Table of Contents Special thanks to all who sent feedback on the last part. Also, an extra special tip of the hat to those knowledgable in martial arts for helping me to use the correct terminology. I'm still not sure how I'm wording things in the final version, so if you haven't voted but want to, there's still time. Previously, on part 13:
Clark opened a plain paper sack and started unloading it onto her desk top. He set aside some gauze and medical tape, and then continued to unpack.
“First thing, this is arnica. It’s a homeopathic remedy for shock and bruising. You’ll want to take five or six of these little pellets and let them sit under your tongue. I hope we haven’t waited too long, since you need to take it as soon as possible to get the full benefit.”
He continued to unpack. “Next, after you’ve cleaned those wounds with antibacterial soap and water, you’re going to want to use this salve. I’m not sure what’s in it; it’s the kind my mom always uses. She’s the real herbalist.”
The next mess he pulled out looked vile and exotic. “Then you’re going to want to put on these poultices. This is Echinacea, garlic, aloe, plantain and comfrey. I recommend you put it on for four hours or so today—leave the paper towel in place, you don’t want a mess. And then I’ll make another fresh one for you tomorrow. And then we’ll reassess. Okay?”
Lois wasn’t sure exactly how to respond.
“What is all this stuff, Kent?”
“You said you didn’t want to go to a doctor. And you don’t want this to get infected. That would be nasty. And remember, I’m on the same medical plan as you are, and I don’t want you to be raising the costs for everybody.”
“You’re a strange one, Kent. But it works for you. Okay, now get out of here. I’ve got to get some sleep.”
Clark grinned and made his way to the door.
“Oh and, by the way. I did call the police, but I didn’t give them your name. They probably already came by to lock them up.”
“Actually, the police probably found nothing. Guys don’t stay unconscious for hours on end, unless they’re really injured. And I doubt you have it in you.”
________________
And now, part 14 (my personal favorite):
Lois was feeling stiff and sore, but she had to hand it to Kent. There was barely any bruising on her cheek, and her hands and knees didn’t look too badly infected. She was a little concerned by the amount of filth that she found on the paper towels, this morning when she awoke, but there was nothing she could do about that.
She skipped the early morning study session, choosing instead to turn off the alarm and sleep until her body was done. She couldn’t afford to get sick or her grades would surely suffer. Of course she couldn’t do this all day, since mid-terms were coming up at the end of the week.
Her pace was slower than normal as she strolled toward the cafeteria. She had selected only a single textbook to bring along, instead of her normally tall stack. It would take her a few days to get the kinks worked out. She had thought about doing a few stretches this morning but had wimped out in the end.
She picked out a light brunch. Since pain tended to turn her stomach she wasn’t sure she wanted something heavy. She made her selections and sat down at the closest table.
It wasn’t long before the table filled up. She continued eating, lost in her thoughts and studies. She was used to letting the dialogue go on around her without getting involved in the conversational dalliances the young kids tended to indulge in. So it was a surprise to her when she heard her name called.
“Kent, what are you doing here?”
Clark looked surprised at her question.
“I told you I was going to come back and check on you and bring fresh herbs.”
Lois sighed. If the truth were told, she would rather be dissecting worms right now.
“I didn’t ask you to come here today. I don’t need some kind of a superhero bodyguard following me around. I need to study.”
Clark sighed and worried his hands through his dark hair.
“I know. And I promise I’ll give you lots of time to study. But first, I want to tell you something.”
He looked around at the room, appearing rather tense.
“Is there someplace more private we can talk?”
There was no reason for Lois to say ‘yes’ and every reason in the world for her to say ‘no’, but yet she was strangely curious. And so she found herself inviting him to join her at the library.
~*~
To say that Clark Kent looked uncomfortable would be the understatement of the year. As he shifted and nervously glanced around the room, he looked downright miserable. She glanced around the tiny space. They had landed in the college’s listening lab which was lined with alcoves covered in overly large headsets and a wide array of MP3 players, CD players and tape players. Heck, it probably had an 8-track player and a micro-fiche somewhere. There was a large conference room table in the middle of the room where they planted themselves.
Lois had never seen ‘Mr. Machismo’ looking so ill-at-ease. That left only two possibilities for their little tête-à-têtes--either he wanted details from her personal history or he planned to apologize.
Well, that was tough. She had no intension of supplying details to feed his prurient curiosity. And she wasn’t about to accept any apologies, either. That ill-mannered reporter had been pushy and argumentative.
“Let’s get on with this,” she demanded as she watched him fiddling with his glasses and panning the room, once again.
He swallowed and adjusted his chair. Finally he straightened and met her gaze.
“I have certain… um, gifts… that allow me to do certain… well, things,” he stammered.
Lois wrinkled her brow. A frown descended upon her face.
“You brought me in here to brag?
This is the all-important thing that just
had to interrupt my studies?”
He was back-pedaling now, waving his arms in front of him.
