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Had one of his lenses not broken when that lizard guy slammed his head against the Flatiron earlier, he probably would have noticed he wasn’t alone.
As he is, Peter tumbles more than gracefully swings to his floor, spider senses taking over while the rest of his very human brain remains scrambled like a bad breakfast. Mild to moderate concussion, E.V’s voice echoes. Sounds about right.
Everything that can hurt is hurting right now. There’s debris and tears all over his suit, enough cement in his lungs to qualify for a whole new subset of scientific studies, and one of his ribs is definitely slipping.
It stands to reason then that he careens towards his apartment door and entirely misses the girl planted right by it.
That’s a forgivable offense, has to be.
Only when the hairs on the back of his neck pick up on it does he realize she’s here, a second before she steps into view.
“Jesus, Peter,” MJ gasps, worried brow coming into the light. “You look like you were mauled by a cat.”
Lizard, not cat. There’s a slimy, scaly difference, he’d happily fend off a cat. But forget the lizard, forget everything apparently. What comes out of Peter’s mouth is a garbled, slightly panicked: “MJ? What are you doing here? Are you okay? Is Ned okay?”
“I feel like I should be asking you that. What happened?!” She steps closer, assessing the damage.
He probably looks much worse than he feels is the thing. He’ll be fine, this is hardly noteworthy. Had Peter continued keeping a journal, today’s entry would have read something like: September 20, Crocodile Dundee. Forgot to launch a laundry load before I left.
He takes a step forward. Trips.
Hairline fracture of the right tibia, E.V’s voice sings in his ear.
Shit.
“Okay, uh, do you have a-a spider key or something?” MJ catches him, hoisting his arm over her shoulder. The faint smell of coffee grounds wafting off her hair is about the only thing he can focus on right now. Coffee. Coffee would be nice. His is lying untouched and forgotten on his desk, third one this week he didn’t get to drink before running out the door.
She taps him on the chest. “Hey, hey, hey—Peter?”
He blinks, winces the pain away. “Under the doormat,” he rasps, something slick dripping over his right eye.
He hears the pause and slight judgment in her voice. “Seriously?”
He waves—tries to anyway. “No one comes here, it’s full of asbestos.”
“What—Peter!”
“S’fine, doesn’t affect spiders,” he mumbles as she finds the key, shoves it into the door. She ushers the two of them inside, triple locks it behind her as he quietly slips to the floor.
That’s right, nice and easy. Hardwood floors welcome him as warm a hug as he can handle, and he pulls the mask off with a relieved sigh. Let there be light.
“Okay, do I need to panic?” MJ asks, managing to sound remarkably calm in spite of her rapid breathing.
“No, no,” he shakes his head—horrible idea, nausea washes over him. “Just give me ten.” His rib is already healing, tugging unpleasantly at his side.
“You’re not doing the hero thing, right? I can trust that?”
He raises the lamest thumbs up. “All good,” he confirms, pushing one more labored breath out. “How did you..?” He hasn’t shared his home location with either of them, still unsure of how willing he should be to repeat past mistakes.
“Oh, uh,” he thinks he sees her flush, maybe. “I triangulated repeat locations on Ned’s tracker. It wasn’t that hard, actually. He had logs for the full year.”
Okay, so that’s concerning. Unfortunately for Spider-Man’s safety, most of Peter’s thoughts are currently split between ripping the rest of the suit off, making snow angels on the cool floor, and figuring out the reason behind MJ’s light stalking. Once thought one and two are sufficiently suppressed and she’s sat next to him—there’s a chair and a sofa, he wants to say— thought number three is free to take as much space as it pleases.
So MJ is here, at his place, by his side. In the flesh.
“Crap, I should probably move out,” he says after a beat, wiping blood out of his right eye.
“You should,” she nods, eyes scanning the area. “This place is bleak.”
“Yeah, I haven’t exactly had time to decorate.”
He glances at her then, covertly getting his fix—like one look would ever be enough. She’s busy staring at the barren brick walls, cobwebs up on the beams. It is as depressing a bachelor pad with multiple OSHA violations can be, but he wasn’t exactly expecting company. Besides— on a scale from Ned and her’s to Frank’s, his place can’t be that bad.
