From the previous chapter:
“Please,” Clark said. Please, Lois. Please come over. Please let me talk to you. Please talk to me. Please.
They stared into each other’s eyes. Lois was the first to look away.
“OK,” she said ungraciously. “But only because Moose needs dinner.” She turned around and called Moose to her. He’d given up testing apartment doors and had moved on to sniffing Clark’s trousers. “Your apartment. Half an hour.” Her voice hardened. “And don’t follow me.”
“I won’t.” Clark held up his hands in surrender. The two yellow roses lay on the floor by him. Their petals fluttered in the breeze of Moose’s passing. The movement caught Clark’s eye, and he instinctively bent to pick up the flowers. By the time he looked back at Lois, she had already retreated into her apartment with Moose and locked the door.
“I won’t follow you,” Clark said quietly. She had sensed him earlier. Or maybe she just knew him well. Whatever the reason, he would honor her request.
He took the roses home with him. He still had hope.
**************************
The tentative knock on his door gladdened him. Clark had spent what seemed like an eternity (the past twenty minutes) worrying that Lois would change her mind and not come over after all. But, he realized as he hurried to answer the door, that was doing her a disservice. She had said she would come over, and Lois Lane did what she promised.
He opened the door. Moose, on a leash, jumped up to greet him. “Hello, Moose,” Clark said. “And hello, Lois.” He ushered them inside.
Lois did not answer him, and Clark wondered uneasily how far she was taking this “I’m not speaking to you” thing.
“I have dinner all set up, if you’re ready,” he babbled. Funny, it was usually Lois who babbled. Now Clark scrambled for words to fill the awkward silence. “Would you care for a glass of wine?”
Lois nodded. She knelt and took Moose off the leash. The dog promptly went on an exploration of Clark’s apartment, sniffing furniture and investigating floors. He went into the kitchen, but to Clark’s relief, Moose didn’t try to jump up and eat the food on the counters.
Clark took Lois’s coat, which she silently handed to him. She made her way over to his table in the dining area – they’d spent many a convivial moment there, with Clark cooking or the two of them enjoying takeout. Now she sat stiffly and uncomfortably. Clark had previously laid out place settings and water glasses, and she took a sip of water.
“Is Chardonnay OK?” Clark asked.
She nodded. He poured. She sipped.
“Uh, Lois?” Clark began hopefully.
“Dinner?” she asked archly.
“Oh, right. Dinner,” Clark said, deflated. “Um, let me get Moose settled first.”
He quickly assembled a bowl of boiled white rice and some cooked chicken breast. Moose had been watching and whining, and began nuzzling at the bowl even before Clark got it all the way to the floor. The dog finished off the meal in ten seconds, then licked the bowl for another fifteen. Looking hopefully at Clark, and getting no response, Moose then padded over to Lois, sat down next to her, and put his head in her lap.
“Good appetite,” Clark muttered. He hoped Lois would have a good appetite too. He suspected that she hadn’t eaten since their dinner together last night. He quickly served out their dinners – a small green salad, mixed steamed vegetables, and chicken cooked with rice and a creamy mushroom sauce. It was pure comfort food. It brought back fond memories of dinners with his parents. For dessert, he’d picked up another order of tiramisu from Ciao Amicis, the Italian restaurant where they’d had such a nice dinner last night. It sat on his kitchen counter in a decorative cardboard box.
Lois still hadn’t said anything, although she had drunk half her wine already. The awkward silence echoed through the room.
Clark took a bite of chicken.
Lois took a bite of chicken.
Clark poured himself some wine and sipped it. In his agitation, he barely tasted it.
Lois topped up her own wineglass and took another large swig.
They ate some salad. No one said anything.
Lois mashed up her rice and ate a large forkful.
Clark copied her.
Lois delicately cut up her vegetables. Her mannerly chewing made a faint noise. Clark could hear it, but no one else would have been able to unless, like him, they had super-hearing.
Clark drank some more wine.
Lois followed suit.
Clark’s fork clattered against his plate. He looked at Lois. Her eyes skittered away at his glance.
Moose whined. He wanted more chicken.
The whining broke Clark’s paralysis. He wanted to talk with Lois. No, strike that. He wanted Lois to talk to him. But she wasn’t talking to him. How to start?
