Page 62 of Wedge

I shake his hand and gesture to Adrian. “Yep. Adrian Carter, Mike Coulson.” I step back so that they can exchange handshakes. “You looping for a player here?” I ask, just to be polite. I don’t really know Mike from anyone else.

“Yeah, pretty good guy outa Virginia, Jeremy Battoli. Folks are taking him out for breakfast. Kind of a pampered rich kid, to be honest, but the pay’s okay. Figured I’d get some grub, check things out.”

Adrian has wandered away, heading for a stack of bagels.

“Hey,” Mike says, lower, bending his head to mine, “I’m hearing rumors…”

I swallow. “Oh?” I’m not going to make it easy on this guy. “Shouldn’t listen to gossip, Mike.”

He rubs the back of his neck. “Yeah, so I figured I should ask you rather than believe the worst.”

My jaw clenches. “The worst?”

Mike flinches, seeing that he stepped wrong. Then he recovers. “Heard you were looping for your boyfriend?”

“And?” I bite out, staring into his startled gray eyes.

“Ballsy, man,” Mike stammers. “Just wanted to wish you the best. Takes some guts.” He extends a fist for a bump.

I blink, then let my shoulders down from my ears, an almost-smile on my mouth. And bump his fist. “Thanks, Mike.”

Adrian is making his way back to me, with two bagels in one hand and his coffee in the other.

“See ya, Stephen,” Mike says, turning away. “Good luck out there, Adrian.”

I stare after him in bemusement.

“Everything okay?” Adrian asks me quietly.

“Yeah, actually.” I take a bagel from him, and let myself give him a proper smile. “Folks already know. Mike knew. Was confirming.” I take a bite of bagel, then a sip of coffee. “It’s okay. Eat your breakfast, boyfriend.”

He coughs a little. “Could you not get me hard in the clubhouse?”

I chuckle. “You started it with your ’walking funny’ chirp.”

He huffs. “Funnier when I said it.”

We start on Heron Valley. No scorecard today, just Adrian and me and a bag full of range balls and my growing stack of notebooks. The morning is soft and humid, live oaks hanging with Spanish moss, and a great blue heron stands motionless at the edge of the third pond like it’s waiting for a tee time.

“You’re really going to write down every yardage.”

“Every yardage.” I pace off the distance from a sprinkler head to the front edge of eleven’s green, jot the number, move to the next landmark. “This is the only time we get to see these holes before it counts. I’m not wasting it.”

“Nerd.”

“Says the man who has played through Mass Effect One five times. I’m prepared. There’s a difference.”

He grins, drops a ball in the rough left of the fairway just to see what a recovery shot looks like from there, and I make a note of that too, filing it under don’t go left on eleven. I’ll remember that specific thought three days from now, standing in this exact spot with real numbers on the line.

“This hole’s mean,” Adrian says, squinting at his lie.

“This whole course is mean. That’s the point.”

We wander over to Ponte Marsh the next morning, more traditional, old pines and marsh grass hissing in the wind, the greens just as fast, maybe faster. I keep filling pages. Distances to bunkers, false fronts, spots where the wind funnels through the trees.

“You’ve got three notebooks,” Adrian says, watching me flip between them at the fourteenth tee. “Three.”

“Greens, yardages, wind by time of day.”