Chapter 136: The Road to Starfall Isle

Stan pulled the Huracán out of the campus lot and fell in behind the convoy of buses, three of them, lumbering and unhurried, their indicators blinking in synchronized sequence as they navigated the morning traffic toward the coastal road.

The drive settled into an easy rhythm. The city thinned around them as they moved outward, dense commercial blocks giving way to lower buildings, then to open stretches of coastal road where the Inksea glittered in irregular silver flashes through the tree line to the east.

Beside him, Maya had produced a sheaf of papers from her bag and was reading through them with the focused, slightly obsessive attention of someone revisiting work they already knew well but couldn’t quite stop checking. She’d read through the stack at least twice since they’d left campus. Her lips moved slightly over certain lines. Occasionally she’d nod, small, private, self-affirming.

Stan let her be with it for a while as he hands worked on the steering. Then after a while he glanced at her:

"Good pages?"

"Very good pages." She looked up, and the smile she turned on him was the unguarded kind, not the campus-belle composure or the careful warmth she deployed in public, but something brighter and more genuine. The face of a person doing something they actually loved. "The chancellor announced an award. Best script and best performance from the excursion, assessed by a faculty panel and, apparently, an external industry reviewer from Star Entertainment."

Stan glanced at the papers in her lap. "That’s what you’ve been working on?"

"For three weeks. I just, I didn’t have the right location or the right opportunity to actually shoot it." She turned back to the papers with renewed energy, running her thumb along the margin of the top page. "If I execute this properly, I don’t just have a shot at the award. I have a portfolio piece. Something I can actually use after graduation. Something for my TikTuk channel too, properly produced content, not just streams."

"What kind of scene is it?"

Maya hesitated. She sighed inwardly, she was hesitating because to ask for a favor she haven’t fully formulated yet.

She took a deep breath and replied; "It’s a thriller sequence. Corporate espionage angle. A hacker being extracted from a compromised location by..." Another pause. "By her personal security detail." 𝚏𝐫𝚎𝗲𝕨𝐞𝐛𝕟𝚘𝐯𝚎𝗹.𝕔𝐨𝗺

Stan waited.

"I need someone to play the bodyguard," Maya said, her voice taking on the careful, anticipatory quality of a person who has identified their ideal candidate and is approaching the subject with strategic delicacy.

"No."

"Stan..."

"I’m not an actor."

"You don’t need to be an actor. You need to be convincing, and you are, you’re naturally convincing. You walk into rooms and people move out of the way without being asked. That’s the entire character. I wouldn’t need to direct you at all. You’d just be yourself."

Stan was quiet for a moment.

"I’d need to read the script." He smiled as he complied... He wanted to help right from the the start, he refused her request at the start to know what she’ll say...

Hearing him, Maya beamed at him, a full, bright, entirely victorious smile that she deployed before he’d finished the sentence.

"I love you, Stan. You’re genuinely the best person I know."

The words came out with the easy warmth of genuine affection rather than calculation, and Stan caught the moment she registered what she’d said, the slight widening of her eyes, the half-second of internal recalibration, before she leaned across and pressed a quick kiss to his cheek.

She pulled back immediately. The blush that followed was deep and immediate, the color spreading across her cheekbones. She didn’t know why her body had acted on a feeling before her mind had approved the action.

Stan kept his eyes on the road. The smile that arrived was quiet and unhurried.

"You seem excited," he said mildly.

"I’m... yes. I am. It’s a good project." She turned toward the window, which did nothing to conceal the fact that her ears were still pink. "I’ve been thinking about this kind of opportunity for years. The chancellor organized something genuinely remarkable. Serious students will get real professional-grade material from this."

"You phrased that very specifically." Stan glanced at her briefly. "Serious students."

"I meant it as a compliment to the chancellor’s judgment in selecting the participants."

"Did you? Really?"

Maya gave him a look. He held it for exactly long enough, then returned his eyes to the road.

"Anyway," he said, after a comfortable beat, "I wouldn’t object if you did that again."

"Did what?"

"The peck."

Maya’s blush, which had been fading, immediately reasserted itself.

"You’re incorrigible," she said, which was not a denial.

"I’ve been told."

[Maya Zimmerman: Favorability 59] [Maya Zimmerman: Favorability 60]

"I would have..." Maya stopped. Started again, her voice dropping into something softer, angled toward the window rather than at him directly. "I would have made it something more than a peck. But I’d rather we arrived at Starfall Isle with the car intact."

Stan smiled. "I’m an excellent multitasker."

"You’re a flirt," she said firmly, and her pout was so thoroughly unconvincing as an expression of displeasure that it functioned more accurately as its opposite.

"There’ll be time for it later," Stan said. "Properly. When neither of us is driving."

[Maya Zimmerman: Favorability 61]

[Maya Zimmerman: Favorability 62]

Maya said nothing. She returned to her script with the focused attention of a woman who needed something to look at that wasn’t Stan Harrison’s profile.

The coastal road opened ahead of them, the sea appearing in full beyond the tree line, wide and blue-gray and endlessly patient, and the buses trundled on ahead, and the morning was warm, and neither of them felt the need to fill the comfortable quiet that followed.

Starfall Isle appeared after roughly an hour on the road, announced first by the signage that began appearing along the roadside at increasing frequency, then by the distinctive silhouette of the island’s central ridge against the sky, then by the entrance gate itself.

It was, by any honest measure, breathtaking.