[Formerly known as 'Trinkets']
Mahika and Amoli can't stand each other, but that's not the only thing they have in common.
Mahika treats Amoli like she's childish. Amoli thinks Mahika is a stuck-up prude. But Mahika's best friend and Amoli's brother...
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The café is quiet in the way weekday afternoons often are; just the clink of mugs behind the counter and the hum of soft instrumental music playing over the speakers.
Amoli sits at a corner table by the window, her untouched chai growing colder by the minute. Her bag is still at her feet, one strap coiled like a question mark, and her fingers hover over her phone, typing and deleting and typing and deleting and typing and deleting the same sentence over and over.
She has written hey at least six different times.
Then can I tell you something? and then it's not that big of a deal but also kind of is at the same time. But then she'd backspaced the entire thing and locked her phone like it had offended her.
Outside, the sun is soft and golden, catching in the glass, turning everything hazy. But inside her chest, there is a weight she cannot shake.
She's been thinking about it all day. Ever since that morning at Dhruv's place... the warmth of Mahika's friends, the gentle way Sakshi had pulled her into a hug, the rainbow cake, the way Mahika had looked at her like she Amoli was her world. It had all felt like something sacred. Something rare. And sitting in that moment, Amoli had started to believe that maybe she could have that too.
With her own people. With Arnav.
But when it came down to it, the words wouldn't come. Not out loud. Not in person.
So she's been writing.
After Mahika's friends held them like they mattered, like they belonged, the fear felt a little less like a wall and more like a door. Still closed, but maybe... maybe she has the key now.
So she types without thinking this time. She doesn't even let herself look it over before she hits send:
Navi
I don't know how to say this out loud
But I want you to know
Mahika and I are dating
She stared at the screen, heart hammering.
I think I love her
She stares at the screen, heart hammering.
The words sit there like a confession carved into stone. Simple. Spare. Impossibly loud.
A part of her wants to reach out and snatch them back, to rewind time just a few seconds and pretend she'd never had the courage to press send. But she can't. Her thumb did it before her fear could catch up. Now it's just... out there.
Her phone feels heavier in her hands, like it holds the weight of something irreversible.
The world beyond the café window blurs; students walking past, sunlight scattered across the pavement, someone laughing too loudly near the entrance. But in Amoli's chest, everything is still. Suspended. Her breaths come shallow and too fast, barely reaching the bottom of her lungs.
