerate before the doubt arrives.
She catches my wrists.
Her fingers circle them completely — long, warm, firm without force. My wrists are small in her hands. My pulse hammers against her thumb.
"Slow."
"I don't want slow—"
"I know what you want." Her voice drops into the register I've been hearing on the course for two weeks — the low murmur that arrives before each shot, close to my ear, carrying information that changes everything. "I'm telling you what you need."
She holds my wrists at my sides. Not restraining — anchoring. I could pull free. I don't.
"You've been thinking about this for a week. You rushed through every thought. You imagined everything happening quickly because speed is how you manage fear. You come fast, you leave fast, you process fast, and nothing touches you long enough to become difficult."
"That's not—"
"Tala." Just my name. Said with patience and certainty and something underneath both that sounds like a woman who has also been thinking about this for a week and managed the wanting differently and is now standing in front of me with the result of that management: control. Deliberate, costly, earned control.
"We're going to do this at a pace where we can feel all of it."
She releases my wrists. Steps back. Gestures toward the bed.
"Sit."
I sit on the edge. The mattress gives under me. The height dynamic reverses — I'm looking up, she's looking down. Six inches becomes more when she's standing and I'm not.
She steps between my knees. Her thighs press against the inside of mine. She threads her fingers into my hair — slowly, starting at my temples, sliding back through the damp strands until her palms cradle my skull. The sensation is so specific and so gentle that my breathing stutters.
"Tell me what you actually want," she says. "Not the performance version. Not the version designed to sound confident and make this go faster. Tell me what you want right now, in your body, specifically."
I open my mouth. Close it. I'm used to sex being a thing that happens through momentum — two bodies colliding at speed, friction and urgency and the satisfying crash of getting what you want before the doubt catches up.
I've never been asked to narrate my desire before the first piece of clothing comes off.
"I want you to touch me."
"Where?"
"Everywhere."
"Everywhere is a cop-out, Tala. Be specific."
The word specific in her mouth. The precision of the demand. The quiet insistence that I stop performing desire and start articulating it.
"My neck," I say. My voice sounds different. Lower. Less defended. "Start with my neck."
Nerys leans down. The height — her standing, me sitting — means she folds over me, and the architecture of her body creates a shelter.
Her mouth finds the side of my throat. Not a kiss — a press.
Open. Warm. Her lips part against my pulse point and she stays there, feeling the speed of my heartbeat against her mouth.
"Good," she says against my skin. "What else?"
"My — under my jaw. Where you held me. In the corridor."
Her mouth travels up. Along the tendon. Under the hinge of my jaw. She kisses the same place her thumb pressed five days ago, and the echo of that moment — the corridor, the keycard, the first kiss — layers over the present until I can't separate memory from sensation.
"What else."
I'm shaking. My hands are gripping the bedsheet. I want to grab her — her waist, her hips, her shirt — and pull until something gives.
"Take my shirt off."
She straightens. Her fingers find the top button of the silk shirt.
She undoes it slowly. Not a tease — a deliberate act, one button at a time, watching each inch of skin as it appears.
The second button. The third. The shirt falls open.
She pushes it off my shoulders, and the silk slides down my arms like water.
I'm in a bralette. Black. Simple. Her eyes track across my body — the collarbones, the tattoo beneath the right one, the curve of muscle in my shoulders, the flat plane of my stomach.
"You are—" She stops. Recalibrates. "The first time I watched your swing on film, I thought your body was an extraordinary instrument. I was wrong. It's extraordinary in every context."
She removes the bralette. Her fingers find the clasp at my back and release it with a precision that I would find clinically impressive if the result wasn't her standing between my knees looking at my bare chest with an expression that makes her gray-green eyes go dark.
She touches me. Not my breasts — not yet. My shoulders. The defined muscle she praised. She traces the line of my deltoid with one finger, follows it down my arm to the elbow, comes back up to the collarbone. She maps me the way she maps a course — systematically, attentively, cataloguing terrain.
"Your skin," she says. "The way the light hits it. Like metal that's been warmed."
Her mouth follows her finger. Collarbone. The hollow of my throat. The rise of my chest. She kisses the top of each breast without touching the nipple, and the avoidance is so calculated that I arch toward her mouth and make a sound I didn't authorize.
"Patience."
"You keep saying that—"