“There’s just no warmth,” MJ points out. “It doesn’t feel very you.”
She shouldn’t know him enough to feel that way. She doesn’t, his concussed brain insists. The non-existent warmth on his walls pools at the center of his chest anyway.
“I mostly just sleep there,” he winces.
“On the floor?”
“There’s a bedroom on your left.”
She stares in the direction for a while. He does anything but. His bedroom can’t be associated with any thoughts of her, old or new.
MJ’s gaze turns back to him. “Do you have a towel or anything? You’re covered in soot.”
“I think I left a dishcloth by my desk.”
She gets up, unspoken permission for her to walk to his computer before bringing the towel over. Luckily for him, it’s not too much of a mess. His sore limbs scream as he hoists himself against the wall, tugging the top half of the suit down— fabric no longer at risk of fusing with his skin anymore.
“Jesus,” MJ hisses under her breath. She hands him the cloth, eyes cataloguing the number of cuts across his chest. They’ll be gone soon, he wants to reassure her. For now, he’s a little worse for wear, marbled skin purple below his left rib and wounds crusted shut by his shoulder. How come battled and bruised only ever looks good on men like Frank, not guys from Queens who went through spider puberty twice?
“You’re still breathing weird,” she notices. “Are you sure you’re okay?”
“Yeah, I’ll be fine,” Peter closes his eyes. Looking at her isn’t doing him any favors right now.
He feels her slide next to him, her back resting against the door.
“You’re weirdly calm for someone whose superhero lair got discovered.”
“You’re weirdly calm for someone who just discovered a superhero lair,” he shoots back easily.
“Give it time,” MJ smiles. “Right now I’m a little busy making sure Spider-Man won’t bleed to death in his apartment.”
He hacks out a cough. Ouch. “Not a chance.”
“Not the type, are you?”
“Definitely not. No, ma’am,” he smiles.
“Thought so.”
Now that the proverbial dust has settled, he kind of wants to ask why she’s here again. Something— be it muscle memory or projection— tells him she might not answer before she feels ready to. It’s in her posture, her back weirdly stiff like she’s bracing for it. Defensive, not withdrawn or withholding. MJ’s gearing up, is all.
“Please tell me you at least have a first aid kit,” MJ eventually sighs, hands fiddling with the hem of her shirt. “It’s really weird sitting here doing nothing.”
Turning his head takes more effort than he’d like—blood oozing from a head wound he’s only now starting to feel, but he does it anyway.
Like always where she’s concerned, two dogs tussle within him. There’s the Peter who made a conscious decision to keep her at bay for precisely this reason, stupid eighteen-year-old willing to tough it out, and the one in front of her, five years later, so starved he can barely bear it. This isn’t fair. He shouldn’t worry her like this, and patching him up isn’t her job. MJ’s here because she tracked him, which means she might need help with something, and any wisps of nurse fantasies need to stay far, far away from him.
Blood continues to drip on his cheek, however, and MJ’s mouth draws into a thin line.
“Head wounds look worse than they are,” he tries for nonchalance. “They’re just gushers.”
“I know, I used to read medical textbooks in high school.”
The confession draws an awkward silence between them, and guilt trains his eyes to the dark stain he left on the floor. There are a billion reasons MJ could have chosen to dive into those back then. The glimpse he got of her frown narrows it down to one.
Hands gently cradling his head, tending to him, eyes scanning—piercing through his facade to make sure he’s okay. Over and over again, no matter how small the cut.
He might be the only one to remember, but she’s too smart not to piece those gaps together.
“Peter,” she calls after a while.
“Yeah?”
She’s looking at him again. He wants to press the frown line between her brows with a thumb and make it disappear.
“Your first aid kit?” Her hand falls to his knee.
Twenty-three-year-old Peter wins out.
“In the bathroom, second door on the right.”
He holds the cloth up to his temple as she goes, his head still spinning. It’s a good thing he got rid of the mirrors in this place, because he couldn’t stand to look at himself right now.
