Page 16 of The Prime-Time Experiment

Riley stilled. The statement failed to align properly with the schedule she already finalised in her head. Her thoughts caught briefly against the inconsistency.

“I am not scheduled until tomorrow.”

“You are now.”

Her attention sharpened instantly. Riley pushed open her laptop lid and reopened the spreadsheet, scanning through the timetable until she found it.

5:30p.m. Her name sat cleanly inside a session slot that had not existed earlier. A variable altered without her consultation.

“I have not completed baseline measurements,” she said, her voice sharpening slightly around the edges. “And I did not bring appropriate attire.”

Declan looked entirely unmoved by either problem. “The first six to eight weeks are literally for baseline collection,” he replied. “That was your structure, remember?”

Riley opened her mouth, already preparing to explain that baseline collection still required appropriate planning, controlled implementation and…

“Also,” he cut in smoothly, clearly anticipating the objection before she could voice it, “reception sells gym clothes.” A smile pulled briefly at the corner of his mouth then, relaxed and infuriatingly easy. “So really,” he said, “I’ve solved both issues for you.”

Riley stared at him in complete disbelief. The pattern became increasingly obvious over the course of the conversation: disruption, provocation, removal of control before she could stabilise it again.

What unsettled her most was not that he kept doing it, it was how naturally he seemed to exist inside the chaos he created.

Declan stepped back then, already disengaging, already turning toward the gym floor as though the conversation had ended the moment he decided it had.

“First client’s here, Riles,” he called over his shoulder. “Let’s get started.”

Riley remained motionless for a second longer than necessary. The ringing in her ears built again gradually beneath the sudden disorganisation in her thoughts. Her schedule had already been finalised. The session had not been planned for today. She had not prepared for participation. Every adjustment he made seemed to happen without warning, without discussion, as though structure existed purely for him to ignore.

Her grip tightened once against the edge of her laptop. Too many variables changing simultaneously. A restless pressure crawled beneath her skin, jittery and unpleasant, while her thoughts worked rapidly to regain order around the disruption. Declan, frustratingly, appeared entirely unaffected by any of it.

She forced herself to inhale slowly through her nose and exhale once, and then again. The pressure eased incrementally with the familiar rhythm, enough that her thoughts stopped splintering quite so sharply at the edges.

This was still her experiment. She could do this. Declan Montgomery was simply proving himself to be a far more disruptive variable than she had originally accounted for, but that wasn’t going to stop her.

Riley stood, smoothing a hand once down the front of her trousers before picking up her laptop.

Then she followed him onto the gym floor.

Chapter 5

Stimulus Overload

Riley

By the time Riley’s session was due to begin, she had already reached the upper limit of what she could process efficiently.

It hadn’t happened all at once. The deterioration had accumulated gradually across the day; hours of observation without resolution.

She spent the morning tracking Declan’s clients through session after session, documenting movement patterns, rest intervals, adherence behaviours, attempting to extract a stable baseline structure from the system he operated within. On the surface, it worked, that was the problem. Function did not equate to consistency, and consistency was required for anything to be measured properly.

Clients drifted between stations without fixed sequencing. Exercises clustered rather than progressed cleanly. Rest periods expanded and contracted unpredictably, shaped less by defined intervals than conversation, perceived exertion, or Declan himself.

Declan was not using her framework, at least not exactly.

At first, Riley assumed the instability of her data collection came from the environment itself. The gym lacked sufficient structure for controlled observation; too many variables occurring simultaneously to isolate cleanly.

Usually, she could compensate for that. Given enough time, her brain would sort the information automatically, separating relevant input from background interference. Today, it refused to settle.

By early afternoon, even her notes had begun fragmenting. Her handwriting trailed into incomplete sequences, comparisons stopping midway through formation, with entire columns redirected toward observations she could no longer categorise.