Hudson started cooking, and Don Juan became viscerally aware that he smelled of the cheap cigarettes he'd been smoking for the past half hour. Had something changed in the air when Hudson lit the stove, and that made it more obvious? Or was it just that he'd spent long enough standing still in a closed room to realize it? He wondered if Hudson had noticed. If he had, he hadn't reacted to it. If he asked, what excuse woudl Don Juan give? Someone had given him some and he was just using them up, maybe; he'd borrowed them from someone when he ran out of his own at their house. But either possibility implied that he was spending a lot of time hanging around other people sharing cigarettes, and... did he want to imply that? Maybe. It wasn't as though it was untrue. Hudson was having people over for days at a time. He wouldn't think twice of Don Juan implying he'd picked up a bunch of shitty cigarettes when he'd slept over with someone else. (Would he? If someone had asked him a day ago he would have thought that perhaps Hudson would mind — maybe not that he would be angry about it, but perhaps passingly disappointed? But this had been, like everything he'd thought prior to today, just an assumption. Entirely unverified.)

He'd rather avoid the question if he could. Maybe it was just his coat that chiefly smelled of smoke — but that didn't help, because he couldn't take it off until he'd found somewhere to get rid of the manuscript, or Hudson might see it and he would certainly ask about a sheaf of paper tucked into Don Juan's waistband.

"Coffee," he agreed, aggressively cheerful — the scent of coffee might be strong enough to mask the cigarettes.

It was also beginning to dawn on him that he was failing to make conversation. Had he crossed the line into suspiciously quiet yet? He had to avoid that at all costs. "You look good," Don Juan blurted, which was the first thing that came to mind but did not exactly qualify as making conversation. Fumbling through, he continued, "It must have been a good trip, I mean. You look — relaxed."

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