AN Thanks everyone for reading. I think I might try Sundays with an occasional Thursday slipped in. I have exams coming up and I know that if I don't stick to a schedule, things will get even crazier
![Shocked :shock:](./images/smilies/icon_eek.gif)
I made this part a little longer...I hope you guys don't mind....OH, who am I kidding, you guys love it as much as I do
clueless Thanks! Your feedback is terrif
Natalie36 Aw, yeah he is
LoveisForever Thank you! I hope that is a really good thing!
Timelord31 Thank you!
Flamehair Alex and Liz, huh? *whistles*
![Laughing :lol:](./images/smilies/icon_lol.gif)
That's going to be explained later, but Alex and Isabel haven't met yet, or at least re-met. By the way, congratulations! I'm waving to little Ember
L-J-L 76 Thanks!
Begonia9508 Lol, wasn't enough, huh? And yup, he sure is a nice guy.
Alizaleven Thanks! A cute update *aw* thanks
Alien614Lol, yeah so they think. Thanks!
ken_r Very interesting! Thank you - I'm feeling better now
Dreamer<3 Thanks
![Very Happy :D](./images/smilies/icon_biggrin.gif)
Lol, don't worry about the comp prob's. I need a new one too.
Stars in My Eyes Thanks! By the way, I love your siggy, wonderful quote
Dreamon Wow, okay
![Very Happy :D](./images/smilies/icon_biggrin.gif)
Thanks for delurking, and I'm very complimented that you did stop by then. Thank you!
Chapter 9
It’s his eyes, she decided.
Simply Irresistible was playing, the half-eaten popcorn was in the bowl that was between them, and the common room was empty. She invited him over earlier to come watch movies with her and a few of the other girls from her dorm. Liz was surprised at how open the other girls were to her now. Maybe they just needed to warm up to her and her personality, but over the past few weeks, Liz had become a fixture in their lives. She saw them around campus now and instead of overlooking her because her arms were weighed down by more than one textbook or misinterpreting her silence as a product of conceit, they tried getting to know her. They played Taboo on Wednesday nights in the common room together, they borrowed her boots and her skirts because they admired her style, and she couldn’t go across campus without being waved to or stopped by a friend.
“I’m going to go too,” Nicole yawned. She was one of the girls Liz befriended recently. She was sitting behind Liz and Max on the couch, or rather reclining. “I’m falling asleep here; you two are machines,” she joked. She sat up and stood, but before she left, she tousled Liz’s hair.
Liz looked up from where she was on the floor and she said, “Good night, Nicole.”
“Night,” Nicole said. She lingered by the door to the hallway and looking back, she said in a sickeningly sweet voice, “Good night, Max.”
Max tore his eyes away from the TV screen and smiled, “Good night, Nicole. Nice hanging out with you.”
“You bet,” Nicole said smiling, and when Max wasn’t looking and only Liz was looking her way, she mouthed a few words to her and did a familiar motion with her hands that Liz had seen too much recently. She blushed and turned her head down, away from Nicole, but she did hear Nicole sigh as she walked away.
“Liz, you okay?”
“Um,” Liz looked up at Max, and of course the feeling hit her again, and for all times for it to do it, this wasn’t the right time; not when he was expecting her to say something. She was staring at him, her mouth wide open, completely incoherent, until she finally recovered a few seconds later with, “I’m fine, I’m perfectly okay.”
“Oh, okay then. I thought you might be tired.”
She smiled, “No way,” she planted her elbows into the rug and put her chin in her hands, “I said I was going to finish this one, so I’m going to do it.”
He smiled, “Right, if you say so.” She looked up at him with a warning in his eyes, but he dropped the sarcasm by laughing at her expression. “I don’t know though; thirteen romantic comedies do have a lot of sap. Are you sure you aren’t getting tired of it?”
“Me? No way, these movies were made for me; it’s you I’m worried about.”
“Oh come on. I’m doing good.”
Liz put her hand down flat on the floor and sat upright to look around the room properly. It was true, she realized. He had done well with this marathon. Everyone else had left, and it was just the two of them left.
The girls on the third floor decided it would be fun to have a marathon of romantic comedies. They rented twenty movies from Blockbuster, lined them up in alphabetical order, and everyone was supposed to go from the top of the alphabet. A team could take a movie out and watch it in a different room or they could stay in the common room with other teams and watch them together. The first option worked when one team was behind or ahead of everyone else.
