The Upper Hand (R) 1/31/10

[lexie]

I´m glad Clark decided to show Chloe Lex´s drafted letter to her and that Lex opened up to him grudgingly. The logic behind his keeping Lana close to him to have access to Chloe is twisted but a nice explanation. Now, I wonder... what is Chloe´s plan? Working for Queen? Oh, my! Will Lex´s long-time animosity towards the blond billionaire resurface with a vengeance? Will Chloe´s plan backfire?

I´m looking forward to a new update.

[hfce]

Wow what a great update. So Chloe will be working for Queen interesting.

[autumngold]

So, now it isn't going to be too easy for Lex to get close to Chloe!! I wonder why she decided to go to London now?!! Is it part of the plan?!! Or is she just trying to protect her heart from being broken again?!! Thank you so very, very much for the update!! This is such a great story!!

[purplemoon123]

Just love that Chloe turned the tables on Lex.

[Ultra]

Classic move from Chloe in the continuing game - anything lex can do she can do better! He was always the one to play everybody, now comes the turn of our fave blonde

Loved your explanations for both Lex and Chloe's behaviour, and the Clark/Lex confrontation was perfect!

Can't wait for the next part of this, but if Chloe goes away to London, how will we ever get Chlex?!

[ThraceC]

Hey I just got the first chapter in but I'll be leaving comments as I go.

I love the idea of incoporating current events into the story.

Both of those videos are friggen brilliant.

I'm not sure what you're going after yet but the story is intriguing. I see an opportunity here for Lex to remake himself and I assume Chloe will be a part of that process. Can't wait to read more.

[ThraceC]

Oh my GOD!!!!

I can't get over how good this is! The way you have turned everything from the show to suit your purposes is absolutely unbelievable.

The plot twists and turns are brilliant and you know how to keep your readers in suspense. You know drama.

I can't wait for the next update. And I happen to know that semesters are ending everywhere soon so I expect an update, accordingly.

Really, sr, you are an awesome writer, I'm looking forward to more.

[superag]

a/n - Thanks for all the reviews and the new reviewers! It means a lot when the steam is running out. But somehow, dreams turn into storylines and here's the next part. Let the mudslinging begin.

Chapter 12 – Distance

Chloe sat in the leather high back chair and spun around to look at the skyline she now sat above. The office was definitely built by males trying to show off their prowess. She laughed at the staleness of the furniture and décor. There would have to be some softer touches brought to the place she thought as she ran her hands along the edge of the desk.

“Thinking more a white washed wood perhaps?”

Chloe turned in the chair and shook her head at Oliver leaning against the door frame of her new office. “No, maybe some more color.”

“Ahh,” he halfway laughed, “You have to understand the feelings of the poor schmuck that we had to kick out of this office for hacking. He wasn’t quite ready to be kicked out so quickly. Then again, I was quite shocked when my friend comes and asks me to manipulate her a fake position in a real company.”

Chloe stood up and came around and closed the door behind Oliver. “Yeah but I couldn’t exactly disappear from the face of the earth for no reason. That would really cause a suspicion to rise on Lex’s part.”

“No, instead you go directly for the gut and tell him that you’re working for his dire enemy. I’m sure that didn’t cause him to break anything.”

Chloe sat down on the stale leather sofa next to Oliver and bowed her head. She hadn’t even talked to Clark about how the last meeting with Lex had gone. She was afraid of knowing what Clark may have found out beyond what she already knew. “Maybe, but it’s necessary for me to get away from him for a few months. I can’t exactly go about the rest of the plan commuting to and from Smallville.”

Oliver stood up and held his hand out, “Then I guess that means you want to see your real office then.” Glancing up, she took his hand and started toward another door in the office that opened to an elevator.

Chloe could feel the speed of the elevator as it zoomed down several floors to where she didn’t know. She had approached Oliver with a plan for the future and wasn’t sure what all the parts were, but they seemed to be falling into place rather well from what she could tell.

Watching the elevator door open, the part of the building they were in looked nothing like the upper floors. It was musty and dark as if a basement had been cut out and never used. Stepping out into the small dark hallway, she remembered some of the tunnels that Lex had hidden his extra curricular projects in. Now, she felt she was in on one of them. “Straight ahead through that door. I’ll see you for lunch back at the office in four hours.”

Before Chloe could question him, Oliver closed the doors and she heard the elevator take off again. Feeling the sudden clamminess of the surroundings creep into her skin, she moved to the door and opened it to a gloriously decorated office that, even if sparsely decorated, looked like him.

Coming from around the corner, he held as stack of folders and a strange grin that she last remembered he made while threatening her over four years ago. “Good morning Miss Sullivan. Are we ready to get started?”

