Things are still sort of stalled out a bit further on, but this section is okay - so here it is. Thank you to those of you who are sticking with me on this rather long, drawn-out posting schedule.
From part 8:
She looked away from him, from the gentle look in his eyes. The urge to stay and talk was strong, but instead she began gathering up her things. Without acknowledging what he had said, she stood and said abruptly, “I’ll get going now, too… We can start on the rest of Dr. Platt’s notes tomorrow. See you later!”
She was halfway up the ramp before Kent could say anything.-----
The Girl Next Door, part 9:
The following morning, Lois arrived at the Planet just in time for the morning meeting. She’d slept poorly, and then had lingered over the lines of Dr. Platt’s notes in the morning, trying to decide if she really wanted to gather them all up and start over. In the end, she’d left them where they were, seizing on the excuse that she was going to be late. She had refused to let her thoughts wander past that point.
She slid into the meeting room on Perry’s heels, to find that Kent had left an empty place beside him. The only other places were at the far side of the room, and she would have to squeeze past several people to get there.
As she hesitated, Perry pulled out his own chair and asked, “Lois? Did you forget something?”
With a tiny, soundless sigh, she dropped into the chair beside Kent. “Well, I could use some coffee, Chief…” She trailed off as Kent slid a coffee cup toward her.
“I didn’t know what you take in your coffee, so I brought sweetener, creamer, and a stir stick,” he said softly. “When I realized you must be running late, I thought you might like a cup.”
What she would like was to be in another room – even another building – far away from this sweet man who disturbed her so much. “Thanks.” She said it flatly, not looking at him, and focused on Perry, who had begun to speak.
But she found it very hard to concentrate on what Perry was saying, and had to keep forcing herself to block out the sound of Kent’s heartbeat. Glancing covertly at the man beside her, she watched his hand, lightly tanned with well-kept nails, as he jotted notes in the margins of the morning handout. She remembered the jolt of feeling she’d had when they’d shaken hands that first day. No. That must have been her imagination. Nobody actually experienced that kind of reaction to anyone outside of fiction.
She was so aware of the man she was ready to scream. How could Perry do this to her? She needed to… to… She didn’t know what she needed to do. She could feel her heart pounding, and wondered if her increasing discomfort was visible to anyone else. She was going to have to find a way to escape… No, to *leave* the meeting. Mad Dog Lane never ‘escaped’ from *anything*. Mad Dog Lane was intimidated by no one. Mad Dog Lane did *not* have panic attacks. Mad Dog Lane was –
“That’s it, people! Now hustle! Get me news!” Perry’s voice broke into her thoughts, and she took a deep breath, forcing herself to unclench her hands and slow her heart rate.
In the same moment, Kent leaned slightly toward her and whispered, “Are you okay, Lois?”
Perry saved her from having to respond to that. “Lois? Clark? You two need anything?” he asked, and she shook her head.
“Not yet, Chief.” She was pleased to hear her voice sounded completely normal. As she rose to her feet, Kent pulled out her chair for her and stepped back to allow her to precede him out of the office. She shot an annoyed look at him as she turned toward the door, and ignored the surprised look he gave her in return. The dratted man. Every time she turned around, literally, there he was doing something *nice* for her.
Once again, she headed for her desk, trying not to notice that he was right behind her.
---
In the short time it took for them to cross to their desks, she had gathered her thoughts and her resolve, and was ready to treat him to the full Mad Dog effect.
“Okay,” she announced briskly. “We have work to do. Here’s how it works, Kent. *I’m* the senior reporter here. You may have experience, but you don’t have Daily Planet investigative experience. *I* call the shots, *I* make the rules. *You* do not work *with* me, you work *for* me. Keep that in mind at all times and we’ll get along fine. Got it?” She looked at him with the light of battle in her eyes.
He gazed back at her for a moment, nonplussed, began to say something, and then obviously changed his mind.
“What?” she snapped.
He looked at her somewhat searchingly, and she gritted her teeth to keep from reacting to the soft look in his eyes. After a moment, he smiled slightly and replied, “Got it, Lois. *You*… like to be…”
He paused for a moment, and she bristled. If he said something chauvinistic and condescending, something totally Ralph-ish like ‘you like to be on top’, she wasn’t going to be responsible for her actions.
“… You like to be a leader,” he continued, apparently without any undertone of insincerity. “A mentor. That makes sense – you are, after all, considered to be the best of the best. It’s one of the reasons I’m proud to work with you. Well, lead away, partner. What do we do first?”
