He came back on a Friday night. The rest of the world might be out partying, but Daphne, who'd long since sworn off the dating scene, was curled up quite happily in her oversized recliner, watching TCM again and eating Ben & Jerry's Phish Food directly from the carton. It was the sort of thing she'd learned to tell herself she cherished, this sort of down time with herself. Later, she'd be pissed off that Niles had simply assumed she'd be home. Why wouldn't she be out dancing the night away at a singles club?
But never mind that just now. He was back.
His knock, of course, couldn't give away who it was behind the door, and with a dismaying lack of prescience, she stood to answer it with no particular qualm. However, when his voice bit through the door she froze. "Daphne, are you in there?" came the call, and she stood immobile, letting the words die away. Unable to believe what she'd just heard. Her mind was almost completely blank. A little word wafted across it unhurriedly - …how… and eventually faded away. Her hands curled around the end of the sash on the bathrobe.
"Daphne." Dear God in heaven, how did he have the right to come back here now with that *commanding* note in his voice? "Daphne, I know you're in there, Frasier said you would be home –" he'd gone to *Frasier* first?! And Frasier had let him come *here?!!* The italics and exclamation points were driving out the numbness rapidly. Sooner or later she'd have to do something. Like open the door.
She opened the door. Saw him there, saw him for the first time in months, standing there gleaming all over with the omnipresent Seattle rain. She saw him and felt his presence for the first time in so long, and she wanted to do so many things -– hit him, scream at him, shake him, demand answers from him – (and there was a little rogue wish to kiss him, too, that she shoved down fiercely). She wound up paralyzed instead. Not entirely paralyzed. Her hands were trembling fiercely.
In the cymbal-crash of a pause while Daphne stood clutched by silence, Niles looked her up and down, slowly. She'd gained a little weight since he saw her last. Her hair was shorter. Leaning in a little bit, he inhaled, seeking the old familiar scent – but what was this? Was it possible she'd changed her shampoo?
Knowing there was no good way to open this conversation, he asked.
She shrugged, violently, caught by a shiver. "I switched to something cheaper," she said, voice low and gravelly. "Trust you to notice." She stared at him, much too scattered to ask him the question she would have liked to ask – Is that the best you can do? Too scattered to fling the door shut in his face. Not too scattered to weep, to collapse into sobs – but that she would not do. She held her chin high. She had no idea why he was here or what he was after, but more than that, she had no idea how she felt about him (damn that surge of tenderness she'd felt at her first glimpse of him! Damn him for coming back here and confusing everything!)
Her voice was still low when she pried the next few words out. "What do you want?" She swallowed. "Why are you here?"
He reached out for her and she drew back instinctively. "Daphne. Love." (Her ears wanted to close themselves off from the danger in that last word of his.) "I know I don't have the right to be here. I know I don't have the right to ask your forgiveness. But I –" He broke off. She was glad to see he was struggling. "May I come in?" he asked.
She debated a moment; then she held the door open. He slipped past her. He'd lost some weight since he'd been gone. She wondered, with more dispassionate curiosity than erotic feeling, what he looked like with his clothes off now.
He sat down gingerly on the couch, looking around the apartment and noticing the changes. "A lot of things have changed," he said, clearly meaning only a commentary on the new furniture; but they both heard the subtext, of course, as soon as the words were out of his mouth. He flinched; she reddened and felt the numbness starting to dissipate in the heat. "I'll just put this ice cream back in the icebox before it melts," she said, ignoring his comment and refusing to look at him. He nodded.
There was time in the kitchen to check her reflection in the spotless stainless-steel of the sink. She ran her fingers through her hair, retied the sash on her bathrobe, and wished she had time to put on a little makeup –
No! That was not what this was about! What was she thinking?
She rerumpled her hair and marched back out to the living room.
She sat on the couch opposite him. He was making a show of watching The Bells of St. Mary's, as if to make it seem that this were a casual visit. She shut it off. He looked at her.