With great effort, he pulls himself up—some stupid notion that he’ll look less worrying to her if he’s at least ten per cent more presentable, and moves to sit on the sofa. His rib still hurts, diffuse heat radiating towards his plexus, his shin not faring much better.
Okay, he might have overshot it. He falls into the back of the couch with a grunt, mentally cussing that Lizard guy out.
MJ comes back with the kit concerned about its contents and the state of his running water.
“It’s been like that for a week,” he sighs. “I keep forgetting to call the landlord.”
She shakes her head. “You really should take Ned up on his offer. You need an assistant.”
“I have an assistant.”
MJ just glares. “I mean a person, not a program.”
She once again completely ignores the chairs in his living room, electing to sit on the coffee table and right across from him instead. Her knees are at risk of knocking with his like this, she doesn’t seem to care. Fine, he won’t either, then. He can be cool under pressure—history notwithstanding.
There is no way not to keep a healthy distance or look anywhere but at her, so he gives up and takes her in in full. He’ll have to forgive himself for it later.
Her hair is up, less neatly so than he’s been used to seeing in recent years. Her coat doesn’t match her shirt. What little makeup she’s wearing is smudged, lipstick bitten off the sides of her mouth—old habit, he knows, he knows. Wherever she was before this, she left in a hurry.
She remains, of course, absolutely beautiful.
A wet compress stings and wipes the thought away, MJ’s hand gently dabbing at his forehead.
“Sorry,” she says, chewing the side of that lip again. She dabs at the wound once more, gentler this time. “I saw the fight on my phone. It looked bad.” Her gaze stays focused on her work, which is to say on him. “Worse than usual.”
“I didn’t know someone filmed it,” he grimaces.
She chews on the inside of her cheek, setting the compress down— imbibed rusty red. “Ned had us follow a bunch of superfans, freshman year. He was convinced one of them would catch you without your mask on. I guess I never unfollowed.”
“Oh.”
“Yeah,” she winces. “He wasn’t answering his phone, so I kind of assumed he was already here, but nobody answered when I got to the door.”
“Oh,” he repeats, dumbfounded. “Ned doesn’t know where I live.”
She startles. “What?”
“I haven’t told anyone. I wasn’t sure it was safe, you know.”
She takes a beat to process that. She is—and might remain— the only person seeing this place beside him. He kind of wants it to stay that way.
“Right,” she eventually nods in understanding. “Same old spiel, then?”
“Same old spiel,” he confirms.
She hums, fingers focused on tearing a bandaid open, and maybe that’s too much, maybe desperation is starting to leak out of his eyes, pores, everything because she leans back, ever so slightly.
See? This is why he doesn’t swing by their apartment too often.
There’s the matter of the boyfriend, of course, but also and mostly that of the wall solidly wedged between them. It is built from a distance they both respect and born out of necessity; there’s only so much Peter can do after all. You don’t stop loving someone just because you want to, just like you don’t start loving them because some version of you once did. So here they are, permanent residents in that awkward limbo between acquaintances and friends. Sure, MJ smiles and waves when Ned forces him through the door, and she’ll sit with the two of them to eat dinner, but that’s about it. They don’t really hang out just the two of them, and even if he knows deep down that she probably avoids him out of kindness rather than discomfort, it’s hard to shake the feeling that there must be a part of her who probably pities him like one does a dog waiting for an owner who won’t come back.
That’s what it feels like, to him. He’s stuck in place— hopeless, but unable to let go. Man, does he wishes he could.
“There’s no mirror in your bathroom,” MJ points out, her chin resting above a propped up knee. “There’s no mirror anywhere, actually.”
He blinks back his surprise.
Of course she’d notice. She’s observant, not obsessive.
“Right, yeah,” he clears his throat—God, so much dust still—”I took them out when I started, uh, changing.”
And he knows it’s the wrong answer: the frown between her brows deepens, concern morphing into something sad that reminds him too much of an eighteen-year-old girl pressing her forehead to his, but it’s too late to backpedal.
“You don’t want to look at yourself,” she says. It is a statement, not a question.
“It’s not—” he starts, and she shakes her head, picking a cotton pad and dousing it in rubbing alcohol before pressing it to his cheek. He hisses, the sting of it sharp. Fine, he deserved that, maybe.
