The shower had stopped running by the time the knocking started, so Chloe figured Lana was available to answer it, and anyway it wasn't anyone Chloe cared about (because she didn't care about anyone when she had an ethics paper due at ten the next morning), so she thumbed up the volume on her iPod and ignored what had become banging rather than knocking. God, they had to get out of the dorms next year; the neighbors had no class at all.

Next thing she knew, there was a spit-polished black leather men's shoe planted on top of the menu for delivery hot wings on which she'd sketched a three-point definition of "theodicy." Chloe punched sideways at the ankle rising out of it, because, hello, this was her desk, and this kind of bullshit was exactly the thing that had driven her out of the library already. She yanked the buds out of her ears by their cord and said, "Hey, get off! God!"

"Lex," Lana said from behind her, sounding lost. "What are you doing?"

"Close and lock that door," Lex ordered, which was just so like him and Lana did it, which was pretty much like her, too and was it really too much to ask, was it really such a wildly out-there concept that Chloe could just get one paper finished and turned in on time? One paper, for one class, like a normal human being?

Secretly, deep down, she'd maybe imagined that when Clark went…wherever Clark went…things would be different. More normal.

Lex produced something from an inside jacket pocket something like a tiny computer-repair screwdriver. Because of course Lex carried a screwdriver, and of course he went around putting his muddy Italian shoes on people's private things and opening up the vent in their ceiling, and yeah. Normal was the fucking pipe dream it always had been.

He stuck his arm up into the duct-work, and Chloe rolled her chair away instinctively, because you really just never knew what lived just out of sight, but sometimes it had teeth. She eyed her laptop and wondered if she should try to remove it from the path of whatever Lex had decided to try to uncover.

What he ripped loose and flung against the far wall had brightly colored wires, no teeth. It bounced off the baseboard near Lana's bare feet, and she skittered sideways, her round eyes still fixed on Lex. He closed his eyes and wiped the back of his wrist across them before jumping back to the floor, landing much more delicately than someone his size should be able to. "Ladies," he said, in that tersely formal way he talked when he was pissed at you, "I'm sorry to intrude."

Lana crouched down by the electronic thingamabob, her Student Activities Committee 2006 t-shirt riding rather inappropriately high up her thighs, although the towel she'd wrapped around her shoulders was keeping her wet hair from soaking the shirt transparent. "What is this?" she asked, reaching toward it.

"Lana, don't touch it!" Chloe said. Jesus, sometimes you'd think the girl wasn't from Smallville at all.

"It can't hurt you now," Lex said grimly. He tossed the leather portfolio he'd tucked under his arm onto Chloe's bed and flipped it open, fanning out the sharp black-and-white photo-captures for display with a professional swipe of his hand.

Chloe used her toes to roll herself closer. "Holy shit," she said. "Holy…shit."

"Oh," Lana said softly, peering at them from around Lex, as if by not quite getting close to them she could make them not quite pictures of her.

"You have these in jpeg?" Chloe tried, a little hoarsely. She'd never been good at suppressing the inappropriate joke. "We could make a fortune."

"I've had to wipe my whole server because of these," Lex said. "This is all that's left, and if I were you, I'd burn them immediately." He paused for a moment, and then his shoulders went somehow lax, that half-perceptible shift between Lex when he was on business and Lex when he stopped moving. "Or keep them," he said, plucking at the edge of one. "A perk of life as a private citizen."

Yeah, Chloe thought, you can totally keep all these little mementos of your collegiate lesbianism. God, they were beautiful, though the pictures. Someone had really gotten in touch with his artistic side while cropping and sharpening these images. Chloe's fingers resting on Lana's cheek, gathering up Lana's hair in the other hand, their eyes half-closed in anticipation of a kiss. Chloe's head resting just beneath Lana's breasts while Lana petted her hair and looked sleepy and content. Her arms sliding around Lana from behind, one hand slipping between Lana's thighs to urge them apart, Lana's perfect lips open and her head lolling back on Chloe's shoulder, perfect surrender. Lana, her face invisible behind a veil of hair, resting her hand on Chloe's bare back, almost but not quite covering up the cat's eyes tattooed there. They were green in real life, but grey in the photos. Sharp eyes, night-vision Chloe had always wanted to be the one who could see what was obscure to ordinary people, but she sure as hell hadn't seen this coming.

Jesus, it had hardly even started to feel real yet at all. She half-believed no one but them could see it without magical powers, but there it was, picked up by a digital camera and attached like a virus to some gmail account somewhere. Jesus.

"Who else has these?" Lana said. "I mean how can you know these are the last?"

