:worship2: This is such a good fic. Your writing is really impressive, the emotions and characterizations are spot on.uppyeyes:
:worship2: This is such a good fic. Your writing is really impressive, the emotions and characterizations are spot on.
sweetie, i know i'm the last person who should ask for update cause lord knows i take forever, but ummm could you please please please update...... I love this fic...
Thanks
CC
"I am scared that I'm always going to be somebody's friend or sister or confidant, but never quite somebody's everything."
Survival - NC-17
NC-17 Fanfiction
Post-Episode for Covenant (Season 3 Finale)
SPOILER WARNING: Spoilers abound, up to the current episode in U.S./Canadian release. Possible AU, but I won't know how far off-track I'm going until the fall, Season 4 premiere.
Disclaimer: Smallville, the characters therein, and all affiliated copyrighted materials are owned by the WB. This is a work of fanfiction not intended for profit or infringement, only for the pleasure of fans of the series. I still own Kyle and Larry, my fictional lawyers. I’ll trade them for Lex if that’s possible.
A/N: I can’t believe how wonderfully supportive everyone has been with each update, even with my inexcusable slacking. Thank you very much for the nice reviews, but please feel free to point out any problems I seem to be having. It really does help me do better.
Chapter 11
Eddie Haring had a name for the conflicting sentiments he felt when he was watching Lex Luthor with his new wife. It was an uneven mix of distaste and unwilling sweetness and he called it dammit. Sometimes out loud, too, he thought despairingly.
Luckily he did most of his observation from a small, dark room packed with security monitors, otherwise he would have been fired fourteen times that morning alone.
His job was quickly becoming unbearable. All day long he watched her in the house, doing nothing in particular except being gazed at by him. Mrs. Sullivan-Luthor would wander into the kitchen to the coffee maker and the man would trail in a few seconds later and rifle through the cupboards until he found something that made a good alibi. He never ate the food he found and he always turned down any offers of assistance from the staff members. He would stand there clutching a can of artichoke hearts and watch his wife pour coffee like she was performing miracles.
Once she was satisfied with her beverage, Chloe gave polite smiles and farewells to the kitchen staff and left the room. Luthor would wait a bare thirty seconds before tossing down the can and hurrying after her. Elsie and the cooks would shake their heads indulgently and fix up the mess he had made being busy.
Chloe would go to the library to read, the pool to swim, upstairs to put on a sweater, and her husband would dog her heels. He was working from home, something he hadn’t even done when he was recovering from one of his frequent beatings. He did paperwork with a distracted air while the petite woman lounged on a sofa within arm’s length. Even with her so close, he rarely finished a work day.
His employer had routinely spent 13-15 hours of every day working, but she never let him do more than six. Sometime in the afternoon she would put down her book and take his hand and then Eddie was forced to walk ten paces behind them as they strolled through the grounds.
He had seen billionaire Lex Luthor pick wild bluebells and shyly offer them to her. He’d seen the man adjust his pants over a hard-on when she bent over to tie her shoes, and he knew they went to bed by ten every night. Since they didn’t appear downstairs before ten a.m., Eddie suspected they weren’t catching up on sleep.
Nothing added up about how Luthor was acting. He was showing every sign of a man hopelessly in love. Eddie thought it was disgusting in a touching sort of way, but he didn’t think it was a good thing for the young woman who was causing so much upheaval. His contracts forbid any kind of disclosure of the information he knew from the Luthor household, but Eddie knew the tabloids and the legitimate newspapers had been duped. A week ago Chloe Sullivan hadn’t been Luthor’s wife and they hadn’t been sleeping together. A month ago he had treated her like a fond acquaintance, not a lover.
The more he thought about it the more he realized Chloe Sullivan should have been running screaming from everything to do with the Luthors, and she had married in instead. He couldn’t figure out what that meant and he couldn’t stop trying, no matter how many lectures he gave himself to sit down and shut up. Was she so desperate that she was trading her body for Luthor’s protection from her own father-in-law? Had Luthor knocked her up? Was she so savvy that she was pulling one over on everyone?
