Re: second floor ; smoking
It was nicer to have a face to look at, not that Nephritis minded the romance of a hooded gentleman. It was just the kind of thing that worked in a movie, one where the hero was always in shadows and ensuring the heroine not break even one fingernail. She'd always thought women should do their own saving, but that wasn't very romantic. Away from here, she wouldn't admit that she liked the thought of being capable and having the hero waiting around the corner to swoop in, should she need it. She like chivalry in the same way she liked fur stoles and lipstick that lasted past lunchtime. She didn't expect it, but she liked it well enough. "Things sound prettier with accents, but that doesn't mean they really are prettier," she told him, quiet but with a smile that said she knew more than her youth warranted. "I do like hearing you say them. You should have been in pictures," she teased warmly.
Her opinion differed on what made a thing true. Courtesy dictated that she let him have his way, but she'd never been that kind of woman. The studio heads hated her for it, but they were thrilled to cash in at the box office. She leaned forward in her chair, the dulcet death upon her breath more pronounced with the pressure against her stomach. "Some people can say a thing with no feeling at all, and yet they mean it more than most. Being articulate has nothing to do with it, bello. Real adoration is something you see and feel." She straightened her arm and reached it the length between them. "You can feel it, just like you feel my fingers on your hand," she said of the weak touched that grazed the back of his hand across the empty space.
She sat back with an almost imperceptible creak of bones nearing the end of their solidity, and he exhaled a pained exhale. She pressed a graceful hand to the small of her back. "It's nothing," she said before he could ask if she needed help. "It comes and it goes." Her smile was shadows and dirges, and she exhaled long and slow as she sat back completely in the chair. "Do you miss her, this woman who's gone? Do you regret her?"
Men boring easily, that was a much lighter subject, and she was perfectly white teeth as she smiled back at him, the bloom of youth visible past the cadaver that shadowed her countenance. "Men bore easier than little children," she said knowingly. "Keeping them interested is work. Women fall in love differently. We fall in love longer. Men fall in love harder," she said, as if she had all the world's knowledge of hearts and love at her tender age. "I think it was fate," she declared, her grin making it questionable whether she meant the words. "Do you think we made our own fate by getting into that lift?"