Andrew walked Clark and Lois to the front door. "Thanks for coming," he said. "At least you managed to get some answers."
"I don't think I helped much," Clark said. "People are going to be curious about why they called off the wedding. It's going to be hard for Jane's past to stay a secret."
"I'll talk to my brothers," Andrew said. "We'll work out something."
"Thanks," Clark said. "I'm sure Jane will appreciate that."
He took Lois's hand, and they ran through the rain to the car.
He opened her door and then hurried to the driver's side. As he shut his door, Lois turned to him.
"OK, Clark," she said. "What is the big secret that you're hiding?"
Part 8
Lois's question had been part joke, part affable curiosity, but Clark's smile had vanished. His expression had sealed to a deadpan mask, his complexion had reddened, and his eyes were fixed on some point behind her.
"What do you mean?" he asked with gruffly laboured nonchalance.
Her interest flared, augmented by flashes of panic. "In there," she said, pointing toward the house. "You seemed to know exactly how Jane would have felt. You understood her dilemma immediately. You argued her case with vehement conviction. Either you know her a whole lot better than anyone realises or there is some other reason why you identify with her so closely."
"What happened to her is terrible," Clark said. "I can't imagine any parents being so heartless to do that to their daughter."
"It wasn't the little girl you were defending," Lois said. "It was the grown woman."
"I didn't know Margaret. I know Jane. She's a friend; a colleague."
The familiar waft of suspicion crept through Lois's mind like pungent smoke. "What are you trying to hide?"
Clark took a breath and his mouth opened, but no words came. His hand moved slightly, and the clink of his keys reverberated loudly through the silence.
"There is something, isn't there?" Lois insisted. "Something you don't want to tell me?"
His nod was terse. And he still hadn't looked at her.
"Why can't you just tell me the truth?"
He shuffled in his seat. "I'm not sure there will ever be a right time," he said. "But I'm sure this isn't it."
"Why?"
"It's too soon."
"You asked me out after five minutes."
He lifted his head, moving in agonisingly slow motion until his clouded brown eyes settled in hers. "You've known me less than twenty-four hours, Lois. How can I … I didn't plan … I wasn't expecting this."
"Are you married?"
"No." His denial, steadfastly stated, brought no obvious reprieve to his distress.
"Wanted by the police?"
"No."
"You had an affair with Jane?"
"No!"
"Then what, Clark?"
He blinked a couple of times and said, "Jane waited too long. I get that. But this isn't right either."
"It's right if you want to continue seeing me."
Her words carried the sting of threat, which hadn't been her intention. Lois consciously softened her tone. "We've come too far to pretend it's nothing, Clark. You've admitted you're hiding something. How can I trust you when I know there's a bombshell coming? Do you really think I'm not going to obsess over something so big you're willing to risk driving me away?"
"It's too soon," he muttered. "You hardly know me."
"I know you're a kind and decent man," she said. "I know that honesty is important to you. I know you're willing to be open, even if it makes you vulnerable. I know you have decided you want to be with me. I know -"
"I haven't decided anything," he said miserably. "I promised you I would never force you into anything."
"You decided what you wanted."
"Yes," he admitted bleakly. "Yes. I did."
"Even though you knew this would come up? You knew that this 'big secret' would eventually be revealed?"
"I knew that if we continued seeing each other I would have to tell you."
"Really? It sounds as if you were hoping to avoid divulging the truth for as long as possible."
"I would want you to know," he said. "But actually saying the words …" He flinched.
Lois took a breath and tried to squeeze a few drops of appeasement into her voice. "Just tell me, Clark. If we're going to be together, let's get this done now. Let's not be like Jane and Shane and have it erupt at the worst possible moment."
"I'm not sure there could be a moment worse than this one," Clark said. "I can't … I just can't see any way forward after this."
His despair stirred her heart, and Lois placed her hand on his. "How bad can it be, Clark?"
