Lois didn't go home right away mostly because she didn't want to face Oliver. He would want to know about the dinner. He might even want to talk about Chloe. She wasn't ready for that.
Glasses were everywhere when she entered the apartment. She wasn't the only one who'd been drinking apparently, drowning their sorrows. Sometimes they were so alike it was almost scary. That had been the fun part in the beginning, their witty, lighthearted exchanges and their passionate natures. Now she wondered if that was the hard part as well.
Oliver was her friend. She'd liked him before she loved him. Sometimes she wished they could go back to the days of beer pong and easy conversation. She'd never known a better man. Why then was this marriage so hard? If he hadn't kissed Chloe would the romance have still spoiled? It was hard to know.
He was in bed, asleep or passed out. She took a shot from the minbar in the corner of the room before she climbed in as well. Sooner or later, she'd have to face the music. They both would. At least it wouldn't be tonight.
sss
"Well, when can he talk about it?" she asked impatiently.
She was trying to get an interview with the mayor to see what his plan of action was in getting the kryptonite distributed in an efficient manner to all Metropolis' citizens. She also wanted some quotes from him concerning what his thoughts were on Ultraman. She had a feeling he was sitting in Luthor's back pocket.
Catherine Grant, an annoying blonde TV journalist, was reporting live from Suicide Slum. "A miraculous save or another Ultraman on our hands?" she said.
"I'll call you back," Lois said, hanging up before she got an answer and looking up at the screen attached to the wall.
"Those bullets were coming right at me," an eyewitness said. "when a streak went by. I might have thought it was nothing more than the wind except the bullets never hit me. They were gone. I don't know who or what saved my life, but something or someone did."
"Well, there you have it, folks," she said in her typically perky and overly sunny way that ran so counter to this drab, gray world. "Wild, wonderful, and strange. The question is do we need more super-powered vigilantes running around?"
Lois tuned out from the rest. It couldn't be. He wouldn't save someone just because he could. Would he?
She wasted no time in going upstairs to his office. She ignored his secretary who tried to stop her and burst into the room. He was there and shuffling papers around like he'd been there all day.
"It's okay, Jenny. I'll see her," he said, looking mildly amused.
Jenny breathed a sigh of relief that she wouldn't be losing her job for her failure to prevent the intrusion.
Alone with him, Lois asked, "Was that you?"
"Was what me?"
"Don't play innocent, Luthor. It doesn't become you. Was that you who just performed the rescue down in Suicide Slum?"
He blinked at her. He had entirely too good a poker face. "I don't know what you mean, Lane. To hear you tell it I'm the devil incarnate. Why do you think I would do a good deed that didn't benefit me?"
"That's what I'm trying to find out."
"Well, I don't pay you to psychoanalyze me, so get back to work." He looked back down at his papers, effectively dismissing her.
She did go back because getting a straight answer from him would prove impossible, but she didn't stop the psychoanalyzing. Maybe she and Oliver had been going about this the wrong way, thinking Clark Luthor could only be stopped with a weapon. What if there was a good man inside waiting to get out? What if she could help that person fully emerge? Was tyranny set into his alien genes or did he just need a better influence than he'd had up to this point?
She didn't know, but she wanted to find out. She had to find out. Helping people was a part of who she was and if she didn't try to help the one person who might need it the most what did that say about her?