To be honest, I just opened this file last night to see if it was finally time to relegate it to the folder called 'Doomed to Incompletion'. (Yes, it really exists on my computer.)

It had been frustrating the hell out of me for several reasons, mostly because I knew Chloe had a story to tell but I couldn't figure out what exactly she wanted to say. And last night -- she told me.

Rating: R

Pairing: Clark/Lana (don't judge me, damn you!)

Genre: Character study (Chloe's POV).

Summary: Chloe will always want to know everything about everything.

A/N: Set mid-season 5, before we knew anything about Clark and Lana's physical relationship after Clark regains his powers. Could be considered mildly AU, but this was written (or started) before it got jossed by canon. There's a good chance that this is one of those fics that I like even though everyone else finds it odd or off-putting. But I don't care! Because Chloe *talked to me*!



There is a small red dry-erase heart next to Lana’s name on the whiteboard, so Chloe flops to the floor in the corridor of their dorm. She’s too exhausted to be properly annoyed. It’s fair enough Lana assumed Chloe wouldn’t be back until later. After all, the Planet has lately become Chloe’s second home and it’s barely midnight, early by Chloe’s standards.

But maybe, just maybe, the festivities have already ended in their dorm room and Chloe can sneak in and crash unnoticed.

She slowly rolls her head, tilting one ear towards the thin partition of the door. Amid the rumble of music and various shouts reverberating around the floor, Chloe makes out the distinctive sound of Lana’s mattress groaning under some three hundred pounds of mingled fairy princess and alien flesh. No such luck.

Some small mean part of Chloe honestly hoped that if and when Lana and Clark finally got together in the horizontal sense, it would be awkward and disappointing. Lana would prove to be repressed and frigid, or maybe Clark would be like Jimmy Olsen, oddly convinced that the clitoris was inside there somewhere. In Chloe’s mind, Lana and Clark had only been capable of unsatisfactory Ken-Barbie coupling, stiff plastic limbs unable to interlock, molded plastic underwear prohibiting any real contact. Too pristine to be pliant, too good to be messy.

It’s just her luck that she ended up being Lana’s roommate and Clark’s confidant just when Ken unexpectedly shimmied out of his plastic drawers and Barbie miraculously learned how to spread her perfect thighs. After all, it would hardly have been enough merely to suspect that Clark and Lana had good sex…of course not. Chloe has to know it, know it from a dozen evenings like this one, sitting on the wrong side of the dorm room wall while her two best friends in the world do things that make the linoleum shiver.

Chloe hasn’t turned her head away again, because she’s mildly masochistic and besides, some damnable part of her is still a reporter; she will always want to know everything about everything. She writes the article in her head as she hones her eavesdropping skills, building a picture in her mind from what she hears and what she’s been told: Kent has been described by those in his confidence as being an assertive sexual partner. While he is almost overly cautious and is known for inquiring after his partner’s well-being, he is reputed to be surprisingly altruistic in the pursuit of his own goals once proceedings are underway. Lang, on the other hand, has garnered a reputation for her charismatic approach to sexual relations, utilizing her femininity to gain control of any given situation.

Lana is gasping now, and the mattress’s upset noises are becoming more pronounced. Clark is quiet except for the way he’s slamming the flimsy bed frame into the cracking plaster wall.

While public opinion is still divided on the long-term viability of this couple, Chloe continues, seeing the words appear on an imaginary screen behind her eyelids, pollsters suggest that Lang and Kent are well-liked among middle-aged Americans. Yes, neat and impersonal and completely devoid of any hint of Chloe. Dr. Macready would be pleased.

“Oh, oh, oh god,” Lana cries sharply, and the bed slams faster.

Political science pundits predict that, if Lang and Kent outlast their freshman year of college, their odds of permanently dementing young journalists-in-the-making are far better than initially expected.

Right, send it to press, Chloe thinks, just as Lana comes with a soft sigh, just as Clark stutters to a halt. There is soft laughter behind the door next, and Chloe draws her knees up to her chest, waiting.

