"Another Night on a Familiar Porch in WeHo"

Jenny cracked open a beer. "Can you believe Charlotte Birch doesn’t see the infinite genius of my writing?"

"Did you try sleeping with her?"

Jenny looked for a smile on Shane’s face, but the other woman seemed serious.

"Well," Jenny began.

"Do you think everything can be gained by sleeping with someone?" Bette raised an eyebrow.

"Everything? Well, that might be asking a little much," Shane conceded. "But there’s been times."

"Times like?" Jenny asked, eager.

Shane shot her a look.

"It’s research," Jenny said, pretending to be nonchalant about the matter. "Can you imagine she said I was too autobiographical?"

This time both Shane and Bette shot her a look. But Jenny was too busy examining something sparkly. Something that she was wearing, but, had the fashion police been by, something that would have earned her a visit to fashion court.

"How about you?" Shane gave Bette a nod.

Bette raised her hands as if to say she was innocent. "I’m not sleeping with her writing teacher. Women have got me in enough trouble lately."

Shane rolled her eyes. "I didn’t mean that. I meant you and T. How’s that going?"

"Well, she did come by the other night."

Shane leaned forward. "And you talked?"

"Not exactly. She cleaned out her wardrobe but only of sweats and granny panties, and ran back to Alice’s."

"Oh." Shane sat back and took a long swig off her beer. "And that’s ‘normal’?"

"Who knows what’s normal anymore," Bette mused. "It was odd."

"How so?" chirped Jenny.

"Well, it was about 80 degrees, and she was wearing a trenchcoat."

"And that’s odd?" asked Shane.

"No," Bette replied.

"It was odd that she only took part of her wardrobe?" Inquired Jenny.

"No," Bette stated again.

"Then what was odd."

Bette gave a smile that alternated between happy and pained and, somewhere in the midst of it, let the others glimpse into the entire universe that had existed between her and Tina. "What’s odd is that the coat and the shoes matched, but didn’t match the purse she was carrying."

Shane’s jaw dropped. "No way."

Jenny pondered the thought. "But would the outfit have looked good on me?" Well, pondered to the extent that she was able.