Mary woke up in a haze. As her eyes fluttered open, she couldn’t help but wonder what, exactly, had happened last night, especially as her surroundings came into focus. Whose couch was she on, and why did the room seem exactly like the set of Everybody Loves Raymond? She was laying on a couch, naked but for a ratty flannel bedsheet; by her feet was a worn leather recliner, and to her right was a TV set straight out of 2003.

“W-where am I?” Mary asked groggily, to nobody in particular. A deafening silence was the only response.

It was then that she heard someone walking down the stairs. She heard the man shout: “Deb, would you get down here and make my damn pancakes? I don’t know how to work the griddle.”

An older woman’s voice responded, “Debra doesn’t know how to work a spatula!”

A man arrived on the landing, rubbing his eyes, as though he, too, had just woken up. She sat up in fear, clutching the sheet to her chest, and the man looked towards her with a look that changed slowly from fear to suspicion, then, unmistakably, to arousal. Mary grasped the sheet closer around her.

“Hellllllllllllllllllo, lady,” the man breathed, his marble-mouthed voice stimulating Mary’s insides in a not-altogether-unpleasant way. His hair was tousled, a blue terry-cloth bathrobe hung on his bare shoulders, complemented only by faded blue boxer shorts with tiny baseballs and bats on them. “Where did you come from? You’re not the child wrangler, are you? The kids aren’t on set today, you can go. They’re shooting a scene in the bedroom set, but you can get out of here if you want.”

Mary blushed; she was only 19, yet he was mistaking her for a working woman; It was pretty hot. She peered up again at the backlit silhouette of Ray Romano.

“Hang on a second, where are your clothes?” Ray asked, his audibly gravel words a concoction of care and mystification.

“I just woke up here,” Mary responded huskily, increasingly turned on by Ray’s demeanor and 5 o’clock shadow. “I don’t know how I got here.”

“Well, you’re here now. And you’re safe. With me.” Ray blushed, his skin fresh and dewy despite his recent 40th birthday.

Mary stood up, letting the sheet cascade to the ground around her ankles. She was hesitant, yet not. Frightened, yet not. There was something about Raymond that made her feel secure, and just a little bit reckless.

“I have one request,” Mary whispered.

“Anything. Wow. Yeah. Whatever you need, as long as it doesn’t involve my parents!”

The laugh track tinkled faintly.

“You have to call me Debra in bed,” said Mary.

“Oh boy. Um.” His eyes fell to her ample bosom. “Well, yeah, I guess, yeah I can do that.” She heard Patricia Heaton speaking her lines to Doris Roberts, but barely processed it as she took in Ray’s chest hair with her sparkling blue eyes.

She approached him, running her hand through his mane, and he shrugged the bathrobe off of his shoulders. His jet black hair slid through her hands like silk, with the aroma of Head and Shoulders shampoo pervading her nostrils. As she inhaled his musk, something inside her seemed to come to life, and she drew him closer, entangling their curves within one another. She groped his farmer-tanned thighs, he her milky white arms. Slowly they became closer and closer until he spoke again.

“D-Deb-De-” He stuttered. They fell to the couch, rocking it with rigor a prop couch should not have been able to handle.

“What was that?” asked the real Debra from upstairs.

“N-nothing, honey,” he said, as Mary traced a path down his chest with her plump lips.

“I don’t know where Ray Barone ends and Ray Romano begins,” Mary panted.

“Neither do I. I never want to know again,” he growled.

As Mary took him inside of her, Ray’s growl turned to a howl, and neither of them heard the doorknob turn.

Peter Boyle sauntered into the room, carrying a baking dish of his wife’s signature lasagne, and released a booming “Holy crap!”