Sorry I've been gone forever🤭
You wake up to the taste of cheap coffee and the faint smell of rain on the windowsill. For a second your brain refuses to cooperate — Wanda in your guest room, Lizzie curled against you like a live wire, and a bruise that doesn't belong to anyone you know. You blink, push your hair out of your face, and realize you're still wearing last night's sweater. Lizzie is already up, scrolling something on her phone with the same smug expression she had when she tried to prove you belonged to her.
Wanda is gone from the bed.
Your heart thuds in a way that makes you aware of how ridiculous this situation is: two women who look exactly alike, one of them claiming you're her girlfriend, the other swearing you are hers. You swing your legs over the side of the mattress and pad into the kitchen only to find Wanda at the counter, drying a mug with the sort of small, focused movements that look better on her than they should.
"Morning," she says before you can think of something less dumb to say. Her hair is still a little damp around the ears; she smells faintly of something like rosemary and smoke.
"Morning," you repeat, and pause. "You slept okay?"
"Like a log, actually. Your blankets are perfect." She grins, like it's a casual compliment and not a claim that makes your stomach twist.
You hear Lizzie's voice upstairs, muffled but sharp. "Y/n? Where are you? Don't tell me you left me for—"
"—someone from a different reality?" Wanda finishes for her, and both of you snort.
Lizzie stomps into the kitchen like she was born to make dramatic entrances and immediately notices Wanda. Her face goes through that whole progression you know too well: confusion, then recognition, then the physical act of hurling herself toward you. She grabs your waist and squeezes like you're oxygen.
"You're really here," she breathes in your hair. "You... you look like a trashier version of me. And I hate you."
Wanda doesn't flinch. She just tilts her head and says, "You call that an insult? Cute."
"Okay, cute is not what I was going for," Lizzie says, hands still possessive on you. "You're not staying here long, by the way."
Wanda's eyes flick to you. "Are you sure about that? I have plans. Big plans."
There's something in the way she says it that makes you snap upright. "What plans?"
She leans against the counter, chin in her palm, and for a second she looks tired — not the kind of tired from travel but the tired of someone who's been living with an ache for a long time. "Back home, we were supposed to get married," she says. The words land like a confession. "Not the ceremony kind — I mean, we said it to each other in a stupid diner one night. We promised. You left. I couldn't find you. I thought I lost you forever."
Your mouth goes dry because the confession peels something open in your chest that you haven't thought about in a long time: the memory of someone else's hands, someone else's promises you thought belonged to a lifetime you never lived. But you didn't leave anyone. You don't remember leaving. This is Wanda's story, not yours.
Lizzie's grip on your hip tightens until you yelp. "Don't even think about that," she snaps. "You don't get to make those promises here. Y/n made promises to me."
"Made?" Wanda echoes. "What is that? A promise as in a word? Or a promise as in blood?"
You want to laugh and then you don't. The joke is the fact that your life is this—words spinning around you like a pair of planets. Wanda steps closer in a way that is not threatening but entirely deliberate, and you see the old ache in her eyes rearranged into an intent you can almost read like a book.
