Clark had just finished changing into soft cotton shorts and a sleeveless shirt when he heard the knock on his hotel room door. He slid his glasses down to x-ray, but it was just a formality. He knew exactly who was on the other side. He considered ignoring the knock and seeing if he could get away with pretending to be in the shower.
“I know you’re in there! Open up!”
He sighed and crossed the room, opening the door.
Lana pushed past him into the room, excitement radiating off of her. “Finally! I’ve been dying to get you alone. Spill!”
“Lana,” he said, infusing his voice with all the annoyance he could muster. “Come on in.”
“Oh, cut the crap. You know you want to tell me. Please, please, please tell me she gave you her number. And what happened last night? I about had a heart attack when I got to breakfast this morning and she was there! Did you-”
“No!” he said immediately, cutting her off before she could finish that thought. “Not that it’s any of your business. But no.”
“Are you sure? Because you seemed awfully cozy at breakfast, and I heard-”
“Yes, I’m sure! What kind of question- Wait, what? What did you hear?” he asked, horrified.
“I heard some of the kids talking – they are all pulling for you two big time, by the way – and I heard you had your arm around her all morning during the speeches.” She wiggled her eyebrows at him, a cheshire cat grin on her face.
He sighed again. He knew the kids had been talking – their whispers and excited glances would have been impossible to miss even without superpowers. And he should have realized that piece of gossip would make its way to Lana in record time.
Sitting beside Lois in the conference room today had been a heady experience. Not the quiet intimacy of the bar the night before, when he had longed to taste the wine on her lips, to run a finger down the curve of her neck. But a gentle familiarity that made him long for a life with her, his arm around her shoulders as they shared old memories and made new ones of their own.
“We had a few drinks last night. I walked her to her room and said goodnight. That’s it. Nothing happened,” he told Lana.
It was both the absolute truth and a bald faced lie. Nothing and everything.
On the surface, it was nothing more than a couple of drinks and a chaste goodnight. But he knew it was a night he would never forget, no matter how hard he tried.
She waited, eyebrows raised. He tried to wait her out, but he knew how tenacious she could be, and he didn’t want to do this all night.
“I kissed her goodbye after lunch,” he admitted finally. “And she gave me her number when I saw her in the lobby after the ceremony.”
“Halle-freaking-lujah!”
“Relax, Lana. She made it perfectly clear that she’s not open to a long-distance relationship; that she doesn’t have time for that. I’m honestly not even sure why she gave me her phone number at the last minute.”
She rolled her eyes. “You don’t know why she gave you her number? Really? REALLY?”
He sighed. “I think she just wants to stay in contact as friends. She said she enjoyed talking and maybe we could talk some more.”
“I swear to god, you are the most dense man I’ve ever met, and that’s really saying something. She doesn’t just want to talk to you, she wants to TALK.”
He knew what Lana was insinuating, but he refused to let his heart believe it. The attraction between them had been obvious and mutual. And it was clear from her reaction both when he kissed her goodbye and when she had changed her mind at the last minute and given him her contact information, that if their situations were different she would be open to exploring a relationship. But their situation wasn’t different.
“She lives halfway across the country,” he pointed out. “She’s married to her job. We barely know each other. It’s not like we can really start dating long distance.” He was acutely aware of the fact that he was trying to convince himself as much as her.
“Right, because no one in the history of the world has had a successful long distance relationship.” She sat cross legged on his bed and picked at her nail polish for a second before popping back up, too excited to sit.
When he didn’t say anything, she went on. “You like her. Don’t try to deny it. I’ve never seen you like this. Never.”
“I’m not denying anything. Of course I like her. She’s gorgeous and brilliant and successful and interesting and funny and sweet. What is there not to like? Of course I like her,” he repeated.
“So what is your problem?” she asked. “Why aren’t you as excited as I am? She obviously likes you too or she wouldn’t have given you her phone number.”
He was quiet for a minute, thinking about the feel of her knees against his thigh during the speeches that morning; the way her fingers twirled around the stem of the wine glass as they talked the night before; the shine of tears in her eyes when he kissed her goodbye.
“I don’t know, Lana. I don’t want to talk about it.”
