b

You’re not a rookie. You knew he was doing it to get on your good side. It was hidden in every sweet little crooked smile, every attempt at charming you with the Kansan lilt in his voice, every seemingly innocent question he’d ask you about your hundreds and thousands of edits on his pieces.

You didn’t entertain it. That’s what each stone-cold, expressionless look you’d send him each time he asked you something was for: Telling him that he wasn’t forgiven no matter how hard he tried to get on your good side. That he wasn’t good enough to be on your good side. 

The second month is when Clark stumbled upon a new attitude. 

“I don’t really think it’s fair for you to say that kind of stuff to me. It’s unprofessional.”

That insubordination just so happened to coincide with you embarrassing in front of all of the other writers on your team by projecting his article on a screen and pointing out how not to write for the Daily Planet. 

“Really? I’m unprofessional? How about the fact that you never get here on time and keep making me write the same feedback over and over again? Is not listening to your supervisor unprofessional, Clark?”

“Well, I get here as quickly as I can, but it’s hard because—because I live on the other side of the city. And I do listen to you, I just think a lot of what you want me to edit is unreasonable.” 

“Unreasonable, huh? Tell you what, I’ll show you what unreasonable looks like on your next piece, just so you can learn what unreasonable actually looks like. How’s that sound?” 

He was the person sporting a cold silence after that one.

After that, he went from timid and apologetic to a little more confident and rigid. His entire being changed; his shoulders straightened, his eyes made contact with yours for longer than two seconds, and he ditched those crooked smiles for a straight face and a tightened jaw. If you were lucky, you’d get a look of disgust, or annoyance, or frustrated confusion to accompany it. That made dealing with him a little more rewarding. At least you knew you were getting under his skin.

Your interactions changed, too. They got shorter. Quicker. A little meaner. Went from a hesitant Clark hovering over your desk and asking you: 

“Excuse me, ma’am? I just—I really wanna get these right, and…well, I value your effort in helping me get there. Could you walk me through some of these introduction edits?”

To a quicker paced Clark laying his edited piece down on your desk and telling you: 

“I’m not editing this. I know it’s good, and I know you think so, too.” 

That’s when he started walking away after throwing you a line or two of complaints instead of hovering. It’s like he was trying to spend as little time near you as possible. As though you were sickening to him. 

It told you he wasn’t scared of you anymore.  

The third month, though? That’s when the fights started. When things got a little more interesting because you both got even meaner to each other. 

He returned to hovering over you, but it wasn’t hesitant anymore—it was a challenge. He’d toss his pieces down on your desk, right on top of what you were already working on, without a care about how you’d react. He’d get louder. More combative. 

You’re not proud of it, but both of you got to volumes that were considered unacceptable. 

“How are you still even here?! You don’t know how to write! You don’t know what the fuck you’re doing!” 

“And you do?!”

“Yes, Clark! I do!”

“No, you don’t! Your edits are…God, they’re as insufferable as you are!” 

“Takes an insufferable asshole to know an insufferable asshole!”

Your voices mingled and echoed off of the walls of the bullpen more than once. Faces turned bright red. Veins popped from beneath skin. Eyes widened with rage. Fists roughly clenched. 

Sometimes, it even required a third party to tear you away from each other, and you rarely—if ever—made physical contact. The thought of touching him makes you shudder. The way he’s practically allergic to your desk, to you, makes you think he feels the same way. 

But…today? That shifted. 

Today, the shit really hit the fan. 

You know you’ll end up fighting with Clark before you even see him. You can hear it coming your way before it happens. A familiar score you know all too well; one that’s been the soundtrack to your life for the last three insufferable months. 

It kicks off with the harsh scrape of his chair against the bullpen’s floor. A scrape that everyone knows, judging by the chorus of hushed, annoyed groans from the other editors that have the misfortune of sitting nearby your desk. As those groans sound out and float up into the air surrounding you, his footsteps—quick, angry, determined—start marching in your direction and join them. 

What the fuck is he going to say to you today? What on earth will he possibly complain about? Will it be a list of whiny questions about why you struck out a useless metaphor or a repetitive line? Why the fuck is he so repetitive, anyway? How has that not changed in the three months that he’s been working under you, by the way? Is it some kind of cruel, repetitive joke from the universe, or does he actually do it on purpose just to irritate you?

Lois’s voice, a soft, comforting mumble, breaks you out of your own head. Takes you out of thinking about the man you don’t even like thinking about while he’s bounding your way. 

“Could you at least try to be nice to him today? I’m not interested in doing damage control two days in a row.” 

“I’m nice. Why would you say I’m not nice?” 

She scoffs. Lowers her voice into a hissed whisper. “Seriously? You started white-knuckling that pen in your hand as soon as you heard him move. I could recite every ugly thought in your head right now if I so desired.” 