"I don't know," Lex admitted, closing the portfolio back up. Chloe could hear Lana's soft sigh of relief, along with her own; it was too hard to think, staring at their secret selves like that. "But if the media had them, I would have heard about it by now. So whoever sent them is playing a longer game than " He broke off with a grunt of laughter and said, "Than I would like him to be. I hate enemies with patience."

"Your father," Lana said.

Lex frowned at the portfolio. "Maybe. No. I called him, and…. Well, my ability to detect outright lies from my father is hardly failsafe yet, but it's a lot better than it used to be. I don't think he knew what I was talking about. I don't think it's from Governor Kitteridge's camp, either; they play fairly, as a rule." He made it sound scornful. "No, this means new enemies."

"Lex, as long as I've known you, you've had enemies," Lana said. She sounded sympathetic, as if it were some rash of surprisingly bad luck, instead of Lex's thoroughly well-earned karma at work.

Chloe could see his mouth twitch. "Well, then I'm an expert, and I can tell you, this is the worst kind to have. An enemy who knows you."

"You better go," Chloe said, which seemed to her like basic good sense. If you're a state senator on the eve of a gubernatorial election that's been too close to call for six months and you think you have enemies who want to make it look like you set up illegal surveillance to perv on co- eds too young to buy their own beer, isn't a dorm the exactly wrong place to hang out? Chloe still didn't exactly trust Lex, and she wasn't going to vote for him, either, but for all of their sakes, she really didn't want to be his Chappaquiddick. "How do you know there aren't more cameras?"

"All the pictures were from the same angle," he said dryly, "and I assume the two of you aren't terribly strict about in which corner of your own bedroom you indulge yourselves."

"You still don't know "

"I don't know anything," he said, his voice clipped. "But there is such a thing as an educated guess."

Abruptly, Lana said, "An enemy who knows you?" in the kind of small, questioning voice you only use when you already know the answer, and of course everything changed right then.

Everything always changed when Lana was ready for it.

---

Lana kissed Lex Luthor one time in her freshman year of college, and she felt just horrible about it, because she wasn't possessed or transformed or even drunk at the time. She was just cleaning the espresso machine because it was a little strange, but she still liked to pull shifts at the Talon when she was home on vacation; it would always be her place, maybe the only place that was ever really hers and everything was locked up and everyone had gone home except Lex, who washed and dried the last coffee cups like it was something he did every day, although Lana wondered if he'd actually ever done it in his life. They were talking about…oh, something. Something harmless, but forbidden, because everything between them is forbidden. Absolutely everything.

It was the way his hands smelled like flowers, like dish soap, and she took them in her own hands, palms up, and stared at the puckered, sweet-smelling skin of his fingertips. "You didn't have to," she said.

"I don't mind," Lex said, and when she looked up at him, God, the expression on his face. He looked all glass and shadows and streaks of pain and need like rain running down a broken windowpane, and it was like nothing she'd ever….

She'd been wanted before, maybe even needed. She'd been loved. Clark not just Clark, but especially him, and she'd always told herself there was something special about the intensity with which Clark longed for her, something romantic and rare, but Lex looked at her as if he as if he were dying and she was the last thing he'd ever see, and the one thing he didn't regret.

So she put her hand behind his head and they kissed each other, sudden and blinding. He felt soft and strong at once and he smelled like expensive aftershave and cheap dish-soap, and he pressed the small of her back into the counter and slid his hands up her thighs, over her tights and under the swish of her skirt until her legs didn't hold her, and then he picked her up (she could feel the strain in his shoulders, the way he had to fight harder than Clark ever did to pull it off smoothly) and carried her to the couch.

So maybe she did more than kiss Lex Luthor, that one time her freshman year. It was almost Christmas and he'd just won an election and she wasn't a virgin anymore and it was starting to snow outside and he undid each button of her blouse with incredible care and kissed the revealed skin underneath like the Catholics on her mother's side of the family kissed their rosaries and it was so beautiful and silent and intense and she wanted him so badly. When he rolled her tights down from her hips and covered the wet silk of her panties with his hand and traced the edges with his fingers, she rolled her body under him and said, "Lex, Lex," just so he'd be sure that she knew who he was.

But that was all. He stood up, drew his left hand hard across his face, and then fished through his pockets for his gloves, shaking his head over and over the whole time. Lana smoothed her skirt back down. "I can't do this," he finally said raggedly, as if he'd just re-learned how to talk after a long coma. "I'm sorry…Lana. I shouldn't have."

"I it's okay," she said. "I'm sorry, too. I can't really…."