“Moose,” Clark began, “I don’t know if you ever heard my story.”
The dog looked up at hearing his name.
“I grew up in Kansas,” Clark said, ostensibly addressing Moose but actually looking at Lois. “And I thought I was just a regular kid, till I got to be ten or eleven or so. And then I found out that I was getting strong. Really strong. I mean, most ten-year-old kids can’t lift up their dad’s tractor.”
Lois looked like she wanted to say something, but then held her tongue.
“And then, as time went by, I found myself able… I got more weird abilities. I mean, you’re a dog, so you wouldn’t know how abnormal it is to be able to see through solid objects, or set fire to something with your eyes.”
Lois scratched Moose’s head. It seemed to be a way for her to avoid meeting Clark’s gaze.
“Do you know how frightening that was? Even when I was ten, I knew something was wrong with me. I knew I had to hide.” Clark took a deep breath. “My mom and dad knew it too. They always told me, ‘Hide what you can do, Clark, or someone will strap you down in a laboratory and dissect you like a frog.’ So I hid.”
He let the words fade away. Another long silence filled the air.
Lois took the dog’s head in both hands and spoke directly to him. “Moose, maybe you don’t know about my childhood.” She wouldn’t look at Clark. “When I was ten, my father started spending more and more time away. And when I asked him where he was, he said he was doing medical research. But I found out that he was with his mistress, Mrs. Belcanto. And every time I asked him what he was doing, he lied to me.”
Ouch. Clark didn’t let the silence last this time.
“Moose,” Clark said. He sweetened the deal by taking a small piece of chicken off his plate. The Labrador rushed over and gobbled it down, then put his head on Clark’s lap. “Well, Moose, continuing my life story, I traveled around the world for a few years. And every time I got settled in somewhere, I had to leave. Because I couldn’t not save somebody if they needed it. And then somebody else would see Clark Kent doing something totally inhuman. So I would have to get out before questions were asked.”
“Moose,” Lois countered. She offered the dog a bigger piece of chicken. Moose, the pragmatist, trotted back over to Lois. “My mother started drinking when I was five. No, actually, she’d been drinking for years before that, but that’s when she really started with the heavy drinking. Every time I would ask her, ‘Mom, are you coming to my school play? Mom, will you be there to pick me up from school? Mom, will you make Lucy and me some lunch?’ she would say, ‘Yes, of course,’ and then she wouldn’t come. She was too busy drinking. She would promise me and then she’d break her promises. She was a liar.” Lois stared at Clark when she said this.
“I’m sensing a theme,” Clark said, forgetting to address Moose.
“Ya think?” Lois replied in elaborate sarcasm.
Clark scurried back to safer ground. Looking directly at the dog, he said, “So I got to Metropolis, got my dream job with the Daily Planet, and in walks this beautiful woman, Moose.” The traitorous canine didn’t come over in the absence of a chicken bribe. No, Moose kept his head lying on Lois’s lap, giving Lois an entreating puppy-dog gaze. “I wanted to stay, more than anything. I wanted to get to know her better. She was the most fascinating woman I’d ever seen. So I paid attention to what she said and what she did. Now, she didn’t pay too much attention to me, but one day she suggested that I bring a change of clothes to work. So I put on a costume.”
Lois choked. “That’s where you got the idea?” Then she realized she’d addressed him directly and looked down and gave Moose a ball of rice. The dog snapped it up, almost biting her fingers.
“Yep, from you. You invented Superman.”
“And then, Moose,” Lois said, recovering from her momentary slip of addressing Clark directly, “this guy is flying all around town, creating news, and being the best story of the century. And all the time it was my co-worker, and I was too stupid to see it. But he was lying to me, every day.”
“You never asked me, ‘Are you Superman?’” Clark said defensively.
“Yeah, like that’s a question you ask your co-workers every day,” Lois muttered.
“Besides, tell me that if I’d told you back then, you wouldn’t have turned me into a Pulitzer Prize,” Clark said, irritated and wanting to score a point.
“Maybe.”
“Yeah, maybe. Lois, you know as well as I do that you would have published. And I couldn’t take that chance. I need to be Clark Kent.” He abandoned the fiction of addressing the dog. Willing Lois to understand, he told her, “Lois, Clark Kent is who I am. Superman is what I do.”
