She took a small step closer. “Ever consider going under cover as a reporter?” she asked.
He could never say ‘yes,’ of course. But even as she asked it, she was absolutely sure he wouldn’t say ‘no.’
He hesitated before replying quietly, “It’s tempting.”
His response hung in the air between them.
There was been something there, so tangible she could almost, almost grasp hold of it.
Finally, he cleared his throat. “We should head over to the precinct.”
She nodded and he slipped one arm beneath her knees, another around her back. As they alighted into a star-filled sky, she couldn’t help but wonder…
How tempting?*****
“…and,” Lois was saying with undisguised glee, "the last three shots on the roll are copies of her distributor list.”
The flight to the precinct had been a short one, and the superhero’s presence had garnered them a meeting with Inspector Henderson more quickly than she’d ever been awarded one on her own. They were currently in an unused interrogation room, her camera and recorder on the table between them.
“Her?” Henderson asked.
“Yes,” Lois replied, picturing Blondie in her mind. “Get me a Luthor Corp look book and I can ID the leader of this. She was one of his outer office secretaries. She would have had easy access to the warehouse location, and probably the false versions of the shipping manifests, too.”
“Luthor Corp?” Superman said, with tightly bound surprise.
Lois carefully cast her gaze to the floor.
Henderson’s expression didn’t quite change but his voice was even more languid as he said, “Yeah. Lois didn’t tell you that part, did she?”
“I wasn’t sure until I got a good look at her,” she said innocently.
“Lois…” Her current partner’s tone conveyed a deep displeasure. He looked at her, arms crossed, and waited.
They didn’t call him the man of steel just for his invulnerability, she thought. The look in his eyes showed steel right now, too.
She felt herself give in. “I’d been working their case from the other end. I just asked Bill what he knew. When it sounded like drugs had new routes into neighborhoods that didn’t have much traffic before, I thought our investigations might meet.” She turned to the detective beside her to gloat, “And I was right!” Turning back to Superman she said, “But when I heard that kids were dying because of it, I pushed a little further. It led me to the warehouse tonight. And it’s a good thing, too! We got them!” she finished with more zeal than she’d anticipated.
But then again, she’d felt good tonight. It felt like she was finally getting back into the groove of her life after months of being wrong-footed. They’d gotten the story and were about to get the bad guys, too! Why shouldn’t she feel good?
“How does Luthor fit in?” Superman asked in an uncompromising tone.
Henderson jumped in then, “Lois hasn’t mentioned that she’s been the unofficial Luthor Corp clean-up crew these last few months?”
Superman’s eyebrows jumped to his hairline. “What?!”
“Bill!” she protested.
Henderson waved her off. “Lois here has been in my office every couple weeks with proof that one Luthor lackey or another is wracking up felonies like it's a new hobby.” She could nearly see Henderson’s smirk poking through. “We’re getting pretty used to it, too. She’s saving my guys a lot of field work.”
Henderson looked like he was really having fun with this. At her expense!
Actually, that was kind of a relief, she thought, though she’d never admit it. He’d been walking on eggshells around her for months, just like Perry and Jimmy. She’d been sick of it, but nothing she’d said or done had made a change. The return of her favorite precinct sparring partner evoked a sense of normalcy that she hadn’t felt since — Well, that she hadn’t felt in months. She’d have to bring Superman along more often on visits to Henderson.
“That’s dangerous,” Superman said to her disapprovingly, breaking into her thoughts.
Or not, she immediately recanted.
“It’s my job,” she said stiffly, remembering those times he’d undercut her stories by dropping her off halfway across the city when she’d been perfectly positioned in the middle of the action. Looking back at Bill she asked, “So what can I print?”
“Everything but the distro list. I don’t want to tip them.”
“Your
job isn’t to go after
Luthor,” Superman said, steel still in his voice.
“I’m not going after Luthor, obviously. I’m going after his secretaries,” she said archly. To Bill, she said, “Will you let me know when Blondie’s in custody?”
Henderson ran a hand over his five o’clock shadow, then picked up her recorder and camera. “Yeah. It’s about time to hand this over to my old partner. It’s his case. I’ll have him get with you on that employee list. Wait here.”
He left her with a righteously indignant superhero.
