Lois felt a little bit like Cinderella as she readied herself for work the morning after the ball. She looked at herself in her conservative grey suit, which she had thought very flattering when she bought it, and she felt unusually drab after the glitz and glamour of the night before.
To feel like Cinderella
after the ball - what a great comparison! But you wouldn't want to feel like that. Poor Lois!
But Clark had seen her in her work clothes before, she reminded herself, and his feelings for her had apparently survived the experience. If this thing between them was to work at all, they would both have to realize that it couldn’t all be dress-up and dancing.
And she is feeling embarrassed because of
Clark, because she isn't feeling sufficiently beautiful for him. He became the be-all and end-all of her existence pretty quickly.
She remembered with a prick of conscience her indignation when Mitchell had made his comment about scratching an itch. Hadn’t she intended that Clark be no more than that? And if he’d never shown up at the Planet, if she’d never seen him again, that’s all he would have been.
The way Lois is thinking about Clark now, that must be amazing to realize.
She was used to taking no one into consideration but herself. Even remembering to feed her fish was a challenge. How could she possibly be in a relationship, with all that that entailed? She was sure to make countless mistakes and to hurt Clark’s feelings at every turn, and by the time she left her apartment, she’d convinced herself that the whole thing was going to be a complete disaster.
This reminds me of what you said about Mitchell, the man who couldn't think about anybody but himself. And Lois is wondering if she can ever be anything but a female Mitchell.
She was a nervous wreck by the time she arrived at the Planet, and she felt almost resentful of Clark as she stabbed at the elevator buttons and tried to check her makeup one last time in their shiny panel. A week ago, she’d been able to go to work in the morning like a normal, calm, sane person, and now every elevator ride up to the newsroom was fraught with nervous anticipation. He had done this to her.
I love your description of Lois, the nervous wreck.
And she would have liked to pretend that she didn’t know how or why, but the truth was that the memory of their night together had inscribed itself on her heart with remarkable precision and clarity. The minute she began to think that no man was worth this...this... upheaval, she would be reminded of what it had felt like to be loved by Clark Kent, and she would once again think that any amount of upheaval was worth it.
I can't help it, I love this. Just because Lois made love to Clark on their very first night together, she knows what intimacy with him is like. And it is worth - well, it's worth almost anything, especially since she is beginning to see that the gentleness and sincerity that he showed her that night was not a fluke or a temporary thing, not a one-night performance of his body. It was
him, and therefore he is worth almost anything, although there is going to be a rocky road ahead indeed (and I'm not talking ice cream) before she and Clark can be a real, official couple.
Her eyes swept the newsroom the minute she stepped off the elevator, and she immediately caught sight of Clark, standing near the coffee service in friendly conversation with Pete Frye, the Planet’s sports editor. From the looks of things - Clark appeared to be scratching out a play on one palm - they were talking football, which was Pete’s consuming passion. Lois huffed a little and then headed for her desk.
Oh, what a let-down! I don't know, but somehow the words "scratching out a play on his palm" reminds me of "scratching an itch", which you mentioned earlier - it's absolutely not the same thing, of course, but it is - well, it's not the thing Lois wants to see Clark do right now, that's for sure.
What had she expected? That he’d be waiting at the elevator with a bouquet of flowers in his hand? She reluctantly acknowledged that she had imagined something of the sort.
This reminds me of an old comic book, probably from early 1990, where Clark and Lois had just had their serious first date ever. And the next morning, Clark handed Lois a single, long-stemmed rose, as she stepped out of the elevator into the bullpen of the Daily Planet. Well, believe me, Clark and Lois had
not been sleeping together in the continuity of that comic book.
Okay, maybe not with the flowers, since that was clearly over-the-top, but she’d thought that he’d be waiting for her, looking for her - would drop everything the minute she walked in the room. She hadn’t thought that he’d be so busy talking sports that he wouldn’t even notice her arrival.
Poor Lois!
Since Pete was approaching sixty and was so out of shape that he got winded if he walked across the room, Lois fully expected him to throw his back out with the exertion, but he survived the experience and the conversation went on.
This is so funny! Aren't sports reporters often really out of shape?
It was nothing to her if Clark wanted to stand around talking sports when he could be talking to her. She couldn’t care less, frankly.
Oh, I think you could, Lois....
She grabbed at the spot where she normally kept her coffee cup and met with a bare patch of desk. Her eyes darted around the rest of her desk, even looking behind her computer monitor, but no coffee cup appeared.
This is just so extremely funny, Caroline! You had me laughing out loud.
Much as she’d appreciated Clark’s gesture with the coffee the day before, the truth was that she hated drinking out of Styrofoam cups. She wanted her coffee cup, which was just the right size and weight and fit nicely in her hand, but the damn thing seemed to have disappeared.
Inanimate objects conspire against Lois Lane.
But she wasn’t going to allow the missing coffee cup to deter her from her goal, which was to show Clark that she was capable of calmly, coolly helping herself to coffee. She made much better progress this day than she had the day before, managing to walk all the way across the newsroom and into Clark’s immediate vicinity without mishap.
