"I shouldn't have to prove it to you."
The sentence lands with the finality of a dropped club. No reverberation. Just the sound of something hitting ground.
"Everyone else — the sponsors, the tour officials, the media — I expect them to require proof. That's appropriate. They don't know me. They don't share my bed. They haven't watched me hold your hands and praise your decisions and stand beside your bag in the rain and the heat and the wind for six weeks."
Her voice drops. Lower than I've heard it. Lower than the course reads. Lower than the praise.
"You have watched all of that. And you are asking me for proof."
"Nerys, I just need—"
"You need to decide whether you trust me. Not the version of trust that exists when we're winning. Not the version that lives in hotel suites and putting rooms and Scottish cottages. The version that survives when every external voice is telling you I'm a liar. That version. Right now."
I open my mouth to answer, and the answer isyes, and the answer is true, and I am about to say it when the image surfaces — the paragraph on my phone,she does not trust herself without an audience,the accurate assessment, the clinical precision with which Nerys has catalogued the deepest mechanisms of my psychology — and theyescatches in my throat.
Not because I don't trust her.
Because for one second — one fraction of one second, a duration so brief it should be immeasurable — I wonder whether the woman who identified my patterns so precisely might have used that precision for something other than my benefit.
The thought is there and gone. A synapse firing. An involuntary flicker of doubt that I extinguish before it fully forms.
But the flicker takes time. And the time is visible.
One second.
Nerys sees it.
•
The anger becomes physical before either of us decides it should.
I push her against the wall. Not gently. My hands on her shoulders, my body pressing forward, my mouth finding hers with a force that has nothing to do with desire and everything to do with the desperate need to override the silence — the one-second silence that I know she saw and that I know has changed everything.
She kisses me back. Hard. Furious. Her hands grip my hair, pull my head back, and she bites my lower lip — not playfully, not the careful dental attention of previous encounters. She bites me and I taste copper and I grab the front of her shirt and I feel buttons give.
We are not making love. We are not having sex. We are colliding — two bodies translating an argument that words have failed to resolve into a language that requires no translation.
My shirt comes off. Pulled over my head and dropped. Her belt — I unfasten it with hands that are shaking, not from desire, from anger, from the need to close the distance that the one-second hesitation opened. The belt hits the floor. Her trousers are unbuttoned.
She reverses me. Pushes me against the opposite wall. Kisses my throat with an aggression that is nothing like the measured mouth that has praised me for six weeks. This is the Nerys who exists beneath the composure — the woman who won championships through psychological endurance, who outlasted opponents by refusing to yield, who stood over a three-foot putt and tried six times because she would not surrender.
I reach for her. My hand slides inside her trousers, past the waistband, and I feel the heat of her against my fingersand I press forward because if I can just touch her — if I can just reach the place where our bodies communicate without the interference of words and doubt and one-second hesitations — then maybe the damage can be undone.
Nerys catches my wrist.
She stops.
Not gradually. Not with the measured deceleration of a woman choosing to pause. She stops the way a circuit breaker stops — completely, instantaneously, with the mechanical precision of a system designed to prevent overload.
She pulls my hand out of her trousers. Holds my wrist. Looks at me.
"Do you trust me?"
"Yes."
"Do you trust that I never manipulated your play?"
I open my mouth.
