For the longest time, that guy didn’t have a face. He was a nameless, shapeless figure. Well, she knew that he would have a male figure like every male has. What she didn’t know was his looks, his smile, his personality ... not even the color of his hair. He was like a shadow in each dream and fantasy. Lately, she feared that her security of that shadowy figure had been changing. She would be deep into her own world, looking at this shadow and noticing new aspects about it ... it had eyes, or a certain hair style. It was like the shadow was taking form and it scared her. She was afraid that she finally met that guy, but that he wouldn’t be in these fantasies. He wouldn’t be around to be in these dreams that she had.

As her shadow dream man took form, she would wake up in the middle of the night, from noticing each change. One night, he would have eyes- deep, cool, hazel eyes. While another night she would view it with spikey light brown hair. Once, she woke up in a sweat and she knew that was the worst nightmare of a fantasy she ever had. That was the night when Maria saw her dream man as someone other that a plain gray shadow. She saw Michael instead ... and that scared her. She wasn’t even getting along with him that well and she was seeing him in her fantasies. Maria only knew that one thing was certain. If Michael ever left her all her fantasies would break into shards like fragments of glass, never to be repaired. That’s what scared her- that Michael would leave and she would be broken forever. He made her fantasies ten times more complicated than she ever imagined- and she hated that.

Her life was complicated enough to have to deal with Michael Guerin in real life. With Tess entering the group and the FBI nearing the three aliens she now cared about so much, she couldn’t afford to think of Michael as part of her future. She always thought that more than one man would fill that shadowy figure in her fantasy land. For her, Michael was the only one who ever had. She tried not to admit it, but she knew that no one else would ever fill that shadow as completely as Michael Guerin- no one.

One day, she took a day off from work and went on a drive by herself to think. She ended up somewhere half-way between Albequerque and Roswell in the middle of the desert near the highway she drove out on. She walked a little ways from the road to a small cave. Maria had never been out here before even- this was her heart telling her where to go. She sat down in the coolness of the cave and closed her eyes. She wanted to have just one fantasy that didn’t have Michael written all over it. Maria tried- she tried so hard- she just couldn’t manage it. She ran though every thought, every fantasy every dream- every one of them containing Michael in some way. He had saturated her brain with himself and she wanted so badly to hate him for it. She just didn’t have the capacity. Instead, she opened her eyes, checked her watch and sat there for a little bit longer. She wanted to so something that would end this Michael saturation in her brain- or at leaast make it subside somewhat.

Maria wondered how Michael would react if she told him her private conflict. He wasn’t good at opening up to her. He would probably just shut down and block out whatever she tried to tell him. It would overwhelm him like it did her- and she wondered. She wondered if he had the same problem.

Maria knew that Liz was her best option in a crisis like this. She could tell Liz just about everything. Liz was, after all, her best friend and Maria knew that Liz had fantasies- probably ones that included Max. She wondered why Liz didn’t seem worried, but then she couldn’t say for sure. A brief thought entered her mind that her problem was alien-induced, but that would have been too easy. Even if he had "induced" it, he wouldn’t have done so on purpose and she just didn’t think that it was an alien thing. Somehow, she just knew.