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Her steps were measured, her back was ramrod straight as she stepped into the room and closed the door. He was sitting there, looking up and straight ahead at her, and Maria's breath caught in her throat. The night previous not counting, this was technically the morning after, and in the overstimulated scope of her mind, he was still naked and hot, the small room redolent of their mingling.

"Before we go any further, I just want to know that there won't be any mind reading or X-ray vision or similar immature pranks" she rasped.

He nodded mutely, which left her oddly wanting for an answer. He was very clothed, in fact, and the room didn't smell even vaguely like sex, it smelt of laundry, and the faint vestiges of a man's cologne, and the slight mildew of an unkempt trailer. She attributed her dizzy head to this, it was a more acceptable excuse than her proximity to him.

"I promise" he said.

"Good."

The silence was thudding. He was looking at her eyes, which made her nervous. "Look" she began, glancing away. "Last night was..."

"Uncalled for" he finished simply, folding his hands, which were slim and strong and helpless. "I had no right..."

"No" she agreed, struggling gamely to maintain the upper-handed sense of authority she wanted. "You didn't."

"You noticed the flowers?" It wasn't so much the question it sounded like as a statement, a fact he could feel from her the minute she walked into his bedroom, where they were conducting their tryst.

"Ye-es" she admitted, before she could betray any associated emotion on her face. Curiously, she bit her lip. "How did...?"

"I touched them" he said quietly, gazing at his own hand inscrutably, as if he couldn't possibly believe it himself. "And they bloomed."

She blushed scarlet, so quickly that she was amazed. Roses, she thought. Can his touch make anything blossom?

"I don't know how I did it."

"Michael" she said, and her voice was ragged as she changed the subject. "You came over last night to tell me something."

"I... yeah, I did" he said.

"What was it?" She prompted.

"I wanted to say I was sorry?"

"What was that?" she leaned closer.

"You heard me."

"Oh." She sat back on her hands, nodding sagely. "I know I must have heard something. Certainly it wasn't Michael Guerin saying he was sorry."

He blushed, furiously, acutely feeling every burning coal she dragged him across. His hand came up, unconsciously, like he wanted to hide his face, and he ran it nervously through his spiky abundance of hair. She scrutinized him, taking a vindictive satisfaction in every moment of his embarrassment. Finally, when he had reached a penultimate degree of red and the comprehension that nothing could possibly be worse, he stuttered:

"Come on, Maria."

"'Come on Maria' nothing!" she exploded, finally gaining the advantage with a vengeance. "What am I supposed to do, just... just pretend that you don't affect me?" She was ready to cry again. "Play like it doesn't matter? It does, Michael. And I know it'll just stroke your damn ego..." she wiped her eyes with the back of her hand shamefully, and her voice dropped to a whisper. "But it does. You do that to me."

The same hand, the mindful one that he had brushed his hair with, wanted to reach out and touch her. With his nearness to her came the heady rush of the shampoo she had washed her hair with that and every morning, the soap she bathed in, and the realization that he was even identifying that. His hand wavered in the space between them, and she batted it away in frustration.

"Don't do that!" she cried. "That doesn't work!"

"Shh!" he whispered, agitated. "Don't.. do that!"

He didn't know what to do. Michael was having a hard enough time dealing with his own emotions, never mind her going all Lifetime on him. He didn't know whether to shake her or yell at her, which was his instinct. Aggression was always a good technique, he thought. At the same time, though, his convictions in the power of nastiness were shaken by his core urge to wrap her in his arms and curl her to his chest and protect her, and rock her like a baby until her trembling subsided. That was a bit too much for his reach at the moment.

She shook her head, a bitter laugh erupting from her pretty lips. "Oh, that's typical, isn't it, Michael?" she spat. "Emotion. It's the only thing that scares you. Not death, or the abstract concept of God, or even that Topolsky and the FBI are going to discover you. No big deal for Michael. God forbid you poke a nail under that chilly facade, though, and discover the blank space underneath... ooh, now that hurts, doesn't it? Those big, bad thoughts... those *emotions*..." She paused just a moment in her harangue to breathe, her big eyes locking on hers coldly as she drew another. "That's what makes human life such a bitch, isn't it? You're incomplete, Michael. When they were fitting you out for your human body, or whatever, they forgot to add a heart into the mixture."

He took a step back, genuinely stricken.

"That's not true" he said.

"You know what?" she asked sadly, the blush of her anger fading to cool reality with every passing second. "Maybe it's not true. Maybe you have the ability to love, and hate, and cry..."

For a second, she hoped against hope that he'd challenge her, before she delivered his absolution, from her, like the quivering pale angel of vengeance she couldn't stop herself from becoming. Just then, every word he'd rehearsed, every phrase and declaration he'd committed to heart died on his lips, because he knew he needed to hear it.

"But not for me" she finished. "Never for me."

"Maria" he whispered. She was standing so close to him that she could hear every syllable of that breath, yet was so far away that she couldn't listen.

"You can't be *normal*" she told him, cutting deeper and deeper with every agony-laced hiss she shot straight into him. "It's not possible. Not when your greatest fantasy is a big, silver spaceship to come down and just fly you away."

He still said nothing.

A cold, sick feeling of nausea overtook her. She gripped the doorknob behind her, and he saw, in flashing second intervals, her turning it each minute degree.

"Maria" he repeated.

She turned, betrayal, pain, fear, and layers of hurt marked with his fingerprints all over her.

"You want to know what I love?" he rasped. "What I hate? What I fear?"

He didn't wait for an answer.

"I've been inside your head, seen your fantasy" he said. "What if... How about if you came over here and took a look at mine?"