INCURABLE

INCURABLE

When Clark turned twenty-one, Lex showed up at his dorm room with his hands behind his back and an order for Clark to close his eyes. Clark sat on the bed and obeyed; images of cars, houses, and small Caribbean islands whirling behind his eyelids.

"Don't look so worried," Lex said, sounding infinitely amused as Clark felt a box being pushed into his hands. "I was just kidding about buying you land."

Clark scoffed, opening his eyes. "I can never tell with you."

Lex just grinned and bounced on the balls of his feet. "Open it," he said, nodding at the box.

The wrapping paper had little green aliens on it. Clark laughed and shook his head. "You had way too much fun doing this."

The paper came off easily despite the several feet of tape, which told Clark that Lex had wrapped it himself. The box was dark blue, and inside Clark found two shot glasses.

"Lex," he began.

"You're legal now." Lex cut him off. "I thought you should start a collection. And see-" he slid one gloved hand out of his pocket and traced a finger over the glasses, pulling Clark's eyes back down "-they're engraved."

"Clark's," read Clark, easing one glass out of the tissue paper. He grinned at Lex, who raised his eyebrows and gestured at the other one. Clark looked down. "Lex's."

"I figured if you're going to start drinking, you should do it with someone experienced," Lex said when Clark looked up.

Clark grinned and shook his head again, weighing the smooth glass in his hand. It was cool against his palm.

"And this way, if you're getting toasted without me, you can drink from this one," Lex plucked the glass bearing his own name from the box as he sat down next to Clark, "and you'll remember who started you on the path to drunken debauchery in the first place."

Clark looked down at the glass in his hand. "Thank you," he said. "I love them."

Lex smiled and shrugged, leaning over to put his glass back in the box. "You're welcome."

Clark remembers Lex chose that moment to turn to face Clark. His hand was still in the box. He was very close.

It was their first kiss.

It turned into their first a lot of things as the afternoon wore on, and Lex never got over that fact that Clark's mattress broke halfway through, spearing a protesting spring into Lex's back.

"I wanted everything to be perfect," he complains when Clark reminds him.

Clark always says, "It was."

Once, when he was away in Rome on business, Lex called Clark after a very successful meeting and sang 'That's Amore' down the phone in a surprisingly good baritone. Clark teases him about it whenever they order pizza. Lex grins into his red wine and blames the mini bar. 

Lex is very romantic.

He's all about the big gestures and dramatic declarations - he always has been, ever since Clark first met him. Clark can't count the number of times Lex has bought him things 'just because'. Sometimes they're expensive, like Clark's watch, and sometimes not, like the little wind up cow that's sitting on top of Clark's monitor. Lex sends him lengthy, verbose e mails at work which look like one of Clark's old lit papers but always, on closer inspection, turn out to be love letters. Prettily worded porn, shot through with sentimentality and wrapped up in old English and clever metaphors.

Clark reads them while Lois rants about their latest assignment, and picks out a favourite line to tell Lex when he gets home.

And then there's poetry. Lex views poetry as his Waterloo in The Romancing of Clark Kent. Clark knows this because Lex told him one night while they were playing pool.

"You've just never experienced it in the right setting," he said, lining up to take his shot. 

"No, Lex, I just think it sucks." Clark folded his arms, his cue propped up and forgotten against the wall. He's gotten better since high school, but Lex can still kick his ass when he wants too.

Lex stood up, tapping his pool cue against the open palm of his left hand. "Ten bucks," he said, smiling when Clark rolled his eyes. "Ten bucks says I can make you like poetry."

Clark considered it for a minute. "Okay," he said. "You're on."

But that was two months ago and so when Clark wakes to warm lips around his cock and cool hands stroking his hips, he doesn't make the connection.

"Good - fuck - morning," he says, and Lex pulls off, grinning.

"Let me not to the marriage of true minds admit impediments," he says, dropping kisses onto Clark's fluttering stomach between words.

This doesn't strike Clark as being odd, particularly. Lex always quotes stuff at weird times, and anyway Clark's brain isn't functioning on any level higher than 'Lex mouth good.'

"Love is not love," Lex mutters against the inside of Clark's elbow, "which alters when it alteration finds."

Clark gets it and rolls his eyes, but he doesn't say anything.

Lex bites one of his nipples. "Or bends with the remover to remove. Oh, no."

Clark gets a kiss, then, and he can taste himself in Lex's mouth. 

"It is an ever-fixed mark," Lex murmurs, slicking Clark's lower lip with his tongue, "that looks on tempests and is never shaken."

Clark opens his mouth to say something, but suddenly there are fingers between his thighs and all that comes out is a groan.

Lex grins fiercely. "It is the star to every wandering bark, whose worth's unknown-" the fingers are inside Clark now, and it always amazes him that Lex can bend Clark's unbreakable spine into an arch just by crooking his fingers-there "-although his height be taken.

"Love's not Time's fool, though rosy lips and cheeks within his bending sickle's compass come." Lex nuzzles the aforementioned as he talks, his fingers driving Clark to a place where the only things he's aware of are the low lilting of Lex's voice and the strange empty feeling in his stomach.

"Please, Lex," he manages. "Inside."

"Love alters not with his brief hours and weeks, but bears it out-" the fingers slide out of him and Clark whines out loud at the loss, thrashing his head blindly on the pillow. He feels Lex settling against him, feels a hand stroking his hair off his face. He opens his eyes.

Lex is there, flushed and serious. "Even to the edge of doom."

Then he's inside Clark, and Clark lets his eyes roll back in his head, lets his head fall deep into the pillows and his legs come up to wrap around Lex's waist.

"If this be error, and upon me proved, I never," Lex is gasping now and Clark can barely make out the words, "I never writ, nor no�no man ever loved."

Then the poem surrenders totally to bitten off moans and hissed half-curses, which Clark likes because it's the only time Lex ever seems lost for words.

Later, when Clark can breathe again, he looks up from listening to Lex's heartbeat and asks, "Did you write that?"

Lex smirks, and then gets an exasperated look on his face. "I'm flattered Clark, but I'm not that good a wordsmith. It's Shakespeare, sonnet 116 and didn't you listen to any of your classes in college?"

Clark shrugs, and settles back down again. "Not the ones about poetry."

Lex laughs, and it sounds different from inside his chest.

"Lex?"

"Clark."

"Will you say it again?"

Lex puts the ten dollars towards a bottle of very nice wine, and he doesn't let Clark have any. 

Clark doesn't mind. He's kind of hoping for another serenade.