“Live with you permanently?” Lois said. “That’s not going to happen.”
She was still reeling over the thought that Clark Kent and Kal El were the same person. The similarities were now so obvious that she wondered why she’d been so slow on the uptake.
She supposed it had to do with one thing. She’d been led to believe that Clark Kent had no powers. That single fact meant that he couldn’t be Lisa’s father, despite their obvious similarities. As a disguise it was remarkably effective.
“Why not?” Clark asked. “It would solve all our problems. Lisa would grow up with someone who understands what she’s going through. She’d be in a place that’s quiet enough that she can hear herself think, and she’d have a mother who wasn’t working herself to the bone.”
“So I’m not to work?” The idea of being a kept woman was unpalatable, and Lois knew her displeasure was creeping into her voice. She’d worked for everything in her life, and she didn’t intend to stop now.
“I didn’t say that,” Clark said quickly. “I’ve been looking over the work you’ve done for the Foundation, and I’ve been more than pleased.”
He’d been double checking her work? It should have angered Lois, but instead it pleased her. It meant that the work she’d done was valuable to him, as the Foundation itself was. She wasn’t just being given make-work to keep her satisfied while Clark got to have a relationship with his daughter.
“So I’d be living in you house, accepting your charity?”
She’d grown up around enough wealthy people to know what they called poor people who lived off the wealth of richer friends. Being thought a gold-digger would be the least of her worries, but it wasn’t a way she wanted to be viewed.
Clark shook his head. “I owe this to you. I owe you for every time you wiped her nose when I wasn’t there, for every diaper you bought with money you didn’t have. I owe you for the life you would have had…should have had. I’m not sorry about Lisa, but I’m so sorry about leaving you alone.”
“About that,” Lois said. “If the night was as special as what you are saying, why didn’t you try to find me?”
“I was ashamed,” Clark said slowly. “You were clearly drunk and I took advantage of you. I may have been bounced around the system for a while, but I lived with the Kents long enough to know what was right and what was wrong. What I did that night was inexcusable..”
That wasn’t how Lois remembered the night. What few memories she did have made her still want to blush with how aggressive, how wanton she’d been.
“So you thought I wouldn’t want you?”
If he’d come to her, she’d have been cautiously open. She’d thrown herself at him, after all. It would have changed everything to have had another set of hands to help with Lisa. Perhaps she could have gone back to college, finished up, had a career.
“How could you?” Clark asked. “I was some guy you’d picked up at a bar, and either you did that sort of thing all the time, in which case I was going to be nobody special…or you didn’t…which would be even worse.”
“It was my first time,” Lois said quietly.
“Me too,” Clark said somberly. “I’d planned on waiting until I found someone I could share everything with.”
She’d stolen that from him, from them both. Lois frowned.
“I’m glad I did.” He said.
Lois blinked. “What?”
“It doesn’t repel you that I’m an alien.”
Lois shook her head. How could she be repelled by him? What he was, her own daughter was.
“You were human enough to give me a child,” Lois said. “You don’t repel me.”
He smiled at her slowly, and Lois realized that this was only going to encourage him. “That doesn’t mean that I want to spend the rest of my life with you.”
“Just give it a few years,” Clark said, “I think you’ll want to stay.”
Lois suspected that she might as well.
“We barely know each other.”
“We have a child together,” Clark said. “We can hardly be considered strangers.”
But they were. Lois had barely met the real Clark Kent, or Kal El or whoever he really was. She was only beginning to learn who he really was.
“We haven’t even been on a real date!”
“I seem to recall differently,” Clark said.
Lois flushed. “That wasn’t a date. That was sex.”
“I’m not asking you to have sex with me,” Clark said. “Just to move in with me so I can have access to my daughter. Whatever happened with us…that’d be entirely separate. Living with me doesn’t mean you want to marry me.”
Lois suspected that’s what it would have meant to her parents; they’d been disapproving of Lucy’s living arrangements often enough.
As a thought occurred to her, Lois frowned. “How does the red poison affect…relations?”
If it was as Lois suspected, Clark wasn’t factoring in the most obvious flaw in his chain of arguments relating to his guilt.
“A little like alcohol,” Clark admitted. “It removes inhibitions…tends to make me more passionate and more likely to do things I wouldn’t normally do. It doesn’t affect performance.”
That was a tidbit she hadn’t needed to know.
“Lana liked me better on the red poison. She always thought I was a little too…conservative normally. She liked me without my inhibitions.” Clark’s voice was a little bleak. “She tended to want to do things in the bedroom that I wasn’t comfortable with.”
That was definitely something Lois hadn’t wanted to know.
“How did you get involved with her anyway?” Lois asked, happy to change the subject. Talking about sex was the last thing she needed at the moment, especially if it involved Lana Lang.
“She started dating me when I was eighteen as a way of getting back at her father,” Clark said. “I was the kid from the wrong side of the tracks that he hated, and it excited her to think that I was forbidden fruit.”
“And when she discovered your secret?”
“She was repelled, a little. She didn’t want to dump me right away for fear people would ask questions. Then she started to realize just how much money I was making.”
