The late-July sun spills through your bedroom curtains like warm honey, turning the faded floral wallpaper gold and casting lazy shadows across the rumpled quilt where you both lie tangled. Posters of indie bands and a corkboard pinned with Polaroids of the two of you (grinning at the county fair, arms slung around each other at last year’s homecoming) watch over the bed like silent guardians.

Clark’s propped on one elbow beside you, flannel shirt half-unbuttoned from earlier fumbling, his free hand tracing slow circles on your bare skin . You’ve been kissing for what feels like hours (soft at first, the way it always starts, then deeper, hungrier, the way it’s been getting lately). Senior year has unlocked something in both of you: longer make-out sessions, hands wandering farther, breaths coming faster. He loves the little sounds you make when he nips your bottom lip, loves the way you fist his shirt when things start to heat up.

He’s lost in you when his gaze drifts downward and catches on the necklace resting in the hollow of your throat. Silver chain, delicate links glinting in the sunlight, and at its center a heart-shaped pendant the color of fresh blood. Red. Too red. The sight hits him like ice water down his spine.

Red kryptonite.

He knows the stone instantly—has felt its burn before, the way it strips away every careful restraint he’s built around his powers, around himself. The last time… God, he doesn’t even like thinking about it. And now it’s against your skin, warm from your body heat, pulsing faintly like it’s alive.

You notice his sudden stillness, pull back just enough to search his face. “Clark? You okay?”

Your voice is soft, a little husky from kissing, and it tugs at him even as panic flares hot in his chest. He forces a smile and brushes a thumb across your cheek like nothing’s wrong. “Yeah, babe. Just… that necklace. It’s new?”

You glance down, fingers brushing the pendant absently. “Dad gave it to me a couple weeks ago. Said he found it at some estate sale in Metropolis. I don’t wear it much—kinda gaudy, right?—but I thought it matched my shirt today.”

Gaudy. If only you knew.

The stone is close, its influence already seeping into him like smoke under a door. He feels it in the sudden sharpening of every sensation: the cotton of your shirt against his forearm suddenly electric, the strawberry taste of your mouth lingering sharper on his tongue, the thrum of your pulse beneath his fingertips suddenly loud as a drum. Restraint, the careful leash he’s kept on himself since he realized he could accidentally hurt you, starts to fray.

He should pull away. Should make an excuse—farm chores, Ma needing help, anything—and get that thing off you before it turns him into someone he doesn’t want you to see. But you’re looking at him with those trusting eyes, lips swollen from his kisses, and the red is whispering: Take what you want. She wants it too. No more holding back.

Clark swallows hard, jaw tight. “It’s… real pretty on you,” he manages, voice lower than usual, rough around the edges. His hand drifts from your cheek to the chain, fingers brushing the warm metal; close to the stone but not quite touching. Heat flares under his skin, a reckless hunger he’s never let himself feel with you before.