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Wrong Place, Wrong Time, Wrong Clark TOC can be found Here

Where we left Lois in Part 199…

Lois’s teeth ground together. Now, she knew the true reason Jimmy had abandoned Metropolis for Las Vegas just shortly before her return. Elopement, ha! The man knew what Lois would do to him if… when she discovered he had read her personal note to Clark. She stood up, her hands clenched into fists. She would have to be doubly sure nobody else piggybacked her hard work to gain their own success. “How lucky for him,” she snarled.

“Those photos along with the ones from Bureau 39 story in Smallville from last year got him a nice junior photo journalist position at the Las Vegas Review-Journal,” Perry bragged in such a manner that told her that he had more to do with that job offer than Jimmy’s photos had.

“Uh-huh,” Lois replied, rising to her feet. “If there wasn’t anything else…” she said, pointing behind her towards Clark’s desk. She had a partner to strangle.

“You were right about Arianna Carlin. A little digging upstairs showed she was on the board as the lead psychologist at the Luthor House for the Mentally Unstable,” Perry said.

She looked at him, waiting for him to tell her something she didn’t already know. That gut feeling she developed upon seeing Dr. Carlin would have increased to an ulcer had she been forced to spend more time with that woman. “And?”

“Good work, honey. I can’t imagine what she thought she could accomplish by coming here,” he said.

“It’s simple. She wants to ruin my life as she believes I ruined Lex’s. I’m sure if I had been forced to sit on her couch, she would have made me barking mad… and not in my usual way, by the end of the week,” Lois replied, heading for the door. She paused as another wave of unwelcome familiarity flowed over her as if the change of only one detail would have had her locked in that woman’s psych unit instead of free. “Thank you for believing me, Perry.”

To have both Clark and Perry back her up on the day she came face-to-face with Dr. Carlin felt as if some major wrong had finally been righted.



Part 200

Clark was just hanging up his phone as Lois left Perry’s office. Maybe he hadn’t been eavesdropping after all, but he still owed her an explanation.

Lois grabbed her notebook off her desk and bee-lined over to him. As she approached his desk, she saw his jaw stiffen and his gaze develop this far-away look to it.

“Clark, you need to…”

“Meet my source,” he interrupted, jumping to his feet. “I’m going to be late, if I don’t leave now.” He gave her a meaningful look tinged with an apology.

She rolled her eyes with annoyance. Why did the world need Superman whenever she wanted to rake Clark over the coals? “Go!” She waved him off. At least, he didn’t try to use stupid excuses such as ‘needing to return a video or a book to the library’. “I’ll hold down the fort,” she grumbled.

Clark kissed her cheek with a murmured, “Love you.”

“Yeah, yeah. I’ve heard it all before,” she mumbled, playfully slapping his behind with her notepad to remind him to hurry as he passed her. “Next time, I want to see some action behind those words, Chuck!”

He shot her a parting grin from the steps leading to the elevators, before turning toward the stairwell.

As she sat down in her chair, she noticed that Eduardo Friaz and Preciosa Valdez who had been talking when she left Perry’s office were now both staring at her with dropped jaws. Actually, now that she thought about it, the bullpen seemed to quiet with Clark’s departure. She glanced around and saw that quite a few eyes were gazing at her with disbelief. Had Clark accidently outed himself as Superman while she was in space? It would be just like Clark not to tell her about that, either.

She ignored them as if nothing extraordinary happened and picked up the slimy rag… tabloid newspaper she had been reading before her meeting with Perry. After a minute, the newsroom returned to its normal buzz and she closed the Metropolis Star. There on the back of the paper was Arianna Carlin’s column: Healing Your Inner Self.

Ugh, Lois sneered. It was worse than Cat’s Corner. What kind of pathetic loser read this tripe? Oh, right. Her new BFF, Cheryl the copywriter, she thought wryly. There on her desk was the printout memo Cheryl had promised to get for her. Perhaps Lois wouldn’t have to torture the woman after all. Where was the fun in that, though? Alas, Lois had to deal with dragons that were more important.

