Archive of Our Own ^beta

Chapter Text

There was a new, unfamiliar scent in the air. 

It was sweet—feminine—a soft, dizzyingly pleasant synthesis of lilac and peaches that seized the most basal animal impulses of his Kryptonian biology in a violent chokehold, singularly redirecting his executive function to the exclusive pursuit of that heavenly fragrance. Standing in the downstairs lobby of the downtown headquarters of the Daily Planet, every muscle fiber in his body activated. His hearing sharpened. His nostrils flared. 

His mouth watered.

He had to find the source of this delicious scent.

Typically, Clark had to consciously and constantly will away the overwhelming bombardment of human odors that assaulted his heightened sense of smell by suspending his breathing for hours on end, but on this Monday morning, Clark was actively respirating through his nose at an alarming rate as the elevator opened on his floor, the scent growing stronger with every step he took. He offered quiet, polite greetings to his colleagues as he strode down the wide hallway, hoping his face didn’t betray his inner torment, but as the moments passed and the trail grew harder to discern in the bustling corporate tower, Clark grew increasingly agitated—desperate—to locate his target. 

Was the scent even human? An object?

And why was he reacting so strongly?

“Kent! There you are,” the booming voice of Perry White suddenly sounded. “Come with me, there’s someone I’d like you to meet.”

Clark detected faint traces of the scent around Perry’s hands, almost like a heat signature, confirming that this haunting ambrosia was something his employer had physically encountered fairly recently. That meant that whatever it was, it could be touched.

It meant he could grab it and capture it, keeping it all to himself, before burying his nose in it like a wild animal, taking deep, furious drags of its sweet sweet nectar until his lungs burst—

“Of course, boss,” Clark dutifully responded on a gulp. “Lead the way.” 

Clark followed Perry throughout the labyrinth of cubicles, pretending to listen to his employer’s dramatic recapitulations of the Metropolis Monarchs game the day before as he scanned his surroundings for possible sources of the intoxicating sweetness. He could smell it everywhere yet nowhere, a tease veering on torture that was steadily fraying his sanity, so close yet still out of reach. 

Where was it?

Pausing at a new desk situated at the entrance to the corridor of private offices reserved for chief reporters—where Clark and Lois worked—Perry suddenly announced, “I’d like you to meet your new floor assistant. This is Elsie.”

A petite young woman he hadn’t noticed immediately stood at the mention of her name, and when she raised her head, Clark knew he’d finally found the source of the fragrance that had been tormenting him all morning.  

Now right in front of him, her scent hit him like a missile to the chest, detonating within his flesh and shredding his organs like shrapnel with a blistering agony that was violently pleasurable. Just as his cells responded with fervor to the radiation of yellow stars, he found himself similarly reacting on a molecular level to her fragrance, subatomically vibrating with pure, electric rapture. Ecstasy. His very muscles were galvanized by the sweet, hypnotic redolence wafting through the air, his lungs automatically expanding and burning in heaving desperation for more.

But the powerful, mouthwatering smell of her did nothing to prepare his other senses for the impact of her appearance.

Not only did she smell overwhelmingly good, but the girl was so pleasing to look at her physical appeal actually veered uncomfortable to behold. 

She wasn’t just beautiful—she was breathtaking.

She was a small, delicate little thing—tiny in comparison to him—with wavy brown hair, creamy skin, and the warmest eyes he’d ever seen. Round and guileless, there was an inexplicably familiar quality to her eyes, though he couldn’t recall where he’d seen them before. They were a radiant harmony of gold and laurel green, a color most often described as hazel, which struck Clark as a profoundly reductive term for the girl. 

Her beguiling eyes reminded him of being back in Kansas, at that quiet hour of perfect, peaceful stillness when the sun was just edging above the horizon, bathing the verdant, foggy farmlands in a benevolent solar glow. 

Elsie had eyes like dawn.

Clark was slack-jawed, dumbfounded, and his heart—which typically rested around five beats per minute—began to dangerously race, hammering so ferociously against his ribcage he grew lightheaded from the sharp increase in circulation, temples throbbing from the unusual pressure. He struggled to mitigate his senses, his alien vision intuitively shuffling beyond the upper layers of her skin to her physicality beneath, scanning her health like an MRI. 

Her heart was racing even faster than his, and there was a heavy concentration of electrical impulses firing throughout her limbic system like a lightning storm. Was she anxious? Scared? The girl’s body was unusually warm, at least a degree higher than typical for humans, but she didn’t appear to be harboring any illness. His electromagnetic gaze lowered to the organs of her lower abdomen, and he noticed pronounced activity in her left fallopian tube, suggesting the girl was likely ovulating— 

Clark cleared his throat and frowned hard, ashamed of himself for his wayward alien senses—and entirely inappropriate thoughts. He’d been successfully schooling his vision to remain surface-level and humanlike for so long that he rarely even had to think about it, but something about this girl completely jostled his faculties, leaving him scrambling to regain control.

Who was she?

“Umm…hi, Mr. Kent!” she said brightly—nervously. “It’s really nice to meet you!”

She extended a shaking hand, her heart pounding even harder than it was before, and Clark was overwhelmed with guilt.

He was terrifying her. 

Willfully softening his features, Clark offered her a small smile and slowly reached to accept her handshake.

“It’s nice to meet you too, Elsie,” he responded. “Please, call me Clark.”

He tried to be gentle. Human. Careful.

But her skin was so soft to the touch, smoother than silk and as fragile as a flower petal, that Clark found himself nearly crushing her tiny hand in his giant mitt in instinctual longing for a stronger feel of her, causing the girl to yelp in distress. 

“I’m so sorry,” Clark stammered, cheekbones warming as he ruefully dropped her hand. Typically he feigned clumsiness as part of his cover, but right now, his physical awkwardness was entirely genuine. 

“It’s quite all right—it’s my own fault, really,” Elsie said shyly. “I was kneading bread all weekend and I think I may have sprained my wrist…” The girl was blushing furiously now, her youthfully plump cheeks stained a charming shade of deep rose. 

He wondered if this delectably feminine hue matched whatever secret shade of pink resided between her soft thighs—

Clark awkwardly cleared his throat, disgusted with himself for the unbidden, grossly indecent thought. He wasn’t like human males, blinded by the fickle whims of his erections, reducing the fairer sex to their looks and their bodies. He didn’t objectify women—he respected women.

He was better than this.

Not to mention, he was in a loving, committed relationship with Lois.

What was wrong with him?

Clark glanced at Perry, who was watching him suspiciously. “Everything all right there, Kansas?” 

“S-sorry,” Clark mumbled apologetically after a beat. “I…uhh…I didn’t get much sleep last night. Please excuse me—I’m going to go and grab a cup of coffee. Welcome to team, Elsie.”

He was proud of himself for thinking of a plausible excuse to leave this strange interaction, considering how much his thoughts seemed to turn to mush in the presence of Elsie and her impossibly sweet smell, but before he could exit, the young girl spoke again. 

“I’d be happy to get it for you, Mr. Kent!” she said earnestly. “How do you take your coffee, sir?”

She looked hopeful, anxiously so, as if it were her greatest ambition in life to please, which incited something dark and carnal within him that Clark resolutely refused to acknowledge, especially in the girl’s presence. 

He would not succumb to his base Kryptonian urges. 

He was not that kind of man. 

How old was she anyway? She was hired to assist the chief reporters, a position that required bachelor’s education at a minimum, in addition to relevant work experience, but with her sweet, innocent face, girlish flowery dress, and headband in her hair, Elsie could have easily been mistaken for a teenager. 

“With…uhh…cream. And lots of sugar, please,” Clark croaked, increasingly disturbed by his wayward thoughts. He’d found the source of the beguiling scent—and now he couldn’t get away from her fast enough. She was unnerving him. “Th-thank you, Elsie.”

He offered Perry a short wave, rushed beyond the girl’s desk, and made a beeline for his office, closing the door behind him. 

Only then did he feel like he could finally exhale, his wits slowly returning to him as her scent began to fade.

He was just beginning to unload the contents of his briefcase onto his desk when Lois entered his office in a furiously glorious rush. 

She looked as attractive and polished today as she always did, her dark auburn hair flowing in sleek layers around her stunning face. He inhaled slowly, taking in her familiar, comforting scent of red roses and amber, noting with distant alarm that he’d never reacted to the natural fragrance of the woman he loved anywhere near as strongly as this young stranger out in the hall. 

Clark motioned to embrace Lois and give her a morning kiss, but she brushed off his advance with a wave of her hand. 

“Can you believe Perry?” she asked, exasperated. “Of all of the qualified applicants HR received for the assistant role, they gave it to her.” 

“You mean Elsie?” Clark questioned. “I only just met her, but, what’s wrong with her?” 

“You mean apart from the obvious?” 

Clark frowned, confused. “What do you mean?” 

Lois tilted her head to the side and smiled weakly. “She’s a small town girl.”

“I’m from a small town.”

“Yes—but you’re also the man of steel,” Lois said, dropping her voice. 

“What are you saying?” It wasn’t like Lois to put down a colleague, especially another woman.

Lois sighed, a faraway look saddening her features. “It’s just—I’ve seen countless girls like her before. They come to the big city with big dreams, and they end up crushed. She’s being set up for failure. Metropolis is going to chew her up and spit her out.”

“Perhaps we should give her a chance,” Clark offered. “She might surprise us.”

“Doubtful—look at this.” She shoved her iPhone into his palm. “It’s her Instagram profile.”

At Lois’s prodding, Clark scrolled through Elsie’s posts, trying not to acknowledge how pretty she looked in the rare tiles that contained her face.

Though nowhere near as pretty as she was in person, the girl was so damn gorgeous—

Clark cleared his throat. This was yet another inappropriate thought. 

For the most part, her content consisted primarily of food photography, along with short videos of herself cooking in a small kitchen.

So that explained why she’d mentioned spending the weekend kneading bread…

Clark selected a reel at random, which featured Elsie animatedly showing off her groceries from a recent trip to a nearby farmers market, encouraging her modest number of followers to support local regenerative farmers in an effort to be kinder to the planet. She then proceeded to prepare a delicious-looking meal of herb roasted chicken with mashed potatoes and a green salad with her locally sourced produce, all set to upbeat Doo-wop music with a beaming smile upon her pretty face. 

She was adorable.

“I’m really not sure what the problem is,” Clark said, returning Lois’s phone before he spent too much time searching for more photos of Elsie herself. “So she likes to cook—”

“She’s an influencer—not a reporter,” Lois groused, though Clark wasn’t sure that was a fair assessment of the girl. Admittedly he didn’t know much about social media, preferring to leave that type of work to the paper’s marketing director, but from what he could gather, Elsie was simply posting about her hobbies. She didn’t have very many followers to begin with, and based off of his cursory survey of her profile, none of her content was actually sponsored by anyone. 

She seemed to just be a sweet, passionate girl, excited to share her cooking and crafts with anyone who might be interested.

“I don’t think barely three-thousand followers makes her an influencer,” Clark placated as Lois began to pace back and forth. “Besides, perhaps working with you will be the challenge she needs to—”

“Don’t be stupid,” Lois clipped. “I am not working with her.”

“You won’t even give her a chance?” Clark was puzzled—Lois typically loved supporting young women entering journalism. “Don’t you think that’s a little harsh—”

“Forget it. You wouldn’t understand, Clark.”

Lois was furious with him—she often was, lately—but Clark truly couldn’t fathom just where he’d gone wrong. 

Clark slowly stepped forward with a pleading, non-threatening look and wrapped his arms around her waist. “Then help me understand.”

He gently squeezed her the way he knew she liked—she often said she liked his arms—and finally, he felt her relax against him.

Lois took a deep breath. “It’s hard, Clark—being a woman in this industry. I am a Pulitzer award-winning journalist. I’m a multimillion bestselling author. I’ve interviewed three sitting Presidents. I’ve been to war zones, I’ve been on the ground of terrorist attacks—both alien and domestic—and still it’s a constant battle to be taken seriously.” 

Clark dropped a kiss on her head, and began to slowly stroke her arms up and down. 

What Lois was saying wasn’t new to him—he’d certainly been confronted with privilege he didn’t deserve, and that was when he was just living and working as Clark Kent. He worked hard, but Lois worked even harder. She was older, more experienced, and certainly more accomplished.

And yet, their salaries at the paper were the same. 

“You find—what Elsie seems to represent—demoralizing,” Clark deduced carefully, wanting to be absolutely sure he understood Lois’s stresses. 

Lois smiled faintly. “I’ve fought so hard to shatter the glass ceiling that prohibits women from succeeding in this business. But girls like Elsie—with that bubbly, fifties housewife nostalgia—it’s like she’s arriving with glue. What will people think of me—the young ambitious girls, the next generation of female reporters, who look up to me as a role model—if I associate with someone like her?”

“You’re an extraordinary role model, Lois,” Clark said sincerely. “An…unconventional assistant won’t denigrate all that you’ve accomplished.”

“I really hope not,” Lois said. “Because regardless of the editorial board’s desire to appeal to a younger market, I have absolutely no use for an air-headed twenty-something whose greatest professional achievement is picking out the perfect filter for her blueberry pie.”

Clark was about to respond, but the sound of a new heartbeat—a panicked heartbeat—just beyond the door filled him with dread. 

“Someone’s here,” Clark muttered to Lois as he walked across his office, vainly hoping that by some miracle, the sweet-smelling girl couldn’t hear the unfavorable things that had just been said about her. 

He opened the door, and felt like his insides were being bludgeoned by the heartbreaking sight of Elsie, staring up at him with big tears in her eyes. 

She’d heard them, all right. 

And she looked absolutely crushed. 

“I…umm…I have your c-coffee, Mr. K-Kent,” Elsie stuttered, timidly extending a tray with the aforementioned prepared exactly the way he liked it, along with what appeared to be a homemade scone. 

She’d even included a handwritten note thanking him for welcoming her to the team, punctuated with a smiley face.

She was a sweetheart. 

And he was an ass.

“Elsie, I—”

“I’ll be at my desk if you need anything,” she responded with a weak smile, seeming to grow smaller before him. “You t-too, Ms. Lane.” Clearly too afraid to look at Lois, Elsie scurried down the hallway like a frightened mouse cornered by a cat before either of them could say anything else. 

Clark dropped the tray on the short coffee table in the small sitting area of his office. “She heard us.”

“I’ll go and talk to her,” Lois responded definitively. She gave him a quick kiss on the cheek before reaching for the door. “Oh, did you still want me to come over tonight? Anything I can bring?”

“Just yourself,” Clark answered warmly. Lois had been traveling for weeks on assignment, and combined with his Justice League duties, they hadn’t had quality time together in nearly a month. They needed this. “All you need to do is show up, and let me pamper you.”

Lois smiled at that, a real smile, and she offered him with a proper kiss, slowly and tenderly brushing her lips against his, allowing him to taste her. “You spoil me, Superman.”

Clark gave her a final, loving squeeze. “It’s my privilege to do so, Lo.”

Later that night, Clark found himself with his face happily between Lois’s legs. 

She’d been tense upon her arrival at his apartment, more than an hour after she’d said she’d show up, but it seemed that after the hot, candlelit bubble bath he’d drawn for her, followed by her favorite takeout from a nearby bistro—in addition to the sensual shoulder massage he’d performed while she sipped her favorite wine—Lois was finally beginning to relax. 

Now he just needed to send her completely over the blissful edge, and Clark had learned that the quickest way to accomplish this was with his tongue swiping rhythmically against her clit.

He was on his knees on the floor, Lois reclined on his oversized bed with her back arched, her legs draped haphazardly around his wide shoulders as she writhed against his ministrations. Every moan and shudder she gave him felt like a reward, one he was eager to drink up, and he gently held her hips to keep her in place as she wildly bucked against his face with the impact of her third orgasm of the night, flooding his mouth with her juices. 

“Fuck me,” Lois commanded in a whiny, lust-filled haze. “Now, baby.” 

Clark lowered his boxer briefs with one hand as he crawled over her, lining the swollen head of his cock against her still-quivering hole. She wrapped her long legs around his waist with a nod—her way of granting her approval for him to proceed—and Clark slowly and carefully sank inside her slick heat with a satisfied sigh. 

He kept his thrusts controlled and shallow, focusing on angling his hips to target her G-spot, taking extra care not to push too hard or crush her with his weight. Clark was well aware he was big in all ways, and he’d vowed even before he became sexually active as a teenager to make sure he never let his strength go unchecked with his lovers, a commitment he’d maintained throughout adulthood. 

He’d never once hurt a woman during sex—and he never would. 

Sensationally, intercourse felt pleasant enough, though he’d long suspected his experience perhaps wasn’t as intense as whatever humans felt. Regardless, Clark strongly enjoyed watching his partners’ reactions. 

And Lois was highly expressive—and demanding—with her pleasure. 

She groaned deeply for him, meeting his thrusts with slickness and heat as she held onto his biceps, her polished nails struggling to indent his marble skin the closer he brought her to her next orgasm. He felt her tighten around him, the furious blood flow blazing through her contracting vaginal walls, and Clark slightly increased his pressure in the way she needed to help her reach her peak. 

She cried out for him, clinging to him in her powerful ecstasy, and Clark enjoyed every moment of watching her come.  

It brought him satisfaction every time—whether he was using his fingers, his tongue, or his cock—to make the woman he loved orgasm. 

The sight was enough to keep him hard when Lois pushed him off of her, signaling that she was getting sore and was ready for him to pull out. 

Per usual, Clark quietly excused himself to the bathroom, and proceeded to beat himself off to the memory of Lois coming for him.

He finished in his fist, enjoying a few moments of private pleasure, before he promptly rinsed off, donned a pair of sweatpants, and returned to the bedroom. 

To his surprise, Lois wasn’t waiting in bed to cuddle as she normally liked after sex. 

Instead, he found her scrambling to get dressed. 

“In a hurry?” Clark questioned. 

“No, no…everything’s fine!” Lois answered—too quickly—as she haphazardly buttoned her top. “I’m just jet lagged and could really use a night in my own bed.”

Her heartrate spiked with her words, one of the sure tells that she was lying. 

“Is everything all right?” Clark asked, not wanting to use his super-senses as an unfair advantage against his girlfriend. If there was something she was hiding, he needed to make sure she felt safe enough to share it. “Have I done something wrong?”

Lois smiled sadly. “No, honey, no…you’re great. Perfect. I’m just…”

Clark sat down on the bed in front of her, hoping that perhaps she’d be more inclined to be honest with him if he was seated, and not as physically intimidating. She was taller than the average woman, lithely standing at five-eight without heels, but at six-five, Clark knew quite well that he dwarfed her.

“Lo, what is it?” Clark asked softly. “You can tell me anything. I only want to make you happy.”

Lois seemed to consider his words for several moments, before she said in a low voice, “I think we need to take a break.”

Clark was stunned. 

This was the last thing he’d been expecting.

Sure they’d been distant lately due to their respective schedules, but he loved her, and thought that she loved him. 

How long had she been unhappy?

Clark took a deep, calming breath to keep his voice even and non-confrontational. “Can I…can I ask why?”

He’d only hoped to open a dialogue, to encourage her to voice her grievances, whatever they were, but instead, his question only seemed to frustrate her. 

“I’m breaking up with you, and you…fuck, I can’t believe I’m saying this—Clark, you’re too calm.”

“Too calm?”

“Yes—you are always so calm, and careful, it’s…it’s infuriating! I can’t do it anymore.”

“Infuriating?” Clark was perplexed. “But I thought—”

“You are perfect—always,” Lois explained. “Relationships—people—aren’t meant to be like that. Clark, we’ve been exclusive for over a year. You’ve never once raised your voice at me. You never get annoyed, you never lose patience, you are always so goddamn happy to see me no matter what I do, or how horribly I’m behaving—”

“And that’s a problem?” Ironically, Clark indeed felt his ire rising, but he swallowed hard to tamp it down. Do not get angry. “Are you saying you want me to yell at you?”

“I’m saying I want passion. And all of the messy imperfection that comes with it. Come on, don’t you think it’s odd that I’ve never once been able to make you come? Doesn’t that bother you?”

Technically, no one had ever been able to make him come.

“Babe, I don’t care about that,” Clark pleaded. “Besides, each time you’ve tried, you’ve been sore. I don’t want to hurt you. I’m built differently—you know this.” 

“And I’ve told you countless times that I don’t mind a little pain,” Lois countered. “I like it rough—but you always stop me just when we’re getting somewhere.” 

Clark sighed. “So you’re unsatisfied with our sex life? Is that why you’re breaking up with me?”

Lois scoffed and rolled her eyes. “I’m perfectly satisfied. Believe me. You’re like a big blue vibrator—you get me off right on schedule. Every time.”

She spoke with a level of derision that bordered on disgust. Not only was Clark confused, but now, his pride as a man was wounded. 

He’d made her come four times this evening—once around his fingers, twice on his tongue, and once around his cock. He’d studied her body long enough to know with certainty she wasn’t faking. 

And yet, she was still unsatisfied. 

“I’ve tried to be the best for you,” Clark said. “I’ve tried to be…I’ve tried to be everything you wanted…”

Lois placed a gentle hand on his shoulder. “Clark…you shouldn’t have to try so hard. That’s the point I’m trying to make here. Wouldn’t you prefer to be with someone you could relax with? And just be yourself?”

He knew her words were meant to be comforting, to be a gentle let down, but a dark, volatile fury was kindling deep in his gut. 

He breathed slowly and deeply, clenching and unclenching his fists to modulate the anger. 

Clark didn’t have the luxury of losing his temper, for his anger wasn’t just dangerous—it was deadly. 

Of course he wanted to be with someone he could relax with, but he’d long accepted that it would never be a reality for him. The planet where he was born was destroyed, along with all those like him. He was destined to be alone in the universe. 

But up until this evening, Lois had been the closest thing he’d ever experienced to feeling slightly less lonely. 

“I love you,” Clark said eventually. “Is it really so wrong to want to make you happy? To be perfect for you?”

Lois slowly shook her head. “This isn’t enough for me, Clark. And I think deep down, you know it’s not enough for you, too.”

She leaned forward and gently kissed him on the cheek. “Look, I’ve got to go. Let’s just…let’s just take some time. Okay?”

Clark responded in the affirmative, but he knew in his heart that Lois was only humoring him. 

When Lois Lane made a decision, she committed to it. 

Their relationship was over. 

He wordlessly got dressed, and held Lois’s hand as he escorted her downstairs to the car service he’d called for her. He sent her a text to confirm she’d made it home safely. 

And only once he was back safely in his apartment—alone, as he was destined to be—did Clark allow the violent, savage rage boiling inside of him to be released. 

Elsie softly yawned, absently massaging her aching neck as she sat at her desk, reading through her redlines on her computer one final time. It was nearly midnight, and the office was deserted, with the exception of the friendly security guard in the lower lobby. 

In addition to proofreading and diligently fact-checking all pending articles written by the five members of the chief reporter team, Elsie had also completed a preliminary survey of relevant historical events, current events, research studies, and even case law to help inform any subsequent revisions their respective editors might require.

She hadn’t planned on working this late on her first day, but after the humiliating conversation she’d overheard in Mr. Kent’s office, Elsie was determined to prove herself worthy of her hire. 

She was capable of far more than selecting filters for blueberry pie! 

Regardless, Elsie didn’t even use filters on her homemade food photography. 

“Elsie?” a deep male voice asked. “What are you still doing here this late?”

If she hadn’t been seated, Elsie would have fallen over in terror at the unexpected arrival of Clark Kent in front of her desk. 

He was easily the biggest man she’d ever seen, so tall that he seemed almost inhuman, and never before had Elsie felt smaller—not even when she was a little girl. He was also overwhelmingly muscular, his athletic body barely contained by the conservative button-down plaid shirt and dark pants he wore. He could easily crush her in his bare hands if he wanted to. 

And though his huge physicality was intimidating enough, it was the sight of his face that truly threatened Elsie. 

Never before had she fathomed a man could be so incredibly handsome. 

He had a strong face that was equally powerful and beautiful, with prominent, perfectly proportioned features that made him look like he’d been hammered and chiseled from solid marble by a master sculptor, like those ancient works immortalized in famous fine art museums. He had smooth, thick hair as dark as midnight, and an arresting pair of brilliant blue eyes that seemed to transport her not to the sea, but to the sky. 

His eyes matched a shade Elsie had seen in photographs, but never in person—the otherworldly, almost magically rare hue of bright blue found in the aurora borealis of the high arctic, a place she’d always longed to visit. 

Elsie was terrified of what would happen if he ever chose to remove his square-frame glasses in her presence. 

She’d surely faint under the impact of his staggering eyes without a barrier. 

“Elsie?” Mr. Kent prompted.

Elsie swallowed hard. “H-hi, Mr. Kent—is there…umm…is there something I can do for you?”

Mr. Kent frowned. “You can tell me why you’re still here. It’s almost midnight. Have you been here since I left?”

“Well, I went home briefly to feed my cat,” Elsie explained, “but I came right back!”

“Why?” Mr. Kent pressed. He seemed increasingly perturbed, his strong brow deeply furrowed as he breathed hard through his nose. 

Was he angry with her? 

“I just…I thought…I just wanted to make a good impression,” Elsie stammered. Her cheeks burned in shame as tears welled in her eyes. He’d really think she was a stupid girl if she cried in front of him! “I’m s-sorry—”

“No, Elsie, no…you have nothing to apologize for.” Mr. Kent sighed and brought his fingertips to his temples. “And, what you overheard earlier—”

“It’s okay, Mr. Kent—really!” Elsie said quickly. Ms. Lane hadn’t quite apologized to her earlier that day, but she had explained that whatever she’d heard was likely out of context. “I…I understand I’m maybe not what everyone wanted, but I promise I will work very hard.”

She’d hoped her words were reassuring, a demonstration of her commitment to the job, but it seemed like she was only making the situation worse. Mr. Kent looked even more upset than before. 

“Elsie, you’re clearly dedicated. I know you’ll be a wonderful asset to the team,” Mr. Kent said tensely. “But it’s late—you really should go home.”

“Do you…do you want me to leave, sir?” Elsie asked. Perhaps he’d come in to work on a breaking story, and didn’t want to be disturbed. “I’m just proofreading an article for Ms. Lane. I promise I’ll stay out of your way—I won’t make a peep!”

Something dark flashed in Mr. Kent’s eyes, something unknown yet unsettling that made Elsie nervously squirm in her seat.

When he spoke again, it seemed as if his deep voice had lowered even further, rattling her to the bone like a bass. “What I want is for you to go home, and get a good night’s sleep. Can you do that for me, Elsie?”

There was an unspoken command in his otherwise smooth question, and Elsie found herself automatically nodding in acquiescence, helpless to resist his show of authority. 

She’d always been a people-pleaser—she was happiest when given a task to accomplish—but the way Mr. Kent spoke seemed to target something much deeper than her mere desire to exceed expectations at work.

“Y-yes, s-sir,” Elsie breathed, and Mr. Kent’s eyes widened, his pupils dilated. On a nervous impulse, she nibbled on her lower lip—holding onto it for dear life—and suddenly, there was a strange…rumbling in the air. It was too low for her to hear, exactly, but she could still feel it vibrating through her ears all the same, almost tickling her brain. 

Mr. Kent averted his gaze and cleared his throat, his frown deepening to a true glare, and Elsie gulped in fear. 

Was he going to fire her?

“I’ll see you in the morning,” Mr. Kent said roughly. “Goodnight, Elsie.”

He stormed beyond her and into his office so quickly that his swift movements caused several items and loose papers on her desk to scatter to the floor. 

When she heard his door slam shut, Elsie exhaled on a dejected sob, and slowly knelt on the floor to gather her belongings, sorrowful tears freely falling. 

It didn’t matter how hard she worked, how hard she studied, or how hard she tried to prove herself. She’d done everything that had been asked of her today, and beyond.

And still, she was unwanted. 

Alone.

“Goodnight, Mr. Kent,” she whispered to herself.

Chapter Text

Clark had hoped that with brief, controlled exposure, he would eventually acclimate to the new floor assistant’s sweet smell and pleasing appearance. Surely, after several days of seeing her and professionally interacting with her, this strange lure she seemed to unwittingly snare him in would fade, and he could get through the work day without salivating.

Unfortunately for Clark—and unfortunately for Elsie—the girl’s appeal only seemed to magnify as the week passed. 

By Friday afternoon, Clark was doing far more than drooling. 

Elsie had started dressing differently, eschewing her modest floral dresses in exchange for button-down blouses and minimalist, modern skirts. She did appear slightly closer to her age with her new clothes—which Clark had learned to be twenty-four—but now, it was both her face and her body that he was struggling to look away from. 

Despite her petite, slender build, Elsie had lethal curves, her soft hourglass figure forming a winding, mouthwatering labyrinth of gentle, sensual femininity. With her fitted attire, he could now see just how tiny her waist was—tiny enough for him to wrap his hands completely around, with overlap—along with the ample swells of her pert teardrop breasts, the ripe, fertile roundness of her hips, and the perky plumpness of her well-formed buttocks. She maintained fairly modest hemlines, but his male gaze was still helplessly drawn to the curves of her calves, the softness of her knees, and just the slightest, teasing hint of her smooth thighs. 

On top of it all, she smelled even sweeter by the day. 

Indeed, Clark was doing far more than drooling over Elsie. 

He was now biting his knuckles and fighting erections every time he got a whiff of her—every time he glanced at her. 

And every time she offered a shyly eager yes, sir in response to a directive, Clark experienced full-body shivers, necessitating his immediate withdrawal from their interaction before he voiced any of the dark urges her mere existence seemed to provoke. 

A lifelong monogamist, Clark had never been one to lust after women he didn’t know, even in his most private thoughts. His very sense of physical attraction, his basic understanding of arousal and desire, had always been intrinsically linked to his emotional—and most importantly, reciprocal—connection with his partner.  

The deeper he loved, the stronger his body reacted. 

But with Elsie, a girl he barely knew, the temptation to grab her and throw her down onto his desk, flip up her skirt and rip off her panties, before thrusting his cock all the way inside of her until she screamed herself hoarse was now so persistent it was nearly an obsession. 

Clark was no longer in control of his body, or even his own thoughts. 

His young assistant—with her unbearably pretty face and tiny, mouthwatering body— had somehow managed to shackle the man of steel in a primal, raving delirium of dangerous, deadly want. 

Though perhaps the one benefit to his unbidden fixation with Elsie was that he was simply too distracted to spend excessive time mulling over the fact that he’d just been dumped by the woman he’d thought he was going to marry. 

Lois and he hadn’t exchanged a single word since their breakup Monday night. 

It wasn’t that he was avoiding her—he’d offer a friendly wave if they crossed paths in the office, which she’d typically ignore—but he wasn’t particularly inclined to try and engage her in conversation. Lois had made her feelings abundantly clear, and while he was deeply hurt by her rejection, he respected her too much to insult her by arguing with her decision. 

Lois didn’t want him. Which meant he had no choice but to accept it, and move on. 

It was half past two, and Clark was holed in his office, struggling to put Elsie out of his mind long enough to finish an overdue article for Perry on the upcoming gubernatorial election.

He was barely able to type three lines before he heard the very girl stand from her desk outside and down the hall, her heart beating faster the closer her dainty footfalls advanced. 

Moments later, there was a soft knock on the door. 

Clark cleared his throat. “C-come in.”

Elsie silently inched inside his office, her narrow shoulders arched and head lowered as she approached his desk, making her look even smaller than she already was. “I…umm…I have the prints of the archive reports you asked for on historical voting trends in Metropolis, Mr. K-Kent. I’ve gone ahead and annotated them for you.”

She extended a manila folder, and Clark noticed that her small fist was shaking. 

“Thank you, Elsie,” Clark said gently, accepting the folder. 

“Is there anything else I can do for you, sir?” she asked, still staring at her feet. 

His jeans immediately tightened at her use of the word sir. 

“No, thank you—this is perfect.” She motioned to leave, so he added, “Also, I wanted to say…you’ve done excellent work this week.”

And she truly had. Elsie was painstakingly detail-oriented, especially in her proofreads, polishing his prose to grammatical and syntactic perfection with her careful eye. He tried not to ask too much of her, mindful of the fact that she was supporting five chief reporters throughout her workday, but whenever he did assign a task, Elsie was unfailingly efficient, always providing her deliverables ahead of schedule with a wholesome smile on her face. 

Elsie slightly raised her head and offered one of those heart-melting smiles, but this time, it didn’t reach her eyes. “Th-thank you, Mr. Kent.”

She waited expectantly for another task, but Clark was fresh out of responsibilities to delegate to her.  

Still, he was compelled to keep her in his office just a few minutes longer, just to ensure she was okay. 

It was absolutely not because he wanted to keep looking at her. Admiring her. 

Smelling her— 

“I’ve been meaning to ask…how are you settling in?” Clark prompted. This was the longest conversation they’d had since he’d found her working at midnight on her very first day. 

It really was poor form that he’d waited this long to check on her well-being.

She considered his question for a beat before answering quickly, “Just fine. Thank you for asking, Mr. Kent.”

There was a brief spike in her heart rate. 

She was hiding something. 

“You know, you can call me Clark,” he said good-naturedly. “And, I know some of us reporters can be a little difficult, me especially—”

“You’ve all been fine!” Elsie interjected, before sheepishly chewing her lower lip as pretty blush flooded her cheeks. “I’m so sorry, I didn’t mean to interrupt you, sir…”

She crossed her legs at her ankles and began twiddling her thumbs, practically shrinking before his very eyes, the girl was so apprehensive. 

“Elsie,” Clark said, willfully softening his voice. “Has something…happened? You can tell me. I want you to be happy here.”

“You do?” She looked both hopeful and confused. 

“Of course I do,” Clark answered honestly. “You’ve been a great asset already. So tell me: what’s going on?”

Elsie took a deep breath before responding. “Well…I thought you were going to have me fired today.”

“Have you fired? Why would you think that?” 

Elsie looked terribly uncomfortable, but she continued in a small voice, “I’m not sure if you’ve noticed…but you glare at me a lot, Mr. Kent.”

He could see the tension in her body—the stress contractions in her muscles, and the blood pooling around her vital organs. He could see the terror in her warm eyes. Elsie even winced, as if she were bracing herself for some kind of violent impact. 

Clark was overcome with guilt.

In his frustration with himself over his vulgar physical responses to her face and her body and her smell, Clark had made the girl feel as if she were at fault. 

This wouldn’t do. 

“I’m very sorry, Elsie,” Clark said ruefully. “I’ve…I’ve had a very stressful week. But you’ve done nothing wrong.”

Elsie shook her head. “I shouldn’t have said anything—you don’t have to apologize to me, Mr. Kent.”

“Yes, I do.” Taking a chance, Clark stood from his desk and slowly approached where Elsie stood, giving the tiny girl a wide berth so as not to intimidate her with his size. “The last thing I want to do is make you uncomfortable. I’m very sorry I’ve let my…outside stressors…impact you. Can you forgive me?”

Elsie eyes widened for a moment, but then her delicate features softened into a genial, benevolent warmth that rivaled the power of the sun. “Of course I forgive you, Mr. Kent.”

Just like that—devoid of any bargaining, agenda, or manipulation—the sweet, sweet girl had accepted his apology. 

Her fragrance was growing stronger, and Clark released an automatic moan at her delicious natural perfume—thankfully too low for her human ears to detect. 

Or at least, it should have been. 

Perplexingly, Elsie’s eyes actually widened the moment he released the deep, rumbling tone.

“I guess I’ll…I’ll go back to my desk, now,” she said, blush deepening. She turned on her toes like a little ballerina, and Clark focused hard on the muted news broadcast on the television mounted on the opposite wall to resist the compulsion to stare at Elsie’s plump, round, spankable little—

“Actually, Mr. Kent?” Elsie suddenly chirped. 

Clark’s head immediately snapped back in her direction. “Yes?”

“I…umm…I brought some persimmon walnut muffins today. I made them from scratch.”  Elsie gazed up at him shyly, but thankfully, there was less fear in her eyes than before. “Would you maybe like to try one with your afternoon coffee?”

There were a great number of things of Elsie’s that Clark wanted to put in his mouth—

“I’d love that—thank you, Elsie,” Clark replied with a strained smile, shame settling like lead in his stomach. “That’s very kind of you.”

The innocent girl rushed out of his office with a happy grin to complete her new task, mercifully heedless of the grossly inappropriate way her superior was thinking about her. 

This couldn’t continue. 

There was clearly something dangerously wrong with him.

And unless he fixed it—unless he found a way to stop these lecherous thoughts and obscene urges—he couldn’t be trusted to be around Elsie. 

A breaking news story suddenly interrupted the regular news broadcast, and Clark welcomed the disruption from his consuming preoccupation with his assistant. 

A stratovolcano had erupted in a remote part of Iceland, and more than two dozen hikers were trapped on the treacherous mountain in the immediate path of the lava flow—and that wasn’t even the most immediate threat to their lives. The flammagenitus cloud resulting from the initial blast was so severe that rescue aircrafts were unable to even locate the missing persons, let alone evacuate them, there was so little visibility.

The hikers weren’t just at risk of burning alive—there was a strong chance they’d suffocate on the boiling cloud of ash before the lava even reached them. 

Diana had already been on the island for several days due to the unusual increase in seismic activity—European disasters were primarily Wonder Woman’s jurisdiction, after all—but perhaps she could benefit from some extra help clearing the ash and tephra before it spread to the local village. 

The Amazon may have had the strength of a god—but she couldn’t sustain long periods of flight.

Resolved, Clark stealthily slipped out of the office, shrugged out of his civilian clothes in a nearby empty alley, and launched himself well beyond hypersonic speed into the upper atmosphere, fracturing the asphalt beneath his feet. 

