Roz is trying to figure her escape plan.

She’s lying in Daphne’s bed, grimly removing Daphne’s kneecaps or elbows from the small of her back at intervals. Daphne may be a sound sleeper, but she’s not a still one. Though it’s just as well. The digital clock on the bedside table is glowing 4:07, and Roz is beginning to get sleepy. But she can’t fall asleep because she has to leave before Frasier knows about any of this, and she can’t leave because she doesn’t have the keys to get out, because Frasier is a psychopath who locks his door with a key from the inside. The twist-bolt lock isn’t enough – he needs to double-lock it so no one can get out? What does he think, that Martin’s going to sneak out in the night and moon the security cameras? Anyway, she hasn’t got the foggiest idea where he keeps his keys, and she needs Daphne to tell her. But Daphne, as she has already established, is a sound sleeper. Plus, she’s had maybe a few too many gin and tonics. Plus, she and Roz spent the first half the night screwing. That last thing might not be strictly relevant, but Roz has to admit that in these circumstances it’s something of a conversational inhibitor:

Hi, Daphne – no, don’t get up, it’s okay. I was just wondering where Frasier keeps his... you really don’t remember? Oh. Well, don’t worry about it. I just need –

No, I need Frasier’s keys. No, really, don’t get up, just tell me, we can talk in the –

Sorry about that. I don’t know where my shirt is. No, no, don’t bother, it’s okay. Can I just borrow one of yours, though? I just want to drive home before –

I really think you should maybe just sleep this off, and we can talk later when you’re –

No, I didn’t try to get you drunk! In fact, you wanna know the truth, you basically came on to – well, no, maybe it – you know, this all just kind of – look, later, okay? Just please tell me where the –

No, I’m not a lesb—

Daphne’s knee lands in Roz’s lower back again. Biting back a highly toxic string of epithets, Roz shifts out of the bed as quietly as possible and makes her way to Daphne’s bathroom.

She’s afraid to run the water above a trickle for fear Daphne will hear it, but the cold water revives her a bit anyway. It’s time to look at her options.

One: she can sneak around the house, peering around all the objets d’art and quietly sliding open drawers until she finds the keys. Or, more likely, until Eddie barks enough to wake the family up and she gets caught in a compromising position with some creepy African love god. No good.

Two: she can try shinnying down a drainpipe or something. No, not a drainpipe. This is the 19 th floor of Elliott Bay Towers, not the second floor of her boyfriend’s house, and she’s 36, not 15. But a fire escape or something. Or... seriously, Roz? A nineteen-floor-high fire escape on one of the ritziest buildings in Seattle? She grinds her fists into her eyes furiously, trying to clear the remnants of the gin out of her head and get focused.

Three: she can stay until Daphne wakes up, and convince Daphne to hide her in the bedroom until it’s safe to sneak out. Practically speaking this would be the best option, except that there might not be a good chance to sneak out...

...but that’s not the real reason, and staring at the raccoon-circles of mascara under her eyes in the mirror, Roz knows it. The real reason is that option three would involve talking, and Roz isn’t ready for the talking.

* * *

The night had started off like a million others. Daphne was a mess over her breakup with Joe, so Roz had cleaned her up and brought her to the singles bar at Pike and Elm, just like she’d done with dozens of other newly single friends over the years. It was the kind of night that was always exciting without ever turning too wild: they’d have some drinks, Roz would guide her friend over to the second-hottest guy in the room and get them on the road to a hookup, and then turn her own attention to the hottest guy in the room and nab him for herself. And it had all started off okay... but then the second-hottest guy in the room had left with some blond bimbo with tits like helium balloons, and the hottest one turned drunk and ugly and got kicked out... and...

...and how many drinks had they had, anyway?

No. No. Things had gotten fuzzy, but there was plenty that Roz could remember if she chose. She just wasn’t so sure she wanted to remember.

The guys Roz had picked out went home and it was just Roz and Daphne again, and there were plenty of other guys they could have gone after if they’d regrouped and started again, but somehow they didn’t feel like it so much anymore. Roz would have expected Daphne to disintegrate into tears of fresh rejection after Hottie-Two’s defection with BouncyBoobs, but she didn’t seem to mind so much. She’d whispered in Roz’s ear at one point that she was tired of that type, the well-muscled prettyboys looking for a quick lay. “I think it’s time I started looking in a new direction,” she’d said.

Roz swivels her head sharply, casting a glance at the sleeping form in the bed behind her. Was this what she’d meant? Had Daphne planned –

Well, it had hardly seemed planned.

