"I want a dog," Chloe said and flopped down into one of the comfy leather chairs in the study. She looked over at Lex and waited for him to respond. He appeared to be working on his thesis again. It was all he seemed to do lately. If he could finish it soon, he would be able to start work on his PhD in the fall and that was what he really wanted to be doing.
Lex's eyebrows rose immediately but it took a moment longer for him to look up and meet Chloe's eyes. Lex saved his document and then reached out and closed the laptop computer he had been working on. He looked up at her and smirked softly at her words. Chloe couldn't help but find it charming.
"Hello Chloe. How was your day? Where's Clark?" Lex asked her teasingly.
"Hi Lex. My day was fine. Clark's still on campus doing some research. I finished early and decided to come home," Chloe responded to his questions. She sat forward in her chair and rested her elbows on her knees. Lex was trying to avoid the topic. This was going to be an interesting conversation, she could tell already.
"You have the car?" Lex asked. Chloe could hear the surprise in his voice. It wasn't like her to leave Clark on campus without the car they shared.
"No, I took the bus," she supplied even though she knew her confession would not make her older lover happy.
"The bus?" Lex nearly growled.
Chloe honestly still didn't understand Lex's objection to her taking the bus. He had told her several times that they would buy another car for her if the arrangement with Clark wasn't working out, but Chloe had refused each time. She didn't mind taking the bus, and, no matter how long she had been with Lex, taking things from him still made her feel a little nervous. Lex had money, everyone knew that, but Chloe didn't want it to look like that was the reason she was in the relationship.
"Lex," Chloe persisted, "I want a dog."
"You know I don't like you taking the bus," Lex continued on his own line of thought. "I would have come and picked you up if you had called me. And what was Clark thinking? He knows better than this."
"Clark isn't my keeper. And I might sleep with you two, but it doesn't give either of you the right to tell me what I can and can't do."
"You could get hurt," Lex insisted.
"Oh, for god's sake, Lex, it's just the bus. It's not like I was skulking around in dark alleys in the middle of the night. Besides, we live in Glenwood. Stop being such a snob."
"Chloe," Lex protested. He sounded genuinely taken aback by her words. Chloe just rolled her eyes. Lex was never going to understand her and she was never going to understand him either.
"You're not listening to me," she complained. "I want a dog."
Lex sighed and leaned back in his chair. He ran one of his hands over his baldhead and stared directly at Chloe. "Oh, I'm listening. I'm just choosing to ignore." Only the slight gleam in his eye let Chloe know that he was really teasing her and not entirely serious.
"Lex," Chloe protested with a small laugh.
"You're on hold in my brain," Lex told her in a slightly juvenile tone and moved so that he could place his feet up on the desk. He looked like the picture of careless wealth. It was such a façade and they both knew it. Chloe felt an almost overwhelming desire to go over and crawl into his lap, but knew she needed to hold off, if only for a little while longer.
"Lex, I really want a dog," Chloe insisted. "I've been thinking about this for a while and Suzie, in my history class, her dog had puppies a while ago and now they're ready to go out to homes, and, Lex, I really want one."
"Oh?" Lex asked. His eyebrow rose again at her insistence. He swung his feet down off the desk and leaned forward towards Chloe. "What does Clark think?"
"I haven't talked to him, but you know he'll go along with it. Big dumb farm boys; they all love dogs, don't they?"
"Clark's not dumb."
"I know that," Chloe said with a sigh and fought off the urge to growl in frustration. Why did Lex always insist on making everything so god-dammed difficult? Couldn't they just have a normal conversation for once? "And that's not the point. I want a dog. I know Clark won't have a problem with it. I just... Lex, I really want it. They're so cute."
"This is kind of sudden, isn't it Chloe?" Lex asked.
"Not really. I've wanted a dog all my life, but it was just dad and I, and we moved a lot when I was younger. And then we settled in Smallville and he was working a lot and I had school stuff and we didn't have much of a backyard. It just never happened."
"You don't really need my permission, you know that, right Chlo?" Lex asked her softly.
"Of course, I do," Chloe said earnestly. "It's your house."
"What?" Lex asked. He sounded horrified and Chloe couldn't understand what she had said to elicit that kind of reaction. "This is not my house..." Lex protested.
