I should talk about golf. I should mention the sixteenth hole, the wind strategy, the trust I felt building through the round. I should keep this professional and warm and within the boundaries that two adults maintain when one of them pays the other to carry her equipment.
"Have you imagined kissing me?"
The question drops between us like a ball on hardpan — no bounce, no spin, just the flat, honest sound of something landing exactly where it was aimed.
Nerys's expression doesn't change. Her body does. A nearly invisible recalibration — her weight shifting backward half an inch, her right hand tightening on the door frame. The hand holding the keycard — the long fingers, the scarred thumb — presses harder against the plastic.
"Yes," she says.
The syllable is quiet and completely unadorned. No deflection. No performance. She hands me the truth the way shehands me a club selection — cleanly, without flinching from the consequences.
"So—"
"No."
"Why?"
"Because right now, you pay me. Right now, my income from this arrangement depends on your continued satisfaction with my work. Right now, if this goes wrong and you decide I'm inconvenient, I could lose guaranteed compensation, professional reputation, and the first significant caddying contract I've accepted in three years." She pauses. The pause is not hesitation — it's emphasis. "Right now, the power runs one direction and it isn't mine."
I absorb that. Each word. I hear them the way I heard her course reads today — completely, without filtering.
She's right.
She's right the way the center-of-the-green play was right on the sixteenth. Not the answer I want. The answer the math demands.
"What if I fix that?"
"Fix what?"
"The power. The contract. Whatever Phaedra needs to make it equal. Whatever you need to make it safe. What if I restructure the whole arrangement so that you have independent representation, guaranteed pay regardless of what happens between us, and the right to walk away without losing anything?"
Nerys studies me. The corridor is quiet. Somewhere on a lower floor, a door opens and closes. The ice machine cycles off.
"Then we would have a different conversation."
She opens her door wider. She's going inside. The evening is ending and she's drawing the line and I'm about to be standing alone in this corridor with my pulse at a hundred and forty andnothing to show for it except the knowledge that she saidyesand then chose not to act on it because the professional framework isn't safe enough yet.
She turns back.
She looks at me. All of me. Slowly. Without pretending she isn't.
Her eyes start at my face — the damp hair, the jaw, the scar on my lip. They drop to my throat. The collar of the silk shirt, open to the third button. The shape of my shoulders. The rise and fall of my breathing, which is faster than I want it to be and can't seem to slow.
She's not assessing me the way she assesses a course. She's looking at me the way a woman looks at another woman when the answer is yes and the timing is not yet.
Then she steps forward.
Her hand comes to my jaw.
Those long fingers, the ones I've been watching for two weeks, the scarred thumb pressing against my cheekbone. She tilts my face up — the height difference requiring the adjustment, six inches between us, her chin above my forehead — and she holds me there.
"This is the answer to your question," she says.
She kisses me.
Not tentatively. Not cautiously. Not with the reserve I've come to associate with every controlled thing she does.
She kisses me the way she reads a green — thoroughly, patiently, with total attention to slope and speed and every subtle break. Her mouth is warm and firm and unhurried. She tastes like peppermint and the red wine she was probably drinking when I knocked. Her fingers tighten on my jaw, angling my head, and the precision of the adjustment is so exactly Nerys that I feel something crack open in my chest.
