Three words. Said simply. The way you'd saythe wind is from the left.
My face does something I can't control. It crumples — not prettily, not cinematically, not the photogenic tears of a woman who looks beautiful while crying. It collapses inward like a structure that has been bearing weight for two weeks and has just been told it can stop. I cover my mouth with my hand and the sound I make is halfway between a laugh and a sob, and both halves are equally true.
"Say it again."
"I love you." She steps toward me. One step. The hallway is narrow and one step covers most of the distance. "I have loved you since Scotland. Since the cottage. Since you held my hands while they shook and kissed the scar on my thumb and told me they were more than the worst thing they ever did."
Another step. She's in front of me now. Looking down. Six inches.
"I loved you when I left. I loved you during the eleven days I didn't answer your calls. I loved you while I sat on my porch and wrote strategy notes for a round I wasn't caddying because writing your strategy is the only way I know how to say the thing I couldn't say."
Her hand comes to my face. The right hand. The scarred thumb against my cheekbone. The same gesture from thecorridor at Kiawah — the first kiss, the tilt of my jaw, the beginning of everything.
"I loved you when I watched you play without me and saw you choose every shot correctly and realized you don't need me to be great."
"I need you for other things."
"Name them."
"This."
I kiss her.
Not carefully. Not with the measured patience of Singapore or the quiet tenderness of Charleston or the angry collision of the last time we were in the same room. I kiss her with two weeks of separation and grief and relief and the particular urgency of a woman who has just been told she is loved by someone who does not say things she doesn't mean.
She catches me. Her arms come around my body and she lifts — easily, the height and the leverage and the strength of a woman who has carried golf bags for decades making the motion simple. My feet leave the ground. I wrap my legs around her waist. My back presses against the hallway wall. She holds me there — pinned between the plaster and her body — and she kisses me back.
Her mouth on mine. Her hands under my thighs. The full length of her pressed against me, and I am suspended, lifted, held by a woman who is choosing to hold me because she chooses to, not because I need her to, and the distinction is the most erotic thing I have ever experienced.
She carries me to the living room. The couch. She sets me down — not drops, not tosses, sets — and follows me down. Her body over mine. The familiar weight and length of her, the architecture I've been missing for two weeks. I pull her closer, my hands on her back, her shoulders, her hair.
We undress each other. Not with the controlled slowness of Singapore or the efficient enthusiasm of the victory suite. With urgency that has been earned — the specific desperation of two women who almost lost this and know exactly what the loss would have cost.
My shirt over my head. Her T-shirt pulled off. My bra unhooked and tossed. Her sports bra joining it. My trousers pushed down and kicked free. Her shorts. My underwear. Hers. Until we are skin to skin on the couch in her living room in the dark house in Charleston, and the marsh sounds through the cracked window and the air is warm and my body remembers hers with a specificity that makes me gasp at the first full contact.
Neither of us leads exclusively. We trade. She rolls on top and settles between my legs and her fingers slide into me — two, direct, curving forward — and her mouth is on my neck and the full weight of her body presses me into the cushions. I grip her shoulders. I feel the lean muscle under her skin. I feel her fingers inside me, moving with the precise rhythm that she has refined over six weeks of learning my body, and the sensation is familiar and devastating and new because the context has changed.
"I trust you," I say. Not a whisper. Not a moan. A statement, spoken clearly, directed at the woman above me while her fingers press deeper. "I trust you. I trust—"
I come saying it.
The orgasm is not quiet. It's not controlled. It moves through me the way the press conference moved through the world — unfiltered, undeniable, produced by a decision that carries consequences. I come with the wordtrustin my mouth and Nerys's fingers inside me and her body anchoring mine to the couch, and the pleasure is so tangled with the emotion that I can't separate the physical release from the psychological one and I don't try.
She holds me. Forehead pressed to mine. Her breathing ragged. Her hand still inside me, still present, not withdrawing until the last aftershock has passed.
"I trust you," I say again. Quiet now. "Every second. No hesitation."
She kisses me. Softly. Withdraws her hand. Presses both palms against my face and looks at me from three inches away and I see the gray-green eyes that I've been watching for seven weeks, and they're wet.
I reverse. Push her onto her back. Move down her body.
I take my time. Not the Singapore time or the cottage time — a different kind of time. The time of a woman who has been away for two weeks and wants to relearn every surface. I kiss her throat, her collarbones, the contour-line tattoo along her ribs. I praise her — not the strategy, not the intelligence, not the composure. The body.
"You're beautiful when you let go." My mouth against her hip. "You're beautiful when you shake." My mouth moving lower. "You're the most beautiful woman I've ever seen and I am never going to stop telling you that."
I settle between her legs and I put my mouth on her and she arches off the couch and her hand finds my hair and her fingers thread through it and hold. Not gripping. Holding. The way she holds a putter now — with her fingers, gently, with trust rather than force.
I work her with everything I've learned. Every lesson in patience and precision and reading terrain that she's given me over seven weeks, returned to her through my mouth and my hands and the sustained attention of a woman who has stopped chasing and started staying.
