Part 5
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Three months later...
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Lois Lane carefully applied mascara to one eye, trying desperately to keep her hand from shaking. Hastily she stuck the brush back into the tube. The last thing she wanted was a bloodshot eye – and besides, in her state of mind, she couldn’t take poking her eyeball out. It would lead to complications that she just didn’t want at this stage. She had to be calm – she had to be cool – she had to be brisk. Otherwise she would crack up as soon as she saw him.
She paused for a second, her lip trembling ever so slightly as she mulled over the events that had led to this. She cursed herself. She cursed *him*. If she hadn’t been such a fool – if she hadn’t been sucked into that feel-good, lovey-dovey, utterly deceiving feeling again – she wouldn’t be in the mess she was in now.
Today marked the first day of her life at the reconstructed Daily Planet. It was the day when she would need to be perfectly polished, perfectly poised in order to make sure that her colleagues could see how well-adjusted, stable and *together* she was. To make sure that they could see that her complete and utter humiliation three months ago, on the day of her wedding hadn’t affected her at *all*. To make sure that they knew, without a shadow of a doubt, that Clark, her colleague, her partner was still just that. Her partner. Nothing more, nothing less.
//Dream on, Lois// a snide little voice needled nastily. Lois drew a ragged breath and closed her eyes momentarily. She couldn’t think like that. Not now.
She began to trace the bow of her lip with a cherry-coloured lipstick. It was no good. Her hand shook so much that the scarlet stick danced around her mouth hopelessly and ended up way outside the lines. She cursed and threw the thing back on her dressing table. She was a mess. She was really pathetic.
Dammit to hell! Damn *him* to hell! Why, *how* had she let herself be so influenced by that hack from Nowheresville?
Clark Kent was pond scum. No, he was lower than pond scum. He was nothing.
Absolutely nothing.
Lois drew a shaky breath and tried to blot out the memory of how well pond scum could kiss.
She had absolutely no idea what had possessed her that day three months ago. She had run the scene over and over in her mind since then, pondering her freakishly abnormal behaviour again and again. What she had done wasn’t at all like her. To be pushed beyond the point of logical thinking, determined to do anything, *anything* to get him to see her point... that wasn't at *all* like her!
Even he had been amazed, she remembered.
//Who are you and what have you done with Lois Lane?//
She swallowed hard. In some small corner of her mind, a voice suggested hopefully...
...but no. She wasn’t a double, she wasn’t an evil twin, she wasn’t Lucy in Lois’s body and she certainly wasn’t a clone. She, and she alone had committed that string of idiotic actions that had tormented her night after night. No matter how much or how hard she wished it not to be so.
Immediately after he had run out on her, she had started cursing herself, and their situation, even as a cascade of tears made their way down her face. Why did she have to keep proving to herself, over and over again, that she wasn’t destined to be in a relationship? How could she have kissed him like that? How could she have killed their friendship, the same camaraderie that had been so precious to her? How could she have been so *stupid*, so *utterly blind*?
The cosmos could be so cruelly ironic sometimes, she reflected wistfully. Why was it that until the second, the *split second* that her lips had touched his, she hadn’t been aware of how much that man meant to her?
It was almost like being drunk, she thought sardonically. She had been totally intoxicated, inebriated, *smashed* on the way his lips had felt on hers that all other reasoning, all rational thought, had faded away until it was nothing but a tiny little warning voice in some distant corner of her mind. She had been so completely blotto on the feeling she was experiencing that she hadn’t noticed his withdrawal, hadn’t come back down to earth until the final, unmistakeable sound of the door slamming had rocketed her out of her distant hazy heaven and she had crash-landed back to reality with a definitive bang.
And boy, had it hurt.
Lois could barely remember what she had done for the rest of the day. She had been frozen in space for who knew how long after he had left, until she had wondered why some salty liquid was pouring down her face in rivulets and had realised that she was crying.
The rest of that day faded away into a wash of salty tears, oaths and sleep. She had some vague idea that she had curled up on the couch and cried herself to the Land of Nod, because the morning afterwards, like any alcohol-influenced slumberer, she had woken up with a giant headache and an inability to look directly at bright lights.
