A/N: Kathy and I talked about it and decided that since this is such a long story and it's already complete, we might as well post daily instead of every other day. Enjoy!
“Oh no! You did not!” she exclaimed, her hands flying to her mouth in horror.
“Oh, I absolutely did,” he insisted.
They had been discussing his travels for hours. One drink had turned into two, and then a half hour ago he had ordered a plate of cheese fries from the bar menu, and they picked at them half heartedly as they talked.
He hadn’t meant for stories of his travels to dominate their conversation. It had started innocently enough with the story of how he had fallen in love with good wine, but then one question had led to another, until now here he was admitting to insulting the chief of a small village in Ghana by refusing what Clark thought was an arranged marriage with his youngest daughter but turned out to be just a dinner invitation. In a community where hospitality and the sharing of food were considered a matter of honor, it had been a grievous insult.
“In my defense,” he said, hands in the air, “I had only been learning the language for a few weeks and the words for ‘marriage’ and ‘evening meal’ were only one sound apart. Once I realized my error, I tried to explain, but that only made things worse.”
“Because how dare you assume you were worthy of his daughter’s hand in marriage?” she asked.
“Yes! And not just worthy of her hand, but too good for it! How dare I assume I could do better than her and reject the offer – she was the daughter of the chief.”
She dropped her face into her hands and laughed harder, shaking her head. Finally, she pulled her hands from her face and looked at him. “What did you do?”
“What do you think I did? I got the hell out of there. I made my way back to Accra as fast as I could and never looked back. And trust me, on subsequent trips to the region, I gave that village a wide berth.”
“Well, I’m glad you made it out alive,” she joked when they had stopped laughing. “Despite your near-fatal error, you must have picked up a good bit of the language in just a few weeks. How many languages do you speak?”
He grinned awkwardly. “I don’t keep count, but… a lot,” he admitted. “I’m only really fluent in a handful, but I can carry on a decent conversation in a couple dozen. And I like to say that I can order dinner in 347 languages – it’s a joke, but if you count regional dialects and small tribal languages, it’s probably not far off. Clearly my ability to retain foreign vocabulary is food motivated.”
“That’s incredible. I took six years of French classes and would be lucky to order dinner.”
“It’s amazing how fast you can learn a language when you are fully immersed and highly motivated. Most of mine sort of fade with time, but if I return to a region where it’s spoken it comes back quickly.”
Before she could respond, a voice from behind him called her name, and her gaze went over his shoulder.
“Tom, Valerie, hi,” she said warmly.
They approached the table, and Clark saw a middle aged man and woman in business suits.
“Clark, this is Tom Watts and Valerie Jenkins. They’re on the conference committee.” He stood and shook their hands, while Lois continued. “This is Clark Kent. He’s here with his students. They won a Pacemaker.”
“That’s wonderful,” Valerie said. “It’s so nice when the winning teams are able to send a delegation.”
“How was your class, Lois?” Tom asked. “I’ve been eager for a report since this is our first time offering the master class.”
Clark braced himself for Lois to make an apology and end their evening. She obviously had more important things to do than sit around discussing his travels. He had dominated enough of her time.
“It was wonderful,” she said. “I’m looking forward to giving you a full report. In the meantime, maybe we can discuss it tomorrow at the presenter’s dinner before the ceremony.”
“That sounds great,” he said. He glanced toward the entrance and lifted a hand in greeting. “We’re meeting a few other presenters and committee members for drinks. You should come join us.”
“Maybe in a bit,” she said politely, and they said their goodbyes and walked off to meet the rest of their group.
“It’s fine if you want to go join them,” he said when she turned her attention back to him. “I know you-“
She laid a hand on top of his, stopping his words in their tracks, and shook her head.
“So,” she said, removing her hand from his and reaching for her wine glass. “Do you still travel regularly?”
He smiled at her, his heart tight in his chest.
“That’s one of the perks of a teaching schedule,” he replied. “I can take a month to travel each summer. Our school year ends mid-June and I have to start football practices at the beginning of August. But that still leaves me six weeks to play with.”
“Where did you go last summer?”
“India and Pakistan,” he told her, prompting another long discussion of the region and the highlights of his trip.
“Have you already made your plans for this summer,” she asked when the conversation wound down.