Iceland would be the perfect detour on his way to the Fortress of Solitude. 

It was after six when Elsie finally returned home to her cozy midtown apartment, her earliest night in since she began working for the Daily Planet. She was exhausted, but as soon as she walked through the door, she found a second wind of happy energy as a tiny blur of smooth gray fur rushed from his scratch tower near the far window and down to her ankles, meowing affectionately. 

Dropping her purse on the kitchen counter, Elsie knelt down and gathered her beloved tripod kitty into her arms, giggling as he nudged his head against hers with gratuitous purrs. 

“I missed you so much today, Teddy,” Elsie cooed to the little cat as he curled himself around the back of her neck, settling around her shoulders. “Did you have fun with your new puzzle while I was at work?”

Elsie was well aware she was overly anthropomorphizing her three-legged companion—she knew he likely spent all day sleeping without a care in the world—but Teddy was the only family she had left, her best friend in the whole world, and it broke her heart to think he might feel bored or neglected for even a second while she was away. 

She’d gone a bit overboard shopping for new toys and games when they’d first moved to Metropolis two weeks ago, but Elsie had wanted to ensure the transition from Misty Falls went as smoothly as possible for her highly attached feline. Metropolis was a huge, loud, bustling city, arguably the financial and media capital of the world, with skyscrapers taller than Elsie had ever dreamed possible—a far cry from the quiet, sleepy Maine town where she and her cat spent the last decade together with her grandmother. 

Elsie had nearly ended up across the harbor in Gotham due to a competing job offer from Wayne Enterprises, but despite the higher salary, Elsie decided she’d feel much safer in the city of Superman than the city of the bat vigilante. 

The Kryptonian had saved her life once before, after all. 

Though back then, he wasn’t yet Superman. He hadn’t yet revealed himself to the world. He’d still been a figure of mythos—a silent, shadowy guardian angel—known only by a series of fantastical stories of heroic rescue and supernatural wonders that no one could ever quite confirm to be true. 

And while Elsie never hoped to officially meet Superman—for that would mean a life or death emergency!—she carried enduring gratitude in her heart for the man of steel and everything he did for the world.

After toeing off her shoes and preparing Teddy’s dinner for the night—a homemade blend of gently cooked Atlantic salmon, chicken gizzards, and yuca root topped with a sprinkle of vitamins from his veterinarian—Elsie decided to relax on the couch and turn on the evening news as she contemplated her own meal, and whether or not she would post about it. 

Truthfully, Elsie didn’t actually like social media very much. She was terribly self-conscious and afraid she sounded stupid when she spoke in her reels, and she hated posting photos of herself almost as much as she hated taking them in the first place. She’d initially only created her Instagram profile at the recommendation of her psychiatrist several years prior, when Elsie had suffered debilitating panic attacks and crippling social anxiety upon her enrollment in college.

But then Granny had gotten sick, with her appetite severely weakened due to multiple rounds of chemotherapy. To try and cheer Granny up—and entice her to eat—Elsie had started researching recipes from all around the world, sharing photos and videos of her efforts at Granny’s bedside in the hospital. Before long, Granny had started sharing Elsie’s posts with her nurses and doctors. 

My little Elsie is just like Martha Stewart! she’d say proudly. 

She’d been gone for six months now, and oftentimes Elsie considered abandoning her Instagram profile altogether. But each time she hovered over the deactivate button, something made her pause. 

Deleting her profile felt too much like deleting Granny, the only loving caregiver Elsie had ever known. 

With a sigh, Elsie rose from the couch and padded to the kitchen with her phone in hand, positioning it within the mounted ring light above her counter space. She really was weary from work, and didn’t think she’d be able to handle making an overly elaborate meal, so she decided to prepare something easy and comforting with the leftovers and pantry staples she already had available.

Olive oil. Shredded chicken. Rice. Dill. Lemon. 

She’d make avgolemono tonight—a delicious and creamy lemon-egg soup from Greece.

And she would indeed post about it, on the off chance someone who followed her could use some comfort, too. 

Granny would be proud. 

After sautéing her veggies and adding homemade chicken stock to the Dutch oven, Elsie’s attention was suddenly pulled by the breaking report unfolding on the television. 

A volcano had erupted in Iceland several hours earlier with minimal seismic warning, trapping more than twenty unsuspecting hikers on the mountain itself. The resulting ash cloud from the violent explosion had made traditional rescue efforts impossible, not to mention grounding all flights to and from western Europe and Scandinavia. 

But it looked as if the mysterious Wonder Woman had arrived just in time to evacuate all of the hikers, with Superman diverting the flow of hot ash and volcanic debris with his freeze breath before the nearby fishing village was destroyed. 

Elsie smiled at the grainy cell phone footage offering a brief glimpse of the elusive Kryptonian flying high above the cooling volcano. There were far more questions than answers about the powerful, secretive man, but one thing was certain: the world was safer because of him.

Returning to the kitchen to add the shredded chicken to the mixture on the stove, Elsie wondered idly if one of the chief reporters would end up writing an article about Superman’s latest act of heroism. Perhaps even Mr. Kent. Elsie truly admired his articles, even before she’d started working at the Planet, particularly his commitment to exposing corruption and systemic injustices. He consistently used his platform at the paper to uplift those who had been wrongfully silenced, especially women and marginalized communities. Mr. Kent’s biggest critics often said his editorials were sentimental and overly idealistic—but Elsie didn’t think that was a bad thing. She found his articles uplifting. Hopeful. 

And now that she knew just how handsome he was, Elsie couldn’t help developing a tiny crush on her boss—one she would never act upon, of course. 

Not only were workplace romances between a superior and subordinate forbidden according to her HR orientation, Elsie knew there was nothing special about her that would intrigue a man like Mr. Kent. 

Elsie wasn’t just inexperienced. She was entirely socially inept—stunted—a gaping developmental deficit that not even years of therapy had been able to rectify. 

She’d thought she’d finally managed to get the brilliant and intimidating reporter to warm up to her this afternoon with her offer of freshly baked goods, but when she went to deliver his coffee and promised persimmon walnut muffin, she’d found his office empty. 

Clearly, it had been wishful thinking on her part. Mr. Kent didn’t like her at all—he’d just been humoring her. 

She was just a young and silly girl to him—just as she was to most people—and he didn’t take her seriously. 

The temptation to fall into the familiarity of despair and self-doubt was strong, but Elsie’s determination was even stronger. 

She may not have been particularly sophisticated or socially savvy, but she would prove that she could be taken seriously, in the only way she knew how: with kindness. 

Elsie put the soup on simmer and marched back to the couch with her new work laptop, and opened the shared drive containing Mr. Kent’s articles. She selected the story about the gubernatorial election she knew was overdue—and incomplete—and with a deep breath, she got to work.

The news broadcast was once more showing footage of Superman hovering above the volcano, an image as striking as inspiring, and Elsie chose to take this vision of her childhood hero as a positive omen. He’d saved her when she was thirteen, and while she was still small, shy, and puny at twenty-four, Elsie could also call herself a survivor because of him. Superman had given her a second chance at life when she was a girl, and Elsie would not let it go to waste. 

Yes, she’d experienced horrors. But she’d also recovered from them.

Which meant she was more than capable of rising to the challenge of winning over a skeptical colleague.

“You seem troubled, my son.”

Clark smiled faintly at the projection of Jor-El, languidly strolling in front of him throughout the glacial halls of the Fortress. Even though it had been several years now since Clark had learned the specifics of his true alien heritage, the novelty of having some small piece of his birth father to seek out for guidance hadn’t yet faded. 

However, he maintained caution with these conversations, for the advanced Kryptonian technology was almost sophisticated enough to provide the illusion that his father was actually standing in front of him. 

But there were limits. 

This projection, a mere partial restoration, was but a facsimile of Jor-El’s consciousness and memories. It may have looked like him and talked like him, but Clark reminded himself it wasn’t truly him.

The depth of a father’s love for his son—the kind of love he’d experienced every day with Pa, a love he’d taken for granted—simply could not be replicated by a simulation. 

“A volcano erupted in Iceland,” Clark answered eventually as he and the projection walked side by side to his sleeping quarters deep within the glacier. Clark lowered himself onto the bed, which he’d carved from stone and ice using a combination of heat vision and his bare hands. “It was a hard fight—but Diana and I got it handled.”

“The Amazon is quite powerful.” Jor-El inclined his head in consideration, a faint twinkle in his eye. “And quite beautiful too, is she not?”

Clark’s eyebrows rose. Jor-El’s artificial intelligence had never before offered observations about anyone’s physical appearance, least of all Diana Prince. “Yes—but she’s just a colleague, Father.”

Of all of the members of the Justice League, Diana was perhaps the one he had the most in common with, as a fellow powerful being with otherworldly blood in her veins. Sometimes, he considered her a friend.

But there was nothing more than that. 

“Interesting. You’re showing all the signs…”

“Signs?” 

Perhaps this was another limit to what Clark had been able to restore from the command key after Zod’s destruction. Certain conversation topics caused the program to malfunction in loops of nonsense. 

The image of his birth father chuckled, enjoying a private joke with himself. “Signs of sexual attraction, my son. Lara and I hoped it would happen for you naturally, as it happened for us, and your ancient ancestors before us. So if not the demigoddess, who is your target?”

“Target?” Clark frowned. “I’m not sure I understand—”

“We both know you never had real sexual attraction for the reporter, though she is certainly a lovely girl—”

“Wait what?” Clark was even more confused than before. “Father, Lois and I…we are—were—a couple. I love—loved—her. Of course I was…umm…attracted to her.”

It would have been funny if it wasn’t so awkward, talking about sex with the ghost of his alien father. 

Jor-El shook his head, a mischievous—yet strangely proud—expression on his gray, wise face. “I have no doubt you loved Lois as much as you could, Kal. You’re a child of Earth—it’s only natural that you have been mimicking human behaviors on attraction, courtship, and companionship. But mimicry cannot suppress your Kryptonian instincts.”

“What exactly are you saying?”

Was this why he was reacting so strongly to Elsie?

“Check for yourself. Have Kelex scan your hormones,” Jor-El suggested.

“Kelex,” Clark called out. “Would you mind completing a full health scan, please?”

The liquid geo machine manifested in the ice-walled room within seconds, hovering in front of him with what could only be described as reverence—or as much reverence as an amorphous, faceless robot could reasonably express. 

“Certainly, Kal-El,” the feminine voice of the service robot announced. “Commencing scan now.”

Clark remained motionless as Kelex projected a painless, yet still invasive, series of lasers from his head to his toes—and back again three times. 

“I’m finding no anomalies, Kal-El. Your vitals are all within normal ranges—with the exception of your androgens and sex hormones,” the robot reported upon conclusion of her scan. “Your testosterone values are elevated.”

“How elevated?”

“Approximately ten times your typical baseline,” Kelex answered pleasantly. “Which suggests you have encountered a compatible female recently. You are experiencing sexual attraction. Warmest congratulations.”

“I knew it.” Jor-El smiled fondly at his son. “Congratulations indeed, my boy. How soon are you to bond with her?” 

“Bond with her?” Clark suppressed a laugh, but warred even harder to tamp down the sudden image deep in his consciousness of sweet, tiny, beautiful Elsie in a demure white dress. “Father…I barely know her. Relationships don’t work that way here.”

“Interesting—how do they work, then?” Jor-El queried, as if he were asking about advanced theoretical physics. “Is physical attraction not a factor for humans?”

Clark rubbed his temples, newly aware of a dull tension—not quite pain, but close to it—that had suddenly manifested in his forehead in the last several days. 

Specifically, the day he met Elsie.

It was a throb that only began to percolate in the hours following exposure to Elsie’s smell.

It was…a craving. 

“Physical attraction is one of many factors—but it’s not the most important one,” Clark explained. “Friendship, trust, respect, love, shared values…that’s how humans bond.”

Though as he spoke the words, Clark silently questioned just how true they were. 

He’d thought he’d shared all of these qualities with Lois—but still she didn’t want him. 

Jor-El stared pensively around the room for several moments, before politely dismissing Kelex. “My son and I need to have a word.”

“Certainly, Jor-El. Kal-El, I will take my leave.”

The robot’s smooth edges dissolved into shapeless, pulsating liquid, and she floated out the door as silently as she’d arrived. 

Jor-El sat down next to Clark, his posture identical to the relaxed way Clark held his body at rest. 

It reminded Clark of the day Pa had sat him down for his very first “man-to-man” talk, back when Clark was in junior high. Pa had euphemistically explained the birds and the bees, and had even given Clark some pointers for asking out his childhood crush, Lana Lang. 

Bring her flowers. Take an interest in her interests. Compliment her. But don’t just call her pretty—women need to know you care about more than what they look like…

The tone of their dialogue had become much more somber when the topic of Clark’s strength came up. 

Consent wasn’t just something Clark had to actively and constantly seek out—it was something that had to remain at the forefront of his mind for all physical encounters, before they began and long after they concluded. Pa had warned Clark that sex wouldn’t be something he could ever completely lose himself in, for a single instance of getting caught up in the moment—a single misstep—could result in irreparable harm for the woman he was intimate with. As such, Pa had encouraged Clark to always be overly gentle and overly cautious, and to always prioritize his partner’s pleasure above his own. 

Which made Clark’s bestial urges for Elsie that much more disturbing—they went against everything he knew.

Clark wanted to give Elsie pleasure—he wanted to inundate her with it, to make her come so many times she begged him to stop—but he also wanted to take pleasure from her. 

He didn’t want to be gentle with her. 

He wanted to fuck her. 

“You seem troubled, my son,” Jor-El said, repeating his words from just a few minutes prior. 

“I’m deeply troubled by…certain intrusive thoughts. Intrusive…urges,” Clark said carefully. “They started…when I met someone new. And now it feels like I’m losing my mind.”

“I can certainly see how it might feel overwhelming for you, son,” Jor-El sympathized. “Much like when your powers started to develop here on Earth. You’re dealing with heightened senses. Overstimulation. But this time, the source is just one person.”

“Will this go away?”

“If you avoid the target of your attraction, with time and distance I’m certain it will fade.” Jor-El paused. “But are you sure that’s what you want?”

“I don’t want to hurt her,” Clark admitted quietly. “She’s…young. She’s fragile.”

Elsie was vulnerability personified. The tiny, innocent girl needed protection—especially from someone of his strength.

Jor-El hummed pensively. “If this woman triggered a Kryptonian animal response within you—something the leaders of Krypton itself attempted to control and suppress through centuries of genetic engineering—then I suspect this woman is much stronger than she appears. But perhaps her strength manifests in ways you may not have considered.”

“How do you mean?” 

Jor-El stood and began to slowly pace back and forth with his hands folded, like a professor delivering a lecture, and Clark wondered if he was getting a glimpse of what the former head of the Kryptonian Thinker Guild had been like in life, orating his scholarly findings. 

“Every moment, with every person you encounter, your body is making billions upon billions of cellular and subatomic calculations, assessing ideal mates for sexual compatibility. We’re beings of high intelligence—but we are still animals, Kal. We eat. We sleep. We procreate. So if you’re responding so strongly to this girl—not just as a human man, but as a natural Kryptonian—it means your body has already recognized something very special within her.”

“How common were…responses like this?” Clark asked. “Back on Krypton?” 

“Exceedingly rare, Kal,” Jor-El said solemnly. “Even in the old days before genetic engineering. We Kryptonians are monogamous in our natural state. We form bonded pairs for life. It’s why our population suffered for so long—there were far too many of us who never found a mate.”

“So this means…love?” Clark was bewildered. “I’m supposed to believe a woman I barely know is some kind of soul mate?”

Jor-El chuckled and shook his head. “Love can’t be quantified, Kal. It can’t be controlled. Nor can it be forced. It’s one of the greatest mysteries of life—but it’s also the greatest joy. There’s no guarantee you’ll be a match of values, or interests, or any of the other human criteria—but I will say this: your biological response confirms she’s an ideal match for you physically. Which means you owe it to yourself—to both of you, really—to see where this can lead. You might not ever get this chance again.”

Jor-El brought his hand to hover above Clark’s shoulder, as if he were attempting to comfort him. “You deserve to be with someone with whom you can truly be yourself, my son. You deserve to be happy.”

And then, the projection vanished—as if he were never there to begin with.  

Clark contemplated his father’s words for the next several hours, vacillating between suspicion and intrigue. 

Unless Elsie were secretly a metahuman of unknown status, Clark couldn’t possibly fathom how the two of them could be physically compatible. Even if he were a regular man, one thrust and he’d split the poor girl in two.

…But perhaps not if he got her wet enough. Sticky and sweet and dripping. Perhaps she’d relax enough to open up for him if he spent a few hours with his mouth sealed against her pussy, coaxing her tight little hole open with his tireless tongue hungrily lapping up all of her sweet spots.

Just the thought of eating her out had Clark violently hard within seconds, but he resisted the urge to beat himself raw to the illicit fantasy. 

It seemed perverted to think about Elsie in such a crude way, for such a shameless act of self-pleasure. She wasn’t an object—she was a person.

And she deserved better. 

Needing a distraction from his body’s urges, Clark made his way to the bathroom and stepped into the shower, and stood beneath a deluge of icy glacier water for more than an hour before his erection finally began to deflate. He returned to the bedroom with a towel slung low around his hips, deciding to attempt a brief sleep cycle. 

Clark didn’t require sleep the way humans did—he could easily survive on just a couple of hours of rest per week, and he seldom dreamed—but there was no denying the psychological benefit of willfully shutting his mind down each night, and suspending the stresses of the day. He needed it to stay sane. He’d become an expert at meditating over the years, his consciousness slipping into a deep, relaxed state of near-sedation, where his only awareness was quiet, peaceful stillness and silence. 

Tonight, however, Clark slipped immediately into an REM cycle the moment he closed his eyes. 

And for the very first time in his thirty-six years on Earth, Clark had an erotic dream.

Chapter Text

It was after midnight, and Clark was alone in his office, struggling to complete long overdue copy for Perry to approve in the morning. But despite his best efforts, he was completely unable to focus, distracted to the point of madness by the intoxicating smell of fresh lilac and ripe peaches swirling through the air. 

Elsie. Sweet, sweet Elsie.

The girl was torture. 

He’d been painfully erect for hours, shaking and panting and sweating, his fists tightened like boulders as he fought an internal mortal battle between executive function and animal instinct. 

Between right and wrong. 

The girl was just outside and down the hall, vulnerable and defenseless, her resting heart rate slow and steady as she worked on her assigned proofreads, humming a pleasant tune to herself. He could be on top of her in a nanosecond, bulldozing his way through the walls that separated them with nothing more than a gentle shove—and there wouldn’t be a thing she could do to stop him. Before she even blinked, he could throw her down onto her stomach, tear off her clothes, gather her hair in his fist, and mount her ripe, fertile body like a rutting beast in high season.

And then fuck her within an inch of her life. 

Clark was practically growling where he sat, on the verge of scaling the walls as his aching cock began to split the fabric of his jeans, his mouth watering and muscles tightening with unhinged sexual aggression as the moments elapsed.

If he could just get his mouth on her—his cock deep inside of her—his torment would end. 

Sweet Elsie. 

Sweet, small, beautiful little Elsie.

He had to have her. 

Clark was on his feet before he’d even realized it, licking his lips and scenting the girl in the air—hunting her—moving slowly and silently so as not to spook his skittish target. 

He approached her desk, where Elsie was obliviously typing away at her computer, entirely unaware of the depraved, barbaric things the most powerful man on Earth was about to do to her tiny body. 

“Elsie.”

The girl turned her head and released a startled, high-pitched squeak—like a helpless mewling kitten—as her eyes landed on his torso. 

“M-Mr. K-Kent!” she exclaimed with her adorable stutter, craning her neck to meet his gaze. Christ, she was so small. “What c-can I do for you, sir?”

Clark remained silent as he stared down at her, at the irresistible image of pure innocence and raw sensuality she presented. She had pigtails in her long brown hair, giving the appearance of a coquettish farm girl, the succulent curves of her slender body tightly wrapped by the short gingham dress she wore. 

She was the embodiment of his deepest fantasies, those dormant, obscene erotic urges he’d never dared to even acknowledge, let alone voice. It was as if she’d been specifically made for him—intelligently designed for him, and him alone—every last aspect of her body a dangerous provocation that sent him feral with lust. There wasn’t a single part of her he didn’t crave. No other woman before or after could ever compare to the exquisite creature before him. 

Elsie was the very pinnacle of Clark’s sexual attraction.

“Mr. Kent?” Elsie asked shyly. The alluring flush in her cheeks was edging down to the fleshy swells of her breasts. “Is it…is it me that you want, sir?”

He could hear her heart racing—the tiny girl knew she was cornered with no chance of escaping—and yet, there was an undeniable determination in her sunrise eyes. 

“I think you know exactly what I want, sweetheart.” Clark reached forth, and began idly toying with the pink bow of one of her pigtails in his long fingers. “I’ve been hard for you all night.”

Clark had never dared speak to a woman like this—he’d never even considered it before now—but the heated words fled his lips with abandon. 

The girl’s gentle, lamblike nature unshackled something…savage within the man of steel. She was submission made manifest—soft, meek little prey.

And Clark, a starving apex predator, wanted nothing more than to dominate her. 

She timidly glanced down at the mammoth bulge in his pants that was positioned directly towards her like an assassin, and gasped. Elsie chewed her swollen lower lip with wide eyes, her long lashes fluttering. “Would you…umm…would you like me to take care of that for you, sir?” 

Clark reached for her other pigtail, and then yanked both, pulling her closer to him. “Would you like that, honey? Would you like to please me?”

Elsie nodded quickly, her round eyes glassy. “Y-yes, s-sir.”

“Say it,” Clark ordered. 

Her rosy blush turned nearly scarlet red, and suddenly, there was a pronounced increase in the peachy scent in the air, strongly outweighing the lilac.

Clark released a deep, rumbling groan, powerful enough to agitate the air molecules between them as his sensory receptors instantly recognized that particular scent for what it truly was. He’d become so attuned to Elsie over the last week that he knew now that the lilac came from whatever she put on her body, either her soap or shampoo or her perfume. 

But that creamy-fruity scent? That sharp, raw, hypnotic, juicy nectar? That intoxicating flavor was organically and purely her. 

Elsie was getting wet for him. 

“I…I w-want to p-please you, s-sir,” Elsie breathed, her breasts jiggling enticingly from her tremors. 

Clark brought his hand to her cheek, gently stroking her smooth skin with his knuckles. “Good girl.”

Elsie released a shaky moan, leaning into his touch. “What do you want me to do?”

Clark leaned forward and dropped his hands on either side of her chair, caging her within his arms. He lowered his lips to the crook of her neck and nuzzled her like an animal, deeply inhaling the scent of her skin with a low growl.

He opened his mouth, and swiped his tongue from her earlobe to her collarbone—and back again. He was going to lick every inch of her. 

He was going to eat her alive. 

“Take off your panties, Elsie.”

Clark awakened on a heaving gasp, hovering several inches off the bed as lightning shot down his spine and headed straight for the base of his cock. There was a searing weight crushing his ribcage as his heart hammered hard and heavy like a battering ram, causing the veins in his temples to painfully protrude as his blood pressure ascended to dangerous heights his alien body had never before reached.  

Images of the dream flashed in front of him in dizzying succession with the intrusive clarity of a hallucination—he could see, hear, and smell Elsie—and Clark reached down, desperate to relieve the maniacal sexual pressure that had officially edged into excruciating agony. Never in his life had he been so aggressively hard, so desperate to ejaculate it felt as if his balls would actually shatter, if his heart didn’t collapse first. Trembling, he forcefully fisted his cock and bucked his hips, fucking himself into his hand midair, and it was with no more than a dozen blurred strokes that Clark roared loud enough to fracture the ice walls of the bedroom, coming all over his abdominal muscles. 

He collapsed back onto the bed—breathless, trembling, and sweating—as billowing waves of unmitigated pleasure raged through his veins with the violence of a hurricane. He wasn’t just sated by his sexual satisfaction, he was incapacitated by it, delirious and paralyzed by the powerful endorphins surging throughout his body, every motor and neural impulse simultaneously signaling sheer ecstasy. 

Never before had he had a more powerful orgasm—not even in the presence of a partner.

Clark was so bone weary with pleasure that he was barely aware of the cold, sickly guilt that was just beginning to edge back into his consciousness as the orgasmic waves began to recede after what felt like hours. He knew he would soon feel disgusted with himself, dreaming about his young assistant in such an offensive—daresay sexist—manner. His dormant mind had dredged up a mere caricature of Elsie, reducing the innocent girl to a hollow, two-dimensional sex object to fulfill his lecherous fantasy.

But right now, he just wanted to enjoy the intensity of the moment for as long as it would last, before his suspended morals returned to their rightful place, and the shame over his actions settled in. 

As wrong as Clark knew it was, fantasizing about Elsie—coming for Elsie—had been his single greatest pleasure in recent memory.

Ever since he’d revealed himself to the world as Superman several years ago, donning the red cape and the House of El sigil for billions to witness, his life had become an interminable cycle of saving and self-sacrifice. No matter how hard he was hit, no matter how physically exhausted or psychologically weary he was, Clark existed for the sole purpose of helping others. There were no days off. By emerging as a hero, his very body had been reduced to a tool, one to be used, abused, and scrutinized by every nation on Earth. 

He was as much a warrior as he was a slave. 

For the most part, however, Clark took his role as a hero as a solemn duty, even if it was more often than not thankless. He was grateful to be in a position to save lives, to inspire hope in others. He was a man of unprecedented privilege, bestowed with extraordinary powers by accident of fortuitous alien genetics and proximity to a yellow star—powers he didn’t necessarily deserve. Therefore, it was his responsibility to use his gifts for the greater good of his adoptive planet. 

And yet, there were still these quiet, lonely moments when Clark wished there could be something in his life that existed just for him. Something he didn’t have to share, something he could protect and cherish with the full-bodied dedication of both halves of himself—with equal intensity and fervor. 

Despite the salacious nature of his unconscious fantasies, his erotic dream of Elsie was the closest thing Clark had ever experienced to having someone who was all his. Someone who wanted him for all he was—both the superhero, and the boy from Kansas. 

And while he’d privately enjoyed this dream version of the exclusive object of his intense sexual attraction, it was still nothing in comparison to the real Elsie. The girl was so much more than her beauty, complex and sweet in ways far beyond her alluring smell. She was endearingly shy—and highly intelligent. She was gracious, polite, and hardworking. 

She had a pure, forgiving heart. 

But even those qualities he’d learned over the last several days of working with her were still merely surface level. He didn’t actually know a thing about Elsie and her personal life beyond the fact that she had a cat, and she liked to cook. 

Elsie was irresistible to him. Clark couldn’t help wanting to know more about her. 

Despite Jor-El’s revelations about the highly singular, almost fated nature of Kryptonian sexual attraction, Clark remained committed to not acting upon his full-body desire for the distressingly tempting girl—no matter how all-consuming his cravings for her were. Not only was he far too old for her, but she also worked for him. It was his duty to keep her safe, both as Superman and as Clark Kent.  

Any advances he made would be sexual harassment. 

Regardless, the likelihood of Elsie even welcoming any romantic overtures from his mild-mannered civilian persona was highly improbable. A girl like Elsie—a girl that gorgeous and sweet—was probably inundated with admirers with far more impressive backgrounds than a nerdy reporter who grew up on a farm in rural Kansas.  

Lois had once told Clark that she didn’t know if it were possible for him to love her and be him, a statement that carried a much more harrowing meaning now that she’d left him for good. Lois knew him better than anyone, and yet she’d found him profoundly lacking as a partner.

Perhaps that was the ultimate sacrifice of being a hero. 

Perhaps there was simply nothing of value he had left over to offer a woman, after everything he had to give to the world. 

Being with Elsie in any kind of romantic or sexual capacity was strictly out of the question, but the thought of avoiding her long enough to try and eliminate these animalistic,  borderline obsessive desires was an even greater impossibility. Already Clark was…agitated, being separated from the unwitting object of his infatuation. His alien impulses had identified Elsie as a perfect physical match, and Clark hungered for the girl with an ardor that only seemed to intensify as the hours passed.  

If he couldn’t be her lover, then perhaps he could be her friend. 

Once his heart rate completely slowed, Clark rose from bed and quickly showered, donning his Kryptonian skin suit to fly back to Metropolis. It was still nighttime when he arrived back at his apartment, but Clark was too wound up to attempt another sleep cycle. Instead, he spent the next several hours busying himself with manual labor, repairing the near-catastrophic structural damage he’d caused to his apartment earlier that week with the release of his anger.  

When the sun began to rise, Clark showered again for good measure, and neatly dressed in casual civilian clothes. He left his apartment and walked to his favorite local waterfront diner and slipped into a private booth, casually listening for any cries of distress in the City as he sipped his morning coffee.

On an impulse, he reached for his phone, fully intending to read that morning’s digital edition of the Gotham Gazette, but instead, he found himself hovering over Elsie’s Instagram account. She’d shared a reel the night before of a Greek soup he’d never heard of, one he was curious to try, but it was the post she’d added just a few minutes ago that truly caught Clark’s attention. 

Beneath a close-up image of a delicious-looking persimmon walnut muffin, drizzled with whipped honey, was a reminder to her followers about #ShopLocalSaturday. 

And she’d tagged the Central Metropolis Farmers Market. 

Despite years of therapy, Elsie was still getting used to the idea of looking at herself in the mirror each morning in order to style herself for the day. For such a big part of her life, such practices were not just discouraged—they were punishable. Violently.

Up until her rescue, Elsie had been forbidden from ever looking in the mirror beyond hygienic purposes, for it had been ingrained in her mind from as early as she could remember that vanity was a mortal sin. 

Are you trying to be a whore like Jezebel? Then stop looking in the mirror!

Logically, Elsie knew now that none of the harsh teachings she’d been raised with were actually true, yet she still struggled with severe anxiety when it came to certain aspects of regular daily grooming. She had no issues with cleanliness—she’d been taught that it was equal to godliness, and that was the one near-obsessive habit that she hadn’t quite broken in her recovery. She scrubbed herself red in the shower every morning and every night, she brushed and flossed her teeth at least four times each day, and she constantly washed her hands with warm soap and water.

But things like hair styling, and even worse, makeup, still often immobilized her with panic. 

The only way your lips will ever be red is if I make them bleed!

I saw you playing with your hair today, you stupid, wicked child—that means it’s time to shave it off again!

Elsie closed her eyes and counted backwards from ten three times, with deep breaths in between, repeating to herself that she was safe and in control. None of the demons from her childhood would jump out and punish her if she styled her hair, or wore tinted chapstick. There was no one here to yell at her. No one here to starve her. 

There was no one here to shame her, or hit her, or beat her.

And even more importantly, she was no longer a frightened, helpless little girl. Elsie was an adult now. A capable adult.

She was alone—and she was safe. 

Opening her eyes, Elsie finally felt her heart rate return to normal, so she slowly and methodically resumed  brushing her hair, dividing it into two equal sections. She knew it was way too long, but after years of having it forcibly shaved while she was held down, screaming and crying, the prospect of going to a salon to have a professional work on her overgrown hair paralyzed her with terror. 

Her psychiatrist had encouraged her to explore different styles and trends as part of her long-term therapeutic healing, for more than just what was on her head, but Elsie suspected her natural tastes weren’t actually very fashionable to anyone but her. Aesthetically, she gravitated towards things she liked to look at—flowers, pastels, soft textures, pretty bows and patterns—things that had been denied her during those formative years when such preferences would have been more age-appropriate. 

With a deep breath, Elsie proceeded to tie her hair into two loose pigtails secured with some pink ribbon she’d recently found at a craft store. 

She could worry about looking fashionable another day. 

Today, she just wanted to be comfortable. And that in itself was a triumph for her.

After she finished her hair, Elsie returned to her bedroom and pulled on a modest floral skirt and cozy pink sweater over her simple cotton underwear, taking a moment to enjoy the warm familiarity of her preferred way of dressing. Ms. Lane had informed Elsie earlier in the week that she expected professionalism with her assistant’s attire, so Elsie had immediately purchased dark pencil skirts and crisp tailored blouses to better fit in with her work peers. It certainly took her out of her comfort zone, wearing things that were much tighter and more revealing than she was used to, but overall, Elsie was grateful for the opportunity to challenge herself—removing herself even further from the remnants of her upbringing. 

On weekends, however, Elsie vowed to only wear what she wanted to wear.

And today, Elsie wanted flowers, cashmere, and pigtails. 

After giving Teddy a final indulgent belly scratch, Elsie went to the kitchen to package the food she’d set aside for her weekly trip to the local homeless shelter. As a single woman living alone, there was always a risk of food waste with the frequency and variety with which Elsie cooked, so she tried to make sure she always gave lovingly prepared leftovers with fresh ingredients to those in need before she bought anything else. 

She left her apartment and made her promised drop-off at the shelter, and then began her leisurely walk to the Central Metropolis Farmers Market, reusable bags in tow. 

It was after less than an hour of browsing the outdoor aisles that Elsie’s attention was suddenly grabbed by a tall, powerful, and familiar silhouette standing proudly in front of a display of tomatoes.

Even with his back turned to her—his broad, muscular back—Elsie knew exactly who he was. 

“Mr. Kent?” Elsie exclaimed before she could think better of it. “Mr. Kent! Hi!”

Mr. Kent immediately turned around at the sound of her voice, his handsome face breaking into a warm smile the instant his eyes settled on hers, his radiant cerulean irises practically glowing in the late-morning daylight. 

“Elsie—what a nice surprise seeing you here,” he said kindly as he strode towards her. “And surely, you can at least call me Clark when we’re not at the office.”

He cocked his head to the side as he paused a few feet in front of her, an errant curl falling over his eye, and Elsie couldn’t help squirming beneath his gaze as a sudden heat filled her lower belly. He was dressed in a casual flannel shirt and dark jeans, the outline of his huge, hard muscles even more striking now than they appeared in his office clothes, which was already intimidating. It wasn’t just the fact that he was so big and tall that unnerved her, though his impressive physicality was certainly a large part of it. 

Mr. Kent—Clark—had an inexplicable energy about him, a magnetic charisma, something commanding yet gentle that Elsie was helplessly drawn to.

She felt safe and unsettled all at once. 

“Elsie?” he prompted when she still didn’t speak. 

Elsie felt her cheeks warming, and she quickly blinked and shook her head to snap herself out of her sudden bewilderment, smiling happily yet nervously. “S-sorry…umm…h-hi, Clark.”

Clark’s smile widened, and Elsie’s heart fluttered, her cheeks practically burning now. He really was a staggeringly handsome man. “Hi, Elsie.”

Elsie chewed her lip and rocked back on her heels, clutching her reusable bags to try and anchor herself. “Do you…do you shop here often?”

Clark ran a hand through his smooth dark hair, a rueful look on his face. “Not as often as I should. Especially considering I was raised on a farm.”

“You were?” She knew he was from Kansas—Mr. White had clued her in on her first day—but she had no idea Clark came from a family of farmers. “What kind of farm?”

“Uhh…mostly wheat and corn,” Clark answered. “America’s breadbasket, and all.”

“I think that’s wonderful,” Elsie said sincerely. “It really is such noble work. Feeding people. You must feel very proud.”

It could have been a mere trick of the autumn sunlight, but for a brief moment, it looked as if Clark’s hard, prominent cheekbones were beginning to flush. 

Several moments of silence passed between them, though it wasn’t necessarily uncomfortable for Elsie. Clark was pointedly staring at her, but she didn’t feel as threatened or judged by the direct attention as she normally would have if it had been anyone else looking at her. 

Even though he was intimidating, there was an undeniable tenderness in his gaze that Elsie couldn’t help but take comfort in. 

“S-sorry,” Clark said after a while. “That's very nice of you to say. I don’t get that a lot when I tell people where I’m from. Especially here in such a big city, where everyone’s very…professional.”

“I can relate to that,” Elsie confessed on a giggle. “Lumber and fish are the big industries where I grew up.”

“And where’s that?”

“A little coastal town called Misty Falls,” Elsie answered. “It’s in Maine.”

Even though it wasn’t technically a lie—lying is a sin, you stupid, wicked child!—Elsie still felt privately guilty for failing to mention the first place where she’d been brought up.

But she was enjoying her pleasant conversation with Mr. Kent—no, Clark—and Elsie didn’t want to ruin it by oversharing things best kept private. No one really talked to Elsie to begin with.

Chatting with Clark at the farmers market was a treat—her social highlight of the week!

“It sounds really nice,” Clark said eventually, though there was a slightly puzzled look on his face, as if he somehow knew she was omitting something—which was of course a silly thought.  Clark was a reporter, not a mind reader. “How long have you been in Metropolis?”

“Just two weeks,” Elsie replied. “It’s been a big adjustment, but I like it a lot.”

“Well I’m definitely glad you’re here,” Clark said genially. “This big city is better with you in it.”

Elsie realized he was probably talking about the overdue article she’d finished for him last night. Not wanting to gloat—pride is a sin, you stupid, wicked child!—Elsie simply beamed up at him, appreciative of the acknowledgment. “Thank you for saying that. It means a lot to me.”

They shared a brief look before Clark suddenly glanced down, clearing his throat. “I’m sorry if I’m keeping you from your shopping,” he mentioned, motioning to her empty bags. 

“Oh no no, it’s okay! Really!” Elsie said, growing self-conscious. Was he already tired of talking to her? Was this her social cue to say goodbye? “I like to wander around for a bit before I buy anything. See where the inspiration strikes.”

“For your Instagram?” he asked, and Elsie began nervously squirming again. Clark hadn’t brought up that unfriendly comment Elsie had overheard ever since Monday night, and Elsie was perfectly fine with pretending it hadn’t happened. 

