A/n: You guys are FANTASTIC! I love reading all of your comments, and honestly I'm not sure I would have finished this chapter as quickly as I did without your feedback. I'm so glad you're enjoying this so far and I hope you continue to enjoy and review- there's nothing better than feedback, because if you make me feel like someone's actually reading it, I'm more likely to actually WRITE the rest of what I have planned out. Anyway, no fear, next chapter this will earn it's M rating for exactly the reason you're hoping it will. It should be up by Sunday, maybe sooner. Again, thank you for all the lovely reviews!

By the time Jane walked back through her apartment door, she was already a complete and total mess. She'd been expecting that, no matter what the outcome of that conversation had been, but she'd been expecting that Maura would yell at her. She wonders if she would feel any better if that was the case but can't get her mind far enough away from Maura's lips on her own for long enough to come to a decision.

God, how long have I wanted that?

About fifteen seconds after she's inside that door, though, she remembers that her mother is sitting on the couch seven feet away, and she hushes herself internally just in case Angela has suddenly developed the superpower to read minds. Or at least to keep herself from blurting out something she really shouldn't. As much as she has to talk about what's happened, she knows better. Besides which she's not really all that sure it even happened, except that her lips are still tingling and she's still shaking slightly.

It had never consciously occurred to her that she might be attracted to her best friend. Born and raised Italian Catholic didn't leave a lot of room for experiments with same-sex relationships, and generally the mention of it at any family gathering made everyone uncomfortable. Not that she knew that any of her immediate family had an issue with it, just that nobody really liked to talk about it. Most of them, or at least two of them, preferred to talk about murders. Which in the long run was a lot more fucked up than talking about homosexuals at the dinner table, right?

She doesn't know what to think.

"Janie? What happened?"
"Um… nothing. Nothing happened."
"Did she forgive you?"

Jane doesn't even have the decency to glare at her hovering mother, in fact, she's too restless and distracted to even realize there's anything to glare about. Instead her tongue catches on her words and she halts halfway through a word, finally coming back into the present as if she's being taken out of the slow-mo version of a DVD.

"Di- did she…? No, no. I mean, she didn't say…she didn't say that she did."

She collapses back onto the couch, bewildered, but manages to bring herself back into focus again when she realizes her mother has sat down again, this time next to her. "If she didn't forgive you, then what happened?"

Jane realizes that she has no idea how Angela even found out what happened- she guesses it was Frankie, but the fact that she hasn't even wondered about it until now is a testament to what a mess she is. "We…disagreed. I apologized but it didn't seem to do any good," she admits, pressing the pads of her thumbs into the scars cradled in the centers of her palms. Since Hoyt's scalpels she's had that habit whenever something's really bothering her, and she doesn't usually notice. The only reason she does this time is because her hands suddenly hurt like hell, like all the hurt she's feeling everywhere else has centered right in them and she can't get rid of it.

And then Ma takes her hands and everything feels a little bit better. She also kind of feels like she's sixteen and has dumped been dumped at her junior prom again, but that's beside the point. Her hands don't hurt as much when her mother's squeezing them half to death. Her eyes, do, though, because she's fighting back tears again, for only the second time since the shooting.

"Oh, Janie. It's gonna work out, you'll see. You and Dr. Isles are too close for this to last long."
"Ma, you don't understand, it's like…I've lost her already."

She never opens up like this anymore. Maybe, occasionally, to Maura- whispered confessions, I've never been more scared in all my life, earnest and deliberate truths she'd rather keep in her head, you're nothing like that monster, things she really ought to have kept to herself, at any rate. But she never does this with her mother. She hasn't for years

And Maura's absence has sent her straight back to this, to being too vulnerable and confused and helpless that only her mother's voice can even begin to calm her down. "No you haven't. Sweetie, friendship is like…"

There's a pause while Angela thinks up an appropriate analogy and Jane takes a deep, shaky breath, fighting her tears away for good. She's not ready to cry over Maura yet. She doesn't know if she'll ever give up enough to cry over it. "Friendship is a lot like marriage." Some analogy. "You don't just choose someone to be your friend on a whim, you know? Someone like you doesn't, anyway, you're a Rizzoli, it means something to you." Jane has to bite her tongue to keep from mentioning the divorce, but she managed, somehow or another.

"You're friends with Dr. Isles for a reason. People come into each others lives for reasons and I think you two are far too good for one another for something like this to ruin it. I know you're afraid she won't forgive you, because you already apologized, but honey, she's already forgiven you. She just doesn't know it yet."