"Yes it is."
"... this is our house," he insisted. Lex paused for a moment with a confused and slightly hurt look on his face. "You don't honestly believe that, do you, sweetie?"
"You paid for it," she insisted. They had spent the summer after her first year of university looking at houses and picking the one that was just right for them. They had moved in just before Chloe's nineteenth birthday that August. Lex had purchased it outright, and even though Chloe knew that her and Clark's names were on the papers, she had never truly thought of the place as being 'her' house. Sure, it was their house, but Lex was still the one who had paid for it. In her mind, that meant that he got the final opinion on anything that went on there.
"You don't feel like this is your home?" Lex asked shortly. The hardness that took over him when he was feeling hurt or threatened was just beginning to edge into his eyes. Chloe cringed. This wasn't what she had intended at all.
Chloe looked down at her hands. Her nails were neatly trimmed and polished with a pale pink nail polish that Lex had picked out to go with the dress she had worn to dinner on Saturday. She had planned on using a darker color, but Lex had insisted that the pale pink was both more sophisticated and brought out her gentle, feminine softness. Chloe hadn't been quite sure that was what she was trying to accomplish, but since it was a dinner with Lex's colleagues, Chloe had accepted his suggestion. Clark had attended as well. It had been a while now since they had tried hiding their relationship, and most of the people Lex worked with knew of the situation. More than a few of them likely had some kind of issue with it, but they tended to keep their opinions to themselves and that was good enough for the three of them.
"Lex, it's not that I don't think of this as home. It's just..." Chloe trailed off. She was still looking down at her hands. She ran the index finger of her right hand over the nail on the index finger of her left. "It's just that it's your house."
"It's our house," Lex insisted. Chloe looked up and saw that he was standing behind the desk now.
"Lex."
"Why is this such an issue with you, Chloe?" Lex asked. He moved around the desk and came to stand next to the chair she was sitting in. His hand traveled down and tangled into her hair. She leaned into the touch slightly. "You've never been able to accept anything from me without feeling bad about it."
"That's not true," Chloe protested.
"Nothing of value," Lex amended his statement.
"I just... I... Lex, that's not why I'm with you," Chloe eventually managed to stutter out.
"I know that," he insisted. His fingers traveled over her scalp and started to massage it gently.
"I know," Chloe said and moaned softly at what his fingers were doing to her head.
"Clark doesn't think that either," Lex murmured. He sat down on the arm of the chair to continue his caress.
"I know that too," Chloe assured him.
"Then what's wrong?" he asked. Lex leaned in and dropped a small kiss on her temple.
Chloe sighed. Lex just wasn't going to drop this now. He was upset, although Chloe realized that it wasn't really with her, and he was going to get to the bottom of whatever it was that was bothering her so much.
"People talk," she eventually said softly. It was almost a whisper when it escaped her mouth and, for a moment, Chloe wondered if Lex had heard her at all. Then Lex tensed up beside her and she knew he had heard.
"Did someone say something to you?" he demanded. There was an edge in his voice that really scared her. This was the voice he usually saved for dealing with his father and other people that he knew were going to be difficult with him.
"Nothing I haven't heard before," Chloe admitted.
"Who was it?" Lex asked.
"It doesn't really matter," she said with a sigh. She didn't want to relive the moment. Not thinking about it or talking about it was the best way to ensure that wouldn't happen.
"Chloe," Lex growled low in his throat and slipped off the arm of the chair to kneel in front of her. "Please tell me." He wrapped his hands around her fingers and stared up at her.
Chloe closed her eyes at his intense glare. She didn't want to deal with this. She hadn't planned on bringing this issue up with him today, if ever. She just wanted a dog, and Suzie was waiting on Chloe's decision before she offered the puppies to anyone else so that Chloe could get the first pick. So she needed to make this decision now, and she had just wanted to make sure that it was okay with Lex before she brought an animal into a house that he had paid for.
"Chloe," Lex repeated her name.
