***
What If...He Confessed?
***
He seems nervous, not quite finishing his sentences, doing some strange dance between staring at her and avoiding her eyes, and is he talking to the picture of them? Weird. He’s the one who suggested breakfast, when she’d been all too willing to cling ever closer to him, when her hands had stroked his hair and played with where his glasses curled around his ears, when their kisses had gone deeper and longer than ever before and she felt like they were flying. He’d pulled away, breathless and shaking, and told her breakfast was a good idea, it was important, he’d come pick her up and then…
Well, then she’d kissed him again. He was too far away, talking when she’d come to his place with her speech and her therapy-approved decision and her desire for them to move forward, and she wasn’t sure how he was able to think so clearly when she was swimming in oceans of sensation and emotion (all for him). Talking wasn’t on the agenda, so she kissed him, and he melted against her, strong and solid and unwavering but so malleable in her hands, so pliable against her lips…so abruptly stiff when she managed to gasp between kisses that she’d love to have breakfast with him.
So here they are. Kisses and touches and the joint desire for this to go somewhere new, somewhere more, but he’d walked her home like always (kissed her on her doorstep until they backed up against her door and she almost pulled him inside, would have if she could have convinced herself he wouldn’t regret it) and they’d slept apart, but now they’re together again, doors unlocked and layers casually undone and so much past between them, so much future now unfurling ahead of them.
And he’s nervous.
And she’s giddy.
He’s hers. All the worries and the missteps and the fears and the late night deliberations (her almost-wedding and his packed boxes), nearly two years of fights and feuds and competitions, of dinners and stories and hugs and disguise kisses that never felt very fake. All of it, and here they are. She can still taste him on her lips, can still feel the gloss of his hair beneath her fingers, can still imagine all the delicious possibilities she’d glimpsed in the shine of his eyes last night.
Lois and Clark. Not just Lane and Kent, not anymore, but Lois and Clark. More. Different. Exclusive.
She wants to kiss him again. In fact, if he’d put down that picture frame (and she didn’t love him, in that picture, or rather, she didn’t know she loved him, so she needs a new picture, a better picture, one where she loves him as much as he deserves), she’d kiss him right now.
“Clark,” she says, hoping that will wake him up.
She reaches out to caress his cheek, hoping that will jar him free of his nervousness.
She steps closer, tilts her head up toward him, hoping he will take the invitation.
“Lois,” he says, and she loves it. She loves the sound of her name on his lips, loves that he says it so often, so consistently, so tenderly, and she cannot wait any longer. It’s been eight hours since they last kissed.
Bridging the last space between them, she brushes the picture frame out of his hands (hears it clatter, muffled, against the couch and then forgets all about it), slides her hand around his neck, and kisses him. He pauses for just a split second before he wraps one arm around her and splays a hand (so, so gently) across her cheek, and kisses her back.
Yes. This. This is what they should have been doing from the moment he knocked on her door. This is what they should do instead of breakfast. Come to think of it, Perry will probably turn a blind eye if they don’t go in today.
Lois wraps her arms around him completely. She wants to be closer, closer, so close there is no breaking them apart, no tearing them asunder, no room for more insecurities or bad decisions or any Scardinos or Maysons or Luthors. Just them. Just him and her and the warmth of him sinking down deep, deep into her bones and the smell of him (air and wind and home) enclosing her in a private atmosphere.
He kisses her as if he’s been drowning all night. As if she’s air and water and sunlight. He kisses her as if nothing in all of existence could ever make him unwrap his arm from around her waist, and yet still, for all the tightness of his hold, his other hand is soft, light, so tentative she wants to blink away tears.
“Lois,” he gasps into her mouth, and if she thought she liked the way he said her name before, it is nothing compared to this.
She smiles, alight with happiness, with relief, with joy, and the smile breaks their kiss. Panting, his breath stuttering across her cheeks like intangible caresses, Clark leans his forehead against hers.
“I love you,” he whispers. His eyes are closed (squeezed tight, as if he is afraid to see her reaction to this declaration). “Lois, I love you so much.”
“Clark…” She wants him to feel as cherished as she does, so she loosens her hold on him just enough to slide her hand down his cheek. The way he leans into it without opening his eyes makes her heart feel too big and too small all at once, a tiny thing not nearly large enough for the emotion spilling out of it, so swollen and large it strains against the confines of her breastbone.
“I have to tell you something,” he says.
And he opens his eyes.
And Lois goes cold.