She thought her days of waiting for Clark Kent were long over.

***

Chloe likes Lana, she genuinely does. When they were younger, Lana was more uptight and Chloe was more volatile, and that hadn’t always been a good combination, but these days they’ve both matured, and they have a lot in common. They’re both Smallville survivors, both independent and ambitious, both intelligent and social. They share long stories about profs, classes, dorm food, clothes, clubs, family angst – all typical roommate stuff.

But there will always be a part of Lana, Chloe thinks, that is obsessed with her own idea of perfection. It’s in the way she orders her life: no project too large for the undertaking (run a busy coffee bar at the age of sixteen? Sure!), no space too insignificant for her attention (even her pencils are neatly organized), no aspect of her life that’s not under careful management (Chloe once snooped inside Lana’s pink journal in sophomore year and found a terrifyingly itemized to-do list).

For Lana, there is a right way to do everything. And while she’s long since stopped commenting on Chloe’s messiness and inability to organize her life outside of her work, Chloe can always feel Lana’s silent comparisons, the way that Chloe’s imperfections make Lana feel better about herself.

Lana is sitting on her neatly-made bed, a brown paper-jacketed textbook propped open in front of her crossed legs, while Chloe ransacks her own closet. “If I wear the mesh thing, then I need a clean camisole, and mine smells like beer because that stupid neanderthal at Solstice tripped over my chair leg.”

“I just did laundry, borrow one of mine,” Lana suggests.

Chloe hates borrowing Lana’s clothes. They fit, in the technical sense, but they’re all wrong, too long, too tight. Still, it’s not like she has a choice, so she says thanks and goes to Lana’s closet, heading straight for the sleeveless stretchy section.

“What’s the occasion?” Lana asks as Chloe pulls off her baby T, the one that says ‘runs with scissors.’ It’s slowly growing a hole in the left underarm, but Chloe can’t bring herself to throw it out yet.

“It’s a thing with a boy and a pre-arranged meeting time and place,” Chloe says, waving away the reply.

“You mean a date?” Lana asks, giving Chloe one of her kind ‘I don’t get your humor but I’ll smile anyway’ looks.

Chloe tugs Lana’s cami over her head and pulls it down, grimacing at the way it bunches around her waist, the way it stretches thin-tight across her chest. She looks like an unevenly squeezed tube of toothpaste. “I figure it’s either that or he’s a crazed killer and I’m walking right into his trap.”

“Well, take your cell phone,” Lana orders, going back to her book, “in case it’s the last one.”

“I just hope that he doesn’t turn out to be like Mike the engineer,” Chloe says, digging through her hamper to find the mesh shirt. “Hung like a camel and not the slightest idea what to do with it – such a waste.”

Lana laughs uneasily but doesn’t look up, and as usual, Chloe abruptly feels crass and low. Sometimes she honestly forgets it’s not Lois with her, but mostly she says these things in the wild hopes that Lana’s discomfort will finally seem prudish instead of merely polite. But it always ends like this: Chloe feeling like a carbon copy of her vulgar fart-joke dad, and Lana with that tiny line between her eyebrows suggesting that she’s far too nice to let on.

Because any girl who comes as noisily and quickly as Lana can’t be prudish, not really. It’s only that Chloe is destined for less meaningful things, awkward and goofy one-night stands with people she doesn’t know or like – whereas Lana is in capital-L Love. Love is discreet and intimate and all those other adult euphemisms for ‘fucking like bunnies’, and Lana knows that Chloe can’t really understand because she’s never been there. But Lana’s kind, so she doesn’t make a big deal out of it, doesn’t point out the difference in their kinds of experience.

Lana never overshares.

That really bugs the hell out of Chloe.

***

Especially when Clark really, really does.

