Perry loves to (websling) wrote in doorslogs, @ 2012-10-29 21:22:00 |
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Entry tags: | door: marvel comics, gwen stacy, spider-man |
Who: Peter & Gwen
What: Fuzzies after the party.
Where: Gwen's room in the Stacy apartment.
When: Backdated to after the party.
Warnings/Rating: PG13. For fuzzies and kisses.
Peter could find his way to Gwen Stacy’s metaphorical balcony blind and half-dead, and it was probably a good thing, because in his mask he could feel the the pound of his head and the remnants of things he would never have done if it had been screwed on right. His tongue felt sandpaper dry and bitter from things he wouldn’t have drunk and pills he wouldn’t have swallowed, and the only thing that was really the same was the lingering feeling of resentment and anger at the people who got away with their crimes whenever he wasn’t there to catch them. The balcony was metaphorical because he was pretty sure it was for firemen and not wayward superheroes, but he told himself he was doing a public service by testing his weight on it, the flat athlete’s treads on his feet seeming to sink into the pores of metal even as he floated over it.
Still in the mask, he kept his weight low until he’d verified there wasn’t anyone else in the room but one soft-breathing girl, and then he straightened until he could see inside the warm glow. Sliding four fingers into the seam at the base of his neck, he pulled off the mask and shook some of the sweat out of the nape of his neck and the curve of his ears. He moved slowly even without bruises, unsure about the foreign aches, and despite how sure he felt they would soon go away, their strangeness disturbed him. Not all of them felt... really all that bad.
Tap tap, he went on the glass, gentle but determined. He was going to talk to Gwen about it. The party, not the aches.
Gwen rarely came home these days, and the once bright and put-together penthouse was a little like a tomb. Her brothers were off with friends, staying away as much as they could, and her mother was probably asleep in the master bedroom with a partially empty glass on the nightstand. Gwen's room was dusty with disuse, and she had pulled the vacuum out without actually doing any vacuuming. The maids had been let go when her dad's life insurance had started paying the bills, along with the cook and the driver. And so, the room that Peter was perched outside of looked very different than it had the last time he'd been there; a warm glow, but messy with the comings and goings of a teenage girl that didn't actually live there.
Gwen was in the closet when the knock came, looking for clean shirts that she could pack up. She wanted to go stay with Harry for a few days, but he was being strange, and she needed some time away from the cramped little space she shared with Dr. Banner and, most of the time, Flash. She could ask Mr. Osborn about staying at Oscorp, which is what she was thinking about when she heard Peter's knuckles on the glass.
Unlike Peter, Gwen had no interest in talking about the night before. Thinking about it only made her sad, made her stomach do flip flops in a way that wasn't good. She was too herself to be able to enjoy a random encounter after the fact, and she hadn't held onto her virginity (at the expense of much mocking) only to give it away to someone she didn't know, and who hadn't even really been able to talk to her. Add in the fact that being MK-esque for a night had left her feeling completely sorry for the girl she so envied, and she had no idea how to even broach the conversation.
She walked out of the closet in a short, pleated red skirt and a demure grey sweater, knee highs to match and her hair held back in a red headband, and she smiled when she saw him at the window. She looked at him for a minute, and then she moved forward and pushed open the glass. "Hey, bug boy."
Peter wasn’t exactly the cleanest boy out there, and he also wasn’t particularly observant about his environment when he felt safe--and when said environment was inhabited by a pretty girl. Eventually he would smell the increase of dust and the close air (and maybe even Mrs. Stacy’s glass down the hall) but until then he was preoccupied by his own thoughts and otherwise entirely centered on her. Sometimes that could be part of Peter’s charm, after all, and he ducked his head and gave her a shy, pleased smile at the greeting, the way he always did. “Hey. You going to let me in, or should I stay out here until somebody with a telescope gets a good look at my secret identity?” He thought the prospect was funny, and the shy smile blossomed into a grin, but it didn’t last long, because he was obviously concerned about something and nervous about addressing it, the emotion set deep in the shadow of his eyes and the angle of his face. He leaned in so they were close, face-to-face, the sweaty flop of his hair over his brow and his soft eyes evasive. He didn’t quite kiss her, worried about the conversation to come. Peter could also be transparent as plastic wrap sometimes.
