Puppy Dog Eyes
Chloe watches Lana the way a puppy begs at the dinner table. No one ever notices -- especially not Lana -- but that doesn't stop Chloe's eyes from lingering.
Chloe remembers the day that Lana attacked her, tried to kill her, swung an axe at her head. Chloe doesn't remember the amazing way Lana seemed to have magically learned martial arts; no, Chloe remembers watching the overwhelming passion in Lana's eyes when they exchanged blows.
She doesn't reflect on falling down all those stairs with fondness, but the memory of the sound of the axe on metal and the resultant ruins of the gym locker make her spine quiver with something closer to arousal than fear. And Chloe recalls that when Adam finally knocked Lana unconscious for a split second, laying there with the showers making her clothes cling in all the right places, Chloe wanted to kiss the blood away from Lana's lips, taste the metallic tang on her tongue and battle for dominance with the brunette.
But because certain brunette ex-cheerleaders can only handle so much rebellion, Chloe knows she can never give voice to her deep, dark fantasies. She lets the school, and Clark himself, think that she still has a thing for him. That his forever-blushing cheeks and slightly scraggly teeth and unruly hair make her heart start throbbing in time with her sex.
Chloe feels power from deluding people this way. Much like she gets a tiny secret thrill from wearing her hair in a different style every other week. Since Chloe can't experiment the way she really wants, manipulating her blonde locks into new, hipper shaggy Metropolis-esque fashions has to do.
The week of Chloe-cide attempts, she thinks once everything's calmed down enough that the brutal scrape on her arm from Clark's attempt to make her into roadkill really bothers her if it isn't sitting just right, is the closest to Hell she ever wants to get. The donated computers were un-donated, Lana was hanging out with a creepy guy whose lips and perma-blush and unruly brown mop of hair almost rivaled Clark's, and Clark and Lex were making eyes at each other when they assumed no one was watching.
But Chloe watched. That's what she did, and maybe it was just an excuse to hold herself up and away from everyone else, but that's what she did. She watched the way Lana tried to make Adam into a replacement Clark, a softer, less confusing version. Clark-lite.
Chloe thinks about telling everyone what she's figured out. She's had her suspicions for a while, but no solid confirmation. She's not sure she really wants to find out. Clark's mystery is the only safe fun to be had in the entire town. When the days are slow and she wants to just float for a while, Chloe sits back and looks at her Wall of Weird, utterly devoted to the bizarre things that happen in Smallville. It had taken years to assemble but just a few months before she figured out that Clark figured too prominently on it for it to be a coincidence. But here she still was, and despite the oddity of Smallville it was never going to be somewhere she actually wanted to be; Chloe is stuck in a town so enticingly close but achingly far away from the throbbing pulse of Metropolis.
Chloe's internship with the Daily Planet had been an experience with pure bliss, as far as she was concerned. And not for the reasons that everyone assumed; they thought that it was because the intrepid reporter got to finally exist in the frantic world of the newsroom in her beloved hometown. Chloe let them think that she actually did something useful and exciting, the entire time silently remembering all the coffee she'd made, the articles she'd proofread, and all the shitty little research missions she'd been sent on. It all sounded so much more romantic when Chloe told her friends -- at least that's how she liked to think of them -- about the excitement of seeing an article all the way through its lifecycle. Chloe had learned such pretty bullshit language the hard way, with people scoffing at the pitiful Smallville address on her resume while she tried to catch up on all the flowery ways people described their shitty lives.
Lies, after all, are much more glamorous than reality; Chloe knows this very, very well.
Reality, for example, is that Chloe loved being in Metropolis because that's where she lost her virginity. She's pretty sure that, finally, she has one up on Lana. Because when Taylor wined and dined her, Chloe looked at the girl's beauty and swooned. Tall, lanky, graceful, silky light brown hair, blue eyes -- Taylor was everything that wasn't Smallville even though Chloe knows that from that simple description one could draw a connection between Taylor and Clark. But, Chloe reminds herself, any comparison falls flat because when Chloe kissed Taylor, she didn't taste like strawberries or sunlight or the Kent farm.