He’s her so-called date, but Chloe couldn’t tell Lana, because how could she explain Clark being in Metropolis as often as he is? Clark doesn’t like lying, so he leaves it up to Chloe. After all, she sort of enjoys it. It’s an outlet for her creativity, making up excuses to keep Lana from guessing. So far this semester, Clark has been Mike the engineer, Yves the philosophy major, and Trey the artist. He’s also been a certain book at the library, a non-fat latte at the coffee shop, and tampons at the drugstore.

Today Chloe is thinking Clark will be ‘Rex’, if for no other reason than that she thinks it’d be kind of funny to tell Lana she was dating a guy named after a dog.

“Because I think she likes it, but then when I ask her, she just says, ‘well, I finished, didn’t I?’ Which when you think about it, isn’t really an answer. Right?”

Chloe tucks her heels up under her on the desk chair and pushes off on her desk, spinning around a few times so that when she stops, Clark is pitching to the left of her vision and snapping back to center, over and over. It actually helps with the nausea.

“I mean, would you like it?” Earnest green eyes, and Chloe’s stomach lurches again. Would she like it? Clark stretched out between her legs, lying belly-down on rumpled sheets, smiling up at her as he strokes his thumbs over her inner thighs before bowing his head…

“Kind of depends on your technique,” Chloe answers as flatly as possible. “And besides, all girls like different things.”

“Okay, but – did she say anything about it?”

Chloe tries to picture it – Lana saying, “Clark keeps going down on me and I hate it.” The idea makes her laugh, and Clark immediately looks panicked. He’s a lot like Lana, which is probably why they’re good together – he can’t stand something being less than perfect, and neither can she. Clark’s just a lot more obvious about it. “No, she hasn’t said anything,” Chloe reassures him. “If she’s getting off, you’re probably okay.”

“I don’t want to be just okay,” he pouts. “I want it to be –”

“Perfect,” Chloe finishes, annoyance edging into her voice. But Clark blinks over at her with a startled hurt expression, and her sympathy flickers back to life. “Clark, nothing happens overnight. You two will get it right. It just takes time.”

“Maybe I should ask Lex,” Clark says, brows coming together.

Chloe can’t help it, it still sounds the alarm bells in her head whenever Clark says that. Because for every drawback of being Clark’s closest friend, there is the flying-high surety that he trusts her at long last, and she can’t screw it up. “I’m pretty sure that Lex’s partners are on a whole different plane of experience than Lana,” Chloe says, her voice dripping with innuendo.

Clark is troubled for a moment, his features cloudy. But his expression clears as he realizes that he likes his Lana sweet and shy and ambiguous, not bold and unafraid and determined.

He’s so stupid.

***

Determined to push his unpopular cunnilingus mandate, Kent today made another bold move in his campaign for more oral sex.

Of course, she doesn’t know that’s what he’s doing: there’s still a door and a wall between Chloe and whatever mandate Clark’s pushing, and she’s not the one with the x-ray vision. But Lana’s being pretty quiet, and the bed’s hardly creaking, so Chloe thinks she’s probably right.

Either that or they’ve fallen asleep.

There’s about a two-inch gap between the lino and the bottom of the dorm room door, though, so Chloe knows her first guess was right when she hears Clark say, “Did you-?” and Lana answers, “Yeah, I did. Come up here.”

“No, I want to keep going,” Clark says, his voice muffled.

“You really like doing that, huh?” Lana half-cajoles, half-wonders.

However, his best attempts were met with, at best, a lukewarm reception, Chloe types in her mind. She can’t help smirking.

“I like making you feel good,” Clark says, testing.

“You make me feel good when you’re up here,” she urges. “Come on, Clark.”

Chloe briefly considers just walking into the room, laughing hysterically at the look on Clark and Lana’s faces, and walking back out again. She should go to the library, or to Yolanda’s room down the hall, or to the Planet do to some more work – but instead she feels compelled to sit here, listen to how completely Clark has overcome his fear of hurting Lana.

