East Coast Gazette

Author’s Note: To everybody who’s waited for a complete version of these, I’m so sorry for how long this delay was (read: ridiculous).  Also, HAHAH — I apparently didn’t even have a complete copy of this story on my own hard drive, so yay livejournal and ctrl+c, guys.  Anyway, this url is permanent, and will be updated to add the story’s url on my website when that does finally go up — you should feel pretty safe linking here barring the actual talkoncorners domain going down.  Again, sorry for the ridiculous lagtime!

Silk (and Pearls), or, How Jane Sheppard Got Her Groove Back

“Can I drive?” Reed asked.

Jane cocked a brow at him in the rearview mirror.  “No,” she said.

Pouting, he whined, “I got my license like, four months ago.  And it’s only to the airport.”

“And this is, ‘like,’ my car,” Jane told him, “so the answer remains ‘no.’“

“Buzzkill,” Reed accused, slumping back into his seat and scowling.

Neil, sitting next to him and barely fending off an imminent landslide of garment bags and suitcases and—proving Reed really had packed, all by himself—garbage bags containing their clothes and allergy medications, said, “Reed, shut up—you’re the reason we’re packed into the backseat.”

Elliot, grinning widely, gave Jane his most angelic smile from the passenger seat and said, “Ms. Sheppard, have I ever told you how much I love you?  Like, a lot?”

“Oh, Jesus,” she muttered, and got onto the highway.

*

When Reed and Neil had run up to her, three months ago, their Coke-bottle glasses steamy and tears streaming from their eyes, shouting about how they’d done it!  They’d qualified for the ISEF! she’d been happier for them than almost anybody—but then Dr. Greenburg had wussed out claiming a “heart condition” and Jane had been shafted into chaperoning.  Apparently potential for cardiac embolism was of greater concern than the complications of having a baby.

So she handed Gabe off at Rodney’s new and even more palatial estate three days early.  It was three stories, a sleek glass and white ceramic affair nestled in the hills with a glittering night view.  There was lots of disjointed art and nowhere to sit, no human touch.

“Isn’t it beautiful?” Rodney had asked, not looking at any of it—pulling Gabe close to his chest.

“You have algea growing in your hot tub,” she’d told him, and kissed her son, curled into Rodney’s strong arms.  She’d run her hand over the soft, warm curve on the back of his head and murmured, “Goodbye, baby—don’t forget me,” into his sweet, pink cheek, and tried not to see the way Rodney’s eyes got glassy and red, the way they were both holding in whatever they were feeling.

“He won’t,” Rodney had promised, voice strange and hurt.  “You’ll be back soon.”

Gabe was the last thing they’d ever done together and no doubt the best, and Jane wished—the way she wished she hadn’t lost her virginity to Dan Taylor or that her mother hadn’t died so young—that things were different, that the last fifteen years of her life hadn’t been invalidated by a stack of legal documents three inches deep.

That first night in the hotel, Jane dialed the first six numbers of Rodney’s house phone thirty times—she wanted to talk to Gabe, even if he couldn’t talk back, but when she finally pressed her finger to the last nine, a woman picked up, saying, “Hello?” and Jane set the phone back in its cradle.

*

“Okay guys,” Jane said, clapping her hands together and watching Neil and Elliot and Reed nearly vibrate out of their skins with nervous energy, “rule: do not shame our school.”

“Right,” they chorused.

“No inappropriate behavior,” Jane continued, “language, vomiting on the judges—”

Reed turned a few shades greener at that.

“—or saying, ‘I came,’“ she concluded, giving them all a narrow-eyed look.  “Don’t think I won’t tell the librarians who wrote the work-around for looking at 4chan at school.  I know you three yahoos had a hand in it.”

Consumately bad liars, all, they just paled and nodded in agreement.  Satisfied, Jane gave them each a squeeze and said, “You guys are going to do great,” and meant it.

She’d believed in their ability to succeed—although, to be honest, she hadn’t anticipated they’d get this far—since they’d come and asked her to be their co-advisor with Dr. Greenburg, babbling about this brilliant idea they had—about technology that didn’t just respond, that was responsive.

“What, so like, telemarketing phone trees could tell when I was about to flip out and throw my phone against the wall?” she asked.

“EXACTLY,” they’d chorused, and Jane had shrugged and said, “Okay, whatever gets me a live person on the phone faster.”

*

The entire affair was nerve-wracking, with cascading minor disasters and a malfunction in their project’s voice system that had Neil crawling under their display table to have a good cry for half an hour before Reed realized—mid-hystrionics—that they needed new batteries.

The judges came round and saw their robot, nicknamed inappropriately HAL and voiced with a harmonic mix of Neil, Reed and Elliot’s tones, interpret the tenor of their voices, read their questions into emotional ranges and offer them advice like, “Perhaps you should consult a cardiac specialist,” and “You are enjoying this.  A lot.  Probably too much,” and “You sound like a true scientist: curious, yet poorly-dressed,” Jane was ready to crawl under the display table and have a cry herself.

“It’s very impressive,” one of the judges had told her boys, and they’d all puffed up so much Jane worried they’d explode—and that was before she went to the bathroom and came back to find yet another easily-amused spectator at their display table, laughing as the HAL told him, “You’re either brilliant, or insane. Or maybe both.”

“Did you guys manage to program him to say anything polite?” Jane sighed, coming up around the side of the table and despairing at the eternal-ness of boys.  Rodney would have thought this was hilarious.

The robot, reading her voice, turned in her direction to purr, “Don’t be mad at me, Jane—I love you.  You are my muse.”

And then the man at the booth laughed again, bright and unembarrassed—even as Jane imagined new and interesting ways to kill her students—and said, “The robot’s correct, Ms. Sheppard—these three boys are very talented, you shouldn’t hold a grudge.”

Jane finally really looked at him—tall, slim, pale and completely bald, at odds with his young face and slim shoulders—and blinked in sudden, startling recognition from his cover photo on Time, the big spread they’d done in Wired, and said, awkward and surprised, “Lex Luthor.”

He smiled at her and offered a hand.  “In the flesh.”

*

Lex hated phone trees, too, but he hated having call centers even more, and although LexCorp was a strictly B2B corporation, he had enough software enterprises out there that he wanted a more efficent way of doing things—better voice recognition software also had security applications, screening capabilities.  According to Lex Luthor, talking to three starry-eyed boys, their work had opened new doors, and as such, he was interested and wanted to keep in touch with them.

“I mean, if you don’t mind,” he said, faux casual, and Jane snorted as they fell all over themselves to offer up phone numbers, email addressses, IM handles, their avatar names on XBox 360.  (That was when they found out that Lex had been the guy handing them their asses in Halo 2, which had spurred another round of protracted moaning and praise.)  Jane thought that if they could, they would have offered Lex their virginities, and that was even before Lex offered to take them all out for dinner.

“Oh, no—“ Jane started.

“Oh my God, yes,” Neil moaned.  “That would be just like.”

“Just such an incredible honor,” Elliot continued.  “God.”

Reed looked nearly in tears.  “Eating with Tyrian Phoenix.  I just can’t.”

Lex just smiled at her, extending an arm.  “You were saying?”

She scowled at him, falling into step even as her students ran ahead, shouting at the sight of Lex’s limousine.

“Fine, but you’re only setting yourself up to take a massive charge and suffer public humiliation,” she warned.  “And for the record,” she added, “I don’t like being manipulated like this.”

This time, he didn’t laugh, just smiled at her, seeming fond, and said, “I’ll keep that in mind for the future,” and put three fingers on the small of her back, guiding her to the car where the driver was waiting, holding open the door.

Jane didn’t turn that over in her head until they’ve arrived at the restaurant, till after Lex had ordered a round of appetizers and nonalcoholic beers—“in the future.”

*

The next night, the students were all corralled into a massive party.  Before she left them in their room, Neil and Reed and Elliot were all putting on hair gel and way too much cologne, asking her if they looked “fly” and how many “babes” they’d pick up.  She didn’t have the heart to tell them that nerds girls or not, they were never going to go for the Aqua Velva so she told them, “so fly,” and “at least two, maybe three.”  They were thrilled.

Her plan for the night was to go back to her room and debate whether or not to call Rodney again—to feel profoundly sorry for herself and miss being 23 and in love, or 30 and happily married, or 33 and not on a school-mandated field trip so she was free to get well and truly wasted.

Except that when she got to her door Lex was leaning against it, dressed in black slacks and a dark gray sweater, and said, “If you were free—I’d like to take you to dinner again.”

“The boys are at a party tonight,” she apologized, sliding her room key and seeing the indicator light go green.  “And they’re trying to pick up girls, so I don’t really think they’re going to be in the mood after all that inevitable rejection—but thanks for the offer.”

“How perfect,” Lex said, “considering I was hoping to have dinner just you and I.”

He hovered in her opened doorway, and suddenly Jane felt shy, because of course, how could she have missed it—the bottle of Riesling he’d ordered the night before, to go with panna cotta and fresh berries, that hadn’t been for the boys’ benefit, that’d been for her.  But it’d been so long, and anyway, she’d never seen it coming, and so when she finally figured out that particular curve in Lex’s smile, it hit her like a semi of awareness and she felt herself blush down to her toes.

“Um,” she said, feeling stupid and suddenly old.

Lex just took a step into her room, curving into the convex of space she left behind when she took a step away, purring at her, “It’s just dinner, Jane—you did well enough last night.”

“Last time, I wasn’t the one you were trying to charm,” she argued.

“No,” Lex agreed, smiling, “you did the charming.”

She frowned at him, and then down at herself.  “You do know that I’m a divorced, single-mom math teacher, right?” she asked, looking back up at him.

Lex smiled at her, pushing away from the wall to put his fingers on her back again, steer her gently out of the room and back toward the bay of elevators.  “Don’t worry, I Googled you,” he murmured, close to her ear.

“Oh, good,” Jane said.  “I Googled you, too.”

They ended up at Nicolai’s Roof at the Atlanta Hilton, the maitre’d a silent, fairlylike presence around them.

“You know,” she said, watching Lex refill her glass, “I read an article about Chateau d’Yquem once.”

He grinned at her over the candles.  “Did you,” he said—without a trace of condescension.  “What did you learn?”

She cocked a brow.  “That not even restaurants like Nicolai’s Roof have it lying around in their wine cellars.”

“Haven’t you heard?” Lex laughed.  “I travel in style.”

Jane couldn’t help but grin back.  “This isn’t going to work, you know,” she told him, and felt weirdly regretful about that.

Lex studied her for a moment, heavy-lidded and thoughtful, and Jane though it was probably weird she was used to that—to being considered.  Rodney used to do it in the early days of their marriage, like when she woke up and found him staring at her, equal parts bewildered and bemused.

“What?” she asked, tracing her fingers along the wine stem.

“I work all the time,” Lex said after a beat, easy as you like.  “I was hoping this would be something different.”

Something different, Jane thought, maybe she could offer.  It was the rest of the Chateau d’Yquem and a walk through the underground mall discussing robots and math and why Jane taught either or both later that Lex carefully pinned her to the wall of her hotel room and slid a hand up her skirt.

“Before we get any further,” she said, “I feel obligated to point out that I don’t fuck on the first date.”

That wasn’t true, exactly, but Jane could admit she was scared—it’d been a long time, and the last people who’d gotten up close and personal with her vagina were watching her have a baby.  God damn Rodney and his high definition Sony handycam, anyway.  Lex’s fingers was narrow and smooth, nimble on her thighs, the crease of her knee—different, new.  Jane hadn’t been unexplored territory in almost two decades, now.

Lex smiled at her, lopsided and amused.  “A classy lady, I haven’t dated one of those in a while,” he murmured, close to her ear, and Jane couldn’t help but smile at that, paw for the hotel room lightswitch, and whisper back: “Well, not that classy.”

He left, pressing an affectionate kiss to her forehead, her shoulder, her naked hip, three hours later.  Jane stared up at her ceiling for the rest of the night, and called Rodney at first light, making him hold Gabe up to the phone so he could babble in babyspeak at her, ground her, remind her who she really was.

