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//
When did you know?
He asked Pa once, over the finished wedding anniversary card they’d made together for Ma—Clark helped draw the flowers along the border.
When did I know what?
That you really, really liked Ma. Enough to love her.
Clark thinks back to that moment and reads his father’s heavy, pensive sigh in response with all the weight of hindsight: how does one reconcile the pure innocence of a boy from another planet asking about humanity’s most basic elements, while giving him answers appropriately inclusive of the species as a whole? He asked everything about anything, all the time.
Clark’s home-grown neuroses aside, of course Pa saw it differently. As in all things, he made it simpler to understand.
First time she said my full name, he’d revealed wistfully with his voice low and reverent, looked me right in the eyes and snapped at me like I’d ticked her off, shew. That was it. I was gone for good on that woman.
Really? That was it?
You’ll get it someday, kiddo. Maybe. Who knows. Different for everyone, I think.
//
Lois shifts in Clark’s periphery to rise from her desk, hiking her laptop bag up over her shoulder and checking the watch face on the inside of her wrist as the last fourteen minutes before billable overtime tick down. “Hey, newbie.”
Clark glances at her from halfway turned in his chair and nudges his glasses up the bridge of his nose. “I have a name, you know.”
Lois stops her quick clip to the metro-side exit and looks right at him. “Hey, Clark Kent,” she over-pronounces, and raises her slim brows with a challenging twitch. “Quit clocking in early. If the train schedule manages to spit you out on time, you kill the remainder buying doughnuts for the floor like a sane person. Alright? Perry hates sloppy shit like that.”
Clark blinks. “Noted.”
She doesn’t hide the slight roll to her eyes as she returns to departing.
Clark’s chair squeaks through his slow twist back to facing his keyboard; the blinking reticle on his screen; another article stalled while the back of his mind goes running with the horrifically human loop of “is she there, is she looking, is she noticing me, is she still there, is she aware of anything I do at a scale not patently planetary, is she there, is she looking,” et al.
You’ll get it someday.
Shit.
//
Metropolis messes breaking out during rush hour are never easy. Metropolis messes breaking out during Friday rush hour make Clark want to pull out his hair by the roots.
No one is dead, but plenty are hurt. The city bus is all but folded in half around a marble pylon in the financial district—he’s already chased the anomalous appearance that threw it in the first place past city limits for capture and tracking, but lifting wounded citizens down to the ground from the amid smashed windows and totaled seats feels somehow more delicate, more dire than pointing a giant amphibious monster to—
He stills. Instinct pulls him like a scent: One of the passengers disembarking on her own with a wobbly balance from the front of the bus looks too familiar to stop it before it leaves his mouth—“Lois!”
She turns, looking scrambled and more than a bit inconvenienced, her bag and badge wrapped tightly in two arms like a shield in front of her as she hurries to the far end of the park. Adrenaline is familiar, but fear is not. It shouldn’t even be here, crawling all sticky through Clark’s overclocked limbic system, but he can’t expel it once it’s started. He hurries over to her making herself scarce by a secluded bench and finds with a drop in his gut that she’s bleeding from a narrow gash across her forehead.
“There’s a kid over there with a broken arm,” Lois says, waving away Clark’s automatic prodding as if it isn’t the Man of Steel attempting to help but an ornery fly. “This is nothing, smacked my head on the window. Cut and a headache.”
“You may have a concussion, you—”
“I’m fine.” Lois squeezes her eyes shut, scowling, and catches herself on the bench when she swoons lightly. “Don’t tell me to go to the hospital, I haven’t met my deductible yet.”
Clark puts a steadying hand on her shoulder, and immediately her jumping vitals and infinite chemical makeup invade his awareness—he lets go, but Lois lists into his touch with an automatic easing in her pulse that makes Clark’s wrists tingle before suddenly stiffening; Lois rounds on him with a sharp light in her eyes. “How the hell do you know my name?”
Damn it. Shit-fuck-hell-damn it. He’s so sure to call everyone citizen or friend, never to slip up with familiarity, that’s day one shit, but here—she—
A sickening, dawning light seeps into the back of Lois’s gaze. She stares at his eyes, his brow, drawing it all together in her head. “Oh, my God.”