She thought he was giddy and awash in desire and happy (even if a bit nervous) to confess his love to her for the second time. She thought he was feeling everything she is.
She was wrong.
Because Clark is not giddy. He’s not happy. He’s not lost to the feelings invoked by her skin against his and her lips on his.
He’s terrified.
***
Lois sits down. It hurts, to separate herself so wholly from his touch, but she is suddenly sure this is something better taken sitting down.
“Oh, boy,” she says (to cover her stabbing fear). “This isn’t good.”
“What?” He stares (as if it is she who’s stabbed him). “Why would you say that?”
“What is it?” she demands. “Clark, I thought we were…I thought we’d decided to move on. To be together.”
He sinks down onto the coffee table, perched right in front of her, his head bowed. She hates it. He looks like a supplicant. Like a penitent.
Like he’s confessing something horrible.
“Lois, I want that, more than anything.” He sounds sincere. Earnest. Wistful. It does nothing to reassure her. “But to have that future, I…I have to tell you something. And I was always going to tell you, but it never seemed like the right time, or if it did, I…I hesitated and the moment was always gone. But I want you to know. I want us to be able to survive this.”
There’s a sick feeling in the pit of her stomach. Suddenly, more than anything, she wants Clark gone. Out of the apartment, back in his own. She wants time to rewind. She wants to be getting up way too early because her excitement won’t let her sleep. She wants to be messing with her hair and changing her outfit three times because even though she won’t admit it, she’s thinking about the way Clark’s hand slid over her stomach (and just a bit higher, just a touch more daring) and she wants to feel that again. She wants him to come here, and to smile at her, and to kiss her as soon as he sees her, and to never give a second look to that picture frame currently jutting against her spine.
“Clark,” she says abruptly.
Because that’s something her mother said, when they found her dad kissing Mrs. Belcanto.
We can’t survive this.
And that’s one thing she and Clark should never have to worry about. Not the affairs, not the cheating, not the lying, and certainly not surviving anything when their bond has already withstood more than any other in her entire life.
(She can’t lose him. She can’t go back to a life like the one she lived for those twenty-four hours after Clyde Barrow and three bullets.)
“Lois, I can’t keep this from you anymore. I’m afraid…I’m afraid you’ll already hate me. I can’t wait until I know you’ll never do anything but hate me.”
“Then tell me,” she says (she dares him) even though she’s desperately hoping the phone will ring or the fire alarm will sound or something. “Tell me whatever’s so important you think it will push us apart even though you promised me--you promised me, Clark--that we’d give this an honest try.”
“I am!” he cries. “I can’t not tell you this, not anymore. Not now.”
“Clark,” and now she’s begging, but she almost (almost) doesn’t even care, “I don’t want anything to come between us.”
She doesn’t know why, but that’s when his nerves fall away. That’s when he goes bold and resolute and unflinching. And she knows (she knows because Clark, when he gets that look in his eyes and that set to his jaw, is the only one she cannot persuade around to her way of thinking) that there is no stopping him. Whatever he’s decided to say is going to happen.
She only got one perfect night of happiness before it all shatters at her touch.
“I don’t either,” he says. “So, Lois, I have to tell you this, so that it can never come between us again.”
He takes her hands. Something inside her urges her to snatch them back, to pull away, to protect herself as much as she can, but she’s numb. Unmoving. Her hands are limp and unresponsive in his.
“You know how…how I’m always ducking away with lame excuses? There is a reason for that, a good one. You see, I’m…I’m…”
She stares straight ahead. Her heart will puncture against the sharpness of her breastbone if she moves. Her lungs will deflate and wither and disintegrate if she meets his eyes. So she stares straight ahead and says nothing and lets their relationship die around them.
Clark clears his throat and tries again. This time, he actually finishes his sentence.
“I’m Superman.”
He finished his sentence, but it makes no sense at all. Gibberish. Jargon. Words that don’t go together at all.
“Lois?” He peers up at her. She can feel the weight of his anxious gaze, but only as if it’s far away. “Lois, say something.”
“You’re…you’re Superman.”
“Yes.” He’s breathless, tremulous.
Afraid.
And she? She’s nothing.
***
They don’t eat breakfast.
Later, that’s what she remembers. She finds herself thinking it often. They were supposed to have breakfast together, the first in their new relationship, but they don’t.
It’s not the first time Superman has come between them.
(But is it the last?)
