Obligatory Disclaimer: I don't own "Ugly Betty" or any of the characters or brand names mentioned. Unlike Daniel Meade, I'm broke as a joke, so please don't sue me.

A/N: Well, you guys twisted by arm…these things are a series now. Sigh. Just kidding, I'm having a blast ;) Words cannot say how much I appreciate my reviewers. So I'll just say "THANK YOU ALL!!!" So, without further ado, here's the next installment in the "Positions of Fluff, Angst and Unresolved Sexual Tension" series. By the way, this fic takes place one year after the events of "The Fetal Position"/ "A Comfy Position." Hope you like!

By all accounts, Daniel should've been over the moon. The model's name was Patches-- see, Betty, I found out her name this time, neener-neener boo-boo! She was an exquisite strawberry-blonde with legs that stretched into another time zone and a set of knockers that would put his brother's to shame. Yes, his family was weird. She was from another country—he hadn't bothered to learn which one, it's not like he was going to marry her or anything, sheesh Betty!—and the fact that neither of them could understand a blessed word the other was saying was a help rather than a hindrance tonight, as Daniel would soon discover.

So, they were really going at it, and for the first time in about six months Daniel thought that once, just once, he could be with a woman without thinking about her. When he yelled "BETTY!" at the critical moment, however, that theory was kind of shot straight to hell.

This is getting ri-goddamned-diculous, Daniel thought. At least he didn't have to bother explaining to Patches who exactly Betty was like he'd had to do with the last, oh, seventy women he'd screwed over the past while.

Patches, for her part, was happy as a clam; she wasn't the sharpest tool in the shed, he'd picked up on that right off, and could barely understand her own language, much less his. She seemed to take "BETTY!" as an indication of either her sexual prowess or his.

"Betty!" she giggled, rolling off of him and onto the mattress. "Betty!"

An hour later, after he'd piled What's-Her-Dumb-Ass into a cab, he returned to his not-so-swingin'-at-the-moment bachelor pad and mulled over what to do. His first instinct, as always, was to call Betty. Tonight's events would make this somewhat awkward, and the knowledge that this was the one problem of his since he'd met her that he couldn't talk openly to his soul mate about was killing him.

Daniel cringed away from the words "soul" and "mate" and especially crammed together as they often were to indicate sappy, trite, Hallmark-worthy closeness; he really preferred the term "kindred spirits" as applied to him and Betty. From the moment he'd seen her smack right into the glass wall of the conference room, everything just sort of clicked into place, and despite his initial mental reservations, his emotions, his feelings, his heart had always been clinging to her Guadalajara poncho for dear life since the second he saw her wide-open, blue, train-track grin.

Oh, she assured him over and over again that she depended on him as much as he did her, but despite his fervid and pathetic hopes, he tended to doubt that this was true. The girl was really quite the paradox. She could look at him in such a childlike way sometimes, her determinedly beating, bleeding heart torn out and pinned to her polka-dotted sleeve, her sweet ideals such that the bitchy, bulimic, panty-less, crack-fiend model that had thrown her coffee at her this morning was really just having a bad day and would emerge as Mother Teresa if she only had someone friendly to talk to—these were the things that made Daniel ache to protect her, to pad the safe underneath his desk with cotton wool and lock her in until the coast was clear.

But his Betty was an "old soul," too, as Alexis had quietly observed once. Betty was indeed that, whereas Daniel felt that he would eternally retain the emotional maturity of a seventeen year old. Betty openly admired his worldliness, and worldly he was, but the fact remained that more often than not, Betty was his shield, his comfort, his person, his everything for the times when his worldliness turned into just plain jadedness, when his head spun from too much champagne and he needed to talk, when the entourage of sycophants that were always cackling around him like hyenas around a wildebeest carcass practically pushed him into the gaudy explosions of the stalker-azzi's flashbulbs.

She was there for those moments that were really par for the course for the Meade clan, moments that had had them all sailing onward to therapy, ho! on a wing and a prayer since he was about twelve--moments like his brother Alex's triumphant (he guessed) return from the dead as Alexis, sporting a new rack and a chip on her shoulder (ten years worth of therapy and Betty), like the times when Wili had her bitch on (read: always) (no real therapy required for that one, just lots of Betty), like his mother's drunken attempts to striptease on the corner for cash after Bradford had shut down her funds (it was working until Betty and Daniel had put the kibosh on it—fifteen years worth of therapy and Betty).

He had to see her. If he called her, she would probably tell him to take an aspirin, a cold shower, and then bed. And what would he say, exactly? Hey, Betty, it's me, I know it's, like, 2 AM and all, hope you're not pissed. But I just wanted to remind you to put the finishing touches on the Fabia presentation Power Point and don't forget to be the mother of my children…

No, if he wanted to see his girl, launching a sneak attack would be the best. She could rarely refuse him face to face. Filled with purpose, he started to get dressed, but abruptly stopped, hitting an, um, snag when he tried to pull up his jeans.

He decided that the cold shower might not be such a horrible idea.

Have no fear, this one's a multi-chapter! Love it, hate it, flame it, worship it (okay, maybe not the last two) please review!