CHAPTER THIRTEEN
Tala
I don't go to the studio.
Nerys asked me not to. Not in those words — she said, "The interview is a professional obligation and I'd prefer to manage it independently," which in Nerys's dialect means please don't watch me try to be brave and possibly fail at it while cameras record the attempt.
I respect the boundary. I spend the afternoon at the hotel gym, running intervals on the treadmill until my lungs burn and my legs feel clean and the restless energy that comes from knowing someone I love is doing something hard without me has been metabolized into sweat.
She texts me at three forty-seven.
Left early. Back at hotel.
Three words. No explanation. The brevity tells me everything the explanation would.
I shower. Dress. Walk to her room. Knock.
She opens the door. She's still wearing the interview clothes — a tailored navy blouse, dark trousers, the steel watch.
Her hair is neat. Her face is composed. She looks exactly like a woman who has spent the past two hours presenting herself as a functional, articulate professional to a camera crew.
Except for her hands.
She's holding them against her thighs, fingers pressed flat against the fabric, the way you'd press a wound to stop the bleeding.
The tremor is visible even through the compression — a fine, persistent vibration that travels from her wrists to her fingertips and makes the fabric of her trousers shift in barely perceptible ripples.
She sees me looking. She doesn't move her hands.
"I'm fine."
"You're not." I step inside. Close the door behind me. "And that's allowed."
She turns away. Walks to the window. The hotel room is unremarkable — standard layout, standard lighting, the anonymous geography of temporary spaces. She stares at the car park below as if it contains strategic information.
"The interviewer asked about the moment I knew it was over. I'd approved the question in advance. I'd prepared an answer. I'd rehearsed the language in my head for three days — specific, factual, controlled." She pauses. Her shoulders are rigid. "My voice broke on the word putt."
"Nerys—"
"I couldn't say the word putt without my voice breaking. On camera. Recorded. A forty-four-year-old woman who cannot say a single-syllable word without sounding like she's being dismantled."
"How long did you stay?"
"Twelve minutes. The interview was scheduled for forty-five."
She's still facing the window. Her hands are still pressed against her thighs. I can see the tremor from across the room — the subtle motion of her fingers, the tension in her forearms, the effort of a body trying to suppress an involuntary response through sheer force of intention.
I know what she wants me to do. She wants me to be professional. To acknowledge the difficulty, offer measured support, suggest a debrief with Phaedra, and return to the strategic framework that governs our interactions during business hours.
I know what she needs me to do.
"Do you want me to leave," I say, "or do you want me to stay and make this about something other than that studio?"
She turns. Her eyes are dry — she hasn't been crying; the distress is structural rather than emotional, living in her nervous system rather than her tear ducts.
She looks at me the way she looked at the course maps in the cottage — with the particular intensity of a woman trying to determine whether the terrain in front of her is safe to cross.
"Stay."
I walk to her. Not fast. Not with the urgency that has been my default in every previous encounter. I walk to her the way she walks a course — measuring, reading, arriving at the right moment rather than the earliest one.
I take her hands.
She resists. A small pull backward, the instinct to hide the tremor, to press it against her body where I can't see it. I hold firm. Not aggressively — the way she held my wrists in Singapore. Present. Not releasing.
I lift her right hand. The scarred thumb. The long fingers vibrating against my palm.
I kiss her thumb. The scar. Slowly. Feeling the tremor against my lips.
Then the inside of her wrist, where the tendons are tight and the pulse is elevated.
Then each finger. Index. Middle. Ring. Pinkie. Each knuckle, each pad, each tip. Her hand shakes throughout. I kiss it anyway. I kiss it because of the shaking, not despite it.
"These hands won two majors," I say.
"These hands couldn't make a three-foot putt—"
"These hands made me come so hard in Singapore I forgot my own name.
" I look up at her. Six inches of height, her face above mine, those gray-green eyes.
"These hands. Right here. The ones that are shaking right now.
These are the hands that touched me so precisely I couldn't form a sentence afterward.
