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Pride, Prejudice and Jimmy Choos
[-9-]
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Walking with her thumbs interlocked through the belt loops of the jeans she wore, Lois smiled as she sidestepped two little boys that were chasing each other through the market stalls.
As she walked through the Lowell County Farmers Market, Lois couldn’t help but think to herself that it was nothing like The Grove in Los Angeles. Hollywood’s version of a farmer's market was like anything else that went through the Hollywood machine. It was big, it was loud, it was over-the-top, and it was often used as a vehicle for celebs to get their pictures taken.
The market she was at today, on the other hand, was quaint and quiet. The vendors were polite as a rule—not because they were counting on you buying something, but because they just were happy to be out in the open exchanging wares and conversations with their neighbors. In fact, Lois hadn’t purchased anything yet, and had already tasted more samples than she’d ever received in an Awards Ceremony swag bag.
As she smiled and nodded at the grandfatherly-looking man running an odd-and-ends booth, she realized that she was getting fond of the slow-plow pace of this town. Here, she didn’t have to worry about the paparazzi jumping out from behind trees or sighting her with the help of telephoto lenses. She didn’t have to fight crowds to go in and out of stores and she didn’t have to worry about cameras being hidden in sewers by creepy voyeur photogs looking to score ‘undercover’ shots.
She could really learn to handle a place like this… in small doses, of course. Smallville was proving to be a place where she could let her hair down and relax in her skin. She had even let her sunglasses rest on top of her head instead of hiding her eyes as usual. Here, she wasn’t Lola Dakota… hell, here she wasn’t even Lois Lane. She was just the young woman that was staying at the Kent Farm for a few weeks. It was obvious that people were curious, but first and foremost, they were polite. So, even though they wanted to know more, they didn’t push.
Lois was enjoying her anonymity—perhaps for the first time in her life. Her dad had mentioned something about ‘gaining perspective’ when he had unceremoniously dropped her at the corner of Nowhere and Vine, and she was starting to think that this qualified. She was finally understanding what Lola Dakota was all about. *This*--this ability to walk around without people fawning, falling and fanfaring—was why Lola existed. Before arriving at the Kent Farm, Lois had been seriously considering giving up the dual identities and just being Lola forever, but now she could see that Lois wasn’t possible without Lola—and vice versa.
One of them was a caricature and the other was flesh and blood, but Lois couldn’t have one without the other.
It was because Lola Dakota was so larger-than-life that Lois Lane could walk around and smile at strangers. Smiling was something she could do because when the people here smiled back, she could rest assured that it wasn’t because they wanted something from her—it was because they didn’t.
Maybe what it all boiled down to was that Lois Lane was who she was (or who she was learning to be) and Lola Dakota was what she could do.
Whatever the case was, she knew that she couldn’t allow herself to get too comfortable in her new-slash-old skin because it would only take one false move for Jiminez Olsen and his ilk to descend upon this town like a plague of locusts. She needed to be careful… and she needed to avoid risky situations like last night’s karaoke fest.
“I’ve got everything loaded in the truck.”
The sound of Clark’s voice coming from beside her pulled Lois from her thoughts. “What?”
“The truck,” he repeated. “It’s all loaded up.”
Lois blinked up at him, squinting in the sunlight. “Oh, I guess we should go, then.”
He shook his head. “No. I mean, we can walk around a bit more. If you want to, that is.”
“But the stuff is just sitting in the bed of the truck,” she countered in concern.
“It’s safe,” he assured with a slight smile. “It’s Smallville.”
Lois looked at him for a few silent seconds more before nodding and starting to walk again. She bit her lower lip unconsciously as she considered the young man walking beside her. He appeared somewhat restless and the change in behavior made her a little wary. She had teased him about the bathtub incident, but now she was wondering if it was a bigger deal than she had thought.
The fact that he’d accidently barged in on her ‘tub time’ had been comical at the most. She’d been covered by suds, (Mounds of them, she thought to herself with a smirk) so she hadn’t been overly concerned—the bikinis she’d worn on magazine cover photo shoots showed more than he could have possibly seen—but now that he was acting differently around her, she realized that those reactions fit Lola, not Lois. As Lois, she probably should have dove for a towel or at least not treated the encounter so lightly. The last thing she needed to do was draw any extra attention.
They continued to walk through the market and Lois ignored the continuous number of non-essential facts that Clark verbalized as they passed the different stands. Against her will, she’d learned that Mitchell, South Dakota was home to a Corn Palace, that coconut water could be used as a substitute for blood plasma in an emergency, and that peanut oil could be used to make dynamite. Finally, a comment that he supplied while she was studying the label on Mrs. Boatwright’s Homemade Honey caused her to glare at him in exasperation.