"That depends on how you react."
"Have you done something you're ashamed of?"
"No."
She forced a rickety laugh. "It's probably not as big as you're thinking. Once you've told me, we'll probably both wonder what all the fuss was about."
"I really can't see that happening."
The certainty of his statement shivered down her back, pouring dread through her heart. "Just tell me," Lois pleaded. "Because as big as it might be, it can't be as bad as some of the things I'm imagining."
He pushed the keys into the ignition. He stared out of the window for a long moment, his face turned away from her. "I wasn't born here."
"I know that," she said. "You told me you're from Kansas."
"I wasn't born there either."
Lois stared at Clark, trying to glean understanding from the taut outline of his profile. "Are you trying to tell me you're not American?" Another thought dawned on her. "You said you're adopted. Are you saying that your adoption wasn't legal? That your adoptive parents brought you here without permission?"
"They didn't bring me here. They found me."
He'd been abandoned by his birth parents. Lois squeezed his hand. "Aw, Clark," she said. "I can see how that would cause you a lot of pain, but it doesn't have to change anything for us."
His hand clenched to a hard fist. "Even if they found me in a spaceship?"
"A spaceship?" she echoed.
He turned to her then, his eyes blazing with an acid mix of pain and trepidation. "When I said I wasn't born here, I didn't mean I wasn't born in this country, I meant I wasn't born on this planet."
Lois stared, her mouth adrift, her heart thumping as all her hopes crumbled to dust. She tried to find words … anything … but nothing came to fill the raging void of her mind.
"Say something," he begged.
"I … I really don't know what to say."
He dragged his hand from under hers and clenched the steering wheel, his knuckles white like glaciers.
"Did your parents tell you they found you in a spaceship?" Lois asked.
He nodded tightly.
"And you believe them?"
He winced as her implication battered him. "Of course I believe them. Why would they lie?"
Obviously, they'd had a reason. Perhaps they'd stolen him from his birth parents. Perhaps they'd been given him by a young unmarried girl and had promised to keep her secret. Whatever Clark's parents' reasons for lying to him, nothing could justify his blind belief in them. "Clark," Lois said as gently as she could, "you couldn't have come from outer space. It just isn't reasonable that a child would survive that sort of journey. And alien life … there's not a shred of evidence …"
"You don't believe me."
His eyes dived again, but now, instead of eliciting sympathy, it sparked anger. Lois had believed in him, and he had ruthlessly trampled over the fragile threads of her reawakened hope. "No," she said harshly, "I don't believe you. Not for a moment. But I can't decide whether you are deliberately lying or you're delusional."
He rose to face her. "My parents don't lie," he said. "They certainly wouldn't lie to me about something as important as this."
"Did they ever offer you any proof? Have you seen the spaceship?"
"I have always felt different from everyone else," Clark said.
"Feeling different does not make you an alien."
"I can do things … things no one else can. I have … unusual abilities."
Boy, she sure knew how to pick them. Lois shook her head, reeling at the sudden and complete collapse of something that, just a short time ago, had seemed so solid and durable. "Like the ability to believe you're a spaceman?" she sneered. "That's definitely unusual."
"I can fly."
It was time to get out. Out of Clark's car. Out of his life. Out of Des Moines. "Take me to the hotel."
Clark started the engine. They drove to the hotel in frigid silence. Lois used her fuming anger to quell the tears that pushed up her throat. She would not cry. She would not let him know how close she'd come to allowing him into her heart.
He pulled up outside the hotel. As soon as they stopped, Lois opened the car door to prevent him from doing it for her.
"Lois?"
She sprung out of his car. "What?"
"Are you going to print this?"
She turned on him, propelled by a volatile medley of anger and disappointment and shock. "Do you really think I would trash my reputation with a fairy tale?"
"Thank you."
His civility aggravated the rawness of her emotions. "Don't contact me," she hissed. "Don't call me. Ever." She slammed the door and ran into the hotel.
