Wells laughed.
He laughed.
Josephine’s legs almost gave out. Her eyes shot open, hoping to catch the tail end of his laughing face, but he was already back to concentrating on the shot he was about to take, stepping right to left and examining the angle, feeling the wind.
His swing followed through, without the hesitancy he’d developed over the last two years, and the ball dropped down on the left side of the fairway. A smattering of applause rippled through the crowd assembled behind them.
Wells handed her the driver. “Good call, belle.”
Josephine might have spent the rest of the morning driven to distraction by the fact that she’d just won a bet that guaranteed her a personal snapshot of Wells’s rear end, but she was too transfixed by the glimpse she was getting of the old Wells. He consulted with her before every shot, both of them poring over yardage books and hunkering down side by side to compare notes on the angle of the green. He almost seemed to be having . . . fun.
But all that progress came to a screeching halt on the eighth hole.
Josephine and Wells were shoulder to shoulder, waiting for Tagaloa to take his putt, when Buck Lee appeared on the sidelines. He was just one face among the crowd, but his arrival was like a bucket of cold water tossed on Wells. His expression slowly grew shuttered, his movements less natural.
In no time, he’d dropped two spots on the leaderboard.
“Hey. It was a tricky slope. Shake it off.”
When he didn’t bother to respond, Josephine’s stomach sank.
The next hole went worse.
Buck Lee left, as casually as he’d arrived.
And that’s when her glimpse of the old, astonishing Wells Whitaker winked out completely.
At this rate, their chances of making the cut and continuing in the tournament tomorrow were slim to none. Not unless he managed to get through the rest of the afternoon without bogeying a single hole and that seemed about as likely as TSwift performing in her bathroom later tonight.
Keep trying. Don’t quit on him. “The wind is picking up—”
“I don’t give a shit about the wind, Josephine. I’m pissing into it at this point.”
Her shoulders wanted to slump, but she wouldn’t let them. “You’re burning it all down.”
“Sounds about right,” he responded, tight-lipped, while examining the head of his club.
“Don’t. Step back, recognize what you’re doing, and balance yourself out.”
His snort drew the attention of several spectators. “Oh Jesus, stop shovel feeding me your Zen nonsense, belle.”
“Nonsense is allowing that passive-aggressive, condescending has-been to get in your head and letting him rearrange it. Letting him win. I thought you were more badass than that.”
Wells’s head turned slowly, pinning her with an incredulous look. “You met him for all of thirty seconds and you got all of that?”
“Yup!”
He really, truly looked like he was trying to claw his way out of the mental hole he’d dug for himself, but he just couldn’t do it. The grimace of regret, the remaining light fading from his eyes, told her that much. “Let me take my drive, Josephine.”
“Go for it. I’ll be on the sidelines.”
“What?” he shouted.
“I said, I’ll be . . .” She fluttered her fingers at the roped-off spectator section. “Over there.”
Panic slowly snuck into his expression. “What happened to never quitting?”
“I said I would never quit as long as you didn’t quit on yourself. That’s what you’re doing.” She whirled around, took a few steps, and ducked under the rope, a few feet to the right of the gallery— And immediately her foot was run over by a golf cart.
Pain shot from her toes to her ankle, snatching the breath clean out of her lungs. It was such a shock, happened so quickly, she didn’t even have a chance to make a sound. Her backside planted in the grass before she knew she was falling, her only necessity to get the pressure off her foot. Surely it was broken?
A roar of denial from Wells nearly deafened her. “Josephine.”
He was in front of her, his image momentarily blurred by the blood rushing to her head, but after a few seconds of taking stock, the shock wore off and the pain started to dull. Just surprised. You were just surprised. “I’m fine.”
“What the fucking fuck,” he exploded, dropping to his knees in front of her. “You got run over.”
“Just my foot.”
“You ran over my caddie,” he barked at the cart, which was carrying two officials. “I’m going to f—”