"They might just think you're a really eager suitor. Peter Parker? Spider-Man? No way," she teased, even as she swayed closer to him for just a hint of a second. She had her own guilt about the night before, and even about things with Harry, and she was stepping back just as quickly, giving him room to come inside, the lime-vanilla scent of her shampoo leading the way. She was more aware of things than he was. Maybe she was even hyper-aware when things were bad, and she noticed the shyness (nothing new for him) and the shadows. It was the shadows that worried her.
She backed up until she was sitting on the edge of the bed, dust dancing around her imperceptible (to her) in the air when she sat down. "Do you want to wash up?" she asked, and that same old nervous that always cropped up when she was alone in a room with him blossomed. Butterflies and nervousness, no matter how she refused to give in to the science of chemical attraction. She'd wanted Peter Parker since she'd first seen him, and that had only gotten more intense when he'd noticed her back. She swung her legs, and then she crossed her ankles, and she glanced toward the bathroom and back. The blush on her face was a more knowing thing than it had been the party, and even the way she asked the question came with some new maturity that she wasn't aware of, some knew knowledge. "I can get us some cocoa?" was asked with almost-nervous quickness, because she wasn't thinking about what was beneath that suit, really she wasn't.
She smelled really good, something that smelled tasty, and he figured girls did that kind of thing on purpose. He got a confused memory just then, the taste of a girl, something sweet and pink. His face colored up, and he looked away at the sight of her surrounded by the small gentle motes, lit up golden in the desklight. He looked down at her legs swinging, listening to them moving in the material, and the color got deeper. He thought that the question about washing up might have been a hint, but he just gulped and shook his head no to both offers. “Uh... no. Not yet. I mean. I’m not sure if...” he trailed off. This conversation wasn’t going to be a good one, and he was worried about her, and what she’d say, and he was scared she was going to throw him out the second he told her the truth. He didn’t want to be wet in his undies when she did it, so he just massaged his scalp with a blue glove and moved closer to her on the bed, spine loosely straight, shoulders hunched, the step of a thousand halls crossed and lockers opened familiar with his weight. When he got close enough he sighed, dropped to his knees, and put his elbows on the bed next to her. He subjected her to a transparently guilty look. “Listen, Gwen, I’m... so happy you’re back. Really happy. But we have to talk about something.”
She was nervous, but it only took a few seconds for her own anxiety about the night before to make way for realization, and she watched his guilty approach with an expression that slid from nervous butterfly-wings anxiety, to real worry. By the time he dropped to his knees beside her, arms on the bed, she had already turned her body toward him, and she was giving him a serious look. All the things Flash and Mary Jane said came back to mind, all the the ways they'd been worried about Peter's actions for the past week, and she wondered if something had gone terribly wrong while she'd been away. Or maybe it was Mary Jane. Maybe he and Mary Jane had hooked up, even if Mary Jane hadn't said anything like that. The fact that he didn't kiss her or touch her (Peter was always handsy), made her wonder if he'd changed his mind about them. Maybe he had. A week was a long time, and maybe he realized that was what it would be like if she died. "I'm not going to die, Peter," she said before he had a chance to say whatever he was going to say, a result of her recent conversation with Mary Jane. "Not like in the comics anyway. I'm working for Mr. Osborn now, and he's being really nice to me." Gwen was fond of preemptive strikes, even when they were lies; it always worked well for her in debate club.
Gwen’s preemptive strike had the same effect on Peter’s planned topics as a fire drill on a chess tournament. His brain emptied and he obviously switched his total attention to this new flood in one blink, attention buoying up with energy. His hand quickly abandoned his hair, which stuck up in all directions. Knees still solid in the carpet, a thousand tiny muscles stretched and aligned as Peter’s spine went ramrod straight and all the guilt flooded right out of his face, only to be replaced by a mixture of resentment, anger, and confusion. “No,” he said, fiercely. “You’re not going to die. I wouldn’t let you. Stop reading stupid comics that say you will.” Then, with less fierceness and considerably more confusion (though not a little disapproval): “Harry? You’re working for Harry?” His palm had flattened in a long spread of webbed fingers against the bedspread, and when he shifted it a couple inches he brought the cloth with him, threads sticking flat, without noticing a thing.
