Chapter 8

The Loft

Saturday morning - In front of the Talon

Clark held the door to the passenger-side front seat for Lana. Her eyes were on him as she stepped over the doorsill and into the cabin. As she lowered herself toward the seat, Clark suddenly remembered the roses and lurched forward, shoving his arms under her to stop her descent. Then, he lifted slightly and gently pulled her from the car.

Not knowing what was going on, Lana squawked loudly and said, "Clark! What do you think you're doing? I hardly think I need saving in the front seat of your car." When he levered her out of the car and she finally noticed the box on the front seat, Lana turned to Clark and asked, "What's that?"

Clark set Lana down and gestured to the box. "Open it," he said. "It's for you."

Lana lifted the box off of the leather seat, walked around the door, and placed it on the hood of the car. Then she looked at the box with all the anticipation of a kid on Christmas morning, wondering just what Santa Hunk had brought her. Finally, she slid her nails between the lid and the bottom of the box and lifted.

Inside was something she had not expected from Clark, something she could not ever remember receiving from him, other than during one of her all too frequent visits to the hospital. Flowers, she thought. Roses, to be exact. From Clark. Oh my dear man, 'later' just became somewhat sooner.

Absentmindedly holding the lid of the box in her left hand, Lana reached out with her right hand to touch the roses, as if to make sure they were real. They looked so fresh, that she thought they should still have morning dew on the blood-red petals. Her hand slowly pulled back to cover her mouth, which was opened wide in surprise.

Lana quickly recovered her equilibrium, and a smile swept over her face. "Clark, the roses are gorgeous," she said, as she launched herself at Clark and kissed him thoroughly. Her eyes were aglow as she pulled away from Clark to lift the flowers, which were wrapped in green tissue paper, out of the box. She lowered her head toward the just-opening blooms and breathed in their scent.

"They smell just as beautiful as they look," Lana said. Thinking quickly, she told Clark to meet her at her house. She just had to put the flowers in a proper vase, and this way, she would be able to leave her truck at home.

Lana drove her truck home with the flowers on the bench seat beside her and Clark following in his Audi. Once home, Lana hustled up the steps and into the house and was rummaging in her cabinets for a suitable vase by the time Clark stepped inside.

"Is there a particular vase you're looking for, Lana?"

"Yeah. It's tall and fluted, and it's made out of clear glass."

Clark focused, seeing through the wooden cabinets as if they were not there. Spotting a likely candidate almost immediately, Clark walked two cabinets down from where Lana was looking, opened the door, and pulled a vase out from behind some old Mason jars that his mom used to use for canning.

Lana took one look and stopped her search. "What was that doing in there?" she wondered out loud.

"What are you asking me for?" Clark replied. "I don't live here."

"I was asking a rhetorical question, Clark," Lana said as she snatched the vase from his hand. She spent the next several minutes carefully arranging the flowers in the vase. After adding some fresh water to the vase, she was ready to go.

Clark looked at his watch and noticed it was just approaching eleven o'clock. He thought for a second and then asked, "Lana, since the picnic isn't scheduled to start until noon, would you mind terribly if we went to the loft. I'd like to see what's happened to it since I left."

Lana acquiesced and they headed out to the barn, arm-in-arm until they reached the foot of the winding stairway that led to Clark's personal refuge from days gone by. At that point, Lana jumped in front of Clark and brought him to a halt by pressing her hand to his chest.

"Stay here for a minute and let me go up and turn some lights on," Lana said. "I want you to have the right first impression."

"Okay, I'll be waiting."

Two steps up the stairway, Lana looked back over her shoulder, and said, "No peeking with x-ray vision, either."

Giving Lana his best hangdog look, Clark said, "Yes, Mother!" Jeez, I haven't gotten that warning since Mom thought I was getting an early preview of my Christmas presents back in high school.

Lana rolled her eyes and continued up the stairs.

Once at the top, she raced around tidying things that did not need to be tidied and took a quick look around to make sure nothing embarrassing was sitting out in the open before flipping on both power switches and telling Clark he could come on up.

The main part of the loft, right in front of the Dutch doors, was where most of the changes had occurred. Gone were the old strings of Christmas lights that used to line the walls; in their place were some tastefully chosen track lights on both the left and right sides. A large ceiling fan had been installed and the couch Clark remembered, which had been old even then, had been replaced with a couch that was newer and was upholstered in a pale yellow fabric. Next to the couch was a halogen stand lamp. On the floor in front of the couch was a faux-Persian area rug that covered a large portion of the floor in this section of the loft. Clark noticed all of these things peripherally, but his eyes were drawn to what stood before the Dutch doors.

A telescope.

His telescope.

There was no doubt in Clark's mind about that. He could see certain scratches on the telescope that had been there for as long as he could remember. He hurried over, pulled the caps off of the lens and the eyepiece and looked through the telescope for the first time in years.

Lana stood silently to one side, watching as Clark made minute adjustments to the telescope's focus. He looked up at Lana, a smile on his face, and said, "I can't believe you still have this. I thought for sure Mom would have sold it in the yard sale when she moved out of here."

"She did, Clark, and I bought it. I hadn't yet decided to try and buy the house, but I wanted something of yours that had some of our memories attached to it." Lana stepped up to the other side of the telescope and said, "There was nothing that meant so much to us as this telescope." She gave the telescope a wistful look and said, "I used to come up here at night and wish I could use it to spy on you, wherever you were. To see you were all right, to know you were happy."

