Both Alice and Dana were usually romantically unattached.

Prior pairings, had been seriously flawed, or unimportant- they weren’t
a challenge to ‘Alice and Dana,’ until Lara and now Tonya. Dana was
allowing Tonya to become important and it was killing Alice.

Alice had understood that before Tonya arrived, they had been like an
old married couple. It was comfortable. It was intimate on an emotional
level. It was fun. It was also dysfunctional probably. At any rate,
all of a sudden, it wasn’t fun anymore. All of a sudden, Alice couldn’t
look at Dana without her stomach hurting. She wanted more.

Worse, Tonya was trying to take her place and that was more than she
could bear. Alice had driven out to the beach that night after watching
Dana and Tonya leave ‘Provocations’ arm in arm. She had climbed out on
the rocks to sit and try to figure out how she was going to make peace
with all of this.

Finally, watching the moon go down, she had concluded that, her
feelings aside, she needed to talk to Dana. Alice’s attraction to Dana
was secondary, she could think about that later, she just needed to let
Dana know how she felt about Tonya and what Alice felt was her
manipulative hold on her best friend. She couldn’t wait another minute,
she’d had to see Dana that night and talk to her.

Looking back on that 4am visit Alice’s heart never failed to skip
remembering how Dana had looked when she came to her door. Alice had
barely been able to speak, much less look at her.

“You can’t marry Tonya,” she had told her. It was part of a well
thought out discussion she’d planned. A discussion about how Tonya was
exploiting her and was attracted to the ‘tennis star’ not the woman.

Of course, all of that had left her head the moment the door had
opened. Alice’s heart had pounded so hard at the sight of Dana she’d
been sure she could hear it.

Dana had been approachable but also insistent on an explanation. “What are you talking about? Why?” she had asked her.

And suddenly, Tonya’s calculating behavior had seemed completely beside
the point to Alice. That was not why she didn’t want Dana to marry
Tonya. “Because,” she had whispered.

“Because, Why?” Dana searched Alice’s face. Alice wrestled with her
fears until desire won out. Quickly, before she could change her mind,
she had kissed her. It wasn’t a long kiss, but it had been fervent
enough to convey to Dana the feelings behind it. Afterwards she’d been
unable to look at her friend as she waited for her reaction.