It's Christmas like that solves everything, puts soft snowy blanket over every sharp edge and complication. That despite knowing each other in a few truly incredible, intimate ways, they do not really know each other at all, that their respective families are going to struggle to process it, that if they are to be teammates and co-workers at the most insane profession in the universe this could enormously, problematically complicate things, that Bruce is so difficult and has hurt Clark so badly already--

Maybe it does solve it. At least just for now. Bruce stayed. He can't have stayed just to dig his heels in and pull away. Right?

Bruce should know better, with his hard-won isolated privacy and his constant awareness of ending up in tabloids, but pulling away from Clark is an impossibility. Clark kissing him upends the whole world, shuts everything else away so that it's just the two of them out here in the snow. It might as well be, for how deserted this little town is. His hands find the younger man's sides and he holds him, returns that kiss, doesn't pull away.