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Green-Eyed Monster TOC

Part 2

Part 3

That was cool, Kent. Really cool, Clark told himself with a large dose of sarcasm and a real sigh as he watched her disappear back into bookstore. Perhaps dinner with his folks was not the best first date. And letting her know he had overheard her conversation with Perry like that, also a bad idea. When she had spoken to him about sunshine it took every ounce of his strength to stop himself from kissing her. He had never desired a woman more than he had at that moment. Lana surely had never brought out those feelings in him.

Clark had known from that first moment he had seen Lois up in Receiving almost ten days ago, she was different. Special. It was as if her heart beat matched his… impossible, he knew. But he had memorized its sound and found comfort in its steady thump-thump-ba-thump. And then he had opened his mouth. He seemed unable to think around her.

He wished he could say it was his one regret -- but he could definitely call it his biggest regret -- that he had never warned her about Claude. But Clark hadn’t known how to word his warning to make it sound anything other than petty jealousy or envy. To be truthful, Clark had seen his own green-eyed-monster lurking around as well.

Lois hadn’t given him a second thought and hardly a first glance on that first day -- for that whole first week -- he could tell. It stabbed him like a knife to a human to listen to that beautiful heartbeat of hers quicken when Clark had heard her speak to Claude. The way that slime had brought out the rose in her cheeks when he could not.

And then the other night in the rain… He closed his eyes in a wince. She had spoken about the rain like it was the boogey man. That night still haunted her. Clark knew he had something to do with that and for that reason alone he would never forgive himself. He had just been returning home from fighting the latest tenement fire in Suicide Slums when he heard her scream. She had been cradled in his arms before he knew he was reacting. Her head brushed against his chest, absorbing his comfort, before she had passed out. That was when Clark knew he was in trouble, deep deep trouble.

Normally he just dived in and set the person straight, pushed them out of the way. Sight unseen. Deniable. But not Lois. He couldn’t leave her on the street in that condition. Not in the pouring rain. Not in that neighborhood. So he had taken her home. Back to her apartment.

Clark had seen her leaving one morning on his way to work. True, he had seen her from the sky, not the ground. Perhaps he had been pulled in her direction due to that irresistible heartbeat of hers. He didn’t know. But he knew where she lived, so he had taken her home. Another in a long series of bad decisions when it came to Lois. He had landed by the swimming pool, unfastened her purse, removed her keys and opened her apartment door.

He could have just set her on the futon and left. That would have been the gentlemanly thing to do, Clark knew. But she still hadn’t woken up and part of him was worried about that bump on the back of her head. He wanted to be there to make sure she didn’t have a serious concussion. Also she was soaked through to her underwear. He swallowed, taking another drink of his fruit punch. He hadn’t meant to peek. First he had been checking for injuries…

Sure, keep telling yourself that, Kent. Maybe someday you’ll actually believe it. His conscience was an annoying best friend.

Clark’s hand dipped into the cooler and removed a package of chocolate Ding-Dongs. He ripped the packaging so quickly he almost dropped the chocolaty cupcakes on the ground. Almost. Thank God for his lightning fast reflexes. Taking a bite of the chocolaty goodness, he closed his eyes and let the events of that night flow through his memory again.

At least he hadn’t removed her clothing. Bad. Very bad, Clark, for even letting that thought cross his mind, even for the briefest of moments, for even being tempted to touch her soft skin. Someday, maybe when she knew him much better. Accepted him for who and what he was. No woman had ever tempted him to break his vow before.

Then his conscience slapped him across the face. She turned you down flat, Kent. You can’t even get a date with the girl and you’re thinking of a possible future with her?

Hope. Clark always retained hope that someone would love him for himself, not for what he could do. And he wanted that someone to be Lois. He sighed. He knew it from the first time she rolled her eyes at Cat. He allowed a smile to form on his lips again.

That night he had saved her, Clark had known he should warm her up, dry her off with his heat vision, so he had. He liked doing things for her. Like blowing his cooling breath on her swelling ankle as he had held it in his lap.

That was also why Clark had joined Lois for lunch when he saw her sitting on the bench alone. He wanted to make sure she was getting enough to eat. He knew she wouldn’t be getting her first paycheck from the bookstore until Friday. And her fridge and cupboards had been practically bare as old Mother Hubbard’s. Her purse had only had five dollars and sixty-seven cents in it the other night.

The grumbling of her stomach had proved his theory right. Lois was hungry. More than hungry. He wished she had taken her up on the offer of his sandwich or dinner at MJ’s Café. But Clark couldn’t force her. He felt like he had already taken too much advantage of her to begin with. At least she had eaten some potato chips. Not exactly healthy, but it was something.

