Blue-Gray
by Nymph Du Pave

It's the same every week.  Sometimes I'll spend extra days with them, but really, basically, it's got the same foundation.  And unless I'm out somewhere saving someone, or knocking another mutant unconscious, I'm there.

Monday afternoons, I play about six games of HORSE with Pete.  Really, I've been trying to change the game into something like ELEPHANT or LAPSO OPSO or ISISTIUS BRASILIENSIS. Carcharodon carcharias.  Whatever.  Just something long.  How many years have we been playing the damn game?  The letters H-O-R-S-E are getting really old.  But Pete won't vary.  Won't even play HORSE backwards.  Says it's the princible of the matter.  Then starts into some argument about how he doesn't even like elephants - like I don't this; his best friend and all, right? like I don't remember that elephants with their tusks and their eyes and their incredible long-term memories give him the creeps; who does he think I am? - and would you count the space in 'Isistius brasiliensis' or not?  He's not getting the point.  He might never.

But I digress.

Mondays are Pete days.  After HORSE, grrr, we do our homework together and now that he knows what I am - as much as I know what I am, anyway - he guilts me into giving him the answeers to our math questions.  He's getting used to it by now, I think.  Having an alien best friend, that is.  Not guilting me into supplying him with the correct arithmetic equations.  He still gets miffed everynow and then with the little things.  When he remembers times that I faked needing help.  He got really angry and even left the farm when he realized that all the Sundays he came over early to help me were in vain.  He'd done it so that I'd finish up early and we could go out and do things.  His help had only hindered my ability to do it faster.  All I really had to do to get him not mad at me was explain that I had enjoyed the company and we'd had fun.  When I told him that I would have rather spent three hours doing the chores with him than half an hour without, I think he understood where I was coming from.

So Monday is my 'spend time with Pete' day.

Wednesdays [Wed-Ness-Days, my mother used to tell me; I couldn't spell that word to save my ass from meteor fragments] I spend my time with Chloe.  Usually in the Torch's headquarters.  It was a lot more fun when she and I were just friends.  Okay, not just friends, but best friends.  I feel that, after the Spring Formal and our little talk in the forest about maintaining our friendship as just that, a friendship and nothing more...  Well, I've felt recently that we've slipped apart.  I can't do enough to get her to treat me like she used to, and even if I tried everything possible, I'm afraid it wouldn't work.  Her once sunny smiles are now peppered with tension and disapointment, plus a quality of 'phony Chloe' that I never thought would be directed at me.  Her disposition is laden with the same contradictory menace that she usually reserves for people trying to avoid giving a straight answer to her questions and I honestly don't want to think about how well that applies to me.  She has more of a disregard to my feelings then before, but she's still trying.  I can't help but feel that I have not only let her down, but deeply hurt her in a way that only I could.  Pete won't tell me what I've done and I can't ask her straight out.  So I'm stuck in a nightmare that I see no way out of.  Maybe if I give it time...

I've clearly burned a bridge along the way, sometime between the seconds that our lips were almost touching on the makeshift dancefloor of the gym to the moment I agreed to just stay friends, but I'm a guy and, as sensitive as I've been told I am, I cannot for the life of me pinpoint the exact location.  So Wednesdays are still hers, until she tells me that no longer wants them.  She wouldn't say those words exactly but, her being Chloe, she would make it as painfully obvious as she could.  I think that's why Lana's been coming around on Wednesdays.  They used to be our days, but now they're Chloe days.  And Lana's a part of that now.  I know I'm losing them both to each other, and not in a way that would make me not mind so much.  They're interested in each other for what they can offer.  Opposites attract in friendship, too, and I'm not surprised to see the girls latching onto one another in an attempt to make a connection where I have failed them both.  Chloe and Lana are both searching desperately for the truth, any truth, and that is something that I feel I cannot give them just yet.  I haven't known them as long as I've known Pete, and I cannot take the stress of another revelation.  Someday soon perhaps, but not now.  I just have to make sure it is before I lose either one of them.

Lana.