Lana sat back on the edge of his bed, calmer now. “What are you so afraid of?”
“I’m not afraid, I’m just being realistic. Yes, there was an obvious chemistry. It wasn’t just physical. We talked for hours last night. It was…incredible. But she’s going to get home to her fancy, exciting life, and she’s going to forget all about me. Pulitzer prize winning reporters from Metropolis don’t fall in love with high school English teachers from Kansas.”
Lana shook her head. “I don’t know, Clark. I saw the way she looked at you at lunch today. It didn’t look like she was in any danger of forgetting you anytime soon.”
“I hope you’re right, Lana,” he said finally.
****
Clark rolled his head to the side and cracked an eye open. Lana was seated a few feet away in a folding beach chair in the shade of a giant umbrella rubbing a fresh coat of sunscreen on her arms.
She noticed him watching her and glared at him. “It’s not fair. You just lay there getting more golden, and I’ll probably still be red as a lobster tomorrow.”
He didn’t bother replying to her timeless lament, and rolled his head back to face the sun. The warm rays beat down on him, and he took a deep breath and soaked them in.
All his life, he had loved the sun. He felt stronger, healthier, more alive when he spent time outdoors, especially in the summer. He had always assumed everyone felt this way, and when he heard the term Seasonal Affective Disorder for the first time in early adulthood, he understood it immediately. Even though the short winter days didn’t affect him that way, he immediately empathized with those who suffered from the syndrome. It seemed so obvious to him that sunlight was linked to health and wellness.
It wasn’t until last year that he learned the yellow rays of the Earth’s sun were actually responsible for his powers, for his strength and invulnerability.
The previous fall, at the start of his second year teaching full time, a group of people from the government had appeared in Smallville, poking around and taking soil and water samples. Their leader, a weasley man Clark immediately distrusted, claimed to be with the EPA, looking for groundwater contamination.
But the whole thing had seemed suspicious given that he appeared just weeks after their neighbor, Wayne Irig, had sent off a sample of a rock unearthed by a storm-fallen tree on his property. Especially once Clark’s father showed him the rock, and it made him feel weak and dizzy.
So Clark had done some investigating of his own and learned that Jason Trask was actually the leader of a shady group called Bureau 39, charged with investigating reports of UFOs and evidence of extraterrestrial life. Trask had hit a wall in Smallville, and eventually he gave up and left, taking his fake EPA cleanup with him.
But Clark wasn’t finished with him. A little more investigating had unearthed the location of a storage facility near Metropolis where Trask kept evidence he recovered in his investigations. It was there that Clark found the ship that had brought him to earth as a baby, and a small globe that showed a map of Earth and of another planet that he had instantly and inexplicably recognized as Krypton.
He had pocketed the globe and gotten the hell out of that creepy warehouse and back to Kansas as fast as he could. He kept the globe in a small, decorative chest in his bedroom for months before it awoke from some sort of hibernation and began to display holographic messages to him from his late father, one of which explained that the Earth’s yellow sun was the source of his super-human powers.
The globe had answered many questions, but left him with so many more. He knew now where he came from and how he got to Earth and why he was sent here. But there were so many other questions about his past and his own body that he might never truly be able to answer.
A lifetime of hiding his abilities, even from people he loved and trusted like Pete and Lana, meant keeping secret these new revelations was second nature. But sometimes he wished he had someone other than his parents to talk to.
He loved them so much and never wanted them to feel as if they weren’t enough or that he longed for another family or wished to trade his childhood in for another. They supported him always and had been fascinated by the scenes projected by the globe. But he longed to express his own complicated emotions about his origins without worrying about how they would affect his listeners.
“It’s too bad Lois didn’t stay through the weekend,” Lana said, and he didn’t have to open his eyes to know she was smirking. “If she saw you in nothing but swim trunks…”
“I’m going to tell Pete you were ogling me at the beach,” he said, a hint of amusement creeping past his pretend outrage.
Lana laughed, clearly unimpressed with his mock threat.
“Why didn’t she stay through the weekend? Did she have to work?”