The goal was for each team to have five movies left by the end of the three days. It was a test of stamina and capacity; how many jokes could you predict, which happy endings could you call, which guy or girl would be the first to run away, or better yet, give in? Those were all typical questions, but Liz had to admit her skills with it were getting sharper from just doing the marathon. Of course, the marathon was expected to go down without a hitch for all of the girls, but to make it more complicated and interesting, Nicole had proposed a twist. Nicole, who roomed three doors down from her, had suggested that they invite guys along too.
“It would be so much fun, and it’d just add another level,” she had explained. They were having a meeting with everyone on the floor in the common room. Harris Hall had eight floors, but each floor was like its own neighborhood. Liz had felt completely at ease at the meeting because at least now she knew more people than just Jennifer. Jennifer was sitting in the back with a pair of sunglass shades on, obviously trying to cover up a night out, and Liz was keeping her distance from her as much as possible. Things between the two girls weren’t getting easier or more difficult; instead, they avoided each other as much as possible, each one trying not to be in the room at the same time as the other. They hardly got along and Jennifer had taken what appeared to be a permanent dislike to Liz and was sticking to it.
“Think about it? Guys are always complaining when we pick a romantic comedy that they know exactly what’s going to happen,” Nicole added, “Do you want to bet that they can’t pick out as much as they think is wrong with these movies? I bet they could come away from it liking a few.”
“That sounds great, but who would we invite? Should we invite one of the other dorms and make it an open night?” Claire, their residential advisor, asked.
“Maybe just our boyfriends,” one girl offered, and a couple of the girls around the room started nodding and calling out their approval of that idea.
Liz had looked down; she didn’t have a boyfriend yet. Was it easy to have one, because she had been trying so hard for the last week to get even closer to Max, but nothing had really happened. Nicole saw the flash of disappointment in Liz’s eyes and she called out, “Or we could just do guy friends,” and the response to that mirrored her first suggestion. It was so much easier to find a guy friend than to keep a boyfriend. Once that was settled, they went about picking out the movies.
The marathon had started at one two days before, but as the hours went by and the movie pile for each team dwindled, people started to lose steam. It was now nine thirty on the last day, and Max, Liz, Nicole and her guy friend Jake had only six movies left. Jake left early, saying even he couldn’t last any longer, and then Nicole had just called it a night. Only a few hours ago, there were thirteen other teams and groups of people doing the marathon, but three days was a lot to take. Now, it was only Max and Liz left.
“Yeah, you’re not doing too badly,” she said smiling. He shared the smile with her before he turned back to the movie. The clipboard that they used to tally the movies was in front of them and he picked up the pen and started adding to one of the pages.
“You’re really taking this seriously?” Liz asked.
“Yes,” he said. He got off his stomach and sat up beside her, “It’s kind of cool.”
“Didn’t Isabel feed you enough of these movies? I thought she would have given you tons of this stuff already.”
“Not really,” he started, and he turned his attention back to the clipboard.
She waited for him to elaborate, but he didn’t say anything else. He had been doing that a lot lately. Anytime Isabel or anything to do with Roswell came up he didn’t say as much. As well as she knew him, and they had done a lot together over the past three months, she had a growing feeling that there was something more, something else that he knew that she could, possibly, never understand. It hurt her, but she tried to let it go.
“So, what’s the verdict; how do you feel about ‘Simply Irresistible.’”
He smiled, “It’s good. I have to say I liked the kitchen scene.”’
“I would have died with embarrassment if that was me,” Liz said, blushing as she remembered the scene. “She ruined their dinner.”
“She made it better,” he insisted.
“By bringing all of those emotions to the surface, she made it better?” Liz asked, challenging his point a little. “I don’t see how that was better.” There was a part in the movie where Amanda used her new magic powers, accidentally, while she was cooking and the result was catastrophic for the people who ate her food. She had just fallen out with her love interest in the movie, everything that she was feeling while she was cooking, her disappointment and her heartache all went into the food. Then while the guests were eating, they were overwhelmed with the emotion each entrée carried because it infected them too. Liz knew that if something like that happened to her she would be embarrassed, but she felt like she couldn’t relate all the way. “Her powers made a mess of things, and it wasn’t a good thing that she made them feel that way.”