Wandering through her apartment that day had been like her own personal trip through hell – everywhere she looked, everywhere she turned, there were memories of him. She had been in a constant state of denial – one word had been bouncing through her skull the entire time – no. No. No. This was not happening to her. She had not kissed Clark Kent. She was not in love with Clark Kent.
She was not in love with Clark Kent.
After her five-hundredth circle around the obstacle course which had appeared in her living room, the outright, indignant ‘No’ had reduced itself to a restless hemming and hawing and finally to bitter, weary resignation.
Just her luck.
She was in love with the one man who could hurt her far more than anybody else in Metropolis – indeed, anybody else on the planet. Three men who had, once upon a time, posed as love interests: Superman, a comic-book hero, Lex, a cultivated billionaire-turned-crime-lord, and Clark, a gentle farmboy from Kansas, who had seemed unworthy of praise, and who had, in the end, turned out to be the most dangerous. The irony of it made her sick to her stomach and brought a strange tightness to her chest.
She had been a cynic – and had been hit with the one thing cynics had no defence against – real magic. The magician had not had a top hat, nor a cape, nor a rabbit – but he did look good in black. The qualities of his performances had been exquisite – he had torn her heart from her, and he had somehow managed to make himself disappear without a trace afterwards.
Magicians never reveal their sources.
The pain of this realisation had been shocking, to say the least. The poison had been absorbed quickly, and the effects had been immediate. Faced with the magnitude of her actions, and the consequences they had brought, Lois had borrowed the magic wand and turned it upon herself – vanishing with only a puff of smoke and a credit card bill where she had stood moments before.
A vacation had been just what she needed.
Of all the places in the world, she had chosen Ireland as her destination. Reminiscences of the time she had spent there as an exchange student had tainted her decision to buy a one-way ticket – the memories of a year without responsibilities to her family, without worrying about her mother’s drinking and her sister’s ability to treat men like paper napkins had brought an astringent smile to her face – the only smile which had graced it then or since. It had been bittersweet, that year – the time spent away from her parents had only served to lead her into believing she was a normal student – a normal girl, without a care in the world, and when she had returned... she had been brought back to earth with a definitive bang.
Dublin had been different to what she remembered. She had re-done all the touristy things – visiting Trinity College to peek at a page of the Book of Kells, tracing her fingers over the bullet holes in the O’Connell monument, strolling through St. Stephen’s Green; and of course, there had been the city itself – just as bright and vibrant and bursting with life as she remembered it. She had enjoyed listening to the blend of distinct Irish accents around her – of course, she herself had not been able to recognise any of them, but there was definitely a variety there. It had been like a whole different language - and one that she was not fluent in. The strange words and abbreviations had astounded her almost as much as the different attitudes. The Irish people were easy with their emotions – physically demonstrative and amazingly open. Lois had been surprised at the expressions plainly seen playing across people’s faces in the street – raw emotion that was so rarely seen in American people was plastered plainly across their expressions as if they had no skeletons in their closet – nothing to hide. The concept was alien to Lois.
Her stay had been pleasant, to say the least – away from Metropolis, there was nothing to remind her, nobody around to disturb her from her comfortable state of mind. Nothing scary – nothing frightening – nothing hard to fathom. Nothing. The humiliation of her rejected confession of love, the embarrassment of her botched wedding, the pain of her attempt at another chance at romance – they had all seemed worlds away, as indeed they were. One day followed the next and Lois simply drifted for a month, chipping away at her savings and moving restlessly around the country, visiting each province, never staying more than three days in each place. One trip on the public buses had led her to hire a car – a banged up thing that they called a ‘Corsa’.
Cut off from her life in Metropolis, she had only realised how long she had been away when she had received an urgent message at her hotel one evening, telling her to call her mother. The sense of foreboding that had immediately hit her had not gone unsubstantiated – after the blistering torrent of words had poured down the phone line, she had a through migraine and had immediately the travel agent, asking for their earliest flight to Metropolis. Lois still hadn’t figured out just how her mother had been able to track her down, but Ellen had had a good deal to say.
The second she had stepped off the plane, she had been hit with the magnitude of her situation and had had an immediate urge to flee back onto the plane and hide in the baggage department until it took off again.
