The frenetic energy of the Daily Planet’s bullpen had simmered to a dull hum, most of the reporters long gone for the day. Lois sat at her desk hunched over two thick stacks of documents. The sandwich she had purchased at the cafe across the street for dinner lay half eaten and abandoned beside her.
The disk she had stolen from the backroom at the Metro Club nearly three weeks earlier had been all the confirmation that she needed that Beece, Inc was a shell company of some sort. It purported to be a research and development division of Costmart, but public information about the company was impossible to find and all their banking appeared to be done offshore. She couldn’t prove it yet, but based on vague notes in the Metro Club files and the regular payments, she had a feeling the company’s true purpose was accepting and washing protection money.
If that was true, it was unhelpful in her search for the Toaster’s weapons, but a breakthrough in her investigation into Intergang’s ties to Costmart and Bill Church. Now she was scanning reams of financial documents from local nightclubs, restaurants, and high-end retails establishments looking for any record of similar payments.
“You need anything else before I head out?” Jimmy asked, dropping into the chair beside her desk.
Lois shook her head, not bothering to look up from her task.
“Heeeey, looking good!” Jimmy said appreciatively, and Lois looked up to see what had caught his attention.
“This old thing?” Cat said, giving a twirl and showing off the sparkly gold evening gown with a slit up the front so high Lois worried a stiff breeze would turn the newsroom into a scene from an x-rated movie.
“Visiting some fellow ladies of the evening?” Lois asked, raising an eyebrow.
“The mayor’s fiftieth birthday dinner, if you must know,” Cat replied, sliding into her seat and booting up her computer. She pulled a reporter’s notepad from her purse and dropped it on her desk, paging through it leisurely.
Lois went back to analyzing her financial records, highlighting monthly payments of $5000 to an unnamed company for “loss prevention” in the records of a prominent local restaurant.
Her email inbox dinged, announcing the arrival of a new message, and for a fraction of a second, her heart soared. And then she remembered. Her shoulders slumped and her heart ached, missing him with a sudden ferocity.
In the weeks that he had been out of touch, she had thrown herself into her work, spending hours each day on her investigations into the fires and Intergang in addition to the daily stories Perry assigned her. It felt reminiscent of last year, when she had spent every waking moment obsessed with Luthor.
Except that this time her heart wasn’t in it. She cared about her investigations and worked hard on them. But always in the background there was a hollowness; a sense that something was missing.
Deep down, behind her frantic work pace and her carefully guarded emotions, she missed him all the time. Every day. She missed venting to him about minor inconveniences, and hearing his laugh as she rambled. She missed listening to his stories about his family and his students. She missed the way her heart thrilled when she heard his voice over the phone.
His visit before leaving for his month abroad had given her even more things to miss: the feel of his chest beneath her cheek, the touch of his hand to the small of her back, the look in his eyes as he stroked her cheek.
And sometimes, like when she heard the chime of her inbox, or when her phone rang in the evening, the emptiness that she shoved down deep inside most of the time surged to the surface, and she ached for him.
Her inbox chimed again, and out of the corner of her eye she saw a playful grin spread across Jimmy’s face.
“Ooh,” he teased. “Aren’t you going to check that? In case it’s your secret boyfriend?”
“He’s not my boyfriend,” Lois answered automatically, not looking up from her work. “And it’s not him.”
“What’s up with secret not-boyfriend?” Cat asked with a practiced nonchalance. “He doesn’t email at six anymore. And you’ve been extra surly and sullen, even by your standards. You break up?”
Lois sighed, not in the mood to joke. “There’s nothing to break up. And if you must know,” she said, imitating Cat’s haughty tone of a minute ago, “he’s traveling abroad and doesn’t have email access.”
“For work?” Cat asked, suddenly sitting up a little straighter. Lois never offered information about her “secret not-boyfriend”, and Cat wasn’t going to miss a chance to pounce.
“Not for work,” she said. “He’s a teacher. He’s on summer break. He always spends July traveling.”
“He’s a teacher?” Cat said, incredulous.
Lois looked up, annoyed and defensive. “There’s nothing wrong with being a teacher.”
“It’s just not how I imagined him,” Cat admitted, and Lois cringed at the idea of Cat imagining anything about her personal life.
