Stay the Night
Author: Dee
Coupling: M/L
Rating: Adult
Disclaimer: I don't own Roswell and we all know this!
Summary: Picks up during Cry Your Name when Liz goes to Max for comfort.
AN: There are chunks of dialogue taken from the Cry Your Name ep but the rest is my imagination. This fic is a one parter. Just something I wished would have happened. Enjoy.
Stay the Night
“I don’t want to be alone.”
Max fell back a step as he realized that Liz was standing outside his bedroom window, his heart doing a wild dance in his chest. Her eyes were puffy and red-rimmed from crying and she looked as if she was going to drop right then and there. In essence, she looked like he felt, ragged, raw and lost as hell. Max pulled open the window without the slightest hesitation.
“Can…Can I stay here tonight?” she asked in a tremulous whisper, her vulnerability evident.
He inclined his head in a jerky nod, stepping back from the window. “Sure…”
“Thank you,” she muttered as she climbed in past him.
It was evident Liz was dead on her feet but Max feared making any suggestions of rest for fear she’d fly off the handle. She looked barely together as it was, as if she was holding on to her sanity by a mere thread. Max wanted to take her into his arms and stroke the rumpled length of her hair. He yearned for it but it seemed as if there were miles separating them, a sea of despair and misunderstanding and he couldn’t close the distance. He couldn’t bridge the gap even though he desperately wanted to.
“What happened, Liz?” he whispered after watching her weep softly for a moment.
“Valenti,” she snapped angrily, suddenly falling into a frantic pacing, “You wouldn’t believe what he suggested to me! God…I’m so furious!”
“What did he say?”
“He said…he said…he said they think Alex committed suicide!” she burst out in tearful anger, “I mean…isn’t that sick?”
“That’s crazy,” Max agreed quietly, her frenetic movements alarming him more than her revelation.
“Yeah, I know!” Liz threw back anxiously, her entire body vibrating with barely leashed emotion, “That’s what I said!”
“Alex would never do something like that,” Max murmured in consideration, “Why would Valenti ever think that…say that to you?”
“You’re right!” Liz fired out, flashing him a wild look, “Of course not! It’s ridiculous! And…and you know what’s gonna happen? Hanson is gonna go and he’s going to put that in his report and it’s going to be in the newspaper for every, single person to read! All of his friends, his family… God!”
Max rose from the bed to go to her but stopped short of her shaking body. Again he wanted to hold her. He needed to comfort her, but he felt as if they were being separated by an invisible, but impenetrable wall. Though he suspected their sorrow was the same, their need was the same it kept them apart rather than bringing them together. Depressed at the thought, Max tried to comfort her as best he could with his words. “No,” he whispered, “No, Liz. We won’t let that happen.”
“I can just see the headlines now!” she cried tearfully, “’Alex Whitman’s death was declared a suicide yesterday by the Roswell Sheriff’s Department!’ God, I think I’m gonna be sick.” She had already been and her stomach continued to roll with agonized disgust more than an hour later.
“Liz, we won’t let that happen,” Max insisted again, “I’ll…I’ll talk to Valenti. He’s just jumping to conclusions right now. I’ll reason with him.”
“Just the fact that his parents have to go through this…this nightmare at all!” Liz railed angrily, “They don’t need to think that their son…” She fell to the floor abruptly, burying her face in her hands as sorrow and exhaustion overtook her. “God…God,” she moaned, “Why is this happening, Max? Why?”
Max stooped down beside her, his heart aching to see her in such pain. “Liz…” he murmured, “Liz, I’ll handle it. I promise.”
“Thank you,” she whispered tiredly. She opened her mouth to say more, what she planned to say Max wasn’t sure because her stomach chose that moment to gurgle loudly. Liz’s cheeks flushed with embarrassment at the sound. “Oh God…” she groaned in mortification.
Max bit back his answering smirk. “Hungry?”
She managed a weak nod. “That was…really embarrassing…”
“No, that’s all right,” Max assured her gently, “When was the last time you ate, Liz?”
“Um…ah…yesterday maybe…” she mumbled, “I don’t remember.”
“Well…how does frozen macaroni and cheese sound?” he offered, “You have to eat something, Liz.”
“Okay,” she agreed with a jerky nod of sorrow, “Macaroni and cheese it is.”
In the kitchen he watched her nibble half-heartedly at the dish and lick at the tears collecting in the corners of her mouth. The sight broke Max’s heart. He wished he could do something to make her smile…and himself as well. It seemed he’d lost the reasons for smiling a long time ago.
“Liz?”
She moodily pushed her fork around in the macaroni. “Huh…Max?”
“I know I didn’t know Alex as well as you,” he began tentatively, “But I wanted you to know that he really made an impact on my life. I’m so sorry I couldn’t help him.”
“It’s not your fault, Max,” she mumbled.
“I wanted to,” he said gruffly, “I wanted to bring him back…for myself, for Isabel…but especially for you…”
“Max, please…” she pleaded, her tears falling in earnest.
Max valiantly blinked back his own tears, forcing a smile. “Do you remember that time when he electrified Mr. Hoffman’s desk?” he recalled.
