ANOTHER WORLD TODAY EPISODE #110-2

"If I tell you what I was thinking about," Allie cut right to the point of Rachel's obvious interest. "Do you promise not to make a big deal out of it?"

"Are you pregnant again?" Rachel asked.

"No! Of course not!"

"Planning to kidnap another young man and help him die?"

Allie rolled her eyes. "You know I'm not."

"Then, honestly, darling, I can't think of anything you could say that might prove a bigger deal that what we've already survived together over the past two years."

"You do have a way of putting things into perspective."

"Good. Because that was precisely my intention. Now, what's on your mind that it warranted the immolation of a perfectly innocent bag of popcorn?"

Allie took a moment to collect her thoughts. Then, in a rush of words nearly devoid of punctuation, she demanded, "How is it that a person can know someone is bad for them, know that they treat you badly and that they make you do bad stuff in return; how can you understand that you're much better off without them, but then still... still want them anyway? Or, at least, a part of you does?"

"I see..." In contrast to Allie's ramble, Rachel willfully dragged out her response.

"You promised not to make a big deal out of it," Allie reminded.

"All I said was: I see."

"It was the way you said it. Like you were gearing up for a lecture."

Rachel laughed. "Rest assured, I know the futility of that. I certainly never listened to my mother when she lectured me on the very same topic. Hard as it may be to believe, we were all young once, Allie. Before I was your grandmother, I was...well... a lot of things. Among them, a woman who knowingly allowed herself to suffer at the hands of more than one man who I also understood was very, very bad for me."

***

Rachel's confession about her own past to help Allie leads to a startling question, Frankie and Cass' pasts color their takes on Charlie's future, Donna and Matt resurrect their past, Jamie struggles to keep the past from repeating itself with Lorna, while Grant ponders what went wrong in the present.

All at: http://www.anotherworldtoday.com/2011/2011_110p2.html