Helen recognizes the warning signs, although she wishes she didn't; these small penny-pinching measures that Johnson is putting into place are the same ones Gund put into place after the 2003 season, and everyone who was in the league then knows what happened next. Once was enough, more than enough; she hates putting down roots only to be moved once more. She refuses to think of herself as a journeywoman, although the team after Charlotte (and there will be a team after Charlotte, she will not disappear into the uncertain mists of unemployment) will be her fourth in essentially seven seasons. It's not her fault one of her teams doesn't exist and another is about to stop existing. She has resigned herself to the call that will come in a few days or weeks, the one that means she has a new team to negotiate with. She's already trying to figure out if Minnesota will want her back, or if they'll take McCarville just to shut up the local fans, and whether New York's happy with their point guard situation right now, and how much longer Pee-Wee has in San Antonio; she wants to know where she and her children will go. Part of her is hoping for a reunion with LaToya and Coach Hughes, familiar faces to ease her through the transition, but the pick San Antonio holds seems destined to be a point guard, and her old coach wouldn't be sentimental enough to use a dispersal pick on a stopgap like her.

And at the same time, she's doing calculations to see who needs a sharp-shooting two-guard, because it's clear from their far-too-infrequent conversations that Kelly hasn't thought about things the way she should. But then, she's never had to. The only teams she's known are this one and the Lady Lions, and she's never had to worry about anything else. She thinks everything will be all right, as it always was. And in some ways, that's all right, that's okay, because Helen doesn't mind being motherly and protective of Kelly, and she'll be ready to catch the tears that fall, to catch Kelly in her arms for a moment before they go their separate ways.

She treads a fine line in their conversations, keeping a steady stream of realism in what she tells Kelly but not revealing her fear. How can they keep their little secret if they're hundreds and thousands of miles away from each other? It's bad enough that they're doing things that they were taught never to do when they wore blue and white, but people will know if they meet after games when they're on separate teams. Yet this is something she cannot let go, and she knows that Kelly doesn't want to let it go either. Her voice shakes every time they speak, but she keeps it under control for Kelly's sake. She can't let on just how different things are going to be, because they will be very different.

The babies scream for attention, and she is distracted from her thoughts of the road ahead… and from thoughts of Kelly.

There are worse ways to christen a new house, but Tangela is hard-pressed to think of them. If someone pushed her, and she knows that Sheri or Tammy would, to admit the one person she had wanted most at her housewarming, she had to say Tamika. Family is one thing, but family is forever. One never knows how long a lover will stay; people change, relationships change, circumstances change. Tangela has learned to take advantage of whatever moments she can find, and so she has brought Tamika home after this first game of the Kansas City Sting- what a name, it sounds like a crime drama. The bed is big enough for both of them. She made sure of that when she went shopping.

She laughs quietly and stretches. "Isn't so far now, is it?" she teases her lover. "Sure, we still need to cross two states to get it done, but this might make things easier in the offseason. Well, okay, for the two weeks you're not in Poland and I'm not trying to find somewhere else to be. But it's closer, and that's a good thing."

She runs her fingers along the neat lines of Tamika's braids as Tamika leans against her, purring. Moments like these have been few and far between in their hectic careers, especially when Tamika is so hard to connect with sometimes. It's rare that she has Tamika's undivided attention the way she does now, and she can't help but think that Tamika's adorable when she's dreamy, never mind that there are very few people on the face of the planet who would ever put those two adjectives in Tamika's vicinity.

Kansas City is not Charlotte, for which she is very grateful. It doesn't have the painfully Deep South feel that she never got used to when playing in Charlotte. Not that she feels like she belongs here, either, but it's better than it was before. And so close to the mighty Mississippi, Tamika seems more comfortable too, although there doesn't seem to be any conscious, logical reason for it. Maybe there's just something about the way the river flows that soothes her; maybe Tangela's imagining things, or maybe the rush of the river has the same rhythm as the blood in Tamika's veins.

Tamika stirs against her sleepily and kisses her hard, teeth nipping at the soft skin of her neck and tongue tickling the sensitive spot over her heart. Tangela moans in the back of her throat as Tamika goes lower, and moans for a different reason when Tamika pulls away. "I should go," she says reluctantly, looking at the clock on the nightstand and trying not to look in Tangela's eyes.

"You only get one housewarming," Tangela says, and her hand rests on the small of Tamika's back, sliding low to stop on her hip. "I missed you, you know. There's only so much you can do alone before you get bored with yourself. C'mon, babe, it's been too long. Winters won't care if you're in your hotel room as long as you make the plane tomorrow."