Chloe sat down at one of the desks that were pushed together already stacked with books and file folders. Taking a deep breath, she looked across at the man still dressed much more casually then she ever knew and picked up a pen. “Let’s get started Mr. Luthor.”

***********

Lex sat at one of the booths in the restaurant on a break and flipped through an old magazine. The term yesterday’s news drilled into his head thinking about the slight bending of the rules that Mark gave him by letting him read the old issues of Time. Still, knowing where all his holdings ended up and that even after being rescued from the Luthor hands that some still faltered had some kind of feeling of revenge.

He felt like he had memorized most of the articles in their entirety. It was all he had to do with Chloe gone. She hadn’t even called in a month. At first, he wondered if the letter explaining that she would see him at his hearing in a month was just a statement, but he at least expected to hear her voice sometime in those two months.

He couldn’t dismiss the reason he wanted to hear her. He was pretty sure that if Clark had heard him as he was leaving his apartment a month ago, Clark had already told her how he felt and ruined his chances of her coming back. The last thing Chloe would do was to let him have that kind of power over her. And the more he thought about it, talked about it, wrote about it, he realized that love was extremely powerful.

It contained a power both light and evil. Losing love could drive a person mad. He watched it repeatedly with his own family. He had fallen into the clutches of that power a year or more ago when a small brunette suddenly went from co-owner to wife to stranger. It had drained him.

A smile almost cracked across his face when picturing a screaming blonde. In one instant, she had filled a void, even if at the time he got it filed under what most people would have considered nefarious means.

He looked down at the magazine whose pages he had been turning every few minutes to at least show his doing something. Very few people had seen the completely idle and introspective Lex Luthor and he wasn’t about to let that change.

“Hey, wipe down before the lunch crowd enters the gym?” he heard from off to the side just as a rag hit him in the lap. Looking up, he silently nodded in Mark’s direction before throwing the magazine back in the bin with the others.

Lex grabbed the spray bottle and began absently spraying the front of the treadmill and step machines before wiping down the bars and the displays. The new owners of the crap factory, his factory, had started adding employee perks for fitness and suddenly hordes of overweight non-farmers showed up every lunch hour and tried to pretend they actually cared about their fitness. Lex laughed silently at the thought and wondered exactly what kind of monthly charge was being paid for that experience.

To be honest, he was curious to see the books for the Talon or his old business. Without his late night distraction of a bubbly blond on the other end of the phone, he was hard pressed for entertainment. He could only write in his journal or come up with homespun business ideas for so many hours a day.

“Lex Luthor,” he heard from behind him as he turned around and stared at the tall lanky brunette in bicycle shorts running at what Lex could only guess was a good 6 mph.

“Can I help you?” Lex was still wary. The last strange woman that had spoken to him he had insulted with good reason. He had been there now long enough that media coverage was non-existent. “I don’t do interviews.”

The woman punched a couple of buttons and jogged into a walk as the treadmill slowed down. Still remembering to be a gentleman, Lex handed her a towel from the shelf on the wall. “Thanks.” He watched as she dabbed her neck off before removing her earphones. “No interview. Just wanted to tell you to pass onto Mark that this is a wonderful place. It’s a nice place to get away from the miles of miles of corn. Reminds me of the Grrenhouse they opened in Metropolis across the street from the old Luthorcorp building.”

Lex swallowed visibly at the sound of the ‘old’ Luthorcorp building. “It’s like this one?”

“Yeah, but I only got to go a couple of times before I moved out here.” The woman put out her hand and smiled, “Gretchen Peters, the operations manager at Alga Materials.”

“You work at the plant?”

“Yeah, I’m actually in your manager’s old office. I have to say we have pumped so much money into cleaning up the place to EPA standards, it should be pumping out dollar bills instead of fertilizer. How did you get around ever keeping anything up to code?”

Lex huffed and looked at the woman perturbed without saying anything. Instead, he watched her walk over to the bench and wait for him. It had been a long time since he had seen a woman that cut. Even with the model types he had dated, they were all breakable, but this woman’s muscles actually popped accordingly when she changed positions. “I’m actually supposed to be wiping the machines down.”

“Come on, I need three sets of ten and then you go back to doing whatever they tell you to waste your required 12 hours of labor a day.” She laid back on the bench and glanced at the weights as she took ahold of the bar.

Hanging the spray bottle on another apparatus, Lex stood over her and watched as the woman proved she was definitely a force to be reckoned with. Pulling the bar up from her last set, he handed her her towel and started away again. He couldn’t decide whether she was a plant to watch him or if he had really been away from the action so long that the attention was really getting to him.

“Thanks. Hey, I have another question.”

Lex closed his eyes and took a another deep breath. He could feel a headache like the ones he used to get from insatiable board members coming on. Turning, he plastered a nice smile on his face and hooked the bottle into his pants pocket. “Yes?”

