Electric

The pool party was exactly as Maya feared — too many people, not enough space, and that specific kind of humidity that made everything stick to everything else. She'd been hovering by the snack table for twenty minutes, clutching a red plastic cup like it contained the antidote to social suicide.

"You gonna swim or just supervise?" Jordan appeared behind her, all effortless cool in swim trunks that matched his eyes. Her stomach did that thing it always did around him — like swallowing a handful of lightning. Bright, dangerous, impossible to ignore.

"Maybe," Maya managed. "Where's Buster?" The distraction tactic.

"Oh, he's around." Jordan nodded toward the deep end, where his family's golden retriever was happily dog-paddling despite the pool's NO PETS sign. "He loves swimming more than any person I know. Kind of admire that about him."

The sky had been purple-dark all evening, and suddenly the air felt different. Charged. Someone's phone weather alarm blared through the Bluetooth speakers.

"Storm incoming!" someone shouted, and suddenly everyone was scrambling for towels and phones. Maya found herself pressed against the back wall of the pool house with Jordan, watching through the glass doors as the first real crack of lightning splintered the sky.

"Crazy storm," Jordan said, standing closer than necessary. His arm brushed hers — accidentally, probably, but her skin hummed anyway.

"Yeah," she breathed. Outside, another lightning strike illuminated everything in stark white: the pool surface rippling in the wind, lounge chairs overturned, Buster still happily swimming through it all like the weather was just another thing that happened to dogs.

"Hey," Jordan said softly. "I'm glad you came tonight."

Maya's heart was doing that lightning thing again. "Yeah?"

"Yeah. I was gonna text you but, like..." He rubbed the back of his neck, suddenly un-Jordan-like nervous. "Anyway. This storm sucks but I'm not exactly hating being stuck in here with you."

Outside, thunder rattled the glass doors. Inside, Maya smiled — for real this time, not the fake polite smile she'd been wearing all night. The storm raged for another hour. They spent it trading childhood embarrassments and making fun of people from their chemistry class. By the time the rain slowed, everything had changed.

Later, walking to her mom's car under clearing skies, Maya realized she wasn't the same person who'd arrived at the party. The lightning storm outside had nothing on what was happening inside her chest — electric, impossible, and just beginning.