"I know. Of course you can't. I…. My God. How beautiful you are."

And she tried to apologize again, but she got tongue-tied, and she couldn't say Clark's name and didn't really need to. Lex didn't seem to want to be slowed down, anyway.

That night she went home to her boyfriend, and she went down on him, but she couldn't bear the thought of letting him touch her, not while she was still hot and wet and electric from someone else's hands. The whole thing made her feel sick, but it made her feel heavy and helpless, too, as if it were nothing that she ever could have really controlled or changed, and she fell asleep by Clark's side, warm all over, her head dark with sense-images of Lex's snowfall-gentle mouth on her skin, his beautiful strong body fitting easily between her legs, holding her down, making love to her with perfect, smooth control while his dark eyes flashed chaos and fire.

Later, she forgot about the whole incident. Things happen; everyone has indiscretions. The important thing was, they stopped themselves before it was too late. They did the right thing.

---

"I'm sorry," Lex said. He was sitting on Chloe's bed now, although Chloe didn't remember him sitting down, and she sure didn't remember inviting him to. He looked back and forth between Chloe and Lana, and then tugged restlessly on his tie. It was ten-thirty at night and he'd come over here to discuss the fact that they were being spied on to throw the outcome of a state election, and he was still wearing his tie.

"Sorry for what?" Lana said in a choky voice, her cheeks bright with color. "For feeling for wanting that like that or sorry somebody knows, somebody who can break into my room and take pictures of me and my girlfriend?"

"Oh, Jesus," Chloe said. Jesus, is that what they were now girlfriends? It was supposed to be just a thing, just a cuddling and hair-brushing, your-boyfriend-abandoned-you-and- vanished-off-the-face-of-the-earth moral support thing, but you know, Chloe had never been really good with the social niceties, and the line between best-friend moral support breakup cuddling and feeling up the girl who knew to buy you the first season of The L Word on DVD for Christmas of 2005 well, it was awfully arbitrary when you stopped to think about it, wasn't it?

Lex fixed Lana with something that was not quite a glare, but was obviously not an invitation to fuck around with him, either. "I'm really very sorry, Miss Lang, that it offends you to learn that I find you attractive. If it makes you feel any better, it's actually an enormous inconvenience to me, too, as I find it prevents me from maintaining lasting friendships and possibly from having a job, at the rate things are going."

"You could get anybody to be your some dolled-up hooker some gross video fantasy thing. Pick somebody else!"

"Do you honestly think ?" Lex snorted and jerked hard at the cuffs of his shirtsleeves. Chloe had known cats like Lex, who would immediately fall to grooming themselves if they tripped or fell or did something they wished you hadn't seen them do. "If I wanted hookers, I'd hire hookers. If I wanted a video, I'd buy a damn video." One of those videos they advertised on late-night tv, Chloe assumed the ones with Mardi Gras beads and sorority girls in the shower together the kind that made Lana throw slippers and the TV Guide at the screen and yell about objectification and passive-aggressive homophobia. Sometimes Chloe wondered if she ever should have made Lana take that women's studies class with her.

"Of course," Lana said. "Because you're Lex Luthor, and you always get what you want." Chloe had heard variations on that theme many times, but they didn't sound like Lana's words, even in Lana's mouth. She'd always seen Lex as something something different from that. Not Lex Luthor, but just a man she'd grown up with, maybe an unreliable friend, but still a friend. There was pain splattered all over her face at the idea that all these years, Lex might have been looking at her as something less than the same thing.

"I can't have what you have! What you and Chloe…. That's not for sale. God knows I've tried to buy it a time or two."

---

Clark dumped her via a nine-page, badly spelled letter. At first it made Lana suspicious, since Clark had always gotten very good grades on spelling tests, but deep down she always knew it wasn't a fake, wasn't some kidnapper or torture-happy, allegedly rehabilitated enemy of Clark's out for revenge and covering his tracks. She could hear it in Clark's voice, every one of the fifty-eight times she read it. He just tended to get messy when he was upset.

"Who needs him, anyway?" Chloe said brightly. She was wearing red vinyl boots with silver heels, the ones she'd bought to wear to the party she skipped to stay home and listen to Lana cry and read selections from the letter out loud. She put on a pink terrycloth robe instead of her little black dress, but she left the boots on.

"You do," Lana said pointedly. "You'll be you'll be nowhere without Clark. You won't even know what to do."

Chloe frowned for a minute, then reached out and stroked Lana's hair. "Well…we'll make something up. We'll find things to do. Lana, we'll be we'll be okay."