As she went to toss the Star into her ‘read’ pile, she could’ve sworn she heard Clark’s voice whispering on the wind, “It’s an acrostic.”

“I know what an acrostic is, you lunkhead,” she mumbled in response. “Hello? Graduated at the top of my class.” She froze and lifted her gaze from the next paper in the pile.

Clark had left on his emergency less than five minutes before. He couldn’t have returned already. She glanced around. Nobody else was looking at her, and Clark certainly wasn’t anywhere in the vicinity. That was odd.

Well, technically, not odd for her as she had heard Clark’s disembodied voice before. Only that time, he had been in the hospital with amnesia. Clark had sworn to her that he wasn’t telepathic. She took a deep breath and exhaled it slowly.

‘It’s just my psychic self telling me I’m missing something,’ she told herself. Clark wasn’t hurt. She glanced over to the television in the corner of the room and saw Superman rescuing people from a fire.

As her gaze returned to her desk, it passed over the lovely bouquet of wildflowers that some unnamed person had left to brighten her desk. She automatically thought of Clark and smiled.

Pulling the discarded Met Star back in front of her, she concentrated on the therapist’s column. The letters from Dr. Carlin’s article seemed to float off the page and arrange themselves before her eyes, ‘Hate Superman.’ She flipped over the newspaper and noted the date, May 24. She felt around her cluttered desk for a pencil and not finding one, she opened her desk drawer, pulled out a box of already sharpened pencils and plopped them into her Superman mug, leaving one on her notepad. She tossed the empty box into her recycle bin, jotted down on a fresh sheet of paper the date of the newspaper and the acrostic found in Dr. Carlin’s column.

Tapping her pencil on her notepad, she thought about the likelihood that Dr. Carlin had published only the one. She grabbed the May 25 issue and flipped it over. ‘Superman bad.’

Wow, Dr. Carlin, what lousy grammar you have.

May 26. ‘Superman Kills.’ Superman kills? What kind of crap is that?

“Superman most certainly does not kill,” she murmured aloud to herself.

Lois flipped over the newspaper to the cover story. Superman had only been able to save three miners after an explosion damaged a mine in the Carolinas. Twenty-six other miners had died.

She covered her mouth as her heart physically ached. Oh, poor Clark. How he must have suffered? How had she missed that? She had heard about the mine explosion, of course, everyone had, but she hadn’t known Clark had been there.

May 27. ‘Superman is Death.’ Must have been more of the crap regarding the mine blast from the day before.

Lois recalled that Superman had been fighting a downhill popularity battle after Nightfall. People had blamed him for messing up for colliding with Nightfall Major instead of pushing it out of the way. Well, if one considered LNN “people”. Actually, the general public had gotten especially brutal after they had learned from Ralph – Lois sneered as she thought of her former coworker – that the asteroid never would have hit Earth. Being the first to report news wasn’t the only important thing in this business. Making sure it was presented in an accurate and non-sensationalist manner separated the real journalist from the tabloid ones.

She took a fresh notepad and wrote down some dates. She pulled out her agenda from her briefcase and quickly scanned for some other dates. The day Luthor had proposed: April Fool’s Day. How could she have forgotten that? Too bad that she couldn’t put Clark’s proposal in the same joke category as they had spoken the next day. The date Lois had started at LNN and Ralph had leaked her story about the Nightfall virus during the news conference with Secretary Cosgrove were also added to the list. Had that only been a week later? The day the Daily Planet had been bombed. April had been a bad month. Lois also marked down for comparison the date Miranda sprayed the Daily Planet with her love drug and a couple of random dates from the previous year, including some prior to Superman’s arrival on Earth.

Standing up, she hollered, “Jimmy!”

“You called, fair lady,” Jimbo said, arriving at her desk a few seconds later.

