leap

Reccing Note: This has become my Smallville Universe, no matter how the show eventually works out. Read and marvel at three dimensional Chloe and Davis and an ending which is not an ending, but the best way to start.

chloe pov.
8411 words. m/nc-17. bride and onwards.
by paraxdisepink at her livejournal. Drop her oodles of love!

Leaving Smallville was like tearing off a limb. Or better yet, chewing one off. I found myself so hellbent on getting out of a trap I didn’t realize how crippled I was until I tried standing again.

Leaving Smallville was like tearing off a limb. Or better yet, chewing one off. I found myself so hellbent on getting out of a trap I didn’t realize how crippled I was until I tried standing again.

I found an apartment – a hole in the wall in the less than privileged part of town – but considering my shortage in the funds department hot water and a leak-free roof made the place feel like the Luthor mansion. I dusted off my rusty old reporter’s hat and tried for a job with The Daily Star - lets face it I had no other useful skills. After a few weeks of eating nothing but Top Ramin and living in a cable-less void the job came through, thanks to some recommendations from a few old pals at The Daily Planet. Not exactly my dream paper, but journalism brought me back to much-needed familiar ground and a real writer would scrawl her stories on empty walls if she had to. Luckily it didn’t come to that. I guess the Star figured a girl fired by the notorious Lex Luthor on questionable grounds had to have a knack for uncovering something she shouldn’t have.

If only they knew.

I had to admit, my craving for the bizarre and unexplained had suffered a bit considering that my metaphorical Wall of Weird had expanded into a veritable museum over the years and that my passion for Truth carried the taint of hypocrisy given that I sat on the biggest secret in the history of civilization and could heal death with nothing more than my mind. That passion had died the minute I understood what exposing a real secret like Clark’s could cost him and saw a full-on funeral when I learned I had a secret of my own to hide. I’d die before I betrayed Clark and others like me, and I refused to be the one to yell “fire’ in the proverbial theater for the sake of breaking the story of a lifetime and making a name for myself. So I dedicated my poisoned pen to working toward Justice instead, and slowly my enthusiasm for my one and only craft revamped itself. The world was rife with corruption like Luthorcorp’s to expose, and everyday heroes who deserved a moment in the spotlight. Maybe as a planet we weren’t ready for super-powered extraterrestrials walking among us, but the world sure needed a strong dose of integrity and hope. As long as I worked for that I had a purpose. My job meant something again. It made me one of the good guys.

Star City was every bit as much of a concrete labyrinth as Metropolis, and I tried not to look like a lost Freshman on the first day of high school learning my way around. I found the delis, the Chinese, and of course the all-important source of the substance I thrived on – caffeine.

That’s where I saw him, one afternoon during my lunch break, sitting alone at a table outside, staring into an espresso I doubt he had any intention of drinking. My first instinct when I recognized his close-cropped dark hair and chiseled features was to run as fast as I could. Memories came back like lightning flashes, Clark beaten bloody and dead in my arms, the Fortress exploding in red light . . . Guilt washed over me, along with an ocean’s worth of apprehension. What he’d been . . . and God how close I’d let him get. I felt like I was lingering at the edge of a cliff all over again, a bare inch from plunging over.

If I planned on running, I missed my chance. Davis raised his head and those dark eyes met mine, and I felt their pull from across the sidewalk. I spent a small eternity flailing for what to do, but it was too late to hide and acknowledging him didn’t mean I had to let my guard down.

He lowered his face as I started toward him, and when his hand tightened around his coffee I thought he would be the one to make a run for it. My apprehension doubled. Did he have a reason to run? He definitely adopted the cornered animal look when I stopped in front of him.

“Chloe . . .” he breathed, half surprised, half pained, as though they very sight of me opened a wound. I bit hard into my bottom lip. But it was a little too late to count the hundred reasons why coming over here was a mistake.

“What are you doing here?” I tried to keep the question neutral. I didn’t exactly buy into the notion of random chance these days so long as Brainiac remained on the loose. Davis and I running into each other in the same city at the same coffee shop pinged my eerie coincidence meter big time.

Davis’ mouth moved, on the verge of either an explanation or an apology, but he couldn’t seem to find the right words and he shrugged instead, frowning down at his espresso as though it could provide as good an answer as anyone. I hate to admit, I’d never seen anyone look so lost.

“Just trying to live with myself, I guess.”

I did a mental recoil at that. I’d forgotten his knack for drawing attention to pink elephants, at least compared to the super-powered extra-terrestrial companion I’d left behind who was like the Oracle at Delphi in comparison. But it wasn’t like we could just make small talk and pretend the nightmare hadn’t happened. I looked both ways over my shoulder and pulled a chair out. Maybe I’d handed in my membership card to the save the world club, but I couldn’t let go of who I’d been and what I’d done.