His reaction made her realize that he hadn't been thinking about her dying at all, which left her to wonder what he had been thinking about. "I'm agreeing with you for once, bug boy," she said gently, touching his cheek and giving him a look that was all question. "I'm not working for Harry. I'm working for his dad. Remember I had dinner with them? Mr. Osborn asked me to come back to Oscorp. I'll still work with Dr. Banner after school hours, but I'll be at Oscorp my first three periods and my last two," she explained, and she knew it was a lot of work, but she could juggle it. It wasn't like she could just leave Flash alone with his work on the Venom suit, and Dr. Banner would eat nothing but Ramen if she wasn't there to make sure he had a vegetable on occasion. The movement of his hand on the bedspread drew her blue gaze, and she watched the cloth stick with a grin. "Trying to steal my bed, Peter Parker?" she teased with a blush, her expression sobering when she looked at his face again. "What did you want to talk to me about?" she asked, a deep breath preceding the question.
MPeter had never heard much of anything, good or bad, about Norman Osborn, so all he could do was frown a little bit after searching his mind. “It’s awesome you can be back in the lab,” he said, honest about this, at least. He did think it was probably safer she wasn’t with Doc Banner as often, but still, he knew he wouldn’t be seeing her much when she was so busy. uch of the tension left Peter’s body at the quiet touch to his cheek. He could hear her fingertips brush his skin and it was a soft, pleasant sound he didn’t really feel like he deserved. He rubbed his head again when he remembered that she might not want to see him again at all. He took a deep breath, let it out. “The party. We need to talk about the party.”
There was no disagreeing with his statement about being in the lab again. Dr. Banner's lab was homey, but it didn't have any of the bells and whistles the Oscorp lab did. She hadn't mentioned it to Flash, but she could make so much more progress on the symbiote work there. Maybe she could even sneak him in on weekends. Mr. Osborn had never paid much attention to what happened in the lab, and Dr. Connors hadn't been replaced. With any luck, she'd be able to get a good look at some applicable research there. Her hand slipped back to her lap when he rubbed his head, and she didn't like the fact that he brought up the party again. "Can't we just pretend it didn't happen? It wasn't us, Peter," she said hopefully. It hadn't been her, not when it came right down to it, but she still felt guilty and miserable about it. "I talked to Mary Jane, Flash and Harry about it, and I don't think there's any single reason we did what we did, or that we turned into what we did. With that much variance, it's hard to come to any real hypothesis about what happened." Science. Peter understood science.
Peter did understand science, but his agonized look when he met her gaze spelled out clearly that science was not what he came to talk to her about. “No,” he said, in that earnest way words tumbled together when he was caught up enough not to stutter over them, “I can’t forget it. There is a reason...” He trailed off and shook his head, causing tufts of hair to waft in all directions. “I don’t know exactly why I ended up...” Again trailing off, he made a sharp gesture of frustration when he couldn’t complete the sentence, completely dislodging his hand from the bed and rolling back with strong thighs to settle on his heels. “I know which of the seven I was, and I know why I was taking all that stuff. Drinking and... pills and stuff. It wasn’t me, really, I get that.” He was working himself up to it, like a man on the edge of something high speaking desperately to the empty air.
He wasn't going to let it go. She realized it with the acceptance of a person condemned to death row, with the weight that only a teenager could give to such a thing, and she sat up when he rocked onto his heels. She decided that she would just let him say whatever he had to say. She vowed (mentally) not to interrupt. She tried to focus on those errant tufts of hair to the exclusion of all else, her legs swinging without her notice, agitation in the shaking of one foot. "It doesn't matter," she blurted unintentionally, groaning at her own inability to stay quiet. "You would never take pills or drink, and I would never do what I did, and Harry would never do what he did." She paused reluctantly. "Flash was like himself, and I don't know about Mary Jane, but it doesn't matter, Peter. This is who we are," she insisted, reaching out and touching a hand to his shoulder, trying to get him to focus on her.
