I know I've been careless with your love

Dani took a deep breath, then warily approached the door to the Master’s Suite. So, I guess we’re really doing this, huh?

Yup. This was going to be trouble, all right.

And that wasn’t even accounting for all the commotion she could hear on the other side of the door. She could hear muffled shouts and the scraping of furniture. It sounded like someone was getting into a fistfight in there!

That was enough to kick Dani into action.

“What’s going on in here!?” She roared, kicking the door open.

Everyone in the room jumped.

The first thing Dani saw was the mess all over the place. Weren’t the maids supposed to be cleaning up the Master’s Suite? Not… whatever this was?

The next thing Dani saw was the panting frame of one of the maids. It was Ella, the new girl who’d just joined the harem. Only she didn’t look like Ella. Her eyes were wide behind her bangs and her pupils were narrowed into pinpricks, and her hair was a mess of knots and tangles. Her face was flushed with anger, and her teeth were clenched tight. Her hands shook and she glared at Dani with fury in her sharp eyes.

“Dani…” Nick looked a little flustered. He took the opportunity to approach her, his expression twisted with concern. “Now’s not really the best time.”

Dani frowned. “I can tell,” she replied, scanning the room. “But it’s not like Dakota really gave me a choice here.”

She saw Rose huddled in the corner, and Mary standing in front of Holly, serving as a human shield. All three girls looked tensely at the hurricane in the center of the room.

Whatever was going on here, Ella was at the heart of it.

“What do you think you’re trying to do!?” The maid demanded, her voice filled with bile. “Trying to pretend like this isn’t all your fault?!”

“Cinder…” Nick’s voice cracked as he looked back at the dark-haired girl, and Dani immediately stiffened.

“Cinder?” She asked, walking further into the room. She put herself between Nick and the other girl, since she figured that even in the unlikely event that the other woman lost her temper, she wouldn’t be able to do much to Dani.

But it didn’t hurt to be safe.

“Who the fuck are you?” Cinder spat, glaring at Dani.

“My name’s Dani,” the tomboy replied, crossing her arms in front of her chest. “I’m Nick’s friend. It looks like I got here at the right time. I’m gonna guess you’re responsible for this?” She waved her hand at the state of the room.

“No,” Cinder stubbornly replied. “It’s his fault!” She pointed an accusatory finger at Nick. “All he had to do was keep his hands to himself, but no! He went and molested Ella right in front of me! You expect me to keep calm after that?! All this is on him! And I’m gonna rip his throat out!”

She lunged towards him, but stopped herself when she saw Dani tighten her stance. She leered warily at the wall of Amazonian soft flesh in front of her; in spite of her impulses, Dani was enough of a deterrent to keep Cinder on her leash.

“I didn’t **** her!” Nick asserted.

“Liar!”

This wasn’t getting anywhere.

“I trust Nick,” Dani said plainly. “He wouldn’t do something like that.”

“Th-that’s right! He wouldn’t!” Rose came to his defense. “Not when he has me to **** to his heart’s content!”

“Rose!” Mary hissed at the other woman. “That is NOT helpful right now!”

Rose pouted.

Dani glanced at the blonde and frowned. “Rose, couldn’t you have done something to stop this? You’re supposed to be tough, right?”

“Yeah, but if I put my hands on her maybe I get penalized. No thanks.”

Sounded mercenary enough to be Rose. Dani sighed and rolled her eyes.

“Anyway, like I said, he wouldn’t do that.”

“But he did!” Cinder screamed. “He had his hands all over her! And they all saw it! Lying cows!”

“Nick?” Dani glanced at him and raised her eyebrow. While she definitely trusted his word over that of a woman who’d just torn the entire Master’s Suite apart, she was clearly not getting the full story right now.

Nick shook his head. “It-it’s not like that,” he stammered. “Rose was mopping the floor… and Ella slipped, that’s all that happened. I moved to catch her. But I swear, I only grabbed her shoulders, that’s all!”

“You see!?” Cinder exclaimed, jamming an accusatory finger at him. “He admits it!”