Clark asks her to say something, tells her to yell at him, tries to tease her about being mad, and finally begs her to do anything at all. She tries (even now, she can’t be completely unaffected by him), but she is empty. Drained. Stunned blank and polite.
“I don’t know what you want me to say,” she tells him over and over again until finally she just asks him to leave.
“Lois,” he says at the door. He sways, as if he means to kiss her, and Lois backs up two steps.
She may as well have hit him. With Kryptonite.
“I’m sorry,” he whispers, and then he’s gone.
She thinks she should feel relieved, but she doesn’t. Instead, she feels…alone.
(She remembers that morning, an hour before, when she kissed him and he fell into her as if he never wanted to come up for air. He was saying goodbye, she realizes now. A last kiss to keep him when he lost her. Three little words as a final confession to explain the revelation he was about to unveil.)
Work slips her mind so that she never even calls Perry. Either he plans to ambush her later or Clark covered for her, because he never calls. She’s given free reign to pace her apartment endlessly, roving circles that take her back through countless moments, endless deceptions, dual betrayals.
No wonder Superman picked her out immediately, spoke to her and singled her out from the crowd and flew her back to the Daily Planet. To her desk, even, but she’d completely missed that subtlety. Of course he noticed her and thought she was special enough to come to Clark’s (to his) apartment and make sure she knew he cared. Of course he cared--Clark cared.
Clark cared from their first meeting, the one she barely remembers. Clark cared since he laughed at her in an elevator and listened to her tearful confessions and kept all her secrets locked up tight in the fortress of his heart. Clark came to see her when Superman was auctioned off, he cared about the blood on her temple when Superman was tested with a bomb, he wondered what good Superman (he) could do when there was so much tragedy and evil in the world.
Lois brews coffee in the hopes that the smell or the caffeine or just the habitual movements will wake her up. But all it does is remind her of all the cups of coffee Clark has brought her. The croissants and bagels and doughnuts and Chinese and pizza he’s given her so freely with some vague reference to ‘a little place he knows.’
The flights Superman took her on, all the times he was there to save her even before she cried out for help, the things he knew that should have attracted her curiosity if not suspicion, the things he knew about Luthor…the Kryptonite cage, oh no, no, no, the Kryptonite cage. That was Clark in there, Clark who crawled out of it and dressed himself and dragged himself up to the front of the Lexor building to hug her and comfort her and somehow neglect to ever breathe a syllable of ‘I told you so.’
Clark who lay on the floor with that Kryptonite bullet in his shoulder. Who grasped her hand and told her he trusted her. Clark who faced down Metallo and hid in shame that he was beaten and bruised and bloody. Clark who finally heard her compare him to Superman and not find him wanting. Clark who then gathered the courage to ask her out, who kissed her, who held a dying woman in his arms and watched Lois slip away from him while the world monopolized his attention.
Every step of the way, he was there. Ties and capes, glasses and boots, he was always there.
Don’t fall for me, she told him, so he tucked it all away (but never stopped hoping).
I’m so completely in love with you, she told Superman while Clark nursed a broken heart.
You lied, she realized while he did his best to tell her only the truth so far as he could, the omissions and deflections piling up until it was easier for him to leave her side than to try to juggle the shifting mountain.
He’s a lot like you, she told Clark, and then yes when he asked her out on a date.
You live above us, she said to Superman while he looked at her with his heart in his eyes before he walked away. And when she went to Clark’s, he was packing, still walking away because it’s what he thought she wanted.
I’m ready to take the next step if you are, he said, and then he came for breakfast and he told her his secret.
And she gave him nothing in return.
I’m afraid you’ll hate me, he confided.
She doesn’t.
(She doesn’t think she ever can.)
***
How do you find a man who can fly from one end of the world to the other?
Lois doesn’t even try to hunt him down. She just goes to his place, retrieves the key from under the window frame (he showed her where it is, told her to use it whenever she needs to), and enters his place. The temptation to snoop, now that she is here and he isn’t, is nearly irresistible, but the possibility of him coming back to see her ‘investigating’ him is so horrifying that she doesn’t touch anything. Though she does look, enough to see that he’s unpacked all the boxes she was so stunned to see the night before. Everything is back in its place.
But the empty boxes are still stacked up on the balcony. It would be so easy for him to fill those boxes up again and be gone forever.
Lois, we haven’t been happy with each other lately, and that’s my fault.
He could disappear in the blink of an eye. Vanish from the face of the earth so that her only hope of finding him would be following rescues, ambushing Superman until…until what? He didn’t trust her anymore at all or he stopped letting any of the media close to him? Until he used his supersenses to completely avoid her?