“I don’t see why it was so fucking urgent you had to wake me up for it,” Rodney complained, putting Gabe back down in his crib, the rustle of soft fleece blankets faint over the phone line.

“I missed him,” Jane said, because it was true.  “Don’t you ever miss people you love?”

She heard him swallow over the line.  “Yes,” Rodney croaked.  “I do.”

*

The boys made it to the semi-final round the next day; they celebrated by holding a LAN party.  Lex celebrated by taking her to dinner again and reaching underneath the table at the hotel restaurant to slide his hand underneath her skirt, run a thumb over her clitoris.

“You’re going to get me fired for indecent behavior,” she told him, disapproving, letting him lower her across the king-sized bed in his penthouse suite, flip her skirt up.

“Excellent,” he said, sliding black cotton panties down her legs, kissing her ankles.  “I have a position opening up tied to my bed in Metropolis.”

“I can’t believe you ever got laid with horrible lines like that,” she complained, feeling his mouth on the inside of her calf, her knee.

“Well,” he murmured, nosing at the wiry curls between her thighs, “it helps that I’m a billionaire.”

Lex was a diligent, intense lover, all serious eyes and panting-hot breaths against the hollow of her throat.  And maybe a decade of marriage to Rodney had wrecked her for normal relationships—apparently most other people didn’t accidentally give one another black eyes their first week of sleeping together, who knew— but then she didn’t think Lex’s constant, silky-dark litany of erotic promises was particularly normal, either.  It was like having sex in a gothic romance novel; all that was missing was the wind shrieking across the moors, a crazy wife in the attic.  And she managed not to laugh all the way into the handsiest part of the foreplay before she cracked.

“Okay, this is a reaction I don’t usually inspire,” Lex said, looking sullen and somewhat wronged and very naked.

“I’m sorry,” Jane said, tugging him close to kiss him in apology.  She could feel his dick hot and slick at the tip, rubbing the curve of her hip and she loved that she could still do that to somebody.  “Haven’t you ever laughed in bed with anybody?”

“No,” he said, stubborn.  He slipped one knee underneath hers, canting her hip up, and Jane gasped as he pushed inside, his thumb stroking just above where they were joined.  “They’re mostly too busy being wracked with multiple, blinding orgasms.”

She sucked a kiss at the wings of his collarbone, dug her nails into his back.  “Far be it for me to like, turn down orgasms—but laughing can be fun, too.”

Lex gave her a narrow-eyed look.  “Maybe later,” he growled, and slid his thumb up until her breath hitched.  “But not now.”

Jane dug her nails into his shoulders.  “Okay,” she agreed, “maybe later.”

*

Her boys came in third place in the competition, which salved a lot of wounds accumulated from (a) not being fly and (b) picking up, between them, (-4) chicks.  Lex had met them after the awards ceremony, invited them to visit LexCorp’s research and development headquarters anytime, and given her a fond, platonic kiss on the cheek.  Jane thought about telling them she was apparently sleeping with their Halo 3 hero, but they might have killed her in jealousy, so she kept quiet about it on the flight and quiet about it driving them each home.

*

She went to fetch Gabe from Rodney’s house and met his new housekeeper, a 36DD Nordic goddess with legs the length of Jane’s entire body.  She answered the door in Kate Moss skinny jeans and a black tube top, holding a copy of The Nanny Diaries.  “You must be Jane,” she said.

“And you must be kidding,” Jane said instead of ‘hello.’

Carelyn (“It’s pronounced Caroline, though, like the old-people name,” she explained), looked baffled at that until Jane rolled her eyes and said, “Whatever—where’s my baby?”

Gabe was a happy baby, and he was happy to see her, clapping his chubby fists and stuffing them into his mouth while she peppered his face with kisses, rubbed her face in his belly, breathed in his warm, baby smell and felt something click back into place in her chest.  His hair was the same dishwater blond as Rodney’s, mired in cowlicks the way hers had as a baby, the way McKay said John’s did, in another time and place, and Jane smoothed her hand over Gabe’s warm, small head and loved him so much she could barely breathe.

“Dr. McKay’s at a conference,” Carelyn explained, snapping bubble gum in the doorway of the nursery, “but he said he’d be back by five.”

Jane looked at her from the corner of her eyes.  “He makes you call him Dr. McKay?”

Carelyn looked confused, again.  Jane made a mental note to make Rodney fire her for somebody with more than six brain cells and 23 breast-sizes to rub together.

“Well, yeah,” Carelyn said.

“Maybe it’s a sex thing,” Jane muttered under her breath, pulling Gabe into her arms.  “Tell Rodney thanks for looking after him—I’ve got to head out if I want to get home before dark.”

“He said you could stay here,” Carelyn offered.  “He had me make up the guest room.”

The last time she’d stayed in the guest room because it was too late/too wet outside/too cold/too windy to drive home, Rodney had come into her room at half past three and they’d fucked hard enough to leave bruises, and she’d had to drive home anyway in the raging wind and pouring rain.

“That’s not happening,” Jane said, throwing the diaper bag strap over her shoulder.  “But tell him thanks for the thought.”

When she pulled into the driveway of her house, she saw a box on her front porch.  It was covered in deep red paper, a brown package string around it, and in elegant longhand, written in permanent marker on an attached, pasteboard card was: I think you should laugh at me in bed some more,  Lex.  Inside the box was a pair of Yves St. Laurent sunglasses, a handbag containing a book of sudoku puzzles, three ballpoint pens, and a first-class plane ticket to Metropolis International Airport, redeemable at any time.

Jane glanced down at Gabe, who stared back up at her with her own green eyes, beguiling and curious.  “You don’t mind if your mommy turns into a sex fiend cliche, do you?” she asked him, and he just giggled in reply, waved his fists at her.  “It’s not my fault, you know,” she felt obligated to tell him.  “Your dad’s idea of romance was to spill peanut sauce on my blouse and cop a feel in the back booth of a Malaysian restaurant.”

*

At first, Jane decided it was adolescent and irresponsible and set the box away—something to look at with shuttered affection occasionally, to think about when she was lonely.  Lex was a two-night stand and Jane had responsibilities.  But then he’d started in on the dirty emails.

Have you ever looked at the upper corners of rooms during interminable meetings? Lex wrote her the week after.  That place where three verticies meet makes me think about the perfect apex between a woman’s thighs—shadowed and mathematically-difficult to navigate.  By the way, I’ve been assured by a phalanx of my yes-men that my pick-up lines are phenomenal.

Just because I teach math doesn’t mean I’m a whore for it, Jane lied.   How did you find my email address?

I checked the CalTech alumni group—and I know for a fact people who graduate from the CalTech math program are whores for it, Lex answered.

And laughing, Jane had written back, Clearly, you did more googling than me.

Jane wondered why, those first few exchanges, Lex would waste so much time on a small-town schoolteacher, but then she couldn’t help but think that maybe he was lonely, that anybody who’d never spent time laughing in bed with a lover had to be lonely.  It wasn’t her fault she wrote him back, that she sent him funny anecdotes about her students, that she told him the next time he was in California, he should feel welcome to swing by.  Jane told herself it was because she didn’t think he would, but in October, when Lex showed up on her doorstep in a Hugo Boss suit and Marc Jacobs power tie, looking fierce and tired, she wasn’t surprised at all.

“You look hungry,” she said, unbuttoning his shirt.  Gabe was asleep in a playpen in the living room, just yards away; she was utterly going to hell.

“I’m starving,” Lex told her, and sat her on her kitchen counter, fingers working the zipper on her jeans.

*

In November, Jane handed Gabe to Rodney so he could drag their son to Thanksgiving in Vancouver with his sister.  “You could come, if you want to,” Rodney offered, looking at her like she was a math problem, and Jane looked down at the ground so that when she lied, “No, it’s all right—I made plans,” she wouldn’t give herself away.  She hadn’t, then, but the thought of sitting in their house—it’s still their house—is too sad; to think of Rodney in the blustery November cold of Vancouver with Jeannie and Madison and Kaleb.  They’re her adopted family, her sister by marriage and affection and her niece, her brother-in-law, and she loves them, more than she thought she would.  Jane used to call Jeannie every week, and they’d talk about Rodney and Kaleb, about Madison, about nothing in particular.  She forgot, in the middle of the divorce, that it wasn’t only Rodney she was losing.

“Fuck this,” she told the flat-screen television in the living room, and packed a bag.

She didn’t call in advance, but somehow there was a sleek black sedan waiting for her at Metropolis International.  A beautiful, icy blond woman waylaid her at the luggage carriage, saying, “Ms. Sheppard—your bag has already been retrieved.  If you’ll follow me, Mr. Luthor is waiting for you.”

Kansas was flat and brown and miserable in fall, and Jane was grateful to see the spikes of skyscrapers in the distance when they finally emerged, shimmering in the deepening evening.  Lex’s was the highest skyscraper of all, all chrome and steel inside, and Jane let herself get ushered into an elevator with no buttons, rocketed up to the 107th floor, where Herbie Hancock was playing when the doors opened.

“You’re worse than a 14-year-old boy with Facebook, Lex,” she chided, and Lex just handed her a glass of brandy, kissed her hello.

“Some people find my stalker tendencies charming,” he replied.

Jane kissed him back.  “Those same people laugh at your jokes about aerodynamics.”

She had thought all she’d see of Metropolis would be from a horizontal vantage point in front of Lex’s bedroom windows, but he had different ideas.  They went to the art museum, saw a Metropolis Sharks game, where the Sharks lost 42-7.  “God damn it,” Lex had said in the skybox, shouting helplessly through the soundproofed glass.  “Why did I buy you morons!”  Jane suggested post-season baseball, which turned out to be pretty much the same amount of embarrassing—only at closer range, since Lex had seats near home plate so he could heckle and be heard.

“Are there any other teams you don’t own?” she said, watching the Rockets run around like they were in a Three Stooges sketch in the outfield.

“Other than the Rockets?  Several intramural college squash teams,” Lex muttered.

Jane smiled and bought him another hot dog.

They saw a movie and went to bookstores and she didn’t wear high heels once.  And on Thanksgiving night Lex roasted a turkey and Jane made some stuffing, and they ate it while watching National Treasure: Book of Secrets on his television, which was the size of an entire wall, and Jane complained about going blind until Lex decreased the screen contrast.

“You’re completely unimpressed by my money,” Lex said, looking constipated.

Jane reached for another slice of turkey.  “I thought you said you did thorough research on me,” she teased.

“I did,” he answered, looking constipated.  “Although I just suppose this means McKay Technology is doing much better than I had thought.”

Lex engaged a helicopter to send her back to California the next day, and standing on the roof of his glittering skyscraper, Jane shouted over the sound of the blades, “Don’t you think this is a little bit of overkill?” and Lex shouted back, “It’s like you don’t even know me.”

*

Jeannie guilted Jane into agreeing to spend Christmas at Rodney’s, making up elaborate lies about how Madison had wept and taken up cutting and cocaine after her favorite aunt—“I’m her only aunt,” Jane had pointed out—had been missing at Thanksgiving.

“You’re still family, Jane,” Jeannie had said, before putting her daughter on the phone—that evil, manipulative woman, Jane thought—so Madison could sniff out, “But you’re my favoritest only aunt, Aunt Jane!” in her most pitiful voice.  So Jane had called Rodney and Rodney had called Jane and they’d called a cease fire for Gabe’s first Christmas.

It was weird being in Rodney’s new house—which had everything you could want and nothing anybody needed.  There were cashmere robes in the guest bathrooms and not enough tissues; artisan glycerin soaps and like, four spoons.  Jane had endured 20 minutes of looking for paper towels and cooking oil before she’d stolen Rodney’s wallet and car keys and their son and headed for the CostCo.

“Where are you going?” Rodney called from his perch on the roof.  “I need a spotter!”