“It’s true,” he said with a shrug. “It’s called Mellified Man.”
“And how exactly do you know about dead people being steeped in honey?” Lois asked, setting the jar back on the display.
“It was in a book on cadavers.” When Lois frowned, he added, “Hey, it was on the New York Times bestseller’s list. You should read it.” He paused. “Wait, you do read, don’t you?”
Lois shifted her jaw and turned away from him. He caught up with her at the Talon’s mini-concession stand. When Lois lifted a bag of dark roast beans to her nose, Clark smirked.
“Did you know that the most expensive coffee beans in the world come from poop?”
Trying valiantly to go back to ignoring him, Lois placed the bag she held back on the table before picking up another blend.
“Kopi Luwak beans,” Clark continued, undaunted. “The partially-digested beans are harvested from civet spore.”
“Okay! Enough!” Lois abandoned her facade and spun to face him. “Why are you torturing me?”
“Torturing?” Clark asked innocently. “I was just trying to impress you with my wealth of knowledge.”
Hearing the mocking edge to his tone, Lois narrowed her eyes.
“How does it feel?” Clark asked smugly.
“How does what feel?”
He shrugged. “Well, I’m guessing that you’re about as interested in the wide world of foods as I am in the comings and goings of the Hiltons, Hamptons and Hudsons.”
Lois crossed her arms over her chest. “So you *were* listening to me,” she challenged.
“Not the point,” he replied, mimicking her posture.
Seeing his smirk, Lois let her shoulders droop. He was flirting again. “Clark,” she sighed. “I thought we talked about this last night…”
His eyebrows rose. “You told me not to fall for you. Believe me, that’s not going to happen.”
Surprisingly offended, Lois was about to respond when he continued, “I’m just giving you a taste of your own medicine. Besides, you’re the one who needs to beware of falling for me.”
Lois almost doubled over when she burst out laughing at that. “Oh really?” she was finally able to ask.
For his part, Clark seemed to take her outburst in stride. “Umhmm. See, I started thinking about what you said last night…” He paused, gave her a serious look, and said, “…the small town flirting thing, in case you thought something else.” Then the smirk was back. “And the way I see it, you’re a city girl, so you’re probably used to slick-haired guys giving you bad pick-up lines and buying you drinks in bars.”
Lois’s laughter tampered down to a chuckle as she found herself wondering where he was going with all of this.
He went on, “So it makes sense that you were confused…”—Lois arched an eyebrow at that—“…in thinking that my being nice to you was the equivalent of flirting in a small town. But it isn’t.”
“It isn’t,” Lois repeated warily, still not sure where the conversation was heading.
“No, it isn’t. But I’m going to show you what it is.”
Lois frowned. “It? As in…”
“Flirting,” Clark answered nonchalantly. “Smallville style.”
Lois lifted a hand to cover her mouth, but it did nothing to hide the wide smile that barely kept her hysterics at bay. She couldn’t understand how he could say any of this with a straight face. She drew in a breath and cleared her throat. “And, um, what makes you think that *I* am in any danger of being…” she searched her mind for an appropriate word, “…vulnerable to your charms?”
“Well, you tried to flirt with me when you first got here, so I figure…” he trailed off and shrugged, tucking his hands in the pockets of his jeans and looking all too self-satisfied for Lois’s liking.
Lois stopped laughing and studied his expression. “You figure, what?”
Clark’s small smile morphed into a wide grin. He seemed to like putting her on the ropes. “That you think I’m cute.”
Lois felt any vestiges of her humorous demeanor drop. “Correction,” she countered wryly. “I *used* to think you were cute.” She felt her own measure of self-satisfaction when his brow furrowed in confused rejection.
What she didn’t tell him—and what she wouldn’t tell him even under threat of death—was that cute was something associated with little kids and puppies, and though she hated the admission… Lois was starting to see Clark Kent as grown-man attractive.
And that, she thought as she turned on her heel and stalked toward the truck, was going to make her life a lot more complicated—something she hadn’t even thought was possible.
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Clark massaged the back of his neck with his right hand as he waited. After his karaoke plan had failed, he’d realized that he needed to try a different approach to getting Lois to open up about her music. Finding out why she wouldn’t sing in public had become somewhat of a secret obsession of his. Either she didn’t think that she had a voice—which was totally wrong—or she was shy—which was totally out of character.
