Page 22 of Wedge

“Stephen going with you?” he asks. “That man is such a snack.”

I blush. “Yeah. Learning a ton from him.”

He stares at me.

“Your face, A, it’s doing things.”

Fuck.

“You have the hots for him, don’t you.” He says it flat. Not a question.

I huff. “He’s not gay, Caleb. He told you so.”

Caleb nods slowly. “Has he said anything to you?”

I can feel the tips of my ears turning red.

He giggles. “I know that look, A. He did, didn’t he? Tell me.”

Words start spilling out of me before I know I’m talking. “Fuck, Caleb. I had a hot dream about him, couldn’t look at him on the tee box, he called me out on it, made me confess then said…” I swallow. “Said he’d had thoughts, too.”

Caleb gasps and puts his hand over his mouth, his eyes big like saucers.

“But Caleb, even if he was into me? That man is no bottom. That man is a top. A Daddy top. A big, muscly top. It would never work. I can’t bottom, Caleb. Even the thought of it just shuts me down and I want to hide in my bathtub.”

“Oh, darlin’. I don’t know what to tell you. Don’t shut it down before it happens? Give him a chance? He is a good man, Adrian. Caddied for TJ when I got sick last year, has been a good sport, always.”

I huff. “I probably am reading more into it than is there. He probably said it just to make me feel better.”

“Maybe? I don’t think he’d lie to you, but maybe.”

Two very buff guys in short shorts and crop tops jog by, and we both pause to watch.

“Whew, I’d hit that,” he chirps and we laugh.

Steamboat is pretty in a way I don’t get to enjoy. Green mountains, bare ski runs, thin dry air that smells like sunscreen and dust. It doesn’t feel like Ben’s club. No buffet, no Ben working the room, no free polos. Just a chain-link fence around a scoreboard, a card table for a registration desk, and forty guys who all look like they’ve been doing this a lot longer than four days.

“Breathe,” Stephen says, handing me my driver on the range. “Same game you play every Saturday. Different flags. It’s still just golf.”

It doesn’t feel like just golf. It feels like the first time in my life something actually matters, and I might not be good enough for it. My stomach threatens to toss the cheap breakfast burrito I ate this morning.

The guy in the group ahead of us hits three balls in a row that sound different than mine, a tighter, cleaner click, more controlled, like his driver costs more money than my whole bag did. I try not to listen. I fail.

Round one, I hang on. Seventy-three, one over, nothing special, nothing disastrous. Stephen calls it solid. I call it barely surviving.

“Cut comes after two rounds,” he reminds me that night, back at the motel, both of us eating grocery store sandwiches on top of a rumpled bedspread like it’s the most normal dinner in the world. The window unit rattles, and somewhere down the hall an ice machine clanks. Like we weren’t eating prime rib together three weeks ago. “Past few years it’s landed around four over. Shoot even tomorrow and you’re through with room to spare. Don’t do the math out there. Just play golf.”

Just play golf. Like I have any idea what that even means when my hands won’t stop being tight on the club.

Round two starts fine. Then it goes sideways.

Fourth hole, I miss a three-foot putt I should make with my eyes closed. Sixth hole, wind blowing right at me, water shining in front of the green, and I hook a drive so far right it’s basically a different fairway. The sun is brutal now, sweat stinging my eyes, my glove soaked through. By the turn, I’m six over, and every group behind us feels like it’s breathing down my neck, waiting for me to fail, impatient for me to get out of their way.

I can feel Stephen watching. Me, getting smaller with every swing. Tighter. Worse.

I hate that he’s watching me crumble. I hate that I need him here.

“Hey.” He stops me on the tenth tee, voice low enough it’s just for me. “Where’d you go?”