She handed over the list. “Go down to archives and bring me copies of Dr. Carlin’s column from the week after each of these dates.”

His brow furrowed. “Uh… o-kay?”

“I’ve got a hunch.”

Jimbo shrugged, and replied, “Okay.”

After he was gone, she picked up from her desk the pile of Metropolis Star tabloids, her pencil, notepad, and what was left of her morning cup of coffee, and took them into the conference room. This would be much easier if she could spread out.

***

“Hey, CK,” Jimbo said, exiting the elevator at the same time Clark emerged from the stairwell.

“Hi, Jimbo,” Clark replied.

“Take up smoking this summer?” Jimbo asked, waving a hand in front of his face.

Clark smiled sheepishly. “There was a gas leak over on the West Side near where I met my source and an old office building caught fire. It required two fire houses and Superman to finally put it out,” he said. Glancing around, he didn’t see his favorite journalist as he paused in front of her desk. “Where’s Lois?”

“Don’t know,” Jimbo replied. “She had me digging up some old columns of Dr. Carlin’s for her.” He held up what appeared to be a wedding announcement for Lex Luthor. “Doesn’t name Arianna Carlin as the bride, though. It was ten years ago and it only says that Mr. and Mrs. Luthor were recently married while on a cruise in the Caribbean. I’m about to start a search on the ship’s captain to see if he can confirm it was Dr. Carlin. Oh, and did you know that Dr. Carlin wrote the book on subliminal advertising? Literally.”

“I wonder why they ever divorced,” Clark said wryly, still looking around for Lois. There in the middle of her otherwise empty desk was a sticky-note with two words on it. Conference Room. He smiled, happy that Lois hadn’t forgotten him. He pointed out the note to Jimbo and the two men headed for the room.

Clark opened the door and paused on the threshold, blinking his eyes. He was reminded of the first story he had worked with Lois where they tried to piece together Samuel Platt’s scribbles. Papers covered every square inch of the conference table, only this time they were newspapers.

“Whoa, there, Lois,” Jimbo said, scooting past Clark into the room. “I wasn’t gone that long, was I?”

Clark had started wondering the same thing.

Lois glanced up, her fingers so black with newsprint she hadn’t noticed that she had streaks across her nose where she had rubbed it. She held out her hand. “Gimme!”

“Hello to you, too, Lois,” Clark said as Jimbo handed her the photocopies. Jimbo glanced back at him with a grin.

“Uh-huh,” she replied, quickly shifting through the pile, separating them into two piles.

Clark stood behind her from over her shoulder to see what she was looking at. She flipped through the copies of Dr. Carlin’s column hardly long enough for her to read the first line. After about five articles, he stepped back getting a headache from the doctor’s advice. “Lois?”

“It’s just as I thought,” she murmured, setting down one pile from her hand and picking up a notepad he hadn’t seen buried within the mess.

“What is?” Jimbo asked.

Lois looked over at them and did a double take as if she just noticed Clark. Then she shot him her award-winning expression that Clark had come to know as her ‘gotcha grin’. “Dr. Carlin was behind Superman’s bad press this spring.”

“What?” Clark sputtered. How had she figured that out in the two hours he had been gone?

“She’s also the one trying to convince the good citizens of Metropolis that Lex Luthor was framed,” she announced.

Clark and Jimbo stood on the edge of the cliff waiting for Lois to describe how exactly she knew this.

Instead, she walked over the connecting door to Perry’s office and knocked twice. Without waiting for Perry to invite her inside, she opened it. “Chief, do you have a copy of Dr. Carlin’s column for tomorrow?”

“Lois, you can’t just barge into my office… Do you know how much hot water I’m in over your accusations from this morning? The lawyers upstairs are saying we have to honor her contract,” Clark heard Perry berate her.

“Give me her copy and I’ll give you the ammunition to prove I’m right,” Lois said.

