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one (sneeze, wither)
The thing about Lois Lane is that she takes her coffee like it’s an accusation, a conspiracy against her by the whole world.
Black, too hot, no patience for it to cool — she drinks it scalding and then complains, every time, that it's scalding, as if the coffee has personally wronged her and Clark is somehow the coffee's accomplice. He keeps the second pot going on the back burner because she'll want a refill before she admits to wanting the first. He's never decided whether knowing this about her is a kindness or a liability. He just knows it. He knows it the way he knows each beam and slat of the barn, the way he knows the precise weight of a thing before he lifts it.
"You're staring," she said, not looking up from the Inquisitor spread across the kitchen table. "It's unsettling. Like being watched by a very tall scarecrow."
"It's my kitchen," he shoots back.
"It's your mother's kitchen. You just live here and brood in it." She turned a page, without looking up at him. "There's a difference."
"You're eating my mother's cereal." He can’t stop looking at the hair that has come loose from her ponytail, landing just in front of her eyes, curving towards her mouth.
"I'm reviewing your mother's cereal. There's a difference. And she loves me, she said I was the daughter she wished she had." She finally looked up, and there it was — that quick bright lift at the corner of her mouth, the one that meant she'd landed something and knew it, the one that made his whole chest go light, and combative at once. "You should write that down, Smallville. The differences. You're going to need a list," she grinned.
This is the part he wouldn't have told anyone, because he didn't have the words for it and wouldn't have wanted them anyway: that he was happy. Right then, leaning against the counter in a kitchen that smelled like burnt coffee and the cut hay coming in through the screen door, getting needled by a girl who'd moved into his house two years ago like a hurricane and never fully moved out of his orbit since — he was happy, and — something else that he didn't fully know. It didn't have a name. It was just the temperature he ran at when she was in the room. He thought everyone felt this way about the people they argued with. He thought it was friction. He thought it was free.
He thought it was theirs.
////
By that afternoon she had a new word, and the word was Oliver.
She said it in the Talon like she was trying it out for weight. Oliver Queen, the Queen of Star City, here in Metropolis to sponsor a gala his mother had attended as a prospective senator — that Lois had talked her way into covering. Clark watched her say the name and watched her face do a thing he had never once made it do.
It went open.
That was the only way he could put it, later, in the parts of his head he didn't visit on purpose. Her face with him was a closed fist that he loved to pry at, a debate she never conceded. Her face when she said Oliver Queen was a door someone had left open in a warm house. The light went through her differently. She wasn't performing it for anyone, which was the worst part — she wasn't doing it to win. She just looked, for a second, like a person who had seen something she wanted and decided she was allowed to.
Something turned over hard in Clark's stomach and he reached, immediately, for somewhere to put it.
"Queen Industries," he said. "Isn't he the one whose ships keep — there were those reports. The thefts." He hadn't read any reports. He invented the reports between one breath and the next. "You should be careful. Guys like that, the money, the press, it's all — there's usually something underneath it."
Actually, there didn’t seem to be much hidden under Oliver at all, at least nothing sinister, it pained Clark to admit, when he'd stormed into — whatever it is Oliver and Lois were doing in Oliver's penthouse. Not that he cared. She was infuriating and it was none of his business and there had been a reason he'd gone up there, an excellent reason involving the missing diamond necklace, and it evaporated the instant the elevator opened.
Because the lights were low and the city was going about its business behind the glass and Lois was in a ridiculous, hardly practical, low-cut black dress that was making him dizzy, her head tipped back mid-laugh, and Oliver was close to her, and for one entire second nobody noticed Clark at all. He got to stand in the doorway and see it — the two of them easy in the warm dark, the air between them thick as honey — and something went through him so hot and so wrong that he almost put his hand through the doorframe.
It felt like catching her. That was the insane part: the stomach-dropping, how could you lurch of walking in on something. And Lois shot up off that couch like a kid who'd heard a key in the lock. Smoothed her dress. We were just — and stopped, because there was no just, because nothing had happened, and you don't scramble to explain a thing that didn't happen unless some part of you has already decided it counts. She looked caught. He had no idea why she looked caught and he hated how much it gratified him.
Oliver didn't move at all. He looked from Lois to Clark and back, slow, assembling it, that easy mouth going up at one corner — and then he held on Clark a beat longer than he held on anyone, a beat that did something to Clark's pulse he would not name, and said it lazy and amused and lethally kind: Well — if I lived under the same roof as such a gorgeous woman, I'd be mask my feelings in sarcasm too.