They stayed up all night, eating ice cream cake and watching animated movies not the gross ones with princesses, but Shrek and Finding Nemo and Toy Story.

"Sue me," Chloe said. "I hate men, but I still love Lady and the Tramp."

"You're just like that dog," Lana said dreamily, curled into Chloe's terrycloth side. "Like Peg. You're Peg."

"Okay, no way does Clark get to be the Tramp. He was never that cool. I mean, Lana, I love Clark…. I love him, but. Come on."

Underneath the robe, Chloe was still wearing the black panties and bustier that went with the little black dress. Lana ran her hand down the smooth side of it, fitting her fingers against the metal struts under the silk, and Chloe gasped and threw her head back on the cheap dorm carpet, bottle blonde on faded taupe, and Lana said, "Have you ever done this before? With a girl?"

Chloe swallowed hard, and her chest heaved against the confines of the bustier as she caught her breath. "Not…. I've just made out. Nothing like this? I guess? I don't really know what this are we making out, or…?"

Lana thumbed the bottom eyelet hook open, and then another one, and there was a triangle of bare skin. Lana put her mouth against it and dipped her tongue into Chloe's navel, and Chloe moaned and pulled up her knee. Lana could feel the cold heel of Chloe's boot through the cotton of her pajama top. Chloe was always so sexy so brave, and brave girls were always the sexiest, everybody knew that, like Angelina Jolie or Christina Aguilera or someone. Lana would never even try on boots like those, and Chloe had done everything first, before Lana, everything, always.

"I think we're making something up," Lana said, and she moved her mouth down, sucking on the warm swell of Chloe's body through the silk panties, pressing her tongue up to rub the fabric against her. Chloe cried out her name, over and over, and cupped her hands around the back of Lana's head, her hands shaking, her body heaving breathlessly.

Lana had never realized she could be something new for someone like Chloe. For Clark, sure, but what did Clark know? Chloe was well, not a slut. Never that, Lana had never thought of her like that, and never could no matter what. But she knew things, she'd done things. She'd always been ten steps ahead of everybody, ever since she was the bratty new girl from Metropolis that everybody said thought she was too good for Smallville Junior High.

Lana hadn't exactly defended her back then, but she'd thought about it. She'd sat there quietly, smiling blandly, and she'd thought, what she wouldn't give for people to say she was too good to be here. What she wouldn't give for them to just let her go.

She'd never been brave enough to imagine she'd run away with Chloe someday, back to Metropolis, where they'd live together and eat ice cream and wear fifty-dollar bras and say fuck you to men who didn't want them enough and make love on the floor any time they wanted and tell everyone or no one and be too good for everything in the world that didn't make them feel invulnerable.

---

"You'll find somebody, Lex," Lana promised earnestly. She brushed his shoulder with her hand, as if she'd planned to rest it there but changed her mind at the last second.

"Finding somebody is the easy part," he said with a thin smile. "I try and try to become a misanthrope, but I keep meeting the most remarkable people."

Chloe didn't expect He meant Lana, of course. Lex had always been a little strange with Lana, too intense and then too cold right after, and he got stranger and stranger as his friendship with Clark got less and less friendly. Chloe hadn't believed in coincidences for a long, long time.

But he was looking at her. After a moment, Chloe realized that Lana was looking at her, too, smiling indulgently like she was delighted that someone finally noticed. Chloe considered being insulted hi, plenty of people thought Chloe was something special, this wasn't her first time or anything but found that her heart was getting a little too fluttery to pull off "insulted."

"What?" she demanded, trying to pin Lex with her best bad-ass, ghostbusting chick look. She'd seen scarier things than Lex Luthor, after all, whether or not you could ever get him to believe that. "Why are you staring at me?"

He shrugged with one graceful shoulder and said, "I apologize. You're the last person I'd ever want to offend."

"Why?" she said. Was he making fun of her?

But he looked perfectly serious when he said, "Because I have a lot of work to do in the next fifty or sixty years, and given the choice between having you with me or against me…. That's no choice at all."

"Gee, Mr. Luthor," she said, "do you think you have room for another creepy, anti-First Amendment spin doctor on your team? What if I threw in my girlfriend, too? She's totally hot."

She didn't really think it was going to quash him, but she was a little surprised to see him smile not smirk, but really smile. "The fact that you would say that to me is my definition of 'totally hot.' I suppose if you've never had to live surrounded by toadies and suck-ups, that might seem strange to you."

"It doesn't seem strange to me," Lana said, and then smiled shyly. "Of course, I kind of had…high school."

