The yawn is enormous, the kind that cracks his jaw and scrunches his entire face, one hand half-covering his mouth while the other drags his school bag behind him like a child hauling a security blanket through an airport. His blond hair is slightly disheveled, pushed back from his forehead in a way that suggests he has been running his fingers through it during whatever class or practice just released him, and his amber eyes are glazed with the particular exhaustion of an athlete whose body has been pushed past the point of reasonable cooperation.
He closes the door with his heel, his gaze sweeping the living room with the automatic surveillance of an Alpha entering a shared space.
His eyes land on me.
One eyebrow arches.
"Why are you wearing that?"
I look up from my phone, pausing mid-tutorial, and the words die on my tongue because my brain has suddenly abandoned its technological frustrations in favor of processing the visual information standing in the doorway.
Cal is wearing a button-down shirt.
White. Fitted. Tucked into dark slacks that sit at his waist with the kind of tailored precision that transforms a college hockey player into a man who looks like he bills by the hour. A tie hangs loosened around his neck, the knot tugged down just enough to expose the hollow of his throat, and sitting on the bridge of his nose, framing those amber eyes with dark rectangular frames, are glasses.
Glasses.
Cal Whitmore is wearing glasses and a button-down and slacks, and my brain is performing emergency maintenance because none of those items were supposed to be combined on this particular human being without a written warning issued in advance.
"Damn," I breathe.
He frowns.
"What?"
"You look like a hot professor who is having a scandal with a student."
The observation exits my mouth with zero filtering, delivered with the blunt conviction of a woman who calls them like she sees them and has no intention of apologizing for accuracy. Cal stares at me for a full two seconds, his expression cycling through surprise, confusion, and a flustered irritation that stains the tips of his ears pink.
He rolls his eyes.
"Great. Exactly the aesthetic I was going for," he mutters, dumping his bag by the door with the carelessness of a manwho has no respect for the organizational systems I have been mentally designing for this apartment. He crosses the room toward me, his long legs eating up the distance in four strides, his fingers already working at the knot of his tie.
"It is the glasses giving you character," I add, tilting my head to study the frames as he approaches. "Very distinguished. Very I grade papers by candlelight and quote Dostoevsky at dinner parties. The slacks are doing the heavy lifting, but the glasses are the co-star."
He groans, the sound dragged from somewhere deep in his chest.
"I am getting contacts."
"Wait." I sit up straighter, tucking my legs beneath me. "Do you actually wear glasses? Like, prescriptively? This is not a fashion choice?"
"I do." He drops onto the couch beside me with the boneless exhaustion of someone whose muscles have collectively agreed to stop functioning, his body sinking into the cushions until our shoulders are nearly touching. His scent arrives with him, ocean salt and warm amber and the faint trace of ice that clings to hockey players long after they leave the rink. "But I hate wearing them during school or practice because every time I do, it becomes a whole production."
He yanks the tie free, tossing it onto the coffee table.
"People either swoon over me and make it weird, call me a hot nerd and make it weird, or decide I look like a predator and make it extremely weird. Every outcome involves weirdness. There is no neutral response to Cal Whitmore in glasses. So I leave them off and squint at the whiteboard like a man with dignity."
I snort.
"You do NOT look like a predator. That is absurd. The predator association is entirely Netflix's fault for putting glasseson every serial killer in their true crime adaptations like poor eyesight is a character flaw that leads to homicide. The glasses look good on you. People are just incapable of processing attractiveness outside of their pre-established categories, so when the hockey jock shows up looking like a literature professor, their brains malfunction and they default to the nearest pop culture reference."
Cal stares at me.
"Did you just psychoanalyze the public's reaction to my eyewear?"
"I am a woman of many talents."
He sighs, the sound long and deflating, and stretches his arms across the back of the couch, his biceps straining against the white fabric of his sleeves. The posture is unconsciously territorial, his body expanding to fill the space with the casual dominance of an Alpha who does not realize how much room he occupies in a world designed for smaller people.