“You’re going after dangerous people, Lois. Not just secretaries.” His voice was like flint.
“The Planet expects copies of that roll of film, Bill!” she shouted to the Detective’s retreating back. When he didn’t reply, she shouted, “Bill! I have deadline!” He didn’t turn, but his hand came up in a lackadaisical wave. She sat back in one of the chairs, satisfied. From Henderson, that was as good as a written agreement.
“Why are you going after the House of Luthor?” he asked, quoting one of her first articles after her disastrous almost-wedding.
“I’m not,” she said.
“You are, too.”
“Am not,” she rejoined.
“
Lo-is,” he sighed.
Her breath caught in her suddenly burning chest. There it was again. A reminder of what she’d lost. It hit her like a punch to the gut. His head was down, as if in despair over her stubbornness. Now that they were under bright fluorescents, instead of a dull crescent moon, she took him in again.
Trying to block out the spandex and bright colors, she instead concentrated on his face. Most of the time, he held his features so still and his posture so poised. She tried to imagine him more relaxed, even with a slouch. Her gaze traveled over his high cheekbones. His hair was the right color, but it’s texture and length were masked under the gel.
She told herself again that wishing didn’t make things so. She'd had that fact reinforced almost nightly over these past few months. Then again, his upper lip had a freckle that she hadn’t seen in the weak moonlight, but couldn’t deny now.
Suddenly she had to know for sure.
Her hand moved toward his face, intent on mussing his hair.
He looked up then. “What are you doing?” his voice pulled her out of her single-minded daze.
She dropped her hand. The image she’d been conjuring — and the hope — dropped out at the same time.
“Sorry,” she said. Unable to tell the truth, whatever the truth even was now, she said instead, “Old habits.”
She put both her hands in her lap and stared at them, willing time to keep moving on.
“Listen, Lois—“
“You Lane?” a thick voice interrupted.
She looked up at the detective at the door, and her brow creased. “I know you,” she said, standing.
“Detective Woolf,” he introduced himself to the room.
She knew exactly where she’d seen him before. At the Planet. Six months ago. He’d used her message pad and pen. She’d been in sweats and an oversized shirt. She’d written the last piece she’d ever really cared about that day and then left early. After that, it had taken her over a week to drag herself back to the Planet.
“Woolf,” she said, suddenly unmoored. “You—“ she started, then took a step back. She felt Superman rise to stand beside her, a steady presence over her shoulder. “You’re Henderson’s old partner?”
“We were only paired up for a coupla’ months,” he said gruffly. “Then I moved over to narcotics.”
“When?” she heard her voice ask.
He looked at her steadily. “About 5 months ago.”
“Oh,” she said inadequately.
“Detective Woolf,” Superman greeted. He looked at the pair of them, both still silently looking past the other. Unable to shift her gaze, she was vaguely aware of him, the crease cementing at his brown line, no doubt trying to work out what he'd missed. “Lois?” he tried, leaning closer.
She finally looked over at him, eyes skittering over that freckle at his lip, and came back to her surroundings and the present. “Hmm? Oh. Right.” To Woolf she said, “Did Henderson fill you in?”
“Yeah,” he grunted, making his way over to the table with a laptop. “I’ve got the Luthor Corp company look book on here for you. Though by now you should have it near memorized.”
Superman frowned at that, as Woolf set the laptop down and keyed in the password.
Glad for something else to focus on, she sat down at the chair in front of the laptop and leaned in toward the screen.
She was familiar with this document, once housed on the Luthor Corp intranet and now copied onto myriad precinct hard drives all across Metropolis. It showed the name, position, office phone extension and photo of every official Luthor Corp employee.
Lex had often chosen his employees for their intangible qualities — initiative, innovation, discretion, and a smattering of larceny in their hearts. Unfortunately for Metropolis, with their leader’s little fiefdom now unlocked and ripe for the picking, some of the former employees had begun using their special skills to liberate Lex’s most dangerous assets and wreak havoc with them. It was turning into a criminal’s ‘finders keepers’ free-for-all. Like Blondie finding her drugs to hawk to high schoolers.
