Carol, it's great to have you back!
I couldn't help giggling at this:
"I think I'd rather go back to Paris," Lois said looking aroundher with a slight frown on her face.
"Oh, come on. Where's your sense of adventure?"
"It's frozen!"
Clark smiled at her. "We're staying at the ice hotel in Sweden. Did you expect it to be warm?"
"Last night was," she muttered.
Ah, poor Lois! Well, I've never wanted to go to that ice hotel in northern Sweden, either!
Me the feminist couldn't help sighing at the idea that Jimmy would ask Clark and Perry for permission to marry Lucy, but Lois, who was the one who had been there for Lucy all her life no matter what, was not asked to give Lucy's marriage plans her blessing.
I'm glad that Lois told Lucy the truth about the nature of her and Clark's relationship.
I found this hugely interesting:
"What did she say?"
"She asked how you felt about it and said she'd wondered if we'd flown off to some tropical island after she was asleep because she never heard us. Either that or we were a lot quieter than Mom and Dad had been." She shuddered. "I'm glad she's the one who shared a wall with them and not me. I have enough trauma to deal with without that on top of it. I mean, I heard them once or twice when I fell asleep in her room, but she told me once that it rare the first time around but was an almost nightly occurrence after they remarried."
"Isn't that a good thing, to an extent? That they were together regularly?"
Lois shrugged. "I don't know. They only did after they fought and they fought all the time. I would much rather have had sexually frustrated parents who didn't fight constantly those last couple of years."
So not only did Sam and Ellen have a bad marriage, but they also had sex almost every night. I think that might explain why Lois would associate a bad relationship with a man with the idea of having sex with him. And that might be part of the reason for why she still can't make love to Clark.
One of the relatively few male FoLCs who comment on these boards, Arawn, recently said that most nfics here are written for women, not for men. And when I read this part, it struck me that this Clark might, generally speaking, appeal to women more than to men. I'm talking about his superhuman patience, of course. As a woman, I, too, admire and love Clark's incredible patience with and love for Lois. Imagine having a husband like that, who loves you so much that just sharing his life with you is more important to him than having any sex life whatsoever! But perhaps, if I were a man, I might think that a man should not deny his own needs like that and sacrifice his married sex life just because his wife is such a fragile flower.
Anyway, it is going to be very interesting to see how Lois finally learns to really, really, really love Clark to the point that she can also
make love to him.
Ann