The whole flirting thing had been a spur of the moment idea that had come to him when he was loading the truck. It had occurred to him that the only way to get Lois to not knock him off of his game was to knock her off of hers first. He had to keep her off kilter, and turning her tricks back on her seemed to be a good way to do it. So far she’d either ignored his attempts or shot them down, but he was perseverant if nothing else.
He shifted the items he was holding and stepped to the door to knock again. “Lois, I’m still here,” he called through the cottage’s door. “You know, ignoring me doesn’t give the impression that you’re unaffected, it just makes it seem like you’re afr…”
The sudden movement of the door swinging open cut off his words. “What do you want?” Lois demanded.
Clark took in her angry glare, white tank top and old jeans and smiled. “These are for you,” he said lifting his hand.
“What are those?” Lois asked, not moving to accept.
“They’re flowers, Lois,” he answered, shaking his head. “Hasn’t a guy given you flowers before?”
She looked at him for a moment before taking the offered items with a noncommittal grunt. “Thanks.”
“Want to take a walk?”
“Why?”
Clark laughed. “Because that’s what people do. They walk and they talk.” He lifted his hand and left it palm upward as an invitation.
After looking from his face to his hand a couple of times, she tilted her head. “Fine.” Tossing the flowers into the room behind her, she stepped out of the little house and pulled the door shut behind her. Then, she faced him with a raised brow.
“I had a feeling you’d do that,” Clark said with a small sigh, “so I saved one.” He pulled his other hand from behind his back to reveal a lone wildflower. See, Lois was doing everything in her power to get him to drop the ruse, and he was doing everything in his power to keep it going. Smiling at her defeated look, he reached up and tucked the flower behind her ear.
“I’m only letting that stay because I have a feeling you’ve got more hidden on you,” she huffed, brushing past him to go down the steps.
“Fair enough,” Clark said as he followed.
Lois walked with her arms over her chest and he walked along side her for a few minutes before she finally spoke. “So what happened to the talking part?”
“Oh, right.” Clark smirked to himself, having expected her to not be able to take silence for too long. “What’s your favorite color?”
She turned her head long enough to frown at him. “I don’t have one.”
“That’s sad,” Clark replied. “Mine’s blue… but sometimes I like red.” He moved so he was in front of her and began walking backwards. “If you had to choose right now, life or death, what color would it be?”
Lois scoffed. “Why would a color be life or death?”
Clark lifted his arms in an elaborate shrug. “Because… you have to cut the wire on a live bomb, I don’t know. What would it be? Three seconds.”
“Uhhhh…”
“Two seconds… we’re all going to die!”
“Um, goldenrod, I guess!”
Nodding, Clark turned so he was walking beside her again. “You couldn’t just say yellow?”
“No, because I don’t *like* yellow,” she answered, laughing.
“Right, because obviously goldenrod is more golden,” he teased. “I don’t know what I was thinking!”
Lois felt her guard slip a bit as Clark kept shooting nonsense questions while they walked. When they reached the fence at the end of the drive, he climbed up to sit on the top bar and she ducked under to sit on the bottom rung. They seemed to silently agree to not speak for the next several minutes as the sun slipped past the horizon.
It didn’t do any harm to answer his silly questions, and if that and handpicked flowers were the basis for whatever he was trying to prove with this flirting gig, than she wasn’t worried.
As if in response to her thoughts, he began asking questions again. “If you could do anything other than…” He paused in thought and looked down at her. “What is it that you do again?”
“You mean, like, in life?”
He nodded. “Yeah. For example, I’m a farmer. And you are…”
Lois considered the question for a few seconds. “I’m a socialite.”
“Okay,” Clark answered doubtfully. It didn’t appear that he considered that to be a profession, and silently, Lois had to agree. “Say you couldn’t be a socialite. What would you be?”
Frowning, Lois tried to come up with something far enough in left field that it wouldn’t connect to anything real. Surprisingly, she couldn’t. Artist was too close to musician, she couldn’t even say scientist or accountant with real gusto… “I don’t know. Maybe a… ” She shrugged. “I don’t know. I guess I never thought about it.”
Clark blinked at her and seemed to think about her answer for a moment. “You wouldn’t want to work in the music industry?”
She couldn’t help the way her head snapped when she looked up to look at him. “The music industry?”
“Yeah, I mean, with Chloe being a singer and your dad…”
Lois frowned and tilted her head.
“He’s a big-time producer right?”