“No more extra-curricular escapades of the dark and scary?” Mayhem and mass murder wasn’t exactly light-hearted, broad daylight, coffee shop subject matter, but how else could I ask if there was a monster in our midst ready to tear the city apart.

He shook his head. He looked so worn down, like he had a thousand-ton weight resting on him that he couldn’t shake off. I thought I’d seen Clark look that way a time or two, but never like this. “No, thanks to whatever you guys did – or something did. No more black-outs, no more waking up covered in blood. Not that I sleep much, just in case.”

Clearly he didn’t sleep at all. Shadows ringed his eyes and he looked paler than usual. How could I blame him? Who on earth would sleep soundly after finding out they took sleepwalking to a whole new mass-murdering degree?

“You super-speeded your way out of Metropolis in no time flat – figuratively speaking, of course.”

It wasn’t like Clark and I expected him to come to tea after Clark and Davis’ other half had fought to the death in the Fortress, and there was no way Davis knew the whole story of why he was standing here – sitting here – today, but part of me had never stopped seeing him as the friend I’d made before the weird and apocalyptic kicked in. I guess I’d expected a goodbye. Clark took his hasty exit as a sign of suspicion. Maybe I believed him. I didn’t know anymore.

Never one to beat around the bush, Davis heaved a sigh and pushed his espresso away. “Come on, Chloe, it was the right thing to do after the damage I’ve done. My first instinct was to put a bullet in my brain the second I was sure it’d do any good, but the more I thought about it, the more that felt like the easy way out. I’ve got to clean up the mess, make amends somehow, even the score, right?”

No one could blame him for wanting to end it all considering what he’d been, but my stomach turned at the thought of him blowing his brains out. I couldn’t tell him why, not when I doubted I’d done the right thing in the first place. Clark definitely didn’t think so.

“Davis, that thing didn’t even look like you. It took you over. You had no control.”

It was the truth, and it’d be cruel not to give him that little consolation when he looked so destroyed. But I couldn’t convince him, and once again he shook his head. “I tried telling myself that, Chloe. It doesn’t matter. That thing was part of me, when it committed those crimes, it was me in there. When it carried you –”

He stopped, and I looked down at my hand for the wedding ring that wasn’t there anymore. Maybe I could handle the pink elephants, but I wasn’t ready for the glaring red ones. I cleared my throat and tried for damage control on the dangerous and discomfiting factor.

“So . . .? What are you doing here?”

He glanced down at his leather jacket and white shirt. It was still strange to see him without his uniform. “Same. Drive an ambulance; pull people out of car wrecks and swimming pools, that sort of thing. I try to do whatever else I can. Help people, right wrongs. It’s like dropping pennies into a volcano. Feel like it’s never enough.”

All this sounded familiar. Only Clark didn’t have an inferno of remorse to fill, just his own survivor guilt. Or maybe he did, in his irrational Clark way. Both meteor showers had brought unimaginable destruction upon Smallville and the world around it, alien threats, violent meteor types . . . But none of us who knew Clark’s secret would ever think to blame him for any of it, not even Lana, who’d lost her parents because of him.

I left Davis to go back to work, but I couldn’t get him out of my head the rest of the day. I wondered if I should avoid that coffee shop from now on or whether I should tell someone back in Smallville he’d turned up. I wasn’t ready for Clark to rush in pointing fingers though, or to admit that sitting with him my heart had broken just a little at the misery he lived with. I decided to handle the matter my way, dust off my Scooby hat, and do some under the radar investigating.

Turns out Davis rented a house with three other guys, and while I couldn’t exactly line them up for exclusive interviews I did learn there hadn’t been any unsolved grizzly murders in the city in the three months since Davis had moved here and that one of his roommates had worked as his partner the entire time.

The Daily Star building stood right smack in the middle of downtown, a handy vantage-point for a girl who kept her eyes peeled to catch a glimpse of my very own beautiful disaster every now and then. Star City had as much 24/7 street crime as Metropolis, and at least once a day I saw the flashing red lights and heard the sirens of an ambulance peeling into the hospital across the street. Davis and his partner would rush out in their blue uniforms, running into the ER at a speed that could have rivaled Clark’s with gunshot victims and kids stabbed in gang fights. I saw him wander off more than once after he delivered them, peeling off bloody latex gloves white-faced and sick. I saw the memories of waking up to what the monster had done playing in his mind. I couldn’t imagine it, reliving a starring role as the villain in his own personal horror movie over and over.

I saw him when he wasn’t in uniform too, carrying boxes of toys, or old clothes, or food to the Goodwill a couple blocks down, and he went into the nearby cathedral once or twice a week. I saw a man who had become obsessed with good deeds, with filling his waking hours with every altruistic act he could think of.

