Chapter 142: A Dark Joke

Elias seemed to realize Giselle had been looking at him for too long.

A faint embarrassment crossed his face. He lowered his head, and even his voice turned lighter, almost careful. "What... what is it?"

Only then did Giselle notice that her stare had gone past what could be considered ordinary. She let the question in her eyes fade into something calmer and asked, "Why didn’t you wait inside?"

Had he not said he was afraid of the dark and ghosts?

The corner of a stairwell should have been darker and more unnerving than the apartment itself. There was no bed frame to check under, no curtains to fear, no bathroom mirror to turn into a horror-movie trap, but there was also no warmth in the walls, no sign of actual living, and no door he could lock between himself and the rest of the building.

Elias blinked at her.

His eyes were very bright. Even under the weak stairwell light, they caught what little glow there was and held it, clear enough to make the whole excuse look both ridiculous and painfully sincere.

"Have you never watched a horror movie?" he asked, lifting both hands as he spoke. "Ghosts always stay under the bed, behind the curtains, in the bathroom, places like that." 𝗳𝚛𝗲𝕖𝚠𝚎𝚋𝗻𝗼𝕧𝗲𝐥.𝚌𝚘𝐦

His gestures followed every example, quick and animated, and the expression on his face was almost painfully alive. He did not look as if he were explaining fear. He looked as if he were telling her about some strange, entertaining fairy tale where the monsters had rules and he had personally lost confidence in every one of them.

In that moment, calling him cute would not have been an exaggeration.

The corner of Giselle’s mouth lifted before she stopped herself.

She remembered who he was, remembered the plane, remembered Serena Blackwood, remembered the danger folded under his harmless face, and the small almost-smile disappeared before it had a chance to become visible.

"You haven’t watched enough horror movies," she said, her tone returning to its usual cold steadiness. "Stairwells are common places for ghosts too. Compared with an apartment, they already have less warmth and less safety. Late at night, when everything is empty, footsteps sound much clearer than they should. When the person coming home starts looking for her keys and tries to unlock the door, she may suddenly wonder why the hallway lights are so dim tonight. Then she looks up, and a twisted thing is clinging to the ceiling above her."

Before she could continue, Elias’s face came close.

The distance between them vanished so quickly that Giselle caught only the brief warmth of his body and a faint, clean scent, something like washed cotton with a trace of soap. Then his hand covered her mouth.

His palm was warm. The touch itself was not forceful, but it cut off the rest of her sentence with perfect timing. His breath fell near her cheek, close enough that the air between them seemed to grow damp for an instant.

Giselle lowered her eyes.

Elias was looking at her with widened eyes, annoyance and grievance mixed so naturally that it almost looked real. "Don’t keep talking about it," he said. "If you do, I won’t dare go upstairs alone again."

After saying that, he stepped back and let his hand fall as if nothing unusual had happened.

Giselle knew the gesture had been instinctive for him. It had not carried the deliberate closeness that came from a man testing the boundary between himself and a woman, nor the shy invitation of someone conscious of being touched. Elias had simply heard something he did not want to hear, panicked in his own theatrical way, and stopped her mouth before the imaginary monster on the ceiling could finish forming.

That made the contact harder to sort out, not easier.

Elias did not seem to notice the problem he had created. "Right," he said, as if remembering where they were. "Standing out here talking is kind of weird. Let’s go in first."

He took out the key and unlocked the apartment.

Giselle followed him inside.

The apartment was not large, but it had everything a person would need to live comfortably. The furniture was new. The floors had been recently redone, and the walls had the clean, untouched look of a place refreshed before move-in rather than a place passed down through tenants. There were no old scuffs near the baseboards, no leftover smell from a previous occupant, no mismatched dishes abandoned in the cabinets. Even the bedding had been chosen with care, pale pink and white, fresh enough to make the bed look softer than the rest of the room should have allowed.

The space carried the faint, awkward sweetness of something prepared for a young man who had not been asked what he wanted but had been thought about anyway.

Elias was clearly seeing it for the first time.

He stopped just inside the door. His lips parted slightly, and surprise crossed his face before he could hide it. The reaction was simple enough at first. Shock, then pleasure. But underneath those, Giselle saw something heavier and harder to name.

Gratitude, perhaps.

No, not exactly gratitude.

It was closer to being moved.

That strange feeling from him returned again, more distinct than before, and Giselle’s brows drew together.

She wanted to know what had happened to him.

She wanted to ask why he looked as if this small apartment had touched some part of him no one had been allowed near. She wanted to know whether Serena had done this, and whether Elias knew what it meant to accept a room arranged by someone who had already hurt him.

But that was his private matter.

