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Airby C.M. Decarnin |
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It only occurred to Clark at the last minute to look back.
As they turned the corner he pulled away slightly from his mother's arm and turned his head.
Far away already, in a pool of light, long black coat shrouding down around him, all alone, Lex stood there looking after him.
Clark stumbled clumsily as something in his knees stopped while his shoes kept walking automatically.
The corner cut him off from line of sight.
"Dad."
Clark stopped.
"I have to go back."
"We just have time to catch the Smallville train." His Dad's voice was full of happiness but it was still -- well -- Dad. His mother looking up and so weird tonight how he kept noticing he was taller than she was. Taller than his Mom. Looking down at her.
"I have to talk to Lex."
"Lex Luthor --" his father started.
"Lionel Luthor -- " his mother said with a surprising tone of anger. They looked at each other in determined agreement.
"You don't need to have anything to do with them."
"Dad --"
"Your father's right, Clark."
His Dad's face looked bitter like it always was when he learned something beyond what he'd thought possible about how bad people could be. "I heard Lex talking on his phone to the kidnappers. He was behind this whole thing."
"The only person they talked to on the phone was the man who hired them," his mother said. "They were taking meteor rock and files on you."
"You can't afford to get between those two, Clark."
Clark didn't move. He remembered being in the air, so high above the city streets, so sure that he would fall, the safety glass he hadn't thought about till then that wouldn't break if his momentum wasn't great enough --
"No." They looked at him, a strangeness in their eyes. High in the shrilly streaming air -- "Between them is exactly where I have to be."
I'm going to take Lex away from him.
So much more than just the tiny technological seeds of his downfall, Lionel had sown broadcast distrust. He was blind. He could not have implanted minute machines invisibly to spy on Lex. He had had help. Who could Lex trust now? How could he know which impudent fingers placed a device actually into the spray of blossoming freesia that sweetened his mind and heart every time its fragrance infiltrated him...
Deadly fury. It took everything in its sweep, he had learned so long ago to keep it in leash: great power, who and what he was devastating everything in his infinite reach, loved or hated, innocent or guilty; useful or... marred.
His mother's flowers.
The attar that, like her, changed everything around it, utterly. Except his father. Nothing ever altered Lionel.
Lex got on his knees and found the sprig unharmed. Miraculous.
And then the tiny hairlike glint.
Within the only bud that remained to him of anything like innocence...
On the thirtieth floor, the lights weren't on.
Lex stood there quietly in the dark.
The glitter of broken glass like hailstones covered the carpet.
Vertical blind blades clicked and scraped in little breezes, letting in the Metropolis-light.
When he finally turned and saw Clark standing there, he didn't show whatever he was thinking.
"I didn't hear the elevator."
"You weren't in your Dad's office. I took the stairs from there."
They looked at each other across the unbelievable.
"Are you afraid of heights, Lex?"
Stillness, and a silence.
"I wasn't, until just this minute."
That rough silk voice. Then what he'd said seeping into Clark.
"If you're going to always misjudge me," Clark said hotly, "this will never work."
Lex's head tipped back a fraction, in what Clark recognized was surprise. "'This'?"
The silence hung there, like a final veil.
Lex said, "I've been in therapy, till it turned out my therapist was in the pay of Luthor rivals. I understand how paranoia operates. It doesn't mean I can control it."
Clark felt a smile turning up his mouth. "I'm afraid of heights. That's why I took the stairs." He added, "Your elevators howl, Lex."
"That's not the wind in the elevator shafts, that's the dire-wolves we keep stabled in the basement."
Everything Lex said that touched on Lionel came out that way, that wistful, bitter, taunting tone. So different from his usual straightforward nakedness. He looked right at Clark. "But it's my father's building, Clark. The only thing that's mine now is the name over the door."
Clark looked down before he met his eyes, and said, "He's the only important person in your life, Lex. Isn't he."
Uh-oh. Lex. Pissed off.
"What do you know about my life."
That cut like a scythe at him.
Clark felt impervious. "I know everything in it is expendable. So you can beat your Dad."
