Maura Isles lay in bed, rigid, fists clenched at her sides, gritting her teeth as she contemplated the woman snoring softly beside her. The pounding rain from the night before had ended and the day's first sunbeams cautiously poked their way through the slats in her bespoke window blinds. She hadn't slept all night. She arose early the previous morning, ran 4 miles, worked a full day (including a crime scene and complete autopsy), conducted her weekly assessment meeting with her interns, had a drink with Jane, Barry, and Vince at the Dirty Robber and then went on to Merch alone. She had been awake for 25 hours, but packed more into that time than the average person does in two full days. She fought a growing irritation that threatened to bloom into a full-fledged tantrum if she couldn't get herself under control.

This is merely a dip in serotonin due to lack of sleep. I'll catch up this weekend and be just fine.

Having a rational, scientific reason for her feelings always calmed Maura, and she felt her spine soften just a little. She commenced yogic breathing; in through the mouth, out through the nose. She unfurled her fists and lay her palms atop her bare, flat abdomen, feeling her diaphragm expand and contract with each breath. She imagined the air filtered through the clean, pink alveoli of her lungs, and her jaw relaxed. She visualized the gas exchange in her pulmonary capillaries, the oxygenated blood rushing out to energize every part of her body and she sighed.

"Hey" came the sleep-heavy voice from beside her. The woman rolled on her side toward Maura and ran her hands through her own messy, dark hair. A small beam of sunshine chose that moment to sluice the dim air of the bedroom and illume Maura's king-size bed. The woman squinted against the intrusive beam and attempted to bury her face in Maura's soft ivory neck to avoid waking fully. Maura stiffened again; her careful, meditative calm was destroyed because in the moment the sun glanced off the warm olive skin and dark eyes of her bedmate, all she could think was, not Jane, not Jane, not even close.

Maura wanted this woman, this pseudo-Jane, to leave. She had wanted her to go as soon as she had climaxed, and free from the desperate need of her libido, she became once again herself, her own solitude-loving, rational self. But it had rained heavily last night, great torrents of rain that threatened to overpower windshield wipers, even at their highest settings. And so, Maura, with her kind heart, allowed, no insisted, that the woman, who lived up in Revere, stay until it was safe to leave.

Men are so much easier. If she were a man, she'd be gone, rain, sleet, snow or...

"Mmmm," the dark woman hummed against Maura's neck and began moving her mouth down across a freckled collarbone and onto the softer, whiter skin of a heavy breast.

Maura felt her spine go rigid, but this time it was not anger and frustration that tightened her latisimus dorsi, obliques and serrator muscles, it was the libidinous arching of her back as she strained to get one pink nipple into the woman's wet mouth. As she felt the familiar warm slickness trickling from her sex, she knew that maybe it would be enough for today to see that dark, curly head between her thighs and to pretend yet again that it was the insistent rhythm of Jane's tongue and Jane's fingers that brought her over the edge into ecstasy.

An hour later they sat, fully dressed, across from one another in Maura's spacious kitchen, drinking their second cup of french-press coffee. Maura's smile was more of a grimace and she worked her hands like Lady Macbeth in an unconscious act of ablution. It was not blood, but lady cum on her soft, clean hands.

Lady cum. Argh. She flinched at the phrase and began searching the well-ordered library that was her mind for the proper, scientific term.

Squalene.

She relaxed her hands, satisfied until she remembered there was still a stranger in her kitchen, a stranger who had brought her to orgasm twice in the past 6 hours and to whom she owed... what? Another cup of Gevalia coffee? Breakfast? An hour of conversation? Maura didn't know and her social anxiety welled up in her like an ill-chewed bit of food caught in her esophagus. She swallowed hard to dislodge the metaphorical lump in her throat.

If only this were Jane, there would be no unease and a surfeit of laughter and comfort. Or if not Jane, any Rizzoli, even Tommy, would be preferable to this shorter, heavier, and, Maura now noticed with chagrin, considerably younger Not Jane.

