33
Morning comes quickly but unfortunately is not entirely stress free. Her alarm goes off at 6:00 a.m., and she rolls out of bed away from me, stands, and stretches stiffly. She then walks over to the window and pulls back the curtain. It is still dark outside, but the faint light from the streetlights illuminates her features, revealing taut facial muscles and a scowl. After a moment, she turns back to me, her expression serious and concerned.
“I have to go talk to Clark,” she explains, swallowing as she watches me.
Clark. The other me. Right. How could I have forgotten? He’s been working in my place for over a month now. Working as her partner, and acting as her good friend. And saving her life on occasion.
Like her, I’m sure he knew this day was coming, but I’m also sure he wouldn’t expect it to be here already. In fact, based on the events of the previous day, I’d bet anything he’s already got a plan for their follow up stories on Nigel St. John and has been thinking about how to find evidence to implicate Luthor. He probably also has other stories he’s working on, with and without her.
It won’t be an easy conversation.
I nod in response and push myself up off the bed as she moves across the room toward me. Her feet shuffle along the floor, and she stares at the ground rather than up at me as she approaches. Her hands fiddle with the sheer material of her nightgown nervously, and she bites her lower lip. I frown and reach out to her, my hands lightly gripping her upper arms. Relief washes over me when she leans into me rather than pushing me away, and her arms wrap around my waist.
“I have to go alone, Clark. Don’t argue with me, please,” she says, her voice firm but low. My stomach lurches, and my jaw muscle twitches. I start to talk, to try to reason with her, but she continues before I have the chance. “It’s just something I need to do. He’s been too good a friend, and I need to tell him myself, alone. I’ll get you work clothes while I’m over there. Suits and shirts and ties and such.”
I nod again as my arms tighten around her. She’s right; she should talk to him by herself. However, I desperately do not want to let her leave without me. As much as I don’t want to be alone, I also don’t want her to be alone.
“I understand, Lois,” I tell her quietly. “But let me come with you, please. I-I can sit in the car and—”
“No, Clark. No,” she inserts, cutting me off. She still doesn’t move away from me. At least she gives me that. But I recognize the tone in her voice. Lois Lane has made up her mind, and she will not give in. Even if I had superpowers, I couldn’t change her mind. “I have to do this alone.”
She slides her hands up my chest and around my neck, then reaches up to kiss me gently. As she pulls away, I bury my head into her shoulder, and my hands rub her back, the nightgown bunching up as I do. I slip one hand underneath the hem and run my fingers up along her side, her bare skin soft and smooth. My hand then pauses, and I kiss her neck.
“You’re not safe. It’s not safe for you to go alone. The last time you went somewhere alone… Please, let me be with you, Lois,” I beg, my voice hoarse.
This time, she pushes me away. Not far, not hard, but she puts a definite space between us. My hand slides down to her hip.
“No, Clark. I’ll be fine. Trust me. It will only be a short drive to Clark’s apartment. Then I’ll be with him for a bit. I’ll—I’ll probably go on a run with him. He does that every morning, you know—he goes running. And then, I’ll get your clothes and come home.”
I shake my head again. “It’s too long. That’s too long for you to be alone. And—and for me to—for me to… Please, Lois, let me come with you.”
She kisses me again, but then pulls away and meets my eyes. Nope. I’ve lost this argument. Not a chance. My chest feels tight.
“Tell you what, we’ll compromise.” She loops an arm through mine and leads me out of the bedroom and into the kitchen. She then moves away from me and starts preparing a pot of coffee. “I’ll go, by myself. But I’ll call you to let you know when I get there, and then I’ll have Clark escort me home,” she proposes. Sort of. There isn’t any discussion to be had. So it’s not really a proposal so much as a statement of what is going to happen. I’d be wasting my time to argue, and I know it.
The coffee starts to drip steadily into the pot, breaking the silence that has grown. I stand a couple feet away from her, my arms crossed in front of me and my shoulders hunched. My eyes stay glued to the floor as she turns to face me.