She feels the slight smile on her face before she knows what's happening, before she can even register that the weight she's been carrying is a little less now. It might not be the best analogy, and her Ma might not be the most eloquent, but in her own way she has one hell of a way with words. She always has. Jane's at the brink of tears again when she lets her mother pull her into a bone-crushing hug, and she closes her eyes tightly and tries to forget, for a second, what's happened in the last hour or so of her life.

The problem is, she can't stop applying that speech to Maura in another sense. In the sense that makes her think maybe she should have been paying better attention all these months- maybe she would have caught it earlier and realized she was attracted to Maura, and that Maura was attracted to her. And if she had, she wonders, would it have changed anything?

"Thanks, ma."

.,.

She wakes up to the phone ringing practically in her ear. She's left it by her pillow again, because she'd spent most of last night checking again and again to see if Maura had texted her. She's only barely awake when she picks it up, grunting some kind of a greeting into the mouthpiece as she blinks repeatedly.

"Jane, it's Frost."

Well, that wakes her up. She rolls over and checks the clock- 5:30 am. She doesn't even have to wake up for another three hours to get to work by 9. And if there's one thing on the planet Earth that Jane Rizzoli absolutely cannot stand, it's being woken up before she's decided it's time to wake up.

"Jesus Christ Frost, it's not even light outside!"
"It's important."

She scoffs, switching the phone to her other hand.
"It better be!"
"It's Dean."
"…oh."

She wishes she felt something. She wishes her stomach dropped at the mention of his name and the chance this news might be bad news. She wishes it's his face that flashes into her mind when she thinks of the hospital and the night he was shot. Instead, it's Maura she remembers, as she always does.

"He's stable, Jane. He's asking for you."

Of course he is.

Jane clutches the phone so tightly she can feel her scars start to hurt again. It takes her almost a full minute to work up the courage to ask what she needs to know.

"What about Doyle?"

Frost's silence tells her everything she needs to know. She slumps back against the headboard, defeated, eyes falling closed as she lets out a breath. Any hope she might have had for Maura's forgiveness is gone. "He's still in the ICU," Frost tells her, apology absolutely dripping from his voice, "his vitals are stable, but nobody knows how long that'll last. He's not conscious." The rest of his sentence, though unspoken, is just as clear- and he's probably never going to be conscious ever again.

.,.

When she looks at Dean, lying there sunken into his hospital bed like he's closer to 80 than 40, she tries her hardest to force herself to worry for him. She stares at the bandage on his chest and thinks about the bullet that hit him and tries to feel the way he'd expect her to feel- scared, anxious, anything but betrayed. The fact that he broke his word is more important to her than anything else besides the fact that Maura could be a room or two down, checking on Doyle, and she can't go to check.

Maura's the one that she wants. Part of her assures her that it's always been that way, that's it's not really a recent development that the medical examiner is always the first thing on her mind. She remembers waking up next to Dean and immediately thinking of Maura alone in the hospital and wonders how long she was so blatantly obvious to everyone but herself.

He stirs, eventually, though she's not sure how long it is after she arrives. She forgot her watch in her rush to leave the apartment without waking her mother, and there's no clock in the room, presumably to help the patient sleep without reminding them that their time is running out, whether or not they're leaving healthy.

"Hey, stranger." She returns his smile with a vague version of her own and when he extends his hand she takes it in her own, but it feels too cumbersome and calloused to be anything but dead weight. "Frost said you were asking for me."

She sees the flicker in his eyes that says, as it has in the past, that her straightforwardness amuses him. She doesn't like that about him. She wishes it would bother him more. It bothers Maura quite a lot when she skips the 'formalities' she usually takes in teasing and joking around, because unlike everyone else, Maura realizes that it's not just a joke when she makes it. It's something else. A coping mechanism or something.

There's nothing left to cope with as far as Dean's concerned. "I was," he admits, quirking an eyebrow at her, "why, are you surprised?" His humor has always been dry, but the bullet wound seems to have made that more obvious. Either that or he has some kind of inkling as to where this conversation is about to go. "Not really," she replies, without missing a beat, "but you shouldn't bother."

When she'd told him there might be 'someone else' in her life, she'd been thinking of Casey. The truth is, though, there isn't really anything between her and Casey at all. He's too far away and he's gone for too long for anything to come of what was really just some fumbling kisses and a night spent feeling at least a little bit more safe than she did alone. He wasn't a 'somebody else'. Maura was a 'somebody else', or she could have been, at least.

