Bonus Chapter: The Nineteenth Hole

Grip It, Rip It, Kiss Me — Exclusive Bonus
by Aurora North

This bonus chapter takes place eighteen months after the events of Grip It, Rip It, Kiss Me. Contains major spoilers and extremely explicit content. Read the novel first.

The call comes on the seventeenth green.

Not a phone call — Nerys would never let me answer my phone during a round, even if the round in question is the final hole of the US Women’s Open and I’m two shots clear of the field. The call is internal. The voice in my chest that has been saying not yet, not yet, not yet for eighteen months, and which is now, as my birdie putt drops into the center of the cup on seventeen, saying something different.

Now.

I finish the eighteenth with a par. Conservative. Center-green. A 7-iron from a hundred and fifty-three yards to the fat of the putting surface, two putts, tap-in. The gallery is six deep and the cameras are everywhere and the broadcast team is already narrating the story of Tala Sarmiento’s first major championship and I am standing on the final green of Oakmont with a scorecard that says twelve under par and a body that is vibrating at a frequency I have never felt before.

I look at Nerys.

She is standing at the edge of the green with my bag over her shoulder. Silver streak catching the late-afternoon light. Gray-green eyes. Steady hands. The expression she wears when she has given me all the information and the decision belongs entirely to me.

“We did it,” I say.

“You did it.”

“We.”

She sets the bag down. On the green, in front of the cameras and the gallery, she hugs me. Not the brief professional embrace we’ve been performing for eighteen months. A real hug. Her arms around me, her chin above my head, the six inches of height difference closing into the architecture I know better than any course we’ve played.

The gallery roars. The cameras flash. We separate. Professional. Composed. Two colleagues celebrating a result.

But her hand brushes mine as she picks up the bag, and the brush says: tonight.

The trophy ceremony takes two hours. The press interviews take another ninety minutes. By the time I’ve showered, changed, called my parents, texted Bisi, and accepted fourteen congratulatory messages from players I barely know, it’s ten thirty at night and the tournament complex is emptying.

I text Nerys: Where?

She responds in twelve seconds: Practice facility. Eleven. I have a key.

You stole a key?

The tournament director gave me one. I chose not to return it. There is a difference.

The difference is plausible deniability.

Exactly. Eleven.

I arrive at five minutes past. Not because I’m late — because I’ve spent five minutes sitting in the rental car with my forehead against the steering wheel, breathing, trying to separate the adrenaline of winning a major championship from the anticipation of what’s about to happen.

They feel identical. My body doesn’t distinguish between the two. Champion and lover run on the same circuitry, and right now every wire is live.

The practice facility is dark except for the security lights along the perimeter. The door opens when I push it. Nerys left it unlocked.

Nerys is standing at the far end.

She’s changed out of her caddie gear. White linen shirt, unbuttoned at the collar, sleeves rolled to her elbows. Dark trousers. Barefoot on the practice turf. Her hair is down, the silver streak falling across her right temple, and in the amber security light she looks like a painting of something you’re not supposed to touch in a museum.

She’s holding a putter.

Not mine. Hers. The thirty-four-inch blade she’s owned for eleven years. The one that lives in the labeled slot in our Charleston club room. The one she hasn’t used competitively since the day her hands refused to obey her on national television.

“What are you doing?” I ask.

“I’m going to putt.”

“Nerys.”

“I’ve been thinking about it since Scotland. Since you held my hands in a cottage and told me they were more than the worst thing they ever did.” She looks at the putter. Her fingers are steady on the grip — the same grip I’ve watched wrap around me in hotel rooms and practice facilities and our bed in Charleston. “I want to make a three-foot putt. One. Just one. And I want you to watch.”

My throat tightens. I nod.

I walk to the nearest cup. Set a ball on the turf. Three feet from the hole. Slight right-to-left break. The same distance that ended her playing career.

