For three weeks there had been a cup of coffee on Lois Lane's desk at a quarter past eight.

She had never asked where it came from. It was large, it was hot, it was in a paper cup with a plastic lid, and it was always sitting on the left side of her blotter, out of elbow range, which showed somebody had thought about it. She drank it while she read the other papers and marked them up in red. By nine o'clock the cup was empty and in the wastebasket and she had forgotten it entirely.

On Tuesday at a quarter past eight, her desk was bare.

Lois looked at the blotter. She looked under the stack of morning papers. She looked at the clock over the elevators, which said eight-sixteen, and then at Clark Kent's desk, which was empty, his chair pushed in square and his pencils lined up in the cup like a row of little soldiers. She did not put the two things together. She put her bag down and sat and pulled the first paper toward her, and read the same paragraph three times.

At eight-twenty-five she said, out loud, to nobody, "This is ridiculous."

"What is?" said Jimmy, going by with an armload of contact sheets.

"Nothing. Where's Kent?"

Jimmy shrugged so hard one of the contact sheets slid off the top of the pile. "Haven't seen him. Hey, are you watching this?" He nodded at the television bolted up in the corner of the newsroom, where a crane had folded over on itself at a construction site on the east side and was hanging off the top of a half-built office tower. A tiny figure in blue and red was holding up the end of it. Half the newsroom had drifted over to watch.

Lois watched for a minute too. It was hard not to. He made everything look so easy, as if steel weighed what a broom handle weighed. Then she remembered she had a nine o'clock story meeting and nothing to say at it, and no coffee to say it on, and she went down to the lobby.

Ray Melton had kept a coffee cart in the lobby of the Daily Planet for eleven years. He had a white paper hat and a radio that only got the ball game, and he knew every person in the building by what they drank.

"Miss Lane," he said, and smiled like she'd surprised him. "Coming down yourself today?"

"Just coffee, Ray. Large. Whatever."

Ray already had the cup in his hand. He poured, and added cream, and a sugar, and then took a little shaker off the shelf behind him and dusted the top with something brown.

"What is that?"

"Cinnamon."

"I don't take cinnamon."

"Sure you do," Ray said. "Every day for three weeks. Mr. Kent's orders." He put the lid on and slid it across. "First week he started bringing it up, he asked me what you usually got. I said, Miss Lane gets whatever's quickest, she doesn't care. And he thought about it, and he said that wasn't the same thing as what she likes. So he tried a few things. The cinnamon was the one you finished every time."

Lois stood holding the cup. It was the right cup. It smelled like the right cup.

"He checked," she said. "Whether I finished it."

"Checked your wastebasket, I guess." Ray laughed. "He's a farm boy. They notice things."

She paid him, and then, before she could think better of it, she said, "What does he drink?"

"Black. Whatever's been on the burner longest." Ray shook his head. "Says that's how his mother made it, back home. I tell him he's going to burn a hole in himself, and he says he's got a strong stomach."

"Give me one of those too," said Lois.

The story meeting went badly. Perry White wanted three ideas from her and she had one and a half. He told her so at some length, with his reading glasses pushed up on his forehead, and then told a long story about how the King never walked into a recording studio without knowing exactly what song he was going to sing, which was meant to be about preparation and somehow ended up being about a peanut butter and banana sandwich. Lois sat through it holding two coffees, and when Perry finally said "Well? Go!" she went back to her desk and put Clark's cup on the corner of his and glared at it.

Cat Grant came by at ten, trailing perfume and a pink memo slip.

"Is that for Clark?" she said. "Lois. That's sweet."

"It's not sweet. It's a cup of coffee."

"Mm-hmm," said Cat, and went away looking pleased with herself, which was worse than anything she could have said.

At ten-forty the elevator opened and Clark Kent came out of it at a sort of jog, straightening his tie. His hair was a little damp at the temples and his glasses were crooked, and there was a smudge of something gray on his cuff.

"Sorry," he said, to the room in general. "Sorry, Perry, I know. My landlady locked herself out and I had to wait for the locksmith, and then the bus..."

"Kent, I don't want to hear about the bus," Perry called from his office. "I want to hear about the zoning board."

"Yes, sir. On it."

He sat down. He saw the coffee. He stopped.

Lois kept her eyes on her screen. She typed a sentence about the zoning board herself, which was not her story, and deleted it.

"Lois," Clark said. "Is this from you?"

"Ray had extra."

"Ray never has extra."

"Well, today he did." She swiveled her chair to face him, because she was not a coward. "Black, from the bottom of the pot. Which, by the way, is disgusting."

He was smiling at her, that slow, surprised smile that went all the way up to his eyes, the one that always made her feel as if she had said something much nicer than she had. "Thank you."

"It's cold now. You took two and a half hours to get here."

"I don't mind." He picked it up and took a sip, and his face did something, a little flicker, and then he said, "It's fine. Really."

"Clark, it's been sitting there since nine. It's ice cold. Give it here, I'll get you a fresh one."

"No, no, I like it." He set it down in front of him and pulled a file toward him.

"You smell like a campfire, by the way," Lois said, turning back. "Did you set your landlady on fire?"

"Toast," said Clark. "I burned the toast."

She typed for a while. She could feel him not looking at her, which was a thing he did, a very particular kind of not looking. When she turned around again to ask him if he had the number for the man at the zoning office, there was a thin curl of steam coming up out of the little hole in his lid.

Lois stared at it.

"Is that still hot?"

Clark glanced down at the cup as if it had spoken. "Huh," he said. "Must be one of those good cups. The insulated kind."

She looked at the cup. It was the same cardboard cup Ray had been handing out for eleven years. She opened her mouth, and closed it, and decided that she had more important things to think about than the Daily Planet's paper goods.

"Two-five-oh-one," Clark said. "The zoning man. His extension. That's what you were going to ask me."

"I was not," said Lois, and wrote it down.

On Wednesday at a quarter past eight there was a cup of coffee on the left side of Lois's blotter, out of elbow range. She took the lid off. Cream, one sugar, a dusting of cinnamon on the foam.

Across the aisle, Clark's chair was pushed in and his pencils were lined up in their cup, and on the corner of his desk, steaming, was a large black coffee from the bottom of the pot, with a folded piece of copy paper tucked under it. On the paper, in red pen, it said: Don't get used to it. L.

He came back up from the mail room at eight-thirty, stopped at his desk, and stood there reading it for a long moment. Then he folded it very small and put it in his shirt pocket, behind his pens, and sat down and drank the coffee, all of it, and did not say a word.

Lois didn't look up. She didn't have to. She was a reporter. She noticed things.

THE END

Author's note: This one started because I bring my husband his coffee every morning and one day I forgot, and he walked around the house all morning like a lost dog. I thought, I know two people who would be just like that, and neither one would admit it. Feedback to [email protected]. Thanks for reading!