Clark spreads his hands. “Please don’t tell anyone,” he pleads in a low voice.
Lois’s eyes go wide. “You aren’t even going to refute it?”
“What would be the point?!”
“Oh my God.”
“I’m sorry.”
“Why are you sorry?! You just saved our shit, you—! You’re fucking Superman?” she leans in close to hiss at him, and Clark wishes he was anything but drawn hopelessly to the wild vehemence pinning up the snarled edges of her mouth. Lois swats his shoulder with her overfull satchel. “I knew you were being weird about something!”
“Ow! What’s that supposed to mean?”
Lois tests tenderly with her fingertips at her bleeding forehead. “Can you fly all the time?”
Clark stares at her, incredulous. “Yes?”
“Could you fly me home?” It looks like it pains her to ask for kindness. Clark’s chest pangs.
“I have to—”
“Maybe Superman forgot I’m on a deadline,” Lois snaps through her teeth. “It would be far more helpful to return me to my apartment as close to now as possible than it would be to drag me to urgent care. I do not need this shit today.”
Lois gestures broadly at the crash site across the park. Clark casts a look over his shoulder at it all, where EMS has already arrived to start taking over.
“I’ll order us takeout,” Lois mutters in last-ditch consolation.
As he watches the flurry of safe-making, an old woman notices Clark looking and points fire and rescue eagerly in his direction. Clark curses under his breath.
“You live near any dim sum spots?” he asks, crouching to hook one arm under Lois’s knees and the other around her shoulders. Lifted to his chest, she smells from this near of raspberry and palm sugar.
Lois shifts one elbow to settle more comfortably along Clark’s ribs. “There’s a Szechuan place half a block away.”
“Deal.”
When his feet leave the ground, Lois gasps. The sound of the slipstream steals it down, but Clark hears and memorizes and commits it to his deepest and most unassailable memory.
//
Aground in Lois’s apartment, the dam of Clark’s secret hangs open and the truth won’t quit spilling out at full flume despite his best efforts to play it fucking cool.
“. . . so then they put me in sports, but of course that got tough, too, because surprise-surprise, it’s very fucking strange to see a six-year-old hit four dingers in a row at tee-ball.”
A spurl of victory joins the whackbang flavor of the crispy-spicy chicken Clark shovels gratefully from the container at Lois’s coffee table into his mouth, cape folded neatly over one shoulder, when Lois laughs from inside the icebox. She wraps a bag of frozen corn in a tea towel, and sits down across from Clark and the minor feast spread out before them.
“What about football?” Lois asks. She dry-swallows three store brand NSAIDs. Her forehead is already starting to scab.
Clark winces. “Making another kid try to tackle this isn’t exactly fair sportsmanship.” He gestures broadly at his torso.
Lois sniffs and rubs her eyes, looking away from him. “Could you get me a beer from the fridge?”
Clark roots around in her condiment drawers and door shelves, still prattling about the trials and tribulations of pee-wee athletics, before he frowns into the crispers. “Not seeing any beer in here.”
“Damn it.” Lois digs for her wallet. “The shop downstairs should have those cheap-o’s, the green bottles with the guy on them.”
Clark leans on the open door and fixes her with his best your-friend-neighbor look. “You really shouldn’t be drinking if you hit your head, it—”
“Clark.”
“Lois.”
Her eyes flash. “What?”
“No. You need rest, not shitty pilsners.”
Giving up, Lois digs her laptop out from its cave of papers and last week’s Wednesday issue folded in fours. “They’re not shitty,” she says tartly, “they’re crushable.”
Clark watches her get to it, the switch flipped: Lois on a job, heaven help the poor idiot who tries to pry her off of it. He snaps the lid back on one of the rice containers and starts cleaning up his half of the food. “You need anything else that isn’t alcohol?”
“Four more hours in the day.”
“Well if that’s all,” Clark chides, and catches her eye over the edge of her screen shouting soft blue light across her face—she shouldn’t look like that after an accident, nobody should; shouldn’t be so easy to look at, so simple to be around, so . . . all of it, to him.
“Thank you,” she says softly. “I mean it. Seriously.”
