I don't say them. Not because I don't mean them. Because saying them would require me to accept that I have built something I could lose, and the last time I built something I could lose, I lost it on national television while four million people watched.
"You are the bravest person I have ever worked with," I say instead.
She pulls back slightly. Studies me. Her eyes are clear and steady and she is reading me the way I taught her to read a green — with attention, patience, and the willingness to accept what the terrain is actually doing rather than what she wants it to do.
"That's not the same as I love you."
"No." I touch her face. My hand — steady, present, the scarred thumb resting against her cheekbone. "But it might be more from me."
She considers this. I watch her process the offering — the woman who attacks every deficit, who responds to incompleteness by escalating until the gap is filled, choosing to accept an answer that is less than what she asked for because the answer is honest and the honesty is worth more than the words would be if they arrived before they were ready.
"Okay," she says.
She doesn't push.
She kisses me instead. Then again. Then her mouth is on my throat and my clavicle and her hands are on my breasts, and she is moving down my body with a focused joy that is different from every previous time — not desperate, not proving, just giving because she wants to and the wanting is enough.
She settles between my legs. Her mouth on me — warm, confident, practiced in a way that no longer carries the self-conscious attention of a student and instead carries the easy fluency of a woman who has learned this particular language and now speaks it natively.
I grip the headboard. The wood is smooth under my palms. I hold it the way I used to hold a putter — with my fingers, with precision, with the understanding that what's about to happen requires me to trust my hands to hold on while the rest of me lets go.
She brings me there. Not quickly, not slowly — at the pace the moment asks for, which is the pace of celebration, the pace of joy, the pace of two women in a hotel room after a victory that belongs to both of them.
I come with the headboard creaking under my grip and Tala's name in my mouth and the knowledge, held alongside the pleasure like a second heartbeat, that I love her and I haven't said it and the reason I haven't said it is fear, not absence, and fear is a thing I have spent six weeks teaching her to distinguish from courage.
The hypocrisy is not lost on me.
Later — after she's fallen asleep, after the room has gone dark, after the last of the celebration has settled into the quiet companionship of two bodies sharing a bed — I lie awake.
The trophy is on the chair by the door. Untouched.
My course notebook is on the desk, open to the eighteenth hole. The strategy page. The probability tables. The yardage data that allowed Tala to choose the 7-iron with confidence.
I get up. Walk to the desk. I see what she's written.
In the margin of my course map, in handwriting that is larger and less precise than mine, slanting right instead of left:
Thank you for the read. I love you. — T
She wrote in my notebook. My sacred, pristine, obsessively maintained course notebook. She put her handwriting in my margins. She placed her words inside the space I've kept controlled and private and exclusively mine for twenty-five years.
I should be furious.
I close the notebook gently. Hold it against my chest.
I stand in the dark hotel room with my course notebook pressed against my body and the woman who wrote in it sleeping six feet away, and I think three words that I have not yet said aloud and that I will say, soon, when the saying can be accompanied by the certainty it deserves.
Not yet.
But soon.
The 7-iron is already in my hand.
I just need to trust the stroke.
CHAPTER FIFTEEN
Tala