“She was, unintentionally, showing them things they didn’t know about themselves. She was making them face their true feelings, but it wasn’t like she could help it.”
“Max, she knew she had ‘powers’” Liz said frowning. “And maybe it was better for them to not feel that way.” Liz turned back to the TV screen and saw the credits were now rolling. “It’s finished anyway,” she told him, “So it doesn’t really matter.”
“I guess it doesn’t.”
“It’s just a movie,” she started to sit up and she asked him, “Are you up for one more?”
“Yeah, I am.”
He thought to himself,
It’s just a movie.
* * * * *
Two weeks earlier
“Okay, that wasn’t too bad,” Max joked.
“Are you kidding me?” Liz retorted. She was frowning at him but not smiling around Max was hard to do so she fought back the smile that was just under the surface with her excuse: “That stack of books was too high. Borders discriminates.”
He nodded, pretending her theory had complete credibility and he asked her, “Against whom?”
“Short people,” she whined. She rubbed the top of her head again and ran her fingers through her hair before she sat down by him. “If they would only make all of the shelves five feet, and no more, and put all of the textbooks for the classes we tend to frequent nearer to the middle area,” she gestured to the space around her waist and chest, “then there wouldn’t be any problems.”
“And what kind of classes do short people tend to frequent?” he asked.
“Any class that doesn’t need a Spark Notes handheld, or a sports magazine,” she laughed.
Max smiled, but he pretended to be offended, “Are you referencing my library?”
She frowned, deep in thought, as she tried to reconstruct Max’s “library” in her mind. Granted his room was small, but he managed to put together a good bookshelf. It had the classics like Dickens and Voltaire’s works, and also some back issues of Spiderman and Sports Illustrated. She then looked back up at him and smiled, “Oh, are you referring to the unwrinkled 1998 Sports Illustrated Fall edition I’ve seen on your top shelf, which, also happens to be just out of reach?”
He smiled, “Well, I wouldn’t want anyone’s grubby hands getting on it.”
“Grubby hands?” she pouted.
He glanced sideways at her and he nodded, “Yes. You won’t believe it unless you see the disaster in progress, like the rec room after morning practice, but some of the men in my dorm are very messy.”
She laughed. “I’ll take your word. For a second, I thought you were going to say I was messy.”
“I didn’t say that.”
She frowned again, but started smiling when she saw him biting back a grin. “Oh, you’re going to regret you said that,” she promised, and she leaned in to tickle him, hard.
As usual though, he ended up on top of her, making her cheeks flushed with every effort she made to push him away and overpower him. She wriggled and writhed as laughter ripped through her, and the only thing she could do before he would make her surrender with the power his wandering fingers had over her waist and neck was to swat him with the nearest pillow she had.
She heard him sigh into the pillow as it made contact with his face and she giggled when he rolled over to be side to side with her. He was winded now. “Ouch.”
She laughed, “I’m sorry.”
He shifted so that he was looking at her face. Three weeks of spending time around Max had been fun, and he always found ways to make her smile everyday. She literally spent everyday around him, too. From psych class to breakfast at the café to where they were right now, laughing, he made her feel things. There were things that she felt happening to her when she was around him: she waited for his smile because without doubt, it could make the day go by quicker, and she waited for his soft ‘Hi’ or even just for him to hold her hand, protectively. He did that a lot too, she noticed.
Last October she didn’t feel any of this. With Alex, it had just happened; one minute he was her best friend and then they had transitioned into something more. The line hadn’t been a hurdle for them to go over together but something that had just taken place.
And here she was, a year later, at the precipice, ready to jump.
“Max,” she said.
* * * * *
“Max,” she said, as she sat back down. “Earth to Max!”
“What?” he stuttered, and the filmy bright color of the DVD she was holding snapped him back to the present. “Huh?”
“I asked if you would mind if we tried for
Titanic.”
“Isn’t that three hours long?” he asked as he smiled.
Thoughtfully, Liz turned the cover over, “Actually, three hours and 14 minutes.”
“Okay,” he agreed. “Put it in.”
She did and then she came back to where he was sitting now, his back against the bottom part of the couch and she sat beside him. She was surprised when he opened up his arm and let her lean on his shoulder, and she smiled as she moved closer.
"The expected is just the beginning. The unexpected is what changes our lives."
Meredith - Grey's Anatomy