"I'll admit to having had moments of happiness," Clark said, "whether it was from a well-written article, or from stopping a particularly nasty criminal, or from something else…but I was never truly happy, because you weren't there. I've missed you more than I know how to explain."

"You don't have to explain, Clark, because I know,in here," Lana said as she tapped her breastbone"exactly how much I missed you."

Clark finally took a careful look around the rest of the room, noting in detail the changes he had only half-seen earlier. The one thing Clark had missed on the way up, were the bookcases that lined the walls underneath the track lighting. The bookcases were nearly filled to capacity with everything from paperbacks, trade paperbacks, hardbacks, and even a few leather-bound special editions.

It dawned on Clark exactly what Lana used the loft for these days. It was her personal library and reading room. He was pleased by the fact that Lana decided to use his original 'Fortress of Solitude' as the place she went to get away from the world for a few hours.

"Still reading I see," Clark said as he picked up a dog-eared, paperback edition of Doctor Zhivago and began to thumb through it.

"Yes, I still read, and as you've probably already guessed, this is my reading room. I bring a couple of electric heaters up here in the winter, but because of school, I usually don't have much time to read then. Only summer vacation allows me the time to read that I'd like, and then I'm up here nearly every day." Waving a hand skyward, Lana said, "Hence the ceiling fan."

"Yeah, my parents always said it was too hot up here during the day from May through September."

"It was hot, Clark. It can get so stuffy up here."

"I never noticed."

Lana rolled her eyes and said, "Why am I not surprised…Superman?" She returned her gaze to the loft and continued, saying, "As for the rest of the furnishings, the rug is here so I can walk around barefoot without collecting a slew of splinters in my feet, the stand lamp is for good reading light, and the couch is yellow because it lightens a room that is otherwise too dark."

In the other area of the loft, where Clark's desk had been, he could see the same desk was still in place. "What do you do over there?" Clark asked as he set the book back on its shelf and led Lana to the desk.

"Paperwork, grading, even studying when I went back to school to get my Master's degree."

"A Master's? Cool! What's it in?"

"Art History, what else?" Lana replied with a smirk on her face. "The local school system wanted all of the teachers to have Master's degrees, so I had to get one. I did get a sizeable pay raise after I collected the sheepskin, though."

"After all that work? I should hope so!" Clark took a final look around and said, "I like what you've done up here, Lana. The loft still looks comfortable, but it also looks more elegant, more refined than when I lived here. Of course, back then, I thought refined meant not belching in public." Clark glanced at his watch and saw that it was past 11:30, so he said, "If we want to be there on time, or maybe even a little early, we need to go."

"Sounds fine to me, let's go." Lana was closer to the stairs than was Clark. She noticed this, began edging closer to the stairs, and said, "Last one to the car makes dinner!"

She hadn't even set foot on the first landing when the sound of a revving car engine came in through the open barn door. Lana looked behind her and saw no Clark, then she raced outside to see Clark driving his Audi right up to the barn door.

Totally chagrined, Lana stood there, hands on hips and mock-glared at Clark. He replied with a big grin, leaning his head out of the driver's-side window to ask, "Hey, Lana, what's for dinner tonight?"

"I don't know, I wasn't planning on having to cook," she replied morosely.

Once on their way, Clark asked, "Whatever possessed you to have a foot race with me?"

"The thought that you might play fair?"

"Oh, and you announcing the race while already heading toward the stairs was fair?"

"Well, I'm little," Lana said, "I need a head start." Looking over at Clark, Lana asked, "How'd you get by me anyway? I was blocking the stairs with my arms. You didn't fly did you?"

"Nope," Clark said smugly, "I just jumped out of the open Dutch doors. Admittedly, I used super-speed, but I would have won going at normal speed by going the direct route."

"I wonder if you're still ticklish? Or maybe that's super-ticklish?"

A wary look now on his face, Clark chanced a glance at Lana and said, "You wouldn't!"

"There's no telling what I might do, Clark. It could happen at any time. Remember, I know your weakness."

"Actually, Lana, you don't know my weakness. My real weakness, physically anyway, is Kryptonite. It's a mineral that came from the sky during the two meteor showers. The most common color is green and if you were to have a piece in your possession right now, I would cramp up uncontrollably and drive off the road. It doesn't just make me sick, it negates all of my powers…long-term exposure to the stuff would mean my death."

By the end of his monologue, Lana was slightly scared. "Why?"

"Why what?"

"Why does it make you sick? Why have you come back when you know that stuff can be found all over the county? And most importantly, why haven't you told me before? I used to have a necklace made of that stuff back in school…" Lana paused and gasped as the realization hit her. "So that's why you turned into a klutz whenever we got close, it was my necklace, not me."

"Let's take those 'whys' in order. First, I don't know why it makes me sick, except…that stuff comes from my home planet, so maybe that has something to do with it. Second, that stuff has been cleaned up in the public areas, the only places likely to have green-K are impact craters and places deep in the woods. Needless to say, I'm not going hiking in the woods anytime soon.

"And as for why I didn't tell you, that secret goes hand-in-hand with where I'm from. Once I told you about that, the information about Kryptonite wouldn't be far behind."

About that time, Clark's car pulled into the parking lot at Crater Lake next to where the picnic was being held.

Holding her door, Clark said, "Come on, Lana. Let's go see if we can make Pete choke on his drink when we walk up hand-in-hand."

"All right, as long as it's hand-in-hand, I'll go anywhere with you."