“She doesn’t have to be at work until Monday,” he replied. “But she’s probably in the newsroom right now. She said she was planning to check in today.”
“Seriously?” Lana asked.
“You don’t win a Pulitzer at twenty-seven by sitting home on the weekends.”
“Or by spending the weekend at the beach with a hot guy you met at a conference?” Lana asked gently.
Clark said nothing, his heart tight in his chest.
A weak cry for help interrupted before he could think of a response. He sat up quickly, sliding his glasses down his nose and scanning the length of the beach quickly, looking for the source of the cries. He didn’t see anything. His heart rate kicked up as he scanned again. The cries came again, and this time he heard the splashing of water.
“I’m going to take a walk,” he said abruptly. Lana raised an eyebrow, and he knew she assumed he was avoiding a conversation about his love life or lack thereof.
He strode away, before she could say anything else, scanning the water along the shore. He found them quickly, two little boys clinging to a half-deflated raft, so far out in the water that they would be barely visible to the human eye.
He was moving without conscious thought, running across the sand as fast as he could without looking suspicious. In his periphery, he could hear people commenting on his abruptness but he was laser focused on the little boys out near the horizon line, struggling to keep their heads above the water.
His feet splashed through the shallow water, his stride never slowing. He hurled himself forward, arms slicing through the waves as he sped toward them.
By the time he reached them, one of the boys had slid under the water, and the other’s frantic
cries threatened to wear out the last of his reserves.
Clark pulled the first boy from the water, holding him above the waves and breathing a sigh of relief when he immediately coughed and sputtered and then began to cry.
He wrapped one arm around each boy so their heads were resting on his shoulders as he floated on his back. Then he propelled himself backward to the shore.
As he swam, he could hear both boys’ heart rates even out and their lungs begin to breathe deep and steady, no longer gulping in desperate breaths, and he allowed himself to relax and slow his speed to something slightly less suspicious.
He was met by a lifeguard twenty yards from shore, and he transferred one of the boys into his arms. Assured that both boys were safe, he reached out, listening to the voices on the shore and heard the sounds of frantic crying and screaming from a woman he assumed was the boys’ mother. He pushed just a little faster, eager to end her agony.
When they reached the shallow water, he stood and lifted the little boy who had slipped below the waves into his arms, getting a good look at him for the first time. He was smaller than Clark had realized at first, probably only six or seven, with dark hair plastered to his forehead and blue eyes bloodshot and glassy.
“It’s okay, buddy,” he said softly as he carried him to shore. “You’re okay.”
The little boy didn’t respond, and Clark knew he was probably in shock. He followed the lifeguard who had met him in the water to a cluster of people who appeared to be the boys’ families as well as another lifeguard. In the distance, he could hear sirens, and he knew an ambulance was headed this way with EMTs to examine the boys.
He handed the boy to his frantic mother, and then took a step back and glanced around, hoping he could slip away without having to talk to anyone. When no one in the cluster stopped him, he turned and started to scan the beach for his towel.
“Mr. Kent! Mr. Kent!”
Clark’s heart sank. He had been so hopeful that his heroics would go unnoticed. He turned and found four of his students just off to the side of the cluster of parents and lifeguards.
“That was incredible!” Travis said, his voice awed. “You just like…took off!”
“How did you even see them?” Elise asked. “They were so far out there we couldn’t even figure out where you were going!”
“I’ve never seen anyone swim like that,” Henry said. “You were so fast!”
Clark took a deep breath, and held up his hands. The kids quieted, waiting for his response.
“It was nothing,” he said. “Really. I saw movement out there and thought it was a dolphin or something. So I was really focusing on it. That’s when I realized it was a raft and there were kids out there. I didn’t see a lifeguard nearby and didn’t want to waste time looking for one. So I just went after them myself. I think adrenaline kicked in.”
“But you were FAST,” Travis repeated.
“Good conditioning,” Clark teased his star running back. “Next time you whine about doing sprints, you’ll know I’m not asking you to do anything I don’t do myself.”
Travis grinned, and Clark felt the knot in his stomach loosen a little.
“You want to make it to State again next year, you better keep working on those sprints in the off season,” he added.
