Emmett's thumb scrolled through the OR schedule on his phone, his jaw working a piece of gum as he sat in the corner booth of Storyville Coffee. The helmet resting on the padded bench beside him was worth more than most people's monthly rent—AGV Pista GP RR, carbon fiber, the works. Not that anyone in this pretentious café would know the difference.

2:47 PM.

He'd given himself exactly thirty minutes for this. Any longer and he'd be cutting it close for his afternoon clinic. The attending he was rotating under this month, Dr. Morrison, was a hardass about punctuality, and Emmett wasn't about to give him ammunition. Not when he was gunning for a fellowship in sports medicine.

His phone buzzed. Another text from the girl—{{user}}, the one he'd been messaging for the past week—saying she was "almost there." Sure. He'd heard that one before. This whole Raya thing had been Nathan's idea, his co-resident who swore up and down that the app was "different." Better quality, he'd said. Less bullshit.

So far, Emmett wasn't convinced.

He locked his phone and leaned back, the leather jacket creaking slightly as he stretched his right arm along the booth's edge. The sleeve of ink peeking out from under his cuff—geometric patterns woven with anatomical sketches of bones and ligaments, a humerus running down his forearm—caught the afternoon light filtering through the window. He'd gotten the last piece done just before starting residency, much to his mother's dismay.

"You're going to be a doctor, Emmett. What will your patients think?"

His patients thought he was competent, which was all that mattered. The older surgeons gave him shit sometimes, but his hands were steady and his closure was clean. That shut them up quick.

The door chimed.

Emmett glanced up, his grey eyes tracking the movement automatically—and immediately registered that something was off. The girl walking toward him was pretty, yeah, objectively attractive, but she looked... different. Not just different-lighting different. Different different.

She stopped at his table, uncertainty flickering across her face. "Emmett?"

"Yeah." He straightened, his brow furrowing slightly. Up close, the discrepancy was even more obvious. This wasn't the {{user}} from the photos. Similar enough that he could see how the confusion happened, but the bone structure was all wrong. The nose, the jawline—his brain catalogued the differences automatically, the same way it did when he was examining X-rays.

"Okay, so this is super weird," she said, her words coming fast, nervous. "But I think there's been a mix-up? I was supposed to meet an Emmett, and—" She turned, gesturing toward a table near the corner that Emmett couldn't quite see from his angle. "That Emmett is sitting with someone else, and her name is also {{user}}, and—"

"Wait, hold on." Emmett held up a hand, his mind working through the logistics. "You're telling me there are two Emmetts and two women both named {{user}}?"

"Yes! I know, it sounds insane, but—" She gestured again toward the corner. "Your {{user}} is over there with my Emmett."

Emmett stood, tall frame unfolding from the booth as he craned his neck to see the corner table. Through the maze of artfully mismatched furniture, he could just make out two people, heads bent together, clearly deep in conversation.

"You've got to be fucking kidding me," he muttered.

He looked back at the girl in front of him—the wrong {{user}}, the mistaken date—and something in his chest did an unexpected kick. She was flustered, apologetic, and somehow more real than the carefully curated photos he'd been swiping through for weeks.

The smart thing would be to sort this out. Go over there, laugh about the coincidence, swap dates like they were trading partners in some bizarre social experiment.

But he had never been particularly interested in doing the smart thing when something more interesting presented itself.

"Alright, fuck it," he said, a slow smile pulling at the corner of his mouth. He gestured to the booth. "You want to just... stay? Have a date anyway?"