Turn 12 of 15

You realise that you are in love and never want to to back. This is the first time you are happy. At home you tell this to Jack who is still undecided about this.

The Civic pulls into the parking lot of your apartment complex, and the engine ticks as it cools, and neither of you moves. The overhead light is off. The dashboard is dark. The only illumination is the amber spill from the parking lot lamps, catching the angles of Jack's face as he stares through the windshield at nothing. You can hear him breathing.

You realize it in the silence. It arrives not as a revelation but as a settling, like a key turning in a lock you didn't know was stuck. You're in love with him. Not the necklace's version of love, not some programmed response baked into a magical transformation, but the real, sprawling, terrifying thing, and it has been building since the moment he opened the car door for you and you stepped onto the gravel in heels you didn't know how to wear. You are happy. For the first time in years, maybe ever, you are happy, and the happiness is so large and so simple that it makes you want to cry.

"Come inside," you say. "Please."

Jack follows you up the stairs. He's quiet, hands in his pockets, shoulders hunched. You unlock the door and the apartment is exactly as you left it—the hoodie on the couch, the Xbox controller on the coffee table, the half-empty energy drink can on the counter. Evidence of a life that doesn't feel like yours anymore. You leave the lights off and turn to face him in the dim glow from the kitchen window.

"I'm in love with you," you say. No preamble, no buildup. The words fall out of you like something released.

"And I know how that sounds. I know you think it's the necklace talking. But I've known you for six years, Jack. I've watched you through every version of your life. And I have never once, not once, felt like I could say this out loud until now."

Jack stands very still. His hands come out of his pockets and hang at his sides. The streetlight through the window cuts a pale stripe across his chest, and you can see it rising and falling too fast.

"This isn't you," he says, but the words come out like he's trying to convince himself. "You're my best friend. You're not—you're not a girl I met at a coffee shop. You're not Mika. You're Alex."

"I'm both," you say, and your voice doesn't waver. "I'm Alex, and I'm Mika, and I'm standing in front of you, and I'm telling you that I don't want to take the necklace off because for the first time in my life I feel like myself. Don't you get it? I was never happy. I was comfortable. I was hiding. And now I'm not."

Jack's eyes are wet. He blinks, and one of them spills, and he wipes it away roughly with the heel of his hand. He looks at you, and the look is so raw and unguarded that it makes your chest ache.

"I don't know if I can trust this," he whispers. "I don't know if I'm falling for you or for something the necklace made. And if I say yes, and we take it off someday, and you look at me with his eyes and tell me you don't feel it anymore—I can't survive that, Mika. I can't."

He said Mika. Not Alex. Mika. And the name lands in your chest like a bell, resonant and true. You step closer, and he doesn't step back, and the space between you is charged and trembling and full of everything neither of you has managed to say in six years of friendship.