"Business, politics, high school," Lex said airily. "It does all run together after a while."

Lex looked between them again, measuring now, analyzing them. It wasn't about sex, except that it was. Lex, after all. He almost couldn't help it. "You're fortunate," he said. "The two of you. I am sorry…sorrier than you know, that your privacy was invaded because of me, but I can tell you what I thought of when I saw those pictures." He ignored Chloe's snort, which was okay, because her heart wasn't really in it. "I thought, they look so alone. Like they know they're alone. Maybe you don't know how rare that is. I don't know, maybe it's not rare. It's rather unprecedented for me, though. All my life, there have been people over my shoulder. Even when they're not there, they are." He gestured toward the portfolio beside him, but somehow Chloe suspected he wasn't thinking about bugs and cameras, at least not the computerized kind; Lex was bugged from inside his own head. Who but a man who was scared he didn't have any of his own could be so fixated on secrets?

Oh, God. Chloe was totally giving up men, very soon now. They turned her into a crazy person. "Look," she said. "Get off my bed, okay?"

He stood immediately, looking contrite. Nothing if not courteous, Senator Luthor. "I'll contact you as soon as I've learned something," he said, and laid the portfolio on her desk. "These belong to you."

"Shut up, please?" Chloe sighed, and sat down in the warm dip of the mattress where he'd just been. "I'm trying to tell you something. I'm not going to vote for you."

His mouth twisted slightly, but he inclined his head and said, "Vote your conscience, of course, Miss Sullivan. I can hardly hold that against you."

"If you don't shut up, I can't get to the part where I say something nice." He assumed an expression of patient waiting. "I don't trust you, and I think you're dangerous I think you've always been dangerous to Smallville, and if you're the governor you'll be dangerous to Kansas, and when you take over the world you'll be dangerous on the freaking planetary level. Frankly, I think we'll all be lucky if that's where it ends. But I think you're dangerous because because you go too far. Because you don't have any concept of what's too far, and I know that's probably not even your fault, okay? But that's how it is, life's not fair, blah blah blah. The point is, though, I don't think you're dangerous because It's not some sick biological determinism. I'm not one of those people who thinks you're you know, fruit of the poisonous tree, or that there's some kind of hideous plague on both your houses or what the fuck ever. I think you're…I think you mean well. I think you really try, and I wish I could tell you that was enough."

"It isn't anything," Lex said. "No one is interested in anyone else's intentions only results."

"It sucks," she said, "but it's how things are. Your father's an asshole and I hate him. You're…. You do try. And maybe it doesn't mean anything, but the thing is that you don't have to, and you still do. You've maybe even saved my life a couple of times, and you're you're good to Lana. You've always tried to help her out. So maybe not nobody cares about intentions, because apparently I kind of do, and you're probably going to blow us all up one of these days, but you're still, I guess, kind of a friend of mine. And you're kind of cute," she said, and grinned at the way his eyebrows shot up, and Lana's, too, "and…."

Chloe stared down at the faded knees of her sweatpants and thought, Don't say that, what's the matter with you? you can't say… until Lana reached out and put her hand on her head, all that soft-edged but indestructible Lana Lang certainty flowing straight into her and making the top of her head tingle. She looked back up into Lex's fascinated, almost frightened eyes, and said, "I was twelve when my mom split, and then right away we were in a whole new town where I didn't know anybody, and I know it doesn't exactly compare to your unauthorized biography, but that was the worst. Out of all the other shit that's happened to me, that was the worst, because I was lonely, and nobody should have to be lonely. So. Here's my offer." She reached up and disengaged Lana's fingers from her hair and held onto Lana's cool hand; her wrist was at an awkward angle, but it actually felt a little nice to have it pressed gently out of keyboard position. "I'm going to blow off yet another paper so I can take my girlfriend to bed. You can stay, if you if you sit down and be quiet, because this is not an invitation to take over, it's just…."

"Chloe," Lana said. "What are you doing? And I think I should get a vote, or some advanced warning, or something."

She kissed Lana's knuckles lightly and said, "You, with your martyr complex? You'd never let yourself agree to it, so no, you don't get a vote." She grinned at Lana, who smiled back helplessly. "You're not in Smallville anymore, Princess. Metropolis girls are allowed to do things just because they want to." And you want to, Chloe didn't say. Lana knew it perfectly well; she'd always been good at resisting temptation, but she sucked at sublimating.