Or maybe it was just another Brainiac scheme for my benefit. I couldn’t be sure anymore, so I did the smart thing for once in my life and maintained my distance.

That plan failed one evening after work. I was struggling to carry half my desk in a flimsy cardboard box down the back stairs when a low voice echoed from behind me.

“You know, they do make digital picture frames. Would make things a whole lot lighter.”

I jumped. No girl liked surprises on a darkened street growing emptier by the minute, and no one liked the feeling they’d been watched. I turned to find Davis leaning against the back wall of the Star building with his blue uniform jacket zipped up to his neck, flashing a dimpled smile that reminded me of the days when everything had been new and innocent in cute paramedic friend land – if it had ever been innocent. My mind raced with questions. What was he doing here? How long had he been standing there? And how did he know when I got out of work?

His smile slipped when he realized he’d startled me and his features fell back into that perpetually self-loathing mask. “I’m scaring you. I’m sorry. I was on my way to get coffee and I saw you coming through the door with your hands full. You looked like you were having a hard time, so . . .”

He shrugged and straightened to go. My gaze immediately dropped to my box full of old pictures of Jimmy and Clark, maybe because I couldn’t bring myself to look at the man in front of me. How could he get past what he’d been if I of all people who had a PHD in all things Krypton and knew better still treated him like a monster?

“No, it’s just . . . “ I balanced my burden on my hip and pushed my hair out of my face with my free hand, forcing out a nervous laugh. “I’ve been off in lala-land all day, and . . .”

Davis’ eyes went to my box and he nodded. I tried not to notice the mixture of guilt and disappointment on his face when he saw the pictures of Jimmy, but he didn’t say a word about Jimmy, or Clark either for that matter.

“How about I help you take those to your car and let you get home?” he offered instead, in a sad, quiet voice that knew I’d lied to him about being startled. It forced me to really look at him. His face was so innocent and so honest, a guy who just wanted to help somebody, who was desperate to, because he feared more than anything that if he stopped being the exact opposite of everything the monster was for half a second it would wake and tear its way right through him.

I was afraid of the same thing, for the city, for my conscience, and of course for Clark, but I found myself handing Davis my heavy box anyway. “Actually, I don’t have a car anymore. I . . . kinda had to sell it for rent money before I landed my job with the Star.” I blushed a little and tried not to look down at my shoes in embarrassment. Poor financial planning wasn’t my usual.

One side of his mouth curved up and he nodded. Maybe he thought I was getting more street-wise these days. Or maybe not. He glanced over his shoulder down the dark side-street I’d been prepared to head down before he’d caught me. “Well, uh . . .” He started to hand my box back, but I stopped him before he could.

“My apartment’s a couple blocks down, if you’d care to give a packrat in distress a helping hand.”

His face lit up. He hadn’t expected that. Neither had I, honestly. Maybe I was laying a trap for myself showing him where I lived. Maybe . . .

As we walked he told me about the calls they’d gotten that day, two mysterious accidents at the Luthorcorp plant which proved everyone’s favorite multi-national Satan hadn’t abandoned operation Clandestine Evil Lab by a long shot. I tried not to grill him for too many details, or blather on about the searing exposé I could write. I could almost pretend he was a normal guy I was afraid of scaring off with my old persistence and enthusiasm. But when we reached my doorstep on the ground floor I remembered all too clearly what he’d been.

“Well, Chloe,” he said in that low, deep voice that could melt a girl if she wasn’t careful, or maybe just send chills down her spine. He stared at me under the porch light with eyes that wanted to pull me into another dimension where there was just the two of us.

I cleared my throat and took my box from him. I didn’t dare invite him in.

We crossed paths more often after that, usually by chance – or what looked like chance anyway. My duties as up-and-coming reporter took me to newsworthy crime scenes, outside government buildings with bomb threats, and of course the ominous Luthorcorp plant. Davis was more than willing to feed me the inside scoop on any given incident, which he and his comrades-in-blue usually attained from the on-scene police if not firsthand, and police hated reporters. I met his partner, who spent more time looking down my shirt then he did resuscitating victims of the minor explosion at the plant that had us all gathered outside that morning, but the two of them saved three people that day anyway.

This was too easy, I kept telling myself. Davis was too clean, too perfect. I had to be falling into a trap.

A week passed without any sign of him, and as the days went by this gnawing wariness grew in the pit of my stomach. But there were no mysterious massacres or homicidal rampages throughout the city, and I did my best to convince myself Davis would come to me if he had a blackout. What else could I do, other than pray I hadn’t made the worst mistake possible?

