“I don’t have a swimming suit.” Lois was surprised to find that she was stammering a little. How long had it been since she’d been affected this way by a man? Suddenly she couldn’t remember.
“Do you really need one?” Clark asked. “The weather is great, the water is warm. I promise not to look.” He grinned slightly.
Lois had a thought. “You said you could see through things. Do you see bones, or actual...”
“I see as much as I need to see.” Clark said. “I wouldn’t violate your privacy without permission. That’s a lesson I learned a long time ago.”
“Oh?” Lois asked quietly. “So you had to learn not to look through girls’ clothes?”
“When I was thirteen, there was a three week period where I couldn’t actually see anyone’s clothes. “ Clark’s grin shrank and he shuddered slightly.
“I’d have thought that was a pubescent boy’s dream come true.”
“I didn’t have a single teacher under the age of fifty,” Clark said. “And my foster parents’ ninety year old grandparents were visiting.”
“That must have been troublesome.” Lois found herself grinning, and relaxing a little.
“I spent the next couple of years looking at the ground a lot,” Clark admitted. “If you aren’t sure, I can always…”
Lois shook her head. “I’ll just wear a T-shirt.”
He smiled again, briefly, before turning back into the cabana.
*******
The water was warm; it enveloped her as she stepped off the hidden ledge, and Lois caught her breath. She hadn’t expected to feel immediately relaxed, but it felt as though some of the tension that she’d been carrying with her since the first moment she came to Smallville was finally beginning to dissipate.
She’d had a hard time reconciling the two sides of Clark Kent. The smooth, suave, seemingly perfect man she’d met in Metropolis, and the beaten man she’d seen since he’d returned to his hometown.
Now she was seeing a third side to him, but instead of further muddying the waters, it was making everything clear. He was the outsider, the loner, the one honest man who was forced to live a lie on an everyday basis. He was a good man haunted by a past where he hadn’t been perfect.
He wasn’t the perfect man of her dreams; Lois doubted that she could have stayed interested in someone who had no flaws; they wouldn’t be remotely human. However, he was far beyond anything she could have ever imagined. He could fly; of all the men in the world, only he could truly show her the stars.
She stiffened for a moment, settling onto the ledge carved into the rock and leaning back. She heard the tinny sound of music; she looked up to see Clark carrying a small, battery powered radio. It was classic rock, soft, tinny music singing of lost loves and beautiful dreams. He was wrapped in a towel, and for a moment she wondered what he had found to wear.
He set the radio on the small stand beside the door, then pulled off his towel to reveal a perfectly normal pair of swimming trunks, in red and blue.
He grinned again, sliding into the water beside her, and said, “I hope you don’t mind the music. This is the only station I could find this far sound that wasn’t in Spanish or Portuguese.”
Lois smiled. He’d done more to make the evening perfect than she could have ever imagined.
He took her hand and said, “You’ve got to try the waterfall.”
“I’m just finally relaxing” Lois protested.
“Trust me,” he said.
Lois nodded slightly, and allowed her to slip down until her toes touched the bottom of the pool. The pool floor was a sort of gentle sand that caressed her feet. The water here came up to her chest.
Pushing against the side of the pool, Lois swam into the center. The light stick Clark had thrown into the center of the pool was still lighting everything with a green glow. She could see Clark swimming effortlessly beside her, his body slicing through the water as though he were born to it, and for a moment she felt clumsy, slow, a mere mortal in the presence of a god.
Then he grinned at her, and she was herself again, Lois Lane, the woman who was good enough for any man in the world. The woman who was good enough for this man.
The water here was deep, but as they reached the edge of the waterfall, it began to become shallower. Beneath the waterfall was another ledge, this one also carved by human hands.
Clark was at her side and he lifted her onto the ledge. The water from the waterfall was warmer than the waters in the pool, and Lois gasped for a moment before allowing herself to relax yet again.
She leaned back slightly, and her head passed behind the wall of pounding water. Clark was there too, and he grinned at her once again.
The impulse was overwhelming. Before Lois could allow herself to consider cutting it off, she kissed him, and the world exploded.
********
In every life there are milestones, events that mark the transition from one chapter in a life to another. The death of his parents was one such time; finding the body of Lilah and her husband had been another. Clark couldn’t remember a single happy milestone. That made this the first.
For the first time that Clark could ever remember, he felt complete. He’d searched the world for this, unknowing. His entire life before this point had been defined by hunger: hunger for acceptance, hunger for truth, hunger for love.
He didn’t feel lonely anymore. Being with her was like being enveloped in warmth after a lifetime of being numb.
The kiss seemed to last forever, and Clark realized that he’d allowed time to slow, fearful that when the kiss ended, so too would the feeling of completion.
He allowed time to shift back into normal and he opened his eyes, pulling away after yet another endless moment.
