East Coast Gazette

Firstly, for those of you who picked up Harudaki 1-3, now, if you go to my swag folder, you can get 4-6 — happy reading!

And secondly:

Title: Arc (pt 2/?)
Rating: R
Summary: In which Geoffrey is not actually a hooker, Conner looks like a hipster tool (but in an endearing way), and Clark does that thing my mom does and drives me up the motherfucking wall.

*

Three weeks later, Geoffrey got his last set of ARE results back and immediately tackled Conner into bed—which would have been a lot hotter and sexier if he hadn’t then immediately fallen asleep.

Conner, because Geoffrey was a dead weight and not at all because it was kind of nice to pet him like a cat, stayed in bed anyway, typing one-handed on his laptop and running his fingers through Geoffrey’s hair with the other. He had emails from both Julie and Garrison, casting disturbingly similar aspersions on one another—although only Julie’s included a frighteningly detailed plan of how to break into Garrison’s apartment and kill him without leaving any signs of entry. Garrison talked extensively about Loretta, his new dealer. Conner suggested—purely for Garrison’s safety—that he should look into introducing Julie and Loretta in the (very) near future.

And since Geoffrey seemed content to sleep through the night that way, Conner eventually wormed his way out from underneath his six-ton arm and wandered into the kitchen. There were three stacks of manuscripts laid out on the counter: to be mailed, in progress, and oh fuck I should have already started these. Most people worked straight off of electronic documents but Conner had approximately twelve thousand multicolored Fineliners and God damn if he wasn’t going to use them—so he grabbed something off of the in-progress pile and headed up for the roof garden.

It was an unseasonably cold spring for Metropolis. Conner had gotten used to the sidewalks and buildings soaking up sunshine like ovens, radiating it outward again so that team rose late at night. Conner, during his extremely short love affair with Sin City, had thought that Metropolis at night looked like something out of a Frank Miller comic: a little sultry—but only from a distance. From his 23rd story view, Metropolis looked like an electric playground. Nearby, there were short, orange-windowed rowhouses and brownstones, squat apartments with rooftop gardens, overflowing with greenery nearest, and in the distance, slick, sleek, seamless skyscrapers glittered.

The sight of Metropolis shining only made it feel colder, and Conner abandoned his defensive position next to their wildly overgrown fern to retrieve a blanket, wrapped it around his shoulders like a shawl. It was too dark, really, to do any work, but it felt good to listen to the city murmur below, to look at the burnt umber shadows of people in nearby windows and smell food and car exhaust and the occasional breath of cold, sweet oxygen.

In his more maudlin moments—which Lex attributed to Clark’s genetic contribution—Conner thought Metropolis was a dark-haired woman, and like Lois Lane who documented her ins and outs, Metropolis would have a laugh that filled entire rooms. In contrast Washington felt buttoned-up, the beltway like fine hemming, holding it all in tailored perfection, a city cut out of limestone and marble and artfully lit—beautiful and intimidating and elegant.

Conner had always felt awkward in the face of elegance, like he was in a complicated choreography: he knew all the steps—of course he did—but he was so busy making sure he did everything right he could hardly do anything at all. When he was 17, redoing his junior year at St. Ann’s, he’d come out of a subway station and tripped—face first—into an open recycling bin, and even then he’d been thinking about the physics test he was honor-bound to fail. Conner had always thought privately he’d probably been born above his station in life, despite how horrible and French feudalism it all sounded: he’d come from a glass tube and a family legacy of megalomaniac bastards—it didn’t seem right he shied from crowds and blushed when photographed.

“And it’s only going to get worse,” Conner told the fern, sighing into the blanket.

In the morning, he had a four-hour meeting scheduled with Lex’s publicists and campaign strategists, and knowing how time slowed and warped at the event horizon of his father’s political intentions, he could expect that four hours to balloon into six, then eight. And then he’d wake up on a jet and be headed toward Washington, kidnapped out of his ordinary existence to make nice with potential contributors and negotiate Clark and Lex’s latest peace treaty, to keep them from burning down their multi-million dollar townhouse in Georgetown, which would almost certainly hinder his father’s campaign.