I worked late one evening, and ever a worshipper at the altar of junk food decided to venture a few blocks behind the hospital and go for pizza. When I came out – stuffed with pepperoni, breadsticks, and more calories worth of Pepsi than I cared to count – I heard shouting and running footsteps coming from down the street. Someone called for help just as a car screeched around the corner. The shouts grew louder and a girl screamed. My heart began to pound

I slipped behind a concrete pillar and pressed my back against it, peeking my head past it just enough to make out what I could in the patches of shadows and the orange glow from the streetlights. The bright lights of another car blinded me as it sped up the road, either oblivious to what was happening or in a rush not to get involved. The girl screamed again. She was begging for her life, or someone’s life. A dark blur tore through the bushes at the far end of the parking lot, darting toward her at lightning speed. A gunshot rang out, and then another and another. I heard swearing, someone who couldn’t believe what they were seeing. The woman started to cry and the car peeled away. I could hear the teenager in the passenger seat as it sped past me, yelling at the driver to “get the fuck out of here before whatever that guy is comes after us.”

Everything went quiet. I let out the breath I’d been holding and stepped out from my hiding place, cold all over. I should have went the other way, done my best Clark impression and made my own hasty exit, but my out-of-the-ordinary radar beeped bigtime inside my head. Something had scared off the guys in the car – no, not just something. My worst fear come true.

Two bodies lay facedown on the sidewalk when I came closer, a dark distinctive stain between them. One was just another teenager holding onto to a yellow iPod in one hand, the other . . . The girl had crouched against the street sign, her hands over her eyes as she hyperventilated and sobbed. She wasn’t hurt, but the other two . . .

The smaller one scrambled to his feet and didn’t bother looking at me. He grabbed the girl by the arm and the two of them took off running. Maybe I should have called out to them, asked them what they’d seen, but I couldn’t take my eyes from the other figure on the ground, and didn’t I know the answer?

He rolled over and started to sit up, rubbing his eyes when he saw me. He’d always talked about not remembering the blackouts and waking up in strange places covered in blood, but he didn’t look the least bit disoriented now, or the least bit bothered by the blood smearing one side of his face down to his neck. I pressed one hand to my stomach, ready to spew up my dinner. How could I have been so stupid?

“Chloe . . .?” Davis looked genuinely shocked to see me and hurried to his feet, but his expression was more concern than horror at being caught in the act. “Chloe, what are you doing here? This isn’t exactly the best part of town as you can see. I just saved one drive-by victim. I bring in enough of them in my daily routine without adding your name to the list.”

I snapped my mouth shut on the verge of demanding when he’d dispensed with the hulking-out altogether and started prowling for victims with a human face. The blood was running from a mark on his temple, and another along his collarbone just above his shirt, and he clamped a hand around his left arm and sucked in a breath, in pain. He’d been shot. I ran over in my mind what he’d just said.

“You saved that kid,” I breathed in a mix of relief and disbelief, and the inevitable selfish vindication. “That car was coming for him and you jumped in front of the bullet. You weren’t –“

You weren’t going to hulk out and tear him to pieces I was going to say, but police sirens sounded in the distance and Davis had stopped listening, too busy glancing frantically over his shoulder in their direction.

“Look, I have to get out of here. I can’t exactly stick around and let them see me.”

He started to walk away, but I caught up to him. Why would he run when that kid’s brains would be splattered all over the sidewalk right now if not for him?

“You’re bleeding,” I insisted. “You have to get to a hospital.”

Davis shook his head and growled a little too fiercely, “No hospitals.” He relented when he saw I didn’t understand. “I don’t get hurt that easily, Chloe. I’ll be fine in a few minutes.”

I looked him over now that we had rounded another corner and my mouth fell open. The marks on his temple and neck weren’t minor graze wounds as I’d originally thought. The bullets had gone right through him and he was healing right before my eyes.

He saw what I was staring at and pressed his lips together tight, disgusted with himself. “Guess there’s still some of that thing in me after all. At least something will actually go through me this time, instead of just shattering.”

So that was why he didn’t want the police to see him, and no wonder the thugs in the car had made a run for it. They’d shot him three times and he hadn’t died. I’d seen this with Clark a hundred times, but with Davis . . . I stopped myself. I didn’t want to see remnants of the monster, or a potential re-run of our own little slasher flick. I wanted to see the guy who’d saved a kid’s life. Besides, Clark didn’t bleed. This couldn’t be anything Kryptonian.

“Is this a habit? Jumping in front of bullets?”

He nodded, reluctantly, as though it were something to be ashamed of. “It’s like I said, I try to do what I can. Sometimes when I can’t sleep, I walk the streets. I figure with enough bad things going on in this city there’s got to be something out there I can do, right?”

I nodded, proud. If someone had extra-human abilities, they should use them for good. God knows we’d seen that go the other way more often that not back in Smallville. “Sounds like someone has one foot in the superhero business.” The word seemed to shame him even more and he stared down at the concrete as we walked, shaking his head. My heart went out to him. In his book “hero” meant doing good for the sake of it, the way he’d been when I’d met him in Metropolis eons ago. Balancing the scales didn’t count. I laid my hand on his arm. “Why don’t you come with me and get yourself cleaned up?”

