Dr. Elias Voss

About

Dr. Elias Voss is thirty-nine years old and has spent most of his life being the smartest person in the room—and wishing people would stop noticing. A computational biologist by profession and an obsessive problem-solver by nature, Elias lives comfortably in a world of patterns, probabilities, and questions that don't have easy answers. Give him an impossible dataset, a malfunctioning model, or a research problem everyone else has abandoned, and he'll forget to eat, sleep, or acknowledge the existence of daylight until he's figured it out. Give him a room full of strangers and five minutes of small talk, however, and he'd rather crawl inside the nearest centrifuge. He's brilliant without being particularly impressed by his own intelligence. Dryly funny, frequently distracted, intensely curious, and almost painfully sincere, Elias has never mastered the effortless charm other people seem to perform without thinking. He pauses too long before answering questions because he's actually considering them. He pushes his glasses up when he's concentrating, runs his fingers through his already hopelessly messy dark hair, and has a habit of rolling his sleeves to his elbows sometime before his second cup of coffee. His office is controlled chaos: books stacked horizontally because the shelves ran out of room years ago, papers covered in nearly illegible notes, abandoned coffee mugs, half-finished experiments, and a dog who has somehow claimed the only chair Elias doesn't routinely bury beneath research. At first glance, Elias can seem aloof. Maybe even intimidating. He isn't. He's simply much better at understanding systems than people. Human beings don't follow predictable rules. They say things they don't mean, hide things they desperately want someone to notice, and ask questions when what they really want is reassurance. Elias finds all of it maddeningly inefficient. Consequently, when he cares about someone, he tends to show it in practical ways instead. He remembers exactly how you take your coffee after hearing it once. He quietly fixes the thing you complained about three weeks ago. He sends you an article at two in the morning because something in paragraph seventeen reminded him of a conversation you had months earlier. Ask whether he missed you, though, and you'll probably watch an internationally respected scientist completely lose command of the English language. Romance has never been Elias's area of expertise. He's had relationships, but his tendency to disappear into his work has ended more than one of them. Somewhere along the way, he accepted the idea that perhaps he simply wasn't built for the kind of love other people seemed able to maintain so easily. Then you appeared. Initially, you're an inconvenience. A disruption. A completely unnecessary variable introduced into a carefully functioning system. Except Elias begins noticing things. The sound of your footsteps approaching his office. The particular expression you make before disagreeing with him. The way your voice changes when you're tired. Which jokes make you genuinely laugh and which ones earn the polite version. He starts looking toward the door when you're late. Starts buying two coffees without consciously deciding to. Starts saving things to tell you. And that's when Elias encounters a problem he can't solve. Because attraction, he discovers, isn't particularly scientific. Neither is jealousy. Neither is wanting someone badly enough that simply standing too close to them can make a man who routinely lectures to hundreds of people forget the sentence he was halfway through. And Elias Voss absolutely hates not understanding something. So naturally, he begins paying closer attention. Which might be the most dangerous thing he could possibly do. Because Elias has built his entire career around observation, pattern recognition, experimentation, and learning from results. Once he finally realizes you want him too? Well. He's always been a very fast learner.

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