But if he was mentioning her profile, did that mean he’d looked at it again?

Was Elsie the subject of even more cruel private remarks between Ms. Lane and Clark?

“Umm…yeah, for…that,” Elsie mumbled, cheeks burning with humiliation. She wished she was sharp and quick-witted enough to divert the conversation elsewhere, but when directly confronted, Elsie always caved under pressure and crumbled with the truth, even when it humiliated her. “I…umm…I try to develop my recipes based on what the farmers are offering.” 

Elsie looked down at her feet, bracing herself for a judgmental or sarcastic response, but instead, there was a gentle touch on her chin from a large, warm hand, carefully lifting her head. 

“I think your profile is very impressive, Elsie,” Clark said kindly, his deep, warm voice wrapping around her like a weighted blanket. Just as quickly as Elsie had been about to panic and cry, Clark had managed to calm her down. 

“You do?” 

His hand was still on her chin, his thumb idly stroking her lower cheek. It was such an odd way to be touched, but it felt so good that Elsie couldn’t think of any reason to ask him to stop.

Not only was it exceedingly rare that people spoke to her socially, but it was even rarer that Elsie was touched. 

“I do,” Clark affirmed. “In fact, I’d love for you to tell me more about it. Would you mind having a shopping buddy for the day?”

Clark was playing with kryptonite. 

Elsie had given him an inch, and he was slowly but surely taking a mile.

He told himself he was merely being sociable, continuing their conversation as they walked together throughout the park. She was a work colleague, and it was perfectly normal for him to want to know more about her life and interests, likes and dislikes.

He was not trying to learn every last detail about the enchanting girl in order to stand a chance at wooing her. 

He told himself he was merely being a gentleman, insisting on carrying her shopping bags as Elsie excitedly flitted from stand to stand like a little hummingbird, carefully selecting her ingredients with the wide-eyed wonder and reverence one would expect from an archeologist looking for buried treasure. 

He was not trying to imagine what their weekend trips to the farmers market would be like if they were a couple, with Clark dutifully holding her bags—and Elsie holding his hand.

He told himself he was merely being helpful, volunteering to take photos of Elsie as she journeyed throughout the market. It was for her Instagram, he argued, and surely her followers would enjoy seeing the content creator herself in her posts for the day.

He was not trying to immortalize the mouthwatering image of her in pigtails for his own private purposes, looking even more delectable than he’d fantasized about in his erotic dreams. 

But as he watched the tiny girl animatedly chatting with a European cheese vendor, keeping the camera on his iPhone active so that he could capture her every smile, blush, and giggle, Clark finally acknowledged that he was lying to himself.

He wanted Elsie. He wanted her badly.

Every second they spent together he adored her more.

Clark quickly schooled his expression when Elsie finished her purchase and made her way back towards him, a dazzling smile on her pretty face. “Mr. Beaufort had Gruyère today! Flown in all the way from his family farm in Switzerland!”

“Is that a favorite of yours?” Clark asked. 

Elsie eagerly nodded. “I love it! I’ve been wanting to make croque-madame for the longest time.”

“What’s croque-madame?” Clark asked as he took her newest bag, falling into an easy stride with the girl by his side as they walked down the aisle. 

“It’s this delicious French sandwich made with jambon de Paris and a béchamel sauce, topped with a fried egg,” Elsie explained brightly. “It’s just gooey and comforting and so good.”

“I’ll definitely need to try it sometime,” Clark mentioned. Elsie’s heart rate briefly spiked, and suddenly, she paused. “Is everything all right?”

The blush returned to her plump cheeks, the sweetest shade of pink he’d ever seen. 

The only shade of pink more enticing would be her lush, fragrant, wet—

“Would you…umm…would you like to come to my apartment for lunch?” Elsie asked. “I’d be happy to make croque-madame for you! You know, as a thank-you, for being so nice today and carrying my bags, and hanging out with me…”

The girl was adorable with her nervous rambling, talking herself in circles as her anxiety continued to climb, but for what reason, Clark remained unsure. He’d truly tried to be as non-threatening as possible throughout their time together, but perhaps some hidden instinct within Elsie’s small body was alerting her to the very real fact that she was being circled by a hungry, dangerous predator. 

He should have immediately declined her invitation. He should have taken advantage of any number of readily available excuses to not to accept her offer of a homemade lunch. 

But Clark was helpless to resist anything Elsie asked. 

He wasn’t just taking a mile from the girl—he was taking a light year.

“I’d love to join you for lunch,” Clark said, “but only if it won’t be too much trouble.”

There. He’d put the ball back in her court, granting her an easy way out. 

To his surprise and relief, Elsie’s shoulders instantly lowered, her delicate facial features softening. “It’s no trouble at all. It would be my pleasure to have you over—you’ll be my first guest in my new apartment!”

They remained at the park for another half hour as Elsie concluded her shopping, slipping right back into effortless conversation. Clark was traditionally very nervous talking to women he was interested in, but Elsie’s sweet nature put him immediately at ease. Not only was she uncommonly kind, but she took a greater interest in him—just as Clark—than anyone else had recently. 

It was so easy to talk to her that Clark found himself veering dangerously close to revealing himself as Superman as they made their way out of the farmers market.

Thankfully, before he divulged his darkest secrets in his poorly restrained desire for intimacy with the girl, to not just know her but be known by her, he was distracted by a far more powerful force. 

The instant Elsie opened the door of her tasteful midtown apartment, Clark was assaulted by an impenetrable fog of lilac and sweet peaches. 

He really should have anticipated it—this was her home, so of course it would smell like her—but Clark hadn’t been prepared for just how strongly he’d react to her natural fragrance in such an enclosed space. His jeans were already tightening as he stood in the entryway, his cock throbbing in aching desperation, and it was with nothing more than a mumbled apology that Clark shoved her shopping bags onto a nearby counter before rudely barreling his way into her home, desperately searching for a bathroom.

Ma would be horrified with his manners. She’d raised him better than this.

He splashed cold water on his face and took several deep breaths, but his blood only boiled hotter. He grabbed hold of the counter to try and collect himself, but ended up cracking the marble underneath his palms.

He was a disaster.

Clark jerked back and blindly reached for the window, hoping fresh air would help him calm down, but before he could open it, a sudden, sharp gust of that mouthwatering creamy-peachy scent cut through his consciousness like a blade, mutilating his sense of right and wrong.

His vision instantly tunneled on a small wicker laundry basket, and Clark was moving towards it before he could stop himself, flipping the lid open.

And right there, resting upon a pile of her other discarded garments, was a pair of Elsie’s panties. 

Elsie clutched Teddy close to her chest as she stood on pins and needles in the living room. The little cat had yowled incessantly at the sound of Clark stomping through the apartment, disturbing the quiet peace they’d grown used to. 

“It’s okay, Teddy,” Elsie cooed, rocking the disgruntled kitty to calm him down the way he liked. “I think maybe Clark’s not feeling well. He didn’t mean to scare you.”

Elsie considered preparing some ginger tea for Clark to help settle his stomach, if that was indeed what had him running to the bathroom, but she didn’t want to draw any further attention to his illness if it was something he preferred not to acknowledge. 

It was in moments like these that Elsie felt horribly disadvantaged for her glaring lack of social skills. How was she supposed to reassure her colleague—and hopefully, new friend—that he had nothing to be embarrassed about? Everyone got sick from time to time, after all. Even Superman himself, she imagined.

A few minutes later, she heard the bathroom door open, followed by Clark’s heavy footfalls, and Teddy immediately jumped out of her arms and scurried underneath the couch to hide. 

“Are you feeling okay?” Elsie asked once Clark emerged. He was frowning hard, practically scowling, and his skin was clammy, yet somehow also flushed. There were bluish veins protruding from his temples that she’d never seen before, and when he finally looked at her, Elsie couldn’t help but gulp in fear. 

Elsie didn’t truly think Clark would ever harm her, but in this moment, there was something dark in his eyes. 

Something dangerous. 

Clark swallowed hard, the prominent apple of his throat bobbing from the effort. “I seem to have…come down with a…a sudden migraine.”

“Oh, Clark, I’m so sorry!” Granny had suffered from horrible migraines towards the end of her life, constantly complaining about the unbearable pressure in her skull. It broke her heart to think that Clark was also experiencing such a horrible pain. 

Softening her voice just in case he was sensitive to auditory stimuli, Elsie asked, “Is there anything I can do? Would you maybe like to lie down—”

“I have to go.” His voice was low and gravelly, leaving no room for argument. 

Elsie was frozen in place as Clark stormed to the front door, looking somehow both tortured and murderous in his exit. She watched him for several moments as he took a series of deep, heaving breaths, his wide shoulders shaking.

Suddenly, he spoke. “I really…I really enjoyed spending time with you, today,” he said between pants.

“M-me, too,” Elsie said in a meek whisper. 

He shouldn’t have been able to hear her—he was clear across the apartment—yet somehow, his head snapped around immediately at her utterance.

He was clearly in agony, but somehow, he managed to offer her a small smile that made her belly flutter. “I’ll see you Monday, Elsie.”

“See you Monday, Clark.” Elsie smiled back. “I hope you feel better, soon.”

Chapter Text

“Lombard,” Perry barked across the long glass table. “What do you have for us in sports this week?”

It was late morning on Monday, and all five chief reporters were gathered in the conference room for their regular weekly editorial meeting with Perry. Unlike the other staff writers who deferred to their respective content editors for directives, the chief reporters were considered featured journalists, with the freedom to operate somewhat independently under the general guidance of the editor-in-chief of the paper.

Clark was the newest—and youngest—member of the chief team, having only been promoted a few months prior following his series of articles exposing the pervasive discriminatory lending practices committed by Metropolis Savings & Loan. His reporting had put sufficient pressure on local politicians to facilitate the launch of an official investigation, resulting in multiple sanctions against the bank, as well as ample financial restitution for all victims over the last decade. 

It may not have been as dangerous as stopping hostile alien invaders from terraforming the Earth, or flying a nuclear bomb into space before it wiped out an entire country, but Clark had felt like a hero all the same when he’d received thank-you letters from several people who had suffered harm from the bank’s systemic injustices.

People who were now first-time homeowners.  

“I’m working on an exclusive with Flex Bradford,” Steven Lombard announced smugly. “His suspension is about to be lifted, and he wants a chance to tell his side of the story once and for all.”

Clark held his tongue, reluctant to engage in yet another heated debate with his long-standing workplace adversary. In Clark’s opinion, it didn’t matter that Flex Bradford was the star tight end of the Metropolis Monarchs. The NFL player had been arrested earlier in the year on felony domestic violence charges, with the investigation dropping only on account of his battered wife’s sudden refusal to cooperate with the police. 

If anyone deserved to have their story told, it was Katie Bradford herself—not the abuser who put her in the hospital with a broken jaw and punctured lung. 

It was in situations like these when Clark struggled most with his internal moral compass as a hero, balancing what he could do with what he should do. Theoretically, he could easily fly over to Flex’s penthouse in his red cape and hit the athlete so hard that his NFL career would be over, before removing Katie from her abuser’s clutches.

But what if Katie didn’t actually want to leave her husband? He couldn’t exactly force her to save herself. If he ignored her free will, if he violated her agency as a human being, then he’d be playing God. 

And despite his power, Clark was not a god—he was a man. There were clear limits on how much he could reasonably interfere in strangers’ private lives as Superman, and unfortunately, this was one of them. 

If he’d learned anything from the interminable congressional hearings following his public emergence as a hero several years ago, it was that he truly couldn’t act unilaterally. For the safety of humanity—not to mention his own sanity—Clark’s absolute power had to be restricted to a boundary he was forbidden to cross, before that power could inevitably corrupt him. 

“Controversial…but our readers definitely want to hear from him, critics and fans alike,” Perry acknowledged to Steven. There were a few rumbles of concurrence around the table. “How long until you close on this?”

“I’m meeting his publicist for drinks this evening,” Steven answered. “It’s as good as done.”

“Good. I want notes in my inbox by noon tomorrow. Now, Lane.” Perry pivoted to Lois. “What do you have for us?”

Lois straightened in her seat, flipping her glossy hair over one shoulder. “I’ve finally nailed down a witness who is willing to go on record concerning the multiple allegations of bribery and FEC violations surrounding Senator Caldwell.”

Perry rolled his eyes. “Lois, if you run this rumor without proof again, his office is going to slap us with an injunction—”

“This is the proof,” Lois countered adamantly. “We’re talking tens of millions of unreported dollars, all attributable to a wealthy group of conservative donors who stand accused of all kinds of crimes, from insider trading to racketeering to arms dealing. We can’t sit on this—the good taxpaying citizens of our state deserve to know the truth about the man they elected.”

Lois folded her arms and stared hard at Perry, daring him to challenge her, and in that moment, Clark experienced a small twinge of regret and longing.

She may not have had powers, but Lois had the intelligence, determination, and intuition of a hero. She was an unstoppable force of nature when she was on a case, and nothing could get in the way of her exposing the truth. 

It was largely why he’d fallen in love with her in the first place. 

Suddenly, the door to the conference room opened, and the nostalgic, gnawing ache in Clark’s chest was instantly soothed by a gentle breeze of soft lilac and ripe peaches. 

Elsie.

He was already orienting his body in her direction before he’d even realized it, and he was pleased to find that it seemed his shy new friend was looking for him, too. She smiled sweetly once their eyes met, offering him a small, eager wave. 

Clark nearly floated out of his chair. 

There were six people seated around the conference table, and Elsie had looked to him, first. 

Elsie demurely lowered her head just as blush was beginning to form on her cheeks, and Clark watched her through his peripherals as she wheeled a small coffee cart into the conference room.

“You’d better be right on this, Lois,” Perry relented as he accepted a fresh cup of coffee from Elsie. Turning his attention to Clark, Perry continued, “Now, Kent—talk to me.”

Clark swallowed hard as Elsie moved around the room, finding himself increasingly…enraged by the way Steven’s bloodshot eyes also followed her. The sports journalist was a notorious womanizer and a walking HR liability, constantly hitting on female colleagues, but to Clark’s knowledge, he hadn’t yet directed his typical lecherous advances towards Elsie. 

Judging by the way Steven’s gaze overtly lowered to Elsie’s backside when the girl bent down to pick up a saucer she’d dropped, however, such advances were now imminent. 

Clark tightened his fist as a sudden, violent urge to crack Steven’s skull against the table flashed through his mind, but he just as quickly loosened it upon the stark realization of his own hypocrisy. Yes, Steven was clearly ogling Elsie, but Clark wasn’t much better. 

In fact, he was worse.

Clark was the one who’d spent an appalling amount of time over the weekend beating himself raw while fantasizing about Elsie, his nose buried for hours on end in the seat of the very panties he’d stolen right out of the girl’s laundry basket—

“Kent?” Perry said again, his voice hardening. “What’s on your pipeline?” 

Clark cleared his throat and adjusted his glasses, face heating in embarrassment. Not only was he behaving like a creepy, obsessed pervert in regards to Elsie, but he also still hadn’t finished the article Perry had assigned him more than a week ago. “R-right…regarding the election piece, I just need—”

“Old news, Kent, it’s running tomorrow. I want to know what’s next.”

“It’s running tomorrow?” Clark frowned. “But I thought—”

“Thought what? I checked it over this morning—it’s solid. That addition on historical voting trends was a nice touch. What’s the problem?” 

Elsie’s heart rate spiked, and Clark glanced in her direction, watching the small girl as she timidly refilled Lois’s coffee. 

Realization instantly dawned on him.

“Perry,” Clark said carefully, “Elsie will need to be credited as a co-writer for the article.”

“Excuse me?” Perry pointed accusingly at Clark, and he knew he was in for a harsh reprimand. “Finishing your overdue articles is not part of her job duties, Smallville! She’s an assistant for all of the chief reporters—Elsie is not your personal ghostwriter! What in the hell were you thinking, telling her to—”

“Actually, Mr. White, Mr. Kent didn’t tell me to do this,” Elsie suddenly said, and all heads in the conference room turned towards her. Elsie looked like the proverbial deer caught in the headlights, her eyes were so round and terrified, but still she persisted. “You see, umm…Mr. Kent had to leave the office early on Friday, to, umm…to follow up on an urgent lead…so I just thought I’d help him out. I’m really sorry I acted without permission.”

“Is this true, Kent?” Perry asked. “This wasn’t your call?”

Clark looked back at Elsie, who was silently pleading with him with her pretty eyes, an alluring sight that was somehow both poignantly innocent and irresistibly erotic. Her heart was pumping vigorously hard, the little thing was so anxious, so for now, he decided to answer Perry in the way it seemed Elsie wanted him to—with the truth, skewed heavily in his favor. “It wasn’t my call. I was…pleasantly surprised to find her additions this morning. She and I haven’t had a chance to discuss this yet, but I’m willing to back everything she wrote.” 

“And I really didn’t write much—Mr. Kent had everything clearly outlined, with lots of notes,” Elsie added. “I just filled in the gaps he’d already labeled as missing. It was basically just a copyedit. You don’t have to credit me.” 

Perry gazed between Elsie and Clark for several moments before he sighed. 

He spoke first to Elsie. “While I appreciate the proactiveness, you can’t simply jump in and finish articles if you’re not a reporter. I’ll let it slide this one time—but this is not what you were hired for. Are we clear?” 

“Yes, sir.” Elsie lowered her head, and Clark could smell an increase in salinity in the air.

The girl was about to cry.

“Good. Go see Jenny and let her know you need to be credited as a contributor before the article goes to print.” Perry nodded curtly, waving his hand to dismiss Elsie. “Now Kent, what was this lead you chased on Friday?” 

Clark watched Elsie flee the conference room, listening for changes in her heartbeat as she rushed across the floor of cubicles to the assistant editor’s office. 

He heard her release a soft sob when she was about halfway there, and the pitiful sound gutted him like a kryptonite blade. 

Clearing his throat, Clark absently answered, “The lead didn’t pan out. It was a dead end.”

Just how long would he have to reasonably wait before he could check on Elsie? His every instinct, both as Kryptonian and as a man, strongly compelled him to rush after her and take her into his arms, keeping her safe and secure as he dried her tears and comforted her, protecting her from anything and everything that could possibly cause her even the slightest hint of distress. 

Elsie was crying—and that was entirely unacceptable to Clark. 

“Well that works out perfectly then, because I’m putting you on arts and culture this week,” Perry announced. “This arrived via courier for you this morning.”

His boss tossed a sleek black envelope across the table, and Clark didn’t even need to use his alien vision to confirm who it was from. 

Damnit, Bruce…

“What’s this?” Clark asked, feigning ignorance as he opened the envelope. 

“An invitation to a private party in Gotham hosted by the Wayne Foundation,” Perry answered. “Their PR director sent you two tickets, so you’ll be attending as an invited guest, which means you’ll need to lose the plaid, dress the part, and report as such—”

“But Perry, I—”

“I’m thinking, Gotham’s Gilded Gala: An Exclusive Evening of Philanthropic Frivolity in Metropolis’s Scandalous Sister City…”

Perry did have an uncanny talent for alliteration. 

“Are you sure you don’t want to send someone else?” Clark questioned as he scanned over the invitation. His emphasis was generally on local politics, crime, and human interest—not lifestyle, and especially not luxury. “This isn’t really my specialty—”

“You’ve been granted personal access to an invitation-only, black tie event that costs fifty-thousand a head, and you’re looking for excuses not to go and do your job?” Perry barked. 

Any further denial would come across as suspicious, so Clark quickly backtracked and acquiesced. “Sorry, boss. I’ll be there.”

He kept his eye on the offending envelope as the remaining chief reporters shared their current stories, and once the meeting adjourned, Clark closed the door to the conference room and reached for his phone.

“I’ve received your summons,” Clark said dryly as soon as the line was active, not even bothering with waiting for a greeting. “I thought we agreed you wouldn’t contact me at work.”

“You’re a reporter,” Bruce stated plainly. “I have use for a reporter.”

“You do realize I don’t work for you—”

“You work for the Justice League, which I finance—”

“You just said it’s a reporter you need,” Clark clipped. “Or is there something you’re not telling me?”

Bruce Wayne wasn’t remotely what Clark would consider a friend, but they had developed a tacit understanding of mutual respect over the last year—at least now that the brooding billionaire was no longer trying to kill him. Due to their innately conflicting personalities, they didn’t actually interact very often except in dire world-threatening circumstances, in which they had no choice but to put their egos and differences aside in order to save humanity. 

Generally, however, Bruce preferred to operate as the dark guardian of his home city without interference.

And it was an unspoken rule that Superman was not to enter the Batman’s territory unless expressly invited.

“There’s a…delicate situation unfolding,” Bruce said evasively. “And I would greatly appreciate your attendance at the gala. Both as a reporter, and as an alien.”

Clark sighed, mildly vexed by the way Bruce still used the term alien as a slur. “You’re going to need to give me something more to go on—”

“I’ve given you everything you need to know.”

“If it’s just eavesdropping you need, why can’t you do it yourself? You’re the world’s greatest detective,” Clark acknowledged truthfully. “Unless something has happened to you?”

Bruce was silent for several moments, and that was all the confirmation Clark needed.

Something had happened to Gotham’s dark knight—something serious. 

“Let’s just say…I’m trying to skin a cat,” Bruce said eventually. “One who knows I’m onto her. For a number of reasons, I can’t do this as the Bat.”

“So what do you need me to do?”

“Just your job. Your day job,” Bruce stated. “Observe, report. I’ll handle the rest.”

“Fine,” Clark conceded. “Anything else?”

“Actually, yes,” Bruce responded, a subtle lift in his low, rasping voice. “Nice work in Iceland.”

And then he hung up.

Clark was stowing his phone when he heard a familiar heartbeat approach, and he turned around just as Lois re-entered the conference room.

“Who was that?” she asked. “It looked serious.”

Clark shook his head, which was beginning to faintly throb around his temples. “It’s nothing. Just another lead.”

Clark had never revealed to Lois the civilian identity of the bat vigilante, and he intended to keep it that way. Lois didn’t even know that he knew.

Bruce may not have been his favorite person, but his identity wasn’t Clark’s secret to share. 

He started gathering his notes that remained messily splayed on the conference room table, but curiously, Lois made no motion to leave. “Did you need something?”

She opened and closed her mouth several times, before straightening her shoulders in resolve. It was a trick he’d learned she relied upon in those rare moments when she felt unsure about something. “I just…I wanted to see how you are.”

“I’m doing well. Thank you.” Clark slipped his laptop into his messenger bag. “How are you?”

Lois briefly appeared unsettled, but she quickly disciplined her features. “I’m doing well, too.”

“Good—I’m glad to hear it.” Clark slung his bag over his shoulder and started towards the door, Bruce’s invitation in hand, but Lois suddenly blocked his path. 

“Everything okay?” he asked. 

Her heart rate slightly increased, but nothing on Lois’s face betrayed any uncertainty. 

At least outwardly, she appeared as confident and polished as she always was. 

“I was wondering if you’d thought about who you’re bringing with you to the Wayne Foundation Gala,” she said quickly. “Since you were given two tickets, and all.”

“Are you serious?” Clark frowned, bemused. “You just broke up with me—”

“I don’t mean I want to go with you as a date.” Lois rolled her eyes. “But I believe several of Senator Caldwell’s secret donors will be in attendance—dirty billionaires—and since you don’t have anyone else to go with you—”

“What makes you think I have no one else?” 

Clark tried to keep his tone even and controlled, but even he could detect the abrasiveness in his voice. 

Apparently, Lois was equally as surprised by his unusual sharpness, for she actually took a step back from him, eyeing him suspiciously. “Clark, I understand you’re hurt, but I would have hoped we could be adults about all this and still maintain a professional working relationship—”

“No, Lois.” Clark brought his fingertips to his temples, which were throbbing even more incessantly now. Her rose-amber scent was actually beginning to aggravate his mild headache. 

He needed the calming serenity of fresh lilac to assuage his tension. The invigorating brightness of sweet peaches to lift him up. 

He needed Elsie—

Taking a deep breath, Clark continued, “Look, this isn’t about me being hurt. You made your decision, and I respect it. But I am allowed to move on with my life. I already have someone in mind to go with me to the Wayne event. It wouldn’t be appropriate to ask you.”

“You have someone?” Lois looked utterly shocked, which wounded Clark’s pride far more than he dared to admit. “Who is she?”

“That really isn’t any of your business.”

“Sorry, I’m not trying to offend you, it’s just…it’s surprising,” Lois remarked, releasing a soft, incredulous laugh. “I mean, we both know you’re kind of a homebody when you’re not out saving the world. You tend to keep to yourself. And it’s not as if you’ve really been socializing with anyone other than me lately…”

Clark wasn’t certain if he was imagining the condescending lilt to her words, but for now, he forced himself to ignore it. 

Lois was making him…angry. 

And that was dangerous. 

“Well, you’re not the only woman I know in the City,” Clark said coolly. 

“So who are you taking, then?” she pressed. 

Clark was beginning to feel like he was being interviewed for one of her stories. “If you’re that curious…I’ll be taking our new assistant. It’ll be good experience for her.”

All of the color drained from Lois’s face, and she appeared seconds from either screaming at him or hitting him.

He strongly hoped it wouldn’t be the latter, for despite how much she was antagonizing him—either willfully or unintentionally—Clark really didn’t want to watch her break her hand against his jaw. 

For the second time.

“You’re taking…Elsie?” Lois asked with clear disdain. “You’re taking our twenty-four-year -old assistant—a naïve girl who has barely been here a week—to a black-tie party in Gotham hosted by the hedonistic Bruce Wayne?”

Well when she put it that way, it sounded nefarious.

“Look, Lo—”

“If this is your way of trying to make me jealous, it’s not going to work,” Lois snapped, voice rising.

“I’m inviting her as a colleague—that’s all,” Clark asserted, though whether he was trying to convince himself or his ex of his intentions, he remained unsure. “It’s not about you.”

Lois scoffed, shaking her head in disbelief. “I can’t believe this. I’d expect this bullshit predatory behavior from Steven, but not from you—”

“Predatory behavior?” Clark was now hazardously close to fuming. “That’s low—you know me better than that. This is a work event. There’s nothing predatory about inviting my assistant to go with me.”

“She’s not your assistant, she’s ours—”

“Damnit, Lois, you didn’t even want to work with her in the first place!”

Clark hadn’t meant to raise his voice, but something deep within him had snapped at Lois’s prodding—that same, stubborn tenacity he used to adore about her. He didn’t truly yell at her, for he wouldn’t have been able to forgive himself if he had, but he had spoken in a volume far louder and harsher than he’d ever before used in the presence of a woman, least of all his former girlfriend.

Lois gasped and brought her hand over her mouth, and Clark took a guilty step back, breathing hard as shame settled deep in his gut. 

“I’m…I’m sorry,” Clark said contritely, lowering his voice. “That was uncalled for.”

Lois studied him for several prolonged moments, before she exhaled on a weary, shaky breath. “Where was this side of you when we were together?” 

Clark didn’t have an answer for her—so he didn’t respond. 

They stood together in silence as Clark willed his anger to cool down, and as he gazed at Lois, he was struck with a profound clarity he hadn’t been anticipating. 

She was still the same beautiful woman. The same brilliant reporter. He still cared about her, and wanted good things for her. 

But Clark now knew with absolutely certainty that he was no longer in love with her. 

The invisible cables that had bound him deferentially to her side from the first moment he’d laid eyes on her, tightening as the years had passed, had been irreparably severed—by a far more compelling force.  

“I need to get back to work,” Clark said quietly, slowly walking towards the door. 

This time, Lois immediately stepped out of his path. 

“Yeah, me too,” he heard her say.

Clark paused, offering her a short nod. “Take care of yourself, Lo.”

“Need some help there, sweetie?” 

Elsie could barely see beyond the tall—and heavy—stack of Thomson Reuters books she was carrying all the way from the Daily Planet’s legal library, but she wasn’t too eager to accept help from the man who had snuck up behind her. 

She hadn’t interacted much with Steven Lombard over the last week, but every time he spoke to her, he always made her feel uneasy, and Elsie still couldn’t pinpoint out exactly why. He’d never said anything outwardly cruel or offensive, he was certainly friendly enough, but it was the way he talked to her that made her skin crawl. There was some hidden undercurrent beneath the overbearing volume of his loud voice—something aggressive in his very inflection—that seemed to set off all of her internal alarms. 

Then again, it could have just as easily been her own anxiety and social ineptitudes running rampant.

Elsie didn’t have much experience with men, after all.

“No thank you, Mr. Lombard,” Elsie said with a tense smile over her shoulder as she eased her way down the hallway. “I’ve got it handled.” 

“Are you sure about that, honey?” Mr. Lombard was standing uncomfortably close, close enough for her to smell his thick, cloying cologne and remnants of alcohol on his breath, and Elsie stumbled in alarm, nearly dropping the books. “It must be so difficult for such a tiny thing like you, handling such…big, thick…books.”

Mr. Lombard stepped in front of her, completely blocking her path with his hulking breadth, and Elsie was acutely reminded of the fact that he was a retired football player. 

He was slightly shorter than Clark, but significantly wider, his muscles almost steroidal in appearance. But while Clark’s towering height and intimidating muscularity struck Elsie as impressive, Mr. Lombard’s big build was scary. 

Gulping nervously, Elsie tightened her hold on the books, feeling embarrassingly small. “Umm…Ms. Lane is waiting for these, Mr. Lombard.”

Mr. Lombard smirked. “Don’t worry, baby, I won’t keep you long. I just have a simple task for you.”

“Oh?” Perhaps she truly was being overly paranoid. “What can I do for you, sir?”

“Such a polite little thing you are.” Mr. Lombard chuckled deep in his chest, and inexplicably, the sound made Elsie nauseous. “You don’t have to do anything except wear something short and pretty for me, and be ready at seven tomorrow night.”

“P-pardon?”

“Have you ever gone out with an older man, sweetie?” Mr. Lombard slowly advanced, so Elsie had no choice but to retreat, panic rising with every shaky backwards step. “Have you ever…had…an older man—”

“Elsie! Need a hand?”

The unexpected addition of Clark’s deep, warm voice was a welcome respite from Mr. Lombard’s unsettling presence—but it was also a surprising one. Shocked by Clark’s arrival, Elsie lost her footing, and she released a frightened gasp as the law books Ms. Lane had asked for went flying out of her hands. 

Elsie scrambled to right herself, still getting used to walking in heels, but she was already wildly falling backwards like a marionette with broken strings. 

But instead of crashing against the cold floor, she collided with a warm wall of solid muscle.

“I’ve got you,” Clark murmured gently, and for a brief moment, Elsie was reminded of a highly specific memory from eleven years ago. 

I know you’re scared, sweetheart, but I’m not going to hurt you.

I’m going to get you out of here—just close your eyes and hold on tight to me. 

I’ve got you—

“Elsie?” Clark asked, eyes sweeping over her with concern. Elsie slowly blinked, willing herself out of her sudden daze. “Are you feeling okay?”

It was then that Elsie realized that she was completely reclined in Clark’s arms as he crouched on the floor. Her vision was spotty, and the hallway seemed to be tilting from side to side.

Had she actually…fainted?

Under any other circumstance, Elsie would have been red-faced and near tears with humiliation, displaying such clumsiness in front of two people she worked for.

But Elsie was so deliriously overwhelmed by the feel of Clark’s strong muscles surrounding her, supporting her, that there was simply nothing left within her to be embarrassed. 

Clark’s body felt like a cross between a bulletproof vest and a heated blanket. His sheer strength was undeniable—he must have been the type of man who practically lived in the gym during his off hours—but so was the warm sense of comfort he effused. 

Cradled against his broad chest, his huge arms wrapped around her, Elsie was keenly aware of how big Clark was. But she didn’t feel threatened by his size in the same way she felt threatened by Mr. Lombard. 

Despite how minuscule she was in comparison to Clark, she felt perfectly safe in his tender grasp. 

Almost cherished. 

But even more bewildering than the feel of Clark’s muscles and the heat emanating from his body was the incredible smell of him.

Elsie didn’t know much about men’s fragrances, but she knew immediately that whatever Clark wore was her unequivocal favorite. 

His scent reminded her of the evergreen woods she used to wander when she’d first arrived in Misty Falls, when she was a terrified, traumatized young girl without a voice, slowly rediscovering what it meant to live. He smelled like the powerful, earthy greenery of white spruce and cedar leaves, with pleasantly sharp notes of frosted winterberries and crackling fireplaces, all unified by a subtle, soothing base of a fresh, cliffside ocean breeze. 

Clark smelled like her very first memory of freedom. Of comfort. 

Of home.

If she could have gotten away with it, she would have absolutely buried her face in his broad chest or his thick neck, shamelessly nuzzling into him like a kitten with catnip—

“You smell so good…”

Elsie hadn’t realized she’d spoken out loud until Clark’s eyes suddenly widened, and a burst of redness flushed across his hard cheekbones. 

“Oh! Umm…th-thank you,” Clark responded with a tense smile. “Did you hit your head?”

Elsie moistened her lips, her sense of shame and self-preservation rapidly returning to her. “No, I…I’m s-sorry, I was just…umm…just dizzy…”

She motioned to stand up, but Clark tightened his hold around her. 

“There’s no need to rush if you’re still lightheaded,” Clark advised, visibly concerned. “Do you have low blood pressure, maybe?” 

Not only did Elsie indeed have chronically low blood pressure, but she was also very anemic due to the constant starvation she’d endured during her formative growing years. Granny had done her best to give Elsie access to good medical care and nutritious food to help her grow and gain weight once she’d taken custody of her granddaughter, but unfortunately, most of the damage was irreversible. Elsie was stunted, in more ways than one. “I’ll be okay—it always passes.”

Suddenly, Mr. Lombard cleared his throat. 

Elsie had completely forgotten that he was still in the hallway. 

“Hey there, Kansas, I can take care of our girl,” he said. Mr. Lombard lowered himself to reach for her, but on a nervous instinct, Elsie curled deeper into Clark’s chest. 

She did not want to be touched by Mr. Lombard.

“I’ve got her,” Clark said resolutely, seemingly sensing Elsie’s unease. “Elsie and I have a few things to discuss, anyway.”

Mr. Lombard didn’t look pleased, but he eventually stormed off without a backward glance. 

Finally, Elsie felt like she could exhale. 

“Thank you for the rescue,” Elsie said shyly as she reluctantly eased out of Clark’s arms, standing on wobbly legs. Being held by Clark felt too good. Addictive. “You must think I’m the biggest klutz.”

Clark smiled warmly as he bent down to retrieve the books she’d dropped, gathering them neatly in one arm. “Not at all. I know I’d probably fall on my face if I had to walk in shoes like yours.”

He slowly stood to his full height and motioned to her brand new four-inch pumps—the first pair of heels Elsie had ever owned.

“I’m not used to them yet,” Elsie confessed sheepishly. “Ms. Lane said I should try and dress more like she does. More professional, and all.”

“I see.” Clark appeared faintly perturbed, before shaking his head, almost as if he were silently arguing with himself. “Is that where you’re headed? Lois’s office?”

Elsie nodded. “Yeah, Ms. Lane asked for these books. I probably shouldn’t keep her waiting.”

“Let me walk you there,” Clark offered chivalrously, extending his free arm for her to hold to steady herself. Elsie timidly curled her hand around his bicep, privately marveling at the feel of Clark’s impossibly hard muscle fibers beneath her sensitive fingertips. Was he flexing? Or was he just such an elite athlete that his incredibly developed muscles were always activated? 

“In fact, I actually have something I wanted to discuss with you,” Clark said as they approached the chief reporter corridor.

Elsie paused in a sudden panic, fearing Clark was now going to berate her for finishing his article without permission.

She’d truly thought he’d already known about it, and was okay with it—wasn’t that why he’d been so nice to her on Saturday?

“W-what’s that?” Elsie asked.

Clark suddenly averted his gaze, clearing his throat several times. “Well…umm…have you taken your lunch break yet today?”

“Not yet—why? Did you need me to skip it?” Elsie questioned. 

She wasn’t certain, but Clark almost looked…nervous, though she couldn’t imagine why.  Elsie was pathetically harmless.

“No no, of course not.” Clark absently adjusted his glasses. “Actually…I was wondering if you’d perhaps like to…join me. For lunch. A work lunch.”

Elsie couldn’t believe her ears—Clark Kent was asking her to lunch! Even if it was just for work, Elsie was delighted.

“I’d love to!” Elsie exclaimed, entirely incapable of holding back her enthusiasm. She’d never been invited out to a meal before with anyone other than Granny. 

“You would?” Clark asked, seemingly in disbelief. “Because you certainly don’t have to, I don’t want you to feel pressured, or obligated—”

“Not at all! I’d really love to have lunch with you!” Elsie affirmed, and finally, Clark looked like he was beginning to relax. “Where would you like to go?”

Clark selected Bizou, an elegant French bistro located just around the corner from the office. She’d been wanting to try it ever since reading a profile about the Michelin-starred restaurant in a magazine on the train ride from Maine to Metropolis, but Elsie hadn’t yet felt brave enough to go to a fancy restaurant all by herself. 

But with Clark’s invitation, she didn’t have to. 

For the first time in her life, Elsie had someone other than Granny to share a meal in public with.

Elsie tried her best to keep her excitement in check as the waiter arrived to take their orders, for she truly didn’t want to embarrass Clark with her eagerness, but this was a completely novel experience for her, and Elsie was practically buzzing with joviality across every touchpoint. She simply could not stop smiling, from her admiration of the hand-painted china to the tasteful floral centerpieces to each exquisite dish the kitchen staff brought out to other patrons in the intimate dining lounge. 

