Page 23 of Iron

“You’re twenty-one.” Caleb sets his phone down, actually serious for a moment. “He’s forty-one and has had twenty years of doing exactly this. You’ve had one professional start. Give yourself a minute, babe.”

“I know.” I flop back against my pillows, staring at the ceiling the way I have most nights since Illinois. “Doesn’t stop me wanting to be where he is. On every level. And I have a name to live up to.”

Caleb doesn’t say anything to that, which is rare enough that I actually turn my head to look at him. He’s got that same soft, knowing look he had after the deck, after the bar, after every single time this whole thing with Gavin has cracked me open a little further.

“You’ll get there,” he finally says. “The golf part, anyway. The Gavin part, well.” He shrugs, flopping back onto his own pillow. “That one’s not really about grinding it out, is it, babe.”

He’s right, dammit. I don’t have an answer for that one. I just keep scrolling through results from a golf course in England I’ve never seen, looking for a name that isn’t mine, wondering when, or if, the distance between us is ever going to close.

The guy at the Miles Ferry Tour’s Thursday night mixer is objectively, undeniably good-looking: tall, dark-haired, a smile that’s clearly gotten him whatever he’s wanted his whole life. He’s a sponsor’s kid, not a player, here because his dad’s company has its logo on somebody’s golf bag. He corners me by the bar with the easy confidence of someone who’s never once been told no.

“You’re TJ Harrington,” he says. “The Illinois kid.”

“That’s me.”

“I watched that double eagle on YouTube like six times.” He grins, leaning in a little, and it’s flattering, genuinely, the kind of attention I would’ve killed for a year ago. “Buy you a drink?”

I let him. We talk for twenty minutes, easy, comfortable, no complicated history, no golf tension underneath it, no push and pull. He’s funny. He’s interested. He asks good questions and actually listens to the answers. When he touches my arm to make a point, I don’t flinch away from it the way I would if it were anyone else’s hand.

It should be easy. This is exactly the kind of guy I should want: my age, good looking, unattached, no baggage, no twenty-year gap, no complicated history, none of it.

“You want to get out of here?” he asks eventually, low, direct, no games about it.

I open my mouth to say yes. I shape my mouth to say yes.

“I can’t,” comes out instead, and I feel as surprised as he looks.

“Oh.” He pulls back slightly, not hurt exactly, just recalibrating. “Girlfriend? Boyfriend?”

“No. Not exactly.” I rub the back of my neck, feeling stupid, like I’m about to explain something I don’t fully understand myself, that may never be true. “There’s just. Someone. It’s complicated.”

“Complicated like it’s actually happening, or… complicated like you’re hung up on someone who isn’t interested?”

“I genuinely don’t know,” I admit, and it’s the most honest thing I’ve said all week. “That’s the complicated part.”

He laughs, not unkindly, and clinks his glass against mine. “Well. For what it’s worth, whoever he is, he’s an idiot if he’s not fighting for you.”

I think about gray eyes and a smile at a turn between nine and ten, a hand that touched my cheek and then disappeared, a man who gave up his own caddie without ever quite saying why.

“He’s not an idiot,” I say. “Just scared, I think. Of something. Something I don’t really understand yet.”

“Well. Good luck with that.” He raises his glass in a small, gracious toast, entirely unbothered, already glancing past me toward someone else at the bar. “You know where to find me if it doesn’t work out.”

I thank him and walk away feeling lighter than I expected. Not because I dodged something unwanted, but because I finally said the truth out loud, to a stranger of all people, in a way I hadn’t quite managed to say it to myself yet.

I’m not available. I haven’t been since a golf course in Denver.

Might as well stop pretending otherwise. And do something more about it than pine.

22

GAVIN

Wilton Manors on a Friday night is loud, warm, and exactly the chaos I usually love. String lights are hung over the patio at Niki’s, a table of guys I’ve known for a decade taking up half the outdoor seating. Drinks are multiplying faster than anyone’s actually tracking them, crowding the tiny tables.

“Okay, but for real,” Bill points his fork at me across a plate of nachos neither of us ordered. “Tied for sixth at Royal Links and you’ve said maybe four words all night. What is happening with you?”

“Nothing’s happening with me.”