He had said the magic word – State. Instantly Travis and Henry, a graduating senior who had led the team in interceptions, were lost in their memories. He left them to reminisce and made his way back to their towels, where Lana was eyeing him, her book abandoned in her lap.
“Are they okay?” she asked worriedly, and any hope of her missing the commotion was gone.
He nodded. “I think so. I’m no expert, but they were alert and talking. I’m sure the EMT’s will give them a good look over.”
“I saw you take off, but I couldn’t tell where you were going at first. They were so far out there.”
“The lifeguard was right behind me,” Clark said, trying to deflect.
“No he wasn’t. He was nowhere near you. If you hadn’t gone out there…” He heard the catch in her voice and knew she was thinking about her own babies.
“They’re fine, Lana,” he said gently, and she smiled at him, knowing he meant both the little boys on the shore and her own children at home with their father.
He shook his head, drops of water spraying from his hair, and she shrieked and then laughed, the tension broken. He grabbed his towel and dried off, checking his watch.
“If we’re going to go to dinner in Little Havana, we should probably start wrapping things up here so we can get back to the hotel to shower and change,” he said, pulling on a shirt.
She nodded and stood, lifting a hand to shade her eyes as she scanned the beach for their students, and Clark breathed a sigh of relief. It was always such a risk using his powers in a crowded public place like this, but he couldn’t just leave those boys to drown. Even if he had been able to locate and alert a lifeguard as soon as he heard their cries for help, there was no way they would have reached them in time. There was no question he had done the right thing, but now he would live with the familiar fear in his gut until enough time had passed without comment that he was certain no one was suspicious about his abilities.
*****
Clark pulled the truck into his driveway and cut the engine, glad to finally be home. The trip itself had been wonderful, but a full day of airports and turbulence-filled flights, plus the hour drive back from Wichita and then waiting for his students’ parents to pick them up had been interminable.
He had sent Lana on home when they got to the school, knowing she was eager to get home and see her kids before they went to bed, and he had stayed alone with the kids who were waiting on rides. About half the kids had cars of their own, or had come with a friend who did, and most of the rest had parents who were waiting for them when they arrived. But the school district was large, and the last two kids lived on the opposite side of the county from the rest, so he had sat with the stragglers for thirty minutes, smiling as they reminisced about their favorite parts of the trip while they waited for their ride.
He hoisted his suitcase from the passenger seat and walked up the short path, climbed four steps, and crossed the wide covered porch that spanned the front of the house, before turning the key and entering the house.
He stepped inside and pulled the door shut behind him, dropping his keys on the small table just inside the door. He turned and climbed the stairs, heading straight for his bedroom. He tossed his suitcase on the bed and took a quick shower before changing into sleep shorts.
He unzipped his suitcase, and started emptying out the contents, tossing dirty clothes in the laundry hamper and putting away everything else. He pulled out the program for the award ceremony from the final night of the conference and hesitated for a second before giving in and flipping it open. Her black and white headshot smiled up at him atop a brief bio that listed her professional awards and mentioned that she had attended this conference for four years in high school. She looked beautiful in the professional photo, but it failed to capture the twinkle in her eye, her impish grin when she teased him.
He picked up his wallet and flipped it open, pulling out the business card she had pressed onto his hand at the last minute. He flipped it over and smiled at the ten digits scrawled in her looping handwriting.
He still wasn’t sure what had possessed her to give him her number. She had made it clear repeatedly that she didn’t have time for a long distance relationship, that she didn’t think they were worth the effort.
But aside from the undeniable attraction between them, they had also genuinely had a connection. They had talked for hours over dinner and drinks on Thursday and fallen into an easy, comfortable rapport Friday. She had told him that she was making an effort recently to be more social, so maybe she just wanted to continue getting to know each other as friends.
His feelings for her went well beyond friendship, but if that was all she was willing to offer, he wasn’t going to look a gift horse in the mouth. She was brilliant and fascinating and he wanted to talk to her again.
He set the card on top of the program on his bedside table, beside the phone. It was too late to call tonight, and he didn’t want to scare her off by being overeager and calling the second he walked in the door.
Tomorrow. He would call her tomorrow.
