how can lex be so dumb asking a question like that?! (is chloe sleeping with lionel). he's going to get thrown back into the ocean if he's not careful! hahaha and we don't want that. where would we be then with no lex.. more importantly no chlex smut :biggrin: :chlexsign3:
I love you for updating so quick: ! Very
stuff. **sigh** I really wish something like this would happen in SV **sigh** Anyway, can't wait for the next one..... :chlexsign2: !
A/N: Fic rotation? What fic rotation? Sorry, but my muse is pushing this one. Hope you guys won’t mind too much.
~*~*~*~*~*~
Chloe slept fitfully throughout the night; tossing and turning, waking up several times when she rolled the wrong direction and the gritty sand irritated the open wound on her arm. When the sun finally began to rise and light the sky, she woke up for good, grumbling under her breath when Lex’s heavily sleeping form was the first thing she saw.
Although he had apologized for asking whether she was involved with Lionel and told her that he never meant to imply that his feelings toward her were anything other than platonic, the tone of his voice suggested that he was only saying one or both of the comments to placate her.
‘Asshole,’ she thought, turning her head so she wouldn’t have to look at him anymore.
She shakily pushed herself up and sloughed the sand away from her body as best she could, wincing when her hand drifted across the injury on her other arm. She held it up to get her first truly good look at it. It still hurt, but at least it wasn’t bleeding. In fact, it looked like it had started to softly scab around the edges, although Chloe wasn’t entirely sure as to whether or not that was a good thing.
Unfortunately, it wasn’t how it looked that mattered, but how it felt – and it felt lousy. She thought that her head wound would have caused her the most trouble, but it actually seemed to be a dull ache compared to the sharp pain that had taken residence in her arm.
“Probably infected,” she murmured, the soft sound of her voice causing Lex to stir ever so slightly. She looked at him, glanced over to the trail’s entrance, and then looked at him again as she made her decision.
~*~*~*~*~
Lex finally awoke several hours later to the heat of the mid-day sun pouring down on him, tampered by the strange sensation of a small trickle of water against his parched lips. He groggily opened his eyes, staring at Chloe in surprise for but a second before sitting up and accepting her offering of fresh water from an oversized cup.
He opened his mouth and greedily drank the liquid, basking in the almost blissful pain of having the cool fluid sweeping down his dry, cracked throat. He finished quickly and turned to Chloe with an unsure expression on his face. She motioned toward a bucket filled with water and it was all Lex could do not to stick his entire face in it and drink from it like it was a trough.
When he had enough he wiped his mouth through panted breaths and turned to see Chloe sitting down, staring out at the ocean.
“I --- thanks,” he said. Chloe nodded a couple of times, but didn’t turn back around to look at him. Lex moved to sit closer to her, unnerved when she didn’t even seem to acknowledge his presence. ‘She must still be angry about last night,’ he thought to himself. ‘But then why would she bring me water?’ “Chloe ---”
“There’s some fruit over by the seats,” she interrupted quietly, still not turning to look at him. Lex twisted his head to see a small pile of exotic fruit lying on top of what looked like…Chloe’s shirt? He snapped his head back around, his eyes widening with surprise when he saw that she was wearing something different than she had been from the time he last saw her.
“New clothes?”
Chloe let out a huff of air through her nose.
“I’m pretty sure you can’t call them new,” she said, finally swiveling her torso to shoot him a wry look. Lex blanched at the dried spots of old, spattered blood on the front of the sundress she was now clothed in. “I needed something dry,” she explained when she saw him pale a little and then try to cover it up. Lex nodded absently.
“Am I to take it from the condition of your new apparel that the previous owners ---”
Chloe turned away from him again, but this time Lex noticed the haunted expression that creeped over her face.
“Something bad happened in that house,” she said in little more than a whisper.
‘Well, that certainly explains why she’s not mad at me anymore,’ Lex thought. ‘Nothing like one bad thing to make you forget another.’
He nodded again and reached out to place his hand lightly on her shoulder, which, because of the new dress and the amount of skin it allowed to show, was now sporting the beginning signs of a sunburn. Chloe pulled away as if his touch had scalded her more than the sun and Lex frowned.
‘Okay, so she *is* still mad at me.’
