Free Web NovelChapter 213: My Favorite Cartographer
[Black Coral — South Beach — 5:30 PM]
Everyone had returned to the boat.
Everyone except Maya.
Alex saw her stay behind with the maps in the sand as the team started climbing into the boats. He didn’t say anything. He let the others leave and stayed.
No one asked.
Grim on his shoulder looked at him for a moment.
**"I’m going to the boat."**
"Are you sure?"
**"There are times when being discreet is part of the job."**
He climbed down from Alex’s shoulder and walked toward the boat with the specific dignity of someone who had made an adult decision and didn’t need anyone to comment on it.
---
Maya was still kneeling over the map when Alex arrived.
Her pen moving over the paper, her loose hair falling forward in the beach wind. Akari asleep in the sand beside her as if the whole world was that square meter of beach and everything else was background noise.
Alex sat down without saying anything.
Maya glanced at him.
"Weren’t you going to the boat?"
"I was."
"So?"
"I changed my mind."
Maya didn’t answer. She went back to the map.
Alex looked at her.
The concentration she had — her brow slightly furrowed, her lips moving soundlessly when the numbers still didn’t add up. The way her hand paused for a second before tracing something, as if the thought needed to arrive first.
"What are you calculating?" asked Alex.
"The route that’s left." Maya pointed to an area of the map without looking up. "This area has unusual currents. If we use them well, we arrive half a day earlier."
"And if we don’t use them?"
"We arrive when we arrive." Maya. "But I like arriving earlier."
"Why?"
Maya finally looked up from the map.
She looked at him.
"Why what?"
"Why you like arriving earlier. It’s not just efficiency. I see it on your face when you find the shortest route."
Maya opened her mouth.
She closed it.
"Because when the map says it’s possible," she said finally, "I want to prove the map is right."
Alex smiled.
"That’s the most Maya thing I’ve ever heard you say."
"I don’t know if that’s a compliment."
"It’s the best compliment I know how to give."
"Besides, I like seeing you and thinking about how you’ve changed, even though before you led a team to investigate dungeons." She looked at him with a smile. "These days you’ve become our star cartographer."
---
Maya looked at him for a second longer than necessary.
Then she went back to the map.
But something had changed in the way she held her pen.
Alex moved a little closer — not much, just enough to see the map from her angle.
"Will you explain the route to me?"
Maya hesitated.
"Why? You don’t sail."
"No. But I like listening to you when you explain things."
Maya looked at him.
"Why?"
"Because when you explain something that matters to you, your voice changes." Alex. "It becomes different from how you talk about anything else."
The beach wind between them.
Akari opened one eye. She closed it again.
Maya looked at the map, a blush on her face.
"The southern current picks up three knots at this time of year." The pen on the paper, tracing the line. "If we take it here — at four in the morning, before the wind changes — it carries us all the way here." She traced the point. "Four and a half days instead of five."
"And the Eternal Sailors?"
"How do you know about the Eternal Sailors?"
"Max mentioned them."
"Ah." Maya. "Their territory is here. If we approach from the south instead of the west, we don’t cross their routes. We still arrive, and without a detour."
"Did you calculate that just now?"
"I calculated it while I was explaining it to you."
Alex was looking at her.
Maya with her pen still on the map.
"What?" said Maya.
"Nothing." frёeweɓηovel.coɱ
"You’re doing that thing of looking at me."
"What thing?"
"The thing where you look at me when I’m not paying attention, and then when I do notice, you keep looking as if nothing happened."
Alex didn’t say anything.
"You’ve done it since I met you," said Maya. Her voice lower than before.
"I know."
Maya put down her pen.
"Why? I’m supposed to be older than you. I should be making you behave, you know, the way I’m acting right now."
Alex considered the question honestly.
"Because when you’re focused on something that matters to you, you have an expression you don’t have at any other time." A pause. "And I like seeing it."
Maya looked at him.
Not with the evaluation she used to look at maps.
With something different.
"That’s —" she began.
"Uncomfortable?"
"No." Maya. "It’s just that no one has ever said something like that to me before."
"Something like what?" free𝑤ebnovel.com
"Something about my face when I work." A pause. "Usually people comment on the result. The finished map. The route found. Not —" she stopped, "— not what I put into it while getting there."
Alex didn’t answer.
The evening was fully settling on the horizon, the ocean orange, the sand still warm.
"You’re beautiful, besides. I think spending so much time with Raven taught me many things from her." Alex heard what he said and clarified. "Besides, you know, that."
Maya looked at the map.
Then she looked at him.
"And what expression do I have?" she said quietly.
"One that says you already know the answer but you enjoy the path to get there more than you admit."
Maya stayed still, unable to believe that someone younger than her could make her behave and feel this way.
*Before I met him, I liked my life as a team leader.*
She looked directly at him for a few seconds, and for the first time Alex blushed at seeing her gaze so focused on him.
*But since I met him in that dungeon and saw him alone with Grim... I felt the need to protect him like a little brother.*
She looked at him again, and this time she blushed again.
*But now that I’ve spent so much time with him, I don’t want to lose him. Just thinking that he might get lost in the power of the Fragments and never be the same again...*
The wind moved her hair to the side.
Alex reached out and brushed it away from her face — slowly, unhurriedly.
Maya didn’t move.
Maya’s eyes on Alex’s with that expression — the one he had described, the one she hadn’t known she made, the one they both now knew was real.
"Four and a half days," said Maya, barely audible.
"By your calculation."
"By my calculation."
And Alex closed the last few centimeters.
---
And he kissed her deeply but affectionately, and with his free hand he steadied himself, leaning more toward her so as not to lose his balance, while Maya let herself be carried away in the kiss.
Alex’s hand still in Maya’s hair, Maya’s pen still in her hand even though the map no longer mattered, the orange ocean in the background, and Akari in the sand with her eyes closed, as if she had been waiting for this since the day they boarded the boat.
When they separated, Maya looked at the ocean for a moment.
Then she looked at him.
"Akari has been pretending to sleep for ten minutes," she said.
Alex looked at Akari.
"And the girls on the boat are watching us ’discreetly’ from the window." She used her fingers to emphasize the irony.
Then she looked at Akari.
Akari with her eyes perfectly closed and her ears perfectly alert.
"What is she thinking?"
Maya looked at her.
"Finally," said Maya.
Akari opened her eyes. The golden ones looked at Maya with the unmistakable expression of someone who had spent months being ignored on her most obvious suggestions.
Maya picked up the map.
She stood up.
Alex stood up too.
The two walked toward the boat with the island behind them and the boat ahead, and Akari on Maya’s shoulder looking at the horizon with the satisfaction of someone who had finally finished waiting.
