Guardian Devil

CHAPTER FIVE: LIKE LIONEL

Jonathan's words cycled in my head like snakes eating their own tails: 'You agreed it had to be done, Martha. Don’t let the devil convince you otherwise. You agreed to it. Agreed. To. It.'

I was so dazed that I hardly felt Lex reach for me, hold me against his hard lean form encased in silk. I didn’t even hear my own sobbing. I just clutched at his back, wanting to dissolve into him.

“We’ve got to get you warm, Clark.” Lex gently pulled me out of our embrace after long moments of petting and soothing noises. He grasped one of my hands and started leading me towards the limo, rubbing my hand between his own. “You’re chilled to death, angel. Got to get you home.”

Even though I had stopped feeling the cold for some time, I was surprised to find that I was frozen. Because she agreed. I thought she … loved me … She even seemed to like Lex, give him the benefit of the doubt, argued with Jonathan about it. But … but she didn’t deny what Jonathan said. She agreed to it. Agreed with my punishment.

As the driver moved to shut the passenger door behind me, Lex called to him, “Turn the heater on full back here.”

Lex didn’t let go of my hand, but continued to clasp it between his. He gave a satisfied sigh as heat blasted through the vents in the back and the limo began to move up the road. I huddled down on the seat against Lex’s side, his dress coat swathed around me like a mummy. I took in Lex’s scent, clean and spicy, with every breath. The privacy window was up, blocking out the driver’s bulk. I watched Lex; it helped keep the pain from crashing back in. One of his legs was crossed loosely over the other. His face was mostly in darkness, but as we passed under the few streetlights I saw flashes of him: the smooth hard cut of his jaw, the aquiline nose, and the full, sculpted lips. I felt the press of one of his firm muscled thighs against my own.

“She … didn’t love me, did she, Lex?” My voice sounded soft and strange to my own ears like it came from a great distance.

Lex’s steel-colored eyes met my own and I saw his mouth thin for a moment. He let out another sigh and tightened his hold on my hand.

“I don’t know, Clark. But if she didn’t, she was a fool at best.” And under his breath he added, “And a whole lot worse.”

I felt ripped apart and re-stitched together badly. All my beliefs about my self-worth were in tatters. The next question seemed to just come out of my mouth on its own, “Can … some thing like me be loved?”

Lex’s eyes widened and he let out a strangled exclamation. “You’re … you’re not a thing, Clark! And yes, absolutely, you deserve love, can be loved … are loved. I … good god, Clark, I … I love you. For what that’s worth.”

Something like warmth flooded in my chest at those words, “To know you … love me … it’s worth everything, Lex. You don’t know how … incredible you are.”

I couldn’t express what he was and what he meant to me. But there was this warmth and light in Lex’s eyes that I had never seen before when I spoke those inadequate words.

I dipped my head down, suddenly not able to look at that happiness, “But you just learned about me, Lex. Martha and Jonathan knew since they found me as a toddler that I’m not human. I doubt that’s really sunk in for you. Once it does … you might not feel the same. Every power I’ve gotten has made me more and more … alien. Who knows where these changes will end.”

Lex let go of my hand and cupped my face, forcing me to look at him, “I love you. That won’t change. No matter what we discover about you. You’re Clark … my Clark--”

I opened my mouth to protest, but he stopped me by putting a finger against my lips. I felt branded by the heat of his touch even when he removed it after allowing his finger to glide all the way across my mouth.

“I know what it is to have a parent that treats you like you’re some kind of … freak.” Lex grimaced like the word left a bad tasted in his mouth, but he soldiered on, “A parent that tells you that you’re unlovable, disgusting, less than nothing, but even if they say it and mean it with conviction… it doesn’t mean it’s true. And in your case, believe me, it isn’t.”

Lex turned to look out the window for a moment, his eyes too filled with a dark emotion that he didn’t want me to see. He swallowed and turned back to look at me. “I wish I could undo what Jonathan and Martha did to you. But that’s the past … unchangeable now. What I can do … what I will do for the rest of my life … is tell you and show you how much you’re worth. And I assure you, angel, you are priceless, precious, beyond anything.”

