The Oak Tree and the Cypress

Written for mistressace.  Thanks to mecurtin and chasethecat for beta work.

“Holy.  Fucking.  Christ.”

Clark rolled over onto his back, panting and glistening and flushing and generally doing about a dozen other things of which Lex whole-heartedly approved.  His hair was sticking to his forehead in untidy whorls, completely undone after a day’s obedience to the most ferocious hair products the stylist had been able to unearth, and his lips were slightly parted, showing a tongue that was still restless.

Lex cracked his neck to one side and grinned, collapsing onto the mattress beside Clark.  “Such a filthy mouth,” he said proudly, too enamored of the picture Clark made to consider intruding on it personally.  “I never would have guessed you had that mouth when I met you.”

“I’m surprised,” Clark said, some seconds later, as he regained use of his limbs and one hand drifted up to pull Lex closer.  “From what you’ve told me, I was pretty much nothing *but* a mouth when you first saw me.  What did you say?  ‘A mouth made to be fucked’?”

“I said ‘when I met you’,” Lex corrected, as Clark reached up and tucked Lex’s head down, resting against Clark’s shoulder.  Lex could feel Clark’s pulse thudding against his own temple, slowing gradually.  “Not ‘when I saw you’.”

“Oh, so – by the time you met me at the interview, all the masturbatory fantasies involving my mouth were completely exhausted, were they?” Clark laughed.  Lex pressed his fingers into Clark’s side, feeling them slip into the slight indentations between ribs.

“On the contrary,” Lex said.  “Your mouth looked even more fuckable in real life.  It still does.”

“So, were you thinking dirty thoughts even when you watched me walk down the aisle with my parents?” Clark asked, smiling coyly.

But Lex’s mind was now stuck back on that first meeting with Clark, that long-ago day in his LexCorp office when, for the first time in Lex’s experience, reality had trumped fantasy with amazing flair.  Clark had been so much more vivid, so much more beautiful, so much more *everything*, in short, that Lex had surprised himself by retreating into an unplanned kind of cool professionalism, distancing himself from the urge to just grab Clark by his cheap dress shirt, haul him across his desk, and devour that perfect cherry-red mouth.

“Where are you?” the now-Clark asked in a quiet voice, like a single plucked note on a guitar.

Lex smiled into Clark’s skin, feeling the pull of his lips against Clark’s body.  “The interview.”

“I refuse to believe that you found anything sexy in the way I rambled about cattle insemination,” Clark said firmly.  They had had this conversation before.

“It wasn’t the topic, Clark,” Lex replied, lifting his head merely for the pleasure of settling it down in a slightly different place, giving himself a new square inch to kiss absent-mindedly.  “It was the reality of you.”  Clark wouldn’t like that – he never liked it when Lex started praising him too much.

But for once, Clark didn’t dissemble, joke, or protest.  He only stroked a hand over Lex’s face and settled gentle fingers on Lex’s ear, caressing it a little.  “Tell me,” he said softly.  “Tell me about it.”

So Lex did.  “You were sixteen when I first saw a picture of you,” he said, closing his eyes to view the photograph that he had memorized.  “School picture.  You had the worst haircut.”

“You like my hair long,” Clark said, still toying with Lex’s ear.

“But your mouth was – ” Lex stopped, opening his eyes to tilt his chin up so he could see the mouth again.  “God, for months, I collected you.  Stupid things.  I had an album.  And I would lock my office door and I’d – all I needed to do was think about that mouth, and I came.”

Clark made a slight noise at this, shifting, and Lex was afraid for a moment that Clark was about to shush him, but Clark didn’t.

“But when I met you,” Lex said, seeking out a nipple and gently pinching it, “it was completely different.”  The pinch made Clark’s hips swivel, just a little, but it encouraged Lex.  “I don’t even remember most of what happened that day,” Lex admitted, pinching again and getting a soft gasp for his troubles.  “All I knew, when you left the room, was that my plan had utterly failed.”

“It had?” Clark asked.  “But… we got married, didn’t we?”

“That was the long-term plan,” Lex said, looking down now to see Clark’s cock begin to harden again as Lex continued to play.  “The short-term plan was much simpler.”

“Was it?” asked Clark in the slightly distracted tone that meant he was thinking about the prospect of sex in the immediate future.

Lex pushed himself up on one elbow and took his hand away, forcing Clark’s attention to his face.  “The short-term plan,” Lex said succinctly, “was to fuck you senseless.”

Lex could actually watch Clark’s pupils dilate as this revelation took hold.  “You were going to…back *then*?” Clark asked, his voice suddenly rough and young-sounding.

“It was supposed to be a seduction,” Lex said, clambering up further, until he was straddling Clark’s chest.  “I thought the best way to get you to agree to the plan would be to get into your pants first.”

“Why didn’t you?” Clark asked, wriggling under Lex’s weight, reaching around and getting a good hold on Lex’s ass as if Lex were about to leave.

Lex paused for a moment, torn between the old instinct of mendacity to protect himself and his newer and far less consistent urge to make Clark proud of him.  In the end, with the help of Clark’s clear gaze, the latter won out.  “You threw me.  Completely.”

