The bedroom door was partway ajar so Richard can say later it was an honest mistake, walking in like that, though he couldn't answer with equal frankness if asked why he walked in without knocking.

Clark starts, groping for the towel on the dresser, dark hair wet and messy over the glasses that are already securely shielding his eyes. He's wearing slacks but his torso is bare, chiseled, and beaded with droplets that slide down the expanse of sleek pectorals of which any bodybuilder would be jealous.

"Uh," Clark says, a sentiment that Richard echoes.

"Sorry," Richard says, dragging his eyes up. Up, his locker room experimentations are far behind him, or supposed to be. Difficult to recall that when Clark is here, and it's been a long time he did anything in the master bedroom's king-size except sleep or ponder insomnia. "Wow, Clark. When do you find the time to work out?"

Richard knows that he's not in bad shape, for a thirty-two year old reporter with a desk job and a son, but this kind of musculature would not have been high on his list of expectations of what to find after unbuttoning the man's crisp white dress shirts. Not that he's ever thought of that and he won't think about it now or going forward.

Clark stammers about this, that, and altogether declines to answer the question while finishing up with "Did you want to see me for something?"

Richard's mouth forms an 'oh' as he admires the virtuosity of the non-answer. He struggles to recall the question he forgot, because he knows he had one before he walked in there. It wasn't 'white or red,' he wanted to ask... "Do you have any strong feelings about meat or fish?"

Clark stares at him for a moment and Richard wishes he could take back the question. Perhaps mentally he really has reverted back to college. Oh God, please let Clark not have the same code words.

"I like both," he replies, and Richard says something, he forgets what, and makes a strategic retreat. The grill, he said he'd fire up the grill, and he'll put on a nice cut of London broil and he's forgotten the way this kind of intensity can broadside him, because he had it all successfully compartmentalized since his salad days and now he actually has Clark in a room.

Richard is caught in the hall for a long moment, suspended in the agony of choosing the bathroom and his right hand or going back in for the ostensible reason of apology.

He's saved by Jason's call, asking for Daddy to come help tie his shoes. There is a God, he thinks, and fortunately for him not only the one in aerodynamic blue form-wear.

There are times Clark is tempted to use his x-ray vision and there's really no moral guidebook for it besides what seems right and wrong. No one goes around handing out Superhero manuals though heaven knows some of them could use it. Looking through the door to see Richard in the hallway, biting his lip and glancing between Clark's door and the room down the hall, is something Clark considers a less than minor infraction because if he were to push the door open even a little, he'd see it anyhow.

He wanted to dislike Richard from the start. The way Lois introduced him was like a classified ad, the girl he loved reeling off statistics of the man she'd taken up with, and it was so unreal. Now he's been back three months and he sees Richard more often than Lois and it was hard swallowing the fact that Richard is so much more than that litany of interests; he's perfect in pretty much every way.

At least that was less difficult than Lois' disregard. A week and a half after moving into the White/Lane spare bedroom, Clark wonders if Lois really does live here. He wonders if it was like this before he came back. Richard doesn't talk about it and Clark doesn't ask. He has started to wonder if he's seeing the deconstruction of a relationship down to its component elements. When he returns from a tour of Metropolis at midnight or a lap around the world at three a.m., there's a solid bar of light from the den's window, but he doesn't peer in on her anymore.

Clark has never seen a dysfunctional relationship and though he's been called naive before, he likes to think it's less that than purity of heart and anyhow, he's not stupid. He hates the thought that he might have put his foot in it, had anything to do with stepping on perfection.

Not him, he hastens to clarify, and never once thinks it's all very split-personality. Superman.

"I think that I should go," Clark says earnestly, but there is a furrow to his brow that puts Richard in mind of inner conflict.

"What? Why?"

"Well, you're a family, and I, I just...I'm just here, and I don't want to interfere or - um, intrude, so..."

"So what?" Richard offers a smile. "Clark. You think we're not going to be a family if you're here? Don't be silly." He thinks he knows what brought this on, and he wants to offer more surety. Practice, he thinks, for what he may have to tell Jason someday. A family is what you make of it, and your family never stops loving you no matter what form it takes.

"Well...I..."

Clark turns away and fear chases resolve over his face, followed by a touch of longing that Richard sees and resonates with.

This is, Richard thinks, the look of a man on the outside, always. "You're not an outsider," he says, gently as possible, "if we've invited you in."

Clark rearranges his broad shoulders, sits bolt upright, blinks at him in startlement as if he's never thought of this before. "Richard?"

"Besides," Richard says, grinning at him, now trying to infuse the unbearable solemnity with something light, "if you go, who's going to guilt Jason into doing his chores the way I sure can't? And who am I going to talk with about obscure Russian fairy tales and Beirut fine dining and the moral relativity of a capitalistic society?"

By the end of the litany Clark is grinning back. "Okay, okay. But I should be paying you rent, you know."

"We'll work something out," Richard assures him. Far too obvious, he thinks, if he suggests they work something out in trade.

It's easy to take that the wrong way.

+end+