"Missed!"
"Clark, aim for the center of the board." Chloe gave him an odd look and Clark tried to look more disappointed in his bad throw at the dartboard. It took a lot of effort to lose convincingly, Clark was finding. Lionel had never permitted him to lose; that had been one of his many arguments against letting Clark attend school or socialize with outsiders, that it would mean Clark would have to make himself lose. So that meant that he was concentrating on looking like he was concentrating on playing, instead of concentrating on playing badly, or, better yet, concentrating on Chloe.
He decided to change strategies. "Come on, Chloe, you're distracting me."
"So that's your excuse?"
He took a step closer. "What if it's not an excuse?"
She first looked up at him through her lashes, then tilted her head back. She really truly was acting like she wanted to kiss him. He bent his head, slowly, savoring each second of anticipation, and then the screaming started.
"Get away, get AWAY!" It was a man's voice shouting that; the woman's voice just screamed. Clark knew screams by now and this was the real thing. He also knew that it was his superhearing and that Chloe wasn't hearing a single thing.
"Uh, gotta-" He ran down the loft steps and the moment he was out of the barn, took off in the direction of the screaming.
He didn't recognize the young black man who was trying to beat off a huge Rottweiler or the young woman who had a nasty bite on her arm. The dog snapped through the stick effortlessly and the man thrust the piece at its face.
Clark needed only that instant to take in the scene and grabbed the dog, continuing to run as he did so. He remembered where the police station was and ran there, past the front desk, and found an open cell. He thumped the dog on the head, dropped it in, and ran out again and back to the loft.
Chloe didn't look at all happy with him. "What were you-"
He could only think of one excuse. "I think it was, uh, something I, uh, ate. I kind of had to..." Yeah, that would bring back the kissing atmosphere real quick, he groaned to himself.
"Are you feeling all right?"
"I'll be fine." In a year or two.
Chloe left soon after, telling him to go home and get some rest, and he decided to return to Gotham City, hoping that some patrolling would distract him from worse than terminal embarrassment, the kind of embarrassment that wouldn't kill you.
Lionel was not pleased with the situation. His plan of privatising as much as he could of the city's police forces was supposed to make things much easier for him, but instead, the unexpected jumps in the crime level were making things much more difficult. He had actually had to defend himself and LuthorCorp's efforts. It was a problem and it was a distraction.
So far, he'd found nothing with his investigations. Most of the city's criminal insane were back in Arkham Asylum, thanks in large part to the Justice League. Not that that proved anything about the League.
Lionel was suspicious of it. Clark had joined it out of gratitude and the desire to be accepted, he was sure. He might well be oblivious to anything going on under the surface, or, given his patterns of defiance, even deliberately oblivious, or worse.
Like Caesar's wife, most of them were above suspicion. Which made suspicion quite reasonable. But one of them was controversial, a vigilante, and Lionel didn't even need to feed the newspapers editorials about whether this particular member considered himself above the law, or whether he was too dangerously straddled between sanity and his own targets' madness. If any one of them was trying to undermine him, it would be this one.
He'd do it in careful steps. Clark's emotions would run both ways over this, and since he had so much trouble disciplining his emotions, Lionel would have to do it for him, to make sure that Clark would neutralize Batman for him.