“Did you Google me?” she asked, smirking. He dropped his head a little and she wished it had been lighter outside so she could see if he was blushing. Maybe if she could find out if his flirting wasn’t as innocuous as he was saying it was, she could cut him off before the pass. “You did, didn’t you?”
He chuckled. “Yeah,” he admitted. “But there was surprisingly little out there about you. Come to think of it, you must not be a very successful socialite if the only information that pops up under your name is just stuff about your dad and…” Then he sobered and Lois had a good feeling about what was coming next. “…Your mom,” he finished quietly.
Lois studied the ground for a long moment. There was a certain picture that was sure to pop up on any search engine when her name—not Lola’s—was entered. Just as iconoclastic as the historic image of little Jon-Jon Kennedy saluting his father, the image showed a small six year-old Lois dropping a large lily into an unseen grave somewhere below her. The contrast between the little girl dressed in white against a backdrop of all black-clad mourners was one that left stark impressions on anyone who viewed it.
Lois barely remembered anything other than scattered images from that day, but that picture was forever burned in her mind.
Clark cleared his throat. “So, you never considered doing music for yourself?” he asked, changing the subject a bit. Lois figured that he didn’t want the conversation to turn into a discussion of lost parents, and she agreed. “I mean, music seems like a family affair.”
Lois nibbled on her lower lip. “Nah, it’s not my thing. What about you?” she asked, shifting a little so she could peer up at him easier. “Why is a star football player who was on his way to being a hotshot lawyer still running the family farm?”
He smiled and looked down at her. “Did you Google me?”
Laughing, Lois repeated the answering line. “There was surprisingly little out there about you. No. I didn’t Google you—unless you consider Lana to be the equivalent to an internet search engine.”
Clark tilted his head as if to seriously consider that possibility, then smiled. “I think I might regret having introduced the two of you.”
“Just remember that it was your doing,” Lois quipped back.
“So, really,” Clark said, switching subjects again, “you come from a musical family but don’t want any part of the business yourself?”
Lois swallowed a sigh. They were back to this again. “Nope,” she said in what she hoped sounded like a nonchalant return. “And you never answered my question. Why aren’t you a lawyer?”
Clark got quiet and thoughtful and she wondered if she had wandered into forbidden territory. She suddenly put together the information about his dad’s death and his change in personality and realized that his loss was a lot fresher than hers.
She was about to tell him that he didn’t need to answer when he spoke. “Can I tell you something I haven’t ever told anyone else?”
Surprised, Lois shrugged. “Sure.”
He sighed. “I never wanted to be a lawyer,” he said. “That’s just what I told people as a cover.”
Lois was intrigued. Living with her own secret, she was often surprised to find out that other people—normal people—had secrets too. “A cover for what?”
“I don’t know,” he replied, genuinely sounding like he was thinking about it for the first time. “I guess sometimes when you have something you really want, it’s easier to keep it under wraps. That way, there’s no pressure to make it happen.”
Lois stared out at the darkening sky as she pondered the comment. It was strange how those words seemed to resonate with her situation. “So what do you want to be?” she asked, still gazing out in the distance.
He sighed, apparently still a little hesitant to share his revelation even though he’d already intimated that he would. “Not like it’s ever going to happen, but I always had a dream of working at The Daily Planet.”
“The newspaper?” she asked, stiffening and turning her head to look at him again.
Her discomfort appeared to go unnoticed. “Yes,” Clark answered with a wide smile. “It’s almost a relief just to say it out loud.”
Lois swallowed and forced herself to smile in return.
“What about you? Do you have any secrets?”
Lois felt like her throat was starting to close. “I, uh. I’m…” She licked her lips. This was strangely starting to feel like one of those ‘I’ll show you mine’ type deals.
As if she hadn’t already been feeling a little wary about the sanctity of her secret, Clark’s Daily Planet revelation had turned her paranoia on its head. Now along with everything else she had to worry about, her life story could become the big break that would make Clark’s pipe dream come true. There was no way she could allow that to happen.
“I’m really hungry,” she finally admitted.
Clark’s expression looked momentarily disappointed before he smiled and jumped down from the fence. “You’re right. Come on.”
Lois took the hand he held out and let him pull her up. “But your mom’s not back yet,” she protested as they started waking back toward the house.
“I know. I’m cooking tonight.”
Lois paused mid-step. “You can cook?”
Chuckling, Clark turned and faced her, once again walking backwards as he spoke. “There are a lot of things I can do, Lois Lane. A lot of things.”
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tbc...
