Turn 11 of 15

Tell him you don't want to take the necklace off

The question hangs in the car like smoke. Jack's thumb moves across your knuckles, a slow, absent stroke, and he opens his mouth and closes it. The highway stretches ahead, empty and dark, and the Civic's headlights cut a pale tunnel through the nothing. You watch his profile, the line of his jaw, the way his brow creases when he's thinking, and the necklace pulses warm against your collarbone like a second heartbeat.

"What do you mean?" he says. "Like, tonight? You can take it off in the morning, we'll figure out—"

"No." The word comes out harder than you intend, and your voice cracks on it, and you feel him tense beside you.

"I mean I don't want to take it off. Not tonight. Not tomorrow. I don't want to go back."

Jack's hand goes still in yours. He glances at you, and his eyes are wide and searching in the green glow of the dashboard, and you can see him trying to reconcile the woman beside him with the best friend who put on the necklace six hours ago. His mouth works around something he can't find.

"Alex, that's—the necklace was just for tonight. That was the whole point. One wedding, one night, done. You can't just—"

"Mika," you say quietly. "My name is Mika."

The words land like a stone in still water. Jack's grip loosens, not pulling away but going slack with shock, and the car drifts slightly before he corrects it. The silence between you is no longer warm. It's taut, fragile, the kind of quiet that precedes either a breaking or a mending, and you can't tell which way it's going to fall. Your chest aches, and the ache isn't from the necklace.

"I felt it too," Jack says, and his voice is low and unsteady. "At the wedding. I kept forgetting you weren't—I kept looking at you and seeing someone I—" He stops. Swallows hard. His jaw clenches, and his eyes stay fixed on the road, and you can see the tendons in his neck pulled taut.

"But you're my best friend. You're Alex. And whatever this is, whatever the necklace is doing to us, it's not real."

The word lands like a slap. Not real. As if the jealousy was not real, and the kiss was not real, and the way he held your hand through the reception, the way he called you Mika in the dark, the way his eyes lingered when he thought you weren't looking—none of it real. You stare at the windshield and feel something inside you folding, collapsing inward like a house with its supports kicked out.

"It feels real to me," you whisper.

Jack doesn't answer. His hand is still in yours, and he doesn't pull away, and that small fact is the only thing keeping the folding from finishing. The city lights are closer now, orange and scattered along the horizon, and in ten minutes you'll be back at your apartment, and you'll have to decide what happens next, and Jack will have to decide whether the woman he spent the evening falling for was ever really there.