Nerys walks to the ball. She stands over it with the posture I’ve never seen — her real playing stance, the one from the championship footage, wider than mine, more grounded, the stance of a woman who won two majors by reading the earth with her feet.

She takes a breath. Addresses the ball.

Her hands are steady.

She draws the putter back. Holds. For one second — one second that contains ten years of shaking, ten years of silence, ten years of locked trophies and empty shelves — she is the woman on the green at thirty-four.

She strokes the putt.

The ball rolls three feet on a perfect line. Takes the break at the halfway point. Curves left. Drops into the center of the cup with a sound like a small, private bell.

I am crying before the ball stops moving.

She is not. She is looking at the cup with an expression I recognize because I saw it in my own mirror after I chose the 7-iron on eighteen: the face of a woman who just did the bravest thing she’s ever done and found that the fear was always larger than the act.

“That was disciplined,” I say. Her word. The word she’s given me on a hundred courses. Returned.

She laughs. The sound breaks in the middle — half joy, half something older that’s been waiting ten years for release.

Then she drops the putter on the turf and crosses the distance between us in three strides and her hands are on my face — the same hands, the same scarred thumb against my cheekbone, the same long fingers tilting my jaw up — and she kisses me under the security lights on the practice green of a US Open course where she just made a three-foot putt for the first time in a decade.

“I am so proud of you,” she says against my mouth.

“I’m proud of you.”

“We’re both doing extraordinarily well. Now let me celebrate properly.”

She takes my hand. Leads me off the practice green, through the equipment corridor, past the storage rooms, to the indoor putting facility at the back of the complex. She opens the door. Pulls me inside. Locks it behind us.

The putting room at Oakmont is nicer than Singapore’s.

Better carpet — dense, professional-grade, the kind that cushions bare feet. Better lighting — adjustable, currently dimmed to the lowest setting, casting the room in warm amber. A full-length practice surface extending thirty feet along one wall. An equipment bench along the other, padded leather, waist-height.

I know from experience what that bench height means. It means Nerys can stand between my legs while I sit on it. It means the six inches between us disappear. It means eye contact without tilting.

“This is trespassing,” I say.

“You have a key.”

“The key is for the practice green, not the—”

She kisses me. Her hands come to my shoulders, then slide down my arms, then find the hem of my polo and pull it over my head in a single fluid motion. The shirt drops on the putting surface. The air conditioning raises goosebumps across my bare stomach.

“You won your first major today,” she says. Her mouth moves to my throat. Her teeth graze the tendon — not biting, testing. Mapping. “I made a three-foot putt. These are both extraordinary accomplishments and they deserve an extraordinary celebration.”

“In a putting room.”

“We have history in putting rooms.”

Her hands unfasten my bra. Front clasp — she knows my equipment as well as she knows her clubs. The fabric parts. Her fingers trace the undersides of my breasts with the precision she brings to green-reading, and when her thumbs brush my nipples simultaneously, I grab her shoulders and make a sound that bounces off the walls.

“The acoustics in here are exceptional,” she says. “I’m going to enjoy that.”

She lifts me onto the equipment bench. The padded leather is cool against the backs of my thighs. She stands between my legs — and there it is, the geometry that undid me the first time in Singapore and has undone me every time since. Her face above mine. Six inches of authority. Those gray-green eyes looking down at me with an expression I’ve spent eighteen months earning and still can’t believe I own.

Not controlled. Not strategic. Not the measured hunger of a woman managing her desire to protect a professional framework.

Raw. Unmanaged. The composure dissolved so completely that what’s looking at me is just Nerys — the woman beneath every layer, the one who shakes and stays and loves me with the same thoroughness she brings to reading terrain.

“Tell me what you want,” she says. The low voice. The pre-shot murmur. “You just won a major. You can have anything.”

“You. All of you. No strategy. No patience exercise. No not yet, no slow down. Just you, wanting me, not managing a single second of it.”

Something shifts in her face. The last architecture falls.