“I’ll only be alone on the short drive there,” she repeats, closing the distance between us. Her voice has grown softer, as though she realizes how much I’m trying to keep myself from panicking, and she once again envelops me in a comforting hug. “I know you’ll be here by yourself for a bit, but it won’t be too long. And then Clark will drive with me back here.” As I squeeze my eyes shut to try to keep the room from spinning, she adds, “I’m safe with him, you know. He’d never let anything happen to me. I think he proved that to you yesterday.”
And then she kisses me again, on the cheek this time, and pours me and herself each a cup of coffee. As she hands me my cup, her eyes meet mine again, and she gives me a weak smile.
“Okay, sweetheart?”
I want to argue with her. I want to tell her how my chest feels tight with anxiety and how my lungs won’t fill fully with air. And I want to hold her and not let her go. But I just nod. And sip my coffee. And try not to shake too badly as she touches my cheek and then heads back to the bedroom to get dressed.
34
Busy. I have to keep myself busy. Shower. Shave—still not fun. Eat, though I have no appetite. Read the morning’s paper, the bold Lane and Kent byline gracing the front page.
But it’s still not enough. She’s been gone for almost two hours. She’ll be back soon. I promised her I wouldn’t eavesdrop on their conversation using the telepathic connection Clark and I share. Keeping that promise is becoming more and more difficult. Even without trying, I’ve heard tidbits of his thoughts, the ones that he can’t seem to conceal. The thoughts mostly reflect his sadness, disappointment, and concern, as well as an overwhelming sense of love. He loves her. Of course, I already knew that. But it’s quite powerful to feel. And his sadness seems to stem from a deep sense of loss. He’s truly cherished the closeness he and Lois have had over the last month; he will greatly miss spending time with her.
I guess I can understand that as well.
I finish up washing the few dishes in the sink and close my eyes as I surreptitiously try to connect with him. However, he’s deliberately blocking our connection right now, and I can’t even sense where he is. I move to the window, not for the first time that morning, and pull back the curtain as I scan up and down the street. Lois’s familiar black Jeep turns the corner and heads toward the apartment building, and my knees almost buckle with relief. She is driving, and he sits in the passenger’s seat, staring aimlessly out the window. Her fingers tap on the steering wheel anxiously.
Wait a minute.
I blink rapidly several times and take another look. The Jeep is still several hundred feet down the road, traveling slowly in my direction. I definitely shouldn’t be able to see this amount of detail. Like the small dry leaf stuck underneath the windshield wiper, and the single strand of Lois’s hair that has escaped her ponytail and now falls out of place across her cheek. My hand tightens carefully on the hem of the curtain as I pull it back farther, letting more sunlight into the room.
My powers are returning.
Dammit.
This is not good.
Well, I mean, there are some good things about it, I consider as I watch Lois’s car approach. At least if I have my powers back, I’ll be able to protect her. I won’t need to rely so much on him.
But overall, no, this is not good. Not when I’m not trustworthy. Not when I can’t guarantee that I’ll always be in control of my actions.
Lois pulls into a parking spot in front of the building, and I can’t see her anymore. No x-ray vision yet. That’s probably a good thing. Clark, however, I can see him; he is watching her intently, speaking with her. After a few moments, he glances up toward me, his eyes dark with concern, but then looks away quickly, and I feel a strong force push against me as he intentionally blocks our connection.
Dammit, Clark. I almost move away from the window. I also almost smash it; I raise a hand up and start to pound my fist against the glass, but at the last minute, I stop myself. Good thing too. If my powers are starting to return, I need to be extra careful and make sure I stay aware of my strength and speed.
My jaw clenches as I carefully pull my hand away from the glass and cross my arms over my chest. They are still talking. I strain to try to hear them, but apparently, I still don’t have my superhearing. What are they talking about that they couldn’t already have discussed over the last two hours? Anxiety builds in my chest. My breathing becomes shallow and faster, and my heart starts to race.
