Unbreakable - Surviving the Truth · (Roswell Fanfiction) ·

TEN

When Max walked into his room twenty minutes later, I was curled up on my side on the bed, legs pulled to my waist and tears quietly wetting my face and the bedspread. 

I looked up at him through my tears as he approached the bed. Caressing my damp cheek with his knuckles, he tenderly said, "Let's go outside."

In the midst of my gloomy mood, I managed to raise an eyebrow at him, before looking over my shoulder at the setting sun through the window. 

"Trust me, you'll feel better," he promised me. "Dress warmly, it's getting chilly."

The garden of the Evans' mansion was beautiful, throughly kept in check by the full-time gardener. Living on top of a restaurant in the middle of town, I never had a garden growing up. Still, this was not exactly a garden that I could picture children running around in. It was all so neatly structured, with stone pathways, brick walls that divided the garden up into different sections, vibrant plants that thrived in the New Mexican heat adding color to the sandy landscape. During the current winter months, the orange light from the setting sun was coloring the evergreen vegetation, the flowery plants in hibernation for a couple of months yet.

Max brought me to a small patch of well-irrigated grass at the back of the garden. As he put a thick blanket down, guiding me to sit down in the privacy created under the Magnolia tree, we were not alone. Our ever-present bodyguards had followed us as soon as we got outdoors. They granted us some privacy by staying at least thirty feet away from us, but their watching eyes still made me feel surveilled and not in the least hidden nor private.

This must be what royalty and famous people felt like. Never alone. Never safe.

I was still scanning our surroundings and the trespassers (as I had chosen to label the protectors) when Max took a seat in front of me, mimicking my cross-legged position, having our knees touch. He attracted my full attention when he reached out and grabbed both of my hands with his.

"Remember what I did when Sean was trying to find you in that garden at that party?"

I frowned at him and probably wouldn't have figured out what he was hinting at if it hadn't been for my ability to peek inside his mind and watch the memory he was referring to. The memory of the time when he had held me tightly to his front - his arm around my middle and his hand initially over my mouth to prevent me from screaming in surprised shock - in a dark unfamiliar garden.

The time when Max had turned us both invisible and Sean subsequently had failed at finding me. 

"Yes?" I answered questioningly. 

He smiled at me, one corner of his mouth curving upwards in a sexy angle. Heat shot straight through my body and my next breath got stuck in my throat. 

He was up to something. There was something he was hiding from me. It made me both excited and slightly nervous. Mostly because his eyes had darkened with that sexual heat I had not seen in a long time. A look I had not seen since before the war and before the whole thing with the pregnancy and subsequent miscarriage.

They can't see us anymore, he told me then.

I had expected a shift in energy. Had even expected the sensation of energy being pulled from me, like it had the previous time. Max's invisibility act had, after all, knocked me unconscious that last time.

I hadn't expected to feel completely unaffected, not in any way being able to tell that my physical self was currently invisible. 

My head whipped to the closest protector, but except for him no longer looking straight at us, (now having the expression of a blind person - unable to fix their sight exactly on an object) there was nothing on his face that revealed our sudden disappearance.