CORY
Gavin and I met up for a round of golf on Sunday morning. It was almost a prerequisite to working in the banking field. I wasn’t the best golf player, but I wasn’t the worst either. Gavin was pretty bad. All those other countries he visited, I guessed he never took the time to learn the game.
He swung and nearly missed the ball, even though it was right there on the tee. When he did manage to hit it, there was no direction to his drive. It went south and ended up in the sand trap or went north and ended up in the bushes. I gave him a hard time, just like any good friend would do.
“Do you want to wager?” I asked at the sixth hole.
“No,” he grumbled.
“If you keep it on the green, I’ll give you twenty bucks,” I said.
He looked at me with an exasperated eye and lined up his next shot. “I’m going to hold you to that.”
“I think my money’s safe,” I teased.
Gavin swung and missed. He glared at me, forcing me to remain silent. I held my breath, wanting to give him hell for the mistake. He swung again, and the ball soared out over the hills, coming to rest right beside a collection of trees.
We drove the cart over to investigate and found it lying within centimeters of the tree’s roots. “That counts,” Gavin declared.
“It does not,” I told him.
“It’s on the green,” he argued.
“Just barely,” I answered. “You can’t even get a swing in. You’ll hit the trunk.”
“I can get a swing,” he asserted. “Pay up.”
Not wanting to cause a fight, I dug into my wallet and produced a twenty. “Here you go. But you’re cheating. It’s clearly out.”
Gavin took the payout with a smile. I stopped betting but he didn’t do any better after that. Eventually, he gave up and just drove me around. When I got a hole in one on the twelfth hole, he turned away as if the sight of my wild success burned his eyes.
“That’s how you do it,” I told him.
“Lucky shot,” he grumbled.
“We’ll have to play again next week.” I retrieved my ball. “This is too much fun.”
“We’ll see,” he allowed. “Maybe we could play chess or go hang gliding.”
“Hang gliding?” I gulped. Dangling over a valley at a hundred feet in the air, strapped to a set of metal wings wasn’t my idea of a good time.
“Then we’ll see who has the bigger balls,” Gavin promised, looking smug.
“That would be me,” I answered him, stealing back the spotlight. “Don’t be a sore loser.”
“I’m not a sore loser,” he said.
We drove back to the clubhouse to turn in the cart. Neither of us played enough to own our own clubs, so we had to turn those in as well. The day was young, so we went to the café to grab a drink. There weren’t that many people there, and we were able to snag a table far enough away to score ourselves some privacy.
I wanted to clear the air between us. This thing with Petra was potentially a bombshell, and I didn’t want to continue without letting him know what had transpired. Since the kiss at the bakery, I had been visiting Petra every day. We were friendly and flirtatious with each other, but nothing else remarkable had happened.
We’d gone on one date that had ended sweetly with a bit of hand-holding and a second kiss. But I hadn’t visited her apartment, and she hadn’t visited mine. While it was clear that we both liked each other, we were taking it slow.
“I want to tell you something,” I began.
“Shoot,” he said.
“Petra and I have been seeing each other.”