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A/N: Only two chapters left in part 2! ...I'm getting excited, and nervous. I think I've watched the pilot online like twenty times in the last week. I hope I don't mess up any details...

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Chapter 30: Friends. Again.

For the first time since I'd met Gil, I could honestly say that we were friends. Not together, not lovers, not avoiding or ignoring or pretending to be friends only to have sex via instant messaging… actually friends.

I was grateful for the change from not-speaking, but I found myself missing the honestly our relationship had previously had, even when confined to the computer. Now it felt like our real relationship existed beneath a blanket of lies… I flirted, and though everything I said was true, I said it without intent or conviction—it was mostly to hide how badly I did want him. I even talked about other men… joked about needing to get laid… joked about the hot DNA guy who had replaced Greg.

He didn't like it when I talked about Greg—although he did not indicate this directly, I could just tell. The tone of his voice changed, slightly. I wondered if he knew about Greg and I… but no, surely not. He would have said something.

And Greg… Greg was the type to brag about his exploits, but he rarely, if ever, used names. Behind the cocky exterior, he was very respectful of women. He wouldn't have said anything, of that I was certain.

Gil, for his part, joked about women as well. I think he only did this because of my comments—the ones I spoke specifically to hide how much it hurt to just be his friend, because I didn't want to lose that too. It was all I had. But he did tell me about an awful date he'd had—I think he only told me because it had gone so badly… something about Dark Side of the Moon and "Lions and Tigers and Bears, Oh My!" preceding the poor woman getting up and walking out without a word to him.

When I asked why anyone would do a production like that, I was given an easy explanation—the internet had been filled with rumors that Dark Side of the Moon had been made to be a soundtrack to The Wizard of Oz, and that if you played the two simultaneously, certain phrases throughout the music coincided with the actions in the movie. Apparently, someone had taken this theory and applied the concept to theatre—but it hadn't been done well.

My next question had been why on earth he would take someone he hardly knew to something like that, on a first date (I think it said a lot that I did not ask why the hell he would want to go himself). …He told me it was that or a drag show, and I laughed so hard, and for so long, that by the time I had calmed down, I didn't remember to ask him to explain that comment.

What bothered me was that this was the only date he mentioned—which meant that, since he was dating now, apparently, he was not telling me about the ones that went well. I understood—I wouldn't feel comfortable telling him about anything that had gone better than his venture into Oz, and a large part of me didn't want to know anything about the subject as a whole.

A small part of me, though, couldn't handle the not knowing. We didn't talk every night—one every week, week and a half, at most. But if he'd mentioned that he had a night off and didn't call me that night—whether he had just called me during the day or a few days before or a week before—I assumed he was with someone. And then I would lie awake, staring at my ceiling, unable to distract myself by reading, wondering how the evening was going and what he and the mystery woman were doing.

And then, as the night got later, I would imagine the dating winding down… I would imagine him kissing her at the door… her inviting him in. The first time this happened, I imagined the rejection easily—he had told me he always waited.

But by the second night I did this, I replayed everything he'd ever said to me about sex, and then I was convinced that he would have taken her—whoever she was—up on her generous offer. Half of the people he'd been with, before me, had been meaningless one-night stands. He wasn't promiscuous, per se, but he wasn't opposed to sleeping with someone he didn't intend to stay with, spontaneously.

And if she had meant something to him, well, there was every possibility that they'd been together long enough for him to give into his baser needs. I call them baser, because I was not the one fulfilling them. When I had been, they had been immaculate needs—the joining of our two bodies had always been nothing short of earth-shattering, and though I was hesitant about the whole concept of a higher being, the closest I'd ever come to believing in one had been when I looked into Gil's eyes, intertwined in a way so perfect that it had to be other-worldly.

If there was a God, I was convinced that he had devised love making as the perfect form of worship.

…Not sex. Certainly not meaningless sex. Any self-respecting God would turn his nose up at such a thing, which could, in all honesty, only be harmful to an individual, even if they never regret the action. Biology, Psychology, and Statistics could all prove such a thing, even if there were no religious decree to back it up.

But the act of love—the joining of two souls created for one another from the moment of conception and beyond the moment of death—certainly that was holy. Holier than anything I'd ever been witness to. The fact that it was pleasurable—that humans were hard-wired to want it… only proved my point. Psychologically, we were hard-wired to believe in a higher power too….. And any God I could believe in wouldn't create sexual beings if sex was shameful.

But with her, those needs and desires were base and shameful. And if they hadn't been together long enough for him to give in—and if he didn't make an exception, like he had with me—then it was only a matter of time, as far as I was concerned.

I spent a lot of time staring at my ceiling.

It was just good that I was used to functioning without much sleep. And, on the bright side, no sleep meant no nightmares. See, I mused bitterly to myself in the dark loneliness of a bedroom I had once shared with him, there's always a silver lining.

Yeah, right.