Green-Eyed Monster TOC Part 5 Part 6Yeah, Lois. You ‘owe him.’ You ‘owe him’ an explanation. You ‘owe him’ for once again rescuing you. You…No! ‘Rescue’ wasn’t the correct word. ‘Rescue’ was the word that that crazy man had used for Superman. ‘Save’? ‘Being there’? Oh, darn. ‘Rescue’ would have to do. Lois did ‘owe him’ an apology for using him.
But you aren’t going to give him that one, are you? Because you aren’t sorry. Not in the least.Lois pushed down her inner voice again. Clark was a friend.
Just a friend, she told herself.
Yeah and that’s all.She cleared her throat and realized that it had been over a minute since either of them had spoken and it was her turn. “I ‘owe you’ the opportunity to take me out to dinner. How about Saturday night?”
Clark raised a brow at her as his lips spread into a grin. “Saturday night isn’t good for me. I’m busy.”
Busy! Shouted her inner voice.
How could he be busy?!“And since you ‘owe me’ shouldn’t you be taking
me out?”
Lois’s tongue ran over her teeth. “Excuse me?” she practically snarled.
“Lois, I know.”
Her eyes widened. “Know what?”
Clark leaned against the door frame and smiled at her; his body more relaxed than it had been a few minutes before, more confident.
When he grins like that, his face makes the cutest dimples.“Jimmy told me, Lois. I know why you kissed me.”
Humiliation galore! He knows you like him.Lois’s cheeks turned slightly warmer as she argued with her thoughts. No! He knows that she
used him. “Oh.” She swallowed. “And you’re busy Saturday night?”
“Uh-huh. I’ve got plans.” That smile was reaching his eyes now.
Ooooh. That man was waiting for her to ask him out. As if!
You ‘owe him,’ Lois.Not a date.
Dinner, then? You said you were friends. Friends can have dinner, can’t they, Lois? You both need to eat.Lois couldn’t afford that.
You’re making excuses. You have that gift certificate. And *he* didn’t blow your cover by pushing you away when you kissed him.OK. Fine. She would take him to dinner. She hated to admit when her inner voice was right. “I guess I do ‘owe you’ dinner,” Lois said to Clark aloud. “But this isn’t a ‘date.’ This is a ‘thank you’.”
His grin practically exploded. “Thank you for kissing me?”
Her tongue crossed her front teeth again as she turned back to her magazine piles. “We could just forget it.”
“I won’t,” he murmured.
She glanced up at him. What had he meant by that? The kiss? Or that she ‘owed him’? Lois tried to ignore him as she went back to work, but could sense he was still standing there watching her. Therefore, it wasn’t a surprise when he broke the silence first.
“So?”
Lois glanced up from her v-cart. “Oh, fine. I guess I could take you out to dinner for not ratting me out to Claude and Cat. For not telling them that nothing happened between us. And for not telling them we’re just friends.” She
wasn’t going to suggest a night. Lois could just picture her asking him about night after night. And hearing of all of his ‘busy’ nights compared to all of her ‘free’ nights would just be too much. “What night is good for you?”
“Sunday dinner would be nice.”
Lois sneered at his smile. “As friends.”
“Of course.”
“Can you pick me up? I don’t have a car.” Lois wished she didn’t sound so desperate. “Or do you want to meet there?” She guessed she could figure out how to get there by bus or splurge on a cab.
“That seems fair,” Clark replied. “What time?”
“Anytime,” Lois said absently. “I have Sunday and Monday off.” She paused. “No, that’s not right. I have Saturday and Monday off. How about six pm?”
“Six pm, Sunday night. It’s a date,” called Clark as he left.
“It’s
not a date!” she grumbled. And she heard him chuckle.
Yes it is! Sang her inner voice.
A date! A date! Lois has a date!“With no more kissing, it would hardly be considered a date,” she mumbled to herself.
There could be kissing, hinted her passionate side.
You liked the kiss upstairs. Why then no more kisses?“Kissing Clark complicates things,” she told herself.
Then you sure opened up a can of worms, didn’t you?“I don’t want or need a boyfriend,” she grumbled.
Sure you do.“Clark is just a friend,” she reminded herself.
A friend with benefits?Lois covered her ears. “Stop it! Stop it! Stop it!” she told herself. “Clark is just a friend.”
Whatever you say, replied her inner voice.
You’re the boss. Lois heard another chuckle behind her and fell over. Didn’t anyone knock in this city?
“Losing an argument with yourself, Lois?” Perry asked with a satisfied grin. Then the smile slipped and she saw sadness in his eyes.
“How can I help you, Chief?” she inquired, not wanting to pry and wishing to change the subject.
Perry cleared his throat. “I’ve been thinking. I believe I know who our thief might be.”