She realized she was gaping at him, and she hurriedly shut her mouth and dropped into her chair. “First, we go through the rest of the printouts Jimmy found for me. If Dr. Platt is correct, we need to find out who is apparently sabotaging the shuttle flights, and why.” Booting up her computer, she reached for the stack of printouts and divided them roughly in half, sliding one stack across to him as he sat down and booted up his own computer.
He took his stack, flashed a smile at her, and began to read. She looked down at her own stack, but it took a few moments before she was able to school her thoughts and concentrate on the words in front of her. The man’s smile ought to be outlawed. It was too unsettling, and she didn’t like the way it made her feel.
---
They worked their way through the information steadily until lunchtime. At that point, Lois reluctantly pushed the last of her printouts to the side of her desk. She’d finished reading it half an hour previously, but had resolutely not looked over at her new partner to check on his progress. She was afraid he would catch her eye and suggest something unappealing <appealing> like having lunch together. She looked up when he spoke from across the desk.
“Lois, have you finished reading your printouts?” he asked pleasantly.
“Yes.” She kept her reply short and abrupt.
“Me too,” he replied. “I think it’s time for lunch.” He stood up and she braced herself, ready to throw her best Mad Dog Lane attitude at him when he continued with the invitation she knew he was about to issue.
“Lois,” he began as he stepped around the edge of his desk, and she made herself look up at him. He hesitated, looking away from her toward the top of the ramp for a moment, and she got the impression he was rethinking what he had been going to say. “I have an errand I need to run,” he told her, “so I’ll see you here in about an hour, okay?” With a quick smile, he turned and headed up the ramp, replying pleasantly to those who spoke to him as he went.
Lois sat watching him, telling herself that it was relief she was feeling, not surprise. Absolutely not disappointment. The less she was around him the better.
---
She grabbed a sandwich at her favorite deli and sat in the park to eat it, as she often did if the weather was nice. She didn’t enjoy it as much as she usually did, though. If she weren’t invulnerable, she would have wondered if she might be coming down with something. As it was, she decided it was probably the uncertainty of the investigation that was getting to her. That it had never been an issue in any of her other investigations she refused to consider.
Her new partner wasn’t in the newsroom when she returned.
“Where’s Kent?” she asked Jimmy abruptly as he walked past.
“I don’t know; I haven’t seen him since – oh, there you are, CK,” Jimmy said, smiling as Kent appeared from the direction of Perry’s office.
“Hi, Jimmy. Hi, Lois,” he said as he reached them.
About to ask him where he’d been, Lois instead found herself asking, “CK?”
Kent shrugged and smiled as Jimmy replied, “Yeah – CK; Clark Kent…”
“I get it,” she informed him snappily, then turned to Kent. “You don’t mind?”
“No, of course not,” he replied with a smile. As Jimmy continued on his way, Kent set a Metropolis Coffee Company cup on her desk. “I stopped to get myself a coffee and remembered I’ve seen you drinking them,” he told her, “so I brought you one, too. It’s a Double Mocha Latte – you like chocolate, don’t you?”
She loved the stuff. She looked at him warily, but saw only simple friendliness in his expression. “Thanks,” she said gruffly. Then after a brief silence, more softly, “Thank you… Clark. I do like chocolate.”
He smiled and moved to his own desk. “Did you bring Dr. Platt’s research notes in?” he asked. “Unless Jim’s got more information for us, I think we’re ready to tackle that mess.”
She sighed. She’d spent the whole morning *not* thinking about those notes and the fact that they were still laid out on her living room floor.
“Lois?” her partner asked.
She sighed again, then squared her shoulders and looked at him challengingly. “No. I didn’t bring them in,” she said belligerently. “I decided that I didn’t feel like messing up two days of work. We can work on them there. If Perry vouches for you I guess that’s good enough for me.” Her eyes dared him to comment.
All he said was, “If that’s what you prefer, Lois, that’s fine with me. Do we work on them now, or this evening?”
She stood up, Mad Dog Lane from head to toe. “Now, Kent. Let’s go!” she snapped, then grabbed her coffee and headed up the ramp without looking back. After a moment, she heard him follow her.
-----
The walk to her apartment was made in silence, but to Lois’s surprise, it wasn’t an uncomfortable silence. By the time they arrived, she was actually feeling quite calm. She could do this – it wouldn’t be any different from having Jimmy stop by to help her.
Once they were actually standing inside her apartment, she started to have second thoughts again. What was she supposed to say? She hadn’t ever had visitors, other than Sam and Ellen, and even that had been rare. Jimmy had stopped by several times to deliver information she’d requested, but he’d never stayed.