Liz responded with a weak smile of reverie. “Yeah,” she laughed in memory, “You know…he almost got suspended for that.”
“Alex Whitman?” Max chuckled softly, “Never happen. The teachers loved him. That guy could get away with anything. At the prom…I overheard Mr. Hoffman telling Señora Villa the whole chair thing. He thought it was a riot.”
At the mention of prom, Liz’s face fell a bit and she went back to stirring her food in moody circles. “Yeah…about prom, Max…” she mumbled.
“I was wondering where you went,” he interrupted in a hollow tone, “I looked for you later but you were gone.”
“Yeah…well maybe you were just preoccupied,” she said, pinning him with a penetrating look, “…with Tess. I…um…saw you kiss her, Max.”
Max was horrified by the prospect, his stomach rolling with the thought. “Liz, please--,”
“It’s okay,” she recited numbly, “You’re moving on. I get that.”
“Liz,” he whispered, “It’s sooo not like that…”
“Doesn’t matter,” she replied dully, “We’ve discussed this, right? You’re moving on and I’m moving on and that’s the decision we made. I just wanted you to know that I saw it and that I’m okay with it, okay?”
But he wasn’t okay with it. Moving on wasn’t a decision they had made together at all. She had all but dumped it in his lap at prom and then left him standing there in quivering confusion. Max didn’t want any of this at all, but then he didn’t know how to argue with her either. “Okay,” he choked reluctantly.
“Okay,” she whispered painfully, slipping from the stool. “Thank you very much for the macaroni and cheese and…um…thank you for listening…” She walked over towards the back door; obviously intent on leaving but at the last second tossed a glance at him over her shoulder. “Just always be my friend, Max,” she implored tremulously, “Will you do that for me?”
“You know I will,” he vowed, yet when she put her hand on the knob to step out of the door Max found he couldn’t let her. “Liz, wait!” he cried as the door yawned open. She froze, her shoulders shaking with repressed tears. “God…please…don’t leave…”
“Max,” she croaked in despair.
“Please stay,” he begged gruffly, closing the distance between them, “You need to be held and…and I need to hold you.”
The breath whooshed from his chest as she turned unexpectedly in his arms, crying so violently that he thought her tears might rip her in two. “Shh…shh…” he soothed into her hair, easily swinging her into his arms and bearing her back towards his bedroom, “It’s going to be all right, Liz…I promise…”
Max held her for the longest time afterward as she cried and cried like the tears would never stop. Max wept with her, taking her pain for the death of their lost friend onto himself, agonizing and despairing right along with her. He tenderly brushed the tears from her blotchy cheeks, skated his lips across her eyes to kiss them away. They both fell still with his natural caresses.
“Max?” Liz whispered, slowly coming to realize how entangled her limbs were with his, how closely they were pressed together. “Max, I should leave…”
“No,” he protested. The word was half-command, half-plea. “Just be with me tonight, Liz… I need you here.”
His naked pleading was her undoing. Liz didn’t want to fight him anymore. She was too tired to push him away. Sighing, she brushed her fingers over his trembling lower lip, compelled by his eyes as she always was. “And I need to be here,” she whispered back.
When their lips met it was simple, without fanfare or awkwardness. It was like coming home, a healing process for them both. The kiss began as something light and tentative but gradually progressed into something deeper, more profound. Max cradled her face in his hands, sampling Liz’s lips as if he were partaking of something holy and precious. He savored the feel of her mouth yielding beneath his, her lips parting sweetly for him…
Their tongues touched and the kiss exploded. Neither of them thought about the consequences or whether the moment was right or wrong. They tore hungrily at each other’s clothes, eager to be skin-to-skin, heart to heart. There were no preliminaries, no thoughts of responsibility or reason just the burning need to join, to be filled up, to be made whole again…
At the first thrust into her body Max froze completely, his head clearing of his sexual haze for a moment as he recognized he’d just torn through her virginity. He stared down at Liz in open shock. “Liz…”
“Max, I--,”
“You lied,” he whispered in stunned disbelief, “You…you never slept with Kyle at all…”
Liz swallowed hard, trying to school her disobedient body against lifting her hips to urge him deeper within. “You…you’re right,” she gasped, “I did lie about it…I did…. But Max…I don’t want you to stop now. Please, please don’t…”
He groaned and lowered back down against her to bury his face into her throat. “I couldn’t,” he moaned, “Even if I wanted to… I couldn’t stop, Liz.”
He rocked inside her, his rhythm awkward and hurried, creating a burning ache within Liz. Max knew he had no chance of holding on, of seeing her through to the end and Liz seemed to sense that as well. She clasped him hard between her thighs and surged up into him hard. It took only that last, penetrating thrust to make Max erupt in a breathless torrent of sensation.
When it was over it didn’t take very long for them to resurface and with sanity came a crashing sense of reality, too. Max rolled over onto his back to contemplate the ceiling in thoughtful silence. “So…” he said finally after an awkward silence between them, “Were you ever going to tell me the truth about it?”
Liz nibbled on her lip, shifting onto her side to regard his profile. “I actually had a good reason for lying,” she replied carefully. She felt strange having the conversation with him when they were both nude, but the thought for clothing seemed belated now.