“Great news, Chief.” Lois smiled. She hated knowing someone was using her workspace for a crime.
“Have you seen Jack back here? Does he come back here to chitchat? Or anything?” Perry looked at her hopefully.
“Jack? Jack, from music, Jack?”
Jack who got chased through the store by your wife Jack? Lois raised an eyebrow. “Perry, that’s a pretty serious accusation.”
“There is something about him I just don’t like,” Perry grumbled.
“Do you have any proof? Anything more concrete that he’s the guy?” she asked.
“He’s poor. He works in the music department, which is right outside this hallway.”
Lois slid her tongue over her teeth. “This doesn’t have anything to do with your wife trying to kiss him earlier, does it?” she inquired quietly.
“No! Of course not. I have facts! Cold hard facts,” he yelled and then his demeanor changed. His shoulders hunched. His face fell. He spoke softly with his head bowed. “No. No, I don’t. I just
want it to be him. Twenty-five years of marriage down the drain.” He snapped his fingers. “Like that. Don’t ever get married, Lois. You love someone and then they just betray you for no reason, no reason at all.”
Lois placed a reassuring hand on his arm. “I know, Chief. My Dad’s been cheating on Mom for over fifteen years. She hangs on – living with the pain – drowning her sorrows in a bottle.”
“So you think I should just cut my losses?” he asked, his eyes searching hers.
Lois didn’t want to be the impetus for any break-up. Suddenly, the voices from her two visitors ‘from the future’ echoed in her ears. “Are you sure she wasn’t drugged?”
“Huh? Who?” stammered her boss, confused.
“Your wife? Something a customer said to me earlier…” Lois shook her head. How could she explain the words of two psychos from ‘another dimension’?
“What? What? If you know something about this, Lois…” Hope glimmered in Perry’s eyes.
“I had some guys in my newsstand earlier -- clearly insane – but…” She took a deep breath and plunged ahead. “They said that Miranda was spraying the people at her book signing with a pheromone perfume – a mind altering drug.”
Perry thought about that for a couple of minutes. “That would explain some of the strange behavior at the bookstore today.” He raised a brow. “Did she get you?”
“No!” Lois gasped. Had her kiss with Clark gone throughout the store already? “Otherwise I would have danced the Dance of the Seven Veils. Or so I was told.” She snickered.
“Excuse me?”
She waved the words out of the air.
Perry continued to look at her with a strange expression and then shook his head. “So these ‘crazy guys’ in your department, did you catch a name? The police will want to know.”
Lois blushed and looked away. Her voice was barely audible when she responded. “H.G. Wells.”
“What?!” The Chief leaned closer.
She took a deep breath and raised her eyes to his. “H. G. Wells.”
“The author of
The Time Machine?” Perry guffawed so loud and so hard, Lois took a step back.
“I told you they were crazy!” she said in her defense. Then she started to laugh as well. It had been ridiculous. “Apparently he developed a working model.”
Perry wiped a tear of laughter from his eye. “Oh, Lois, You’re priceless. Thanks,” he said, still laughing. “I needed that; but I doubt even a time-hopping author is going to help repair my marriage.”
Lois shrugged. It had been worth a shot. “And don’t worry about me, Chief.” She laughed thinking about what Tempus had told her. “I’m never getting married.”
Perry looked at her with a raised brow. “Oh?”
“According to my wacky visitors from ‘the future’, I’m destined to fall in love and marry a superhero.”
Her boss stared at her. “A what?”
Lois continued to laugh, turning back to her magazine piles. “A super strong, super fast super man from another planet who can fly without a plane.” She shook her head. “Wouldn’t that be a riot, if he even existed. I doubt such a man would fall for someone like me.” She glanced back over her shoulder expecting Perry to be gone, having not responded to her hilarious tidbit, instead she saw him still in the doorway, face pale, jaw hanging open. He appeared to be in a daze. Poor fellow. His failing marriage was just tearing him apart. “Perry?”
His eyes finally blinked and he cleared his throat, before tossing her a grin. “I wouldn’t give up on love so easily, Lois,” he said resting a hand on her boxes of magazines Clark had dropped off the day before which she hadn’t finished receiving after cutting her hand. “You never know what you’ll find around the next corner, honey.”
***
The time machine appeared out of thick air into the gardens outside of the sanitarium.
“Oh, no, Herb. Not back here!” Tempus moaned. “Couldn’t you have taken me back to the Metropolis of 1997? I was really looking forward to meeting my great-great-great-great-great-great-grand-mother-in-law as an infant.”
“Do be quiet, Tempus,” snapped H.G. Wells. “Time again to go home.” He pulled a plastic bag containing a dead bolt off the floor of the time machine.