I started crying while he was speaking. I felt like a big dumb farm boy. Young and weak. How could he see such value in me? Lex brushed my tears away with his thumbs. I gripped the front of his silk shirt. It felt like touching water.

“I love you, Lex.”

He smiled one of those special Lex smiles that only I got to see.

“You’re the only one who has said that to me and … and meant it, Clark. Besides my mother.”

“I do mean it, Lex. I just wish I could show you how much. I … I just don’t know how. Tell me how to show you.”

My words seemed to echo in the limo and that hidden fire I had seen in Lex earlier in the barn flared up in his eyes and set me ablaze, burning me internally, scorching, insidious heat. I was suddenly hyper aware of Lex’s male scent and the quiver of muscles and sinews in his strong hands as they cupped my face so gently.

I heard the change in Lex’s breathing going from slow and steady to faster and shallower. His heartbeat doubled. Our faces were only six inches apart. He leaned forward, halving that distance. His head tilted to one side, his pupils dilated, his eyes hooded, his tongue darted out and licked his full soft lips.
I moved forward to meet him, to breach the remaining inches between us. He caught my lower lip in his teeth and sucked on it gently for a moment before covering my mouth with his own. I felt the flick of his tongue against my closed lips, asking for entrance. My mouth opened and his tongue was inside, teasing my own to come into his mouth.

I moaned as our tongues met and became liquid heat together, dueling and twining around the other. He tasted crisp and cool like mint and moss. Lex made a hungry sound in the back of his throat. One of his hands slid around to my lower back. He pressed his palm flat and pulled me towards him, wanting me on his lap. I scooted closer, keening softly into his hot mouth, as my erect penis slid against the silk lining of the coat. Once I got on Lex’s lap there would only be the thin material of his pants between us. I trembled.
But suddenly Lex was pushing me off of him. His hands were gone, his lips off mine, straightening the coat around me, buttoning the bottom buttons that had come undone as I had moved towards him. I let out a whine of dismay at the loss of his touch.

“Lex, what?” I felt dazed and fisted my hands in the front of his shirt, but he gently pulled my hands off of him.

“We’re home, Clark.”

The limo had indeed stopped and the driver was opening the door for us to get out. If Lex hadn’t realized where we were … the driver would have seen everything. Lex’s hands hovered near his own erection and he adjusted himself to try and hide it for when we exit the limo. I wished I could give him the coat, but that would have only half solved our problems as my erection was nowhere near ready to go down. Not to mention the whole buck-naked thing. I gathered the pair of jeans, t-shirt and flannel that Dominic rummaged out of my room into my arms from the limo’s seat.

Lex took a few deep steadying breaths then exited the limo, offering me a hand up as soon as he was out. I took it, marveling at how steady he seemed, while I was shaking. I could feel that my cheeks were still flushed and I was hard and aching everywhere for things I couldn’t even name except they had to do with Lex’s touch and mouth and dick. Wanting Lex, being with Lex, losing myself in the sensations that were unfamiliar yet felt like coming home, distracted me from Jonathan and Martha and (you agreed to it) all the rest of it.

Lex’s mask was on perfectly as we went walked the few feet from the limo to the front entrance of the Castle. I couldn’t help but look at him, as he moved, so sinuously, so sensually without seeming to try. I was so flustered that my normal clumsiness seemed like grace, my body hardly felt like it was working, like a jiggling marionette on strings. But somehow we made it inside.

As soon as the door shut behind us, I dropped my bundle of clothes, reached for him, spun him around and brought him close against me, wanting to continue where we left off. I hardly thought of the servants. Lex’s eyes were blazing with need and desire and I felt the hitch in his breathing as his body melded against mine, not to mention how he hardened against me in seconds, but his actions didn’t go with his body’s involuntary responses. He placed one restraining hand against my chest and despite all my strength and a need for his closeness that made me want to start screaming, I was stopped dead in my tracks.

