CHAPTER SEVENTEEN #2
"Everyone else — the sponsors, the tour officials, the media — I expect them to require proof.
That's appropriate. They don't know me. They don't share my bed.
They haven't watched me hold your hands and praise your decisions and stand beside your bag in the rain and the heat and the wind for six weeks. "
Her voice drops. Lower than I've heard it. Lower than the course reads. Lower than the praise.
"You have watched all of that. And you are asking me for proof."
"Nerys, I just need—"
"You need to decide whether you trust me. Not the version of trust that exists when we're winning. Not the version that lives in hotel suites and putting rooms and Scottish cottages. The version that survives when every external voice is telling you I'm a liar. That version. Right now."
I open my mouth to answer, and the answer is yes, and the answer is true, and I am about to say it when the image surfaces — the paragraph on my phone, she does not trust herself without an audience, the accurate assessment, the clinical precision with which Nerys has catalogued the deepest mechanisms of my psychology — and the yes catches in my throat.
Not because I don't trust her.
Because for one second — one fraction of one second, a duration so brief it should be immeasurable — I wonder whether the woman who identified my patterns so precisely might have used that precision for something other than my benefit.
The thought is there and gone. A synapse firing. An involuntary flicker of doubt that I extinguish before it fully forms.
But the flicker takes time. And the time is visible.
One second.
Nerys sees it.
·
The anger becomes physical before either of us decides it should.
I push her against the wall. Not gently.
My hands on her shoulders, my body pressing forward, my mouth finding hers with a force that has nothing to do with desire and everything to do with the desperate need to override the silence — the one-second silence that I know she saw and that I know has changed everything.
She kisses me back. Hard. Furious. Her hands grip my hair, pull my head back, and she bites my lower lip — not playfully, not the careful dental attention of previous encounters. She bites me and I taste copper and I grab the front of her shirt and I feel buttons give.
We are not making love. We are not having sex. We are colliding — two bodies translating an argument that words have failed to resolve into a language that requires no translation.
My shirt comes off. Pulled over my head and dropped. Her belt — I unfasten it with hands that are shaking, not from desire, from anger, from the need to close the distance that the one-second hesitation opened. The belt hits the floor. Her trousers are unbuttoned.
She reverses me. Pushes me against the opposite wall.
Kisses my throat with an aggression that is nothing like the measured mouth that has praised me for six weeks.
This is the Nerys who exists beneath the composure — the woman who won championships through psychological endurance, who outlasted opponents by refusing to yield, who stood over a three-foot putt and tried six times because she would not surrender.
I reach for her. My hand slides inside her trousers, past the waistband, and I feel the heat of her against my fingers and I press forward because if I can just touch her — if I can just reach the place where our bodies communicate without the interference of words and doubt and one-second hesitations — then maybe the damage can be undone.
Nerys catches my wrist.
She stops.
Not gradually. Not with the measured deceleration of a woman choosing to pause. She stops the way a circuit breaker stops — completely, instantaneously, with the mechanical precision of a system designed to prevent overload.
She pulls my hand out of her trousers. Holds my wrist. Looks at me.
"Do you trust me?"
"Yes."
"Do you trust that I never manipulated your play?"
I open my mouth.
One second.
One second too long.
Nerys releases my wrist. Steps back. She picks up her shirt from the floor. Buttons it. The buttons she replaces are the ones I tore open — she fastens them with the steady, precise hands of a woman who has regained control of the one thing she can still control.
She buckles her belt.
She straightens her collar.
She looks at me — shirtless, flushed, breathing hard, standing against the wall of her hotel room with my hand still warm from being inside her clothes — and her expression is the one I saw on the first day in Phoenix.
The parking lot. The moment she placed the bag beside my car and told me she would not carry for a player who never intended to listen.
"You trust me when we're winning," she says. "You trust me when this feels good. You trust me when we're in bed and my hands are on your body and the world is small enough to contain only us."
She picks up my shirt. Holds it out to me.
"You don't trust me when it's hard. You don't trust me when the cost of trusting me is higher than the cost of doubt. That's not trust, Tala. That's convenience."
I take the shirt. I put it on. My hands are shaking. Not from cold.
"Nerys, I do trust—"
"You hesitated." Her voice is quiet. Not angry anymore. Worse than angry — certain. "I asked you a direct question and you hesitated. And the hesitation was not because you don't know the answer. The hesitation was because you know the answer and you were calculating whether the answer was safe."
"That's not—"
"I will not be touched by someone who believes in me conditionally. I will not lie in bed with a woman who trusts me in the dark and doubts me in the light. I have spent ten years being doubted by people who don't know me. I refuse to be doubted by the one person who does."
She walks to the door. Opens it.
"Please leave."
The word please — the word she said last night in my arms, against my neck, while my hand moved between her legs. The same word. A different language entirely.
I leave.
·
I stand in the corridor. The door closes behind me. The lock clicks.
I walk to my room. I enter. I sit on the bed.
The phone is still open to the photograph of Nerys's handwriting. The paragraph. The assessment.
Sarmiento uses aggression to force admiration. When she cannot impress with power, she escalates until the spectacle replaces the result. She does not trust herself without an audience.
I read it again.
I read it like I'm reading a green — not looking at the surface but feeling the slope beneath it. The contour. The direction the ground is actually moving.
The note is accurate. Every word. The aggression. The spectacle. The audience dependence. The external value system that measures worth through reaction rather than choice.
Nerys saw all of that. She wrote it down in the precise, left-slanting handwriting that I've watched fill margins and map courses and annotate every hole I've played beside her.
She catalogued my deepest dysfunction with the clinical clarity of a woman who processes human behavior the way she processes wind speed — as data, as information, as the raw material of correction.
And she used that understanding to help me.
Not to control me. Not to engineer dependence. Not to ensure that I would fail without her and obey when I returned.
She used it to teach me to choose the 7-iron. To aim center-green. To wait for the wind. To say please in the dark and mean it.
She saw the worst of my machinery and she stood beside my bag anyway and she said good girl in a voice that made me believe the word applied to something more than my putting stroke.
And when she asked me — directly, with her eyes on mine and her wrist in my grip and her body against the wall — whether I trusted that she had never used our relationship to manipulate my strategy, I hesitated.
One second.
One second in which the woman who wrote she does not trust herself without an audience watched me fail to trust her without an audience of sponsors and officials and media voices confirming that trust was safe.
One second in which I proved the assessment correct.
My phone buzzes at three forty-seven in the morning.
A text from Nerys.
I'm withdrawing from the trial. You are a remarkable player. I hope you find the caddie you deserve. I will not answer calls or messages for the foreseeable future.
I read the text. I set the phone on the nightstand.
The note is still on my screen. The paragraph. The handwriting. The most honest thing anyone has ever written about me.
She does not trust herself without an audience.
She's right. She's right about all of it. She was right about my tempo and my grip pressure and my tendency to pull my right foot back before committing to an aggressive line. She was right about the 7-iron and the center-green and the wind at Kiawah and the slopes at St Andrews.
She was right about me.
And I punished her for it.
I lie on the bed. The ceiling is white. The air conditioning hums. The Pacific crashes against the cliffs below the hotel, indifferent to the wreckage occurring in a room above it.
I close my eyes.
I don't sleep.