This is the chapter I'm supremely nervous about. No one has read it and no one knows Lois' backstory so... Let me know what you think [but I still feel blech so being nice about it would be good too
]. I'm also about to go pick up DD7 before long then clean the kitchen and make cookies and do other stuff which will allow me to avoid the boards for a while
.
Thanks!
Last timeHe took a deep breath and blew it out slowly. "I think that's enough of a no-holds-barred interview for today, Ms. Kent."
She nodded against his shoulder where her head still rested. He'd bared a lot of his soul to her – details she was sure very few people knew, even without the alien subtext to it. Why had he done that when they'd only known each other a couple of days?
"So what now?" he asked. "Just sit here for a few more hours."
"We could always make out."
*~*13*~*What?
"What?" he said.
"Um..."
He turned to look at her, sheer mortification written all over her face, but what he felt the most was a sense of loss that she'd moved as far away from him as she could in their makeshift hideout.
"I'm sorry," she said, ducking her head and pulling her cap off so that her hair fell down around her face, hiding it from his view. "I can't believe I said that out loud."
"Is that what you and Josh did yesterday?"
She shook her head. "No. Yesterday I just tried to keep him alive. I mean, he was conscious and he wasn't bleeding too badly and his ribs weren't hurt enough to be fully broken, just cracked. Mostly I just held him while he tried to breathe."
"Oh." Silence filled the air. "So what do we do? Neither of us is having trouble breathing so..." He shrugged. "You owe me your life story?"
"Not happening," she replied instantly.
"I told you pretty much everything," he pointed out, "and you're telling me nothing?"
"I was born at the hospital in Independence, raised in Smallville, went to Midwest for college, got my degree in journalism, moved home and here we are."
"The Life and Times of Lois Kent in Thirty Words or Less... Sure to be a best seller." He finished off the last of his bottle of water and stuck it back in her backpack. "Let's see..." He turned to look at her. "You were top of your class, from kindergarten on. You dated Josh Irig in high school. Probably gave you a hickey or two behind the Dairy Freeze. Your parents secretly hoped you might marry him because then the farm might stay in the family – especially since it joins his family's farm – but mostly they want you to be happy. You haven't said why you moved back home, but I suspect it has something to do with helping out your folks, though I'm not sure why. Hard financial times, most likely. Injury to one or both of them so they needed more help to make ends meet. You dated Sheriff Dan for a while, but I'm guessing he was more serious than you were. He was... pushing you to get married, you told him to back off and that was the end of that?"
She shook her head. "Not exactly."
"Then what?"
Lois sighed and tucked her hair behind her ear so he could see her profile in the dim light. "In college, I met a guy. Lex. Lex Luthor. He was a small town boy made good – kind of the male me. He was going into business management, certain that he was going to be one of those 'bootstraps' stories you hear about and we'd end up on top of the world together. The... material gain didn't really interest me. I mean, money's nice in the sense that not having it stinks but the limos and penthouses and all that didn't appeal to me in the end-goal sense. Nice if it happened, sure, but not a focus for me. We dated for a couple years. He..." She hesitated, playing with strap of the bag that sat on her lap. "He was my first," she finally said, rushing through the statement. "I thought we were perfect together even if I didn't have his drive for material things. He treated me like a princess, talking about how we'd jet off to Paris whenever we felt like it and just... taking care of me. It's kind of odd, because usually the girls who get sucked in by stuff like that are girls who never had Daddy's approval and I always did. Lex... he treated me like I'd always seen Dad treat Mom and I wanted that for myself. I craved it."
Clark reached out to lightly grasp her hand in his. "What happened?"
She gave a short bark of laughter. "Lex happened. In an effort to short circuit the path to wealth, he was running the largest drug ring on campus. And guess who finally brought down the 'Midwest Drug Boss' for the school paper?"
"You," he said quietly.
She nodded, swiping at a stray tear with her free hand. "I'd been investigating for months and never knew that the key piece of evidence was under the mattress where I slept some nights. Not often, but sometimes. I found it by accident when I spilled a soda all over Lex's bed one day while we were studying. He was in the bathroom when I went to change the sheets and I confronted him when he came out. I honestly thought he would hurt me, kill me even, to keep me quiet. I got away and called the cops. He ended up throwing himself off the top of the bell tower to avoid getting caught. He's still on life support at a nursing home in his home town. There's no brain activity – hasn't been for nearly five years now. He doesn't breathe on his own or anything, but his family can't let go."
"I'm so sorry," he told her, rubbing his thumb along the back of her hand.
She shrugged. "He made his metaphorical bed..." Her head leaned back against the rock behind her. "Dan... I never told him all of this. Just that I'd dated Lex and that it had ended. If he really wanted to, he could have looked up the whole story. We dated for a year and he was... more than a little impatient with me because I wasn't ready for a... physical relationship with him. I just needed to be *sure* before I went that far with a guy again. Then last year, the last night of the Corn Festival, up on the dance floor with all of Smallville watching, he proposed to me. I ran off. I just... turned and ran. I didn't talk to him for two days and then we had a big fight. I told him I wasn't ready for that and I didn't know if I ever would be. I cared about him – a lot – but love? Marriage? All of that? I just didn't know. I wanted to keep dating and he gave me an ultimatum. Said that was fine and he was okay with me turning him down, but if I wasn't going to sleep with him then obviously this relationship wasn't going anywhere and maybe we'd both best move on. It wasn't like... sleep with me or else, but if you're not willing, ready, whatever to sleep with me, then where is this relationship going? Does that make sense?"
She looked up at him, tears in her eyes, pleading for understanding.
He nodded. "I think so."
"And he was right. I didn't want to sleep with him because we *weren't* going anywhere in the long run. So we both just cut our losses. Or I thought we did. He still has that picture. It was taken, literally, minutes before he proposed."
He let go of her hand and wrapped his arm around her shoulders, pulling her towards him as the tears began to flow.
"It's okay, Lois," he murmured into her hair. "I'm here. I'm right here."
*****
TBC
