I Confessed to the Wrong Twin

Two Texts

SENA

I wake up Sunday with the phone still clutched loosely in my hand, the screen long since gone dark, and for a disoriented moment I almost convince myself I dreamed the whole thing. The panic, the porch, the message signed with a single letter I don't recognise.

I didn't dream it. The text is still there when I unlock my phone, alone in an otherwise empty thread, sent from a number with no name attached at all.

Hope you're feeling better. — R

I sit up against my headboard, blanket pooled around my waist, morning light slanting grey and unconvincing through the blinds, and read it over and over until the words stop meaning anything, until I've been sitting frozen long enough that Priya finally sits up too, squinting at me from her side of the room.

"You've been staring at your phone like it insulted you for the last ten minutes," she says, voice still thick with sleep. "You good?"

"Yeah," I say, though it's not entirely true.

I spend longer than I'd like to admit turning the contradiction over. A green shirt that became a black hoodie sometime between the stairs and the porch. A number given like it was new information, when he'd walked me all the way home already sure of exactly where I lived. A single letter R signing off a text I have no explanation for.

I could ask him outright. It would be easy enough, a single message: did you change your shirt last night? Also, who signs off as R? And yet some instinct keeps my thumb hovering over the keyboard without ever typing it, some reluctance to hand over the fact that I've noticed anything at all, not yet, not until I understand what it is I'm noticing.

By the time I make it down to the dining hall for a late breakfast, I've mostly talked myself into three separate boring explanations. A typo, a joke, a friend borrowing his phone, and none of them sit right, though I decide, for now, to let it sit unresolved rather than pick at it further. I have bigger things to focus on. A stack of readings I ignored all weekend. An article draft due Wednesday. A body still faintly sore from hitting the ground too hard the night before, bruises blooming faint and yellow-green along one knee I only notice when I change out of my pajamas.

Priya finds me at a corner table half an hour later, tray loaded with more pastries than any reasonable breakfast requires, sliding into the seat across from me with the particular energy of someone who has gossip and intends to deploy it immediately.

"Okay, so," she says, "half the girls in my chem lab are saying you had some kind of moment at the party last night. Are you good? What happened?"

My stomach tightens, old habits kicking in fast. Deflect, minimise, control the narrative before it gets away from me the way narratives always seem to. "I just wasn't feeling well. Needed some air."

"That's not what I heard." She's not unkind about it, just direct, the way she always is, dark eyes steady on my face like she's genuinely trying to read whether I'm okay or performing okay. "Someone said Kai carried you out of there."

"He didn't carry me. I walked." The correction comes out sharper than I mean it to, and I soften it with a small, tired smile. "Some guy got handsy in the kitchen. It freaked me out more than it should have. Kai helped me calm down, walked me home. That's genuinely it."

Priya studies me a beat longer, and I brace for the follow-up question I don't want to answer. Why did it freak you out so much? What happened? Are you actually okay? But she surprises me, letting it go with a simple, "Okay. I'm glad he was there, then. And if that guy's name was Marcus, he's a known creep, half the girls on our floor have a story about him."

"Comforting," I say, though something in me does settle slightly at the confirmation that this wasn't some unique, personal failure on my part, just an ordinary hazard of ordinary parties, the kind of thing that happens to plenty of girls who don't carry a year-old trauma underneath their skin waiting to be triggered by it.

I don't see Kai for the rest of the weekend, a fact I notice more than I probably should, checking my phone more than once for a message that doesn't come from the account I actually expect it from. It's Monday, walking out of my first class of the week, when I finally do run into him, jogging to catch up with me outside the lecture hall, hair still slightly damp, wearing a fitted charcoal sweater that fits nothing like the black hoodie from Saturday night, which I notice and then immediately hate myself for noticing.

"Hey." He falls into step beside me, easy as ever, none of the careful weight from Saturday night in his voice now. "How are you feeling?"

"Better," I say, which is mostly true. "Thank you again. For everything."

"Don't mention it." He says it lightly, but there's something searching in the way he looks at me, like he's checking for cracks I might be hiding. "You looked really shaken up. I've been worried."

"I'm okay." I hesitate, then decide to test the water, keeping my tone as casual as I can manage. "Did you end up finding a way back to the party after? I feel bad, you basically babysat me the whole walk home."

"Yeah, of course." He shrugs, unbothered, no flicker of confusion or hesitation in his answer, nothing that suggests he remembers the walk any differently than I do. "It wasn't a big deal."

I study his face for a moment too long, searching for some tell, some c***k in the story. Mostly I find nothing, the same easy warmth in his dark eyes, the same familiar concern, except for one small thing I can't quite place: something in the set of his mouth that doesn't match the softness in his eyes, a fractional delay before he answers that reads less like memory and more like performance. It's gone as fast as I notice it, smoothed back into ordinary Kai before I can decide if I actually saw it or invented it.

"I have to get to class," I say instead of pressing further, already turning to go, my mind spinning faster than I want it to.

You're being ridiculous, I tell myself, weaving through the crowded hallway. You've spent a year finding conspiracies in innocent things. Not everything is a secret. Not everyone is lying to you. It's an old, worn argument, one I've had with myself more times than I can count since everything fell apart back home, and it usually works. It usually talks me down.

It isn't until I'm some steps away that my phone buzzes again, and I glance down without thinking, expecting Priya, expecting anyone except the name that actually flashes across my screen.

Kai: Feeling better today?

I stop dead in the hallway.

Kai is still standing exactly where I left him, twenty feet behind me, phone nowhere in sight, watching me with mild confusion at my sudden halt.

I look down at the screen again, at the name, at the timestamp, and feel the ground tilt slightly beneath the careful, rational voice I've spent all morning trying to listen to.

I wasn't imagining it after all.