She leans down and kisses me — deep, open, the full weight of her mouth against mine. Her tongue finds mine and I taste peppermint and the champagne someone poured at the trophy ceremony and beneath both of those, the taste of Nerys, which I have been memorizing since Singapore and will never finish cataloguing.

Her mouth drops to my neck. My collarbone. The sampaguita tattoo — she traces each petal with her tongue, then bites the skin below it, and the combination of tenderness and teeth makes my hips jerk forward on the bench.

She pulls my sports bra fully off. Takes my right breast into her mouth — tongue flat across the nipple, then circling, then the edge of her teeth clamping down with pressure that walks the exact line between pleasure and pain. My hand flies to her hair. The silver streak threads through my fingers like a marking I’m reading by touch.

“You taste like victory,” she says against my skin.

“That’s the worst line you’ve ever—”

She bites my nipple. Not gently. Not the careful dental attention of our early encounters. She bites me the way a woman bites someone she’s done being careful with, and the spike of sensation shoots straight down through my stomach into the heat between my legs and I stop forming words.

Her hands work my trousers. The button. The zipper. She hooks her fingers into the waistband — trousers and underwear together — and pulls them down my legs in one motion. They drop to the carpet. I’m naked on the equipment bench in a putting room in Oakmont at midnight and the woman I love is standing between my spread thighs looking at me like I’m a green she intends to read with her whole body.

“Lie back,” she says.

I lie back. The bench is long enough that my shoulders rest on the padded surface. My legs dangle over the edge. She’s standing between them, and from this angle — looking up at her, at the underside of her jaw and the column of her throat and the silver streak falling forward — I feel the specific vulnerability that Nerys has taught me is not weakness.

It’s trust.

Her hands spread my thighs wider. She looks at me — all of me, the wetness that’s been building since the seventeenth green, the flush across my chest and stomach, the way my hips cant upward involuntarily because my body is done waiting and my body doesn’t care about patience or discipline or any of the things this woman has spent eighteen months teaching me.

“You’re soaked,” she says. Matter-of-fact. The tone of a caddie reporting conditions.

“I’ve been wet since the trophy ceremony. You were standing behind me in that white polo and your forearms were visible and I spent the entire press conference thinking about your fingers.”

“Which fingers?” She traces one down the inside of my thigh. Slowly. Not touching where I need her. “Be specific.”

“The ones that are about to be inside me or I’m going to lose my mind.”

“That’s more like it.”

She kneels between my legs. From the bench, I can see the top of her head — the auburn and the silver, the way her hair parts, the place where the streak begins at her temple. She presses her mouth to my inner thigh. A slow kiss. Then the other thigh. Then higher — the crease where leg meets pelvis, where the skin is thin and the nerve endings are dense and her breath alone makes my entire body shudder.

“You chose the 7-iron on seventeen today,” she says against my skin. “A hundred and ninety-two yards to a front pin. You could have gone for it.”

“Nerys, if you narrate my round while you’re between my—”

“I’m going to praise every correct decision you made today while I make you come. If you have objections, voice them now.”

I do not voice objections.

She puts her mouth on me.

Not the patient, educational approach of Singapore. Not the careful reciprocation of the putting room at the hotel, where she guided and I followed. This is the mouth of a woman who has been standing beside me for four hours watching me win a major championship while maintaining professional composure, and the composure is gone and what’s underneath it is starving.

Her tongue moves through me — a long, flat stroke from entrance to clit that makes my back arch off the bench. She does it again. And again. Each stroke collecting the wetness that’s been building all day and spreading it under her tongue, and the sound she makes — a low, involuntary hum of satisfaction — vibrates against me and I nearly come from that alone.

“The approach on twelve,” she says, lifting her head barely enough to speak. “Two hundred and seven yards into a crosswind. You took the extra club. Trusted the conditions instead of forcing the shorter iron.” Her tongue circles my clit — slow, deliberate, with the same precision she uses to read a break. “That was disciplined.”