“You would have been done hours ago if you weren’t putting up Santa’s Crack Den up there!” she shouted back, and tried to ignore the mortified looks from the neighbors, the passers by.  “And I am going to the store because you still live like a college freshman.”

Rodney looked offended.  “I bought toilet paper!”

He had: one four-pack.

Jane sighed and added it to the mental tally as she strapped Gabe into the baby seat in the back of the car, saying to her son, “I don’t care if it’s going to make you gay, I’m mothering you until you learn to live like an actual human being.”

Jane came back from the CostCo with a raging migraine, 24 bags of groceries and paper goods and a furiously angry child.  Gabe had thrown his pacifier out of the window on the highway, and Jane, who’d fished the damn thing out of fishbowls and off of department store floors and out of bushes, drew the line at stopping interstate traffic to pluck it out of a pile of tire dust and vomit and stuff it back in his mouth.

So for the first time since Rodney’s net worth had climbed from $894.67 to $894.6 million, Jane was glad to see the housekeeper and Rodney’s tanorexic nanny waiting at the front door when she pulled up.

“Thanks for grabbing the groceries,” she said to Lina, whose face turned into a mass of laugh lines when she smiled.  Jane had adamantly refused to let Rodney get them a housekeeper when they were still together, the thought of having a witness to her puffy eyes first thing in the morning or the way—toward the end—she and Rodney fought over everything from dish soap to well, getting a housekeeper wasn’t a thought she relished.   But if, instead of hot tweenies from Singapore, Rodney had offered to bring Lina in to help out, Jane might have capitulated, if only because Lina didn’t seem to like Rodney all that much.

“Thank you for getting my child as far away from me as humanly possible,” Jane said to Carelyn, and dumped her purse and Rodney’s keys and wallet in the hallway before she retreated to her room.

Jane was technically a guest in the sprawling house, but Lina always laid out linens in the same room for her, threw open the curtains, and Jane knew Rodney had done it on purpose, because the bookshelves on the walls were lined with Russian tragedy and the view of sunrise and sunset could break her heart.

In a lot of ways, Rodney, for his absentmindedness and tendency to drop off the face of the Earth for days at a stretch, was a stereotypically indulgent husband.  When they’d just been married, he’d made her model airplanes, built her ships in bottles and strung them up to the ceiling.  And when they’d tiptoed into another tax bracket, he’d bought her a bright red convertible, built her a sunroom and found her a house with a sprawling backyard populated with bright green and red maples.

The presents afterward stopped meaning so much, since they felt like an afterthought instead of a gift: a necklace to appease her after he’d spent most of February in Singapore securing McKay Technology’s manufacturing plants there; a tennis bracelet when he blew up at her.  Nevermind the only jewelry Jane had worn were Rodney’s engagement and wedding rings and her father’s dog tags.

Now, Jane didn’t wear any jewelry at all.

She’d put her father’s dog tags away in a jewelry box on her vanity, crowding for space with her parents’ wedding rings, set together as a pair the way they’d been buried, side by side in a grassy green plot of land in Virginia.  And in the compartment below, Jane had put her own wedding ring, the engagement ring Rodney had given her, gleaming with diamonds.  She’d cried the day she took them off, and when she’d gone to work, red-eyed, her fourth-finger naked, all the kids in her 8th period class had been too quiet, too well-behaved.

“I love your hands,” Rodney had said to her, inspecting her after he’d returned from South Africa, after she’d laughed and dragged him back to their apartment to make love on the living room floor, to celebrate their engagement.

“They’re all ripped up,” Jane had said, shy and trying to pull them away.  She’d had a part-time job at a bookstore moving boxes of new novels and hardbacks, and she knew her nails were stubby and her palms were calloused.  There were prettier hands by far.

“They’re perfect,” Rodney had contradicted and kissed her fingers one by one, and Jane had thought he looked impossibly handsome in the late-afternoon light.  “I can’t wait to see you wearing my ring.”

She’d been so happy she hadn’t had words, just pressed grateful kisses to Rodney’s mouth, his throat, his shoulder; Jane hadn’t believed she’d get to keep him.

So she was still staring at her hands, a little lost inside her own head, when Madison barreled into the room shrieking, “Aunt Jane!” at a pitch frequented by dolphins and dogs and knocked her over, right onto the bed, where they collapsed in a tangle, with Jane bursting into laughter as she hugged her niece.

*

Madison had a crush on a boy named Toby in her class but she wasn’t ready to commit to going with him yet, mostly because there was another boy named Michel who had black hair and the “greenest green eyes ever” that sat next to her in class and spoke French like a dream.

“Ah, French,” Jane sighed to Jeannie, smiling, “we fall for it every time.”

“Oui,” Jeannie agreed, grinning.  “Hey, Maddie, why don’t you go get the present we brought Gabe?”  Squealing, Madison ran off, because although she had transient affections for the boys in her class, she loved Gabe the way all children loved younger siblings: like he was a puppy.

“She’s going to drive me crazy in like, five years,” Jeannie said, sounding equal parts fond and regretful.

Jane laughed, curling her legs underneath herself on the couch and reaching for her coffee mug.  “She’s adorable, and she’ll be fine.”

“Speaking of fine,” Jeannie said, with the same McKay family tact that had won and lost the war, “how are you doing?  Are you holding up?”

“Jeannie,” Jane said, disapproving.

“I know,” Jeannie rushed to say.  “But I just—oh, Jane, I worry about you.  I also worry about Rodney, but mostly I worry about you, because my brother is a dick and I like you better.”

Jane squirmed in her seat, held her coffee like a shield in front of herself.  “Jeannie, come on, we’ve had this conversation before.”

Rodney hadn’t, in his infinite wisdom and sensitivity, seen it fit to tell Jeannie they were separated, and Jeannie had learned by way of a Silicon Valley online gossip rag and called up Jane demanding to know that it wasn’t true.

“Wait, they’re writing about our divorce in Valleywag?” Jane had asked, packing another one of Rodney’s old t-shirts away.  She’d met Paul Boutin once at a McKay Technology holiday party; he’d been halfway into the open bar and completely, miserably bored, and apparently he hadn’t recognized her because he’d asked if she wanted to flash him for the website.  “Why would they write about us in Valleywag?”

“You are completely missing the point,” Jeannie had yelled.  “You guys are getting divorced?”

“Oh, son of a bitch!” Jane had yelled right back.  “That asshole didn’t tell you?”

“I’m not trying to have that conversation again,” Jeannie promised her, putting a hand on Jane’s knee.  “I’m just—I want to know that you’ll be okay.”

And there was something about the way she said it that made Jane want to put her face in her knees and give up.  Jane thought that maybe Jeannie knew better than Rodney did how Jane had loved him, and that alone was tragic, that her sister-in-law was better-informed about her marriage than her husband had been.

“I will be just fine,” Jane said, and took another sip of coffee, grateful that whatever Jeannie was gearing up to say next was cut off when Madison ran back into the room, holding up a stuffed yellow star cushion and tailed by her uncle.

“Aunt Jane, Uncle Rodney says this star is Polaris,” Madison reported, crawling into Jane’s lap.

“All McKays, so encroaching,” Jane faux-complained, stroking a hand down the back of Madison’s blond hair.  “And your uncle would know.”

“I said it could be Polaris,” Rodney corrected, standing awkwardly in the doorway, like the remains of her and Jeannie’s conversation were hanging in the air, “it’s not like stuffed toys have a lot of distinguishing elements.”

Ignoring him, Madison confided, “Daddy says to call the ladies in for dinner.”

“Did he?” Jane asked, and without thinking, she looked up to catch Rodney’s gaze and found him already looking at her.  When they’d still been married, at dinner parties and corporate functions, at a thousand meals they’d shared in the company of others, Rodney had always come to fetch her, to find her from across a room and smile, hold out a hand and lead her to their seats.  It was just habit, Jane thought, to look for Rodney before sitting down to break bread.

“He did,” Rodney confirmed, holding out his hand, and Jane reached out to take it before he added, “Come on, Madison—let’s go.”

Jane must have sat there a moment too long after Madison scrambled away to take Rodney’s offered palm, her hand half-suspended in air, because the next thing she heard was Jeannie’s voice, soft and sad, saying, “Oh, Jane.”

*

She’d gone to dinner, she’d even eaten, but most of it sat uncomfortably in her stomach all through the stilted evening conversation, through the re-watching of A Christmas Story and of The Nightmare Before Christmas.  Jane was considering pleading sickness to go curl up in bed and feel sorry for herself when her cell phone started to ring.

“Hello?” she asked, plucking the phone off of Rodney’s coffee table and ignoring everybody’s curious looks.  Almost everybody she knew in the world was already sitting in the room.

“Merry Christmas,” Lex said, a rough laugh in his voice.  “Is now a bad time?”

“Merry Christmas to you, too.  And now,” Jane declared, pushing herself to her feet and heading for the now-deserted kitchen, “is a great time.”

“Oh, good,” Lex purred in her ear.  “What are you wearing?”

Jane laughed, she couldn’t help it.  “Clothes,” she teased.  “Where are you?”

“Shanghai.”  Jane could hear the sound of good crystal in the background, and she could imagine Lex pouring himself a brandy, golden liquid swirling around ice.  “It’s—noon here?”

“What’s it like?” she asked, leaning up against a counter to look out into Rodney’s backyard, the Almaden Valley at night.

Lex hummed.  “Crowded.  You’d like it, I think.  It’s strange—a lot of neoclassical architecture across the river from some of the tallest, most beautiful skyscrapers I’ve ever seen.  Not as,” he hurried to correct, “beautiful as LexCorp Towers of course.”

“Of course,” Jane said, and hoped he could hear the smile in her voice.  “No warm holiday moments with your family then?”

“No,” Lex answered,  and Jane thought she could hear the smile in his.  “How’s it going?”

She’d written him the week before, a short, uncomfortable email confessing her growing nausea about spending the holidays with her ex, with her ex-family.  He’d sent her to an online game website where you could club baby seals to death, and Jane thought that if she wasn’t all tied up, an emotional shipwreck, she could probably love him for that alone.

Jane looked at her feet, bare against the terra cotta tile of the kitchen.  “It’s going,” she said, quiet.  “I guess it’s better than being alone.”

“Very the sun’ll come up tomorrow,” Lex said, and Jane heard the clink of ice in his glass again.

She wished she was there, or he was here, so she could put her hand on his wrist, set his glass down on a table and draw him away.  Jane didn’t really know anything about Lex—none of the important, world-shattering things like his business or his history or his family, all the reasons he was frictionless and sleek, too well-kept, but she knew she liked too much to hear him drink alone on Christmas Eve in another country.

“Go to the front door,” Lex said suddenly.

Jane frowned.  “What?”

“The front door,” Lex encouraged.  “Now.”

Jane looked around the house.  “Lex, I’m not at my house right now.”

“Jane, please,” Lex chided.  “Now—front door.”

Sighing, Jane made her way through the hallway, passing through the great room again and seeing Jeannie’s face, Rodney’s frown, Madison’s curious gaze.

“Seriously, what is this about?” she asked, crossing into the front hall and stopping awkwardly at the enormous double doors to the house.

“Are you at the door?” Lex asked.

“No,” Jane lied.  She could hear footsteps behind her, and she knew if she turned around Rodney would be standing there.  It made her neck hot to think about him watching her on the phone with her—what the hell was Lex to her anyway?

Lex said, “Good—now, open it.”

Jane sighed, but did, struggling to balance her cell phone for a moment before she managed the lock and swung the door open—to find a very, very large box on the step.

“What the hell is that?” Rodney asked, and Jane could feel his breath on her shoulder—hot in the brisk night and too close.  “What is that box?  Is it a bomb?  Give me the phone.”

Jane shoved him away.  “Private phone call, Rodney,” she snapped, and turning her attention back to the box, she said, “Seriously, what is this?”

“You should open the box now,” Lex suggested.  “Also, I take it your ex-husband doesn’t—or rather, didn’t—know about our acquaintance.”

