Sweaty Palms & Strikeouts

Maya's palms were sweating. Like, actually dripping sweat onto her cargo shorts as she adjusted the coaxial cable for the fiftieth time that morning. Her summer job as a cable tech wasn't exactly the vibe she'd imagined for her junior year, but whatever paid for concert tickets, right?

"You good over there, Maya?" Liam called from across the room. He was sprawled on the beanbag chair, scrolling through his phone like he owned the place. Which, technically, his parents did.

She'd been crushing on Liam since middle school, back when they'd had science lab together and he'd accidentally set his notebook on fire. Now he was the varsity baseball star with 20K followers on Instagram, and she was the girl crawling under his furniture trying to fix his WiFi.

"All good," Maya squeaked. Her voice cracked. Smooth. So smooth.

"Cool." Liam sat up suddenly. "Hey, you like baseball?"

Maya froze, one hand tangled in a mess of ethernet cables. "Uh, not really?"

"Fair." He grabbed a baseball from his desk, spinning it in his hand. "We've got playoffs Friday. You should come."

Wait, was this happening? Was Liam Miller actually inviting her to a baseball game? Her heart did something embarrassing, probably visible through her shirt.

"I'll check my schedule," she managed, trying to sound casual and failing.

"Cool." He stood up, all tall and baseball-player perfect. "I'll save you a seat."

Maya spent the next twenty minutes messing up the cable connections so badly that she had to start over. But when she finally crawled out from under the desk, Liam handed her a Gatorade and told her she was his favorite cable person ever.

Later that night, Maya stared at her ceiling, phone in hand, screenshotting his Instagram story where he'd posted about the playoffs. Her palms still felt sweaty. Some things never changed. But for the first time ever, she thought maybe, just maybe, that wasn't such a bad thing.