“Oh.” Lois seemed a little taken aback. Clark saw that he’d cut off a nascent rant. Lois turned her attention to her plate and began eating again.
Clark followed suit.
Lois took another sip of wine. Her glass was empty. Clark went to pour more, giving Lois a questioning look. She nodded once, abruptly, and he filled her wineglass. She took another large gulp.
“I’m still getting my head around the fact that all the time, it was you. It wasn’t Superman. It was Clark Kent in a costume.”
Encouraged, Clark leaned forward. “That’s exactly it.”
Lois picked up her knife and viciously stabbed her chicken. The blade squeaked along the plate, much like fingernails across a blackboard. Clark winced. Lois took a bite of chicken and deliberately, slowly, chewed it. “And all the time I was following you, and asking for quotes, and dropping hints, you were laughing at me.”
“No! No! I wasn’t!”
“I bet you said, ‘There goes Lois again. She must be pretty stupid not to recognize her partner.’” The venom in her voice panicked Clark.
“No! Lois, no.” He took a deep breath. “I was happy you didn’t recognize me…” He took another, deeper breath. “Well, actually, I had mixed feelings about that. At first I was happy that you didn’t recognize me. Because you worked with me the closest. Your desk is right next to mine. If I could fool you..”
Lois’s high-powered glare made Clark realize he could have chosen a more tactful term.
“I mean, if you didn’t recognize me, given how much time we spent together, it mean that I was safe. Nobody else would recognize me either.”
“Yeah, like I said before, because it’s so common that the guy at the next desk over is a super-powered alien.” She gulped more wine.
“Lois, you’re the smartest woman I know. I live in awe of your reporting instinct, how you put clues together, how you come up with the solution that I could never come up with, not in a million years.” Clark had given up on dinner, and he blatantly forked up a large piece of chicken and offered it to Moose. The dog, always out for the main chance, quickly left Lois’s lap and came over to gobble down the morsel.
“Funny how I missed that big fat anomaly right there in the Planet newsroom. Gee, Clark is gone. Gee, Superman is there! You’d think I would have put it together,” Lois said disgustedly. Then her face hardened. “Of course, my partner was deliberately pulling the wool over my eyes!” She put a bigger piece of chicken on her fork and called Moose over from Clark. The dog came running to her and put his head back on her lap after eating the chicken.
Clark flinched. She really wasn’t taking this well at all. Her racing heartbeat and short choppy breaths told him that. “Lois,” he persevered, “I said I had mixed feelings. Yeah, when you didn’t recognize me in the Suit, I knew my identity was safe. But half the time I wanted you to recognize me. I wanted you to see the man behind the Suit.”
“For what? Superman taking me flying, giving me scoops, flirting with me – gosh, Clark, you had things pretty good right there.”
“No I didn’t!” Clark almost shouted. He moderated his tone at Lois’s flinch. “I did all that because I lo – I like you so much that I lost track of who I was when I was in the Suit.” He reached for his own wineglass and tossed back the entire contents. Too bad it wouldn’t affect him. “Superman has to be emotionless. Superman can’t have friends, or a family, or a girlfriend. They’d get used against him, hostages maybe.” He poured himself more wine and at Lois’s slight push-forward of her wineglass, topped hers up as well. “But when I was with you and I was Superman, you paid attention to me. I wasn’t the Hack From Nowheresville.”
Lois paled.
“Yes, I heard that,” Clark said bitterly. He breathed deeply before going on. “When I was in the Suit, you looked at me.” He leaned forward, not letting Lois look away. “So I forgot myself, and let part of Clark Kent show up in Superman. I flirted, and I took you flying, and I gave you scoops, because you paid attention to me when I was Superman. It was all I had.”
Lois finally looked away. Another silence echoed through Clark’s apartment. She drank more wine.
“So it’s my fault for not seeing you despite the fact that you took on another identity, adopted a preposterous costume, lied to me every day, and went to elaborate lengths to keep me from seeing you?” Lois finally asked. Her words scythed through the silence.
Depression coursed through Clark. Her words pointed out the idiocy of his position. “No. Nothing is your fault. If it’s anyone’s fault, it’s all mine,” Clark said quietly. He leaned back, defeated. “I didn’t really think this through. I set up the Superman identity to help people, so I could use my powers openly. I never thought it would get this big. I had no idea.”
