Luka resumes staring silently at Janel. "Why don't we get out of here and see what kind of trouble we can get into?" she asks lightly. "I think I know the place," Luka husks adorably. "Three-hundred an hour, two-thousand for the night," Janel says, her face clicking from vixen into businesswoman. Luka humphs in surprise, stares at her with a highly entertained expression on his face, then shakes his head and gets up to leave. But, faced with a long, cold night in bed without me there next to him -- a frightening, soul-crunching prospect indeed -- he pauses, then turns and downs the dregs of his drink. "Coming?" he whispers. Janel's lips twitch as she gracefully gets up to follow him home. Wow. He so does not need to pay for sex, but maybe he's paying for the companionship of someone who won't sign a petition against him or whose husband won't chase him down. He's paying for the lack of strings. I don't think he's desperate for the sex so much as he's desperate for an intimacy that he can compartmentalize and keep completely separate from the rest of his daily life. Boffing nurses just doesn't achieve this.

Abby is curled up on the couch, staring into space, when Carter lets himself into the apartment. Now, wait. This looks awfully similar to Abby's old apartment, except that the front door is in a different place. Way to go, set designers. Way to get creative. A depressed Abby says she hasn't been able to reach Eric. "Might have to wait until the morning," Carter says sympathetically. He brandishes a bag of fish and chips he picked up for dinner, and as he trots it into the kitchen, his gait slows when he sees a lone glass of red wine sitting on the table. Abby peers into the kitchen, almost as if awaiting an explosion, then scrambles to her feet and toward Carter. "I bought the bottle on the way home from work," she says, words tumbling out of her mouth. "It took me an hour to get it out of the bag and another forty-five minutes to pour the glass. I haven't had a sip. I just wanted everything to stop, I just wanted it to stop..." Her voice dies in his chest as Carter gently pulls her to him. She buries her nose in his sweater and holds him, but her head's being tilted at the angle it is prevents it from being a full-body hug. She's more resting against him than embracing him, and I wish it were a more intimate hug like the one Sandy gave Kerry, but at the same time it really just looks like she's trying to lean on something solid, which makes symbolic sense for her.