“How did you meet him?” Jimmy piped up, eager to join the conversation.
Lois hesitated, considering momentarily telling them it was none of their business and shutting down this whole line of questioning. But it felt so good to talk about him.
“At the high school journalism conference I spoke at a few months ago,” she said. “He was there with his students.”
“Wait, he’s not even local?” Cat said. “Where does he live?”
“Kansas,” Lois replied, running her highlighter over another transaction.
“KANSAS?” Cat replied. “Secret not-boyfriend is a high school teacher from Kansas?!”
Lois said nothing and continued highlighting. Cat’s speculation about her “secret not-boyfriend” had been a fun game in the beginning, but her banter tonight was just annoying.
“Seriously?” Cat said. “You’re not joking right now? He’s really a high school teacher from Kansas.”
“Why would I joke about that?” Lois snapped.
“Touchy, touchy,” Cat said, beginning to type up her article.
“So that’s why you needed to email so much,” Jimmy said, cheerfully oblivious.
Lois nodded, relaxing a little.
“And you haven’t heard from him at all since he left for his vacation?” Cat asked. Her voice lacked the incredulity of a moment ago. Lois looked up and saw Cat watching her with an expression that was almost gentle.
“He’s island hopping in Asia,” she said, going back to her highlighting. “He doesn’t have access to email or international phone calls. He’s been gone almost three weeks. He’ll be back at the end of next week.”
“You sure about that?” Cat asked.
Lois looked up sharply. “What’s that supposed to mean?”
Cat shrugged. “I’m just asking. You sure he’s really out of the country for a month? He didn’t just want to break things off without a big fuss?”
“Oh, yeah!” Jimmy interjected. “My friend Brian is notorious for that. You should hear some of the crazy stories he’s told girls so he didn’t have to break up with them. This one girl, Natalie, banging body but super clingy, you know? Anyway, he tells her….”
Cat rolled her eyes as Jimmy continued his tone-deaf ramble. She gave Lois a questioning look, and Lois was surprised to see genuine concern in her eyes.
“I’m sure,” Lois said softly, and Cat nodded and went back to typing.
****
Lois stumbled through the door of her apartment, keys in one hand, bag slung over her shoulder, and arms full of additional files, a travel mug of coffee, and a precarious stack of mail. She walked to the kitchen counter and dumped it all, grabbing the mug before it could spill, and letting the stack of mail slide to the floor in the process.
She sighed in frustration. It had been a long day, and her conversation with Cat and Jimmy had left her melancholy and tired. She didn’t have patience for this.
She didn’t have patience for anything these days. Not that she had ever been known for her patience, but lately everything got under her skin.
She tried to pretend she didn’t know why — that it was work stress or hormonal. But the truth was, she missed him.
She didn’t begrudge him his trip. She knew he looked forward to this month all year. His travels were a huge part of his identity, an important part of life, and he immersed himself in them fully during the small window that he got each year.
She wanted him to enjoy every minute of his vacation. He deserved time away from his work and responsibilities.
But it hurt to imagine him gallivanting around the beaches of Borneo with friends and cheerful strangers, beautiful women in tiny bikinis draped across lounge chairs and barstools everywhere he went, knowing he probably hadn’t given her a second thought since his plane touched down.
And it frustrated her, how much that thought pained her. She didn’t want to care. He was her friend. Whatever attraction there was between them on top of that friendship, was an inconvenience. She wanted to be happy for him. She wanted not to care how he spent this month.
She knelt down on the kitchen floor and collected the scattered pile of mail, sorting the bills from the junk mail and catalogs.
A hand addressed envelope with a bright red international air mail stamp caught her eye, and she reached for it, her heart stuttering. She set the other mail back down and held the envelope in both hands, almost afraid to open it in case it wasn’t what she hoped it was.
She tore open the side and slid out a stack of three or four pages, unfolding them quickly.
“Dear Lois,” she read silently. “It has only been a week since we said goodbye, and already I’m wondering how I thought I could go a whole month without hearing your voice.”
She exhaled a little whimper, tears already pooling in her eyes. She darted a glance up to the top right corner of the page and saw that it was indeed dated eleven days earlier and he had written it only a week after arriving.
