In the center of the table stood a dinner plate piled with pastries and a large bowl of fruit salad. Lois helped herself to a chocolate croissant as she sat and took a bite.
“Clark! This is amazing! Where did you get it? I’ve never found anything this good in Metropolis!” A thought occurred to her and she continued, “Wait, don’t tell me you actually flew to Paris for breakfast?!”
“Actually, I only flew to Chicago. But the couple who run the bakery are from Belgium, so it is semi-European. Indirectly, at least.”
Lois gave her head a shake. “I can’t believe I’m having this conversation. This is just so weird.”
“It works for us, though,” Clark replied with a smile and they ate in companionable silence until Lois remembered something.
“Wait a minute! A good horse is like a member of the family?”
Clarked laughed, and replied, “Busted; that was Shanghai. I’d only been in town for a week. I had no idea where to get good Chinese food in Metropolis, but I so wanted to impress you.”
“Clark, I am the queen of take-out. If I’d known you could fly it in from anywhere on the planet I might not have told you not to fall for me.”
“Doesn’t matter,” he replied around a bite of fruit salad, “you were a week too late as it was.”
“What do you mean?”
Clark’s face became serious and he reached to place his hand over hers. “Lois, I fell in love with you the moment you came bursting into Perry’s office during my first interview. It wasn’t the same love that I have for you now; I’ve grown to love you more and more as we’ve grown up and grown together over the years, but it was love. I knew right then and there that I just had to get to know you. That’s why I wrote up the mood piece that you didn’t want. I just had to get Perry to give me a chance; I had to find a way to be near you.”
“You’re kidding! You knew that early? Clark, those early days are so fresh in my memory. Besides yesterday, they *are* my memory of you. And, seeing how you treat me now, I’m ashamed of how I’ve been treating you the last few weeks. That is, the last few weeks that I remember, you know what I mean.”
“It’s okay, Lois. That water is *way* under the bridge. It took a while for you to realize that I wasn’t another Claude. Or Paul, or Sam Lane. You’d been hurt, and you were protecting yourself in the only way you knew how.”
“And you weren’t scared off. Most men would be.”
“I’m not most men. And you’re not most women. I could see who you were hiding underneath that prickly exterior. Maybe because I was hiding something, myself. Take off your wedding ring.”
“What?”
“Take it off; read the inscription.”
Lois pulled off the gold band and held it under the light. In tiny script, she read “CK to LL 10-6-96. I have loved you from the beginning.”
“Clark! That’s beautiful!” She put her ring back on and helped herself to a large scoop of fruit salad. The obvious question arose in her mind. “What does your ring say?”
Smiling, he took his ring off and handed it to her. In the same tiny script, she read “LL to CK 10-6-96. I will love you till the end.”
Was that true? Did she love him? She hardly knew him. Yet, sitting across the breakfast table from this near stranger, she felt less like a stranger than she could ever remember feeling before. Even as a girl, before her parents split up, she could never remember feeling this much at home. What was it about Clark Kent that made her feel that her layers of self-protection, so carefully built up and maintained over the course of a lifetime, were utterly superfluous?
They were. That’s what it was. For the first time in her life, she was in the presence of another person whom there was absolutely no need for her to impress. She didn’t have to be any particular way for him to respect her. Whatever she might have once needed to prove to him had been proven long ago. Last night she had been a complete and utter wreck, not because she had chosen to trust him but because she had had no conscious choice; she had simply reached the end of her ability to hold herself together. And he had shown his regard for her by his reaction. He loved her. That was crystal clear. It showed in his every word, every look, every touch. And, in the face of that obvious love, she couldn’t help but love him back.
And she needed to tell him so. She handed him back his ring, and as he reached for it she grasped his hand in hers. “Clark, there’s a lot I don’t know about my life, but I do know you love me, and I love you, too.”
He squeezed her hand and replied, “I know you do, Lois. And the rest will come back.” He leaned across the table to kiss her reassuringly.
At that moment, a wave of panic tried to overwhelm her as she remembered just what “the rest” included. She beat it down by sheer force of will. She didn’t have any choice. This was her life now, and she had to learn how to live it.
“Yeah, well, it had better come back soon, Clark, because I can tell you right now that I don’t know how to do any of this.” Her expansive arm-waving took in the kitchen, the house, her whole life. “I barely made it through one afternoon at work, and that was only because everyone was too pre-occupied with the Metro collapse to pay much attention to me. I bluffed my way through the dinner conversation, but as it is you and Jimmy had to take up the slack. And, Clark! We have children! I don’t even know how to be a decent friend, let alone a wife or a mother. I don’t do well with relationships, Clark, and I don’t do well with kids; how am I going to handle three kids who think I’m their Mommy?” Okay, so maybe that wave of panic hadn’t been beaten down so far after all.
“Lois, calm down. You can do this.” At her disbelieving look, he continued, “I felt the same way when I lost my memory. The whole world was desperately searching for Superman, waiting for him to save the day, and my parents showed up and told me that I was him. I had no idea how to be Superman.”
“What did you do?”
“I remembered. You helped me remember. And you will remember, too. Lois, you *do* know how to do all of those things. You’re a terrific reporter, a wonderful wife, and an amazing mom. It’s all in there, somewhere. We just have to find the key to let it out. Now, why don’t you tell me exactly what happened yesterday morning?”