Early Thursdays are the days I have with her.  I'll make excuses during the week to go there, but Thursday's a no fail.  I help her set up for the Poetry nights.  I used like her company more than now.  There was something calming about being with her, around her.  I needed it.  Like a sanctuary.  A place one goes to be a peace with himself.  At times I felt like her conscience.  At others she was mine.  We've helped each other through rough spots.  But now there's too much tension.

She's always been so very honest with me and now it's coming into light that I'm not doing the same.  Now she's taking to mocking me when I speak my mind, or mention a possibile action she could take.  She mocks me when I speak of telling the truth.  And I can't blame her.

I know I see interest in her eyes.  She's free from her relationship with Whitney.  I wonder if I told her the truth about the way I feel about her, if I told her I need more time before allowing her in, allowing myself to be that much more exposed, would she let me hold her.  Would she let me kiss her?  Do I really even want to?  My want for her is a slow, sensual thing and the more she presses for the truth, the more I can't help but push her away.  She's threatening our friendship, slowly instating an ultimatum and with each time she pushes it further, I push her along with it.  If this was more than a 'classic beauty from far away' deal, would I be doing this?  And since Whitney's been out of the picture for quite some time now, shouldn't I have already taken my chance?  Shouldn't she be mine now?

There are things I see in her eyes, but they're things I don't find myself passionately wanting.

Fridays.  That's where I spend my passion.  It's also where my confussion lies in wait.  Fridays.

My days with Lex.  As much as we push each other, I've found more passion in this relationship then in any in my life.  Everytime he does something more me, my heart feels weak, like it can't take the weight of my body.  Lana's never made me feel like that.  She's never made me crazy with her dark brown eyes and her smooth, curvy body.  I find myself after the blue-gray end of the spectrum, after a different kind of smooth. 

Lana's given me sultry looks before and sure, I'm a guy.  I feel them in my groin.  But I don't feel them in my gut.  Not in my mind.  The way that Lex's looks stick, you'd think they were burned on my brain like the sticky-sweet chorus of some new bubble-gum pop hit.  He's got a magic to him.  We don't have anything in particular that we do together.  Movies.  Go out to eat.  He's started teaching me how to fence.  We even just sit and read.  Sometimes we talk about our days and our lives and what we want from them.  It doesn't matter.  Everything is okay with him.  He's not pressing to do something else, to do something that has rigid rules or forcing me to tell him the truth.  Not now.  I only briefly wonder if it's because he's got something to hide himself until I realize that it doesn't matter.  One day I know we'll know all of each others secrets.  And that calms me.  Like being with Lana used to.  Only this is different.  She's like finding somewhere quiet for rest and solitude.  Being with Lex is like learning how to pray.  In the same way that Lana was like a shelter or refuge, Lex is like an alter.  A shrine.  I haven't found out quite what the alter is for, but one day, like his secrets, I will know.

I'm with him right now.  He's leant me a book, a study on Alexander the Great, because I told him I wanted to know where he's coming from.  What his father forced him to read, why Lionel's so tyranical and what Lex is fighting to break away from.  He says that Lionel grew up with parents that drilled this nonsense in him.  At any other time, with any other person, Lex would show no pity for the man that left thousands of workers without jobs, just to keep Lex as his unwitting drone.  That never lashed out with emotion, but instead drew back in cold, chilly silence.  A man that pulled back from Lex as he shivered in the broken stalks of corn instead of embracing the frightened nine-year-old.

Lex told me of his memory one stormy night awhile back.  His fear, his humiliation.  Everything that the meteor shower some twelve, thirteen years ago had forced into his life.  That night I came close to telling him the truth.  That or kissing him.  I did neither of course.  For all my invincibility, I'm just a chickenshit fifteen year old afraid of the possibilities that a relationship with Lex could bring into view.  I'm afraid and like everything else, the knowledge that this will someday pass is comforting.  I can't help wondering, however, if Lex will be the one to help kick away the blanket of stagnant and stuffy worries, fears and incapabilities.

I hope it's him.

I look up from the words I'm reading and glance at him.  The pages of the thick book are of little interest to me.  Lex seems to have this subtle magnitism about him.  We started out across the room from each other, just like almost every Friday.  I was in this comfortable, overstuffed chair next to the empty hearth.  Lex said it was expensive silk, French or Italian.  He even told me the appropriate forgein name for it.  It sounded chic and expensive and danty.  Far away.  Not at all the plush, comfy, cozy set I'm actually sitting in now.

