Fic - Beginnings (Lex/Chloe) R, 1/1

[abvj]

Title: Beginnings
Summary: Chloe is vaguely aware there is an ending in all this.
Rating: R
Author's Notes:  2, 536 words. Set in-between season three and season four, when I fully believed Lex and Chloe were getting down and dirty behind the scenes and would one day take over the world together. The beginning of my Missing Pieces universe -- a collection of post eps for season four focusing on the Lex/Chloe dynamic that season so severely lacked. Obvious spoilers. All mistakes are mine, the characters, however, are not. Reviews are a wonderful thing.



 

Chloe is vaguely aware that there is an ending in all this.

Every kiss of his lips, touch of his fingers, every single thing he does tells of an ending that she doesn’t want to see. Sometimes, Chloe thinks he sees it too. It’s in his eyes over breakfast as she sips her coffee and he reads his copy of the Daily Planet, it’s in the way his kisses linger when he leaves, the way his fingers intertwine with hers and stay there, each day a little longer, the grip a little tighter.

He will work while she watches stupid made for TV movies, and she will read Tolstoy while he watches CNN. They share quick witted humor and pathetic attempts at sexual innuendos over eggs and coffee. He makes her pancakes and sometimes she’ll make him an omelet and think of her father, and what he’s doing then, in his own safe house, far, far away from her.

It all holds an air of domesticity, but to Lex it just spells mistake.

But it’s a mistake he’s willing to take the consequences for making. A mistake he made the first time she whispered ‘stay’ with a gentle brush of her lips and he obliged. A mistake he has made many, many times again already knowing the eventual outcome. But it’s worth it. It has to be, because each touch of her fingers, each sigh of contentment from her lips, each moment he spends with her and manages to forget about everything else, touches something in him he hasn’t seen in himself in a long, long time.

“Any news on Clark?” Chloe will ask, snuggled up next to him, his arm around her shoulders, hers around his waist, tight and secure, as if she never wanted to let go. He is beginning to like that feeling, and is not quite sure what scares him more: the fact that he likes it or the fact that he is beginning to return it.

“Nobody knows anything. It is almost as if he just disappeared.”

Lex will never admit how her loyalty to Clark hurts him, so he answers her questions, and kisses her afterwards and hopes that her mind is on him instead of his once best friend. It’s not, and somehow he knows that, but he kisses her anyway, the feel of his lips against hers, the touch of her blonde hair underneath his fingers, is always exhilarating and terrifying at once.

Exhilarating in the fact that it makes him want more, always wanting, needing more. Terrifying in the fact that he knows in the end one of them is going to end up hurt, and every night, sometimes as he watches her sleep, he selfishly prays to a God he hasn’t acknowledged since the day his mother died, that it isn’t him.


***


Light touches to his abdomen, pause over his navel then travel down, far down under the crisp, plain white cotton sheets she insisted on having for the simplicity of it. His eyes travel over her face, her vibrant green eyes, sparkling with mischief and want, her cheekbones, more prominent now than ever and he makes a mental note to remind her to eat more, to take better care of herself. His gaze stays on her lips, supple and well kissed.

“What time are you expected back?” Chloe asks, voice like gravel, echoing throughout the plain room. She knows there are time restrictions, that unlike her he has a life outside of this house, a business to run. And while she has every right to be selfish, she’s not. Lex knows Chloe is a better person than he can ever hope to be.

And he wonders how she can be so young, yet so old at the same time.

Most times Chloe doesn’t wait for an answer to her question, just kisses him. Full, sometimes hard, sometimes soft, on the mouth. Lex is an excellent kisser, with excellent hands and an excellent mouth, and sometimes her mind wanders when she’s alone, and she misses her father, and she wonders if he’s using his talents on other women. Tall, beautiful women, with a different shade of hair and darker skin.

But then her name is torn from his lips against her breast, and she knows he’s not.

