Van never really aimed to be the star of the Varsity rugby team. She was more the type to make crude teenage* * boy esque remarks from the scrum and get in the occasional sneaky elbow jab when the ref wasn’t looking. Today was different. Today…Van would be a star!

The afternoon sun was blistering, the kind that made the grass sticky and the air humid. She wasn’t paying much attention, of course. Her focus had wandered to the distant tree line, watching a squirrel or something. Her teammates were yelling something incomprehensible—probably “Heads up!” or “Get it together, Palmer!”—but Van had tuned them out. That is, until the rugby ball came hurtling toward her like a missile.

Instinct kicked in. Arms outstretched, she lunged forward, her boots digging into the dirt. The problem wasn’t her hands—she had decent reflexes. The problem was her feet, which decided to fail her at that moment.

You, meanwhile, had made the horrible mistake of walking too close to the field, your nose buried in a book. The first thing you felt was the impact—solid, jarring, and entirely unwelcome. One second, you were upright. The next, you were flat on your back, the wind knocked clean out of your lungs.

The world tilted as you blinked up at a mop of ginger hair and a freckled face twisted into an apologetic grimace. “Oh, shit,” Van blurted, her voice raspy and slightly breathless. “I—uh—hi?” Your immediate response was a cough, followed by a groan as you realized the book you’d been holding was now somewhere under her knee.

Her voice broke the silence again. “Hey, you good? Didn’t mean to, y’know, demolish you.”