“Do you still think you’re a monster, then?”
He stares at her, knows the answer she wants to hear. He isn’t sure why she’d need to so bad. He also knows she won’t like him lying again.
“Sometimes,” he confesses. “More like a freak than anything. The web thing is pretty gross. The eyes I’m getting around to.”
“Eyes?”
“Like this.”
He blinks, lets his entire vision black out. It is a gamble, showing her the extent of his mutation, but he lets it happen anyway. Feels the fingers resting on his knee times a million, the heat of her body, the beat of her heart getting quicker—fear, most likely. It’s fine. Let it happen, let it all wash over him.
She doesn’t move at first—shock still, shaky breath fanning across his cheeks.
He holds in his. MJ already takes up a good portion of his thoughts on average. With his senses tuned up to the extreme, she’s all he can feel. Which is precisely why he needs to stop, because he’s not that much of a masochist.
Fingers splay on each side of his face before he gets to, imprints searing all the way to the bone as MJ tilts his head to study him further.
“Now I’m really regretting switching my major from Biochemical Engineering,” she murmurs as he forces a swallow.
So it’s fascination, not fear. Four inches from him, goosebumps climb across her long neck.
“I forgot how much you like this kind of stuff,” he tries to laugh it off, leaning away from her touch before blinking back to normal.
“I mean, it’s hard not to,” she shrugs. “Most of…this,”she gestures around them, “is so boring. Life, I mean. Most of the answers are already known.”
Makes sense, she always liked asking hard questions. He’ll try one of his own.
“So why Aerospace engineering, then? Why not EAPS?”
“I’m…” she starts, then clips her mouth shut. “I’m not sure, anymore,” she says, pensive. “It used to make sense. Now, not so much.” She raises an eyebrow. “What did she want to study, your MJ?”
He frowns. He tries not to think of her when the two of them are in the same room, makes it easier for him. “She thought degrees were government engineered ways to limit and quench Man’s innate thirst for knowledge,” he quotes. She always had a way with words.
This MJ nods. “Sounds about right.” She pauses, smiling back at him. “I still think that.”
He will never, ever stop falling in love with her.
“Hey, Peter.”
He looks up. “Yeah?”
“Please buy mirrors again?” She says. “And fix your water.”
Now he laughs, for real, sitting back in the couch. It’s worth the slight tinge of pain in his side, really, it is. “Yeah, yeah. Okay.”
“I’m serious. This is dire. I’m talking worse than Ned’s college room.”
“I can only imagine.”
“Maybe get a lamp or two? It’s dark in here.”
“I’m working on it, I promise.”
He must look better than he feels, because MJ finally relents and sets the kit aside, sighing as she takes a seat on the sofa next to him. Tension leaves her shoulders as she melts into the cushions, a deep breath leaving her lungs. “Okay,” she says, maybe more to herself than to him. “Okay. I feel like you’ll live.”
And he sees it now, no need for spider senses; how scared MJ actually was right up til then. She carried it well, hid it in the set of her jaw and beneath acerbic jokes, but the difference is stark now that she’s let go. And he shouldn’t ask, told himself he wouldn’t, has no right to—but he’s still largely human, and he hopes. He wants a ledge to catch himself on, wants her fingers on his face again, on his knee, anything. He’ll take anything.
“MJ, why are you here?” Her hand is resting across her eyes, and will probably stay there until she replies. She lets out a long breath. Silence falls between them, occasionally broken by the rumble of his neighbor’s laundry room, a floor below.
“I figured out where you lived weeks ago,” she eventually says. “I don’t know why, I just needed to know, I guess. And then I saw the news, and my body took me here.” She lowers her hand, staring at him, visibly upset.
Just like that, he’s eighteen again and making the worst decision of his life.
There aren’t enough apologies in the world to convey how sorry he is for doing this to her.
“I know he remembers, and I don’t,” MJ goes on. “I’ve accepted it. I even thought it was a good thing. Healthier to move forward, no one’s the same as they were in high school anyway.” Her brow furrows, her lip bitten raw at this point. “But I think my body is starting to remember, and I don’t know how to feel about that.”
