5. Zach
ZACH
I’m on my third attempt at reading this windmill.
The blade passes. I count the rotation. One Mississippi, two Mississippi, the gap opens for maybe half a second before it closes again.
I could time it. Should be able to time it.
Except I don’t actually hit things with sticks for a living, I stop them, big difference, and my brain keeps trying to calculate angles that don’t matter because the ball’s going to do whatever the hell it wants once it leaves the club.
“What are you doing?” Mackie’s standing right beside me, pink golf ball balanced on the head of her club.
“I’m figuring out the timing.”
“It’s a windmill, Zach.”
“I know what it is.”
She watches me crouch down again, probably trying to see what I’m seeing, which is nothing useful. Just a stupid wooden blade spinning in circles and my brain refusing to admit I’m bad at this.
Then she reaches over with her club and taps my ball.
“Hey—”
It rolls straight through the windmill and drops into the cup with a soft plunk.
I stare at the hole. My ball is just... in there. Gone. No timing required.
“You just—” I look up at her and she’s grinning. “That worked!”
“Of course it worked.” She’s already marking on the scorecard, her handwriting loopy and confident. “You were trying to apply physics to mini golf, dude, that’s not possible.”
She hands me the scorecard and we walk to the next hole. There’s a group ahead of us so we end up waiting.
“So, is Mackie short for Mackenzie?” I ask.
She glances up. “Mackinnon.”
“As in... the hockey player?”
“Yeah, obviously.” She’s laughing as she says it, already sizing up the next hole.
“Why is that obvious?”
She glances back at me with her eyebrows raised as if I’ve just asked the stupidest question before she hits her ball. It ricochets off the wall, stops three feet from the hole and she holds her arms up in triumph. “Hole in one!”
“That’s not even close to a hole in one.”
“It’s going to be. Watch.” She walks forward and taps it in. “See.”
By hole seven my ball is in the water hazard.
I watch it sink and turn to look at her. She’s examining her fingernails like she didn’t just kick it in there. Which she absolutely did. I watched her foot connect.
“That was my ball.”
“Was it? I didn’t see.”
“You literally just kicked it in.”
“Prove it.” She’s already lining up her shot.
This girl just cheated to my face and dared me to do something about it.
I look at the fake pond with the plastic lily pads, then at her ball sitting in perfect position two feet from the cup.
Two can play at this game.
I pick up her ball.
“Zach, what are you—”
I throw it. Hard. It sails over the fence and disappears behind a truck in the parking lot.
Her mouth falls open. “You did NOT.”
“I absolutely did.” And I don’t feel bad at all, which is new. Actually, I feel like I just won something I didn’t know I was competing for.
She stares at me and then she starts laughing. Not the polite laugh girls do on dates. Full volume, head thrown back, doesn’t care who hears her.
I’m laughing too, which is weird because I just committed what feels like mini golf vandalism and there’s definitely a kid behind us crying and a woman complaining to her husband about out of control youths.
I look back and see an employee walking toward us and everything about his body language says he’s had enough.
My stomach drops because I know what’s about to happen. I’m a rule follower. I keep my head down and don’t make waves because that’s how you stay on the roster, that’s how you keep your spot, that’s how you—
“Yeah, so.” He says. “I’m gonna need you both to leave.”
“Totally fair,” Mackie says before I can apologize or explain or try to fix it. “We were way out of line, very sorry.”
She grabs my hand and pulls me toward the exit. I can’t resist because me, Zach Almardon, who has never even gotten a detention is now getting kicked out of a mini golf course.
“We just got kicked out,” I say when we reach the parking lot, and I know I sound like I’m stuck on repeat but my brain can’t move on from this wild turn of events.
“Yeah we did.” She’s grinning at me over the hood of my car, face flushed from laughing.
“I’ve never been kicked out of anything.”
“How does it feel?”
I’m waiting for the guilt to show up, the voice in my head that usually tells me I fucked up and need to fix it immediately, but there’s nothing except this weird lightness in my chest.
“Good,” I admit. “Weird, but good.”
“That’s the spirit.” She opens the passenger door and pauses, looking at me across the roof of the car, and she suddenly won’t meet my eyes, her fingers picking at the hem of her sweater. “I... um. I really want to kiss you right now.”
The girl who just cheated at mini golf and got us kicked out is looking at her shoes with a blush climbing up her neck and I realize she’s been like this the whole time. Bold until it actually matters.
I walk around the front of the car. I should probably say something smooth right now but I’ve never been smooth in my life so I just step into her space and back her against the passenger door as she looks up at me and the pulse jumps in her throat.
“I mean, if that’s what you want.” she says. “In case you were still figuring it out.”
“I’ve had it figured out since the third hole.” I slide my hand into her hair, tilting her head back. “I was just enjoying watching you pretend you weren’t thinking about it too.”
Her mouth opens and I kiss her. Whatever careful, polite version of myself I brought to this date leaves.
She makes a small overwhelmed sound against my mouth and I swallow it, my tongue sweeping along the seam of her lips until she opens for me, and we’re kissing in a parking lot and I’m pressing her against a car and I don’t recognize any of this behavior as mine.
When I pull back she’s flushed, breathing hard, eyes fixed on my face. I’m not doing much better.
“Car,” I say. My voice comes out lower than I’ve ever heard it. “Get in the car.”
We make it maybe thirty seconds before she’s climbing over the center console into my lap.
Or I’m pulling her. It’s unclear. Then she’s straddling me, her knees sinking into the leather on either side of my hips, and she’s watching me with those green eyes, and this is not how I expected mini golf to end.