“Honey, you can’t just…” Perry said, following her back into the conference room. “Saints alive! Lois, what is all of this?”

“This is every copy of Dr. Carlin’s syndicated column printed in the Daily Planet and the Metropolis Star over the last three months,” she said.

“I can see that,” Perry replied. He was eyeing her as if she might need to lie on Dr. Carlin’s couch after all.

“Each one of her columns is an acrostic forwarding her or Lex’s agenda,” Lois explained.

“An acrostic?” Clark echoed.

“Keep up, Smallville. It’s where the initial letter of her paragraphs spells out a message of its own. You know, subliminal messaging, brainwashing. Don’t they have acrostics on Kr… in Kansas?”

“I know what an acrostic is, Lois,” Clark replied, a tad bitterly at her teasing, and crossed his arms. He knew what it was, but he had hardly expected it. Then, again, self-help columns weren’t exactly his thing, either. Like Lois, he focused on the real news and hadn’t read Dr. Carlin’s column.

She pointed to a newspaper at one end of the table and read off her notepad. “‘Superman Lies.’”

“What?” Clark gasped, picking up the newspaper in question, but Lois had already moved onto another one.

“‘Superman Bad for City.’” She pointed at another paper. “‘Man of Steel Leave.’” She moved to a paper in the center of the table. “These are some of my favorites. ‘Luthor to Marry Slut.’ ‘Lois Lane Whore.’ I'm guessing that she has some unresolved issues in regards to her former husband. She should really seek some therapy about that.” Lois grabbed the paper out of Perry’s hand, reading, “‘Luthor Set Up.’”

Perry took the paper back to look at it. “Glory be!”

“Since April, Dr. Carlin’s column has been badmouthing Superman, praising Lex and his innocence, and bashing me,” Lois said, pulling out a pencil from where it had been tucked behind her ear and tapping her notepad.

Perry looked down at her notepad and read, “‘Superman Must Pay.’ ‘Man of Steel Menace.’ ‘Superman Let Luthor Die.’ ‘Lane Killed Luthor.’ ‘Luthor Innocent.’ ‘Lex Luthor Needs You.’ ‘Lex Luthor is a good man.’ ‘Free Luthor.’ ‘Lane cheated on Luthor.’ ‘Lock Superman Out.’ ‘Send Lane to Jail.’ ‘Lane and Superman Frame Luthor.’ ‘Luthor Good for City.’ ‘Alien Threat to Earth.’” He shook his head. “Sounds like she’s quoting Bureau 39 there.”

Lois held up the papers that she had taken from Jimbo. “Here are some of the early ones, back from right after Ralph leaked my story about the Nightfall Virus. ‘Don’t Trust Aliens.’ ‘Superman Lied.’ ‘Superman Wants Us Dead.’ ‘Superman No Hero.’ ‘Man of Steel Isn’t God.’ It seems as if Dr. Carlin didn’t start with these subliminal messages until then.”

As Lois read, Clark had sat down and shifted the tabloids around to see the words that Lois had. ‘She’s done it,’ he thought to himself. Lois had saved Superman, again. He couldn’t believe the screaming, yelling, and flinging of insults by the people of Metropolis might finally be ending. It had become so bad, it had started to feel like the norm.

“This is just the type of thing the suits upstairs will want to see, Lois. Good work,” Perry said, tugging on the notepad in her hand.

“Hey! I still need to write my story,” Lois exclaimed.

Perry jerked the notepad out of her hand. “I’m just borrowing it.”

“Probably best that we’re not publishing Dr. Carlin’s column anymore,” Jimbo said. “It seems as if only twenty percent of Metropolitans were reading it.”

Lois laughed.

“I’ll mention that, too,” Perry said, returning to his office.