Tamika hesitates, and there's a flash of guilt on her face when Tangela speaks of her loneliness, so maybe that's why she throws judgment to the wind and removes what she had put on to leave. The bed's too big to sleep in alone, after all, and it's just not polite to leave a lady in distress. Tamika may not be a lady, but she is, at heart, a gentleman.

Only when Tamika is curled up against her, one hand cupping her breast with surprising gentleness, does Tangela get the first decent night of sleep she's had since the move to Kansas City.

"I was never good at limbo," Janel grumbles to Lindsay the first time the Sting meet the Sun for the 2007 season, or more precisely, lunch the day before the first time the Sting are to meet the Sun for the 2007 season. "I'm not meant for it."

"I've never had any trouble with your flexibility," Lindsay replies with a flexing of her surprisingly expressive eyebrows.

"I didn't mean that kind of limbo. Can we save the dirty jokes for when we're not in public and people aren't staring at us like you're the Messiah and I'm some guy named Judy?" Janel stabs a French fry, stares at her fork as if she's never seen one before, and plucks the French fry from the tines. Waving the fry like a baton, she continues, "I mean the kind of limbo where no one knows what the hell is going on. Nothing's changed. Nothing's fucking changed. Everyone says we'll have a new owner, but then no one comes up with the money. Johnson says we'll have staffers that just work for our team, and we don't get them. We get maybe a thousand people at a game at an arena that holds- well, I don't know how many exactly, since I don't sit there and count the seats, but a lot more than a thousand, and half of those don't even care enough to cheer for us. Homecourt advantage? What home court advantage?"

Lindsay looks around the restaurant to make sure there's no one there who might recognize her or understand what she's about to do. Sure that she's as safe as she can be, all things considered, she rests her hand on Janel's and says, "Life on the edge. Isn't it fascinating? Look, this can't last forever. At most, one more year of people running around like they don't know what's going on, and then someone will find an answer. Maybe the league will take over the team again, or they'll find a new owner, or they'll force Johnson to take whatever price is offered just to get the team out of his hands, or they'll move you guys somewhere where you'll actually be appreciated, or-"

"Or we'll be dispersed," Janel interrupts, and Lindsay's stomach drops at how certain Janel sounds about that. "Poof. Like we never existed as a team. As if we never put on those butt-ugly uniforms and represented a city. We might be shit now, but Allison knows the history and she's told us enough about it. We're not talking about some expansion team that just started play three years ago and never had a decent season. This team went to the fucking Finals, okay? This team won the Eastern Conference one year and went to the playoffs a bunch of others. Doesn't it matter if it suddenly doesn't exist anymore?"

"You're taking this way too seriously, Juan. If the team matters that much, someone will save it, that's all there is to it. And if not…" Lindsay shrugs. "We're in a young league. Teams move. Teams fold. Look at the Grizzlies. Look at the North Stars and the Wild. Look at the Nationals. It goes on even in the established leagues. Sucks if you get caught in it, but there'll always be a place for you."

"Always?" Janel asks, and the question seems to mean so much more than basketball when she asks it; there's something more desperate in her voice, like she's trying to prove something to Lindsay. She holds Lindsay's hand tightly, almost until it hurts (but not hurting Lindsay, because for all her rough edges and the beating she can dish out on the court, she knows when and how to be gentle).

Lindsay didn't get to where she is without learning how to pick up some subtle nuances, although that isn't her strongest point. But she's known Janel long enough and well enough to pick up what Janel is really asking her, and to know that it doesn't really have anything to do with the ambiguous fate of the Charlotte Sting. She gives the only answer she can. "Always."

Sheri curses the schedule-makers in the league office loud and long. Of all the teams to have a convenient break for at home. Why couldn't these three days be in Seattle, or against Detroit? She knows what's going to happen, and she knows she can't avoid it, no matter how much she knows she needs to. In this town, relentlessly perfect and so plastic it gleams in the wrong light, there are more problems with the knock that will come at her door than there would anywhere else. Not that there weren't problems, even in Seattle.

And because thinking about trouble summons trouble, her doorbell rings. And rings again, because patience hasn't come yet to the impetuous young woman on the other side of the door. Sheri debates whether she should even answer the door, or if she should let Lauren think that she's got the wrong apartment, but she has the sinking feeling that she'll lose Lauren's fickle affection if she ignores her now. She sighs and rises from her easy chair to answer the insistent chiming of the doorbell. "You shouldn't have come," she says as soon as she sees Lauren, and before Lauren can say anything, Sheri has pulled her into the apartment, grateful that she had the foresight to slam the curtains shut this morning.