No, it’s fine, I try reminding myself.
She’s here and safe. She’s just…with him. I stare down at them again, and he looks up toward the window again. Our eyes meet, and he gives me a weak smile, then turns back to her.
A second later, he jumps out of the Jeep, hurries around to the driver’s side, and opens the door for her. Chivalrous. Lois is smiling as she exits the car, and I feel my hands start to shake as I watch her. Her long hair is pulled back into a ponytail, and that single strand of hair that I’d seen earlier remains errantly out of place. She smiles at him and then starts on her way up to the front entrance of the building.
I feel Clark drop the huge barrier he’d set up between us, and I immediately shoot him a simple question.
Is she okay? He responds quickly, his tone almost irritable.
“She’s fine. I told you I’ll protect her. And this will not change that.” I’ve never heard him snap like that, out loud or in his thoughts, and I hastily shift my gaze from Lois to Clark. He’s looking up at me, a barely concealed scowl on his face, as he removes a large duffle bag and several garment bags from the back of Lois’s Jeep. I inhale sharply as a strong sense of unease hits me. But then his expression changes, and he adjusts his glasses.
“Sorry,” he apologizes silently, his scowl turning into a much less abrasive half-smile as he raises his eyebrows. He struggles to hide his sense of disappointment from me, and I feel him try to project an air of confidence as he adds,
“She’s fine, really. She’s still the strongest woman I know.” I nod briefly, steal another glance at Lois, and then step away from the window and back into the kitchen. Coffee is much needed. With lots of milk and sugar. Maybe even a bit of that cocoa powder that Lois bought earlier in the week. Yeah, that will help too. Although Clark will undoubtedly still drink his plain black. I swallow hard and get to work as the deadbolts unlock and Lois and Clark make their way into the apartment.
35
Lois turns to me and straightens my tie as the elevator dings and the doors open. She looks as nervous as I feel, her eyes darting out toward the busy newsroom, already bustling with activity. The familiarity of the sights and sounds actually provide me a bit of comfort, and I slip my arm around her waist and plant a kiss on her cheek as we start down the ramp toward our desks.
“CK! Smooth haircut, I like it!”
My shoulders tense as I twist to see Jimmy Olsen wave at me from across the newsroom, and I nod in acknowledgement as I adjust my glasses with my free hand. Right, my hair has not yet grown out from the haircut imposed upon me on New Krypton. What other little differences between Clark and I has everyone gotten used to?
“Thanks, Jim!” I try to sound upbeat, but I’m not sure if I succeed. Jimmy just waves again and hurries off to Perry’s office, a batch of photographs in hand, while Lois continues to lead me down into the bullpen and over to her desk. “Jimmy is doing well?” I ask Lois quietly, loosening my arm from around her waist as we reach her desk.
She shifts away from me, opens one of the top drawers, and pulls out a folder stuffed with printouts and notes. Her eyes again scan the room, a hint of worry causing frown lines to appear on her forehead, and then she seems to realize that I’ve asked her a question.
“Yeah, um, he’s good,” she says, forcing a smile up at me. She lowers her voice a bit as she provides me a bit more context. “Um, he just started dating a woman—Melinda, I think is her name. She’s a part-time copy editor here, started at the end of the summer, and is also studying molecular biology at MU. And he recently got an award for some photos he took of Superman carrying a cruise ship full of passengers into Metropolis Harbor.” She sits heavily in her chair and opens up the folder, and I rest my hands on the desk and listen as she finishes. “Oh, he also just bought a new car. He’s really proud of it. Some sports car. I don’t remember the model. He was planning to take Clark—you out for a drive in it next week.”
“Lois, Clark, in my office pronto!”