“Only you could make that word sound so dirty,” Jane complained, reaching for the red silk bow.

“What word” Rodney demanded.

“Oh my God,” Jane said, because as soon as she pried the lid off of the box, she looked down inside to see a red-gold and white Corgie, smiling up at her with the brightest brown eyes she’d ever seen.  “You didn’t.”

“Oh God, is that a puppy?” Rodney wailed, right into her ear, and Jane rolled her eyes and shoved him away again, squatting down to stroke a hand down the dog’s head, scritch him between the ears.  It whined at her obligingly, tongue lolling out for a moment before he leapt up, feet catching the edges of the box, so it could stretch up and lick at her face.

“Meet Bellerophon,” Lex told her.  “He’s been trained expertly, there’s no need to worry about housebreaking him again.”

Jane laughed, ruffling the dog’s hair.  He was warm and sweet, and she clutched the phone between her shoulder and ear to pull him out of the box, to sit down on the floor with him and admire his collar, engraved: Bellerophon, Jane Sheppard.

“Hello there,” she cooed to the dog.  “I think I’ll call you Bell.”

“What?” Lex squawked.  “What the hell kind of name is Bell?”

“Jesus Christ—who bought you that thing?” Rodney demanded.

“He’s wonderful,” Jane decided, planting a kiss on Bell’s forehead.  “Thank you,” she said, feeling the most inappropriate kind of shy, sitting in her ex-husband’s foyer hugging a puppy and blushing.  “I’m glad you called.”

“Likewise, Jane,” Lex said, adding, “Good night.”

Jane pulled Bell into her lap, and he lapped at her face again, barking twice to say hello, and when Jane looked up, she saw Rodney’s look of utter despair.

“Oh my God,” he said, voice flat.  “Someone bought you a puppy.”

Which was when Madison finally put in an appearance, running into the room at mach 5 screaming, “Puppy!” at the top of her considerable lungs.

*

“So this hasn’t been that bad, has it?” Rodney said, trying to sound upbeat through his gritted teeth.  “Also, fuck, that hurts—what are you doing?  Trying to dig it in hard—argh!”

“Got it,” Jane said, flicking the splinter aside into the pile of instructions and abandoned toy parts.

It was 11:30 and they were camped underneath Rodney’s 12-foot Christmas tree, professionally decorated and banked in by an embarrassment of presents.  Jane had felt kind of bad about her own dozen until she’d walked into Rodney’s great room and realized a small Toys ‘R Us franchise had apparently decamped in his living room.  Bell was collapsed in a heap of copper-colored fur near Jane, wuffing softly and sleeping, exhausted and happy from chasing Madison and Jane around the house for hours, from meeting Gabe for the first time and licking his tiny hands sweetly.

“Maybe we shouldn’t put this together for Madison after all,” Rodney said, eyeing the playhouse with deep suspicion.  “I mean, this cannot be child safe.  It’s tried to murder me three times already.”

Jane smiled.  “Rodney, splinters aren’t homicidal in nature.”

She was feeling generous, good, and Rodney had been on his best behavior, dragged off by Jeannie before he could start peppering her (or the dog) with questions.  She could tell it was killing him not to ask, not to rush upstairs and hire private investigators immediately, but he was holding his tongue and Jane appreciated the effort.

“Wait until they get you,” he sulked, turning back to the playhouse roof, and Jane watched the line of his back, strong through the gray button-up he was wearing, and realized that she wanted him to be happy.  Maybe this was that post-divorce epiphany that authors of self-help books talked about, that moment of realization that Rodney was neither her enemy—she could want him to be happy, Jane decided, and said, awkward:

“Um.  You should call her.”

Rodney didn’t stop what he was doing, which seemed to involve a lot of cussing under his breath.  “Who?” he asked, distracted.

“Carter,” Jane said, and then clearing her throat, said, “I mean, Samantha Carter.”

His hands stilling, Rodney turned to give her an odd look.  “Why would I call Carter?”

Jane frowned at him.  “Rodney, it’s Christmas.”

“So?” Rodney asked.

“Oh, come on, Rodney,” Jane teased, grinning. She felt good, and she owed Lex and Bell for it, and Jane thought maybe later, after Rodney had gone to bed, she should pick up the phone and let Lex know she was wearing a mismatched pair of bra and underwear—he seemed irrationally pleased by things like that.  “You know this sort of thing is part of why we got divorced, right?”

Only Rodney didn’t seemed chagrined or baffled so much as hurt, like she’d slapped him, and he asked, voice creaking, “Excuse me?”

Too soon, Jane berated herself.  “I just meant that it’s Christmas,” she said, putting a hand on Rodney’s wrist.  “You should—I mean, you can call your girlfriend.  It’s not going to upset me.”

Rodney gaped at her.

“She’ll be glad to hear from you,” Jane went on, and swallowing a knee-jerk wash of jealousy, said, “And look, maybe in the future, we could do this together.  I mean, we’re all adults.  We can learn to get along for the holidays, you know?”

“Sam Carter is not my girlfriend,” Rodney said, voice flat, and Jane saw red at that, that after everything, that after all this time and the divorce and all of their fights and that hideous moment in the mountain in Colorado, Rodney still wanted to lie about this.

She turned back to the mobile she was putting together.  “You know what?” she said.  “Nevermind.  Forget I mentioned anything.  Of course she’s not your girlfriend.”

There was a short, loaded silence before Rodney said, voice tight, “No, Jane—she’s actually not my girlfriend and you—where the fuck do you get these stupid ideas?”

Jane’s hands stilled on the toy.  “Stupid idea?” she repeated.  “Stupid?  Look, if you’re too much of a coward to admit it now, after it’s a moot point, then fine, but I don’t have to take your shit anymore, a judge told me and everything.”

“If I’m too—are you kidding me?” Rodney yelled, throwing a playhouse shingle across the room.  “Are you seriously fucking with me?  Do not tell me you thought I was—”

“Yes!” Jane exploded, and she threw the mobile in Rodney’s face.  She hoped it hurt.  “Yes, you jackass, I thought!  I thought you and Sam were fucking!  I thought you’d been at it for years—what the hell else was I supposed to think?”

Rodney actually looked speechless.

“Every other day, there was a fucking phone call from S. CARTER on your phone, and it didn’t matter what we were doing or what was happening you dropped everything and ran—week-long business trips, dinner meetings, in the middle of the night or at four fucking a.m., she called and you went running,” Jane bit out.  “And she’s—I don’t even blame you, Rodney.  She’s hot, okay?  She’s gorgeous.  She’s blond.  She doesn’t take your shit.  And I’m over it, I don’t care, we’re divorced anyway—but do not sit here and lie about it anymore.”

“What is—I can’t even,” Rodney kept stopping and starting, on the verge of a brain hemorrhage, so red it looked like all of the blood had rushed to his face, before he threw the mobile across the room to join the shingle.  “I am not, and have never been, and never would have had an affair with Carter—and I cannot fucking believe that you have to be told this shit!  What the fuck, Jane?  I was married, you were my wife, and—“

Rodney faltered for a bit before he drew himself up, before he said, “And—and you never would have stayed.  Carter and I’ve worked together for years, and if you’d thought that we were…well, you never would have…”

But his sentence kind of melted off in the end, and Jane wondered if it wasn’t because of the look on her face.  Everything in her line of vision had gone blurry, washed out by tears, because Jane had thought this, known it, for years, but she’d never said it out loud, and it somehow hurt much worse after being given syllables and consonants and exclamation points than it had occupying all of her head, filling up all the empty spaces between her thoughts.

“Of course I fucking stayed,” Jane managed, choking it out, and she felt like she was drowning, gasping for breath.  “Where else would I go?  Rodney, you—you were my husband.”

And Jane could see Rodney staring at her, see his face crumpling, his eyes and cheeks and nose go red like he was about to cry, too, and oh fuck, they couldn’t both be this pathetic on Christmas Eve, so Jane scrubbed at her face and got up, snatched her cell phone and pulled on a sweater.

“I’ve got to go,” she mumbled.  “I have to get out of here.  Tell Jeannie I’m sorry.”

She was halfway down Rodney’s mile-long driveway when her phone rang again—Lex Luthor, the call display said, and Jane cleared her throat and fished around for her car keys, hitting the talk button.  “Hello?”

There was a long silence on the other end of the line.  “Are you crying?” he asked.

“No,” Jane lied.

“I see,” Lex said.  “Well, I’m taking a suite at the Fairmont in San Jose—if you’d like, you’re welcome to join me, I’ll be there in about four hours.”

Jane got into her car, clutched at her steering wheel.  She could see all the lights in Rodney’s house go on, see shadows in the windows.  There was maybe another five minutes grace period before Rodney came after her—he always did.  He could never just let anything go.

“I thought you were in Shanghai,” she said.  “That’s—far away.”

“I would explain, but the patents haven’t gone through yet on the new aerospace technology,” Lex answered smoothly. She could hear him smiling through the phone.  “When you get to the hotel, tell Mihaela you’re my guest, and she’ll see to everything.”

“Lex,” she said, feeling a stutter in her chest, “it’s Christmas Eve.”

“I’ll have you back by morning,” he promised.  “Go on, Jane.  Drive carefully,” he added, and hung up with a beep.

Jane saw the door to the house open in the rearview mirror, saw Rodney standing in the orange-lit doorway just a moment too long, and that was enough to make her turn her key in the ignition, to put her foot down on the gas.

*

Mihaela was either exquisitely kind or exquisitely well-paid, because she ushered Jane up to the Fairmont Suite with quiet efficiency, and then returned a few moments later with a silk nightgown and La Perla underwear.

“Really?” Jane asked, looking at the black bra.  “How much was this?”

Mihaela only shrugged helplessly.  “It’s Mr. Luthor.  I special-order him $16 water.”

“I’m not going to think about that one anymore,” Jane decided, and Mihaela laughed, promising to send up a bottle of Chivas as she went.

Jane was drunk and submerged in the whirlpool bath by the time she heard the door open again, heard Lex’s measured footsteps padding into the bathroom to admire her, pink from the hot water and near-melted from the alcohol.

“How intoxicated are you?” he asked, taking off his suit jacket and rolling up his sleeves.

Jane took another drink and dropped the crystal in the water.  “Let’s fuck against the windows.”

“Very, I see,” Lex laughed, but he helped her out of the water, let her ruin his shirt, pressing her slick body against his and shoving at her until she was positioned against the wall of glass—and Jane giggled, impatient and a little blurry, as she helped him unbutton his pants and pin her to the windows.

“Ah,” Jane gasped, feeling Lex rocking into her, “how was Shanghai?”

“Hm,” Lex said, indistinct, and bit at her collarbone, “I like this view better.”

*

Jane had twin hangovers by the time Lex got her downstairs and into his Aston Martin, the combination of a lot of drinking and acrobatic sex making her entire body hurt.  She’d woken up with rugburn on her hands and knees (but not as badly as Lex) and bruised in weird places, and Lex had just handed her a mug of coffee and said, “So you’re kind of bloodthirsty when you fuck.”

“Oh, God,” Jane had said, mortified, and tried to smother herself in the bedding.

Mihaela made another trip upstairs to bring her jeans and a red black sweater, as if that would lessen the impact of the walk of shame, and Jane had pulled it on over her new, overpriced La Perla underwear and nursed her coffee and emerging Chivas headache.  San Jose rolled past them far too quickly in the car windows, and by the time they reached Rodney’s estate in the valley again, Jane couldn’t decide if she wanted to throw up from motion sickness or revulsion with her entire life.

“We could just go away again.  I do own an island,” Lex said, pulling to a stop at the front gate to Rodney’s house.  “Also, wow, very nouveau riche.”

Jane shoved at his shoulder.  “God, Lex, shut up—not everybody owns a Scottish castle.”

She was seriously considering asking “Where is the island?” when the front doors to the house burst open and Rodney came running out—as if he’d stayed up the entire night watching the exterior security feed for some sign of her return.  Jane wouldn’t put it past him.

