Walnut Street

by a campbell

Chloe Sullivan/Lex Luthor, implied Clark Kent/Lex Luthor

Thanks to fajrdrako for beta

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She only said, “My life is dreary,
He cometh not,” she said;
She said, “I am aweary, aweary,
I would that I were dead.”

--Alfred, Lord Tennyson, 1830

The summer heat passes over the Kansas prairie in shimmering waves. The old wicker glider barely in motion, Chloe swings on the farmhouse porch, fans herself and sips from the glass of Country Time with lots of melting ice and extra sugar, mixed up twenty minutes before. The noon sun beats down from high overhead; moisture beads on the frosted surface of the glass spanned by retro multicolored rings, mirroring the droplets of perspiration on Chloe’s neck and arms. No need, no desire for lunch when it’s this warm.

She glances down at her wrist to check the time. “Hair past a freckle,” Gabe, who hated have a watch on his arm, used to say. The memory sparked a smile. 1:37 p.m.

She pushes herself up and off the worn, mildewed cushions. Her gathered muslin skirt sways and clings to her legs, sandals scuff on the chipped paint of the wooden porch floor, screen door creaking behind her as it slams lightly shut. She sets her empty glass in the sink, runs a little water into it, then loosens the top button on her sleeveless white blouse of eyelet lace. She leans elbows on the kitchen counter by the sink and gazes out the window.

Chloe sighs. A nap is often the best way to spend a drowsy summer afternoon way out here, even though now she gets plenty of sleep each night. But still she lingers in the kitchen, remembering the touch of Lex’s lips on her skin, his mouth on her breast.

He long before he might be here? Five hours, six? Seven?

***

Chloe sighs, bored. A nap is often the best way to spend a drowsy summer afternoon, even though now she gets plenty of sleep each night. Nine hours, ten…better than the four or five that were typical when she had a Planet or Torch deadline. Back in another time, another life.

One day blends into another, way out here, as she lazes around. Unusual for her, Chloe Sullivan, who usually has this pressing need to be active, doing something, whether pounding away at the keyboard or phoning Clark breathlessly with her latest brainstorm. She’d blink, and, bingo: a day, two, three days, have passed. Luckily, she has a top-of-the-line laptop computer and plenty of books to while away the time, or she’d go stark-staring crazy. She still writes, though not as much as she’d always imagined she would with hours of undisturbed time on her hands.

“Stark raving mad,” she murmurs to herself.

Even though the address is “Walnut Street,” the safe house is way out in the middle of the country, the middle of nowhere. She smiles, the phrase bringing to mind her summer adolescent crush on Hanson seven years ago when she was ten. She has orders to stay in the house, or very close to it, which is okay, because it’s too hot now, in high summer, to walk very far, and besides, there could be snakes in the long, pale prairie weeds and flowering saltgrass. Besides, she wanted for nothing. Deliveries come in the gray hours before dawn. She hears vehicles in the distance lumbering closer across the fields, and rolls over for more sleep, knowing the workers can let themselves in. Bringing one sack, two, of the few groceries necessary for one person. Milk, granola, the gourmet coffee she still craves although she doesn’t need it to keep her awake on evenings before deadlines. Out here, it doesn’t matter if she sleeps all day. When she sleeps, she dreams, long exotic sagas, the details of which are forgotten when she awakes, except that she remembers that, in these dreams, she is always alone. She rises to find a bouquet of her favorite tulips in the rarest of colors—magenta—and a note tucked in. She opens the small envelope as she sips her morning coffee: “Tonight. Late.”

She’d smile and lay it down on the counter. All her needs were being met.

She gets up and dresses each morning, even though, again, there’s no one to mind if she stays in pajamas all day. Dad, even though he indulged her like crazy, would never let her get away with that.

Dad. She sighs and blinks back a stray tear, missing him. But Dad is safe. Waste of time to worry about him, even though she yearns to see him. Sometimes she gets lonely, though, so lonely that she even misses Lana, forgets the deceptions and duplicities, forgets Lana smiling in her face while dating Clark behind her back, Lana looking embarrassed and uncomfortable, giving it all away nonverbally, still not telling her the truth.

