She falls asleep fast. I can tell by the way her breathing changes, the tension leaving her shoulders one muscle at a time until she's heavy against me.
I stare at the ceiling and think about the name I gave her.
Caleb.
The name my mother gave me. The name I kept locked in a room I didn't let anyone enter because the boy who carried it was supposed to disappear when the prospect took over.
He didn't disappear. He was here the whole time. Waiting, learning, growing into the man wearing the patch.
The prospect is gone. The brother is here.
And the brother's name is Caleb.
CHAPTER FIFTEEN
Saylor
Armstrong Hall hasn't changed. Same fluorescent lights, same scuffed linoleum, same rows of desks filling the room with the stale energy of students who'd rather be anywhere else on a Thursday morning.
What's changed is the man in the third row.
Rookie is in his usual seat. Cut draped over the chair behind him, jacket zipped over it the way he always covers the leather on campus.
Same posture. Same dark hair. Same deep brown eyes tracking me as I walk down the aisle.
Except he's holding a pen.
Not a normal pen. Not even the bachelorette party pen from the first week, which I still have in my nightstand drawer because throwing it away felt wrong.
This pen is shaped like a flamingo. Bright pink. The flamingo's head bobs when you write with it, and there's a tiny feather glued to the top that waves with every stroke.
He's already taking notes with it. The flamingo's head bobbing up and down on the page while he writes probability formulas in pink ink.
I stop at his row. He doesn't look up. His mouth is doing the thing where it's trying very hard not to curve.
"Where did you find that?" I slide into the seat beside him.
He taps the flamingo against the desk. The feather waves. "Shayla collects them. She's got a whole drawer."
"You're taking a statistics exam with a flamingo pen."
He finally looks at me. Those brown eyes, warm and steady, carrying the same expression he wore the night he told me his name. "I'm taking a statistics exam with a flamingo pen. Is that a problem, Miss Bell?"
I press my lips together to hold back the laugh. It doesn't work.
The sound escapes—short, loud enough for the girl in front of us to turn around—and his mouth curves into the half-grin I fell for in this exact room eight weeks ago.
Eight weeks. That's all it's been. Eight weeks since a man with a ridiculous pen sat down beside me and rewired everything I believed about what I deserved.
Dr. Petrov starts the lecture. Probability distributions. The flamingo bobs.
I open my notebook and try to focus on standard deviations while the man beside me radiates a confidence he didn't carry eight weeks ago.
The patch changed him. Not his personality, not his humor, not the way he leans back in his chair with one ankle crossed over the opposite knee.
The change is underneath. A foundation that was shaky for three years and is now solid. He's not performing confidence. He's living in it.
I catch myself staring at his jaw instead of the whiteboard. He catches me catching myself and the half-grin widens.