“Clark, you call yourself a journalist?” Lois asked incredulously. “Of course a flying man will get headlines. And when it turns out he’s an alien… you’re talking story of the millennium here.”
“I realized that, later on,” Clark admitted. “Too late. I was the flying guy, and flying, well, it’s normal to me now. I didn’t think it would be that big of a deal. But I’d gone public by then, and I couldn’t undo it. I didn’t think ahead.”
Lois snorted.
“But Lois,” Clark said, trying to put all the sincerity he felt into his words, “You’re right. I started out by telling a lie, and then each lie I told needed fifteen more lies to support it.”
Her heartbeat slowed a little. “So I’m right! You’re a big fat liar.”
“I’m a big fat liar,” Clark echoed. He had to admit it. It was true that he was a liar. The irony almost choked him.
“So why did you tell me the truth now?” Lois actually seemed brighter. It was as if making him admit that he was a liar had relieved some pressure. Her tone was still acid but it was much less bitter. “Did I finally meet your stringent criteria? Am I a member of the Superman club now? Was the moon in a triple eclipse or something?”
Clark brightened slightly. “I’ve gotten to know you, and hopefully you’ve gotten to know me.” He ignored Lois’s softly hooted catcall. “You’re my best friend, Lois.” He gestured to the vase full of twenty-four yellow roses across the table. “That bouquet is for you. It’s for friendship. Because whether I’m playing Superman or I’m being Clark Kent, you’re my best friend either way.”
Lois ignored his deflecting tactic and speared him with her gaze. “So why now? Why tell me now?”
Clark fortified himself with another sip of wine. His hand trembled slightly. “Well, given how we talked about maybe taking this to the next step, um, it was time.”
“Uh-huh. It was time. Time now.” Lois’s heart had started beating rapidly again. “Couldn’t it have been time earlier? Why couldn’t you have told me earlier?”
“Um, well, at first I didn’t know you very well,” Clark temporized. “When you told me that getting a newspaper story was like a war, I got a little shy. Lois, when we first met – in fact, that whole first year – I was afraid that you’d tell my secret and it would end up on the front page of the Daily Planet.”
“Hmm.” Lois actually seemed to be considering this instead of leaping to deny it.
Encouraged, Clark went on. “Then, as time went on, I got to know you better. I got to know the Lois Lane you keep under the façade.”
“You’re the only one with a façade in this room.”
Clark decided to ignore that comment. He focused on Lois. “I saw the Lois Lane who cared, the Lois who had passion for truth and justice, the Lois who stuck to whatever she started, the Lois who wouldn’t give up.” His voice lowered. “I saw the Lois who is incredibly loyal to her friends, the Lois who sticks to them through thick and thin.” Clark leaned back, surprised at what had come out of his mouth. But every word of it was true.
He looked at Lois carefully. Was she… was she crying? Was there an actual tear on her cheek? She’d definitely lost her hard-edged anger.
“So,” Lois said, after a long minute. “So…” she pulled out a tissue and blew her nose. She was crying. “If I’m such a good friend, if I’m so loyal, why didn’t you trust me? Why didn’t you tell me?” She speared him with a tear-filled glance. “Why did you let me believe that you’d been shot?”
“What?”
“When we were in the nightclub with the gangsters. You got shot. And you let me believe you were dead!” Lois blew her nose again defiantly, and then took another gulp from her wineglass.
“Oh. That.”
“Yes. That.” Lois seemed to have herself under a little more control now. “Why didn’t you tell me then, Clark? Why did you let me go on believing that I’d led my partner and best friend into an ambush, and that he died protecting me?”
“Lois, I…” Clark trailed off. How to explain the confusion of those days? “I don’t know. No, what I do know is that the first thing I should do is say I’m sorry.”
Lois sniffed briefly. His apology was obviously not accepted.
“You’re right. I should have told you then. But I was so lost myself, so confused. Clark Kent was ‘dead’ that night – he’d been shot in the chest three times, in front of a roomful of witnesses.”
“But you weren’t dead.”