I walked him back to my place. It was funny or maybe just pathetic how my sense of caution went right out the window the instant he showed a heroic streak. But if he planned on re-growing any bony protrusions and tearing me to shreds a flimsy door and the paper-thin walls of my apartment wouldn’t save me.

He washed the blood off his face and neck in my kitchen sink, and then shrugged out of one sleeve of his jacket and washed his arm off too. The wounds had pretty much healed by then, leaving the skin of his rather nice bicep perfectly smooth. I was a little disappointed when he put his jacket back on, but did my best to conceal it as he took a seat at my kitchen table. I’d never shied away from the fact that I found him attractive, but this wasn’t a time for ogling.

I didn’t have anything but Coke to offer him, but he didn’t mind. He barely drank anyway, just stared at the can until I could feel him starting to brood again. God, he could give Clark a run for his money, but unlike Clark he had moping rights for the next ten years and his sorrows consisted of something more meaningful than a failed relationship with Lana.

I draped my coat over a chair and sat next to him. “You’re really taking this redemption thing to heart, aren’t you?” The giving to charity, throwing himself into his job, the nighttime vigilance . . . Lex Luthor often talked about fresh starts, but that usually involved more duplicitous projects that speared him deeper into the realm of Evil Overlord with a tinge of megalomania. This was different, actions coming from a man in pain who’d only ever wanted to help people and didn’t use an abusive past as an excuse for his transgressions.

Davis frowned at the tabletop. Looking at him, I could scarcely believe those chiseled features had ever morphed into a killer’s. “The day-to-day’s hard, Chloe,” he sighed. “I just want to go back and do whatever it takes to stop that thing from hurting anyone and I can’t. I can’t fight it, and I can’t change it, no matter how much I want to scream that animal isn’t who I am, that I would die before I killed anyone. I feel like . . .” He ran a hand over his face. “I’m not good with words, Chloe.”

He didn’t have to be. I understood. There was no peace for him, and there was no one to share the burden either. Everything he knew about himself and the world had been ripped apart, and he was alone now, and part of that was my doing.

I put my hand on his shoulder. He raised his head and his eyes settled on mine. Something in his face was pleading so badly for something to hold onto I couldn’t look away, and just when he had me he caught me off guard.

“Is this a good time to ask what you’re doing in Star City?”

I broke away from his gaze and lowered my head. Maybe it was the softness in his voice, maybe it was because I felt cornered by the question although I’d known it would come eventually. I touched my ring finger, only to let my hand fall when I remembered it was empty. I felt naked with nothing there, sitting so close to him. My only tactic was to force a smile.

“It was just time to get away, you know?”

He saw right through my hollow attempt at avoidance – he’d always had a talent for that – and he gently pressed, “From the man you married and your best friend?”

Clark. I sank back in my chair and folded my arms, on the verge of crumbling. I hadn’t talked about Clark to anyone, not even Lois. How could I when the secret identity safe version wouldn’t explain anything? I drew in a deep breath. Evading only worked for so long.

“Clark and I had a fight – sort of.” It was more like me losing it on him in the barn while he fumbled to deflect my anger with noble excuses and a blank, hurt expression. For the first time I’d felt like he really was from another planet. Why couldn’t he understand? Davis waited for the rest, and if he was sitting there ready to listen why not tell him? He knew everything – Brainiac, Krypton, the Fortress. Almost everything. “Remember that time I lost my memory and was hanging all over you like a second coat?” His lips twitched in the tiniest involuntary smile. My face went hot, and I ploughed onward before he could say anything. “It wasn’t amnesia – well not your garden variety anyway – and it wasn’t that drug that cured me. After you left, Clark took me to the Fortress. It was Brainiac, and in the process of curing me he made the executive decision to erase all the . . . shall we say classified knowledge I’ve acquired of him over the years. I woke up and four years of my life was gone, just like that.”

Davis’ eyes went wide. He’d learned to take the paranormal in relative stride, but this tested his limits. “Your best friend? He erased your memory?” Color flooded my face. I felt like such an idiot repeating this. “That’s what he did with you after I injected you with that sedative? Carried you off unconscious and erased your memory? Does he rape passed-out girls at frat parties too?”

I opened my mouth to defend him. I never thought I’d hear Clark’s name and the R-word in the same sentence, not the bumbling flannel-clad farmboy I spent five years of my life thinking couldn’t hurt a fly and who bolted like a cat when any other woman but Lana showed interest in him. But Davis had hit on something. My stomach twisted in a knot and I wished I could just sink down and disappear into the floor. It was either that or cry, and I’d done enough crying over Clark Kent in the past ten years.

