CHAPTER SEVEN #3
Not the way I usually come — hard, fast, over in seconds, already reaching for the next thing.
I come the way she taught me to play the sixteenth at Kiawah — slowly, fully, trusting the trajectory even after I've released the shot.
The orgasm moves through me in waves. Long, rolling, devastating waves that start where her fingers are and radiate outward through my hips, my stomach, my chest, my throat.
I hear myself saying her name. Not screaming.
Saying it. Quiet and wrecked and so far from the woman who walked into this room forty minutes ago that I'm not sure I can find my way back.
I don't want to find my way back.
She holds me through it. Fingers still inside me, other hand in my hair, mouth against my temple.
When the waves subside, she withdraws slowly and wraps herself around me — her long body curving against mine, her chest to my back, her knees tucked behind my knees.
She holds me the way she holds a putter — gently, with her fingers rather than her palms, with precisely enough pressure to maintain contact without force.
I lie there. Breathing. Feeling the aftershocks move through my muscles like weather systems clearing.
Her hands. Her long, scarred, extraordinary hands. One resting on my hip. One still in my hair.
I turn in her arms. Face her. She looks at me with an expression that makes me understand what Keoni meant about three weeks — because if this is what the first week feels like, I understand why people would do anything to stay in this space and why walking away from it could destroy you.
"Your turn," I say.
"Not tonight."
"That's not — you can't just—"
"It's not about fairness." She traces my jaw with her thumb.
The scarred one. The one I've dreamed about.
"It's about me wanting to give you something that has no conditions.
You don't owe me a reciprocal orgasm tonight.
You don't owe me anything. I wanted to touch you. I touched you. That's complete."
I stare at her. "No one has ever—"
"I know."
"That's not how this works."
"It is with me. Tonight it is."
I don't argue. Not because I agree — because I'm lying in the arms of a woman who just dismantled every defense I've built since I was fourteen and reassembled me into someone who can receive without performing, and arguing right now would be the old Tala.
The one who turns generosity into negotiation because receiving freely feels more dangerous than earning.
I rest my head on her shoulder. She pulls the duvet over us. Singapore's skyline pulses through the windows — blue, gold, white, the city performing its own kind of spectacle for no one.
Her hand moves through my hair. Slow strokes.
The rhythm is hypnotic. I feel my body cooling, settling, becoming quiet in a way it never becomes quiet after sex.
Usually I'm already planning the next thing — the departure, the morning, the distance that prevents the afterglow from becoming obligation.
I don't want distance. I want to crawl inside this woman's ribcage and live there.
"That word you used in Arizona," I say. My voice is sleepy. Wrecked. Barely there. "When I made the putt. You said good."
"I remember."
"Say it again."
She's quiet. I feel her breathing change — a deliberate intake, held for a moment, released slowly. Her hand stills in my hair.
"Good girl."
My entire body shudders. Not an aftershock — something else.
Something that starts at the base of my skull and moves down through every vertebra and settles in the center of my chest with a heat that has nothing to do with sex and everything to do with being seen by a woman who does not say things she doesn't mean.
I bury my face against her neck. I breathe her in — soap, skin, the faint trace of salt, the particular warmth of the hollow behind her jaw.
"Again," I whisper.
"No." Her hand resumes its movement through my hair. "That one is rare. You'll have to earn the next one."
I smile against her neck. Close my eyes. Her heartbeat is steady under my cheek.
I sleep.
·
I wake alone.
The suite is quiet. Morning light through the Singapore windows. The bed beside me is empty but still warm — she hasn't been gone long.
On the pillow, a folded piece of hotel stationery. Her handwriting — small, precise, slanting left.
You played well today. Both rounds. — N
I read it three times. I fold it carefully. I get out of bed and find my trousers on the floor and my shirt draped over the desk chair and my underwear near the foot of the bed where she placed them after removing them with the same methodical attention she gives to course maps.
I dress. I leave the suite. I walk to my room three floors down.
In my golf bag, there's a zippered pocket meant for scorecards and pencils and spare ball markers.
I put the note inside. Between the scorecard from Kiawah and a pencil I stole from the practice green in Phoenix.
I zip it closed.
I go to the bathroom and look at myself in the mirror.
Same face. Same scar. Same gold earrings.
But my eyes look different — wider, or softer, or less defended.
Something has rearranged behind them. Something that looks, if I'm being honest, like a woman who has just discovered that the most terrifying shot in golf is not the one with the highest risk.
It's the one where you stand still, trust the read, and let someone else's hands guide you home.