“Yes, I was!” Clark slammed his hand to the table. It wobbled. Moose whined. “I was officially dead. How could I – Clark Kent – explain surviving three gunshot wounds to the chest?”
Lois didn’t meet his eyes.
“So I was grieving too. I thought I’d lost everything. Everything that made life worthwhile – my life in Metropolis, my job, Perry, Jimmy.” His voice lowered. “You.”
Lois was looking at him now.
“You’d lost your best friend and partner – well, at that moment, so did I. I couldn’t be around Lois Lane anymore. Because Superman doesn’t work at the Daily Planet. Superman doesn’t go to ballgames with Perry and Jimmy. Superman doesn’t hear you go off on some weird tangent and secretly love it.” Clark willed her to see it. “Clark Kent was officially dead, and Superman was all that was left.”
“Yadda yadda yadda,” Lois said bitterly. “So Clark Kent was dead. But you weren’t really dead. You were alive. You were just faking it. Why not tell me the truth?” Now her tears were overflowing again. “Did you know how much I cried? Did you know how much I hurt? Why didn’t you tell me? We could have come up with something to explain it.” She wiped them away and tossed off the remaining contents of her wineglass.
“I’m sorry,” Clark said. “I’m sorry.” Only now did it dawn on him what a horrible thing he’d done to Lois. Her tears made him realize just how badly he’d messed up. His shoulders slumped. This wasn’t something that could quickly or easily be forgiven.
He tried to explain, knowing it would sound lame and stupid and unconvincing and heartless. “I was so confused myself… all my life I’d hidden… now, all I could think of was what I’d lost…” All his reasoning, all his frantic speculations from that time were now revealed to be wrong thinking.
He took a deep breath. “You’re right. I should have told you then.” He saw it now. Clark poured himself another glass of wine and knocked it back, wishing that alcohol affected him. This seemed a good night to drown his sorrows.
Lois was well on the way to drowning hers, based on her wobbly refill of her own glass. She sipped it.
They stared at each other across the table. The air was full of the scent of lost opportunities.
“Lois…” He couldn’t let their dinner end like this. Then he heard the sirens. Automatically he cocked his head, triangulating and distancing. “Oh God, not now…”
“Someone needs you?” Lois asked delicately.
Clark turned back to her, his attention divided. He had to talk with her, he had to. But more sirens joined the original set. A tenement fire near Hobbs Bay – already he heard cries for Superman.
Lois didn’t wait for his confirmation. Clark saw that she had made the connection. When he got that look on his face, Clark Kent was going to run out on her with a feeble excuse. Except now she knew why.
“That’s OK – it’s time for me to go home anyway,” she said, pushing her half-eaten plate to the center of the table.
“Lois…”
“Go. Go be Superman,” she said bitterly. Then, less bitterly, “People need you.” She flicked her hands at him. She tried to stand up and she wobbled.
With a quick burst of super-speed, Clark was at her side. He caught her before she fell over.
“How’d you do that?” Lois asked owlishly. She looked back and forth between him and where he’d been, on the other side of the table.
He eased her down so she sat on his couch. “I told you. I’m Superman.” Clark spun into the Suit in front of her. “Lois… please stay here.”
Her jaw dropped at his spin-change. Then she collected herself. “Stay here? Why? So you can tell me another fairy tale?”
“No, because you just had about five glasses of wine,” Clark felt compelled to point out.
“I’m fine.”
“Lois – “ the sirens were getting louder, and now that Clark was tuned into the scene, he could hear screams. He had to leave soon. “Lois, you can’t drive with all that wine on board.” He overrode her automatic protest. “Think about this. If you get pulled over, if you get arrested, you know what will happen to your credibility as a reporter.” That was the one card he had to play. He couldn’t forbid her to leave – Obstinate Lois would leave, just to spite him. But he could point out the danger to her professionalism.
She considered it for a moment. “OK.” The fact that she agreed so quickly told Clark that she also knew she shouldn’t be driving.
“Your word? You promise you won’t drive home? You’ll wait for me to drive you home?” Clark was almost frantic but he had to pin her down. If Lois gave her word, she would keep it.
“OK. I promise,” Lois said sullenly.
“You know where everything is. I’ll be back soon.” He hoped. He left in a whirl of super-speed. With his last glance, he saw Lois staring blankly at the floor.