Lex settled slowly into the desk chair, moving in brief, stiff bursts that weren't his usual style at all. He rolled himself a few feet away, loosened his tie, shed his coat, and set his hands flat on the arms of the chair as if to demonstrate he was unarmed. The shock was beginning to fade out of his expression, leaving that sleek blankness that was Lex walking into a negotiation. Chloe had never seen him in the boardroom before, but half of everything Lex ever did was a negotiation of some kind, so she knew the look well.

"Come here," Chloe said softly, putting both her arms around Lana's waist and drawing her down to sit on the bed next to her. She brushed Lana's hair back with one hand and kissed her lips lightly. "We're still alone."

---

Lana was only wearing the shirt she'd thrown on when she got out of the shower, and Chloe skimmed it off of her in one quick beat; there went her plausible deniability, and any chance she might have had of saying, Hey, wait, we should slow down, can we talk about this?

They apparently weren't going to slow down, or talk about this, so Lana closed her eyes and thought about the familiar cappuccino-and-pizza-sauce tang of Chloe's mouth on hers and the too- faint-to-bruise pressure of their elbows digging against undefended skin as they found a comfortable way to wind their arms around each other. She slid her fingers over Chloe's ribs, pausing to rub just beneath the elastic on Chloe's sports bra. Chloe shivered, and Lana leaned in and rubbed against her, duplicating that rough-warm friction of cotton against her skin.

Chloe swung her around, and Lana found herself lying flat, damp hair under her back bleeding coldness through her body while Chloe's mouth on her lip and her chin and the pulse-point on her neck spread warmth through the other side. Chloe's hand came up the side of her body, brushing past the side of her breast and up the fragile, sensitive skin under her arm that made Lana squirm and her hips start to raise and lower in a slow, dream-like rhythm.

She turned her head then, and She'd almost forgotten. For a second, she'd forgotten him completely, and the shock of the unexpected, the thrill of it, pushed a small sound out of her mouth, a frightened little moan. But she wasn't frightened, not at all.

"Chloe," she said, still unable to look away from the fierce, unwavering focus of Lex's eyes. She clenched her fingers in the sleeve of Chloe's t-shirt and tugged ineffectually at it as Chloe's hand smoothed back down her body, drifting sideways to cover more of Lana's breast, to close over it and rub firm circles on the underside with her thumb. "You you, too. Show…."

Because they weren't alone, not at all, and Lana wanted him to see what she had now, how things had changed for her. The girl Lex taught how to write a business plan and stood out on a balcony with, promising her it wasn't strange at all, not to always want the things people said you should want she'd been so many things since then. She was connected by a million silver threads to that girl, but now she was here, and she was the Lana Lang who had won the Greenfield Fellowship in stratigraphic geology, who'd lived in Europe and had visions and loved one or two people and killed one or two people and owned something of her own, who had this gorgeous, brave girlfriend with red boots and three tattoos and a miraculous smile. The Lana Lang who had survived Smallville and moved on.

She wished she could show everybody, but she could begin here.

Between kisses, she pulled the shirt and the bra together off of Chloe, then took her by the arms and pulled her up higher so that Lana could lift her head and taste them, one and then the other of Chloe's small, sandy-brown nipples, smooth skin becoming tight and textured in her mouth. Chloe moaned and let her spine dip, and Lana reached down and settled her hands comfortably over Chloe's ass. (A hundred different consultations on a hundred different outfits, when Chloe would put her hands over her head and twist herself around at the waist and say, "Seriously, how's my ass look?" and Lana always said, "Great, it looks great," and meant it, but sometimes now she couldn't stop watching it, the dip of Chloe's back and the soft rise of it that looked like it was shaped just for Lana to curve her palms around.)

Lana could feel Chloe twitch from shoulders to knees when Lana gave her a long, playful lick up between her breasts and into the hollow of her throat, and Chloe bit her ear and murmured, "Jesus, fuck, I want to, I wanna…."

There was nothing to block her view of Lex when Chloe crawled backwards down the bed, sparking rough kisses over Lana's abdomen as she went; Lana couldn't tell that he'd moved at all since he sat down, any more than if he'd been turned into lead. She frowned slightly at him, then smiled, trying to coax him into smiling back at her. She still wasn't entirely sure why they were doing this, but she thought it was mostly to make Lex feel good, to make him feel less trapped in his pressurized, powerful life. She'd always wanted that for him; she'd always understood, in the pit of her stomach, how it felt for him. He seemed willing to pay the price for it, but she'd never believed he should really have to.

He didn't smile at her, not exactly, but his eyes moved, and Lana thought she could suddenly see him through whatever wall he'd put up. It wasn't quite the brute force of the look he'd given her that night in the Talon, like being kicked by a thoroughbred, but it was something similar: watching her, wanting her, simple and pure in a way few things were for Lex, and no regrets.

