Hi @trudgencia. Welcome to The Ink Well! We love it when new writers join us, bringing talent and a fresh voice to our community. You have a very nice writing style, and your story is engaging, interesting, and has an excellent mix of action, dialog and narrative, which we love to see. (Check out our article on this topic in our catalog of storytelling tips.)

We like to provide feedback from time to time to help fledgling writers on their journey. I'd like to share some tips with you to help with future stories.

The first tip is about point of view (POV). You may be familiar with the difference between "omniscient," "first person" and "third person" POV:

• With omniscient, we don't see inside the thinking of any character. We observe the characters like a drone might, sort of hovering around and watching one then the other. For example, we wouldn't know that your character still has feelings for her ex unless it is shown with gestures, movements or dialogue. In your story, if you wanted to use omniscient POV, she could lean toward him. Her eyes could water. She could say, "Jeff, I wish..." and then stop speaking. Through those hints, we could surmise that she still has feelings.
• With first person, we hear the story as told by one person who refers to him or herself as "I" and "me."
• And with third person POV, we hear the story as told from the perspective of one person, but told by a narrator.

For example, you demonstrate very good use of third person POV here:

The varsity jacket he wore with pride all through high school went to ensure Todd Packman, the man who always seemed to be better than him, was stricken down with a mysterious illness for the last three months.

That little scene shows very nicely that the story is being told from Jeff's perspective. We want to know more about Jeff, and what is causing his current distress.

In a longer work like a novel, sometimes the author will shift perspectives from one chapter to another. For example, you might write a chapter titled Jeff and then another chapter titled Cassie. In a short story, written in third person, there is really only room for one perspective. If the author shifts from one perspective to another within a scene it is called "head hopping," and it can be confusing to the reader.

All that is to say that in this story, you started out in third person POV from Jeff's perspective, and then sprinkled in Cassie's perspective. It would be better to tell the story purely from either Jeff's perspective or Cassie's perspective to avoid head hopping. You don't need to go back and change your story, of course. But I thought it would be a great example to share some writing tips with you on POV and perspective. By getting inside that character's head and seeing the entire story from their perspective, you help the reader become fully involved in the story. We want to know what will happen to them, and that compels us to continue reading the story.

The second tip is about tense. It's important to choose present tense or past tense, and make it consistent throughout the story. Most of your story is told using past tense, except for certain phrases where you shift to present tense. In the following passage, for example, I've put past tense verbs in italics and present tense verbs in bold so you can see where it shifts.

He lunged forward toward her. A man possessed desperate for his last chance of survival.

Cassie tried to turn and run but stumbled, falling backward to the ground. She rears her right leg planting her left leg firmly into the ground. Jeff lunged forward, she aimed and thrusted her right leg forward finding its mark halfway between his ribcage and stomach.

“Aarg.” Pain set through his stomach, but he still managed to grab her foot and then leg. “You don’t understand.” He says. He does not completely understand himself.

She's able to get to her knees and then stand.

The third tip is that it's great to use a free grammar checking tool like Grammarly, which will point out spelling and grammatical errors. We also recommend drafting your stories in Google Docs or Microsoft Word, as both of these tools will point out things to fix.

I hope these tips are helpful! We share many more in our catalog of fiction writing tips. Check it out! Best wishes and keep writing. We look forward to reading more stories from you.