"Yeah, so after college I started working at the bar." The final word was pronounced like the sound a sheep makes. Maura cringed inwardly at the brutal ugliness of the blue-collar Boston accent, an accent neither she nor, surprisingly, Jane, shared.

Worse than Brooklyn, but not as bad as Long Island, she mused, constructing a quick regional dialect map in her mind.

"Yeah, so that's been over 2 years now and I'm still a baaaa-back. Economy sucks," said Not-Jane.

"Two years?" Maura quirked an eyebrow, suddenly drawn into the conversation. "So you're...24?"

"23... community college, and it took a bit longer. I'm not that smart," smart rhymed with "cat" in Not Jane's voice.

"I'm 40." Maura blurted, blushing and fighting the urge to cover her mouth.

"No shit. " Not-Jane's eyes widened, "You look wicked good. Really. My ma's 42 and she could totally be your mother."

That admission was enough to whisk away the social niceties on Maura's part and she quickly stood and straightened her skirt.

"Well, I have to get to work and so..." She gestured to the door, quickly planning to swing by the morgue to recheck Susie Chang's toxicology screens from the previous week, thereby avoiding having told a white lie and risking a case of hives or worse, a vasovagal episode. Jane called them vasi-vaginas, much to Maura's delight, as in her mind Jane and vagina went hand in hand like Watson and Crick or Pierre and Marie Curie.

"Yeah, so, umm, I'll put my number in your iphone and we can get together whenever you like," said Not-Jane.

Maura smiled slightly, unable to summon the backbone to decline. So there she stood in her kitchen, the imposing Maura Isles, Chief Medical Examiner of the Commonwealth of Massachusetts, accomplished, genius, beautiful, middle-aged Maura Isles, afraid to break up with her one-night stand. She smiled wanly, but inside she cringed.

Angela Rizzoli was always an early riser, a habit acquired when she had 3 young children and a cranky, demanding husband at home. Now she was used to rising with the sun and sharing her morning coffee with those nice kids on Good Morning America. She stood at the sink, listening to the cheerful banter on her TV and glancing out her kitchen window at the junker parked in Maura's driveway. Setting aside the mug she was rinsing, she stepped outside just as the doctor and her overnight guest were exiting the main house.

"Good Morning, Maura. Why are you dressed for work on such a beautiful Saturday?"

"Oh, I... I have a few things to check on and then I will be back."

"And this young lady must be one of your interns? An ambitious one. Did she stop by to bring an apple for the teacher? Or a soy latte?"

Maura's face was frozen in an expression mid way between terror and flabbergastedness. She was physically unable to lie and yet she wanted desperately to not blurt out the truth. She bit her lip and moaned a little as she realized she didn't even know the woman's name to foster an introduction. Mercifully, Angela changed the subject not even realizing the discomfort of her interlocutor.

"So, my Janie is in love. I've already started knitting booties for the grandbabies."

Maura's mouth twitched and she hugged herself tightly around the waist. She would almost rather discuss her weekly trips to Merch and all the anonymous lesbian sex she'd been having than Jane and her romance with Casey Jones.

Angela mistook her dejection for worry and reached out to pull Maura into a clumsy one-armed hug.

"Don't worry, sweetie. Casey is going to pull through that surgery just fine and he and Janie will live happily every after. I've been talking to the Blessed Mother every day and I just know she will answer my prayers. The Virgin Mary will fix Casey's penis."

Angela's smile sagged as she noticed the pained look in Maura's golden eyes. "Doctor, he will pull through, right? And if they can't fix it, they can still have babies, right?"

"You're a doctor?" Not-Jane piped in for the first time.

"Hey, if she's your intern, how come she doesn't know you're a doctor? What does she think you are? Some kind of undertaker?"

"She's not my intern." Maura stated, but elaborated no further. "And one does not need a penis to have a baby."

Before Angela could utter another word on either subject, Maura had turned and was hurrying toward her Prius, her four inch Jimmy Choos clicking away on the pavement.