Feelings?, Clark had said, too fast. Oliver had only smiled wider.
Pulled back into the Talon, Lois looked at him for a long moment and broke his reverie: "You're doing the thing."
"What thing."
"The thing where you decide you don't trust someone before you've met them, and then you investigate it, and then it turns out you were right, and then you're insufferable about it." She tipped her head. "He bought a new cardiac ward for the children's hospital, Clark. Anonymously. I only know because I'm good at my job. What did you do today, save a barn cat?"
I would have donated too, he didn't say, if I had it, which was the first time the shape of the real thing moved under the water, and he didn't see it, because he was already saying something about how anonymous donations were exactly what guilty men did. He was good at this. He'd had a lot of practice deciding a man was dangerous so he didn't have to decide anything else about them.
She rolled her eyes and went back to her notes, and the door in her face stayed open, just slightly, turned toward someone who wasn't in the room.
I thought the bickering was ours, he thought, and couldn't have said why it felt like something being taken.
two (green arrow)
He found Oliver Queen on a rooftop because that was where the Green Arrow turned out to live, between the penthouse and the sky, and Clark had gone there to catch a thief and instead caught a man peeling a hood back off a face he'd seen smiling in a newspaper.
"Huh," said Oliver Queen, not nearly as caught as he should have been. "You're faster than the reports."
"There are no reports."
"There's always reports." He was looking at Clark the way you look at a horizon — calmly, like it would still be there in a minute, like he had all the time in the world to take its measure. He'd clocked the speed. He'd clocked the way Clark had come up six floors without a stairwell. He wasn't afraid, and that absence of fear did something to Clark that he was not prepared for. "So. You've got the whole — " Oliver gestured, an easy hand taking in all of Clark at once, top to bottom, like an appraisal that came out approving. "And you're using it to chase me across rooftops in a flannel shirt. Okay. We're going to have to talk about the flannel."
Here is what Clark had braced for: a fight, a lie, a man scrambling to cover. Here is what he got: a man who looked at the most dangerous thing about him and called it interesting. I see you, the look said, and I'm not going to manage you, and I'm not going to flinch. No one looked at Clark like that. People looked at him like a secret they had to keep or a destiny they had to feed. Oliver looked at him like a peer. Like an equal. Like — and this is the word Clark stepped around so wide he nearly fell off the building — like he wanted to know him.
Clark felt the heat come up his neck and decided it was the run.
"You can't keep stealing," he said. "Even if it's — even if the cause is —"
"Good?" Oliver pulled the hood the rest of the way off, ran a hand back through his hair, and Clark's eyes followed the hand and then made themselves stop. "It is good. That's the part nobody tells you, kid. You can decide what it is. You don't have to wait for somebody to hand you the map." He came a step closer, and Clark's whole body registered the step like a change in weather. "You've been waiting for the map, haven't you. I can tell. You've got that look.” Like you're holding back a flood with a screen door.
It was so exactly true that Clark couldn't answer.
Oliver smiled — not unkindly, that was the maddening thing, none of it was unkind — and clapped a hand on Clark's shoulder, and the hand was warm and certain and stayed a beat longer than a stranger's hand stays, and Clark stood there and let it and told himself it was the relief of being understood. He thinks you're like him, he told himself. He thinks you're a man who's chosen. And under that, where he didn't look: I want him to keep thinking it.
"Secret for a secret," Oliver said. "Yours is safe. Mine better be."
"It's safe," Clark said, and his voice came out lower than he meant it to.
They stood on the roof a while longer than the conversation strictly needed, and Lois never came up once, and Clark counted that as proof of nothing because he wasn't counting.
three (hydro)
The worst of it — the genuinely unfair part, the part he'd have complained about to God if he'd thought God was listening — was that she came to him.
"I need your help," Lois said, dropping into the chair across from him at the Talon with the particular energy she got when she'd decided something. "I think Oliver is the Green Arrow."
Clark's coffee stopped halfway to his mouth.
"I know, it's insane, except it's not, it's the only thing that fits — the disappearing, the cuts that heal too fast, the way he ducks every straight question... I've been making a list." She slapped a notebook on the table; it was three pages deep in her slanting furious shorthand, and Clark loved her handwriting the way you love a thing you'd recognize in the dark, and he hated, suddenly and completely, that he was about to lie inside it. "I need somebody steady to help me prove it. Somebody who won't tell me I'm crazy. You're the only person I know who's congenitally incapable of telling me I'm crazy even when I am."
