The Maisie I knew had simple tastes.

  Back in school, that was something people never quite noticed about her. Or maybe they did and didn’t know what to do with it. She liked plain notebooks (they were from either Silvine or Pukka Pad, but I couldn’t remember which), one of those thin ones where the writing showed through on the next page. She drank tea without sugar because she forgot to add it and wouldn’t admit she’d forgotten, and she would refuse to try Chicken Tikka Masala because she thought it looked red and red was spicy.

  At the time, that used to annoy my immature seventeen self. She would’ve been more popular back then if she hadn’t been so quiet, if she’d just tried a little. The cheekiest thing she ever did at school was draw a caricature of Mr. Hargreaves on the whiteboard while he was out of the room, rendered with a kind of brutal accuracy that made it instantly recognizable, and forgot to wipe it before the teacher came back. She became famous around the school for two weeks.

  The café she chose felt consistent with that version of her. The chairs did not match, and no one seemed in a hurry to turn tables over. It felt like a place that expected people to sit for a while rather than pass through.

  Maisie sat down, slid her bag off her shoulder, and took out a pen. She walked it between her fingers, letting it flip end over end, catching it without looking. Neat movements. She used to do those little sleights of hand at school too, then gloving. I knew she was good at it—better than she ever let on—but she never did it in front of me. Now, watching her fingers move without thinking, I wondered if it said more about me than her. If I’d been someone she felt comfortable showing unfinished things to, things she cared about, maybe I would have known.

  Maybe this would be a nice conversation starter.

  I nodded at the pen. “You still do that.”

  She glanced down at her hand. The pen stalled, then she set it on the table. “Do what?”

  “Little tricks,” I said. “You used to do it with coins too. I remember you spent an entire lunch break trying to pass a pound coin across your knuckles. You just kept dropping it and picking it back up and wouldn’t talk to anyone.”

  She furrowed her brow, then laughed. “Of all the things you remember about me, that’s what stuck? That’s mad.” She was speaking a bit more slangy now, more relaxed. Good.

  I shrugged. “You chose me talking to Ellie behind the bike sheds as your core memory of me. I think this evens it out.”

  That got a proper smile out of her. She picked the pen back up and rolled it once between her fingers, slower this time. “I forgot about the coin,” she said. “I did get it in the end, by the way.”

  Maisie didn’t delve deeper into the Ellie incident. If she did, I would’ve had things to admit. Maybe she was reasonable enough to believe you could become a different version of your secondary school self.

  “So,” she said, looking up again. “How’s Hungerford treating you, then?”

  “Upgraded,” I said. “There’s now a kettle in the dressing room. Morale has improved dramatically.”

  “Why Hungerford though?”

  “It’s close to Dunsvale, and someone I know works as head coach there.”

  She nodded. “Yeah. That’s very you, to be fair.”

  “Very me?” I asked.

  “Very you,” she said. “You always liked projects. Bit of a fixer, you.”

  I hadn’t realized that was a pattern until she said it.

  The conversation kept moving forward in careful tiptoeing. Maisie stuck to subjects that felt deliberately neutral, like how the weather around here never seemed to decide what it wants to do, and how half the people we went to school with moved to Manchester or Leeds for work. She asked after my brother, but only in the abstract. Never once did she mention the Premier League, never framed it as an achievement, never said the thing she must have known everyone else had said. It felt like she was avoiding turning him into a headline or me into an accessory to it.

  At some point it becomes obvious that this is how she is steering the conversation: icebreakers only, no emotional traps. Maybe she thought she’d left a bad impression the other day, shipping Ellie out the gate.

  Eventually, the words slipped out of me without thinking, “You don’t have to be so careful, you know.”

  Maisie went still. Her finger worried at the handle of her mug, turning it a few degrees back and forth while she thought. “I know,” she said after a moment. “I’m just… out of practice. With you, I mean. It’s been a minute.”

  “That explains the weather talk. Very brave of you,” I said. “You know, you usually talk about non-consequential things when you’re nervous.”

  Her mouth twitched. “That is slander.”

  “Maisie, you once complimented my haircut just so I’d carry your art folder across the car park.”

  “It was very heavy.”

  “It wasn’t that heavy. I carried it like a martyr.”

  She laughed properly at that. Her shoulders loosened, and she finally let go of the mug handle.

  “Okay,” she said. “Maybe I am being careful.”