As she stood there trying to hang onto Mad Dog Lane, Kent himself solved her problem. Instead of standing there like a guest, he had moved into the living room area and was inspecting the neat rows of Dr. Platt’s scraps.
“Wow, you *have* done a lot of work, haven’t you?” he asked. Looking into the box still partly full of scraps, he continued, “And is this the rest of them? You weren’t kidding when you said they were a mess, were you?” He lifted the box off the coffee table and set it in the middle of an empty area of floor, near where her previously laid lines of scraps ended. “It looks like we’re all set,” he continued cheerfully, glancing at her with a quick smile and then returning his attention to the box. “We’ve both got coffee, and lots to go through. How about if we start at opposite ends of this open space – would that work? Then we can both sort and the work will go faster – hopefully.”
To her surprise, Lois found herself agreeing without argument, and settling onto the floor at one end of the open area with her coffee and a stack of Dr. Platt’s notes. Kent settled at the other end with his own coffee and stack of notes.
They very quickly worked out a process where each of them sorted what they could into order, laying it out in rows parallel to each other, with the scraps that were illegible or out of order tossed into a narrow sort of no man’s land between the two areas. If one or the other of them came to a gap in the bits and scraps, he or she could sort through the discards; more often than not, the gaps were filled in.
The reading and sorting, and the occasional comment about a scrap from one or the other of them, soothed Lois with its normality. While she was still very aware of Kent, she found that they worked very well together, and she was feeling calm enough and secure enough to admit it to herself. She’d been right, down there on the pavement – it wasn’t any different than working with Jimmy.
Recalling something Perry had said, she asked him, “Where did you go to school?”
“Midwestern University,” he answered. “You know I’m from Kansas; Midwest was close enough to go home on weekends, and its School of Journalism is in the top ten…”
“That well-recommended thing…” she broke in. “You know, that Perry said – how does Professor Sterling know you, if you’re from Kansas? I know he’s been at Met U for at least a decade.”
“Yes, but he and the dean of Midwest’s School of Journalism participated in a very short – three week long – exchange course between the two schools,” Clark explained. “I was in that program my senior year, in the spring – I spent three weeks at Met U, and one of Dr. Sterling’s students spent three weeks at Midwest.”
“Oh.” She pretended to be engrossed in the scrap she’d just picked up. He had been there, on campus, at the same time as she had. Spring of his senior year – he was two years older than she was, so that would have been her second year. The year she’d been perfecting her control over her strength and speed at Uncle Mike’s gym.
He’d been there only a very short time, yes – and he’d been an upperclassman, so they wouldn’t have been in the same classes. But still – he had been that close; somehow she should have sensed it. She knew how ridiculous that sounded - one man in a student population of close to ten thousand – but it still felt like she ought to have known. Ought to have somehow sensed he was there.
She was getting tense again. For a brief while, she’d allowed herself to ignore her reaction to this man, but it was back in full force now. She also realized that Mad Dog Lane had been nowhere in sight. Granted, they’d spoken very little, but she couldn’t afford to appear friendly with him. It was too dangerous. It made her want things she couldn’t have.
How to get him out of here, though? They still had a long way to go, and suggesting that they stop for dinner might give him the impression that she wanted to have a meal with him. Which she didn’t. She *didn’t*. She… couldn’t.
She’d have to unleash the full force of Mad Dog Lane on him, and she didn’t want to. Not because she wanted him to stay, or to like her. No. Of course not. But she *did* have her pride; she didn’t want him to… think she was unstable. Yes. Even *she* couldn’t pull off quite that mercurial a mood change without causing some concern.
Once again, the man solved her dilemma for her. Rising to his feet, he said, “Lois, I’m afraid I have to… call it quits for the night. I’m sure you have plans for the evening, and we seem to have accomplished quite a lot. I’ll see you tomorrow morning at the Planet, okay?”
And before she had time to say anything more than “Oh. Okay.” he was wishing her a quiet goodnight and had left her apartment.
Lois looked at her living room floor. They had, indeed, gotten a lot accomplished. At this rate, they might empty the box tomorrow. Then the reading could begin in earnest.
He’d left rather abruptly. Maybe her strategy was working.
She picked up the two empty coffee cups and went into her kitchen. She didn’t *want* Kent to be interested in her. So why was his unexpected exit bothering her so much?
Why had he left so quickly? She hadn’t said anything to him… maybe that was why. She hadn’t made much effort to talk to him. Or maybe he had a date or something. She hadn’t missed the way the Planet’s resident female version of Romeo, gossip columnist Cat Grant, had brazenly introduced herself earlier today.