“I brought what I could find down from the house. They actually had a first aid kit, but I don’t think any of the medicines are still good. There were a couple of long Ace bandages though, so at least I don’t have to try and rip some sheets up to put your leg in a makeshift splint,” she rambled, jerking him away from his thoughts.
“You’ve had a busy day,” he observed.
“You’ve been asleep for most of it,” she countered dryly, though Lex noticed there was no hostility laced into her words. She was probably just exhausted from having to make a few trips back and forth and…Lex furrowed his brow as he took in her appearance again, leaning forward to sniff her right after his eyes traveled her body. Chloe turned her head and looked at him with bemused surprise. “Did you just ---?”
“You don’t smell ---”
“Gamey?” Chloe supplied. Lex gave her a hint of a smirk and his eyes danced with an amusement he hadn’t felt in quite a while.
“I was going to use a less offensive description, but yes,” he said. “You smell…nice. Care to share your secret so you don’t have to sleep next to someone just as ‘gamey’ as you were yesterday?”
Chloe chuckled silently and she graced Lex with a smile that would have taken his breath away had he not seen her smile at several Smallville residents in the same manner. It was just how she was; the smile wasn’t something special reserved for him. And why should it be? They barely knew each other and she was sure to never look at him the way she looked at Clark.
‘Not that I want her to,’ he thought to himself, quickly followed by, ‘Yeah, you just keep telling yourself that. Because God knows it would be a disaster if someone beautiful, smart, *and* nice actually liked you – you and *not* your money. Hell, she likes Clark and he has nothing…’
“Lex?”
Lex blinked a couple of times, only to focus on Chloe’s really concerned-looking face.
“Are you okay? Do you have sunstroke or something?”
“I ---” Lex paused and shook his head. “Just a little lightheaded.” Chloe nodded.
“You need to eat,” she said, already starting to stand up to retrieve some of the fruit for him. “I felt amazingly better after my blood sugar went back to normal – or as normal as it’s going to get here.” Lex grinned at her and she walked back over to him, kneeling beside him as she emptied out the contents of her arms.
“So,” he started, holding a piece of fruit out in front of him and then rubbing it against his shirt. Chloe leaned her head forward as her body shook with laughter and Lex raised an eyebrow at her.
“You really think rubbing it against your bloody, dirty shirt is going to make it any cleaner?” she teased and then shook her head as if she couldn’t believe it.
He narrowed his eyes playfully, but then brought the fruit up to his mouth to take a bite, nodding in appreciation at the sudden rush of sugar that filled his body.
“I believe you were going to tell me how you suddenly appeared looking and smelling clean when I’m still ---” he trailed off and looked down at himself before looking back up at her knowingly.
“Ah – the miracles of water,” Chloe said. Lex gave her a blank look and she rolled her eyes at him. “I took a bath. There wasn’t any soap, but ---”
“There’s running water in the house?” Lex asked with surprise. Chloe frowned.
“I wish,” she said. “The stream is deeper toward the end; it kind of flows into a pool before it hits another and flows into the ocean.”
“You took a bath in the stream,” Lex repeated with a modicum of disbelief.
“It’s not like I had a lot of options,” she said defensively. Misreading the look on his face, she swiftly added, “And don’t worry, I got the drinking water from upstream, the little pool thing is downstream. No cross-contamination.”
Lex let one corner of his mouth rise into a lopsided smirk.
“I wasn’t actually thinking about that, but it’s good to know.”
Not wanting to overanalyze what he meant and knowing that Lex had a tendency to be kind of flirtatious, at least in the few times he had been in the room with her, Chloe simply grinned back at him and then stood up again to go get the supplies she had been able to find to piece together some sort of splint for him. She knew that it was a poor effort at best and that it had little chance of actually helping heal his leg correctly, but she reasoned that it wasn’t as if they had a lot of other options available and at least this way he would be able to hobble with a walking stick or something.
Lex stayed silently appreciative as Chloe knelt down beside him again and bit her lower lip as she seemingly tried to decide on the best way to raise his leg without hurting him too much would be.
“Um…”
Lex leaned forward to help her, but ended up wincing at the pain caused by the gash in his side. Chloe let out a small sigh.
“You leave any water in the bucket?”
Lex nodded and Chloe gnawed on her lower lip again, this time with embarrassment.
“What is it?”