The images are flooding back, and Roz isn’t sure she wants them to. Not now, not while she’s sitting half-naked on Daphne’s bathroom floor, the clock ticking toward 5 am and every tick a little more dangerous. She needs to get out of here first, get back to the safety of her own apartment, away from the smooth whirring of central air and the light, lingering scent of Daphne’s citrus body spray.

But that isn’t happening. So she places her hands on her throbbing temples and lets the memories of the night come into focus.

The problem is that there’s not much *to* remember, no long, complicated story that would explain how the two of them had wound up here. They’d been at the bar and somehow when the hotties had drifted off neither Roz nor Daphne had made a move to find replacements. They’d laughed the guys off as nuisances, more trouble than they were worth. And then they’d moved their chairs a little closer. And laughed a little harder. And ordered some more drinks. And the night wore on and Roz’s cheeks were burning, her fingers cold, and everything was hilarious and their hands kept brushing on the table.

And neither of them’d been in any shape to drive anywhere, so they’d left Roz’s car at the bar overnight and grabbed a cab. And cabs were hard to come by and they were headed in opposite directions, so Daphne had invited Roz back to Frasier’s to crash for the night. It had seemed reasonable enough at the time, Roz too drunk to give any thought to how Frasier might react, or what he might think, or anything at all. But she wasn’t too drunk to notice how Daphne’s hair caught the light from the streetlamps as it swung over her shoulder. Daphne was really awfully pretty. Hottie-two must have oatmeal for brains.

They’d even had a few more drinks back at Frasier’s apartment, though Roz was pretty sure that was mostly because they’d both been unable to resist the naughty pleasure of breaking open one of Frasier’s bottles of hundred-dollar wine. Well, hell, it was good wine. They’d drunk it cross-legged on Daphne’s bed, purply-red splashes spilling over the rims now and again as they leaned dizzily on one another.

And somehow (how, Roz couldn’t remember) the talk had turned to their high school and college years. Roz had been astonished to learn that Daphne had been an actress on a British sitcom from the ages of twelve to sixteen. “Mind Your Knickers”, something about girls at a boarding school. How could Roz never have known this? Daphne’s cheeks went from flushed to flaming – it wasn’t something she liked to talk much about, she said. Roz could sympathize; it sounded like a pretty crappy show, not something you’d want all your friends and acquaintances buying DVDs of. But... holy shit. A TV star. What else didn’t she know about Daphne?

Well, a few things.

“Oh, and of course there was Melly,” Daphne had said in her rambling account of what life was like on the set, waving her hand randomly, her wine sloshing over again. The bedspread was beginning to look like they’d been slaughtering chickens on it. “She played me best friend on the show, y’know. For awhile she and I had quite the hot little thing going.”

Roz had stared openmouthed, entirely unable to assimilate this information. “Daphne! Are you telling me –“

“Well –“ Daphne’s brow had crinkled; she seemed to be genuinely trying to remember – “I guess it wasn’t so long. A few nights after rehearsals ended, if it was too late to go home, and we were camped out in the green room. For maybe a few months, then she got into a hot and heavy thing with one of the actors on the show. Big hairy fellow. But oh, we did our bit of messing around for awhile. You know, a kiss here, some groping there, and ooh, wouldn’t we heat up our little corner!” She’d laughed harder at Roz’s astonished expression. “Come on, don’t tell me you’ve never tried it?”

There was a definite challenge in her tone, and Roz was not used to having her sexual experience challenged. So instead of laughing it off, she’d upped the ante. “Well, hell, I’d be open to it,” she said, and she’d licked a drop of wine off her lips, a little more slowly than she’d needed to. “If I thought the girl would make it worth my time.” The words had hung in the air between them, waiting for one of them to tip the balance.

And in the end it was Daphne who’d done it after all. She was already heading into another drunken lean, but her right eyebrow had cocked up a half a second before she’d caught herself, and Roz knew what was going to happen. As smoothly as if she’d been practicing it Daphne’s chin angled up and in, and, hey, here they were kissing after all! The world tilted a few degrees off its axis for Roz, and the wineglass had finally slipped out of her fingers, pouring its contents down the side of the bed and bouncing a time or two on the rug. Neither of them noticed.

What had happened from then on had been shockingly exciting for Roz. She loved sex, spent as much of her time having sex as she could, in fact; but over the years she’d become accustomed to the fact that she’d pretty much done it all. Not that it ever stopped being fun, but there were only so many positions you could try and so many ways to spice things up. Or so she’d thought.

But now, running her hands over the curves of Daphne’s body, slipping her tongue into the little hollow above Daphne’s collarbone and then running it down swiftly over her left breast, tracing the nipple with her tongue and feeling it stiffen as Daphne gasped – Roz thought fleetingly that she hadn’t been this turned on in a couple of decades. The newness of it all, the dizzying sense that the night was full of possibilities and that she’d never experienced a fraction of them... God! She felt nineteen again!