Before she reached her room, hot tears were streaming down her cheeks like lava spewed from an angry volcano.
She fumbled with the key, staggered into her room, and shut the door on a world lost under the blanket of despair.
After hauling in a long and shuddery breath and sweeping away the overflow of tears, Lois picked up the phone, and keeping her voice flat and unfluctuating, she asked to be connected to the airline. She booked the next available seat, not caring that it would mean a wait of six hours for her connecting flight to Metropolis.
She had to get out of Des Moines. She had to get away from Clark. She had to expel this entire weekend from her memory.
She had to get back to where it was safe.
Back to the big impersonal city where her heart could hide in the shadows of anonymity.
||~||
Perry White's pencil paused as he recognised the footsteps approaching his door.
"Lois?" he called.
The door opened, and she entered. "Hi, Chief."
One hasty scan of her face told Perry all he needed to know about the trip to Iowa. "I wasn't expecting you back today," he said, striking out a couple of words from the story he was editing. "I thought your flight didn't arrive until this evening."
She sank into his guest chair. "They cancelled the wedding," she said with no more fanfare than if she'd been announcing what she'd eaten for breakfast. "So I got the first flight back to civilisation."
"They cancelled it?" Perry scribbled a note and looked up. "Why?"
"They came to their senses just in time."
"They decided? Just like that? No wedding?"
Lois picked at the arm of the chair. "Actually, the groom realised it wasn't what he wanted. The bride agreed. And it was pouring with rain."
"Lo-is," Perry said, allowing some of his exasperation to leak into his tone. "You cannot tell me they called off the wedding because of the weather."
Her mouth stretched, but it was too empty and vapid to be considered a smile.
"I guess you didn't have a great time?" he asked carefully.
"It was exactly as I expected," she said. "A complete waste of time and money. It would have been worse if I'd actually had to attend the wedding. As things turned out, I only had to suffer through the pre-wedding party the night before."
"The wedding was still on the night before?" Perry asked. "When did they decide to cancel?"
"Yesterday morning."
"Oh," Perry said. "That's awful. How is your friend?"
"She's upset now," Lois said, "but in time, I'm sure she'll see this as a lucky escape." She leaned forward in the chair. "What's happening with the Senator story? What do you want me to chase down? I read this morning's edition in the cab. The story seems to be fading fast."
"It's Sunday. And you're not supposed to be here."
"Have you had someone dig into the Senator's past? Tried to find the first indication he had a gambling problem? Have you checked on his known associates from college? High school, even. What was his first job? Have you had someone talk to his colleagues? Uncover his credit history?"
"Yes," Perry said, a little peeved that Lois assumed he couldn't do his job without her. "I've had a couple of reporters researching his early life."
"And?"
"And, so far, they've found nothing."
Lois jumped from the chair. "On it," she said.
She marched from his office, pulling the door closed with enough force to vibrate the glass.
Perry stared after her.
His best reporter was back.
She would get him a story.
Because she was Lois Lane. As a reporter, she had it all.
But …
Perry sighed.
In the things that really mattered, she was destitute. And worse than that, she seemed oblivious to her plight.
||~||
After leaving Perry's office, Lois immersed herself in every detail of the Senator's life and refused to entertain even the tiniest possibility that her efforts had any agenda except getting the story. She succeeded so well that by the time she fell into her bed very late on Sunday, she knew more about the Senator's college days than she could remember about her own and she was beginning to hold tentative hopes that Des Moines and all its accompanying memories could be banished forever.
By Monday night, she had tracked the Senator's gambling problem over twenty-five years and uncovered evidence of multiple illicit activities.
At times, thoughts of Jane and Shane had slithered amongst the pages of research. Lois couldn't help wondering if they had talked. Whether Jane intended to stay in Des Moines. Questions about incidental details such as what had happened to the wedding clothes, food, and flowers drifted through her mind at odd moments.