You clear your throat. Loosen your grip on your pen and hum. You even throw in a shrug just to be extra convincing.

“I don’t know what you’re talking about, Lois.” 

She drops her mouth open to shoot you a quip, but you’ve got a giant popping up behind you and cutting her off instead. 

Clark leans over you, tossing an article that you edited down on your desk. The weighty thump of it on the hard wood surface is just another track within your shared score. His palm, heavy and irritated, presses flat against the empty spot next to it. Takes up the entire area between your hand and the paper. Invades your space in a way he’s never done before. 

He’s touching you this time. You must have really pissed him off today. He’s got so much of his weight on you that you can hardly breathe. Apparently his head isn’t the only dense thing about him. 

Your body bends a bit, stomach pressing against the edge of your desk and face closing in on his piece littered with your distinct red pen strokes. His little attempt at trying to embarrass or intimidate you has fallen flat. All he’s doing is showing you your own work. Work that you’re proud of; there’s nothing better, to you, than completely slaughtering a Kent original.

You pull one arm forward so that you can brace yourself to elbow him in the ribs, but he’s learned your ways. Learned your tricks, your low blows, your tendencies to play dirty. Of course he’d expect you to hit him the first time he touched you. Why wouldn’t you? You’ve been exchanging verbal blows his way since he got here—a physical one isn’t much different. 

His other hand, once clutching the back of your chair, flies toward your arm. His fingers and grip burn into your skin, harsh and unforgiving and so fucking annoying. If your jaw tightens any more, you’ll crack all of your teeth and shatter the bone.

“I seem to recall us having a conversation earlier this week about how you’ve been sabotaging my writing. Did you forget about that? About what we talked about?” 

You make a feeble attempt at ignoring him. Bite your tongue, shut your eyes, and suck in a deep breath. Try your best to ignore the thoughts about his specific kind of grief you can’t ever seem to escape with him. His presence isn’t something you can ignore, though; he’s so God damn irritating, so God damn heavy, that all you can do is deal with him and hope you’ll keep your job after your inevitable blowout that’s bound to result from this.

“I know you heard me. I’m not giving you an option to have this conversation. I’m making you have it.” 

“You’d better fix that tone if you wanna have any sort of conversation with me, Kent.” 

He lowers his voice. Leans down a little more. His body heat is on you, bleeding into you, irritating you even more because you know it’ll linger if he ever leaves. Your least favorite person always finds a way to remind you that he’s in your life. In your space. Inescapable.

“Is this tone better?” he whispers. His continuation only serves to make you angrier. 

“You’d better fix these edits if you know what’s good for you.”

When his breath fans out against the shell of your ear, you have to clench your fists together. Your nails dig into your palms. Your jaw tightens, then loosens, then tightens again. The heat flooding your face is pure torture. 

“Don’t make me go to Perry about this.” 

That’s your final straw of the day. The stupid suggestion that broke your resolve. 

You rip your arm out of his hold and wriggle out of his grasp to shoot up from your desk. Hatred bubbles out from your internal thoughts and manifests on your face. Angry, stitched together eyebrows. A deep set frown that you’re certain you won’t be able to remove. Heat that’d been boiling beneath your skin’s surface, stoked by your hatred for the man in front of you and by his own body’s warmth as he hung on top of you for much longer than you’d wished he would have. 

“I’d like to fucking see you tattle on me. As if he’d ever take your advice,” you pause to poke him in the chest and push him backwards, “over mine.”

Clark laughs at you. When he steps toward you to close the distance a little more, you feel sick. Being this close to him is pure torture. His stupid face, those dumb glasses, that ridiculous glint in his eye he always gets when he’s fucking with you. How the fuck is everyone here in love with this guy? He’s absolutely intolerable.

“Oh, really? You think he won’t?”

“I know he won’t. He’ll take my word over yours in a heartbeat, newbie.” 

That laugh he let out a few seconds ago was accompanied by an infuriating smirk. Your verbal challenge ends up widening that smirk. As soon as you try to speak, try to filet him before he can get a word out, he’s practically lunging at you. Before you could react to his lightning fast movements and run away from him, he’s got his hand wrapped around your left wrist. 

The hold he’s got on you is tight. Inescapable. You knew he had attitude problems, but this? This is a level you never thought he’d get to. 

Maybe this isn’t just your breaking point. 

“Then why don’t we go ask him together?” he asks while he lifts his article off of your desk with his other hand. 

“If you don’t let me go, I’ll start screaming,” you whisper while you attempt twisting out of his grip. It’s hard to ignore the way his skin is scorching yours; it’s almost like you’re allergic to him. Hell, maybe you are. You always feel like you’re going to die when you’re stuck around him and forced to ingest his presence.