Dani groaned and pinched the bridge of her nose. She had no idea why Ella, who had seemed so kind and gentle, was now calling herself “Cinder” and getting violent, but it was obvious since yesterday that the girl had some sort of temper issue.

She’d get the full story from Nick later. For now, it looked like Ella, Cinder, whatever she was calling herself, might have had a split personality. And a pretty violent one at that. That was definitely a problem. Dani had her own issues with her temper, and knew how big of a problem that could be, not just for the rest of them, but for Ella/Cinder herself.

“Listen, Cinder, that’s not being molested,” Dani replied simply. “Trust me, I would know. Nick’s molested me far more severely than that.”

“Eh?!” Mary’s jaw dropped.

“Well… she’s not wrong,” Rose pointed out.

“Dani!” Nick’s face turned crimson. “That was an accident! You can’t hold what happened in the sauna against me forever! Or the sunscreen! The challenge required me to do that, I didn’t-!”

“It’s fine, Nick, I’m not upset about any of that,” Dani scoffed. “It’s just some stuff that happened. It’s cool though, because it’s you.”

She turned to Cinder. “But obviously, it’s not cool for you.”

“He invaded Ella’s personal space!” Cinder asserted. “After he said he wouldn’t! He should be lucky I can’t tear him limb from limb!”

Huh. Was this what Dani was like when she was being unreasonable? What a world…

“Again, that was just an accident. And it wasn’t even really molestation either,” Dani asserted firmly, crossing her arms again and standing up taller to cut an imposing figure in an attempt to intimidate the other woman. “Seriously? You want to cry about him grabbing your shoulders? What, are you a little kid or something?”

Dani had gone through far worse on this stupid show. And Cinder wanted to quibble about some g-rated touching?

Seriously?

Yeah, she was having none of that.

“Nick.”

Dani turned to her friend, who jumped slightly. He was clearly on edge, and for obvious reason.

“…Yeah?”

“I think you need to show Cinder the truth of the matter,” she said. “She’s clearly not going to listen to reason, so… yeah. Mind lending me a hand here?”

Nick nodded dumbly even though he had no idea what Dani was talking about.

He quickly found out though, when Dani grabbed his wrist.

Then his hand found something nice and soft.

“Wha…” Rose’s jaw hit the floor.

“D-Dani?!” Mary stammered in disbelief.

Holly broke out into a fit of laughter.

As for Nick? He was at a loss for words.

Dani- his Dani, the most lesbian of any lesbian who he’d ever seen lesbian- had just planted his hand right on her breast.

He knew that he shouldn’t be doing this. But before he even had time to comprehend what was happening, his hand was already moving, getting a nice juicy squeeze of her succulent meat.

“There, see?” Dani wasn’t even looking at Nick, her eyes were focused on the stunned maid in front of her. “That’s what molesting looks like.”

Never in a million years would she have been okay with this. But really… what was the harm? Dani knew on some level that this was her Just One of the Guys transformation speaking; normally, she would have thrown a fit like Cinder at the idea of a guy touching her like this!

But as Cinder’s face burned and anger gave way to embarrassment, she knew that she’d made the right call.

With someone like that, rational discussion wasn’t really an option, you had to settle things by ****. And since Dani couldn’t fight with her fists, she had to take a different method of directly advancing the situation.

Like giving her best friend a little skinship to hammer the point home. It’s not like Nick touching her breast was going to make it fall off or something, and they both knew that nothing was going to happen from this. So Dani could ignore what would normally have been a massive discomfort because she was just supporting her best bud.

“Th-that’s so lewd!” Cinder screeched, covering her face, even as she peaked out from behind her fingers. “Letting a man lay his hands on you like that!? You… you harlot!”

“Are you for real right now?” Dani raised her eyebrow and let go of Nick’s wrist. He instantly yanked his hand away like Dani’s chest was a hot stove. The tomboy approached Cinder, wearing one of her “no-nonsense” expressions. “Look, all I’m doing is showing you that if you want to claim that you were molested, at least say he touched your boobs, or your ass a little.”