“Herb, you know you could be arrested for bringing that plastic bag into the future. We have an order against plastic bags. I remember Lois joking that the law should be entitled the ‘Endangered Plastic Tree Act of thirty-six’.” He sighed. “They broke the mold after she was born.” As they walked toward the sprawling compound of recycled shipping containers, Tempus continued with another dramatic sigh, “I do hate how everything is recycled here in the future. Don’t you sometimes want to throw something away just for the fun of it?”
H. G. Wells ignored this statement and said, “I’ll go back and erase our presence in that other dimension and let that Lois and Clark discover their true love for themselves. Admit it, Tempus. This one time I bested you at your own game.”
Tempus removed a small remote from his pocket. “Oh, we couldn’t have you doing that, Herb, could we?” He pressed the button, exploding the interdimensional time machine.
“Tempus!” Wells stammered. “How am I supposed to return?”
“Precisely, Herb,” Tempus answered with a grin. “This way even if you built another machine, you’d never find the coordinates to that other backwards dimension. Knowing what you and I know about Lois Lane, she’ll fight her destiny to marry Superman tooth-and-nail, won’t she, Herb?”
“You meant for this to happen?” gasped Wells.
Tempus tapped Wells’s head. “When are you going to get it through your thick skull, Herb? I will always be two steps ahead of you.”
“You knew about Miranda? We wiped that event from the history books.”
With an exasperated sigh, Tempus rolled his eyes. “You might have wiped it from the history books, Herb, but not from people’s minds. I learned about it from Perry White’s unpublished autobiography
Elvis, Superman, and Me.”
A moment later a brunette in a teal and purple suit landed between them and the still burning time machine. With one quick breath, she blew out the flames. She turned around and looked at them with pinched lips, her arms crossed. “I should have known.”
Tempus smiled his best sarcastic, charming smile and opened his arms wide. “Hi, honey! I’m home! Miss me?”
***
Sunday arrived at last. Lois couldn’t believe how excited she was at returning to work… especially this job. But after twenty-four long hours alone in her apartment staring at a blank computer screen, she was happy for the distraction. So much for her great American novel!
Maybe she should start out writing a romance. Lois had not been able to get her mind off of Clark and their impending non-date date. She sneered at the thought of having to rely on Cat Grant to make sure her book made it to the bookshelf. She would need a pen name. Let’s see: Lois Lane… Lucy Lane? No, she wouldn’t want her sister to receive credit… Lola Dane? Not bad…
Lois Kent?Lois shook her head. Where had that name come from? She pressed the off-hours buzzer outside of Daily Books for the security guard to let her in.
“
I always enjoy meeting Clark Kent...” Tempus’s voice echoed in her head.
“Ha-Ha. Very funny,” Lois grumbled to her inner voice. Don’t forget he had ‘plans’ for last night? A man like that must have women lining…
Lois saw movement inside the store and took a step back as the security guard unlocked the doors to let her in.
“Good morning, Lois,” said the guard. His voice sounded familiar.
Lois took a second look at the security guard. “Clark!”
He smiled at her before grabbing with ease the stacks of Sunday papers just outside the doors, dropping them on the floor of the newsstand and re-locking the doors.
Lois’s mouth hung open.
These were his ‘plans’ for Saturday night?
Tempus’s voice echoed again. “
Go ahead, call Security. I always enjoy meeting Clark Kent for the first time.”
Clark turned away from the door and saw her staring at him. He smiled. “Have a good day off?”
I spent the day daydreaming about you, murmured her inner voice.
Lois really had to muzzle her horny side before it made her say something aloud. She cleared her throat. “Good enough.”
“I’m glad,” he said, heading for the escalators.
“Clark?” she asked following him.
“Hmmm?”
“Is your last name Kent?”
He turned and raised a brow at her. “Why do you want to know?”
“Well, Jimmy calls you CK, so I’m guessing those are your initials, unless you have a middle name that starts with K. Kevin, Kirkpatrick, Kalvin with a K of course, Kenneth, Killjoy – then it’s for your last name.”
“Jerome.”
Lois released a breath she hadn’t known she was holding. Tempus was wrong. The man was crazy just like she initially thought.
They reached the mezzanine level and Clark stepped off the escalator. “Clark Jerome Kent,” he amended.
Lois stumbled off the escalator, but she caught herself. He
was Clark Kent! “Clark?” she asked again.
He stopped half-way to the next bank of escalators and looked back at her with a raised brow. “Lois?”
“Do you know a man who goes by the name of Tempus?”
He thought for a moment and then shook his head. “Not that I know of… But, then again, I meet so many people with my jobs…” He shrugged. “It’s possible. Who’s Tempus?”
“The crazy man who told me that Clark Kent was a security guard at the bookstore,” she replied.
Clark hopped off the up escalator and walked back to her.