  “See?” I said. “This is much more familiar. Mild manipulation. We’re back on solid ground.”

  A muted cheer rose from somewhere behind the counter. I glanced over without thinking.

  The café had a television mounted high in the corner, partially obscured by a hanging plant. A match was on—Championship by the look of it. The broadcast angle was wide, and even better yet, there were tactical cams cycling between phases. Someone had turned the sound down, but the movement was enough: two banks of four compressing, a late fullback overlap, a midfield triangle rotating to cover the half-space.

  A tactical goldmine.

  The reward was tempting, annoyingly so. I could do this in five minutes. Less, if the team stuck to pattern.

  I forced my eyes back to the table.

  Maisie was watching me again, tilting her head the way somebody would do when they noticed the brief absence.

  No, Jamie, you knob, stop.

  Mitch was right. There was a place and time for gains. Football wasn’t supposed to be your life, and it shouldn’t take a cute girl sitting across from me for me to realize that.

  I didn’t look back at the television.

  That was when I got a brilliant idea. You know how in cartoons there’s always a little lightbulb that pops on above someone’s head right before they do something they’re convinced is clever? It felt exactly like that.

  The author's narrative has been misappropriated; report any instances of this story on Amazon.

  I took a breath, then another.

  “Do you want to get out of here for a bit?” I asked. “Go for a drive.”

  Her eyebrow lifted. “Anywhere in particular?”

  “Somewhere quieter,” I said. “Clear heads. There’s not much else to do in this town once the coffee runs out.”

  “Where were you thinking?”

  “There’s a spot up toward the Downs,” I said. “Bit of a lay-by, walking paths if you want them. Twenty minutes, give or take.”

  She looked back at me, amused. “I never pegged you for the nature type.”

  “I’m not,” I said. “But you are.”

  That got a short laugh out of her. “Oh. Someone’s learned to be thoughtful.”

  “Don’t spread that around,” I said. “I’ve got a reputation to maintain.”

  She slung her bag over her shoulder. “A reputation for what? Avoiding anything that can’t be measured on a pitch?”

  I felt that one land.

  Now that’s more like her, I thought.

  Maybe today didn’t have to stay in neutral after all.

  She drained the last of her coffee and set the mug down. “Alright,” she said. “Let’s go see your not-nature.”

  The sky was clearer up here in North Wessex Downs. The town lights were distant enough to dull themselves into an orange glow on the horizon, and a scatter of stars hung overhead, not enough to make people wax lyrical, but still about the most ‘natural’ thing I’d looked up all week. It would’ve almost been poetic if it weren’t for the sheep bah-ing at a distance.

  Maisie had kicked her shoes off and tucked her feet up beside her on the bonnet. She’d shrugged out of her jacket and laid it beneath her hands so she wouldn’t scratch the paint, a small, unconscious courtesy. She leaned back on her palms and tipped her head up, and pulled the pen from earlier out of her bag again. It reappeared like a habit she no longer felt the need to police.

  “This is nice,” she said.

  “Told you,” I said. “Top-tier not-nature.”

  A sheep bah-ed in the distance.

  She let out a soft chuckle. “It’s passable.”

  “Passable? You live in Slough.”

  ”I don’t tell people to come to Slough to hang out, though. If this is genuinely the best hanging-out spot you’ve got, then this town’s finished, mate.”

  I snorted. “In my defence, the town’s got a population of… not a lot. You either do this, go to the pub, or pretend Tesco is a social activity.”

  “You go to Tesco when Booths exist?”

  “Fair. Booths is the one reason I stayed.”

  “Surely you didn’t stay in Dunsvale for a mall.”

  “Someone had to keep the local economy alive. Buy milk. Wave at the same three people every morning. What’s surprising is that you are here.” I turned to her. “I had you pegged as the type who’d vanish into a big city and live in a studio flat with bad heating.”

  She laughed, sharper this time. “Wow. You really had a whole future planned out for me.”

  “Tell me I’m wrong.”

  Her gaze dropped to her hand, and she kept rolling the pen between her fingers, end after end.

  “Sometimes life just… goes a way you don’t expect it to,” she said.

  Ah. Vague again. That was new territory I’d wandered into without checking the footing first. Or maybe it wasn’t new at all.

  I said, “It’s not like unexpected is bad. If it hadn’t gone the way it did, we probably wouldn’t be sitting here.”

  She glanced up at me. “Is that a good thing or a bad thing?”

