Caustic sort of Romance

We are steel / and we don’t feel anything at all

She thinks about his words and feels a bitter taste in the back of her throat that could be bile. She thinks it tastes like regret but she curls her fists in at the thought, recoils at the suggestion. The way out of his office is easy and she slams the door behind her and nearly shatters the stain glass windows that probably cost a fucking fortune. She wishes she had broken them and she’s half tempted to go back and try again when her foot catches on the corner of the Persian rug in the hall and she trips, stumbles and crashes onto her knees while her palms take most of the impact.

It’s an ungraceful sort of slide and it burns the skin on her fingers but it isn’t the pain that brings the tears to her eyes as much as the humiliation. She bites her tongue as she slides back onto her heels. It’s the principle of the argument, she tells herself. It’s the way he looked at her when he said, “Now it’s so easy to see why you never had a serious relationship, Chloe.” It’s mostly the way she couldn’t form the words to fight back, to tell him to go fuck himself and just stay the hell away from her best friend.

She’s crying now, biting her lip and it’s bleeding as she stands and wipes her aching hands against her jeans. There’s a heavy silence as Chloe makes her way through the hall and to the entrance of the mansion and she knows that his security cameras are picking up her tears and the blood on her hands and she wonders if they can see the anguish curled in the pit of her stomach.

Outside and she’s walking so fast it’s almost a run. She wipes the tears away angrily but they just come back again and burn their way down her cheeks until she’s walking so fast the wind lifts them away.

She thinks about how many times her pride as been wounded and how pathetic it is that she hasn’t built up a resistance to it by now. He’s always had a kind of power behind his words that she could never possess and it hurts that he would use it against her. There was a time when they were open with each other—when she trusted him to keep her safe and he had. It was a time when his visits brought her a sense of normalcy and security she hadn’t felt since she was a child and her mother was still there in the morning when she woke up.

He would come in smelling like rain and he would sit with her on the porch, silent, and they would watch the night sky until she fell asleep with her hand curled in the collar of his jacket. There had been nights when he would find her standing on the porch, waiting, and he would guide her back into the house where they would linger, pressed together by the door for just a little too long.

She knows now that it was all in her mind, as every relationship usually was and that he was right to attack her there. She would have done the same. But it didn’t take away the burn in her heart and the betrayal again at the pretty perfect little hands of Lana Lang. The girl she was trying to protect—the girl everyone was always trying to protect. Because of her doe eyes and her natural beauty and the way she could whisper a name like the exhale of breathe.

And it’s all stupid and it’s certainly masochistic but Chloe knows, understands that it’ll never change. Lana will always be the girl that comes first and it makes Chloe hate her all the more and want to protect her all the more. It’s a cycle and it makes her dizzy with regret and anguish.

So she runs to her car, turns the engine and leaves the mansion behind her. She keeps driving while she keeps crying and she leaves Smallville until the tears and her heart just stop.

Thirty miles out of town she’s run out of gas and she’s tired and her eyes are heavy from crying. But she won’t call anyone because she’s not Lana and she doesn’t need their charity. So she locks her car and starts walking, keeps walking the distance away from Smallville and that stupid, under appreciated life she built for herself there.

Fifty miles out of town she’s tripping over her own feet out of exhaustion and it’s suddenly dark. There are headlights in the distance behind her and they’re the perfect spotlight as she drops to her knees and just sighs. She can’t cry anymore and she wouldn’t anyway if she could so she just shakes her head and rubs her eyes. The headlights are closer and she can hear the engine slowing so she grips the dirt in front of her and tries to drag herself back up. Her fingers just slide through the dirt and her legs aren’t much help either. She manages to stand, wobbling and dirty as the car pulls up beside her and rolls its window down.

She hears, “Jesus, Chloe what are you doing?” And she almost laughs out of bitter irony. There’s a small amount of concern, somewhere, hidden at the edge of his voice and for this she does laugh, sharp and loud.

“I’m walking, Lex. People do that when their average American cars break down on them.”

“Why didn’t you call someone?”

“Yeah well, not all of us have the ability to have a helicopter flown in at the drop of a hat.” She says, but she’s too tired to put real fuel behind it.

“Get in.” He tells her and she shakes her head, keeps walking.

“I’m doing just fine, thank you.”

He shifts into park, cuts the engine and steps out of the car. She thinks briefly about running but decides against it when her left leg gives out and she falls back down to the pavement.

There are hands at her sides lifting her but she fights against them and steps away, cursing. “I don’t need to be rescued, Lex. Go find Lana if you’re feeling particularly heroic tonight. I’m sure she’s up in a tree somewhere, mewing for help.”

He comes at her again and this time forcefully yanks her toward the car. “Just get in the car, Chloe.”

She plants her feet to stop them but he grabs her around the waist and she can feel her feet dragging against the ground out of resistance.

“Stop, Lex,” She pulls on the collar of his jacket and for a moment it’s so familiar that he does stop. They’re standing on the side of the road, a few feet from his car and she’s gripping his collar and thinking about how she never gets anything she deserves.

He’s saying her name but she isn’t listening because she can’t hear over the hum of memories flooding her mind. Eggs in the morning and making him smile over coffee and the tugging feeling in her chest that lingered every time he left. It’s all too much so she pulls away, just like that night on the porch and she files it away under ‘regret later’.

“Just, stop.” She says, quietly. But he doesn’t let her go, even though her hands have returned to her sides and she’s trying not to touch him with her entire body. It’s obvious, so he pulls her closer. She thinks about screaming, even opens her mouth but she shuts it just as his finger slide against the collar of her shirt. There’s a pulling in her stomach that reaches her chest and it starts to burn when she says, “Leave it. Leave me, I’m fine.”