Perry’s stern voice carries across the newsroom, and for a brief moment, the commotion of the morning seems to grind to a halt as the collective gaze of the newsroom settles on us. I do my best not to shrink down and make myself invisible. That’s not me. I’m supposed to be confident, self-assured, composed. Not this nervous, ragged, uncertain mess.
“Yes, Chief,” Lois responds quickly, and she jumps up out of her chair, grabs my hand, and hauls me toward Perry’s office with her. “I should have told you more about the other stories we’re working on, and did you read the article Clark and I wrote yesterday?”
“Yes, I read it this morning while—”
“Good, okay,” she interjects, cutting me off as she pauses in front of Perry’s door. She turns toward me again, a look of concern in her eyes, and she reaches up and straightens my tie. Is it really that crooked? Maybe it’s just her way of dealing with her apprehension. Obsessively fiddling with my tie. “Um, just let me do the talking, okay?”
I smile at her, then lean down and kiss her on the cheek again.
“Of course, hon.”
Her eyes close for a second, and when she opens them, a bit of the concern is gone.
“Sorry, I’m just a bit nervous,” she admits. “It’ll be fine. Come on.”
I nod and follow her into the lion’s den. Perry sits at his desk, rifling through a large stack of papers. He glances up at us over the top of his reading glasses as we enter. He looks the same as I remember, except a few new wrinkles at the edges of his eyes.
“Ah, good, there you are,” he drawls. His eyes linger on me just a second longer than I think they should—maybe it’s just my haircut or maybe I’ve underestimated how different I look now, that is, the expression in my eyes, the tightness of my muscles, how I stand or hunch my shoulders or… But then Perry blinks and lowers his eyes back to the papers in front of him. “Good work helping bring in Nigel St. John yesterday, you two, but you know in this business, we can’t just rest on our laurels. So, that said, uh, where are you on that Luthor story you mentioned yesterday afternoon, Clark? Any closer to getting the evidence you need?”
Lois squeezes my hand as though to remind me not to talk and then takes a small step forward.
“We don’t have anything new yet, Chief, but we’re going to go back over everything with a fine-toothed comb right now and make sure we didn’t miss anything. And Superman is following up on another lead for us too,” she explains, her voice confident.
That’s my Lois. Covering for my lack of knowledge about what ‘I’ said yesterday. Quick thinking on her part. My response would have been something like,
“Uh, I, um…what?”“Sounds good,” Perry responds, his eyes darting back and forth between Lois and I. I adjust my glasses and nod. “You two need anything, you let me know, you hear?”
“Sure, Mr. White, thank you,” I say, my arm looping again around Lois’s waist. She leans into me a bit, and although I can’t yet hear her heartbeat, I get the sense that her heart is racing and that she’s not feeling quite as confident as she sounds. I kiss her on the cheek again, and she tenses up even more. Are public displays of affection now considered faux pas? I press my fingers gently into her side, hoping she understands the gesture as an apology. “Shall we, hon?”
Perry raises his eyebrows at me, but then nods and starts flipping through the pages on his desk again, and Lois takes my hand and pulls me out of his office toward her desk.
“Perry knows something is up,” she hisses at me as soon as we’re out of earshot. “Did you see the look he gave you? He knows.”
She’s gripping my suit jacket, pulling me along with her, and I glance over my shoulder back toward Perry’s office. He’s on the phone now, talking animatedly with whomever is on the other end of the line, completely oblivious to whatever Lois and I are doing. But Lois seems almost panicked. She leads me to her desk and grabs a chair for me, then hastily motions for me to sit while she turns on her computer.
“I think we’re okay, Lois,” I tell her softly, my hand coming to rest on her back as I scoot the chair closer to her so we can both see her computer screen. “You think he’s really going to figure out that the Clark Kent who has been working here for the past month is actually from a different universe, and that he pulled me out of the Sun, where I’d miraculously healed after being dead less than a week ago?” My voice is low, but my joking tone earns me a punch in the arm. I feign indignation momentarily, and she almost laughs. Almost. Not quite. She’s not there yet, I guess.