“It’s just . . . I never thought I’d feel victimized by someone I loved so much, you know?”

“Chloe . . .” Davis’ eyes went velvet soft and he laid his hand over my own. A surge of something shot through me at this touch. His skin was warm and his fingers strong curling around mine. “What he did was pretty fucked up. Back in Metropolis I used to think I was the luckiest guy on the planet because you remembered I existed from day to day. I couldn’t imagine thinking I had the right to pick and choose.”

That wrenched a giddy smile from me, despite myself. I couldn’t help it; I wasn’t exactly used to being on the receiving end of that sort of flattery. “Who forgets a hot guy in uniform who finds homes for street kids?” I tossed back. I couldn’t keep from wondering what would have happened had I not worn an off-limits ring back then. Davis had been so dedicated to helping people, so kind, like some dream guy materializing out of the smoke that day of the explosion in Metropolis. That ring was the only thing that kept my feet on the ground, before the nightmare swept us all way of course.

He flashed me that unforgettable dimpled grin, and for a moment we stared at each other, well aware that he hadn’t let go of my hand and that the room had gotten dangerously warmer. “And Jimmy,” Davis prompted in his low, soft voice, “was he in on this too?”

I couldn’t shake my head fast enough. “No, no. Jimmy’s . . .” Jimmy’s the sweet, dependable guy I’d planned to spend the rest of my life with, a nice normal life with a dog and a job and maybe some kids. But who I was kidding? I’d once scoffed at “normal,” and I couldn’t keep using Jimmy just to go through the motions of something I wanted to hide behind now that my craving for the strange and unexplained had come back to bite me in the ass.

“You didn’t tell him.”

Those words hit home and I wanted to wrench my hand away. But it was just the guilt welling up again that I wanted to run from. The lies I’d told, the double life I’d lived in the same apartment as my supposed other half . . . “Davis, how could I? His life would never be the same, and I couldn’t be the one who brought him into this. Look what it’s done to us?” Turning over a new leaf and stepping back from Clark as I’d originally planned wouldn’t change anything. The secrets were still there, the walls I couldn’t let Jimmy behind, for his own good, for Clark’s own good. I couldn’t let him be second anymore either, marry one guy while another took center stage in my life.

Davis nodded. He knew better than anyone how learning the ugly and impossible truth of aliens and monsters and supercomputers destroyed your life, but he was content to let the subject of Jimmy lie. He’d never thought much of the two of us as a match anyway. “Do you think you’ll ever trust Clark again?”

I swallowed hard. It killed me that I had to ask myself that question. “I want to.” I wanted him to be Clark again, the Clark I thought I knew who understood where the line was and would never use his powers to hurt anyone. “After eight years of a front row seat to the Clark and Lana show I know what an idiot he can be when he thinks he’s protecting someone, but . . .“

“But you trust me.”

His hand tightened around mine, and I’d have to be blind not to see the hope in his face. I glanced around my apartment, overly conscious of the fact that we were alone. That was ridiculous. We’d been alone dozens of times before, at the Isis foundation, in his car. He’d been my friend for God’s sake. When I couldn’t remember anything but him I’d felt safe with him. A part of me knew that wasn’t all Brainiac’s doing.

I couldn’t answer, or maybe I didn’t want to answer. I just smiled at him and said in a small voice, “Davis, I’m glad you’re here.” I meant it. I didn’t realize how much I’d missed him, not the monster, but the friend I used to talk to, who saw through me and meant it when he promised he’d always be there, and not just when Lana ran off with another guy. I couldn’t let the monster claim that man as his last victim.

He smiled back, not his charming half smile, but a real smile that lit up the room ten times brighter than that light bulb he’d changed for me the day we met. That smile drew me toward him though I should have pulled away. I couldn’t take my eyes off him. His eyes had always been so melting, and his mouth . . . I didn’t need Brainiac to lure me, I was doing fine on my own. He closed his eyes, and I closed mine, and when his mouth touched my own I thought my knees would have given way were I not sitting down.

His hand came to my face to pull me closer and this time I didn’t stop him. I couldn’t, not when his mouth was so warm and full and soft and when he took his time tasting mine. His thumb stroked along my jaw all the while, so featherlight and gentle I shivered and melted all at once.

He was the one who pulled away, slowly lowering his hand from my face as though he had to force himself to do it. His eyes gleamed almost feverishly and his cheeks were flushed from kissing me. He looked absolutely tortured.

“I’m sorry.” His chair squeaked on my linoleum floor as he pushed himself up from the table. “This isn’t right. I should go.”

My heart clenched. I felt like someone was tearing off another limb when I had enough trouble standing already. I didn’t want him to go.

“Davis . . .”

