Ronin – 4
See header for details.
'Once a group of ten blind masseuses were traveling together in the mountains, and when they began to pass along the top of a precipice, they all became very cautious, their legs shook, and they were in general struck with terror. Just then the leading man stumbled and fell off the cliff. Those that were left all wailed, "Ahh, ahh! How piteous!"
But the masseuse who had fallen yelled up from below, "Don't be afraid. Although I fell, it was nothing. I am now rather at ease. Before falling, I kept thinking 'What will I do if I fall?' and there was no end to my anxiety. But now I've settled down. If the rest of you want to be at ease, fall quickly!"
She almost calls him a thousand times a day.
Almost. Almost calls. Not with finger actually on the speed-dial button, but thinking about it. Can't stop thinking about it. Can't remember the last time she was this unfocussed. Not when her dad died – she threw herself back into work then with an almost demonic fervour that's hardly abated, until now. So, maybe a long long time since she was this easily distracted. When she was sixteen, say, and a certain dark-haired farmboy could-would wander through the doors of the Torch offices, and make her mind blank out with a simple grin…
She's not thinking about Clark now.
Clark's fingers don't make her jerk and bruise, and his eyes don't fix on her with sacred sinful intensity, and his tongue doesn't lick the sweat off the skin of her stomach…
And when Lex whispers 'My god, you're like a narcotic," into the crook of her neck, with his eyes screwed up tight and his voice hoarse, she wonders if it hasn't been him all along. The way she's taken to this - duck to water – may be evidence enough.
The thought makes her jump around in her chair.
Minutes are like hours, and hours, days. She wishes her brain would stop fucking with the time difference, and forces herself to keep typing. Pads of her fingers brush the keyboard, and she can feel skin, touch bone, taste him at the spot where abdominal muscles and pelvic ridges meet. Marking the territory with her tongue, her jaw clenches. This is too much.
Next time is four hours distant, and the first time, she remembers, they'd kissed each other kneeling on the rug. She'd translated fast from shock to aggression, pulling at his shoulders, and his fingers had been shaking so badly that he'd lost patience and ripped open the front of her shirt, the sound of buttons popping, flicking onto the floor.
Her own fingers flick over the keys. She types the same sentence for a full paragraph, thinking about his gasping. The way the tension in his body builds with each exhalation, each shudder, tightening the muscles, cresting as he closes his eyes, as she urges him on with her own, pushing past throaty moans to the point of cursing, to the point of keening, to the point of involuntary noises, to the point where she knows he wants to scream…
She wants him to. She wants to reply in kind, and she almost does it right there in the office, because her throat is dry, and her blouse is sticking against her, and her skirt is rubbing against her thighs, and her body is burning, and –
Come on. She checks her watch again, but it doesn't bring the end of the work day any closer.
oOo
'Walk with a real man one hundred yards and he'll tell you at least seven lies.'
It's about 11.30pm and she's calling him from the back of a cab. Takes him longer than usual to pick up, and she wonders if he's in a meeting. Doesn't particularly care. Offers no preamble.
"Did you know?"
"Hi – I'm afraid that this isn't really a good –"
"I don't care if it's a good time. Did you know?"
She hears the starch in his shirt crackle against her ear as he excuses himself – she waits in a storm of impatience, her skin itching. Then his sharp voice is slightly echoing; she figures he's in the hall, or the library, or whatever.
"Chloe, what the hell are you talking about?"
She flaps the paper jerkily near her face so he can hear the sound.
"I have Jeff Linden's JMV article in my hand, Lex. I was wondering if you knew about it."
"You mean did I know that Aaron James was about to be indicted, or did I know that Linden was writing about it?"
She blinks at that, then ploughs on.
"Both. Either. Or."
He sighs, sounds too composed.
"I knew about James. Linden doesn't really concern me."
"You knew about James," she repeats. Even to herself she sounds pathetic.
"Yes."
"How long?"
There's a pause before he concedes.
"A while." Then, almost tentatively. "Are you still angry?"
Is she still angry? She rolls her head back, phone still to her ear, and blows out a breath. Does it matter? He has a way - he's always had a way - of dealing with her twitching fits of temperament. Soothing the savage beast.
But does it matter? Does it matter that the Docklands deal is now blown wide open? Does it matter that Jeff got the jump on her once again?
Both. Either. Or.
She'd been shaking when she left the office, with the ink from the hot copy staining her hands. Now she's just…
Shit.
She sighs again. Lex's voice manages to sound both innocent and sinuous.
"Can I come over and make it up to you?"
"I thought you were with a client?" she huffs, feeling petulant and ridiculous and longing all at once. It's a bit frightening, how her mind pulls her one way and her heart and body tug the other.