“I don’t know exactly what your schedule is but I have some questions about the land acquisitions around the plant if you have some time. We’ve tried to research the information, but I figured its cheaper to go to the horse’s mouth.”

Thinking carefully about his possible options, he watched as the woman sat down at one of the next machines. He could have guests and he wasn’t allowed to see the numbers relating to the Talon. No one had made stipulations otherwise. The urge to get into business burned. “Sure. Put together what you have questions about and come over around 8 tomorrow. I’ll make dinner.”

“This isn’t a date Mr. Luthor.”

He looked at her drop her hands to her waist as if she already could see a possible set up. “No, but we all have to eat and I venture you probably leave work around 7:30. So dinner.” Without waiting for her to refuse his offer again, he disappeared back into the restaurant area.

**********

Chloe was about to scream. Now she understood how Lex could have easily gone insane or just became who he had after a life of what she now considered torture. She had only been through a month of this, but she understood now why she had wanted to stay far away from business school. Now, her business school lessons came from the University of Lionel Luthor complete with real money and real losses for screwing things up. So much for just failing a test.

“Does it get any easier?” she asked as she stared at yet another loss report complete with strange red scrawls of what she could have done differently.

“Yes Miss Sullivan, but its much more complicated when the market itself is not helping your situation. Remember, Lex had the luxury for a long time of a market that worked in his favor. It’s hard to build something back from the ashes it lays in. Now, are you prepared for the business meeting in Toronto with Oliver?”

Lionel Luthor had definitely changed. If Lex wouldn’t be absolutely stunned into silence to see the man very well alive and kicking, the man in dressed in simple dress pants and a button down linen shirt would have caused immediate heart failure.

Chloe even found it hard to believe sometimes that Lionel had turned a corner like he had. Denise, the older woman he had been seeing, brought them lunch twice a week, and was genuinely nice. She never mentioned anything about Lex or Lionel’s past. Apparently, those things had never come up when they first started seeing each other and the off limit topics had never been ventured.

Chloe sadly wondered what would have happened possibly if Lex had known someone like Denise in his later years after his mother had passed away. Would having a step mother of sorts ever helped him? It was hard for Chloe now to even picture the awful, conniving man she had known in Lionel after working with him for hours on end, seven days a week, doing what he obviously loved and missed terribly.

“The meeting, yes. But the board meeting next week has me concerned. What if they ask something you haven’t prepped me for. There are still items on the agenda I can’t understand beyond from basics you have explained to me.”

“No worries. Board members are properly put in their places if you just look at them right. Besides, Oliver will be there and the board members are going to be astonished enough that we are gathering them together to begin with. Most are probably going to just grumble that you pulled them off their latest yacht they bought with their last payment before the market crashed.”

Chloe just shook her head and smiled. She had been collecting those kind of paychecks in her ‘fake’ position at Queen Industries, signing off on PR developments she knew nothing about. An expensive ruse she thought to keep up the look of her being one, in London and not in San Diego, and two in charge of something instead of being run through an MBA course in six months. Now she understood how Lex felt being put in charge of the crap factory at 22. Her pile of crap just happened to be much, much bigger.

She watched as Lionel gathered up the materials from the day and started toward the door. “What if I fail?”

“Then you fail. There’s nothing wrong with failure.”

“Lionel Luthor would have never said that.”

“No, but Lionel’s dead remember?” He smiled as he disappeared out the small door that went to the parking garage. Chloe gathered up her things and headed upstairs to prepare for the meeting in Canada. Her first business trip; she prayed she wouldn’t vomit in the other company’s board room.

**********

Lex looked at his clock and wondered if something had happened during the contract negotiations at the plant. Gretchen was an hour late. Taking a few cleansing breaths, he tried to remember that he was not in charge of anything and simply walking her through some delicate changes in the land that Luthorcorp had acquired for expansion before they had gone under.

On the one hand, he felt he was lying to Chloe about his non-involvement with business since he obviously had been working with Gretchen on a twice a week basis. He wondered why she hadn’t called, especially since she was probably looking at the visitor logs and Gretchen’s name appeared there for several hours a week.

On the other hand, Chloe hadn’t tried to even call, write, nothing. She literally had disappeared into the corporate world without being found. He had checked every report about Queen Industries in the magazines and never saw a mention of her name. He wondered what exactly she was doing for the man’s company if she was PR and never heard from her print or otherwise.

“Deep in thought?” Lex glanced up at the open door and saw Gretchen in jeans and a sweater. Seeing his odd look, she smiled. “I had some personal business to take care of today, so I’m a little late.”

“Everything ok?” Lex asked s he walked over and took her bag from her shoulder and closed the door.