He nodded. “I’m planning to island hop in southeast Asia. I want to visit some friends in Borneo and then just wander around the islands.”
“That sounds incredible. No plan? No agenda?”
He shook his head. “I usually have a rough outline of where I want to spend my time. But I’ve discovered that the less I plan, the more incredible things I see. It’s best to just follow the opportunities that present themselves.”
He left out the part about not being at the mercy of public transportation schedules. His ability to arrive and depart under his own power gave him a flexibility other travelers couldn’t duplicate.
“What about you?” he asked.
“Me?” she asked, her confusion clear.
He smiled. “Yes, you. You obviously love the idea of traveling. But you said you haven’t traveled except for work since college. Why not? You must get a decent amount of vacation time.”
She paused, and he could see her mulling her words. “I’m married to my job,” she said finally. “I never take any vacation time. I think half of it rolls over every year, but I’m honestly not sure. I have no idea how much I have accumulated. I felt lost just leaving the newsroom for two days for this conference. I’m not scheduled to be back to work until Monday, but I’ll probably check in this weekend after I get settled at home.”
“What would happen if you just…didn’t?” he asked. “If you took off for a week or two and didn’t check in.”
“Before or after my editor died of shock?” she teased. “I don’t know, honestly. If you asked me that a year ago, I’d probably have told you the world would fall apart. Or that I’d lose my edge. You’re only as good as your next story. Now…I don’t know. I love my job. I love the excitement of the newsroom. I love the thrill of chasing a lead. I love the satisfaction of knowing I made a difference in my community. I love challenging myself and honing my skills as a writer.”
“But?” he asked quietly.
She was quiet for a minute, and he watched her contemplate her answer. He couldn’t remember the last time he had felt so comfortable with someone. Lana liked to joke that he never met a stranger, and it was true that he was friendly with everyone he met. But those conversations always stayed on the surface, and he was a master of turning discussions back on people so they talked about themselves and didn’t ask too many questions about him. Tonight, with Lois, he found himself telling stories he had completely forgotten, digging deep into his memories. And he turned the conversation back on her not as a defense mechanism, but because he so desperately wanted to know her better.
“Last year, I was completely obsessed with bringing Lex Luthor down. I knew he caused the heat wave, but I couldn’t prove it, and I was furious. Once I knew that, I started digging and couldn’t stop. The more I found, the more there was to find. It was a rabbit hole of corruption and filth. I couldn’t think about anything else. Mostly because I knew he was responsible for countless deaths, and I was desperate to expose him before he could hurt anyone else. But also…”
She hesitated, and he wondered if she was as unused to sharing her own stories as he was. He waited patiently, afraid that if he prompted her, she would retreat.
“Also I wanted to make sure I was the one to bring him down…because I had something to prove.” She lifted her glass to him in a mock toast, and he knew that admission pained her.
“What could you possibly have to prove?” he asked. “Even before the Pulitzer, you were one of the best respected reporters in the country. I’ve been reading your work for years. In my classroom, I use your articles as examples of the gold standard.”
“I’ve spent my whole life trying to prove myself,” she said, eyes pointed at the table where she toyed with the stem of her wine glass. Her voice was quieter now — less angry and a little sad. “I started out trying to prove myself to my father. In college I was constantly trying to prove myself to the upperclassmen and my professors. Then once I was working at The Planet, I had to prove myself to everyone in the newsroom. When I started at the paper as a research assistant, I was a twenty-year-old girl in a man’s world. When Perry promoted me to a reporter right after graduation, a lot of people were pissed. Most of them had risen through the ranks in smaller papers. They said I didn’t deserve the job. They called me his little pet.”
She looked up at him, and he could see her in his mind, that young girl trying to force a place for herself in a hostile newsroom. That environment would have chewed up and spit out most people, but she had found a way to survive and thrive.
“I was desperate to prove I belonged there, and they were just as desperate to prove I didn’t. I thought if I could land a big story or two… It was a rough couple of years. I found out who I could trust, and that was no one. I made a bunch of rules for myself: Never get personally involved with your stories, never let anyone get there first, and never sleep with anyone you work with.”
