Julia and Adriana play rock, paper, scissors

The bombshell that Julia dropped at the end of Part 1 of the reunion was so big that we here at the Real Housewives Institute had to rush to our panic room to write an emergency recap of it for the Housewives Institute Bulletin. (What? Don’t you know about our twice-monthly newsletter? Sign up here for free! Also don’t forget to like, subscribe and Follow me on Instagram.) As I said in that piece, the first part raised more questions than it answered. After watching the second part, I still have a lot of questions. The bigger question is, does anyone know how lesbians have sex?

When Andy asked Adriana if she had sex with Julia, she said, “I don’t have a penis.” What’s going on here in the Clinton administration, the stained blue dress, the “I didn’t have sex with that woman” thing? The stunned silence after her answer says it all. Andy told her that you can have sex without a penis, and she said, “Not really.” Not real? There are a million ways to have sex without a penis. If a man gave Adriana the best blowjob of her life and didn’t penetrate her, wouldn’t she consider that sex? And if not, poor Adriana. She needs to go to the Ramona Singer School of Satisfaction, where gentlemen south of the border are given directions, told to eat, and then shown the door without their boxers even hitting their ankles. When Stephanie says they can scissor, Adriana says she hasn’t clipped anyone.

The ladies take a break for lunch, and Julia is in the dressing room talking to Alexia and Marysol, and Alexia says, “Did I eat her out? Did she eat you out? I don’t know what you guys are doing.” Yes, you do. This is what they do! Adriana is talking to Lisa in the dressing room, and Lisa says, “Did you do this?” She puts her hands together in the universal symbol of scissors. Adriana says no again. While there was a legend that Lesbians don’t actually scissorsince then It was exposed. So, lesbians do scissoring, but it’s also not the only thing they do. Sex is a wild and varied thing. A physical buffet, if you will. Maybe not for the straight women sitting on these couches who just engage in three to eight minutes of missionary and then turn off the light, but there are all kinds of things people can do to please each other. If you think the only thing lesbians can do is scissor or go down on each other, I’m sorry, but it’s too bad your imagination and ability to access all of Al Gore’s web porn is missing.

Another crazy reaction is when Lisa first heard the news, she said, “Why were you sleeping? [together] If you’re married?” Oh, you poor, ignorant Canadian. Married people have sex with people other than their partners all the time. What do you think Lenny was doing with all the plastic surgery conventions? A lot of people cheat, so yeah, Julia might be married, but that doesn’t mean she’s wearing a chastity belt and Martina is the one holding the key. (If she did, you know she’d hide it inside an open tennis ball.) As Kiki points out, not all relationships are the same, and Julia may have been having sex within the confines of her relationship. For a group of cosmopolitan women, they certainly have an insular view of the world.

To answer some of these questions, we got more details about what happened thanks to Andy’s clever questions. (Hats off to our collective dad, who’s flying without a net in this episode, with nothing to help him. But you can see by the sly smile on his face that he knows he’s making excellent TV.) Martina and Julia aren’t in an open relationship, but Martina knew about Julia’s affair with Adriana because Julia told her about it six months ago. She also told Martina that she would mention it at the reunion, which made Martina cry.

As for what happened, when Alexia pressed her for the gory details, Julia demurred but said they “were intimate,” which is all I needed to know. To me, this means there was contact under the belt, and that’s enough to count as “co-sleeping” in my book. Adriana admits they communicated, but said it was nothing more than heavy foreplay. She even treated us kindly by putting it in Bravo language and saying it was “Pussy caresser“. She says there were no scissors and that she didn’t know what Julia’s female parts looked like. To use another bit of Bravo language, was it “No finger kiss“Anyway, I think what Adriana tells us paints a clear enough picture for the audience without getting into the nitty-gritty of what happened there.

While they agree on the facts of the hookups, everything else about their stories is different. The way Julia tells it, she was in a dark place with Martina and she was vulnerable, and Adriana didn’t necessarily take advantage of her, but she was working the situation to her advantage. After they hooked up, Giulia says Adriana asked her if she would leave Martina for her and she supposedly said: “Imagine the story line!” Then Julia thought that Adriana wasn’t really interested in her or her real friend and was just using her for the show. But Adriana isn’t wrong either. Imagine the story line!

