Chapter 175: Smoke
Elias laughed at once, his eyes bright with mischief.
"Can I take that as concern, Yvonne?"
Yvonne’s voice stayed flat. "I’m a doctor."
Because she was a doctor, she would instinctively think about reducing harm when soone insisted on smoking. That was all. Professional reflex, not concern.
Elias did not mind.
He had never planned to sleep with Yvonne once and make her fall for him imdiately. That would have been fantasy, and Elias had worked in dog-blood fiction too long to confuse fantasy with progress. Forty percent favorability might have ant sothing warm from an ordinary person. Friendship, maybe. A decent amount of trust.
For Yvonne Quinn, it might not even qualify him as a real bed partner.
So he only smiled, looking straight into her eyes as if he had suddenly understood sothing.
"Oh," he said. "So even without the white coat, you’re still a doctor."
Yvonne heard the mockery imdiately.
He was not only talking about her job. He was talking about the difference between the woman she showed at Longhaven and the woman standing in this bedroom. In the hospital, she smiled with clinical patience. At ho, stripped of professional manners, she was cold enough to make the room feel scrubbed down and sterile.
But that was only the surface.
Elias was talking about the thing buried under it: the desire she kept locked beneath discipline, reputation, and all those neat, clean rules.
Yvonne knew that after leaving the hospital, her grip on those thoughts always loosened.
Being a doctor was not only her profession.
It was also a restraint.
And Elias had seen that again.
He had seen sothing she had buried deep enough that most people never noticed the grave.
Yvonne no longer bothered trying to untangle how he did it. This was how demons worked. They smiled, found the sealed door, and tapped their knuckles against it until whatever slept inside started breathing harder.
Elias stopped talking too.
He took the cigarette carton from her, tore it open with practiced fingers, and slid one cigarette free. He held it between his lips, then paused as if rembering sothing.
Slowly, he lifted his eyes to her.
His expression hovered between a smile and a dare.
The cigarette shifted slightly with the movent of his mouth, making his words a little blurred. "Yvonne, guess what you forgot."
Yvonne said nothing.
She turned and left the bedroom.
A little while later, she ca back with a lighter. It was not cheap either, black and silver, heavy in the hand, the kind of thing soone gave as a gift and expected the recipient to rember.
Elias had been smiling, amused by the way she could be so sharp and so slow at once. When he saw the lighter, he stopped.
He blinked. "Are you Doraemon? I ask for sothing, and you just pull it out."
"I found it here," Yvonne said. "Soone gave it to ."
"No wonder." Elias held the cigarette between his red lips, the tip bobbing with his words. "For a second I thought you went downstairs to buy a lighter without clothes on. I almost thought you were a pervert."
He leaned closer to let her light it, then his eyes brightened as if another idea had struck him.
He pointed at her and laughed. "Wait. A patient gave you this, didn’t they? Dr. Quinn, you accepted a gift from a patient. That’s bribery. I’m reporting you."
Yvonne’s answer was only two words.
"Go ahead."
Elias laughed and shook his head.
Then he lit the cigarette.
A thread of smoke entered his mouth. He drew it in slowly, then let white fog spill from his lips. It drifted across his face, blurring his features, then spread through the bedroom with rude, stubborn confidence.
He was far too practiced.
There was nothing experintal in the way he held the cigarette, nothing awkward in the angle of his fingers. Even the way he tapped off ash had a strange, lazy elegance.
That elegance lasted until the ash fell straight onto the floor.
Yvonne looked at it.
Elias caught her expression and smiled like a little fox, his eyes lifting at the corners.
"Mad?"
Before Yvonne could speak, he moved.
His arm looped around her neck, pulling her toward the bed. His bare body stood openly before her without a flicker of sha.
Elias bent, found her mouth with unnerving precision, and kissed her.
Then he breathed the smoke into her.
The smoke was sharp and choking, heavy with heat. Yvonne had never smoked before, and her body reacted before her mind did.
She tried to cough.
Elias did not let her.
His mouth stayed sealed over hers, mischievous and cruel, trapping the cough in her throat as he insisted on giving her the entire mouthful.
Under those conditions, the harshness changed.
The burn faded into sothing else, the way bitterness sotis hid a trace of sweetness after the tongue gave up fighting it.
At last, Elias released her.
He stepped back onto the bed, both pale bare feet sinking into the soft covers, and bent over laughing.
"Ha... hahaha..."
He had pulled off a childish prank, and it delighted him completely.
After laughing for a while, he looked at Yvonne and froze. Then his face filled with childish anger, bright and offended.
"You liar. You totally know how to smoke."
Yvonne did not explain why she had not coughed.
She only watched him.
That expression of his, that sudden spoiled outrage, finally gave her a glimpse of the boy she had first t. The sunny college student. The bright smile. The harmless warmth she had once almost believed.
Then Elias laughed again.
"Just kidding. I had your mouth blocked. Even if you wanted to cough, you couldn’t."
"Now you smoked too," Elias said, stretching one pale arm over the edge of the bed and tapping ash onto the floor again. His mouth curved. "So you don’t get to lecture ."
He brought the cigarette back to his lips and took another long drag.
This ti, he did not exhale.
Instead, he lifted his chin toward Yvonne. The gesture was proud and wordless.
Co here.
Yvonne stood where she was.
Elias did not care. He hooked his arm around her neck again, lowered his head, and kissed her, passing the smoke into her mouth.
He did it again and again, tireless and delighted, until the entire cigarette burned down.
Only when nothing usable remained did he stop.
They separated.
Elias looked at the damp strand connecting them. With lazy amusent, he used the burned-out cigarette to break it, then bent his knees without hesitation and knelt on the bed.
In that position, Yvonne was taller than him again.
That was exactly what he wanted.
He reached out, caught a fistful of her hair, and forced her to bend until her face was level with his. His smile cooled into sothing sharp.
"Didn’t you say you were afraid I was sick?" he asked. "Not afraid anymore?"
Settling accounts after the fact.
Yvonne seed not to feel the pull against her scalp.
She only looked at him.
A faint haze lay over her eyes, and underneath it was sothing thick, dark, and restless.
Elias smiled brightly.
"Actually, I lied to you. If you grab an HIV rapid test right now, maybe it’ll show two lines."
Yvonne answered with action.
Elias’s knees stayed neatly together, his hips resting on his heels as his body slowly tilted back. He let the person above him kiss him with controlled force.
In the space between breaths, Elias whispered in a ruined voice, "Yvonne, let’s do it again."
His lips stayed parted.
After a long, stiff silence, a low sigh slipped out of him.
"Yvonne," he murmured, "I really like you."
anwhile, Naomi Vale was still upstairs like an unpaid storage clerk, waiting for Elias to co back and collect his suitcase.
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