Abandoning the hope that he’d be able to calm enough to do this sitting by her side, Peter gained his feet in one smooth movement and started pacing in a wide three-quarter circle, his thin treads making little sound on her soft carpet. He looked thinner than ever without his usual baggy jackets and board-stuffed backpack, thin but coiled with energy, red and blue lightning, strong and restrained. He gently pulled his hand away as she reached for him, not ready yet for so physical a reassurance that he did not deserve. “I know that. But that doesn’t change what I did.” He shook his head, looked at his hands with a faintly hysterical, disbelieving chuckle. “I mean, it couldn’t of been me. I wasn’t making sense. I don’t even think I was speaking English, but look, Gwen... really...” He looked at her and tried to figure out words.
She watched him pace, and every footstep made her more nervous. She was usually nervous around Peter, but it was a different kind of nervousness. It was the fluttering of butterfly wings in her stomach, not this horrible pit that was growing with every step he took. And then he mentioned not speaking English, and she was fairly sure she looked like a fish. Her mouth opened, closed, opened, closed, and no. It couldn't be. He couldn't be. She hadn't really had any intention of coming clean with him, having logicked all of it away as not being her, as having been gone, but that looked kind of impossible now, and she really didn't want to explain why to him. Why she'd been the kind of girl she'd been, why she'd done what she'd done. And it didn't even feel like it had been the two of them. Sitting there, on the bed, watching him pace in that blue and red, it didn't even feel like she'd slept with him. But, of course, teenager that she was, the thing that came out of her mouth was the last thing that should have come out of her mouth. "Why did you like her?" Oops.
Peter wasn’t like that. Whatever else he was, even in a mask, he was deeply honest, deeply earnest, and deeply himself. Even under the influence of whatever the hell had happened to him the night before, he was still unable to convince himself away from the actions he had taken. Some kind of moral permission would have let him move on the way Gwen had hoped, but he wasn’t able to give himself that. It wasn’t his way. He stopped moving, and forced his shoulders square to face her, allowing his gaze to stay focused on her face. A quick combination of relief and worry struck his eyes at her question. He assumed she guessed. “I’m not sure. I can’t really remember that well.” He said it apologetically.
The little voice in the back of her mind said that wasn't true. It was the little voice that caused her to doubt things on occasion, though she wasn't very prone to that before Mary Jane had come into the picture. "Not because she reminded you of Mary Jane?" she asked. She wasn't angry at him, and she didn't even think he'd cheated. She'd been gone, and no one had any way of knowing if she she'd ever be back. Even if he'd been himself and it had been Mary Jane in that alcove with him, she wouldn't have been able to blame him for it. She'd been gone. "I wasn't here, Peter. You can't blame yourself, and it wasn't us." And why couldn't she just come out and tell him? She wasn't the type to hold back what she thought, so why was she having trouble now?
She hadn’t been gone, not for Peter. Peter had refused to believe that she’d been gone, not like that, not permanently, not even to a place where he had not been able to reach her. It hurt to consider it, so he had denied it. No one else had wanted to understand that, but she hadn’t been gone long enough for them to want to force him onto another path. “No. She didn’t remind me of anyone,” he said, angry and confident at the same time. “That wasn’t what happened. And I know it wasn’t us but... I have to take responsibility.” He gave her a worried, sidelong look, not understanding her reaction. Why wasn’t she upset? “I haven’t talked to her yet, but I should. I feel like I should apologize to a lot of people.”
"Then what happened?" she asked, scooting toward the edge of the bed, her stocking-covered feet resting on the floor. "If it wasn't because she reminded you of Mary Jane?" She looked away, toward the window and the long drop, and she wondered why everything felt so confusing. Had it felt like this before she'd disappeared for a week? She couldn't remember, and she looked back at him and held out one hand. "Come're, bug boy," she said. If she was going to own up to this, it wasn't going to be when he was far away and pacing.