Except, of course, that she had those couple of decades of experience under her belt still. And it was surprising how many of the skills she’d learned were transferable. Then, too, there was the fact that Roz had spent a lot of time over the years figuring out exactly what the guys she was with ought to do to her – or, in the occasional dry spell, what she ought to do to herself – to send her into the kind of shrieking, toe-curling orgasms she deserved. That knowledge turned out to be transferable, too.

All in all, Roz would concede that Daphne might have had better sex in her lifetime. But she didn’t think it had happened very often.

And so they’d fucked long into the night, and Roz had had to shove a corner of a pillow into Daphne’s mouth a few times to keep her from waking anybody up. To be fair, she had to admit she hadn’t been so great on the self-control herself, though with her ass in the air and her face buried in a pillow it had been a little less noticeable.

Oh man. Roz sinks slowly to the floor of the bathroom, placing her forehead against the comfortingly cool tiled surface of the wall. She’d come out here to try to get her head straight (ha, ha... ha) and figure out what to do next. She’d come out here thinking of what had happened as a disaster, and damage control as her immediate task. Now she’s sitting here on the bathroom floor getting all turned on again, all by her lonesome.

And instead of thinking about how to get home, instead of nailing down that escape plan she’d been so focused on, she’s half-wondering if they’d maybe want to do it again sometime.

Not Daphne, the logical part of her brain insists. Go to a gay bar for Christ’s sake if you really want to do this, but not Daphne. She works for Frasier. You work for Frasier. You’re, like, Frasier-employee-sisters.

Ew.

No, but seriously, it’d be totally weird. Tonight was totally weird. You were both drunk and you know you’d never have done this if you were sober.

So? A lot of fun things start that way.

So you might think you want to make this more than a one-time thing – and be honest, you think all those drinks have really worn off yet? – but Daphne is not going to want to be messing around with you in the clear light of day.

How do you know?

And that’s just it, of course. Roz doesn’t know. She’s got no idea what Daphne’s going to be thinking about this when she wakes up, or what she was going to say. She doesn’t even know what she herself wants. Sure, last night had been a hell of a good time, but she knows that last night, with all that spontaneity (and all that alcohol), isn’t going to come around again. And is she seriously thinking about dating Daphne? They’d been friends for years. Daphne?

(She’s really gorgeous, Roz has to admit. It had been a kick, touching someone so soft – not something Roz is used to, but damn, Daphne’s sexy. And funny, and sweet. And a lot better in bed than Roz would ever have predicted. All those cracks Frasier had made for years about the English and sex – and Daphne herself – had turned off to be way off the mark.)

After all, the best relationships were the ones that started as friendships first... weren’t they?

No, Roz corrects herself. The best marriages were the ones that started as friendships, or so she’d been told. The best random flings were the ones where you spent a torrid six weeks screwing without ever finding out the other person’s middle name, then lost their phone number a week after the fling ended and never missed it.

Friends with benefits?

Come on! Daphne’d never go for it.

None of this is getting her anywhere. But Roz can’t seem to let it go, her thoughts racing pointlessly like a gerbil in one of those little plastic wheels. Her eyes are getting grainy and her head’s nodding every so often now, but she’s got to figure something out – figure out what she’s going to do in the morning, what she’s going to say to Daphne, even what she wants to happen from here on out – before she falls asleep. And it would be especially idiotic to fall asleep on the bathroom floor. Imagine how that’d look in the morning.

Imagining it, she drops off to sleep.

* * *

She wakes up with a numb left leg, one hell of a crick in her neck, and Daphne standing over her.

“Oh.” She scrambles to her feet, then promptly falls over as her left leg refuses to support her. “Oh. I – hey, Daphne.” She grabs the towel rack and uses it to haul herself to her feet. Daphne is looking amused, and – what? She can’t read the expression flickering a little deeper down.

“My, my,” Daphne says, and there’s definitely a laugh hiding in her voice. “What are you doing in here?”

“Oh.” Shit. So she didn’t remember. How in the hell is Roz going to explain this one? “I – well. I kind of... well, we –“

Daphne brushes this off impatiently. “Oh, I know, we did our share of drinking last night. But the bathroom floor, Roz? She lets the laugh go at that. “You’d have been welcome to share the bed with me rather than crumpling up in that corner there all night, but you’re closer to the toilet here, after all, and I suppose I should be thanking me lucky stars that neither one of us did chuck up all over me room. Though we did spill quite enough wine on the bed, didn’t we? Oh, Frasier’s going to give me hell for that. I suppose he’ll be docking me pay for six months to pay for it.”