She hated having him look at her that way. He should not look like he still loved her. Because if he did still love her, then every bit of progress she'd made towards dealing with this was shattered. She had a lot invested in his being a complete asshole. How was she ever going to move on if he was just weak and confused?
What the hell was she going to do if he was just weak and confused? What the hell was she going to do if he wanted her back?
"So." She sat back against the couch, noted peripherally that there was pain in her thighs. She looked down. She was gripping them convulsively. She released her grip and looked back up at him. "I wasn't expecting to see you again."
He nodded quickly. "Daphne, I know. I can't say I'm sorry enough, but please, if you'll let me explain –"
"Explain?" She sat forward. "Yes, an explanation would be nice. Why don't you explain why you ran off on me, Niles, is that a good place to start? No, why don't you explain how you ran off on me about twelve hours after you told me you gave me AIDS. Oh, and while we're at it, why don't you explain where you've been all this time, why you haven't given me so much as a phone call, and oh, yes, you never did explain before how you got us both into this situation. Let's see, you can explain all that and then you can explain how the hell you have the nerve to waltz back in here like you still live here, how the hell you have the nerve to come back here and tell me you want me back!"
He hadn't said that yet, but of course it had to be true. Why else would he be here? And as further confirmation, he didn't deny it. Oh, no.
She pressed her hands against her stomach to try to keep the sickness back.
"You're right." Her head snapped back up. "And I don't even know what I can say. God, I was so afraid it would be like this…" He drifted off, and she could see he was on the brink of tears. She sent him wild thought-waves forbidding him to do any such thing. She couldn't deal with it.
"You hate me now," he said finally, voice low and nearly inaudible. "Well, I don't blame you." He was looking down so she didn't have to watch the tears bubbling out of his eyes. She watched them splash on his knees.
That tenderness she hadn't been able to control ruled her briefly. Her voice was gently when she spoke. "If you have an explanation, Niles, I want to hear it."
He glanced up, wiped his eyes. "All right," he said. "But I know –"
"No, let's not talk about – how I'm going to react," she said. "Just tell me why you did all this."
"All right," he said again, and cleared his throat. "I – oh, God. Where do I start?"
A good question. She pondered a second. "Just – go chronologically," she said finally. "Whatever." Just say something, dammit.
"Oh." He cleared his throat again, nervously. "That means going back to – to when I – when I – contracted the virus."
She'd forgotten that, had been thinking back to his leaving her; but she needed an answer there too, and she would be impressed if he managed to give one now. "Why not," she said, closing her eyes briefly. She could feel him gathering himself.
He explained, briefly and obviously with a great deal of difficulty, how, in the aftermath of his divorce from Maris, his loneliness and confusion and about fifteen drinks had driven him to Aaron's bed. "It was one time!" he cried, as soon as he'd gotten the worst out, as she was still staring blankly at him. "Once. I'd never…" He broke off there, apparently unable to lie to her and tell her it had been a bad experience. "It was not anything that made any great difference in my life," he finished finally. "And I've never done anything of the sort since."
"So you slept with a man," she said slowly, sorting it through in her mind.
He looked down at his lap, forced himself to nod. His hands were wrapped around one another so tightly the knuckles were white.
"That's what you thought you couldn't tell me, before."
He nodded again.
"All right…" she said. "Okay. Next explanation, then."
He looked up at her, astonished. "You don't want to… to talk about this some more?"
She shook her head. "There are more important things to talk about."
"But – it's just –"
"Oh, for God's sake, Niles, what's the bloody big deal? So you experimented a little, so you had a fling with a man, so what? If I ever had a problem with that I'd have to've dealt with it years ago when me brother Billy came out of the closet. Not to mention Uncle Jackie down there in California, I lived with him for six months, don't forget. So have you jumped the fence permanently or are you bisexual? Or was it just a mistake?"
He stared at her speechlessly for all of thirty seconds. "Um – bisexual. I think," he said finally.
She nodded, businesslike. "Fine." There was a second's pause. "I am glad you told me."
"You know, I am too," he said slowly. "I'm just surprised you're not more – well, surprised."
"Oh, I'm surprised," she said. "But we have more important things to deal with."