Annoyance crossed Peter’s face in a long shadow. “What is it with everyone and MJ?” He shoved at his hair one more time, glancing at the sky in the exact way his aunt did when she was pleading for patience. He didn’t even notice he was doing it, because he reluctantly moved on over. He took her hand in his cool, web-patterned one, but only briefly, because he immediately let it go and sat close at her hip with a long sigh. “I’m not sure why her, except she really liked me, I guess.”
"She's in love with you," she said of Mary Jane. She said it quietly, surely, and it had nothing to do with what she'd read in any comic. There was jealousy there, but not with the same bite as before. She wasn't how close her experience had been to actually being Mary Jane Watson, but she hadn't liked how it felt. It had felt nice to be in the boy- Peter's arms, but it would have felt better as herself, and it would have felt better for her own reasons, instead of the reasons a party foisted on her. She took his covered hand a second after he tugged it away, and she turned on the bed, one knee bent and flat against the dusty bedspread. "Don't I really like you enough?" she asked.
“She’s my friend,” Peter insisted. Nobody gave him hell for being next to Mrs. Neiderman on the other side of the damn street. He took in a deep breath and then let it out over his tongue in a quick whip of air. Anger left over from the party, he told himself, more forcefully than really necessary. Another deep breath. This time he let her pull him over without pulling away, and he had controlled his emotions enough to give in to a smile. The heel of one hand sunk deep into the mattress and he lifted up most of his weight to slide next to her, relenting enough to slide his elbow inside hers and draw her arm against his ribs. “You do. It was just the weird party, and I think the language thing and all the stuff was starting to get to me.”
"I didn't say there was anything going on with you two," she offered. Sometimes she was scared of precisely that, but she didn't think so right at that minute. The solid weight of him against her bed was like the past, bringing memories of better times with the familiar dip of this particular mattress. It made her think of careless days when her dad was still alive, and when he'd hidden behind every piece of furniture in her room. She smiled a faraway smile, wishing she could get those days back. That was before everything had gone crazy, and before the world had turned into a scientific impossibility. His arm drawing her against his ribs made her sigh, and it was a lovesick little sigh. She'd been crazy about him from the first time she saw him, awkward and stupidly brave like he was. She'd wanted nothing more than for him to notice her - and then he had. "You wanted to apologize to her?" she asked, meaning the girl at the party.
Absurdly comfortable in the skin-tight suit, which was vinyl stretch new and not oft-repaired, Peter put one arm behind his head and stared up at her ceiling. “Yeah. I mean we could barely even have a conversation and we... I don’t know. I feel like I must have kind of...” he frowned, making out images in the speckled plaster where there were none, trying to call up a face but failing. “Taken advantage of something... somehow. Maybe she was saying something that I didn’t understand that could have been unhappy.” He was working himself up into real worry now, and he cut off the swirl by rolling over onto his side, still pillowed on his elbow. “Why aren’t you more upset about this?”
She rolled onto her stomach beside him, the hem of her skirt riding up the back of her thighs as she watched him staring at the ceiling. "You didn't take advantage of anything," she said, and she left it at that until he rolled onto his side. She gave him a look that was all long stare and teenage adoration. "You didn't take advantage of anything," she repeated, putting on her best "showing people around Oscorp" voice, "because I wasn't myself. I wanted to be Mary Jane, to experience the things she experienced and do the things she does. "And one of the things Mary Jane does is... that." She realized that might have come out sounding critical, and she buried her face in the bedsheets with a groan. Why was this so embarrassing? When she talked again, it was muffled into the dusty coverlet. "It wasn't great, because it hurt, and I didn't know it was you. But it wasn't terrible either." Which didn't sound much better. Another groan.