How athletic!She had never seen anyone get off an up escalator like that before. Even the adrenaline junkie that she always dreamed she could be would never try that.
“You mean the man who proposed to you?” Clark practically growled. “
That crazy man?”
Lois raised a brow.
Clark is jealous! her inner voice happily sang.
She smiled and patted his chest. “Upset that he beat you to the punch, Clark?” She tittered.
“No! Of course not,” he sputtered.
“Don’t worry, Clark. I turned him down,” Lois told him.
“I am just worried for your safety, that’s all.”
Lois sighed dramatically, stepping onto the up escalator. Reaching down to cup his jaw as the escalator moved her upwards, she then replied in her best princess voice, “My hero.”
***
Clark could continue to hear her laughter as she walked to the break room. He enjoyed hearing her laugh, even if it was
at him. He knew he deserved her mocking laughter after his jealous outburst. Clark didn’t know what got into him. Since Perry had called him to the store the other night…
Clark shook his head. He still couldn’t believe it was true. The whole conversation with Perry had seemed surreal.
First, he had arrived at the store to find it closed and cordoned off by men in biohazard suits. He had been allowed to enter the store via Receiving as long as he did not venture farther into the store than the break room.
Perry had been in his office off the break room, his feet propped up on his desk, his tie loose around his neck. He had nodded at Clark’s entrance and asked him to shut the door. When the door had been firmly closed, his boss had come straight to the matter, “What are your powers, son?”
Clark had dropped – gently for him – into a chair. In the five years he had known about Clark’s abilities, Perry had never asked him so directly or bluntly about his extra skills.
“Perry! I can’t answer that question now. The store is crawling with police,” Clark had replied softly.
His friend had sighed and dropped his feet to the floor. “I’ll explain them in a minute. Trust me, Clark, when I say they aren’t here for you. Look around, I know you can, and you’ll see none of them have microphones or other recording equipment.”
Clark had lowered his glasses and, true to his boss’s word, none of the police officers seemed interested in them, the office or even the break room. They were all focused on the events area of the third floor.
Once Clark had returned his glasses to their proper position on his nose, Perry had raised his brows and had asked, “So?”
The younger man cleared his throat. Other than his folks, he trusted no man more. “Speed, strength, hearing, x-ray and microscope vision and invulnerability, you already know about,” Clark started keeping his voice low. “I can also heat things by looking at them and cool things by blowing on them. And my sense of smell, too, is enhanced. I can read a book as quickly as I flip through it.”
“And?”
Perry had known he was holding something back. Clark had looked away, slightly embarrassed since he had never spoken with anyone about his special skills besides his folks before. “And I can fly.”
“Ah.” Perry had smiled and leaned forward, placing his fingertips together. “I thought so.”
“Has someone seen me?” Clark asked. “I try never to fly, except at night…”
Perry waved his worries from the air. “The police are here because Miranda sprayed her books and the people at her signing with a pheromone perfume,” his boss had explained.
“Pheromones? As in those scents that animals secrete to attract a mate?”
The Chief had nodded.
“Claude?” Clark had asked.
Perry had nodded. “And Alice.”
“Alice?”
His friend had nodded again. “She chased Jack through the store.”
“I’m so sorry, Chief.”
“Me, too, Kent.” Perry had cleared his throat. “Cat and several other employees who were working the event as well.”
Clark had blanched. “Lois?”
His bossed had chuckled. “No, son. She kissed you of her own free will.”
Clark’s cheeks had surely gone red from the revelation of this knowledge. “You heard about that?”
“Son, there isn’t anything that goes on in this store that I don’t know about.” At this point Perry had stood up and walked to the cabinet that held the security videos. “The reason I needed you to come now was that the police will surely take these.”
“Oh, God!” Clark had gasped. “I floated when Lois kissed me! Did that get caught on tape?”
Perry had grinned with a chuckle. “Did you, now? Does that happen to you often? Floating when a pretty girl kisses you?”
Clark had cleared his throat again. “It’s never happened before.”
Perry had turned the full force of his grin on him at that point. “That must have been some kiss to make you float in less than thirty seconds.”
“No. The kiss lasted longer than that.” Clark had corrected Perry, although he hadn’t known why. “Two minutes, at least.”
Perry’s chuckles had been more pronounced that time. “Twenty-three seconds. I timed it myself. And no, you can’t see you feet leave the ground. It just looks like you go up on your toes.”
“But… But…” Clark had stammered. It couldn’t have been that short of a kiss.
“Do you want to me to show you the videotape?” Perry had asked.
Clark had adamantly shaken his head.
“It doesn’t take much of a kiss from a beautiful girl for it to seem like forever. Next time why don’t you try for less of an audience?”
*** End of Part 6 *** Part 7 Comments
