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~late August/early September, junior year
“Hey, Alice.” Clark gave her a brilliant smile, then chided himself for being too eager and dorky and tried to tone it down. Unfortunately his efforts caused a confusing sequence of expressions to trot across his face, which he then also felt stupid about, until he finally gave up and just smiled weakly at Alice. Maybe she hadn’t noticed…?
“Hey, Clark.” Alice’s smile was, as always, perfect. Well, not perfect in that Lana Lang, orthodontist’s poster child way. It was actually a little bit crooked, now that he looked at it. Not crooked in that Chloe Sullivan, quirky-sardonic-offbeat way, though. It was more like, I haven’t quite got this smile thing down yet, because I don’t actually do it very often, but I’m willing to try for you, and—s—t, had he just spent, like, the last five minutes staring at her smile? Way to go, freak boy.
Clark scrambled for something to say that would hopefully distract Alice from the blush he felt creeping over his face. “Um, you look nice today,” he stammered, and was rewarded by her looking down at her outfit, if only for a few seconds.
“Well, thank you, Clark,” she told him, sounding genuinely surprised. “I really just threw some clothes on and dashed out the door… The washer’s busted and my mom and I haven’t had time to hang out at the Laundry Barn lately, so…” Alice shrugged as they headed towards the entrance to the high school.
“You could probably do some laundry at my house,” Clark offered impulsively, holding the door open for her.
“Really?”
“Sure, why not? You could bring over a load and we could study while it runs,” he suggested. It was a normal, friendly thing that people did to help each other out, wasn’t it?
“Man, that’d be great, Clark,” Alice told him, vastly relieved. She leaned closer and confessed, “I picked this shirt up off my mom’s bedroom floor. I think it’s real silk, I don’t know where she got it, but it didn’t look too wrinkled and I literally did not have anything else in my closet.”
Clark took a closer look at the shirt. It was a beautiful deep purple and while the color itself didn’t look half bad on Alice, the shirt was obviously too big for her. And—he didn’t know how he knew this, fashionista as he was—the cut looked almost like…
“It kind of looks like a guy’s shirt,” Clark opined, then realized he probably should have thought a little more before saying that—since she found it in her mom’s bedroom and all.
Still, he thought Alice’s reaction was a little extreme. “What?!” she exclaimed, drawing the attention of several nearby students. She lowered her voice to a hiss. “I’m wearing some skanky guy’s shirt?”
“Well, um,” Clark hedged, not sure what exactly had set her off, “he’s probably not that skanky… um…” He stopped himself before pointing out that the man likely had money—because Clark realized he knew only one rich guy who would wear purple silk. Not that it made a lot of sense, because where would Alice’s mom even meet Lex—she was a hairdresser, after all, which Lex certainly had no need of.
The fact that the shirt was male, coupled with its original location on her mother’s bedroom floor, was more than enough to disgust Alice on its own, so Clark kept his theory to himself. “Ugh!” Alice gagged, staring at the shirt like it was smeared with something unmentionable. And then she started unbuttoning it. In the middle of the hallway.
“Alice, Alice, what are you doing?” Clark had his hands on hers in an instant, even though the teenage male in him was cheering her on.
“I am not wearing this… shirt that I found on my mom’s bedroom floor a second longer!” Alice insisted, running the words together like they were a brand of revulsion for the unfortunate item of clothing.
“Well, um—“ Clark glanced around and saw the music room nearby, still dark and empty at the beginning of the day. He took Alice’s arm and pulled her inside. The second they were out of sight of the hall she resumed undoing the shiny black buttons.
“You have something on under that, right?” Clark asked. He wasn’t exactly sure which answer he was hoping for.
“Of course,” she replied, as if it were obvious, and he chastised himself for feeling disappointed.
“Holy c—p, Alice,” Clark exclaimed a few seconds later, spinning around to face the opposite wall.
“What?” she demanded irritably.
“You said you had something on under that,” Clark protested.
“I do.”
“It’s a—“ Come on, you can say it. “—a bra.”
“Yes.” Alice did not seem to see what his problem was. “Your point?”
“I was thinking… a tank top or something,” he explained, hoping the dimness of the room would cover his second blush of the morning. Although he was kind of surprised there was enough free blood in his system at this point to be drawn up to his face. He tugged his red plaid shirt down a little lower. “Something you could wear around school.”
“Oh, that’s a good point,” Alice agreed, as if she had just now thought of it. “Well, I’m not putting this back on. Here.” She tossed the shirt over Clark’s shoulder. “Can you dispose of this for me, Clark? Maybe set it on fire and bring me the ashes or something.” She sounded serious.
“Um, sure.” Clark held the silk carefully, in two fingers, and tried to think of it as being Lex’s instead of Alice’s. He definitely did not notice that the shirt was still warm from her—body. Not that he was thinking about her body. He was just acknowledging that Alice did, indeed, have a corporeal form, as opposed to being a disembodied voice, which would of course not wear clothes. Not that he was thinking about her not wearing clothes. Because obviously she was now standing behind him dressed in her black skirt, black boots, and… black lace bra, which he had absolutely not gotten a good look at.