His head snapped sideways, his profile expanding into wide eyes and loose lips as he took in her expression. He didn’t know that she used that voice intentionally, and it was familiar in that it immediately convinced him she was fine, and he didn’t have time for many other considerations. His mind got fused between two things, one that she had just about admitted that she had been the one with him in the alcove, and two that she’d been (trying to be?) Mary Jane. He opened his mouth and sputtered for a few seconds, and then she kept going and everything else derailed from there. Peter sat sharply upright, hips back, knees folding over so he could fully face her. “What? I hurt you?” He was horrified by that, really horrified, so much so that he was on the verge of scraping his mind for the smallest detail that could suggest it.
The reaction wasn't really what she'd expected, but then Peter always did surprise her. He always stammered his way through things, and that's what she expected, but he occasionally did just the opposite. Like the first time he'd kissed her, when there had been no stammering or hesitating at all. The speed with which he sat up on the bed was one of those unexpected moments with no stammering, and she stared at him for a full thirty seconds before smiling. She reached up, tucked her fingers in the neck of the suit, just below the high collar, the back of her fingers against his adam's apple before sliding back to his nape, and she tugged him back down. "It always hurts the first time, Peter," she said. Her cheeks went red as apples, but she didn't want him to freak, and she just waited for his brain to remember biology.
He stared back at her, eyebrows slowly lowering and twitching every other second as she kept him in suspense for what felt like forever. He was trying to remember everything that had happened, but he hadn’t been able to understand what she’d been saying, and he had been so high--or whatever it had been--that he couldn’t remember what he’d said either. Except he’d been real sure she wanted to as much as he did, and that was the only thing that kept him from tearing himself apart about the whole thing. He flinched when she touched him at the back of his neck, because getting under that suit took work with the fingertips, but he let her tug him flat next to her on the bed. He flushed too. “I know. But not a lot?” He gave her a worried look down in the intervening inches.
"Not a lot," she assured him, a shy smile before she ducked her head. Her fingers slid from beneath the edge of the suit and into the sweaty mess of his hair as she tried to find the words that came next. "I wanted to. The girl I was that night wanted to, but I would never do that with someone I didn't know, Peter," she assured him. It was important, now after the fact, that he not think she was like Mary Jane. The entire thing, being like her, had left such a bad taste in her mouth, and she wanted it far away. "I'm not saying she's bad or anything, but I didn't like how it felt to be her. I slept with-" She shook her head and looked up. "The girl that was me that night made choices I wouldn't make, and I wouldn't make them for the reasons I did then either. I don't want sex to make me feel cared for. I want to feel cared for, and then do that." She wasn't sure if he'd understand, because she wasn't explaining it very well. Maybe she should draw a venn diagram.
Maybe she should. Peter set his forearm down next to her arm, propping himself up so he could watch her expression and try to figure out what she was saying. “But the girl that night was you,” he said, obviously confused, but trying, still trying. “That’s not why MJ does things,” he said, right on the heels of that, visibly disturbed still. He put his gloved hand over her chest to grip her other arm and pull her elbow against her body and then her body into his chest. He dropped his head down next to hers and curled his knees in so he could curl around her. “And I do care about you.”
"Yeah it is," she insisted. "I talked to Flash about it, and he knows Mary Jane better than anyone." If he hadn't been so close, she might have thought that through before saying it. "It wasn't me, Peter. It was what I thought I wanted to be, and it made me realize I didn't want to be that at all. Me is better," she added, and it wasn't a vain statement. She was just better for herself, and she would never be Mary Jane Watson; there was no point in trying.
Somewhere along the line, she'd gotten used to how handsy he was, how he liked to grab and tug. He didn't ask, he just did, and it always made it hard for her to think when he did it. He managed to pull her close and curl his knees in while she was still trying to catch her breath, and she touched her fingers to his messy hair when he said he cared about her. "I know you do, Peter." It sounded like there was a but coming, and she tried to listen over the beating of her heart as she waited for it.