"My father," Chloe breathed and pulled her hands out of Lex's grip. She drew her legs up into the chair with her and curled up as small as she could. She really hadn't wanted to deal with this. She loved her father and she knew that her father loved her. She didn't want Lex or Clark to think that he was an awful man. It was just that he would never be able to understand why his only child, his little girl, would choose to live this way.
"Ah, sweetie, I'm sorry," Lex said and reached out to draw her into his arms. "When did he say that?"
"Couple times," Chloe admitted in a soft murmur. She expected Lex to say something then but he just remained silent and waited for her to continue. "When I first told him and a couple of times since then. He understands how I could love Clark. He always kind of wanted us to get together. But he doesn't understand how I could love you, or how I could love both of you at the same time. He thinks it's your name, or your money, or the prestige of being with you, or something like that. It couldn't simply be that I fucking well love you, could it?" Chloe demanded. Her voice rose in volume as she continued speaking, and by the end she was yelling and sobbing softly.
"I'm sorry," Lex mumbled and ran his hand over her hair and down the back of her head. He leaned in further and kissed the side of her neck. "I wish I could just marry you." He didn't seem to register what he was saying until the words were actually out of his mouth. He froze suddenly.
So did Chloe. It was perhaps the last thing she had ever expected Lex Luthor to say to her. "What?" she asked slowly.
"I..." Lex stuttered. He pushed back from Chloe and looked at her somewhat uncertainly. "Well, it would solve a lot of problems, wouldn't it?" he asked her softly. "Make your father happy."
"Are you serious about this?"
"Well I would be, but there's Clark," Lex told her. "And that's not a bad thing. It just makes it harder. There's no legal way for the three of us to be together like that."
"But you would if you could?"
"You wouldn't be able to stop me. I love you," Lex told her sincerely. Chloe smiled happily. Lex said that so rarely, but it never failed to make her heart skip at least one beat. She knew that both he and Clark loved her. Clark said it so much that it seemed almost commonplace to hear it. From Lex it was like a little gift. "That's why I want you to feel that the house is as much yours as it is mine or Clark's, because really it is."
Chloe nodded slowly. She could give Lex this if it meant that much to him. And knowing that Lex loved her enough to want to be her husband somehow made the rest of it all okay, no matter what anyone else said, because now she knew that he felt the same way she did. She didn't need to feel like the odd one out any longer.
"Okay, it's our house," she conceded and Lex smiled happily. "But don't think this means that you can buy me things whenever you feel like it, Lex," she warned him.
"We'll have to work on that one," Lex said with a smirk.
Chloe swatted him lightly on the shoulder, then leaned in to kiss him. When she pulled back she was smiling happily. "So does that mean I can have a dog?" she asked cheekily. She was almost bouncing with excitement.
"If that's what you want," Lex assured her.
"Cool," Chloe said. She climbed out of the chair, over Lex, and dived for the phone on the desk. She was already dialing Suzie's number before Lex was able to respond.
"Umm, wait, what kind of dog is this?" Lex asked. He suddenly sounded very nervous.
"Golden Lab," Chloe supplied. "Hey, Suz," she greeted her friend as the other woman picked up the phone. "Yeah, we decided we want one. Can we come over now?"
"Aren't those big?" Lex asked, but Chloe waved off his question.
"Yeah, we'll be right there. I'm so excited. Yeah, we. Lex is coming with me," Chloe said and then turned around to give her bald partner a questioning look. Lex nodded slowly at her silent question. "Thanks, Suz. Bye."
"I was thinking more like a lap dog," Lex said when Chloe hung up the phone.
"You'll love it," Chloe told him as she led him out of the room. "They're so friendly, and loyal. We can take it to the park and you'll be able to run with it. They're great with children, too."
"Children?" Lex asked in surprise as he followed her.
"Well not now, but some day, right?" Chloe pulled on her coat and tossed Lex's to him.
"Umm," was the man's only response.
"Oh, maybe we should grab some towels."
"Towels?"
"Well we don't want it making a mess in the car, do we?"
"My car," Lex exclaimed in dismay. It was as if he had just realized that they were going to put a rather large puppy into the Ferrari.
"Our car," Chloe reminded him happily as she let herself out of the house. "I wonder if we should buy a dog house."
"Oh god," Lex groaned as he dashed to go get the towels before following behind her. "If I didn't love you so much..."