She sighed and rolled her eyes in resignation. “I’ve broken every one of my rules. I somehow manage to get personally involved with all of my-”
“You slept with someone you work with?” It was out of his mouth before he could filter it. He cringed, waiting for her to tell him it was none of his business. It absolutely wasn’t.
Instead, she laughed self-deprecatingly and nodded. “I was young and naive. I thought we were… I woke up one morning, and he was gone, along with all my notes for a big story I was working on. That should have been my first Kerth.”
She drained the last sip from her wine glass. “I can’t believe I just told you that.”
She closed her eyes and rubbed a hand against her forehead.
“How old were you?” he asked quietly.
She looked up, surprised. “Twenty-one. I’d been full time at the paper for three months.”
“How old was he?” he asked, pretty sure he already had a good idea of the answer to that question.
“Mid thirties,” she said with a shrug. “He was French. He had worked in the Paris bureau for a decade before transferring to Metropolis.”
His stomach roiled; fire pumped through in his veins. He focused on keeping his breathing steady and keeping himself in his seat.
“That is…infuriating,” he said finally, his voice tight with anger. “Did he get fired?”
She laughed mirthlessly. “No, he got a Kerth and a promotion to foreign correspondent.”
He deserved a Nobel Peace Prize for not flying into a blind rage. He was not so naive that he didn’t know these things happened, but imagining them happening to her broke his heart.
“Word got around,” she continued. “Not about the story. But… you know. And I was the laughingstock of the newsroom. That’s when I made my three rules. And that’s when I stopped trying to make friends. I put my head down and focused. I didn’t date. I didn’t take vacations. I didn’t do anything but work. I won four Kerths in a row. And then I won a Pulitzer. And no one says anymore that I didn’t deserve the job.”
In the low light of the hotel bar, her eyes flashed with righteous anger, and she looked like a warrior goddess from some foreign mythology. He was in awe of her, and he could only imagine how those in her crosshairs must tremble in her presence.
He watched as the anger bled away, and for just a moment he saw the fragile vulnerability of a woman who trusted no one.
“I’m done trying to convince people I’m a good enough reporter. It doesn’t matter what I do, there are still some people who whisper that I don’t deserve it.” She paused, considering him. “You know they say I slept with Luthor.”
He did know. He had seen the tabloid headlines; heard the whispers. He had never believed them, but he had heard them.
She had spat that last sentence out with the glint of a challenge in her eyes, and he wasn’t sure if she was daring him to ask if she had or to deny that he had heard the rumor. He chose not to acknowledge it at all.
“Anyone who doubts you deserve your accolades obviously hasn’t read your work,” he said instead. “But you’re right — you’ll never convince everyone. There will always be those who try to undermine you because they are jealous. You’re one of the best writers of our generation. It can be lonely at the top.”
“Thank you,” she said softly.
“I’m only telling the truth,” he said. And he was. He had admired her skill for years. And now that he knew her, he only respected her more.
“Why am I telling you all this?” she muttered. “How did we even get… vacations. That’s right. My point is, I don’t have anything to prove anymore. Once I got the Pulitzer, I decided I only had to prove things to myself.”
She reached for her wine glass, then remembered it was empty and sat it back down. He looked up, eyes scanning the room for their waiter so he could order her another glass, but she held up a hand to stop him and then reached for her glass of water instead.
“I love my job,” she said when she set the glass down, and her voice was gentle again. “I’m not going to stop striving to be the best reporter I can be. But this year I’ve made an effort to try to find a little balance; go out socially a bit more. Even dated a little.”
She rolled her eyes at that last part and he laughed.
“You didn’t find a love connection?” He knew the truth from her behavior tonight and her facial expression, but he would be lying if he said he didn’t want to hear her say it, to confirm that she was still single, that her heart was still free.
She shook her head. “There was someone for a while, but…” she trailed off, waving a hand dismissively. “It always had a limited shelf life. He was a DEA agent in town on a case. When he was done, he went back to DC and we… I mean, you know how it is with long distance. It never works. I don’t have time for that.”
He nodded, hearing the finality in her voice — glad for his own selfish sake that she wasn’t pining for this DEA agent, but painfully aware she wasn’t going to pine for him either.
“Anyway, I’ve relaxed a little over the last year. Stopped picking fights with coworkers. Tried to let snide comments roll off my back. Tried to get out a bit more. I was really skeptical at first, but it’s not so bad. Maybe it wouldn’t kill me to take a vacation every now and then.”