"Like I told you before, there's…there's someone else. And you deserve better than this," she adds, for good measure and because some part of her believes it. "I'm a mess, and you deserve better than that."

The agent Dean she knows would accept this rejection with the same stoic air he accepts everything else. In a move that only proves her point even more, his reaction is much more caustic and shocking than she ever could have expected.

"You're probably right. It would be too hard for me to maintain a relationship with someone who put a friend's feelings before the arrest of a known crime lord."

To keep herself from lunging forward and yanking the IV out of his arm so she can beat the crap out of him, she lets go of his hand and leaves without a backward glance. There's a certain kind of anger that goes with being told exactly what you know you don't want to hear. It's the kind of anger that makes you do stupid things like find the other door marked with a "D" and pushing inside without permission.

She's not surprised to see Maura sitting stiffly by Doyle's besides. Somehow it seems obvious that she'd be there, obvious that she'd want to watch over the dying criminal that fathered her. Maura looks up and for the first time since she crawled into the ambulance behind Doyle her reaction to Jane isn't flat. It's razor sharp, all of it- "You can't be here," she leaps to her feet and immediately hassles Jane out of the room and into the one across the hall, which is empty and silent and smells like rubbing alcohol and new plastic.

"What are you doing here?"
"Looking for you."
"You shouldn't. You really- you shouldn't."

Jane takes a few steps closer to see if Maura backs away. She does, but only a little bit, not enough to matter. "Don't do this, Jane." The detective raises an eyebrow but doesn't move an inch. "Do what? Find you and make you talk to me?" Maura stiffens and something about the resolve in her eyes is more attractive than it is abrasive. "You can't make me do anything. You're only here to…investigate…what happened when you tried to talk to me about the shooting."

"What if I want this?"

Maura furrows her brows and looks around briefly as if to say, 'what, this? an empty antiseptic room filled with nothing but filtered air and two bodies and too many feelings?' and Jane doesn't have a chance to continue before she's cut off with something she didn't expect.

"You don't want me like I want you."
"What in the hell is that even supposed to mean?"
"It means what it means. You don't have any idea…you can't just decide you're interested in what's going on just because I slipped up."

There's a split second where Jane realizes she has two choices. She can either pursue Maura's forgiveness, or defend her newly uncovered 'feelings' for what they are- just that. Nothing less. She chooses the first, because she's not as good with words and she doesn't know what she'd do if Maura proved her wrong.

"That man is a criminal," she says, gesturing toward the hallway and Doyle's room. "Two months ago you hated his guts, now you hate me for taking him out? What on earth did he do to get your forgiveness? Tell me," she half-hisses, "because I sure as hell need to know how to do what he did."

Maura's reply comes rapid-fire and Jane has to brace herself to take it in stride. "That man was the only man that loved me unconditionally my entire life, even when I know that he did. He kept track of me, he watched over me, he made damn sure I had a good life and in a lot of ways he was more of a father than the one who adopted me."

Jane knows she's been out-talked and changes tactics again, barely sparing a glance into the empty hallway before backing Maura up into the counter against the far wall, leaning forward. "You knew I couldn't be charged for murder," she says, coming to that same realization, herself. "I didn't know he was out of bullets, so I shot him out of self-defense, as far as the court is concerned. I'm a good cop, he's a bad guy, and they're not gonna charge me. You knew that when you told me they could."

Jane can see Maura's jaw clench and wonders what the names of those little muscles are. She's never noticed them in anyone else before, but Maura works her jaw for a few seconds, long enough that in their current position it's hard to miss. It doesn't help that Jane can't stop thinking about her lips for a long enough time to stay convincingly angry.

"I realized it later," is Maura's eventual half-whispered reply. "I don't lie, you know that. At the time I said it, it seemed like a definite possibility."

Because that doesn't excuse anything, and because there doesn't seem to be much left to do, Jane pushes them further into shadow and tilts her head down to close the space between them. As if it's choreographed Maura ducks out of her grasp and pushes her away firmly, shaking her head, retreating into the fluorescent lights of the hallway. "You're not going to do this to me," she says, still backing away. "You're not going to do this, and neither am I."

She gets the last word. She always does, and Jane's not too disappointed to leave empty-handed. She has a legitimate reason to leave Dean behind, at any rate, and she's gotten some kind of a response out of Maura, which has to count for something.

She's just not sure if she's taken a step forward or two steps back.