This wasn't how Lois Lane envisioned spending her Saturday night. She was supposed to be lying on the couch reading the latest true crime novel. That's what she'd been doing for the last half hour anyway, until a rush of nausea struck her and she'd been forced to keel over the toilet and hack into it.
Instead of a soft couch, hard tile pressed up against Lois' rear end, the coldness seeping through the thin fabric of her nightgown. She dimly recalled her college days when puking into a toilet was a more than rare occurrence, with a group of friends hovering over her laughing. Now she wondered what the hell was so funny about it.
She lifted her head up, pulling a stray hair back into the fist that held the rest atop her head, and looked over at her former refuge. On the coffee table sat her dog-eared book, and beside it an empty container of Kung Pao Shrimp holding a plastic fork. She'd ordered the special with two egg rolls and wonton soup, and ate it all in less than ten minutes. Oddly the mass of food did little to quench her hunger pang.
This was supposed to be a quiet, uneventful evening. As bad as it sounded, she was enjoying this little respite from her son. Clark and Jason left last night on their father-son trip, and that meant that no five-year-old was running around, slamming toy trucks into her feet as she prepared dinner or booming vroom vroom at the top of his lungs while she nursed a headache. But at the same time, she felt lonelier than at any time in her life.
Grabbing a bundle of toilet paper she wiped the vomit from the edges of her lips, then flushed the toilet. It was the fourth time this week that she had puked. It was time to face the facts. In a daze she made her way to the bedroom and found her purse. She pulled out her date book, sat down on the bed and started to count. One week. Two weeks. Three weeks. Four weeks. Five weeks. Six…
She couldn't go further. Wasn't the pill supposed to have a 99 effectiveness rate? Surely she couldn't be in the one percent category.
But, of course, the 99 assumed your partner was human.
Besides, didn't having two backup methods move that percentage up to a nice round 100? It just wasn't possible.
She laughed at the absurdity of her thoughts. She'd been nauseous lately, but she'd been recovering from a nasty cold. It was just the last leg of the flu.
All she needed to feel better was a hot bath and a bottle of wine. She returned to the bathroom and turned on the tub faucet. As the water level rose, she opened the cabinet and removed a dusty bottle of lavender scented bath salts. A bubble bath was a remedy she'd used often in the past to feel better, usually after a bad breakup with a man preceded by a heated argument where said man told her there was something seriously wrong with her. It always did the trick.
She removed her clothing and threw it in a pile in the corner. She slipped on her bathrobe and shuffled her feet into a pair of slippers. Making her way to the kitchen, she opened the cabinet where she kept her wine collection. Richard's wine collection. He had been the wine connoisseur, coming home with his latest discovery on an almost weekly basis. A new bottle hadn't been added to the stash since he left.
Opening the freezer, she removed a pint of chocolate ice cream and tore off the lid. Holding the spoon between her teeth, she carried the ice cream in one hand and the wine bottle and glass in the other back to the bathroom.
The tub was nearly full. Shutting the water off, she slipped into the warm water and felt the bubbles caress her skin. She poured herself some wine and leaned back as she brought the glass to her lips. As the liquid grazed her tongue, her mind inadvertently pictured herself counting off the weeks in her date book. Rolling her eyes, she set the glass down and dug into the ice cream.
"I'm not pregnant," she said aloud. She wondered how many times she'd have to repeat the words to make herself believe them.
Lois wasn't afraid of being pregnant again. She could handle it. But she wasn't sure about Clark. After their tumultuous re-acquaintance eight months ago he'd asked her what her pregnancy with Jason was like. He painted on a brave face, but his enthusiasm failed miserably to mask the fear behind his eyes. What he was really asking was, "Did it hurt you?"
She didn't lie to him, exactly. It wasn't easy, she admitted. There were complications, as to be expected, but she glossed over them as though she were reading bullet points out of an article she'd just composed.
The truth: she'd spent the last month in bed with an ice pack on her forehead, with nurses hovering over her desperate to keep her temperature down and not knowing why they couldn't. But she left that part out.
Lois put down the empty ice cream container and reached for the remote control. A small TV perched on the ceiling in the far corner of the room flickered on. Flipping through the channels, she stopped when she saw a familiar flash of red and blue across the screen.
She thought she found the news, but there was no commentary, no anchorwoman poised in the middle of the screen. All that was visible was a red cape, fluttering in the breeze. The camera lingered on it for an inordinate amount of time, and it wasn't until the angle widened that she saw the face attached to the suit.
