I shower at the course. I go back to the hotel. I shower again. I change into the dark silk shirt — the same one from Kiawah, because it's the shirt I was wearing when she kissed me and I am not above superstition — and loose black trousers and bare feet.
I look at myself in the hotel mirror. Bronze skin. Damp hair. Gold studs in my ears. The sampaguita tattoo visible in the open collar.
I look like a woman who is about to walk three floors up to another woman's suite and say something she can't take back.
I look terrified.
Good. That means it's real.
•
I knock.
Eight seconds. The door opens.
Nerys is in a soft gray T-shirt and dark trousers, barefoot. Her hair is damp — she's showered too, and without product or styling, the auburn falls around her jaw in loose waves. The silver streak is darker when wet, more pewter than chrome. Her face is clean. No armor. No composure architecture. She looks like a woman in a hotel room in a foreign city at the end of a long day, and the domesticity of it — the bare feet on the carpet, the reading glasses perched on her head, the course notebook open on the desk behind her — makes something expand behind my ribs.
"This visit is personal," I say. The words I agreed to say. The delineation between work and want. "I'm not here about golf."
"Come in."
I step past her. The suite is larger than mine — Nerys negotiated her own accommodations, one of many things the new contract guarantees. It's orderly. Course notebooks stacked on the desk. A glass of water. A single lamp casting warm light across the bed. Floor-to-ceiling windows showing Singapore's skyline — Marina Bay, the light show, the city blazing against the dark.
I turn to face her. She's closed the door. She's leaning against it, arms at her sides, watching me with an expression I haven't seen before. Not controlled. Not strategic. Something closer to hunger that has decided to stop pretending it's analysis.
I cross the room toward her. Fast. My default. Close the distance, take what's offered, accelerate before the doubt arrives.
She catches my wrists.
Her fingers circle them completely — long, warm, firm without force. My wrists are small in her hands. My pulse hammers against her thumb.
"Slow."
"I don't want slow—"
"I know what you want." Her voice drops into the register I've been hearing on the course for two weeks — the low murmur that arrives before each shot, close to my ear, carrying information that changes everything. "I'm telling you what you need."
She holds my wrists at my sides. Not restraining — anchoring. I could pull free. I don't.
"You've been thinking about this for a week. You rushed through every thought. You imagined everything happening quickly because speed is how you manage fear. You come fast, you leave fast, you process fast, and nothing touches you long enough to become difficult."
"That's not—"
"Tala." Just my name. Said with patience and certainty and something underneath both that sounds like a woman who has also been thinking about this for a week and managed the wanting differently and is now standing in front of me with the result of that management: control. Deliberate, costly, earned control.
"We're going to do this at a pace where we can feel all of it."
She releases my wrists. Steps back. Gestures toward the bed.
"Sit."
I sit on the edge. The mattress gives under me. The height dynamic reverses — I'm looking up, she's looking down. Six inches becomes more when she's standing and I'm not.
She steps between my knees. Her thighs press against the inside of mine. She threads her fingers into my hair — slowly, starting at my temples, sliding back through the damp strands until her palms cradle my skull. The sensation is so specific and so gentle that my breathing stutters.
"Tell me what you actually want," she says. "Not the performance version. Not the version designed to sound confident and make this go faster. Tell me what you want right now, in your body, specifically."
I open my mouth. Close it. I'm used to sex being a thing that happens through momentum — two bodies colliding at speed, friction and urgency and the satisfying crash of getting what you want before the doubt catches up. I've never been asked to narrate my desire before the first piece of clothing comes off.