“Hi,” I say, wrapping my hands around her waist.
“Hi.” She breathes. “Is this okay?”
“Yeah, Mackie. This is okay.”
I pull her down and kiss her again. The way she kisses is so honest it’s almost hard to take, eager and unguarded with nothing held back.
I slide my hands under her sweater and she shivers at the cold of my fingers, then arches into me like she’s been waiting for exactly this, her nails dig into my shoulders.
“Too cold?” I murmur against her jaw.
“No. Don’t stop.”
I don’t. I let my hands travel and my brain does what it always does—tries to process, tries to file things into categories—but the categories are gone.
There is no category for this girl, my hands on her, the way she rolls her hips down and I feel it everywhere at once and every coherent thought exits my body.
“Sorry,” she gasps, like that was an accident. “Sorry, I didn’t mean to—”
“Don’t apologize for that.” The voice saying it doesn’t sound like mine.
I’m not thinking about angle or distance or what comes next.
There’s no next. There’s only her, the weight of her, the sound she makes when I touch her—desperate and startled, like she surprised herself—and my hips answer before my brain can catch up and she gasps and grinds back down and suddenly we’re just doing this, fully clothed, after getting kicked out of mini golf, and I have never been less in control of my own body and I have never cared less about anything in my life.
I can feel everything through the denim.
The heat, the pressure, the specific way her hips roll in these small, clumsy, frantic circles that she’s clearly not controlling anymore.
My hands are gripping her ribs and I’m harder than I’ve ever been in my life and I want to slow this down, I want to be the version of myself that has a plan and knows what he’s doing, but she’s making these soft, broken sounds against my neck and my hips keep moving on their own and I am not, as it turns out, that version of myself at all.
“Zach.” Her voice is barely there. “I think I’m going to—”
I can feel it building in my own body, this tightening low in my stomach that I know I should do something about, should slow down, should stop, except she shifts her angle slightly and presses down hard and I feel her come apart against me with a full-body shudder, her breath catching, her fingers digging into my shoulders, and that’s it, that’s all it takes, I’m gone.
I bury my face in her neck and come apart with a sound I’ve never made before, my hands gripping her hips like she’s the only solid thing in the universe, which right now she might actually be.
I come in my jeans like a teenager, fully clothed, in the front seat of my car, in a parking lot, while the girl I barely asked out twelve hours ago shakes through her own orgasm on my lap.
We’re both breathing like we just did suicides at practice. There’s a ringing in my ears and my hands are still gripping her hips and I’m slowly becoming aware that I just came in my pants from dry humping.
“Oh my god,” she whispers.
“Yeah,” I manage.
“Did you—”
“Yeah.”
“Oh my GOD!”
“Please don’t.” I have my forehead against her shoulder and I cannot look at her. “Please don’t make fun of me right now.”
She’s shaking, and for a second I think she’s about to cry, and then I realize she’s laughing. “Zach, I’m not making fun of you, I just also—that was so fast—I didn’t know that could happen from—”
“Me either.” My face is on fire. “I’m usually—I have more control than that. In theory. I’ve never tested the theory but in theory—”
“Wait.” She pulls back just enough to look down at me. “Zach. Am I your first?”
“No! I’ve—no. I just.” I close my eyes. “I’ve never reacted like that to anyone before. I don’t know what that was.”
“It was hot,” she says, with a certainty that does not match the current state of my underwear.
“It was mortifying.”
“It was hot AND mortifying.” She runs her fingers through my hair. “Should I be worried about getting pregnant or—”
It takes me a full two seconds and a minor heart attack to realize she’s joking. “Mackie. I’m wearing jeans.”
“I know. I’m kidding.” She’s completely delighted with herself. “Although for the record, I’m on birth control, so even if your jeans weren’t involved, you’d be fine.”
“Great. That’s. Good to know.” I’m storing that information in a very specific place in my brain and trying very hard not to think about the implications of it right now. “Can we talk about literally anything else.”
“We can talk about how you came in your pants at a mini golf course.”
“Something ELSE.”
She’s laughing so hard she can barely breathe, her forehead against my shoulder, and I’m sitting in the wreckage of whatever dignity I have left and I should be humiliated, I should want to crawl into the backseat and disappear, but she’s laughing with her whole body pressed against mine and I’m starting to laugh too because the situation is insane.
“The windows are totally fogged,” she says, wiping her eyes.
“Please stop.”
She lifts her head and cups my face and looks at me and she stops laughing. “Hey. That was really good. Weird and fast and unexpected but really, really good.”
“Next time though, maybe not in a car.” Oh fuck. Now I’m the type of guy who just assumes there’s going to be a next time. “I mean, if you—”
“Zach.” She’s blinking at me like I’m the dumbest person she’s ever met. “I definitely want there to be a next time.”
“Okay. Good.”
“But I’m holding you to that.” She presses a quick kiss to my mouth.
“Deal.”
We sit for a few more minutes while the windows slowly clear. Her hand finds mine on her thigh and she laces our fingers together.
When I finally pull out of the parking lot she’s still smiling.
“I’m leaving tomorrow,” I say. “On a road trip to Dallas and St. Louis. Four days.”
Her nose scrunches up in displeasure.
“I’ll miss you,” she says.
“Really?”
“Obviously.” She says it like I’m being stupid. “You think I let just anyone see me cheat at mini golf?”
I almost smile at that. “I’ll text you. From the road. If that’s okay.”
“I’d be mad if you didn’t.”
She kisses me one more time when I drop her off at her car. “Next time,” she says against my lips.
I watch her drive away, then sit in my car trying to process everything that just happened.