Oh, Caroline, I'm totally reminded of that heart-wrenching episode, where Lois was absolutely unable to get herself coffee because she would have to pass Clark Kent to get it. That time when she saw, however, that Clark was hurting for some reason, and she wanted to reach out and comfort him. And
he was going to pieces because he could see how miserable his presence made her, and he decided to quit the Daily Planet for her sake. But he brought her coffee, in a styrofoam cup, and she accepted it.
“Morning, Lois.” Clark looked away from Pete and greeted her with a friendly smile.
“Someone stole my coffee cup!” she blurted.
Oh, so Lois! I love it!
Why had she said that? Why hadn’t she just said good morning, like a normal person, instead of acting like a missing five dollar coffee mug was front page news? She shouldn’t be allowed out of the asylum, really she shouldn’t, and it wasn’t going to be any time at all before Clark figured that out and turned his attention to a normal woman. A sane woman. A woman whose brain actually communicated with her tongue.
Oh, I can totally sympathize with her flustered embarrassment here, and her anger at herself. She is driving Clark away, isn't she?
Clark blinked at her, clearly taken aback, and then his face cleared and the smile reappeared. “Uh, that was me,” he said, sounding apologetic. He reached over to the coffee cart and picked up her coffee mug, which was filled with steaming coffee. “One Equal, two creamers, right?”
She felt her cheeks blaze with embarrassment. “Right,” she said faintly, accepting the coffee. He’d even washed the mug - the lipstick stains were gone from the rim. She wished she could just disappear into thin air.
Poor Lois! But so funny!
Lois waited until Pete had walked away and then managed a smile and said, “Thank you for the coffee.”
There. That had sounded perfect. Why couldn’t she have managed something like that in the first place?
Yes, why? Why is everything a rag, as it says in a Swedish poem?
“You’re welcome. I’d meant to leave it on your desk, but I got distracted talking to Pete, and you came in before I had the chance. Sorry about that.”
“No...it’s...I’m not always....” She sighed, having no idea how to explain. “I’m an idiot, all right? Just ignore me.”
“I thought we weren’t doing that anymore,” he said softly, with a look that left her feeling distinctly breathless.
“Doing what?” she managed.
“Ignoring one another.”
“Oh, right. Well, maybe you could just ignore me when I say stupid things. Of course, that would be pretty much all the time, wouldn’t it, so we’d be right back to ignoring each other. Or you’d be ignoring me, and I’d have to ignore you right back...because that’s just the way I am.”
“Competitive ignoring?” he asked, his mouth twitching.
“Well, it sounds silly when you put it like that,” she said, with as much dignity as she could muster.
Adorable! So funny! And really sweet, too.
He apparently couldn’t hold it in any longer: he burst out laughing. She tried to glare at him but gave it up when she realized that he was right. It was funny.
“I don’t want to ignore you, Lois,” he said, his eyes twinkling down at her.
“I don’t really want to be ignored,” she admitted. “But...I don’t want to be obvious, either,” she said in a rush. “You know, all...obnoxious, like some couples are, and people just can’t stand to be around them because they’re always so mushy and lovey-dovey and touching each other at inappropriate times and right out in public. I hate that.”
And look at this! It's the start of Lois and Clark's bantering!
“So...the sex on the conference table is out, then?” he deadpanned.
Hmmm, no, I mean, yes. Yes, the conference table is out, Clark. This isn't Meredith Knight's Rest and Reproduction, where the conference table is the venue for just this kind of activity.
Even though she knew he was teasing, the mental image his words inspired was enough to send a jolt of arousal flashing through her. Her breath hitched slightly and she swallowed hard, hoping he couldn’t hear the sudden racing of her heart. “I can’t...I can’t believe you just said that.”
“I shouldn’t have,” he said, looking earnest now and a little worried. “I was kidding - I hope you know that. But listen, we’re both finding our way with this. If I do something you don’t like, just tell me, and I won’t do it again.”
I like that she is so incredibly affected by his words, and I like that he is contrite and feels that he has gone too far.
Anyway...if we’re both around, would you like to have lunch together?”
A date! He was asking her for a date. And it was the perfect date, too. She wouldn’t have to obsess over what to wear, because she was already wearing it. She wouldn’t have to wonder what was going to happen afterwards, because they both knew that nothing could happen except that they’d go back to work. It didn’t even have to be romantic at all. Just two co-workers having lunch together, getting to know one another a little better. Assuming they could keep their hands off of one another - an assumption with, granted, little to no corroborative evidence so far - no one would think anything of it if they saw Lois Lane and Clark Kent having lunch together.
I love it. This was the perfect thing Clark could ask for.
Well, as you can see, Caroline, I'm nowhere near done going through this great chapter, but I'm totally out of time. I don't even have time to go through this feedback to remove its generous helping of typos. But I will be back later.
Ann