“Not too late for me to hit the gas,” Lex said, watching Rodney bolt down his driveway.

Jane shook her head.  “There’s only so much running I can do,” she murmured.

Lex smiled at her, affectionate, and Jane felt a surge of something warm in her chest to know that at least Lex liked her, and according to the tabloids, Lex didn’t like anybody.

“I do like you, Jane,” Lex said, and reached over to curl a palm around the back of her neck, pull her close and kiss her, sweetly and slowly, luxurious.

“I’m glad,” Jane panted into his mouth, and she would have slipped two fingers into the collar of his black shirt, but that was when Rodney pasted himself to the hood of the car, raving:

“Lex Luthor, you let go of my wife fucking immediately.”

*
*

Despite Lex’s insistence that if it came down to fisticuffs, he could defend himself, Jane just rolled her eyes and made him stay in the car as she got out.

“Rodney, he’s a black belt,” she said, holding Rodney back as Lex drove away.

“How do you know that?” Rodney demanded, grabbing her wrist. “Did he hit you?”

Jane knew it was unintentional, but sometimes Rodney forgot he was four inches taller than her, that he was broad in the shoulders, and she felt herself tip toward him, losing her balance, as he jerked her close to inspect her. Jane thought with a sigh that if anybody were going to give her (un-fun) bruises, it’d be Rodney.

“Yeah, Rodney, he beat me and then he bought me a puppy.” Jane rolled her eyes and pried his fingers off of her, rubbing at her wrists. “Come on, Rodney.”

Rodney opened and closed his fists, like he wished he could chase after Lex’s car and personally destroy the upholstery. “How long has this been going on?” he asked. “How did this—how did you two even meet? He’s from Kansas.”

“It doesn’t matter. I’m a grown-up,” she told him, feeling far too superior for the patchwork of hickey’s Lex had left on her inner thighs. “I can make my own decisions.”

“Not if those decisions involve fucking Lex Luthor!” Rodney pointed a shaking finger to Bell, rolling in something on the professionally manicured front lawn. “Did that hellhound come from him, too?”

“No,” Jane said, “that came from one of the other guys I’m fucking.”

Rodney yelled, “How many are there—a fleet?”

“I wish there was!” Jane yelled back. “I wish there were two fleets. And that way, I wouldn’t feel like such an absolute moron for not enjoying our apparently-open marriage!”

“Okay, that is fucking it,” he roared at her, and even Bell stopped rolling on the lawn, tensing, abruptly aware that the tone of the argument had just changed. “I wasn’t the one about to have sex with—with the football coach in an alleyway behind a Marriott Courtyards! And I’m not screwing somebody from Kansas, either—God, what? Did you go to Forbes.com and look up the next person richer than I am in America?”

Jane’s entire field of vision went red.

“You know what?” she said, suddenly preternaturally calm. “That is it. I am done.”

Faltering, Rodney asked, “What?”

“Done,” Jane repeated, marching over to pull Bell into her arms. “Through. With you.”

“Well,” Rodney said, looking constipated, “good!”

“And by the way,” Jane said, turning to go collect her baby, “Lex is a lot richer than you are.”|

*

Jane managed not to see Rodney for the rest of December and all of January by choreographing school, the nanny, and sending Rodney emails telling him to pick up Gabriel for his weekends straight from day care—that had been the hardest part, having to say goodbye a whole seven hours early. And Jane knew, sometimes seeing the confusion on Gabe’s face that she was being selfish, that if she were a better person and a good mother she’d suck it up and mend fences with Rodney and they’d do the hand-off the traditional way, with Jane lavishing Gabe with his due in good bye and see-you-soon kisses. But the zen she’d gained just before Christmas had gone out the window, and it was like all the fury she hadn’t felt in the face of her grief, had suddenly welled up inside of her, like Jane realized Christmas morning she was divorced, that she’d spent 10 years with a man who thought she was a gold digger and a slut. Whenever it got too much, she put the leash on Bell and they went out for a run—in the pink-gray of early morning or the deep, velvet blue of night, and Jane made lists in her head of trashy sex books to pick up from the library and mine for tips on how to get on with her life, how to make peace with her new reality, how to hire the cutest barely-legal pool boys.

*

In March, Lex took a penthouse in San Francisco, and in the second week, he called asking if she’d like to join him.

“You know, I do work,” she laughed, turning into the high school parking lot. Reed and some girl with glasses the size of her entire face were awkwardly flirting next to the Pepsi machines outside, and Jane felt a pang for her high school romances—for how Dan had, despite being an asshole and almost giving her a concussion when they’d broken up, given her his letter jacket to wear. “I can’t just run off every time you want to ravish somebody.”

“Jane, please,” Lex chided, “that is what escort services are for—I require your presence to entertain me both in and out of my ostentatiously large bed. I’ve already looked up your school schedule, you have two weeks off coming at the end of this one.”

She set the parking brake and grinned down at her lap. “And you just happened to know my schedule well enough to know that Gabe’s with Rodney those two weeks.”

Lex made a considering noise. “I had planned that if he wasn’t, I could buy a playpen, but I think then most of the world would start running our pictures prematurely in the New York Times wedding section.”

Jane wondered if there wasn’t something weird about their relationship, who they lived in a massive gray area of undefined interpersonal connection. She doubted she was being groomed to be the fifth ex-Mrs. Luthor. Maybe this was how friends with benefits was supposed to work, Jane thought philosophically, and grabbed her bag. She wished she had some friends to call around and ask since she’d barely been a sophomore in college before Rodney had started leaving his toothbrush in her apartment. That jackass, Jane decided, ruined everything.

Lex’s apartment in downtown San Francisco was wide and warm, decorated in red-oranges and creams, dark teak wood. There were entire walls of windows and Jane spent the first two days of spring break in bed—sometimes with Lex, sometimes with a book. She’d already read most of the embarrassing Olivia Goldsmith ones, and now she was onto the Starter Wife, ignoring how much Lex was rolling his eyes at her.

“I have other books,” Lex offered, offering her an arm for balance she toed her feet into a pair of soft, faun-colored sandals. “In fact, I have a library.”

“You had these in your library,” Jane told him, and let him open the door for her as they went out. “I’m not letting you force your housekeeper to FedEx me Russian tragedy. Besides, I’ve read it all.”

“Oh?” Lex said, affectionate. “What did you think?”

“All of it made me want to throw myself in front of a train,” Jane replied. “Also: can I drive your Lotus?”

Lex said, “Ha ha ha, no,” and they ended up in his Audi, driving until Lex reached a ramshackle restaurant on the beach as dusk was gathering pink at the edges of the sky. Lex ordered lobster and skate and a cream-briny oyster stew, and they traded stories about all the places they’d been until darkness blanketed the sky over the sea. It was strange to think how far away she felt when she and Gabe and Rodney were looking at the same ocean, near enough to touch.

“Hey,” Lex said, touching the inside of her wrist, “where did you go?”

She frowned out the window. “Do you ever feel like you’re in the wrong place?” Jane asked.

“What, like out of phase?” Lex joked.

Jane made herself smile. “Sort of,” she admitted.

And when Lex leaned over and kissed her fondly on the corner of her mouth, murmuring, “All the time, Jane—all the time,” she thought, You know, I really, really like you.

*

The next morning, she woke up to a blitz of blurry media coverage, pictures of her and Lex entering and exiting the restaurant and giant headlines about the warring romances of the tech titans, which Jane was sure Rodney appreciated if only on the most abstract of levels. That is, he would, if he were over having a seizure—which at the time of his 7:30 a.m. wake-up call to her cell phone he hadn’t been. Of course, it didn’t help that Lex had answered.

“You’re doing that just to piss him off,” Jane accused, pushing her hair from her face and listening to Rodney scream through the handset.

Lex held a finger up to his lips. “I’m sorry, McKay, it’s just that Jane was still incapacitated from our night of lurid passion,” he said sympathetically, and then held the phone away from his ear when another barrage of shouting came forth.

“Okay,” Jane laughed helplessly, clutching the sheets to her chest and trying to snatch the phone away, “that is just deliberately cruel. Lex, give me the phone!”

“While I’ve got you on the line, I wanted to talk about you lowballing me on the last Apple contract,” Lex said, conversational, and that’s when Jane said, “Okay, that’s it,” and abandoned dignity in favor of tackling Lex—naked—and snatching her cell phone out of his hand.

“Hi,” she said, breathless, trying not to think about how she’s straddling Lex’s chest right now, dressed in her hair and a dark blush. “Sorry about that.”

There was an angry silence on the phone. “What the fuck are you doing?” Rodney growled.

“I’m on vacation,” Jane told him truthfully, ignoring Lex as he kissed the pads of her fingers, smirking.

“US Weekly is fucking calling me,” Rodney yelled at her. “Valleywag is calling me!”

“That guy from Valleywag asked me to flash him at your Christmas party like, three years ago,” Jane told him, for lack of anything better to say.

Rodney made a choking noise and hung up on her.

“Congratulations,” Lex said to her, smiling, “I think you just won the divorce.”

And once Jane started laughing, she couldn’t stop.

*

Four weeks later, Jane was reaching into the backseat of her car to unbuckle Gabe’s carseat when she felt someone over her shoulder—and she turned around just in time to see the shadow of a square jaw before the small of her back exploded in pain, a starburst, and she felt her arms and legs and knees go weak, and the last thing she saw before it all went black was Gabe’s face, pale with terror.

*

She woke up later, aching and numb in her fingertips, and she couldn’t feel her legs for long minutes, frozen and hearing her own breath too loud in her ears as she reached around with heavy arms to try and find her son. Jane was on a cold cement floor, nothing binding her wrists or ankles, but she was sluggish, weak. She could barely lift her neck. It took a moment for her eyes to adjust, for the darkness to fade into shadows, and by then the panic was hot and tight in her chest—she couldn’t find her baby, she couldn’t hear his breathing.

What if they had hurt him? He could be cold or bleeding. What if he was scared or confused, and Jane couldn’t help him—she didn’t know where he was. Jane had never not known where Gabe was, and Gabe had always known where she was, where Rodney was, and oh my God, she didn’t even know where she was—

“Oh, good,” someone said. “You’re awake.”

Jane froze.

“You don’t need to worry, your son is fine.”

“Let me see him,” she gasped, automatic, knee-jerk. Her throat felt raw. “I want to see my son.”

“Easily done,” her captor promised, voice soft. “As long as you cooperate.”

“The McKay Technology board isn’t authorized to ransom without proof of life,” Jane said, trying to remember what the lawyers had told her.

Rodney had celebrated becoming a paper billionaire by buying key man and key woman insurance for the family, which Jane felt was strange and then decided was morbid when he’d invited a legal team to dinner to discuss kidnapping procedures. She wished now she’d paid more attention to what they’d been saying to her instead of her pork chop.

“Dismembered body parts don’t count,” she said.

“You’re not here because of McKay Technology,” the man said, amused.

Jane held her breath for a moment. “I—I don’t know what LexCorp’s policies are,” she admitted, and felt sick, because she’d heard an ugly rumor a long time ago that LexCorp didn’t ransom under any circumstance. Maybe Rodney would cut a deal; he could owe Lex, with interest.

The man laughed, and Jane winced at the sound of it. New aches were emerging—her head, her wrist, the inside of her thigh. She tried not to think about it. She needed to get to Gabe and then she needed to get out and the rest was unimportant.

“Oh, Jane, you honestly have no idea, do you?” he asked her, tracing a finger down her cheek, and Jane jerked away, pushed herself up on her hands and knees before collapsing back on her haunches. She was wrung out, exhausted, and now she was leaning against a wall in the near dark, nauseatingly dizzy and scared. She’d never been so scared before.

“Don’t,” she bit out, “touch me.”

He ignored her, curled a finger through her hair, and Jane shuddered, turned her chin. “Didn’t you ever wonder what it was your husband was working on?” he asked. “Not many people would leave a woman like you cold in bed without a good reason.”

“What do you want?” Jane snapped.