Chloe just laughed happily. He had said it twice. It was going to be a good day. They were going to have a good life. No matter what anyone said.
Lex's eyebrows rose immediately but it took a moment longer for him to look up and meet Chloe's eyes. Lex saved his document and then reached out and closed the laptop computer he had been working on. He looked up at her and smirked softly at her words. Chloe couldn't help but find it charming.
"Hello Chloe. How was your day? Where's Clark?" Lex asked her teasingly.
"Hi Lex. My day was fine. Clark's still on campus doing some research. I finished early and decided to come home," Chloe responded to his questions. She sat forward in her chair and rested her elbows on her knees. Lex was trying to avoid the topic. This was going to be an interesting conversation, she could tell already.
"You have the car?" Lex asked. Chloe could hear the surprise in his voice. It wasn't like her to leave Clark on campus without the car they shared.
"No, I took the bus," she supplied even though she knew her confession would not make her older lover happy.
"The bus?" Lex nearly growled.
Chloe honestly still didn't understand Lex's objection to her taking the bus. He had told her several times that they would buy another car for her if the arrangement with Clark wasn't working out, but Chloe had refused each time. She didn't mind taking the bus, and, no matter how long she had been with Lex, taking things from him still made her feel a little nervous. Lex had money, everyone knew that, but Chloe didn't want it to look like that was the reason she was in the relationship.
"Lex," Chloe persisted, "I want a dog."
"You know I don't like you taking the bus," Lex continued on his own line of thought. "I would have come and picked you up if you had called me. And what was Clark thinking? He knows better than this."
"Clark isn't my keeper. And I might sleep with you two, but it doesn't give either of you the right to tell me what I can and can't do."
"You could get hurt," Lex insisted.
"Oh, for god's sake, Lex, it's just the bus. It's not like I was skulking around in dark alleys in the middle of the night. Besides, we live in Glenwood. Stop being such a snob."
"Chloe," Lex protested. He sounded genuinely taken aback by her words. Chloe just rolled her eyes. Lex was never going to understand her and she was never going to understand him either.
"You're not listening to me," she complained. "I want a dog."
Lex sighed and leaned back in his chair. He ran one of his hands over his baldhead and stared directly at Chloe. "Oh, I'm listening. I'm just choosing to ignore." Only the slight gleam in his eye let Chloe know that he was really teasing her and not entirely serious.
"Lex," Chloe protested with a small laugh.
"You're on hold in my brain," Lex told her in a slightly juvenile tone and moved so that he could place his feet up on the desk. He looked like the picture of careless wealth. It was such a façade and they both knew it. Chloe felt an almost overwhelming desire to go over and crawl into his lap, but knew she needed to hold off, if only for a little while longer.
"Lex, I really want a dog," Chloe insisted. "I've been thinking about this for a while and Suzie, in my history class, her dog had puppies a while ago and now they're ready to go out to homes, and, Lex, I really want one."
"Oh?" Lex asked. His eyebrow rose again at her insistence. He swung his feet down off the desk and leaned forward towards Chloe. "What does Clark think?"
"I haven't talked to him, but you know he'll go along with it. Big dumb farm boys; they all love dogs, don't they?"
"Clark's not dumb."
"I know that," Chloe said with a sigh and fought off the urge to growl in frustration. Why did Lex always insist on making everything so god-dammed difficult? Couldn't they just have a normal conversation for once? "And that's not the point. I want a dog. I know Clark won't have a problem with it. I just... Lex, I really want it. They're so cute."
"This is kind of sudden, isn't it Chloe?" Lex asked.
"Not really. I've wanted a dog all my life, but it was just dad and I, and we moved a lot when I was younger. And then we settled in Smallville and he was working a lot and I had school stuff and we didn't have much of a backyard. It just never happened."
"You don't really need my permission, you know that, right Chlo?" Lex asked her softly.
"Of course, I do," Chloe said earnestly. "It's your house."
"What?" Lex asked. He sounded horrified and Chloe couldn't understand what she had said to elicit that kind of reaction. "This is not my house..." Lex protested.
"Yes it is."
