Anniversary

“My eyes are shot,” Lois said as she walked through the apartment door. “I’ve been looking at screens all day, and when I wasn’t looking at screens, I was reading fine print, and when I wasn’t reading fine print, Doris had on a really ugly blouse.” 

She got to the living room and sagged into the nearest chair. Clark, like always, had beaten her home, his tie off, his shirt unbuttoned, his glasses halfway down his nose so he looked more Super than man. He gave her a warm smile.

“I just want to sit here,” Lois said, “and not even think.”

“Lois,” Clark said, “it’s our anniversary.”

Lois groaned. “Trust you to remember.” She shut her eyes tight. “I know you want to do something special, but I’m beat. Can’t we just—“

In a flash, she’d been stripped of her clothes, scrubbed off with a warm washcloth, and deposited under the covers of her bed. The lights were off, but some candles were lit, revealing Clark—now barefoot, belt undone, shirt open, just the right thing for Lois’s writerly imagination as he held her purse by the dresser, taking out her phone and plugging it into the charger. Even a Man of Steel couldn’t get the USB cable in on the first try.

“Mr. Kent!” Lois exclaimed, pulling the sheets up over her bare chest. “The liberties you take.”

“Too much?” Clark asked her. 

“More than enough to make me wish I had eight hours of sleep, a full stomach, and my armpits shaved.”

“I can help with some of that,” Clark assured her, then he was slipping into bed behind her. She felt his nude body press against her own, his muscles rock-hard but his well-sized manhood comfortingly flaccid. Sore and tired as she was, she didn’t think she could resist his erection, but years of marriage had built up an immunity to his member, at least when it was limp, and ever since college she mainlined sleep like a heroin addict, when she could get it. Between marital worry, more than a few of the stories she’d written, and simple deadline anxiety, she was not the most well-rested woman in the world.

“How about having your midnight snack a little early?” Clark asked her, and Lois smelled strawberries as one was waved under her nose, dipped in cream. She opened her mouth, let Clark slip it between her lips, then chomped down. Clark pulled the stump away—there was a saucer of whipped cream and a bowl of strawberries on the bedspread in front of Lois. The window was also open; Clark flicked the stump out through it.

“Clark,” Lois moaned.

“It’ll land in the woods,” Clark assured her. “And it’s biodegradable.”

“Of course it is.”

“How about something to read?”

“I don’t think I could open my eyes one inch.”

“Then just think of me as your book on tape.”

Lois snorted. “No one uses tapes anymore, Smallville.”

“I didn’t know they used Nooks either.” Clark fed her another strawberry. In his other hand was the e-reader. He powered it on with a flick of his thumb. “Hmm. ‘The Highlander’s Hilt’. This wouldn’t happen to be research, would it?”

Lois wasn’t in any way ashamed of her sex life, but something about Superman’s Boy Scout reputation—even when she knew for a fact he was no Boy Scout when it counted—had her ears burning when he brought up that. She covered it up in irritation, though not with him. She wasn’t in the habit of kicking puppies.

“And another thing,” she muttered disgruntledly. “My ebook hit a sex scene and I could just tell it was going to be good, so how am I supposed to read it at work, while I’m on the can… God, I even tried reading it on the bus, but I felt like I was about to star in a Girls Gone Wild video.”

“How bad can it be?” Clark asked her, and began to read. He dipped his voice down into the deep, assertive Superman register too, which wasn’t supposed to be hot, but every woman knew it fucking was, the bastard. “’Lady Katrina sighed as she thought about the so-called Captain Angus. He was nothing like the sniveling man she’d been forced to marry. Though a lowborn renegade, he was made of far stronger steel. He knew the real value of masculinity to a woman. When he snapped out a command, he expected it to be instantly obeyed. No amount of cajoling or defiance could take him aback if he was denied the respect he thought, and often proved, he deserved. And so, as Katrina rued how foolish she’d been to denigrate him after he’d saved her life, and how she’d compounded her error by slapping him, he pulled her drawers to low upon her thighs, and gave her buttocks a firm slap, his grave-gray eyes watching as they jubilantly jiggled, as if long awaiting the touch of a real man.’”

Clark stopped to feed his wife another strawberry. “Lois, you’ve won a Pulitzer.”

“Hey, I don’t talk about your fashion sense, you don’t talk about my library. And keep going. No way Captain Angus lets her off with just one spank after she called him a ruffian and a rapscallion.”