Lex shouting: "He's trying to destroy me!"
"He's succeeding."
24/7 365 for 22 years --
Like something had just cut through all that bullshit.
All that drowning, suffocating, violent embattlement.
All that Lionel.
"Get out." Reflexively; with all kinds of breath under it.
And Clark was simply -- gone.
After one really, supremely irritated look.
Where he had been, just -- hallway.
Blind-blades chattered and what seemed like minutes later Lex heard a distant stairwell door close emptily.
He stood there.
Later he moved away from all the glass-stones, opened the blinds so wind wouldn't send one vertical scything down on anyone below, and stared over at the Daily Planet roof.
"Clark?"
He had heard the tires in the lane, but despite the engine sound -- there weren't a lot of Ferrari Spiders in Smallville -- had kept himself from hoping.
Lex was there. Coming up his loft stairs. Like a sunrise.
Clark didn't want to be rude at all. Yet he didn't get up from where he was lying on the couch. It was as if huge hands of lassitude were holding him down. He wanted to look up at Lex. Walking over to him.
"No one was in the house."
Lex always looked so --
So Lex. No one else looked anything at all like him. Those clothes. So formal always lately. Yet Lex looked --
-- undressable.
There. He had thought it. Lex with his clothes half off.
Lex. Liking. Having his clothes half off.
Lex. Smiling at him half undressed.
Smiling because he was half undressed.
Say something.
"Mom and Dad are at the movies."
Lex's head tilted the slightest bit. "A matinee?" Like that was something novel to a rich boy.
"No, they're going to do some stuff and go to dinner first. They're kind of -- making up."
Lex's eyes on him teased just perceptibly, the way they so often did, as if he were waiting for Clark to get some unspoken joke. "So you're holding down the fort."
Something in the way he said it made Clark feel like a lone defender with a single musket; protecting the Kent farm and all it held from...
Suddenly it was as if they looked at each other across a carpet of shattered safety-glass.
Across a gauntlet.
Lex stepped forward with that half-open-mouthed look he got when he was about to beg for something -- usually, understanding.
Knowing so well how Lex looked when he begged made Clark suddenly feel desperately ashamed. As if he'd been using his X-ray vision to see something he shouldn't. Lex shouldn't have had to plead with him so often.
Even if a lot of people wouldn't have recognized it for what it was.
Lex didn't exactly get down on his knees.
Might even sound more like he was yelling at you.
Lex said, "I didn't mean to throw you out of LuthorCorp." He looked right into Clark's eyes. "What you said was hard to deal with."
"I don't want him to get you, Lex."
Looking up and to the side then, mouth opening. Like that. "I don't think I can change what I am, Clark."
"I like what you are. I just don't want you to change into... something else."
"You were right. It's all been about him. But..."
The silence went on so long, Lex looking at the floor, that Clark urged, "What?"
"He's not going to let me go." Full level stare again. "He took that contract because it was mine. It's me he's coming after. I don't get the option to just walk away and not look back."
What would it be like if the best thing he could hope for from his Dad was to be able to escape him?
Without thinking Clark reached up his left hand to Lex and evidently without thinking Lex put his own hand into Clark's.
His fingers were so warm... so gentle, touching his.
Lex was getting closer.
Lex. Getting. Down.
On his knees.
Beside the couch.
It felt like they were hypnotizing one another.
"You --" Lex started. Started over, with even less breath, "There are things about me you don't --" and Clark reached up his other hand behind Lex's head and bent him carefully, carefully down until his lips felt the touch of Lex's mouth.
Clark Kent was kissing him.
Oh god.
Oh god no.
The middle of Clark Kent's tongue was wetly soft against his lips and when he didn't do anything to greet it, uncurling to the pointed tip and slithering -- pushing in between them and onto his own astonished, utterly dumbfounded tongue. While Clark's other arm went up around his neck and shoulder and was holding in a fantastical way that gave new meaning to the concept "locked in an embrace".
He couldn't move.
He was pretty sure.
Lex wasn't kissing back.
So...
