Chapter 1: Wine and Revelation
The fairy lights strung along the mantelpiece flickered, then steadied, casting a jaundiced glow over the carnage of a Thursday night. It caught the edge of a half-eaten container of kung pao chicken, the tangle of synth cables snaking from Oli’s laptop, and the deep red stain at the bottom of Emma’s glass. Her third. Or maybe his fourth. The tally had blurred into a comfortable, warm haze.
“No, look, look at this one,” Oli wheezed, his glasses slipping down his nose. He thrust his phone towards her, his laugh a little too loud for the cramped room. “It’s a pigeon wearing a tiny hat and it’s got the face of the Prime Minister. It’s called ‘Statment Pidge.’”
Emma snorted, a genuine, unguarded sound that made her shoulders shake. She was curled into the corner of the sagging sofa, a fortress of grey cashmere swallowing her whole. “That’s genuinely the best thing I’ve seen all week. Send it to me.”
“Already done.” Oli took a triumphant slug of wine, missing his mouth slightly. The droplet that traced a path down his chin felt emblematic of the whole evening—messy, familiar, fine. He let his head loll back against the cushions, his gaze drifting to her. She was wiping a tear from the corner of her eye, her face softened by the light and the drink. It was nice. Easy. He gestured vaguely with his free hand. “You’re in a good mood. Must be all that… comfort.” His hand, aiming for a playful poke at her shoulder, landed with a soft pat on the fabric covering her stomach. “The lockdown belly’s treating you well, eh? Solid. Reliable.”
The laughter in the room didn’t so much die as get vacuumed into a sudden, airless silence.
Emma’s smile froze, then melted into something flat and hard. She looked down at his hand, still resting on the thick wool of her jumper, as if it were a strange insect that had just landed there. Oli, sensing the shift but too wine-slow to understand its magnitude, left his hand there, giving a couple of friendly pats.
“What did you say?” Her voice was low, careful.
“I said it’s a solid lockdown basecamp you’ve got going!” He chuckled, finally removing his hand to top up his glass. “All those banana breads and no commute. It happens to the best of us, Em. Don’t be shy about it.”
She uncurled from the sofa. The movement was not slow, but it was precise, like a machine powering up. She placed her empty wine glass on the cluttered table with a definitive click. The fairy lights buzzed. Outside, a siren wailed past, a distant, rising and falling cry.
“You think this,” she said, her words crisp and cold, “is fat.”
Oli blinked, the joke now curdling in his gut. “I didn’t say fat, I just said—“
“You patted my stomach and called it a ‘belly.’” She stood up. The oversized jumper hung from her frame like a sack. “You think I’ve been sitting here, in this flat, baking and getting soft.”
“Emma, come on, it was a joke.” He tried to laugh, but it came out thin and brittle. “A bad one. Forget it.”
“No.” The word was a shard of ice. Her green eyes were locked on him, wide and blazing. “I won’t forget it.”
Her hands went to the hem of the massive jumper. For a second, Oli thought she was just adjusting it, hugging herself. Then she grabbed a fistful of fabric in each hand and, in one sharp, furious motion, wrenched it up and over her head. The static made strands of her mousy brown hair crackle and stand away from her face.
She stood before him, breathing heavily, wearing only a simple black vest top.
Oli’s brain simply refused to process the information.
The soft, cashmere-clad shape of his best friend was gone. In its place was a structure of defined angles and startling, rope-like curves. The vest top strained across her shoulders and back, which formed a detailed map of interlocking muscle. Her arms, previously hidden, were carved with distinct ridges, the biceps pressing against the cotton sleeve, the veins in her forearms standing in stark relief under the warm light. The fabric of the vest pulled taut across her abdomen, not over a soft belly, but over a rigid, paneled topography. Every breath she took was visible, a flex and release of powerful machinery.
She was, indisputably, powerfully, heavily muscled.
“You think this is fat?” Her voice was a shriek now, shrill and raw, scraping the walls of the flat. She took a step forward, and he instinctively shrank back into the cushions. She thrust a rigid arm towards him, the deltoid popping into a perfect, hard cap. “This? This is two hours a day, every day, for eighteen months. This is lifting until I vomited. This is protein shakes that taste like chalk and going to bed so sore I cried. This is the only thing I could control!”