It wasn't Clark. A burly man with bulging muscles stood in the center of a dimly lit room, his hands on his hips. He was dressed like Superman, and despite herself she was quite impressed with the detail of his suit, right down to the curve of the letter "S". He was standing in front of a canopy bed, where red, transparent curtains flowed freely from the headboard and footboard poles. Upon it, a scantily clad female dressed in sexy red lace lingerie lay on her back, her legs slightly parted.
Then, the words The Adventures of Superhunk: Part VI flashed upon the screen in calligraphy-style letters. Lois' heart stopped beating. The decision to turn off the television misfired somewhere between her brain and index finger, and she sat completely still watching the scene play out before her.
The woman was a leggy brunette with curly hair, and Superman had just called her Louisa. She said something about dancing around each other for months and it was time they did something about it. Louisa had a pen and paper next to her on the bed, but Lois was quite sure she wouldn't be able to write given the length of her fingernails. The camera zoomed in towards the woman, who pushed her nightgown off of one shoulder. It was obvious Louisa was completely naked underneath. Then she muttered, "Take me, Super."
Superman, for his part, zipped over to the side of the bed and swooped her up in his arms, jumping up onto a poorly disguised wooden block behind the bed. They twirled in the air for a few moments mimicking what Lois thought must be flying. Suddenly, the woman grabbed the front of the man's suit and pulled it down.
"Oh, that is so fake! Don't you guys do your homework?" Lois muttered. In one swift movement the suit was down to his ankles. The very well endowed man reached for the woman's garment and did the same.
"My, you really are Super," Louisa said.
"Oh come on!" It was all wrong. His suit didn't come off like that! But she supposed that she was only one of two people on the planet who knew that. As for the other part… Lois could only smile. Drowning out what was unfolding on screen, she closed her eyes and reminisced about what really happened on their first night together. It'd been in her apartment, about a year after they first met. The sexual tension between them had been building for months, and they'd become quite deft at avoiding the subject.
Lois allowed herself to get lost in the moment. She reached into the soapy bath water and worked her hand slowly up past the soft skin of her thigh. Well, that solidified it. She couldn't be pregnant. She'd never been horny when she was carrying Jason, in fact, the very thought of sex had made her nauseous.
Somewhere in the recesses of her mind she registered that her cell phone was ringing. It eventually stopped, and a few moments later chirped, indicating she had a message. Lois' eyes fluttered open, just in time to see Superman hovering over Louisa on the bed. She settled back into her memory, momentarily forgetting the interruption.
Until the phone rang again. Lois did her best to ignore it, imagining Clark's strong body on top of her, his warm breath on her skin and hands working their way across her frame. But as the phone rang a third time the illusion shattered. She groaned, irritated, picking herself up out of the tub. As she put on her bathrobe the phone rang again, but this time it was her landline.
It stopped abruptly in the middle of the second ring. Lois cursed. She hit the power button on the remote and went to the door. As she turned the handle, she thought she heard something just outside the door. She froze, focusing her hearing on all the sounds in her apartment. An occasional car flew by on the street below. Her next door neighbors, two college boys, were laughing hysterically about something. But that was all.
Shaking her head, she pulled the door open a crack. At that instant all the lights in her apartment went dark. Looking out the window, she noticed other units in her building still had power. Then she watched in astonishment the slow turn of the doorknob. She grabbed a ceramic tissue holder and held it high over her head, staking a spot near the door.
Seconds passed. Nothing happened. Finally she reached towards the door handle, intending to pull it open quickly and startle whoever was on the other side.
But she wasn't quick enough. The bathroom door swung open, the force of which sent her careening backwards into the tub. The water splashed up all around her, leaving puddles all other the floor. The tissue holder shattered onto the tile, sending pieces ricocheting across the floor. She let out a loud scream as her back slammed into the side of the tub, her eyes darkening despite her efforts not to pass out.
A very angry Bobby Knightly stood above her wielding a shiny knife in one hand and a plastic phone cord in the other. Both had been his weapons of choice before he'd been caught by the police. What was he doing out of prison? In the shadows she could see his lips move, but couldn't hear what he was saying. Then, he lurched towards her. She tried to move her arms in front to protect her body, but the soaked robe impeded her movements. An unimaginable pain tore through her abdomen. Looking down, even in the darkness she could see her blood begin to cloud the water.
About a mile away, a string of police cars flew down the street towards her building, their sirens wailing in the night air. Lois watched Bobby raise the knife above his head, ready to make another pass. Immobilized, she managed to mumble the words "Superman, help me." She repeated them over and over, but he wasn't going to be coming tonight.