As she scrolled through the digitized corporate directory for at least the fifth or six time in as many months, she recognized a number of the faces and names. Her eye always stopped on a woman on the second page; her working as a housekeeper in the penthouse had made her face familiar. A few faces she’d made contact with during her time at LNN. A face on the fifth page caught her eye because she’d been in the same chair looking for him just a few weeks earlier. He was now awaiting trial for attempting to smuggle firearms. Having nearly memorized the first six pages by now, she skipped quickly to the seventh page and scrolled more slowly from there.
Woolf's glib comment had been right. She had been committing more employee’s faces to memory every time she looked through this. With the bent her investigations had been taking recently, she thought it might come in handy. She’d been right so far.
A blonde shock of hair in the third column of the fourteenth page caught her eye.
“There!” she and Superman said together.
She glanced back at him, stifling another rush of emotion. She hadn’t realized that he’d been leaning over her shoulder to look along with her. Couldn’t he see this from a city block away? Why lean in? She could feel the heat from his hand on the back of her chair now that she’d leaned back. She shifted in her chair.
Woolf turned the laptop to face him fully and read the caption below the name. “Mercy Graves?”
“That’s her, Detective,” Superman affirmed.
“Ok, then,” he said, shutting the lid with a snap and heading toward the door. “Henderson said to keep you in the loop once the arrest is made since you positively ID’d her for us. Thanks for bringing your information in.”
He turned to leave.
“Detective Woolf?”
He stopped at the door and turned back to her.
“Why did you leave homicide?” she asked.
It was her reporter’s intuition rearing its head in the ugliest way. She had a feeling the answer would hurt, but she had to ask it anyway. She’d become such a glutton for anything connected to him, even if she had to wipe the blood off later.
“I, uh…” Woolf folded the laptop under one arm. He put his other hand on the door jam, leaning into it. “There was a murder a few months back. Wasn’t gruesome or anything. I didn’t even get a look at the vic. …but sometimes, something about a crime scene stands out.”
She felt dread settle over her. But she couldn’t not ask, “What stood out?”
Woolf settled more heavily into the door frame, eyes cast down. “One of the witnesses had been there with the guy. She was sobbing when the uniforms questioned her. Kind of out of it, they said. But by the time I got there, she was… in pieces. Hysterical. Broken doesn’t begin to…” He shook his head, as if to clear it. “All my time on the force, I’ve never heard anything like her screaming his name. Pain like that... it's once in a lifetime. It got into my bones.” His knuckles were white from gripping the door jamb, she noted absently. “Couldn’t get it out of my head.” He cleared his throat. “I put in for a transfer that next week.”
She couldn’t speak.
He still didn’t look at her.
“I was sorry for your loss, Ms. Lane,” he said.
Superman looked at her sharply.
She didn’t move or reply.
“We’ll courier the photos and the recorder over to the Planet in an hour or two. I’ll make sure one of the uniforms gives your city desk a call when we’ve picked up Graves.”
“Thank you, Detective Woolf,” Superman said for her, once it was clear she wasn’t going to respond.
Woolf made the escape he’d been craving since he’d heard who was waiting in the room for him.
The room was still again.
She tried to force herself to breathe.
She couldn’t help that her thoughts flashed over to the red dress that she couldn’t bring herself to throw away but couldn’t bear to look at. It never failed to strike her as ironic that she'd bought it because it was the color of passion, but the color had instead always brought to mind blood. That night she had gently, carefully wrapped it, and stuffed it far out of sight beneath her bed.
It didn’t matter where she put it. It haunted her every night anyway.
She felt a hand on her shoulder, and became conscious of a careful pair of eyes studying her.
“Would you like me to take you home?” he asked.
Home… She winced.
She really ought to go to the Planet. Write this up in the dim overnight lighting and trudge through on dying embers of the day and stale coffee. As unappealing as that was, home sounded even worse. But at least at her apartment she could go straight to sleep as soon as she’d sent a draft to the night editor.
Tonight had been too much.
She’d go home to memories and finally sink into the best part of her day, she decided. Her familiar pain could tuck her into bed again, as she lay above that harbinger of a dress. Maybe she’d get lucky and actually fall asleep this time.
Out loud, she just said, “Sure.”
His hand moved to her lower back as he guided her from the room. She fought the accompanying wave of emotion and insisted to herself was it was just wishful thinking.