“Emma, I—“
“Look at yourself!” she snarled, cutting him off. Her finger jabbed the air in his direction. “You pathetic, weak little man. You make a joke about my body? You, who hasn’t lifted anything heavier than your laptop charger since university? You’re a collection of coat hangers in a shirt! You’re all bone and no fucking substance!”
The insult landed with physical force. Oli felt his own posture collapse, his shoulders curling inwards. He was lanky, scrawny. He’d always been. He’d made jokes about it himself, a pre-emptive strike against the world noticing. But hearing it from her, coated in this much venom, stripped the humor away and left only the naked, ugly truth of it. He saw himself suddenly through her eyes: a silly, clumsy boy in glasses, swimming in his own insecurities, patting the arm of a goddess he was too blind to see.
He opened his mouth, but no sound came out. His gaze darted from her furious, magnificent form to the empty wine glass, to the stupid meme still glowing on his phone. The gap between the reality he’d assumed and the one now vibrating with rage in the center of the room was too vast to bridge.
Emma watched him crumple. The fury in her chest, white-hot and addictive, began to mix with something else, something colder and more shameful. She saw the shock in his eyes, the hurt. She had wanted him to see, but she hadn’t planned for the wreckage. The silence stretched, thick and choking, punctuated only by the ragged sound of her own breathing and the hum of the laptop fan.
She didn’t put the jumper back on.
She stood there, exposed, her monumental effort hanging in the air between them, suddenly looking less like triumph and more like a confession. A bizarre, physical confession of pain he’d never noticed.
Oli finally found his voice, a broken whisper. “Why didn’t you… say anything?”
Emma’s defiant stare wavered. She wrapped her powerful arms around herself, a gesture that was suddenly less about strength and more about shelter. The fight drained out of her, leaving a vast, hollow exhaustion.
“You weren’t looking,” she said, her voice now quiet and terribly final.
She turned, picked up the discarded jumper from the floor, but didn’t put it on. She just held it in a bundle against her chest and walked out of the living room. Her bedroom door clicked shut, a sound as small and definitive as a gunshot.
Oli remained on the sofa, surrounded by the debris of their friendship. The fairy lights flickered again. This time, they went out.
This time, they went out.
The flat held the silence for a full twenty-four hours. It wasn’t a quiet silence. It was a thick, echoing one, filled with the ghosts of her shouted words and the image of his crumpled form on the sofa. Emma went to work, came home, painted in her room with the door shut. Oli called in sick, staring at the ceiling from that same sofa, the pat of his hand against wool playing on a loop in his mind.
On the second evening, just as the sky deepened to a bruised purple over the rooftops, a key turned in the lock.
Oli stood in the doorway, backlit by the hall’s harsh fluorescent light. He looked rumpled, anxious. In one hand, he clutched a bottle of Pinot Noir. In the other, a sad bunch of tulips from the late-night garage, their stems wrapped tightly in cellophane.
Emma stood in the kitchen doorway, a glass of water in her hand. She was wearing a fitted long-sleeve top, the fabric stretching across her shoulders. No baggy jumpers. Her expression was unreadable.
“I come in peace,” he said, his voice rough. “And bearing terrible garage flowers.”
He stepped in, toeing off his shoes. The ritual of it—the shuffle, the sigh—was so familiar it ached. He placed the wine and flowers on the cluttered coffee table, right on top of a sketch of a grotesque, beautifully detailed pigeon.
“I am,” he began, not looking at her, focusing on arranging the bottle just so, “a colossal idiot.”
Emma didn’t move.
He finally glanced up, pushing his glasses up his nose. “I feel so stupid, Em. So, so stupid. I was drunk and lazy and I reached for the easiest, lamest joke in the world.” He took a shaky breath. “I said you had a lockdown belly. You have abs of steel. I pathetically patted a granite slab. It’s maybe the most cognitively dissonant moment of my life.”
A snort escaped her. It was small, unexpected. She tried to swallow it, but it was too late.
He saw it. The corner of her mouth twitched.
“It was pretty funny,” she said quietly, her voice raspy from disuse. “The look on your face. When I took the jumper off. You looked like you’d seen a ghost. A really vascular ghost.”
“I had!” he exclaimed, the relief in his voice palpable. “You’ve been haunting this flat as a benign, cashmere-wearing spectre, and then bang, you’re a marble statue of vengeance! It was terrifying. And cool. Really, really cool.”