Clark still felt stunned. In his gut, he had known that it couldn’t only be LNN’s horrible coverage of Superman that made his popularity numbers decline, but to have the words spelled out in front of him turned those assumptions into verifiable fact. Both Lex Luthor and his ex-wife had been conspiring to bring down Superman, and Lois had found the proof in two hours. Two hours. Psychic ability or not, Lois was an amazing woman.

If he hadn’t loved her unconditionally before, he would now.

He felt Lois kneel down beside his chair. “Hey,” she said softly. “It isn’t true.”

He smiled at her. One of the things he loved most about Lois was her unfailing loyalty to Superman.

“I’m not a slut or a whore,” she went on soothingly.

Clark cupped her chin in his hand. “I never thought that you were.”

“Liar,” she murmured as he tilted his lips towards hers.

“Guys… um…” Jimbo interrupted, taping his watch. “Could you do that on the newsroom floor? I have eleven thirty this morning for the pool and it’s coming up on that now.”

Clark turned towards Jimbo. “Pool?”

“Yeah, CK, after you kissed her cheek and Lois slapped your butt this morning, the whole newsroom hasn’t been talking about anything else,” Jimbo explained.

“Oh, that’s what…I was…” Lois murmured, before bursting into a fit of giggles as her cheeks reddened in the most adorable of ways. “Oopps, Clark. I guess our little secret is out.”

Everyone knew that he and Lois were an item. Clark smiled.

At last.

“Should we give them a show?” he asked, wiggling his eyebrows and hoping she would say ‘yes’.

“Nah, let’s keep ‘em guessing,” Lois whispered with a wink.

Jimbo pointed his thumb towards the bullpen. “I’m just saying… I could use the funds.”

“Well…” Lois said, rising up to her feet and resting against the table. “I could use a lift to my desk.”

Clark chuckled. “I’m not carrying you.”

“But my feet!” Lois chided with a pout.

“I could hurt my back,” Clark retorted innocently. She was the one who said that Clark couldn’t be seen carrying her around.

“Where’s a Superman when I need one?” Lois grumbled.

“So, is that a ‘no’?” Jimbo asked.

Clark ignored him. “You could lean against my arm.”

“My hero,” Lois replied sardonically.

“Come on, guys. I never told them you were holding hands this summer,” Jimbo whined. “Or meeting in secret while Lois was engaged to Luthor. There’s this new leather motorcycle jacket I’ve been eyeing…”

A curl of a smile, hiding laughter that Lois couldn’t keep from her eyes, came up to the edge of Lois’s lips and Clark mirrored the effect back at her. He heard the door close and a quick glance confirmed that he and Lois were finally alone. They burst into soft chuckles, as she rested her head against Clark’s shoulder.

“Oh, Clark.”

“Perhaps that will teach Olsen not to interrupt people’s intimate moments,” Clark murmured.

“Doubtful,” Lois replied. “If he stopped doing that we would have to check to see if someone replaced him with a clone.”

Clark laughed. It was short lived, because the expression in Lois’s eyes changed as if she were reminded of something not as pleasant as their almost kiss. She stepped out of his arms and opened her mouth to speak, but then paused to stare at him.

“Anyone need you?” she asked, crossing her arms and Clark remembered that she had wanted to speak to him before he bolted out of the office earlier.

He closed his eyes and listened. Opening his eyes, he beamed at her. “I’m all yours.”

“I’m holding you to that,” she said curtly.

Clark pulled out a chair for Lois and sat down next to her, taking her hands in his. “What’s up?”

“Perry said something about a woman’s body being found in Luthor’s bunker.”

Clark swallowed. Thanks, Chief. Clark had been trying to figure out the best way to tell Lois about that.

“So, I take it it’s true,” she went on. “He implied that you thought it was me.”

Clark forced a smile to his lips. “Never.”

She raised her eyebrow in a familiar arch. “Never?”

“Never,” he said with a nod. Just because he had the medical examiner check to make sure that the body had never broken or fractured its ankle, didn’t mean he had doubts. “I know that you’re the real Lois Lane.”