The weight of that truth hangs heavy in the air, Peter’s chest tight with it.
“I’m so sorry,” he says, and means every word of it, however pained they come out of his throat. “You of all people do not deserve this.”
The sigh she lets out is heavy, and she stretches her legs across the sofa. “I’m not saying this to guilt you, Peter. There are worse people to run to. It’s just… If I’m running to help, I want to be my choice, you know?”
“Yeah. Yeah, of course.”
He needs to move, Peter decides right there and then. A harder location to track, maybe multiple places. That could stretch his budget, but it would be doable. He’ll start meeting Ned outside of their apartment, do whatever it takes to keep the wall in place and close the door on that limbo, anything to make sure this doesn’t happen again. The fact that he loves her is completely irrelevant; he’d break his own heart a thousand times over to keep her safe.
“And I still would have come, you know.”
His head snaps up, heartbeat caught like feet in a carpet. “Why?”
That, she doesn’t answer. Just fiddles with something beneath her shirt, a necklace. Black, broken petals. Stares at him a while, not entirely unlike the way she used to, but not exactly like it either.
He doesn’t get her.
That’s what it is.
This new MJ is half mystery, half prickly reminders of a past that’s still too tender to continuously poke at like this. He can’t predict her moves, because she’s not the girl he knew, but she won’t act like a stranger either.
His pulse quickens.
They need to stop being around each other if she wants to be completely free, she must know this.
Instead she stares at him head on, intense, defiant.
I still would have come, you know.
She does not want him to be a stranger, he realizes with a start.
The truth licks at his insides, low and hot. It is a different kind of flame, but a fire all the same.
She used to glare at him from the other end of a cafeteria table, prodding until both of their edges softened like candle wax, making him forget half his words. It’s a miracle anything even happened back then, all things considered. This MJ’s gaze isn’t as sharp and guarded, though; it is a molten type of bronze that would make him daring without a curtain to hide behind or a mask to pull down this time around.
Alright. Maybe he should stop staring at her. Or maybe he should stop guessing, and just ask her what she wants.
“You’ve already pretty much healed,” MJ hums, eyeing the damage. “That’s pretty crazy.”
“The wonders of science, everyone.”
This wins him a smile, she must enjoy dorky.
She’s still staring. At his chest, his eyes, his lips. Taking him in, one way or another. He stirs. She needs to come much closer or sit at the very far end of that couch. Now that the baseline of his immediate needs has been met, he’s left with nothing but wants. They’re pounding in his heart like they’re fighting to be let out, loud as hell and probably clear as day. The upside of this is that any throbbing pain is a distant memory, his breathing much easier than it was mere minutes ago.
“It’s getting late,” he clears his throat, giving her an out— silently begging her to take it. Or not.
“Sure is, Maynard.” She nods, yet makes no move to leave.
“What, you don’t like it?” He asks. He will never live that down.
“I like Peter better.”
Yeah, daring might be too kind a word, actually. Impulsive and reckless would be more accurate.
He rolls his shoulder, testing its soreness. Not too bad, but he should probably take it easy. From her end of the sofa, MJ’s eyes follow in an invisible trail, singing red hot on his skin—what was he saying about being a masochist again?
“Won’t Ned wonder where you are?”
What he really means to ask is won’t your boyfriend care that you’re here? Wouldn’t he be upset? But Peter swallows the tar of that thought way, way down. There is an ugly, wretched part of him who loves all of this, who wants the boyfriend he refuses to remember the name of to feel threatened, for there to be something to even warrant the feeling in the first place. It goes against everything Peter believes in, literally everything. And yet.
“Yeah, I’ll call him later,” MJ promises, still fiddling with the necklace.
A second passes. Another.
“What about Mister Withholding?”
Like he said. Absolutely reckless.
She scoffs. “Subtle.”
“Hey, I’m flying across New York in red and blue spandex,” he grins. “If you were looking for subtle, you might want to start stalking a different guy.”
And it’s this moment that shifts things for him, finally. The Peter who knew her—some forgotten version of her anyway— wouldn’t have made that joke. The MJ she used to be wouldn’t have found it funny enough to gently kick his leg with her foot. They did anyway.