They looked at each other. The tension, which had been a solid, frozen lake, began to crack with a sound only they could hear. A real smile, tentative and weary, touched her lips. He mirrored it, a goofy, relieved grin.
“The flowers are shit,” she said, walking over to pick them up. She unwrapped the cellophane.
“The worst. I think one is already dead.”
“They’re perfect.”
She filled a mismatched vase at the sink. The domestic sound of running water was the most normal thing in the world. She placed the tulips on the windowsill, their heads drooping slightly. He uncorked the wine, found two less-grimy glasses. They settled on opposite ends of the sofa, the space between them no longer a minefield, but a bridge under repair.
They drank. The silence returned, but this one was softer, thoughtful.
Oli swirled the wine in his glass, watching the legs streak down. His curiosity, a living thing, had been squirming inside him since last night. The awe had overtaken the shame. He looked at her arm, resting on the back of the sofa. The definition of her tricep was clear even through the fabric.
“Just how strong are you, Em?”
She raised an eyebrow. “Strong enough.”
“No, I mean… demonstratively. Quantifiably.” He gestured around the cluttered room. “What’s the heaviest thing in this flat?”
She followed his gaze. The TV? The worn IKEA bookcase, sagging with records? Her eyes landed on the large, solid-oak coffee table buried under their collective detritus. It was a beast, inherited from a previous tenant, stained with ring marks and history.
“That,” she said, nodding towards it.
Oli blinked. “The table? No way. That thing weighs a ton. The movers swore at it.”
Without a word, Emma set her glass down. She got up, walked to the table, and crouched. She brushed aside a sketchbook, pushed the empty takeaway containers to one side with her forearm. She positioned her feet, her posture dropping into something trained and profound. Her hands slid under the table's overhang, finding purchase. Her back tightened, the muscles across her shoulders and lats fanning out, mapping a topography of pure function.
She took a breath, held it, and lifted.
It wasn't a dramatic heave. It was a controlled, smooth ascent. The table, with all its cargo, rose six inches off the carpet. The wine bottle wobbled. A pencil rolled off and clattered to the floor. The tendons in her neck stood out, but her breathing remained steady, measured. She held it there, suspended in the flickering fairy light, a monument of impossible strength in the heart of their messy, ordinary lives.
Oli’s jaw hung open. His own arms, thin and pale, prickled with a phantom sympathetic strain. He wasn’t seeing a spectacle. He was seeing the two hours a day, every day. The protein shakes. The silent, private victory. He was seeing her.
After what felt like an age, she lowered it back down without a sound. Not a scrape, not a thump. Just the quiet sigh of carpet fibres decompressing.
She stood up, flexed her hands, and rolled her shoulders. A faint blush coloured her cheeks, but she met his gaze squarely.
Oli found his voice, a whisper of pure wonder. “Okay.”
He lifted his own glass in a silent, shaky toast. She picked hers up and clinked it gently against his. The ring of glass on glass was the only sound in the room, clear and bright, hanging in the air between them, a new and uncharted promise.
The ring of glass on glass was the only sound in the room, clear and bright, hanging in the air between them, a new and uncharted promise. Oli drained his glass, the wine doing nothing to calm the frantic, admiring buzz in his head. He just stared at her, at the arms that had lifted a piece of furniture like it was a throw pillow.
“So,” he began, his words tripping over each other. “Can you, like, do a proper push-up? I mean, obviously you can, but how many? A hundred? More? Is it like a military thing? Do you have a plan? Do you count macros? What’s a macro, even, really, when you think about it? Is it true you can’t get that big without… you know.” He winced, immediately regretting the implication. “Sorry, ignore that. Do you watch those videos? The really intense women who yell about discipline? Do you yell? Have you ever bent a frying pan?”
Emma listened, a slow smirk spreading across her face. The questions were idiotic, falling out of him like coins from a slot machine. It was endearing. After so many months of secrecy, his clumsy, wide-eyed interrogation was a bizarre form of appreciation. She leaned back, enjoying it.
“Yes, I can do push-ups. Many. Yes, I count macros—it’s just protein, carbs, and fats, Oli. No, I don’t take steroids, you plank. I just work harder than you’ve ever worked for anything in your life.” Her tone was dry, but the edge was gone. “And no, I haven’t bent a frying pan. They’re expensive.”