She can’t let that happen. She has to stop him, has to let him know that it’s not better for him to be out of her life. He’s…he’s the best thing that’s ever happened to her, the best thing in her life, and she can’t lose him.
She’s mad. Maybe. Or…disappointed. Or surprised. She’s something, anyway, but she can’t lose Clark. She refuses to lose him.
He’s hers.
Isn’t that what he’s promised her over and over again in a multitude of ways and a variety of words? Isn’t that what he’s proven consistently these past two years, always there, always ready with a hug, always willing to be her guardian, her refuge, her confidante, her friend, her hero, her everything?
Hopefully, he’s just out with his parents. Probably spilling all his troubles and woes out to them, and she supposes she might as well just give up any hope she ever had of them approving of her, not after what Clark has to tell them about today (or a lot of days, if she’s perfectly honest, which she tries not to be, generally).
Even if he’s not, if he’s out on a rescue or a story, trying to bury his troubles in work, Lois decides it doesn’t matter.
She sits on his couch, and she waits.
(She will wait forever.)
***
When he comes in, he must know she’s there. There’s no way Superman doesn’t hear her heartbeat and her lungs filling and emptying and the thrum of her pulse. She’s even turned the light on, so she is lit and obvious, sitting on his couch after a few hours of pacing and one time raiding his fridge for a snack and the cream sodas he keeps on hand for her.
He knows, but he doesn’t look at her for a long moment. As if he is alone, he walks down the steps. Stands in the middle of his living room and sighs. Then he squares his shoulders and turns to face her.
It doesn’t take a best friend or a body language expert to see that he has braced himself for the worst. That he expects the worst.
The contrary part of Lois wants to give it to him, wants to shout and accuse and point her finger at him and say her own version of ‘I told you so’ (because she knew no one was trustworthy, she knew everyone lied, she knew no relationship could handle the strain of life).
But the larger part of her (the part that’s been coaxed and nourished and brought into the light by Clark’s presence in her life) wants, instead, to soothe him. To coax him closer, to nourish him with forgiveness and compassion, to bring him (the true, real him) forward into the light. She wants to put her arms around him and caress his face and pull him down into a kiss that will spin their world once more and turn her giddy and flush like she was this morning.
What she actually does is something in between.
“Clark,” she says (because it’s important he know who she’s talking to). “We need to talk.”
He flinches. But he sits. There’s over a foot of space between them, though Lois isn’t sitting on the end of the couch.
“All right,” he says softly. “What do you want to ask me?”
“Questions.” She tries on a smile but gives up when it appears wobbly and unsure. It’s not like Clark is even looking at her to see it. “Questions are good. Answers are better.”
She didn’t actually mean it as a barb, but she can see why Clark takes it as one.
“I’ll answer.” He’s even more guarded now, if that’s possible, all the dazed awe from last night gone (she thinks she’d take the mess of packed boxes back if it meant he’d look at her again with that light of reverence in his eyes). Even this morning’s nerves are gone, drowned beneath his wary stiffness.
“Why?” she asks him. “Why tell me now?”
This actually gets a response out of him, his brows drawing down, his head coming up, and even if he doesn’t quite meet her eyes, at least he’s looking in her general direction now.
“Because you told Clark you wanted to move forward, and we couldn’t do that with Superman in the way. I told you that this morning.”
“But why?” she presses. “I told Superman I wasn’t going to try loving him anymore, and you packed up all your things, so if it was that easy for you to just leave me, then why bother telling me? Why not just wait until things went south for Clark too and then have both of you leave?”
“Lois,” and there, finally, his eyes collide with hers, meet and hold and clash, “Superman isn’t who I am most of the time, and he’s certainly not who I am with you. I didn’t…I couldn’t know that you’d accept Clark until you chose him. Until you chose me. It wasn’t until you said goodbye to Superman--that you told Clark that there was more to us than friends--that I knew we could actually try this.”
“So the reason you never told me before…is because…what? I had to choose your disguises in the right order?”
“No!” She almost thinks he’s going to pull at his hair, but he only scrubs a hand back through it, angling to face her more directly. “I didn’t even know if the entire idea of Superman was going to work, at first. I’d never done anything like it, and I’d had to move so many times before, that at first, I was just waiting for the other shoe to drop. But then…then you made it work. You presented Superman in such a way that the world accepted him. Even loved him, to the point that I was afraid Clark was going to completely disappear.”