“Clark.” He got the impression she had said his name a couple of times already and he gave himself a mental kick. “You’ve got a t-shirt on under that flannel thing. Can I wear your shirt today?”
This seemed an appropriate moment to stare at Alice with wide, surprised eyes, but Clark remembered halfway through his turn that he should stay facing the direction he had been. “Well, yeah, of course,” he agreed. It only made sense, after all.
Quickly he unbuttoned his armor—er, red plaid flannel shirt, slid it off his shoulders and handed it back to her. “Wow, this is enormous,” she commented. “I could sleep in this, look.”
Clark fell for it and turned, only to whip back around when he realized she had not actually buttoned the shirt up yet. He couldn’t tell if Alice was just teasing him… or if she felt so little attraction to him she could strip off her clothes in front of him without being at all bothered by it. The latter possibility was a distressing one, but it served to get his blood flowing more normally again.
“How tall are you, Clark?” Alice asked conversationally, as she presumably wrestled with the expanse of fabric.
“Six-four,” he replied self-consciously. He thought he had grown another inch over the summer. What if he didn’t stop growing soon? Suppose his people were all seven feet tall?
“I’m five-ten,” she informed him. “Six even in these boots. You can turn around now, I’m done.” Clark did so, but slowly, in case her version of “done” and his version of “done” conflicted. The flannel shirt, though obviously not the right size for her, had been artfully gathered, folded, and tied at her waist. Clark immediately christened that shirt his favorite of all he owned. “That bothers a lot of guys.”
“What?” He realized he had forgotten the last thing she said—because he had been staring at, well, his shirt—and he blushed again.
But Alice just smiled, a friendly, understanding kind of smile, not a mocking, teasing one. “The height thing,” she repeated for him, stepping a bit closer. “I don’t meet a lot of guys I don’t tower over.”
“Yeah,” Clark agreed, “I don’t meet a lot of girls who aren’t…” He discovered he didn’t have a smooth way of finishing his sentence. “…a lot shorter than I am.”
Alice stepped a bit closer, and she didn’t have to crane her neck to maintain eye contact with him. And Clark didn’t feel like he was some hulk lumbering over her. In fact, she was just about the exact right height. The exact right height for… what? his brain prodded. The exact right height to—
“Hey, guys—oh.” Alice and Clark turned at the same time to see Chloe pop her head into the room. The blond took in the lack of lights, the mere inches separating the male-female pair, and the slightly guilty look on Clark’s face and decided she was interrupting. “Um, sorry, I was just—“ She paused and squinted. “Alice, are you wearing Clark’s shirt?”
Alice shrugged. “I had a wardrobe malfunction this morning,” she explained easily. “But Clark had me covered.”
“Oh.” Chloe didn’t know what else to say to that. Or to the little smiles that passed between Clark and Alice. “Well.” She cleared her throat. “Were you guys going to show up in algebra today, or…?”
Clark sighed. Back to reality, he supposed. “I guess we’d better.”
When Clark entered the castle’s lounge that afternoon, he found Lex playing pool in the multicolored light of the stained glass windows. Lex gave him one of his little half-smiles and went back to lining up his shot. Clark waited until he’d taken his shot and sunk the ball before greeting him. “Hey, Lex.”
“Good afternoon, Clark,” Lex replied, eyeing the table. “What brings you out here?”
When the teenager didn’t reply right away, Lex glanced up at him and saw the dark purple shirt hanging from his fingers… and the smirk on his face. Lex found himself staring at the shirt as recognition dawned, and he licked his lips unconsciously as he tried to trace the sequence of events that had led that particular shirt home at the hands of Clark Kent.
“Okay, I give up,” he admitted after a moment. “Where did you get that?”
Clark drew out his teasing a little longer and draped the shirt carefully over a chair, then dumped his denim jacket and bookbag on top without thinking. Lex winced a little but said nothing, merely handing Clark a cue.
“Alice had it,” he replied casually, looking for a shot on the table. “She found it on her mom’s bedroom floor.”
Lex winced again. “Clark, there’s a perfectly innocent explanation for that,” he assured his friend.
Clark grinned at him, then leaned over to strike a ball with his cue. “You might want to call Ms. Wilson once you’ve thought of one, so she can pass it on to Alice.” Clark grimaced as the ball rimmed the pocket and swung away.
Lex sighted out his next shot. “Why did Alice give the shirt to you?” he asked curiously, after his ball had sunk cleanly.
“Well,” Clark replied, rounding the table, “actually, she grabbed it and wore it to school today.”
“Hmmm.” Lex took another shot and missed. “I feel kind of… weird about that. For some reason.”