Lana is breathing out in fast little puffs, and Clark murmurs something about being sorry, and Chloe gets the image in her mind – Clark’s solid body braced up by big hands, his hips pushing in with determination, his mouth frowning a little as he judges force and distance and pressure, his eyes closed to keep from getting carried away by the sight of pain-pleasure flickering across Lana’s face.

Lana is getting noisier, ten times noisier than she was before, and Chloe understands why Clark is so bothered by the discrepancy in her responses.

But Chloe herself is unsurprised: for Lana, even sex has to be just right.

***

The next morning, Lana comes back from her closet with an armload of clothes and winces just slightly as she sits on the edge of her bed.

“Rough night?” asks Chloe, looking up from where she’s painting her toenails. It’s maybe a little mean, but then other girls might laugh and confide in Chloe. Lana just blushes, quickly turning her head aside as she sorts through the three shirts she’s considering. “You know I live here, too, right?” Chloe presses, irritated. “I mean, it’s not like I’m going to be oblivious when I come home and see that there are two people in your bed.”

“I didn’t know it bothered you,” Lana answers prissily. “But I can ask Clark to leave sooner if you like.”

“It doesn’t bother me, why should it bother me?” Chloe snaps. “Clark’s my friend, and so are you. I just wish you would stop acting like it’s this big secret that you and Clark are sleeping together.”

“It’s not a secret. It’s just that some things are private,” she says tautly, face going smooth like a doll’s.

“Yeah, well, the two of you should really check the party line about the privacy thing,” Chloe grumbles to her left foot. “I’m not certain that you’re in the same place on that point.”

“Clark – he tells you things?” Lana asks, eyes wide.

Chloe lifts one shoulder and drops it, refusing to look up.

“What does he tell you?” she asks, annoyed and insistent.

“Some things are private,” Chloe mimics sweetly, and smiles. She doesn’t know why she’s chosen today to rediscover her inner fourteen-year-old, but it feels good to let her out to play for a while. Even if it’s going to make Lana furious, or maybe make her cry. All Chloe knows is that she’s tired, that she’s pulling a C in her creative writing seminar, and that she listened to Clark make Lana come last night; somewhere in there is the reason she’s so bitchy this morning.

But Lana isn’t furious, and she isn’t crying. When Chloe looks up, Lana is just sitting on her bed, knees tucked up under her chin, her hair knotted because she hasn’t been to the mirror yet.

Chloe melts just a little, around the edges.

“We don’t fit together,” Lana says at length, in her careful matter-of-fact way. “Does he say that?”

Chloe can’t quite figure out what Lana means, if she’s talking on a purely physical level or if she’s being psychological.

“I thought –” Lana starts. “I thought if we could – if we could just *be* together again, then things would fix themselves. But even in bed, it’s like we don’t quite line up.”

There are a dozen things that Chloe could say, and half of them are genuinely helpful. She considers telling Lana to communicate with Clark, considers telling her that things are sometimes less than perfect, that soft-focus euphemistic lovemaking only happens on TV. But none of that will really help with the fundamental thing that Lana’s expressing. She’s saying that Chloe’s wrong -- that two perfectionists don’t make for a perfect couple; two rights don’t in fact make a right.

Analysts say the most dangerous weakness in the Kent-Lang platform is that both Kent and Lang are idealists – and every idealist needs a pragmaticist to temper his or her ideals.

Lana’s still not crying. She’s pillowing her head on top of her knees, looking small and desolate and tangle-haired. “Is that what he says?” she asks bleakly.

Chloe still can’t put together an answer. Instead, she caps the polish, walks over to Lana on her heels, and sits beside her on the bed. She’s probably wrinkling Lana’s crisply ironed shirts with her butt, but she doesn’t care. It’s her job to be the messy one. She slings an arm around Lana, kisses the tip of her shoulder affectionately, and snugs her head down beside Lana’s. Lana smells like strawberry body-wash and Red Zone antiperspirant, like mingled fairy princess and alien. “Are you really sore?” Chloe asks, quietly.

