It had been six months since the night of the Provocations premier.  It had been six months since Bette’s world had been turned upside down.  She had begged Tina for a second chance, explaining that she would go to therapy, on her own as well as with Tina for couple’s counseling.  She told her that she would change her work habits, focus more on them as a couple, and be more open to different experiences.  She begged her to go away with her, anywhere, just out of LA to figure all of this out.  She swore that she would change; she would become the partner that not only Tina wanted, but that she deserved.  All of this had fallen on deaf ears.  Her response was always the same, cold lifeless eyes that hollowly looked at her and screamed for Bette to leave her presence.  Bette felt that at one point, being in the same room with Bette had made Tina visibly nauseated.  Tina had moved on and had made it abundantly clear that there was no place for Bette in her life.  They saw each other only sporadically, occasionally running into each other at The Planet, but aside from that, led completely separate lives.

It was not by Bette’s choice that things came to be this way, but she did not know what else to do.  She knew that she could not keep up with this.  The constant begging and pleading was taking its toll on Bette, and she knew that part of her was dying inside with every rejection that she got from Tina.  Six months was enough and if Tina truly wanted no part of her, than she needed to respect that and figure out what to do with her wreck of a life.

She had thrown herself into work, hoping that that would dull some of the pain and fill some of the void that had been left after Tina, but she felt nothing but emptiness in her life and knew that something would have to change.

Bette had heard that Tina was seeing someone, fairly consistently for the last month and Bette had been too fearful to ask Alice about it.  She knew that Tina had her own place now, but did not have the strength to ask further as to what was going on in her life.  She saw the gang infrequently as there were simply too many reminders of the life that she had had with Tina.