Afterwards, Julia says that Adriana always held the secret of their relationship above her head. She said that Adriana wanted her and Julia to be good friends like Marisol and Alexia, and if Julia tried to get close to anyone in the group or defended Marisol or Kiki, Adriana would threaten to reveal her secret. Julia says that even during their fight at the finale party, when Adriana was threatening to “break the fourth wall” and “tell the truth” about Julia, she was alluding to their sexual past. The producers are giving us a solid prop by airing unseen footage, and it looks like Julia might be right. Julia says she is coming forward now because she felt like she couldn’t be herself for three years because Adriana was gagging her and emotionally blackmailing her with information. Although she will look bad for cheating on her wife, she says that she wants Adriana and the audience to know that she did not leave her old friend Adriana for her new friends, but she needs to break free from Adriana’s control.

Adriana calls Julia a “fool” for sharing this of her own free will because she would have taken this secret to the grave. In Adriana’s novel, Julia was charming and always had a crush on her. The first time they met, Adriana says Julia took her into the bathroom to show her breasts (which anyone with a Peacock subscription can see throughout the show), and Julia showed off her butt. Adriana says that Julia is a fraud who changes based on who is around her and that she changed her name. Her real name is, wait, Yulia. Oh, the eye roll Andy Cohen gave her when he heard that name revealed.

Adriana says she was always going to keep Julia’s secrets, but now that Julia has brought it up, she feels like she has carte blanche to say everything. “She was cheating on a Haitian mortician!” she exclaims, adding that Julia should have bought him a coffee maker as a gift. It says that Julia had another lover who was a policeman. (Based on the use of the pronoun Adriana, those sound like male lovers, if that matters.) Andy, who does hardcore journalism for the people, only has one follow-up: Why did she have to buy a coffee maker for this Haitian mortician? exactly! Julia! Answer the question!

This adds to Adriana’s narrative that Julia is a liar, a cheater, and a “whore.” She also says that when they were in Spain, Adriana came into Julia’s room and Julia again tried to sleep with her, but Adriana said “no.” This happens when Andy mentions that the two wanted to fix their relationship at the beginning of the day, but it seems impossible now that Julia brought it up. That’s when Adriana delivered her support, her heart in a wooden box, which she was going to give to Julia again. Ah, that’s the problem with Adriana: She does these stunts, never lands, and we’re all squirming from our teeth to our dirt.

Now that we get the whole story, who should we believe? I tend to think that most of what each woman said was absolutely true, mostly because they both admit it. Adriana agrees that they are related, and Julia says that she has some indiscretions unlike the Adriana that Martina knows, and Julia also agrees that she showed Adriana her butt when they first met. I also think, based on everything we know about her from the past, that Adriana will likely use her knowledge of Julia to keep her on her side and try to make a better outcome for herself on the show. Have you ever blackmailed her by flat-out saying, “If you don’t do this, I’ll tell everyone”? Probably not, but from the clip we saw, it was certainly heavily implied. The only thing I don’t believe is that Julia tried to contact Adriana in Spain, but maybe. At this point, who knows?

Based on what we know now, the other big question is: Do we care? I mean, not really. Julia does not paint for me a picture of Adriana that is completely different from what I already assumed of her. Julia apparently discussed this with his wife and worked it out, so it’s between them. Is Julia as liar, manipulative, and deceitful as Adriana says? Well, she certainly wasn’t faithful, but then again, that’s Julia’s job. So, I care in the sense that this is a reality show and these are some really juicy details, and of course I’m sitting there, but I don’t care in the sense that it doesn’t change how I feel about either of them, really.

The rest of the episode focused on Kiki, her relationship with her father, and everything she’s been through this season. I love Kiki, she’s happy because she’s happy and she also wins best dressed. Then it’s a matter of rehashing what happened with Stephanie and Alexia, but they seem to have gotten over it and moved on as friends. Same thing with what happened with Larsa and Lisa, two wicks in the same candle. I was interested in what ChatGPT had to say about Larsa’s reputation, and frankly, it was spot on. Is Sam Altman a gritty junkie? Is Alexia next!

But after the fireworks between Julia and Adriana, all these conversations seem strange and stilted. It’s like trying to go to McDonald’s after a funeral. No one is in a good mood, and the fun and enjoyment you’re supposed to be having has been sapped by the upheaval of emotions we’ve just experienced. I don’t know if all of this will create the kind of shift in group dynamics (or casting for next season) that Julia believes will happen or that Adriana fears will happen. However, any time we can uncover an affair between co-workers and have kinky sex front and center on your TV (or wherever I stream Peacock), I’m always happy to talk about scissors.