“Well, I’m glad she did it,” Clark told him earnestly, sinking his next ball.
When he didn’t continue Lex prompted, “Why is that?”
“Because as soon as I told her it was a guy’s shirt—that she found on her mom’s bedroom floor”—Lex didn’t miss the teasing emphasis—“she took it off.” Another ball dropped into a pocket.
Lex’s smirk mirrored his teenage friend’s. “She had something on underneath it, I presume.”
“Well, yeah,” Clark admitted. He lined up another shot. “Black lace bra.” The ball bounced off the wall and rolled smoothly into the corner pocket.
“Clark,” Lex commented approvingly, in that male-bonding tone of voice. It was nice to know Clark had a normal teenage libido lurking in there somewhere, instead of just his pristine fairy-princess-under-glass fantasies. Finally he missed a shot and Lex was back in the game. “Is this just general appreciation, or have you developed a… fixation?”
Clark shrugged, unwilling to commit himself one way or the other. He stood back as Lex cleared the table. “I really like Alice,” he decided finally. “She kind of reminds me of you.”
Lex did a double-take over the cue. “You’ll have to elaborate on that one, Clark.”
“I mean,” the teenager clarified, “she says stuff that other people don’t say. And she’s not always… expecting me to be a certain way.”
“There’s not as much history between you two,” Lex suggested, “not as much... baggage.”
“Yeah,” Clark agreed eagerly. He handed his cue back to Lex, who hung them up on the wall. “I mean, with Chloe, or”—he heaved a sigh—“Lana, things just get really awkward sometimes. Like we’ll be going along as friends just fine, having a good time, and then all of a sudden, one of them will look at me in this weird way and…” He accepted the chilled bottle of water Lex offered him.
“Old romantic feelings can be difficult to get rid of,” Lex remarked, twisting the cap off his own bottle. “And it probably doesn’t help people to move on when all the other people they like either die or turn out to be homicidal meteor freaks.” Fortunately Lex turned away to settle in his chair right then and missed the look of guilt sliding across Clark’s face.
“I think there’s more to it than that,” Clark confided, sitting down on the other side of the desk. Lex raised an interested eyebrow. “It’s like… Chloe and Lana, and even Pete sometimes, they act like I’m not supposed to change, or surprise them at all. Like if I do something I’ve never done before, it’s a bad thing.” Clark struggled to come up with a more concrete example. “Okay, last Friday night, I was over at Alice’s house watching this weird kung-fu movie. She likes kung-fu movies,” he explained quickly to Lex. “And I’ve never really watched one before, but it was kind of fun. And we’re going to get together sometime and watch more.” Lex waited patiently for the point of this story. “All this week, I thought about mentioning it to the others, you know, just as part of the conversation, but I never did, because I knew what they would say. Pete would laugh it off, saying that the only reason I sat through a dumb subtitled movie was because Alice was there.”
“Pete has something against subtitles?” Lex queried with a smile.
“I think he had a bad experience in French class once,” Clark explained quickly. “And Chloe would make some snarky comment about how surprising it was that I liked kung-fu movies now, and this was a new facet to Clark Kent, and wow, she never would have suspected that beneath the flannel was—“ He broke off before he got too snide and noticed Lex was chuckling quietly. “Lana—Lana would be like, ‘Two years ago I asked you to see a kung-fu movie and you said you didn’t like them, how could you have kept this a secret from me, I’m so disappointed in you, Clark.’”
Lex was outright laughing now, trying hard not to snort expensive bottled water out his nose. Clark had his friends’ attitudes down pat. “Well, Clark,” he said after he had composed himself a bit, “I can certainly understand your frustration with that. After all, I’ve been in Smallville for two years and a lot of people still see me as nothing more than a sneaky, manipulative Luthor.”
“But Lex,” Clark told him pleasantly, “you are sneaky and manipulative. And you are a Luthor.”
“Okay, you have a point there,” Lex conceded. “But I do nice things sometimes. And it’s annoying when people act like they’re shocked by it.”
“I wouldn’t be shocked by it, Lex.”
“Well, you see that’s why I like you, Clark,” Lex smiled. “But,” he added more seriously, “maybe you’re just drawn to Alice because she’s someone new. Maybe once you get to know her, or rather, once she thinks she knows you, you’ll just have the same problem with her as everyone else.”
Clark rolled his eyes. “Gee, thanks for that pep talk there, Lex.”
“I’d just hate to see you be disappointed, is all. Still,” Lex stood to deposit his empty bottle on the sideboard. “sometimes what you need is a fresh start. Someone who doesn’t have several years’ worth of assumptions about you floating around in their head.”
Clark stood as well and reached for his things. He had to get home soon and make sure it was okay for Alice to come over with her laundry. “Now you see, that was more what I was hoping to hear,” he joked. “The voice of experience talking.”
“Trust me, Clark,” Lex assured him, picking up his slightly mangled purple silk shirt, “my experience is not what you want.”