“So that isn’t the reason Superman didn’t rescue me from space?” she asked.

Clark groaned and leaned back in his chair, running his hands through his hair. “Not directly, no.”

“I’m listening.”

“If Luthor was crazy enough to make a double of you… and I was able to get Henderson to admit off the record that the woman didn’t have the same blood type as you, so she wasn’t a clone. Between what the blonde said and what Asabi admitted to Henderson…” Clark started again, only to be interrupted by Lois’s raised hand, telling him to stop.

“Blonde? What blonde?” she asked.

“Uh…” Clark sputtered, unsure how exactly to answer that question. “Nobody’s quite sure. I mean, she told Cat her name was ‘Mindy’. Only records show that none of the Luckies had that name and nobody else remembers her. Luthor obviously knows who she was… is, but according to my sources he’s not talking. He refuses to help the police with their investigation against him, he says.” Cocky…

Lois crossed her arms. “That still doesn’t tell me who she is. There are a lot of blondes in Metropolis.”

“Didn’t you read Cat’s article?”

She shifted in her seat but didn’t answer.

Clark held up a finger, asking her to wait. “Let me get you a copy.”

“About time,” he heard her grumble as he exited the conference room to head to his desk.

He found his copy of Cat’s article from the Houston Chronicle in his folder on the Luckies. He turned around to find Lois standing behind him with her hand outstretched.

“What did Asabi tell Henderson?” Lois asked as he handed her the article.

Clark guessed he owed her that much. He cleared his throat. “The woman Nigel St. John brought down into the bunker had bandages covering her face. St. John never gave Asabi a name. He only said that she was Mr. Luthor’s fiancée, so Asabi naturally assumed that she was you or at least, that’s what he said before...” His voice faded and he cleared his throat again. Clark didn’t want to think about what had happened to all of Luthor’s insiders since the billionaire’s arrest and what that meant about Lois’s safety.

Lois set her hand on Clark’s arm. “Perry told me he was poisoned.”

Clark nodded. “Shards of glass in his food, actually… Anyway, when Asabi took the bandages off her, it had only confirmed his hunch, because he said she looked like you.” He paused, letting that information sink in. He hoped the downtick in Lois’s expression meant she wouldn’t discount Luthor as a threat any longer.

Asabi was in a coma. St. John and Luthor’s clone were dead. ‘Mindy’ had vanished without a trace and the police had never found the video surveillance she claimed existed, showing Luthor killing the woman. The body had been so badly burned and bashed in that neither Henderson nor Clark had any hope that the FBI forensic lab would ever be able to say whom the body resembled.

Clark knew for certain what the woman looked like. He had watched the video long enough to know she could’ve been Lois’s twin. He had only been glad that no record of Luthor’s sex tape with Lois’s double had surfaced either. “With the disappearance of Dr. Heller, that plastic surgeon Luthor had taken you to after you fell down my stairs, Cat and I supposed the woman had been made to look like you.”

Lois raised her eyes from Cat’s article back to his as he finished speaking. “Dr. Heller disappeared?” she asked. “Wasn’t he found murdered in a dumpster by some homeless man?”

“You think he’s dead?” Clark stated the obvious. After everything that had happened to those associated with Luthor, it wasn’t out of surprise.

Lois dropped her gaze and stepped closer, lowering her voice, “I know it.”

“How?”

“Source,” she murmured, pretending to peruse the article in her hand.

“Same one as who told you about Dr. Carlin?” he inquired softly, moving closer so that they wouldn’t be overheard. They were still standing in the middle of the newsroom after all.

“Uh-huh, and Luthor’s clone. Only…” her voice drifted off. “Something feels different, wrong.” She shook her head. “Heller disappeared months ago?”

“The week before your wedding,” he said with a nod.

She gritted her teeth. “It wasn’t a wedding!”

“What do you want me to call it?” he said before he could stop himself.

“The worst day of my life!” she screamed.

