Y&R WILD SPECULATION! What If the Most Dangerous Address in Genoa City Is Not the Newman Ranch but the GCAC, and Nobody Has Figured That Out Yet?!

WHAT IF DIANE JENKINS AND NIKKI NEWMAN ARE ABOUT TO DISCOVER THEY ARE NEIGHBORS AND THE GCAC IS NOT READY FOR WHAT COMES NEXT

TL;DR: Diane Jenkins walked out on Jack Abbott the same night Nikki Newman got kicked out of the Ranch by Victor on Y&R, and both women landed at the GCAC without knowing the other was there. Phyllis Summers is already in the building. Audra Charles is already in the building. Picture four women with this much history, this many grievances, and this many reasons to burn something down, all living within hallway distance of each other. The GCAC’s innocent guests have absolutely no idea what is coming.

Let Us Set the Scene

It was not supposed to happen this way.

Diane Jenkins did not plan to end up at the GCAC. She planned to be at the Abbott house, living the life she had worked so hard to build, married to the man she had fought half of Genoa City to keep. Then she walked onto that yacht and found Jack Abbott in bed with Patty Williams. She slapped him across the face, and she left.

Nikki Newman did not plan to end up at the GCAC either. She planned to be at the Ranch, living the life she had rebuilt after everything Victor Newman had put her through. Then Victor looked at her, after she had done the one decent thing in this entire situation by telling the truth, and told her to get out. So she left too.

Same night. Same hotel. Different floors, possibly. But the same building.

Neither one knows the other is there yet.

Phyllis Summers is already there. Audra Charles is already there. The Genoa City Athletic Club, in its infinite architectural innocence, has somehow become the most loaded address in Genoa City without anyone stopping to think about what that actually means.

Do you think the GCAC is ready for Diane Jenkins and Nikki Newman under the same roof? Send your wildest theories to [email protected] and we just might publish them!

Picture It: The Moment They Find Out

What if the discovery happens at the elevator?

Picture it. Diane is standing there, overnight bag in hand, still processing everything she saw on that yacht, still feeling the sting of that slap on her own palm. The doors open. Nikki Newman is standing inside, looking like a woman who has just been thrown out of her own life by the man who put her there in the first place.

They stare at each other.

Neither one speaks for a full three seconds, which in GCAC elevator time is approximately one eternity.

Then one of them presses a floor button, and they ride up in the kind of silence that has about forty years of history compressed inside it. Two women who have spent decades on opposite sides of everything Genoa City has thrown at them, standing three feet apart in a mirrored box, both homeless on the same night for reasons that connect directly back to the same web of Abbott and Newman chaos they have been tangled in their entire lives.

What if their suites are next to each other?

What if they figure that out before the elevator even reaches their floor?

The Phyllis Problem

Here is where it gets truly diabolical.

Phyllis Summers is already at the GCAC, and she is already making herself known in the way that Phyllis Summers always makes herself known. Loudly. Pointedly. With maximum disruption to everyone within a three-suite radius.

Phyllis has history with Diane that could fill its own separate article. She also has history with Nikki that is currently running at a temperature that could heat the entire building. She is, by all available evidence, pissing everyone off with the kind of focused dedication that only Phyllis can sustain over an extended period of time.

Now picture Diane and Nikki, two women who have never once needed a reason to dislike each other, suddenly discovering they have a common enemy living down the hall.

What if the Athletic Club is the place where Nikki Newman and Diane Jenkins finally, improbably, accidentally become allies?

What if Phyllis Summers is the thing that unites them?

We are not saying it would be comfortable. We are not saying it would be warm or easy or anything resembling a genuine friendship. We are saying that two extraordinarily intelligent, extraordinarily dangerous women who have both been pushed to their absolute limits on the same night might look at Phyllis Summers causing chaos in their building and decide, silently and simultaneously, that enough is enough.

Genoa City has never seen Nikki Newman and Diane Jenkins on the same side of anything. The GCAC’s housekeeping staff would not survive it.

Then There Is Audra Charles

Because this building did not have enough history in it already.

Audra Charles is already a resident of the Genoa City Athletic Club. She worked for Nikki at Newman Media. She was kind about Nikki’s drinking. She got fired anyway. She has a history with Kyle Abbott, Diane’s son, that goes well beyond professional, and when Victor Newman, the man who just threw Nikki out of her own home, needed someone to get close to Kyle in the south of France and pull him away from his own granddaughter Claire, he called Audra.

She went. She and Kyle came close enough to something that Claire found out about it. Kyle and Claire broke up. Audra never got the company Victor promised her for her trouble.

So now picture Audra Charles in the hallway of the GCAC when Nikki Newman checks in.

Then picture that same hallway when Diane Jenkins, Kyle Abbott’s mother, realizes who her neighbor is.

What if Audra is the variable that nobody in this building has accounted for? What if she is done being Victor Newman’s pawn and done being the woman in the hallway and decides that living in the same building as Nikki Newman and Diane Jenkins is either the worst thing that has ever happened to her or the most useful situation she has ever stumbled into?

Audra Charles did not get that company. She is still owed something and the GCAC just got very interesting.

The Innocent Guests of the GCAC Deserve Our Thoughts and Prayers

Let us take a moment for the people nobody is talking about in this scenario.

The guests. The regular, unsuspecting guests of the Athletic Club who booked their rooms expecting a lovely stay in one of Genoa City’s finest hotels are about to find themselves living inside a situation that no concierge on earth is trained to handle.

What if the lobby becomes a war zone? What if room service stops functioning because the staff is too busy navigating the diplomatic minefield between suites? What if the hotel bar, which was once a perfectly pleasant place to have a quiet drink, becomes the site of conversations so loaded that the bartender starts updating their resume?

The GCAC has survived a lot. It has not survived Diane Jenkins, Nikki Newman, Phyllis Summers, and Audra Charles all operating at full capacity in the same building on the worst nights of their respective lives.

We are speculating. We are also not entirely wrong.

Victor Newman threw Nikki out of the Ranch. Jack Abbott’s choices put Diane on the street, and the Athletic Club, through no fault of its own, is about to find out what happens when Genoa City’s most formidable women have nowhere left to go but the same address.

The elevator is going to need therapy.

Do you think Nikki Newman and Diane Jenkins could actually become allies against Phyllis Summers at the GCAC? And which of these four women is the most dangerous when she has nothing left to lose? Sound off below because this comment section is about to need its own suite!

WATCH THIS: I love Nikki’s comedic side!

@soapoperamag I giggled during this and had to do a rewatch because it was too funny. It's not often Nikki shows off her comedic side, but when she was pointing her finger and laughing in Cane's face, I gotta say, I nearly spat out my tea! This moment has lived rent-free in my head since it happened, and I couldn't help but talk about it. Were you Team Nikki or Team Cane in that moment? #YR #YoungandtheRestlessYoungandtheRestless ♬ original sound – Soap Opera Magazine