“At eighteen?”
“I found work on an Alaskan King Crab boat and made enough money in two weeks to pay for two years of college.” Clark smiled wistfully. “I saved a couple of guys’ lives, and they asked me back every year.”
Crab fishing was dangerous work, but being invulnerable, strong enough to lift the boat by yourself and able to go without sleep for days if needed had to have made him an invaluable asset.
He probably hadn’t even been cold in the freezing waters.
“I drifted after college,” Clark said. “Found work, mostly in mining. In a couple of years I learned my way around mines all over the world, and then I used crab money to buy my first mine, one everyone said was played out.”
“But you knew better.”
“They were going to blow the place up as a local danger to children,” Clark said. “I didn’t feel like I was hurting anyone.”
“Lana found out about it, I don’t know how, but suddenly I wasn’t this person who repelled her any more.”
“She sounds like a really wonderful person,” Lois said. It amazed her just how many excuses Clark was willing to make for the woman.
“She wasn’t always crazy,” Clark said. “It was a while before we realized that it was the effects of the jewelry that made me act the way I was. I wore a necklace Joshua made myself for a couple of years before I realized what it was doing.”
Lois had her doubts that Lana hadn’t known, but she didn’t say anything.
“It wasn’t until I took it off and forgot it one day that I started feeling different. When I got around Lana I felt the same way though.”
“Because she was wearing the jewelry.”
“It never made much sense to me that she would wear it,” Clark said. “As status conscious as she was there were much finer pieces I could have bought her.”
Lana had to have known, otherwise she’d have never turned away expensive jewelry for handmade fifty dollar pieces made by her cousin. Especially when they were gaudy and glowed in the dark.
“I convinced her to take them off, and we argued,” Clark said. “I felt guilty about cheating people. I may have said something foolish about giving the money away.”
Lois could imagine that hadn’t gone over well with Lana. As invested as she was in being rich and important, the idea of letting it all go would have been repugnant.
“I’d really only accumulated the money in the first place to make her happy,” Clark admitted. “Even under the red poison I mostly just wanted her to love me.”
He hadn’t had that from anyone since the Kents had died, Lois suspected. She couldn’t imagine how achingly alone he must have felt. Being the only one of his kind in the universe, the last of a dying breed, he’d have tried to latch onto the least bit of affection anyone could have given him.
Lana would have used that, dangled the prospect of love in front of him. In the end, though, Lana struck Lois as the sort of person who might be incapable of love.
“And she didn’t.”
He shrugged and looked away. “Sometimes it seemed like she did.”
With his parents dead, and with him unable to share the greatest secret the world had ever seen, he would have been desperate for the affections of the one person who knew. The fact that she’d initially rejected him would have made him only more desperate for her affections.
“It was good sometimes,” Clark said quietly. “I could never tell when, and whenever she did something that hurt, I always told myself that the next time would be good.”
Lois had edited an article once about abusive relationships. Abusers tended to do the same thing, dangling the possibility of things being good just often enough to string the other person along, while at the same time keeping them abused enough that they never felt strong enough to leave.
“So what did she do?”
There had to have been something, or Clark never would have left her.
“I started to feel like I did around the red poison all the time, even when I wasn’t close to any of it.” Clark stared out the window. “I couldn’t figure out why it was happening. I started thinking that maybe it was just the cumulative effect of too much exposure.”
“It wasn’t though,” Lois said. “It was something she was doing.”
“She was putting it in our food. We were both eating it.”
Lois stared at him. “She was poisoning you?”
Clark didn’t look at her. He only nodded.
“By the time we found out what it had done to Joshua, it was too late. She’d developed cancers in the brain, ovaries and small intestines. Doctors were able to get rid of most of it, but there is a tumor in her brain that is inoperable. It isn’t growing, but it puts pressure on her brain, making her behavior increasingly erratic.”
“So…”
“She got worse when she found out that the treatments had made her infertile. I think that was the last straw.”
She’d been infertile with Clark because of what he was, and then afterwards she’d become completely infertile.
“She’s sick.” Clark said. “She was my wife, and I wouldn’t have left her. After she found out she couldn’t have children though…it was never the same. She became bitter and erratic, and she divorced me.”
And she’d taken half of his wealth to Lex Luthor. Lois could even see how the affair might have started, with Lana desperate to have a child from a human man, and taking out her anger on Clark by having sex with his greatest rival.
Lois had looked Lana Lang up after she’d realized just who she was. She’d been married to Lex Luthor for a little less than eighteen months before he’d been killed in a car bombing. The bomber’s identity had never been discovered.
Just how crazy was Lana Lang?
“She wasn’t good before the illness, Clark.”
“But she wasn’t all bad.” Clark stared stubbornly out the window.
Lois frowned. Clark was loyal to a fault and wracked with guilt. She suspected that if she made a deal with him he’d do his best to live up to it. She thought a moment and then she made her decision.
What they needed was time. Time to get to know each other, to know if they could live together, or if they could become more than that.
“We can at least stay the summer,” Lois said. “Make our decisions closer to the end.”
Clark nodded, and the limo faded into silence.