For the past several days, Giselle had been deliberately staying away from him. She had not wanted to hurt him, so she had decided not to give him useless hope. If she stepped closer now, if she asked questions with concern he could hear, would that not become another kind of hope?

The question stayed behind her teeth.

Giselle did not speak.

She had no idea that every shift in her expression, every pause, every hesitation she tried to swallow, had already been caught by Elias through the system.

Inside, Elias laughed softly.

So she was worried about him.

That was enough to prove he had some place in Giselle Frost’s heart. It was not love yet. If it were love, with her personality, she would not keep refusing to respond to his feelings while still coming when he called. The category was probably friend.

A friend, then.

And what did a person do when she saw a friend slowly walking into an abyss?

Elias’s mouth curved for an instant before he smoothed the expression away.

He looked toward the only bed in the room and hesitated with almost perfect timing. A moment later, he seemed to brace himself and said, "Um... Giselle, there’s only one bed here. We may have to sleep together tonight. You don’t mind, right?"

Giselle did not answer him immediately.

She only looked at him.

Elias waited for a response, then went on by himself, as if afraid his request had put her in a difficult position. "If you don’t want to sleep with me, that’s okay too. I can look around and see whether there’s an extra comforter. I’ll make a spot on the floor for you."

Giselle kept her eyes on his.

"You not minding is enough," she said.

Elias’s face lit up.

The smile was bright, unguarded, and almost too easy. "Why would I mind? We’re besties."

Giselle froze slightly.

Besties.

The word could be childish, sometimes unserious, but Elias used it with the clean certainty of someone putting their relationship into a safe box. It meant more than casual friends, or at least something closer, more familiar. It could also be used without romance, without desire, without the kind of claim the room seemed ready to invent around them.

Giselle did not think the label was wrong.

In her heart, she had indeed treated Elias as a friend. If she had not, she would not have come all the way here because of one message from him.

The problem was not the word itself.

The problem was that when she looked at Elias, those bright green eyes held no romantic heat at all. Even when he had mentioned sharing the same bed, there had been no real shyness in him. There had been a little embarrassment, yes, but not the embarrassment of a young man asking to sleep beside a woman. It was closer to the apology one friend offered another when circumstances made things inconvenient.

The strangeness swept over Giselle again.

This time, she stopped circling around it.

She looked directly at him and asked, "Did she rent this place for you?"

Elias smiled in his heart.

Finally.

On the surface, he pretended not to hear. He turned toward the closet with quiet obedience. "I’ll check whether there’s an extra comforter."

Giselle stepped forward and caught his shoulder.

Elias flinched as if he had been shocked. He quickly moved aside, turned his head, and bit his lip while looking at her.

The reaction was too fast and too practiced.

Giselle slowly withdrew her hand.

Elias had not answered. He did not need to. The answer had already settled in her mind.

This was Serena Blackwood’s work.

The apartment, the new furniture, the warmed-over sweetness of the room, the bedding chosen with almost painful attention. All of it had Serena’s shadow on it. Not the public Serena who smiled gently and behaved with perfect social manners, but the private one who placed a person inside a prepared space and made care feel indistinguishable from possession.

Giselle looked at Elias again.

He seemed so docile standing there, as if a rented apartment arranged for him were enough to make him grateful to Serena.

The thought made something cold move through her.

Emotional conditioning.

That was the word that surfaced in Giselle’s mind.

Elias looked exactly like someone whose world had been handled for him too thoroughly, whose sense of value had been shaken until he began mistaking control for kindness. Serena had hurt him before. Giselle knew that much. Yet here he was, standing inside a room Serena had prepared, looking as if the wound had been covered with something warm enough that he wanted to thank the person who made it.

Giselle could not watch him fall into that abyss.

Her expression became grave. "Don’t trust her. Don’t forget what she did to you. Her tenderness is temporary, and it cannot repay the harm she caused."

Halfway through, Elias lowered his head.

"You misunderstood," he said softly.

Giselle paused.

What had she misunderstood?

For a moment, a different possibility flashed through her mind. Had Elias rented the apartment himself? Had Serena only helped with something minor? Had Giselle made the wrong assumption because she had seen Serena’s shadow too often and no longer trusted any light near Elias?

Then Elias continued, his voice slow and gentle. "I misunderstood too. Serena has actually been... very good to me."

Serena.

The name landed inside Giselle’s head with a force she had not prepared for.

For an instant, her thoughts scattered. Only one clear answer pushed through the mess, but it was too absurd to accept, too ridiculous to fit into the room without turning the whole thing into a cruel joke.

It felt like opening a beautifully wrapped gift box only for a grinning clown to spring out.

The clown was smiling.

Elias was smiling too.

His smile was soft, warm, and happy, as if during the days Giselle had spent keeping distance from him, he had already received everything he had once wanted from someone else.