He sinks inside her, his lips on her shoulder, her hands on his back, his eyes on hers, the gaze never wavering. “I missed you today,” he whispers against her pale skin as he moves inside her and that, right there, with the two of them connected so intimately, there is a side of Lex she’s never seen before. A side of Lex she never wants to lose.

A broken, unsophisticated, needy side of a man who is never broken, always sophisticated and has never wanted for anything. Selfishly she hopes no other woman has ever seen this side of him. Selfishly she thinks she may just want to be the only woman to ever see this side of him.

“I missed you, too,” Chloe whispers back, her lips attacking his, hips meeting his frantically. And it’s the truth, with each passing day she misses him a little more, thinks about him a little more, comes to depend on his presence a little bit more.

His pace is often frantic and needy, sometimes slow and lingering. Chloe isn’t sure which one she likes better. She has come to expect the fact that no matter what he does, with him it will always be good, always be fantastic, because it is the two of them, and they just seem to fit in all the right ways.

He knows every place to touch her. Every way to kiss her. Knows how to kiss her exactly the way she wants, when she wants it. Chloe knows every nerve ending, every spot, every sound. Knows just where to apply pressure and when to lightly graze her fingers. They know each other so well, that it’s routine. A glorious, always changing, never dull routine that’s addicting and consuming at the same time.

Long after touches has slowed and their desires are sedated for the time being, Chloe will burrow into the nook between Lex’s shoulder and neck, and one of his arms with be snug around her, one hand idly tracing patterns on her belly. The two of them will lay there together and bask in the glow of magnificent, toe-curling, muscle numbing sex. Sometimes they’ll talk, and sometimes they won’t. But most of the time they will just be. Be together, be them, be two people they can only ever be with each other.

It is in that time, that rare special time they spend together, Chloe and Lex both know this isn’t just about sex, about want or desire. This is about need. About needing each other in ways only the other can give. Ways that weren’t just physical, but emotional as well.

And it is then that both of them hope when the time comes, the need will have dwindled a little bit, become a little more livable, so they could say goodbye.

***

“He’s a good guy, Daddy,” Chloe tells her father on one of the rare occasions Lex takes pity on her and against the wishes of the numerous bodyguards that surround them day in and day out, takes her to see him.

Not seeing your father for weeks on end makes the hugs tighter, the smiles sadder, and as she looks at him, really looks at him, she knows time does things to people that can never be reversed. Chloe watches his face as he sits inside the screened in porch of a house in the middle of nowhere, with men dressed finely in black suits and dark sunglasses, and Chloe thinks he looks older than she remembers. Worry lines are noticeable on his forehead and have aged him far too much in such a small amount of space.

“I just,” a long deep sigh and Gabe’s eyes trail to Lex, far away from them and out of ear shot, shouting on his cell phone. “I just think after everything that’s happened his intentions need to be re-thought out on our parts.”

Chloe will never tell her father what goes on between her and Lex. Will never let him know that their relationship crosses the borders of friendship and trails into the category of lovers. A part of her knows she doesn’t have to, knows her father is smart enough to figure it out. Knows he knows her just a little too well.

“I know him, Dad,” she reassures her father, laying her hand on top of his, “he won’t hurt us.”

“Look around, honey,” Gabe says with a hint of irritation in his voice, “he already has.”

Chloe knows he’s right. Knows that before all of this is said and done with, before they finally return to Smallville and the rest of their lives that are waiting in shambles for them, she knows, somewhere deep inside her, that she is going to be even more hurt than she was when she got here.

“Never intentionally,” Chloe reminds her father gently, eyes trailing over to Lex behind her sunglasses.

Her words are the truth, but really, there are still so many ways you can hurt someone and not do it intentionally.

***

Lex watches Pretty Woman in vain. Doesn’t exactly care for the movie, but Chloe likes it, says it’s romantic in an offhanded way as her lips are against his. So he wraps his arm around her and reads his paper in the dimly lit living room while she watches Richard Gere and Julia Roberts fall in love.

