Staring at the familiar red cloth bundle, I sighed. It was the third set I’d discovered this month.
The life of an air conditioner repairman in Metropolis wasn’t easy at the best of times. Between the sullen customers, constant traffic jams and blistering heat, it was an unforgiving job at the best of times.
None of it was made any easier by the bundles that were being left all over the city. Others in the profession had mentioned finding the same thing in hiding places all over the city.
You had to wonder what sort of compulsion would force someone like him to stash bundles like this all over the city; was he less human than he looked? Was he like a magpie, compelled to collect things in hard to reach places.
No one went to the press and no one said anything because angering a man who could bench press a space shuttle seemed foolish at the very least.
Plus, odds were that he’s saved a brother in law or a cousin somewhere along the line. The man who made life for Superman wouldn’t just get booed in public, he’d get it at home as well.
Still, the thought of hundreds of boots and capes being scattered all over the city made me wonder. Why did he bother? Where were the hundreds of suits to match?
***********
“There’s one thing I don’t get,” Lois said slowly. “You wear the suit under your clothes, right?”
Nodding, Clark watched her carefully. She’d taken the revelation better than he’d expected.
“But where do you keep your boots and cape?”
He smirked. “Don’t you think there should be some mystery left in the relationship?”
Truthfully, he didn’t want to admit that the answer was simple; he’d stashed copies all over the city so that he was never more than a millisecond away from a set. He could have simply stashed a set at home, but there were times were even a few seconds made all the difference between life or death.
Of course, Lois wasn’t going to be pleased that he was still paying them off. Six hundred pairs of ski boots from a company in Colorado weren’t cheap, and on his salary he’d had to put them on credit.
The fact that the capes were repeatedly being destroyed didn’t help, and neither did his conscience, which forced him to at least try to help pay for all the destroyed walls and property damage all over Metropolis.
Being a superhero was expensive.
Clark had an uneasy feeling that Lois was going to expect him to crush coal into diamonds or look for buried treasure when she heard just how big a debt he’d accumulated.
She’d probably also insist that he stop breaking through walls.
But breaking through walls was fun, and he really didn’t want to stop, even if he always felt a little guilty later.
Lois shook her head. “So don’t tell me. You probably just pull them out of your-“
“Lois!” he said, shocked.
“I was going to say back pocket. You compress them down with super speed and then bring them back….”
Clark shook his head. Give a guy a few dozen superpowers and people would assume he could do anything.
“Sure…that’s it.”
“Or maybe you have an extradimensional pocket.”
“I’m from Krypton, not Gallifrey,” Clark said. At her look he shrugged. “What, so I liked shows with alien heroes growing up.”
“Maybe you have a super hiding power.”
“Like my super cooking power, or super dog walking abilities? You can’t just tack on the word super to everything I do…”
“You could always just tell me.”
He shook his head. “I’ve said too much.”
“Maybe they are magic boots and you bought them from the fairies.”
“There’s no such thing as magic boots,” he found himself saying.
“But there are fairies?” she asked.
He scowled. “You aren’t going to let this go, are you?”
“Don’t tell me…Martians are real. Atlantis, mer-people, cities with talking gorillas…”
Clark felt himself flushing at Lois’s incredulous response to what she saw on his face. He’d encountered amazing things in his travels; things he had never bothered to mention to Lois. He’d thought that his secrets were going to end with his secret identity, but it now occurred to him that there was an entire world of things he hadn’t yet shared with Lois.
At least some of the secrets he had would take her mind off the stupid boots.
He hoped.
