Blackout ✓

01 | identical twin

A/N:

Welcome to Blackout!

Some of you might have come after Handwritten (set four years before).

Some after Nightlife (set a year after).

Some after never, ever seeing my works before.

This note is just to let you know that all my works are set within the same extended universe, with stories focusing on different characters at different times in their life. As with all other Universe 1 stories (unless stipulated), you can read Blackout as a stand-alone.

Enjoy!

▬▬▬▬▬▬▬▬▬▬

IT MUST BE SO AWKWARD when people get identical twins mixed up.

I wasn't an identical twin, so I couldn't say. But imagine meeting someone, forming a friendship with them and then finding out they can't tell you from another person. Granted, you do look and sound exactly like that person, but still. You thought you meant more to them. 

As someone—self-professed—phenomenal with remembering names, I didn't expect to make that blunder ever, let alone tonight.

It was September, and Halston was humming with noises of orientation week on campus. Parties proliferated, and students squeezed into every third house like sardines. At the behest of my friend Sushmita, I was at a house party at one of the student flats off campus. Sush and I had met through the Halston University Women in STEM Association, or WISA—the organisation we'd been devoting countless volunteer hours to.

A junior like me, Sushmita was smart and confident but she also wanted to fuck the living daylights out of the boys' football team captain, to whom she had been cozying up over fall break. The only problem was that he was a really shy person, barely ever partied, and she didn't know if he would even want to hang out with her tonight. So she needed Plan A and Plan B.

Plan A: getting left all on her lonesome in a big, unfamiliar house full of men, in which case she wanted someone around to fall back on.

Plan B: Sushmita's dream coming true, in which case she would unquestionably ditch her company for her one and only chance at, pardon my French, QB dick. Then, she didn't want the guilt of having abandoned a helpless woman to the perils of college party life.

Someone who would be fine whether or not Sushmita was with her, someone who could handle herself either way. That's what she wanted.

Enter me.

Sushmita met me on the committee for a nuclear science networking event we volunteered to organise. In that short month, she'd discovered my raging appetite for loud music, faceless, nameless boys and getting blackout drunk.

And my no-nonsense attitude. It matched hers. She could appreciate that.

"Maybe you can find someone to hook-up with, too. Get over that scumbag ex of yours," she had added during our phone call yesterday.

I'd flicked my hair behind my shoulder and proclaimed, "Already over him."

I slipped into the kitchen and pulled a bottle of vodka from inside my denim jacket, which had an interior pocket just large enough to hold the circumference of the vessel. My silver sequin two-piece set twinkled conspiratorially at me as I twisted off the cap and threw my head back.