"... this is our house," he insisted. Lex paused for a moment with a confused and slightly hurt look on his face. "You don't honestly believe that, do you, sweetie?"
"You paid for it," she insisted. They had spent the summer after her first year of university looking at houses and picking the one that was just right for them. They had moved in just before Chloe's nineteenth birthday that August. Lex had purchased it outright, and even though Chloe knew that her and Clark's names were on the papers, she had never truly thought of the place as being 'her' house. Sure, it was their house, but Lex was still the one who had paid for it. In her mind, that meant that he got the final opinion on anything that went on there.
"You don't feel like this is your home?" Lex asked shortly. The hardness that took over him when he was feeling hurt or threatened was just beginning to edge into his eyes. Chloe cringed. This wasn't what she had intended at all.
Chloe looked down at her hands. Her nails were neatly trimmed and polished with a pale pink nail polish that Lex had picked out to go with the dress she had worn to dinner on Saturday. She had planned on using a darker color, but Lex had insisted that the pale pink was both more sophisticated and brought out her gentle, feminine softness. Chloe hadn't been quite sure that was what she was trying to accomplish, but since it was a dinner with Lex's colleagues, Chloe had accepted his suggestion. Clark had attended as well. It had been a while now since they had tried hiding their relationship, and most of the people Lex worked with knew of the situation. More than a few of them likely had some kind of issue with it, but they tended to keep their opinions to themselves and that was good enough for the three of them.
"Lex, it's not that I don't think of this as home. It's just..." Chloe trailed off. She was still looking down at her hands. She ran the index finger of her right hand over the nail on the index finger of her left. "It's just that it's your house."
"It's our house," Lex insisted. Chloe looked up and saw that he was standing behind the desk now.
"Lex."
"Why is this such an issue with you, Chloe?" Lex asked. He moved around the desk and came to stand next to the chair she was sitting in. His hand traveled down and tangled into her hair. She leaned into the touch slightly. "You've never been able to accept anything from me without feeling bad about it."
"That's not true," Chloe protested.
"Nothing of value," Lex amended his statement.
"I just... I... Lex, that's not why I'm with you," Chloe eventually managed to stutter out.
"I know that," he insisted. His fingers traveled over her scalp and started to massage it gently.
"I know," Chloe said and moaned softly at what his fingers were doing to her head.
"Clark doesn't think that either," Lex murmured. He sat down on the arm of the chair to continue his caress.
"I know that too," Chloe assured him.
"Then what's wrong?" he asked. Lex leaned in and dropped a small kiss on her temple.
Chloe sighed. Lex just wasn't going to drop this now. He was upset, although Chloe realized that it wasn't really with her, and he was going to get to the bottom of whatever it was that was bothering her so much.
"People talk," she eventually said softly. It was almost a whisper when it escaped her mouth and, for a moment, Chloe wondered if Lex had heard her at all. Then Lex tensed up beside her and she knew he had heard.
"Did someone say something to you?" he demanded. There was an edge in his voice that really scared her. This was the voice he usually saved for dealing with his father and other people that he knew were going to be difficult with him.
"Nothing I haven't heard before," Chloe admitted.
"Who was it?" Lex asked.
"It doesn't really matter," she said with a sigh. She didn't want to relive the moment. Not thinking about it or talking about it was the best way to ensure that wouldn't happen.
"Chloe," Lex growled low in his throat and slipped off the arm of the chair to kneel in front of her. "Please tell me." He wrapped his hands around her fingers and stared up at her.
Chloe closed her eyes at his intense glare. She didn't want to deal with this. She hadn't planned on bringing this issue up with him today, if ever. She just wanted a dog, and Suzie was waiting on Chloe's decision before she offered the puppies to anyone else so that Chloe could get the first pick. So she needed to make this decision now, and she had just wanted to make sure that it was okay with Lex before she brought an animal into a house that he had paid for.
"Chloe," Lex repeated her name.
"My father," Chloe breathed and pulled her hands out of Lex's grip. She drew her legs up into the chair with her and curled up as small as she could. She really hadn't wanted to deal with this. She loved her father and she knew that her father loved her. She didn't want Lex or Clark to think that he was an awful man. It was just that he would never be able to understand why his only child, his little girl, would choose to live this way.