Grumpily, she dumped the cups into the trash and opened the refrigerator. Dinner. And sleep. She could have a nice quiet dinner and then use this time to catch up on her sleep.
-----
It was raining rather heavily when she arrived at the Planet the following morning, another bunch of Dr. Platt’s sorted notes, this time in a plastic bag, tucked under one arm. She shook out her umbrella in the foyer, wishing she could have just flown over from her place. She could fly fast enough – and high enough – that she wouldn’t have gotten wet, but years of caution kept her from flying during daylight hours.
When she entered the newsroom, she saw Kent sitting at his desk, turned sideways, brushing rather ineffectively at a large patch of mud marring one pant leg near his knee.
“What happened to you?” she asked him, dropping the wet umbrella on the floor near her chair, and setting the bag of Dr. Platt’s scraps on her desk.
“I…” he began, but was interrupted by Jimmy’s cheerful voice.
“Same thing that happened to me, it looks like,” he said, gesturing to his own slacks; the bottom six inches or so of both pant legs were soaking wet and dirty. “I was the victim of a drive-by splashing.”
“You’re going to have to get that cleaned, Kent,” she told him. “You ought to do what most of us do – keep a spare set of clothes here.” Turning to Jimmy, she demanded, “Didn’t you show him where the cafeteria and locker rooms were?”
“Not yet, Lois – I haven’t had a chance to,” Jimmy hastened to tell her. “It is kind of a neat setup, CK,” he continued as she shook her head at him in exasperation. “There’s showers and stuff, too, you know – a bit unusual but since the Planet owns the whole building…”
“Jimmy! Just show him where they are already!” she snapped. “You’ll have to see if you can borrow something,” she said briskly to Kent. “Or make do with whatever repairs you can do downstairs – at least until after the morning meeting.
Jimmy hastened away, taking Kent with him. She stared after them for a moment. Honestly! It wasted valuable investigation time when things like this happened, although it was inevitable in a big city. She’d learned that early on, and after the first time she’d had to spend the whole working day in clothes she’d worn for a stakeout, she’d made sure have a change of clothes on hand at all times, and had made use of the Daily Planet's amenities multiple times. Being able to shower and change on the premises had saved a lot of that valuable time.
Usually, she was coming off of a stakeout in some elaborate or heavy disguise. But one time, she’d been at lunch when she’d come upon a cluster of workers and onlookers at the entrance of a manhole. Hearing panicky shouts from below, she had paused. She could hear one man at the entrance clearly. “I can’t reach him,” he’d said. “If we don’t get him out of there soon…”
A low, pain-filled moan had decided her. Looking around carefully with her enhanced vision, she'd seen a second manhole cover partway down a narrow alley. With all of the bystanders focused on the man just inside the hole, she'd been able to slip down the alley and lift the cover, dropping quickly down inside to hover above the dirty concrete floor of the conduit. After scanning the area thoroughly, she had used her strength and speed to push through debris, coming up behind the injured man and lifting both him and his coworker toward the surface.
The surprised coworker had found himself on the street with the injured man beside him, and no adequate explanation for it. As he had gabbled that an angel had helped him rescue their coworker, she could hear the others wondering if he’d hit his head coming up. She’d retreated, fast, the way she’d come, and in less than thirty seconds she’d replaced the cover, exited the alley, and made her way halfway down the block. She’d arrived at the Planet aware that her blouse was dusty, with smears of dirt on the sleeves, and had had to concoct a quick story of being knocked against a dumpster by an over-exuberant jogger who hadn’t been watching where he was going.
She sat down and booted up her computer, checked her email, and then carefully pulled Dr. Platt’s research notes out of the bag.
She looked up as Jimmy and Kent returned, talking about some ballgame or other. Looking them over, she noted that Jimmy had changed clothes, while Kent had been more effective than she’d thought at getting the mud cleaned up.
“Hmmm, nice job, Kent. You can hardly tell it’s there,” she said, and received one of those unsettling smiles of his.
“Oh, thanks, Lois,” he said, and she remembered Mad Dog Lane.
“Yeah, whatever. C’mon, let’s get to work on this,” she said flatly, handing him half the stack of notes.
With a small shrug, he took them from her without comment, and they spent the next half hour reading carefully through the scraps of paper, jotting down notes and questions as they went.
---
The morning meeting proceeded much the same as the previous one had. Kent was already in the conference room when she entered, having been delayed with a phone call to Bobby Bigmouth. Once again, Kent had left a seat for her. This time she dropped into it without hesitation. He was her partner, after all; it would look strange, even for Mad Dog Lane, if she appeared to be avoiding him. Mad Dog did not retreat, after all.
