Page 39 of Start With A Slap

She sensed a change in his demeanor and followed his downcast gaze. Oh god, she was resting her hand on his knee.

She recoiled as if he were a hot stove. “I didn’t— That doesn’t...” Their eyes met. “That was an accident.”

Face unreadable, he stared at her for a long moment... and lunged.

She shrunk back with a squeal, realizing too late that he wasn’t serious.

Finding her reaction hilarious, he said, “You really think I’m that awful?”

She didn’t let her guard down. “Aren’t you?”

“Oh, Ivy.” He wiped a laugh-tear from his eye. “I wish you knew me when.”

What did that mean? “When what?”

“It doesn’t matter.” Sever placed the pawn on the board, backed up three moves, spun the board around and picked up his glass. “Rewind. You’re me. What would you do?”

As he crunched on his ice cube, she saw it; a subtle but fool-proof offense. “You sneaky bastard.”

“Now you’re getting it,” he said with a grin.

MAKING A MARK

Sever Mark doesn’t look back. Or down.

The 26-year old North London native and entrepreneurial maverick isn’t losing sleep over the fate of Marked Records, the label he started at age 17 and sold this year for a cool £560M to fund his burgeoning luxury hotel ventures. ‘Everyone thinks I’m crazy,’ he says, ‘but I get off on risking it all.’

He’s not kidding. When he tells me this, we’re 4500 feet above Thailand and he’s about to skydive for the third time in his life.

“Whoa,”Ivy breathed, and turned the page to a photo of him pink-cheeked and grinning in his parachute gear, a beguiling, childlike gleam in his eye — a spark that had since been extinguished. “What happened to you?”

—I wish you knew me when

After a stop in the ultra-luxe bathroom, she’d peeked at the bedroom, which was disappointingly tasteful — nary a tiger print nor disco ball in sight. Then she passed through the gym, which made her wish she could call her mother —I’m telling you, Mom, all this plane is missing is an Olympic-size swimming pool!— and was drawn to the conference room by an 8x10 photo of a twenty-something Sever in the cockpit of a small plane, his tongue sticking out.

She wasn’t sure what was more fascinating: his former self, or his tongue. It was freakishly long and... flexible.

Once she managed to tear herself away from that image, she discovered beneath it a thick binder of press clippings and professional candids: Sever partying with various celebrities; Sever on the cover ofTime; Sever interviewed byPlayboy; Sever in a racecar; Sever on a rugby field; Sever windsurfing, tangoing, riding a camel, climbing a mountain... Photo after photo of a spark-eyed, roguish young adventurer so unlike the man he’d become, they almost seemedfake.

“And what have we learned today?”

Startled at the sound of his voice, Ivy shut the binder and played it light. “We learned that most of these articles were written before I knew my ABCs.”

He sucked air through his teeth. “Now that would hurt,” he said, leaning on the doorframe, hands in pockets, “if I didn’tstillhave the body of a strapping twenty-two year old.”

“Twenty-two,” she echoed wryly.

“Just wait’ll you see it.” Grinning at her, he bit his lip and twitched his brow, and in his irises burned a flicker of the spark. She wouldn’t have noticed had she not been looking for it, but there it was — and it was way more disarming in person.

Clearing her throat, she opened the binder and flipped to a shot of him playing guitar onstage with Bowie. “Now, when you say, ‘been there, done that’, you actually mean it.”

Gazing into her eyes with a wistful sigh, he said, “With one painful exception.”

His delivery was off-handed, yet it held a note of tenderness and truth. Ignoring the intensifying goosebumps this caused, she said, “I bet you can sing, too.”

“Ivy. If I could sing, you’d be sitting with a rock star. An’ not just any rock star, mind you — the bloodyJesusof rock and roll.” He struck a Christ-like pose and unfurled his freakish tongue, wiggling it around.

He had to know what a tongue like that could do to a girl’s thought process. “It’s a shame you have such low self-esteem.”

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