Hmmmmm... (Patreon)

Mary Jane sat down beside her on the bed, the mattress stirring gently with her added weight. Gwen moaned even at that un-seismic shift. Her head was swimming; she felt dizzy even lying down. She hadn’t drunk, but she felt as though she was loaded, sloshed, hammered. She pondered sending MJ out to get her some hair of the dog that bit her, wondering if that would work when she was drunk on her own loneliness, not on alcohol.

“Bad day?” Mary Jane asked, reaching out to run her middle finger over the top of Gwen’s spine, the back of her neck, as if it were the rim of a wineglass.

“Bad year,” Gwen muttered in reply, barely able to turn her head so she wasn’t muffled by the bedspread.

“You threw a great party, though,” Mary Jane said cheerily. “Everyone’s having a good time, enjoying themselves. I think you’ve gotten a few people to hook up. Come next year, we could be celebrating Peter’s birthday along with some poor slobs’ anniversary.”

Gwen made a keening noise as she sniffled. “You know what Peter and I did for our anniversary? He took me to dinner, and dancing…”

“Yeah, I remember, it was in all the papers. Very storybook.”

“He wouldn’t screw me, though. He said I didn’t have to. But I wanted to, MJ! I just wanted to… are you fucking him, MJ?”

“What?” Mary Jane gasped. “No, no.”

“Because you’ve always been so close. And those love scenes… there are these people on Tumblr, they make gifs, they splice in porno stuff, it’s really well done…”

“Gwen, it’s Tumblr. They think Peter’s fucking Harry. They think Peter’s fucking Norman.” Mary Jane paused, resuming her massage of Gwen, now with both hands. “Does porno me have big tits?”

“Yeah,” Gwen moaned in dismay.

“Like, crazy big tits?”

“No, just big. Like, Megan Fox big. D-cups. I don’t know…”

“Okay. But no one… splices you and Peter into porn movies?”

Gwen raised a dismissive hand as if to dispel some curse over her head. “Oh, there’re posts about us. Aesthetic posts. There’s like, those valentine’s candy hearts that taste like flavored chalk and… and roses, and quotes from John Green, John Green… it’s all very twelve year old girl. They must be able to sense it, smell it on me. How chaste we are, how pure and innocent our love is…” Gwen almost choked on the bitter irony spewing from her own mouth. She did cough a few times. Mary Jane patted her back.

“We need to get your shoes off,” she said. “And so do I, if we’re going to commiserate about your love life. We can make it a girls’ night in. Order room service and watch a Katy Perry concert movie. Does this place have room service?”

Gwen sniffled pathetically. “Robots… wait, what’ll Peter do if he comes up here and we’re in bed together?”

Mary Jane was slipping off her shoes. “Well, that would make for a good birthday present.”

Her jibe didn’t get so much as a flicker from Gwen. “He probably wouldn’t even notice. He probably won’t even come up here. We have a lot of bedrooms; he sleeps in other ones a lot. Says he doesn’t want to bother me with his snoring…”

Bare toes wiggling in the carpet, Mary Jane bent over Gwen to unstrap her sandals. “And I’ll take those… I really might take those, they’re nice. Pretend you don’t remember this conversation if these go missing.”

Gwen bit her lower lip. “I wish he would fuck you. You two would be so happy together…”

“Gwen, stop,” Mary Jane told her, settling down beside the blonde.

“No, it’s true! Maybe he wants to be a family man, or thinks he should be, but he has a wild side. And I can be there when he wants to lie around and be lazy, but I can’t go with him when he’s… Spider-Man. I can’t keep up. You can. You’d take it in stride. Just another challenge for the indomitable Mary Jane Watson.”

“I am not indomitable. I tried it once and I was dommed very hard…”

“See? That’s what he needs. Someone who can… inspire him.”

“You inspire him just fine, Gwen. All those romance scenes, those kisses, he’s thinking of you…” Mary Jane’s voice faltered as she ended the sentence, looking away, eyes crossing the door, like it was an escape route, like Peter might come through it despite Gwen’s protestations. “Listen to me,” Mary Jane continued, rallying. “Whatever Peter’s going through—he’s Peter, he goes through stuff—there is no way he doesn’t love you. You could not be more beautiful, more lovely, more sexy than you are now. You…”

Mary Jane rushed in, pressing her lips to Gwen’s mouth. Gwen squirmed at first, astonished with what was happening to her, but then it didn’t matter. What mattered was that she was being touched, being kissed, treated with passion and lust and a sheer want for her that had been direly, direly missing from her life. She yielded almost immediately, her hands resting on Mary Jane’s hips, and she allowed the kiss to deepen and allowed herself to moan and if she’d had any choice in the matter, she would have allowed the flaring sensation in her core as well, the sudden bone-deep need that she’d thought she could only have for Peter.