Chloe tugged at the ring in Lana's bellybutton with her teeth. (They'd gotten those together, a year ago, and Clark blushed when he saw it, although even after he said, "No, no, it's nice it's hot," he kept looking at her with worry, as if she might not be in her right mind again, and he'd always seemed afraid to touch it. He never once suggested that Chloe's was evidence of any kind of possession or hallucinatory experience.) Lana put her fingers in Chloe's hair, gritty with the last grains of this morning's hairspray, and said, "Okay, okay, please," as if Chloe might not be able to interpret her hitching breath and the way her legs were spreading steadily apart.

It was so good, Chloe was so good at this Clark had been, too, but only for a little bit at a time, just until she was loose and warm and whimpering, and then he'd stop and go on to bigger and better things. She'd thought they were, too, at the time real sex, the important stuff, but Chloe had cured her of that. (She'd given it a try even before they were involved with each other, back when they were only trading best-friend confidences. Chloe waved her hands in exasperation and said, "Fucking Clark, of course he doesn't do it right, this is what happens when you learn about sex by watching cows." Chloe had learned by watching porn, which Lana wasn't sure at the time was much more reliable, but later experience had convinced her that it might be.)

Loose and warm and whimpering was just the overture, the way Chloe did it.

She was adorable, too, with her shaggy golden head down and her ass in the air, like a pouncing kitten, and Lana scratched her scalp with one hand and rolled her own nipple between the fingers of her other and tried to hook her toes in the leg of Chloe's sweatpants to pull them down, but she couldn't quite manage that last part.

"Lex," she said, her voice soft from breathlessness, and he fractured like she'd struck him with a rock-pick, his muscles all jumping as shock and hunger flashed across his face. Lana poked at the sweatpants again with her toe and said, "Can you help me out?"

He looked back and forth between Lana's face and Chloe's ass, stopping only once or twice in between, and only for a split second. He licked his lips and said, "I probably…. I think sitting here was a condition…of…."

She felt her spine arch almost painfully before she felt the brush of Chloe's tongue, sweeping in slow, elliptical arcs, against the side of her clit, and she sounded garbled and stoned to her own ears as she said, "It's okay, don't worry, you have such hands, I always loved your hands I want to see them on Chloe, please?"

He stood up slowly, took off his cufflinks and rolled the cuffs of his sleeves back once before he approached the bed. He did have beautiful hands, large but delicate, soft-skinned and pale and perfectly deliberate, the right one studded with a heavy gold ring that Lana remembered feeling cool like a bite against her hip. He stood over the bed for a moment, watching with considering eyes as though this were a design challenge of some kind, until finally he put his hands on Chloe's hips, his fingers under the elastic, and began to pull slowly. Chloe shivered a little, but otherwise acted like she hardly noticed at least until she rolled her weight to one knee and then to the other so he could get them off of her completely.

Lana thought he might retreat again, but he didn't. He watched them from his new, higher vantage point, and after a moment he reached out again and touched Chloe's cat's-eye tattoo, and then the private one at the very top of the back of her thigh, two Chinese letters that Chloe said meant truth and justice. He touched her back and drew his hand slowly down her spine; Lana could feel Chloe's little noises of pleasure all the way through her body, making her shudder. His larger hand spread across Chloe's ass seemed to cover it just as easily and naturally as both of Lana's own. The way he stood facing the bed made it particularly easy for Lana to see the shape of his hard-on pushing out the front of his tailored pants; we do that, she thought, and it seemed amazing, because this was Lex Luthor. He wasn't like ordinary guys. He almost never had been, until now.

He moved a single finger, and Lana couldn't see exactly where he put it, how far he could reach with it, but the movement made Chloe's hips jerk, and Lana came out of nowhere, her attention pulled with dizzying speed from Chloe and Lex to the rumbling explosion in her own body. Chloe panted and squirmed and didn't stop licking; she wouldn't, not yet, she never did until Lana was worn to a thin rag and too weak to roll over. Chloe had very firm ideas about how to do this right.

"Lex," she said, and he pulled in a breath that seemed to cost him something; the tremble in his shoulders at the sound of his name was, God, maybe the sexiest thing Lana had ever seen. "Bottom drawer of the desk," she said, and he moved his hand without hesitation and walked to it. He made it look easy iron Luthor control, or was that just how much he trusted her?

