CHAPTER EIGHT #3
"You taste like—" She lifts her head. Her mouth is wet. Her eyes are dark. "Like something I'd ruin my career for."
"Don't ruin your career."
"Then keep making that sound."
I didn't know I was making a sound. A low, continuous vibration at the back of my throat, halfway between a moan and a hum, the kind of sound that escapes when the body bypasses the mind's editorial process and simply responds.
She returns. Her mouth. Her tongue. One hand slides up my thigh and two fingers press into me — not slowly, not cautiously, but with the direct certainty of a woman who knows what she wants to give and has no interest in asking permission twice.
I gasp. My back arches. My hand finds her hair and grips.
She curves her fingers forward and strokes the front wall while her tongue works in a rhythm that I cannot predict and cannot control and do not want to control.
I feel the orgasm building the way weather builds over open water — not gradually but with gathering force, a system of pressure accumulating beyond the horizon.
"Tala—"
She hums against me. The vibration adds to everything else and I am done.
I come with her name. With my hands fisted in her hair. With my back arched off the practice table and my legs shaking around her shoulders and a sound I have never made before — broken and raw and entirely uncontrolled — filling a putting room in a Singapore hotel at nine o'clock at night.
My hands are shaking.
Not from the yips. Not from failure. From the opposite of failure.
She stands. Wipes her mouth with the back of her hand. The gesture is so unselfconscious and so physical that it makes me want to pull her against me and hold her there until my heartbeat stabilizes.
So I do. I pull her forward between my legs and I kiss her deeply and I taste myself on her tongue and I feel the specific, startling intimacy of my own body returned to me through someone else's mouth.
"Now we're even," she says.
"We are nowhere near even."
I hold her. My arms around her waist. Her face against my neck. My hands on her back — steady, finally, quiet against the fabric of her polo. The practice room hums. The fluorescent light continues its indifferent observation.
I release her. Step off the table. Find my clothes. Dress.
She watches me with an expression that is equal parts satisfied and wary, as if she's waiting for the withdrawal Keoni described — the version of me that retreats after intimacy, that treats vulnerability as a one-time concession rather than a sustainable practice.
I pick up her putter. Hold it out to her.
"Twenty more lag putts before bed."
She stares. "Are you serious."
"I'm always serious. Your pace was two feet long for the first hour. The grip correction fixed the direction. Now we fix the speed."
She takes the putter. She is looking at me with an expression I want to photograph and keep in a locked cabinet alongside my trophies.
"You just — I just — and now you want me to putt."
"I want you to putt correctly. What happened in this room stays in this room. What happens on the practice green is preparation. You have a third round tomorrow and your lag putting needs twenty more repetitions. Hit the ball, Tala."
She hits the ball.
She makes eighteen of twenty. The two she misses are each less than six inches from the target.
I am not surprised.
·
We walk to the elevator. Side by side. Not touching. A tournament official passes in the lobby. Polite nods. Professional composure. Two colleagues returning from a late practice session.
The elevator doors open. We step inside. The doors close.
I push her against the wall.
Not gently. Not strategically. I press her shoulders against the mirrored panel and I kiss her with six floors of uninterrupted privacy and the absolute certainty that the controlled, measured, analytical woman I present to the world is a construction, and the woman kissing Tala Sarmiento in an elevator in Singapore is something rawer and less manageable and far more honest.
She gasps against my mouth. Her hands find my waist. My hips. The small of my back. She pulls me against her and I go — all of me, my entire height pressed against her compact body, my thigh between her legs, my hands in her hair.
The elevator chimes. Our floor.
I step back. Straighten my shirt. Push my hair behind my ears. The silver streak falls forward again immediately, which is its habit.
"Good night," I say.
Tala's back is still against the elevator wall. Her lips are swollen. Her breathing is visible. Her eyes are wide and dark and she looks like a woman who has just been kissed by someone she assumed was incapable of ambush.
"You're a menace."
"I'm your caddie." I step into the corridor. Turn back. "Good night."
The doors close between us.
I walk to my room. I enter. I close the door. I stand in the dark suite with the Singapore skyline performing its nightly spectacle through the windows and I press both palms flat against the wall and I breathe.
My hands are steady.
My heart is not.
For the first time in longer than I can calculate, I don't mind the discrepancy.