“He’s strong,” Lana says in response, “but he’s careful. I’m the one who…”

Lana doesn’t need to explain. Chloe heard her, after all. Lana’s the one who urged ‘more, faster, harder, deeper,’ and now Chloe gets that it was because she was trying to keep Clark there, to get him so far inside herself that there’s no possibility that he could ever leave.

***

They all think he’s her boyfriend, the other interns and staffers here in the basement at the Planet. It’s understandable, the way he hangs around with her after hours, the way he’s constantly just dropping by, trailing the scent of Smallville-fresh air behind him because not more than ten minutes ago he was probably lounging on a bale of hay.

They don’t stick around to watch his face grow stormy, the way he looms over her desk until Chloe finds herself zipping around the office like a demented mosquito, seeking shelter in the gathering gloom. If they saw that, they’d probably figure out that there’s nothing romantic about the two of them.

“I just wish I knew what she’s thinking.” Clark’s mouth goes down at the corners, his shoulders are slumped, and his elbows are propped on his knees. He’s folded at the waist like a Rodin bronze, only wearing flannel.

Chloe could tell Clark what Lana’s thinking, but she’s not about to become the messenger with the arrow in her chest. She supposes that’s one way she’s grown, because there was a time when Chloe couldn’t keep a secret around Clark to save her life.

Still, she can’t help teasing him. She pauses in the middle of the floor and rubs her temples exaggeratedly. “I -- I’m getting a psychic flash,” she gasps dramatically, and Clark’s gaze snaps up from the floor. “Lana is thinking -- she’s thinking -- she’s thinking that you should go and buy me a cappuccino and let me get some work done.”

Clark tries to scowl at her but she keeps her grin turned up to maximum cuteness, and soon enough he’s smiling too. “Double shot?”

“My boy knows my drink,” Chloe sing-songs, heading for the fax machine because it looks like that acne-ridden creepoid over at the morgue is finally coming through for her. Grainy photos of a grisly autopsy report are spooling out onto the tray. She’s so absorbed in this new data for her story that Clark’s kiss, dropped onto the top of her head, catches her off-guard.

Clark can’t help making everyone love him. It’s his tragic flaw.

***

Chloe doesn’t have a lot of experience with couples -- except for Clark, it seems like everyone’s parents are divorced or dead -- but she guesses that this must be what a prelude to a break-up looks like.

She thought it would have been louder.

Clark is sitting on Chloe’s bed, using their wi-fi connection to play an online computer game. Lana is cross-legged on her own mattress, making a good copy of her class notes (of course she makes copies). There’s no music, no conversation, nothing. Chloe’s keys jingling as she wrestles them from the lock seem almost rude.

“Hamburgers!” she exclaims, because someone needs to shout something. She holds up the paper bag in her free hand and waves it like she’s encouraging a puppy.

It works on Clark. His ears practically perk up. “Really?” he asks, and clicks his laptop shut.

“With onion rings,” she elaborates, waggling her eyebrows. “Come on, Clark. Let’s get fat together.” She bounds onto the bed and puts the paper bag between them. Clark starts opening it right away. “Lana, you in?”

Lana shakes her head. She has the same look she gets whenever Chloe leaves her socks on the floor: like Chloe’s disappointing her.

“Extra bacon on that one,” says Chloe, and Clark lunges. “God, I’m *so* PMSing today. I had a chocolate bar for lunch.”

Clark gives her the slightly betrayed look he always gets when she mentions her period, but he’s too busy lighting into his food to actively reproach her.

“Hey, how was the midterm?” Chloe asks Lana, taking a bag of onion rings and crossing the floor to visit the other half of the quietest couple ever.

She hisses in a breath and takes an onion ring. “Bad.”

“You got an A,” Chloe grumbles knowingly.

“Probably not,” Lana sighs.

Just to see what happens, Chloe settles in and waits.

No one speaks.

