Chapter 457: Meeting Zack...

The drive toward Peak was short enough to be almost ceremonial. Camilla watched the street with the particular attention of someone cataloguing a species. A student in a hoodie jaywalked. A bus exhaled at the corner. She tracked both.

"Theyre really carefree," she said.

"Well there’s a saying Ignorance is bliss."

"Its bliss indeed...’

The corner of her mouth almost admitted humor. It did not quite arrive. She glanced at him again, measuring the ease in his profile, the absence of apology. The possessiveness stirred and found no handle. She let it sit behind her teeth.

Stan’s phone sat against the wheel long enough for a message.

[Are you on campus?]

Zack’s reply came quickly. [Yeah. Cafeteria.]

[Meet you there.]

Camilla watched him send it without asking who Zack was. She already knew the shape of his ordinary life well enough to leave some of the furniture unnamed.

Peak University opened around them in brick and wide walks and the low noise of people who believed midterms were a form of fate. He parked near the cafeteria. When they stepped out, Camilla’s attention left him the way a hawk leaves a glove, not rejection, interest finding a larger field.

Trees. Banners. A cluster of students arguing about nothing with great sincerity. She looked at all of it as if the buildings themselves might confess what humans thought worth teaching.

"I’ll look," she said. "You can return to the apartment when you’re finished. I’ll come back on my own."

He knew that on her own could mean a walk or an instant. He did not waste the distinction.

"All right."

A glance held a second longer than the arrangement required. Unresolved tension passed between them like a current that had agreed, for now, not to spark. Then Camilla turned into the campus, already half a study of a world that still thought it was only a school, and Stan started toward the cafeteria doors, Zack somewhere beyond them, the afternoon splitting cleanly into two kinds of unfinished business.

....

The cafeteria at Peak did not care who held shares in what.

It smelled like fryer oil and weak coffee and whatever soup had been sitting too long on the line. Trays clattered. Someone two tables over was arguing about a midterm as if the grade were a moral injury. A printer in the corner chewed a receipt and spat it out crooked. Stan bought food without ceremony, something hot enough to count as a meal, and took a table at the edge of the noise, back to a pillar, campus flowing around him in hoodies and lanyards and the particular hurry of people who thought they were late for their real lives.

He ate. He waited. Camilla was somewhere on the walks, studying humans as if lectures were a wildlife exhibit. The awareness of her sat at the back of his mind and did not interrupt the fork.

Zack came in through the far doors, scanned once, and found him. He crossed the room with the unhurried confidence of someone who belonged here and also belonged in rooms that did not smell like this. When he reached the table they shook hands, firm, brief, the kind of grip that did not need to prove anything.

"Look who remembered campus exists," Zack said.

"It didn’t move." Stan nodded at the empty chair. "Sit."

Zack dropped into it, set a cup down, and glanced at Stan’s tray as if checking that the man still ate like a student when it suited him. "Been a stretch. Semester’s loud. Half the building thinks group projects are a personality."

"And the other half?"

"Thinks sleep is optional." Zack tipped the cup in a small salute. "You look like you actually got some."

"Some."

They let that sit. Easy. No need to fill it.

Stan swallowed, set the fork down. "How’s the deal."

"Don’t worry." Zack didn’t hedge. "Every day you couldn’t show, I covered. Schedules, handoffs, the boring parts that break if nobody watches them. It’s running. No fires. No idiots I couldn’t step on."

Stan’s mouth eased, not quite a smile. Quiet satisfaction. "Numbers holding?"

"Holding. One vendor tried to get cute on timing. I reminded them who signs. They remembered." Zack leaned back, chair complaining. "You want the long version or the version where I tell you it’s fine and we talk about something that isn’t invoices."

"Fine is enough. If it stops being fine, you say so before it becomes a story."

"That’s the arrangement." Zack flicked a look around the cafeteria, the ordinary swarm of backpacks and laughter. "Weird place to do this."

"Best place. Nobody here is listening for the right words."

Zack huffed a laugh. "Fair." He stretched his legs under the table, knocking Stan’s shoe once on purpose. "You vanishing for a bit going to become a habit, or was that a one-off."

"Depends on the week."

"Mysterious. Very on brand." Zack drank. "Classes are still classes. Professor Hale still thinks eye contact is extra credit. If you’re actually checking in today and not just haunting the lunch line, the east quad’s a circus. Some club fair. You did not miss a spiritual experience."

"I’ll survive."

A tray crashed somewhere near the dishwashers. Neither of them turned. Mutual trust lived in that, business spoken in a sentence or two, then left on the table like a napkin they both knew how to fold.

Stan took another bite. The food was ordinary. The room was ordinary. That, after Velaris and a hallway pout and a sister learning how to breathe energy, felt like a kind of rest.

Zack tapped the rim of his cup. "You good?"

"I’m here," Stan said. "That’s close enough."

They stayed seated in the noise, two young men with a handshake still warming their palms and an arrangement that did not need an audience, the conversation open on the table between them, ready to go wherever the next easy minute wanted.

***

A/N:

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