She pulls away, manages to move so that only her waist is touching his lower body. Her arms are at her sides. He says, “Why were you walking away from Smallville? If you’re fine, why didn’t you just walk home?”

“Maybe I would have,” she says, angrily and feels a bit of the spark returning. She ignores the one building in her chest. “if you hadn’t stopped me.”

“Maybe you would have? Chloe,” he laughs. “You were on your knees in the dirt. You weren’t going anywhere.” It’s the insinuation that pisses her off. The idea that she can’t do anything without tripping, without scraping her knees in the dirt like a pauper. She thinks that she wants to punch him, hit him in his perfect nose and it would be worth it to print that story on the front page of the Daily Planet.

“Well it’s a good thing you were here, Lex. You and your $75,000 chariot of martyrdom. I just don’t know what I would have ever done without you.” She pulls away with the intention to hit him but she settles for shoving the front of him, hard. He stumbles and she hears the pebbles shift under his expensive leather shoes.

She feels sick to her stomach.

Mostly, from the movement, the dragging and hauling and fighting and the amount of control it takes to keep herself from screaming. All of it, together, this, makes her stomach jolt so she moves away from him and starts walking. He notices her direction with his back to her and shouts, “Christ Chloe, just get in the fucking car.”

There are a million reasons why she shouldn’t get in that car and a hundred reasons why she won’t. There are only two reasons why she should. One is for her own safety. Two, fuck, she can’t even remember two anymore but she thinks it smells like him and that keeps her feet moving, away, away, away.

She wants to talk to him. She wants to say that she hates him; that she hates this situation and she hates what their relationship has become. There has always been a lack of understanding between them but now it feels like a wall and she’s sick of trying to break it down. She’s sick and tired of having to break down everyone’s walls. Let them try to break down hers for once.

There’s no longer any resolve in her steps, just a kind of desperation to keep moving but it isn’t enough to propel her so she stops, looks up at the sky and sits down.

“I hate Smallville.” She says, weakly. Her arms gesture, fall flat in the dirt.

She can hear the crunch of gravel and she worries that he actually has left. Part of her cares, but the rational part of her isn’t surprised that he would. Dirt hits her jeans and she looks to the side to see him standing next to her and she can see the scuff marks on his black shoes and a tiny rip in the seam. She smiles. Fucking figures.

Contradictions, contradictions, she used to love them. She used to search them out, hunt them down and tape them to her wall. Freaks, accidents, people mutated and alien occurrences—she used to love it. Even after Clark, even after everything he withheld from her and everything they went through she still craved it, craved a challenge. Now, now she hated it. Contradictions in life meant that somewhere things had gone wrong and contradictions in people meant that all along they had been wrong—she had been wrong.

It was all just too much and she feels stupid and just a little bit melodramatic as he sits down beside her in the dirt—all pristine white shirt and crisp black pants and he doesn’t look at her when he says, “I’m sorry.”

Contradictions, contradictions, and she shakes her head. “You should be.” she answers and feels like saying more but doesn’t. She wants the words, the right ones, not the fumbling, angry ones that rise up in her whenever she looks at him.

He rests his arms on his knees and looks at her. She wants to look away but doesn’t so she follows her first impulse and just keeps talking. “What you said to me, back there at the mansion it--”

“Was unnecessary and cruel.” He finishes for her, surprises her. Chloe opens her mouth, shuts it, smiles in the dark.

“It was true,” she says and watches the line of his neck curve when he looks at her. “It was unnecessary and cruel, yeah, but it was true too. You got me where I was weakest—I would have done the same.”

“No you wouldn’t have,” he says and she looks away before he can speak again. She feels like she doesn’t want to face him—face this, anymore. It’s all going to be so heartbreakingly overdramatic. A fine fucking tragedy, she thinks. It’s only fitting.

“You would have said it in less—caustic terms.” His voice is easy, just as it always is, lilting in tune and conversationally accurate for the time. She thinks it might all be calculated but when she turns her head to look at him she catches him looking at her and it all falls away, somehow. She was never very good at reading people—too trusting, but she could always spot a lie because she learned to read people’s reactions, movements. She could read little jittery hand movements, darting eyes, sweating brow, the compulsive need to smile or to gently guide her by the arm while their eyes insisted that she leave, that she was too close to something important.

It’s hard to make the eyes lie.

She tries to see his eyes but it’s too dark and her own are too tired for searching. So she sits in the dirt, hands in the gravel and legs outstretched. He isn’t talking anymore and she suddenly feels like making a declaration—like standing up and shouting at how unfair everything is and how ridiculous their relationship has always been. She wants him to understand her, to see her, to get her like no one else does. She wants to be known, touched, felt, lived, by someone because she’s never had it and everyone else has come too close to it without her.

She feels left out.

Her legs curl in and she touches the soles of her shoes with the palm of her hand and says, “It can’t ever just be normal, can it?” She doesn’t need to turn her head to see his face because she knows he has the best poker face in the world and even she couldn’t crack it to see the emotion behind it.

She laughs, quietly, and moves to sit up. She feels foolish, suddenly shy, awkward and displaced. His hand catches her wrist and she stills with her knees in the dirt and her legs behind her awkwardly. He looks at her and she can see his eyes, bright and open in the dim lights of the distant city and she feels exposed, flung open. He says, “Just wait a little bit.”

And she does. She sits back, with her palms in the dirt and her legs outstretched and they watch the lights flicker against the sky. He doesn’t apologize and she doesn’t expect him to and they don’t use banter as a shield to cover the silence. They just sit, with his hands close to hers in the dirt and the smell of grass in her hair and she forgives him if just for an instance—if just for the moment where he finally saw her.