“Yeah, just doctor’s appointments and those normal person things that I try to do all on one day. How was your day?” She asked as she sat down at the table that was already set as it always was. She watched as he finished up the last steps in the kitchen. She never offered to help; she wasn’t that kind of woman. Besides, the small smirk that she gave him always seeing him the kitchen was always returned with a smile.

The two had played this odd game for the last month, dinner, work, and then the odd silence before her leaving. She knew better than to push a man like Lex Luthor to do anything he didn’t want to, but was oddly amused that the man who had a very active libido once upon a time could cool his heels as well as he had. The woman, the little girl, he had apparently married last had apparently cut off his manhood and carried it with her when she left.

“The bread is warm. It just came out.”

“How domestic of you making bread,” she giggled as she took a piece from the plate.

Lex glanced up as she tried some and waited for the nod in approval. “Actually, I have found that cooking is something I happen to be damn good at it and it makes me relax. So, shoot me and call me domestic,” he joked and smiled as he sat down with the meal.

The meal went on with some introductions about what problems were arising from the last round on contract negotiations of the factory workers. Through all the mundane questions and answers, Lex continued watching as Gretchen’s small smiles and light laughs seem to start to be infectious. He hated admitting but he was enjoying listening to someone laugh and joke with him. It had been sadly lacking in the apartment for six weeks.

Lex cleared off the table and watched as Gretchen set up their normal workspace. Turning to put items back in the cabinet, he took a couple of quick breaths and tried to focus his energy. It had become harder to do the more she came by. He pictured disasters, his father naked, Chloe crying, but more and more things didn’t work out his way.

“You feeling alright? You look a little pale?” Gretchen leaned against the counter with her arms crossed and stared at him.

Turning to face her, he could smell her perfume and feel her breath, she had moved so close. “Yeah, no problem. Let’s get down to it.” He walked over and sat down on the couch, picking up the first item she had laid out to look over. “These figures are actually starting to look like productive numbers. I guess you posted black numbers this last month?”

Gretchen moved to the couch and crossed in front of him, purposely teasing him with her ass in his face. Lex closed his eyes briefly and then squarely glanced at her face as she smiled. “Yes, the head manager is quite pleased.”

“Who is that by the way?”

“Not anyone you would know. Someone named Lance Aronot. He conference calls from somewhere overseas. He’s never even been to the plant. I think if we weren’t in the black he’d just close up shop and leave us all high and dry.”

Lex laughed at the strange similarities. “Yeah, I know the kind. And even if you are in the black, that doesn’t mean he couldn’t do that anyway if the overseas markets suddenly take a jump over American markets. The value of the dollar here isn’t exactly helping our case out.”

Gretchen silently agreed and leaned over Lex’s shoulder eyeing the piece he was reading. Sliding her hand across to his thigh, she could feel Lex tense and look directly at his knee. “You know, I haven’t been at work all day frankly I could use the rest of the day off.” Lex glanced over and saw her eyes peruse his face and then fell lower as her hand squeezed the inside of his thigh.

“Then take it. We can do this another time,” Lex tried write off growing sensation that her hand was causing. He leaned over the table, ignoring his possible squeezing her hand in the process, and started to stack up her folders.

“I can think of a way to relaxing,” she whispered into his ear and he let out a groan against his greatest will. She ran her other hand up his arm and nipped his ear. Celibacy for months was hell if it meant being in this kind of pain after simply having someone whisper in your ear.

“A nice book?” Lex tried to joke as he reached to remove her hand from its location dangerously close to his crotch. Staring at her squarely, he saw the normal foreplay moves for the women he used to play with. The open mouth temptation, the hot breath, the now open shirt showing off a black lace bra. He couldn’t even think when she had undone that.

“How long has it been?” she whispered as she continued running her hands along the back of his neck. He could feel where his hair would stand up if he had any.

“A long time,” he honestly choked out trying to explain to himself that it would stay that way.

“Look, all I do is sign that little book that I’m up here. No one asks what we do,” she whispered again as she kissed his neck under his collar. She could feel him stiffen again at her touch but felt one of his hands slide up her side. “Long time here too. Not much to play with in this crap town. God, that feels good,” she responded to his hand in her hair as she continued teasing his neck.

“Town isn’t as bad as you think,” he muttered and then groaned as he removed his hand, realizing what he had done.

“Not anymore,” he heard as her hand turned his head with her hand and pressed her lips to his.

TBC

[lexie]

Queen and Luthor Sr working together? Lionel a domestic guy? And what´s that Gretchen woman up to- beyond the obvious? Oh, I don´t trust her one bit!

I hope you´ll be able to update soon and shed some light on these puzzling events.

[hfce]

Gretchen is up to something and Lex is falling for it. It is funny how Chloe can trust a snake like Lionel but distrust Lex. That makes no damn sense to me.