Chloe looked at Taylor in a way that she was sure Lana had never looked at Whitney or Clark or any of the parade of look-alike boys. Chloe looked at Taylor like she wanted to devour the taller girl whole. They'd even spent an entire weekend in bed, only leaving the confines of the sheets to play in the shower and to refuel their stomachs.
So when Chloe swaggered back into the dismal halls of Smallville High, she had a shiny, perfect secret that she could keep from the teenage hordes and the drama-queen angst of high school. And when things got especially dull or weird, which often happened in the span of a single day, Chloe would read one of the sensual emails Taylor sent her or write one of her own and ship it on its merry way, blushing in a manner that made her grin helplessly.
Once, sitting in physics and listening to Mr. Keyzer spout off about parabolic trajectories, her thighs quivered with bliss when a particularly sizzling moment with Taylor invaded her memory. Chloe knew that Lana had seen it, had looked at Chloe with wide, disbelieving eyes and blushingly looked away. Chloe felt a tiny thrill of victory and a lascivious grin spread itself on her face when Lana unconsciously crossed her legs tightly and swallowed hard.
Chloe likes feeling evil sometimes. She listens to loud, angry music and sad, mournful music but nothing in between and dresses with perfect alterna-rock flair. Chloe wonders, sometimes, if she could be gayer if she tried really hard. So when Taylor emails her and asks if Chloe would like Taylor to visit Smallville, Chloe can barely hide her delight.
Predictably, because Taylor is Taylor and Chloe likes it when Taylor is being Taylor, Chloe ends up on her back on a hastily cleared desk in the Talon office after school on the Friday of The Weekend. She enjoyed capitalizing the letters in her emails to Taylor, because it made it that much more special and out-of-the-ordinary and non-Smallville. Taylor's hands are like nothing Chloe has ever known, gentle and demanding and so very sure. No hesitation, no wishy-washy emotions, just raw physical want.
And though Chloe doesn't plan it that way, she isn't terribly surprised or displeased when Lana walks in to see Taylor's hand creeping below the waistband on Chloe's uber-chic green khakis. Taylor is nipping at Chloe's throat and Chloe's back is arched and she is doing her best not to moan too loudly. Even though both Taylor and Chloe sense Lana's gasp and sudden exit from the room, they're so lost in the haze of arousal that it doesn't really click. But when Clark comes ambling through the door at his aww-shucks best, wondering what made Lana run down the hall like a bat out of hell, and stopping speechless at the sight of Taylor's physical possession of a very eager Chloe, the awkwardness settles on everyone equally. Chloe wonders if he'll tell her about Lex now that he knows about her, but has serious doubts about the boy's ability to let go of a secret. After Clark leaves Taylor smirks at Chloe knowingly and whisks Chloe back to her bedroom where there are no more interruptions.
The next morning Chloe looks at herself long and hard in the bathroom mirror after wiping off the leftover steam from a long, exploring shower with Taylor and mouths the word 'lesbian' over and over until it has lost all meaning. Chloe likes having another line to draw between herself and the rest of Smallville and she wonders if that's the only reason she finds Taylor so damn enticing, but she's pretty sure that it's because she's really that gay.
So when Taylor leaves after a weekend chock full of passionate sex and more adult banter than Chloe's had since moving to Smallville -- except, maybe, the few conversations with Lana where she's not freaking out about something boy-related -- Chloe feels bereft. She still swaggers through the halls on Monday morning, because that's what Chloe does, but that doesn't mean that her heart has to be in the posturing. Chloe knows that by now half the school probably has heard about her liaison with Taylor in the Talon office, and Chloe likes that this will add to her mystery.
Slowly but surely, Chloe knows, she'll find a way to make Lana watch her like a puppy begging at the dinner table. And when that happens, the world will tilt on its axis and Clark will look at her with his soulful eyes and Chloe will laugh because Chloe knows that what Clark will really feel isn't sadness but something closer to relief. And she will make Lana a part of the mystery-that-is-Chloe.
Because that's what Chloe does and she's good at it.