And even if he resented it more than a little, Conner could never begrudge his father’s aspirations, his due credit. He’d meant what he’d told the L.A. Times.

His father did want to rule the world, and Conner wanted to see what he would do with it.

*

The Luthor for America campaign headquarters were across the street from the only Krispy Kreme in all of Metropolis, which Conner figured was the primary reason for the location of said headquarters. Considering it was barely eight a.m. and he was meeting with politicos, he was grateful for it, and stuffed three still-warm doughnuts into his mouth, one after another, washing it all down with the appallingly bad coffee from Newton’s Cafe next door. Conner knew a guy who knew a guy who knew Newton, and if ever there was an argument for the power of guilt by association, it was Conner walking past two Caribou Coffees, a Starbucks, and an indie hipster place that roasted its own fairly-traded shade-grown organic beans on site to go buy coffee at Newtons.

The actual office interior bore no resemblance to any other Luthor-affiliated office space Conner had ever known: the furniture was old and scuffed and looked as if it’d been collected from the dumpster area of the MetU South Campus dorms, there were ugly (defaced) motivational posters on the walls, and there was utter, unrelenting chaos. People shouted into telephones and shouted at fax machines and computers and typed in ALL CAPS on their BlackBerrys; there were television and video feeds running constantly, NPR faint in the distance, and Conner saw at least two dozen video phones and two dozen faces from different corners of the country reporting in.

He debated, briefly, sneaking away, but then Sherry—God damn her, Conner thought—caught sight of him and waved him over. Even her elbows looked harried, snapping her forearm and wrist in and out like a telegraphed shout, and Conner hustled, eating another doughnut for strength as he went.

“You’re late,” she told him, snatching up a tablet computer and a binder of loose paper, pen already tucked behind one ear, near-lost in her nest of red hair. She was wearing a black linen shirt and tan slacks, spike heels and no jewelry. Conner and Julie had once been in the process of betting whether or not Sherry actually had a soul when Lex had walked past and dropped a twenty and said flatly, “No,” which had pretty much ruined the entire thing because Conner’s dad was only ever wrong about women he tried to marry.

“I was on time,” Conner argued, winding around wayward campaign workers and following her tap-tap-tapping heels to a back conference room. “I was watching the crazy.”

“I was teleconferencing with some stockbroker in Norway,” Sherry muttered, sounding disgusted, tugging open a door and waving Conner inside. “How many women did you father have to propose to? I’m the only person in politics who’s ever been in the unenviable position of trying to convince people somebody is gay instead of just slutty.”

Conner covered his face. “Sherry,” he moaned.

“Please, Conner, grow a pair,” Sherry sighed, aggrieved.

“Not about my father’s sex life,” Conner snapped, glaring at her through his fingers.

Sherry gave him a pitying look over the thin, silver-wire frames of her glasses and said, monotone, “Okay,” and tapped around her laptop with her manicured nails, clearing her throat before she said, “This is going to be a long ride, Conner—longer than the Senate races or House races.”

Conner wished he had another doughnut.

“I’d give you some stupid campaign kid speech about smiling and thinking of the White House but I think you already know that song and dance,” Sherry continued, relentless and without any empathy. “Are you ready for this?”

Conner stared at her, morose. “No.”

“Good,” she said, turning back to her tablet. “Let’s talk about platform.”

Seven hours later, Conner finally dragged back into his building, sore and cranky and feeling six kinds of stupid. Sherry had spent the whole morning insulting his intelligence and then the entire afternoon making fun of his clothes—and then she’d polled the entire office via instant message about whether or not his Chucks made Conner look like a hipster tool. the only redeeming element of the entire day had been when the poll came back with a firm, “Yes, but in a cute way,” answer.

Conner had just liberated himself of pants with buttons and his socks, Jeopardy playing in the background, when the migraine hit.