Clark had not been able to think straight and the words – his invitation -- had just tumbled out of his mouth after watching her suck her fingers, blissfully unaware of what she had done to him by that simple act. He had wanted to be the one to lick the salt off her fingers. To taste the salt on her lips. Her tongue.

He exhaled, causing a stray piece of an old Metropolis Star to blow high into the air. Down boy. It wasn’t going to happen. Not anytime soon, at least.

Only when Lois had started to rouse herself from her sleep, about twenty minutes after he had rescued her, had Clark left. He had known she couldn’t find him there, in her apartment. How in the world would he have been able to explain his presence? He couldn’t, so he had bolted.

Bad. Bad Clark Kent.

He wondered, not for the first time, if Lois even knew how incredibly stunning she was. He didn’t think so. That she didn’t had made her even more attractive in his books. Clark had found nothing to detract from her. She was all positives. Okay. One thing. That darn wall that popped up every time he spoke to her. He was beginning to think he had installed it himself, how in tune it was to him.

Clark knew he didn’t deserve her friendship, let alone anything more. He had scared her. Terrified her. She knew he – well, not him per se – but someone had rescued her. And it had scared her. She had admitted as much at work the other morning, when she had confided in him. When she had let the tears fall he had drowned in every one of those drops of saltwater. He had done that to her. He had made her feel vulnerable. Unsafe. Him. Clark Kent. Hero. Ha!

He had wanted to reassure her… wanted to tell her the truth -- that he had been the one who had saved her. But he couldn’t. She wouldn’t have believed it of him anyway. So Clark had her doubt her own intuition. He had hoped that lying to herself had given her some kind of comfort. He would have rather shouldered her pain for her.

Clark gathered up his lunch things and crossed the street to the bookstore. He needed to return to work. He had one more load to take up to Jimmy before starting his afternoon deliveries. As he entered the bookstore, he saw Lois standing at her long magazine rack talking to some man. She wasn’t talking to him as a customer, but as a friend. After ten days, Clark already had her different facial expressions memorized.

He turned his gaze away from her and almost bumped directly into Claude, who was heading toward the exits. Clark felt like strangling the man for what he had done – was still doing – to Lois. It would have been easy too, just close his hand and snap, Claude would be gone. Clark pressed down his anger. He had made himself a vow that he would never hurt a human, no matter how much they might deserve it.

“Excuse me,” Clark mumbled politely.

Claude didn’t even acknowledge his existence.

Clark got that a lot in this uniform. Either he was center of a deliveryman fantasy – usually a woman’s -- or he might as well be the wallpaper. Hardly ever did anyone look at the man wearing the suit, except Lois. She had looked him in the eye and smiled that first morning they met. When she had rolled her eyes at Cat. Perhaps that was how she taken hold of his heart so quickly.

“Was that him?” That was the man with whom Lois was speaking. “That scum who ditched us the other night?”

Clark turned around on the escalator to watch them. Us?

Lois nodded.

“You work with him?” the man asked incredulously.

She looked away, but nodded again.

“Which department is he responsible for?”

“Eduardo. No.” Lois smiled at the man and touched his arm. Definitely a friend. The green-eyed-monster roared inside of Clark.

He almost tripped off the escalator as it reached the mezzanine level, because he was distracted by Lois’s conversation.

“He left my station, my table without paying. Without tipping. He left you with a check you could not pay… how can you defend him?”

Clark stopped next to the escalator and continued to watch. Oh. So, this was the waiter from the Carlton House restaurant. That was how Lois knew him.

Lois’s tongue went over her teeth. Oops. Eduardo shouldn’t have said that to her.

“Travel. Reference. Third floor, next to Humor,” she replied with a flick of her wrist upwards. As she looked up she caught Clark watching her and she raised a brow at him. Then she smiled. It wasn’t an angry smile or a resentful smile. It was a ‘gotcha’ smile.

Darn. She knew he had been asking her out on a date, because she just caught him watching her. Darn. Darn. Darn. He jogged as quick as was humanly – not Clarkly – possible to the next escalator, laughing quietly to himself. Yep, she got you good, Kent.

On the third floor he gazed back down at her again.

“Take it!” Eduardo was saying to her, trying to hand something to her.

Clark’s brow furrowed and he focused intently on the man’s hand. Folded inside it was a ten dollar bill.

“You earned it, Eduardo. There was no reason you should lose out on that tip just because my date ran out on us.” Lois had tipped the man? Even with her limited resources?

Clark’s heart soared. He loved learning new and wonderful things about her. She might have a stubborn streak to her, but at least it was a fair and just and honest stubborn streak. Every new little thing he learned made him more sure that Lois was the perfect woman for him.