“Dammit,” Eddie muttered, watching as Luthor leaned tenderly over the young woman to butter her toast. He was really looking forward to his weekend off.
++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++ ++++++++
“I can do that myself, Lex,” Chloe said, but she didn’t try to take the knife back from him. Drawing in a breath heavy with his cologne she watched the muscles work in his arms and enjoyed his heat. She let him fuss and tried not to grope him. It was like playing hopscotch with her hormones.
They had done the same thing the past three mornings, since the night had negotiated their sleeping arrangements. Lex ate his breakfast in quick bites between pouring her more juice and encouraging her to eat a little more. She ate most of what he pushed on her and when they were both finished there was still enough food to cater a forty-person buffet. She was still trying to convince Lex she was happy enough with a coffee on the tiny kitchen table, but he wouldn’t hear of it.
She thought he might be fattening her up.
“Are you fattening me up for Thanksgiving?” She asked the question with a straight face, in her fake earnest tone.
“The Luthor family tradition of eating wives for major holidays hasn’t been in practice since, oh, say, 1988, I believe,” Lex replied deadpan. He topped her toast with a thick layer of strawberry jam and gave her a look that dared her to complain.
Chloe sighed and picked up a slice. “What can I do to get a smile this morning?”
Lex thought she sounded hurt but he couldn’t force himself into a better mood. In a few hours they would be facing the world press and he was worried. He didn’t want Chloe to have to be exposed like that, he didn’t want to face it and he didn’t want his father to gather ammunition from it. The press loved and hated the Luthor family in dizzying turns and it was never possible to predict what kind of day it would be for them in print.
“This is going to be a hard day. You should eat your breakfast,” he said. He sipped his coffee and brooded over all the things that could go wrong. He was relatively confident that they would be physically safe, but he wasn’t sure how well Chloe would respond to the questions that were going to be asked. She had never been on the other side of an interview before.
“You’re worried,” she said, wiping jam off the corner of her mouth. “About me. You think I can’t do it.”
Lex studied her calm face. She was resolute, almost relaxed, and he wondered if she was aware of how difficult it was going to be a convincing married couple on the world stage. They had spoken briefly of their cover story but any details would have to be ad-libbed on the spot, under the glare of scrutiny from literally hundreds of people hoping for a slip.
He knew the score: The news wasn’t good unless it was scandalous. Lex Luthor enjoying an uneventful, happy marriage wasn’t what they wanted. They wanted an unplanned pregnancy, wanton infidelity and fast-brewing hatred between him and his spouse. They wanted exactly what his father would want to discredit their testimony against him.
“You’re technically not well enough to be doing anything except resting at home,” he said. “I’m regretting the necessity of parading you in front of a bunch of judgmental assholes to prove you’re mine when what they think doesn’t mean a damn thing. They’ll make the Kents look like my cheering squad. I have every confidence you can pull this off, but it won’t be a fun day, honey.”
Chloe frowned. “I’ll be fine. It will suck but we’ll get it over with and try to enjoy the weekend.”
“Quite contrary to all the practice I’ve had in my life, I don’t enjoy being the gossip around every water cooler on Earth. They’ll paint me as the evil, philandering Luthor heir who knocked you up and you as a gold-digging whore who fucked both the father and the son and there’s not a damn thing we could possibly do to change their minds.”
Lex stood abruptly, pacing the room behind Chloe as she sat stunned. He was so angry, so angry and hurt, and his flat tone indicated it was a festering wound. She knew he’d had very little personal life that truly remained personal, but she’d never considered things from his perspective.
Every small embarrassment in childhood and his teenage years, every ill-advised action in his wild times and every one of the cruel squabbles with his father had been recorded for posterity. No doubt there was a massive file of background on Lex Luthor in every major newsroom, containing a wealth of right and wrong information that could be thrown in his face any time an enterprising journalist wanted to look through the back issues. It was a constant vulnerability and there was absolutely no hope it would ever stop.