Together, they exited the precinct and took to the night sky.
*****
It seemed like he was taking the scenic route over to Carter Street tonight. She didn’t mind. The night was quiet and her thoughts were jumbled. They unspooled in different directions, but she didn’t have the energy to chase any single one to its conclusion.
Her senses had been in overdrive after running into Woolf, and reliving the night that Clark hadn’t made it through. She felt more numb now. The cool spring air and the silence of their altitude were helping.
She looked up at the stars blankly. They were so much clearer here, above the lights of the overly bright city.
“Can I do anything for you?”
She shook her head mutely.
“Would chocolate help?” he asked.
She shook her head again.
“Even chocolate from Switzerland?”
She quirked her mouth in a failed smile. She’d already tried chocolate to solve this problem. It tasted like ash every time.
But if he really wanted to help… “I don’t suppose you can race around the earth so fast that you could turn back time?”
“No,” he said sadly. “Time isn’t always exactly linear, but I’m afraid it doesn’t work that way.”
She took that in. “Then, no.”
A moment passed.
“Can I give you a quote?”
“What?” He’d caught her woolgathering again.
“For your story,” he said.
He seemed so earnest, so eager to please, so desperate to make something right for her tonight.
She shrugged.
She wasn’t thinking about the story at all. Something that had been bothering her finally surfaced to the point where she could articulate it, so she followed her hunch and asked about that instead.
“How did you know that I would need to photograph the distributor list?”
“What?” he looked down at her.
“Her list. You didn’t try to take it with you. You handed me the camera to photograph it. And then you put it back.”
He looked like he was trying to follow her logic. “Alright. And?”
“And how did you know to do that? A cop would have gathered it as evidence. Bagged it and tagged it. You work with the police, so why don’t you work like they do? Why didn’t you take it to them?”
“Lois, what does that—“
She cut him off. “You’re a crime-fighter, right? Well, you didn’t do what a cop would do to fight the crime. You did what a reporter would do,” she said accusingly.
He stopped their flight forward and hovered in place.
“I don’t understand,” he said.
She thought that maybe she did.
Maybe for the first time.
She changed tracks. “How did you know where I was?”
“I was flying by and saw you—“
“How do you always know where I am when I’m in trouble? You
always know exactly where to go to save me. How?”
“You usually call for help,” he said weakly.
It was the correct answer.
But not the right one.
She regarded him.
“Can I ask you a question?”
He exhaled, as if he’d been holding his breath. “Sure.”
“Off the record?”
He paused so long that she thought he wasn’t going to answer her.
“Sure,” he said, again.
She gestured to his hair, her hand poised at his temple. “May I?”
“Is that your question?” he asked, sounding wary but somehow relieved at the same time.
“No,” she said, suddenly feeling more sure of herself than she had in months.
He paused again, then seemed to come to a decision.
“Sure,” he said for a third time.
She ran her fingers through his hair. It was thicker than it looked underneath the gel and impossibly, unimaginably soft. Ignoring the ripple of electricity that sprinted down her arm to her spine, she did it again, this time working it out of the carefully slicked back style that held it in place. There was something surreal about running her hand through Superman’s hair. She did it again, working to make sure that she wasn’t merely indulging in a caress, but intentionally mussing it.
A lock of hair fell across his forehead.
She examined him. She saw the pulse jump in his throat.
“I usually ask forgiveness afterward, instead of permission first.” She took a quick breath and it spurred her candor. "But I can’t lose both of you to one of my hunches, so I’m asking permission first this time. Will you forgive me?” Her voice broke, so she tried again. “Will you forgive me if I’m wrong and this is just the grief finally winning?”
His eyes changed at that, as if he was reassessing how fragile the woman in his arms really was. Was that grief of his own that flitted across his eyes? Or guilt?
But instead of addressing any of that, he asked, “Is that your question?”
“No,” she said firmly.
“Yes,” he said. “I would forgive you.” His arms tightened around her almost imperceptibly. She felt it. “Will you forgive me?”
Her heart raced. “I think so.”
“Ask me, then,” he said.
It was harder than she expected, to ask for the one thing you wanted most.
She put her hand to his cheek and looked into his warm, achingly familiar, chocolate eyes.
“Clark?”
“Is that your question?”