“Maybe you should – you know – wash up a little first. It doesn’t make a lot of sense to wrap a dirty wound because you’re just locking the germs in there. I’d tell you where the stream was, but ---”
Lex smiled inwardly in delight at Chloe’s rambling. She may not like him as a man, but at least she saw him as one; and her embarrassment over the situation was oddly endearing after years of being treated like an object, like a means to an end to get his money.
“It’s fine,” he answered, cutting her off. Chloe nodded; thankful that he hadn’t let her go on much longer, because if she had then she was sure she would have started blushing.
“Good. I brought a washcloth, it’s been rinsed off so it shouldn’t be moldy or anything, and I’ll just take a walk while you…clean.”
“How far away is the house?” he asked as Chloe tossed the damp washcloth at him.
He twisted his head to look at her and saw her struggling to bring over the bucket half-filled with water with her one good arm. Lex frowned when he saw how much trouble she was having with it and realized how much effort she must have put into it when she lugged it from the stream to the beach while it was full. If he hadn’t been impressed by her intelligence and wit before they had gotten in the mess they were in, he was certainly impressed by her stubbornness and resourcefulness now.
She had already saved his life by getting him a flotation device and now again with bringing him drinking water so he didn’t die of dehydration. Lex silently vowed that if they ever got out of there alive that he would do everything in his power to make it up to her.
“About fifteen minutes,” Chloe answered, snapping him out of his thoughts for the fourth time in a relatively short period of time. Lex made a mental note to start paying better attention so that wouldn’t keep happening to him, though for the life of him, he couldn’t remember the last time it had before he had been stranded on the island with Chloe. “It took longer yesterday because the path was overgrown, but ---”
“You had a busy day today,” he said with an understanding grin.
Chloe smiled back at him and nodded.
“I should get going so you can ---” she stopped and motioned to the washcloth before starting to turn around to leave.
“Chloe?”
“Yeah?”
“Stay nearby.”
Chloe arched an eyebrow at him and he smirked at her.
“So I can call to you when I’m done.”
That time Chloe did blush, but she covered it well with a light shake of her head and turned the other way.
Lex smiled to himself as he watched her walk down the beach. Maybe his father and Helen trying to kill him wouldn’t end up being such a bad thing after all. Hell, if nothing else, he could end up making a friend out of the whole deal.
He stripped off his shirt and started to wash his chest, quickly followed by the other parts of his body. He groaned and grimaced when he had to run the cloth over his side and his leg, but knew that Chloe was right. It would do no good to wrap the wounds if they were filthy.
When he finished he yelled her name and hoped that she hadn’t wandered off so far as not to be able to hear him.
“Chloe?!” he called out again when he didn’t get a response within five minutes, going into a panic when he still heard nothing.
Then he caught sight of her walking slowly back toward him on the beach. He smiled at first, but then she got closer and he saw that she was wearing the same horrified expression on her face that she had on earlier when she talked about the house.
“Chloe?”
She got even closer and he saw that all the color had drained from her cheeks.
“What’s wrong?”
TBC…
What is wrong??? She discovered a dead body or what???
OMG, what's wrong? What happened? Tellme tellme tellme! Arg, they should make cliff hangers illegal. I'm going to start a petition banning cliff hangers! Grrr...
Great chapter by the way
Okay, I truly meant it when I said I love you for posting so quickly. And I still do
Now that you have your fun, get back over here and tell us what made her looked so pale??!!
What you cant stop there nooooo . More now please....
Hope :worship2:
"Everyone seems normal until you get to know them. "
Oh my god! What's wrong??? You are Pure Evil!
Ok, I seriously think that the incredible scariness of their situation, hasn't hit Lex yet. He's thinking about friendship, and goodness and stuff like that, instead of worrying about the important stuff, like: infections, sanitary issues, ghost, island animals, and most importantly, how the hell they are getting off that island and what the hell happened in that house?. This leads me back to my first question. What the hell happened? What did Chloe see? That line she whispered to herself, "something bad happened in that house" just about had me turning on all my lights on in my room. It freaked me out! So, please...reroute your rotation again, and let us in on what happened on that island. I'm ashamed to say this, but what the hell...when's the smut happening??? Am I a bad person for asking that?
fee
omg what happened...? And what bad thing happened at the house? Update please please please
LA
gah!hmy: what happened?! the suspense is killing me! great chap heheh
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