Chapter 587 | Symmetry Is Important

Chapter 587: 587 | Symmetry Is Important

Naomi slid into the chair beside Belle and stole a strip of bacon off her plate before she had fully sat down, which told me how much the shower had done for her confidence.

Belle kept typing. "That was a forty-credit strip, Love. I took it off a Ruby boy who cried about it."

"Then I’m eating his tears," Naomi said, and bit the strip in half while looking me dead in the eye.

I went to the food line because standing at a table while two women audited my neck counted as a terrible tactical position. My C-rank metabolism had opinions after Vale broke my nose twice, so I loaded the tray with eggs, sausage, three pancakes, a mountain of hash browns, and a banana for moral support. The egg station lady added a fourth scoop without being asked, and she gave me a look that told me she had seen the thread too. I paid for Naomi’s pancakes on the card Aurora had told me to use for emergencies, because a girl who carried my corpse out of a collapsing dimension on national television had earned blueberries.

When I sat down, Belle turned her laptop around so the screen faced me. The campus forum glowed in academy blue, and the top thread had four hundred and twelve replies under a title that read BURGER GUY CARRIES PRINCESS, with a blurry security still of me walking down the switchback with Blair in my arms. Someone had circled her bare feet in red. Someone else had circled my face and written a caption about the smug energy of a man who had never paid taxes.

"There’s a poll," Belle said, scrolling down with one finger. "Sixty-one percent think the sweater was stolen. Twenty-eight percent think it was a gift. Eleven percent voted for an option called arranged marriage, and I respect those people."

"Who made an arranged marriage option?"

"I did, obviously. I needed a control group." She spun the laptop back around and started typing again. "The thread is also the reason three Sapphire girls have walked past this table twice to look at you. You owe me for every one I glared away."

Naomi pushed her plate toward me without comment, so I cut her pancakes into squares while she stole hash browns off my tray. We had stopped asking each other for food somewhere around week four. Belle watched the whole exchange over the top of her screen, and the corner of her mouth twitched in a way she would have denied in court.

Jordan arrived with his hair flattened on one side and his uniform tie looped around his neck in a knot that could not be legally classified. He dropped into the chair across from me and put his forehead on the table next to my banana.

"I saw the thread," Jordan said into the wood. "I want it on record that I bet against this happening, and now I owe Javier sixty credits, and I’m starting to think Javier has inside information."

"Javier was asleep at five forty," I told him.

"Javier is never asleep. Javier is a notebook that learned to walk." He turned his head sideways so one grey eye could glare at me. "You also have a new bite mark, which means you showered with somebody, and I’m too tired to guess who."

Naomi raised her hand like a student in class, and Jordan groaned into the table.

I ate four bites of eggs before I remembered the message I was carrying, mostly because Vale’s coffee mug had been staring at me from my memory the entire walk over. I swallowed and set the fork down.

"Vale says Yumi wants you in Santa Barbara on Saturday," I told Naomi. "Noon sharp. Vale is driving, and you get the playlist."

Naomi stopped chewing. Her pink eyes went wide, and a faint gold shimmer of leftover buff crawled under the skin of her wrist where she held her fork. "The bird lady wants me specifically?"

"She wants the cleanest readings, and your ring is the closest one to the middle of her plate." I said it plainly because she deserved plain, and I watched her ears go pink. "She’ll probably poke you with a tuning fork made of bone, but she’ll ask first."

"I already cleared Saturday," Belle said, which earned her a look from both of us. She shrugged one shoulder and kept her eyes on the screen. "I clear everyone’s Saturdays. Aurora has her tablecloth date with you at seven, so you’ll be back on the ferry by five, and Naomi needs to sleep in the car on the way home because she’ll be emotional."

"I will not be emotional," Naomi said.

"You cried at a pancake commercial on Saturday, babe."

"The dog was so happy about the pancakes, Belle."

Jordan laughed into the table so hard that my banana rolled off it.

The doors at the far end of the dining hall opened, and I knew who it was before I looked because the temperature at our table climbed two degrees. Blair Davenport walked in wearing a full Obsidian uniform with every button fastened and every pleat pressed into a blade. Her short red hair had been styled back into its usual sharp bob, with no trace of the pillow dent that had followed her around the helipad an hour ago. She had a silk scarf knotted high at her throat to cover the burn scar, black tights over the legs I had carried down the hill, and polished heels that clicked on the floor loud enough to turn heads at four tables. She looked untouchable, which meant she had spent forty minutes in front of a mirror building the look.

Then she crossed the light from the windows, and I saw a grey cuff peeking out from under the sleeve of her blazer. A small bleach spot sat right on the edge of it.

Belle saw it at the same second I did. Her fingers stopped on the keyboard, and her whole face lit up with a joy so pure that I worried for Blair’s safety.

"She’s wearing it under the uniform," Belle whispered. "I’m going to frame this moment and hang it over my bed."

"Don’t say anything to her," Naomi whispered back.

"I would never," Belle said, already typing.

Blair stopped at the end of our table with a glass bottle of French mineral water in one hand. Her ice-blue eyes moved across the group, landed on me, and dropped straight to the right side of my throat. The fresh bite mark sat there, pink and round and very obviously new. Her eyes moved from my neck to Naomi, who smiled back at her over a forkful of blueberry pancake, and the cap on the water bottle popped off with a hiss of steam.

"Good morning, Davenport," Naomi said, warm and polite and completely aware of what she had done.

"Love." Blair said the name like she was reading it off a warrant. She pulled out the chair on my other side and sat down with her back perfectly straight, and her knee landed against mine under the table. She did not move it away, and neither did I. "I see you were productive this morning."

"I was very productive," Naomi agreed.

"Symmetry is important," Belle added helpfully.