"What do you mean by that?" At least Lauren hasn't been drinking; if anything, she's biting her words out a little too crisply. She's really too naïve for this, and Sheri suddenly wishes that the Storm had been forced to move to Oklahoma City after all, just so Lauren could get an idea of how backwards the US could be. Seattle had its problems, and sometimes it wasn't as idyllic as it painted itself to be, but Lauren fits in there more than she would anywhere but New York. A year in the Midwest, or the South, or whichever faction Oklahoma currently considers itself part of, might teach her the caution that Sheri had to learn at a very young age.

"This isn't Seattle, or even Charlotte. This is Arkansas. This is Wal-Mart country. They don't take well to people like us, in case you haven't noticed." There's no way to do it properly, not when she's talking to someone who doesn't have an American background, but Sheri tries to get across all the layers of why they aren't wanted anyway. From the blank look on Lauren's beautiful face, harsh under the bare light bulb, she hasn't gotten through, which is what she expected. "Look, in case you haven't noticed, most of this country doesn't approve of gays, unless they're in porn, and even you don't like to show off that much. We don't fit their family values, and this town we're in here happens to be the capital of family values. Not to mention- look at us, Laur'." Sheri puts her hand on Lauren's and tries to avoid the cliché of chocolate against vanilla, but it's hard when Sheri's skin is just that shade of brown and Lauren's skin is so milky pale. "Even if one of us were male, they don't look kindly on this either."

"They never did," Lauren snaps. "And are you becoming like them, too? Are you going to send me off because of what they think? Stop being an idiot for a moment, all right? I'm going to love you whether your neighbors want me to or not." She steps closer to Sheri, using her height for effect and her closeness for a different effect. Even though she doesn't wear perfume, she still has a signature scent that has the perhaps-intentional effect of utterly scrambling Sheri's higher functions. Sheri tries to remind herself just who the cagey, savvy, cynical veteran is here, but the hormones win out, as they so often do around Lauren, and she lets Lauren pull her close for a kiss and more.

In her bed that night, a bed that was not designed for two and thus has been an interesting workbench, Sheri says to Lauren, "We can't do this again. Not here. Anywhere else, I'll go there with you in a second and you know that better than you know me. But you can't come here again. I can't risk it."

Lauren mumbles something that sounds like agreement, which is not a surprise consider what Sheri's done with her in the last couple of hours, and Sheri decides to be satisfied with that, even though she knows that it's a lie. They won't have that fight for too much longer, anyway. Sheri only has so much playing time left, and she's certainly not going to retire here once she's done with her career.

After all, they say the heat down south is good for ailing joints, and does it get much further south than Australia?

The visiting locker room stinks of disappointment, even though most of them knew they had no chance of pulling off the ultimate upset to crown their Cinderella season. For the veterans among them, this is more of a shot at the crown than they ever had; for rookies like Tammy, just being invited to the ball and getting in a dance with the prince is good enough. Allison is moping, but only because she hates losing to her old team, and she can't shake the feeling that getting rid of her was the key more than acquiring the players from the trade was.

And then there's Dawn, who is more of a veteran than half the players in the room, but has been in the WNBA only three seasons now, which leaves her in an uncomfortable twilight place that she'd rather not inhabit. There's only so much of this she can take, and when it becomes clear that the mood isn't going to darken, that her teammates are satisfied with their ass-kicking at the Sparks' hands, she gets up and leaves. Andrea gets up to follow her, but she waves her backcourt mate off, even though Andrea might be the only one who understands and isn't satisfied with just being close enough.

It's surprisingly quiet once she gets away from the locker room, away from the noise of the Los Angeles fans still celebrating in the stands, away from the rustle of her teammates packing their bags, away from the party she could hear from the Sparks' locker room. Once she's away from all that, she could be in the back rooms of any arena; she half expects to take a left and end up in the Coliseum back in Charlotte. It's peaceful, and though it doesn't soothe her the way it should, she starts to decompress. She knows what her team can do now. Anne will have an entire season next year, and a new draft pick to play with; Kelly and Tammy will have picked up some seasoning, and they'll all have adjusted to the radical makeover the team went through last offseason. She doesn't think about the fact that she and Andrea will be a year closer to retirement and that she doesn't really have an apprentice to pick up where she will leave off.

