She kisses me. Harder this time. I feel her smile against my mouth.
"You are the most infuriating woman I've ever met," she says. "I just won a tournament and you want to talk about shot selection."
"I want you to know what you actually accomplished. Anyone with your talent can make a six-foot birdie putt. Not everyone can put the 3-wood back in the bag."
"And then you'll celebrate with me?"
"Then I'll celebrate with you."
She grabs my hand and pulls me toward the bed. Not urgently — joyfully. The word is important. Every previous encounter has carried urgency — the desperate patience of Singapore, the vulnerability of the cottage, the need of the post-interview night. This is different. This is the sound of a woman who is happy, and the happiness is not performed or provisional or dependent on external validation.
She's happy because she played golf the right way and won.
She's happy because I'm here.
She pushes me onto the bed. I fall backward, laughing — a sound I don't recognize in my own voice, a sound that belongs toa woman who laughed with Saskia in the early years and hasn't found the frequency since.
Tala climbs on top of me. Straddles my hips. She's still in her golf clothes — the sleeveless polo, the high-waisted trousers, the visor pushed back on her head. She pulls the visor off and tosses it across the room. It lands on the trophy case.
"Good shot," I say.
"Best one all day."
She kisses me while she undresses me. Not slowly — with the efficient enthusiasm of a woman who has performed patience for six hours on a golf course and has reached the limits of her current supply. My polo comes off. My bra. My trousers. She strips me with the focus of someone who knows exactly what's underneath and cannot wait another minute to access it.
I undress her in return. The polo over her head — her hair spills down, black and damp with sweat from the round. The sports bra. The trousers. The compression shorts beneath. She's naked on top of me, and the light from the hotel window turns her bronze skin into something that looks like it was cast rather than born.
"Sit up," she says.
I sit against the headboard. Pillows behind my back. She climbs into my lap — thighs bracketing my hips, arms around my neck, her face level with mine for once because the bed and the angle have erased the height difference.
"I want to ride your hand," she says. No preamble. No negotiation. The directness she's learned from me, returned without modification.
I slide my hand between us. Between her legs. She's wet — has been, I suspect, since the birdie putt, since the hug on the green, since the moment she whispered in my ear and felt me whisper back. My fingers find her and she sinks onto them — two, drawn in with a smooth roll of her hips that is rhythmicand unhurried and so precisely paced that I recognize my own teaching in the motion of her body.
She rides my hand against the headboard. Rolling. Unhurried. Finding the pace that builds rather than chases. Her arms are around my neck and her forehead is pressed against mine and her eyes are open, looking into mine from three inches away, and the intimacy of the eye contact is more exposing than the nudity.
"Look at you," I say. My voice is low and rough and carries a quality I don't control — admiration, desire, the specific warmth that I have been calling professional respect for six weeks and can no longer pretend is anything so contained. "You're extraordinary."
"Because I won?"
"Not because you won." My free hand comes to her hip. Guides her rhythm. Steadies her the way I've steadied her on every course — not controlling, supporting. "Because you chose right and you trusted it. Because you put the 3-wood back without anyone telling you to. Because you're sitting in my lap right now and you're not rushing."
She smiles. Not the competitive grin or the camera-ready performance. A real smile. Slow and warm and directed at me from three inches away.
"I learned from someone," she says.
She comes smiling.
I've never seen that before. Not with Tala, not with anyone. The orgasm builds through her body — I feel it in the tightening of her muscles around my fingers, the acceleration of her hips, the deepening of her breath — and when it arrives, she doesn't close her eyes. She doesn't throw her head back. She presses her forehead against mine and she smiles and she comes and the sound she makes is quiet and joyful and sounds like laughing.
She holds my face in both hands. Kisses me. Still laughing. Still shaking with aftershocks.
"I love you," she says.
The words land in the room the way a ball lands on a green — with trajectory and spin and the specific weight of an object that has traveled a long distance to reach its target.
I want to say it back. The sentence exists — complete, formed, ready for deployment. Three words that would cost me nothing to produce and would change the architecture of everything between us.