“No, Lois. It’s nothing like that,” he insisted.
But Lois was quick to interrupt. “Aw, crap, Kent! You didn’t come here to ask me out, did you? Wanted a little privacy to tell me you weren’t asking me on a pity date, since it’s more about lust than pity? Well, forget it. I’m not interested. As they say in Portuguese, ‘Não’.
Clark was red-faced as he retorted, “It’s not like that, Lois. Can’t you just give a guy the benefit of the doubt?”
“Whatever.”
Lois wasn’t about to back down since he had done nothing to redeem himself.
“Okay,” he paused to compose himself, “as I was saying… Maybe, I’ll just show you. Do you mind if I…?”
He gestured toward her notebook. She rolled her eyes and flipped to a blank page. The large bandages across her palms made mobility difficult; nevertheless, she grabbed her bag and rifled around for a pencil.
Lois’s frown deepened as Clark ripped a page from her notebook and wadded it up. He placed the paperwad on his palm and gently blew.
The paper danced through the air, carried by the breeze, until it remained suspended above Lois’s purse. But it did not fall. Instead it hovered mid-air, rolling and flipping and softly bobbing about on air.
There was no hiding the puzzlement on Lois’s face. She had always hated illusions--it didn’t seem right to feed on the ignorance of the masses. Still, it was Lois’s paper so there was little opportunity for him to use magician’s thread. And he was working in the open air with nowhere to hide a mirror or hidden pocket.
It was perplexing. Downright queer.
Of course there was also the question of his motive. Waltzing in like ‘The Amazing Mr. Stupendous’ with his mind-boggling tricks when he knew she was having a rough weekend seemed tacky, at best.
“I don’t get it.”
With a final whisper of breath the paper came to rest in Lois’s purse.
“I have certain gifts that allow me to do peculiar things,” he repeated, as if that would clarify it for her.
She tried to give him the benefit of the doubt, just as he had requested. But sometimes it wasn’t easy.
“Okay, that was a little bit cool. You stay up late at nights practicing that one? Do you, Kent?”
His eyes fell.
“No. No practice. It’s more like one of those freak-of-nature things.”
She rolled her eyes. Kent might be unusual, but it was overly dramatic to call his ‘gifts’ freakish. Oh, pulease.
“Not that I didn’t enjoy the show, but the point of your performance was…”
He nodded grimly.
“You told me some pretty serious parts of your life story yesterday. Things I’m assuming you wouldn’t want to be revealed to the general public. So I thought you might feel better if you knew something about me that I wouldn’t want anyone to know.”
“And since you live such a coddled and sheltered life, this is the best you can do. It’s sweet of you, really.”
Kent looked a bit flustered. “Well, thanks… I think. But I would appreciate it if you wouldn’t mention this around the newsroom, because I wouldn’t want anyone to think any differently about me.”
“So I can’t just say, ‘Hey, have you noticed that Kent is a little bit gifted?’”
“Lois, has it ever occurred to you that what I just told you is a big deal to me? Maybe just as big to me as your revelation from last night is to you?”
“Oh, that? That happened years ago. I am so over it.”
Her co-worker-turned-psychologist had the audacity to raise his eyebrows at her in disbelief. She dismissed him with a flick of the wrist and continued her diatribe.
“I just moved ahead to the next story, the next country, the next war. No nightmares. No scars. No trauma. No problems.”
“Really.” Sarcasm didn’t suit the touchy-feely reporter.
“Really,” she confirmed.
She stared at him defiantly. And won; he dropped his gaze long before she hit her stride.
“So I, um, I’ll let you get back to your… whatever it is you’d be doing if I wasn’t here.”
“Great. Yeah. I’ll get right on that.” Lois turned her shoulder away from him and flipped open her textbook, making great show of locating the correct page. There was nothing she would enjoy more today than blowing off ‘Wonderboy’.
He stood, as if to go, but didn’t actually leave.
“Um, Lois. One more thing,” he started.
“What is it now?” she hissed.
He hesitated once again. When he finally spoke, it came out in a gush of words. “I’m a little worried about this no-doctors idea. If you’re still bleeding, you need to see a doctor. Don’t shake your head at me. I know you’re still bleeding because one of my freak-of-nature gifts is that I have an unusually sensitive sense of smell.”
Lois couldn’t help it. After all the tension in the last half-hour, “The Amazing Carnac’s” stupendous blunder was awkwardly funny. She laughed.
“I’m fine, Kent,” she assured him through her mirth. “Maybe your Mama never told you this but sometimes women just bleed. It’s one of those birds and bees things, ‘Mr. Showoff’. It’s called menstruation.”
His head dropped. Clark fiddled with his glasses, nervously staring at the table, her hands, anything but her face. His ears were tipped with red.
“I suppose you’re right, Lois. You’ll be okay,” he finally admitted. “I’ll drop some fresh herbs by your room tonight around nine.”