“Scream all you want. I’m getting you there no matter how loud you are.” 

With that borderline threat, Clark starts to drag you to Perry’s office with a swift tug and a few determined steps. You try to plant your feet into the floor and cement yourself to one spot, but his determination overpowers your stubbornness. Your heels screech against the floor with each of his steps, begging for release and yet getting ignored.

Clark is freakishly strong. You’ve been trying to yank your wrist out of his hand since he grabbed onto you, but you can’t budge. All your thrashing and pulling is useless. The rough hits that you’re landing on his arms don’t phase him. He’s eating every smack and every punch without even reacting. The solid firmness of his arm when your fist connects with it is actually making your hand hurt. 

Meanwhile, Clark’s simply walking forward as if he’s not even dragging a fully grown woman behind him. As if you weigh nothing to him. 

“Let me go!” you shout.

“No! We’re taking a little field trip to Perry’s office so we can settle this bet!” he shouts back.

Heads were already turning in your direction from your standoff. They’re definitely turning now that Clark has started to raise his voice. Your heels dig harder into the linoleum beneath you, but the action is no use against Clark’s strength. Where the hell did all this strength even come from? Why is it so seemingly natural to him?

He’s dragging you like a child drags their favorite toy to their parents, and you couldn’t be more embarrassed. You’d be drowning in humiliation if it wasn’t for the anger overtaking it right now. That anger’s so prevalent that you can almost forget about the fact that all of your colleagues are still staring at you, still watching this train wreck of an explosive fight between the two of you go down. 

Your struggles end when Clark, true to his word, takes you to Perry’s office. The unfortunate thing, though, is that the door is closed. And that there are multiple voices talking behind that closed door. 

Clark looks back at the bench across from Perry’s office door. You unwillingly follow his eyes and huff—both from exhaustion and from disbelief—then gruffly tell him, “No! It’s already bad enough that you fucking dragged me here. I’m not sitting with you.”

“And you think I wanna sit here with you?” Clark sasses. “I’m just doing this to prove my point.” 

“Which is?”

“That you’re an unreasonable nightmare to work with. That your edits aren’t fair.”

“You just can’t handle any critiques about your work. That’s why you’re so pissed.” 

His face twitches in annoyance while he tugs you over to the bench and sits down, yanking you down onto it with him. He’s still got that iron-clad grip on your wrist. It’s almost like he knows you’ll escape if he gives your wrist the space it desperately wants. When he finally gets you to settle and sit down, your thigh brushes against his. Your body recoils and, although you can’t free yourself from his hold, you scoot away from him as much as you can. 

You don’t particularly enjoy looking at Clark, but you love to see the effect you have on him. The only time you ever see him look like this, with a fire in his eyes, a tick in his jaw, a slight flush on his cheeks, and anger that you didn’t think was physically possible, is when he’s looking at you or when he’s dealing with you—even from afar.

You smile at him. Laugh at him a little, too.

“What?” he grumbles. You get the feeling he’s able to sense your presence almost as well as you can sense his.

“You’re so ugly when you’re angry.”

“Oh, that’s nice,” Clark mutters through an eye roll. “Real professional. How you’re still employed here is beyond me.”

“Don’t critique me on my professionalism when you just manhandled me out of the fucking bullpen in front of everyone!” you hiss. He falls quiet. His jaw tenses more. 

The silence that grows between you in the eternity of waiting for Perry to open his door is unbearable.  Punctuated by your now slowed-down breathing and the irritating sound of Clark’s teeth grinding together, of his leg jumping up and down, of his fingers still digging into your wrist and the heat of his palm bleeding into your skin. 

You’ve never been more thankful about the fact that you don’t sit next to him. 

Just as you drop your mouth open to berate him about how he’s holding on to you too tightly, Perry’s door swings open. The person he was talking to leaves, ushered out by the man himself. 

Clark takes a deep breath and stands up as soon as he sees Perry, tugging you along with him and beginning to mumble something about how you’re being unreasonable. Much to his dismay, you’re the one with a free hand. You smack that hand right over his mouth, cutting him off and sending Perry your most convincing don’t-fire-me smile. 

“I think Kent’s gone insane. Maybe you should fire him.” 

Clark yanks his face away from your hand and growls out a, “What’s wrong with you?!” before he looks back at your shared editor-in-chief.

“Sorry, sir. Can we talk in your office for a moment? It’ll be quick.” 

Perry sighs. Shuts his eyes so tightly that you’d think he was trying to squeeze them out of his own head, then turns around to walk into his office. He doesn’t tell either of you anything, but he leaves the door open. 

Then, for the second time today, Clark Kent is dragging you somewhere that you don’t really want to go.