“So why not tell me then? Clark was my friend and Superman was…was my…”
“Exactly,” he says, and he’s defeated once more, his face falling. “Superman was yours and I didn’t even know how to be Superman. I just…I just wanted to help people, then suddenly I was this icon, and if you hadn’t given me lines and expected certain things from him, I don’t know what he’d be. But, Lois, it was always Superman with you, and I was afraid that was all it would ever be.”
“But you were my friend. My best friend.”
“I am your best friend,” he promises. “But you were dating Luthor”--it’s her turn to flinch away--“and you trusted him enough to almost marry him. Luthor hates Superman. I couldn’t put you in that position, having to keep a secret from the man you cared about. Having to choose between Superman and Luthor.”
But it wasn’t ever a choice between Superman and Lex, was it? Oh, she’d thought it was, but in the end, it was Clark who had mattered most. Only…she doesn’t think she’s ever told him that (so maybe he wasn’t the only one hiding secrets away).
“And after Lex?” she asks in a small voice. “After all of it, when I was with you all the time and you promised you’d never hurt me. What about then?”
“You were grieving, Lois!” he exclaims. “Why would I put that on you? This isn’t just a secret I keep for fun, you know--it’s not easy, and it swallows up huge portions of my life, and it isolates you. So…I couldn’t do that to you.”
She scoots a bit closer to him, wills him to look at her. “And I had hurt you.”
His mouth opens and shuts a few times before he nods. “Yeah. You did. But then we were friends again and you hid secrets for Superman--you got rid of that Kryptonite bullet--and…I don’t know. I didn’t want to risk that.”
“Until I did.” She tries another smile. It’s still shaky, but at least this one feels more sincere. “You didn’t even want to go to that club, and Clyde Barrows, he…he shot you.”
“Yeah.” Absently, his hand rises to brush at his chest. Lois tightens her own hands into fists to stop herself from doing the same (not yet, almost, but they’re not quite to that point). “I wanted to tell you, Lois, but I didn’t think I was going to be able to save Clark, and it seemed cruel to tell you I was alive only to keep Clark from you forever.”
“It wouldn’t have been.” She grabs his hand and squeezes, tight, tight, too tight but she can’t care about that when remembered pain is swelling like a tidal wave. “It would have been kinder.”
“I’m sorry.” Somehow, in that magical way of his, he turns the death’s grip of their hands into a caress, loosening her fingers and weaving his between, giving comfort. “I was so afraid that whole time. I could barely process my own grief to realize yours. When I came back and I saw your face… I hate that I did that to you.”
“You came back as soon as you could,” she reminds them both. “You came back to me.”
“I’ll always come back to you,” he says, and she stares at him. Belatedly, he seems to realize what he said, how he’s leaning into her, the way their hands are clasped together, the proximity of their faces. He straightens and takes a breath (Lois’s own breathing isn’t too steady).
“So why didn’t you tell me then? Why keep it a secret still?”
“Because you realized Superman wasn’t perfect. He lied to you and you thought you were losing him. I couldn’t make you lose Superman and Clark at the same time.”
Lois looks away, blinking rapidly to keep her tears back. “And then I told Superman I’d do anything for Clark.”
“Yeah.” His tone is filled with a lingering awe, as if even now that moment exists as a treasured memory. “You risked your life for Clark and you helped Superman when he was blind and you…” He shifts. “You seemed almost…well, jealous…when you thought Clark was spending time with Mayson.”
“So instead of telling me the truth, you asked me out.”
And this, here, is what’s most important. What she most needs to know.
She stares at him until the sheer weight of her gaze compels him to look up at her.
“Why, Clark? Why ask for a date as a Clark when you could have told me the truth about you?”
“I…” The light is behind him, illuminating the flush on his cheeks and the yearning in his eyes. “I wanted you to love me, all right? I know it’s selfish, and I know I don’t have an excuse for it, and I lied to you, but, Lois, I just…I just needed to know that you loved me. Not the superhero, not the legend around him that you created, but…me. Me in every moment. The me who works beside you and writes with you and goes home with you and wins every game of Scrabble with you because you cheat. I wanted it to be Lois and Clark, not Superman and Lois. And I’m sorry, but…I wanted that. I needed that.”