Last summer she’d been on the beat in Metropolis, living the reporter’s life of which she’d always dreamed. She’d had friends: other reporters, professionals, people to talk to who had understood what it was all about. This year, it’s as though she’s slipped through a magic mirror. Hidden away from the world like the heroine of one of those fairy tales she always loved so much as a child but given up by her teens. Like Rapunzel, whiling away her days in the tall tower till evening, living for the visits of her prince. Like Eleanor of Aquitaine, imprisoned by the king who’d moved heaven and earth to marry her years before. Or like a kept woman from a nineteenth-century novel, Marguerite Gautier in La Dame Aux Camelias, which she’d finished reading just last week. Whatever, all is as romantic as it could possibly be, considering it isn’t real love between her and Lex.

Because whatever it is, is good.

***

They hadn’t talked about anything beforehand, hadn’t planned, just come together as though it were part of their agreement, part of the deal. When he fucks her, which he does so much better than Jimmy Olsen, she knows without being told that he’s thinking of Clark. Wanting Clark. But she doesn’t care. Right now, here, in this house in the middle of nowhere, he is hers. And she is his.

Something had gone wrong between Clark and Lex, severed the friendship previously so strong, something big, nothing Lex ever wanted to talk about. Instead, he’d shush her with a well-placed fingertip if she mentioned Clark’s name, move in and kiss her until she was breathless.

Sometimes she’s already in bed when his car pulls into the yard, raucous engine stilling crickets and cicadas in the surrounding fields. He smiles drowsily, bends to kiss her teasing her lips open in that way he does so expertly and well. He’d lie down next to her still in his business suit or his shirtsleeves and suspenders, finger the tracking bracelet that circled her wrist, smile a little and lift her hand, caress it with half-open lips, just before her slim arms wind around him. He’d murmur something in that dusky, bronze voice of his, into her ear, making her tremble. They talk some, but not much.

Being “protected” has its advantages.

Next time, he might no sooner step through the door, barely having set two or three containers of cashew chicken, rice and egg rolls on the table, when she’d be on him, tearing off his shirt, pulling him down on the couch. He’d laugh at her eagerness, a bit bemused. The food would be stone cold by the time they remembered it.

She learns fast. Her senses are awake, alive.

I am yours.

Sometimes, he groans Clark’s name, when she sucks him off or he lies buries deep inside her. Which is okay, because it isn’t as it she isn’t always thinking of Clark, too. She harbors no illusions about Lex maybe loving her, any more than she loves him. There’s some mutual attraction, of course. Some rapport, some interest, almost fondness, even though each of them never entirely let down their respective guards. She owes him a lot, not to mention her life, and besides, she learns from him. About sex, about business, about things Clark would never be able to each her in a million years. And she doesn’t need to remind herself that, were it not for Clark and Lex’s fascination with him, she no doubt wouldn’t be here.

Or anywhere.

A different life. With no idea of what the future might hold. But, till then…

Sometimes, memories of Clark seem abstract and long-ago, like arms empty for yesterday’s teddy bear or outgrown shorts and flip-flops from springs and summers past. Sometimes she can’t quite remember how it felt, the love that wrenched at her young heart, made her throat ache, her eyes burn with unshed tears. Sometimes it scares her that the image of his face is growing faint in her memory.

Sometimes, when Lex stays the night, she wakes to him tossing restlessly, speaking in harsh whispers though unaware she is awake, which tells her he still sleeps. She can hear Clark’s name in there, mumbled or in a bitten-off, anguished moan. The sounds would frighten her, if she cared enough. It surprises her mildly that she isn’t jealous in the least, jealous of Lex’s affections or of Clark’s, remembering her searing envy of Lana a bare spring before. This is no illusion, but a reality in which she knows she has no part, would presume to have none. But it isn’t as though she feels no pity for Lex Luthor. She is, after all, no doubt the only one who knows his real secret, deeper even than his love for Clark: his desperation for a father’s regard, never to be his. A father now in prison for murder, and Lex, estranged from Clark, surrounded by many yet alone in the world. She’d draw him to her, fold her arms around him. He’d quiet gradually, nestling close, something she knew he’d never do were he awake.

High School, the Torch…all seem part of another life, now, all things that had happened to some other girl before age seventeen. Sometimes, late in the afternoon, the time would drag. She’d doze and awaken, still alone, and with the sun sinking in the west, feel unaccountably desolate. He might not come at all tonight, the half-moon would coast across the sky, dip in the west, and she’d rise as lonely as she’d been the entire day before.

What does it matter? His visits, whenever they come, keep solitude at bay.

She toys blandly with the notion of a nap, once again. At least she knows Lex is coming tonight. Better to be well rested when he arrives. Because even though they might not love each other, they could save each other from being alone.

At least for a while.

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