"Give me thirty minutes," he says, then clicks off.
That's Lex. No time for goodbyes. She tosses the cell back into her bag and runs her hands through her hair.
She's not stupid. She knows that the Docklands dominoes are all lining up now. What's frustrating and confusing is that she doesn't know which part she most dislikes: the fact that Lex's business deals are slowly coming to light in all their sneaking, back-stabbing, nefarious glory - or the fact that she's not the one getting to write about it.
oOo
'Not to borrow the strength of another, nor to rely on one's own strength; to cut off past and future thoughts and not to live within the everyday mind…then the Great Way is right before one's eyes.'
Yawning. Making a mental note. Less romping, more sleeping. She wonders if she can stick to it.
Tucked inside her bedroom, twisting the sheets, there's a sense of oasis. He's relaxed and open, and she peers into his eyes for underlying motivations and can't see anything but blue. Then he laughs, and looks away, batting her arm, and she can't see anything at all. The smooth line of his neck, maybe. Losing themselves in physical distractions, and it helps her to forget how careful they both are never to hold hands in public.
Her greatest pleasure is to lie behind him as he sleeps and trace lazy infinity symbols on his naked hip with her thumb. But then he wakes, and leaves, no matter how reluctantly, and all that's left is the infinity, endlessly stretching out into black space.
Work is coming back into focus.
Her articles are gaining strength, a sharper timbre, and her confidence is increasing. And it's with a confused kind of enjoyment that she realises her professional outlook has changed – maybe 'clarified' would be a better word.
Maybe it was the front page thing. It's like the time limit on playing around with altruism and philanthropic moralism has come to an abrupt end. Maybe it's her coming-of-age as a reporter – she knows what journalism is now. It's about the Story. It's ceased to be about the Right and Wrong of it, rather become more pure, more base. Journalism is letting the secrets out.
She really is a newshound.
She wonders when she stopped being so holy, and spends an awful couple of days trying to avoid thinking that Lex's influence may be some kind of toxin, absorbed through the skin. Then she has a realisation, in infinity time, and she doesn't have to try at all.
It's not Lex. Never has been. It's her – always, right from the start.
Because the reality's not like the Ethics of Journalism theory she attempted to digest back in college – discussing truth, justice, integrity, and all that other high-moral-ground crap. That's just an A on a paper. She's had too much experience of the nature of layers with Lionel to take the surface-reality for granted.
The reality is…
The reality is what she sees when Perry's nose twitches. What she feels when she knows she's onto something good. A metallic taste, and ferreting out facts, burrowing through details, releasing things that have been tied into knots and hidden away.
Telling other people's secrets can be kind of addictive.
She knows that trying to find out the truth about Clark (and what was that, exactly?), and unearthing the Weird, and delving into Lionel's past, and narrowing her eyes over Lex's business involvements, and even, if she wants to go all Psych 101 and strip herself completely raw, the mystery of her own mother – all this is the impetus for the development of her own journalistic philosophy.
Like all philosophies, it's a philosophy of power.
Secrets are knowledge, and everyone knows what knowledge is. Tell the secrets, and let the people come to their own conclusions, decide the truth, justice and integrity of it all for themselves. Call it like it is, then stand back and -
Far from making her feel like she and Lex share a moral parallel, it feels like the juncture where their two lives meet and fail to mesh. Her life's work, her driving force, has been to expose secrets, and Lex's talents have been honed to constantly conceal them.
It's an entertaining conceit that the existence of their relationship is one of the bigger secrets she's ever been obliged to sit on. She appreciates the necessity of it, although she finds herself squirming a little at work on occasion, when Perry's eyes squint and his comments veer a bit too close. Sometimes she makes a break for the bathroom just so she can lock herself in a stall and grin stupidly and bite her lip and breath out.
The fact that she can keep this one secret is almost a relief – she's not a compulsive blabbermouth, then. She does have discretion, and she can exercise it. This ability might come in useful one day. And anyway, she has plenty of other opportunities for loosing confidences.
After coming to this, her personal epiphany, it all seems much smoother.
Except for Lex. Maybe it's time for a little re-negotiation.
She's lying in bed, propped up on the pillows, eating strawberries out of the plastic carton, and the sheets are pooled around her hips, ebbing up as high as her nipples. He's lying beside her, bare-chested in dress pants, the glow from the little tv blueing his tanned angles and curves, as he watches the stock reports with the sound turned down and absently strokes her knee with one hand.
It's late. She'll be yawning by midday, and this brings a chuckle. He looks up lazily at the sound.
"What is it?"
"You." She hands him a strawberry. "You just got out of a meeting and you're still plugged in."