She shoved the mail aside and sat, leaning against her kitchen cabinets. She kicked off her high heels and planted her feet close to her body, resting the letter against her bent knees.
She continued reading, her heart in her throat.
“I knew I would miss you…everything is better with you…an unceasing desire to write you.”
She closed her eyes and leaned her head back against the cabinets, not bothering to fight back the tears anymore. He missed her. He ached for her the way she did for him. He missed her so much that he lasted only a week before writing her a letter so beautiful the first three paragraphs had her in tears.
She laughed at herself, crying on the kitchen floor like the heroine in some overwrought romance novel, then wiped her eyes with the heel of hand and went back to reading the letter.
She smiled and shook her head at his tenderhearted concern for the monkeys, and the way he imagined the juvenile with the false bravado who nearly succumbed to the crocodile’s jaws as one of his students. She laughed at his newfound sympathy for his mom as he watched the annoying orangutan babies climb all over their mothers and beg for snacks.
And then her heart leapt in her chest again, when he quoted poetry to her. She laughed a pitiful, self-deprecating laugh. Poetry? How could she possibly be expected to resist a man who sent her poetry?
Her smile turned softer as he described their night above the city. And then she felt the tears well up again as he described her, and the things he loved about her.
By the time she reached his closing sentence, her eyes were full of tears again. “I miss you, and I can’t wait to hear your voice again.”
She sat for a moment, eyes closed, letter clutched tightly in her hand, and let herself bathe in the roiling sea of her emotions.
When she felt a little calmer, she reread the letter. And then read it again. Her heart still ached, but in a new way now. She missed him, but not with the sinking dread of before, with the excited anticipation of hearing his voice again soon. She couldn’t stop smiling.
This was crazy. What she was feeling made no sense. She knew it was crazy to dream of a future with him. This teacher from Kansas who made her want to break all of her rules. But this letter was unlike anything she had ever received. He was unlike any man she had ever known. And she was losing all ability to pretend that what she felt for him could ever be restricted to friendship.
She stood, brushing off her skirt, and set the letter on the counter. She bent back over to retrieve the abandoned stack of mail, and a postcard dislodged itself from the messy stack and tumbled to the counter.
She laughed and reached for it. The front featured a couple lounging on a beautiful, serene beach with the name of a resort scrawled along the bottom. She flipped it over and recognized his handwriting immediately. It was dated the day after her letter, and her heart leapt at the fact that he had been thinking about her again the very next day.
She shifted her gaze to his message and laughed with delight.
“I found your island. – CK”
***
Lois entered the lobby of her apartment building with a spring in her step, despite a busy day at work and a particularly challenging taekwondo class.
Work had been one frustrating incident after another – starting with Ralph spilling coffee on her during the morning meeting and ending with her story getting bumped because of breaking news after spending all afternoon breathing down the necks of her sources to get it done before deadline. All day she could see people eyeing her warily, waiting for her to explode, but she couldn’t bring herself to care. Her good mood could not be ruined.
Cat had looked at her suspiciously as she packed up her stuff for the evening with nothing more than an eyeroll when Perry announced that her story would have to run tomorrow instead. Lois had just smiled at her enigmatically and rushed off to taekwondo, laughing internally at Cat’s obvious confusion.
She pulled her keys from her pocket, and unlocked her mailbox. Unlike yesterday’s glut of mail, there was only one envelope inside, and Lois slid it from the metal box, assuming it was a bill. Her heart leapt when she flipped it over and saw the international air mail stamp.
She shut the mailbox door, locking it hastily, and practically ran up the two flights of stairs. She slammed the front door behind her, headed straight to her couch, and ripped open the envelope before she was even seated.
Dear Lois,
I hope you already received the postcard I sent yesterday, because I’m dying to tell you about your beach. I’ve been looking for it since I got here – examining every beach I come across or hear people talking about for all the things you asked for: an island, sunny and warm, without too many people but all the modern amenities. Sunny and warm is no problem in this region, but there definitely seems to be a trade off when it comes to privacy versus amenities.
I thought I might have found your beach twice before.