This probably had been a huge mistake --
If he lost Lex to Lionel --
Because of this --
So --
Terrible --
The worst thing he had ever done. Almost.
Why should a country kid assume rich city people knew this stuff?
The way Lex always looked at him could just be -- Lex.
The way Lex looked --
When he was absolutely sure Lex wasn't kissing him he let him go.
Lex popped back away from him like a bobber to the surface, a look on his face of complete amazement. Open-mouthed. Wide-eyed.
Okay --
So --
What did you say when you'd attempted to seduce the wrong sex earthling?
"I'm sorry!" Clark blurted, panicking, suppressing the crackpot part of him that was thinking disappointedly, Earth boys aren't easy.
And Lex was simultaneously blurting, still with that saucer-eyed look all over him, "Your Dad is going to kill me!"
What?
What?
Looking at each other wildly.
Simultaneously bursting out into laughter.
"God, Clark," Lex finally said, wiping his eyes with the heel of his hand. "You looked, just, so rejected!"
"You looked so surprised."
"That was horror, Clark. Complete and abject. I am going to need a bodyguard."
"Hey, I kissed you."
"A team of bodyguards. Around the clock."
Lex rested his forehead against Clark's ribcage, then, and sighed, and Clark heard singing like an angel choir in his heart, unearthly. He moved his hand up to Lex's shoulder breathlessly to rest on Lex.
On Lex.
Lex letting him.
Oh Lex felt good.
There was warmth to his palm and fingers. Strength on the other side of this amazing cloth. Cloth with Lex right under it. The best kind of cloth. It was like he could feel right through it. Breath, and Lex and muscle and bone and moving and Lex.
Then he could feel Lex's breath on his own chest. A warm spot. Oh.
He didn't want this ever to end.
Then Lex lifted up and smiled at him and he didn't want that ever to end.
Lex's hands closed on either side of his face and oh, okay, rich city people did -- because this was a kiss like -- like he became -- so many distant stars -- that just the friction of the not-much of outer space, enough to spread him like a starfish and start him to, invisibly so far, still imperceptibly but he knew, start turning on an orbit around his own heart, like a galaxy. Forever. It was one horny homo tonguefuck and nothing like anything he'd ever done in the treehouse with Pete or back in Lonnie Jackson's woods or in tall grass or corn with anyone, even Chloe's cousin Ed from Sausalito whose parents lived in a houseboat. Lex just kind of -- took it all, as if Clark were a girl. Which made him shiver; instead of making him feel weird. He felt I.Q. points spiralling away into black vacuum.
Lex lunged back off him with a huge gasp. He panted, "God -- Clark -- sorry -- I --" and because Clark didn't want him to be sorry he reached his hands around and down on Lex's back, and Lex just froze like that, head back, eyes closed, mouth open, and the rest of his breath came out on a much lower note than what he'd started saying.
"Wait --"
Clark had never seen Lex look so -- undone.
He slid his hands to the front and unfastened Lex's pants while he waited. Lex looked down, confused.
"Clark, what are you --"
Clark reached up and unbuttoned the top button of Lex's gorgeous shirt -- blue-green, pale, one of his favorites on Lex. A color you might only find in nature on the wings of rare exotic butterflies. He unbuttoned the second button.
"Clark --"
"I want to see you mussed up." He undid the third button and pushed the shirt a little up and back so part of Lex's shoulder showed and the shirt-front rumpled. "I think guys look sexier that way."
"You --" There was a full stop there. "You do?"
"Yeah." Clark smiled. Many of his brain-cells had returned from their flight. He could see Lex thinking. He stroked his fingertips down Lex's cheek. It slowed the process.
"You... think guys are sexy?"
This could take a while. "Uh-huh."
"And I -- I'm a guy?"
Clark waited patiently.
"That you think is..." Lex crashed into first at last. "I thought you were in love with Lana."
Oh. "I... kind of... fell out of love."
"Oh. But. She's a girl."
"I'm bisexual." It was like it was a new word to Lex. He was absorbing it. "Lex, haven't you been, kind of, flirting with me all this time?"
Lex looked aghast, then blushed. "I didn't think anyone would know but me."