“Take it, Lois. You need it more than me.”

Good luck with that, Eduardo, Clark thought as he walked to Receiving.

“Yo, CK!” called Jimmy.

“Yo, Jimmy!” Clark returned the greeting. He liked the kid. He always had a smile or tidbit of news to relay to him. And he always treated him like a person, not just a deliveryman.

Jimmy was chuckling. “Did you hear what Lois said about Claude this morning?”

Clark glanced around the room to make sure they were alone. Normally he wasn’t a gossip hound, but this bit of news was about Lois. He couldn’t resist. “No, what?”

Jimmy’s chuckle turned into laughter and it was a minute before he could tell the story. “I heard this third hand, mind you.” He laughed again. “According to Janet, she and Cat were discussing Claude’s newest conquest in the break room…”

Clark pressed his lips together with a frown. He didn’t like the direction in which this story was headed.

“Cat had been telling Janet something she had heard… about Lois and the Kama Sutra…”

Clark shook his head. Lois and the Kama Sutra? He bet she had never even cracked the cover of such a book.

“Anyway, Lois heard them. She looked Cat straight in the eye and said – and I’m quoting Janet here, ‘Claude is a waste of time, let alone space. I prefer a real man, not a worm.’ And then Lois apparently raised her eyebrows and wiggled her pinky at the two of them before leaving the break room.” Jimmy burst into laughter again. “Then Cat replied, ‘Maybe she did sleep with him, after all.’” Tears were running down the kid’s face, he was laughing so hard.

“She didn’t,” Clark answered Cat’s rhetorical statement.

Jimmy wiped the issue out of the air. “I know. I know. But what a burn on Claude. Not one, but two women called him a literal worm.”

“Teaches him to double cross Lois like he did,” said Clark unable to keep the smile off his mouth.

“Mad Dog Lane, you mean.”

Clark raised a brow. “ ‘Mad Dog’?” He hadn’t heard that one.

“That’s what everyone around here is calling her now.” Jimmy chuckled. “Half of the booksellers are frightened stiff of her. Of what she might say about them. They are doing everything possible to stay on her good side.”

Wow, she turned her reputation around with that one statement. Good for you, Lois, Clark called out to her with his thoughts. Good for you.

“Do you think she’d consider dating a guy like me? I mean, I know I’m a lot younger than…”

“No.” Clark hadn’t meant to interrupt Jimmy, but the word just jumped out of his mouth.

Jimmy raised a brow and repeated back slowly, “No?”

“She doesn’t date co-workers anymore,” Clark clarified, trying to make it sound like he had answered the kid instead of the green-eyed monster who had taken over his body.

Jimmy grinned. “Shot you down, did she?”

Clark chuckled, his cheeks dusted with embarrassment. He was completely transparent when it came to Lois. “Faster than a speeding bullet.”

His friend patted him on the back with a sympathetic chortle. “If she turned you down, man, there’s no way she’d consider me. Probably best if we just remain friends.”

“Probably best,” Clark agreed. Lois could use a friend or two.

Perry came into the back room at that moment. “Oh, good, Kent. You haven’t left yet. A word. My office.”

Clark waved at Jimmy and followed Perry back to his office. He shut the door and sat down in the visitor’s chair.

Perry sat on the edge of the desk. “What are you doing, son?”

Clark didn’t follow. “Excuse me?”

“I thought we had an agreement. I’d hired you back – at a much higher pay scale than most everyone else in the store – and you would blend into the background.”

“Sir?” Clark stared at him. Had someone seen him working at super speed?

“Now, Clark, you’re the fastest shelver I’ve seen in twenty years and because of your other special… skills, you’re the best deliveryman and weekend security guard with whom I’ll ever have the pleasure of working.”

“Thank you, Sir,” he replied. Outside of his folks, Perry White was the only person who knew of Clark’s extra abilities.

The two of them had been opening the store one morning – almost five years ago now – when a couple of masked gunmen had pushed their way inside and tried to get Perry to open the safe. Perry had balked – as it wasn’t in the Chief’s nature to kowtow to threats – and had grabbed the robber’s gun. A struggle ensued. Despite being ‘tied to a chair’ in the break room, Clark had broken free and made it to the office to stop the bullet before it hit Perry.

Then Clark had tied up the two robbers and had called the police. The robbers had not been quite sure what had happened or how close to a manslaughter rap they had been. The police had been disappointed to find the robbers had destroyed the security tape, so there was no photographic record of the events. Only the robbers hadn’t removed the security tape, Perry had. He had seen… or more accurately known… what Clark had done to save his boss’s life.