He smiled, charmed by her conclusion to this roller coaster of a conversation. She smiled back at him, and any delusion he was still harboring that this attraction was just hero worship or some sort of vacation crush flew out the window. He was head over heels. And tomorrow she was going to go back to Metropolis and forget all about him.
He tried not to think about never seeing her again; never hearing her laugh again.
“This theoretical vacation of yours,” he said with a teasing grin. “If you could go anywhere, where would you go?”
She closed her eyes, a playful smile on her lips. He took the opportunity to stare at her unabashed. She was so beautiful. She tilted her head, her hair sliding across her bare shoulders, exposing one side of her neck, and his mind flashed with images of kissing the soft skin there.
Her eyes opened and found his. She raised an eyebrow and smiled, and he knew he hadn’t wiped the look of desire from his face fast enough. He gave her an apologetic grin, not bothering to pretend she was seeing something that wasn’t there, and she laughed affectionately and seemed flattered rather than offended.
“An island. Somewhere warm and tropical. Somewhere that isn’t super crowded and commercialized. Something a little off the beaten path but with modern amenities. I need flushing toilets and hot showers,” she said with a laugh. “I'm not roughing it on my first real vacation in years.”
He laughed too, imagining her trying to survive some of the primitive conditions he had called home over the years.
“You know anywhere that fits that description?” she asked, and he wanted to tell her he knew just the place, that he would take her there.
He started to speak, and then stopped when he saw their waiter approaching with the bill. He looked around and realized they were the only people left in the bar aside from their waiter and the bartender wiping down tables.
He took the bill from the waiter and paid it quickly, adding a generous tip. The waiter disappeared again, and his eyes went back to Lois. “I think they’re kicking us out,” he said.
She glanced at her watch and grimaced. “It’s after midnight.”
He checked his own watch automatically, shocked to see it was so late.
“I know how to tell time,” she teased.
He looked up and laughed. “Sorry, it just didn’t feel that late. I was surprised.”
She nodded. “I know. This night flew by.”
He stood and waited as she did the same, then rested his hand on the small of her back as they maneuvered through the empty bar. He told himself he should withdraw his hand once they were back in the brightly lit lobby, but he couldn’t bring himself to do it.
They stood together in silence waiting for the elevator, his hand still on her back. “Let me walk you to your room?” he asked quietly.
She looked up at him, suddenly wary, and he shook his head. “That’s not a line,” he promised. “I just want to make sure you get to your room safely. It’s late.”
She examined his face for a minute and must have decided he was sincere. She nodded, and they rode up to the eighth floor together, and then walked halfway down the long corridor, stopping in front of her room.
She turned to face him, and his hand fell to his side. He took a deep breath, at a loss for what to say.
“I had a really nice time tonight, Clark,” she said.
He nodded and reached up to tuck her hair behind her ear. She shivered at the intimacy of the touch, and his heart clenched.
“Lois,” he said softly.
“I know,” she said. “But you live a million miles away. We live in completely different worlds. I don’t have time for…”
“I know,” he said, his chest aching. “If things were different…”
There was a long pause, where neither of them knew what to say.
“Do you think there’s some alternate universe out there where your dad never had a heart attack, and you wound up working in Metropolis?” Her question was lighthearted, but her eyes were sad.
He took a ragged breath. “You’re going to have to forgive me if I don’t try too hard to imagine that,” he said.
She nodded, then tilted her head toward the door. “I should…”
“Yeah,” he agreed. “Thank you for tonight. Dinner, drinks, all of it. Just…thank you.”
“Thanks for inviting me.”
“I’m looking forward to your speech tomorrow. I’ll see you then.”
She nodded, lingering, and every instinct in his body told him to kiss her. Just one kiss. But walking away was so hard already.
He reached out instead and cupped her cheek. Her silky hair brushed across the back of his hand as his thumb stroked her soft skin.
“Goodnight, Lois,” he said finally.
“Goodnight, Clark.”
Then she slipped inside the room, the door clicking shut behind her. He stood there for a moment, letting his longing for her wash over him. And then he turned and walked back to the elevators.
Last edited by AnnieM; 06/03/22 08:53 AM.