Bobby was amused. "I guess he's got better things to do tonight than to save you, bitch. I told you I'd make you pay for what you did to me." He made another swipe at Lois.
This wasn't the first time Lois called for Superman's help and he didn't come. On the edge of unconsciousness, her mind unwillingly began to wander back to that fateful night.
Superman had been missing for three months. To take her mind off that fact, Lois coped the only way she knew how, by immersing herself completely in work. Lately she'd had more than one run-in with security, and she'd been escorted out of the building and threatened with trespassing until Perry intervened on her behalf.
News, or lack thereof, about Superman was impossible to miss. A massive car pileup on a freeway in California, a train derailment in Madrid, with every disaster it felt like another nail was being hammered into his coffin. But was he dead? Lois' guess, based completely on her gut feeling, told her no.
And yet there was no word of him anywhere. His name began falling off the front page, and the daily, "Where is he?" speculation article faded into the back pages. To the world, it was almost as if they'd begun to awake from an intense daze, barely able to recall what their dream had been about.
It was a cool November night. Lois stood atop the roof of the Daily Planet, having sought refuge from the deluge of questions poised in her co-workers eyes that they now knew better than to ask. She inhaled two puffs of her cigarette before a wave of nausea struck. With her foot she grinded the unused portion into the ground. Lately she couldn't handle the nicotine, and she'd grown increasingly irritable as she lost the outlet for her frustration.
Rain began to fall, drenching her clothes and flattening her hair to her head. She went back inside and rode the elevator down to the newsroom. But as the doors opened, she froze. She looked at her watch, 7 p.m. She had another three hours to go if she were to leave at her usual time, but at that moment she decided that she was just going to go home. She hit the elevator button and rode down to the basement where her old Ford was parked.
As she pulled out of the parking deck, the tears started to fall.
That's the one thing she hadn't done yet. She cursed, yelled, to anyone and anything, but not cried. Lois wasn't a weepy woman. But tonight, the floodgates opened and she couldn't stop them. The tears flowed down her cheeks just as the rain pelted her windshield. And a lone, soul-filled cry escaped her lips.
Why? Where? They were questions she couldn't answer. And if there was anything that she hated more than crying for a man it was unanswered questions.
Her whole body shook, rumbled underneath the pain being emitted. For the last several months she told herself that she was all right, she'd be okay if he never came back. But she wasn't. Inside her purse her cell phone rang, and as she reached inside it to silence the ring she took her eyes off the road.
Her car swerved into the oncoming lane of traffic, sideswiping an SUV. As her car spun out, she instinctively called out his name.
She wasn't sure how much time had passed when a man appeared at her door and flashed a light into her face. For one split second, her eyes met his again. She shut her eyes, relieved. "Superman!"
Her brief moment of perfect illusion was shattered by the man's voice. "No ma'am. My name is Richard White. But don't worry. You're going to be just fine."
The EMT at the scene told her how lucky she was to have escaped with minor cuts and bruises. But his instruments weren't calibrated properly to register the hole where her heart once beat. A few meters away Richard was talking to a police officer, but she could feel his eyes now and again wander over in her direction.
He'd offered to drive her home, considering that her car was totaled. She accepted, turning down an offer from one of the police officers at the scene. It would give her a chance to observe this man that she'd mistaken for the love of her life. And she wasn't disappointed. This man, though more articulate in his words, struck within her a sense of familiarity, the shape of his face, the way he smiled. He enabled her accept her new reality. Superman wasn't coming home.
Richard made small talk, broaching topics such as the weather, sports, flying, anything except what just happened to the both of them. His voice had a soothing effect on her, almost like an injection of morphine. In someone else's voice she'd asked him to drive her to the drug store. To her surprise he agreed. After making her purchase, she walked across the street to the gas station and locked herself in a dingy bathroom, and sat on a dirty toilet holding a pregnancy test, waiting dazedly for the verdict.
Thirty minutes later, Richard was knocking on the door, asking her if she was okay. Wrapping the evidence in sheets of toilet paper, she buried the stick in the garbage can. "I'm okay," she called out. Wiping the tears away from her face, she promised herself that this would be the last time she'd ever cry for him.
Richard drove her home, asking no questions about their extended pit stop. She thanked him kindly for the ride and went up the stairs to her apartment and slept.
The next day, Perry formally introduced them to each other.
Lois opened her eyes, barely conscious. Bobby had disappeared, but there was a loud commotion at the front door and she could swear she heard her acne-ridden neighbor's voice. On the street below, wailing sirens came to a stop. She passed out.
TO BE CONTINUED