She didn’t really recognize the guy, not until he started talking to her. Just sort of walked up to her station and said “Hey” all familiar, midmorning lull, average thirtyish white guy, half-full cup in hand, at first she was sure she was about to get hit on. All the signs. She readied her “I’m a lesbian actually” face and then he caught her eye, and all she could think of to say was “Oh.”

He leaned familiarly on the counter. “From the, uh—”

“Yeah,” she said quickly, “house party.” He chuckled.

He was squinting at her nameplate. “Pete,” he said skeptically. “Pete the barista. Wait weren’t you…” He raised an index finger in the “I’m going to get this any second now” gesture.

“It’s a nickname,” she said, blushing. “From ‘pizza.’”

“Right, right right, yeah,” he said, shaking the finger and putting it away. He had an odd sly smile on his face. “Delibery girls.”

She blushed. They still called themselves that. None of them remembered how it started. Pete couldn’t even register the word as wrong anymore, it was just their dialect. Like the way they only used their delibery names with each other, the names they’d used during that week or so in the house. Facing the world—aside from being cheeky with her nameplate—she was still Adele, officially, but it felt more and more like a deadname. What she really was after all these months, deep down, was a Pete. And she’d have put money on Dash and Cart being the same.

“We’re not doing those jobs anymore,” she said half under her breath. He nodded, looking sage. “Turn a new leaf kind of thing, sure,” he mused. “Good for you.”

Blessedly a couple of drink orders came in. Her heart was pounding, and she was unsteady at the machine. This guy couldn’t possibly be the guy, she told herself; anyway she didn’t believe there even was a guy. Not in that sense. Dash and Cart swore that was how they met, one main dude who enticed them all there somehow—the how, crucially, never explained—whereas Pete remembered this big freeform, mind-of-its-own scene, mostly male, that had serially and more or less randomly scooped them up, thrown them together and then let them find each other in the gaps. And while she wasn’t proud that they had their first threeway while boys were watching, no way they’d done it under anybody’s supervision, much less let them make porn of it.

He sipped at his coffee and kept lurking. “You guys still hang out?” he asked after she got the lattes up. He had a light accent of some sort, she noticed, Scandinavian maybe, though he looked a little swarthy for the part. “You seemed pretty into each other.” In the complete absence of any possible response she could come up with, Pete picked at an invisible piece of lint on her shirt.

“Anyway, I got some business in town. Staying pretty close to here in fact.” He reached into his sportcoat. “Give you my card just in case,” he said, holding a couple of fingers out to her, and she palmed the thing automatically, without a glance, and dropped it into an apron pocket.

She marinated silently in the awkwardness through another drink order, a complicated venti, but when Pete looked up again he was gone. On her next break she went straight to the bathroom. The card was blank, both sides. She didn’t know what she’d been expecting, but it wasn’t a card with nothing on it. She kept flipping back and forth with it, like if she did the right number of flips or at the right frequency she might discover a secret, extra side.

The stock was heavy, and a shimmery, fugitive sort of pattern seemed to be woven into it. If you caught it just right, quick enough and at a particular angle, you actually could see some difference there. Not in the card so much as in the air, like an afterimage, like a finger tracing a mark. Every time it seemed closer and closer to being readable. She kept at it till someone knocked, and nearly overstayed her break.

“We, uh— we’re a team, you know? It’s not even about the sex really,” Pete called over to him. She’d fucked her delivery job off for that stupid house party so hard she might have ended up homeless. Would, if it hadn’t been for the three of them banding together the way they had. “We got each other’s backs.”

She stepped out of her panties and curled up in one of the club chairs. She worried briefly that she hadn’t asked permission, but it’s not like any of them had been wearing clothes at any point during the house party. It would have been weirder to resist the impulse. A delibery girl was naked any chance she got, it was like a rule they made for themselves. Nothing sweeter than coming home after work and just shedding it all and there’s a naked girlfriend or two there at the door ready to welcome you.