“Wow, Dani, way to go,” Rose whistled. She wasn’t even upset that Dani had used her own body for the demonstration instead of calling on her to volunteer- right now, she was just impressed that the tomboy had actually gone through with it!

“Dani, are… are you sure you’re okay?” Mary asked warily, not sure what to make of the other girl’s actions. “Letting Nick touch you like that…”

“Don’t worry, Mary, it’s fine,” Dani assured her, sparing her the barest of glances. “I can deal with a little soft touching between friends. …You’re cool with it, though, right? I mean, he is your husband and everything…”

Maybe Dani should have checked with Mary before making Nick grope her to see if the conservative housewife was okay with that. And checked with Nick, for that matter.

“Uh… I-I don’t really have a problem with it, I’m just concerned for your sake,” Mary stammered, shaking her head. She was still trying to process what she’d just seen. But if Dani was cool with it, then did it really matter?

To Dani, Nick touching her didn’t matter in the slightest. They were friends, and that was that. While any guy who laid his hands on her in any other situation would have lost the hand, in this case it was her taking control of the situation in order to defuse the bomb in front of her.

And on that front, it seemed like it was working as intended.

Cinder was sputtering nonsense and trembling like a leaf. It looked like she was going to die from embarrassment.

“I… I know what I felt!” She stubbornly rebuked Dani, like a child throwing a tantrum. “Just because he didn’t do anything like that… that doesn’t mean I was molested! Ella, she was so frightened that she ran away, and I had to take over to make him pay!”

That answered Dani’s question. If she’d had any doubt that the woman in front of her was suffering from some sort of split personality disorder before this, she definitely didn’t doubt it now.

That being said… Dani wasn’t a doctor. Everything she knew on the topic came from pop culture, which she was pretty sure wasn’t a very reliable source of information. So the last thing she wanted to do right now was to make herself look like an idiot. So she kept her mouth shut, and put on an expression of fierce defiance.

“Cinder… Ella… whoever you are, I think you should leave,” Dani said softly. “You only had to work for an hour, right? Well, it’s my time to be with Nick, so I think you can go.”

Cinder was stiff as a board. But she looked at Nick, then at Dani, and muttered something under her breath. She pushed past them and ran for the door.

“Wait, Cinder, I… I’m sorry about what happened,” Nick called after her. She flinched momentarily, so he was pretty sure she heard him, but after that she was gone.

Nick sighed and slumped down into one of the chairs. “…What a mess.”

“Hey, sorry you had to go through that,” Dani apologized, glancing sympathetically at him. “If it makes you feel better, I know you didn’t do anything wrong.”

“That’s right!” Rose asserted with a nod. “You didn’t do anything! It was all one big accident! And you can’t really blame anybody for it, especially not the person who might have used a bit too much water!”

Mary stared blankly at Rose and then rolled her eyes.

“Yeah, I know that I didn’t do anything wrong,” Nick said. “But that doesn’t really make me feel better. Whether it was my fault or not, it’s clear that it still freaked Ella out. And that’s the last thing I wanted to do tonight.”

He’d really tried to stay out of her way, to keep from bothering her. She’d been worked up all night, and he’d wanted this to be something that wouldn’t make her uncomfortable. Because she shouldn’t have to be panicked or worried while she was here.

Nick could just tell- tomorrow would be an even bigger nightmare than tonight, because now when she came, she’d be expecting something to go wrong.

Why couldn’t he do anything right?

“I tried to help her… but I just made everything worse,” he muttered, and shook his head. He glanced up at Dani, who was looking warily down at him while biting her lip.

“Look… dude, it’s like what happened in the sauna, okay?” Dani pointed out. “We were just hanging out together, trying to have a good time, but then we fell. And stuff happened.”

“I remember you getting pretty upset about that, though,” Nick reminded her.

Dani blushed. “Yeah, well… I’m not saying it didn’t freak me out. But I knew it was an accident, and we moved past it. And look, with Ella… I’m not saying it’s going to be that simple. It’s clear that girl’s got some problems. But hey, if I can come around on you, I’m sure she can, too.”