  “You tell me.”

  The cold crept in properly now. I inched closer without really thinking about it, close enough that our shoulders nearly touched. She must’ve noticed, but she didn’t move away.

  We stayed silent for a long while. The sheep had gone quiet. Even the wind seemed to have decided to shut up.

  Then an overlay popped up in front of me.

  The text didn’t move when I blinked. In fact, yet another line slid in beneath it.

  I closed my eyes for a second and let my head tip back against the bonnet.

  Oh, come on. You cannot seriously be gamifying my personal life.

  After a moment, she said quietly, “You’re… different.”

  “Well yeah. I have stubbles now,” I offered.

  She looked at me properly then, then huffed a quiet laugh. “Well, aside from the facial hair—which I assume is a cry for help… I don’t think you’re the same person you were before, Jamie.”

  “Devastating. I was very charming at seventeen.”

  “You talk less now. Or maybe you’ve started thinking before you talk,” she smiled as she said.

  I shrugged.

  She glanced sideways at me. “You know, if you stayed quiet like this, I’d have no idea what you were thinking. Back in sixth form, you never stayed quiet for long. You’d make a joke, or start rambling about something completely unrelated, and then—” She waved the pen vaguely as her words started spilling over each other. “—then you’d say something really sincere and act like it just slipped out.”

  I opened my mouth to object, but she was already going.

  “And honestly,” she added, tilting her head, “you could’ve talked for hours about—well, anything. You’d weave it into a story, and I’d just… follow along. You still kind of do that, don’t you?”

  Another line of text tried to ghost itself into my vision, like it had something important to add.

  Nope.

  I mentally shoved it aside like an intrusive pop-up ad.

  Maisie was still talking like she’d tripped over an unlocked door. “And I think it’s funny that you say you’re different, because you are, but you’re also—”

  “You know,” I turned to her, “you’re always very cute when you get like this.”

  She stopped speaking. Her mouth parted slightly, then closed again as if she’d forgotten what she’d been about to say. For once, she didn’t rush to fill the silence.

  “Oh,” she said.

  Only now did I notice the careful line beneath her eyes, drawn with just enough effort to give their largeness an edge. Her lips were full and soft-looking, and I wondered, distantly and absurdly, how they might taste.

  It all felt right.

  I moved closer. She didn’t move away. If anything, she leaned in by a fraction, like she’d made the decision before she’d caught up with it.

  I leaned in.

  She met me halfway.

  Our lips met like a sentence left hanging, as if I were asking something I didn’t yet know the answer to. Her response was slow, careful, a gentle press that mirrored my uncertainty. My hand brushed her hair back behind her ear, and her hand came up to rest on my sleeve. Her exhale soon came soft and uneven.

  For a moment, there was nothing to optimize.

  When she finally pulled back, she had that dazed look of a lost deer staring at the headlight.

  I opened my mouth, started to say something, then suddenly the overlay popped up above her head again.

  You’ve gotta be having a fucking laugh. Get off my head.

  Her lips parted, and an almost breathless murmur escaped her, “We should keep things… professional…”

  I knew the look. Yeah… she wasn’t entirely sure about all this yet. She was probably right not to be. If we were actually going to work together, then getting tangled up like this straight out of the gate would be spectacularly stupid. Also, I hadn’t even taken her out and offered to pay for her meal. We weren’t expecting anything.

  Plenty of things in my life had gone wrong because I’d optimized too early. This didn’t have to be one of them.

  The drive back was quiet. Maisie hummed along to a song playing quietly on the radio, and I caught her tapping a rhythm on the door panel near the handle, like she always did when she wasn’t talking. I resisted the urge to try and sync my own fingers with hers.

  When we pulled back up to the café, she lingered by the door, hands in her pockets, looking at the glow spilling from the windows.

  “Thanks,” she said. “I had fun. Really.”

  “Good to know.”

  She glanced up at me and a hesitant smile tugged at her lips. “Next time… when we’re not busy with… things.”

  “Noted,” I said, trying to sound casual, but my chest felt oddly full. “Next time, top-tier not-nature again?”

  She laughed. “Night, Jamie.” She slid her seatbelt off and opened the door. “Oh—watch that bend on Mill Lane back to Dunsvale,” she added. “Always a bit slippery when it’s cold.”

  I nodded. She waved, then started down the road toward her house round the corner, disappearing into the night.