She glanced through the peephole and saw Clark standing in her hallway. This was it, the beginning of their first official date. No going back now. She took a deep breath and straightened her dress one more time. She wanted this, she reminded herself. He wasn’t a perfect match like Superman, but Clark was close enough and he loved her.
He is an "Almost (canon) Clark."
There. Now, he looked right, she thought. Her eyes widened and her jaw dropped. It was the first time Clark looked right. He didn’t look wrong. Oh, this wasn’t good. No, no, this wasn’t good at all.
Lois: Oooh, he's handsome. He's gorgeous. I can't help finding him perfect now.
“We’ve been talking about me all night, you must be bored,” she said, taking the last sip of her wine.
Clark shook his head. “Fascinated. Your life is so different from mine.”
Even without the fact that he's from a different universe entirely (hence him avoiding talking about his past) this is true.
Then again, if I'm not mistaken I'm fairly certain that part's canon.
Clark squeezed her hand. “My mom used to bake all the time,” he said, starting in on one of his memories. “She was bound and determined that I wasn’t going to grow up to be one of those men who didn’t cook.
Go Martha! Honestly, my hubby was the one who helped me learn to cook. I could bake (cookies, cakes, etc.) but for some reason never learned to cook much.
So, some of my earliest memories were in the kitchen with Mom. I had my own footstool, so I could reach the counter. My dad had made it; he even carved my name on it. She’d have me measure flour and sugar, crack eggs, and pour ingredients into the mixing bowl. It was our thing that we did together.”
There's a lot of information in that one snippet. His father worked with his hands and his mother wanted him to know his way around a kitchen.
“When is your birthday?” Lois asked, unable to resist an opening like that.
“February 29, 1966,” Clark replied, taking a sip of his wine.
She pressed her lips together. “No, it’s not, Clark. Leap years happen during the same year as presidential elections, and there was no presidential election in 1966.”
It is when you're a foundling and they don't actually know when you were born.
“What can I say? My folks had a wacky sense of humor,” he said with a sheepish shrug.
Clark sighed. “I was abandoned. When my parents found me they guessed I was about three months old, so they gave me that birthday. They told me I was so special that my birthday should be too. It was switched to the twenty-eighth when the papers went through the channels, but between us it was always February 29.”
Awww...
The steam dissipated and chef tilted the large bowl of ice cream towards her for her to examine. He took a teaspoon full of it and handed it to her. She stuck it into her mouth and moaned.
Clark certainly knows how to please Lois. *snerk* Sorry, as soon as I wrote that I realized the second meaning of that. *opens up her head and pours bleach over it.*
She decided to test the boundaries of his anti-sweets stance. She plucked a raspberry off the side of her dish. “How about just a raspberry then?” she asked, leaning across the table with the offered fruit waiting on her fingertips.
It's fruit, Clark! It doesn't have any added sugar. Take it! Eat it!
“I don’t know, Lois,” he murmured as if her name was Eve. She could see the fight inside him. It wasn’t chocolate, but it had touched chocolate. Finally, he relented and ate the fruit from her fingers, his tongue brushing over her fingertips. He smiled generously, and she returned his smile. That’s right, Clark, little steps.
Oh the temptress. How sweet she is.
Clark took the offered fruit from her fingers, once again momentarily sucking her fingers as he did so, but when he swallowed his face went ashen. He stood up. “Excuse me,” he said and rushed off from the table.
At first I was going, *rwar* (in a good way) and then... oh no. Not a rescue!
She glanced down at her fingertips. Seeing a bit of chocolate, she went to lick it off and paused. Could Clark taste the trace amounts? Had he had an adverse reaction to the little bit of chocolate on her fingers?
Her eyes gazed towards where Clark had disappeared. Making sweets reminded him of his mom. Eating sweets made him physically ill. It wasn’t that he didn’t like ice cream; he could no longer eat it. She recalled what he had said to her at the hospital that one and only time he had spoken to her about his parents’ death. It was sweet and smoky like burning sugar… He had been trying to let her in then, only they had been interrupted.
She winced, placing a hand over her mouth. Oh, Clark. What had she done?
So he's having a psychosomatic reaction to the sugar. Oh poor Clark. *hugs Alt-Clark*
Lois pursed her lips. “No more, Clark. I’m not going to let this come between us any longer. I’m going to do what I should have done two months ago. You are going to take me home, and you aren’t leaving until you tell me the truth,” she demanded, pointing at him.
“Well, if you insist,” Clark said, as a sly smile replaced his other one. “— but we’ll have to call Perry and explain why we won’t be coming into work tomorrow, or the next day, or…”
*waggles eyebrows* Something tells me that Clark would be in too much of a doghouse for not telling her though.
Lois raised a brow. If he thought they were going to take up where they had left off at the Metro Club, he had another thing coming. She refused to discuss that topic again until she knew who he really was. “You’re not even going to get a first date kiss until I get some information from you.”
“Twelve,” Clark said.
Threaten to pull back on a kiss....
Personally, he liked her ultimatum better. Her not letting him leave her apartment, until he told her something she wanted to know, that was. Sadly, they both knew that that option wasn’t ever going to happen. She’d get too mad and kick him out, and he’d be the good guy and leave when she asked him to. Clark had tried to explain to her that the reasons weren’t important, only the results. He really didn’t need another woman to tell him it was all in his mind, and to ‘get over it’.
Huh? When would he been told that?
As he hurried out the newsroom, he barely missed a delivery man entering with a large bouquet of red roses.
Aaaaaand Luthor's trying to make good with her. *eyeroll*
Enjoyed it, can't wait to read more!