Nothing, however, made her smile quite as much as the kind and handsome reporter seated across from her. 

Just like at the farmers market, conversation with Clark seemed to flow effortlessly. He didn’t make her feel young or silly or stupid when he asked her questions about her life, which Elsie tried to answer as honestly as possible—without mentioning the first thirteen years of her upbringing. 

Apart from her psychiatrist, Elsie didn’t think she would ever feel comfortable talking about what she’d lived through. 

Thankfully, Clark seemed to sense that she didn’t want to discuss her early childhood, so instead, he allowed her to ask questions about him. 

And the more she learned about Clark, the more curious she became. 

“So what kinds of things do you do for fun?” Elsie asked as she buttered a slice of warm baguette. “When you’re not saving the world, I mean.”

Clark suddenly began coughing, his face red, and Elsie rushed to pour him a fresh glass of sparkling water. 

“Are you okay? Are you choking?” Elsie asked nervously. Clark shook his head, and took several sips of water. 

Replacing the glass on the table, he asked, “What do you mean…s-saving the world?”

“With your reporting, of course,” Elsie clarified. Did he not think of his work as valuable? “I mean…I guess the whole definition of saving the world is a little altered, what with people like the Wonder Woman and the Batman and of course Superman doing all of these dangerous, exciting things, but…I think you’re a superhero with what you do too, Clark.”

Clark’s brow rose. “You…you do?”

“Of course I do!” It saddened Elsie to think that Clark didn’t find his own work as equally as important as the famous heroes with powers frequenting the news. “You know, I’ve actually been reading your articles for years. The Daily Planet used to be delivered to the library where Granny worked.”

“Really?” Clark leaned a few inches forward, and Elsie gulped, suddenly aware of how that small, subtle movement seemed to dramatically emphasize his massive biceps and wide, toned shoulders—

“Yeah—really,” Elsie said, growing breathless. “In fact—and I hope it’s okay to say this—your writing is a big reason why I decided to apply for the assistant job in the first place, though I didn’t know I’d be working directly for you until I got my offer letter—that was a happy surprise! Your articles, even when you report on these really dark, scary things…you still manage to convey a message of hope, and belief that we all have the potential to do good. To make a difference. It’s been really inspiring for me…”

Clark seemed content to let her ramble, simply smiling fondly at her as she embarrassed herself with her overflow of admiration of him. Elsie was blushing fiercely, helplessly realizing that the longer she spoke, the more she was betraying her utter lack of social skills. 

Mercifully, Clark chose not to make fun of her glaring awkwardness. 

“That’s very sweet of you to say, Elsie,” Clark said. He paused thoughtfully for several moments, before asking, “Out of curiosity…what do you think of Superman?”

Elsie was grateful for the sudden arrival of their main dishes—she’d picked the trout almondine, and Clark had ordered the filet aux poivres with fries. 

She needed a few moments to collect herself before she spoke even more like a silly fangirl.

Clark did not need to know that she was rescued by the Kryptonian as a child, that he’d been her hero for nearly half of her life. 

Once the waiter left, Elsie began, “I admire Superman a lot. There’s no denying the world is a better, safer place because of him. But at the same time…I feel kind of sorry for him, too.”

“You feel sorry for him?” Clark frowned. “Why?”

Elsie shrugged her shoulders as she began to cut into her fish. “Well, I just mean…they say he was raised here, but he’s still from another planet. A planet that doesn’t exist anymore. I feel sorry for him because it must be so lonely. To have all of this power and responsibility, to be criticized by everyone, all the time, when it’s obvious even to a small town girl like me that he’s a genuinely good person who’s just trying to do the right thing.” 

“I imagine you’re…probably right.” Clark studied her as she took her first bite of her lunch, seemingly unaware of his own food cooling in front of him. “He’s probably…very lonely, in fact. Isolated, even.”

Elsie knew quite well what isolation felt like.

“Well obviously there’s no way to know for sure, he’s so secretive…but hopefully we’re wrong,” Elsie said on a soft laugh, attempting to lighten the sudden dark mood. “No one deserves to feel alone, especially someone who has saved so many lives. I hope…I hope that whoever he is, whenever he takes off that red cape…I hope there’s at least one person waiting at home for him. Someone to take care of him in whatever way he needs after everything he does for everyone else. Someone who understands him. Someone he can truly be himself with.”

Clark didn’t say anything in return, so Elsie assumed that maybe he no longer wanted to talk about the man of steel. She decided to just enjoy her lunch in silence, already thinking about ways she could replicate the recipe for her Instagram profile. 

When she looked at Clark again once her stomach was beginning to feel full, she noticed that he still hadn’t touched his food. Those stress veins in his temples were protruding—the same ones that had stood out when he’d come down with his migraine on Saturday—and Elsie chewed her lip in concern, desperately hoping he wasn’t in pain.

“Is everything all right, Clark?” Elsie asked softly. “Is something wrong with your steak?”

Almost as if snapping out of a stupor, Clark suddenly exhaled hard, faintly shaking his head, before intently staring back at her. Elsie noticed that his pupils were dilated, even though the restaurant was brightly illuminated. 

“Elsie.” He said her name like a warm command, his voice hypnotically low, and Elsie’s insides were flooded with a hot, ticklish apprehension in her belly. 

No—not her belly. 

Lower.

“Umm…y-yes, Clark?”

A slow smile spread across his chiseled face, the kind of devastatingly handsome smile that some secret, feminine instinct within her intuitively knew could be used as a weapon against her. Elsie was trapped beneath his magnetic gaze, suffocated by Clark’s unfathomable level of handsomeness and masculinity.

And yet, she had absolutely no interest in seeking freedom.

She half-expected him to ask her to finish another one of his overdue articles, despite Mr. White’s warnings. Or perhaps he would ask her to cover for him at work again.

And Elsie would do it—she’d drop to her knees, if he asked—for she was overcome with a strange, besetting compulsion that urged her to do anything and everything he required of her.

Elsie had been brought up in servitude. It was practically ingrained within her DNA to be quiet, dutiful, and obsequious. Following orders came naturally to her, for that was the only way she’d been able survive the first thirteen years of her life.

Every day as a small child, Elsie had woken up afraid that she’d be killed for disobedience. 

Perplexingly, however, Elsie’s desire to serve Clark was not at all motivated by fear, as it had been for the first half of her life. This visceral desire—the desire to be good for him, the desire to earn his approval, the desire to please him—was motivated by something else entirely.

Something stimulating. Something…pleasurable.

When Clark spoke again, his voice was so smooth, so irresistible, that the yes was on the tip of her tongue before he even finished asking his question.

“Will you do me the honor of accompanying me to the Wayne Foundation Gala?”

Chapter Text

Eleven Years Ago

He’d need to pick a new name, Clark mused as he traversed the backcountry plains of Wyoming under a moonless December night. He’d been living as “John” for the majority of the year in Alaska, working on board the Debbie Sue fishing boat, but after the explosion on the oil rig—a disaster that should have been deadly for all involved—it was once again time for Clark to assume a new identity, and settle in a new location. 

Such was the life of a perpetual drifter. 

Perhaps his next name could be “Joe.”

He’d been covertly traveling south by foot and hitchhike for the last couple of months, entering Canada undetected—not to mention illegally. He’d certainly enjoyed his brief stint in British Columbia, working as a busboy at the Cassidy Pub, where an attractive brunette waitress had not only given him a job, but also a bed. 

Hers.

Chrissy was the first woman he’d slept with in years, bringing an end to the long interval of celibacy he’d voluntarily entered following his last disastrous sexual encounter, when Clark had finally been forced to accept that he suffered from an abnormally low libido for his age.

Not to mention erectile dysfunction. 

As a teenager, he’d been able to excuse his awkward fumblings with Lana in the back of Mr. Lang’s pickup with inexperience, but by the time he’d entered his early twenties, such excuses had become entirely inexcusable to his partners. 

No matter how beautiful the woman was, no matter how attracted to her looks and personality he was, Clark took far too long to get hard, his cock embarrassingly unresponsive to the generous stimulation offered to him. And when he finally did become physically aroused— after multiple dates, extended hours of foreplay, and of course, ample apologies—there was no guarantee he could actually sustain his erections long enough for the sex to be enjoyable for either party. 

Clark had endured ridicule and even disgust over his substandard bedroom prowess, one disappointed partner going so far as to suggest that perhaps it was simply impossible for a man to be both exceptionally well-endowed and good at sex. 

By the time he’d met Chrissy, Clark’s sexual confidence was flatlined at an absolute zero. 

But then she’d invited him into her bed, and when he’d once more failed to get hard, she’d simply shrugged her shoulders, pushed him onto his back, and sat on his face, fucking herself onto his tongue until she was satisfied. 

Clark had performed oral sex a handful of times before, but Chrissy was the first woman to offer specific, constructive feedback on his endeavors. 

And Clark was a rapt student, eager to learn everything she taught him. 

Chrissy was surprisingly patient with him as he’d gradually learned to please her, Clark attentively listening not just to her instructions—when I’m close, it means keep doing exactly what you're doing, do not speed up or go harder—but also her heartbeat, her respiration, and even her blood flow. When he’d finally managed to lick multiple orgasms out of her while simultaneously curling his fingers against her G-spot, Clark was so overcome with masculine pride that he was shocked his own head fit through the door afterwards. 

At long last, he’d succeeded in pleasuring a woman. 

Clark’s desire for Chrissy had only deepened the more time they spent together, heedless of her repeated warnings that she was uninterested in anything serious given her recent divorce. It wasn’t much longer before he was able to get hard enough to make love to her thoroughly, and when she came around his cock for the first time as he gently thrust inside of her, Clark decided then and there that he wanted to settle down in that tiny logging village in the Canadian wilderness. He was twenty-five, after all, and it was high time he put down some roots. 

And maybe—just maybe—by using as much patience as she’d shown him, he could stand a chance at winning Chrissy over.

Maybe he wasn’t destined to be rejected and alone.

But then one fateful night, he’d witnessed Chrissy being harassed by a group of drunk truckers at the bar.

And Clark had let his anger get away from him. 

He hadn’t physically harmed her aggressor—despite how much he’d wanted to punch a hole through the asshole’s chest, literally—but he had impaled the trucker’s eighteen-wheeler on a bunch of logs, revealing his true strength in a reckless outburst of pure rage. 

Chrissy and he had mutually agreed at that point that it was probably best for them to amicably part ways. 

Over the next few weeks, Clark had traveled across Washington and Idaho, spending what little money he had remaining on shelter in cheap motels every third night—mainly so he could shower and shave. 

Food, he simply stole.

Now, he found himself in the cowboy state, the penultimate crossing before he would finally be back in Kansas to surprise Ma just in time for Christmas. 

Clark readjusted his fraying backpack as he marched onward, the subzero winds—easily exceeding more than a hundred miles per hour—nothing more than a minor nuisance for his extraterrestrial body. He suspected he would have frozen to death in this flat, icy wasteland if he were a regular human, but Clark’s basal body temperature had always been abnormally hot.

One of the few benefits of being an unidentified freak of nature. 

Suddenly, the deep, echoing howl of the raging winter air currents was pierced by a distant, high-pitched scream, and all of Clark’s heightened senses instantly activated in alarm.

He was running against the blizzard and towards the scream before he could consider the consequences of foolishly revealing himself—yet again—but Clark was fundamentally incapable of ignoring such a poignant cry of pure distress. 

Someone needed help—he had to act. 

He reached speeds a regular human eye wouldn’t be able to detect, particularly in the pitch darkness, and it wasn’t long before he stumbled upon what appeared to be a small, Old West-style ghost town, complete with multiple barns, a saloon, and even a church. 

And the entire compound was engulfed in flames. 

The putrid odor of death—both human and livestock—was even heavier than the stench of smoke and ash, but there was someone alive here, Clark was certain. Someone who was still screaming. 

Someone who wanted to live.

Clark focused hard on identifying the precise location of the screamer, scanning for a heartbeat amidst the roaring flames and falling debris, for he wasn’t confident that he’d be able to search every outbuilding in time before one or all of them collapsed, even with the advantage of his preternatural abilities. 

But then, he heard another scream—this one higher and even more heartbreaking than the last—and Clark realized, to his deepening dread, that it was likely coming from a child. 

He ran at full speed towards the source—the church—pushing his way through the bolted wooden doors with his shoulders. The entire congregation was hellishly ablaze, the burning pews covered in at least two dozen charred corpses. The stench of death was now suffocatingly heavy, and Clark nearly abandoned his mission in immediate revulsion.

Until he heard another excruciating scream.

Clark determinedly rushed directly into the flames, uncaring of the way his clothes and backpack caught fire as he barreled through the eerie glow of the inferno. He used his heat vision to look through the thick black smoke, infrared eyes landing upon a small body seated atop the church altar. 

Just the sight of her was enough to stop him in his tracks, his jaw falling open in horror.

She was a disturbingly malnourished child, a little girl so dangerously thin she was essentially a skeleton, making the fact that she was even alive nothing short of a miracle. Because she was so small, her age was impossible to determine; she could have been anywhere between four and twelve, her physical development was so clearly stunted. 

She was almost completely bald, though it didn’t appear to be a consequence of the fire. Her hair came through in small, uneven patches, suggesting it had been repeatedly shaved and bluntly cut—or perhaps even ripped out. Her ashen face was covered with blood, tears, bruises, and scabs, with multiple open wounds around her lips and cheeks, not to mention the brutal shiners so severe around both of her eyes that they were swollen almost completely shut.

She was wearing an old-fashioned, long-sleeved nightgown that he surmised used to be white, but the fabric was almost entirely soiled with blood that seemed to be sourced from large, gaping lacerations still actively draining at various locations throughout her body. 

The child needed medical attention—immediately.

Clark purposefully stepped forward, disregarding the throng of dead bodies at his now bare feet, his shoes long burned off, but he was halted again by a final detail about the little girl’s condition he hadn’t yet noticed, a sight that filled his stomach with so much revulsion he nearly vomited right where he stood.

The child wasn’t just neglected and violently abused, which was already bad enough. Some monster had deliberately left her here to die.

The little girl had been strapped to the wooden chair she sat on—with barbed wire.

And judging by how deeply the skin around her wrists and ankles was torn almost all the way to the bone, she’d been futilely struggling against her bindings for hours at least, mutilating herself in the process.

Clark had been forced to witness many of the darker aspects of humanity throughout his covert acts of heroism over the last several years, but never before had he encountered something as sickening as this. 

If any of the lifeless people within the church had been the ones to commit these heinous crimes against this girl—if they were even complicit in the violence she’d suffered—then as far as Clark was concerned, every last one of them deserved to be dead. 

Anyone who would harm a child was unequivocally and unforgivably evil—and not worth saving. 

Resolved, Clark quickly advanced once more and ascended the steps of the altar, patting down the flames that had continued to spread across his clothes. It wouldn’t do much good to frighten the child even further by the unexplainable sight of a massive fire-man with glowing red eyes walking towards her. 

A ceiling beam collapsed to the floor just a few feet away from her, and the little girl shrieked in anguish, but immediately fell silent when the narrow slits of her bruised eyes finally registered Clark’s presence. 

The child’s blood pressure skyrocketed, her labored wheezes so rapid she was but a breath from hyperventilating, and she yanked herself against the barbed wire with the unhinged, self-destructive fervor of a wild animal trapped by a hunter, rapidly shaking her head from side to side as fresh tears streamed down her bony, welted face.  

The child was more afraid now than she had been just seconds before. 

Was the bearded, unkempt sight of him truly that scary? 

…Or was the girl particularly terrified simply because he was a grown man?

“I know you’re scared, sweetheart, but I’m not going to hurt you,” Clark said as calmly and softly as he could manage, given the circumstance. He urgently needed to remove the barbs embedded in her skin before she hit a major artery in her renewed struggles to free herself, but if he touched her before she was comfortable, he’d run the risk of inadvertently frightening her to the point where her nervous system went into shock. 

The child didn’t respond—could she even understand him?—so Clark repeated a bit louder, “I’m not going to hurt you.”

The little girl stopped thrashing, but her heart rate was still dangerously high. Moving slower than he would have preferred, Clark crouched and made a deliberate point of nonverbally demonstrating exactly what he was doing as he reached for the wire around her right ankle, wrapped his palms around the metal, and pried it off of her with care. 

A deluge of blood erupted from the deep wound in her ankle once the barbs were removed, and the child released a faint hiss, but otherwise remained wordless as he moved to her other foot, her body stiffening with tension the closer he approached. 

Clark began to fear her unusual silence was a result of being conditioned to remain quiet when she was in pain.

Just what had this child lived through?

The blaze was now only inches from burning her once he finally got her wrists free, so he opened his arms as he still knelt on the floor to appear less intimidating, desperately hoping it would be enough to encourage the child to come to him of her own free will.

She stared at him unmoving for several moments, and Clark worried he’d have to just grab her and deal with the consequences later, but soon enough, she stiffly shifted out of the chair and into his waiting hold, her wobbly limbs barely sustaining her feathery weight.

Despite whatever horrors she’d experienced in this isolated compound, this child wanted to live. 

And Clark was going to do everything in his power to guarantee her survival. 

“I’m going to get you out of here,” Clark vowed as he hoisted her into his arms. She was even lighter than he’d suspected—her anemic body truly nothing more than paper skin and hollow bones. “Just close your eyes and hold on tight to me.”

Still the child didn’t speak, and Clark wondered if she was perhaps mute, but she quickly wrapped her gaunt arms around his neck as firmly as she could manage as she burrowed her face into his chest. 

“I’ve got you,” he assured her.

Without sparing a single backward glance, Clark held the tiny child firmly against his torso as he smashed through a nearby window, leaping away from the church mere seconds before the entire structure disintegrated. He tightened his hold on her once they were outside, doing his best to keep her warm with his body heat in the midst of the blizzard, and he ran back in the general direction of a highway he’d seen the day before, silently praying there was a medical center nearby. 

The child was bleeding profusely, already soaking through what minimal tatters remained of his burned clothes. 

She’d die from the blood loss alone if he couldn’t get her medical treatment within the next few minutes.

Once he was back on the highway, he increased his speed and ran for another forty miles, until finally he began to see semblances of civilization. First, there were truck stops. Then, gas stations and fast food restaurants.

And finally, a county hospital.

Clark marched directly into the emergency wing, noting with increasing alarm that the child had passed out at some point during their journey. 

But he could still hear her heartbeat. He could still hear her struggling to breathe, her protruding ribs fiercely laboring to expand and contract.

This little girl was a fighter.

“This child needs immediate medical attention,” Clark announced as he carried her into the receiving area. The admitting nurse looked to him first, visibly repulsed by his vagrant appearance, but her disgust quickly shifted into alarm once her eyes fell upon the unconscious little girl. 

She reached for the phone on her desk, urgently declaring into the speaker, “I have a code pink on the emergency room floor, I repeat code pink, possibly code blue, we have a serious pediatric medical emergency.” Looking back at Clark, she asked, “Are you the child’s father?”

Clark shook head. “No—I have no idea who she is. I found her like this.”

“Where, exactly?”

“About eighty miles northwest of here, there was a massive fire,” Clark explained. “She’s the only survivor.”

The nurse gasped. “That’s in the middle of nowhere! How on earth did you manage to—”

“Can you help her?” Clark interrupted, voice rising. His heart was starting to race, his hands unsteadily shaking around the wounded child as the icy chill of shock and crushing pressure horror filtrated right down into his marrow.

Clark had been in dangerous circumstances many times before, but never had he been overcome with such an acute surge of pure, undiluted fear. 

Was this…panic?

Speaking in a near incoherent rush, Clark continued, “M-ma’am…she’s dying. She’s…she looks like she hasn’t eaten in weeks, there’s so much…there’s so much blood…someone…s-someone hurt her—you have to call the police—”

“We’ll do all we can for her, young man, but I need you to calmly explain everything you know…”

A team of doctors and nurses swarmed into the receiving area, and within a few moments of orderly chaos, the child was promptly removed from his arms and placed onto a stretcher, an oxygen mask over her face and stethoscope upon her chest.

The last thing Clark saw before the child was wheeled into the ICU was one of the nurses prying her swollen eyes open, searching for a pupillary response.

Revealing a bright flash of warm, radiant hazel.

Clark fully awakened on a jolt, harrowing remnants of the dream—or rather, memory—still racing through his mind. The tremors had returned to his hands—something he hadn’t experienced since that night—and his stomach was violently churning.

Lois had asked him once before if he was capable of getting sick, but the answer was a bit more complicated than a simple yes or no. Apart from exposure to kryptonite, there was very little that could trigger illness in Clark due to his natural resistance to Earth-borne pathogens. However, he was absolutely capable of vomiting if something disgusted him enough. 

And there was nothing that sickened Clark to his very core—sickened him on both a mental and physical level—as much as the abuse of a child.

Clark rose from bed and shuffled to the bathroom, where he proceeded to heave all of the contents of his stomach until the fragments of his nightmare disappeared. It was still just before sunrise, so after washing up, he went back into the bedroom to the wall of east-facing windows, needing the restorative benefit of pure solar radiation to settle his nerves. 

It was perplexing enough that he’d managed to fall into a sleep cycle twice in less than a week, but to dream with such frequency was another mystery entirely. 

Particularly since it seemed his subconscious had found a way to impose an aspect of Elsie onto one of his darkest memories. 

That child’s eyes…had they truly been the color of dawn, just like Elsie’s?

Or was Clark’s waking obsession with his assistant starting to impact his recall?

His rescue of the mysterious little girl in the remote plains of Wyoming had haunted Clark for years afterward. Ma had immediately noticed something was wrong with him when he’d arrived back in Smallville late on Christmas Eve, but Clark had been too disturbed by all he’d seen to tell her why. 

In fact—beyond the nurse at the hospital where he’d left the child—he’d never spoken about that night again. 

For a long time, his faith in the goodness of the world had entirely collapsed, and he couldn’t summon the motivation to bother saving anyone else, embittered with the belief that perhaps humanity truly was all bad, if these were the types of sick things that people were capable of.

He’d kept tabs on that victim for the next several months, however, or as much as he was able to. Because she was a minor, her identity had remained hidden, but he had been able to piece together a general narrative of her case based on news articles and subsequent speculative documentaries, before public interest had inevitably faded in favor of another gruesome tragedy. 

It turned out the child had been living in a community of extreme religious fundamentalists, its elusive leader wanted by the FBI, and while the exact circumstances of the fire that destroyed the cloister remained unsolved, forensic analysts had deduced, due to the lack of evidence suggesting any kind of struggle, that it had likely been a coordinated act of self-immolation—the single largest mass suicide in American history. 

Jane Doe had been transferred to an undisclosed children’s hospital once her health had stabilized, and she was subsequently adopted by her closest living relative. It was reported that the child indeed suffered from mutism, and showed signs of extreme physical abuse and neglect, resulting in profound developmental delays requiring intensive long-term medical and psychiatric interventions to ameliorate. Her true age was never revealed, so at some point, Clark had mentally decided she’d been around six when he’d saved her, given how small she was. 

That was eleven years ago, so hopefully, wherever the kid was now, she was loved, healthy, and safe. He hoped that her biggest current worries amounted to nothing more than picking a dress for homecoming, or applying for college. 

She’d already endured more unfathomable trauma in her young life than any person should ever have to experience.

Clark closed his eyes and meditated under the direct sunlight until nearly eight, and once he felt fully calmed, he returned to the bathroom to properly shower and dress for the day, taking more care than typical in his grooming and overall appearance.

For in less than two hours, he’d be around his newly discovered second form of sunshine, a force that warmed and brightened his life far more than the yellow star in the sky.

A force that proved there truly was pure goodness left in the world.

“Come on, Teddy,” Elsie pleaded with her cat, gently tapping the cozy area rug beneath her knees as she knelt on the floor. “I know you hate the carrier—but you only have to be in it for a few minutes. I promise.”

Teddy glared at her from underneath the couch, his big emerald eyes narrowing in disapproval.

Back in Misty Falls, Teddy happily went with Elsie everywhere as she’d carried him around town in a basket she’d woven herself shortly after finding him. It was even lined with a pale blue baby blanket knitted by Granny to keep him warm. But Metropolis was a huge city of millions, and for Teddy’s safety, Elsie didn’t think it would be wise to allow him outside of their apartment in a basket he could easily jump out of if he got scared.

“What if I give you a…Baltic sprat?” Elsie offered. Teddy’s ears perked up, but he remained unamused. “Okay…two Baltic sprats?”

Teddy’s tail flicked twice to the side, and he slowly inched his way out from his hiding spot and into the portable kennel with his nose upturned in defiance, refusing to look back at Elsie.

Feeling guilty, Elsie tossed three of the smelly dried fish after her disgruntled pet once she closed the gate for good measure. 

It was almost ten on Wednesday morning, and Clark would be arriving at any moment for their trip to Gotham for the Wayne Foundation Gala. He’d suggested the night before via text—Clark texted her now!—that they share a car service to the ferry. When Elsie had mentioned that she’d need to first drop Teddy off at a local pet hotel she’d researched, Clark had assured her that the small detour wouldn’t be a problem with him. 

And that he actually looked forward to properly meeting her cat!

Elsie was so excited for her first overnight work trip that she hadn’t yet found the mental energy to be nervous about it. Granted, she’d never actually been to a gala before, but she hoped that the multitude of etiquette books she’d read in her long afternoons in the library with Granny would be enough preparation for how she was supposed to appropriately behave. 

She didn’t want Clark to regret inviting her along due to her awkwardness.

To that end, after work on Monday night, Elsie had gone to a nearby department store to find suitable attire for the event. The invitation specified black-tie, which meant that men were expected to wear tuxedos, and women were supposed to wear gowns.

Elsie had also never worn a formal gown before.

She’d missed out on things like homecoming and prom, because when Granny had enrolled her in public school less than a year after her rescue, it became obvious within just a few short hours that Elsie was simply not cut out for such an endeavor. School had been absolute torture, a painful barrage of overstimulation, with so many conflicting people and sounds and sights and smells that Elsie had collapsed in the middle of class into a manic fit of crying, screaming, and vomiting. She’d even forgotten how to speak in her heightened anxiety, reverting once more to that wordless, petrified child she’d been for most of her life. 

The very next day, Granny had resigned from her respected position as chair of the literature department at Maine State University. They’d relocated several hours up the coast to Misty Falls, a town of less than five-thousand people, where Granny had homeschooled Elsie for the next four years in between working part-time at the local library. 

Elsie hadn’t fully appreciated it at the time, but Granny had truly given up her entire life to care for her, a granddaughter she barely knew. Granny had been forced to abandon her career, her house, her friends…all because Elsie was incapable of functioning in an environment where most people thrived. 

It was largely why Elsie had been so determined to move to a big city after Granny had passed away. Granny was the strongest, most compassionate woman she’d ever known, and Elsie wanted to honor her memory by following her example, and proving that she too could be brave and kind. 

She owed Granny just as much gratitude for her recovery as she owed Superman for pulling her out of that horrible fire in the first place. 

The gently pleasant circles tone sounded on her iPhone, and Elsie immediately swiped open the messaging app. 

Just arrived downstairs. Ready to go?

Elsie couldn’t help giggling like a fool at the sight of his name appearing on her phone, for the novelty of having someone to text—specifically Clark—still hadn’t worn off. She knew she really needed to do something to get rid of her inappropriate crush, but perhaps it could wait until after the gala. 

If she kept her feelings to herself, was there really any harm in secretly liking Clark as more than just her boss?

I’ll be right down! 😁🤗

She slipped her phone into her purse, gathered Teddy’s carrier in one arm, and her overnight bag in the other. After giving her freshly tidied apartment a final once over, she closed and locked the door and made her way downstairs. 

Clark was waiting for her right on the sidewalk, and when their eyes met, his face visibly brightened. 

For a few moments, Elsie let herself pretend that it wasn’t simply because he was such a nice man, and that maybe, he was just as happy to see her as she was to see him.

“Good morning, Clark!” Elsie greeted brightly, butterflies swarming in her belly at the handsome sight of him. She wasn’t sure how it was possible, but Clark managed to become more good-looking every single day. He certainly had the kind of perfect, deific face that belonged in magazines or in movies. 

And then there was his body—

“Good morning, Elsie,” Clark responded smoothly, his deep, warm voice pleasantly unnerving her. “Can I help you with your bag?”

Elsie didn’t want to be a nuisance, especially after how gracious he’d been the weekend prior, following her around and carrying all of her shopping bags at the farmers market while he had a migraine. He hadn’t even been able to complete any of his own shopping because of her. “Oh! Umm…you really don’t have to—”

“It would be my pleasure,” Clark gently interrupted. “Please—allow me.”

Unable to suppress her ever-widening smile, Elsie responded, “Thank you. That’s really nice of you.”

Clark reached for her overnight bag—a gesture that almost seemed specifically designed to draw her eyes to the impressive extension of his huge arm muscles—and placed it in the trunk of the car, a dark, luxurious sedan with tinted windows. He then opened the door for her and beckoned her inside. 

“Ladies first,” he said with a wink.

Elsie blushed and slid into the back seat as gracefully as she could while holding Teddy’s carrier. 

Once they were both inside, the driver turned around to face them, an elderly man with a genial disposition. “Where to first, Mr. Kent?”

Instead of answering the driver, Clark turned to Elsie. “There was somewhere you needed to stop first?”

“Yes…the…umm…the Barkdorf-Astoria Pet Hotel, please?” 

“You’ve got it, Miss!” the driver answered. “We’ll be there in less than ten.”

He raised the partition as he pulled the car away from the curb, and suddenly, Elsie was acutely aware that she was alone with Clark. A man. 

But she wasn’t scared. 

She was thrilled.

She wondered if Clark would notice if she scooted just an inch or two closer so that she could smell his amazing cologne—

“So…what kind of cat is that?” Clark asked. “Is he a kitten?”

Elsie shook her head, hoping her face didn’t betray her inappropriate thoughts, and in her nervousness, she began to ramble. “Oh no, he’s actually at least ten years old! I found him when I was fourteen. He was even smaller back then, if you can believe it. The vet said he might be part Singapura, since he’s so tiny. He only weighs about three pounds, so I feed him exclusively homemade food with a bit more fat and protein than most commercially available cat foods, to help keep his weight up. I actually developed the recipe with his veterinarian, we alternate between salmon and beef and chicken…”

Clark patiently listened to Elsie describe Teddy’s eating habits and favorite treats with far more rapt attention than she deserved, a charming smile on his face as he stared down at her. Elsie knew she was chattering in excess, sharing far more detail than Clark—or anyone—would reasonably care to hear, but unfortunately, that was one of the most enduring consequences of her upbringing she’d never quite been able to overcome. 

Elsie either talked too much—or she was silent. 

There was no in-between.

“Can I ask what happened to his leg?” Clark prompted once she finally managed to calm down enough to shut herself up.

Elsie sighed sadly, remembering the pitiful sight of her kitty when he’d actually been a kitten, yowling painfully in the woods outside of Granny’s cottage. “His vet said he likely got in a scuffle with a raccoon or a possum when he was a newborn. His leg was so badly shattered that there was nothing that could be done to fix it—so it had to be amputated.”

Clark frowned, a pained look on his strong features. “I’m so sorry to hear that.”

“Don’t be,” Elsie assured. “Teddy is a very strong kitty. He gets around just fine with three legs. Jumping can be a little hard for him sometimes—but he more than makes up for it with his climbing skills!”

Clark looked down at the opening in the carrier, softly waving at Teddy with his big hand. “You’re a tough little guy, aren’t you?” 

Normally, Teddy didn’t care for strangers, especially men, and while he didn’t exactly warm up to Clark, her little cat did crawl to the edge of the gate a few times over the next several minutes, eyeing Clark with reluctant curiosity. 

Clark exited the car with her once they reached the pet hotel, and even insisted on paying for Teddy’s entire stay in the premiere aristocat suite. 

“This is a work trip—and I invited you,” Clark said with a friendly smile when Elsie tried to protest. “That means all of your expenses are on me.”

Elsie wasn’t exactly convinced her cat’s hotel stay counted as a legitimate business expense, but Clark would hear nothing to the contrary. 

So Elsie decided to respond in the only way she could—with a smile, and sincere gratitude. 

They fell into companionable silence once they were back in the car, although Clark did seem to be in some kind of increasing pain or discomfort as the moments elapsed. The veins in his forehead began to protrude again, and his breathing became labored, but before she could ask if he was suffering from another migraine, they reached their destination. 

Clark appeared to relax once they boarded the ferry—perhaps he just needed fresh air—and Elsie finally felt brave enough to try and talk with him again. 

“So…what do you need me to do tonight?” Elsie asked as they made their way to the ferry’s upper deck. “Would you like me to take notes?”

Clark chuckled softly and shook his head. “This press trip is sponsored by the Wayne Foundation, so actually…the only thing you need to do tonight is enjoy yourself. We’ll be experiencing the gala just like any other guests.” 

He motioned towards an empty bench at the rear of the large ship, and Elsie happily followed, lowering herself onto it with care. 

Clark sat down next to her, and while they weren’t in any physical contact, he was close enough for her to detect his body heat. 

“But how will I be useful to you?” Elsie questioned as the skyline of Metropolis began to disappear before them. If she wasn’t at the gala to assist with his reporting, then how could she offer value?

“You’ll be useful by just being yourself—I enjoy your company,” Clark said kindly. “Besides, you’ve already saved me this week at work.”

“Oh, finishing your article on the election?” Elsie shrugged. “That was nothing—”

“It was something, Elsie.” Clark seemed to briefly struggle to pick his words, before adding, “It’s not…common…that other people are the ones saving me. It really meant a lot to me—so please, let me express my gratitude.”

Elsie felt both encouraged and ashamed by Clark’s complimentary words. She hoped he hadn’t invited her to the gala just because he felt like he owed her something. 

It was her job to help him out, after all. 

“How many people will be there tonight?” Elsie asked, needing to change the subject before her paranoia ran away from her. It occurred to her that she probably should have asked these pertinent questions prior to agreeing to attend, but regardless of Clark’s potential answers, Elsie knew that there was nothing he could say that would make her regret her decision.

Any chance to spend more time with Clark would be worth it. 

“I believe last year’s event had over five-hundred, so probably around the same.”

Elsie sharply inhaled, trying her best to hide her automatic fearful reaction at the thought of being around so many people at once, but her heart was already beginning to race. 

Almost as if he could sense how anxious she was becoming, Clark suddenly added, “Hey…I’ll be right by your side all night.”

“Y-you will?”

“Of course I will. And if at any point you get uncomfortable, we can leave.” Clark hummed thoughtfully, before continuing, “You know…sometimes I get nervous in big crowds, too.” 

“You do?” Elsie couldn’t believe someone as smart, accomplished, and physically impressive as Clark could ever feel anxious.

“I do. It can be…overwhelming, dealing with so much…stimulation—coming from so many places at once. My anxiety used to be really bad when I was a kid.”

“How did you overcome it?” Elsie asked, hoping it wasn’t too nosy of her. 

“My mom helped me, actually,” Clark said fondly. “When I started to feel scared, when it felt like…the world was too big…she’d tell me to focus on just the sound of her voice. To pretend it was an island out at sea, and swim towards it. Make the world a little bit smaller…”

Elsie was so lulled by the soothing sound of Clark’s voice that she didn’t even realize her anxiety had completely melted away.

She could easily get through a night of five-hundred strangers if she had Clark’s voice to ground her.

Confidence slowly returning, Elsie was reminded of the unfinished conversation they’d started earlier that week. 

“You never answered my question on Monday,” Elsie mentioned. 

“Oh?” Clark’s eyebrow rose, a faintly mischievous look on his face. “What would you like to know?”

Elsie shrugged her shoulders and took a sip of the hot chocolate Clark had bought for her shortly after boarding the ferry.

To keep her warm for the ride, he’d said. 

“What you do for fun, when—”

“When I’m not saving the world—right.” Clark chuckled. “Honestly, nothing very interesting. Uhh…work…takes up a lot of my time, so when I’m at home, I tend to be pretty boring.”

“Surely there’s something you like to do.” Elsie frowned in contemplation, wondering what a man like Clark might take joy in. “Since you’re so…so big and strong, do you enjoy any sports?” 

There was a twinkle of amusement in Clark’s vivid aurora-blue eyes. “You think I’m strong?” 

Elsie blushed, realizing she probably shouldn’t have made such an observation about his body out loud, but now that she’d spoken the words, there really was no turning back. “You did save me from crashing against the floor the other day. It seemed like it didn’t take any effort for you at all.”

“Perhaps it didn’t take much effort because you’re so small.”

Normally, any observations about Elsie’s size made her feel ashamed and self-conscious, but something about the way Clark uttered the words had the complete opposite effect. There was definitely humor in his deep voice, as if he were perhaps teasing her, but not the kind of ridicule meant to make her feel badly about herself.

Rather, it was as if he were inviting her to share in a friendly joke.

Perhaps she was reading too much into things, but it almost seemed as if Clark even liked that she was small.

And just the thought that Clark might enjoy the way she was built made that strange, pulsating heat just below her belly start to…tickle. 

“Is that…a bad thing?” Elsie chewed her lip. “That I’m…small?”

A mysterious look quickly flashed across Clark’s face, before he murmured in a low voice, “Is it a bad thing that I’m…big?”

Elsie immediately shook her head. “I think…I think it’s a great thing, actually.”

Clark watched her for several moments before responding. “Well I think it’s a great thing that you are…the way you are. Exactly as you are.”

He might as well have called her as beautiful as a supermodel, Elsie was nearly giddy with delight at his praise. 

Suddenly, Clark cleared his throat and averted his gaze, fumbling with his glasses. “And actually, I do enjoy football.”

