Turn 4 of 5

Jax's thumb traces along your jawline, and the touch sends a warm buzz through your whole body. You lean into it, lips curving, and the part of you that wants to be here, wants to be his, wants to be *this* — it's so loud now, so present, that the other part is barely a whisper. Then something catches at the edge of your vision.

A figure stands in the doorway at the far end of the gym. Slim, dark-haired, watching. The transfer student — Mara — has her arms folded and her head tilted at an angle that looks less like concern and more like a scientist observing a specimen approaching terminal velocity. She doesn't move. She doesn't call out. She just watches, and the faintest smile touches the corner of her mouth.

And the moment you notice her, the pleasure *hiccups*. It doesn't stop — the warmth is still there, the golden hum still threading through your body — but something else surges up beneath it. A lurch of recognition that doesn't belong to the girl in the cheer uniform. A memory that the new pages haven't overwritten: a lecture hall, dry-erase markers, pink light exploding outward. The original memory rises toward the surface like a bubble in tar, and the transformation fights back instantly, pressing it down, smoothing it over with new gloss — *omigod, is that, like, a goth girl? Why is she staring at me?* — but the two impulses collide and for one awful second you feel both at once. You are a wealthy, airheaded cheer captain who has never met this woman, and you are Eliot, on your knees in a gym, being rewritten, and the friction between those two selves is a crack of pain behind your eyes.

Jax notices your expression change. "Hey," he says, and his hand moves to the back of your neck, firm and grounding. "Don't get distracted. Eyes on me, babe."

The pressure of his palm is warm and commanding, and the cheerleader in you responds instantly, melting back toward him, letting the pain recede. But the crack stays. A hairline fracture in the narrative the spell is writing over your life. You saw her. You *recognized* her. And the transformation didn't erase that recognition — it buried it under a layer of confusion and glitter, and buried things can be dug up.

Mara unfolds her arms. She takes one step backward into the hallway shadow, and the last thing you see before she disappears again is her eyes meeting yours — not the cheerleader's eyes, not the girl Jax built, but whatever is still left underneath — and mouthing two words you can barely read but somehow understand: *second floor*.