The wind nearly leaves Clark’s chest. He snatches it back down and clears his throat. “Just doing my job.”
“Take the leftovers.”
“You sure?”
“Can’t eat all that alone.” She gestures at the containers on the table scattered amid her TV remote and a shallow stack of photobooks, and then spares him one more glance directly. “I’ll see you Monday, Clark.”
It feels the good kind of dangerous to hear that name given to him while wearing the suit. Clark applies himself with aplomb to packing leftovers, sure that a hydrogen charge is liable to start dancing from his fingertips if he isn’t careful. “Let me know when you’re awake in the morning, okay? Only because with your head, you know.”
“Sure thing.” Lois salutes him, glued to her screen, and Clark knows he’s little more than white noise to her now until she surfaces from under the finished article.
He leaves through the window. The plastic bag around the leftovers rattles in the wind as he flies, red text fluttering THANK YOU THANK YOU THANK YOU—which has never sounded quite as earnest to Clark from anyone else as it has from her, so reticent and true.
//
Lois Lane
10:34 AM
awake ugh
im fine but i havent felt this hungover since i was twenty
Good morning! Glad to hear it 👍
Glad for being fine, not the hangover
(I don’t know what a hangover feels like.)
not that youre bragging huh
is that because youre a prude or because youre an alien
Both 💅
alien prude
theres a first get asimov on the horn
thanks again for yesterday
seriously, i dont always know how not to be sort of an asshole about that stuff
Slow down, professor, I don’t do so well with double negatives 🥲😬
What kind of ‘stuff,’ you mean hellish bus accidents?
youre cool and im glad we work together
yeah hellish bus accidents and gratitude and anyone taking good care of me
all the regular stuff
Got it 🫡
You’re cool too
The regular stuff is for squares
lol yeah fuck thanksgiving
sorry that was stupid
No I’m just frozen over here trying to come up genius of equal or greater value 🤔
hows that going for ya?
Big Think Hard For Hero Man
lmao
i wont tell anyone btw
pinkie swear
Yeah I know
You’re cool :)
//
Things shift, from there.
Clark finds himself wanting every minute with Lois to last longer and longer, an impossible stretch of the present to accommodate any time she deigns to give him and which he takes eagerly at any stretch—shooting shit on break, coffee top-offs, copy-making, any scrap of time stolen in the orbit of Lois Lane ought to last a little longer than it should.
The team goes out for drinks, and then nightcaps, and then the two of them trail along quiet sidewalks talking about music and nothing until they find a dive with two seats open at the bar. Clark doesn’t want to quit talking to her. He can’t bring himself to let her go into the night, not yet; if he can earn one more smile from her, one more laugh, one more companionable lean into his side that last just long enough to make his back teeth buzz, he’ll take it.
“Did you know some cows have best friends?”
They’re out on the curb while Clark nurses down his last beer and Lois works on her second purely-social cigarette of the night. The cold is present, but not overmuch. Lois gives him a dubious look, turning up her collar against a willful breeze. “Like they pick their favorite people on a farm?”
“No, no. In their herds, they have best friends.” Clark grins. “And there can be drama.”
Lois returns the smile through her next exhale. She peers down the quiet street as if looking for an incoming cab, and Clark weathers a wave of stiff awkwardness.
“Ah, man.” Before he can stop himself, he’s mocking a wince and gesturing with his nearly-gone bottle. “This stuff’s weird on my system, you know. Feels like bad form to be partially toasted on a third date.”
Lois examines him like a subject, keen and no-bullshit. An unrelenting heat starts up along the back of Clark’s neck.
“What’s your definition of a date, Clark?”
He mocks a seeking look up and down the sidewalk. “We’re alone, and we’re talking, and we like each other.”
“Do we.” Lois doesn’t look unconvinced. Clark grins.
“I like to think so, yeah. Am I wrong?”
He sips down the last of his beer. Lois tips her head at him and takes two steps closer.
“By those metrics, this would be our second date.”
“Show your work, Ms. Lane.”
A subtle pink goes up under Lois’s cheeks. The scrape from the bus incident is almost fully healed—Clark holds himself back, barely, from stroking a thumb across the shallow scab.
