Page 66 of What We Break
She's been a good sport about being terrible for a solid hour — laughing it off, shrugging, the whole thing. But then her ball goes backward. Actually backward. Like she caught it with the toe of the club and it just... rolled behind the tee. I didn't even know that was physically possible. I'm kind of impressed, honestly.
Something snaps behind her eyes.
"Okay," she says, hands on her hips, glaring at the ball like it keyed her car. "I'm tired of being terrible at this."
"Atta girl," Walsh says approvingly.
"No more soup stirring, no more windmills, no more helicopter thinking." She looks at Tony. "No offense."
"None taken. Sometimes you gotta find your own groove."
She tees up another ball. No asking for advice this time. No copying anyone else's stance. She just sets up the way that feels right to her, takes a practice swing, and lets it rip.
The ball goes straight. Not far, maybe a hundred yards, but straight down the middle of the fairway.
"Holy shit!" Kowalski yells. "She figured it out!"
Laine turns around with this huge grin on her face. "Did you see that? It went where I aimed!"
"I saw it," I tell her, and I can't stop smiling. "That was perfect."
She high-fives Tony, who's acting like he personally coached her to victory. Then she turns to me, still grinning, and something in my chest gets tight.
Then Brennan ruins the moment by hitting his ball into the water hazard with a splash that sends a duck flying.
"That's it," he announces, throwing his club back into his bag. "I'm done pretending this is relaxing."
"Agreed," says Walsh, who just spent five minutes looking for his ball in some bushes only to find out it was in his pocket the whole time. "This is taking forever."
Tony checks his watch. "We've been out here two hours and we're only on the fourth hole."
"And my scorecard looks like a phone number," Kowalski adds, scribbling something that's definitely not regulation golf scoring.
Laine looks around at all of us. "So what do we do?"
"Speed golf," Tony announces, like he's just solved world hunger.
A little spark lights in Laine's eyes. "Speed golf?"
I love that spark. I've cataloged it — filed it away in the growing mental folder labeled Things About Laine That Are Going to Kill Me. She gets it when she's solving a problem at work, when she's elbow-deep in some complicated recipe, when she's about to absolutely destroy me at Scrabble. It means she's engaged. Interested. Ready to compete.
It also means I'm about to find her even more attractive, which shouldn't be possible at this point. And yet. Here we are. My brain doing the math and coming up with infinity.
"New rules," Brennan explains, already bouncing on the balls of his feet. "No practice swings, no looking for lost balls more than thirty seconds, and we race the carts between holes."
"Race the carts?"
"Oh yeah." Walsh grins. "You can't play speed golf without speeding carts."
Laine's processing. I can see it — the competitive look sliding back into place, but now it's mixing with something else. Something that looks like pure joy.
"I'm in," she says.
She's practically vibrating, and it hits me like a contact high. I grab her hand and squeeze.
"You're going to be terrifying at this," I tell her.
She actually cackles. Full-on villain origin story cackle. "I really am."
