SPOILERS: BLIND DATE

Author's Note: After seeing "Blind Date", I *had* to write something, so here it is, from Liz's POV.

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I'm dying inside...that's all I could think of when I was standing there, in the middle of the largest assembled crowd in Roswell, but I was the most desserted I'd ever been in my life.

The EXIT sign still burned, a sick reminder in my eyes as they slowly drifted to the floor that he had just left. A small part of my mind though, could still see the heart he had drawn outside of my window. And his fingertip, which I have come to realize can make me breathless and hopeless in mere seconds, had made it come to life. The two neon signs gave me such conflicting messages, my head began to ache. He had felt a *part* of that kiss, I know he did. And he walked away.

"I don't remember..."

The small words spoken honestly and timidly from his mouth, they pulled a deep cord up from inside of me, and killed everything they touched on the way up.

'How can you NOT remember?!?' I felt my mind screaming at him. 'You just told me every sacred word I've been holding my breath for, that I've been ceasing my life for, in those few magical moments beneath the stars you created for us. Don't you remember, Max? You...you, took your hands, and made lights...stars from your fingertips...all around us. For the first time, not ashamed to admit to me...to *yourself* that something other than what falls under everyone's standards of "normal" is *right* for us...'.

But those words never came out. He just left me there.

"You're my dreamgirl..."

He said that with the most honesty I think any being can posess, but within the span of 20 minutes, he'd "forgotten". The part inside of me that's aching right now wants to say that he'd only forgotten because he was sober then. A person loses inhibitions when they're in such a condition. It's been scientifically proven. I've always trusted science, but then I remember the small and dark part of Max Evans that somehow sees life as this big obstacle to not admitting how he feels, and the world I'm existing in becomes that much more inexplicable, and unscientific. It becomes confusing. It becomes real. Not just data and numbers.

He wanted to run away with me, and make some haven for the two of us, where we could live and thrive and love each other. He said that's how he'd really felt...my heart was soaring so high then. I didn't care that he was drunk, I didn't care that he wasn't the guy who always reluctantly pulls away from any private moment.

As he leaned up against the glass of the store next to the phone booth I was at, looking at me with those same eyes that had closed right before mine seconds before he kissed me that night that seems so long ago, I heard my heart screaming to leave while you could and just go...just go like he said. We could have figured out everything else later.

But then the van pulled around the corner, and as best as any small-town guy could have, hailed his first "cab", and looked at me with eyes beaming with the pride of a 10 year old. He was so revealed, and the person I knew he was. I've never seen him more beautiful.

He's just protecting everyone around him, and killing himself, and now me, in the process. I just have to keep telling myself that because I honestly got lost in his reasoning and more concerned with my love for him. That's Max, to protect, and I love Max, just not that part of him.

I have never and will never want any sort of revenge on Max Evans, but, if God or whatever powers that brought him to me, if they're watching over Max, and Isabel and Michael, and if they see the deep need that the three of them have for knowledge of where they come from, and if they're brought to a point in time when they can choose the life they were supposed to have, or a life they spent half-living, I don't think I can look into Max's eyes when he leaves. Because right now I think he would.

I just don't think I can handle seeing the look in his eyes when he puts the foot out that leads him to wherever he's headed, and he realizes in that one raw-emotioned second, that he could have loved me, been with me, for whatever time he had. Every precious second he could have been stroking my hair, timidly approaching me and sweetly adjusting his mouth around mine, seeing into my soul every time we were together. Because I would have let him.

I don't want him to leave this earth empty, or full of self-resentment. But sometimes, I think he wants it that way. You can't protect someone at the same time you're killing them.

But, God...the way he touched me. He brushed the microphone out of the way, and his eyes were looking so deeply into mine. They were Max's eyes. Not the eyes that had told me they had wanted to run away with me. Not the eyes that had told me that I was his dreamgirl...they were the eyes I saw through my slitted lids as his hands formed life itself back into my dying body. They were the eyes that fixed on mine, and I saw for the first time what Max Evans really is, and how he really sees me.

And suddenly, I knew in the small second that everything he said was true. I caught my breath before his lips came down on mine. Every touch he gave me was more intense than the last, and every time he guided his mouth hungrily over mine, the crowd, the whistles, the fact that I had almost given into the theory that loving him was dangerous, dissolved around me. And it painted this beautiful picture of every single second Max had shown me he loved me. For a breif second, I even saw the constallation that contained his home. I was a part of him now, I was his every fear and emotion, want and need. I was completly his.

Then he pulled away. And he looked at me with Max's eyes. Not the ones I wanted to see this time. His mask of protection and realization of what he had done were swirling around in his eyes. He apologized, and then left me.

Somewhere in those few gut-wrenching moments that he was off the stage and I was fighting my way to get to him before he left, he told me he had forgotten.

I'm dying, I'm dying, I'm dying. And all of these people were applauding.

Maria's voice pierced a deep spot inside of me and the words stung deep with irony. And I think that's when the string that Max Evans had sewn into my very being started to be torn out of me. And I'm almost positive I could feel it tugging harder and harder the further away from me he ran.

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