Page 53 of Wedge

ASK ADRIAN.

He doesn’t say anything for a while. He stares at it for longer than it takes to read two words. Then he gets up, finds the tape in the kitchen drawer, and disappears into the bedroom.

“It’s going on the closet door,” he calls. “Where Jasmine can’t see it.”

“Jasmine can’t read yet,” I call back.

“Pfft, that child is scary.”

“First of every month,” I say when he comes back. “We read it and adjust whatever needs adjusting. After-action review.”

“That’s an audit.”

“You love a system.”

“You love a system,” he says, and drops back onto the couch, right against my side.

“What about when I want you on my lap?” I ask in a low voice.

He shivers. “Come here?”

“Come here.”

22

ADRIAN

The six weeks pass the way training always does, one long stretch of repetition that only makes sense looking backward. Frost whitens the mats at Ben’s range every morning, and I stand there with hand warmers in my pockets, breath smoking over the grass. Halfway through, the course closes for the winter, but the range stays open.

Coach Reyes has me out there four days a week, rebuilding my short game, drilling the same forty-yard pitch shot until my hands stop overthinking it.

“Your problem isn’t mechanics,” he tells me during the second week, watching me flub another one into the bunker. “Your problem is you get scared of your own swing under pressure. We’re not fixing your swing. We’re fixing your nerves. You have a great swing already.”

Fucking hitch, all over again. Turns out fixing nerves looks a lot like hitting the same shot four hundred times until it stops feeling like a decision. Just as Stephen showed me.

Dr. Okafor’s office is a different kind of range work. Once a week, unpacking exactly what happens in my head between good shots and bad ones. It’s a quiet room with a white-noise machine humming outside the door and a bowl of butterscotch candies on the table. I’ve sat in a therapist’s office before, but never one that talks about grip pressure. She gets me talking about Steamboat without flinching, the collapse that still lives behind my sternum every time I stand over a shot with water in play. That red line on the whiteboard.

“You don’t need to forget it happened,” she says. “You need it to stop being the loudest voice in your head.”

Some days that clicks. Some days it doesn’t, and I come home short-tempered and exhausted, and Stephen knows exactly when to talk and when to just put a bowl of his green chili in front of me and let me decompress on the couch until I’m human again. He wasn’t kidding that he already knew my tells. He starts up Stardew Valley on the Xbox and presses the controller into my hands so I can farm my stress away, a little pixel sun rising over a little pixel farm while the real skyline goes dark outside the windows.

Some nights, he presses me back onto the bed and kisses me until I’m a squirming mess, then straddles me and rides my cock until he is a bellowing, gasping mess, collapsing over me then staying there, my cock quietly inside of him until I finally soften and slip out.

Ben calls every few days, checking progress, occasionally sitting in on a lesson with Coach Reyes with that assessing look he gets, like he’s running numbers behind his eyes even when he’s just watching me hit wedges. Unnerving at first, then I stop seeing him. Good training for a future gallery, Stephen tells me.

Second Stage site comes through in week three, a request that actually landed, a course in Arizona that plays to distance and aggressive wedge play, exactly the kind of setup Ben wanted. I picture it right away. Sun, desert, no frost.

“You earned that spot,” Stephen tells me, reading the confirmation email over my shoulder. “Twelfth at First Stage got you on the list. Ben just made sure they couldn’t ignore it.”

“Feels like luck.”

“Everything feels like luck from the outside. Luck doesn’t shoot thirteen under. And Ben doesn’t go to bat for people who haven’t earned it.”

By week five, something in my swing actually feels different, not just mechanically, but underneath it, a kind of quiet that wasn’t there before Grand Junction. Coach Reyes notices it before I do, watches me hit fifteen wedges in a row inside ten feet and just nods once, satisfied, like he’s confirming something he already suspected.

“There he is,” he says. That same phrase Stephen uses. It lands almost as well from him as it does from my lover. “Now let’s see if it survives actual pressure.”

I don’t have an answer for that yet. Second Stage will have one for me soon enough.