“Okay, so I guess you’re right. No one would think of something so outrageous,” she admits. A little bit of the tension she’d had since we’d left home this morning seems to disappear, and she lets out a breath as she opens up a file on her computer. “He probably just noticed your haircut,” she adds, repeating my earlier thoughts. “Like Jimmy did. And…” She hesitates and swivels around in her chair to face me, her expression quite serious again. But it’s a different serious than before. Almost a guilty look.
“And?” I prompt, curious now. She bites her lower lip and ducks her head.
“Of course, Clark never called me ‘hon,’ like you do,” Lois says quietly. “And he never kissed me, either, of course.” As though to draw attention away from the topic, she shifts back toward her computer and begins searching through documents on her hard drive. I don’t know whether she’s actually looking for something, or whether she’s just pretending to, but I also don’t really care. Her admission just now cleared up a longstanding worry of mine—if he’d ever acted on the feelings he had for her. I’d suspected that he hadn’t, and her confession just now confirms that.
I move my hand back to her shoulder.
“Lois—”
“We only ever held hands, sometimes hugged, maybe. That was all,” she interjects, keeping her voice low. “We needed to keep the pretext that we were in love, of course, you understand.”
Mimicking her earlier move, she turns in her chair, but now instead of serious, her expression betrays her uncertainty and guilt. Why is she feeling guilty if they never did anything? Her eyes search mine, as though she needs acceptance of her explanation. I give her a weak smile.
“I know, hon,” I assure her. My hand moves from her shoulder to her cheek, and I brush back her loose hair, tucking it behind her ear. She nods nervously, bites her lip again, and then shifts back to her computer.
“I just—we never talked about that,” she says, her eyes still on her computer screen. “I never told you about all of that. Although, maybe you already knew from your little telepathic connection thing?” Her eyes widen in realization, and she twists her head to me. I smile at her again. She is adorable.
“I didn’t know for sure. I didn’t see everything. Only a few fragmented bits and pieces, and I didn’t really know what was happening until that last day, right before he came to get me. I sort of thought I was still dead,” I explain, lowering my voice even more. The general volume of the newsroom drowns out our conversation, but we’d surely sound quite loony if anyone was listening in. “But, hon, I trust you, and—and I do trust him, and so I wasn’t really worried about it.”
At least, that’s mostly the truth.
My words seem to finally get through to her, and she sighs deeply and then leans in to kiss me, this time full on the lips. I smile into her, and my hand comes up to cup her cheek. As we break the kiss, I open my eyes, and she grins crookedly at me, then turns back to her computer screen.
“So, today, we’re going to go after Luthor. And you have a lot of catching up to do.” Her hand comes to rest atop the folder she’d pulled out of her drawer earlier. “This is everything we’ve got so far.”
Light reading. I nod and lift the folder, opening it up to the first page. As I scan the words on the page, I shake my head in disbelief. Apparently, Clark had taken the time yesterday to go through all of their research; he’d then written a succinct, bulleted list to summarize what they knew and what they didn’t yet know. I hold up the page.
“Did you tell him to do this?”
Confused, she squints at the page for a moment, then chuckles and shakes her head.
“Nope, he’s just that organized. Lucky for you, though—that’s a good summary of where we’re at.” She turns back to her computer. “And look, one of my sources just sent me an email. Luthor is meeting with Bill Church, Jr. tonight in New York. Clark, this could be what we need!”
Her smile grows, and she quickly lifts the phone and dials a number. The light in her eyes—I know this Lois. This is my Lois Lane. My love. She grabs a pencil and urgently motions for me to hand her a notepad. Then, she listens intently to a voice on the other end of the line. She scribbles a few notes on the paper.
Warehouse off 6th and Gilbert. 8:30 p.m. She hangs up the phone and turns to me.
“This is it, Clark, I know it!”