Lois waited until she was sure he was gone before she lunged for the paperwad sitting atop her purse. She picked it up carefully, ignoring a twinge of pain, and analytically held it aloft. Just as she had suspected, there were no hidden strings or magician’s paraphernalia. Was it possible for a geek like Kent to manipulate a piece of paper like that?
Experimentally, she placed it on her own palm just as she had seen him do. She blew, mimicking his technique as best as she was able. The paper shuddered a bit, so she gave it another good lungful. It rolled over her fingertips and onto the floor.
She fetched it again and placed it across her bandaged palm for another attempt. This time it rose, spinning circles above her palm. Her eyes widened as she continued to blow. It was the strangest thing to see the paper dance on air, feeling a slight zephyr on her face. And she still didn’t know how it was done.
Her lungs ached. She gave up and inhaled. The paper remained suspended aloft for a brief moment longer before falling back into her waiting hand.
A whistled melody from the doorway caused her to look up, catching sight of Clark Kent with his lips still pursed. He ducked as the paperwad shot towards him. Lois Lane may not have been able to suspend paper with her breath, but she could fire a fastball with both hands wrapped behind her back.
~*~
“Hey, Mom.”
Clark Kent sunk into an overstuffed chair, cradling the phone between an ear and his shoulder as he settled a steamy mug from one hand and his dinner from the other onto the well-worn wood of his coffee table.
“Where are you?” Martha worried. “It’s not like you to stand us up like this.”
Clark sighed and raked his fingers through his thick hair. He knew her reprimand was born from concern rather than irritation. Still, it would always bother him to worry his mother.
“I know, Mom. It’s just that Lois got hurt and needed my help. And with everything going on, I forgot to call.”
“What happened? Is everything all right?”
Clark quickly decided that an edited truth would be best. He couldn’t lie to his mom. And yet he had just tacitly promised Lois not to tell the details. He felt it best to omit the part where it looked like a gang rape in progress, and he wasn’t sure his mom could handle knowing his own involvement in the rescue.
“She’ll be fine. She just had the misfortune to cross campus too close to some unruly drunks. Lucky for her she’s fast, and they were awkward and inebriated. But she fell on the concrete and tore up her hands and knees pretty badly. She’s a little bruised, too. I saw the whole thing while I was parking about a quarter of a mile away, so I helped her get cleaned up and made up one of your poultices.”
“Poor thing. I take it that it’s pretty bad.”
“She doesn’t have a lot of skin left, but she’ll be fine in a few days.”
“What are you using?” Clark could hear Martha switch into a more clinical gear. “Dried herbs are fine, but remember that your garlic and aloe need to be fresh. Not that you’ll need garlic very long, only while there’s a possibility of infection.”
“I remember, Mom. I learned from the best. She was limping, but I couldn’t see any broken bones. What do you recommend?”
“That could be a little tougher, but I would start with an ice pack. Last night was probably the best time for that. If ice doesn’t cure it on its own, Lois had best get medical advice.”
Clark smiled. It was good to have an ally. The conversation wandered around herbs and healing for awhile, but Clark had some more pressing concerns.
“Mom, when it all happened and Lois was all hurt and bloody, I don’t know what came over me. I said some things that were rude and thoughtless. And now Lois is acting pretty mad. How do I make that right?”
“Clark, honey,” Martha chuckled, “I taught you how to say you were sorry when you were two.”
“But Mom, she’s so cold. I don’t know if she’ll accept my apology.”
“If the two of you have a future together, that means you’ll have to learn to fight fair. If she’s too good to accept your apology, then she’s not good enough for my boy. But my instincts tell me that you’ll work this out. True love can get past anything.”
~*~
True to his word, ‘The Village Healer’ returned around nine o’clock. He handed her a large grocery bag with a piece of paper stapled to the folded top.
He never met her eyes as he informed her, “Since you’ve got directions, I won’t keep you. See you tomorrow, Lois.”
He finally glanced up with a gaze so intent it caught her off-guard.
“And do call me if you need anything. I take care of my friends, no strings attached.”
“Sure,” she promised, despite herself.
She closed the door behind him, and yanked his instructions from the top of the sack.
Lois,
Tonight’s poultice is the same as last night’s. Use it for four hours and
then dispose of it. I included some Willow Bark, to be taken internally
for pain and swelling. Let me know if you continue to see signs of
infection. I also want to know when you see new skin.
The flowers are to say I’m sorry for the harsh way I spoke to you
yesterday. I said it was a bad time for it, but truthfully, it’s never a
good time to be disrespectful or rude. I’m also sorry for your pain. I
know you said you were over it, but I am not.
Lois slid open the paper bag to discover a small bouquet of flowers. Underneath was a large roll of white tissue. She unwrapped it to find a simple glass bud vase. She wasn’t much on flower arranging, but she was sure she could manage. As she slid the bouquet into the vase she discovered a small card from the florist’s.
It read, simply, “Lo siento,” which she automatically translated, “Sorry.”
