Chapter 34: The Mission

The moment Wade stepped out the door, Hailey Yates turned the full wattage of her attention onto Stan.

"Hey, handsome." Her voice softened, warmer and smoother than it had been all night, deliberately sweet. "Can I add you on Snapchat?"

She wasn’t unattractive, cute, even. But in a city like this, cute didn’t move the needle, not when girls like Sophie Youngs and Sarah walked the same campus.

Hailey had figured out her ceiling a long time ago. Early on, she’d decided her best shot at moving up was attaching herself to the right wallet.

That’s what she’d been doing all evening, angling closer to Wade. Just minutes ago, she’d been openly mocking Stan as he ordered course after course, siding with Wade, calling him embarrassing in front of the entire table. She hadn’t cared then that Stan was her best friend’s boyfriend’s friend. None of it had mattered to her.

But now the cards had changed. Stan Harrison had revealed himself as someone with real money, and Hailey Yates was nothing if not adaptable.

A textbook pivot, executed without a trace of shame. A gold digger, her character disgusted Stan a lot...

Stan’s brow creased slightly. "Snapchat?"

"Mhm." She offered what was meant to be a shy smile. "Could I?"

She either didn’t notice, or chose to ignore, the cold edge in his voice.

Stan studied her for a long, flat moment. Then, with three crisp syllables:

"You don’t qualify."

Her smile split down the middle.

He didn’t elaborate. He didn’t need to. The dismissal was clean, surgical. Someone like her, calculating, opportunistic, wasn’t even worth entertaining, let alone befriending. Her personality was disgusting, she’s not even a rebate worthy option either...

Hailey shrank back into her chair, suddenly fascinated by the surface of her water glass, her cheeks flushing a slow, creeping red. The friendliness she’d been performing minutes ago now hung in the air like a popped balloon.

Across the table, Zack Howard slowly raised a fist, thumb extended, eyes gleaming.

"Brother. Brother. That was beautiful."

The rest of the dinner finished without further incident, though the atmosphere never quite recovered. Zoey kept trying to smooth things over with brittle small talk, while Hailey ate in stiff, embarrassed silence.

By the time the four of them parted ways outside the restaurant, the rift between Zoey and Hailey was already visible. After a night like that, their friendship had almost certainly absorbed permanent damage.

Walking back toward campus, Zack slung an arm around Stan’s shoulder with the easy intimacy of a man who’d just witnessed his best friend perform a miracle.

"Brother, listen, I know you’re trying to help, but I can’t stand you wasting so much money."

He patted Stan’s back sympathetically.

"Tomorrow let’s sell off all that Louis XIII you bought. And I’ll give it back to you, instead of wasting it in such bothersome stuff you can use it to do something important."

Stan glanced sideways at him. Zack’s face was completely serious. He genuinely believed Stan had just bankrupted himself in defense of their honor, and was already, in his own clumsy, loyal way, trying to figure out how to help carry that burden in his own small way...

It was almost touching.

"Don’t worry about it," Stan said. "You don’t need to split anything. Keep the money."

"Are you sure?"

"Yes."

"...Are you actually sure?"

"Zack."

After three more rounds of refusal, Zack reluctantly let it go.

That didn’t stop him, however, from quietly hauling all five cases of Louis XIII out of the dorm storage the next morning, finding a buyer through one of his cousins, and offloading them at a slight discount for a clean one hundred and twenty thousand dollars.

He then deposited the entire amount into Stan’s account that same afternoon, despite Stan’s repeated protests that he didn’t want it. He said it didn’t feel right to him..

Stan didn’t actually need the money, by this point one hundred and twenty thousand dollars genuinely registered as pocket change, but Zack had pushed it on him with such insistent loyalty that refusing felt rude.

So Stan accepted it, mentally filed it under roommate sentimental value, and moved on.

... That night, back at the dorm, Zack settled cross-legged on the edge of Stan’s bunk with the look of a man about to share an interesting secret.

"So... I heard you’ve got your eye on Sophie Youngs."

Stan looked up from his phone.

How Zack had picked up that particular piece of gossip was anybody’s guess. The campus rumor at Peak University moved at speeds that defied physics.

Normally Stan would’ve waved off any kind of romantic prying with a flat denial, but this time, he gave it half a second of real thought.

Sophie’s favorability had hit fifty without him doing a single thing. Which shows she probably has genuine feelings for him. That alone told him the affection threshold wasn’t far from cracking. If he could push her to a hundred, the system would unlock the ten-times rebate multiplier, and at his current spending rate, that was a number worth chasing very seriously.

Having a roommate quietly tracking Sophie’s movements around campus actually wasn’t a bad arrangement.

Stan gave a small nod.

Zack’s grin nearly split his face. "Brother. Say less. I’ll keep eyes on Sophie Youngs for you these next few days. Anything moves, you’ll be the first to know. Trust me, I know everyone in her dorm building’s friend group, second-degree connections, easy."

They turned out the lights and went to sleep.

The next morning.

"Stan. Stan, wake up. Get up."

Something was shaking his shoulder hard enough to rattle his teeth.

"It’s her. Sophie Youngs. She’s in the campus square right now. Move, move, move, if you take too long she’s going to be gone."

Zack’s voice was an urgent, hissed whisper directly into his ear.

"Didn’t you say you wanted to add her on Snapchat? Now’s your shot, go."

***

A/N:

Mass Release Chap - 3/3

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