“Yes,” she said, holding back a sob, existing on a hope.
“Yes,” he said simply.
“Yes?” she asked again, surprised even though she’d already had the answer, pleading with the universe that he’d understood, that her hunch was right, that every emotion in her body wasn’t betraying her.
“Yes, Lois, yes,” he said, his carry-hold becoming an embrace as she dissolved in his arms.
It took her a few minutes. To grieve. To release the last few desolate months. To breath him in.
To adjust to the new axis her world now revolved upon.
When she felt steady again, she pulled back from his firm hold just enough to look at him.
“You could have told me,” she said seriously.
He nodded back. She could see the regret written across his face and reflected throughout his whole body. “I know. I should have. I’ve been… a little lost.”
She knew exactly how that felt.
“Ok, then,” she said. She wiped her face with her sleeve.
The sheer enormity of that understatement nearly drove her to laugh out loud. But then again, the surreal feeling hadn’t worn away, yet. Her hero wasn’t off the hook, not by any stretch, she acknowledged to herself. And Swiss chocolate wasn’t even going to make a dent in this one. Once the shock wore off, she’d probably be as angry as she’d ever been.
And then he could explain what in the
hell he’d been
thinking in putting her through this absolute agony.
He could also take the time to really introduce himself, this new partner-superhero hybrid whom she knew intimately but couldn’t quite predict. They would have time for that now. It was enough to hold onto. Because in the end, despite the deception and miscommunication and lost days apart, she would rather have a life with an imperfect, lunkheaded, super-powered Clark than a life with no Clark at all. It made her sure that whatever it took to get them there, they would end up on this new adventure together.
She had, in fact, learned caution this year. Right now, that caution was telling her not to explode. It was telling her that forever letting her temper take the reins wasn’t a sustainable means for a relationship. And it was telling her that her partner might have been lost in agony, too.
Maybe they’d both spent the last six months trying to outrun ghosts.
All of the other awful, difficult life lessons that had been seared into her vulnerable young skin had taught her to be competitive, stubborn, suspicious and brash. But those wounds had all been cauterized as they were won. She’d adapted her behavior to protect herself from them and moved along. The lesson of Clark Kent’s death was easily the hardest thing she’d ever tried to overcome. In fact, she hadn’t overcome it, and the wound had bled sluggishly until she was faint and paling. This lesson overshadowed the others by a mile.
So instead of six rounds of ‘who was right,’ and a week of the silent treatment, maybe, just maybe, starting tonight, they could just be happy. Together. Maybe it could be simple.
Time wasn’t endless and they weren’t immortal. His death had taught to her to be cautious. But his life had taught her to live in the moment. To be grateful instead of vindictive.
She wouldn’t forget.
Although maybe she would ask for that Swiss chocolate anyway.
And so she said, “We have work to do.”
His brow furrowed in return. “What do you mean?”
She launched in. “We have to write up the drug story, send it to the night editor, and make sure he gets it to Perry if we’re going to have a shot at bumping the front page. Then we have to start drafting the other story for page eight.”
“Lois, slow down. I can’t. I want to. It’s tempting — it’s
more than tempting,” he said, calling back to their earlier conversation. “But I just can’t. Clark Kent is dead.”
“That’s what the page eight story is for,” she replied, her usual authority finally returning after months of lying dormant. “Let’s head back to my place, partner. You can grab some of that Chinese food for us — I’ve been dreaming about it, and you can get there a lot more easily than I can. Then we’ll get started on my laptop. I’ll pull my notes together for you to read when you get back from China.”
He was still shaking his head. “Lois, I don’t understand how this can possibly work.”
She grinned at him, feeling the world right itself around her.
“That’s what you have me for.”
She already saw the story starting to form inside her head. Together, they could sort this out believably, make things right again. After all, they were the hottest team in town. They could take on anything.
Her newfound optimism must have been infectious because she could almost viscerally feel it affecting her partner. She watched as Clark’s despair in their situation lightened and shifted into a renewed faith in
them. In the team of Lane and Kent.
She felt her future slide indelibly into place.
With the confidence of someone who knew firsthand that impossible things could be made real, she said, “We’ll come up with something.”
And that’s exactly what they did.
TO BE CONTINUED...