Anyway, that's where I started out tonight.  Throughout the course of the evening this multiple-thousand dollar chair becomes uncomfortable and I'm itching to sit on the floor.  For a while that will work, until I suddenly see that the seat next to the couch Lex is sitting on looks softer.  Then even that will not be enough as I notice how very deep the couch cushions look, specifically the one next to Lex.

I never get there though.  I get to the couch cushion farthest from him - he's not moved and inch since we sat down to read; not even to stretch - and then I chicken out.  It's not subtle enough and I have to wonder why the hell he doesn't buy a tiny little loveseat.

Once again, I know that someday I'll have the courage to scoot a little closer.  The courage to not care if I'm being subtle enough.  I know that my hands will find themselves roaming the contours of a body with no breasts and an apendage low on the body, one that I want stiff and pressed to me.  I want his desire, his flame.  I want to erase every trace of every lover and leave my mark.  There is passion here, the ardent kind that will one day possess the one thing I've ever truly wanted.  The one thing that no longer expects anything of me but me.  Someday I will own Lex Luthor, and he will own me.  We'll know everything there is to know about each other and still find ways to discover more.

But someday is suddenly not enough.  Not here, not now.  Not with him.  I can't be patient.  I find myself wanting, needing.  Dreaming of taking.  And that is the way that I know it will last.  Because with Chloe and Lana, I know that someday is going to happen.  I'm not struggling to find ways to make sure it happens the way I want, because I don't think I'm even sure I know how to want with them anymore.  The two of them have been pushing me towards something.  Pete never did.  He never really demanded.  He let me be me.  He wasn't blind.  He just trusted me.  And then he didn't.  And that was when I knew it was the time to chance something.  I wanted him to know about me.  I needed it because I love and care about him.  He's a part of me.  With Chloe and Lana...  I'm more interested in seeing how fate pans out.

With Lex I won't allow fate to take over.  It won't happen any other way than what we both want.  He'll be mine and I'll be his.  In heart and soul and bed and truth.

What better time than today.  Something Lex told me about his mother comes back to me.

"She was never about rationality, Clark.  She worked with drug addicts and homeless and the deseased.  She never actually let it bother her that by taking one off the street she was making room for two.  She never thought that by taking the drugs from one crackhead she was freeing up the supply for another.  She felt she was giving souls a chance to save themselves.  Everything she did for the most part was from the heart.  That's what keeps me from my father's regime.  I try to instill a little of that in my life everyday."

Exit rational.  Enter heart input.  Here's my chance to do a little selfish soul-saving.  For myself.

I close my book.  My lap takes the weight as I stare at Lex, contemplating my move.  He notices and closes his own book.

"What is it, Clark?"

"I like Fridays."

He smiles and my heart leaps.  It's a soft smile with hidden meaning that I'm not sure even I'm supposed to notice.  "Me, too."

I take a breath.  I can do this, but I've got to do it fast.  All my courage is draining and it's doing so quickly.  "I want more."

A frown.  He doesn't understand and, oh, God, the next part is going to be so hard.  "More what?"

I swallow and almost choke on the lump in my throat.  Maybe I could get away with blushing and looking away.  There has to be some subtle way of doing this.

I'm reminded of the pain that Chloe's phony smiles now bring and I know that subtle is not the way to go.  I have to take what I want.

He's more confused but there's something beneath his confussion, something that if I say the right thing, could become understanding and lust and need and I've got to reply.

"More what, Clark?" he asks, softer this time.

"More you," I whisper and watch as the blue-grays go wide.  There's a happiness there that is only on par with the look on Martha's face when she first found me.

Still, he's got to be Lex, and he clears his throat.  "What brings this on?"

He's worried that Lana turned me down, or that Chloe finally ditched me.  Some sort of emotional impact has mentally affected me in some manner.

That's not it and I know what to say.  "Someday wasn't enough anymore.  I'm taking your advice and making my move."

He's silent as I make my way to sit next to him, to the cushion I've never had the courage to sit in, and I'm so very happy that I've taken my chance.
 
 
 
 
 
 
 

FIN