These are the hands that held my face in a corridor and kissed me like I was worth being steady for. "
I take both of her trembling hands and I place them on my body.
On my waist first. Her palms against the curve above my hips, her fingers wrapping around to the small of my back. Then I move them. I guide them upward — over my ribs, the thin fabric of my T-shirt the only barrier, until her shaking hands are resting against the sides of my breasts.
"Feel me," I say. "I'm not a putter. I'm not a green. I'm not a camera or an interviewer or a gallery of people watching you miss. I'm not going to watch you shake and write about it. Feel me and let your hands do what they know how to do."
Something breaks in her.
Not composure — I've seen composure fracture. In the cottage. During the interview. In the putting room when she told me she wasn't good at receiving. Composure is the outermost layer, and by now I've seen it fall enough times to recognize the sound.
This is the layer beneath composure. The wall behind the wall.
The thing she built after the yips, after the divorce, after her father's silence — the belief that her hands, having failed publicly, must be monitored constantly, managed perpetually, never trusted to act without supervision.
The belief that any moment of uncontrolled motion is a precursor to the worst thing that ever happened to her.
It breaks. I watch it break. Her face changes — not softening exactly, more like a structure shifting from rigid to flexible, a material finding a different way to bear weight.
Her hands move on my body. Not strategically.
Not with the calculated precision she brought to Singapore.
Her fingers grip my ribs, release, grip again.
Her thumbs press against my breasts. The tremor is still there — I can feel it against my skin through the shirt — but the quality has changed.
It's no longer the tremor of suppression.
It's the tremor of a body doing something it was told it couldn't do and discovering the prohibition was wrong.
I pull my shirt over my head. Drop it. Her hands are on my bare skin now — warm, shaking, learning the terrain without a map.
"I'm going to take control," I say. "You're going to let me. Not because you can't — because you don't need to be in charge right now. You've been in charge all day. In the studio, in the car, in this room. You've been managing yourself for hours. You're done managing."
I unbutton her blouse. One button at a time. My hands are steady — not because I'm braver than her, but because in this room, on this evening, my job is to be the ground she stands on. The blouse falls open. I push it off her shoulders. Unfasten her bra. Add it to the pile.
She's taller than me. I have to reach up to slide the fabric from her shoulders, and the geometry of the reach — my smaller body extending toward her larger one, my arms lifting to undress a woman who stands six inches above me — makes me feel not small but purposeful.
I know what I'm doing. I know where I'm aiming.
I guide her to the bed. She sits. I push her gently backward.
She lies down and I follow, settling my weight across her hips, my thighs bracketing her narrow waist. The size difference is present in every angle — my compact density against her lean length, my brown skin against her olive, my short dark hair falling forward as I lean down to kiss her throat.
I pin her hands above her head.
Gently. A request, not a restraint. My fingers circling her wrists against the pillow, holding them there the way she held mine in Singapore — present, firm, allowing escape.
She lets me. Her wrists settle into my grip. Her eyes close.
"You're shaking," I say.
"I know." Her voice is rough. The interview voice — the controlled, measured instrument — is gone. What's left is lower and less defended.
"I love it."
Her eyes open.
"I love that you shake. Not because of the yips.
Because it means you're feeling something instead of managing it.
You've managed every response you've had for ten years.
Every tremor, every moment of fear, every time your body tried to tell you it was overwhelmed — you pressed it down and forced it into stillness and called the stillness strength. "
I lean down. Press my mouth to her ear. "Shake for me. Let your hands do whatever they want."
I release her wrists. Her hands lift from the pillow.
They find my hair first. Threading through it, gripping at the roots, pulling in a way that is not strategic and not gentle and not anything she would have permitted herself in any previous encounter.
Her fingers tighten and release. Tighten and release.
The rhythm is raw and uncontrolled and honest.
Her hands move to my shoulders. My back.
Her nails drag down my spine — not scratching, tracing, pressing, her fingers mapping my body the way she maps a course except there is no notebook and no strategy and no plan.
Just hands doing what hands do when the governing intelligence stops supervising and the body takes over.