“If you count word-vomiting at me in my apartment over Chinese takeout as a date—”
“Absolutely I do.”
“—then this is number two.”
Triumphant, Clark holds up a hand between them and begins ticking off his fingers; “First date salad, second date rescue—”
“First date salad?”
“Of course first date salad! It was a full hour for lunch, just the two of us, and afterward I wanted to take you home and kiss you.” Without looking away from Lois, Clark forgets his bottle’s gone empty and sucks dry at nothing. “Ergo,” he says around the lip before setting it aside, “this is our third date.”
He can’t bring himself to blink, caught so widely by the swing of surprise. Lois looks at him for a long time under the blue cast of neon advertising COCKTAILS high through the plate glass window beside them. The shapes of her face in the half-dark make Clark feel as though he’s hurtled up into the troposphere without holding his breath first.
Lois steps down to the curb with her arm raised. Despite himself, Clark’s pride buckles.
“You know if my jokes are that bad, you can just tell me instead of walking into traffic.”
“I’m getting us a taxi, dumbass. I want to take you home and kiss you.”
//
Lois Lane is many things, but patient is not one of them. She kisses Clark in the back seat of the cab, and in her building's elevator, and all the way from her front door to her bedroom.
Flying doesn’t have shit on the feeling of her mouth exploring his. She touches him like she’s hungry for him, like she can taste through her hands. Pliant, he follows her down onto his back: down into the plush duvet, into the sensation of her warmth, into the light scent of her so concentrated here where she lays down her head that Clark is all but blind with wanting.
Magnetized to her, Clark lets his mouth fall open with a soft, bruised sound as Lois reaches down between his legs and kneads.
“Yeah?” she breathes, smirking sharp with the hunt. Clark’s head falls back in the soft glow of her nightstand lamp with his vision blurred and his breath thick in his chest. His blood feels like champagne.
“Yeah. Yeah.” Clark all but jackknives when her fingertips quest down, inward, petting firmly at the inseam of his jeans. He reaches down bullet-quick and stills her with a gentle thumbpress. “I, h—hold on, Lo.”
Lois stills. She lifts her hands away as if he’s announced he’s charged himself with live current. “What, did I hurt you?”
“No, not you, it’s—” Clark huffs. “This is good, you’re great, this is right, I just got—I got . . . different stuff in there.”
He gestures uselessly at his lap. Lois looks unconvinced.
“How different?”
“If you don’t want to anymore, I—”
“Why would I not want to? How different?”
She looks aroused by a challenge, or perhaps that’s just the residual burn of working-up. Clark’s mouth waters with a backfooted edge. “It’s not—! You know.”
He makes a vague jack-off motion around a flimsy, invisible dick, not quite landing the shape of it. Lois covers her mouth with both hands and laughs.
Clark feels meager and young and tired of himself in a way he hasn’t since he first kissed an older teammate in the empty baseball dugout his second high school summer. Clark drags one of Lois’s thrifted throw pillows across his face.
Lois pulls it away with a sheepish smile. “Hey, no, don’t do that. Look at me. I know better than to expect factory settings.”
Despite himself, Clark gives a winded huff of a chuckle. “Seriously.” He shakes his head, mouth tight. “You don’t have to if you don’t want to.”
“Do you want to?”
“Yes,” he blurts, and finds with an implacable simmering that he means it.
Lois’s gaze softens. She leans in close, their noses touching. “So what makes you think I don’t?”
She kisses him, slow and filthy. Clark leaves his eyes closed to save him the mortification when he parts for air and says with half his voice, “It’s sort of like a pussy.”
“Good. I love pussy.”
Heat dives hard and vivid into the low places between Clark’s organs. He all but whines against Lois’s mouth.
Her fingers are deft down his buttons, tugging his undershirt up from its tuck-in and greedily roving her touch across his naked skin. Lois lets him pant against her cheek while she turns to watch the progress, devouring the sight of him coming into sight from beneath his pedestriana.
“Does that make you wet?” she asks him softly, just enough tease in it to lilt the question on its tail.
There is no beginning and no end in the universe, only this: Touch, and wanting, and warmth—
Lois puts a hand in Clark’s hair and tugs softly at the roots. “I asked a question, Clark: are you wet for me?”