“Just for you to make a call,” he said, soothing, oily.

She held out her hand. “Give me the fucking phone and then bring me my son.”

*

The phone rang twice before Rodney picked up, and Jane knew how much that pause had to have cost Rodney, that delay for the recording devices, and when she heard him croak, “Hello?” voice shaking, it was all she could do to say:

“Hi, it’s me.”

“Oh, Jesus,” Rodney gasped. His voice sounded wet, like he’d been crying, like he’d been about to. “Oh fuck, Jane—are you all right? Is Gabe okay? Where are you?”

“I don’t know,” Jane said honestly, watching the man in the corner of the room watch her, his eyes scraping down the length of her body. “I’m fine, but. Rodney, they said they wouldn’t let me see Gabe until after I called you.”

Rodney muttered something under his breath before saying, “Put them on the phone—I’ll talk to them. If it’s money, I’ve already started the process of building liquidity and—”

She swallowed hard, and the man across the room nodded at her, dark hair falling into his eyes. “Go on,” he encouraged. “Tell him—my people said your son’s getting very annoying.”

Jane thought she’d never hated anybody so much in her life, and if she had enough energy to stand up on her own two feet, she’d go over there and kill him with her hands. She was strangely convinced she could—she could do anything for Gabe.

“Rodney,” she interrupted, cutting him off mid-discussion of how he’d personally fucked up the Nasdaq for the day by selling out his entire position in semiconductor stocks, “they—they don’t want money.”

Rodney’s words jumbled up for a minute before he said, “What?”

“They want Doranda,” Jane repeated, listening to Rodney’s silence go still and scary. “They said they want Doranda—Rodney, I don’t know what that is—”

“I do,” Rodney told her, sounding tight, high, more scared than even before. “Jane—oh my God, Jane, I can’t—I can’t give them—”

And that’s when the man came over and pulled the phone away from her ear and held something curved to the dip between her collarbones. It looked like a gun, but it was too long, too round, and it was patterned like a snake, and Jane felt her heart fluttering wildly out of control in her chest, listening to Rodney’s voice get louder and louder on the phone as the man said to him:

“Dr. McKay, as you’ve told many and sundry, there is nothing you can’t do, and you’ll want to do it fast, too, this will be the second time in 12 hours I’ve zatted her.”

Jane was aware just long enough to hear Rodney shout, “No! Fuck you—no!” before the same earthquake of pain roared through her body and she slumped over again, listening to the tinny sound of Rodney distant on the other side of consciousness.

*

The next time she woke up it was daylight, and it streamed into the gray laboratory from narrow slits of windows near the top of the walls. The air was musty and the floors were covered in dirt, grime, accumulated over years, and Jane grabbed at lab tables and stools and pushed herself to her feet—there was no one else in the room: not the man from before, not her son.

Instead there were dusty consoles, the tired, washed-out look of an abandoned lab. She clutched at the walls and tried the doors—all three of them: locked, welded, lock destroyed—heavy metal and
scarred, and Jane glanced up at the windows, another no go. And anyway, she didn’t want out, she wanted her son, and Gabe had to be somewhere in the building.

“Okay,” Jane said to herself, voice raw, “what would Rodney do?”

She glared around the room—at the broken computer part and scattered detritus, like the R&D labs had looked when McKay Technology had moved from its old digs in an office park to a beautiful gleaming building in the valley.

“Too bad I’m not MacGuyver,” Jane sighed, and went to dig through the piles of spare parts on the table. Maybe there would be a key, something heavy to bash out the door—or her kidnappers skull for that matter, when he came back in.

She was sifting through a pile of abandoned PDAs when one of them glowed to life—going blue and soft and bright through its crystalline casing, and Jane froze a minute, glancing up at the door
and then back down again to see an image resolving on the screen: a map, and a single, pale green dot pulsating down the hall. It felt like the brooch in the basement of NORAD complex had, warm in the back of her mind, familiar, but like a babble of foreign languages, near white noise.

“Okay, cool,” she whispered at it, “but not helpful.”

The deeper in the pile, the more things lit up at her fingertips, and Jane remembered Carter awkwardly trying to explain something about gene-coded technology, and how Jane had spent most of the time fantasizing about stabbing her in the face. Some of the things she found felt dangerous, others less so, some felt dead, and when her fingers brushed over another green octagon—the personal shield, McKay had told her, smirking at it—she closed her fist around it and stuffed it into the pocket of her jeans.

But then Jane heard footsteps and she retreated to a far corner of the room, near a stack of abandoned folding chairs, and she was just debating whether or not she could pull off a wrestling move when the man from before said, “I wouldn’t try that, Mrs. McKay—somebody would end up hurt and it wouldn’t be me.”

Jane had a snappy (and stupid) comeback for that all ready when she lifted her head and saw Gabe, tearful and scared-silent in the man’s arms and all her words fell away.

“Okay,” she agreed in a hush.

“I knew you could be biddable,” the man said, approving, and held Gabe out to her, and Jane felt herself rushing over, pulling her baby too-quickly and possibly too-tightly to her chest, but she could feel from the way he fisted his tiny hands in her shirt he didn’t mind.

She ignored the man, the way he watched her, taking time to inspect Gabe for bruises, any cuts, hurts she couldn’t heal with a reassuring smile and grateful kisses and found he was fine. His hands were cold—it was freezing in the basement and Gabe didn’t have his hat—and he looked shaken, but somebody had changed his diaper and if the man left she could even get him fed.

“Hi, baby,” she said, and he frowned at her, batting at her chest. From the corner of her eye, she could see the man heading toward the door, knocking twice, and a glimpes of a dank hall beyond the doorway before it was slammed shut again.

“Hey, hey—I know. I know—we’ll be out of here soon,” she promised, and as the man’s foosteps faded, she dug around in her back pocket, pulling out the octagon brooth and rubbing it clean on her pants. “God, honey, you had better hope what little I remember from biology is true.”

She slid the brooch underneath Gabe’s Aqua Teen Hunger Force shirt and held it near his heart, pressed her forehead against his and muttered, “Oh, come on, come on—please don’t let this be some disgusting, recessive completely useless freak—“ and then she felt it, the pulse of it coming to life, and the crackle of electricity that had enveloped him “—oh, thank God.”

Gabe made an unhappy noise at her and batted again at her chest, which hurt more when there was a forcefield around his hand.

“Sorry, sorry,” Jane told him, plucking the brooch off again and unbuttoning her shirt, unclasping her bra, “I know you must be starving.”

Jane kissed the top of Gabe’s head as he nursed, nosing his way toward her nipple—his hands cold and a little grimy on her skin, and Jane curled up as tightly as she could, pulling her shirt in around him to keep him warm, to hold him near.

“Now,” she whispered down to him, “we just have to figure out how to get out of here.”

Half an hour later, she was still bereft of ideas. Her latent MacGuyver genius was no more active than before and even with Gabe’s help initiating the broken pieces on the table, so far, she’d found something that looked like a shower massager, three things that were probably cell phones, and what she swore was an etch-a-sketch. She sucked at being kidnapped.

“One day, Gabriel,” she told her son, settling down cross-legged on the floor to rest for a moment, “you’ll be able to parlay this experience into a really hot car.”

Gabe frowned at her and kept squirming, looking over his shoulder at the door, pleading.

“Yeah, I know, kid,” she said. “But for once in my life, I’m going to listen to your dad’s overpriced consultants and I’m going to be patient—so that means you’re going to be patient with me.”

*

That plan lasted until some black-clad underline came in to deliver bottled water and diapers and a couple of MREs and saw Jane fiddling with the PDA, too slow to hide it. The woman’s eyes went wide with surprise to see the machine glowing in Jane’s hands, and before Jane could even panic, she was at the doorway, calling out something about the “ATA gene.”

Gabe looked at her mournfully.

“Okay, don’t you start,” Jane muttered, hands shaking as she put the shield back on him, letting out a breath when she saw the shimmer of green. “I’m going to get enough of your crap when you’re in high school and all messed up from being a child of a broken home.”

And by now, the heavy footfalls of the man she’d seen when she’d first woken up were familiar, like his wide shoulders and descriptionless face, his ordinary mouth and nose—the smooth, leathery wound of his voice when he said, “My my—you are a delightful surprise, Mrs. McKay.”

Jane ignored the urge to remind him she was legally divorced and stared at the floor instead.

But his hand stroked down her shoulder, carded through her hair, and no matter how tightly Jane squeezed her eyes shut, all she could think was that somewhere, there was a version of her who knew how to use a gun, and she was furious it wasn’t her.

“Such beauty in an ATA carrier, it’s our lucky day,” he praised.

“Have you heard back from Rodney yet?” she asked.

There was a laugh overhead. “Your husband has been having difficulty acquiring what we need,” he told her, and Jane’s breath caught in her throat when he added, “but perhaps this isn’t a complete loss after all.”

“Whatever it is you want,” Jane promised, “he’ll get it.”

She believed it without doubt, because she knew Rodney was capable of great and terrible things, that his love could go black and jealous and cruel, and it was the first time in all the years she’d known him she was glad for it. Jane had an idea of what they were asking for, why they would ask Rodney specifically—Jane didn’t care if he had to commit high treason, Rodney would come through, he’d bring it, whatever it was they wanted, or he’d find her and Gabe some other way. Her son wasn’t going to die in this basement.

“Oh,” the man said, casual, “he’ll try, and it’s sweet you have such faith in him still, but Dr. Mckay’s powers are finite. Of course, it’s good to know that even if he should fail we’ll still recover something for our efforts.”

He jerked her chin upward, so she was looking dizzily into his dishwater gray eyes.

“Don’t be scared, Jane,” he soothed, “you won’t feel a thing.”

*

Jane’s father had always said she was too stubborn by half to die, but mostly he said it with a sort of grieving reverence, on days when he got drunk and mooned at photographs of Jane’s mother, her dark, smooth hair and smiling eyes. He said, “Jane, if you’d gone with your mother that day, in the wreck—I’d have followed you both as far as I could,” and pulled her in for a hug.

And when she’d told Lex about this, drunk on strawberries and champagne and sitting on the patio of the penthouse in San Francisco, Lex had laughed, slurring a little, and said, “Oh, that’s good to hear—I’ve been sensing that my ex might want to kill you.”

“You didn’t tell me you had an ex!” Jane had laughed, because it’d been funny—it still was.

Lex had actually blushed. “He asked if we could go on a break.

“Now I’m curious,” Jane had said, topping off both their solo cups. They’d been unable to locate the champagne flutes, and Jane, on account of advocating laughing in bed and not wearing a bra, had said, “fuck it” and gone with plastic. “Who was it? Do I know her?”

“Him,” Lex had corrected.

Blinking, Jane had said, “Huh. That’s two now,” thinking of McKay, and waved off Lex’s curious look to add, “Well, who is he?”

And even more sheepish than before, Lex had just pointed out the window, and Jane had narrowed her eyes drunkenly into the skyline, looking for a billboard with a gorgeous underwear model or a famous movie star until she’d seen a spec of primary colors, hovering sullenly in the distance and gasped.

“No way,” she’d laughed.

“Way,” Lex had admitted.

“We have got to figure out Wonder Woman’s number,” Jane remembered she’d said, worried, “because at this rate—you are totally losing the breakup,” and Lex had started laughing so hard he’d spilled the remainder of his champagne.

So Jane kept reminding herself, over and over again, being shoved toward an unmarked room at the end of an unmarked hallway, that she hadn’t died when the family car had wrapped itself around a tree, she hadn’t died when Rodney had left her, and she hadn’t died from sleeping with Superman’s boyfriend—this wasn’t going to take her down either.

Her daddy, once he’d finished killing her captors with his bare hands, would have been proud.

*

The man had lied, and of course he had, because Jane felt her skin crawling as soon as she got through the other side of the door. Gabe made a fussing noise close to her ear and Jane hushed him, desperate, and stared, horrified, at the glass coffin propped up against the wall—the long, white-haired thing on the inside. It had dark lashes and a green-pale face, dark black claws that curled at the tips, tattoos on its cheeks, and Jane saw a slit in one of its palms, like a gash, red.