Chloe suddenly felt bad for every time she’d ever speculated with Pete or Lana about Lex’s most recent appearance in the tabloids. She hadn’t imagined it would bother him this much.
She pushed her chair out and stood in his path, waiting as he stopped. His expression seemed to soften slightly and she reached for his hand. “I know it’s going to be bad and I appreciate that you want to protect me, but it’s not part of the plan. All we can do is watch out for each other.”
Lex hesitated, holding her hand uncomfortably tight. “You don’t understand, Chloe, they’ll as much as accuse me of fucking around on you with every woman I’ve ever met and they’d rather do it in front of you to see your face. They don’t care and they won’t see us as anything but a byline. They’ll ask you about things . . . things you don’t know about from my past . . . “
“Stop it!”
He did, shocked that his wife had yelled at him. No one yelled at him. He was usually paying their salaries.
Chloe gave him a look of resentment, her jaw clenched. “I think if anyone has learned to spot a lie in the past few years it’s me, and I sure as hell know you’re not suggesting I’m dumb enough to believe everything I read in the paper,” she paused and he shook his head.
”I wasn’t-”
Chloe broke in. “Good. Now that that’s settled we can sit back down and eat a good breakfast and reflect on how a good fight now and again is a healthy aspect of marriage.”
She let go of his hand rather more gently than he had expected from her tone and sat back down to eat her toast. He stared for a few seconds until she shot him a glance over her shoulder and he felt compelled to join her. He was back in his chair before he realized he’d just displayed every symptom of ‘yes, dear’ syndrome.
“And here I was thinking we were becoming shy and retiring,” he quipped.
Chloe thought he could be forgiven for the assumption since they’d been lounging around the castle like codependent house cats for the past three days. However, she knew the old chestnut about settling down into marriage only worked if the two parties were inclined to settle down in the first place. She summed up the thought for him succinctly.
“No chance in hell.”
++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++ ++++++++
Lionel Luthor watched the television through two extra layers of glass that were less than sparkling clean, but he didn’t notice after the screen filled with his first images of his son and daughter-in-law. They stood together, holding hands with fingers intertwined. Lex was dressed in his usual fare, a light gray linen suit and blue shirt. Lionel scoffed at the opened buttons at his collar. No serious businessman would be caught dead at a press conference without a decent tie. He’d taught him better than that.
Chloe Sullivan-Luthor was a striking figure, looking tiny and exquisite beside her tall husband. She was wearing a knee-length dress that mimicked the colour of Lex’s shirt but wasn’t so close in colour that it became precious. It bared her arms and a nicely-tanned span of cleavage, and Lionel smirked unkindly.
I can’t fault you for taking her into your bed, son, he thought. If the circumstances had been more favourable I might have been there first. The question is how long she’s been there and how careful you’ve been.
She didn’t appear to be carrying any extra weight, but he knew that wasn’t a sure sign. The first few questions were standards for any celebrity couple; how was the wedding, when did you meet, when did you know he was the one?
“Have you found her doctor yet?” Lionel asked the question absently to Kyle Layton, who was standing to one side of the screen.
“No sir, we believe she was treated by a European physician your son hired exclusively. We did acquire her latest medical records,” Kyle paused over the words, aware of the video and audio equipment that surveilled the room. They had actually bought the records from an unscrupulous member of the hospital staff. “There’s no sign of a pregnancy.”
He stood at ease, knowing most of his employer’s interest was on the television.
“Keep looking,” Lionel barked. “These things tend to reveal themselves to everyone before long and if it is true I need to know before it becomes common knowledge.”
“Mrs. Sullivan-Luthor, is it true that you are pregnant?”
The disembodied voice of the reporter made Lionel quirk his eyebrows. Bold, he thought, quite bold for a Luthor press conference. Usually they left the terribly presumptuous questions for the last few minutes for fear the guests of honour would walk out.
The young woman blushed prettily and shook her head. “No, that’s not the case. Perhaps in a few years.”
Lionel watched as his son made a miniscule expression of shock that most people would have missed. Either it hadn’t occurred to him where babies came from or he was reacting to the idea of the marriage lasting for years. He filed the slip away.