So Lois related her encounter with the stranger and his memory-erasing machine. Clark drew in a sharp breath when she told him the man’s assumed name, but he let her finish her story. As she continued, he began combing the fingers of one hand through his hair in what seemed to her a nervous gesture. When she finished, he stood up without a word and took a couple of turns about the kitchen.
Lois was completely non-plussed by this reaction. Up until now, he had taken everything in his stride, but her story seemed to have thrown him for a loop. Lois didn’t know how to respond to this sudden change in his demeanor. She just turned in her seat so she could keep an eye on him and waited for him to stop pacing.
Finally, he came to a stop in front of her and leaned back against the kitchen island. Taking a deep breath, as if he were steeling himself for an unpleasant task, he spoke. “Lois, I’ve made a terrible mistake and I owe you a tremendous apology.”
“Clark? What are you talking about? You’re scaring me.”
“I’m sorry, Lois. This is my fault. I should have asked for more details last night. I should have realized sooner. You don’t have amnesia. John Doe didn’t erase your memories. He wouldn’t know how.”
“Of course he did, Clark! How else would I have lost all knowledge of the last ten years?”
“You didn’t, Lois. You didn’t lose any knowledge at all.” She started to argue again, but he kept talking. “John Doe’s real name is Tempus. He’s from the future. I’ve dealt with him before. He can’t erase memories—as far as I know, anyway. But he can travel through time. That machine you described sounds like a soul-tracker. From what you’ve told me, I believe that Tempus traveled back to 1993 and switched your consciousness…with my wife’s.”
“What? Clark, I thought I *was* your wife! What are you saying?”
“That you are the woman I fell in love with ten years ago. But you’re not the woman I married. My wife’s consciousness…her soul, if you will, was switched with yours. So, you ended up in her body ten years in your future, and she ended up in yours, ten years in her past.”
“What? Why? Even assuming that this…Tempus…had some machine that was capable of doing such a thing, why would he want to? What does he get out of it?”
“What does Tempus ever get out of anything he does? He gives us a royal headache, which is all he seems to care about. He’s a psychopath, Lois; he’s not rational.”
Lois could feel a lump forming in her throat. It had been such a beautiful fantasy, but now the bubble was bursting. He didn’t love her after all. He wasn’t her husband. He wasn’t hers at all. That’s why he was suddenly keeping his distance. She wasn’t his wife, wasn’t the woman he’d thought she’d been when he lavished all that warmth and affection on her. A bitter tear of disappointment trickled down one cheek.
“Hey, come here.” He held his arms out to her. That look of concern was back.
She went timidly into his embrace. She didn’t really belong there. She was usurping the rightful place of his wife. But she needed him. And he still seemed to care about her, at least a little. At the moment, she’d take what she could get.
And that very thought grated. What was the matter with her? Ever since she’d stepped out of that stupid newsstand yesterday morning, she’d been accepting whatever this new world threw at her without question. She’d been reacting, not acting, and that just wasn’t her style. New data had been coming at her so fast that she hadn’t been able to get her feet under her, to get ahead of the wave. And she’d felt that she had no choice. But not any more.
Lois pushed herself out of Clark’s embrace and stood up straight. “You know, what, Clark?” She began her own circuit around the kitchen, her arms gesticulating wildly as she spoke. “I have had it. I have just had it! Who does this creep think he is? Two days ago, I was perfectly content. I had my trendy little apartment with my sister; my job, which, by the way, I am damn good at; and a junior partner, who, to be honest, was sometimes a bit of a flake. Oh, yeah, and a huge crush on the new celebrity in town. Then, thanks to Mr. 'I’m-Going-to-Screw-with-Lois-Just-for-Kicks,' I’m suddenly dumped here in Wonderland, where my sister is married to the office gofer, my crush is my husband, but, no! He’s not! Oh, wait, yes, he is, but he’s not just the celebrity. That annoying side-kick partner turns out to be this Mr. GQ Reporter with more Kerths than even I’ve got, except no, I’ve actually got more, I just don’t remember them. And he’s good to me. We’re talking Ivory-Tower-Hero-You-Could-Write-a-Romance-Novel-About-This-Guy good. And, by the way, come Sunday there’s going to be kids involved, so I hope you can bone up on the Mommy stuff real quick, Lois. And, just when I’m starting to love this life that I didn’t want and never asked for, he yanks it all away again! Well, that just pisses me off!”
Her pacing and her tirade came to a stop at the same time. She looked at Clark, only to see a broad smile that, at the moment, didn’t seem the most appropriate response to their situation.
“What?! What could you possibly be smiling about?” she demanded.
“You, Lois. Mad Dog Lane. *This* is why I fell in love with you.”
“You’re kidding. That’s just plain weird.”
“Nope. It takes a will like yours to put up with all the craziness of our life. Now, come on, I think it’s time get you back home.”
“What, you have a time machine and a…soul tracker?...in your pocket?”
“No, but I do have some ideas about how to contact….” he broke off, suddenly grasping her by the shoulders to keep her from running into the living room, where, through the open doorway, they could both see a line of bright light spreading into a square, through which stepped, “….Mr. Wells.”
[Yes, I know. This isn't really an end. They haven't really solved anything yet. In fact they've only just figured out what the real problem is. So, it's more like Part 1 of 3. It's coming, I promise. Stay tuned for Flashback.]