Unfortunately for Nick, Ella wasn’t the problem. It was Cinder. That being said… he wasn’t happy about having hurt Ella.

“I need to apologize when I get the chance,” he sighed, and shook his head. “When she’s Ella, I mean. Not when she’s Cinder.”

“So she does have a split personality, then?” Dani asked quietly.

“So that’s what it was!” Rose walked over, her eyes wide. “A split personality!”

“Technically, it’s dissociative identity disorder,” Nick corrected them. “And you’re right, she does. There’s Ella, who’s sweet but very shy… and the other personality, well… you just met her.”

“Right,” Dani nodded. “Cinder.”

That explained the incident on the beach. Everything was making sense now.

“So you knew about this, and didn’t tell us?” Dani asked. It wasn’t an accusation, and her tone was free from judgment. Even she could tell that this must have been something eating away at Nick, for him to keep it quiet.

“I wanted to, I really did,” Nick replied. He glanced at Mary and Holly. They’d been the only people he’d confided in. “But I was scared. I thought that if I told you guys, well… that might make everything worse. You’d start treating Ella like a lepper. And that wouldn’t be fair to her…”

In hindsight, he’d messed up pretty bad. What, did he think that Cinder would just stay under the surface, nice and docile? Of course not. He should have been able to see that something like this would happen.

But he’d really hoped it wouldn’t.

Well, no one ever accused me of having too much optimism before, he laughed ruefully at himself and shook his head.

“…I guess it was a hard choice to make,” Dani admitted, seeing where Nick was coming from. “But in the future, you need to think about our safety, too. Just because that girl can’t do any physical harm to us, doesn’t mean she can’t get violent.”

“And take it from Dani, she would know,” Rose cut into the conversation, earning her a glare from the tomboy.

“Rose…” Now was NOT a good time.

“What? I’m just trying to lighten the mood a little!” Rose protested. “Look, Nick, you were trying to do something nice for her. I get that. Anybody would! But it’s not your fault she lost control. It was an accident. An accident that couldn’t be avoided no matter how careful anybody was, probably. So don’t beat yourself up over it, okay?”

She patted him on the shoulder, and believe it or not, that actually improved his mood a little.

“Thanks, Rose,” Nick said, offering her the faintest of smiles. “But Dani’s right, there’s no need to snipe at her like that.”

“Right. Sorry, Dani,” Rose apologized, offering the tomboy a sheepish grin.

Dani just sighed.

“Look, we all get why you did it. But if that girl’s going to be one of us… whatever ‘we’ are, then she’s gotta get a handle on that crazy side of her,” Dani pointed out, her exasperation leaking into her voice.

If only it was as simple as that. But obviously, this was a complicated situation with no easy answers.

Hopefully, the maid would be able to control herself again in the future, because Dani definitely wasn’t looking forward to the next confrontation she had with her.

“Well…” Rose smoothed out her apron and put on her brightest smile, trying to pierce through the doom and gloom with some levity. “This has been a really strange night, no denying that. But if you don’t mind, Nick, I think it’s for the best if I head out. Dani’s here, and you two have some bonding to do, right?”

She turned to leave, only for Mary to snag her by the collar.

“Hold on a minute.” The redhead didn’t look amused.

“Hmm?”

“You still have some cleaning to do.” Mary gestured around the wrecked suite, and Rose turned pale.

“Wh-what?! But I didn’t-!” She stammered, shaking her head frantically. “I have to clean all this up!?”

“That’s why you came here, right?” Mary crossed her arms under her chest. “Think of it as a penalty for all that rude stuff you said earlier.”

The room spun around Rose as she started to get a little dizzy. But now that Mary had pointed it out… she still hadn’t gotten her 100 BP from the work she had done.

Clearly, Dakota was being stingy about her reward money.

“Can… can Nick at least **** me a little?” She asked bizarrely, her mind in a tizzy. “It only makes sense, don’t you think? Even Dani got some light petting!”

Mary’s face scrunched up in a strange mixture of confusion and light embarrassment, and glanced at Nick.

He really didn’t know what to say here. Tonight had just been one of those nights where it seemed like no answer was the right answer.