CHAPTER EIGHT #2
She crosses the practice green. Four steps. She stops in front of me. The putter is still in her hand. I take it from her and set it against the wall.
"I didn't refuse because I don't want you. The idea that you think that — the idea that you've spent the day wondering whether I find you undesirable — is so far from reality that it makes me want to describe, in explicit detail, every thought I had about you on the treadmill this morning."
"Then why—"
"Because I'm not good at receiving, Tala.
" The sentence costs more than the contract.
More than the first kiss. More than any strategic document I've ever produced.
"Not anymore. My hands—" I flex my fingers.
Look at them. Long and scarred and still.
"I became accustomed to them being the part of me that failed.
The part the cameras captured. The part everyone remembers.
I stopped thinking of them as instruments of pleasure and started thinking of them as evidence. "
She's watching my hands. Not my face.
"Having someone want to be touched by them — want them on her body, inside her — that's an adjustment. Last night I could give because giving requires my hands to function. Receiving requires me to stop using them. To let go of the only control I have left."
Silence. The practice room hums. The fluorescent light buzzes at a frequency that would be maddening under different circumstances.
Tala reaches forward. Takes my hands. Both of them. Lifts the right one — the scarred thumb, the long fingers — and presses her mouth to the scar.
Her lips are warm. The kiss is slow. She turns my hand over and kisses the palm. The inside of my wrist. The pad of each finger.
"These hands," she says against my knuckle, "made me come harder last night than anything I've experienced in my adult life. These hands. Right here."
Something fractures behind my sternum. Not painfully. The way ice fractures in spring — the surface breaking to reveal the moving water underneath.
She puts my hands on her waist. Holds them there. Then she slides them off and steps closer and puts her own hands on me instead.
"My turn," she says. "And you're going to let me."
She pulls my polo over my head. Her hands are quick and sure — athlete's hands, accustomed to executing under pressure. She unfastens my trousers with the focused economy of a woman who has decided what she wants and has no interest in being redirected.
She eases me back against the practice table. It's waist-height — designed for holding equipment bags and water bottles. My hands grip the edge. The synthetic surface is smooth under my palms.
The table equalizes us. My height advantage disappears.
We are eye to eye for the first time, and the effect is disorienting — I've been looking down at Tala since we met, and now she's at my level, her dark gold eyes three inches from mine, and the intimacy of direct sight-line contact is more confronting than any physical touch.
She kisses me. Not the desperate corridor kiss or the negotiated suite kiss. A steady, warm, deliberate kiss that says I'm here and I'm not rushing and you are going to stop thinking and let me do this.
She pushes my sports bra up and over my head.
Tosses it. Her hands cover my breasts — smaller than hers, but responsive under her touch in a way that makes me inhale sharply through my nose.
Her thumbs move across my nipples and she watches the effect with the focused attention of a woman who reads greens for a living — cataloguing what works, adjusting pressure, repeating.
She unzips my trousers the rest of the way.
Slides them down. I lift my hips and she pulls them off along with everything underneath, and I'm sitting on the practice table in a putting room in a Singapore hotel basement, naked, under fluorescent light, and I should feel exposed but what I feel is the particular relief of being seen without disguise in a place where no one is watching.
She kneels.
Between my legs. On the putting-room carpet.
She looks up at me — five-six looking up at six-even, reversed from every interaction we've had, and the shift in geometry changes everything.
She's not small. She's intentional. She's chosen this position.
She's chosen to be beneath me so that I can see her face while she does this.
Her mouth presses against my inner thigh. A slow kiss. Then the other thigh. She takes her time — moving inward by increments, her breath hot against skin that is increasingly sensitive, her hands firm on my hips to keep me from tilting toward her.
When she reaches the center of me, she pauses. Looks up.
"Tell me if you need me to stop."
"I won't need you to stop."
"Tell me if you need anything."
"I need you to stop talking and put your mouth on me."
She grins. The scar on her lip stretches. Then she drops her head and the grin disappears against my body and I feel her tongue — flat, slow, the full width of it dragging through me — and my hands grip the edge of the practice table so hard the surface creaks.
She doesn't rush. I expected her to rush — Tala, who attacks every shot, who swings before the backswing is complete, who has never met a moment she didn't try to accelerate past. But she doesn't. She works with the same focused patience she brought to the sixteenth hole at Kiawah — reading the terrain, adjusting her approach, finding the angle that produces the strongest response and returning to it with the consistency of someone who has learned that precision outperforms aggression.
Her tongue circles and presses and retreats and returns.
Her hands move from my hips to my thighs, spreading them wider, holding them open.
I grip the table. I grip her hair. I let my hands fall to my sides and I feel them shake — not from the yips, not from anxiety, from being touched with purpose by a woman who noticed the tremor and didn't flinch.