Sweating It Out

Leo's palms were sweating. Again.

He wiped them on his swim trunks for the third time, leaving dark patches on the navy fabric. The pool party was in full swing—literally—and everyone from sophomore year was there. Everyone except Maya, who'd moved away in October.

"You good?" asked Jordan, floating in the deep end with a Solo cup balanced precariously on his stomach.

"Yeah," Leo lied. "Just warming up."

The truth: he'd been "spying" on Maya's Instagram stories for months. Each post was like a tiny knife twist—beach trips with new friends, inside jokes he didn't understand, a life that kept moving without him. Social media was supposed to connect people, but mostly it just reminded him how much he was missing.

His palms started sweating again.

"You gonna swim or what?" called Chloe from the diving board. She was wearing the same bikini she'd worn to the last party Maya attended.

Leo's chest tightened. Everyone expected him to be over it by now. Four months wasn't that long, was it?

He took a breath and slid into the pool.

The water hit him like a shock—cool, immediate, everything above surface level fading into muffled silence. This was why he loved swimming. Underwater, there was no social media to check, no sweaty palms to hide, no expectations to meet. Just movement and breath and the weird peacefulness of being suspended in something bigger than yourself.

He kicked off from the wall, stroke after stroke, until his arms burned and his thoughts finally quieted. When he surfaced, gasping, the world looked different. Not fixed—just different.

Jordan was still floating. Chloe was still on the diving board. The party kept spinning without him, and that was okay. Some things you couldn't control.

But you could choose to keep swimming.

Leo wiped his wet hands on his trunks. Not sweating anymore. Just wet. Close enough.