Disclaimer 1:  All of the characters from “The L Word” belong to Showtime and Ilene Chaiken, et al.

Disclaimer 2: M/F (mention of male private parts), F/F ***** and love.

Disclaimer 3:  No spoilers for Season 2 because I haven’t been spoiled.  This is all in my head with no references to what is supposed to happen in the new season (except for what the S2 preview has shown).

Disclaimer 4:  This is an entry for the Bette’s Coming Out Story Challenge and has nothing to do with my previous story.

Thank you:  Deepest thanks to my friend J.R. for not only editing and beta reading, but encouraging me when things worked, helping me where they didn’t, and contributing ideas, thoughts, and dialogue to this story.  You’re ALL THAT!

Rating: NC-17

Setting:  Several months after Season One’s season finale.

Bette’s Loss and Gain

by

Portia Richardson

PortiaOnly@aol.com

It was Thursday mid-morning and Bette was thinking she had to do something else with her weekend besides going to Milk or some other club.  She wasn’t sure if her mid-life crisis was coming to an end, but she was actually tired of meaningless, uncomplicated *****.  That wasn’t to say that it hadn’t been good, but she was starting to see herself (and she suspected that others were beginning to see her in a similar light) in the same way people saw her friend, Shane.  Bette was much more discreet than Shane, but for three months, she had been behaving in much the same fashion.  She was in fact taking her cues from her player friend—love ‘em (or at least in her case—“let’s be clear that this isn’t about love”) and leave ‘em.  Forty years old, out on the dating scene again, and there weren’t many women her age who didn’t seem desperate for a relationship.  If she picked up on that desperation, and she always did, Bette walked past, not caring if the face was stunning or the body spectacular.  At this point in her life, she didn’t want a relationship or even a close friendship if it couldn’t be with Tina.  She found herself scoping out younger women at Milk.  At first, she would talk to women in their mid to late-thirties, then she dated a couple of women in their early thirties.  The last two women had been in their late twenties.  Bette was feeling ridiculous.  Her body was tight, she was fit, and could hold her own or even better in terms of physical attributes, but still…she was forty.  The last woman had just had her twenty-seventh birthday.    When the woman was born, Bette was already in high school.  Was she becoming as pathetic as those aging male movie stars who clung to youth by dating women who could be their daughters?  Well, in her case, they could be her younger sisters.