One seemed lovely during the day, busy but not overly loud – none of the gaggles of noisy kids I encountered on so many other beaches. But then the sun went down, and suddenly the whole place came to life. I couldn’t help but laugh, thinking of your horror as you described the clubs Jimmy has dragged you to, and the rave he wanted you to attend. This definitely wasn’t your beach.
The other was perfect on the surface – crystal clear water, white sandy beaches, a quiet, professional crowd. The cabins were near the water and some were even right on the water at high tide, with swim up access. I thought it was going to be a winner…until I learned that there were communal bathrooms and no electricity in the cabins.
I had just resigned myself to the fact that this search was going to go on for the duration of my trip, and I was simply going to be forced to visit even more tucked away beaches – these are the sacrifices I was willing to make for you – when I found your beach.
It’s exactly as you described. The ferry ride from Surabaya runs only twice a day, so even though the amenities are not strictly for guests only, there don’t seem to be many outside visitors. There are only twenty-five huts on the island – each with all the creature comforts of home – and each on the beachfront with plenty of privacy from its neighbors. They offer a full room service menu, so you could, in theory, spend a whole week at the beach without talking to a single person aside from the person taking your orders. But assuming you don’t want to be completely anti-social, there’s a cute little outdoor bar that wasn’t crowded at all, and a restaurant with indoor and outdoor seating.
It was, truly, perfection. And I cannot even tell you how much I wished you were there to see it. The whole time I was there, you were all I could think about.
He went on, detailing some of his other adventures – deep sea fishing with his friends from the Borneo Gazette, scuba diving and exploring a coral reef, eating his way through the night food market in Kuala Lumpur. His descriptions were so rich and detailed, she almost felt as if she was there beside him.
This letter felt different in tone from the last, more friendly and casual. She smiled as she read, feeling almost as if they were in the middle of one of their long, chatty phone conversations.
By the time she had reached the end, she had almost convinced herself that she had imagined his emotion in the previous letter, reading something into it that she wanted to see. And then she read the final paragraph.
Every year when I take this trip, the days fly by, and I feel like I am clinging to them, trying to wring out every minute. The end always rushes at me, arriving before I am ready. But this year, I find myself longing for the end, ready to return home. A month seems endless this year. This place is beautiful. And I love it here. But I miss you more.
Clark
****
Lois slid into her seat and sat her coffee on her desk. She opened her bag and pulled out a thick stack of financial documents and sat them down beside the coffee. Something small and colorful was stuck between the stacks of black and white printouts, and she smiled when she dug it out and realized what it was. Her postcard. She let herself stare at it for a minute, a sappy smile spreading across her face as the words from his letter describing his search for her perfect beach played in her mind.
She started to put the postcard back in her bag, then stopped and hesitated for just a moment before propping it against the cubicle wall where she could see it while she sat at her computer.
Later that afternoon, when she was back from covering the latest in a string of armed robberies, she found herself staring at the postcard again rather than typing up her story, and out of the corner of her eye, she could see Cat eyeing her suspiciously.
Lois tore her attention away from the postcard and went back to typing. She didn’t give it any thought when Cat stood and started to walk past her desk, until she stopped suddenly and reached out, snatching the postcard.
“Rude!” Lois exclaimed, spinning around in her chair.
Cat had already flipped the card over and was reading aloud. “I found your beach. CK.” She raised an eyebrow at Lois. “Your beach?”
Lois huffed indignantly. “None of your business.”
“This is secret not-boyfriend,” Cat said – an accusation, not a question.
Lois stood and reached for the postcard. Cat jerked it back, over her head, like a schoolyard bully playing keepaway.
Jimmy happened to be passing at just the right moment, and he snagged the card, flipping it over to read as well.
“I swear, no one in this office has personal boundaries,” Lois ranted, snatching the card from Jimmy and putting it back where she’d had it. “What kind of person just steals someone’s mail and reads it?”
Jimmy raised an eyebrow at her, and Lois threw herself into her chair, refusing to acknowledge his wordless but accurate accusation that she would not hesitate to do the same thing.
“So….” Cat said, drawing out the word slowly as she sauntered over to Lois’ desk and perched on the edge. “This explains your sudden mood improvement yesterday. Lover boy sent a postcard.”
Lois started to type, pretending to ignore her.