They’ve both changed. It isn’t just the eyes or web shooters, the shift in degree or hairstyle. The girl he liked in high school would barely recognize the man he is today.
He used to wish for her to remember, because it meant picking up right where they left off. A soft-hearted embrace, tears being shed over a deli coffee cup, maybe.
He thinks it might be more interesting to get to know this version of her. From where he’s sitting, it’s looking like she might let him.
"Hey. You know I’m not an actual bug, right?” He asks once the staring gets a little out of hand.
She squints. “What?”
“Nothing, it’s just—you’re looking at me like one.” Studying, dissecting. Pinning him down.
“Arachnids aren’t bugs,” she replies slowly.
God, her smile.
And she’s still here. Why is she still here? She might have been brought up by phantom limbs, but she helped already, and he’s fine. He gave her an out, which she blatantly ignored. Ignored his question about her boyfriend, too. She remains seated with one leg folded under herself instead— the other extending across the couch, almost grazing his thigh. He feels it all the way down to his toes.
And here’s the thing about hope, and pining, and every variation of that nasty feeling Peter has left brewing so long it’s turned into acid strong enough to corrode his morals. It doesn’t care that this might be awful in the long run, that she may have stalked him this one time, but he’s done his fair share of it in the last year. It won’t forget how stupid and wrong that kiss on the roof was, but won’t fail to remember its sweet relief or the hunger that followed. It’s firmly lodged at the pit of his stomach, won’t relent, won’t budge; only inexorably grow. He wants, so badly, and the only thing keeping him in check right now is the picture of May on the TV bench and the fact that he categorically refuses to be that guy. It’s bad enough to know he has the capacity to be, to know he could ruin the legacy of a rather harmful sacrifice should he continue to test their boundaries like this.
This is why he needs to move. She can’t know where he lives; he’d never stop hoping she’d show up or pray that she wouldn’t.
“Mark,” she says, the name pulling him out of his thoughts.
“What?”
“That’s his name. Mister Withholding.”
It’s as cold and efficient a shower as he’ll ever get.
Whatever this was, she just put an end to it.
“Right, yeah,” he swallows thickly, rubbing a thumb across his eyebrow. “I should probably start calling him that, then.”
MJ hums, leaves him to stew in his self-hatred for a moment— probably giving him time for about a dozen choice words to hurl, mostly at himself. Her tongue pokes at the inside of her cheek, frown returning; this one isn’t concern, it’s frustration.
“You do that. I’ll keep calling him my ex.”
Boy, is he lucky his concussion healed quick. His head snaps fast, eyes wide, completely and utterly unable to control himself.
“Jesus, your face,” MJ says, almost impressed. “No wonder you wear a mask.”
Shit.
“Sorry, sorry. That’s..”
Inappropriate, the best news he’s heard in a really long time. Both of those at the same time. He hides his head in his hands, trying to slow his heart rate down. “I’m sorry,” he repeats, all other words failing him.
“It’s fine. It’s been a while,” MJ shrugs. "I just thought you might like to know.”
“No, yeah, you got it,” he says, his answer muffled by his hand. He clears his throat. “How long’s a while?”
“Like, November?”
They’d met again beginning of October. Coincidences, conjectures. He lets out a slow, measured breath. “Bummer,” he says, looking at her out of the corner of his eye.
“Yeah, you seem really torn about it.”
“Yeah, well, he wasn’t my boyfriend.”
Her foot nudges the side of his thigh then, and his gaze slowly moves back to hers. She’s toying with the necklace again. Smiling, knowing. A more confident variant of an academic decathlon winning grin; He loves it all the same.
And he could tell her how the petals broke, how they shared their first kiss in the middle of rubble and he kept tasting dust on his tongue, a little bit like now. He’d been too nervous to kiss her first, even as she’d made her own feelings abundantly clear. One of the rare instances of utter normalcy in his life, just a boy in love with a girl.
But he’s twenty-three years old. She is not a girl, he is not a boy, and this isn’t London.