"Yeah." Clark very gently undid the fourth button. "I kind of got that. Like it was a private game. You weren't inviting me to really play."
"I --" And Clark's fingers stopped dead on the fifth button. Was Lex not cool with this? "It never occurred to me that you'd be --"
"Bi?"
"Interested." Clark's mouth fell open, and Lex smiled, feeling the compliment. "Well, what are the odds? A beautiful farm-boy in love with the girl next door? And a bald guy half again your age with a personality-deficit disorder --"
"Lex!"
"-- who's never even been attracted to a -- male before, never mind got any moves."
"Oh!" A lot of lightbulbs going on. "Oh. Ohh. Oh man."
"I could listen to you converse for hours." Lex -- kidding him? Then Lex was looking him in the eyes. "Did you assume someone like me would automatically have tried every form of vice and iniquity in the book? Contrary to popular belief, Clark, that's just what a typical upper-class education is designed to prevent."
Clark looked back thoughtfully. "I guess you would have had a lot of other things to do."
"Wait -- are you implying you became polymorphous-perverse just out of boredom?"
"I don't know about perverse." Clark let a grin break through. "Actually I don't know much about polymorphous either. But there isn't a heck of a lot to do out here in the summer, when there's no school and it's light out till almost nine. It's not like I live in the hustle and bustle of Smallville itself. I can't run into town every day."
"When you say 'run'..."
Air under him, forty, fifty stories of it, time slowed so it seemed like he was hardly moving, moving that fast he hadn't ever had that much time to think before, no obstacles except a big one here, now: death. Up here alone with it and if he fell how long would it seem to take with him at superspeed screaming and grabbing at things that weren't there -- and would he die or break every bone in his body -- did it look like the window was a little closer --?
"People start to wonder, if I do a lot of it."
"Mm." Lex was looking at him so amazedly. Not wide-eyed like from the kiss, but there behind his eyes, deep in that mind big as the sky.
"Getting back to vice and iniquity," Clark persisted. And started smiling.
There it was. Pure and breathtaking. That smile of Clark's that had first stopped him in his mental tracks. Like something aimed at you. Dead on, dead accurate. The bullet with your name on it. The beauty in it something radiant Lex didn't understand, didn't want to lest it shatter his existence all to pieces. That made him look at Clark. A boy. And see...
It wasn't as if he hadn't ever had a crush before. It was just that it had been a long, long time... Surprising, intellectually, to feel how identical it all was, every detail the same, though Clark was male -- except a frisson of the forbidden, exhilarating, a tension against the sure and certain knowledge that he would never, of course, ever attempt --
Clark had somehow gotten his hand down onto Lex's naked rump.
Under his trousers and his underwear.
His brain kept fritzing out like a moth against a bug-zapper every time he thought, "I kissed -- He's a super-mutant!"
He knew how to have sex, but not with --
"I kissed -- He's a guy!"
If Clark would just -- not smile so much -- let him get his breath back --
But Clark was pulling him down again, like this time he wanted him to drown --
Mm.
It was warm.
Clark's mouth -- Clark's hands... Clark's body, arms around him, warm and he found himself making sounds that were whimpering and desperate as his tongue tried to lick down into Clark's sweet throat and somehow he was on top of Clark, forcing himself upon an innocent fuck Clark's hand was on his cock! It was soooo goooood -- He heard himself moaning and felt the bucking he was doing on top of Clark and scrabbled for a way to get Clark naked but, a t-shirt under flannel, jeans shoes Clark's weight his weight it was hopeless, hopeless -- couldn't fuck Clark anyway god condoms, tight, oh god it would be paradise but Clark's -- big -- fist -- oh -- god -- oh--
Who knew Lex was such an animal?
He'd somehow expected Lex to make love with a lot of -- etiquette. Erotically sophisticated tricks and touches and -- kind of elegant.