"Needed a place to think?" a familiar voice asks. Lisa reeks of champagne, and her uniform is still stuck to her in interesting places. The official championship cap hides her eyes, but it can't hide her smile as she comes up next to Dawn. She's not holding the Finals MVP trophy, and Dawn wonders for a second where it is before guessing, logically enough, that it's back in her locker, because no one in their right mind is going to disturb anything that belongs to Lisa Leslie, not if they want to have anything that resembles a career afterwards.

"I don't want to see you right now," Dawn says, and it's true because the smell of champagne and the joy that's still on Lisa's face is too much for her to take when she was the one on the losing end, but it's false because she gets the reminder that at least someone she cares about got to be on the winning side, and that's pretty damn awesome in its own way. Then again, Lisa's always been good at contradicting everything Dawn ever knew, every pre-conceived notion that ever made sense to Dawn.

"Come on. There's an office down this way that Coop never uses. You look like you need a place to sit down." Lisa guides Dawn down the hall, and Dawn doesn't mind, doesn't let herself think about how inappropriate this is supposed to be. Of course Lisa has a key to the office. She's Lisa, after all, and if this isn't her building yet, it will be by the time all is said and done. Dawn's more muddled than anything else, because it's hard to think through the confusion Lisa always causes in her, and the resulting chaos makes her numb, because it's easier to deal that way. Somehow, Lisa knows what she does to Dawn, and despite what people would expect her to do, she doesn't take advantage of the situation, waiting until Dawn seems to be coming out of the haze before speaking again. "You know we don't get rings until next season, right?"

Dawn nods. "That's the way it is everywhere," she says, not sure where Lisa is going with this but fairly certain that it's a direction neither of them should be considering, not here, not now, not with the spotlight of Hollywood burning bright above them like a second sun.

"Give me your hand," Lisa demands. She doesn't wait for permission. She's never been good at waiting for what she wants. She has a soft touch, but Dawn's known that for years now, since the first time they met as Olympic hopefuls. As sharp as her legendary elbows are, as bony as her knees can be when she's not careful of how she moves, she can sheathe herself in velvet when she wants to. Somehow, she always wants when she's around Dawn. The nails like claws and the knuckles like knives melt away when her hands are on Dawn, and where someone else might have expected to see a trail of blood there's only the hint of a gentle touch.

"What're you doing?" Dawn asks, all her Philadelphia suspicion rising to the surface. It doesn't matter that she would trust Lisa with her life and other things that she holds rather dear. It doesn't matter that Lisa has handled the rest of her body over the years that they've known each other. These are her hands, and Lisa better have a good reason for doing what she's doing with them.

"Trying to figure out your ring size," Lisa says absently, and it doesn't take a genius IQ to figure out exactly why Lisa is asking this, especially on the heels of that seemingly casual comment about the rings that haven't come out yet for the championship whose confetti is still floating down from the rafters (and will be floating down from the rafters for years to come, because that stuff never finishes deploying).

Dawn pulls away as if Lisa has drawn blood. "Don't do this. You'll regret it later," she says tersely, quickly. "This thing ain't mine. You won it fair and square, and I won't have you giving it to me just because you feel bad for me, or because you think I deserve it, or any other bullshit like that. You had the year of your life, and don't you forget it."

"Um, hello, three MVP trophies for the mantel?" Lisa counters sweetly. "I have more hardware than I know what to do with, and I never thought I'd have to say that. I want you to have this. I'll have another one, don't worry."

"You never forget your first time," Dawn says with a snicker. "And this is your first, for real. This is yours. Don't size it for me, okay? People will ask questions. I don't give a shit what people think, and I don't think you would either if you weren't in the spotlight. But when they start asking questions, they stop giving you endorsement deals, and if you think I'm gonna be the cause of that turnover, you better think again." She grins cockily, the old confidence that never really left, just went into hiding for a little while. "Besides, we'll be back here next year, and that's when I'll be wearing the silly hat and stinking of cheap champagne. I've spent too much time getting close but never close enough, and I'm so sick of that shit that I'm going to put an end to it."

"Cheap champagne? I'll have you know this is vintage from France. We don't do things by half-measures in Los Angeles." With a dirty, mischievous smile on her face, Lisa asks, "Want a taste?"

"Won't your teammates get suspicious if you go back just for a bottle of champagne and leave again?"

Lisa's smile widens as she gets up and shuts the door. "Who said anything about bottles?"

Slowly, the smile on Dawn's face starts to mirror the one on Lisa's. It's been too long. Somehow it feels right and wrong at the same time, and in the end, that's the essence of Lisa.