Every day of his life, Peter has taken wild swings, launched himself off of skyscrapers, bridges, moving trains. This leap feels like the first ledge he’s ever jumped from.
He leans in, deliberately crossing the line from his space to hers.
Hope lies in the breath catching in her throat.
“I can’t tell what you’re thinking,” Peter confesses, marvels at the thought.
The last four years of his life have been spent white knuckling a memory. Knowing it would be all he’d get to hold onto, playing it over and over like a broken record.
This is entirely new.
MJ’s gaze lowers from his eyes to his lips— careful, intentional. “I’m just trying to decide. Figure out what’s mine, and what’s impulse memory.”
“And?”
The breath she lets out is electric. “I don’t think it matters.”
He leaps.
His mouth tastes like the coffee she saw on his desk earlier, hot, hungry. Not hungrier than her— he reins it in, heart running a mile a minute under her hand, the other lost in his dirty, grimy hair. She doesn’t care. He’s everywhere, in her arms, her head, her lungs.
The last time she felt this drunk was at her house party, almost a year ago. Now her throat is burning with the right kind of heat.
He loves her, every version of her. She can feel it in every kiss, in the way his fingers catch on her sides like he’s still wondering whether or not she wants this.
“Yes,” she rasps against his mouth. “Yes.”
She doesn’t remember loving him at sixteen, but her heart seizes like she did. Like it’s been waiting with a hole carved out in just the right shape, and everyone trying to fill in simply didn’t stand a chance. Yes, MJ thinks, she must have loved him a great deal.
She’s not surprised, he’s easy to love. Handsome, clever, indubitably weird in this fascinating way that makes her want to strip him bare enough to figure every inch out. They might not get to that today—he’s still injured, still bruised on his left side, and frustratingly gentlemanly about the rest.
She bites his lip—what’s one more injury?— and the moan he lets out is choked with a tinge of shock. She’s willing to bet that’s new, the way her body reacts like that’s the most thrilling sound it’s ever heard. She does it again, again, and again.
It honestly doesn’t matter whether she remembers or not, how much of the her, now is holding the wheel. They bothwant this. Peter pins them into the couch, mouth hot on her neck and body heavy against hers. She gets a little lost after that, feeling like the first breath one takes after being underwater too long. Alive, and hazy on the details.
Between her fingers scraping at the back of his neck, his hands clamped on her thighs, and the leg she hooks around him to keep him solidly there, relief is tasting like a long time coming.
“Can I take that off?” he asks, perfectly polite about the fact that he’s been half-naked for the better part of an hour and she’s still somehow wearing her coat.
It’s funny how human he feels, she thinks as he finally pushes it off her shoulders.
Everyone loves Spider-Man. She wants Peter.
Been wanting him for a while.
Her eyes flutter shut. She’s fifteen, signing up for extracurriculars she doesn’t care for, going to a house party at Liz’s when loud music and people are two of her least favorite things. Fifteen, again, attending hours of detention when she doesn’t need to. Sixteen, when she packs up the only dress she owns for their school trip and when she wears it in Prague, nervously twisting her hands on a bridge.
Freshly seventeen when she rushes out of the Tower of London, heart bursting at the seams, because, because—
Her breath chokes; there is a Peter shaped-hole in every single one of these memories.
She did love him, so much.
Tears form at the corners of her eye. She might never be able to remember fully. That’s fine, she soothes the part of her that’s still grieving—they’ll make new ones. She won’t let herself forget them this time.
The kiss she presses to his temple get softer, less hurried. He’s not going anywhere, she understands that now. They slow down, not quite to a stop, her mouth quietly calling his name.
“Sorry, too much?” Peter leans back ever so slightly, completely out breath and utterly charming about it.
She smiles. “I don’t know. I’m not the one with a broken rib here, Tiger.”
His lips are bright red, hair an absolute mess and a flush is running from his cheeks all the way down to his chest. An hour ago, he looked like a crime scene. “Floating,” he corrects. Happiness looks better on him than any suit.
“Oh— well then,” She scoffs, bringing his face to hers again.
The laugh she feels echoing down her throat might be her new favorite sound.
She makes sure she commits it to memory.