Jane froze in her tracks.

“No need to be frightened, Jane,” the man told her, closing his fist on the back of her neck, tight enough to bruise—and she bit her lip to stifle a whimper. She wouldn’t give him the satisfaction. “But we do need your help.”

“Can I abstain?” Jane asked, unable to look away. The glass coffin looked frosted-over, dead, asleep, and she knew, being yards and yards away, that it was radiating warning: stay away—don’t touch—don’t disturb—do not unlock.

The man moved to touch the back of Gabe’s sleeping head and Jane was across the room in a heartbeat, listening to herself hiss like a furious cat. He only smiled at her.

“Open the case, if you please,” he invited.

“Do you know what’s in there?” Jane asked, reminding herself over and over again that Gabe had the shield on, that whatever happened, he couldn’t be hurt—that even if Rodney had to sift through wreckage, he would find their son, that he would be all right.

The man raised an eyebrow. “Now, Jane,” he said, “let’s not waste any more time.”

But the closer she got to the coffin, the louder the voices in her head—the mourning noises, the worried sounds, muffled by a language barrier, and by the time she lifted one hand, near enough that the heat of her sweating palms steamed the glass. And she could feel it already, like the machine had a link to the weight in her chest, and it was like looking at the inner workings of a clock through a veil of skin and bone and sensation, to feel the coffin start to unlock.

“Okay,” Jane whispered to herself, and something in her murmured, run, run as soon as it opens, and she did, as soon as she heard the seal break, Jane broke left, then right, and didn’t look back as an inhuman scream filled the room—she just kept running, darting for the door, seeing the looks of fascinated horror on the faces of her guards as they let her pass, frozen.

*

The only thing she and Rodney hadn’t ever fought about was her sense of direction—they both agreed she had none, and Jane knew, running into the semi-lit hallways of the complex that her best bet at the moment was simply to run as far and as fast as possible from whatever had caused all the screaming in the other room.

Her heart was thrashing out of her chest, and every time the saw guards in the hall, each time she crossed paths with someone, she thought, “This is it—they’re going to shoot me,” and “Gabe’s going to see me die,” and “I didn’t want it to be this way,” and “I miss Rodney. I still miss Rodney.” But they just shoved her out of their way, like they weren’t aware that she was their prized kidnap victim or something, and rushed toward where she’d come from, P-90s drawn.

Somewhere between the first left turn and the last one Gabe had started screaming in her ear, crying, and Jane put a hand over his mouth, trying to muffle his shrieking.

“I’m sorry—I’m sorry, but you can scream as much as you want after we get out of this,” she promised, scanning the hall and darting right when she saw two men coming round the corner.

The hallways were narrowing now, half metal and half crumbling cement, closing together, and Jane found more and more locked doors with security codes, button pads that didn’t open no matter how she pounded at them with shaking fingers.

“Fuck!” Jane shouted, coming up another one. “Oh, come on! There has to be a fucking way out of—”

Whatever else she was going to say was swallowed in a barrage of gunfire, a firework of explosions somewhere behind her, the sound of bullets bouncing off of metal. When it finally slowed, stopped, it left in its absence an odd silence, too huge, and Jane realized what was missing: whatever had been screaming in that room was dead now—she was only glad for a second before she remembered that made her the center of attention again.

She pushed away from the wall, creeping along as near silent as she could and closed a hand over the back of Gabe’s head.

She could hear her own breath louder and louder in her head and Gabe had gone from wailing to whimpering—maybe what they said about babies and heartbeats were true, because she was terrified and maybe Gabe could feel that through her ribcage, where he was curled up over her heart.

“It’s okay,” she whispered to him, “McKay told me John does this stuff all the time.”

Gabe made a mournful noise, and Jane sighed, hugging the wall and heading toward a terminating hall—there was a door, and there was that ubiquitous fucking security number pad, but there was also a whisper of light coming from the crack underneath the door.

It could just be halogen, more overheads like the buzzing ones, but it was better than the other options—the unlocked doors, the half-open ones, with dust trailing out into the hallway, scraps of cloth. Jane didn’t know where she was but it smelled like dying things.

The number pad looked pretty much like all the others, when she got close enough to inspect it: 1-9 with asterick, zero, and the number sign on the bottom row—three letters per key. It could be an alphanumeric code of any length, Jane thought, but she’d seen her kidnapper come and go over the course of the hours: he’d been brief at the number pad, four beeps.

There were of course, still thousands of permutations, and Jane tried not to let herself do the math behind that, starting systematically—0000 yielded a red light, so did 0001 and 0002-0009, and Jane was keying in “1034” when she heard footsteps behind her.

When Jane whipped around, it was to come face to face with—

“Oh my God,” she choked out, curling her body around three-quarters, blocking Gabe—who’d started screaming again—as much as she could.

It was the man who’d come to talk to her earlier—only it wasn’t, because his black hair had turned ashen and olive skin had sallowed and lined, like time had fast-fowarded, like there’d been a warp and she’d stepped five decades into the future, to see him week and falling apart, barely alive, emaciated.

His wrist was trembling, shaking as he struggled to hold up a .45—aimed it between her eyes.

“What did you do?” he rasped, his eyes still gleaming. “What did you do?”

Jane blinked and realized she was holding her breath, eyes crossing as she stared down the barrel of the gun, her mind blanking out.

“What did you do?” the man tried to yell, and it came out barely a whisper.

“I didn’t do anything,” Jane said truthfully. “I just opened it—like you asked.”

The gun came closer, and Jane felt her throat go dry, and the voice in the back of her mind that had been listing the things she’d wanted to do shifted gears, suddenly, to remind her of all the things she had that she’d never expected. After all, if she died here, alone and frightened, she at least had a son who was likely too young to remember having seen any of this, and Rodney, for all he was a terrible husband and an appalling boss, loved him, and had loved her. She had managed to homewreck (well, sort of) a superhero, which she felt was admirable in a slutty sort of way, and her students had won bronze at a national science fair—she’d never been hungry or beaten or raped and on a global scorecard she was doing okay.

“Fix it,” the man hissed at her, pressing the metal barrel of the gun to her forehead. “Fix it.”

Jane closed her eyes, put a shaking hand over Gabe’s face. “I can’t,” she choked out. “I didn’t do anything. Just let me go. I can’t help you. Just let me—”

She heard a metal click and thought, I love you, and waited—for white light, for nothing, for black, for hellfire, and instead of any of that, she heard:

“You’re not as pretty as you look in the magazines.”

*

Intellectually, Jane knew it was all kinds of inappropriate to fight with a rescuer, much less when he was the much-lauded and universally-beloved Superman, but honestly, she could sort of see why Lex had broken up with the guy.

“You know you’re kind of a dick,” she told him, getting pushed along the hallway. Gabe’s squall had quieted into bewildered shock when Superman had appeared, and now his face was nestled into the crook of Jane’s neck, staring and staring.

Superman turned around to glare at her. Even his perfect forelock looked pissed. “You know he’s been divorced like, four times,” he said, looking left and right before dragging her down another corridor. She really hoped he knew where he was going.

Jane rolled her eyes. “Is this really the time?” she hissed at him.

“And also,” Superman went on, knocking two rushing guards unconscious with a casual swipe of his hand, “you have a baby. Do you really want to like, raise your baby in a broken home?”

“Just for that,” Jane snapped at him, stepping over the guards and stumbling, “I’m going to become the fifth ex-Mrs. Luthor.”

Superman made a face at her Jane had seen on Rodney before, when she’d passed him diapers to put in the garbage. “I can see why Lex likes you,” he muttered.

“I’m telling him you said that,” Jane said, feeling 14-years-old.

And Superman whirled around on her, red-cheeked and furiously embarrassed, but before he could start in on how she was destroy his and Lex’s cosmic love, something came out of nowhere and tackled him into a wall.

It was tall and wearing black snakeskin—a coat that flapped around it, and Jane saw a flash of black claws and green skin and knew that whatever it was they’d made her wake up in that room hadn’t died at all. That hand with the cut down the palm was gleaming and wet with blood and Jane saw it rushing up, rising up—

And that’s when Jane heard the shot and the—whatever the hell it was—flew across the room, slammed into the cement with a crunch before crumbling to the ground, followed by another body, another guard, his eyes rolling back in his head, gun abandoned. Then Superman was right in her face, his green eyes wide and his mouth open and his face pale and—

She blinked twice at him, at his blown pupils.

“What? Why are you looking at me like that?” The words weren’t coming out of her throat.

“Jane,” he said, and he tried to take Gabe away from her, “you’ve been shot. You’re in shock.”

And she must have been because she let him, and when she saw Gabe’s face, he was wailing again, terrified, reaching his arms out toward her, force-field around his fingers streaked red.

“Oh,” Jane breathed out, and felt herself slump against a wall, her breath go out of her, and before Superman could scoop her into his arms, one of those doors she could never get open did and Rodney tumbled into the hallway, and the last thing she remembered seeing was him falling to his knees in front of her, his hands open and desperate and empty.

*

Jane woke up saying, “Ow.”

“Oh my God,” Rodney said, somewhere over her head, “Doctor! Doctors!”

The flurry of activity immediately afterward was exhausting, between doctors coming in and out of the room to shine flashlights into her eyes and look at her wound (right in her stomach, to match her C-section scar) and to ignore her when she made sad, parched noises and tried to plead for something to drink. And Rodney, that coward, hung back and wrung his hands, looking heartbroken and disinclined to interrupt her the inquisition.

It was until later, hours later, that everybody was satisfied with poking her and drawing blood and telling her how lucky she’d been and her pathetic moaning finally brought Rodney and a cup of ice within snatching range.

“Oh, God,” she moaned, hoarse, feeling the water slide down her throat, and she could cry from how good that felt. She glanced up at Rodney, at the way he was staring down at her, dark bruises under his bloodshot eyes, he looked thin and a little brittle. “Gabe?” she asked.

Rodney shook his head. “He’s fine,” he whispered at her. “I had Jeannie take him home.”

Jane felt a pang, but nodded. She didn’t want Gabe to see this, either, and then she blushed and glanced down at her chest—she was probably leaking through her hospital gown by now.

“Um,” Rodney said, “I—I had one of the nurses, um.” He waved indistinctly at her chest. “I would have done it myself but Sam locked me into one of the barracks to make me sleep.”

Clutching at her hospital gown, Jane said, “Thanks—I guess.”

Rodney cleared his throat, took another step toward the bed and straightened her sheets, awkward and staring down at the blanket over her legs. “So,” he said, shrill, “I’m suing Superman.”

Jane laughed, and it hurt, a lot. “Oh, God,” she managed, “what? What did you say?”

“For reckless endangerment,” Rodney went on, puffing up, but his mouth was twitching, and Jane thought maybe this was old Rodney, the Rodney who’d drawn her scathing character defamations on napkins at their wedding reception. “He’s clearly a substandard superhero—I should have called Batman.”

“It’s true,” Jane couldn’t help but answer, trying not to grin too wide, “the Dark Knight’s so much more dreamy.”

Rodney scowled at her. “Maybe the Green Lantern, then,” he muttered, and before she could tell him that she thought green was a terribly ravishing color, Rodney blurted out:

“I don’t want to not be married to you.”

“Um,” Jane said intelligently. “What?”

Looking miserable, Rodney reached over, and hesitating, he took her hand, closed his own around it, and Jane suffered a sudden, vivid flashback, a blurry half-memory, of being wheeled into the operating room and Rodney running alongside the gurney, his fingers warm on her face.

“Look,” he said, hushed and desperate, “Jane, I don’t know what to do without you, and I didn’t like the person I was when we were married, toward the end, but I am—” he stopped, smirking bitterly “—and I mean this utterly: but I am an absolute bastard when we’re not married and I miss you. Jane, all three of my secretaries quit.”