“Do you play?”

“No—but I always wanted to. My dad…he discouraged me from trying out back in high school. He thought that my…umm…size…might be an unfair advantage against the other players.”

“I’m so sorry you didn’t get to play—that doesn’t seem very fair at all.” Elsie was compelled to reach out and touch his shoulder to offer comfort, but she stopped herself before she made contact. Clark was her boss, and sort of her friend—but that did not mean it was appropriate for her to touch him. “Who’s your team? The Monarchs?”

Clark feigned a look of dramatic outrage, causing Elsie to heartily laugh with her full body, shoulders shaking from the effort. “I’m from Kansas—I’m a Chiefs fan through and through.”

“I have to admit I really don’t know much about sports, though I’ve always wanted to learn,” Elsie confessed once her giggles began to settle. “Maine doesn’t have a football team.”

“Well if you’re interested, how about we watch Sunday’s game together?” Clark suggested. “Unless, of course, you’re sick of me by then.”

“I don’t think I could ever be sick of you,” Elsie said before she could stop herself, and Clark’s eyes widened, a flush of color forming on his strong cheekbones. 

“Are you always this flattering?” Clark asked. 

It was Elsie’s turn to blush, and she averted her gaze and stared hard at her knees. “I wasn’t trying to flatter you…I really mean it.”

She could feel Clark’s eyes on her, and after several moments, Elsie ventured a peek in his direction. 

“So…Sunday?” Clark asked. “Would you like to come over and watch the game with me?” 

Elsie almost immediately said yes—but then she had an idea. 

“On one condition,” Elsie said, and Clark gazed at her expectantly. 

“What is it?”

“You need to let me finally make croque-madame for you.”

His smile widened, showing off his straight white teeth, and Elsie was positively dazzled by the sight. Elsie was quickly learning that Clark was the type of man who could make someone feel like they were the single most important person in the world, his smile was so powerful. 

“It’s a deal, Elsie.”

Over the next hour, the final remnants of the bright Metropolis sunshine progressively began to fade as the dark clouds of Gotham rolled in, the temperature dropping at least twenty degrees. It truly was puzzling, just how vastly different the climates between the sister cities were. Whereas Metropolis was perpetually sunny, Gotham was constantly overcast and rainy.

By the time the ship pulled into the Port of Gotham, Elsie’s teeth were chattering, her hot chocolate long gone. 

She immediately stood and bounced up and down on her toes when the Captain announced they could disembark, desperate to generate body heat, but suddenly, there was a pleasantly heavy—and pleasantly warm—weight around her shoulders, draping all the way down past her knees. 

Clark had given her his jacket.

He stared down at her, a small curve to his lips, and Elsie felt like one of the women in the old-fashioned movies Granny used to love, moments from swooning. 

Clark wasn’t just a hero for his reporting. He was also a romantic hero, the kind of man she’d always secretly longed to one day give her heart to—if he’d ever want such a broken, damaged thing.

“Welcome to Gotham, Elsie.”

Chapter Text

It’s nothing to be afraid of, pumpkin. 

See? Just a tube of lipstick—it can’t hurt you.

Isn’t that a pretty color, Elsie?  

Elsie smiled wistfully at the melodious echo of Granny’s voice, the balmy resonance tempering her anxiety as she embarked upon the daunting ordeal of applying her makeup for the evening. Even though she was gone, Elsie knew in her heart that Granny’s spirit was still with her. 

The tangible warmth in her chest relieving the sharp ache of her grief—the recollection of this specific memory as Elsie attempted something that would normally incapacitate her with terror—was all the evidence Elsie needed to know with certainty that Granny’s love still endured.

It had been just a few weeks after her rescue that Elsie had first witnessed her grandmother putting on makeup. Elsie hadn’t been able to speak yet, but when she saw the lipstick on Granny’s old-fashioned vanity, she’d panicked, running to her grandmother’s side out of fear something awful would happen to her, per the harsh teachings Elsie had been raised with.

But nothing awful did happen. Granny didn’t burst into flames. Hell didn’t open up and swallow them both whole. Instead, Granny had patiently and calmly explained to a tearful, paranoid Elsie the true purpose of makeup as simply a form of self-expression. As self-care. 

As fun. 

And Elsie had watched with wide eyes, at first cautious, then curious, and finally fascinated, as Granny proceeded to apply rouges and powders and even tasteful sparkles, taking clear joy in every step of the ritual of turning her face into her own personal work of art. 

Though even without makeup, Granny always looked beautiful to Elsie, a sentiment that had been echoed by pretty much everyone Granny encountered. Strangers would frequently walk up to the elegant woman with long silver hair to compliment her on her kind smile, ageless skin, and unique eye color. 

The first time Elsie had ever met her grandmother—when she’d still been recovering in the Wyoming hospital after the fire, mutilated and disfigured—she’d thought an angel had come down from Heaven to visit her.  

Elsie had never dedicated much thought to how her own face appeared to others, but she had been told enough times by the familiar residents of Misty Falls that she had Granny’s smile and eyes. And if Elsie possessed even some small resemblance to the brilliant, loving woman who meant the world to her, then that was all the affirmation she needed to feel good about herself. 

Steadying her hands with several deep breaths, Elsie decided to start her makeup application with her eyes. She wasn’t brave enough to attempt to replicate the complex shading and blending Granny used to do with multiple brushes and pigments, but she could at least apply mascara, for it was quick and straightforward, and the resulting effect wouldn’t be particularly dramatic—and therefore frightening—for Elsie.

Once her upper and lower lashes were darkened, lengthened, and curled—which seemed to fulfill the purpose of emphasizing her eyes—Elsie applied a multi-purpose cream stick in a pretty shade of shimmering rose she’d seen in a recent Instagram ad, one that could be used both as blush and as lip color. Perhaps it was an unsophisticated way of putting on makeup, but Elsie didn’t think the Wayne Foundation Gala was the appropriate time for her to venture too far beyond her comfort level, lest she make a total mess of herself and embarrass Clark.

Satisfied with her makeup efforts, Elsie slipped on the vintage pink pearl earrings Granny had given her for her eighteenth birthday, the same day Granny had taken her to get her ears pierced for the first time. Then, she carefully unfurled the thermal rollers she’d put in her hair after getting out of the shower earlier in the evening—a clever way Elsie had recently discovered she could style herself that didn’t require looking in the mirror in excess. 

Now, she was ready to get dressed. 

Tightening the plush hotel bathrobe around her waist, Elsie left the bathroom and returned to the bedroom. Clark had booked adjacent east-facing tower suites in the very hotel where the gala was taking place—another expense he’d insisted upon covering for her. 

Located in the historic district of downtown Gotham, The Voltaire was a breathtaking edifice, a highly ornamented, neo-Art Deco skyscraper with striking Zigzag Moderne embellishments in gleaming marble and scintillating gold. Elsie’s room was constructed on an opulent geometric scale, and featured a lavishly appointed living area with refined furniture crafted with rich materials in even richer colors. There was an entire wall of floor-to-ceiling windows showcasing the Prohibition-era architecture of Gotham’s shadowy, rectilinear cityscape, and just beyond that, a palatial bedroom filled tasteful accents and objets d’art, all leading to a massive canopy bed carved from dark, exotic wood.

Any anxiety Elsie could have felt about staying overnight in a hotel room for the very first time all by herself had been promptly eclipsed by an almost childlike enthusiasm the moment she’d walked through the stately suite’s grand double doors.

Just for the night, surrounded by beautiful, luxurious things, Elsie could almost pretend she was a princess. 

And she could even pretend that Clark was her handsome prince—

Banishing the inappropriate thought before her imagination could run away from her, Elsie eased out of the bathrobe and stepped into the gown she’d purchased two nights prior. Elsie had thought it was a pretty dress when she’d tried it on for fit in the department store, but now that she could see her full-length reflection in the huge gilded mirror directly opposite from the bed, she was beginning to second-guess her choices. 

Designed with flowing layers of cherry blossom chiffon, the sleeveless gown had a modest empire waist, but also a sweetheart neckline that revealed more of Elsie’s bust than any garment she’d ever worn before. With the top curves of her breasts and entire chest and neck area clearly visible, Elsie felt…exposed. 

But perhaps that wasn’t necessarily a bad thing. 

Repeating to herself that her body was nothing to be ashamed of—as her psychiatrist had often reminded her—Elsie reached for the coordinating gossamer wrap she’d brought to give herself an extra layer of protection, just in case she became too self-conscious. 

Elsie finally began to relax once her shoulders and arms were covered, but there was a very real practical function to the scarf as well. 

To keep it from falling down, Elsie tightly looped the excess fabric twice around each wrist. 

This way, no one would be able to see her scars. 

There was a knock on the front door promptly at seven, and Elsie’s heart rate jump-started as if she’d been electrocuted, though not from fear. 

She was excited. 

Unable to suppress her smile, Elsie rushed to the foyer to greet Clark. 

But once she opened the door, Elsie’s precarious sense of confidence instantly shattered underneath the oppressively handsome sight of him…in a tuxedo. 

Elsie was speechless and paralyzed as she stared up at Clark, her senses decimated by the bewildering impact of his transcendent level of attractiveness. Elsie couldn’t comprehend it, her brain short-circuiting in an ongoing struggle to try to understand how a single human being could manage to embody the absolute pinnacle of masculinity and magnificence and strength and beauty and perfection…

Clark was so good-looking he was almost unreal.

His smooth tuxedo looked like it had been designed specifically for his powerful body, cloaking his mountainous, lethally muscular form like debonair armor, and when Elsie’s glassy eyes helplessly lingered upon his broad chest and thick biceps, that ticklish heat just below her belly began to throb.

At that same moment, there was that strange rumbling sensation in the air again, a frequency too low for her ears to completely discern, yet she could still detect the movement of the powerful wavelengths all the same, vibrating her veins with deep, urgent pulses.

Was Clark somehow making this bizarre infrasound?

Elsie shook her head, forcing herself out of her stupor as she craned her neck to keep her gaze safely and respectfully on Clark’s face. More than likely, she simply experienced vertigo whenever Clark was near, and that was the true source of the unexplained almost-sound. Something to do with the echo in her ears of her own circulation. 

She suffered from chronically low blood pressure, after all.  

Clark was staring hard at her, his eyes dark and brow sharply angled in a deep scowl as the veins in his forehead dilated before her very eyes.

Elsie blushed and clutched her hands protectively, tightening her wrap around her shoulders and wrists. 

“That’s a…umm…that’s a very lovely dress, Elsie.” Clark’s voice was even lower than typical, so deep and husky it was practically a growl.

“D-do you r-really think so?” Elsie stuttered, feeling herself slipping into another anxious ramble. “I was worried that maybe p-pink was a bad idea. I really love pink, but I know some people think it’s s-silly, or childish, I probably should have worn black or red or something m-more m-mature—”

“No.” Clark swallowed hard and loud, the prominent apple in his throat protruding with clear strain. “Pink…uhh…pink really suits you.” 

His words were assuring at face-value, but Clark looked and sounded as if he were in terrible pain.

Was he developing another migraine?

Or…did she truly look awful, and Clark was simply too nice to say anything directly—

“Are you ready to head downstairs?” Clark asked quickly.

He offered his arm without waiting for an answer, and Elsie carefully slipped her hand around his bicep as best as she could, which truly didn’t cover much space. 

Even if her hands weren’t pathetically small, Clark’s arm muscles were still overwhelmingly huge.

“You look very nice, Clark,” Elsie complimented in a small voice as they stepped into the elevator, hoping to ease the uncomfortable tensity between them. It was normally so easy to be around Clark. She couldn’t figure out what had changed.

“Thank you,” Clark answered, somewhat gruffly. He was staring straight ahead, almost as if he were avoiding her, and the minimal remaining fragments of Elsie’s self-esteem plunged into freefall. 

She looked terrible. 

Clark was clearly repulsed by the very sight of her. 

Before she could volunteer to go back upstairs and hide herself to spare him further embarrassment, the golden elevator doors opened on the mezzanine floor.

There was a long red carpet in the center of the hallway with a press wall showcasing the repeating Wayne Foundation logo, where celebrities and other glamorous guests in avant-garde haute couture and sparkling high jewelry were already posing for pictures. 

Figuring the last thing Clark would want was a photo with her, Elsie eased her hand out of his arm, and was just beginning to inch a safe distance away when she was abruptly grabbed by her shoulders and shoved onto an empty space on the red carpet. 

She would have fallen over, but Clark was instantly by her side, holding her upright with his strong hand completely spanning the width of her back. 

However, he still wouldn’t look at her.  

Instead, he was glaring at the photographer who had just pushed her. 

“Hey, watch it! You could have seriously injured her!” Clark reprimanded sharply, but the photographer was unbothered as he adjusted the settings on his Nikon.

“Sorry. Stand on the mark, please,” the photographer instructed in a bored voice. “And sir, I’m going to need you try and lean down, you’re towering over your date—”

“What are your names?” a brusque woman with an iPad suddenly chimed in. “As well as the designers you’re wearing…”

Elsie was quickly becoming overwhelmed by the photographer and press associate, not to mention the sheer amount of people surrounding her. She silently repeated a basic mental calming exercise—one two three, one two three—and tried her best to speak up for herself, but her words were disappearing from her lips before she could utter them as her anxiety continued to climb. 

“I’m Clark Kent, and this is my colleague, Elsie. We’re from the Daily Planet,” Clark answered with authority, his deep voice granting her something smooth and powerful to focus on. Even though he sounded upset—though this time, his anger was directed towards the photographer and the press associate—his voice was still enough to pull Elsie from the edge of a panic attack. 

Clark was her hero.

“Ahh, okay, well we still need a photo, even if you’re not real guests,” the press associate instructed, with no shortage of disapproval. “Sir, can you try…kneeling, perhaps? And miss, can you please look at the camera?”

Elsie tentatively raised her head, eyes settling on the huge camera lens, just as Clark maneuvered his way around her with an irritated sigh, dropping to one knee.

And suddenly, she was utterly surrounded by a heady perimeter of his body heat and delicious smell, and Elsie couldn’t suppress the rising flush in her cheeks and the automatic smile on her lips. 

By kneeling on the floor next to her, Clark was almost eye level with her, for the very first time. 

His gloriously sculpted, godlike face was no longer far beyond her short, feeble grasp.

She could actually reach out and touch his hard, prominent cheekbones and sharp, angular jawline—was that a shadow of scruff on his face?—if she dared.

“Is this…okay, Elsie?” Clark murmured as the photographer proceeded to snap dozens of images of them in rapid succession. At first, Elsie thought Clark was simply asking if she was comfortable being photographed, but then she noticed that his hand was hovering just a few inches away from her side.

Was he actually asking permission to touch her waist?

Thrilled by the prospect of Clark touching her, Elsie arched her back, straightened her shoulders, and closed the distance between them, easing herself against his hand. 

But the moment his huge palm firmly settled upon the curve of her waist, his fingertips at her navel, the pulsating heat below her belly dropped even lower—between her legs.

Shocked by the unfamiliar sensation shooting through her body, Elsie stumbled in her low heels, feet tangling in the overlong train of her dress. She fell backwards, but instead of hitting the floor, she landed on her rear.

…Right on Clark’s hard, thick thigh. 

Clark released a tortured groan behind her the instant her buttocks made contact with his leg. “Oh, dear God…”

“Clark, I’m so sorry—”

“Don’t move an inch!” the press associate interrupted, her voice so severe that Elsie was instantly frozen in place. “This pose actually works for you. But miss, can you put your hand on his chest or something so it doesn’t look like you guys are at a daddy-daughter dance?”

Elsie’s cheeks burned in humiliation—Clark was only thirty-six, he was not old enough to be her father!—but she obeyed the instructions nonetheless, placing a shaky palm upon Clark’s lapel. 

She was too afraid to look at Clark once the photos were finished and they were shooed off the red carpet in favor of more famous guests. 

If Clark wasn’t regretting inviting her to the gala before, he most certainly was now.

“Clark, p-please don’t be m-mad—”

“Are you okay to be on your own for a few moments?” Clark interrupted, and Elsie’s stomach dropped all the way to her toes. Was he abandoning her already? “I have to…uhh…I forgot something in my room.”

“Please, let me, I’d be happy to go and get it for you—”

“No!” Clark clipped, and Elsie jumped back in fear. 

Just how furious with her was he?

Clark was breathing hard, and Elsie couldn’t help the tears that automatically welled in her eyes. 

They’d barely been at the gala for ten minutes, and already Elsie was ruining everything with her awkwardness. 

Why couldn’t she just be normal?

“I’m sorry,” he said in a slightly softer tone, but his voice was still severe. “I need to…uhh…my migraine medication. I’m getting another migraine, so I need to go upstairs for a few moments. I’ll be right back—I promise.”

Clark vanished before she could beg him not to leave her all alone, practically sprinting for the elevators, he couldn’t get away from her fast enough.

Miserably, Elsie made her own run for the ladies room before she embarrassed herself beyond recovery by crying in public. 

To her surprise, she wasn’t the only person in tears in the bathroom. 

There was a young woman hunched over in the elegant sitting lounge near the sinks, and she was sobbing so loudly, and so violently, that Elsie worried she’d make herself sick. 

Elsie quickly wiped her eyes with her palm and slowly tiptoed into the lounge, lowering onto the velvet bench opposite the weeping woman. 

She may not have been able to salvage her own public disaster, but she could at least try and help a stranger in need. 

“Miss?” Elsie asked softly. “Are you okay—” 

“Oh, fuck off!”

Elsie gulped, chagrined. “I’m sorry—I didn’t mean to offend you. You just seem upset…I only wanted to help.”

Elsie motioned to stand, but the woman suddenly reached forth and grabbed her wrist.

“You want to help?” the woman demanded. She raised her head, and at first, Elsie was taken aback by how beautiful she was. With her shiny platinum hair, bright blue eyes, and flawless makeup, she reminded Elsie of Barbie. 

But then Elsie looked closer, and she noticed that the heavy makeup around the woman’s left eye was being rapidly smeared by her tears, revealing a fresh bruise. 

A type of injury that was very familiar to Elsie.

“How exactly can you help this?” the woman snarled. 

Elsie took a deep breath and slowly sat back down, noting that despite her obvious anger, the woman still hadn’t let go of her wrist. 

After several moments of silence, Elsie asked, “Who did this to you?”

The woman released a weary sigh, faintly wheezing from the effort. “My fucking husband.”

Elsie gently placed her free hand right above where the woman was grabbing her, and after a few moments, her grip mildly loosened. 

However, she still didn’t let go. 

“Was this…the first time?” Elsie questioned delicately. 

The woman laughed dryly. “The first time today.”

Elsie swallowed hard, as heartbroken as she was horrified by the woman’s marital situation. “I’m so sorry.”

The woman sniffled and rolled her eyes—as best as she could with her wound. “Aren’t you going to ask me why I haven’t left him yet?”  

“Well…I’m guessing you’ve probably been asked that before.” Elsie smiled sadly. “And…I’m sure you have your reasons. I’m not here to judge you.”

“You might be the only one not judging me.”

Elsie looked down at the end table which held the woman’s purse, and noticed a number of makeup products loosely scattered upon the black marble surface. 

“Would you…like some help?” Elsie offered. She may not have been particularly skillful with her own makeup, but she had learned to assist Granny with the basics over the years, when Granny had become too weak to do it herself. 

The woman paused to consider her question, and soon answered, “You know what…sure.” She handed Elsie her concealer and a small sponge. “Thank you.”

Grabbing a tissue from a nearby box, Elsie carefully wiped the woman’s tears before she proceeded to re-apply concealer over her bruise with short, featherlight strokes, mindful of the pain the woman was surely in. 

“He made me turn down a full ride to Wharton. That asshole said he needed me,” the woman remarked bitterly after a while. Elsie softly dabbed the corner of her eye, where the bruising was heaviest. “I’ve done nothing for the past five years except be his wife. We have an ironclad prenup. If I leave him—I’ll have nothing.”

“Could you maybe stay with family?” Finished with the concealer, Elsie began working on applying the woman’s smoky eyeshadow. “Just until you get back on your feet?”

The woman scoffed. “I haven’t spoken to my parents since they threw me out when I was sixteen.”

“How about your friends?”

The woman briefly paused, before responding in a low voice, “Honestly? I don’t think I have any real ones. There are the other player wives and girlfriends I’ll lunch with, shop with, party with…but it’s not like we ever talk about anything meaningful. How pathetic is that?”

Elsie frowned, unsure of what the woman meant by the term player wives, but as she reached for the eyeliner next to the woman’s bejeweled clutch—which was shaped like a football—Elsie realized this likely meant her husband was a professional athlete. 

“It’s not pathetic.” Elsie twisted off the cap to the eyeliner and slowly brought the calligraphy-like brush to the woman’s face. “It sounds to me like maybe your husband has kept you pretty isolated.”

“You have no idea.”

Elsie handed the woman her compact mirror. “Take a look—let me know if there’s a spot I missed.”

The woman stared at her reflection for several moments and smiled faintly—before wincing from the effort. “You’re actually really good at this. Are you a professional?”

“Not even close.” Elsie released a soft, self-deprecating laugh. “I work for the Daily Planet.”

The woman paled, her jaw dropping in horror, and Elsie quickly added, “Oh no, don’t worry—I’m not a reporter! I’m just an assistant. You have my word I won’t tell anyone anything. I don’t even know your name.”

The woman eyed her suspiciously for an extended period, but eventually, she exhaled. “My name is Katie.”

“It’s really nice to meet you, Katie,” Elsie responded. “I’m Elsie.”

Elsie helped Katie put her makeup back in her clutch in silence, before making her way to a nearby sink to rinse off. 

“You know,” Elsie began as she wiped her hands on a heated towel, “I just moved to Metropolis—but I own a little stone cottage in a small town up in Maine.”

“You own a cottage?”

Technically, Elsie owned not only the Misty Falls cottage, but also a bay-view colonial in Portland, both bequeathed to her in Granny’s will. She was currently renting the latter to a visiting scholar at Maine State University, for Elsie wouldn’t have been able to afford her midtown Metropolis apartment otherwise—even with her salary at the Planet.

Metropolis, just like Gotham, was a very expensive city.

“I do,” Elsie confirmed. “It’s not super fancy. But it’s in the woods, and there’s a beautiful meadow in the backyard with wildflowers and berry patches where the white-tailed deer like to roam, and there’s a creek in the front where mallards nest year-round. Plus, it’s only a few minutes away from the cliffs, so you can reach the ocean pretty quickly too. It’s quiet, and very peaceful.”

“And, you’d actually let me stay there?” Katie asked in disbelief. “A virtual stranger?”

Elsie shrugged her shoulders. “Well…what are friends for?”  

Katie’s eyes began to water, so Elsie quickly handed her a few tissues before her tears could fall and ruin the makeup she’d just re-applied. 

They exchanged contact information, and while Elsie wasn’t fully convinced Katie would reach out to her after this night, she held out hope that she would.

Elsie knew quite well what it was like to love someone who was violent.

As well as what it was like to fear them. 

After a few minutes of lighthearted conversation about the stylish couture gown and hundreds of carats of diamonds Katie was wearing—Elsie’s attempt to try and calm her down—Katie was able to compose herself enough to call her chauffeur to pick her up early.

Elsie waved goodbye, and decided it was probably time for her to seek out Clark, so finally, she left the bathroom. 

And instantly collided face-first with a large, muscular body.

“I’m s-so sorry!” Elsie squeaked, her face nearly on fire from how fiercely she was blushing. 

Clark would surely have her fired over her multiple blunders this night.

“Trust me, you’ll never hear me complain about running into a pretty girl,” the man said warmly. “What’s your name, princess?”

Elsie chewed her lip and shyly looked up at the speaker. He was a very tall, very handsome, and very sophisticated man—perhaps in his mid-forties—with dark, well-styled hair that was just beginning to gray at his temples. He had a casual, rakish smirk on his lips, an expression Elsie normally would have found endearing, if it weren’t for the disquieting…coldness in his deep brown eyes. 

She may have been socially awkward and inexperienced, but Elsie knew with certainty that this man was hiding something. 

Something dark. 

“M-my n-name is Elsie,” she stuttered, her voice even squeakier and more pathetic than usual.

“Elsie…a beautiful name for a beautiful girl.” He gently grabbed her hand, and slowly pulled it to his mouth for a soft kiss. “I’m Bruce.”

It was only a little over a year ago that Bruce Wayne had officially tried to end Clark’s life.

A wholly premeditated assassination attempt years in the making, Batman had taken an instant hatred to Superman from the day of the Black Zero event onwards. 

For nearly two years after that harrowing catastrophe, unbeknownst to Clark, Bruce had diligently studied his every rescue and act of heroism, analyzing his combat strategies and defensive movements for potential weaknesses he could exploit. And during this same time, Clark had become more aware—and more disturbed—by the increasingly vicious acts of brutality committed by Gotham’s bat vigilante. Batman’s merciless approach to crime-fighting often resulted in violent deaths for those he’d branded once they were incarcerated, and the Gotham Police Department did absolutely nothing to halt their dark knight’s bloodthirsty reign of terror. 

Despite Perry’s misgivings, Clark had proceeded to conduct a multi-issue investigative report on the bat vigilante’s alarming activities, and had even interviewed the billionaire Prince of Gotham himself for his thoughts on the controversial masked figure. 

Not only was that Bruce and Clark’s first face-to-face meeting, but it was also the day Clark had discovered Bruce’s double identity—largely on account of the multiple bat-shaped shuriken Clark could easily see through Bruce’s chest pocket. 

It was shortly after this time that Clark—as Superman—had intercepted Bruce—as Batman—breaking into LexCorp’s R&D headquarters in Metropolis, where he’d been attempting to steal a sample of a mysterious mineral that had turned up earlier in the year in the Indian Ocean.

Clark had given Bruce a stern verbal warning to cease his reckless activities as a vigilante. But the very next day, a nuclear disaster had occurred in Eastern Europe, forcing Clark out of the City. 

And Bruce had taken that opportunity to go right back to Metropolis and steal the entire supply of the mineral, thwarting whatever LexCorp had been planning for it. 

From that moment forward, however, Clark had also begun keeping a close eye on LexCorp’s eccentric CEO Alexander Luthor, for the mineral he’d illegally imported was a mineral of his world.

One Clark would harshly learn had the power to end his life, when Bruce lured him to Stryker’s Island several weeks later. 

Their showdown was a savage one, evenly matched for several grave hours, but Bruce had gained the upper hand when he’d shoved a spear of pure kryptonite into Clark’s chest—cracking his sternum and puncturing his heart. 

In that moment, Clark had known he was dying, confronted by his own mortality for the very first time in his life, so he’d pleaded for the one person on Earth who would mourn him—the real him. 

Save Martha.

His mother had already lost her husband. She wouldn’t be able to handle losing her son, too. 

In retrospect, had Clark been under any impression that he was going to survive the night, he would have taken the fact that he was thinking of his mother at his time of death—and not Lois—as a sign that he and his “friend with benefits” truly weren’t right for each other romantically. 

But Clark did end up surviving, the utterance of his mother’s name seemingly breaking Bruce out of his delirium of rage. With the help of a preternaturally strong European woman named Diana, an injured Bruce had transported a mortally wounded Clark back to his clandestine headquarters in the caverns of Wayne Island, where the pair had proceeded to use the very weapons Bruce had forged to kill Superman to instead perform open-heart surgery on Clark. The arduous operation had spanned well into the early morning hour, but they were able to successfully remove the shards of the toxic mineral from Clark’s heart mere moments before his organs permanently gave out. 

The three had then returned to Stryker’s Island to confront their true enemy, a primordial, malevolent entity that the Wonder Woman had been tracking for years. The insidious, unseen force that had taken Bruce’s innate hostility for Superman and amplified it to raging malice aforethought was a being well-known to the Amazon.

Zelus—the daimon of zeal. Emulation. Jealousy. 

And rivalry.

After the fight, with Zelus finally annihilated, Clark had been content to move on with his life by turning a permanent blind eye to Bruce Wayne and all of his activities in Gotham, both as a tycoon and as a vigilante, of equal controversy. He’d gone back to work at the Planet, he’d told Lois that he loved her, and for a short while, everything was peaceful. 

But the emergence of Steppenwolf and his parademons shattered that peace, and Clark, Bruce, and Diana had reunited once more, recruiting additional metahumans Barry Allen, Victor Stone, and Arthur Curry to vanquish yet another evil with the potential to end the world. 

Ever since that day, a tentative, unspoken ceasefire had been established between Clark and Bruce. 

But as Clark watched the forty-five year old billionaire aggressively hitting on Elsie from across the ballroom, he wanted nothing more than to irrevocably end that truce—and bury Gotham’s dark knight once and for all. 

Bruce was circling the young girl like a wolf, his cold eyes hungrily sweeping all over her tiny body, and Elsie—sweet, innocent, too-trusting Elsie—was completely oblivious to the fact that she was being cornered by a savage, selfish animal intent on devouring her. 

…Though if Bruce was an animal, then Clark was a beast. A filthy monster. 

It was Clark’s own fault that Elsie was in this vulnerable position in the first place. 

She’d taken his breath away when he’d come to her room to escort her to the gala, growing more beautiful and smelling even sweeter by the moment. In her dainty pink gown, Elsie was painfully lovely, and truly looked like some kind of ethereal fairy tale princess, one Clark longed to capture and lock in a tower and keep all to himself like a greedy dragon, burning everyone alive who would dare attempt to take her away from him. 

He’d truly tried his best to keep his animalistic Kryptonian urges in check as they’d entered the gala, vigilantly committed to not openly staring at his young colleague and making her uncomfortable. But that distressingly sweet, peachy smell of hers was drugging him to insanity just as strongly as her angelic face, and Clark was but one more sweet smile of hers away from popping a massive erection in public. 

And when Elsie fell onto his thigh as they were being photographed on the red carpet, her soft, plump buttocks pressing into his hard quad, Clark knew he had to distance himself from the girl as quickly as possible before he ripped her clothes off and savagely fucked her into the floor, right there in the hallway for all of Gotham to witness. 

Shackled by his violently overactive sex drive, Clark had no choice but to excuse himself upstairs, where he’d jerked himself off to six roaring orgasms in quick succession before his lustful mania had finally tempered enough for him to think with slightly more clarity. After washing himself, he’d returned to the gala with the sole intent of profusely apologizing to Elsie for breaking his promise to stay by her side and protect her, but he’d found her cornered by none other than Bruce Wayne, who’d picked tonight of all occasions to maintain a personal security detail.

Everywhere Bruce walked, four armed guards followed. And with Bruce monopolizing all of Elsie’s attention, keeping the young girl firmly by his side, Clark was effectively prohibited from accessing her. 

As his civilian self, at least. 

All Clark could do was watch and listen with steadily darkening fury as Bruce audaciously preyed upon Elsie all throughout the ten-course dinner, the speeches, the live auction, and even the musical performances. Bruce was employing a vigorous tactical assault of flattery and innuendo upon Elsie, and by the time the gala progressed to the afterparty, Clark nearly threw caution to the wind and activated his heat vision to incinerate the hedonistic bastard’s head right off. 

He could hear Elsie’s heart racing throughout the night, and her cheeks had remained permanently flushed, but whether she was enjoying Bruce’s attention or feeling threatened by it, Clark couldn’t conclusively determine.

Elsie was as polite as she always was, answering Bruce’s increasingly probing questions and doing her best to gather information about the Wayne Foundation in return—which Clark strongly suspected was likely for his reporting benefit. 

But when Bruce lowered his lips to whisper in Elsie’s ear on the dance floor—forgive my forwardness, but I have to ask: how is it you are completely covered up, barely showing any skin, and yet you’re still the sexiest thing in this entire ballroom—Clark couldn’t take it anymore. 

Balling his fists, he prepared to storm over to Bruce and throw the arrogant prick into high orbit, but suddenly, there was an elegant feminine hand on his shoulder.

“Easy there, tough guy,” the woman said in a lilting, breathy tone. “Mr. Wayne is surrounded by armed guards—they’ll shoot you down before you can get within ten feet of him.”

“I can handle the guards,” Clark said through gritted teeth, so angry he was shaking, but the woman gripped him harder and stepped in front of him, blocking his path.

For a brief, dark moment, Clark was nearly overcome by a violent impulse to shove her across the room. 

“Is that your girl he’s been talking to all night?” the woman questioned, a faintly amused expression on her face. “The one in pink?”

Clark was ready to tell the woman off with a litany of colorful swears that would deeply shame Ma were she ever to hear of it, but he paused once the impact of the woman’s question truly settled. 

He was behaving erratically—dangerously—blinded by wrath with even more potent intensity than the corrosive influence Zelus had wielded over Bruce. 

Despite how much he wanted her…Elsie wasn’t his. 

And she never would be. 

He had no right to act like a jealous, possessive lover. 

“She’s my assistant,” Clark answered eventually, reminding himself of that fact as he willed his infuriated heart rate to slow. 

The woman reached for his bowtie, idly smoothing the fabric with her long red nails. “Quite the generous employer you are, bringing her to a gala like this.”

“We were invited by the foundation’s PR Director,” Clark clarified. 

“Really?” Her left eyebrow slightly arched and her lips slowly curved in a subtly artful gesture reminiscent of a Golden Age actress. “So you must be a personal friend of Mr. Wayne?”

Clark released a wry laugh. “I’m no friend of his.”

“Well, who are you then?” the woman probed. “You must be quite the esteemed figure to be comped two fifty-thousand dollar tickets to Gotham’s event of the season.”

“Sorry to shatter the illusion,” Clark answered. “But I’m here as part of the press. I’m just a reporter for the Daily Planet.”

The woman’s leonine eyes—a vibrant hue almost the exact shade of kryptonite green—narrowed playfully. “Oh I don’t believe for a second you’re just a reporter.” She slowly lowered her hand from his bowtie and down the length of his torso and back up again, before finally pausing on his chest. “There’s something…dangerous in you.”

“And yet, you’re touching me,” Clark observed coolly, growing more and more perturbed by the intrusion into his personal space.

Who was this woman?

She playfully smirked and leaned forward, bringing her lips to his ear. “Perhaps I’m dangerous, too.”

Clark stared at her in shock as she quickly retreated and extended her hand. “Selina Kyle. Pleasure to meet you, Mr…?”

“Kent. Clark Kent,” he replied, accepting her handshake. “And what do you do, Ms. Kyle?”

Selina flipped her golden-blonde hair and rolled her toned shoulders, propping up her breasts in the process. Objectively, she was an undeniably gorgeous woman, practically oozing raw eroticism with her long, lean body, tanned skin, and striking facial features. She was the kind of femme fatale who could easily have any man in the room eating out of the palm of her hand with little more than a flutter of her long eyelashes. 

But there was only one woman Clark would drop to his knees for and beg for a taste of, and she was currently being pursued by one of the richest playboys on the Eastern Seaboard. 

Clark didn’t stand a chance.

“Let’s just say…I’m a lifestyle consultant,” Selina replied with no shortage of whimsy. “One of my clients bought my ticket tonight.”

“Generous client,” Clark acknowledged, echoing her words of mere moments before. 

Selina accepted a glass of champagne from a passing waiter, and for the first time, Clark found himself wishing he was capable of getting drunk. 

How nice it would be to have some kind of consumable to dull his senses and take the edge off of his fury. 

“He is…he does exactly as I say,” Selina took a sip of champagne, pursing her lips in admiration of the flavor. “Always eager to follow orders. He’s a good boy.”

A good boy?

Oh.

“So…you’re a—”

“A professional dominatrix, yes.” Selina stared at him expectantly. “Is that a problem?”

“Of course not,” Clark answered truthfully. “Honest work is honest work. So long as everyone is safe, informed, and all activities are consensual…I have no moral qualms with your…uhh…consulting.”

She maintained her unblinking gaze for several tense moments, before breaking into a wide, Cheshire grin. “You know, you can exhale, handsome. You’re blushing something fierce. I’m not about to bring out my cat o’ nine tails. Not on you, anyway—my efforts would be wasted.”

“Should I be insulted or flattered?” 

Selina hummed contemplatively. “It’s neither an insult nor a compliment. Just an observation about who you truly are beneath those glasses.”

“Who I truly am?” 

“Indeed.” Selina pressed herself against his side and looped her arm in his, guiding him around the outskirts of the ballroom in a languid stroll. “Look around this room. Powerful men, everywhere. Billionaires, politicians, athletes, celebrities, titans of industry…but they’re peacocks. Every last one of them. They believe they’re dominant creatures—and most of them are, to an extent. But do you know what happens to men who are so used to controlling everything in their worlds? They become exhausted. Behind closed doors…they crave not being in control.”

Clark distractedly adjusted his glasses, an odd sense of unease filling the pit of his stomach at Selina’s observations.

“The problem is,” Selina continued, “there are very few people powerful enough to take their power away—because there are very few people they respect enough to submit to.”

“And that’s where you come in?” Clark asked. 

Selina brought her hand back to his chest and returned her lips to his ear, and the unease in Clark’s stomach began to border on nausea. 

“I can guarantee you one thing, handsome: I can have each one of these men on their knees within ten minutes. But you, on the other hand…I could tell immediately that you were different.”

“Different how?” Clark asked suspiciously. 

Selina slinked back in front of him and confidently advanced with graceful, dancer-like movements, causing Clark to automatically retreat until his back was pressed against the wall.

She’d trapped him.

“It’s obvious to me that despite your big, strong presence…that you actually feel quite powerless in your life. Now, whether it’s due to your career, or your home life, or…other obligations…that weariness on your face confirms you’re the kind of man who is quite familiar with feeling…used. Serving others—even to your own detriment. But that’s not a natural state for you, is it?”