“Upstairs?” I questioned.

He shook his head. “Not for more … of this. For your shower and change of clothes … yes.”

“Why?” I was ashamed at how that came out sounding like a whine.

I saw Lex fighting with himself, saw the dark heat inside him try to cloud his vision, but then he squeezed his eyes shut for a moment and when he opened them to look at me, they were clear blue and gentle. No sign of that surrounding darkness.

“I was wrong to kiss you … to do what I did, Clark.”

“You weren’t the only one doing it!”

“You’ve been … traumatized and that’s a mild description of what you’ve been going through. If what I saw was all of it, it would be terrible enough, but I … sense there’s been more that you haven’t told me yet.” His eyes flicked to mine and I dropped his gaze, all but confirming his suspicions that other things had gone on behind the closed doors at the farm than I had said and he hadn’t seen.

“Lex, remember what I was being punished for: having sexual thoughts about you. So whether I’m traumatized or not right now I would be doing this. I have dreamt about doing this. Don’t take it away. Please!”

He ran one hand over his head, rubbing the bump at the back like he did whenever something vexing happened, “I’m supposed to be protecting you, Clark. As your guardian … or soon to be guardian--”

“If you say you won’t touch me because you’re going to be my guardian then I don’t want you to be!”

Hurt blossomed in Lex’s eyes and I flinched at it. “I know you’re sixteen and sex may seem like everything, but you’re too smart to think that… fucking … is more important than what I can give you as your guardian.”

I covered my face with my hands, “I’m sorry, Lex. I don’t want one or the other … don’t you see that? I want both. And it wouldn’t be just … fucking … would it? It would be making love. For me, anyways.”

I heard the rush of Lex’s exhaled breath and then he grasped my hands and brought them away from my face, “It would be making love for me, too, Clark. I just … I want to be your guardian … to protect you … the rest I want, too, but not more than to take care of you as you should have been your entire life.”

“I want that, too. I just don’t understand how being my guardian and being my … lover … are mutually exclusive.”

Lex laughed then, but there was no mirth in the sound, only sadness, “Because it would be too easy a leap for it to go from you willingly coming to my bed to you doing it because you’re afraid I won’t take care of you unless you offer yourself to me.”

“I would never feel that way, Lex. I know that you would do what’s right by me whether we slept together or not.”

“Your faith in me is … touching.” He gave me a smile that was more a grimace and the darkness was back in his eyes, “But sometimes the apple doesn’t fall all that far from the tree, Clark.”

His use of one of Jonathan’s favorite phrases regarding the Luthors and why I shouldn’t trust Lex galled me. Mix that with the sick smile on Lex’s face and the almost imperceptible quiver of his lips and I knew he was castigating himself for some imagined wrong he might commit, believing the worst of himself.

“Stop doing this, Lex.”

“Stop doing what?”

“Stop thinking you’re destined to become Lionel. You’re Lex. You’re so much better than him, more than him.”

Lex’s voice was odd and eyes flat. “You need to take a shower, Clark. You’ve been covered in … blood all night. You need to get clean of it.”

Why did I mention Lionel? And why does Lex look so … afraid … like he does when he thinks he’s revealed more than he’s wanted to?

“Lex, I … I’m sorry, I shouldn’t have--”

He shook his head, “No apologizes, Clark. You’ve done nothing … wrong. You need to get yourself together and … so do I. We’ve got to go to the signing.” He stopped then, his eyes suddenly riveted to the floor. “You do still want to be my ward, don’t you?” He was motionless when he said the last, like he would shatter if he moved.

“Yes, absolutely, Lex.”

His eyes were still focused on the floor, but I heard the break in his voice as he said, “Good.” He turned on his heel and began striding towards his study. He called over his shoulder, “The bedroom next to mine is made up for you for now. Feel free to choose another if you wish.”

I wouldn’t choose another room. I wanted to be as close to Lex as possible, as close as he’d allow. I know you’ve got demons, Lex. I want to protect you from them as much as you want to protect me.