Lois looked dazed. When she finally opened her eyes, she said, “Wow.”
“Lois,” he began, hesitant, “I…”
She put a finger to his lips and drew him into the water.
************
“This was really nice, Clark.” Lois said as she lay floating in the water with her head leaning back against his chest. “But we can’t stay here forever.”
She suspected that he was cheating, levitating them both slightly in the water. It made for the most perfect bed she could have ever asked for. She was grateful. She felt as though she was never going to be able to move again.
She heard Clark sigh slightly. “Do we really have to go back? We could just tell Perry that the story was a bust.”
“Those people tried to kill us, Clark. It won’t be hard to find out where we live, and it won’t be long before they follow us home. I’ve got Lucy to think of, and my parents. I can’t just fly away when everything gets tough.”
She felt him stiffen. “I don’t always run away…just most of the time.”
“What Lilah did to you…it was abuse.”
“Where did that come from?” Clark asked after a moment of silence.
“I’ve been thinking about it for a while,” Lois admitted. “I have to admit that when I first heard about it, I blamed you a little. Infidelity…it broke up my family. It changed everything, drove my mother to drinking and kept us from being the happy family I always dreamed we’d be.”
“If I could change anything, I would,” Clark began, but Lois interrupted him.
“But then I started to think about it a little. If the roles had been reversed, and you’d been the girl whose teacher had been after her since she was fifteen, I’d be outraged. I’d be first in line to want to crucify the person who took advantage.”
“I was seventeen, Lois.” Clark said. “Well, sixteen when it started I guess.”
“At the end. Didn’t you say that she’d been your teacher when you were fifteen?”
Clark didn’t say anything.
“How long was she after you before you gave in?”
“It was a while,” Clark admitted. “I knew it was wrong, and I guess it was several months before I finally couldn’t hold back.”
“And she’d been cultivating the relationship for more than a year before that.” Lois snorted. “Do you really think she didn’t know exactly what she wanted the moment that she saw you?”
“I like to think that it just developed.” Clark was quiet for a long moment. “But given what I learned later about the other boys she was with, I can’t deny that it’s crossed my mind.”
“She was with boys, Clark. Everything comes back to that. She was the adult and she should have known better. It doesn’t matter how handsome you might have been, or how available you might have made yourself. She should have known better.”
“Her marriage wasn’t happy,” he began.
To Lois, it had the sound of a well worn excuse, one he had told himself over and over throughout the years.
Lois turned in the water, and now she was sure that he was levitating them. She looked up at Clark, his face barely visible in the moonlight, the light from the chemical stick below long gone. “You’ve been making excuses for her for years Clark. Sometimes you just have to stop.”
She pushed away from him and immediately sank into the black water below. She shook her head, and found her bearing, with her feet back on the soft sand. She headed back for shore. She felt a tinge of irritation at him for not seeing something that had finally become so clear.
Clark was beside her in the space of a moment. “I’m sorry. I just can’t see this thing as being her fault. I was old enough to know what I was doing.”
“How long did the guilt last, Clark?” Lois pushed herself up on the ledge leading back to the house. The water here felt almost cool compared to the water toward the waterfall.
He didn’t speak. He simply pushed himself onto the ledge beside her. When he finally spoke, his voice was quiet. “Did you ever see ‘Summer of 42’?
Lois nodded.
“The first time I saw the movie, I felt sick. It was after I’d started with Lilah and I went to see it with my brothers at someone’s house. They thought it was great. A fifteen year old guy and a lonely widow? What wasn‘t to like?”
“You didn’t take it that way.”
“Boys aren’t supposed to say no. If they don’t want it, there’s something wrong with them. There was already enough wrong with me that I couldn’t...” Clark sighed.
“It wasn’t your fault, Clark. I know that men hate to feel like victims; the truth is that nobody likes it. The truth is that you were taken advantage of. She found you at your most vulnerable, and she betrayed you.”
“I made the choice to be with her,” Clark said. “She didn’t force me. I did it, and I did it *knowing* just how disappointed my parents would have been in me.”
He turned slightly and stared out in the darkness. “I found out that I wasn’t perfect.”
“You’re only human, Clark.” Lois said quietly.
“No. I’m not.” Clark stared off into the distance. “I can’t afford to be.”
“There are people you can talk to...” Lois began.
Clark sighed. “I appreciate what you are trying to do, but this is something that I’ve lived with for a long time. I’ll think about it, but...let’s just enjoy the rest of the evening. We’ve got a long day tomorrow.”
Lois leaned over and kissed him. “So what else do you have planned?”
“I think we need to go to the prison tomorrow, find out what my brother knows. He ran with the Sangrias before Jess was killed. There’s a few other...”
“I meant for tonight.” Lois said. She smiled brightly at his expression as he finally turned to face her.
His kiss was a milestone.