Clark finishes his burger and looks at his watch. “I have to be going,” he says. “Long drive home.” He stands up, hesitates, then goes over to Lana and kisses her. Chloe watches Lana try to turn her face away but she gets caught on the tenderness Clark presents, the way he always is -- an enticing open book that only snaps shut when you most need to see its contents.

“I’ll call you tomorrow,” he promises in a whisper, loud in the small room.

Lana nods against his lips, eyes lowered, brows contracted a little.

A source close to the pair says that Lang is planning a pre-emptive strike.

***

Lana spends the entire weekend cleaning. Her own life is already minutely ordered, so she practically orders Chloe to hand over everything she owns. Lana alphabetizes Chloe’s cell phone bills, dining hall receipts, and contraceptive pill insurance claims while still wearing yellow rubber dishwashing gloves from her attack on their shared microwave. Her hair is in a manic high ponytail and her socks are different colors.

Lana is in rough shape.

“I hate cramps,” Chloe tells her, even though she really wants to scream stop touching my stuff!

Lana flattens out a crumpled invoice for an oil change on the Beetle. “Automotive,” she tells the paper, assigning it a purpose in the universe.

“Does having regular sex make cramps better or worse?” Chloe asks.

“I don’t know,” Lana says, filing the invoice. “I’m on progesterone shots, remember?”

Oh yes, Lana doesn’t even menstruate. Chloe hates her.

“Electronics,” says Lana, finding the manual for the cell phone Chloe used in her sophomore year of high school.

“Toss it,” Chloe says, and burrows deeper into her bed.

Lana, who normally has a love for recycling that borders on the worryingly obsessive, only fingers the worn booklet before filing it too. She’s not quite ready to throw obsolete things away.

***

Chloe takes five ibuprofen pills and a hot water bottle, and escapes Metropolis. The three-hour drive is long and wearying but at the end there’s a yellow farmhouse and Clark playing basketball alone in the driveway.

“One on one?” he asks, spinning the ball on his finger, and adds, “No alien cheating?”

Chloe shakes her head, but takes the ball from him anyway, dribbling it slowly to watch the dust puff up with every rebound. “Lana’s getting me organized,” she tells Clark, because he should know what he’s done to her. To both of them.

“That’s good,” Clark says, looking down and away because of Lana’s name.

“She sorted my underwear by color and made me get rid of all my socks with holes in the toes.” Chloe doesn’t feel like Clark’s quite grasping the horror of this event, but she supposes he can be excused this time around.

Shelby wanders into the yard with her tail beating, winding between Clark and Chloe in a fruitless attempt to shepherd them into the house where the other humans are. Shelby’s big on keeping everyone in one place. Chloe can relate. She’s starting to feel like a human ping-pong ball.

“So I think I figured out what I’ve been doing wrong,” Clark tells Chloe as they head towards the loft.

“Yeah?” Chloe prompts, her heart sinking.

“I asked Lex,” Clark says, “and he said I should use my fingers too.”

“And Lex knows all about fingering,” Chloe pronounces, and Clark shoots her a quelling glance. “Oh, come on, Clark. You think he’s the expert just because he’s collected two homicidal wives in the past four years?”

Clark pokes at the head of a nail that’s protruding from the stair and it goes into the wood with a squeak. “I’ve got to try something, Chloe,” he says at length, and looks down at her. “It can’t just end like this.”

“Maybe you’re right,” says Chloe, because she really doesn’t know much about couples. Sometimes, when she and Clark are quiet and close like this she thinks about what he might do if she just reached out and kissed him. “But maybe Lana’s not the one, Clark.”

Clark sighs and looks over her head, past her and out the loft window to where the sun is setting. “If she’s not, I don’t know who is.”

Chloe lets that sit between them for a minute before she brushes past him and collapses onto the couch. “Just remember to cut your fingernails first,” she advises.

“Chloe!” Clark exclaims, shocked. But he’s not Lana, so he can’t help the grin that rises.