Perry had called Clark into the office a few days after the robbery and had confronted him about what really had happened. Clark had been hesitant to admit the truth until Perry had shown him the video tape evidence. Then the Chief had done something to cement their friendship forever. He had ejected the tape and handed it to Clark. Then he had said, “I don’t know how or why you did it, son, but thank you.”

Clark had worked at the store under Perry’s management without regret for two years, until one day Clark realized that he could no longer ignore the numerous pleas for help he heard around the city. He needed a job with more flexibility to disappear; he needed to be available to help at a moment’s notice, if he could. Perry had understood and had wished him well.

The a year after that, when his parents’ rent on the Café’s lease had been doubled – thank you, Lex Luthor – in an attempt to close them down and build condos, Perry had offered to give Clark a ‘part-time’ weekend job as overnight security guard and book shelver. He was hired on at five times base salary – as Perry said Clark could easily do the work of five men and do it in one eight hour shift instead of forty hours – so that Clark could help his folks pay their rent without raising prices at the café. The only condition that Perry had was that Clark not draw attention to himself because if Daily Books’ parent company – LexCo – found out that Clark was only working one eight hour shift instead of the forty on his paycheck – it would be both their hides on the line.

“But now I’m on the receiving end of irate tirades from my magazine supervisor that someone has been doing her job for her,” Perry continued as Clark’s thoughts returned to the present. “Kent, you asked if you could put shelves up in her receiving room and now you’re assisting Lois with her duties?”

Clark looked down. He had smiled fondly when Perry mentioned Lois’s irate tirades. He had been on the receiving end of a few of those himself. He could never get away with anything around Perry. The man was sharper than a tack and – as he had reminded Clark on several occasions – he hadn’t become manager of the biggest bookstore in Metropolis because he could yodel.

Clark cleared his throat before answering, “There was a huge backlog when she started, Chief, and I was just trying to help her catch up. I guess I got carried away.”

Perry raised a curious eyebrow at this statement and mumbled under his breath, “Better her than Cat.”

Clark couldn’t agree more. Then he remembered Lois’s reaction to his dinner invitation at lunch. “You need not worry, Chief. Lois has made it clear she no longer dates co-workers.”

His boss’s eyebrows remained elevated as he gazed at Clark with a soft laugh. “That doesn’t surprise me, son, after the number – or should I say numbers? – that Claude pulled on her.”

“Isn’t there anything you could do about him?” Clark asked for what felt like the tenth time. “Ditching her at that pricy restaurant was all but criminal.”

Perry nodded. He had long since stopped asking Clark how he knew what had been said in private conversations. “I agree with you that he has gotten more out of hand, Kent. But officially we have no grounds for termination. All his exploits happen away from the store.”

“Have you heard his latest lies about Lois? That’s walking the line of sexual harassment.”

Perry moved to his desk chair and sat down. “I know. I know. Which is why Claude has gotten an official reprimand and a stern talking to.”

It was Clark’s turn to raise his brow. A stern talking to? There had to be a better solution. “Cat needs to be removed as the female employee warning committee. You should tell the new hires...”

“Kent, as their boss – and as much as it pains me to say this – I represent LexCo. And as that evil representative, I officially cannot go behind one employee’s back to warn another.”

A reassuring smile graced Clark’s lips. “You could never be evil, Chief.”

Perry sighed. “Thanks.” He shook his head. “Sometimes, I wonder though…”

“Then how about some charity.”

“What do you have in mind?” his boss asked hesitantly.

“I’m worried about Lois. She has hardly a penny to her name until her first paycheck arrives Friday. She was eating one of those awful vending machine sandwiches at lunch. She practically devoured my bag of chips.”

“So ask her to your folks’ café for…” Perry started saying before he cut himself off. “You already did.” The Chief guffawed. “And she turned you down flat.”

Clark gazed away, warmth rising to his cheeks. Was his interest in Lois that obvious? No wonder she turned him down. He turned the conversation back to his chosen topic. “When I took her home the other night I noticed she had hardly any food. That and her money troubles. I just want to make sure she had one decent meal in her before payday. She’s already so thin as it is.”

“What do you have in mind?” Perry repeated. “You want me to spring for her dinner? I don’t think Alice would like that much.”

Clark smiled. He doubted Lois would agree to go in any case. “You could always spring for pizzas for the break room. I know Jack and Jimmy love ham and pineapple.” His smile turned to a grin at Perry’s sneer. Then Clark chuckled. “I was thinking more along the lines of me giving you a gift certificate to the café for you to give to Lois. It wouldn’t seem like a hand-out and unlike a date, it would put the power, the control into her hands.” At least he hoped so.

*** End of Part 3 ***

Part 4

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