Clark’s mouth fractured out of sobriety into a drunken sunny grin.  “Yeah, my brilliance must have dazzled you,” he began playfully, “between all the ‘um’s and ‘you know’s.”

Lex didn’t let himself respond to the smile as he wanted to, with his own grin and a lazy kiss.  Instead, he just watched Clark.  “I was so shattered by you,” Lex recalled, pinning Clark by the shoulders and bowing to kiss his collarbone.  “So utterly broken.”

Clark made no verbal response, only arched up into the kiss.  Lex took a moment to trace the deceptively frail arc of Clark’s neck, then sat up again.

“For two years – more – you were just this dirty idea in my head, this plaything that I wanted and ultimately would have.  But when you walked into my office,” Lex murmured, serenely riding the sudden motion of Clark’s lifting hips, “you were so much more than I expected.”

“Taller,” Clark said, with only a trace of a smile left.

“The way you moved –”

“I knocked into your floor lamp on the way in the door,” Clark interrupted, eyes half-mast as Lex’s hands framed his ribcage.

“And I realized you weren’t some porn star in the making,” Lex continued, slipping his fingers under the margins of Clark’s torso, feeling Clark’s powerful breaths pushing at his palms.  “That you were young and vulnerable and still – god, so fucking gorgeous.”  Lex sensed that Clark was about to protest, so he quickly shifted backwards, settling his ass against Clark’s hard erection.  “It was like someone had painted you in more vibrant colours,” Lex reminisced, knowing that the slip of his cleft against Clark’s cock would be enough to belay any teasing comments about the way Lex was waxing poetic.  “Your hair was darker, and your lips were redder.  Your eyes were brighter.  I could see how intelligent you were, how you were studying me to see what I was thinking.”

“Not that intelligent,” Clark’s voice hitched, now at the stage where he was cavalier with his pronouns.  “Never guessed that you wanted me naked.”

His tone, now deep and rough with sex, was in sharp contrast to the sweeter and mellower tenor that Lex had first heard in his office.  “You were younger than I’d ever guessed,” Lex said, “and even though that made me want to – fuck, there were a hundred things I almost did, and they all involved me getting on my knees – I couldn’t.  Because you…I knew it couldn’t be like that.”

“What,” Clark gasped as Lex slid further back, onto Clark’s thighs, “what did you want it to be like?”

“I wanted,” Lex said, “to push you down onto the floor and open your pants, and –”  Now a non-verbal demonstration seemed appropriate, and with a smooth sudden motion, Lex bent down and took Clark into his mouth.  As Clark slid inside with a strangled cry, Lex let himself imagine what it would have been like, if he’d obeyed his baser impulses that long-ago day.  Clark would have been so scared, he would probably have been protesting and pushing at Lex’s shoulders even as his body trembled with eagerness.  This wanton and pleasure-hungry boy underneath Lex would never have existed, back then.  No, then it would have been fear and confusion underscoring Clark’s taste, and just the thought of that made Lex strangely ravenous and desperate for the Clark he had right now.

But Clark wasn’t about to disappear, he wasn’t going to vanish in ten minutes’ time, or twelve months’, for that matter.  This Clark was here forever, in Lex’s bed and his throat forever.  Today hadn’t proven that so much as confirmed it.  Lex suddenly became aware that Clark was making the sharp, short noises that presaged orgasm, and he pulled back, because this wasn’t over yet.  Clark argued briefly, pushing at the back of Lex’s head and sighing, but Lex only shook off Clark’s hand and sat up again.

“Something like that,” Lex said, soothing Clark with a firm stroke, and another, spaced far enough apart to bring Clark back from the brink without making him frantic.

“We,” panted Clark, and it took a moment for Lex to be certain that Clark was speaking and not just making random sounds.  “We could have been fucking for that much longer.  You should have done it.”

Lex moved so that he was kneeling between Clark’s thighs, nudging them farther apart with his free hand and his knees until Clark cottoned on and pulled his heels up.  “You think so?” Lex asked, genuinely curious, stroking down around Clark’s balls and then behind them.

Clark’s throat stretched, long and lickable, as he tilted his head back in ecstasy.  “May just be my hormones talking at the moment,” and Lex had to laugh because Clark was probably the only guy in the world who would say ‘hormones’ instead of ‘dick’, even as he was getting a hand job.

“I think,” Lex said, “that single day could have been incredible.  I would have sucked you off on the floor and you might have let me fuck you –” circling Clark’s hole suggestively at this – “and I would have had fantasy material for years, and so would you, but –”

“We never would have spoken again,” Clark conceded heavily, one leg coming up to rest on Lex’s shoulder.  “So it was just my innocent sweetness that changed your diabolical mind?” he asked, smiling again as Lex held out a couple of fingers for Clark to suck.

“No,” Lex said, watching as Clark went down on his hand messily.  “No, that wasn’t it.”

“Wha wah ih?” asked Clark around Lex’s fingers, somewhere between genuine curiosity and rampant lust.