Sometimes, those thoughts turned towards a tall man with expressive brown eyes. Lois swatted them down, refusing to give them even a breath of air. She had a story to write.
When she collapsed into bed on Tuesday night, she should have been buzzing with elation because the front page of tomorrow's Daily Planet would feature her in-depth, fully evidenced story of a life devastated by greed.
She felt nothing but emptiness.
She didn't care how the Senator had lived his life. She didn't care that the byline to the lead story would carry her name. She didn't care that it would enhance her reputation as the best and probably earn her nominations in all the top awards.
Exhaustion had stripped her of ability to pretend.
She missed Clark.
Her heart ached for him. Her mind yearned for him. Her skin hungered for his touch. Her imagination replayed his smiles over and over, sneaking up on her and eroding her conviction that her life was perfectly fine without him.
Sleep wouldn't come, leaving her at the mercy of a tired mind leaking memories.
The moment she'd first seen him. The moment he'd turned and noticed her.
He'd felt it then. She had, too.
He'd repaid her rudeness with consideration. He'd been honest about his feelings.
And when she'd pushed him into an untenable situation, he'd told her his deepest-held secret.
There were only two rational possibilities - he was lying or he was delusional. Lois realised now that sometime over the past three days, she'd dismissed the former. She'd been lied to many times by many people - her father, her mother, men, people with something to hide who didn't want their lives splashed across the pages of a newspaper.
Over the years, Lois had developed the ability to detect a liar.
And her gut was adamant that Clark Kent did not lie.
He believed he'd been born on another planet.
And that … it just wasn't poss-
The coffee!
Perhaps he had an other-world recipe. It had been the best coffee she'd ever tasted. Since returning to Metropolis, she had only drunk coffee to provide the much-needed boost from the caffeine hit. It had tasted rancid in her mouth and bitter with memories in her mind.
She craved more of Clark's coffee.
More of Clark.
Lois flopped impatiently onto her back. She needed to sleep. Tomorrow, there were more leads to chase, more stories to write.
Clark was not a part of her life. He would never be a part of her life.
Her life was full and busy. And way too stressful to even contemplate the added complication of being with a man who believed he was an alien.
Tomorrow, she would hunt down another story.
Something so big, there would be no time to think of anything else.
It was how Lois Lane had become the best.
She was still the best.
And that was all she'd ever wanted.
||~||
The next evening, Lois entered her apartment a little after eight o'clock, dropped her bag on the counter, and dug a fork out of the kitchen drawer.
She returned to the sofa and sat down, peeling back the lid of her take-out. She lifted it to her nose and sniffed suspiciously. It was supposed to be fettuccine pescatore, but it neither looked nor smelled edible.
She put it on the coffee table and sank into the hard unwelcoming embrace of the sofa.
Her search for a mega-story had been fruitless. Her day had been a series of frustrating dead-ends.
She just wanted to forget.
But forgetting today left an empty mind, and an empty mind was easy prey to the avalanche of other memories.
Clark.
If things had been different, perhaps she'd be on the phone now, talking to him - telling him about her day and hearing about his.
Perhaps she would be looking forward to a time when evenings meant being with him, talking, laughing, sharing, drinking his coffee. Kissing. Cuddling.
Lois sighed.
If only …
She felt as if longing had gnawed a big hole through the middle of her heart. Would it close over? Or would it remain a gaping empty mess for the rest of her life?
The phone shrilled, and Lois's heart clunked somewhere low in her stomach.
Could it be him? He hadn't called. Or if he had, she hadn't been home, deliberately so. But now … She gulped. Should she answer it? She didn't want to talk to him. She couldn't talk to him. She wouldn't have an answer if he simply enquired how she was.
Unable to stay away, Lois rose slowly and walked to the phone. Her hand hovered through several rings. Then she snatched at it, put it to her ear, and squeaked, "Hello?"