“It’s an awfully big mood improvement for just one postcard,” Cat said. “I don’t suppose there was something else….”
Lois refused to respond, but the heat in her cheeks gave her away.
“Aha,” Cat said, smiling broadly. “More postcards? No…a letter. Secret not-boyfriend sent you a love letter.”
“None of your business,” she said again, fully aware that her lack of denial would be accepted as confirmation.
“I guess it wasn’t a ruse to dump you after all,” Cat said, grinning as she walked back to her seat. “Which means the only other possibility is that there is something seriously wrong with this man.”
Lois looked up from her screen long enough to shoot her a glare, and then went back to writing.
“So what is it? He’s twice your age? Lives at home with his parents? Ugly as sin?”
Lois rolled her eyes, but couldn’t fully suppress her smirk. Cat was clearly dying for gossip, and it gave Lois great pleasure to deny her that. She could only imagine how shocked Cat would be if she knew the truth.
“When will he be back?” Cat asked. “Next week?”
“Friday,” she said automatically.
“Does school start back that early in Kansas? Or did he just run out of money?”
“Football practice starts the next week,” she said. “He’s the coach.”
Cat’s jaw dropped. “Secret not-boyfriend is a high school football coach from Kansas?” She cackled with glee, and Lois knew she was picturing a paunchy, middle-aged, backwoods hick.
Cat gathered up her things, leaving to cover…whatever it was she covered. And Lois watched with amusement as Cat continued to smirk and laugh under her breath.
“I’m out of here. Tell lover boy I said…good luck,” she said.
Lois rolled her eyes and scrolled back to the beginning of her now-completed article, preparing to read it all the way through and give it a rough edit.
She read the lede paragraph and paused, Cat’s words penetrating her brain. “Tell lover boy…”
It suddenly occurred to her that she didn’t have to wait a week to tell him what she was feeling. If she sent him an email now, he wouldn’t get it until he got home. But he had been sending her letters without any hope of a response for weeks, so why couldn’t she do the same?
She opened her email with a smile for the first time in ages, and immediately hit the button to compose a new email.
****
Lois sat at her computer on the following Friday afternoon, flipping through her notebook looking for the quote she wanted from her lunchtime interview with the arson investigator. In front of her, propped against the cubicle wall, six postcards were lined up in a row.
She finally found the quote she wanted, and turned back to her computer to add it to the story she was working on. Another building had burned yesterday, the same suspicious arcs of accelerant on the charred remains.
Yesterday’s story had detailed the blaze, the effort to put it out, and the damage done to neighboring office buildings. Today’s would focus on the link between this fire and the previous ones, a connection she hadn’t been able to make in her article yesterday because none of the arson investigators had been willing to go on the record about the accelerant.
Cat came in wearing an animal print dress that was so tight and short, Lois wasn’t sure how she was going to sit in it. She was fanning herself with a folding fan, and swooned into her chair.
“It’s so hot out there, I think I might melt,” she said.
Lois nodded, but didn’t respond. A full week of triple digits temperatures had everyone complaining. The air conditioning in the office was struggling to keep up, and Lois had just seen Perry haranguing Jimmy about getting someone from maintenance to look at it and make sure it was working properly.
Lois had long ago shed her suit jacket, hanging it over the back of her chair, and settling for wearing just the white silk tank with her gray pencil skirt, but she was relatively comfortable without that extra layer.
She glanced at the clock in the corner of her computer screen. 2:12. Clark should be boarding his plane to Kansas now. Her heart twisted painfully, knowing he was in her city, so close, yet so far away.
A crazy, ridiculous part of her had considered momentarily meeting him at the airport so she could see him for just a minute during his layover. But she knew it was going to be tight for him, rushing through customs and hurrying to make his connecting flight.
She sighed and then smiled, looking over her postcard collection. The letters she kept at home, far too personal for any chance of public consumption. But the notes on the postcards were brief and cheerful, and she had begun bringing them in daily, brightening her cubicle, much to the delight of both Cat and Jimmy, who seemed to look forward to each new postcard almost as much as she did, peppering her with questions about his travels.