Roz stares at her, not quite sure what to make of this. “Daphne –“

“Well, come on, let’s at least find you your shirt. Not very comfortable to sleep in, I guess? Can’t say as I blame you. I know it gets you results, Roz, but how you can spend an evening out in a corset is beyond me. I’d be too pinched at the waist to think of anything else.”

Roz is processing this slowly. Daphne’s dressed now, the edge of a lacy nightie showing beneath her bathrobe. But she sure wasn’t wearing any clothes when Roz had left her last night. And – what was that about Roz’s shirt not being comfortable to sleep in? As if she’d taken it off to sleep more comfortably? That wasn’t why she’d taken it off and Daphne knew it.

At first Roz had been convinced that Daphne had forgotten, and she’d figured that would be challenge enough to deal with. But Daphne keeps talking, even though she’s got to have the same hangover clanging through her head that Roz has, even though she looks like hell, like she ought to be spending the next week with her head under a pillow. She’s chatting and laughing and there isn’t a single break in her chatter for Roz to interject anything at all. Not a single pause where Roz could say Daphne, about last night –

And she’s pulling Roz’s shirt out from under the bed, and rolling up the sheets (which smell at least as much like sex as they smell like wine) to toss them in the laundry, and from her chatter anyone listening in would think they were just two women who’d had a few too many drinks the night before and crashed in Daphne’s room for the night. It’s possible, Roz supposes, that Daphne’s putting on this act for the benefit of any of the Crane men who might happen to overhear it, but seeing the look in her eyes, Roz doesn’t think so. Underneath the shifting, animated expressions on Daphne’s face, there’s a hard, taut look, and a rigidity to her shoulders that belies her casual talk. Roz is skilled in reading morning-after body language. This is the “don’t go there” look.

And so she knows that she and Daphne will never speak of this again. Roz will button up her corset and laugh along with Daphne as they recount the bowdlerized version of the night, and Roz won’t bother to avoid Frasier after all, because – she sees this now – there’s no reason he would assume anything untoward had happened between Roz and Daphne. As far as anybody at that breakfast table this morning is concerned, nothing did happen between Roz and Daphne last night. They had a few too many drinks and Roz had taken a cab back to Frasier’s place because it was cheaper and easier than going back to her own place. Daphne had had a night of emergency post-breakup drinking and bitching about men. (And now this morning – Roz hears this across the breakfast table, through her pounding headache and general fuzziness – Daphne is going to call one of the guys she met at the bar last night, someone who’d slipped her his number at some point in the evening.) And Roz was the best friend you could have after a breakup, the kind of friend who knew just how you were feeling and what to do make you feel better.

Yeah.

She could have exploded the whole thing, of course. She could have confronted Daphne at any point, said, Look, what the hell? We spent the night fucking, and I’m not into playing these games, so cut it out. She could have forced the issue. One tap and the house of cards would have collapsed.

But that’s not her way. It never has been. If she spends the night with a guy and he doesn’t call her again, she figures he’s not worth wasting her time, and she’s on to the next one. Even if he does call, if she’s been getting mixed signals from him, that’s the end of that. It’s not worth putting herself out on the line for someone who doesn’t know where their head is at. Roz has spent her life making absolutely sure that she doesn’t need anybody, that no one has the power to fuck with her head and leave her waiting by the phone. What happened with Daphne is really no different. If Roz is bisexual, she can goddamn well figure that out on her own time, without the help of a friend-turned-lover with a cute accent and a bright, flat look in her eyes.

If Daphne wants to ignore what happened, Roz absolutely can play that game. It might not be her favorite game to play. But she sure as hell knows what to do.

She’ll wonder about it for quite awhile, though. Wondering about herself, picking through the Seattle guides to the gay and lesbian scene, weighing the possibility of showing up for lesbian night at one of the clubs. And wondering about Daphne, too. Wondering if this hasn’t happened before, Daphne turning to women every so often under cover of drunkenness, then pretending it hadn’t happened the next morning. Roz has gathered that Daphne isn’t all that great about facing up to the hard stuff in her life, especially where romance is concerned. Maybe she and Roz are sharing some of the same demons, even – neither of them willing to get into the relationships that really cut to the bone, the ones that leave you open to the other person in a way that throws your safe routines topsy-turvy. The relationships that reveal you. Faced with that, Roz can see why Daphne would run away. And though she herself might have been willing to put a little more on the line for this than Daphne would have been, well, she can deal.

She’ll just have Frasier come over to her place to do their promo work for awhile. If he lends her a punch bowl, she can return it at work. They can meet socially at Cafe Nervosa.

And, paging through the Out America guide to Seattle, Roz very deliberately creates in her mind the face and body of an entirely different woman. Shorter hair. Voluptuous curves. There’s no reason she has to see Daphne, really.