"Ah, sweetie, I'm sorry," Lex said and reached out to draw her into his arms. "When did he say that?"
"Couple times," Chloe admitted in a soft murmur. She expected Lex to say something then but he just remained silent and waited for her to continue. "When I first told him and a couple of times since then. He understands how I could love Clark. He always kind of wanted us to get together. But he doesn't understand how I could love you, or how I could love both of you at the same time. He thinks it's your name, or your money, or the prestige of being with you, or something like that. It couldn't simply be that I fucking well love you, could it?" Chloe demanded. Her voice rose in volume as she continued speaking, and by the end she was yelling and sobbing softly.
"I'm sorry," Lex mumbled and ran his hand over her hair and down the back of her head. He leaned in further and kissed the side of her neck. "I wish I could just marry you." He didn't seem to register what he was saying until the words were actually out of his mouth. He froze suddenly.
So did Chloe. It was perhaps the last thing she had ever expected Lex Luthor to say to her. "What?" she asked slowly.
"I..." Lex stuttered. He pushed back from Chloe and looked at her somewhat uncertainly. "Well, it would solve a lot of problems, wouldn't it?" he asked her softly. "Make your father happy."
"Are you serious about this?"
"Well I would be, but there's Clark," Lex told her. "And that's not a bad thing. It just makes it harder. There's no legal way for the three of us to be together like that."
"But you would if you could?"
"You wouldn't be able to stop me. I love you," Lex told her sincerely. Chloe smiled happily. Lex said that so rarely, but it never failed to make her heart skip at least one beat. She knew that both he and Clark loved her. Clark said it so much that it seemed almost commonplace to hear it. From Lex it was like a little gift. "That's why I want you to feel that the house is as much yours as it is mine or Clark's, because really it is."
Chloe nodded slowly. She could give Lex this if it meant that much to him. And knowing that Lex loved her enough to want to be her husband somehow made the rest of it all okay, no matter what anyone else said, because now she knew that he felt the same way she did. She didn't need to feel like the odd one out any longer.
"Okay, it's our house," she conceded and Lex smiled happily. "But don't think this means that you can buy me things whenever you feel like it, Lex," she warned him.
"We'll have to work on that one," Lex said with a smirk.
Chloe swatted him lightly on the shoulder, then leaned in to kiss him. When she pulled back she was smiling happily. "So does that mean I can have a dog?" she asked cheekily. She was almost bouncing with excitement.
"If that's what you want," Lex assured her.
"Cool," Chloe said. She climbed out of the chair, over Lex, and dived for the phone on the desk. She was already dialing Suzie's number before Lex was able to respond.
"Umm, wait, what kind of dog is this?" Lex asked. He suddenly sounded very nervous.
"Golden Lab," Chloe supplied. "Hey, Suz," she greeted her friend as the other woman picked up the phone. "Yeah, we decided we want one. Can we come over now?"
"Aren't those big?" Lex asked, but Chloe waved off his question.
"Yeah, we'll be right there. I'm so excited. Yeah, we. Lex is coming with me," Chloe said and then turned around to give her bald partner a questioning look. Lex nodded slowly at her silent question. "Thanks, Suz. Bye."
"I was thinking more like a lap dog," Lex said when Chloe hung up the phone.
"You'll love it," Chloe told him as she led him out of the room. "They're so friendly, and loyal. We can take it to the park and you'll be able to run with it. They're great with children, too."
"Children?" Lex asked in surprise as he followed her.
"Well not now, but some day, right?" Chloe pulled on her coat and tossed Lex's to him.
"Umm," was the man's only response.
"Oh, maybe we should grab some towels."
"Towels?"
"Well we don't want it making a mess in the car, do we?"
"My car," Lex exclaimed in dismay. It was as if he had just realized that they were going to put a rather large puppy into the Ferrari.
"Our car," Chloe reminded him happily as she let herself out of the house. "I wonder if we should buy a dog house."
"Oh god," Lex groaned as he dashed to go get the towels before following behind her. "If I didn't love you so much..."
Chloe just laughed happily. He had said it twice. It was going to be a good day. They were going to have a good life. No matter what anyone said.