Sweaty Palms & Match Point

Maya's phone buzzed for the third time in five minutes. The group chat was blowing up about Jake's padel party, and she still hadn't RSVP'd. Her palms were literally sweating—like, actually gross—and she wiped them on her jeggings for the umpteenth time.

"You going?" asked Chloe, spinning around in her desk chair and holding up her own iphone with the notification lighting up her face. "Everyone's gonna be there. Even Jordan."

Maya's stomach did that thing where it felt like she'd swallowed a handful of butterflies. Jordan. The same Jordan who'd sat behind her in bio last semester and had somehow graduated to living rent-free in her head.

"I don't even know how to play padel," Maya protested, even though they both knew that wasn't the real issue. She could YouTube a tutorial in five minutes flat.

"Girl, please." Chloe rolled her eyes so hard Maya almost laughed. "Half the people there are gonna be pretending to know what they're doing. It's like tennis but with walls. You'll be fine."

That Saturday, the padel courts near the community center were packed. The smell of sunscreen and anticipation hung thick in the air, someone's speaker blasting a playlist that was basically just last summer's hits on repeat. Maya stood near the fence, gripping her rented racquet like her life depended on it.

"Need a partner?"

She turned to find Jordan standing there, all easy confidence and perfectly messy hair, holding out their phone. "We're doing mixed doubles. Jake and Chloe are already destroying everyone else, and I'm down a partner."

"Oh! Um, yeah, sure." Maya hoped her voice didn't sound as weirdly high-pitched as she thought it did.

They played three games. They lost all three. But somewhere between Jordan laughing at Maya's spectacularly bad serve that somehow still went in, and Maya inexpertly returning a ball that Jordan couldn't get to, something shifted. The sweaty palms thing stopped mattering so much.

"Yo, you're actually not terrible," Jordan said afterward as they sat on the bench sharing a giant water bottle because neither had brought their own. "We should practice sometime."

Maya's phone sat in her bag, screen probably cracked from all the times she'd obsessively checked it today. But for once, she didn't feel the need to. Some moments were better off undocumented.

"Yeah," she said, and her smile was genuine this time. "I'd like that."