“That blonde,” he said, “which one was she?” He came back from the bar and set her promised bourbon down on the table, taking himself to the chair opposite. He was in this overlong, expensive-looking black robe that kept threatening to trip him up. He held his drink under his nose and gave it an inhale. “She was a firecracker.”

The robe wasn’t cinched, and she averted her eyes from his pale, pouchy groin. “Cart?” she said. She didn’t know why she had to make it sound like a question. “Real salty little number,” he said. He saluted her with his glass and took a sip.

She took an answering sip and looked around. They were in a big open-plan penthouse space, and over her shoulder at the far end Pete could see a pair of Asian girls, long dark hair, side by side on a couch playing what sounded like a fighting game. They were in matching white knee socks and matching mini schoolgirl tartans and nothing else.

She took a longer sip, then another. She hadn’t realized she liked bourbon. “You know I can’t remember coming here,” she said.

“That other one though, the brunette?” He shook his head. “Mouthy for my taste. And lean. I like more curves.” He put his glass down and fixed her with a look. “You came here from work. I stopped in, we chatted, gave you my card?”

A small ruckus of celebration or contention came from the gaming girls, and Pete lolled her head back again to watch them. “Cute,” she said.

“Like em? Koreans. Of age, if you were gonna ask.” He slouched a bit in his chair and crossed his ankles. “I mean it’s a little cliche I guess, Korean girls, identical twins,— I’ve always been fascinated by it though.” He picked up his glass again. “Twinship, you know, twin ESP, that kinda thing? I remember the first time I found out about Siamese twins, I instantly thought what if there was, like, a Siamese twins of the psyche, you know? Like only their minds was conjoined. What would that be like?”

One of the girls had gotten on the floor and had her face buried between her sister’s legs, while the seated one whined and gripped her controller and concentrated her attention fiercely on the screen. Pete couldn’t look away. “Is that the game you used to brainwash us with?” she asked.

“You remember that.” He sounded somewhere between mildly surprised and concerned.

Pete took a long breath. “I fucking love being brainwashed,” she sighed.

Something about saying it out loud made Pete feel suddenly small, and whimpery, and desperately aroused. She heard him chuckle. “Careful what you wish for.”

Pete could feel the drink hitting her now, cold and hot at once. She turned in the suddenly thickened air to meet his eyes, but they were unreadable. There was a narrow, tricky ledge she was on, barely wide enough for her to pass, between this moment now and whatever might be next. Her heart was fluttering in her chest and her breath came ragged.

In the corner the twins moaned into each other’s pussies. “It’s not like I could stop you,” Pete said in their direction. It was the truth. He got up from the chair and put his hand on her shoulder.

After that she was back in her work clothes at the front door. A little time seemed to have passed, but no time had passed. She felt fantastic. Fizzy. From tonight, she told herself, Pete was definitely a bourbon girl. She watched the party dude come towards her down the stairs, black satin still flopping about his ankles, his pair of Korean chicks in tow holding each other’s hands. They parted and went around her for a goodbye embrace, one on either side.

He held a business card loosely between his fingers. He said, “Remember what you did with that card I gave you?” That same sly smile on his face. She had a sudden sharp recollection of watching herself in the bathroom mirror folding a rectangle of heavy paper stock and tearing it into neat quarters. “There was nothing on it,” she said, “so I threw it away.”

He nodded his approval. “This is the card,” he said, lifting it to her eyes. “You’ve had it all along. I want you to show it to your blonde friend.”

“Cart,” she answered automatically. “I need to show it to Cart.” The twins snuggled under her arms. Their frames were small but they had such nice big tits, she loved looking at them all naked and smooshed up against her clothes.

He opened the clasp on her bag. “Yeah it doesn’t look like anything to you, but maybe she’ll see something. Ask her.” He dropped the card in. “For blondie, remember. Let’s not spread it around.”

The twin on Pete’s right reached up to her and brought her head down into a kiss, while the other undid her belt and fished a hand into her slacks. The kiss tasted of pussy and spice. Right away the twins got into a rhythm, and it felt to Pete almost like she was making out with just the one girl, one amazing, talented girl possessed impossibly of two bodies.