Summary: Clark can't find the right words, and Lex can't leave the garbage can alone. Holiday schmoopiness ensues.

Warnings: Rated PG. m/m

It was February 13th, and Clark was once again huddled in a corner of the Talon, busily at work on a labor of love. He bent over a stack of hearts he'd cut out of red foil. Previous years' experience had taught him to expect false starts, and this time he'd come prepared.

"Dear Lex," he wrote on the first try. "I'd climb the highest mountain, swim the deepest sea. I'd do just about anything, if only you'd be mine."

Too sappy. He crumpled it into a ball and started again.

"Roses are red.
Violets are blue.
Life would be sweet
If you loved me too."

He sighed. Too third grade.

"Your eyes so blue…lips so red…and God, Lex, the way you looked in those black pants you were wearing when I stopped by the mansion last Monday night. Clinging in all the right places every time you bent over the pool table to take your shot. So tight they answered once and for all that very important question: Just how big is your--"

He cleared his throat, heat rising in his cheeks. Okay. Maybe not.

God. It was just hopeless. His shoulders slumped. Once again, he was going to miss the perfect opportunity to tell Lex how he felt because he just couldn't find the right words. He let out a deep breath of disappointment, shoved his stuff into his backpack and tossed his defective Valentines in the trash on his way out.

To make matters worse, he'd already agreed to spend the next evening with Lex. They were both between girlfriends, and Lex had proposed a Valentine's-Schmalentine's fest of junk food and martial arts films. Not an ounce of pink-laced romance in sight, he'd said, just the thing for two guys running low on female companionship at the moment.

Clark spent the next twenty-four hours totally dreading it. A quiet evening alone with Lex on Valentine's Day was so close to all his dearest fantasies--and yet Jackie Chan and a big bag of Funions was so far--that he was really rather depressed about it.

On the 14th, he trudged off to the mansion after dinner, not using his superspeed the way he usually did whenever he was going to see Lex. The housekeeper let him in, and he found Lex at his desk in the study.

"Hey," he said. "You ready to get started?"

Lex smiled mysteriously. "Oh, I've been ready for quite some time."

Clark frowned, checking his watch. "Am I late?"

"About three years, I'd say."

Lex got up and walked over and, before Clark could even ask what he was talking about, laid a kiss on him that made his knees go as weak as melted wax. He was torn between checking Lex for possible head injuries and tearing his clothes off to test his pet theory that Lex's skin tasted like white fudge.

He did at least manage to disentangle his lips long enough to ask, "What--"

Lex nodded his head in the direction of his desk, and Clark's heart skipped a good half dozen beats when he saw his discarded Valentines, carefully smoothed out, lying in the middle of the blotter.

Lex smiled. "The answer has always been yes. I'd love to be yours."

He kissed Clark again, and then Clark was smiling, too. Maybe he did have a way with words, after all.