Slowly but surely, she had convinced herself to ride it out. It was obviously nothing, this stupid co-incidental fiasco with Clark – it was just the cosmos’ way of giving the cynic in her a wake-up call. Just another bout of stupidity on her part. Just another time in which she tried to hide from herself – the vulnerable, delicate girl she was, the embittered, angry woman she had tried to become. Just another betrayal of the emotions that ruled men – another conformation of that typical fear of commitment. He had been swept into a tidal wave of desire – selfish, needy, weak desire – but, being Clark, he had realised who he was kissing – his best friend, and more importantly, his partner at work – and had bolted out of sheer hormone-induced terror, perhaps realising that if it blew up - *when* it blew up – he would be in serious trouble with his job. Because there was no way that she would ever look at him in the face again. Yes. That was it. That was why.
That was why.
She had managed to convince herself that this theory was correct, until she had reached her languishing apartment, turned the key in the various dusty locks, tepped inside...
...and had immediately been assaulted by the flashing, glowing red light that was emitting itself from her answering machine.
Five messages. All hopelessly awkward, stiff and forced. All very, very depressing. And all sadly unconvincing.
She had ignored them.
Days had spilled over into weeks, which gradually grew into months that were spent in a strange half-living stupor that Lois was getting more and more accustomed to. The clock ticked by, until the inevitable happened; the morning when all her carefully constructed logical refutations would most need to come into play.
The morning when she started work again.
The morning when she saw *him* again.
*This* morning. Shaping up to be one of the worst mornings of her career at the Daily Planet. Worse than the aftermath of the Claude thing – worse than the days that she had been just a rookie reporter, worse than... worse than...
...More out of a corpse... A vulgar masculine voice from the past intruded rudely upon her thoughts. She started and a new sheen of tears came over her eyes. Oh, God. Not worse than that. Nothing could be worse than that. The memory, which had haunted her for months, had been buried deeply at the very back of her mind where there was plenty of clutter and disorder to camouflage it. She didn’t want to think – she didn’t want to feel – she didn’t want to remember. Not that. Not today.
She closed her eyes and fought against the salvo of memories threatening to overwhelm her.
It had happened just a couple of months after the Claude fiasco. That was another reason why it had wounded her so much – she was still raw, vulnerable from what that scumbag had done to her and this had just about been the final blow.
One morning she had discovered that her supply of pencils had trickled out, and rather than waste the time and energy that sharpening it would take, she had ventured into the supply closet to fetch another one. She had just been about to emerge when a loud chorus of guffaws had shocked her, and she had peered around the door to see Ralph, Andy and some of the other guys apparently gossiping close by. Disgusted, she had made to walk out when suddenly she had heard her name mentioned clearly. She squinted at the culprit and recognised him dimly as a new guy Perry had hired just that week. His name was Owen Cotton, and the poor boy resembled an albino rat altogether too much to be funny.
Who would have guessed that underneath his puny chest beat the heart of a man, but apparently so, and his ardour was directed at none other than she, Lois Lane. His devotion had been so strong that he had plucked up the courage to broach the subject while talking with ‘The Guys’ and to ask what his chances might be. Imagine how crushed he must have felt when his request had been greeted with harsh sniggers that would be more suited to hyenas than to men. Puzzled, he had asked what the joke was, and Ralph had clapped him on the back and proclaimed jovially, “No hope there, buddy. Lane’s a cold fish – you’d get more out of a corpse!”
A gale of laughter had greeted this, and as the party moved away, Lois had remained frozen by the door with tears pouring down her face.
From then on, she had closed up tighter than a clam, determined not to let herself be hurt again. No more. She couldn’t take any more.
But then Clark had come along. A naïve, wet-behind-the-ears farmboy from Hicksville, USA, she had decided on their first meeting. She laughed derisively. How wrong she had been. Clark exceeded her petty little expectations in every way imaginable. He was kind, caring and considerate, but he wasn’t a doormat either. He was just... perfect.
Except for the fact that he had run out on her like a coward.
Lois sighed and turned away from her dressing table. There was no time for this – she couldn’t let herself wallow in the events of the past few months. She *hated* wallowers.
She glanced at the clock. Ugh. Time to leave. Time to go face her colleagues – time to go face *him*.
It was going to be a long day.
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