"Michael" she gasped, her voice still husky from sleep. He scrutinized her, trying to tell if she was blushing.

"Ever have one of those dreams" he drawled lazily, leaning over so that his elbows rested on the mattress. "That you just can't seem to get out of your head?"

She sat very still for a moment, not betraying the chill she suddenly felt all through her. His eyes were both laconic and painfully alert, antagonistic and something else she couldn't quite place. The realization hit her from behind, and she didn't quite get it. Michael looked... young. Not childlike, but as if he were a normal teenage guy for once. Liz decided to play it safe, just in case....
*Him and his damn dreamwalking* she seethed.

"I don't know what you're talking about" she told him.

He ignored her. Inching further and further up the coverlet, he was making her nervous.

"I'm had dreams like that" he said conversationally. "The kind that seem to go on... and on.... and on."

Was he *looking* at her? Liz felt a hot, burning path start at her ankles, and make it's slow, searing way up her body with an unhurried glare. Before it hit her knees she felt her blush starting.

"Why did you come here, Michael?" she asked him quietly. "We both know nothing can come of this."

He stopped his analysis of her curves, and rolled his head back, contemplatively.

"Liz." The single syllable, so surreal coming from his mouth that she had to go back for a minute and consider the way it rolled off his tongue like a trifle.

She made eye contact with him, and felt the tension crackling between.

"Is it that banner you wear around yourself?" he asked. "The one that say 'Property of Max Evans: trespassing prohibited by law?'"

Liz pulled her knees back under the covers, up against her body.

"Me and Max" she said helplessly. "You and Maria- friends don't do that, Michael. No matter what- and this is... crazy! I mean, you and me and you in general- neither of us can..."

"Right now" he said softly, his voice rasping like sandpaper, urgently enough that she cut herself off to listen. "I want you worse than I've ever wanted anything or anybody. I don't stop to think about who has what I want. Especially not when it's right in front of me."

She tried, impossibly, not to react to that, but he never stopped staring her down, and she felt hunted, trapped... and she'd be damned if she couldn't rid herself of the feeling of his ghostly mouth on her in her dream, her own hands all over his thin, hard, desperate body.

"We're different, Michael" she said. "This can't ever..."

He laughed, roughly, and it made her feel dirty.

God, it made her feel *good.*

"What's to be alike?" he wondered. "I'm a guy. You're a girl. I'm an alien. Last time I checked, you liked that in a person."

It was so bad, so wrong, that she couldn't even bring herself to *say* it.

So she didn't.

"Here you go" he offered her, as he drew even closer, so much so that she could feel the faintest bristle of stubble on his never-shaven chin. Scratching her. "We've both got a pulse."

Her dazed non-reaction to that made him lean further. Michael propped his hands on either side of her waist, and hovered over her body until their proximity forced her back against the pillows, her hands useless over her head. He smiled, and in the shadow between them, his eyes looked very dark.

He took one of his hands and clasped both of her wrists like possessions. The other arm held his entire weight up, so tenuously as he dropped his head, just a bit, so that his face floated above hers and their lashes touched. She didn't dare blink, but turned her chin up. If she opened her mouth, she could lick that canary-eating smile off his face.

He might not give her a chance.

"How did it end?" he wondered, almost rhetorically.

Their lips met with no preliminary hesitation, no groundbreaking butterfly touch before he crashed into her with his mouth, her world going black and white as her eyelids fluttered, and he kissed her like he was starving. She couldn't move- he had specifically trapped her hands, and she felt a wave of pure, hot submission, that rolled over her with his breath, and he was a silent call she had to answer again and again. Liz thought she might black out- she needed air, or she would collapse from the inside.

If he noticed, he ignored her, and her insistent arching against him went unanswered. He held her down.

"Pass out" he muttered, not raising his head, so she tasted his words rather than heard them, his teeth and tongue against and through hers, driving her against the thin, thin barrier between the shreds of sanity left in the situation and a rising, high scream in her throat that she knew would be his name. She tried to close her eyes, and discovered they were already screwed shut. "I dare you."

Her heartbeat was drowning out everything, the sound of the breeze outside the bare walls, the light, and the deafening buzzing she thought she heard everywhere. Every second that passed dipped him lower to her, and she could feel his skin through the cotton of his shirt, the familiar beating below his shoulder that insisted he was quite, irrevocably *alive,* no matter what he might protest.

Michael was living.

It almost surprised Liz.

His hands on her body under the covers and her tank top came out of nowhere, since she had never felt them leave her arms. Crawling up on his knees, he straddled her slim hips on either side, and, never turning his suddenly undivided attention from her mouth, proceeded to run her over with his amazingly warm hands.

When he finally raised his mussed head to suck air jealously, his lips swollen and full, she bent in half, like she was learning to love oxygen. He looked down at her, and what came back to her was that one-second in which they had fled, him dragging her across the street by the hand, and how taut he had looked, how poised to spring. Living motion.

He looked like that.

She couldn't have argued with him at that point, couldn't have sat back up and logically debated consequences and repercussions and et cetera, the metaphysical logic of them being in *that* situation, at *that* time, in that singularly undistracted state of mind.

In an instant, she knew what he had meant when he spoke of wanting something he couldn't possibly have.