“So why did you tell me now?” she asks again in a voice so dry, so choked, she’s surprised he can understand her. “I told Superman I wouldn’t be in love with him anymore, but…but I didn’t tell Clark that…”
And she can’t finish. She can’t even pretend to say the rest of that, because maybe she hasn’t said it with that specific collection of three words and three syllables and eight letters. But she’s told him. She’s shown him. She’s proved it.
Clark tilts his head as he stares at her (his hand still so gentle around hers). “Lois,” he breathes, “you said you wanted us to have a chance for more. You said that someone needed you and you wanted to be there for him. You said…you said enough. And I couldn’t keep hurting you, not if I really love you. I couldn’t lie to you anymore. If you can’t love me, then…then I’ll survive. But at least this way I know that…I know that you care about me. You care enough to risk your life for me--against cyborgs and nuclear explosions and, I hope, despite any secrets.”
He’s so open. So bare. So vulnerable. Waiting and trembling, terrified and hopeful, wishing for the best and expecting the worst.
Lois can’t wait any longer. She has her answers (he has the answers she wanted spilled out between them for his sake as much as hers). It’s time to give back to him the same thing he’s gifted her.
“You know,” she begins hoarsely. “I had a secret I think I was going to tell you this morning, too.”
His eyes flutter shut to mask his reaction before he opens them again. Patient. Friendly.
“You did?”
“Yeah, but I think I’ll tell you now instead.”
“What is it?”
She wonders if he knows that he’s leaning toward her, like a flower turning toward sunlight, gradually but surely.
“I started keeping it from you a long time ago. Back in the honeymoon suite, really. At least…that’s when I first thought about it. And then I kind of pushed it away until I was getting ready to marry Lex.” Her hands tighten on his when he reflexively pulls away. “I stared in the mirror and I couldn’t do it. I couldn’t pair my name with his. But I paired it with someone else’s, so when I was supposed to say ‘I do,’ I said I couldn’t.”
“Lois…” It’s a choked gasp. She can feel his breath stuttering against her temples, but it’s her turn to avert her eyes.
“I knew it, for the first time, when you hugged me even though I was dressed in white for another man. I knew it when you stayed by me that whole summer. I knew it, and I almost told you when you came back from the dead, but you were asleep and tired and…and I was afraid that it would change everything. So I kept it hidden, but it was hard from then on. It tried to come out no matter what I did. It made me do strange things and think strange thoughts, but I couldn’t shake it. And then you asked me out, and I thought that this was it. This was when I could finally tell you.”
When she shudders, Clark rests his free hand on her back, wide and warm and comforting enough to propel the rest of her confession out of its deep, dark hiding place.
“But Lex came back again, and he’d hurt you so badly. I’d hurt you so badly. So I waited, and then I thought I’d lost my chance because Mayson died. Or rather, because I’ve never been able to have anything good that lasts. I’ve never been the person with it all. So I just assumed that I’d lost you. But I realized you needed me, and I needed you, and I came here last night to finally admit my secret. But…” She lets out a tiny laugh that Clark mirrors with a small grin, his eyes tracing her every movement. “But we got kind of distracted.”
“Yeah,” he whispers. “We did.”
(He looks as if he’d like, very much, to be distracted again. Lois wouldn’t mind herself.)
“I couldn’t sleep last night,” she tells him. “I was so excited about seeing you this morning. About finally getting to tell you my secret. But I didn’t think I would be able to actually say it, because, Clark, I was selfish. I wanted you to say it first. I wanted to know, for sure, what you felt for me--even though you’ve already told me and I wouldn’t have blamed you for not wanting to say it first again. Not after last time. But even though it was selfish, even though it meant I hid things from you that I know you wanted to know…I didn’t tell you. Because I wanted to know that you felt it too. I wanted to hear you say it. I needed to hear you say it.”
And now (she can’t hold herself back any longer), she reaches up her free hand and lays it over the side of his face.
He leans into the touch. Almost unconsciously, unabashedly, until she holds his heart in her hands.
“So I’m sorry that I didn’t tell you earlier, when I’ve known for so long. But I love you, Clark Kent. I love you when you’re an ordinary man who’s a sore loser at Scrabble. I love you when you’re a hero flying above the world. I love whoever you are when you’re not quite either one. I love--”
He kisses her. He enfolds her and envelops her and encases her in his love (Clark Kent’s unbending devotion and Superman’s gentle steadfastness).
And he’s not nervous, or afraid, or closed off. He’s heat and desire and love and forever.
And Lois is still giddy.
(She thinks she will be giddy forever. It’s all right, though, because his touch grounds her.
It will always ground her.)
***