"Yes." His jaw tightened. "I'm afraid the rest of what I have to say might be even harder to hear."
"I'm sure," she said smoothly. "Still."
"Right."
He staggered through the rest of it somehow. If you condensed what he said, there wasn't much there. He'd left because he was afraid and so ashamed he couldn't bear it. He couldn't watch her dying, couldn't watch her going through this. He'd left to try to start over somewhere else, and he'd made it as far as San Diego, but in a sense he'd gone nowhere. He hadn't opened his own practice down there, had hopped on at a severely understaffed free clinic, and spent the last few months dealing with a special brand of rawness he'd stayed clear of in his days of catering to the rich in Seattle. He hadn't done it for any new fulfillment, though, but simply because it was the easiest position to get, and by the time he realized how woefully underqualified he was to be doing it, it was too late. The work depressed him, depressed him because so many people he saw needed so much help and he didn't feel capable of giving it to him. And the work had been the best thing that had happened to him since he left, the white noise of his life that kept him from feeling the reality beneath: the reality that he'd run from all his problems, had resolved nothing, and had abandoned and betrayed the woman he loved in the worst way possible.
It was the first time in the conversation that he'd said he loved her. She sat very still.
He went on for awhile, almost babbling, and she realized that now he'd started talking he didn't want to stop. He didn't want to have to hear what she would have to say.
Eventually he had to stop. He looked at her. Naked eyes.
"None of that is a surprise to me," she found herself saying. He winced. She realized that was a cruel thing to say. It was, however, true. "Now all you have to explain is why you're here."
He raised his eyebrows, startled. "Oh. I thought – I thought we'd been through that."
"When were we through that?" she said, confused and annoyed, somehow.
"The way you said that…" He made himself stop. "I'm sorry. I need to say it outright."
"What is it?"
His voice was quiet and extremely careful. But if voices could bleed, Daphne thought, this one would be. "I came back here because I found that I couldn't live with what I'd done," he said. "I think I left because I had the idea that I wasn't going to have to live with it. But this – AIDS doesn't kill you that quickly."
"I had to find out the same thing," Daphne said, before she could stop herself.
He bit his lip. "I know. I wish we could have found that out together – oh," he said, breaking off as he realized he'd just taken a giant step he hadn't been quite prepared to take. "You know what I'm going to say," he continued in time, more quickly. "You know why I'm here. And I haven't wanted to say it, because it is low of me, to – to do what I did to you and then not just leave you alone once you'd put it all together again. I know it would be better for you if I stayed away." She held herself rigid, unable to avoid admitting to herself that she couldn't fully agree with him there. But she was not going to say it.
"But I just can't live without you, Daphne," he said finally, and her head shot up. "I can't do it. It's a cliché and it's terrible of me to do this to you but I can't help it. You are the love of my life, and I am still alive. I couldn't help hoping. . ."
She looked at him, struggling to get his tongue around those last few words – "that you would take me back" – and suddenly had to end it. Leaning forward, she placed a finger lightly over his lips. He glanced up at her, eyes rounder than before.
"I'm not going to make you beg… I don't want to listen to it," she said, not unkindly. "But I don't know what my answer is. I can't – I can't answer you that quickly. I'm sorry."
"Of course," he said. His expression had shown no change, except a hint of relief, perhaps, that she hadn't thrown him over immediately.
As the silence grew longer he said "Would it be better if I left now?"
She nodded. "I think so. I hope this isn't… you have someplace to stay, don't you?"
He wrinkled his brow. "I hadn't really thought of that. Do you think Frasier will put me up?"
"Er… it might be better if you found a place in a hotel for now. Unless he welcomed you back with open arms when you came to ask him where I was."
Niles thought a moment, then nodded. "Good point. I was too fixated on finding you to notice how… A hotel it is, then."
She smiled. "All right then." Reflexively she began to move towards him, ready to kiss him on the cheek –
And stopped. What the hell kind of a reflex was that? Now?
She smiled faintly as he left the room, too dazed to say goodbye.