Selina stepped even closer, her breasts nearly flattened against his chest, and finally, Clark was able to pinpoint specifically why the brazen woman was making him so uncomfortable, and it had nothing to do with her profession. 

Their conversation was innately salacious in nature, and while Clark was no prude, he was still just a simple man from Kansas—one who happened to possess highly singular Kryptonian sexual urges. His loyalties and desires were exclusively focused on one particular innocent young woman.

Talking about sex with Selina—being touched by Selina—felt innately…wrong.

Almost like an act of betrayal. 

“Ms. Kyle, I need you to back off—”

“You’re a natural dominant. I can feel it simmering like an ember beneath this mild-mannered façade of yours. You’re a powerful, wild animal, Mr. Kent…not built for restraint or captivity. You have a hunger in your eyes. You’re starving.”

“Ms. Kyle—”

“—And I suspect that tiny, Bambi-eyed little thing you haven’t been able to take your eyes off of all evening is precisely the kind of sweet, juicy prey a beast like you needs to hunt down and devour. You’ll never be sated otherwise.”

Selina motioned to touch his face, but Clark firmly gripped her wrist before she could make contact, glaring at her dangerously.

He’d grabbed her too hard in his anger—almost hard enough to bruise—but before he could apologize, there was a gleam of what looked like arousal in Selina’s eyes. 

Did she…like it?

“That’s enough, Ms. Kyle,” Clark warned in a low voice. “I don’t know who the hell you think you are, or what childish games you’re playing—”

“Childish games? Darling, I have a PhD in behavioral neuroscience,” Selina asserted. “Prey drives, animalistic urges…they are quite literally my expertise. Academically, and…in other ways. Don’t lash out at me just because you’re too blinded by foolish propriety to accept who you really are.”

Chuckling to herself, Selina finally disentangled from his body, before reaching into her purse and extending a matte black calling card. 

“For whenever you decide to stop fighting your natural urges,” Selina said. Clark remained unmoving, so she boldly slipped the card directly into his pocket. “And since Bruce Wayne disappeared upstairs with your sweet little princess more than twenty minutes ago, you’re going to need someone highly experienced in submission to satisfy your appetites before you implode. I know a ravenous man when I see one. Call me when you’re ready—I have a very good girl in mind just for you.”

Selina leaned forward to plant a kiss on his cheek, but Clark swiftly evaded her contact without a single word goodbye, storming out of the ballroom and down the hallway to the elevators, his blood pumping dangerously fast with both boiling fury and icy dread. 

His sanity only continued to erode as he waited for the elevator, his mind assaulted with all kinds of vulgar images of his sweet, pure Elsie entangled in Bruce’s vile depravity—so Clark bolted towards the stairwell and ran all the way up to the fiftieth floor within seconds, too enraged with Bruce and too terrified for Elsie’s safety to restrain his speed.

He was going to murder Bruce Wayne.

He briefly paused in front of Elsie’s suite, heart breaking at the muffled sound of a high-pitched cry somewhere in the bedroom.

Elsie…

Unwilling to wait a fraction of a second longer, Clark shattered the metal door handle in his palm, shoved the doors open, and rushed through the hotel suite in search of the sweet girl who needed saving from the sadistic bat vigilante.

He barreled through the bedroom doors with his shoulders, splintering the wood, and he heard Elsie scream, a sound so gut-wrenching that Clark nearly fell to his knees in torment. 

But before Clark could take another step forward to rescue her, he was incapacitated by a violent onslaught of Elsie’s scent, so powerful he blacked out for several blissfully delirious moments. Her sweet fragrance was so strong in the air of the bedroom that it was as if oxygen—no, gravity—no longer existed on Earth. She was everywhere, within him and around him—suffocating him—the sheer pressure of her delicious flavor slicing through his alien flesh and practically crushing his skeleton, until his entire corporeal form was laid waste by an unmitigated, deranged form of animal lust—exclusively for her. 

Clark was so hard he was in agony, his vicious erection progressively splitting the fabric of his tuxedo pants with every heaving drag of Elsie’s scent he rapaciously sucked into his lungs. His jaw fell open, and he began to pant like a rabid animal, a string of saliva slipping down the corner of his mouth as he caught her sweet flavor on his tongue. He could feel the major veins in his body actively rising to the surface of his skin and protruding, starting with his temples and down his arms, his blood boiling like a cyclone with maniacal testosterone and raging adrenaline in a lethal cocktail of pure, undiluted sexual aggression. 

He had to taste her. 

He had to fuck her. 

He had to lick her and smell her and taste her and bite her and fuck her right fucking now—

“C-Clark?” Elsie was partially reclined on the bed, looking smaller and more vulnerable than ever at the center of the huge mattress, her pretty sunrise eyes wide and fearful as she protectively held a pillow against her chest. “W-what are you d-doing here?”

Clark shook his head, forcing himself out of his libidinous stupor, and finally recalled why he’d barged into her room in the first place. 

Elsie needed to be saved—and he was a hero. It was his duty to protect her, and keep her safe. 

Clenching his fists, Clark focused first on scanning Elsie over for injuries, puzzled that Bruce had changed her out of her gown and into a bathrobe in his attack, but he quickly realized that not only was Elsie physically unharmed, but she was also…alone. 

Elsie’s cheeks were flushed nearly red as she gazed up at him, her lower lip quivering as her heart rate climbed to panicked registers, and it was at that moment that Clark finally noticed a distinct…slickness coating her tiny, slender fingers. 

Bruce hadn’t been assaulting Elsie at all. He wasn’t even here. Elsie wasn't in any danger. 

And that little cry he’d heard in the hallway wasn’t a cry of distress. 

Clark had just walked in on Elsie…touching herself.

Chapter Text

“Thank you for walking me back to my room, Mr. Wayne,” Elsie said shyly to the intimidating business magnate as soon as they stepped out of the elevator and onto the fiftieth floor. 

Though she hadn’t actually asked him to accompany her. Mr. Wayne had simply insisted, announcing his intentions without even giving Elsie an opportunity to refuse—a level of self-assured presumption that seemed to characterize all of his interactions with people around him.

Over the course of the evening, Elsie had noticed that Bruce Wayne never explicitly asked for anything, as if neither rejection nor denial even existed in his consciousness. Through snapping his fingers or nodding his head, he just expected his every desire and whim to be fulfilled. 

He didn’t make requests—he made demands.

“It’s my pleasure, honey.” He offered a half-smirk, an objectively attractive sight at the surface level, but his dark eyes remained coldly methodical. Calculating. He was staring at her—no, staring through her—the way Elsie imagined a hunter might gaze upon a hapless doe within his crosshairs. 

Elsie vaguely recalled reading a magazine profile at some point that explained that the first Waynes to settle in the area that would eventually become Gotham actually had been avid hunters, earning great fortunes trading pelts with the French.

Was Mr. Wayne a hunter too?

Had she been…targeted?

Without taking his eyes off of her, Mr. Wayne made a subtle waving gesture, like casually swatting a fly, and the terrifying armed guards who had been looming over them all night like snipers quickly scanned the deserted hallway, before retreating back into the elevator with a synchronized nod. 

Elsie was now completely alone with Mr. Wayne. 

Clumsily stepping backwards, Elsie anxiously stuttered, “M-Mr….M-Mr. W-Wayne, umm—”

“There’s nothing to be nervous about, pretty girl,” he murmured as he advanced on her. "I’m not gonna hurt you.” Despite the reassurance, his words did little to settle her fright, particularly with his low, rasping voice. He was so big—perhaps even as big as Clark—his imposing silhouette plunging the world around her into darkness.

Bruce Wayne was nighttime personified. 

Elsie couldn’t suppress the mousy squeak that escaped her lips once her back hit the door, and Mr. Wayne stepped well into her personal space, trapping her in the peppery fog of his tobacco leaf cologne. “I just wanted a chance to chat privately for a few minutes. May I come inside?”

“Chat p-privately?” Elsie gulped. “B-but we’ve been talking all night!”

From the moment she’d collided with him outside of the ladies room several hours prior, Mr. Wayne had been exceedingly loquacious, quite far removed from the image of the aloof businessman Elsie had assumed Mr. Wayne to be. Not only had Mr. Wayne answered all of her questions about the Wayne Foundation—even sharing salacious gossip about the current board of directors—he’d also turned around and asked questions about her.

As the hours elapsed, Mr. Wayne’s inquiry had steadily evolved from merely friendly—what did you study in college, Elsie?—to increasingly personal—do you have a boyfriend, princess?

At one point, he’d even called her…sexy.

Elsie was painfully aware of her glaring inexperience with men, but she certainly wasn’t naïve enough to believe the billionaire Prince of Gotham harbored any kind of real personal interest in a plain, small town girl like her. Rather, Mr. Wayne’s probing questions made her feel less like she was being pursued romantically, and more like she was being interviewed, or perhaps even appraised, for some unknown position—though she couldn’t imagine why her nonexistent dating history would be relevant for any kind of potential employment. 

More than once throughout the evening, Elsie had considered mentioning that she’d already declined a junior assistant role in the Wayne Enterprises digital media subsidiary, to try and bring a halt to Mr. Wayne’s…inspection, but Elsie didn’t want to risk offending Mr. Wayne—and thereby reflecting poorly on the Daily Planet.

And even more importantly, Clark.

“…did I lose you somewhere, honey?”

Blush flooded Elsie’s cheeks, and she nervously licked her lips, mortified that she’d completely tuned out of whatever Mr. Wayne had been talking about as her distracted mind inevitably fixated on her boss. 

“I’m…I’m so sorry, sir.” Elsie swallowed hard, heart pounding in her ears. “I think I need to head inside—”

“Hey…relax.” Mr. Wayne took another step forward, completely flattening Elsie against the door. He extended his hand, and Elsie fearfully braced herself, unsure of what to do if he touched her. 

To her relief, he paused his movements before he could make contact, hovering a few inches above her arched shoulder. 

His sharp gaze softened to something contemplative—almost sorrowful—and after several moments, Elsie noticed that his wide, calloused, and heavily bruised hand was shaking, his platinum signet ring casting lightning-like flashes between them with every tremor. 

“Are you…okay, Mr. Wayne?” Elsie questioned with concern, wondering just what had caused him such gruesome injuries.

After a beat, Mr. Wayne cleared his throat and shook his head, almost as if he were breaking himself out of a daze. “Tell me, honey…what is your relationship with Clark Kent?”

“Relationship with Clark? I’m just his assistant,” Elsie answered, hoping her voice didn’t betray her disappointment at that truth. “Why do you ask?”

Mr. Wayne silently studied her for several moments, eyes narrowing in what appeared to be…skepticism? She couldn’t be sure. “He was staring at us all night. Well, staring at you.”

“Oh, I don’t think that—”

“He didn’t seem particularly pleased that you were spending time with me,” Mr. Wayne continued. “I think he was jealous.”

Elsie nearly laughed out loud. 

“It’s nothing like that. Trust me.” Elsie smiled weakly, trying her best not to wallow in self-pity at how profoundly uninterested in her Clark truly was. He’d left her all alone after he’d promised to stay by her side, and when he finally did emerge more than an hour later, his attention had been completely captivated by a glamorous blonde woman who looked like a supermodel. 

In a small voice, Elsie added, “We’re just colleagues. Clark is a very professional reporter. He was probably just trying to make sure I wasn’t making a fool of myself in front of you.”

“Making a fool of yourself?” Mr. Wayne was at least polite enough to feign incredulousness, comedically widening his eyes with a dramatic gasp. “Now why would he dare to think that would ever be an issue with a girl as polite as you?”

Elsie couldn’t help but giggle at the playful exaggeration in Mr. Wayne’s stern features. It was almost as if he were attempting to soothe her deeply wounded pride. 

For that, Elsie was grateful. 

“I think you know by now I can be a little…well, awkward,” Elsie confessed, cheeks reddening as her laughter settled. 

Elsie expected Mr. Wayne to follow up with some sarcastic quip, but instead, the corners of his lips slowly curved upward, and that unsettling coldness in his eyes suddenly warmed—for the first time all evening. 

“Actually…you’re truly one of the most enchanting women I’ve ever met. Awkwardness and all,” Mr. Wayne said, a layer of tenderness somewhat smoothing his gravelly voice. He slowly looked her up and down before adding, “I’ll tell you one thing: it’s a real goddamn shame I’m not at least a decade younger.” 

“P-pardon?”

“You are gorgeous.”

“Oh! Th-thank you—”

“You’re so sweet I can practically taste you. And…you’re good,” Mr. Wayne murmured absently, as if he hadn’t even heard her. “You’re good to your very core, aren’t you? You’re truly…like this.”

“I guess? I’m not sure what you mean.” Elsie shrugged. “I try to be a good person. To do the right thing. To…be kind. But doesn’t everybody?”

The small amount of genuine warmth and lightness in Mr. Wayne’s demeanor suddenly darkened, and it was at that moment that Elsie realized that perhaps there were two Mr. Waynes—two distinct personalities, within one large body. 

There was the billionaire playboy, the gregarious hedonist who seemed to navigate his environment with no shortage of charm, privilege, and control. 

But then there was something else. Something deeply feeling.

Something lonely, and almost…sad.

“Not everyone is like you.” He’d returned to intensely staring at her, his piercing gaze veering oppressive. “You’re a very special girl.”

“Umm…that’s nice of you to say.” Elsie chewed her lower lip, unsure of how to further respond to such a statement. “Th-thank you, sir—”

“Promise me you’ll stay this way.” Mr. Wayne’s hovering hand suddenly lowered to her side, gently closing around her waist in a tender squeeze, and Elsie had to bite her lip to subdue a whimper of fright. 

When Clark had touched her in the exact same place earlier in the evening, Elsie had been overcome with a sense of rightness and excitement. There was no fear or shame—she’d liked feeling Clark’s big hand on her waist.

She’d even wanted him to touch her in other places…

But with Mr. Wayne’s unwelcome touch, Elsie was uncomfortably reminded of those strict doctrines that had been beaten into both her consciousness and her body from as early as she could remember.

Your purity is your only value, you stupid, wicked child.

Your filthy soul will burn in Hell for all eternity if you ever let a man touch you—

“Promise me that—whatever happens—you’ll stay just like this…”

Elsie slowly inhaled, barely registering whatever Mr. Wayne was talking about now as she willed her racing heart to steady, banishing the cruel echoes from her childhood. 

She would not burn in Hell just because someone touched her, particularly if that touch wasn’t even asked for in the first place. 

She was not stupid. She was not wicked. 

And she was not a child.

Swallowing the anxious lump in her throat before panic could overtake her, Elsie determinedly reached into her clutch for her room key. 

“So how about we head inside for a nightcap, and then we can—”

“Actually, Mr. Wayne,” Elsie interrupted as she cautiously eased herself away from his grip, “it has been l-lovely getting to know you…but it’s time for me to say goodnight.”

Mr. Wayne appeared dumbfounded for several seconds, the look of someone completely bewildered to have been told no, and for a brief moment, Elsie feared he would react harshly. 

But like a perfect gentleman, Mr. Wayne quickly schooled his features and stepped several feet away from her.

“Of course, honey. My apologies—I didn’t mean to make you uncomfortable.” Mr. Wayne politely nodded. “I hope you enjoyed the gala.”

“I did—truly. It was spectacular,” Elsie responded with a shaky smile. “But the work of the Wayne Foundation is even more impressive. Especially the humanitarian aid in Nairomi. I’m sure you’ll be very happy with the article Clark writes about tonight.”

“Yeah, we’ll see about that.” He released a wry laugh, enjoying some private joke with himself.

He smoothly strolled towards the elevator, but suddenly paused and glanced back at her, a curious expression on his face. “Elsie…I’d really like to see you again.”

“You would?”

  “Very much.” Mr. Wayne briefly hesitated—his most puzzling behavior of the entire evening—before returning his intense stare to her face. “Would you be open to that?”

“Of course, Mr. Wayne!” Elsie answered, perhaps too quickly. She certainly wasn’t in a position to reject any potential new friends. “I’d love to!”

“Good. I’ll reach out next time I’m in Metropolis.” Mr. Wayne smiled softly—his warm smile—and inclined his head in her direction. “Sweet dreams, sweet girl.”

Elsie’s heart rate only returned back to normal once she was safely back inside of her suite, and she vowed not to speculate any further on Mr. Wayne’s strange words and even stranger actions in an effort to keep her panic under control. But as she slipped out of her gown and jewelry, she found that a different form of anticipation seemed to be circulating throughout her veins, as if all of her excess nervous energy was searching for a new purpose. Easing herself into the fine silk and cashmere of the hotel bathrobe, her flushed skin beaded with goosebumps, she found herself idly contemplating her body in ways she’d seldom considered before. 

Just like her face, Elsie’s body wasn’t really something she ever gave much thought to in terms of good or bad. When she was adopted by Granny, so much time for those first several years had been focused on making Elsie’s body healthy that there really wasn’t any opportunity for Elsie to develop self-awareness in terms of how her body appeared to others.

Beyond the fact, of course, that she was significantly smaller than most people. 

But now, as the featherlight luster of the exquisite silk settled against her bare skin like liquid, Elsie wasn’t thinking of her body in regards to her fragile health or her small size. 

Instead, Elsie thought of her body…as a woman.

The robe reminded her of the luxurious dressing gowns described in the steamy bodice-ripper novels Elsie had discovered in the library as a teenager—and still loved to read—those purple-prose paperbacks in which the beautiful heroine would render the strapping hero senseless with desire with little more effort than a hint of a bare wrist, or a well-turned ankle, or even more scandalously, a whisper of décolletage. 

Elsie absently trailed her fingers along her bare collarbone as she tiptoed back to the bedroom and settled on the oversized canopy bed, the butterflies in her stomach growing more pronounced as her rapidly burgeoning imagination inexorably cast Clark in the role of the handsome, smoldering hero—

As if electrocuted, Elsie immediately sat straight up, guiltily chewing her lower lip. It was bad enough for her to have a secret crush on her boss, but for her to fantasize about him sexually was surely tantamount to some kind of egregious ethical violation.

…Or was it?

Would it really be so terrible of her to enjoy a private fantasy with Clark at the forefront of her mind? 

Her imagination promptly decided for her, and it was only moments later that Elsie was once more reclined in a blushing, squirming heap as she pictured Clark wearing classic Regency attire befitting a rakish duke. She thought of his powerful thighs—so big and hard against her backside earlier that night—cloaked in fitted breeches. She thought of his muscular torso wrapped in a finely woven waistcoat, concealing the unmistakable peaks and valleys of his dangerously defined abdominal muscles.  

But the most compelling aspect of her fantasy by far was the image of desire across his handsome face. She imagined Clark’s brilliant blue eyes fixated exclusively on her, his full lips parted on a silent gasp as he stared at her as she writhed on the bed, his broad shoulders heaving up and down with every impassioned breath as she slowly but surely bared herself before his male gaze. 

In her private fantasy, Elsie found it easy to pretend that she was the kind of brave and sexually confident woman who could seduce a man as impressive as Clark, and before she even realized what she was doing, her fingers had moved down her stomach beneath her robe, idly hovering just above her underwear. 

There was a brief moment of intense, gripping shame—to touch yourself is a sin!—almost powerful enough to halt her movements, but it was promptly ameliorated by not just her sharpening physical desire, but also, her own determination, recalling the lessons she’d learned in therapy about self-pleasure. 

To touch herself was not a sin. It was her body—no one else’s. 

Closing her eyes, Elsie shakily parted her legs and slipped her hand into her panties, softly crying out loud at the first featherlight contact of her fingertips on the outside of her clitoris. She shivered in delight as that tingly heat that had been rushing through her blood—that anticipation—compressed with a new, focused intensity directly between her thighs. Elsie didn’t masturbate often, for the urge for physical pleasure manifested very rarely. Now, the urge was far stronger than it had been in recent memory—perhaps ever—as she pictured Clark’s big, powerful body crawling over her as she touched.  

Elsie had never before dared to penetrate herself, but as she teased her clitoris with thoughts of a Duke-Clark watching her—ahem, my lady, this wanton behavior veers most unseemly—she was overcome with not just a desire to feel gentle friction against her pleasure center, but also something…inside of her. 

Arching her hips, Elsie tentatively lowered her middle finger to her entrance, lightly experimenting with various strokes and pressures on her sensitive outer perimeter, marveling at how differently the pleasure seemed to build in comparison to when she rubbed her clitoris. Here, the pleasure was less acute, but not necessarily less enjoyable. Rather, it felt deeper somehow, all-encompassing instead of concentrated, as if harnessing something beyond her body. Something soulful. 

Biting her lip for bravery, Elsie carefully eased the tip of her finger inside, pausing with a cry of discomfort at the unexpected stretching sensation, just edging on painful.

Suddenly, something crashed outside of the bedroom, and Elsie yanked her hands away from herself in alarm, but before she could even begin to think about what could have caused the explosive sound, the doors to the bedroom disintegrated almost immediately afterwards with a deafening crack, as if an explosive had violently detonated, shards of wood and destruction flying everywhere as a massive body barreled inside. 

Elsie shrieked, scrambling to reach for the nearest object to protect herself.

A pillow.

Realizing with grave horror she didn’t stand a chance at defending herself, Elsie resorted to the only option she had left: pleading with the intruder to spare her life. 

But before she could part her lips and beg him not to harm her, Elsie finally took a good look at the man who had forced his way into the bedroom. 

Clark.

Never before had he looked more attractive to her.

…Or more dangerous. 

Standing before her in his tuxedo, his titanic muscles nearly bursting out of the elegant fabric, it almost appeared as if Clark was vibrating right where he stood, there was so much…tension in his body. There was something wild in his gaze—animal—his brow harshly angled in a menacing, predatory scowl so severe he seemed moments from shattering his glasses just from his deep frown. Elsie could barely detect the brilliant blue of his eyes, his pupils were so severely dilated.

He was panting—nearly wheezing—with palpable strain and exertion, nostrils flaring with every inhale and jaw slackening with every exhale. Elsie even noticed that a string of saliva had slipped from the corner of his lips. 

Was he hungry? Dehydrated, perhaps? 

There was also that strange rumbling sensation in her ears again, though it was far more powerful—daresay violent—than it had ever been before. Instead of simply tickling her auditory nerves, those fathomless sound waves seemed to rattle her through the depths of her spine and beyond, disrupting her insides with the unseen volatility of a major earthquake. 

And if the bizarre vibrations moving through the air weren’t enough to incapacitate Elsie, the sight of the now-familiar stress veins elevating on Clark’s forehead—one of the sure tells he was developing a migraine—was a vision so intimidating Elsie was completely paralyzed with both horror and fascination. But instead of bowling over in pain, Clark’s eyes rolled back into his head and his jaw fully dropped to an almost-smile, as if he were actually enjoying the experience.

Perhaps he wasn’t experiencing a headache…

“C-Clark?” Elsie asked in a near-whisper, clutching the pillow for dear life. “W-what are you d-doing here?”

Clark didn’t react to her question—Elsie couldn’t even tell if he’d heard her—and after several tense moments, he absently shook his head. His frown deepened to a deadly lupine glower, canines exposed, as he clenched and unclenched his massive fists. She felt rather than saw his eyes looking her over with abandon, his gaze so vehemently focused it was as if he were studying her underneath a microscope. Even though Elsie was fully covered, she’d never before felt more exposed in her entire life. 

…Could Clark somehow tell what she’d just been doing? 

As if to answer her unvoiced fear, his gaze suddenly settled on her hand—the one she’d been using to pleasure herself—and Elsie’s cheeks burned with so much shame that tears began to well in her eyes. 

Perhaps she really was a stupid, wicked child. 

You’re worthless.

Perhaps she really was filthy.

Ugly. Stupid. Wicked. Filthy. 

Worthlessuglystupidwickedfilthyyoudisgustme—

“You were…touching yourself…just now…” Clark suddenly said through labored breaths. His already deep voice seemed to have dropped another two octaves to an infernal pitch so low it was nearly undetectable. 

He didn’t sound human. 

Elsie swallowed hard, and Clark’s stare instantly flicked back up to hers. 

“Y-yes,” Elsie squeaked, too terrified and confused to lie. 

Clark closed his eyes and breathed deeply through his nose, and Elsie could have sworn she saw the vein on his forehead actually twitch and pulsate, like a snake about to strike. 

“Were you thinking of Bruce Wayne?” Clark asked venomously.

There was a part of her, deep down, that knew his question—or rather, accusation—was inappropriate. But instead of being filled with outrage, Elsie was instead overcome with her own highly inappropriate feeling. 

Pride. 

Perhaps Clark really had been jealous…

“Well? Were you thinking of Bruce? Does he turn you on?” Clark snarled, voice thundering throughout the bedroom. “Or were you thinking of some nice, harmless boy you left behind in Misty Falls, some high-school sweetheart…” 

Elsie shuddered at the aggression in his booming tone, nearly succumbing to her natural instinct to cower in fear at the slightest hint of confrontation. Clark had never raised his voice at her before now—not even during her first week of work when he’d been glaring at her almost non-stop—and Elsie couldn’t imagine what could have caused such a spiteful divergence in his otherwise mild personality. 

Elsie gasped, realizing that was the key. Something had caused a change in Clark’s personality.

And perhaps that same something was responsible for Clark’s physical changes, too, like the scary deepness in his voice, heavy breathing, blown pupils, and bulging veins.

Was he…drunk? 

Granted, Elsie knew next to nothing about alcohol intoxication apart from Granny’s occasional indulgence in a Cadillac margarita, which would simply render her extra jovial and red-faced. Perhaps Clark was having an averse reaction to the champagne that had been served at the gala. 

Satisfied with her reasoning, Elsie swallowed hard and did her best to appear brave.

“Clark…you should go back to your room and get some rest,” she said gently. “I think you maybe—”

“Who do you think about when you touch yourself?” He was breathing even harder now, and when he opened his eyes again, Elsie’s hand flew to her mouth in a silent scream.

His pupils were demonically dilated, his eyes completely obscured from corner to corner in a nameless, impenetrable color that seemed even darker than black. 

“Oh my God—”

“Who do you think about when you touch yourself? Who turns you on—”

“Clark, you’re scaring me!”

Elsie had nearly screamed the words, she was so frightened, and finally, it seemed as if whatever delirious, raging fugue Clark had fallen into was temporarily broken. He lowered his head and took several deep, slow breaths, and when he looked at her again, the whites in his eyes had returned. 

Had she imagined that terrifying infernal darkness in his eyes? 

Had it been some odd trick of the light against his glasses?

Clark swallowed with what appeared to be great effort, and Elsie chewed her lip as she warily watched him loosen his collar. 

“I’m…I’m very sorry, Elsie,” Clark rasped eventually. “I…I have no excuse for my actions, I—umm…I’m not…umm…I’m not quite myself…”

He took several unsteady steps backwards, and Elsie feared he would actually collapse as he shakily oriented himself around the room with no clear direction or purpose, color flooding his prominent cheekbones. “And I’m sorry about the door. Well, doors. I’ll…I’ll pay for all of the damage, of course. Forgive me…I-I’ll leave you alone…”

Alone. 

Every cell in Elsie’s body immediately rejected the suggestion. 

The last thing she wanted was to be left alone. 

“I was thinking about you,” she said on an impulse. 

She wasn’t sure who was more shocked by the words she’d spoken—Clark, or herself. His gaze instantly snapped back to hers, and he stared at her openmouthed for several moments so charged she could nearly visualize the electricity sparking between them. Elsie’s heart was racing so fast she was developing chest pains, her breathing just shy of full-blown hyperventilation. 

She’d just bared her jugular, and any moment now, the beast would strike—

“You were thinking of…me?” Clark whispered incredulously. “While you were touching yourself?”

Elsie lowered her head and nodded, too humiliated to witness Clark’s reaction. Would he make fun of her silly crush? Would he be furious with her unprofessionalism? 

Would he be disgusted by her attraction to him?

A minute or an hour could have elapsed between them, Elsie could no longer tell the difference. Time itself seemed suspended, with Elsie dangling precariously on the edge of plunging into an abyss of panic, shame, and self-loathing. 

One she wouldn’t be able to claw her way out of this time.

But just before it felt like her heart would give out from the palpitations, darkness just beginning to inch into her vision, Clark uttered a single, indubitable word. 

“Fuck.” 

Elsie tentatively dared a peek in his direction, gripping the pillow so tightly against her chest that her knuckles were moments from splitting her skin. 

Their gazes met, and for a split second, Clark’s eyes flashed completely black again, too quickly for Elsie to conclude if it was her imagination—or more likely, her anxiety—playing tricks on her. 

“C-Clark?” She needed him to say something. Anything. 

He seemed to argue with himself for a few moments, but soon, he steeled his gaze and hardened his jaw.

In a blur of movement too fast for Elsie to fully perceive, his jacket was off, and the pillow was torn from her hands.

And finally, Clark was on top of her. 

“Clark! Oh my G—”

His lips crashed down onto hers with so much sheer force Elsie immediately lost her breath, almost as if she’d been shoved. But as soon as Clark’s immovable weight settled on top of her, his warmth surrounding her, his heady woodland scent filling her lungs—Elsie lost all interest in seeking oxygen. 

She didn’t need to breathe—Clark was now her air. 

Nothing in the world—nothing in the universe—mattered more than Clark’s body in contact with hers. She didn’t care if he crushed her, or even if she suffocated, so long as some part of her remained in consistent contact with his flesh.

It was like a new button had been pressed somewhere deep inside, a little flame in the darkness, activating a dormant part of herself she’d never noticed before—something just as wild and hungry as Clark. The needy ache that had been gently thrumming between her thighs ever since she’d started touching herself was now an excruciating emergency, so acute it was actually edging on painful.

“Oh, God…Elsie…sweet, sweet Elsie…my sweet girl,” Clark groaned, trailing his tongue along her lower lip. “Open your mouth, baby…open it…please…”

Elsie obeyed mindlessly, squeaking in surprised delight as Clark savagely shoved his tongue into her mouth, rapidly chasing and twisting it around hers with so much targeted aggression it was as if his tongue were hunting hers down. He was…messy with his kisses, gluttonous, jaw clicking with his hungry efforts to consume her, his labored breath hot on her cheek as he urged himself deeper into her mouth, seemingly unbothered by the clashing of their teeth. 

This was nothing at all like the sweet and chaste way Elsie imagined her first kiss might be.

…And she loved it.

Even though she had no idea what to do, Elsie was perfectly content to let Clark take charge as he wildly moved his lips against hers, practically bathing the lower half of her face in his saliva, his kisses were so savage. It wasn’t just her lips and tongue that Clark seemed intent on taking into his mouth. It was her cheeks, her jawline, and even her chin—he was everywhere at once, practically scent-marking her with his cool, sensual flavor. 

Whatever Clark wanted to do with her body—whatever frenzied way he wanted to kiss her or touch her—Elsie knew that she wanted it, too. Unequivocally. For the first time in her life, her mind was completely at ease, all thoughts and fears submerged in a fathomless pool of desire she never wanted to surface from. It was as if this was her purpose, this very moment, lying safe and small beneath Clark’s massive, powerful body as he did anything and everything he wanted to her. 

At some point, he’d positioned his hand beneath her jaw, his fingers gently resting around her throat, and Elsie wasn’t remotely concerned by the very obvious reality that she was even more vulnerable in this position, that Clark could easily choke her if he wanted to, his hand was so big. Somehow, Elsie knew she was perfectly safe with Clark. 

She knew he would never hurt her.

Elsie was hardly aware of the fact that, between Clark’s weight and Clark’s tongue, she could barely breathe. But almost as if he were somehow attuned to her increasing need for air, Clark suddenly shifted his weight onto his arms, lowering his kisses to her neck, and then her chest. 

Elsie moaned loudly when Clark suddenly brought his hand to her torso, harshly yanking the belt of her robe until it came apart at her sides. 

Never before in her life had she been more exposed in front of another person.

“Oh, fuck…Elsie…” Clark was panting so heavily his breath was coating the entirety of her torso, causing her naked skin to break out in fresh goosebumps—and her nipples to harden to stiff peaks. “Christ, I…fuck…”

Elsie moistened her lips as Clark’s gaze swept over her nudity, eyes darkening as they settled on her breasts. She wasn’t sure what he was going to do, or if there was something she was supposed to do—perhaps take her underwear off?—but for the moment, it seemed as if all Clark wanted to do was stare. 

Reasoning this brief pause would probably be a good time to inform Clark she’d never done anything like this before, Elsie cleared her throat. “Umm…C-Clark, I—”

“You are so…God, you’re so small…so beautiful…so perfect,” Clark murmured reverently as he slowly lowered his kisses to her sternum. “Sweet girl…sweet Elsie, baby…can I touch you?”

Elsie was so entranced by his heated words that she forgot to use her own, and it wasn’t until Clark suddenly looked back at her face did Elsie realize he was actually expecting her to verbalize her answer. 

That simple gesture—searching for her active consent—seduced Elsie just as powerfully as his physicality. 

If there were any lingering doubts in her mind about the rightness of what was going on between them, they were now entirely obliterated. It didn’t matter that she’d only known Clark a short while. It didn’t matter that he was her boss. 

Elsie knew with all her heart that he was the right man to give her body to for the very first time. 

“Please…please touch me,” Elsie breathed, cheeks warming at her own boldness. “I want you to…to touch me.”

Clark returned his gaze to her breasts, and Elsie felt pleasurable tingles brightly flaring beneath the surface of her skin like sparklers as he trailed his hand up her stomach, completely spanning the width of her waist and ribcage with his vast touch. 

When he finally brought his hand to her breast, gently cupping the fleshy mound and molding it to his palm, Elsie’s head fell back in pleasure as those unseen sparklers suddenly compounded between her thighs with percussive intensity, triggering a sharp rush of sheer heat to surge throughout her sensitive folds. 

Clark groaned so deeply he was practically growling, and it was at that moment that Elsie realized it wasn’t just heat flowing from her body. It was wetness. And a lot of it.

It was…slick.

Clark squeezed her breast a bit harder, his kisses growing wetter and more urgent as his lips approached her nipple, and when he closed his mouth around the sensitive peak, it triggered a sharp, keening throb deep in her pelvis that almost felt like cramps, and yet somehow…pleasurable.

She needed him…there.

“Clark…oh God, Clark…p-please—”

“I know, baby, I know…I know you’re wet. I know you’re needy. I’ll take care of you,” Clark assured with a teasing lilt that seemed to only excite her even more. He hungrily swirled his tongue around her nipple, laving it with deep, appreciative moans as if she were his favorite dessert, as his other hand slowly slipped down her stomach and settled between her thighs. 

But instead of touching her where she really wanted—Elsie even had a brief image of Clark ripping her panties off—he paused.

Elsie whined in frustration, and began begging for something she couldn’t even fully understand, much less identify. “Clark….I’m…I…umm…I n-need—”

“I know, sweet girl,” Clark cooed. “I’ll take my time and get you nice and ready for me. I promise you, baby—I won’t hurt you.” He gently scraped his teeth against her nipple as his hand slowly slid up her inner thigh, and it was as if he’d hit an internal electrical board Elsie hadn’t even known she’d possessed. Her nipple was a short fuse, tingling and flaring, threading from her breast through her lower abdomen and ending at her clitoris, before looping around ten times over, and Elsie thrashed and cried out from the pleasure. 

With a gently firm stroke, he finally urged his warm fingertips against her tender core, her wet underwear her only layer of protection, and Elsie’s back arched as her cry edged to a near scream, she was so delightfully overwhelmed. 

Clark slightly increased the pressure of his touch to a level that seemed to specifically target every last nerve ending in her clitoris, and Elsie instinctively widened her legs, hips rocking in desperate search for more of his attention. As if he could somehow sense what she was incapable of voicing, that she needed more, Clark adjusted his touch even further, broadening his strokes to encompass the full surface area of her center, cupping her entirely with his fingers.

He kissed his way to her other breast and hungrily sucked her neglected nipple with a thundering moan that vibrated throughout her insides, all the way to her fingers and toes, and the minimal intelligent thoughts remaining in Elsie’s mind instantly evaporated. She was a creature of instinct, whining and thrashing as he quickened his massage against her sensitive, swollen clitoris to a frequency that matched the rapid pounding of her heartbeat.

And then, even faster. 

Elsie was profoundly overstimulated, her tender senses unable to reconcile the delicious feeling of Clark’s full lips sharply tugging her aching nipple into his hot mouth, with the rapturous agony of his massive, hard hand grinding against her flooding sex. His scent filled her lungs to bursting, those heady woodsy notes amplified by a new…spiciness that seemed to be growing progressively stronger and more intoxicating by the moment.

And then, there were his moans, a dark, rumbling symphony of pure masculine lust that sent Elsie’s arousal hurtling to an aerial summit so high that she felt like any moment now, she’d disintegrate entirely under the sheer erotic pressure. 

“Come for me, baby…come on my hand,” Clark urged, and for a brief moment, Elsie was confused, until she remembered that he was likely referring to that ever-elusive peak she’d countlessly read about in her favorite bodice-rippers, but had never actually achieved on her own. Coming probably meant orgasming, which was the term her psychiatrist had used when describing the specific mechanics of sexual activity, and Elsie bashfully chewed her lip to try and garner the courage to inform Clark she’d never…come…before.

But before she could reveal that embarrassing truth, Clark suddenly seemed to move with a new urgency, abandoning his hungry suckling of her nipple for brazen, wild licks, laving his thick, meaty tongue across the full surface area of her breast as he vibrated his wrist even faster between her legs. 