Jane frowned at him. “Well, that’s because you made fun of Danny’s limp,” she pointed out.

“Jane,” Rodney said, laughing helplessly, “I’m being serious.”

“Sorry,” she said, and looked at their hands, fingers entwined together.

Rodney sounded panicked now, his voice pitchy as he said, “I’ll do better, I’ll sit through the counseling this time—we were good, weren’t we? Before?”

She felt, like Lex had said, out of phase, in the wrong place, and if she didn’t belong with Rodney she didn’t know where she belonged. Jane didn’t know what to say, or how to say it, she just squeezed Rodney’s hand and kept staring at her knees underneath the salmon-colored blanket. It would be easier just to write this off, to say they’d been too young and too stubborn and the hurts were too deep to heal—if she tried hard enough, she could even believe it.

“It wasn’t just you,” Jane said, swallowing around the ball in her throat, because she’d had a hand in it, too, her own disappointment and grief. Rodney was unkind and Jane had been unforgiving, and they’d both gotten distracted—they’d both blinked. “Rodney, I don’t—”

He put his free hand over her mouth.

“Before you say anything else,” he said to her, urgent, “I think you should know that possibly since the moment I saw you, and for the entirety of our courtship and throughout our oftentimes completely disastrous marriage and for every one of the 245 days we’ve been divorced, I have loved you in a way that defies calculation.”

Whatever Jane wanted to say extinguished in her chest, in the fierce, desperate light of his eyes, blue and enormous, pleading.

“You infuriate me and you make me make the good decisions instead of the smart ones,” Rodney went on, turning red, “and Jane, you don’t even know what this means, but I gave up Atlantis to stay with you, even though we were barely talking to each other at that point.”

“I know about Atlantis,” Jane murmured, staring up at him in wonder, remembering the way that McKay had talked about it, with the reverence of the converted, the entirely faithful.

“God, Jane,” Rodney breathed out, his mouth slanted, his entire face collapsing under the weight of his exhaustion, “I don’t want to not be married to you. I don’t want to invalidate everything that made me happy. I don’t want to keep hiring new assistants. Please,” he said, and he lifted their hands to put his face against her fingers, his breath hot and wet on her skin, “please, Jane.”

Jane stared at him for a long time before she managed:

“Can—” he looked up at her, eyes wide with hope “—Can I think about it?”

And it was like the light in Rodney’s face was snuffed out, his whole face closed over.

Before Jane could say, “No, Rodney, I mean it,” he set her hand back down on the bed and took a step away, looking away, edging away, and said, “Fine—take all the time you want,” conversation over.

*

The fourth day she’d been awake in the hospital—third day after Rodney had disappeared on her, third day Jeannie called her at two hour intervals to ask if she was all right and tell her that her brother was an asshole and a coward and please, please, please marry him again before he destroyed his life’s work at McKay Technology—Lex swept into the hospital with a Japanese silk robe for her and said, “Come on, this place is cramping my style.”

“I don’t think that’s such a good idea,” Jane protested, still feeling sorry for herself. “Your ex already made it pretty clear he’d kill me with his giant alien hands if I touched you again.”

“Superman is a very delicate invincible alien,” Lex said, dismissive, tugging at her hospital gown. “Come on, you can’t expect to adequately recover in this hellhole.”

“Lex,” Jane said, eyes darting toward the window. There was a 50-50 chance either Superman was out there trying to kill her with his mind or Rodney had hired a sniper to stand watch at one of the tall buildings around the hospital.

Lex draped the silk over her shoulders—whisper-soft. “Jane, please,” he said, matter-of-fact, “Superman is occupied with a mudslide in India and the last I checked, McKay was still trapped on a conference call with some very angry A-class shareholders—let’s go.”

They ended up in his penthouse in Metropolis, and Lex set her up in his bed, considerately placing an enormous stack of mind-rottingly bad books within easy reach. Jane smiled up at him gratefully and opened a copy of Good in Bed. “Thanks,” she told him honestly, and Lex kissed her forehead and settled in next to her with a copy of the latest book in the Jedi Academy series.

The sixth day since she’d been shot—the fifth day since Rodney had walked out on her, the day after Lex took her to Metropolis—was Tuesday, and Jane circumvented spent most of it playing Katamari Damacy until her fingers were numb. Late that night, into the jewel-tone dark of the Metropolis night, watching light arc over the ceiling of Lex’s bedroom, she turned to her left and whispered, close to Lex’s ear, “Rodney wants us to work it out.”

The corners of Lex’s mouth jerked up a little, rueful. “You know, Jane,” he whispered back, turning to catch her gaze, “some of us would kill to have a lover say he wanted you enough to try.”

Jane found herself suddenly thinking of the first time Rodney had kissed her, the way he’d been so nervous, how his hand had been wet with nervous sweat on her wrist, the way he’d missed her mouth entirely. She’d touched his cheek and laughed a little, softly against his lips, and tilted them until his mouth closed over hers, soft and possessing, and she’d forgotten all about how it was a little too cold and how it was raining, water drizzling over the doorstep of her second-floor apartment. Jane thought about the kiss on her wedding day, fierce, joyful, unafraid, and the way Rodney had kissed her back the day that Gabe had come to them: desperate, lovely—hopeful.

She wanted to believe, too.

She wanted that again, to feel Rodney’s mouth on hers and the buzz of happiness that had fizzed through her veins, the heavy sense of belonging that had pulsed underneath her skin. She wanted him to take her stargazing again, to South Africa and the large telescope, to planetariums during laser shows. She wanted him to be a father with her, to cry with her when Gabe left them for kindergarten and laugh at his graduations, to be on her side when he threw teenaged tantrums, when he broke her heart. She wanted to be angry with Rodney and forgive Rodney and for him to forgive her—Jane wanted to grow old with him. She always had.

Jane smiled back at Lex, watched his eyes gleaming in the dark, and stroked his cheek.

“I would have been,” she said to him in a hush, “an excellent ex-Mrs. Luthor, you know.”

“Of that,” Lex answered her, grinning, “I am absolutely certain.”

*

On the seventh day, Jane paced Lex’s roof terrace, scanning the skies.

She’d called Rodney’s house, his sister, his office. She’d called Rodney’s lawyers and accountants and his therapist and his neurologist, his prescribing general physician. Nobody had known where he was, and Jane had, finally, resorted to calling the number inscribed on an otherwise unmarked white business card: S. CARTER.

“Rodney?” Carter had asked, baffled.

“I can’t find him,” Jane forced out. “I was just wondering if you’d heard from him.”

“Oh,” Carter yelled, “that son of a bitch!”

So now, Jane was looking for the only person who could help her at this point, hands clasped over her still-healing gunshot wound, wrapping the sweater Lex had liberated from the Badgley Mishka show more tightly around her shoulders and despairing at the gray overhead. Lex had been called away, something about terrified tech analysts calling in a frenzy, demanding to know why McKay Technology’s CEO had taken profit on every single one of his equities. It was probably for the best, since most of Lex’s suggestions for summoning his ex-boyfriend had involved setting something on fire or finding some kind of firearm.

“You wouldn’t really have to shoot anybody,” Lex had said brightly. “You could just pretend.”

She’d pointed at the terrace doors. “Go away—go tell people we’re not entering a recession.”

And now, an hour of fruitless searching later, resigned and hoping no one was near enough to hear her, she said:

“Superman?”

No response.

“Superman,” she tried again, louder, and when there was still no response, Jane yelled, “I know you can hear me! I checked the wires—nothing’s on fire, nobody’s political system collapsed. I need to talk to you!”

Still nothing.

Jane rolled her eyes. She hadn’t wanted to resort to this.

“I’m carrying Lex Luthor’s love child, I just thought you might want to know,” she yelled up at the sky—and before the last echo of her words had faded out entirely, Superman was there, a swirl of red and blue and wholesome American goodness, looking devastated as he croaked:

“What? What did you say?”

“I lied,” she said, and before his expression could melt from horror to fury, Jane went on, explaining, “Look, I need a favor.”

It took him a minute, but Superman sputtered, “Are you kidding me? You’re sleeping with my—my—with Lex Luthor! Your ex-husband is suing me!”

Jane had known that Rodney was bad at being divorced from her, the string of increasingly ridiculous nannies had been pretty indicative, but now he was adding frivolous lawsuits into the mix. This was clearly serious.

“I need a ride,” Jane told him, and before Superman could pull her hair and weep about how she’d stolen his man, she said, “To Antarctica, or, so help me God, I will go in there, dress up like Princess Leia and seduce him. We’ll be married in a week.”

Superman stared at her, distressed.

“You know he’d do it. He has a sickness,” Jane threatened.

Superman glared at her hard enough that Jane worried she might be set on fire (literally), but finally, his shoulders slumped, and looking resigned and entirely human, he muttered, “Fine—but you’ll need a parka.”

*

Jane thought she’d known true coldness the one Christmas Jeannie had tricked she and Rodney into going to Vancouver. She’d spent the entire week wrapped in every blanket and sweater in the house, curled up hatefully in front of the roaring fire, sending Rodney to fetch and carry coffee, tea, molten lava, because she’d never been so cold in her life. Every time Caleb opened the door to the house, she had wanted to rise up and scratch his eyeballs out of his face.

That was nothing compared to Antarctica—the sheer bleakness of the cold, the unrelenting wind, was enough to knock the breath out of her, and even with Superman taking the brunt of it Jane could hear her teeth chattering. She was going to kill Rodney for this.

“Are you sure you want to do this?” Superman asked, shouting over the screaming wind.

“No!” Jane yelled back. “Get me closer to the entrance!”

Superman actually looked nervous. “They’re not going to shoot stuff at me, are they?”

“How the hell would I know?” Jane demanded, thumping his titanium back. “How are you this uncool, anyway? Lex told me you were invincible!”

He floated her a bit closer to the dome in the ice, arms tight around her, protective, like he was trying to make up for earlier. “I can still bruise,” he sulked, and said, “Okay, I think this is it,” and set down.

When Carter had said, more embarrassed than anything else, that Rodney had offered to take up the post of chief science officer at the U.S. Air Force’s Antarctic base, Jane’s response had been, essentially, “You’ve got to be fucking with me.”

Jane wasn’t even supposed to know about the Antarctic base—she imagined Carter had told her mostly out of a sense of homewrecking guilt, for which Jane now had deep sympathy—much less be there, and so the idea of a military transport was right out. Even with Lex’s vast resources, arranging a trip with the proper supplies and guides would take weeks, and Jane was pissed enough as it was, allowing her irritation to percolate another month or two could only lead to tragedy.

“This isn’t going to work,” Superman said, sounding genuinely worried and wrapping his cape around her shoulders, “you’re still injured—you shouldn’t even be out here.”

“Give him a second,” she stuttered, teeth chattering.

He looked at her curiously, thoughtful. “I thought you didn’t love him anymore,” he said.

Jane glared at him as best as she could. “I thought you didn’t love Lex anymore, either.”

“We shouldn’t talk,” Superman said, scowling at her, “conserve heat.”

“I agree,” Jane said, and just when she thought no one had seen them at all, out of nowhere in the snowdrifts near the dome, she saw a figure in neon-orange climb out, arms waving as it rushed toward them, and she must have been dumb from the cold because it took her a while to realize that the noises it was making were death threats.

“What are doing here?” Rodney shrieked, coming closer, tromping through the snow.

His face was red and his nose was red and his eyes were red, and Jane thought he was the most wonderful thing she’d ever seen—just that snatch of him visible in the hood of his fur-lined park.

“Don’t you remember you’ve been shot? Oh my God!” he wailed, and shoving at her, tugging her through the snow toward the complex. Jane let herself be led through the drifts, following Rodney closely until he got her inside, where a phalanx of people with Coke-bottle glasses stared at her, wide-eyed, as Rodney struggled to get the door shut again, to block out the wind.

“Hi,” Jane said to them, muzzy from the cold.

“Hi,” one of them said back. “Are you Jane?”

“We’ve heard about you,” another told her. “A lot