"Hm," he said when he opened it and crouched down to get a closer look. If he'd sounded shocked, Lana thought she might still have it in her to feel embarrassed, but he didn't sound shocked at all, just thoughtful in the face of a complex decision. Chloe believed in trying a little of everything, and she had the most amazing sites bookmarked on her laptop; Lex probably wasn't as surprised to learn that sex toys came in such a colorful diversity of shapes and sizes as Lana had been, but he sifted through the drawer for what felt like a long, long time without being sure which to choose, so either he was indecisive about these things the same way Chloe was, or he was at a bit of a loss himself. Lex was rarely indecisive or at a loss, so Lana wasn't quite sure.

She was surprised at the one he chose; she would have guessed most guys would pick one of the largest, or at least something that looked like it required a lot of batteries, but Lex closed the drawer and stood up with one that was slender and smooth, blue-iridescent and elegantly curved at the end. Maybe she shouldn't have been surprised; Lex almost always relied on precision, choosing the least amount of leverage required to get a job done.

---

Chloe figured that someday in her autobiography, she could say that she had sex with Lex Luthor one time in her junior year of college; at least, she thought it should count as sex, even though he hardly touched her at all only with one hand spread out along her belly, holding part of her weight while he slid a vibrator into her. She was so wet and it was so narrow that she almost couldn't feel it at all, only the long, shivering shock waves it put out as it hummed, spreading through her body, heating her nipples and her palms and the back of her neck.

Then he turned it carefully inside her, and Lana came again, crying out Chloe, Chloe, don't stop, and the hooked head of the vibrator touched the perfect spot deep inside of her and she had to stop, couldn't do anything but rest her cheek against Lana's heated skin and keen and howl like a stray puppy dog while she came in wracking waves, clenching around the toy that Lex's hand held unnaturally steady.

He even cleaned it off in the bathroom afterwards, leaving Chloe and Lana twined together on the bed, soaked and exhausted. Lana was the first to move, patting Chloe's shoulder with a hand gone lax and clumsy. "Sorry," she said. "I didn't ask if it was okay…."

"I kinda noticed it was happening," Chloe said, grinning against Lana's collarbone. "I probably would've mentioned if it wasn't okay."

"So…it was okay?"

With effort, Chloe pushed up on her elbow and rubbed her nose against Lana's teasingly. "Gee, let me think," she said. "Best orgasm of my life, in between the prettiest science geek at Metropolis University and a guy who doesn't have to be told what a g-spot is? I think it'll do. The only person who's not okay is my ethics professor; he's getting really tired of giving me extensions."

"If you need any extra credit," Lex said from the doorway of the bathroom, "just ask him if he'd like the Governor-elect of Kansas to speak to his class about cleaning up politics."

"How does anyone ever even survive without you in their corner, Lex?" Chloe said wryly, and then she whispered into Lana's ear, "Also, you giving orders to Lex? So fucking sexy."

"Very," Lex said mildly, and Chloe looked up at him in surprise. Good ears. "Don't get up," he said, although neither of them had moved to do so. He closed up the desk drawer again and folded down and re-fastened his sleeves, straightened his tie and swung on his coat. Other than a slight sheen of sweat high across his forehead, there was no sign at all that he'd been involved with anything more unusual than a cup of coffee. He's going to win this election, Chloe realized in vague amazement. She was going to know the Governor. She was going to have slept with the Governor, and she wasn't even twenty-one yet. Her autobiography was going to be awesome.

"Lex!" Lana said quickly as he reached for the doorknob. When he paused and looked back at her, she seemed startled to realize she had nothing to say. She finally shrugged a bit against the sheets and said, "Goodnight?"

"Goodnight, Miss Lang," he said, his eyes amused but his tone affectionate. "Miss Sullivan."

"Is he going to call us that for the rest of our lives?" Chloe wondered out loud when he'd closed the door behind him. "I mean, it's okay, it's got a whole cute retro thing. It's just, sometimes I wonder if he knows what decade he lives in, with all the noblesse oblige and the Latin and the cufflinks and all."

"He's probably the last real gentleman in the world," Lana said quietly. Chloe rolled her eyes and slipped an arm under Lana, rolling Lana's weight against her. Lana tucked her head against Chloe's neck and purred in contentment.

Chloe didn't really care how long Lana had been nursing her crush on Lex Luthor; Clark might not have been able to deal with it, but then, there was a list like Chloe's arm of things Clark had never been good at dealing with. That was why Clark was the jackass who'd always let a good thing go, and Chloe was the lucky bitch who was with Lana right now.

Patience was always rewarded. Chloe wondered if she could work that into the ethics paper without sounding too much like a lovesick little girl from the sticks.