He had no “but” on that statement, and he was silent for a good while. It was probably a good thing she couldn’t see his face when she spoke about Flash talking of Mary Jane and “what she was like.” His arm didn’t move from around her and there was no change in his breath quiet against her skin, but by the time she was settled, his eyes were over her head and then shuttered by his lashes. A little while later he said, quietly, “You are you, and MJ is her. Whatever Flash says she’s like, it’s all just what people think. Not who she is. You’re you, I promise. This is just you worrying in your head about who is... better.”
"I'm not worrying, Peter. That's the whole point," she said, wondering why boys understood so little sometimes. "I was worrying before, but I'm not now, because I can't be her. There's no point in trying, and no point in wanting to be. I'd just be miserable." She didn't add that she thought Flash understood Mary Jane better than he did. Flash's explanation about Mary Jane's dad, about how she tried to fix everything that stemmed from all that hurt by being popular and adored, it made a lot of sense. And Flash had enough of that going on with his dad too, and she thought that made it more likely that he would understand. But she kept it to herself. It wasn't for her to explain Mary Jane to him; they'd been friends forever.
Peter was thinking that neither she nor Flash understood Mary Jane like he did, and he was angry that they were talking about her this way when neither of them knew the girl he had grown up with. “You can’t be anyone that isn’t you,” Peter said, agreeing. He slid his head forward so that his forehead just touched hers, and he tried to keep his eyes closed for a little while, but it didn’t last. “Everybody wants to be cared for,” he said. “That’s not that weird.” They all did different things to find that feeling, for different reasons. Peter never looked into it too hard. He wasn’t really a “why” kind of person.
She could tell there was some anger in his agreement that she couldn't be anyone but herself, but she didn't understand why until that brief moment of quiet, his forehead against hers and her thinking he might actually kiss her. But when he spoke, she realized why he was upset, and she rolled away and sat up, straightening her skirt and tugging up on one stocking. "I wasn't insulting her, Peter. I was saying I understand a little now, why she does all the wild things she does. I feel bad for her now. It's not all great, like I thought it was." She looked back at him, and she waited for him to take that the wrong way too. This wasn't how she'd envisioned coming back would be, and she knew she might be overreacting too, but that didn't mean she could change it.
Peter couldn’t argue about the general phrase “wild things” because MJ liked parties and all the stupid stuff that Flash and his buddies liked to do. He looked troubled, but not resentful, and though his arm fell away somewhat dejectedly from her arm when she sat up, he didn’t mirror the movement with any haste. Instead, Peter slowly narrowed the angle between elbows and knees until he was cross-legged at the edge of her bed, eyes blank. He was listening to her stocking on her skin, and he tried not to be so obvious about it that he stared. “I see what you mean, I guess. She felt pretty bad about the party going wrong, and people getting hurt. I’m sorry you got hurt.” He brushed his fingers against the back of her elbow.
She expected more lecturing, and she was surprised when it didn't come. She looked back at him as he edged to the end of the bed, and she followed his gaze without thinking anything of it. Their conversation about how the stockings sounded was still fresh in her mind. Everything was kind of. She'd been gone a long time - or it felt that way to her - and she'd spent a lot of that time bouncing from one girl's mind to the other thinking about things he'd said and things they'd done. Her eyes drifted shut when his fingers brushed against the back of her elbow, and she shook her head from side to side when he said he was sorry she'd gotten hurt. "I didn't. It was what I wanted then, who I was then, it was what she wanted. I didn't get hurt. You didn't hurt me." Because he hadn't. She hadn't walked away from that alcove feeling victimized; she'd only walked away feeling sorry it hadn't been him. "I just wish I hadn't stopped you a dozen times before. It would have been better with the real you, you know, the first time." She blushed.
He blushed too. He sat there as the heat suffused his skin under his cheeks and the back of his neck, and he couldn’t think of a thing to say. “Yeah,” he agreed, finally, eyes evasive as they darted to all corners of the room, anywhere but at her face. “I kind of would like to remember the first time... uh. You know. Clearly, and all.” The heat was getting uncomfortable. He rubbed effusively at the hair under the crown of his head, suddenly acutely aware of the fact that he was sitting on her bed.