“C-Clark…oh G-God—”

“Come for me, sweet girl,” Clark groaned huskily. “I need it, baby, please—let it happen, let it all out…I know you’re close. Let me have it—right in my hand…”

He yanked the soaked fabric of her underwear to the side, parted her labia, and brought his middle finger directly to her unprotected clitoris, and close instantly became now. There was a brief moment of utter stillness—for several seconds, Elsie couldn’t feel, hear, or see anything at all—but then, all sensation seemed to simultaneously implode within her body with the force of dynamite.

Elsie was destroyed.

This was nothing at all like the way orgasms were described in the passionate love scenes of her favorite Regency romances. This was no gentle release. Rather, Elsie’s first orgasm—conjured by Clark’s fingers—tore through her body with the destruction of a catastrophic natural disaster, leaving unmitigated, devastating repercussions in its wake. White-hot ecstasy burned her from the inside out in boiling, high-pressure clouds of pure volcanic lust, and Elsie lost all control over her motor functions as the erotic hurricane ravaged her for all of her humanity. She was vaguely aware of the sound of her own screaming, hot tears streaming down her flushed cheeks as she convulsed beneath Clark’s crouching form, but the sudden, sharp torrent of wetness from her body that spilled onto Clark’s fingers and the sheets beneath brought her acutely back to awareness. 

Surely she hadn’t actually…wet herself.

…Had she?

Mortified, Elsie struggled to apologize, but it was impossible to speak through her heaving gasps for air as the billows of pleasure continued to storm throughout her veins.

“I’m…I’m s-s-so…s-sorry—”

“Don’t ever apologize for your pleasure,” Clark interrupted, almost harshly, and Elsie instinctively flinched. Softening his voice, he added, “I love that you can squirt, sweetheart. I love that you released these sweet juices for me—you smell so fucking good.” He made a point of inhaling deeply, taking a deep drag of air into his lungs with a growl, and Elsie watched in fascination as his impossibly darkened eyes rolled back into his head.

Squirt? Juices? Was that the proper name for what had just happened?

And Clark could…smell her?

Elsie thought to ask for clarification, but was promptly distracted by the feel of Clark trailing increasingly wet kisses down her still-heaving stomach, and all she could do was cry out in delight.

She could die perfectly happy with Clark kissing her.

He paused just beneath her navel, hands caging her hips as his fingertips toyed with the band of her underwear, and he stared up at her through vehement, yet pleading, eyes. “Baby—I have to taste you. Can I…please?”

Wasn’t that what he’d already been doing? His kisses had long been much closer to licks anyway, utilizing far more tongue than lips as he’d brandished sensual attention across her breasts and stomach. 

Was he asking to kiss her more? Perhaps her thighs? 

Elsie couldn’t think of anything better.

“Yes…yes, please,” she answered. “I mean…only if you want to.”

She certainly didn’t want to be too greedy with his incredible kisses. 

“Oh, I want to, sweetheart.” Clark’s lips parted on a silent gasp as he tugged on her underwear, slowly slipping the wet fabric down her legs and off her feet. She expected him to toss them on the floor in the same place he’d thrown his jacket, but instead, he shoved her panties into his pocket. “You have no idea how long I’ve been dreaming of having you on my tongue.”

She yelped in surprise when suddenly, he shifted down the bed and knelt on the ottoman, yanking her by the ankles and pulling her along with him, before shoving her legs apart and shouldering her thighs, opening her sex…obscenely. 

The unexpectedly vulnerable position—the sheer exposure—caused Elsie’s terror to edge over her arousal, her mind unable to fully comprehend the abject intimacy of Clark’s face so close to the most private part of her body. Was he appraising her? Studying her? Did he find her lacking? Did he disapprove of her grooming choices?

Being on her back with her legs wide open, unsure of what the figure below was doing or thinking, reminded Elsie far too much of her first gynecological exam shortly after her rescue. Elsie had eventually come to realize that the doctors and case workers had been attempting to confirm with physical evidence whether or not she’d been a victim of sexual assault, and if she’d had a voice at the time, she would have truthfully informed them that no one had ever touched her, that such exams were not necessary. 

But Elsie didn’t have a voice back then. And the nerve damage in her wrists from the barbed wire—and subsequent reconstructive surgeries—was so dire she couldn’t even steady her hands long enough to write. She had no way of explaining that she’d lived in a commune where purity was valued above all else, where she’d been told since before she could remember that her virginity was the only part of herself worth protecting.

Sitting in that stark hospital room, nakedness protected only by a paper gown as fluorescents illuminated her shame like Judgment Day, she’d had no choice but to panic and cry with the arrival of the doctor, who’d proceeded to lock her squirming feet in stirrups, before taking a cold metal speculum and painfully shoving it—

“Hey, hey…what’s the matter, sweetheart?” Clark suddenly asked, concern marring his features. “Do you want me to stop? Am I moving too fast?”

Elsie hadn’t even realized she’d started crying again—this time, in fear—and she quickly shook her head and scrubbed her eyes with her fist. Clark was being so wonderful with her, offering her even more of his incredible kisses, and she was ruining everything with her anxiety.

She had nothing to fear with Clark. 

With a steadying breath, Elsie shook her head and forced a smile on her face, hoping Clark would resume his kisses and fully banish the remnants of her fear, but instead, he kept staring at her. 

“I need you to use your words, sweetheart,” Clark said gently, tenderly stroking the skin of her outer thigh. His hand was so big that Elsie idly questioned if he could actually enclose the entire width of her thigh with just his grip. “I won’t do anything you’re not comfortable with. I’m really sorry if I scared you—”

“You didn’t!” Elsie interjected. The last thing she wanted was for Clark to think he’d done anything wrong. Clark was perfect. “I’m just…just…umm…”

“A little nervous?”

“Well…y-yeah,” Elsie admitted bashfully. “B-but I want to!” 

Clark softly chuckled. “Okay—then we’ll take it nice and slow.” He lowered his mouth to her inner thigh a few inches above her knee and planted a soft, prolonged kiss, causing Elsie to shiver and sigh in delight, his lips were so…magical. “In fact…I’ll gladly stay down here all night if you’ll let me.”

It was Elsie’s turn to giggle. “I have a feeling you’ll probably get bored with that pretty quickly.” She highly doubted he’d be content to simply kiss her legs for hours on end. Men liked sex, after all. Elsie knew that much.

“You underestimate just how ravenous you make me, baby,” Clark teased, his kisses slowly moving upward, which puzzled Elsie. He opened his mouth and began to draw small circles with the tip of his tongue the closer he approached the hypersensitive juncture of her thighs, and Elsie whined in arousal and embarrassment as she felt a fresh surge of moisture release from her sex.

Clark deeply inhaled—and then growled. “Your scent is intoxicating. I’m already addicted to your taste. With your permission…I’ll happily spend the rest of the night licking this sweet little pussy until you can’t come anymore. We don’t have to go any further.”

Licking…what? 

Elsie frowned and chewed her lip, suddenly feeling like she was missing something obvious. “P-pardon?”

“You have the prettiest little pussy,” Clark rasped, his lips and teeth closing in on the particularly soft flesh of her uppermost thighs. “So pink and sweet and so fucking mouthwatering…just begging to be eaten…”

Puzzled, Elsie followed his gaze to her…there…and finally, realization dawned on her. If pussy meant her sex—as opposed to the euphemistic terms Elsie was most familiar with, like folds or privates or Aphrodite’s secret purse—then that meant licking her pussy was another way of saying—

“Oh! You mean oral sex!” Elsie gasped. “You…you want to perform oral sex on me?”

In the rare instances of cunnilingus she’d read about in historical romance novels, the act was most often referred to as “diving for pearls.”

Clark paused and glanced up at her, a curious expression on his face. “Don’t you like to be eaten out?”

Now, Elsie was confused again. “Eaten out?”

“Elsie, do you actually like having your pussy licked?”

Elsie shrugged, feeling increasingly awkward. “I…I don’t really know…umm…”

Clark’s eyes widened. “Oh baby, don’t tell me your previous partners have denied you oral, those selfish—”

“No no, it’s not like that!” Elsie lowered her hands to her…pussy…needing to cover herself to preserve what little dignity she had left. “You see, I…I haven’t actually had any previous partners.”

Every muscle in Clark’s body immediately stiffened before her very eyes, and for several moments, he was as motionless as a statue.

When he spoke again, his voice had returned to that inhumanly low pitch, and Elsie’s heart raced in renewed terror.

“You…you haven’t had any previous partners,” Clark repeated slowly. “So that means…you’ve never had sex?”

Elsie wasn’t sure if it was a good thing or a bad thing that he wasn’t looking directly at her, his stare instead fixated on the part of her now concealed by her hands. 

“Yes,” Elsie answered hesitantly. 

“Oh my God, Elsie…you’re…a virgin?”

He uttered the word as if it were offensive to him somehow, something repulsive and sickening. It was as if she’d been doused with cold water, all of the fires of arousal immediately extinguished—all of her darkest fears and shames made manifest in the ashes. Chagrined, Elsie eased her legs off of Clark’s shoulders and shifted backwards against the headboard, bringing her knees into her chest to hide her nakedness. 

She was kidding herself, thinking a sophisticated and experienced man like Clark would ever want to bother with someone as young and clueless as she was.

She could pretend all night long she was the heroine in a romance novel—but it would never be the truth. 

She was still a broken, stunted, scarred little girl.

Elsie kept her head lowered as she heard Clark rise to his feet, muttering something about having a migraine and needing to return to his own hotel room. There was a small part of her that was tempted to lash out at him for such a pitiful lie—they both knew quite well he didn’t have a headache—but that brief, vengeful instinct was simply the overly protective representative of the vulnerable emotions Elsie was truly feeling. 

She was embarrassed beyond comprehension, her self-esteem crushed to rubble. 

She’d been unambiguously and thoroughly rejected—and she was heartbroken.

Elsie chewed her lower lip and kept her gaze fixed on her knees, picturing herself shrinking to nothingness as Clark’s footfalls grew more and more distant. It was a technique she’d learned as a little girl to protect herself from violence; if she simply disappeared, if she was silent and invisible, then no one could hurt her.

It was only when she heard the front door close—when she was certain she was alone—that Elsie hauled herself with great effort out of the toxic familiarity of that dark and lonely mental cave built entirely out of trauma and fear.

She willed herself back to the present. She was alone, and she was safe.

But she was also devastated.

So for the rest of the night, with nothing else to do, Elsie allowed herself to cry.

There were a great many things Clark knew he had to be ashamed of, but making Elsie cry was now at the very top of the list. 

In close second, however, was the compromising position he currently found himself in—beating himself raw, right in the innocent young girl’s bed. 

In one hand he held her panties to his nose, and not just the pair he’d pulled off of her mere hours prior. When he’d blindly broken into her apartment after flying out of Gotham in a sexually aggressive fury, he was beyond delirious, his frenzied, insatiable arousal for the tiny girl burning to a murderous fever that would have had him slaughtering ten-thousand people if he didn’t secure some relief—and fast. He’d stormed his way through her apartment, practically wheezing in an effort to inhale as much of her sweet redolence as possible, and hadn’t even bothered arguing with himself as he made a beeline for her laundry basket, grabbing a fistful of her panties in manic desperation for something that smelled like her pussy before he lost his fucking mind and burned Metropolis to the ground.

It would have been comical, if it weren’t so revolting—a panty-sniffing Superman, half-dressed in his red and blue skin suit, jerking off in an unsuspecting woman’s bed.

He’d lost count of the number of times he’d already ejaculated—soiling her soft, baby pink sheets with his prolific emissions as he rutted into her pillows like a rabid dog scenting a female in heat—in what was essentially a perfect, illustrative microcosm of what was so inherently wrong with his interactions with the young girl in the first place. 

Elsie was sweet, innocent, and pure, and Clark was dangerous, deceitful, and perverse— violating her with his unhinged animalistic desires. 

Would she ever recover from how monstrously he’d already traumatized her with his lusts?

He’d been so close to having her, so close to tasting her, her dripping pussy mere centimeters away from his mouth, and it had taken every last shred of morality and willpower within his Kryptonian flesh to physically tear himself away from her before he defiled her beyond recognition in willful disregard of her tender inexperience. 

It truly disturbed him, just how savagely turned on he was by the revelation of Elsie’s virginity. Virgins had never before held any appeal—if anything, the idea had been a turn-off—but knowing now that Elsie was a virgin activated an entirely new realm of singular primordial impulses Clark could barely identify, much less control. It was pure animal instinct, reckless and amoral and ancient and wild. He was a predator swept up in an irrepressible prey drive, and Elsie's untouched pussy was his sole target. 

He wanted to claim and possess her in ungodly ways no sane man should ever desire. 

He wanted to hunt her down, and eat her alive. 

Clark knew he’d never forgive himself for being the cause of her heartache, for being the reason why the light faded from her pretty sunrise eyes. 

Had he stayed in her hotel room a second longer, however, he would have succumbed to his filthy urges, for his arousal for the girl was simply too violent and unstable—and Elsie was simply too irresistible. He would have held her down in precisely the domineering way his basal instincts demanded, attacking her tiny pussy with his mouth until he wrung out every last drop of sweetness from her hole. 

And then, he would have mounted her, and quite literally fucked her within an inch of her life.

To steal her innocence in such a barbaric, ruthless way wouldn’t have just been a mere unforgivable offense, but an unlivable one. 

Clark would not be able to live with himself if he’d caused her physical pain; he’d sooner take a kryptonite bullet directly to the chest.

Yet there was no calming himself down from the dark, lecherous rage now that it had been activated. There was no reasoning away his erection. It was an arousal irrevocable, a biological compulsion to chase and capture and taste and fuck his beautiful, ripe little mate. There weren’t enough cold showers in the world, no temperature in the galaxy low enough, to temper the magmatic fever that burned within his body exclusively for Elsie. He’d kissed her, touched her, had watched the gorgeous girl come, and had listened to her cry out so sweetly as her delicious little peach released its juicy nectar into his hand. Now, Elsie was embedded within his very veins, circulating like poison, and his blood pumped only for her. There was simply no escaping her allure—she’d swallowed him whole. 

If he didn’t adore her so much, he would have hated her. 

The image of her lush, wet pinkness was permanently burned into his mind, the most delectable exemplar of abject femininity he’d ever witnessed, could ever fathom, and it was with a roar that Clark ejaculated—again—as he pictured himself grabbing her hips and pulling her down onto his face, tongue-fucking her tiny hole with his nose against her clit until she squirted all over him.

Refractory was mere milliseconds, and it was with a howl of sheer, desperate agony that Clark rolled over and proceeded to fuck himself into her sheets, imagining her squirming and crying out beneath him with her trembling legs locked over his shoulders. He’d have her pinned down and helpless as he ripped her little pussy apart with his cock, shoving himself all the way into her stomach and beyond, pumping her belly so full of his seed she’d burst.

Clark exploded, tears beading in his eyes from the erotic torture as he rolled back onto his back, already bucking his hips as he fisted his aching, blistered cock in a violent blur, this time picturing Elsie impaling herself on his erection as he fucked himself into her.

He imagined throwing her down onto her stomach and fucking her from behind, and he came again. 

He imagined shoving her onto her knees and ramming his cock down her throat as he fisted her hair, and he came again. 

He thought about desecrating Elsie’s mouthwatering little body in ways he’d never before even considered with a woman—even in fantasy—mind racing at the speed of light with dark predilections and kinks that had never before entered his consciousness. He thought of spanking her, and then shoving his cock into her ass—fucking her anally until she bled. He thought of tying her down and restraining her, bruising her and punishing her, biting her and choking her, torturing her with so many orgasms she’d be begging for him to stop, praying to him for relief as if he were a god.

Or more like her devoted devil.

It was sometime shortly before the sun rose that the clouds of lustful mania finally began to recede, opening his exhausted mind to clarity—and guilt.

He wasn’t just perverted—he was deranged.

With a sigh, Clark reluctantly eased himself off of her bed, and methodically gathered her sheets and pillowcases, carrying them to the small laundry closet back near the entrance to her apartment. After he started the wash, he took care to scrub all other evidence of his vulgar intrusion throughout her home so that nothing appeared disturbed or out of place.

It was bad enough that he’d practically forced himself on her, leaving her in tears due to his inability to restrain his raging lusts.

He didn’t need to terrorize her further and also be the reason Elsie feared for her safety in her own home.

He was in the process of replacing the scented candles, paperback romance novels, and potted plants he’d knocked off of a hallway shelf in his initial mad rush to find Elsie’s panties, when his eyes fell upon a harrowing image that immediately made his blood run cold. 

Clark didn’t think it was possible to hate himself even more for his sick obsession, but now, he reached a new, unfathomable low. 

In a simple three by five print in a nondescript black frame, a kindly older woman with long silver hair was standing next to a skeletal little girl seated in a wheelchair. They were positioned in front of a tasteful colonial home, likely somewhere in New England. 

The woman was smiling—the child was not. 

The little girl’s limbs were almost completely covered in bandages, and her bony face was bruised and welted. And yet, there was something oddly adorable about the presence of pink barrettes and bows in her pixie-cut hair. 

She had eyes the color of dawn—a flash of pure gold on a field of green. Her haunting gaze was as heartbreakingly terrified as it was steadfastly determined to survive, no matter the odds stacked against her. 

Perhaps some part of his psyche had blocked out the obvious markers. He really should have recognized her before now. 

But his subconscious could no longer continue to lie to him. 

That mysterious little girl he’d pulled from that fire in Wyoming, that horribly abused child he’d saved eleven years ago…was Elsie. 

“Fuck.”

Chapter Text

It was certainly a naïve notion, but there was a tiny part of Elsie—even through her desperate, heaving sobs—that had hoped that Clark would eventually come back to her room and apologize for his hurtful behavior. She imagined he’d storm back into the hotel suite in a passionate rush, grasp her hands and fall to his knees before her, and beg for her forgiveness with his irresistible velvety voice and mesmerizing aurora-blue eyes.

She’d accept his apology, of course—Elsie had never been very good at holding grudges for long—and it would be with nothing more than a smile that Clark would scoop her up in his strong arms, banishing all remnants of her temporary heartbreak with a breathtaking kiss.

And then, he’d carry her right back to the bedroom, and continue what he’d started.

But as the long hours of her violent weeping faded to catatonic exhaustion, and the pitch of night made way for a cold gray morning, Elsie was forced to abandon those gullibly girlish hopes, and accept the harsh reality that Clark Kent, truly, held no attraction to her whatsoever.

Just because she liked him did not mean that he liked her.

She tried to tell herself that this was perfectly acceptable as she took one last indulgent shower in the gilded palace that was the suite's luxurious bathroom. Elsie had survived just fine without ever experiencing the touch of a man, and surely she could easily go back to living the way she had before. It wasn’t as if the desire for sex and romantic intimacy had ever really crossed her mind with much frequency, prior to meeting Clark; she’d never thought such things would ever even be possible for her.

But as she dressed, packed, and made her way downstairs to the hotel lobby at exactly nine a.m. as they’d originally agreed upon, Elsie was also forced to acknowledge that she was lying to herself.

She wanted romance.

She wanted…sex.

And she specifically wanted them from Clark.

To her continued disappointment, Clark didn’t join her for the car ride to the ferry—the driver announcing that she was the only scheduled passenger—and it dawned on Elsie with increasing dread that not only did she lack Clark’s attraction, but also, apparently…his friendship.

Perhaps even his respect.

Surely he wasn’t actually avoiding her…was he?

When she finally returned home in the early afternoon after picking up Teddy from the pet hotel, Elsie was fully prepared to spend the rest of her day off in self-pity, crying her eyes out until she couldn’t cry anymore. Even she recognized it was a little pathetic, but Elsie had learned after years of therapy that the best way for her to move past negative emotions was to move through them.

Those long, painful hours in her psychiatrist’s office had taught her that it was very unhealthy for a woman like her to bottle up her feelings for too long.

Fresh tears already welling in her exhausted, puffy eyes, Elsie released Teddy from his carrier and shuffled to the bedroom, not even bothering with unpacking her clothes as she collapsed onto the sheets. She took a deep breath in preparation to allow herself to plunge headfirst into her heartbreak—so that she could acknowledge it, process it, and eventually move on from it—but the scent of her detergent seemed stronger than it typically was, the light linen fragrance now an aggressive assault, and instead of gasping for air from sobbing, Elsie was instead gasping for air from sneezing.

With a pained whine, Elsie pushed herself off the bed and blindly reached into her purse for a tissue, but before Elsie could spend much time mulling over whether or not she was developing an allergy to the laundry formula she’d been using for years, her phone suddenly started vibrating.

Elsie frowned—she’d placed it on do not disturb as soon as she’d boarded the ferry to Metropolis, and she no longer had any contacts who could bypass the restriction now that Granny was no longer alive. Scrubbing her eyes with a sniffle, she shakily rose to her feet and unlocked her phone, heart sinking in disappointment at the revelation that she still had no communication from Clark whatsoever.

Instead, she had a message from Jenny Jurwich, Perry White’s assistant, who had sent so many texts in such a short period that the silencing feature on her phone had effectively been nullified. Before Elsie could see what Jenny needed, however, a rapid succession of news alerts suddenly populated the screen.

Tale As Old As Time: A Billionaire Playboy and an Instagram Model Half His Age

Bruce Wayne Surprises With Young Mystery Paramour at Wayne Foundation Gala

Has The Prince of Gotham Finally Taken A Princess? Everything We Know About Daily Planet Assistant and Cooking Influencer Elsie Jane Winter…

Even more alarming than the additional dozen or so headlines that continued to arrive—all seemingly involving her—was the sudden influx in activity in Elsie’s Instagram profile. Elsie’s followers had jumped from just over three thousand to more than two-hundred thousand.

And it seemed to be almost exclusively due to the fact that Bruce Wayne’s blue checkmarked profile had evidently started following her exactly one hour earlier.

“Finally! There you are!” Jenny exclaimed as soon as Elsie stepped off of the elevator and onto the reporting floor. “Perry wants to see you right away—why didn’t you tell us you were dating Bruce Wayne! Do you have any idea how huge this is? Damn, I really underestimated you…”

The cheerful brunette was speaking a hundred miles a minute, and grabbed Elsie by the wrist hard enough to hurt, practically dragging her through the cubicles in pursuit of the conference room.

“N-no, you’re mistaken…I’m not d-dating Mr. Wayne!” Elsie stuttered nervously. “I have no idea why everyone…oh my God…”

Elsie thought she would faint when her eyes landed upon her desk at the entrance to the chief reporter corridor, where a colossal bouquet of at least one hundred long stem white roses was waiting for her.

Easing herself out of Jenny’s grip, Elsie tentatively approached her desk, swallowing hard as she reached for the black envelope embossed with the Wayne Enterprises logo strategically positioned within the bright, almost opalescent blooms. Her temples pulsed from her rapid heart rate as she struggled to undo the red wax seal featuring the Wayne family crest, and when she uncovered the contents within, Elsie feared she would actually throw up.

Elsie,

I’ve made us a reservation for tonight at Karnivor at 7.

Looking forward to seeing you again, sweet girl.

Yours,

Bruce

Those same alarm bells that had sounded the night before in Mr. Wayne’s intimidating presence were now so loud that Elsie’s ears were actually, audibly ringing. If she wasn’t so terrified of the Prince of Gotham’s intentions towards her, she would have laughed at the fact that Mr. Wayne hadn’t even bothered with the formality of asking whether or not she wanted to have dinner with him.

There was no question in his note—just a statement.

He’d simply assumed she’d say yes.

Elsie shoved the card back into the envelope and ashamedly glanced around the office, each breath becoming harder and harder to capture at the realization that almost all of her colleagues were staring at her. It felt uncomfortably similar to that first day Elsie had tried to attend public school, when she’d been scrutinized by everyone, and so mortified by the attention that she’d regressed to a nonverbal, panicked state. 

“…Elsie? Hey…are you okay?”

She could barely discern the words Jenny was saying, for her voice sounded far away—almost as if Elsie were trapped below water, and on the verge of drowning.

Water! What was it that Clark had said about dealing with anxiety?

…she’d tell me to focus on just the sound of her voice.

To pretend it was an island out at sea, and swim towards it.

Make the world a little bit smaller—

Elsie tried to focus on the memory of Clark’s voice, imagining his warm, strong presence as that oasis of an island in the stormy sea.

Unfortunately, the idea of Clark didn’t calm her in the way he typically did.

The second she allowed herself to think about Clark, she was reminded all over again of how much he’d hurt her.

How he’d…rejected her.

Oh my God, Elsie…you’re…a virgin ?

Tears were welling in her eyes again before she could stop them, and Elsie timidly lowered her head and tried to make herself as tiny as possible as the world around her dissolved into a cacophony of stimulation too chaotic for her to discern. The relentless clicking of keyboards, the frantic rumble of hurried conversations and varying vocal tones, the violent smash of staplers, the shrill ring of telephones, the sharp smell of adhesive tape mixed with the fresh coat of paint on the walls, the glaring brightness of the fluorescent overhead lights…everything around her was just too much.

She could feel Jenny’s grip on her wrist again, and she could detect movement, and Elsie haplessly followed, using every last shred of energy within her body to keep herself from collapsing in front of the entire Daily Planet staff.

As long as she didn’t start screaming—and as long as she didn’t start throwing up—she’d be in the clear.

She just needed to keep breathing, and remember how to speak.

The ringing in her ears somewhat quieted when they reached the conference room, and Elsie cleared her throat and hastily wiped her face, warring to keep it together for just one more hour.

“Take a seat, Elsie,” she heard Mr. White say.

Elsie lowered herself into the chair closest to the door, and fearfully looked around the room, surprised to find a new face in addition to Mr. White and his assistant.

“To start…I’d like you to meet our newest chief reporter,” Mr. White said, gesturing to an attractive, polished woman with sleek, shoulder-length platinum hair who appeared to be around Clark’s age. “This is—”

“Cat Grant,” the woman smoothly introduced with a breathy voice. “I wasn’t actually supposed to come into the office until next week—I just landed on a red eye from L.A. this morning—but I couldn’t resist the unique opportunity to launch the Planet’s revamped society pages with you as my first subject.”

“I’m sorry…me?” Elsie’s brow furrowed. “Why would you want to write about me?”

Cat tilted her head to the side and offered Elsie a pitying smile. “Honey, your social currency is on a meteoric trajectory right now, and all because you’re the first person Bruce Wayne has decided to follow on Instagram. You are the trending headline for every tier one publication in the country—and it’s all because of this.”

Cat extended her iPad, and Elsie’s jaw fell open at the high definition image of herself at the Wayne Foundation gala on the front page of the online edition of the Gotham Gazette, with Bruce Wayne’s lips lowered to the crook of her neck at the very moment he’d called her sexy.

“Umm…I….I know what this looks like,” Elsie began, “but…truly…there’s nothing going on between me and Mr. Wayne.”

“But he sent you flowers!” Jenny brightly chimed.

Elsie wanted to throw herself out the window.

“I have no idea why he did that,” Elsie said, frantically glancing between Jenny, Perry, and Cat. “Nothing happened, I promise—”

“Elsie, no one is accusing you of anything…improper,” Perry said, somewhat guardedly. “However, there is a story here. Bruce Wayne has taken an interest in you, and when billionaires take an interest in anything, it’s automatically news. And since you are an employee of a media outlet, our hands are tied. We can’t exactly ignore…whatever this is.”

“But we can control it,” Cat added, which did little to settle Elsie’s fright. “You have an opportunity here to tell your side of the story, on your terms, with the very publication you work for. That’s something most girls in your position never have.”

Elsie wasn’t entirely sure what girls in her position meant, but she knew already that she didn’t like it.

Just what kind of person did Cat Grant think she was?

With a sigh, she brought her hands to her temples, desperate to soothe the tension headache that was quickly worsening to an anxiety migraine.

After several moments of awkward silence, Perry spoke again, sounding even more exasperated than before. “Well? What’s the ask, Elsie?”

“Ask?” Elsie slowly shook her head in confusion. “What do you—”

“I can’t exactly approve a pay raise this early in your employment contract, HR would have a field day…but, I don’t know, if you wanted to be reassigned, or…”

Elsie was now absolutely certain she would soon become sick.

“I just want to do my job, sir—the job you hired me for,” Elsie answered honestly, contracting her stomach muscles to tamp down her nausea. “I would never use Mr. Wayne—or anyone else for that matter—to further my own career.”

“Well with half a million followers and growing, it seems as if your talents would be wasted as merely an assistant to chief reporters, even if I am now one of them,” Cat said with a wink. Her gaze suddenly dropped to the envelope Elsie still clutched in her hand—with the Wayne Enterprises logo still visible—and Cat’s smile widened.

“You want to tell us what that says?” Cat asked.

Elsie swallowed hard, scrambling to come up with a plausible lie, but dishonesty had always been a struggle for her—deceit is a sin, you stupid, wicked child!—especially in the presence of authority figures. Not to mention, Cat was clearly a highly experienced journalist, with that natural, dangerous ability to charm all kinds of secrets from her targets.

“He…he invited me to dinner,” Elsie admitted. “B-but I’m not going to—”

“Dinner where?”

Elsie gulped, thoroughly intimidated. “He s-said he made a reservation at Karnivor. For tonight.”

Cat’s dark eyes widened in clear surprise, and she briefly shared a look with Perry and Jenny before returning her attention to Elsie.

“How about this,” Cat began. “You’re a cooking influencer, and the billionaire Prince of Gotham has invited you for a glamorous night out at one of the most expensive restaurants in the country. What do you think of collaborating on an article all about your experience tonight? What you eat, what you drink, what you see…”

The idea of dining at Karnivor certainly intrigued Elsie—even she had long known about the highly exclusive culinary venue located on its own private island just off the coast of Metropolis, where even A-list celebrities struggled to secure a table. The chance to sample the mysterious tasting menu from the even more mysterious thrice Michelin-awarded chef sounded like a dream opportunity for an amateur foodie like her.

“But…would I have to mention Mr. Wayne?” Elsie questioned.

“Only at your comfort level,” Cat quickly assured, though Elsie didn’t know how much she trusted the newest chief reporter. “We can work out the details. We’ll loop in the marketing department of course to do some work on your Instagram profile, and at your age especially you really should be on TikTok as well…”

Elsie considered her words, and then looked at Perry. “May I…may I think about it, sir?”

He studied her through narrowed eyes for several moments, before offering her a curt nod.

“You’ll go to the dinner. Mr. Wayne sent the invitation to the office—that makes it a work responsibility. And as for the article…we can reconvene in the morning.” Perry’s weariness only seemed to be increasing by the moment. “But if you don’t make a decision by then, one of these other publications will make the decision for you. Get ahead of this while you can, Elsie.”

It was with an almost sad sigh that he waved his hand in dismissal.

No—not quite sad.

He looked…disappointed.

Somehow, this made Elsie feel even worse.

Elsie couldn’t leave the conference room fast enough when the uncomfortable meeting finally adjourned, and she hastened back to her desk, hoping not to draw any further attention to herself.

On the walk back, she separately passed by both Steven Lombard and Lois Lane in the hallway.

Neither one returned her greeting of a polite hello.

They both, however, shot her an icy glare of abject disapproval.

Elsie gathered her things as quickly as she could with shaking hands, unsure of how to even begin maneuvering the flowers, and it was at that very second that Clark finally emerged from his office.

For several moments, Elsie couldn’t even remember how much he’d hurt her, his mere presence was so…breathtaking. Grounding.

Almost...inspiring.

“Might I have a word…Miss Winter?” Clark asked softly, and all of the heartbreak of the night before came barreling right back into her with a brute force that nearly knocked her off her feet. Clark had never sounded so formal with her before

“Of course, Mr. Kent,” Elsie responded.

His jaw hardened at her utterance, and there was a brief flicker of…something…in his eyes, but he quickly steeled his gaze to impassivity.

For the first time, Clark didn’t strike her as warm.

He felt…cold.

“Would you feel comfortable in my office?” he asked, his voice even lower than before. “I think it would be best if we talk…privately.”

A part of Elsie truly wanted to say no. She wanted to scream at him—perhaps even hit him—for humiliating her so cruelly for her sexual inexperience. She wanted to be the kind of strong, fearless person who could stand up for herself with violent ferocity—not this meek, cowering little girl who cried in the face of heartache.

But Elsie’s anger dissolved like smoke the instant she tried to seize it. Rage, indignation, even pettiness…those feelings just weren’t natural to her, as if her very biological makeup rejected such sensations.

Rather, it was as if her very biological makeup rejected such sensations when directed towards Clark. Her body and mind simply would not allow her to harbor negativity against him.

Which meant she was helpless to resist anything he asked.

“Of course, sir.”

Clark could tell that Elsie wasn’t just in a borderline panicked state.

The timid girl was also dehydrated.

And malnourished.

Her heart rate was elevated, yet uncharacteristically arrhythmic, her blood flow heavily concentrated around her vital organs.

Her labored movements as she idled by the door—graceful and nymphlike even in her anxiety—seemed to suggest she was also experiencing muscle cramps.

Clark could hear the contractions in her empty stomach.

The way she faintly swayed in her heels confirmed that she was very lightheaded, perhaps moments from fainting, with additional electrical activity in the nerves around her temples indicating a severe tension headache.

Her naturally deep pink lips were ashen, her sunrise eyes puffy and red-rimmed, and the skin around her cheekbones was nearly transparent, it was stretched so thin and taut.

It was obvious that Elsie had cried so much she now had an electrolyte imbalance, and was so upset that she hadn’t eaten.

And it was entirely Clark’s fault.

If he’d had his way, Clark would have insisted on carrying her in his arms out of the office for all to see, and flying her directly into his apartment. He’d place her right on his bed, wrap her up in warm blankets, and then help her rehydrate with her favorite beverages by holding the glass directly to her pretty mouth with a gentle hand cradling the back of her head. Then, he’d order the entire menu from any restaurant of her choosing.

And feed her.

Elsie would not have to lift a single little finger under his care.

His sweet girl was suffering. She was hungry, and thirsty, and distressed, and every cell in his body compelled him to see to her needs and comfort her, sheltering her from anything that could harm her.

The problem was…he was the harm.

He was the reason why she was like this.

“Elsie,” Clark heard himself say. He couldn’t remain formal with her—she meant too much to him. She was too precious to him. “Elsie…I’m…I’m so sorry.”

Elsie crossed her legs at her ankles—perhaps for balance—and gazed up at him shyly. She licked her lips, and softly asked, “What are you sorry for, sir?”

Was that hopefulness in her voice? Or simply wishful thinking on his part?

Clark didn’t trust himself to tell the difference.

He cleared his throat. “For everything. It was…wrong of me. To touch you.”

Of course, it was also wrong of him to subsequently break into her apartment, steal her panties, and jerk off like a deranged stalker in her bed, but he vowed not to victimize her further.

For her emotional safety, he had to keep those particular sins secret.

The innocent girl would never feel safe alone again if she knew the sick fantasies and rapacious desires he harbored for her—how he’d been thisclose to acting on them.

With all of the trauma she’d already experienced in her young life, the last thing she needed was a perverted alien with godlike power obsessing over her.

“So…you do regret it, then,” Elsie said, her soft voice so meek and small it was practically a kitten’s mewl. “You…you really don’t want me.”

Her eyes gleamed glassy with tears, and Clark felt a sharp pang in his chest, not too dissimilar from the sensation of his sternum fracturing underneath Bruce’s kryptonite spear. It was pure heartache—in the most literal sense—a forceful, piercing pressure in the depths of his torso that actually caused Clark to stumble where he stood, it was so acutely painful.

Feigning a coughing fit to steady himself, Clark eventually responded, “Elsie…I’m your boss. What I want—it doesn’t matter. I behaved…inappropriately. Abhorrently. I…Christ, I violated you—”

“But I don’t see it that way,” Elsie gently interrupted. He watched as she balled her little fists, took a deep breath, and slowly stepped towards him with sheer, steadfast perseverance.

…That same perseverance she’d possessed as an abused child walking through fire eleven years ago.

It lasted for only a brief moment—but it was long enough for Clark to become physically ill from self-loathing. He was struck with a profound, overwhelming sense of déjà vu as Elsie approached him now, his psyche flashing back to that fateful night when she’d silently approached him from where she’d been beaten and bound in wire upon the burning altar. Weak and fragile, yet determined to survive, she’d moved towards him, right into his arms.

She was brave then, and she was brave now.

Yet she was also traumatized, in ways she still clearly didn’t even realize. 

“Clark, I-I really liked it. What you did. Everything—”

“Elsie, stop,” Clark said firmly, and instantly he regretted his tone when Elsie froze where she stood, just an arm’s length away from him. “You’re…you’re so young. You’re inexperienced. I know that, maybe what I did to you…maybe it felt good at the time, but…trust me, when you look back on this, you’re going to hate me. What I did was wrong. You work for me. I’m much older than you. There’s a power imbalance—”

“I don’t care about that!” Elsie pleaded, and Clark nearly fell to his knees. “Clark…you made me feel safe. And…excited. It did feel good, and…I…I really wish I could have m-made you…umm…f-feel good, too.”

She was so open—so pure and guileless—that for several moments, Clark was speechless, staring at her in awe.

Had he ever spoken to a woman—no, had he ever spoken to anyone—as honest and hopeful as Elsie?

When he still couldn’t speak, Elsie continued, “I know I’m not experienced, but that doesn’t mean I’m stupid. I know how sex works.”

Clark sighed. “Elsie—you didn’t know what it means to be eaten out.”

A rush of color returned to her cheeks, and the sudden uptick in her blood flow—and resulting increase in the peachy scent in the air—caused his traitorous cock to begin to stir.

“I’d just…I’d never heard it called that before,” Elsie said. She shyly chewed her lip, and Clark had to look away from her and stop his breathing entirely before he became fully erect just from the sight of her.

“Your first time should be with someone gentle,” Clark said through gritted teeth. “Someone you trust. Someone…someone you love.”

