This is my favorite quote from last part, Terry:
She stopped at a red light and flexed her fingers. “Well – there is something, actually.”
“What?”
She drummed her fingers on the steering wheel. “You'll laugh.”
“No, I won't. Now what's wrong? Are you nervous about this interview? It's understandable. This is a big deal.”
“No, it's not the interview. I'm as ready for that as I'll ever be. It's just – you're sure you won't laugh?”
“Positive.” He shifted in the seat to face her. “Now what's bothering you?”
She pursed her lips and glanced his way again, then stared at the traffic signal as if challenging it to rescue her. It didn't, of course. “You – you're not in my head.”
“What?”
The light changed and she accelerated. “You're not in my head. I can't sense you mentally, through the link.”
Clark frowned in confusion. “I thought that was what we wanted. I don't eavesdrop on you, you don't eavesdrop on me.”
She shrugged. “Yeah, well, I kinda got used to being aware of you.”
“I see.”
She flipped on her turn signal – a courtesy to other drivers she often ignored – and negotiated a corner. “I kinda miss it.”
It's great that Lois misses sensing Clark inside her head. I so hope she will want that link back soon, or at least, that she will be able to mentally call Clark if she needs him, in spite of having "closed the link off". Because, with her visceral attraction to someone like Lex Luthor, she is most certainly going to need Clark's help.
At the very end of this part, Lois got a stark reminder that Luthor definitely has something really sinister to hide:
“I have been by his side ever since that day. I will never leave him.”
“Then you probably know where all the bodies are buried.”
He was visibly shocked. “Bodies? What bodies?”
Lois tried to backpedal. “No, I'm sorry, I don't mean literal dead people. I just meant that you must know about anything that might be – you know – less than – uh – “
Asabi's smile disappeared and he turned to face her. “It is not my place to criticize any guest of Mr. Luthor, nor to give unsolicited advice to one such as yourself.” He leaned closer. “But I must tell you that if you print anything untrue or salacious about Mr. Luthor, I would be most upset by it.” His black eyes turned onyx with menace and he continued in a whisper. “Most upset. I hope I am making myself clear to you, Miss Lane. Because Mr. Luthor saved my life, and I would protect him from harm with all of my being.”
For once, Lois's common sense asserted itself and she said nothing as Asabi stared at her. After almost ten seconds of intense scrutiny, he slowly turned back to face the door again. His smile never reappeared.
Obviously there
are bodies that are buried because of Luthor. If there weren't, Asabi wouldn't have reacted that strongly. Surely, if Lois had asked Asabi how Luthor was doing at tax evasion, he wouldn't have reacted anything like that? He might very well have disliked the question, but he wouldn't have been shocked.
Unfortunately, Lois will probably forget all her suspicions once her hormones are exposed to Luthor's "magnetism" again.
This reminds me of something I read in a Swedish daily just a week or so ago. A female columnist wrote how she had come across "a dangerous-looking male with an absolutely animal kind of charisma". The columnist wrote how she was suddenly almost drowning in a raging flood of sex hormones, and she was barely able to stop herself from running straight at the man and bodily throwing herself at him, plastering him with kisses. Her rational mind repeated over and over again, I can't trust that man! Never! No way! If I get involved with him, I'll get hurt so badly! But her body kept screaming, Want him! Want him!
A colleague of mine, Arnost Rusek, a science teacher and my own favorite intellectual, insists that women get turned on by obviously dangerous men, because they know that other women also respond so strongly to them. Therefore, dangerous men have many women, and they get many children, too. Therefore, if a woman is lucky enough to have a son by a dangerous man, chances are that her son will be just as dangerous as his father, and that way he will be just as attractive as his father, too. Then he, too, will be a promiscuous man with many women, and he, too, will have many children. And that way the woman who had a son by a dangerous man will have huge numbers of grandchildren, which is precisely what her genes want, if not necessarily her conscious mind.
I keep telling Arnost that not all women are attracted to dangerous men. He concedes my point, and then he counters by insisting that
many women are attracted to dangerous men. And I sigh and concede his point.
Here's hoping that Luthor won't make Lois lose her head so completely that she forgets that she misses having Clark inside the part of her anatomy which she lost, her head. Fortunately, I think that Lois's need to have Clark inside her head is a visceral thing, too, and that way she is likely to remember.
Ann