Her own nerves showed in the way she stood from the bed and walked to the window, leaning back against it with fingers that gripped the sill a little too tightly. She didn't stop looking at him, though, sitting on the bed like he was. The suit didn't leave much to the imagination, and she swallowed a few times as she watched him scratch his hair. "Maybe we can go out next weekend? Just the two of us and, maybe we can come back here after. My mom passes out really early." It was a daring offer, and her cheeks went bright red after making it. "Are we still together?" she asked, because she'd been gone; it wasn't a given, and he hadn't kissed her or anything since he'd been there.
Hastily, Peter slid off the end of the bed and distributed his weight on both feet. He was comfortable in the suit, having fought in it and nearly died in it, and he didn’t think too much about his appearance anymore. Though he was still small, still rope thin and all leg, he was also still Peter, and nothing about Spider-man was scary when he was just Peter in a suit. He stepped forward across the room and smiled a pleased smile. “Okay. Yeah. Sure.” He missed the implications of coming back here until she blushed, and even then he had to tip his head in confusion before he got it. His eyes widened. “Oh.” Then he grinned even wider, joining her at the window sill and looking down at her with soft brown eyes that gleamed in anticipation. “Yeah. Okay.”
She knew he'd understood. He hadn't answered about them being together, but he'd agreed to next weekend, and she'd take that. When he was standing so close, with those soft brown eyes, she thought she'd agree to anything. She wouldn't, of course - she was too logical for that - but it felt like she would just then, and she tipped her head back to look at him in anticipation. If anyone had told her she'd be leaning against her window, waiting for a kiss from a filthy boy in a spider suit, she would have told them they were crazy. But there she was, and instead of waiting for him to close the distance and kiss her, she closed the distance between their mouths and kissed him. She tasted of cherry chapstick and the ginger ale she'd been drinking before he'd gotten there, and she pressed a stocking-covered foot back against the wall beneath the window as her lips met his.
Peter leaned into the kiss immediately, the way he always did, with a total willingness to explore and obvious interest in just feeling her like him in the kiss itself, with lips and tongue and teeth. He moved in so he was close enough to feel the rest of her warm through the rough webbed material over his chest and hips, and once she was near enough he put one gloved hand along the side of her jaw and pulled her even closer. A night of swinging around giving smart-mouth to armed gunmen, Peter only tasted of himself, and his smell was just of boy, neoprene, and night air. After a few seconds he turned his mouth and deepened the kiss, wrapping his free arm around her waist and pulling closer.
She whimpered when he wrapped his arm and pulled her closer. It was a good whimper, all girlish sound and a sigh wrapped up in permission. Her arms slid over his shoulders and, her fingers tentatively, tangled in the messy ends of his hair. She'd never been the kind to just give-in to making out, not like him. He'd always been exuberant, always escalated and wanted more, always ended up panting and with fingers that held on too tight and kisses that became sloppy with teenage-boy need. But this time she stretched against him and did some of her own demanding. Oh, the kiss wasn't anything heated or skilled, but there was a want there that hadn't been there before, and understanding that fed into desperation, and it was with great reluctance that she pulled back enough to breathe against his cheek.
The strange little sound made Peter’s insides wind up tight into a warm knot of heated wire, and he made his own sound of dislike as she attempted to pull away from him. He pursued the kiss a second more before remembering what she had said about stopping him, something that he thought maybe he should feel bad about, but didn’t. He softened this second kiss, therefore, all lips and no press, and finally let her go, stepping away with a kind of finality and pulling on the mask before he ducked under the window sill. He glanced back at her before he left entirely, though, his expression hidden but his warm voice unmistakably affectionate. “So... text me?”
She nodded. She didn't tell him she was going to go stay with Harry for a few days, because she figured he'd noticed all that dust that said she wasn't living at home. Dr. Banner had been gone for weeks, and the lab felt so empty. She knew Peter would just offer to let her go to his Aunt's house, but Mary Jane was already staying on the couch, and there really wasn't room for her and Mary Jane in such a small place, even if they had been getting along better lately. She nodded once more, a tiny nod and a smile, and then she leaned against the open window and watched him go.