by Aidan Casey
rum sour
I can’t remember her name now but it may have been Elena. She was quite attractive: medium height, short fake-blond hair and a good ass but not that young anymore, maybe mid-forties. We got talking a couple of times during warm-up and I had the feeling she liked me. I was in no rush because I was seeing a younger girl I was really into but she broke up with me, leaving me eager to move on.
One day, I ran into Elena among the pedestrians crossing the street near the old town hall. I went, ‘Hey Elena!’ but she just looked at me and then she said, ‘I’m not Elena’. I was pretty taken aback but I was sure it was her. After a bit, she explained, ‘Elena’s my sister, we’re twins.’ And she told me her name, which I can’t remember, so, for obvious reasons, I’m going to call her Elena.
‘We talked a bit and I decided to stick with plan A, which was, ‘Are you in a hurry?’ and, ‘Let’s get a coffee’, which we did. And she told me a bit about herself. They were identical, she had a daughter about Seb’s age. I probably talked about Seb, which was all I ever talked about then. We got on well and, on the basis that it didn’t make any difference because they were identical, I went ahead and asked her out anyway. We arranged to meet in the evening but she said she would run it by her sister just in case.
Later in the day, I got a text from her. Her sister was pretty disappointed and reckoned that, as the one I had originally been interested in, she should be the one to meet up with me. And Elena put it up to me to choose. It was a bit of a dilemma. On the one hand, obviously, it was all the same to me but, on the other, I felt like my arm was being twisted and that always pisses me off. So I answered, ‘Well, I asked you out, so I’d like to go out with you.’
A good while later, I got another text back. I suppose they had been having words. She was cancelling the date because it was only going to cause trouble with her sister, and it wasn’t going to be worth it for her.
There’s a coda to this story. Years later, I wrote it up and sent it off on spec to a new magazine. I got a very nice reply from the editor saying that she was actually a twin herself so she had found the story really interesting, although they wouldn’t be taking it as it wasn’t a good fit. It seems that twins and co-incidences are never far apart. Of course, I had to ask her, ‘What would you have done in Elena’s situation?’ She answered, ‘We would have cut you in half.’
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