A short piece of fluff for my pal Caroline K., who prompted me with a single word: Paperweight. Unbetaed.
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“Season to taste? What the heck does that mean? Whose taste?”
Lois growled at the Betty Crocker cookbook and pushed her palm over her sticky forehead, lifting her bangs and leaving streaks of white powder in her hair. The cookbook lay innocently on the counter alongside bowls and whisks and eggs and sugar and other implements of destruction. She squinted at the yellowing pages and Martha’s scrawling script in the margins of the book.
“A dash of salt,” she muttered. “Silly cooking-type people have a whole different language!”
Red gingham curtains snapped impatiently against the kitchen window frame, and Lois leaned toward the opening, sighing with relief as the dry Kansas breeze smoothed over her face. Closing her eyes, she imagined herself on her own home turf. The newsroom. Arguing with Perry. Feeling the thrum-thrum-thrum of the presses running beneath her feet. Nailing a particularly nasty piece of scum with a front-page banner headline. She took a deep breath and smiled. She was a strong, confident woman. She could do this.
Lois Lane could bake chocolate chip cookies.
Opening her eyes, she picked up an egg and tapped it gently against the hard edge of the blue ceramic bowl. It cracked neatly and the bright yellow yolk slid smoothly down the inside of the bowl to land on a fluffy mound of flour. Lois smiled in satisfaction and reached for a second egg.
“See?” she said to the empty room, “I can do this!” The faint echo of her voice was followed by a new gust of wind. She dropped the egg in surprise as the pages of the cookbook fluttered wildly and landed on a tomato-splattered recipe for Spaghetti Bolognese. Obviously the kitchen deity hadn’t thought much of her smugness.
Egg white dripped off the edge of the counter onto Lois’s bare foot as she flipped through the pages of the disobedient book. Where was that blasted recipe? After several seconds of muted cursing, she placed her hand on a photo of perfectly baked and exquisitely displayed cookies and looked around for something to hold the page down. The wind was still blowing briskly, and there was no way she was shutting the window. Martha and Jonathan, beloved though they were to her, were clearly nuts when it came to their choices concerning air conditioning. Rolling pin! She picked it up, testing its weight in her hand before placing it across the pages for Chocolate Chip Cookies on the left and Pecan Sandies on the right.
“You know,” said a voice over her shoulder, “you could’ve just eaten the chocolate chips straight out of the bag.”
Clark’s body pressed against hers and Lois took a second to savor the warmth and solid feel of him. The barn smell, not so much. She leaned her head back against his chest and exhaled in frustration. “With your parents out of town, I’m the resident Mrs. Kent. I should be able to do something as simple as make cookies. We’re not talking about French cuisine, you know. People do this every day!”
Clark placed his hands on her waist and turned her around to face him. “Who are you trying to impress, honey? Not me – you know I didn’t marry you for your cooking skills. And all the cookies in the world aren’t going to make people think you’re a typical farm wife. For starters, I don’t see many farm wives around here wearing shorts like those. I’m not even sure they’re legal.” He lowered one hand to finger the frayed edges of her very short cutoffs, his touch tickling the back of her thigh.
Lois gave him her best stubborn look and pulled her leg away. “Oh, no, you don’t; you can’t distract me that easily. I can fit in here. I can bake, and round up chickens, and, and… are you laughing at me?” She picked up the whisk and waved it in front of his nose in a threatening manner.
“I wouldn’t dare! I’m just remembering a woman who once teased me about hog futures. You don’t happen to remember who that was, do you?” His eyes twinkled down at her, and she knew he was laughing. He was just really good at hiding it.
“Fine, fine, fine. Laugh if you want. But people can change, you know!” She shot him her Mad Dog Lane glare, but he didn’t even flinch. And that right there was the number one problem with marriage. He wasn’t scared of her anymore. Not that she was absolutely sure he ever had been.
“I don’t want you to change. I want you just like you are.” He leaned down and placed a warm kiss on the side of her neck, and she leaned back against the counter for support. She hated to sound like a cheap romance novel, but her knees really did go weak every time he did that.
“Besides,” Clark continued, his voice muffled against her skin, “you don’t need to make cookies.” He slid his hand under her shirt and up her back, under her bra strap.
“Why--” oh wow that felt good “--is that?”
He stepped back and she whimpered a little at the loss. “Because I bought some for you.” He grinned and, reaching over her head, pulled a package of Chips Ahoy out of the cabinet next to the window.
Lois gasped and lunged for the cookies, but he was too quick – of course – and in a blur of movement, they were gone again. “Not so fast, Mrs. Kent. What do I get in return?”
No future in trying to guess where he’d hidden them; better just to play along, and if she tried even a little, she’d get the cookies and little something extra on the side. “Hmmm.” Lois pretended to think about it. “Hey! I could give you a kiss!”
Clark, in turn, pretended to consider her offer. “I suppose that might be okay,” he said doubtfully.
She swatted his arm, sending a few whispers of flour into the air. “Listen, mister, you’ll take my kiss and like it!”
He put his arm around her waist and pulled her body close to his. “Oh, I intend to take a lot more than a kiss,” he leered down at her.
Dizzy. She was very dizzy. Was it because the pair of them were now laying full length on the worn linoleum tiles, or was it because he was kissing her neck again?
It didn’t matter; she was going to get a cookie and some nookie! She grinned at the silly rhyme and tilted her head back to give her husband access to the delicate skin under her jaw. The room swirled around her, the red of Clark’s shirt pooled next to her head, the brown expanse of the cabinetry soaring above her on the left, the bright yellow sun peering through the corner of the window that she could still see from her position on the floor. And something moving at the edge of the countertop --
Thwack!
Clark stopped kissing her – a shame, because he had gotten as far as her collarbone and it would’ve been nice if he had kept going - and looked around in surprise. “What was that?!”
They both looked at the piece of wood that had rolled off the counter and hit Clark in the head. A long crack ran down one side.
She started laughing and he looked down at her with mock severity.
“Lois, you owe my mother a new rolling pin!”
--The End--