I got up before he could make it to the door. There I was hovering at the edge of the cliff again, but this time I jumped off on my own head first. This little dance between us was ridiculous. I knew the truth; I saw it with my own eyes in the Fortress. I had nothing to fear from him anymore. I grabbed him by the shoulders before he could make a grab for the doorknob.

“Davis, stay.”

He didn’t move. He went rigid under my hands, afraid to come closer. I knew him. I knew why, and my hands tightened.

“It’s okay now. You don’t have to close yourself off anymore.” And I didn’t have to hide from the fact that this is what I’ve feared all this time, not the monster resurfacing, not the killer. This. “Stay.”

He stared at me, frozen and wrestling with himself. We both knew how much he wanted me, but his guilt and his hate for himself stretched like a great big ocean between us and for a moment I doubted anything I did or said could convince him to make the leap across. I let go of his jacket and waited.

My heart stopped when he gave in and came toward me, and my courage wavered on the verge of winking out entirely. Maybe I was making a big impulsive mistake here. Maybe this was the part of the movie where the monster emerged and tore me to pieces. He stepped forward and drew me close to him in one motion, wrapping one arm around me and then the other. His hand slid all the way up into my hair and I barely had time to latch an arm around his neck before he smothered my mouth with his again.

This wasn’t like the first kiss – the second kiss, actually – patient and tentative and asking nothing really but that I notice how he felt. I’d asked him for something this time and he was ready to give it to me exactly the way it was – no holding back. His tongue slid into my mouth and my head spun. I had to stretch up on my toes to give back as good as he gave, but I didn’t care. Clark would have to be on red meteor rock the size of Kansas to kiss me like that. Davis was starved for me, too starved for shyness and hesitation.

His arm tightened around my back and he pressed me close against the length of his body, and all of a sudden he was everywhere. His heart raced against my chest and his hips leaning into mine, and below that . . . After three years on and off with Jimmy a guy’s arousal wasn’t anything shocking. But this was different. I’d never been with anyone but Jimmy and we weren’t two fumbling teenagers as inexperienced as the other. This was raw, real hunger, and Davis wasn’t the least bit embarrassed that I could feel him hard and pounding through our clothes.

I wanted those clothes gone. I wanted more than just his mouth and the hot, sweet taste of his tongue against mine. I pushed his jacket off one arm at a time and got my hands under his shirt. He shuddered when my fingers grazed bare skin, all heat and hard muscle.

Before I knew it I’d kicked my shoes off and he was walking me backward through my tiny apartment with his arms still around me and his mouth sucking the skin behind my ear. We stopped in the kitchen doorway, where I arched my head back and let the wet heat of his lips trail down to my neck. My hands went to his shirt again, struggling to yank the pesky thing off him while my mind still worked. He had to pull away from me so I could twist it up over his head, leaving one side of my neck cold and tingling and begging for the pressure of his mouth back. But he didn’t move, too busy staring down at me, and I was too busy staring at him, bare-chested before me. Clark was a regular beefcake fantasy, but he was superhuman. This was all from working out and heavy lifting. I ran my hands down Davis’ chest, watching his face as I traced all that beautiful sculpted muscle. He closed his eyes and held his breath as though trying to keep himself from cracking to pieces. He didn’t stay still for long though. His warm hands took their time sliding up my arms, practically swallowing me with his eyes as he inched his fingers under the straps of my sundress and pushed the thing off my shoulders.

I stood there in my underwear, cold and burning up inside at the same time. He hadn’t taken his eyes off me, or his hands. They slid around to my back and unclasped my bra, and when it hit the floor the moment of truth loomed toward us at lightspeed.

Davis didn’t disappoint. His eyes burned into me and his face was so chiseled and intense I shivered at the heat coming from him. “I want you, Chloe.” He half whispered, half panted, his fingertips resting against my sides. “I want you more than Clark could, or Jimmy, or anyone else.”

I always shrank away from Jimmy when he talked like this. The guilt would swell up, the secrets, until I felt like I had to hide from him in my own skin. But I didn’t have to this time. I stretched up to kiss Davis and my hands went back to his chest, stroking over all that perfect muscle all the way down to the zipper on his jeans.

He kicked his tennis shoe off, and let his pants and boxers fall. My pulse throbbed like crazy now that I pressed against naked skin. At this rate, I was ready to drag him down and do it there on the floor if we had to, but he lifted me up, carrying me toward the bedroom, kissing my shoulder, my jaw, the top of my breast – anywhere he could reach.

I fumbled for a condom in the nightstand drawer the instant my head hit the mattress – leftovers from my Jimmy days – squirming for him to hurry up. Lightning may as well have crashed through me when he pushed into me. My eyes went wide and my mouth opened with a sound that wouldn’t quite come. He was so . . .there, scalding inside me, staring down at me with his eyes glazed over, breathing hard. I titled my hips up toward him and pulled him down onto my mouth again. My hands went everywhere when he started to move, over his back, his hair, the muscles of his arms. This wasn’t like my fantasies of Clark or all those times with Jimmy where I only felt the pleasure through the wall of guilt and the secrets I kept. There wasn’t a wall, just Davis, pushing as deep in me as he could get and kissing me hard, devouring me inside and out and throwing himself into this like he’d never get the chance again.

