/ Back to present /

Slowly Clark opened the door.

She was standing in front of the sink, one hand submerged in the water, but she hardly seemed to notice.

"Lois..." He crossed to stand beside her. "Hey. How are you feeling?"

She was silent for a long, endless moment. "Jerome is your son...our son..." She stood motionless, her face expressionless and devoid of tears or emotion.

"Lois, believe me, I didn't know..."

"I've been with Lex all these years and all the time he was your son..." she whispered, her voice expressionless.

"Lois... "

"I wanted my child to stay with his father. I didn't want him to grow up without a father. And Lex hates him! He's trying to kill my child...and it's all my fault."

"It's not your fault. It's not our fault. We decided to be together, we loved each other, and don't say it isn't true because I don't believe you! Lois, that night...was the most important moment in my life. I never felt so alive. For the first time I knew why I was sent here...to Earth...it was to be with you. Just you..." Lois burst into sobs and Clark held her tightly. "Don't cry, Lois..."

"But I hurt you... and Jerome... I made the two people I really love suffer!"

"And I'm quite sure you were suffering too... "

She nodded. "But I ran away!"

Clark took her face firmly in his hands in order to stare into her eyes.

"Lois, you were scared! You were married!" With his tone he tried to convey all the love that he had for her.

"The next day I planned to talked to Lex. I wanted a divorce, but I started feeling sick. I wasn't able to do anything other than feel sorry for myself...for all of it. I needed so much to be loved like you loved me, Clark. The way you looked at me when the elevator doors closed..."

"Lois, I'm in love with you... I've always been in love with you... "

"How can you be? After everything I did, after I betrayed you! I ran...I didn't tell you that you were going to be a father..."

"Lois... you didn't know that I was Jerome's father..."

"I know, but I wasn't brave enough to tell you I was pregnant...and..."

"Please, Lois, don't cry...you've cried enough. We made mistakes, we're human...well, I'm almost human," he tried to joke. Lois smiled at him. Clark took a deep breath. "Lois, I want you know that you were my first time." He blurted, without stopping to think why he was telling her this.

"What? That's impossible..."

"It was possible, Lois. You were the first woman I loved. That I do love..."

Lois felt new tears roll down her cheeks, but she couldn't suppress them.

"I'm so sorry... Clark... I'm sorry..."

He wiped her tears clear with his thumbs.

"Hey, I'm not asking you to apologize, Lois. I just want you to know how much I love you...and how making love with you was the best memory of my life. The best moment... Lois, every time I take you into my arms I feel more alive than I ever have!"

"You're the most romantic man I've ever known. Earth guys don't stand a chance with you." She smiled a little more. "Oh, Clark how can you be so wonderful with me?"

"I'm not wonderful, Lois, I'm in love with you..."

"Clark, you are the only one who ever made LOVE with me..." Lois's gaze was fixed on the floor, but out of the corner of her eye she was able to make out Clark's amazed look. "All the men I've been with in my life...and there weren't that many... they never made love to me... it was just sex. They never... I never... I thought it would ever be anything else... until that night... with you... and now... I don't know what to do. I can't make up for how I acted... for all the pain I've caused..."

"Lois, don't do this to yourself..."

"But, Clark... It's my fault..."

"This isn't what I want to hear from you... There is just one thing I want to know... Only one..."

Lois raised her gaze until she met his. "What?" This time Clark was the one who moved away. Three words... He'd waited all this time just to hear her say those three magic words. But not like this. He didn't want to force her to say something like that. He hoped that she was ready and that she meant it.

Slowly he turned away.

Lois' voice was husky as she whispered, "What kind of person am I? I keep hurting you! You, the only man I loved in all my life...the man I love...and - "

"Lois!" It was almost a roar, a painful prayer.

"I know I never did anything to show it and I can understand if you won't believe me..."

"Lois..."

"I love you, Clark, so much that it hurts. And I love you more than my life, but if you want to leave me, I'll understand. I just hope you'll be happy and loved in the way you deserve. I never deserved you or your love."

"I love you too," or "I'm not going to leave you," or...whatever other words Clark wanted to say weren't enough. Not now, not after all this time.

Lois felt his hands on her face again, she felt his breath on her, then his lips caressed hers. Her eyes widened for a second as he paused, then they closed again as they shared a second, more passionate kiss.