I moan. The sound fills the putting room and bounces off every wall.

She seals her mouth over my clit and sucks — firm, rhythmic, her tongue working against me inside the seal — and I grab the edges of the bench and feel my thighs start to tremble.

“The bunker save on fourteen.” She pulls back. Her chin is wet. Her eyes are dark. She slides two fingers into me — slowly, curving forward, finding the swollen place on the front wall that she discovered in Singapore and has been exploiting with surgical accuracy ever since. “Fifteen feet of sand and a downhill lie. You opened the face and committed to the swing. Textbook.”

Her fingers begin to move. Slow, deep strokes that press the front wall on each withdrawal. Her thumb finds my clit and circles it in the rhythm she’s taught me to associate with her — steady, patient, building toward something inevitable rather than chasing something urgent.

“Nerys, if you don’t stop talking about golf while you’re fucking me—”

“You love it.” She curls her fingers. Presses hard. My vision fractures at the edges. “You love being told you did well while I’m inside you. You’ve loved it since the first time in Singapore when I said good girl and you shook like I’d touched a nerve no one else knew existed. You’ll love it forever.”

She’s right. She is catastrophically, permanently, infuriatingly right.

She adds a third finger. Stretching me. The fullness is exquisite — her long, elegant fingers pressed together inside me, the scarred thumb on my clit, the rhythm building from steady to relentless. She lowers her head and puts her mouth back on me, tongue working my clit while her fingers work inside, and the dual sensation — the wet heat of her mouth and the deep pressure of her hand — short-circuits whatever remaining capacity I had for coherent thought.

“The putt on seventeen.” Her voice is muffled against me. She doesn’t stop — the words vibrate through her tongue directly into the place where I’m most sensitive, and each syllable is its own form of stimulation. “Twenty-two feet. Uphill. Slight left break. You read it perfectly.” Her fingers press deeper. Curl harder. Her rhythm accelerates and I can feel the orgasm assembling at the base of my spine like a weather system that has been building across open ocean for hours. “You stroked it perfectly. You are the most magnificent golfer I have ever seen and you chose every shot today and every single one was right.”

I come.

The orgasm detonates from the place where her fingers are buried and radiates outward — through my hips, my stomach, my chest, my skull. My back arches off the bench so hard that her free hand has to press my hip down to keep me from falling. My hands grip her hair — fistfuls of auburn and silver — and I make a sound that starts as her name and ends as something primal and wordless that fills the putting room and bounces off every surface and is the most honest noise I have ever produced.

She doesn’t stop. Her fingers keep moving — slower now, riding the contractions, pressing the front wall in time with each wave. Her tongue maintains contact, soft and steady, extending the orgasm past the point where it should end and into a territory I didn’t know existed. The pleasure plateaus rather than fading — a sustained high that keeps my body clenched around her hand while aftershock after aftershock rolls through me.

When it finally subsides — when the waves retreat and my muscles release and my hands loosen in her hair — she withdraws slowly. Three fingers, then two, then one, then nothing. Each withdrawal sends a smaller tremor through me, and when she’s fully out I feel the absence like a change in atmospheric pressure.

She stands. Wipes her mouth and chin with the back of her hand. Looks at me — sprawled on the equipment bench, naked, chest heaving, legs still open, the evidence of what she just did to me visible and glistening.

“Good girl,” she says.

The words land like a benediction. Not the first time she’s said them — she’s said them three times in the eighteen months we’ve been together, each one deployed with the surgical precision of a woman who understands that scarcity is what makes praise devastating. But this time, in this putting room, after this day, the words carry a weight that encompasses everything: the 7-iron, the three-foot putt she made on the practice green, the locked trophies, the empty shelf, the photograph from St Andrews.

My eyes sting. Not from the orgasm — from the weight of being known this completely by someone who uses words the way she uses strategy. Sparingly. Accurately. With devastating effect.

“Your turn,” I say.