“Mine too!” he retorted.

“Oh, Clark,” Lois murmured, raising her hand to caress his cheek. “I’m sorry. Of course it was. I never wanted… If I could go back and change everything, I would…”

“I know. Me too,” Clark whispered, covering her hand with his and wrapping the other around her waist, pulling her to his chest. “But I wouldn’t want to change this… now… you and me.” He smiled.

She returned his smile. “This is nice,” she said softly. “Isn’t it?”

Clark couldn’t agree more. He went to dip his head and brush her lips with his, but she had already turned to glance down at his desk. He saw her move to pick up his Luckies file, but using a dose of Super speed, he grabbed it first.

“Clark,” she warned. “What is that?”

“Story notes,” he murmured, putting the file behind his back.

“What story?” Her fingers danced down his chest and around to his back.

“The Luckies.”

“Uh-huh,” Lois said with a nod. “Hand it over.” She held out her hand.

“It’s my story,” Clark teased, moving the folder out of her reach. He wondered what she might do to get him to hand it over.

“The Luckies were the people down in Luthor’s bunker, right?” Lois asked, reaching up to snatch the folder away from him. He moved it higher above his head.

“Yep, that would be them. He called his bunker the Luthor Underground Community and the people living there referred to themselves as the ‘Luckies’, since they believed themselves to be the only ones who survived the impact of Nightfall Minor,” he replied. “But since Brenda Muldoon was one of them, the story links back to her disappearance last spring, a story Cat and I worked on. Hence my story.”

“Yes, but the existence of the bunker itself, Luthor having a clone, the police raiding the bunker to search for the still living Luthor ties the Luckies story to my Luthor investigation, therefore, in the very least, it’s our story,” she said, hopping up to grab the folder. She missed. Her lips pinched into a line. “We’re partners. We’re supposed to share information. Fork it over, bub!” She held out her hand again.

Clark grinned, lifting the file even higher. “No. These are my notes.”

Lois rested a hand on his shoulder and momentarily stepped onto his chair to give herself the leverage to push herself higher, but Clark still managed to keep the folder out of her grasp. As gravity overtook Lois, her chest brushed against Clark’s face and she grabbed him around his neck to stop herself. Instantly, his arms surrounded her so she wouldn’t fall. He could hear her heart racing and feel her chest rise and fall against his from her exertion.

Their eyes locked and he saw a much different heat than anger shining in them.

“What’s the magic word?” he whispered, his voice rough.

“Gimme,” she replied breathlessly.

Unable to resist, he lowered his mouth to hers.

Somewhere in the background, he could have sworn he heard Jimbo cheering.

“Lois! Clark! What does this look like? The back row of Lover’s Lane?” barked Perry, causing them to jump apart as if they were two teenagers being interrupted by a porch light.

Lois moved away from Clark first, grabbed his Luckies file out of his hand, and awkwardly returned to her desk amidst the applause from their coworkers.

“Okay, okay!” Perry called, holding up his hands to quiet the newsroom. “I’m going to need more than Lane’s exposé of Dr. Carlin to fill the paper. What do the rest of you have?”

Everyone scurried away as if they were cockroaches on a kitchen floor after the open fridge flooded the kitchen with light. Perry pointed towards Clark. “You, too, Kent.”

Clark nodded towards his computer. “The gas fire over on West Side. I was just about to write it up.”

“You do that, then,” Perry growled, and tossed Lois her notepad. “Thanks, Lane. I’ll need that article now. Jimmy, how are you doing on tracking down Luthor’s marriage records?”

“On it, Chief,” Jimbo replied, lifting up the handset for his telephone.

Lois glanced over her shoulder at Clark and smiled softly. He shot her a grin as he sat down at his desk.

It was now official.

They were an item.

No more lying.

No more sneaking around.

Everything was now out in the open.

Clark felt like making loop-de-loops.

***End of Part 200***

Part 201

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