They kissed. And for one wonderful moment that stretched to infinity, it was as if the world vanished around them.

They stared each other for a moment while they moved away in order to breathe, then Lois held him tightly, hiding her face into his shoulder. "I love you, Clark. I love you, I love you, I love you..." she declared again and again, as if she were unable to stop.

Clark smiled. "I love you too. Come on, wash your face. Jerome is worried about his mom." She nodded. She splashed cold water on her face then suddenly turned toward him.

"You are Superman..."

"Well, yeah..."

"Why didn't I realize you were him?" Clark shrugged his shoulders.

"No idea Lois... I was going to tell you everything... but I was afraid you would be angry with me for keeping it from you all this time... I mean..."

"So that was why!" Her tone was that of someone who had gotten the answer she had been looking for.

"Sorry?!"

"That was why you always ran away! It wasn't my fault..."

"Oh no! Of course it wasn't your fault. How could you think that?" Clark was confused. How could she think that?

"I thought about it a lot. That seemed to be the most logical solution..."

"If we hadn't been so afraid of talking to each other...maybe all of this would never have happened."

"I'm sorry, Clark..."

"Stop it. It's not your fault. He's the crazy one. You just tried to make it right. Stop blaming yourself." Clark hugged her again. "Jerome is waiting."

He turned towards the closed door. "Jerome's coming. He's worried about you." He wiped the last tracks of tears from her face. "If you want to speak with him alone, I can wait outside."

"No...I want you to stay. I mean, I'd like you to stay. If you want to."

He nodded.

ooOOoo

Jerome asked Doctor Klein if he could go check on his mom and Klein offered to escort the child there. He seemed too weak to go alone. Klein knew that Superman and Mrs. Luthor needed some privacy, so he waited until the boy entered the rest room and then returned quickly to his laboratory.

This was been really a quite shock for Doctor Klein, meeting Superman like this. He knew it could be happen, but not so soon, and certainly not so suddenly.

He hoped that the vaccine would be ready before he met "him". Stewart and himself used every precaution they could in order not to be discovered. They had fought two months ago in front of a crowd so that everyone would believe they were no longer friends. In this way no one could think they were working together in this unbelievable experiment to save the superhero's child.

He'd seen the way that Superman had acted towards the woman and child. He cared. Superman had said that he had just encountered the child, but there was too deep an affection between them for that. They couldn't have just met moments or hours previously. The doctor felt a little silly conjecturing on their relationship, but it was obvious from the way that Superman looked at Lois and Jerome that he loved them. And that had been another surprise.

The whole world knew that Lois Lane was close to Superman from the first year that he appeared in Metropolis. She and her partner were used to getting exclusive interviews with the superhero. But both of them seemed to have lost contact with him in recent years. Superman didn't give a lot of interviews lately. Just a few per year? And never exclusives.

His withdrawal had made people forget he had a human side. Bernie realized that most people thought he was too cold. He remembered an interview he'd read some time back with some people Superman had saved. They had been trapped in a train, many of the victims of the crash had been children. He had been able to save everyone, but what the people there that night had remembered most was how kind and careful he had been with the children who had been afraid in the wreckage. He had seemed so emotionless to the watching world, to everyone but the people he had saved. And they, as others before them, had seen that he cared. Especially for the children.

But this didn't explain why the child looked at the superhero in the way that he had. It wasn't enough to discover that this was his real father to make a child look at someone that way. There was too much love in his eyes. They had been gone a while now and he decided to peek into the hall to check on them. He could see even now, when Superman opened the door of the rest room to let the child enter, the obvious look of love that Superman had when he saw the boy.

All this was too much to think about. He decided to focus on his experiment instead. It looked as if they'd been quite right so far since Superman and the child seemed not have been affected by the Kryptonite he had in the room. Ok, it was covered by that purple liquid, but he was quite sure this vaccine was starting to work. That's when remembered that he needed to ask Superman a lot of
questions, especially about his invulnerability, so he wrote all the questions he was able to think about down so as to ask them at the earliest opportunity.

Klein was disappointed however when the trio returned to the laboratory and Superman apologized, disappearing before he could ask him anything.

Lois looked embarrassed and seemed to be distrusting of him. He couldn't really say he blamed her.

To be continued