“Mr. Luthor, will your wife be playing a role in the running of Luthor business interests?”
Good question, Lionel acknowledged.
Lex kept his hand in Chloe’s as he answered, “Chloe is an intelligent woman and I trust her expressly. I’m sure I’ll be grateful for her advice many times in the future.”
Nice dodge, son.
There were a few more questions about the honeymoon before a reporter piped up with the coup detat.
“Is it true you first fell in love while you were plotting the downfall of Lionel Luthor?”
Lionel let loose with a rare genuine laugh. Perfect, he thought, I couldn’t have planned it better. He watched as Lex stayed tellingly still and Chloe flinched. The reporters murmured and the pause stretched into a few seconds longer than was comfortable.
“Chloe and I have a relationship based on a friendship spanning the years I’ve lived in Smallville,” Lex answered, and the murmurs faded to a disappointed hum of conversation.
Clearly the reporters had expected them to trip over the question and admit it, and Lionel smirked. Enemies or not, he had to give Lex and Chloe more credit.
His smirk slipped away as the next question rang out.
“So you admit you were dating Mrs. Sullivan-Luthor when she was 15 years old? How long have you been sleeping together?”
Silence followed the question as all eyes were trained on the couple. Chloe had frozen this time, but Lex was enraged. He took a step closer to the podium and clenched his free hand around the edge, grating out his answer.
“I realize as a public figure I’m a subject of interest to people, but I fail to see how it is of any benefit to anyone for journalists like you,” he made the word journalists a slur, “to start unfounded rumours that slander innocent people.”
From the way he drew Chloe slightly closer it was clear that she was one of the innocent people he referred to. The couple stepped back and a public relations person from LexCorp moved to the microphone and announced the press conference had ended.
The tape, recorded from a live broadcast three days previously, ran to static and Lionel turned away. He paced a few turns around the room and considered the interview overall. It had been fairly predictable but the last question had been informative. Lex had given the standard “shame on you for bad journalism” spiel, but the intention had been clear. The press had been put on notice that the new Mrs. Luthor was not fair game.
Kyle stood quietly and waited, showing no outward signs of the irritation he felt at being called to work on a Sunday. He knew Lionel would eventually speak again.
“Layton.”
His employer had the irritating habit of referring to employees by their last names, as if even a lawyer earning six figures was on par with the maid who changed his bed sheets.
“Yes sir,” he answered.
“I want you to monitor what the press says about them and summarize it for me. Buy whatever pictures you can find. The main priority remains the same, but there are a few sidelines that might be worth our attention.”
Lionel waited until the lawyer left before sitting on his cot. He thought about all the possibilities that could result from the newest addition to his family and he couldn’t help but feel rather enthused by them. Lex was certainly a challenge in his own right, but Chloe Sullivan was a surprise at every turn. Every time he thought she’d shown all of her cards she managed to lay down something entirely unexpected.
Her soul is senstive like a finely made tuning fork. It vibrates and resonates with every little hint of trauma, evil and monstrosity that might be humming in the air, and channels it into expressions of fiction... or recomended websites - somethingeasy
:yay2: :yay2: Awesome! :worship2: keep up the good work.
That was just fab! :biggrin:
More soon please?! :worship2:
Kezz......x.x.x.
I just read your whole story again and just want to tell you how much I love it!! Excellent new update!! I like how protective Lex is of Chloe!! Can't wait to read more of this incredible story!!:chlexsign4:
Awww Lex is so cute following Chloe around like a lost puppy.
Eddie needs to get over it or get another job. Its none of his damn business. :tease:
I can't wait to see what that bastard Lionel is up to. He better leave Chloe alone.
Hope :chlexsign2:
"Everyone seems normal until you get to know them. "
that was great. I love this story. Lex and Chloe priceless. is eddie going to cause trouble?
AT
:biggrin: FAN-TAS-TIC-COOOOOOO!!!
great chappy! more soon I hope! :worship2:
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loved it!!
and i cant wait for more.
randa
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