"You're not crazy," Clark said, because it was the truest available sentence, and because it was a way of saying yes that wasn't yes.
So he helped her. That's the thing. He sat at the table and looked at her list of all the ways Oliver had failed to be a normal man and he steered her gently, expertly, into the tall grass — but he was at the gala that night, are you sure about the dates, couldn't that just be — because he'd promised, on a roof, secret for a secret, and a promise was a promise even when keeping it meant standing between Lois Lane and the truth with his whole body.
And the entire time, under the lying, the litany ran. He couldn't stop it. You're chewing your pen, which means you're three steps ahead and bored that I'm not there yet. You touched your collarbone, which means you're about to pretend you don't care about the answer. You ordered the cinnamon scroll and gave me half without asking, which you do when you're nervous, which you'd deny. He knew her like a language he was fluent in and would never get to speak out loud. He was the keeper of both their secrets — Oliver's hood and Lois's heart, the green truth and the soft one — and he didn't get to have a single thing in either hand. He just held them. He held them so carefully. He held them the way you hold something you've already decided you're not allowed to keep.
"You're a good friend, Clark," she said, packing up the notebook, sounding tired and a little sad and entirely unaware that she'd just handed the man she was trying to catch his own alibi. "He's lucky to have you. I mean that. He doesn't have a lot of people who'd cover for him."
I'm not covering for him, Clark almost said, and stopped, because the second half of the sentence was I'm covering for you, so you don't find out the thing I know would break the part of you that hopes, and the second half of the sentence had a word in it he couldn't afford.
"Yeah," he said. "He's lucky."
He watched her go. He'd gotten very good at watching her go. He'd had, by then, so much practice.
////
[drafts folder, unsent]
To: Lois 11:46 PM. He's not who you think he is. He's better than you think and worse than you hope and either way you deserve someone who answers the phone. I would (deleted)
To: Lois ur an idiot. the cinnamon scroll is gross. ur an idiot and the heater works if you hit it and i (deleted)
To: Lois nvm
four (post rage)
The serum made Oliver sharper and crueler and faster and then it made him fall apart, and Clark was the one who drove Lois home.
It wasn't supposed to be him. It was supposed to be Oliver, who'd promised her dinner and a reservation she'd dressed up for — Clark knew she'd dressed for it because he saw her after, and the dress was the dress you wear when you've decided to let yourself want something, sitting on the steps of the Talon with her heels in her hand because there was no point pretending anymore that he was coming.
"Don't," she said, before Clark had said anything.
"I wasn't going to, Lois."
"You're making that face. Just. Don’t."
Some part of him delighted in still being known by her. That she thought of him enough to know. He sat down on the step below her, which put them almost level, which he did on purpose without admitting he'd done it. "He's not coming?"
"He texted." She held up the phone and didn't show him the screen. "Something came up. Something always comes up. Star City, the company, the — " She stopped. She was too smart not to be circling it; she'd half-figured the green hood weeks ago and kept setting it down because the alternative to my boyfriend is lying to me was my boyfriend is lying to me for a reason I'd respect, and neither one of those got her someone she could depend on. "He's a good guy, Clark. He is. He just — there's always something bigger than the table he booked."
And here it is, the moment, the one Clark replays without meaning to: she said he's a good guy, and Clark's mouth opened, and what nearly came out of it was I would never. Just that. I would never leave you on a step with your shoes in your hand. I would never make you say it twice. I would never make you second to the something bigger, because there is no something bigger, there has never been anything bigger than —
He closed his mouth. He let the sentence die where it always died, one word short of the cliff.
"Come on," he said instead. "I'll drive you. The truck heater finally works."
"The truck heater has never worked, Smallville," but she was smiling a little now, and he hated how at peace that made him feel.
"It works if you hit the dash."
"That's not a heater working, that's a heater being assaulted into compliance." But she got up, and she let him take the heels out of her hand and carry them, which was a small thing and not a small thing, and in the truck she put her bare feet up on the dash the way she wasn't allowed to and he didn't tell her she wasn't allowed to, and the heat came on when he hit the dash, and she laughed, surprised, and the laugh was the open-door thing turned toward him for once, and he drove very carefully and looked at the road.
He can give you Star City, Clark thought, and a company and a name people know and a future he's already sure of. He can give you the kind of life you reach for in a good dress.