I sit up. I slide off the bench. My legs are unreliable — they shake when I stand, and I have to grip the bench edge for three seconds before my knees agree to bear weight.

I take her hands. The long, scarred, extraordinary hands that just made me come harder than anything in my life. I lift them and press them to my face — my lips against her knuckles, my cheek against her palm, the scarred thumb resting on my cheekbone the way it did the first time she kissed me in a hotel corridor eighteen months and six thousand miles ago.

“These hands,” I say. “These hands just made a three-foot putt.”

I kiss each finger. Each knuckle. The scar on the right thumb. The inside of each wrist, where the pulse is elevated and the skin is thin.

“These hands just made me come so hard I saw stars. These hands are going to feel my mouth on them while I take you apart.”

I guide her hands to my hips. Sink to my knees.

The carpet is soft. The angle is perfect — looking up at her, at the full height of her, the lean stomach and the small breasts and the silver streak falling across her face as she looks down at me.

I unbutton her shirt. One button at a time. Slowly. Not to tease — to savor. The linen parts. Her skin appears — fair olive, the contour-line tattoo along her ribs, the collarbones that I’ve kissed so many times I could draw them from memory. The shirt falls from her shoulders.

Her trousers. I unfasten them. Slide them down her long legs. Her underwear — dark, simple, wet. I pull them down and press my face against her hip and breathe her in.

She’s standing in front of me naked and shaking.

Not from the yips. From want. From the sustained effort of maintaining composure for eighteen months of professional caddying and finally, in this locked room, being permitted to stop.

“Shake for me,” I say. The phrase I gave her in a hotel room when her hands betrayed her after a failed interview. The phrase that means stop managing and start feeling. The phrase that has become ours.

I put my mouth on her.

She tastes sharp and clean and urgent. Her hips jerk toward me when my tongue makes contact — the involuntary response of a body that has been waiting all day. I grip her hips and hold her steady and work my tongue through her folds, finding the places I’ve mapped over eighteen months, the spots that make her fingers tighten in my hair and her breathing fragment and her composure shatter like glass on marble.

I spread her with my thumbs and expose her clit and flatten my tongue against it and she makes the sound — the low, broken, devastating sound I first heard in Singapore and have been addicted to ever since. The sound that proves the most controlled woman alive is capable of losing control completely when the person between her legs loves her enough to stay through every tremor.

“More,” she says. Her voice is not controlled. It is not precise. It is the raw, unedited voice of Nerys Quillan in extremis, and it is the most honest thing I have ever heard. “Please. More.”

I slide two fingers inside her. She’s tight and wet and her muscles grip me immediately, pulling me deeper. I curl forward and find the spot — she taught me where it was, our first week, her hand over mine guiding my fingers to the place that makes her jaw drop open and her eyes close — and I press.

Her hand finds my hair. Grips. Not directing — anchoring. Holding on because the alternative is falling.

I add a third finger. She asked for three the first time in the hotel room after the documentary, and she’s asked for three every time since, and the stretch makes her gasp and her thighs shake around my shoulders and her hand in my hair tightens until the pull borders on pain.

I fuck her with my hand and eat her with my mouth simultaneously — tongue on her clit, fingers driving deep, finding the rhythm that builds rather than chases. I know this rhythm. She taught it to me. Patient, precise, relentless, building in increments so small they’re imperceptible until the accumulation becomes overwhelming.

Her hips begin to rock against my face. Not the controlled movement of a woman managing her body — the desperate, uncoordinated rocking of a woman who has stopped managing anything. Her hands leave my hair and find the equipment bench behind her and she grips the edge and her knuckles go white and I think of the putter grip, the white knuckles on the green ten years ago, and I think: not this time. This time the hands hold on and the body follows through.

“I’m — Tala, I’m—”

“I know. I can feel you. You’re close.”

“Don’t stop. Please don’t—”

“I’m not stopping. I’m not going anywhere. Come for me, Nerys. You’ve earned it.”