“It was,” Lex said, withdrawing his hand again and returning it to the tight space between Clark’s legs, “the way you smelled.”  He punctuated this with a swift push in, so that Clark’s cry was caught in the nether regions of shock and amusement.  Both sentiments quickly gave way as Clark released a quiet sigh of contentment and pushed down, fucking himself on Lex’s hand.

“I smelled?” Clark asked, somehow finding the salient point even as his eyebrows registered the new curve of Lex’s fingers.  “Bad?”

“No,” Lex said.  “It was more that you – had a smell, at all.  It was mostly just soap and anti-perspirant, but I could *smell* you, and every time you moved, there was this faint warm breath of your scent.  It made me” – and Lex stopped short, pretending to watch Clark’s motions, feigning distraction when really he was summoning the courage to say it.

Lex’s right hand, which had abandoned Clark’s cock some time ago, was gently braced on Clark’s left knee, but now Clark’s hand slid up and took it, squeezing gently in an echo of that first handshake, that first trace awareness of who Clark was, rather than *what* he was.  Lex dropped his gaze to that point of contact, seeing their fingers make love, intertwining and wrestling in a contact more intimate than the way Lex’s fingers were breeching Clark’s body.

Gradually, Lex’s eyes followed the line of Clark’s arm, up over his biceps, his shoulder, his neck, up to the place where Clark was waiting for him, mouth open in welcome, eyes the colour of a rainy day.  “It made you what?” Clark asked, waiting still.

Lex licked his lips and rocked his fingers deeper, faster, but Clark, even though he shifted and sighed in response, wasn’t budging.  Not in the way that mattered.

“It made me want to earn you, instead of just taking you.”  It sounded just as ridiculous outside Lex’s mind as it had within, worse even, and yet Clark smiled immediately.

“Either way,” Clark said, reaching down and pulling Lex’s hand away, “I’m yours now.  You’ve collected the full set.”

Lex laughed, surprising himself, because only Clark could be so generous with himself, so ungrudging of Lex’s possessive ways.  “I’ll put you in the room with the toenail clippings,” he agreed, as Clark reached for the lube on the bedside table and slicked Lex’s cock.

“In a hermetically-sealed case,” Clark added, “because I don’t need air, as it turns out.”

“No, I definitely have to be able to touch you,” Lex protested, and slid home, exactly the way he hadn’t, back in his office on that day.

He would never have had this, this Clark who was unafraid and bold, who kissed Lex’s neck tenderly even as Lex slammed inside him.  He would not have had the Clark who could take Lex’s deepest confessions and set them down so gently, with a smile, that even Lex forgot how much it might have hurt if Clark had been anyone else.  Lex would never have had this sweet familiarity, this knowledge of how Clark’s sweat tasted when Lex bowed his head to lick it from his skin.  None of this could have happened if Lex hadn’t allowed himself that moment of strange mercy on the day he met Clark.

Clark was close, his body taut and urgent, even though neither of them had touched Clark’s cock, and Lex considered slowing down, drawing back, savoring the moment.  But Clark’s hands were raking at Lex’s back, and he was shuddering something about, ‘now, now’, and Lex knew that there would be other times, countless times, and right now, he wanted to make Clark come.

So Lex slipped Clark’s leg off of his left shoulder and drew in close to kiss Clark’s mouth, which was open and at first unresponsive, but then Clark seemed to notice Lex was there, too, and he kissed Lex roughly, murmuring, “Harder,” against his lips.  Lex obeyed, and then Clark shouted, and Lex squeezed his eyes shut against the flare of pressure as Clark came.  And Clark was the one in charge now, skimming a row of fingertips down into the cleft of Lex’s ass, and Lex wasn’t doing anything but fucking, driving in, riding Clark, faster –

“You make me want to earn you, too,” Clark said in his ear, as Lex fell flat onto Clark’s chest, exhausted.  “But I don’t know if I ever could.”  His voice was scratchy, emotion winning out over alien invulnerability.

Their hands found each other again, and Lex felt the wedding band he had just put onto Clark’s finger a few short hours ago.  Remembering the interview, the scent of Clark in the air then as it was now, Lex mused that maybe that first act of mercy was all it had taken to set them on this path, after all.  Maybe, he thought, love was only a chain of such little sacrifices, each small yet beautiful in their perfection.

Rolling onto his side, stretching over Clark, Lex offered another such mercy, another moment of vulnerability, another tiny sacrifice.  “I fell in love with you that day.”

Clark broke his hold with Lex’s hand in order to stroke the back of Lex’s head.  “I’m glad,” he said, quietly.  “That you waited.  That it happened how it did.  I can’t imagine, if it had been our only chance to be together.  It was so long ago.”  He sighed, suddenly sounding a little melancholy, and dropped his hand away.  “Suns, when they set, may rise again.”

“But for us, when our brief light has shone,” Lex quoted back, “we must sleep the long night on and on.”

Their brief light would shine for longer than most, Lex promised himself, as they both drifted into sleep, limbs intertwined like the roots of a tree.  Theirs would be the longest day.

~~~

Lex and Clark are quoting Catullus again.  Poem V can be found in full translation here.

The title comes from Kahlil Gibran's verse On Marriage.

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