She has him pinned with a hawkish look that says he’s a good lead worth following. He has never felt so full of his own body at once.
Clark lets one knee fall to the side, his belt already open and the zipper winking in the lamplight. “Come see for yourself.”
//
The wet cleft follows that liquid shape of joining thighs, soft and damp and lightly furred with cilia all the way in. A silvery, welling slip slicks the way for Lois’s questing fingers in deep, warmer than body heat but then Clark runs like a furnace even by the most baseline measures.
Her fingers alone could prod secrets from him like this, but it isn’t just her fingers. It’s her sense of timing, and the way she talks to him as she goes when she slows it down— How’s that feel? Yeah? Use your words— the way she pets and touches the rest of his body, and her fucking mouth.
The shape of her tongue in him is too real to be real. He’s made a mess of himself and Lois isn’t slowing, speeding him instead to an ending he can hardly anticipate for the immensity of feeling he knows is brewing.
Clark got punched, once. Properly socked in the gut, it juddered him so soundly in his frame he was sure he’d never get his wind back in him until he did.
He clenches his fists around the sheets on both sides of his body. “Lois— Lois.”
“Mhmm?”
She asks from between his legs, her tongue pointed, smug and pleased with her work, and he looks down to meet her unrelenting eyes. Her nose is bent against his pubic bone, pressed close, working him at an angle that’s brought one of his knees up to brace over her shoulder.
He feels patently digestible this way and that fact coruscates through him from core to end; being a project, a task, a solvable puzzle, simple and understandable, every small thing he simply cannot be here reduced by human touch—!
The tempest in him hits its eye for an instant. Every fine sense in his body opens up. Each rapid scrape for breath in Clark’s fluttering lungs clouds his ears, and he can practically see forever from here—Lois keeps at her work, encouraging hums lost to the sound of silvery dribbling around her knuckles and tongue, until Clark comes with a shout on a shuddering release that makes his spine light up.
He is lost and gone and gone and lost, floating forever.
Stillness.
The first thing he sees again is Lois.
She sits back on her heels in the picture of victory, flushed and eager, disheveled with her chin shining.
“That. Has never happened before,” Clark pants. He pets at Lois’s hair with a shaking hand as she crawls up along his side. Her clothes drag lovely-harsh against his nakedness. Clark flinches and hisses, over-live, caught by Lois’s hand still there steadying his flank.
“You never tried that before with anyone?” She looks unbound and alive, as if woken from a long sleep yet still mid-dream.
“Shy kid. Alien prude. Few chances.”
Mocking a sympathetic sound, Lois puts her hand back against his sex. Clark shivers and bucks with a sweet, conciliatory yip—he cants up to meet her, all the good ruin of her work in evidence still sticking between his thighs.
She has her lip between her teeth, marveling at him; each small twitch of her changing expression is an opus of study.
“It’s really pretty,” she says softly, pared back to delicate and undecorated honesty.
“Thanks.”
“I’m serious.”
“I know.” Clark kisses her. The odd savor of the taste left on her makes him shiver with the same frisson of a skimming touch along the back of the neck meant to remind one of ownership.
Lois leans back enough to ask the air between them, “You wanna try mine out, too?”
Her index and middle finger tap at Clark’s lips for entry. The emission has more of its nectar about it from there directly, heavy in his mouth and lighting him up with strange taboo. He laves the length of Lois’s fingers with one long pass of his tongue.
“Yes, ma’am,” he begs around the digits.
Lois’s eyes are dark. “You need a minute?”
“For what?”
“For bouncing back, refractory and all— ah!”
She laughs freely, twisting with futile shoves against Clark’s weight on her when he flips them easily together. “Extraterrestrial biology, Ms. Lane,” he says to her neck from on top, kissing his way up to her jaw, where he stops and fairly bats his eyelashes. “Try to keep up.”
Lois puts her hands back in Clark’s hair and steers him by the sides of his head until he rests his chin on the elastic bow of her underwear braced along her hips. She pushes a tumbledown curl from his eyes and looks above all else terribly, awfully fond of him. “Start slow, newbie.”