She crosses the kitchen in two strides. Her hand comes to my chin — those long fingers, the scarred thumb pressing against my jaw, tilting my face up the way she tilted it in the corridor at Kiawah the first time she kissed me. The height difference is the same. Six inches. Her face above mine. Her eyes looking down.
"I said come here."
"I'm right here."
"You're being difficult."
"You love difficult."
"I love disciplined. Difficult is the obstacle course I navigate to reach it."
She kisses me.
Not the crisis kisses of Singapore or the grief kisses of Scotland or the fury kisses of the interrupted night at Pebble Beach. A home kiss. A Tuesday-afternoon kiss. The kind of kiss that happens between two women who have been living together for ten months and who still — still, after the fights and the reconciliation and the contract negotiations and the media cycle and the two hundred rounds of golf — still feel the contact in their chest before they feel it on their lips.
I laugh against her mouth. She backs me against the club-room door. Her mouth moves to my neck — the spot below my ear that she discovered in Singapore and has been exploiting ever since with the systematic thoroughness of a woman who, having identified a vulnerability, will never stop targeting it.
"The clubs," she says against my throat.
"After."
"Now."
"Make. Me."
She makes me.
Not by fixing the clubs herself — by pressing me against the door until it opens behind us and we stumble into the club room, which is the most organized room in the house and is about to become significantly less so.
My shirt comes off. Hers stays on — unbuttoned, open, her hands too occupied with my body to finish undressing. I pull her against me by the belt loops. She lifts me — still effortless, still the casual demonstration of height and leverage and the upper-body strength of a woman who has carried equipment bags for three decades — and I wrap my legs around her waist and we collide with the storage shelves.
The clubs rattle in their perfectly labeled slots.
She sets me down. I push her backward until her back is against the shelves. She slides down to sitting. I straddle her lap — thighs bracketing her hips, arms around her neck, the geometry of our bodies arranged in the configuration that has become my favorite: her sitting, me in her lap, our faces level for once instead of six inches apart.
Her hand slides between us. Inside my shorts. Inside my underwear. Her fingers find me — wet, ready, because the transition between equipment-disorder prosecution and sex has become so practiced in this household that my body starts the preparation roughly around the time she says my full name.
I ride her hand. Rolling my hips in the rhythm she taught me — not the desperate grind of early Singapore or the slow, grief-stricken pace of the reassurance night. Something between. The rhythm of a woman who knows what she wants and how to get there and is enjoying the route.
"You're destroying my system," Nerys says.
Her voice is strained. Her head is tipped back against the shelves. Her eyes are half-closed and her mouth is slightly open and the composure — the magnificent, hard-won, structurallyessential composure of Nerys Quillan — is dissolving in real time while I move on her hand.
"Your system can handle it."
"Can you?"
She curls her fingers. The angle changes. The pressure sharpens. I gasp and grip her shoulders and my rhythm falters for a beat before I find it again.
"That's cheating."
"That's strategy." She curls again. Watches my face. Adjusts. "You're close."
"I'm not—"
"Your breathing changed eight seconds ago. Your thighs are tightening. You're close. And you're going to come right here, on the floor of my club room, while my putter is in the wedge rack, and you're going to think about what you've done."
I come laughing.
