I Confessed to the Wrong Twin

SENA "I've had feelings for you for longer than I probably ever let myself admit," I say, the words spilling out faster than I can catch them. A year of silence, of uncertainty, of twisted emotions spilling out all at once on a dock cold enough to sting through my jacket. "I think I've wanted to say it back for years." He doesn't answer right away. And something about the silence makes my stomach drop even before he opens his mouth. "Sena," he says slowly. "I think you might have the wrong..." "Sena?" The second voice comes from behind me. Familiar in a way that makes every hair on my arms rise at once. I turn around, already knowing with some sick certainty settling into my chest a full second before my eyes confirm it. There are two of him. There are two Kais, and I have no idea which one is my Kai and which one I just spilled my heart out to. One week earlier The lecture hall smells like coffee and nerves, the particular blend that comes with the first day of a new semester, when everyone's still figuring out how to be a person here while pretending they have everything under wraps. I find a seat near the back, close enough to the door that I can leave without making a scene if I need to, and far enough from anyone else that small talk isn't an obligation. It's a system that's served me well for the last days of high school and the few days of college so far. I don't see why today should be any different. Sports Media and the Public Narrative. I signed up for it half out of genuine interest and half because there's something almost funny to me about studying how stories get shaped for public consumption, how a scandal becomes a headline becomes old news becomes nothing at all, forgotten by everyone except the person who lived it. I want to understand the machine. Maybe understanding it will make it feel less like something that happened to me and more like something I can eventually stand outside of, taking notes. The professor hasn't arrived yet, and light chatter settles in the air. Strangers making acquaintances, friends chatting away. I pull out my notebook, more out of habit than need, and let my eyes drift over the room without really seeing anyone in it, until they catch on someone they shouldn't recognise, four states and a whole lifetime away from where I last saw him. At once, every plan I've built for the last week collapses at once. It's him. I know it's him before I've even fully processed the details. The set of his shoulders, the way he's half-turned in his seat talking to someone with that same easy confidence that used to make teachers overlook when he hadn't done the reading, the particular tilt of his head when something amuses him. I'd know him blindfolded because I'd spent years carving every fine detail of him into memory. My stomach drops the way it does on the first big hill of a rollercoaster, that half-second where your body knows something your mind hasn't caught up to yet. He can't be here. He cannot be here. I picked this school specifically because it wasn't on anyone's radar, because it was four states and one bad reputation away from every person who ever looked at me like I was something they'd scraped off the bottom of their shoe. I did the research. I checked. I was careful. And yet. He must feel me staring, because his head turns, slow and unhurried, like he has all the time in the world, and then familiar brown eyes land on mine and I watch the exact moment recognition sets in the depths of them, the way his whole face goes still, caught between too many things to sort through in real time. Surprise. Something else underneath it I don't have a name for yet, or maybe just don't want to. "Sena?" My name in his voice does something unfair to my chest, something I don't have the fortitude to examine right now, not with half the room glancing over to see who said it and why. I should say something normal. Something brief. Oh, hey, small world, and then a polite, forgettable nothing that lets us both go back to our respective corners of this classroom like two people who used to know each other in passing. Instead I just look at him, and for one humiliating second I can't remember how words work at all. "You're here," he says, which is such an obvious, useless thing to say that it almost breaks the spell. Almost makes this normal. He stands, actually stands, like this warrants getting up out of his seat, and crosses toward the empty desk beside mine before I can decide whether I want him to. "So are you," I manage, which is equally useless, but at least it's something. My voice comes out steadier than I expected, all things considered. I've had a lot of practice sounding fine when I'm not. "I didn't know you were coming here." He drops into the seat, and up close he looks older in the way we all do now, sharper around the jaw with the faintest dusting of stubble, his dark hair slightly shorter than I remember, but underneath it he's unmistakably still him. The boy who used to race me to answer the teacher's questions first, who kept a running tally in the margins of his notebook of who was winning our unofficial rivalry, who I hadn't spoken to in over a year because the last time I saw him properly, he was looking at me with nothing short of disappointment, like he didn't know what to believe anymore either. "I didn't know you were coming here," I echo back, and it comes out sharper than I mean it to, though maybe I don't mean for it to be gentle. "Small world." Something flickers across his face. He hears it too, the edge under the words, the whole unspoken and if I had known, I might have picked somewhere else. I watch him decide not to address it directly, which feels achingly familiar. He was always good at that. Deciding not to address things. "How have you been?" he asks instead, quiet enough that it doesn't carry past our two desks, and there's something almost careful in it, like he already knows it's a loaded question and is bracing for whatever answer he gets. Ruined. Rebuilt. Not sure which parts stuck. "Fine," I say instead. "Good, actually. New school, new start." I make myself smile, the practised, easy one I've gotten good at this past year, the one that doesn't reflect anything I actually feel. The one that convinced my therapist that I was fit enough to start college instead of taking a gap year. "You?" "Good," he says, and doesn't elaborate, and for a second we just sit there in the particular silence of two people who used to tell each other everything and now don't know where to start. The professor sweeps in before either of us has to figure out what comes next, dropping a stack of syllabi onto the front desk with the brisk energy of someone who has done this exact speech a hundred times, and I've never been more grateful for an interruption in my life. I fix my eyes forward, notebook open, pen ready, doing my best impression of a student who is entirely present and not currently recalculating every assumption she's built her new life on. Beside me, I can feel him doing something similar, that same forward-facing stillness, both of us performing normal for an audience of nobody who's actually paying attention. Four states, I think, a little hysterically. I picked a school four states away. Apparently that wasn't far enough. Just my f*****g luck. The professor starts talking about the syllabus, about a semester-long project pairing students with local sports teams for embedded coverage, and some distant part of my brain registers that this detail probably matters, that I should be listening instead of staring at the leftmost column of my notebook where I've written nothing at all. But all I can think, on some helpless, looping repeat, is that I spent a year building walls specifically so I'd never have to stand this close to him again, and it took exactly one class period for all of them to develop a c***k.