He had hands that could hold up a bridge and not one thing to put in hers.
And he keeps leaving you on the steps. And I keep showing up to drive you home. And I'm not allowed to think that means anything, because he's my friend, and I'm in love with somebody else — and being in love with somebody else has been making me feel like a wrecking ball in a town made of glass.
"Thanks, Smallville," she said at her door.
"Anytime," he said, and meant it as a fact about the universe, and didn't hear himself mean it.
five (crimson)
He didn't know it was red kryptonite. He didn't know anything, that was the whole sensation of it — Lois leaned in, Valentine's Day, a joke that turned and kept turning, and her mouth found his and the world went off, every lock in him springing at once, every screen door he'd been holding the flood behind swinging wide.
And for one moment — one — it worked the way it should in the easy story of his life, the one he didn’t dare to dream was possible. For one moment, there was a Clark who kissed Lois Lane back like he meant it, because he did mean it, and his hand was in her hair and she made a sound against his mouth that he would carry around for the rest of his life like a stone in his pocket, and she saw it. She felt the difference. Whatever else she believed about the lipstick after, in that one second she kissed a Clark Kent who wanted her and didn't pretend otherwise, and you cannot unkiss that. You cannot put that second back in the drawer.
And then the red rock had him all the way, and here is where the easy story breaks, because if losing his inhibitions just freed him toward Lois then the rest of the night would have been hers.
It wasn't.
He went to Lana.
He went to her engagement dinner with Lex, a grin on him like a stranger's, and he tore the doors off that — the sanctioned wound, the permitted want, the other girl he was allowed to ruin himself over. The thing that had been stopping him was never the inhibition. Red rock took the brakes off and left the map exactly as it was drawn, and his map had Lana on it in ink and Lois — in all blank he hadn't filled in yet. Set loose, unleashed, free of every brake — he drove straight to the old wound, because the old wound was the only address he'd let himself memorise.
The freest he'd ever been and he still couldn't go to Lois. That was the night that proved it. The thing in his way had never been restraint. It was the part of him that had decided, somewhere in all the Lana years, that he was a person who broke what he reached for — and you can't kiss your way out of that with a cursed tube of lipstick. The damage doesn't come off with the brakes. And he would never, ever, let himself ruin Lois.
Later, when they'd gotten the rock out of him and the night folded itself away into something everyone agreed to call an accident, Lois wouldn't quite look at him, and he wouldn't quite look at her, and neither of them said the word kiss. They filed it under the lipstick. They agreed, without agreeing, that it had been a chemical and not a confession.
He kept the stone in his pocket anyway. The one second. The sound she made. He took it out sometimes, in the barn, where no one could see him being a person who'd wanted something and meant it for exactly as long as he was allowed to.
six (combat)
It came down to a cage, in the end. It usually does, with him — everything he won't say gets said by his body in a room where there's no other choice.
Titan had Lois. The fight club, the thing broadcast to men who paid to watch people die, and Lois had walked into it the way she walked into everything, chin first, certain her nerve would be enough, and her nerve was not going to be enough, and Clark stood at the edge of the floor with the whole of his life on one side of a decision and Lois on the other.
No one can know. It was his first commandment, the load-bearing wall, the thing his father had carved into him before he was old enough to argue — you keep the secret, you keep it from everyone, you keep it from the people you love most because the people you love most are exactly how they'll get to you. He'd kept it from Lana through years of loving her. He'd kept it from Chloe until she pried it loose. He kept it like his life depended on it because it did, because the whole world's did, because the second it's out you can never put it back.
And then Titan's hand closed around Lois's throat and Clark walked into the cage and let them see.
He didn't decide it. That's the part he'd lie about later, to himself mostly. He didn't weigh it. There was no weighing — there was Lois, and there was a thing about to happen to Lois, and his body answered before the commandment could even get its mouth open. He stepped into the light where they could all see what he was and he did it for her, the secret he'd held against every person he'd ever loved, and he tore it open for Lois Lane like it weighed nothing.
After, he told himself he'd had no choice. Anyone would have. There was no time. It was just the closest body to the danger; it would've been the same for anyone.
It would not have been the same for anyone. There was a list, a very short list, of people for whom Clark Kent would set fire to the only rule that kept him alive, and he had just learned — though he filed the lesson somewhere he wouldn't have to read it — that there was a name on that list he hadn't written down on purpose, and the name wasn't Lana's.
