It all happened so fast, but it was years in the making.
Years of dealing with students like the Athlete, who turned up to his classes late and entitled, whom life came to so easily, so readily, where even their stories of hardship and grief could be turned to their advantage, leveraged into a seduction, into a kiss.
Years of seeing opportunities flash before his eyes and vanish before he could grasp them – of relationships that evaded him, and research opportunities handed to other academics over him, of promotion proving elusive, even of a house coming his way in an inheritance that right now felt more like a curse than a gift.
And, most of all, years of thinking and pondering and planning and theorizing about a wide variety of psychological quirks and tricks and experiments that were too ‘unethical’, or seemed impossible, and how he secretly wished he might pursue them anyway, indulge them, cultivate them, experience them.
Years of thinking about the perfect partner, the perfect life, the right opportunities and the courage to seize what he wanted for himself.
All of it had built to this.
To him.
Streaking across a rooftop, thrusting out a hand, as if he was a man trying to stop time, hit pause, go back.
They didn’t even sense him before it was too late.
The two of them – the Athlete and the Artist – breaking apart and twisting partially towards him, still joined at the hips, the Athlete’s hand just below the Artist’s elbow, London lit up behind them, and that brief instant of recognition – a freeze-frame of surprise and miscomprehension on the face of the Athlete, a flicker of distress and horror around the eyes of the Artist – before Sam’s hands made contact, first one palm on the Athlete’s chest, then the other, and pushed.
All that muscle.
All that training.
The Athlete was thick in the trunk and the legs, but his upper body was vastly overdeveloped, his pectorals a broad slab, his shoulders enormous, his biceps huge.
Which was a problem for him because of the waist-high perimeter wall, not to mention simple physics, the pendulum effect kicking in, the Athlete’s legs kicking upwards, his hips pivoting backwards, a gargled cry of terror and outrage, and then one fresh, final development, an outcome Sam hadn’t foreseen – to the extent he could have foreseen any of this, even his own impulsive actions – as the Artist began to fall, too.
A classic chain reaction.
Because the Athlete was still clasping her arm just below her elbow.
Which is when Sam lunged for her waist and coiled his own arms around her and held on as the Athlete plummeted with one abrupt, violent tug, his nail scraping down the Artist’s inner arm, scoring a line that was deep and vivid, bleeding instantly in a way that, when Sam saw it, scared him terribly.
Because she was no longer perfect.
Already.
Before they’d even started, she was marked.