Running on Nerves

Maya's hands were literally shaking. Like, actually vibrating as she stared at her reflection, applying mascara with the precision of a bomb defusal expert.

"You good?" Kai asked, not looking up from their phone. "You look like you're about to pass out."

"I'm FINE," Maya lied, her voice cracking mid-syllable. "Just...

pre-game jitters."

"It's a coffee date, Maya, not the Olympics." Kai snorted. "Chill."

Easy for them to say. Kai wasn't the one meeting Ezra—Ezra, who'd been sitting two tables away in bio since September, whose laugh was stupid cute, and who'd finally, FINALLY noticed Maya existed enough to suggest "hanging out sometime." Casual. Nbd. Except total bd because Maya had been crushing low-key since forever and now her whole future happiness depended on not being awkward in ten minutes.

She'd taken her vitamin D that morning because her mom claimed it helped with "mood regulation" and honestly Maya needed all the regulation she could get. She'd spent forty-five minutes picking an outfit that said "effortlessly cool" and not "I spent the entire morning overthinking this." She'd practiced casual responses to normal questions in the mirror. The playbook was solid.

She checked her iPhone. 2:47 PM. Three minutes late.

"Running late!" she'd texted Ezra earlier, which wasn't even a lie—she'd literally been running down Oak Street because she'd misjudged time so dramatically that she'd had to sprint. Her palm was still sweating from exertion and nerves combined.

"Let me see your hand," Kai said suddenly, grabbing Maya's wrist before she could protest. "Your lifeline is crazy long. You're gonna live to be ninety."

"Since when do you read palms?" Maya pulled away, wiping her palm on her jeans. "That's not even real."

"Everything's real if you believe hard enough," Kai said sagely, which was objectively the dumbest thing Maya had ever heard but also weirdly reassuring?

Her phone buzzed. HERE!

Maya's stomach did a full gymnastics routine. This was it. The moment of truth. The meet-cute she'd been low-key writing in her head since September.

"You got this," Kai called out as she reached the door.

Maya took a breath, smoothed her shirt one more time, and stepped outside. And for the first time all day, she wasn't thinking about her trembling hands or her carefully curated outfit or whether she'd remember how to speak English. She was just thinking about Ezra, and coffee, and how maybe—just maybe—this was exactly where she was supposed to be.