"You came in after me," Lois said, after, hoarse, rubbing her throat, looking at him like she was trying to do a sum that wouldn't add. "That was insane. You could've — Clark, you could've gotten killed, you're not — " and there was a question forming in her, he could see it forming, the same question her notebook had been circling for months, and he watched her decide not to ask it because the answer was too big to hold in a parking lot at night.
"You'd have done the same for me," he said.
"I would not," she said. "I'd have called somebody with a gun. That's what a sane person — " and she stopped, because her voice had cracked, and she covered it by being furious, the way she covered everything by being furious, and Clark stood there and loved her so much it was indistinguishable from grief and called the feeling, in his head, relief that she's okay.
"Anytime," he said, again, like it was a fact about the universe.
It was a fact about the universe. He just still couldn't hear himself say it.
seven (somewhere, the whole time)
Oliver was the one who said it out loud, in the end. Of course it was Oliver. He was the only one in the whole story with the nerve and the clearance.
He was leaving — the team, the city, the whole arrangement, off to do the work somewhere Clark wasn't — and he found Clark at the farm to say goodbye, and the goodbye took a turn Clark didn't see coming.
"She was never really looking at me," Oliver said. He said it easily, the way he said everything, leaning in the barn doorway with the evening behind him, gold and going. "Lois. The whole time. She'd be right there in front of me and she'd be — somewhere else. Took me a while to figure out where." He let that sit, and looked at Clark so pointedly, Clark had to look down at his feet.
"Oliver — "
"I'm not mad. I want to be clear about that, because you've got that guilty little puppy dog face we all go crazy over." A small smile. "You didn't take anything from me. You can't take something that was never pointed at me to begin with." He pushed off the doorframe and came across the barn, unhurried, and stopped closer than goodbye required, and Clark's body did the thing it had been doing since a rooftop a hundred years ago, the registering, the change in weather, and Oliver's eyes moved over his face and Clark understood — with a lurch, with a heat he had no file for — that Oliver had always known about that too. Both of the things Clark wouldn't look at. Oliver had seen them both and carried them quietly and was now, with enormous gentleness, setting them down where Clark would have to find them.
"You want a lot of things you won't let yourself have," Oliver said, low. "I get it. I do. But you should know somebody saw it. All of it. And it wasn't — " he searched for the word, and found the kind one — "it wasn't a small thing to look at. You should let yourself have something, kid. While you're young enough that it still costs you to wait."
He put his hand on Clark's shoulder one more time, the warm certain hand, and it stayed its extra beat, and then it didn't, and then he was a shape walking into the gold, and gone.
Clark stood in the barn for a long time. He's talking about destiny, he told himself. The world's going to need you, that's the kind of thing he means. He was very practiced. The deflection came up out of him smooth as ever.
But the sentence was in him now. Somebody saw it. All of it. And once a true sentence is inside you, you can hold the door against it for a while, but you can't make it not exist. He'd learned that with the flood. You hold it, and you hold it, and the screen door is only ever a screen door.
eight (noir)
(That night he dreamed in black and white. A version of all of them — Lois in a gown and pin-up curls, the Nightingale singing , smoke and rain on the window, himself in a cheap suit at a desk with a typewriter, calling her trouble, calling her sweetheart, and in the dream his mouth had no locks on it at all, in the dream he said every single thing, and she leaned across the desk and said you took your time, Kent, and he woke with the stone in his pocket warm as a coal, and lay in the dark, and did not, for once, put it away.)
nine (phantom)
The dam was the worst night. It's always a worst night with him; he's a person whose feelings get scheduled by catastrophe.
Lois went to Reeves Dam chasing a story that she shouldn’t have been, the way she always went, and a man with a knife found her there, and by the time Clark got to her she was on the ground with her hand pressed to her side and her blood coming up dark between her fingers and her face going the wrong color, and the thing in Clark cracked all the way open in a single beat with no warning at all.
He had her in his arms. He was saying her name. And somewhere in the part of him that narrated his own life in the third person to keep it at arm's length, the he gave out completely, and the flood came through the door it had been leaning on for nineteen years, and it came in first person, and it came in the present tense, and it would not be put back:
I know you. I know how you take your coffee and how you lie and what your hands do when you're scared and the exact second you decide to be brave instead of careful. I know you the way I know the weather, the way I know weight of something before I lift it. I have known you the whole time. I made a fake perfect world in my own head and forgot to put you in it and that wasn't because I didn't want you, that was because you were the one thing too far down to dig up, and I have been digging this whole year with my bare hands and lying about what I was digging for. Oliver gave me the shovel. He told me somebody saw it. Somebody saw it, Lois, and the somebody was me, all along, I'm the one who saw it, I've been standing in front of it the whole time with my eyes shut calling it the weather.