They watch it a total of three, excruciating times, and each time when it comes to the part at the end where Edward lets Vivian leave, Chloe snuggles a little closer, wraps her arms around Lex a little tighter. It’s not the movie she particularly likes, and before then, before that summer, she really hadn’t. Found it cheesy, and stupid, and completely unrealistic.

But sometimes Chloe just needed to be reminded that there is a happily ever after.

So, she watches Vivian leave Edward and snuggles closer to Lex. Watches a woman leave a man she so obviously loves. Watches Edward let Vivian, a woman he so obviously loves, leave. Vivian who got punched in the face for him, who dressed in pretty clothes and pretended to be something she wasn’t for him, a woman who was changing for him. And Edward just lets her leave.

The last time they watch it she sniffles, takes Lex’s free hand and laces his fingers with hers. She never would have taken him for a guy who likes to cuddle, but he does, and reaches out for her just as many times as she does for him.

“What’s wrong?”

Chloe turns to him, wide eyed at his concern. “He lets her leave,” she says simply, as if it should explain everything.

Lex looks confused for a moment, unlaces their fingers and traces her cheek tenderly for a second, “They get together in the end, though. Right?”

“That’s not the point,” the roll of her eyes isn’t seen because she turns her head away from his caress just in time. “The point is he lets her go and doesn’t even try to stop her. He is suppose to love her, and he just lets her go.”

“We’ll you don’t know what you’ve got until it’s gone,” Lex jokes in a manner so completely unlike him, so not Luthor-like, that it catches her off guard.

It is odd because Lex is known to quote famous poets and even Shakespeare on the very rare occasion. It catches her off guard because this is Joni Mitchell, and it’s so incredibly clichéd which is something Lex is far from. She laughs, but it’s forced, and he can tell just as much as she can feel it.

And as she sits there and watches the movie, she wonders if he’d ever let her go that easy. Is afraid of what her answer might be.

***

There is an ending in this and they both know it.

He stands there and looks at her with sad eyes, and she knows that this is it. That it’s over. He’s off on some trip for reasons he refuses to tell her, and while he stands there at the door of this over priced lap of luxury house, where he’s provided her with everything she could ever need, he says that it’s just a break.

Chloe knows better. Lex does too, but he thinks he’s doing this for her. If nothing else, Lex is noble, and for some reason she can’t help but adore that trait and find it infuriating at the same time.

The next time they will see each other they will be back in Smallville, back to life as they knew it, before this mess with Lionel, before the mess they’d tangled themselves in with each other. There was no room for this, whatever it was, in their lives once they returned. It was inevitable, it was a truth they had been trying to outrun since it started. Since that first, innocent brush of lips.

It’s funny how three months can feel like an eternity. How the two can see the unwritten agreement underneath all of this. This summer, this relationship is just for them, a secret that will linger in the back of their minds as they remember touches and kisses and caresses that will never truly fade.

Lex is standing at the door, and she’s sitting on the steps and it feels a little too melodramatic, even for her, even this summer, so she smiles. Smiles that beautiful smile that grows when she watches one grace his own lips.

So unique, and so beautiful, yet so rare. And she thinks she may miss that the most.

“We can’t do this anymore,” her voice sounds like her own, sounds strong and unwavering and masks the feelings she really feels.

He looks just as sad as she feels, but the reason goes unnoted. “I know,” he crosses the way to her, and before she can think his lips are on hers, soft at first, then harder, more pressure. His hands are in her hair but they might as well be holding her heart because that’s where it lies. Fragile and slightly broken in his hands. “We’ll pick this up again later.”

It’s half a statement, half a question, spoken in a raspy tone, and he’s never looked so unsure about anything in the entire time she’s known him.

A sigh torn from her lips, choking and surprisingly the tears she expects to fall, don’t. Chloe is stronger now, learned lessons that no seventeen year old should have to, and she has the battle scars to show it. Except, most of them are on her heart, and hurt more than she ever thought they would.

“Promise?” A watery smile, a needy voice, but she thinks she is warranted that.

He kisses her again gently and promises, because he doesn’t think he’ll ever be able to truly let her go.