Lightning in the Outfield

I was done with running. Literally. Coach Benched had me doing laps until my lungs felt like they'd been scraped with sandpaper, but that wasn't the kind of running I couldn't handle anymore.

The real running? That was the stuff I did every time Liam's eyes locked onto mine across the cafeteria. The straight-up bolt whenever someone mentioned how close we used to be before everything went sideways last summer. The classic回避 maneuvers whenever baseball season rolled around and I had to pretend I didn't still have his jersey tucked in the back of my closet like some pathetic shrine.

So when I found myself at the empty baseball field behind the school at 8 PM, I told myself I was just cutting through. Definitely not drawn here by the gravitational pull of memories I'd been suppressing for nine months.

Then I saw him.

Liam stood at home plate, batting practice alone in the dying light. His swing was clean—like, actually beautiful, the kind of motion that made you understand why people called baseball poetry. Each crack of the bat echoed through the empty field, and I hated how my chest did that thing it always did around him.

"You gonna lurk all night?" he called out without turning around. Because of course he knew I was there.

"Just passing through," I lied, stepping onto the grass.

He tossed me a glove. "You still got that arm?"

Our fingers brushed when I caught it, and a whole season of memories flashed between us. The bonfire where we'd almost kissed. The next day when he started dating Chloe. The way I'd stopped coming to games, stopped watching him play, stopped everything except running from my feelings like they were chasing me with a knife.

"Probably not," I said.

"Play catch with me, Maya."

The sky opened up.

First came the lightning—a jagged tear through the purple-black clouds, illuminating everything in this harsh white flash. Like the universe was finally done with my BS too.

"We're gonna die if we stay here," I said, but I didn't move.

Liam walked toward me through the rain. "You've been running from me for nine months."

"I haven't—"

"You have. And I let you because I'm a coward." He stopped three feet away. Rain plastered his hair to his forehead. "But I'm done watching you run, Maya. Even if you're running away from me."

Another lightning strike, closer this time. The air crackled with static and something else—something that had been building between us since we were fifteen and I didn't know how to be brave.

"I'm not running anymore," I heard myself say.

The first real kiss of my life happened in a torrential downpour behind the baseball field, with lightning cracking the sky open like it was applauding or maybe just warning us: *this is going to be messy, this is going to hurt, but isn't that the whole point?*

We walked home soaking wet, hand in hand, not running at all.