I would never. I would never leave you on the steps and I would never make you say it twice and I would never let you bleed out on a dam without telling the truth at least inside my own chest where it's allowed — I love you. I love you. That's the word. That's the word I couldn't afford and here is the bill and I will pay it, I'll pay it every day, I just can't pay it tonight, because you're hurt, and you're scared of him still, the not-him, the one before, and it isn't time, it isn't time, and the cruelest thing I've learned this whole year is that knowing doesn't mean you get to have it. It just means you get to know what you're waiting for.
"Stay with me," he said out loud, which was the only part she got to hear, and she stayed.
ten (zod; the beginning again)
He'd had her in a hospital bed a few months back, and that was a thing he didn't look at directly either, the way you don't look at the sun.
The plane had gone down — her and his mother both, out of the sky and into the snow near the Fortress — and by the time the world finished ending and starting over she was at Smallville Medical with a chart full of words that all meant lucky and a concussion that had her convinced she'd been to heaven. She kept saying it. I went somewhere, Smallville. Somewhere white. Somewhere good. Heaven. And he sat by the bed and gently, patiently lied her back down to earth — you hit your head, that's all — because the white room was the Fortress, and he couldn't hurt her the way Chloe, and Lana, and Lex were hurting.
And somewhere in the middle of talking her out of the best place she thought she'd ever been, he looked down and found his hand already holding hers.
He didn't remember reaching for it. There had been no decision, no moment where Clark Kent weighed whether to take Lois Lane's hand in a hospital room and landed on yes — there was only the fact of it, his fingers laced through hers on the thin white blanket, warm and certain, as though they'd gone and done it on their own while he was busy lying about heaven. His body had reached for her with his mind looking the other way. His body had gone and known a thing his mind would have vetoed on sight.
He let go too fast, after. Made a joke. She made one back. Neither of them said a word about their hands, hers so soft and vital in his — the way they would later not-say a word about a kiss, the way he was already, even then, framing out a whole house of things-they-didn't-say with her name cut into every beam.
But he remembered the weight of her hand in his. Of course he did.
He remembered the weight of everything before he lifted it.
eleven (post finale)
She lived. Lana left Lex; the marriage came apart the way everyone but Clark had seen coming; the seasons changed as they all do, and Clark moved through them changed in a way no one could point to, because the change was entirely interior, the way the most important changes always were for him.
And then it was an ordinary morning again, weeks on, and Lois was in the Kent kitchen reviewing his mother's cereal, and she said, "You're staring. It's unsettling. Like being watched by a very tall scarecrow," and the whole machine of them started up again, the bickering, the native tongue, the one room he'd ever been completely unguarded in —
— except this time he knew what it was.
He stood at the counter with the second pot going on the back burner because she'd want it before she'd ask, and he watched her be alive across his mother's table, and he felt the old lightness come up in his chest, the happiness with no name, and now it had a name, and the name didn't change a single thing he was allowed to do about it. He couldn't reach for her. She was healing. He was healing. There was a whole future stacked up between here and there like weather coming over the fields, and he could see it now, all of it, the long wait with the truth sitting in his pocket like a warm stone.
"What?" she said, catching him. "What's that face."
"Nothing," he said. "Drink your coffee. It's getting cold."
"It's scalding."
"It's getting cold while it's scalding. That's a Lois Lane specialty."
She threw a Cheerio at him and he let it hit him, and she laughed, and the door in her face came open and turned toward him, and he thought: I can wait. I'm going to wait. The waiting is the only way I get to love you out loud right now, so I'll do it like that, I'll do it so well you'll never know it's happening, I'll keep your coffee hot and your secrets and my own and I will be here, every time, anytime, that fact about the universe — until the time it isn't too soon, and then I'll finish the sentence, and you'll already know how it ends, because you were there for all of it, you were there the whole time.
"Anytime," he said, to a thing she hadn't asked.
"You're so weird," Lois said, fondly, and turned the page.
He smiled at the coffee. He let himself.
For the first time in a year, he knew exactly what he was happy about. It didn't fix anything. It was the best he'd ever felt.