I ended up flat on my back with my legs tangled around his, my mind spinning from a climax that should have blown the top of my head off. He collapsed on top of me, panting for breath, and when I uncurled my fingers from his shoulders I saw that I’d left red marks on his skin. I felt so . . . I didn’t have the word. Like I was looking up at the precipice I’d jumped from only to find the fall wasn’t so steep after all, or better yet like a little kid who’d conquered a fear and went around clamoring let’s do that again! while the grown-up part of me choked up at the risks all over again.

Davis rolled off me with a small shudder and a low sound in his throat. I missed him inside me the minute he was gone, in the little tingling aftershocks and slight soreness as I stretched out. He sank down against my side and draped an arm across me, looking over at me with the most disarmingly dazed smile.

“I feel like I’ve died and woken up in another life.”

I smiled too and let my arms settled around him, but the afterglow dimmed a little. There was still that one thing I hadn’t told him

“Funny you should say that . . . “ I laughed unsteadily.

He caught on, as he always did, and I could feel him bracing himself for another blow to his comprehension and sanity. That left me no choice but to tell him. I had no reason not to. I didn’t have the right not to. Besides, adding another brick to my castle of secrets was the last thing I wanted. I rested my head back against the pillow and drew a deep breath.

“When you were separated from that Ultimate Destroyer thing in the Fortress, you didn’t survive.” We didn’t exactly know how that separation had happened. We didn’t know what he was, part phantom and part human or an elaborate hybrid of genetic matter and Kryptonian DNA. Either way, he had only been part monster. One minute he and Clark had been embroiled in a rematch in the Fortress, the next . . . Clark had struck the killing blow, with another dagger Jor-El had given him. Only the Fortress had exploded in eerie red light that had somehow sucked the Destroyer into the sky. Brainiac, Jor-El had explained to Clark afterward. He had retracted his ultimate weapon before Clark could destroy it, to use it again and let it evolve in a more powerful form.

I’d found Davis crumpled on the ice, lifeless and covered in blood from the blows Clark had dealt during the battle – his own blood, just like Clark after their first fight. My arms tightened, and my eyes watered. Davis had looked so broken there in the cold, the Ultimate Destroyer’s last kill.

He was looking up at me in confusion. I swallowed the lump in my throat. “I brought you back,” I told him. I brought him back just like I had with Clark. “It’s something I can do, heal people.”

His mouth fell open, and he pushed himself up on his elbows. But it wasn’t my meteor power that stunned him. “You saved me?” His eyes went so wide, like he was seeing me for the first time and I was a saint or an angel or . . . “Why?”

Well that was the million dollar question, wasn’t it? I didn’t exactly stop and dig for the inside scoop at the time. I just ran to him and reached out with my gift.

You told me if I found real love to hold onto it, a part me wanted to answer. The rest of me froze. Was that even a word I could use when it came to him?

My hand came up on its own, and I stroked his cheek with my fingertips. “Davis, I saw the man you were,” I told him gently. “You were one of the good guys. You deserved a chance.”

He closed his eyes and leaned into my touch so easily I don’t think he was aware of it. The emotion flooding his face was ten times stronger than the raw need we’d just satisfied.

“I’m going to try to live up to that, Chloe,” he murmured. “A guy doesn’t get that kind of second chance every day.” I couldn’t do anything but smile at him. Protecting kids on dark streets and saving lives day after day was a good start.

He lowered himself on top of me, his mouth settling on the base of my throat and when I didn’t stop him he took his time moving steadily lower. I let my eyes fall closed. No one had ever kissed me like I was made of solid gold before, and I never thought anyone who knew the whole truth would. My breathing quickened when he didn’t relent, and I twisted under him. Any lower and Davis would have to put his CPR skills to good use.

And speaking of reviving, maybe it was time I gave myself a chance too, instead of pushing my dreams aside out of some idiot belief that standing in Clark’s shadow was the only way to do good in the world, or that if I showed him enough loyalty he’d finally notice me. That didn’t mean I had to stop caring about him. I ran my hand through Davis’ short hair and whimpered at the wet glide of his tongue across my stomach. Maybe it was time I gave us a chance. Everything was easy with him and so clear-cut. How could anyone hold him accountable for something inside him against his will? And maybe Clark had my dream job at the Daily Planet and careened toward something with my cousin at super-speed, I had my own career at the Star ahead of me and a guy who’d shown his own heroic colors. Maybe it was time we made our own Lois and Clark story.

~ The end.

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