White Golf Skirt in a Scottsdale Hotel Room

The air conditioning runs at a frequency I can feel in my back teeth, and somewhere below the window the resort sprinklers are already hitting the fairway. Forty minutes to tee time. I know this because he told me, and because I have been watching the clock on the nightstand the way you watch a thing you are actively choosing to ignore.

He is barefoot on the carpet in his khakis and a half-tucked white polo, holding a putter like he owns this room, which for the weekend he does. I am sitting on the edge of the bed in my white golf skirt — pressed, bright, the hem sitting two inches above my knee — with my collar open and my hair still loose around my shoulders, not yet gathered, not yet ready. The skirt is light enough that when the air conditioning cycles it moves slightly against my thighs. I notice this more than I should.

"Lie back," he says. Not a question. The putter tip rests against the carpet.

This is the thing about him: he phrases things as instructions but wears the expression of a man waiting to be surprised. I have never once surprised him. I do it every time anyway.

I lie back. The duvet is cool and faintly stiff under my palms. I let my legs fall open — not wide, just enough, the skirt shifting up an inch as my heels find the bedspread — and I look at the ceiling because looking at him right now would give something away that I'm not ready to give.

He sets the ball on the carpet maybe four feet from the foot of the bed. A Titleist. I hear the faint drag of it leaving his fingers.

Then the roll. Slow, deliberate, tracking straight across the low-pile hotel carpet toward the gap between my thighs. I hold still. The air conditioning hums. I am aware of the exact distance between the hem of the skirt and where the ball will arrive, and I am aware that he has calculated this too, and that this — the calculation, the patience, the dare implicit in both — is entirely the point.

The ball slows as it crosses the shadow of the bed frame. I watch it from the corner of my eye, not turning my head, keeping my jaw easy and my expression somewhere between bored and entertained, which is the expression I've learned costs him the most.

"If you sink it," I say, keeping my voice level, almost conversational, "you can have me right here."

He doesn't look at the ball. He looks at me.

"I'm already there," he says.

The ball rolls the last inch and stops — just stops — at the inner seam of my thigh, warm from his hand, resting against the thin fabric like a period at the end of a sentence he's been writing since we checked in. The air conditioning hums on. Thirty-eight minutes to tee time. Neither of us moves.