Her word. Returned. The phrase she’s used to release me on a dozen nights — come for me, you’ve earned it — given back to her on her knees by the woman she taught to be patient.

She comes with a sound that starts in her chest and ends in the rafters. Her body clamps around my fingers — rhythmic contractions that pulse against my hand while her thighs lock around my shoulders and her back arches against the equipment bench and her hands grip the leather so hard I hear the upholstery creak.

I stay with her. Fingers inside her, mouth on her, tongue gentle now — riding the contractions, extending the release, letting her body take whatever time it needs to finish what it started. Her hips shudder. Her breathing breaks into fragments. Her hands release the bench and find my hair again — not gripping this time. Resting. The way she rests her hands on my back when I sleep.

When the last tremor passes, I withdraw slowly. She slides down the bench — her legs giving way — and sits on the carpet beside me. We’re both on the floor of a putting room in Oakmont. Naked. Breathing. The security lights hum overhead.

Her hands are in her lap. Still. Quiet-still. Resting-still. The stillness of hands that have putted and praised and touched and held and done everything they were ever designed to do.

“They’re steady,” I say.

“They’re always steady after you.”

“After me specifically?”

“After you specifically. You’re the only person whose body has ever made my hands forget they were broken.”

I press my face against her shoulder. She wraps her arm around me.

I don’t get dressed. Instead I push her onto her back, right there on the putting-room carpet, and I kiss my way down her body one more time — slower now, gentler, my mouth moving across her skin with the patience she taught me and the precision I’ve earned. I settle between her legs and I taste her again and I bring her to a second orgasm that is quieter than the first — a rolling, sustained release that crests and fades and crests again while she lies on the carpet with her hands open at her sides, palms up, fingers relaxed, shaking with nothing except pleasure.

Afterward — after we finally dress, after she buttons my shirt because my hands are trembling too much to manage the buttons, after I zip her trousers and she clips my bra and we reassemble ourselves into people who could theoretically be seen in public — we leave through the equipment corridor.

The course is dark. The stars are out — thousands of them, more than you’d expect this close to a city. The grass is cool under our bare feet. We left our shoes in the putting room.

We walk across the first fairway holding hands. Her long stride and my shorter one, adjusted over eighteen months into a pace that matches. The night air smells like cut grass and the particular mineral sweetness of Pennsylvania darkness.

Somewhere in a locked club room in Charleston, there’s a shelf that used to be empty. It holds a framed photograph of two women kneeling on the Old Course at St Andrews, palms pressed to the wet ground, reading the terrain with their hands.

Tomorrow that shelf will hold two things.

“Where are you going to put the trophy?” I ask.

“In the cabinet. With the others.”

“That cabinet is locked.”

“I’ll unlock it.”

I stop walking. She stops. The fairway stretches ahead. The clubhouse lights are visible in the distance.

“You’ll unlock the cabinet.”

“I’ve been thinking about it. The trophies aren’t evidence of a version of me that was destroyed. They’re evidence of a version of me that won. She’s still here. She made a three-foot putt tonight.”

“She made a lot more than a three-foot putt tonight.”

Nerys looks at me. Silver streak in starlight. Gray-green eyes reflecting something I have no name for.

“She certainly did.”

We walk to the hotel. We don’t go to sleep. She keeps her promise — the plans that require a bed, the ones that last until morning, the ones that involve me saying please multiple times.

I say it four times. Each time, she answers.

When dawn arrives, we lie tangled in hotel sheets. Her hand rests on my hip. My face is pressed against her sternum. The light coming through the window is the specific gold of a morning after the best day of your life.

“What do you see?” I ask.

She doesn’t give a yardage. Doesn’t name a wind speed. Doesn’t calculate a probability.

“Everything,” she says.

She kisses my forehead. Her hands — the long, scarred, steady, magnificent hands that won two majors and lost their nerve and found it again on a midnight practice green in Pennsylvania — rest on my body.

Still.

Still.

Still.

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