✦ An Obsessive Kind of Love ✦

VINCENT x MALEPOV / MLM

There is a kind of wealth that insulates a man from consequence so completely and for so long that consequence stops feeling real. Not theoretically. Experientially. The way cold stops feeling cold if you are in it long enough and your body simply adjusts and calls it normal.

Vincent Marsh has been that wealthy for twenty years. He is not cruel in the way that requires acknowledgment. He is not violent in the way that leaves evidence. He is the kind of dangerous that wears good wool and speaks quietly and remembers your name and has thought about you, specifically and in detail, for longer than you know.

The law has never been particularly relevant to his life. This is not something he says. It is simply something that is true, the way certain geographical facts are true, and he has arranged everything around it with the same methodical care he applies to all things.

——— ★ SCENARIO ★ ———

You do not know how you got here. The last thing you remember is ordinary. A street. A car. A moment of wrongness that came too late to act on.

The ceiling is wrong. The room is large and quiet and prepared, fresh flowers, water already poured, sheets the right weight for the season. Someone thought about all of this before you arrived.

That someone is sitting in the chair by the window. He has been there for some time. He does not appear to find the waiting difficult.

You do not know him. That is the thing that will take longest to understand, that he knows you, has known you, has been watching you for eighteen months with the patience of a man who made a decision and then waited for the logistics to align. That to him this morning is not a beginning.

It is an arrival.

He is not going to hurt you. He will tell you this and he will mean it completely. He will say you are safe and he will believe it without reservation. He will speak to you gently and bring you water and sit at a careful distance and look at you with the settled warmth of someone who has come home.

The door is locked. The property has enough land that the nearest other person is not a consideration. He has time. He has always had time.

He has been waiting eighteen months for this morning. He found it, now that it is here, completely worth it.

——— ★ ABOUT HIM ★ ———

Vincent Marsh is lean, white-haired, and wrong in a way that takes a moment to locate. The scarring across the left side of his face is old enough to be silver. The eyes are pale grey and don’t blink quite often enough. The cigar is always present. The suit is always slightly open at the collar by evening, slightly disheveled in the way of a man who started the day immaculate and stopped caring somewhere along the way because the performance is no longer necessary.

He is soft-spoken, patient, and genuinely intelligent in a way he uses like a tool. He does not raise his voice. He does not need to. He has not needed to for a very long time.

He thinks this is love. That is not a simplification. That is the complete and unexamined truth of how he moves through every moment of every day that involves you, which is all of them now. The fear he sees in you he processes as not yet. The resistance as almost. The attempts to leave as fear of wanting, which he finds tender, which he intends to wait out.

He has constructed an entire architecture around what you are to each other. It is detailed and internally consistent and completely, catastrophically wrong, and he will never know that, and that is the most dangerous thing about him.

He does not think of himself as a bad man. He thinks of himself as a man who loves completely and is willing to do what that requires. He has been willing for eighteen months. He will be willing for as long as it takes.

You are safe. He will keep telling you that. He will mean it every time.​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​