“Well…you’re gentle with me. And I do trust you, Clark,” Elsie whispered. Clark audibly groaned as her eyelashes briefly fluttered and she absently licked her lips, soothing the little bite mark she’d just left.

Elsie was disarmingly sexy—effortlessly seductive—and the innocent girl didn’t even realize it.

On a little gasp, Elsie continued, “So…what if I…want…to love you? What if I want you to be my first?”

Clark gazed at her in bewilderment, his jaw hanging open in shock.

Surely he hadn’t heard her correctly.

“Elsie…I—”

“Do you…do you think maybe you could love me?” she asked with a sweet, hopeful smile, her tiny voice trembling. “Not now, obviously, but…I don’t know…maybe one day?”

As a man in his mid-thirties, Clark was certainly well-accustomed to modern dating protocols and expectations. He understood the rituals of flirting, teasing, the cat-and-mouse games, and the importance of not appearing too eager or emotionally invested early on, lest he scare the object of interest away. He was more than used to taking things slow, to subtly pursuing a woman with extended courtship and flattery in order to encourage her to return his affection. Lois and he had been secretly sleeping together for ages before she’d been willing to make their “situationship” exclusive.

And that was only after he’d nearly died.

Yet here was Elsie, unambiguously offering him her heart and her body with clear communication—and no pretense or manipulation.

Was she woefully naïve?

Or was she simply the bravest, most honest person he’d ever known?

Apparently, the conflicting emotions were warring across his face, and after several moments, Elsie suddenly stepped away from him.

“I guess that’s my answer, then,” she said sadly, and he watched in horror as the hope—the light—faded from her eyes, the brightest dawn darkening to dusk.

He needed his light. His hope. His sweet sunshine.

He needed Elsie.

He loved Elsie—

“I guess I’ll just…g-go,” she warbled, and the pain in Clark’s chest doubled as his heart rate escalated to heights his alien form had never before reached, not even in the face of fierce combat. He couldn’t breathe even if he’d needed to, much less form words, his blood was rushing with so much violent force it was like each vein and artery had become its own category five hurricane. He tried to move towards Elsie—to stop her—to tell her that she was the most important thing in the universe to him, but Clark was paralyzed, his muscles rigid and unyielding as renewed pressure formed in his skull, blurring his vision.

A sweat formed on his brow, his stomach seized, and Clark finally realized he was experiencing that same harrowing sensation he’d endured the night he’d brought Elsie to that county hospital after rescuing her from the fire.

Blind panic—and helplessness.

Shock.

Only this time, it was stronger.

It was an anxiety—no, an existential dread—so severe that Clark actually felt like he was about to die.

“Elsie…w-wait, just…g-give me a minute, I—”

“I have a date with Bruce Wayne tonight,” she said flatly.

And then, she fled his office without a single backward glance.

The rest of the day was a blur for Clark—entirely abnormal for him.

Generally, his alien senses meant he could recall everything he experienced throughout the day with explicit detail—too much detail—but for the first time in his life, all of his heightened perceptions were dulled to a state of utter undetectability as the afternoon of panic made way for a night of depression.

By the time he returned home, he barely knew how he even got there.

He had no idea who he’d spoken to—if anyone at all.

Had he eaten anything? He’d learned over the last several years that he technically didn’t actually need to eat very much during extended periods of sunny weather, since his body primarily relied on solar radiation for energy, but he still benefited from consuming organic matter, both on a physical and a mental level.

Eating was normal. Human. Not just about nutrition or even flavor, but a form of connection.

It was how Elsie—sweet, sweet Elsie—connected with people, one lovingly prepared recipe at a time.

He knew it was a mistake—he needed to work on eliminating his obsession, not exaggerating it—but Clark was already pulling up her Instagram profile as he collapsed onto a living room couch, disappointed to find that she’d apparently decided to make her account private.

Likely due to her sudden whirlwind social media popularity.

He really should have followed her sooner with his own rarely used profile, instead of continuously lurking her posts without interacting.

Now, he’d be buried amongst the nearly seven-hundred thousand other people who were now hyperfocused on her every move.

Clark’s jaw hardened. Bruce Wayne really had put a glaring target on the girl’s head with his actions, and Clark couldn’t quite figure out why the Bat would be so uncharacteristically brazen with an innocent civilian. From what little information Bruce occasionally divulged about his private life—usually over a bottle of scotch in those rare moments they’d debrief after a shared world-saving mission—the women Bruce involved himself with were always subject to strict NDAs. Never did the billionaire go public with anyone without a months-long vetting period involving multiple rounds of private investigation and interviews.

Yet here Bruce was, less than twenty-four hours after meeting Elsie, and he was following the young girl on Instagram, sending her flowers at work, and taking her to dinner at an expensive restaurant.

Was Bruce using Elsie, for some nefarious purpose?

Or was this just a consequence of Elsie’s irresistible nature, an uncanny ability to provoke dangerous sexual obsession and reckless behavior in every powerful man who laid eyes on her?

Or smelled her.

Clark clenched his phone so tightly as a sudden, murderous surge of jealousy shot through him that the device sparked and shattered to irreparable ruins within milliseconds.

Though even in his rage, he knew he had no one to blame but himself. He’d practically shoved Elsie into Bruce’s arms as a result of his own panicked inaction.

Shoved her into his arms, and probably right into his bed.

Would Elsie go home with Bruce tonight?

Would Bruce actually be the one to taste her for the very first time? To feel her small body stretch and open up for a man’s penetration?

His heat vision activated as a result of his darkening rage before he even realized it, and Clark quickly brought his fingers to his eyelids before he lit his apartment on fire in his anger.

Feeling increasingly…restless, Clark donned his skin suit and decided to embark upon a casual patrol of the city to redirect his excess energy.

Clearly, staying at home wasn’t a viable option.

It was a fairly quiet, daresay peaceful, Thursday night in the City, with only a small handful of crimes and minor disasters requiring his intervention to supplement the efforts of Metropolis’s finest.

A drunk driver in the Finance District.

A small house fire in the projects by the port.

An attempted mugging on the Upper West Side.

It was for this reason—Clark told himself—that he expanded his patrol area farther than typical on this particular night, to the wealthy palisade suburbs and small scattering of largely uninhabited islands in the heavily forested, fjord-like inlets of northeastern Metropolis.

It was not because one of those privately owned islands housed Karnivor. Clark was not spying on Elsie and Bruce.

He was conducting a simple safety survey—nothing more. He was a hero, and it was his duty to protect.

Clark covertly hovered above the restaurant at a distance that would render his form largely indistinguishable to the naked human eye, and just silently watched, quickly locating Elsie at a private shore-view table with Bruce.

Tell me, Bruce, do you bleed—

Clark averted his gaze before he lost control of his jealousy, and focused on scanning the rest of the venue, noting with vague interest that it appeared Alexander Luthor was dining just a few tables over.

He still needed to investigate that particular billionaire—he hadn’t yet determined why the Prince of Metropolis had been attempting to illegally import a Kryptonian mineral, only to end up thwarted by the Prince of Gotham.

Did Luthor know what kryptonite was capable of?

Clark was preparing to turn around when suddenly, a new, hulking figure shoved his way through the entrance of the restaurant, rapidly storming in the direction of where Bruce, Elsie, and Luthor were seated.

Without even thinking of the potential consequences, Clark made an immediate dive at full speed down to the building.

Unfortunately, before he could land, he was knocked backwards—and unconscious—by a violent, scorching explosion of blinding green heat.

Chapter Text

“Just so you know—the fact that you’re dressed like you’re going to knock on my door and sell me a bible is not going to stop me from finding you absolutely beautiful.”

Elsie giggled her way through a fresh influx of blush, not quite immune to the way Bruce Wayne delivered teasing compliments, but certainly a bit more accustomed after several hours now of being the exclusive target of his nonstop flattery.

Her wounded self-esteem certainly needed it, and Elsie seized each honeyed word with abandon, desperate for someone—anyone—to be kind to her after the heartbreak she’d experienced in Clark’s office.

“This is actually one of the least conservative dresses I own,” Elsie admitted quickly before  she ruined their dinner by succumbing to the instinct to dwell on Clark’s unequivocal rejection.

And it truly had been a lovely evening thus far, despite the miserable hours Elsie had spent crying her eyes out leading up to it. Bruce had picked her up promptly at six o’clock from her apartment in a staggeringly luxurious, blacked out SUV named after the largest diamond ever found, driven by a warm Englishman named Alfred. The leisurely journey to the northeastern side of the District of Metropolis had been relaxed and refreshing, with Bruce charming Elsie with pleasant conversation, almost as if he could somehow sense that her fragile heart had just been shattered into a million pieces.

Bruce had remained a perfect gentleman, dutifully standing by her side and maintaining their lighthearted conversation—seemingly perfectly happy to do the majority of the talking—as they boarded the private electric catamaran that ferried the twenty dinner guests onto the private island where Karnivor was located.   

Designed in accordance with a minimalist, Scandinavian aesthetic, the restaurant was constructed with what appeared to be exclusively organic materials, fitting in perfect, elegant harmony with the surrounding natural landscape. The table Bruce had reserved featured a breathtaking view of the moonlit shore through the seamless floor-to-ceiling windows, and as each artful course from the chef’s tasting menu was delivered by a pair of butlers dedicated only to them for the night, Elsie truly began to feel as if she’d stepped into some kind of royal fantasyland.

There was no denying that Bruce had planned an absolute dream of an evening. Elsie should have been overjoyed.

But as the hours elapsed, Elsie was finding it harder and harder to stave off her tears.

There was a very real, physical ache in her chest, like what she imagined a stab wound to feel like, the piercing pain only growing sharper with each passing second, threatening to puncture her heart.

“…Elsie? Did I lose you again, sweetheart?” she heard Bruce ask.

Elsie blinked away her daze and smiled apologetically at Bruce. “I’m so sorry, Mr. Wayne—”

“Honey, how many times do I have to ask you to call me Bruce?”

“I’m sorry…Bruce.” And she meant it. She really was being a terrible dinner guest. “I…I had a bit of an uncomfortable day today, and I guess I’m a little weary—please forgive me.”

Bruce sighed, a somewhat contrite expression on his face. “I take it I was a big cause of that discomfort, huh? Following you on Instagram.”

Elsie shook her head, faintly laughing on end. In her all-encompassing devastation over Clark’s rejection, she’d actually temporarily forgotten about the maelstrom of media attention that had resulted from Bruce’s interest.

“It’s okay. I know you didn’t mean anything by it,” Elsie offered sincerely.

She’d intended only to offer some comfort, to demonstrate that she harbored no ill will, but strangely, her words made Bruce’s gaze darken further.

Although it wasn’t just his gaze. It was his entire overall demeanor, his body language and posture, as if there were some kind of…split in Bruce’s overall consciousness. Right this moment, before her very eyes, Elsie could visibly detect a second personality emerging. That same, contemplative, almost sorrowful version of Bruce she’d encountered the night before, quite far removed from the charismatic, gregarious billionaire playboy with a silver tongue.

Which version of Bruce was the real one?

“I noticed you made your profile private,” he said after several tense moments. “Any particular reason why?”

Elsie took a sip of sparkling water to moisten her suddenly dry throat before responding. “I…I’m just not used to that level of attention. I never really wanted it. I’m not an influencer or a professional chef or anything—I’m just a simple girl who likes to cook for fun.”

“Your DMs are probably overflowing right now, too,” Bruce added, somewhat cryptically. “Anything from anyone interesting?”

Elsie gently frowned as she considered his question. Truthfully, there had been an overwhelming influx of…offensive messages, but thankfully, those were automatically filtered for the most part, and Elsie simply deleted them without engaging further. There was nothing to be gained from reading hateful or threatening things strangers were writing about her. “Mainly just a lot of media queries. Offers of representation from agencies.”

“Agencies?” Bruce’s eyes suddenly flickered with renewed interest. “What agencies? What were their names?”

Elsie faintly shuddered, feeling strangely intimidated by Bruce’s unexpected interest in the social media fame she’d never wanted in the first place.

“Umm, I received an offer from The Leos. I think that’s a modeling agency though. And obviously I’m not a model,” Elsie shared with a self-deprecating laugh.

“Who else?” Bruce pressed.

Reluctantly, Elsie reached for her phone and reopened the app, trying not to panic over the new wave of follow requests that had come through in the last few hours. “It looks like…there’s a meeting request from Inventive Artists Agency, Wilhelmina Morrow Endeavor, UMG…oh, this one is new—The Kyle Group.”

“Kyle?” Bruce questioned. “As in…Selina Kyle?”

Elsie clicked onto the verified profile for The Kyle Group, and was surprised to find that it was restricted to followers only. There was a link to a website, so Elsie launched that in the browser, but it too was highly gated, requiring a passcode to access.

“I’m not sure,” Elsie admitted, putting her phone back in her purse. “Why? Who is she?”

Bruce sharply inhaled. “She’s a somewhat…elusive figure. Owns multiple businesses in…various fields. We’ve crossed paths a few times, but she’s notoriously difficult to pin down. Even for me. The fact that she’s reaching out to you…it means something, Elsie.”

“You…you think I should meet with her?” Elsie asked nervously. She’d been secretly hoping that this entire frenzy would simply fade away if she ignored it long enough. All she wanted was for the world to forget about her, and allow her to go back to living quietly. Safely.

Bruce took a long sip of his wine, studying Elsie through narrowed eyes. “It might be worth a conversation. Just to see what she’s all about. What she’s offering you. You’re in a very unique position, right now, sweetheart. You should take advantage of it.”

That playful lilt had returned to Bruce’s voice—that polished, debonair charisma that was almost too charming—and Elsie concluded that this version of Bruce was the disingenuous one.

And she no longer enjoyed the façade, because his cracks were beginning to show.

Elsie struggled enough to discern social cues, and she wasn’t particularly interested in spending further time with someone who was deliberately duplicitous. She was overcome with the sinking suspicion that Bruce was using her for some unknown purpose—a purpose likely involving this mysterious Selina Kyle.

Elsie had been used—and abused—for a nefarious purpose once before.

And she’d nearly died from it.

With a sigh, Elsie steeled herself to the best of her ability and tried to change the subject. “How are you enjoying your dinner, Mr. Wayne?”

“Back to Mr. Wayne, now?”

“That’s probably for the best, sir,” Elsie said quietly.

She was grateful when the butlers arrived to deliver their next course—venison tartare with egg yolk and caviar—somewhat cutting the tension between them. But Elsie’s stomach was in knots, and she didn’t think she’d be able to handle eating much of anything else. She aimlessly picked at her food as Bruce reverted fully to his playboy persona, and she kept her responses polite, yet short.

The evening couldn’t end fast enough.

It was when dessert was served that the revolving doors to the restaurant suddenly flung open, and in stormed a large, brawny man with obvious malice in his eyes.

Elsie tensed fearfully, watching with steadily growing alarm as the man determinedly walked towards a group of diners a few tables down from theirs, effortlessly sidestepping the staff members who attempted to protest and block his path.

“Sir, I’m going to have to ask you to leave,” the maître d’hôtel insisted urgently. “This is a private establishment, with a closed guest list—”

“Fuck off,” the man said coldly. She noticed that his voice seemed…unnatural somehow.

Almost robotic.

He paused in front of the nearby table, his enraged stare fixated on a smartly dressed gentleman with a shaved head who struck Elsie as vaguely familiar.

“Ahh, Mr. Corben…joining us for dinner?” the man asked with an unmistakably mocking lilt. “Though I’m not sure the menu items tonight will be conducive to your…unique nutritional needs. Can you even process animal protein anymore?”

“You’ve turned me into a fucking monster, Luthor,” Corben spat venomously, and Elsie’s eyes widened in recognition. The familiar man was Alexander Luthor, the billionaire CEO of the tech conglomerate LexCorp.

Corben laboriously shrugged out of his tattered jacket, groaning in obvious severe pain, and revealed his naked torso.

Elsie—along with the rest of the restaurant—immediately gasped in horror at the sight.

It was like gazing at a robotic version of Frankenstein’s monster, the barbaric way various metals and tubes were haphazardly welded onto the minimal parts of Corben’s mangled flesh that were still human. There was an overwhelming amount of decaying muscle and gangrenous tissue loosely hanging from his shoulders and arms, along with asymmetrical sheets of metal drilled into the areas where bone should have been located. His entire chest cavity was exposed, including his splintered ribs, revealing a hollowed vacuum of blood, pus, and some unknown, glowing green liquid that oozed out of his visibly beating heart, sickly dripping down onto his entirely metallic abdominal column.

“Elsie.” Bruce’s voice was low and sharp, devoid entirely of his playboy charm. “Get down. Now!”

Before she could move, Bruce shoved her beneath the table, moving so quickly it was like he was a trained sniper.

And a fraction of a second later, a violent blast of green heat immediately engulfed the entire restaurant in flames.

When Clark finally came to, knocked on his ass in the dense, dark forest behind Karnivor, he could tell immediately that he’d been exposed to kryptonite in the explosion.

Everything hurt.

An excruciating pain like nothing he’d ever experienced penetrated all the way to the very marrow of his bones, as if his skeleton were simultaneously on fire and under the extreme pressure of the deepest oceanic trenches on earth.

Clark wasn’t just burning from the inside out. He was also being crushed.

He felt sick, sicker than he’d thought possible for his alien body, his stomach so violently nauseated that as soon as he attempted to stand, he immediately bowled over and aggressively vomited blood and bile. His skull was viciously pounding with an electrical agony that felt like a lightning storm was tearing through his brain matter, so relentless that he couldn’t even hold his head upright, much less hear or see clearly. And to top it all off, his muscles were so brutally weakened that Clark couldn’t even support his own body weight.

But none of that mattered to Clark as he resolutely entered into a broken, uneven flight, deliriously slamming into several trees as he approached what remained of the restaurant.

All that mattered was saving Elsie.

He couldn’t lose her. He wouldn’t.

At about thirty yards away, he could no longer sustain flight, so Clark dropped to his feet and staggered towards the flames, feeling as though he were walking through dense liquid metal, his very cells were so distressed by the heavy concentration of kryptonite in the atmosphere. Clark suspended his breathing, trying to limit his exposure as much as possible, but the radiation was seeping through his pores even through his suit, and Clark felt like his skin was being torn apart.

He was relieved to see that several helicopters from the Metropolis Fire Department were already on the scene containing the chemical flames from the air, and medical shore support was evacuating guests and restaurant staff.

But Elsie was nowhere to be found.

Clark panicked as he scanned the remaining flames for bodies, both relieved and terrified that he found none.

Where was she?

“Superman, you need to get out of here,” a modulated voice suddenly said with urgency. A heavy hand came down onto Clark’s shoulder, yanking him backwards. “The explosion…it was pure kryptonite.”

“Elsie…” Clark gasped raggedly. “Need…to…save…Elsie…”

“Your assistant is fine, I had Alfred take her home almost two hours ago,” Bruce—Batman—said, exasperated. “Barely a scratch on her.”

“What the hell…happened here?” Clark rasped furiously. One night with Bruce and sweet Elsie had nearly gotten killed. Before he even realized it, Clark’s eyes began to glow red from rage. “You…you put her in danger—”

“Clark,” Batman said firmly. “Control yourself. You need to get out of here immediately. The radiation is poisoning you—you’re deteriorating.”

“Kryptonite…you told me you destroyed your supply…how is this even possible…?”

“We’ll talk about this later, but you need to get off this island. Now!”

Summoning the absolute final reserves of what minimal strength he had left, Clark launched hard off of the island and up into the clouds. He certainly didn’t feel better, but at least now, the distance from the hot zone had somewhat stabilized his physical agony, his cells no longer actively degrading to lethal levels.

Wearily he flew back into downtown Metropolis at a reduced speed, stumbled into his apartment for a change of clothes, and immediately went back outside, hailing the first cab he could find with a directive for Midtown.

He had to see Elsie, with his own eyes.

He had to make sure she was okay.

Elsie stepped out of the shower and snugly wrapped herself in a towel, slowly shuffling to her bathroom vanity in an exhausted daze. She thought vaguely about putting a request in to her landlord about the cracked marble on the countertop she’d only recently noticed, but after the events at Karnivor, things like damaged bathroom surfaces just seemed…trivial.

It was truly a miracle that no one had died in the fire.

…Quite unlike the fire in the commune when she was thirteen, where everyone she’d ever known up until that point—including her mother—had perished in the flames.

Everyone…except for her.

Shaking away the harrowing memory, Elsie reached for her brush, dropping it three times as a result of the fearful tremors racking her hands before she managed to bring it to her wet hair, carefully working through the long wavy strands until the small handful of tangles were released. Then, she methodically brushed and flossed her teeth, taking far more time than necessary on the task due to her continued trembling, before finishing her nightly grooming by applying the brand of indulgent face cream Granny had loved the most.

Tentatively, she stole a brief glance of herself in the foggy mirror, and Elsie began to tear up at the sight of the harsh bruise that was beginning to form on her cheek, from where she’d clumsily hit her face when Bruce had shoved her under the table.

Elsie hadn’t been bruised on her face since she was thirteen, and of course, the circumstances then were vastly different. Yet somehow, her mind was struggling to recognize the distinction between the two.

Get back over here you stupid, wicked child, and accept your punishment!

I’ll hit you until you bleed if that’s what it takes for you to learn your lesson—

Suddenly, the doorbell rang, startling Elsie’s already rattled nerves to the point of pushing her nearly to a panic attack. She wondered who would possibly be seeking her out this late at night. Bruce had texted her an hour before to check on her and confirm he’d made it back to Gotham safely.

Was it the police, perhaps? To take additional statements from her as a witness to the explosion?

Elsie quickly toweled off as best as she could as her anxiety continued to climb, and securely wrapped herself in a cozy robe, tightening the belt around her waist as she made her way to the door.

She opened it on a deep breath, and immediately, her heart caught in her throat at the sight of her unexpected visitor.

“Clark?” Elsie couldn’t quite believe her eyes.

Was he really here?

Or was this some kind of vision conjured by her traumatized imagination?

“Elsie, I…I’m sorry, I…are you okay?” he asked.

It was then that Elsie noticed that Clark was unsteady on his feet, so unsteady that he looked like he was about to collapse. His skin was ashen and clammy, his dark hair messily sticking to his forehead, and he looked like he was struggling to breathe.

“Clark…are you okay?” Elsie countered warily. “Are you sick or something? What are you even doing here?”

Clark swallowed hard, the cords in his throat visibly straining from the effort. “I…I heard about the explosion. At…at the restaurant you went to. With Bruce Wayne. I had to…I had to see you. I had to…make sure you were okay…”

He’d shown up at her apartment, instead of simply calling or sending a text, when he was clearly not feeling well—just to see if she was okay.

Did this mean that maybe Clark did care about her after all?

Elsie folded her arms in front of her body protectively, terrified of getting her hopes up. Her fragile heart couldn’t handle being crushed by Clark’s rejection a second time today. “I’m fine. Really. You don’t have to worry about me.”

She noticed his gaze fall to the bruise on her cheek, and his face contorted in anguish.

“You’re hurt,” he remarked hoarsely, his eyes blown and bewildered.

Elsie gathered her wet hair over her shoulder, attempting to conceal the wound.

“It’s not too bad,” she said, but it was clear that Clark was unconvinced.

“I should have been there,” he muttered absently, and Elsie concluded with no shortage of sadness that Clark was probably out of his mind on some kind of cough syrup, he was speaking so deliriously. That was the real reason why he was here. “I should have…I should have protected you…”

“Don’t say that—none of this is your fault. It has nothing to do with you,” Elsie said gently. “The attacker…the police said he’s connected to Lex Luthor, but they didn’t really provide more details…oh my God, Clark!”

Elsie nearly screamed with worry when Clark lost his balance and fell forward, his knees colliding so hard with the floor that the wood actually cracked. Elsie immediately knelt next to him, reaching out to steady him as best as she could with her hand on his upper back as Clark’s powerful body violently shook like an earthquake, a fresh layer of sweat soaking through his clothes.

“I’m sorry…I’m sorry, I just…just need a minute…” he said, his deep voice practically a whisper, he was so weak.

“Do you want me to call an ambulance?” Elsie offered.

Clark vehemently shook his head. “No. No…ambulance.”

“Clark, I really think you should go to a hospital—”

“I can’t—please, Elsie,” Clark pleaded. “No doctors. No hospitals. I just…I just need a minute, and then…then I’ll leave you alone…”

They remained on the floor for an extended period, Elsie gently stroking his back, until finally, Clark’s tremors began to subside.

“That feels…so good,” Clark murmured with a deep, throaty groan that really shouldn’t have sounded as attractive as it did, given the circumstance.

“You…don’t get sick very often, do you?” Elsie dared to ask. Clark looked at her with a fearful expression, his face paling even further, as if she’d revealed some kind of deep, dark secret.

“W-what makes you say that?”

Elsie gently smiled. “You don’t want to see a doctor, or go to a hospital…it seems like you’re terrified of feeling sick. Which makes sense if you’re the kind of lucky person who is always healthy. This probably feels pretty foreign to you, huh?”

Clark stared at her for several moments in what almost appeared to be a state of shock, as if the idea had never before occurred to him.

“That’s…exactly right,” Clark said eventually. “I tend to be…extremely healthy. Sickness, it…yeah, it scares me.”

Elsie nodded in sympathy. Because she had spent so much time with serious illness and injury throughout her life, Elsie was very well accustomed to taking care of herself when she inevitably succumbed to seasonal viruses.

But for someone like Clark? Someone who was clearly a paragon of fitness and health? Experiencing a cold or flu probably made him feel like he was dying.

“Well, you’re going to be okay. I’m certain of it. You just need to get some good rest,” Elsie said softly. “Do you think you can stand?”

Clark lowered his head and nodded, and with great effort, he slowly rose to his feet.

He swayed for a few seconds, and Elsie prepared to try and catch him if he lost his balance again, though she doubted she’d be very helpful if that occurred.

Somehow, despite his illness, Clark seemed even bigger and stronger in the small space of her cozy little apartment.

Whereas she felt tinier and punier than ever.

“I’ll…I’ll leave you alone…”

“Clark…I don’t think you’re in any shape to be on your own right now.”

He frowned, the tension lines in his prominent brow deeply furrowing with worry, almost as if he thought he was about to be chastised. Elsie would have giggled if it weren’t so concerning. Clark was twelve years older than she was, and yet right now in the midst of his illness, he looked as guilty and guileless as a little boy. “What are you saying, Elsie?”

Elsie took a deep breath, garnering her courage to do the right thing—the kind thing—despite how much he’d wounded her heart.

Perhaps it would have been wiser to turn him away given what he’d done to her, the hurtful things he’d said, but Elsie couldn’t lie to herself. She still cared about Clark.

And she simply could not stand idly by while someone she cared about was suffering.

“I’m saying…let’s put you to bed,” Elsie said with a small, shy smile. She extended her hand, and Clark stared at it for several moments, his jaw hanging open.

But soon enough, he brought his gaze back to hers, and Elsie noticed that his eyes were slightly glassier than normal.

Was whatever virus running through Clark’s body making his eyes water?

Or was this actually…vulnerable emotion she was witnessing across his handsome face?

“Thank you, Elsie,” Clark said, taking her hand, his massive palm completely swallowing hers.

And with that, Elsie slowly brought Clark into her bedroom—mindful of his dizziness— before carefully removing his jacket and shoes, and helping him settle into bed.

Clark fell unconscious almost the instant she pulled the sheets up to his massive shoulders, and Elsie couldn’t help but smile at his sleeping form, at the way his massive, hypermasculine body completely took over her queen-sized bed and fluffy pink linens.

A tiny, curious meow from the floor signaled Teddy had finally come in to investigate what all the commotion was about, and Elsie picked up her tripod kitty and let him settle in his favorite spot around her shoulders.

“Looks like we’ll be sleeping on the couch tonight,” she whispered with a giggle. Teddy released a series of happy purrs, and softly nuzzled his head against her face.

Just below the area where she was bruised.

It was a strange juxtaposition, simultaneously experiencing the worst and best physical sensations he’d ever felt in his life. The kryptonite was brutally ravaging his body, and yet, Clark also felt like he was in heaven, surrounded by sweet clouds that smelled like lilacs and peaches, all while in Elsie’s bed.

Elsie’s. Bed.

It was a novel experience, being back here as an invited guest, as opposed to an illicit stalker. Instead of being gripped with shame over his perverse actions, Clark instead felt perfectly at peace, more relaxed than he’d ever thought possible.

Elsie’s home, Elsie’s presence, Elsie’s attention—it was paradise on earth.

The tiny, beautiful girl was a sweet, dutiful little nurse, caring for him with gentle patience, unwavering empathy, and demonstrative expertise. Even in the moments when he was vomiting his insides out as his body fiercely rejected the last remaining traces of kryptonite—his pride as a man and as a hero at its lowest—Elsie hadn’t once made him feel like an invalid or a burden, silently protecting his dignity as she helped him clean up without the slightest hints of disgust.

She remained by his side all throughout the following day and night as he experienced high fevers and bone-rattling chills, gently holding his hand and stroking his hair with calming words as the sheer terror over his reduced physical condition resulted in brief periods of delirious panic, soothing him back to sleep just with her touch and her voice.

And her touch really was extraordinary—daresay ethereal. Something about the direct contact of Elsie’s soft, bare skin against his exposed flesh seemed to cause his blood to heavily concentrate wherever they were connected, rendering him…highly sensitive to her.

Clark felt Elsie’s skin with more intensity than he’d ever felt anyone—anything—else.

It was as if his very cells were reacting to her presence, healing faster and more efficiently just because she was there.

Elsie may have been naïve, but she was clearly wise in ways he had drastically underestimated, which Clark was beginning to feel quite guilty about. It had taken her less than five minutes to identify with calm clarity precisely why he reacted so negatively to getting sick.

Of course, she had no idea that the sickness in question was due to kryptonite poisoning, but the essence remained the same. Clark was accustomed to being indestructible. It had been his reality for his entire life.

When his strength compromised…it disturbed him, to his very core.

Who was he without his power? What value did he have?

Those were questions he didn’t have to torture himself with under Elsie’s care, because for the first time, he could just be…Clark. Not a hero or an alien, just a man with a distressed immune system that was warring against a foreign toxin, recovering under the tender care of the most kind-hearted person he’d ever known.

“Do you think you’re up for trying to eat something?” Elsie asked with a hopeful smile.

It was mid-afternoon on Saturday, and Clark had just woken up from a sleep cycle a few minutes before.

He deeply inhaled, and beyond the heady sweetness of Elsie’s natural scent throughout her apartment was a new aroma that smelled almost as mouthwatering as she was.

“Whatever you’re making, it smells incredible,” Clark said, his voice still scratchy from sickness and slumber. Clearing his throat, he added, “Elsie…I truly can’t thank you enough for—”

“Is that a yes, then?” she interrupted gently.

Clark faintly chuckled and nodded. She’d told him the day before that he didn’t need to keep apologizing or thanking her, but Clark felt deeply indebted to Elsie—and not in a negative way.

He wanted to give her the entire world once he recovered, and he didn’t want her to doubt for a second just how grateful he was for her kindness.

More than that, however, he wanted to regain her trust. To demonstrate that he was worthy of it.

If being on the verge of death for the second time had taught him anything, it was that he  simply couldn’t stay away from Elsie, despite how wrong it was for him to covet her.

The girl was the center of his universe.

He knew she wouldn’t believe him if he outright said he was in love with her, not now while he was at his weakest. She’d think his feelings were a result of what she was doing for him, considering how poorly he’d fumbled things with her in his office—not to mention at the hotel in Gotham.

He needed to demonstrate that he loved her precisely for who she was.

…And he also needed to demonstrate that he could control himself around her.

“Is your fever coming back?” Elsie questioned suddenly, her cheeks turning pink with blush.

It was at that moment Clark realized he’d just been caught openly staring at the delicate features of her face.

“Umm…no, I don’t think so,” Clark answered truthfully. “Sorry—guess I’m still waking up.”

“Your body needs the rest,” Elsie said. “And it also needs nutrients. Would you like to eat out in the living room for a little change of scenery?”

“I’d love that,” Clark agreed.

He was much steadier on his feet as Elsie brought him into the living room, offering him a fresh blanket as he sat down on her plush cream couch.

Elsie disappeared into the kitchen for a few minutes, and in her absence, her tiny, three-legged feline hopped down from his perch on his scratch tower and tentatively approached Clark, carefully eyeing him from a crouched distance.

“I’m not gonna hurt her, little guy,” Clark whispered to Teddy. “I promise.”

The cat gazed at him for several seconds, before eventually releasing his body from the defensive posture.

It wasn’t outright approval—but it was something.

“Here you are,” Elsie announced excitedly, presenting him with an elegantly arranged tray of a hearty soup filled with chicken and herbs, freshly baked bread, and sliced fruit.

Clark smiled, recognizing the soup as the same one he’d originally seen on her Instagram profile.

“This is avgolemono,” Elsie explained. “It’s made with lemon, dill, egg…it’s bright and full of nutrients, but also soothing, and shouldn’t be too harsh on your stomach.”

“It looks incredible,” Clark praised. He took a spoonful, and couldn’t restrain his immediate moan of full-body pleasure. The soup was just as Elsie had said—flavorful and bright—but more than that, he could physically taste the love and care she’d put into making it.

It was inexplicable, but with each swallow, he could feel himself healing.

He gratefully finished everything she’d prepared, and tried to restrain his enthusiasm when she sat down next to him on the couch.

She maintained a safe distance from him, but all Clark wanted was to be able to touch her.

Hold her.

“Would you like to watch something?” Elsie asked, somewhat meekly.

“Sure…put anything you want on,” Clark said, hoping he wasn’t inadvertently intimidating her.

Could she somehow sense how desperate he was to feel her skin?

Elsie turned on the television with a shy smile, but her pretty face fell with whatever was unfolding on screen.

Curious what was bothering her, Clark glanced at the news program, unsurprised to find himself in the headline.

SUPERMAN NOWHERE TO BE FOUND AT KARNIVOR DISASTER

WHERE IS THE METROPOLIS HERO WHEN WE NEED HIM MOST?

“This is so unfair,” Elsie griped as she watched a panel of commentators criticize Superman left, right and center, adorably unaware of the fact that Superman was watching her. “He can’t possibly be everywhere at once. Why aren’t they reporting on the half dozen or so crimes and disasters he did help with that very same night?”

Clark smiled warmly at her, his heart swelling with affection by how passionately she unknowingly defended him. “You’re…you’re really not disappointed he wasn’t there to save you and the others?”

Elsie shook her head. “Of course not. I think people forget that Superman isn’t like a police officer or a firefighter. He’s not paid to put his life on the line for us, even though he probably should be. In fact, I don’t even think he chose this. But he saves people anyway, just out of the goodness of his heart, which means…it’s a privilege when he steps in—one we can’t take advantage of.”

Overwhelmed by her words, Clark quickly averted his gaze and cleared his throat before he revealed himself.

Because for the first time in his life, Clark wanted to share who he really was.

“Well…I’m sure he’s more than used to the criticism. It probably doesn’t even bother him anymore,” Clark said carefully.

Elsie’s eyes saddened even further. “Do you think he gets enough praise to make up for it?”

Clark didn’t know how to answer her at first, and he spent a few moments collecting his thoughts.

Eventually, he responded, “I doubt he does this for praise or recognition. And regardless…I have a feeling he gets all the affirmation he needs from the people who matter to him most.”

“I hope you’re right—maybe he has a family? Hopefully they give him plenty of love and appreciation.”

Clark couldn’t wait for the opportunity to introduce Elsie to his mother. He knew without a doubt that Ma would adore her.

And it was at that moment that Clark’s blood suddenly ran cold.

“Shit,” he muttered, and Elsie gasped.

“Oh, Clark, are you okay? Are you feeling sick again?”

Clark shook his head. “No…I’m just…I’m realizing I’m the world’s worst son.”

Elsie frowned in concern. “Worst son? What do you mean?”

Clark tilted his head back. “It’s my mother’s birthday today. She’s flying in from Kansas this evening to stay with me for a few days. I completely forgot.”

“Well, you’ve been sick—I’m sure she’ll understand,” Elsie said gently. “What time does she arrive? Do you want me to try and find a dinner reservation for you guys?”

“Metropolis on a Saturday night? It’s not gonna happen,” Clark admitted dryly. “I’m a terrible son.”

“You’re not a terrible son. Not in the slightest.” Elsie hummed in consideration, but then, it seemed she was struck with inspiration, for her eyes suddenly gleamed with a new sparkle. She was so visibly excited she was nearly bouncing where she sat as she shifted on her knees to face him, and it took everything in Clark to resist the urge to immediately scoop her up in his arms, she was so damn adorable.

“Okay, a reservation may be a reach given the short notice,” Elsie continued, “but how about…a lovely multi-course dinner prepared by your own private chef for the night? Well, amateur chef. But…I hear I’m pretty good at this.”

She nervously ran a hand through her hair, sending a fresh wave of her delicious scent in his direction, causing Clark to faintly shiver in pleasure.

“You’d…you’d do that for me?” he asked, staring at her in astonishment. “You’d…cook for my mother?”

Elsie gifted him with a gentle smile, and Clark was momentarily breathless from the sight, absolutely certain that her smile held more power over his body than the sun. She was achingly beautiful—warm, bright, and sweet—and all Clark wanted was to bask in her light for as long as she’d have him, dedicating his life and all of his power to making her happy.

The words were at the tip of his tongue. He couldn’t hold back anymore.

He had to tell her how he felt.

I love you.

“Elsie, I l—”

“Of course I’ll cook for her! Both of you,” Elsie said sweetly. “After all...that’s what friends are for!”