He shrugs ruefully, attention still on the screen.
"Have to be. I've got to stare down a bunch of associate execs tomorrow – consider it late night cramming."
"Stare them down? Sounds like hypnotizing chickens or something."
He lifts an eyebrow and licks juice off the pad of his thumb.
"You'd be amazed by the similarities. Mainly, you just have to avoid blinking."
She grins.
"And then they get frightened, and call you the Most Wild Thing of All?"
"Come again?"
He seems genuinely perplexed, and she shakes her head in wonder and sympathy.
"My god, you really had absolutely no kind of childhood at all, did you?"
He locks eyes for a second, his expression tense, until she smoothes his jaw with her hand. He doesn't need to say anything. She thinks that growing up a Luthor actually might have been quite close, in essence, to all those Sendak drawings. The ones where there were no captions, and nothing was really spelled out, but you looked at the direction of the monsters' eyes and worried about Max's safety.
She rubs her palm across the back of his neck, and he smiles faintly, reassured, before turning back to the tv.
Another strawberry. She watches his face, and decides that now is as good a time as any.
"Hey, I need to talk to you about something."
"Mm?"
"I've been working on an article all week about the casino bunfight…"
"Fill me in."
"Well, now that Owens is practically dead and buried there's been this almighty brawl over the casino tupperware and who gets what… But you already know about that, right?"
His eyes narrow in profile before he nonchalantly leans for the remote and flicks off the reports. Now it's just the lamp on her bedside table illuminating his calculating curiosity.
"What do you know?"
She sucks on a bit of pink pith before depositing it back in the carton.
"I know that your press secretary won't tell me how much you've already bought." She licks a sticky fingertip. "But that's okay. I think I can get a few more details off one of the casino reps. That guy – what's his name? – Rourke."
"He's offered to tell you?" Lex's voice is tellingly blasé.
She shrugs lightly.
"Well, he's offered to take me out to dinner."
His eyebrows bunch suddenly, like they weren't expecting it, and he blinks hard for a moment. Then she laughs at him, pats his arm.
"Relax, Lex. I haven't got any plans to make the jump from journalism to full-time prostitution just yet. Not for this story, anyway."
"Well. I'm glad to hear that."
But he's looking at her with new eyes. Good. It's about time he started thinking of her as an equal.
She leans over and kisses his lips firmly. If she listens hard, she can hear his brain whirring. Then she lifts her eyebrows at him, anticipating.
There's only a momentary pause as his mental circuits click into new pathways. The corners of his lips curl up in a wary grin, and his gaze is assessing.
"But…you'd still like the information."
"Yes," she nods. "I don't want to jeopardise your business dealings but…yeah, I want this article to go."
This is a gamble, she knows. It's the balance point of their relationship that she's testing – how much he needs to conceal versus how much she's allowed to reveal. The weight of respective self-interest burdens the air. Parley is always a dangerous time – when you lay down your weapons in front of your opponent and stand back, hands spread and empty.
It comes down to how much he trusts her.
Lex's face is calmly neutral in contemplation, and he never breaks eye contact. There's a terrible moment of sweating, when she thinks he's going to get up and walk out – then she blinks, and he's nodding slowly.
"Okay. I'll release some information on the acquisitions tomorrow. Go through Huttle again – you'll have to make an appointment. And it won't be exclusive, of course. I'll release a press statement after lunch, but you'll have about a four hour jump."
She sighs out - hadn't realised she was holding her breath – and then grins at him.
"Thank you."
"No problem."
His smile is faint. He selects a strawberry carefully, lets his eyes focus down. When he looks back up, there's the shadow of a battle on his face.
"Are you sure you know what you're doing?"
She's still sparking off having traversed the last junction, but she can follow his mood.
"Yes, I'm sure. C'mon - I'm a big girl, I can take care of myself."
She thinks he's talking about handling the politics of the article, but his next movement takes her off guard.
"I think I'm polluting you," he mutters, reaching up to tuck a shred of blonde behind her ear.
Surprised, she gapes at him for a second before frowning.
"You think you're…Jesus, Lex, no. It's…look, don't take this the wrong way, but it's really not about you."
And it's not. It's about her. She's changing. His influence is only one of many factors, although she acknowledges that he might have been the catalyst. He should know all this – he's been reading her articles for long enough now.
He looks at her again in that soft pensive way before the words come out.
"And is this what you want?"
There's so many layers in the question she's not sure what he's referring to. She settles for the simplest one, answering them all as she pushes the strawberries and the sheet out of the way, curls her arms around his neck , slides her warm nakedness in, brings their faces close.
"What do you think?"
Part five coming.