*

“Kill me,” Conner begged.

“Yes, because complaining is productive,” Geoffrey said, but his voice was barely louder than a whisper, just a brush of syllables near Conner’s ear, fingers carding through Conner’s hair.

Conner pressed his face into the coolness of the pillowcase.

“The medicine should kick in any minute,” Geoffrey promised.

“You lie,” Conner whimpered. “You’re a liar. The left side of my head is gonna explode and I’ll die.”

Conner recognized that his apparent age decreased with the magnitude of migraine-associated suck, because nothing brought you down a peg or two more than feeling like your brain was committing itself to suicide-bombing your skull.

“It’s true,” Geoffrey admitted. “And then I’ll take all your money and spend it on hookers and blow.”

Flailing in Geoffrey’s general direction, Conner promised, “I’ll kill you. And your hookers.”

“Yeah, that’s the Zomig,” Geoffrey laughed, palming the curve of Conner’s skull.

Conner turned his cheek to the pillow, squinting at Geoffrey’s silhouette, dark against the shining background of the city, faint blue in the lengthening days of late spring. “I’m not sure I’m happy about Dad running for president,” he admitted.

Geoffrey shrugged, reaching over Conner’s shoulder for a quilt to tuck around him, ward off the chill air slipping beneath the sash of their opened bedroom windows. It smelled like laundry detergent and atmosphere and falafels. “You’re entitled to your opinions, Conner.”

He felt selfish, uncomfortable in his own skin, and it was good to talk sometimes like this, when it would distract him from the lingering throb of the headache, a slow pulse in tandem with the blood pounding in his ears. Rolling over, Conner stared at his ceiling, the slowly-ambulating fan blades and thought of Lois and her old apartment, the breeze from her bedroom window.

He reached up and caught Geoffrey’s fingers, laced his own in between. “This is going to suck a lot for you and me.”

Geoffrey’s fingers mapped Conner’s knuckles, and he said, “Well, yeah.”

“Sorry,” Conner said.

Shrugging, Geoffrey said, “I knew what I was getting into when I got into it.”

Conner raised his eyebrows. “Did you just make a sex joke?”

“Yeah,” Geoffrey said, grinning, “I learned it from a hot Kappa in college.”

“Okay,” Conner promised, pushing himself up and reaching for Geoffrey’s neck, “I’ll kill you.”

Geoffrey caught his wrists. “Seriously—Conner. It’s fine.”

Blinking, Conner asked, “Are you sure? Because this—no one signs up for this.”

“Clark did,” Geoffrey pointed out.

“Yeah, but they’re…” Conner started, and then trailed off, because he didn’t even know what kind of point he was trying to make. Or maybe he did, but he didn’t like it because he liked to think that he and Geoffrey were the same kind of self-assured comfort that he saw in his parents—hopefully with less shouting and gay divorce. But he and Geoffrey were still new—a toy with the shine on.

“Stop worrying about it,” Geoffrey told him. “We’re going to be fine.”

The first news cycle barely exhaled before going high-octane into cycle two, spurred by the appearance of photographs of one of the Republican candidates wearing a potentially offensive t-shirt (“YOU DON’T HAVE TO BE QUEER TO BE HERE AND PROUD”), which Conner found hilarious until he saw the front page splash in the New York Post the day after that was a picture of him and Geoffrey in the middle of a wicked fight—hand-waving and hair-tugging and sunglasses askew—at the Metropolis farmer’s market, where they’d pulled over to continue their car fight in a new venue. Not all that embarrassing, except for the part where Geoffrey was wearing an ill-advised wifebeater and a pair of jeans and looked kind of like a prostitute.

“I take it back,” Geoffrey told him, and slammed the door to his office shut.

“If it makes you feel any better, I would totally pay premium dollar for that!” Conner shouted through the wood, and in the background, Clark puttered around the apartment, hiding from Lex’s publicist and digging through Conner’s bills.

*