Not with a possessive, self-centered rut like he was starving for it -- holding Clark down with one hand around each shoulder and plunging like he was trying to bury himself in him, eat him, fuck him, take him, wallow in him -- Clark held on and tried to help him ride it, tugged Lex's cock as gently and expertly as he could amid turmoil like this. Lex started crying out and humping down on him. He thought for sure Lex would come then. But instead he struggled a little, panting, "Want to -- rub on you. Want to -- rub right on you--" with a swerving of his hips that made his exact meaning clear.
Clark let go of Lex's cock, bringing a teeth-set "Nnggg" out of him. Then he lifted his hips up under him. Caught the waist of his jeans and jockeys and pushed down. Lex had unzipped him scrabbling there earlier, and he was able to force the cloth down to his thighs. Lex moving on his freed cock felt sensational. Lex got that signal from him and moaned delightedly, as Clark so carefully inched Lex's own clothes down, down, until his hard heavy implement was on Clark's naked groin, outlined like a blood-hot brand. Lex sighed his breath out onto Clark's neck.
Clark put his arms gently around him, hips staying lifted. The muscle-stretch felt good. The offering himself toward Lex felt --
Ah, god --
Lex shifted.
Their cocks touched.
Clark blindly moved to it. The two shafts lay together, all their lengths, hot flesh cores, touching...
"Oh...
"Lex..."
The practice jumping he'd done, just to see how far he could jump, with Pete measuring in paces. They had a place in a fallow field where they knew the measurements by landmarks, now, and it just kept getting better, like he was -- growing. It had been fun. This wasn't. Mom -- he didn't even want to think, the horror of his Mom in murderous hands -- like his whole world pulled out from under him, the thought that -- no. And don't look down. He looked down. Panic rolled up across his stomach and his eyes rolled up in terror. If I get there I am never, ever, ever doing anything like this again --
Lex's whole body, on him now, felt different, as if it were vibrating with a sweet inner tension all through, as Lex humped so gently and exquisitely now up along him, then drew back with a long shaking breath, and Clark could feel his own pubic hairs around Lex's clean, heavy balls, a digging in, this time before Lex thrust slowly up and moaned "Oh god I want to fuck you," and Clark pushed harder up, and caught Lex's head gently, and his shoulder, and buried his tongue in Lex's mouth. It started Lex into rhythm, that Clark almost matched, he could feel in Lex's deeper breathing sounds and harder clutch a dominance that burned across his skin like fire, in an instant he was there, needing, holding, swaying his hips up into Lex and moaning for it, god it was so good, with him, so good, oh Lex, oh, Lex -- And Lex pushing back, spreading his thighs on top of Clark's like he was riding him, far across the wide world, Clark his young lover, who wanted only to be held down by him, kissed like an invading army by him, taken -- taken -- next time naked -- and Clark felt it welling and building like a tidal wall of pleasure falling, falling through him and then Lex yelled, "Ah! Fuck!" and ground down onto his cock and thrust, and Clark became the wave. Black ecstasy. On the current of Lex's rhythm, Lex's heat and hard, ramming lunges, Lex's gasping, Clark throbbed, and rose, flooded toward golden shore and broke, exploding in a cloud of dazzling foam, spray white as sun and diamonds but underneath, a dark, red -- oh -- god! "Lex!" Never -- he'd never -- oh -- god --! Hot undertow pulling him back, down, throbbing him darkly, deeper, sensation below, beyond anything he had understood before, Lex moved on his crotch and the pleasure stormed him, took him, threw him again on the unyielding land to shatter, left him crying for some help against the pain of such unbearable, such decimating bliss.
He heard his name, rasped in Lex's last orgasmic transport. And then it was as if Lex soaked into him, so utterly did he relax onto Clark's chest, crotch thermonuclear, thighs winged, insteps hooked across Clark's shins, palms pressing hot against his back.
His...
...back?
Clark opened his eyes.
The curve of Lex's head, his beautiful ear. Cheek pink as he turned his lips irresistibly toward it, more of a suck than a kiss; a lick; pink almost like strawberry ice-cream but a taste like Lex.
He looked the other way.
They were up about three feet above the couch.
He had no idea what to do to get them down.
He smiled, and nuzzled back toward Lex, and closed his eyes.
-End-
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