The letters were still pouring in too, almost daily, and though they were mostly chatty recounts of his travel adventures, they all contained at least brief mentions of how much he missed her, and the occasional snippet of poetry. The truth was, the letters were beautiful, but the fact that he wrote her daily said more than any flowery declaration could about the fact that he was thinking of her.
Yesterday, the book of Sara Teasdale poems she had special-ordered from her local bookstore had arrived, and she had picked it up on the way home and paged through it before bed. She had never heard of the poet before Clark had quoted her in his first letter, and she was intrigued to read other works by her.
Many of the poems were dark and angsty, and though Lois could appreciate their beauty, they didn’t speak to her like the one he had quoted. And then she stumbled across a tiny poem, just two stanzas long, that had started off playful and had ended up taking her breath away.
The Look
Strephon kissed me in the spring,
Robin in the fall,
But Colin only looked at me,
And never kissed at all.
Strephon’s kiss was lost in jest,
Robin’s lost in play,
But the kiss in Colin’s eyes
Haunts me night and day
The kiss in his eyes.
She had inhaled sharply at that image, her mind immediately supplying a montage of Clark’s eyes, filled with more love or passion than any kiss she had experienced in her life: outside her hotel room door the first night they met…at the Metro Club as he spun her around the dance floor…on her couch during their movie marathon when she had told him black was his color…at her door, when they had said their goodbyes at the end of the night.
She still had no idea where this relationship was going. It seemed impossible that there could be a long-term future with him. But she didn’t want to go through life haunted by the kiss in his eyes.
She pushed away thoughts of kisses, and pulled up her email inbox, resolving to send him one last email before his arrival.
From: Lois Lane [loislane@metnet.com]
To: Clark Kent [cjkent@aol.com]
Subject: Welcome Home!
Date: July 28, 1995, 2:22pm
Clark,
Have I ever told you about my best snitch? There’s a reason we call him Bobby Bigmouth, and it doesn’t have anything to do with his loose lips. I spent all morning on the hunt for five perfect, loaded chili cheese dogs, only to find out he knows nothing more about these fires than I do. He better remember this the next time I need information and don’t bring him the right condiments for his burger or whatever else he finds to complain about.
Speaking of complaining, there was a new guy in my taekwondo class last night who watched me spar, and then told me I was strong “for a girl” but he didn’t want to spar with me because I might get hurt. He whined and whined when the teacher paired us, and when I refused to back down, he smirked and told me he wasn’t going to go easy on me. I wish you could have seen the look on his face when he found himself flat on his back on the mat.
She went on for a few more paragraphs, chatting about everything and nothing, just filling him in on the last twenty four hours. Finally she ran out of things to tell him, and started to wrap things up.
You should be boarding your flight home to Kansas about now. I’m keeping busy, trying not to think about how close you are. Just a few more hours and we’ll both be home. If you haven’t already by the time you read this, call me. Please. Even if you’re too tired to tell me all about your trip tonight. I just want to hear your voice.
Lois
She hit send, and went back to her article.
“Me-ow,” Cat said softly a minute or two later. “Check out the new tight end.”
Lois rolled her eyes at Cat’s football pun. She hadn’t let up since she had discovered secret not-boyfriend – or “CK” as Cat and Jimmy both now called him – was a football coach.
She glanced up, following Cat’s predatory gaze to the elevators automatically, not really caring about Cat's latest conquest.
Her heart stopped. Her entire body froze. Her brain refused to process what her eyes were seeing.
He was here. He was standing in front of the elevators wearing tan slacks, and a blue and white checkered button down shirt, with the top button undone and the sleeves rolled up, and for just a moment she was transported back to Miami, to the day that had changed everything.
He smiled at her – a tentative, nervous smile – as if he wasn’t sure his unexpected appearance would be welcome. And she remembered that he had been sending his letters on faith, with no indication of her response to them.
She had just been thinking of him, longing for him. And now he was here. He was really here.
“Oh my god,” she whispered.
Out of the corner of her eye, she saw Cat give her a puzzled look, but she couldn’t spare any thoughts for Cat right now. Every cell in her body was focused on him. She stood, still sluggish with shock, and he shrugged as if to say he couldn’t believe he was there either. He didn’t approach, just waited for her, and she realized suddenly he was still waiting for her answer. And then she started to run.