“I’m just saying, it’s not an area where you want to go in with claws.”

“Gross, Chloe,” Clark snorts, and sits beside her. “So how are things going with the mayor’s office and that factory fire?”

Chloe begins to fill him in. He’s a good listener, but she catches him a couple of times, looking down at his hands with a serious expression. He’s got his fingers pressed together at the tips, left and right hands opposed, like he’s holding something between his palms. Like he can’t decide whether to let it go or not.

***

It’s strangely disappointing: for all the times Chloe’s had to sit outside their dorm room, waiting for Clark to leave Lana, she somehow misses the last night. It’s four days after Lex offered his advice about the fingers, Chloe’s story is complete (and completely stolen by a junior reporter, too), and she’s not a little drunk.

“This is probably a really stupid idea,” she tells Jimmy. He’s got her pressed up against the cold painted cement wall and while he seems to have improved in a few of the fundamentals of kissing, he’s still lacking some of the more basic concepts of seduction. Like the difference between sexy urgency and unsexy neediness.

“Please, just one more time,” he says, and slides a hand up her shirt. It’s pathetic but his hand on her breast feels friendly.

“Hang on, hang on,” she tells him, pushing him away long enough so she can get to her door. “Oh, fuck,” she says, facing the whiteboard, the small red heart. “Clark’s here.”

“Who’s Clark?” Jimmy asks.

The door opens as though Clark has been waiting for his cue. He’s tall and beautiful and he smells like sex. He blinks in surprise at Chloe while he sidles outside and clicks the door shut again behind him. “I’m Clark,” he says, extending a hand towards Jimmy.

“Pleased to meet you,” Jimmy says, too tanked to remember his own name. He’s wrapping his arm around Chloe’s waist from behind. “So can we go in, if Clark’s leaving?”

Jimmy seems small and uninteresting now that Clark’s here. “Are you going home?” she asks.

Clark has two spots of color high up in his cheeks. He’s either furious or embarrassed, maybe both. He nods briefly and makes a point of avoiding eye contact. He hasn’t seen another guy touch her in at least three years. Chloe: the amazing nun, slash girl sleuth, slash sidekick.

“Is Lana in there?”

“Yeah,” Clark tells her, and starts to go.

She’d never realized that she’d have to choose who to comfort when this finally happened. “Go home, Jimmy,” she says, unwrapping herself from his embrace and watching as Clark goes down the corridor with his hands in his jacket pockets. She’s abruptly sober.

“Should I call later?” Jimmy asks hopefully.

“I’ll see you at work.” Clark is almost to the stairwell; Lana is inside the dorm room right next to her. Lana is like a sister to her, but Chloe carries Clark’s burdens, and abruptly she knows which friend she has to be with. She jogs a few steps after Clark, and he turns at the sound of her footfalls.

“Want to get ice cream and throw rocks into the river?” Chloe offers.

Snap.

Clark closes visibly. “No,” he says, drawing the ten feet between them into ten yards, ten miles. “No thanks.”

It might be Chloe’s chance to take him down, to tell him that being alone doesn’t make him a hero. That telling someone everything you think isn’t the same as letting someone see how you really feel. That two rights don’t make a right, and that someday Clark should try being wrong just to see what’s it’s like to be a human being. That sometimes Lana’s socks don’t match, and sometimes she has messy hair, and that she spends a lot of time trying to do exactly what’s expected of her, and maybe Clark could have been the one person who didn’t demand anything more from her.

Instead, all she manages is a weak fake smile and a “Talk to you later.” She watches him go, rolls her eyes at Jimmy (who’s throwing up into a nearby garbage bin), and moves to open her dorm room.

One thing before she goes inside: Chloe reaches out with an index finger and wipes the heart off of the board. She can still see the faint red echo of all the times and places it’s been there.

Lang, Kent Call It Quits she announces to her loyal readership of one. Details inside.

Chloe takes a deep breath, and goes inside.