And besides, if she left the seat open she had no doubt Cat would be hanging all over him, annoying Lois and getting in the way. Of their investigation.
He slid a cup of coffee over in front of her with a smile and a soft “Here you go,” and she saw that this time, the coffee already had additions. As if he had anticipated her thought, he told her, with a small grin, “I remembered what you used yesterday; it made sense to go ahead and fix it for you today. Saves time and mess.”
“Thank you,” she said shortly, but her tone was much softer than it had been the day before. Honestly, how on earth was she supposed to keep Mad Dog Lane firmly in place when he kept disarming her at almost every turn?
Perry’s voice, calling for everyone’s attention and ending any necessity for her to make conversation with her disturbing partner, was a welcome intrusion into her thoughts. And to her relief, the intense awareness of Kent was muted to a point where by concentrating fiercely on what Perry was saying, she was able to push it to the back of her mind.
After the meeting, they spent a little time updating Perry on the progress of their investigation, before commandeering Jimmy to help them find some specific data on the space program. Reading through the information he found and the rest of the most recent batch of Dr. Platt’s notes kept them both busy until lunchtime.
---
Once again, they spent the afternoon sorting through Dr. Platt’s research notes at Lois’s apartment. Kent had provided the coffee again, and they’d started in where they’d left off the night before without incident. By four o’clock, they’d finished sorting out every piece of paper, napkin, cardboard, and other odd detritus that made up the professor’s work. The oddest things he’d used were a one-dollar bill and one of those heavy-duty blue paper towels of the kind offered at gas stations to clean windshields.
Now all they had to do was read it. Lois knew she could probably speed through much of it very quickly, and if she’d been investigating alone, she would have. How would she explain something like that to the partner Perry had foisted upon her, though? With a sigh, she looked around at the scraps of paper in neat rows across her floor. They’d even had to extend some of the rows into the kitchen.
“We ought to gather some of these rows up into stacks – carefully, of course – and secure them somehow.” Kent commented. “Maybe with rubber bands? You’re not going to be able to get across the floor from one room to another tonight without disturbing some of these rows.”
She honestly hadn’t thought of that. She’d spent the last few nights simply hovering over the mess whenever she needed to. She couldn’t very well tell Kent that, of course. With another sigh, she conceded that if she couldn’t fly, his suggestion would probably have already occurred to her.
“Fine,” she said somewhat shortly, more out of annoyance that she’d let down her guard around him to the point that she wasn’t carefully watching everything she said or did. She couldn’t afford to have him start wondering how she might have accomplished this thing or that thing. She had to admit, however reluctantly, that the man was sharp.
Standing up, she picked her way carefully to the kitchen and dug around in one of the drawers for rubber bands. Returning to the living room, she found him carefully gathering up Dr. Platt’s notes, starting at the empty area from which she’d taken the first two sets of research notes she’d brought back to the newsroom.
When he’d gathered about three inches of notes in a relatively neat stack, he held it firmly while she wrapped a rubber band around it, then turned it ninety degrees so she could wrap a second rubber band around it. Once it was secured, he picked up a Sharpie marker off her coffee table and wrote a small numeral 3 in an empty space on the top page of the stack. “Because we’ve already got two stacks at the Planet, right?” he commented.
“Yeah. Good idea,” she said grudgingly.
They worked their way together through about half the living room, creating stacks 4, 5, 6, and 7. She was careful not to touch him any more than necessary, and almost managed to convince herself that she didn’t feel *something* every time one of their hands brushed against the other’s.
Kent put each of the stacks carefully into the big box Jimmy had found her for the loose notes, and looked around the room in satisfaction. “There,” he said. “Now you can actually walk around in here without worrying about whether you’ll accidentally kick some of the pages out of order.”
She smiled slightly; her mind had seized on another dilemma. It was now six o’clock; would he expect her to feed him? Or… would he try to invite her out for a meal? She didn’t have anything she could feed him, and anyway, having a meal with him would be so… homey, and intimate. She didn’t *do* homey, domestic scenes. Mad Dog Lane just didn’t have time for stuff like that.
But then he was collecting the empty coffee containers, walking into her kitchen and placing them into the trash, and as she followed him slowly, he glanced at his watch. “Well, I guess I’d better get going,” he said. “I’ll see you tomorrow, okay?” And once again, he was leaving with a quiet “Good night, Lois." while she stood there trying not to wonder where he was going.
-----
To be continued