“Right. Yeah. Of course.” He nodded sagely, as if storing vital intelligence. His eyes swept the room again, and the earlier, lurking fear of London’s various threats surfaced through the awe. “So. Hypothetically. If some proper shady bloke tried to break in here. Wanted to, I don’t know, steal my synth or hurt us. I guess you’d… handle it.”
“I’d protect us, yes.”
“But how?” he pressed, his imagination clearly painting a cinematic scene. “Like, would you use jiu-jitsu? Or just… punch them? Is there a throw?”
Emma set her glass down. A playful, dangerous light entered her eyes. The vulnerability from before had been packed away, replaced by a confident ease. “You’re very concerned with technique.”
“I want to be prepared! For the narrative!”
She stood up and moved to the clear space of carpet by the fallen fairy lights. “Alright then. Come here.”
Oli blinked. “What?”
“You’re the shady bloke. Try and pin me. See what happens.”
A laugh burst out of him, nervous and high. “Don’t be ridiculous.”
“Scared?”
“Yes! Obviously! You’re a superhero and I’m a microbe.”
“Come on,” she said, her voice a low challenge. She planted her feet, her arms loose at her sides. “Give it a go. Or are you all hypothetical?”
Drunk on curiosity and the dregs of Pinot Noir, he shuffled to his feet. He cracked his knuckles, adopting what he thought was a vaguely threatening posture. “I warn you, I did a six-week Krav Maga course in 2015.”
“Terrifying.”
He made a tentative lunge, aiming to grab her shoulders. His hands closed on the dense rounds of her deltoids. He pushed. Nothing happened. It was like trying to shove a brick wall set in concrete. He grunted, putting his full weight into it. She didn’t wobble. Not an inch. She just looked down at his hands on her, one eyebrow arched.
“Are you pushing?” she asked innocently.
He let go, stepped back, and tried a different approach, going for her waist. His arms couldn’t even get a proper circle around her torso, his fingers failing to link over the thick shelf of her lat muscles. He pulled. She remained rooted, a slight smile on her lips. He was just a man trying to manhandle a sculpture.
“Okay, this is demoralising,” he panted.
“My turn,” she said.
It happened faster than his brain could process. One of her hands shot out, not with a punch, but an open palmed grip on his forearm. She used his own momentum—which was negligible—and spun him. It was a simple, efficient wrench that took his feet clean off the floor. The room whirled in a dizzying blur of fairy lights and ceiling. For a heart-stopping second, he was airborne, horizontal, the carpet rushing up to meet his back.
It didn’t.
Another arm, solid as an oak branch, hooked under his shoulders, catching him a foot above the ground. He gasped, the breath knocked out of him. Before he could register the catch, she lowered him, not with a gentle grace, but with a definitive, controlled pressure. His back met the rough wool of the carpet. Her knee came down beside his hip, not on him, but a clear barrier. One of her hands pinned his wrist to the floor above his head. The other rested lightly, threateningly, on his collarbone.
Her face was inches from his. He could see the faint freckles across her nose, the individual flecks of amber in her green eyes. She wasn’t even breathing hard. A few stray hairs had escaped her bun and hung in the space between them.
He was breathless. His glasses were askew. His heart hammered against his ribs, a frantic drum solo of shock and awe. The physical reality of her power, so casually demonstrated, short-circuited his higher thinking.
Then, to his absolute, gut-clenching horror, he felt it.
A stupid, treacherous, involuntary stirring in his trousers.
Heat flooded his face, a violent, prickling tide of pure panic. No. No, no, no. This was Emma. This was his best friend, who he had just massively offended, who could snap him in half. This was a scientific demonstration! It was the adrenalinesurge, the shock of being thrown, the proximity, the… the sheer undeniable force of her. It was a biological betrayal of the highest order.
Her eyes were locked on his. She saw the blush explode across his pale skin. She felt the sudden, tense rigidity of the body beneath her. The subtle shift in the atmosphere was instantaneous, electric, and unmistakable.
Her amused smirk vanished, replaced by a flicker of startled comprehension.
Oli saw her see it. The floor fell out of the world.
She released his wrist and pulled her hand from his collarbone as if it were hot iron. She pushed herself back and up to her feet in one fluid motion, turning away from him before he could even begin to formulate a word, an apology, a joke—anything to dissolve the horrifying, crystal-clear silence that now screamed between them.