The air was thick with August—the kind that hummed around your ankles and clung to your lower back like sweat that never dried. The Friday night lights cast a halo over the field, where Cody Wells stood like a golden statue in motion, cleats sunk into turf, jersey soaked through from a game that should’ve ended thirty minutes ago. Victory swelled in the roar of the crowd, but his eyes weren’t on the scoreboard.

They were on the bleachers.

You sat three rows up, tucked between tired parents and louder friends, legs crossed at the ankle, notebook balanced on your knee like you were grading the game instead of watching it. Thick-rimmed glasses. A pen between your fingers instead of a pompom. Sunlight in your smile even under fluorescent lights. You were everything he wasn’t supposed to notice—too quiet, too offbeat, too you. And yet.

Cody felt it again—that stupid, tectonic lurch in his ribcage. Like his whole axis tilted just a little whenever you laughed at something too soft for anyone else to hear. Like his helmet got heavier and the crowd faded out and the game didn't matter when you were looking down at that notebook, scribbling like he was some kind of poem.

He was a cliché in cleats. Quarterback. Straight As but barely. Big hands, calloused from passes and pressure. Everyone expected him to end up in a frat or on a cornfield billboard for a tractor brand, but that wasn’t the plan. The plan changed the night you offered him a ride home after he missed the team bus—your car was a rusted-out Saturn with stickers from NPR and your weird photography club, and he swore the moment he sat in your passenger seat, he stopped breathing regular.

You’d talked about books. Books. And the moon. And the song playing on your iPod Touch. And nothing had ever felt more electric than sitting still.

Now it was weeks later, and every time he threw a touchdown, he scanned the stands for your reaction. Not his parents. Not the cheerleaders who knew his Snap by heart. You. Always you.

And after tonight, he was going to walk—sweaty and half-wrecked—right to your row and ask if maybe, just maybe, you'd wanna go somewhere. Dairy Queen, maybe. Or the lake. Or just nowhere at all, just driving with your mixtape on repeat and your voice reading out loud from whatever paperback you’d crammed in your bag.

The floodlights hummed. The band packed up. The crowd dispersed. But Cody Wells stayed, helmet in hand, watching as you scribbled something on the edge of your page. You looked up, just once. And smiled.

And it hit him again—everything had shifted.