“So I saw,” he muttered with a plaintive sigh, “What…what was that, Liz?” It was overwhelming enough to receive flashes from her after so many months of distance between them. The onslaught was almost as tumultuous as his orgasm, but to have the images be such a confusing rush, to see himself and not understand the reasons behind it… Now that was wigging him out.
“Okay,” she sighed, preparing herself for the recitation of her fantastic tale and his reaction to it, “Basically…a future version of you came to me and told me that if I didn’t make you fall out of love with me that…the world was gonna end.”
Max fixed her with an incredulous stare. “What?”
“I know it sounds crazy,” she rushed out.
“It is crazy,” he declared softly, “How could a future version of me come to you? What does our loving each other have to do with the end of the world?”
“Remember what I told you about the Granolith,” Liz asked him. Max answered with a slow nod. “Well…it has the capacity to become a time machine, Max. That’s how…um…Future Max came to me. He traveled through time using the Granolith.”
“Do you have any idea how crazy you sound right now?” Max whispered gently, “Liz, time travel is a myth. It defies every law of nature we have.”
“You know they say aliens are a myth, too, Max,” she countered quietly, “And we both know the truth about that.” He looked away from her then, his jaw knotted against her insistence, against the truth in her words. “People died because we were together, Max…” she told him, “I didn’t know what else to do.”
“People died…” he uttered, “This is unbelievable. How could our love affect the world that profoundly, Liz? I don’t understand.”
“Tess.” Liz provided the answer in a glum mumble.
“What about her?”
“She was crucial to the four-square,” Liz recounted, “And…when you rejected her in that first timeline she left Roswell and…well, that left an opening for your enemies…”
“Oh…” he said gruffly, “I understand. So that’s why you pushed me at destiny…”
He sounded so bitter and angry that Liz cringed inwardly. She knew from his tone that he didn’t understand at all. “Max, don’t you see?” she implored, “You were like this…this stubborn mule! Nothing I said or did could convince you that we didn’t belong together… I had to let you see me with Kyle…I didn’t have a choice.”
“But it was a lie,” he bit out, “A trick!” He rolled from the bed then, searching for his boxers in the darkness. “It didn’t make us any less meant for each other, Liz! You just ripped my fucking heart out for no reason!”
Liz sat upright, clutching the sheets to her naked breasts. “I had a good reason, Max,” she murmured pitiably, “And obviously it worked… Tess is still around so the four-square is complete…” She hung her head then, as the magnitude of what she’d done with him tonight washed over her. “You two are together now…just as it always should have been, right?” she finished in a mumble.
“No,” he denied softly, pacing the room in his agitation, “It’s not right. I’m not supposed to be with Tess! I never was! You’re the one I love, Liz.”
“But you kissed her,” she argued softly, “You’re remembering your past…”
“I’m remembering…” Max trailed off into silence before he could complete the sentence. Suddenly, inexplicably all those memories he had retrieved with Tess were no longer accessible. They flittered away from his mind like morning dew in the hot sun, as if they had never existed at all. And as his mind cleared of the fog Max slowly came to realize what those memories had been.
“Bitch!” he uttered under his breath. He whipped around to face Liz with fanatical eyes. “It was a mindwarp,” he gasped, “All the memories…all the feelings… She was playing me…again.”
Liz shrank back from the anguish twisting his beautiful features. “Oh God, Max…”
“I fell for her act…” he muttered self-deprecatingly, “I fell for her act again!”
“We all did,” Liz murmured in consideration, “It makes me wonder if…if she’s been lying about your memories… What else has she been lying about?”
Max wilted back onto the bed, dropping his face into his hands. “Oh…God,” he mumbled, “I’m such an idiot.”
Liz climbed over to him and wrapped her arms around his naked shoulders. She dropped a kiss to his back, nuzzling him there. “I’m sorry,” she whispered tearfully, “I’m sorry I made such a mess of things…”
He turned against her, seeking her lips in a desperate kiss. “It’s not your fault,” he replied fervently, “It’s not… I know you were doing what you thought was right.”
“Max?” she moaned, clutching his shoulders as he pressed her back in to the bed, “What happens between us now?”
Max brushed the hair back from her temples, letting his fingers linger there as he leaned above her. “I don’t know,” he said gingerly, “We have to talk to the others about Tess and…we need to talk about what happened between us tonight and…tomorrow…we have to bury our friend…”
“And find out how he died,” Liz added with soft insistence, “I don’t think it was an accident, Max.”
“Considering what’s been going on with Tess…I don’t think so either,” he murmured, "Who knows what enemies she's brought into our mist."
“What about the rest?” she wondered in uncertainty, “What about…what we did…that…that we didn’t use protection?”
“We’ll work it out, Liz,” he promised, pulling her back against him so that their bodies were spooned together, “We’re together again. That’s all that matters, right? I love you and you love me. I have to believe everything will work out. We have to believe that, Liz.”
And Liz realized that, as she melted back into the warm circle of his arms and drifted off to sleep, she did.
The End
Link to Yours
http://www.roswellfanatics.net/viewtopic.php?t=6069