Playing With Fate

4. Wanna bet on it?

"Okay, by the expression on your face, I'm gonna assume the answer is a no," Phoenix said, withdrawing the hand with which he was offering me his cigarette.

I gave him the 'Are you shitting me right now?' look, and he made a feeble attempt of masking the cheeky smile that was making a way to his lips. "Okay, it's definitely a no," he said.

"I can't believe you're smoking," I said, disgust more than evident in my tone.

He shook his head lightly at my statement. "No, I was smoking. I'm not anymore because you came and interrupted it with your tough looks," he frowned playfully.

Just do it, Hailey, just punch him; the pain will be worth it. As my thoughts escalated, his cigarette moved back up to his mouth, and before he could place it between his lips, I walked upto him and snatched it out of his hand, and he recovered from the initial shock of my action a few seconds later.

"Alright, you changed your mind, huh?" Phoenix said, smirking up at me, and I rolled my eyes at him. I threw it on the ground and crushed it under the sole of the black converse I had chosen to wear to school today. 

Now he looked pissed, and he stood up from his spot. "That wasn't cool," he said, pointing at the ground. "And don't start judging or lecturing me now, please, you don't even know why I was smoking. I could be going through something really harsh," he defended himself with the shittiest argument in the world.

My eyebrows furrowed at his explanation, and I folded my hands over my chest. "Okay then, go on, tell me why you're smoking."

"Okay, so I don't really have a deep reason, it's just fun so and it's so good. It's the most precious thing to me," he said, shrugging his shoulders so very nonchalantly that it essentially shocked me. 

"Did you know it contains over 7000 chemicals, 250 of them are harmful and 69 are carcinogenic? On top of that, it also contains toxins like Carbon Monoxide, Arsenic, Cyanide and Benzene just to name a few from the top of my head," I told him, not in hopes of impressing him but rather as a genuine warning.

He laughed softly. "Carbon Monoxide is 200 times more soluble in blood than oxygen which significantly reduces its uptake causing histotoxic hypoxia. Arsenic is an allosteric inhibitor for the enzyme pyruvate dehydrogenase complex and doesn't let pyruvate enter the citric acid cycle. Cyanide interferes in cellular respiration by binding with ferric ions in cytochrome oxidase three, effectively halting the reduction of oxygen to water. And what was left? Yeah, Benzene is a bone marrow inhibitor, meaning it can cause aplastic anaemia, chronic lymphocytic leukaemia, acute myelocytic and lymphocytic leukaemia, and about 20 others, which I could continue to name if you'd like," he said, almost so nonchalantly that it made me feel as my brain had suddenly left my body.

To say I was shocked would've been a huge understatement. Okay, so Phoenix Kingsley was a bloody genius. An actual one.

"I told you, Mars, I wasn't interested in a lecture. I already know all the chemistry behind it," he definitely knew a lot more than I did. In fact, I was almost ready to say thank you for the extra information that he provided me with two minutes ago.

"Why are you so repulsed by it anyway?" he asked, speaking for the third time consecutively while I was still trying to wrap my head around how bloody intellectual this man was and how much of an attractive trait that was. 

Say what you want to; his brain was definitely a turn on.

I shook all those thoughts out of my mind once I realized how repulsive I found him to be. I didn't have any sort of personal story attached to smoking, nor anything of the relative sort. It just annoyed me how easily people gave up common sense when it came to this wicked activity. It was outrageous how people were projecting themselves towards this form of slow death and called it a temporary solution to their problems. The whole thing didn't sit with me at all, and the fact that I was aspiring to be a doctor further on probably accounted for it too.