CHAPTER NINE #2
Not fast. Not frantically. The orgasm rolls through me the way the wave I've been imagining rolls through — from the base of my spine outward, through my hips, my stomach, my chest, my throat.
My body arches against Nerys's hand and my legs lock around her wrist and I grab the headboard and press my skull into the pillow and I make a sound that starts as her name and ends as something that doesn't have language.
She stays with me through it. Her fingers working, her thumb circling, her voice in my ear saying things I can barely hear through the noise of my own pulse — that's it, there you go, you're so good, stay with it — until the wave breaks and the aftershocks arrive and my body releases its grip on the headboard and collapses into the mattress.
I lie there. Breathing. The ceiling is white. The dawn light has turned gold. My body feels like it's been disassembled and reassembled by someone who understood the engineering better than the original manufacturer.
Nerys withdraws her hand slowly. Lies beside me. Presses her mouth to my temple.
We lie in silence for two minutes. My heartbeat returns to something approaching normal.
"Shower," I say. My voice sounds like it's been through an industrial process.
"Separately."
"Obviously."
I sit up. My legs don't entirely cooperate. I make it to the edge of the bed and look back at her. She's propped on one elbow, watching me, and her expression is one I want to file away in the same locked pocket where I keep the note on hotel stationery and the memory of the word good.
I shower first. She showers after. We dress in separate rooms. She goes to the course at seven fifteen. I go at seven forty-five.
Professional. Composed. Thirty minutes apart. Two colleagues preparing for a tournament round.
Nobody needs to know that the reason I'm walking slightly carefully has nothing to do with yesterday's eighteen holes.
·
The driving range is crowded. Twenty players warming up. Practice balls in neat pyramids. The sound of contact — metallic, percussive, rhythmic — fills the morning air like industrial music.
I'm hitting 7-irons when Zoraida Kwon appears.
She sets up three spots to my left. Her practice routine is metronomic — same tempo, same shape, same clinical precision that has made her the fourth-ranked player in the world and the most psychologically steady opponent on tour.
Zoraida and I have been competing since we were fifteen. She beat me in the junior-national final. I beat her in our first professional event. The score between us is roughly even, which means neither of us has the luxury of dismissing the other.
She hits five balls. Perfect draws. Each one landing within a three-yard radius.
Then she looks at me.
"New caddie looks settled."
"She's good."
"I'm sure. Does she pick your outfits too, or just your clubs?"
The words are delivered with Zoraida's characteristic surface warmth — friendly tone, friendly expression, poison payload.
She's not insulting Nerys. She's implying that I need managing.
That the caddie relationship is closer to a guardianship than a partnership.
That the improvements in my game are evidence of dependence rather than growth.
My grip tightens on the 7-iron. I feel the old response rising — the heat in my chest, the narrowing of focus, the immediate tactical calculation: I can outdrive her by forty yards.
I can play the first hole more aggressively than she'd dare.
I can make her watch me attack shots she'd never attempt and I can win by making her feel conservative.
I take a breath.
"She's the best strategist I've worked with. You should try it — might get you from fourth to third."
Zoraida smiles. Hits another ball. Walks away.
On the course, I tell Nerys what happened.
"She's trying to make you play against her instead of the course."
"I know."
"Good. Are you playing the course or her?"
"Both."
"Pick one. The course doesn't care about your ego."
I pick the course.
For eighteen holes, I play the strategy. Every shot. Even when Zoraida birdies the third and the sixth and takes the lead. Even when she's standing on the adjacent fairway, visible in my peripheral vision, playing steady, flawless golf designed to make my patience look like timidity.
On the twelfth, Zoraida hits an aggressive approach that lands three feet from the pin. Eagle putt. The gallery erupts. She doesn't look at me, which is her way of making sure I know she's not looking at me.
Nerys hands me a 7-iron. "Center of the green. Twenty-foot birdie putt. Play the course."
I play the course.
I birdie the twelfth from twenty-two feet.
I birdie the fourteenth from fifteen. I par the fifteenth when the aggressive play would have risked bogey.
I birdie the seventeenth from eight feet after a textbook approach that Nerys reads perfectly — "Start it a ball outside the right edge, uphill, it won't break as much as you think. "
I finish the tournament at eleven under par. Second place. One shot behind the leader, a German player named Lena Falk who shot a sixty-four in the final round.
Zoraida finishes fifth.
·
The parking area. Equipment being loaded. Caddies heading to the hotel shuttle. The tropical air is heavy with post-tournament decompression — the specific quality of exhaustion that follows four days of sustained mental effort in a foreign climate.
Nerys walks beside me to the rental car. She sets the bag in the trunk. Closes it. Leans against the bumper.
"You let her get in your head and you didn't let her change your plan. That was the hardest thing you did today."
"Harder than the seventeenth?" The approach shot that set up the final birdie. A 7-iron from a hundred sixty-three yards that I hit to eight feet under pressure.
"Much harder. Anyone with your talent can hit a 7-iron to eight feet. Not everyone can hear a rival imply they're helpless and then spend four hours proving otherwise by doing exactly what they were already going to do."
I lean against the car beside her. Not touching. Two colleagues in a parking lot. Anyone watching would see a player and a caddie discussing results.
"I wanted to outdrive her off every tee. The entire round."
"I know."
"I wanted to play every shot she'd never attempt and make her watch."
"I know that too."
"And instead I played center-greens and smart approaches and textbook wedge shots, and I finished second."
"You finished second playing the best golf of the tournament. Falk shot sixty-four. Nobody was beating that today. You lost to mathematics, not to fear."
I look at her. She's not performing the analysis. She's stating it the way she states wind speed — factually, without inflation.
"You're the first person who's ever made second place feel like it means something."
"Second place means you made the correct decision on every hole and someone else was brilliant on the same day. That's not failure. That's probability."
The shuttle bus pulls into the lot. Caddies board. Officials pack up. The day is ending.
I get into the driver's seat. Nerys gets in beside me. I start the engine.
At the first red light, I reach across the center console and take her hand.
She doesn't look at me. She doesn't comment. Her long, scarred fingers thread through mine — her hand engulfing my smaller one, the pad of her thumb resting against my wrist where my pulse is running faster than a woman driving a rental car through Singapore traffic has any reason to expect.
She holds my hand the way she holds a putter now — gently, with her fingers rather than her palms.
We drive toward the hotel. The city glows around us. My left hand is on the wheel. My right hand is in hers. The air conditioning hums.
I am ranked fifteenth in the world after this tournament. Second place. Eleven under par. The best sustained golf of my career.
And I'm thinking about none of it.
I'm thinking about the woman beside me. Her hand in mine. The silver streak falling against her temple. The voice that said you've earned it in the dark this morning and made me feel like I had accomplished something more significant than any trophy I've ever held.
I'm listening to Nerys Quillan not because she forces me to.
Because she's right.
And because being called disciplined by this woman is worth more than every sponsor, every highlight reel, and every standing ovation I've ever chased.
I tighten my grip on her hand. She tightens back.
That's enough. For now, that's everything.