Spider-Man: Forsake Your Vows (Patreon)

Mary Jane was used to being the sane one. The one who put her foot down. The one who stood in the way of all Peter’s suicidal foolhardiness. It was frustrating as hell, having a born hero for a husband and trying to talk him out of his nobility with simple good sense. But if anything was more frustrating than that, it was her trying to be the foolhardy hero and him being the responsible one.

And all from a fight with the Shocker. That low-rent creep had managed to nail Mary Jane with the full brunt of his vibro-blasts, leaving Peter and Annie May to take him down. Mary Jane had survived, obviously, but a check-out with their friendly neighborhood doctor had revealed that she had a concussion. So Peter was sidelining her. And what’s worse, Felicia was subbing in as the third part of the Spider-Man/Spinneret/Spiderling team.

MJ told herself that she wasn’t being so petty as to let that be the reason she was determined to go back into action despite the bandage around her head. But the only other reason—besides of course her worry for letting Peter and Annie go into action without her—was how many times Peter had defied her concerns to go swinging into the night, no matter how many broken bones or sewn-up gashes or purple bruises his body had amassed.

“What makes this any different?” she argued. “The city needs to be protected, even more now that the Regent took so many capes off the board.”

“But it is protected,” Peter stressed. “I’m still out there, Annie’s still out there, and Felicia’s back in her suit…”

As much as she ever is, Mary Jane grumbled inwardly, picturing how she spilled out of it even after all these years. Out loud: “And back in the day, they had the Fantastic Four and the Avengers and the New Warriors. That never convinced you to stay home!”

“Maybe I was wrong then. Maybe I wasn’t. Either way, now I have a family and so do you. Are you really going to gamble your well-being on a bad bet? When Annie needs you?”

He was right. Mary Jane knew that by how angry he made her. She set her hands on her hips. “Do you have any idea how much it pisses me off that I have to agree with you when I know you would just blow me off if you were in my shoes?”

“I would never blow you off!” he protested. “But you’re right, you’re right, you’re way smarter than me, you’re being much more reasonable and responsible and mature than I could ever be and I swear, I’m going to take a page from your book the next time you’re trying to make me see reason. But please, please, this time, just stay home and let yourself heal. Let’s both try to be good, for Annie’s sake—we can go back to being irresponsible jackasses when she goes to college. Both of us!”

He was trying to mollify her with his self-deprecating humor and Mary Jane wasn’t ready to take it. The hypocrisy of Peter claiming to have changed because of Annie when she knew him, knew him better than anyone, and knew he was the same self-sacrificing, guilt-ridden idiot as ever… it cut deep.

Mary Jane couldn’t let it go the way she would some other fight. She remembered how much it’d hurt her, all the times he had shrugged off his own injuries and her wishes and her advice just to do what any other hero in this ridiculously overpopulated city could do.

Peter knew her too—saw that he’d gotten as much leeway from her as he was going to get. He kissed her on the cheek; not so much a gesture of reconciliation as a promise that he would make it up to her later on. And then he was off, doing the same thing he would be doing even if his skull was cracked and she was urging him to stay home.

Mary Jane couldn’t take it. Couldn’t take going from party girl to some responsible mom like everyone who’d ever called her a slut was right: she just needed to straighten up and fly right. Right now, she absolutely could not fly right. She had to do something stupid, even if it wasn’t as stupid as looking for a supervillain to fight while her skull had a hairline fracture in it.

She picked up the contact list by the phone and went to the very bottom of the list, where Peter had written down numbers like Frogman’s, because these were people he would only call if there was an apocalypse on and everyone else was busy fighting Galactus.

Eddie Brock’s number didn’t end the list, but MJ didn’t think she could rip any amount of paper from the lower end without touching his name.

***

It was the worst night of the week for Eddie. Half of the boys were off at their Army Reserve meeting and the other half was at the Elk Lodge. What was going on in Dobbs Ferry was all young and annoying, like food trucks and flash mobs. Even the Reserve seemed frattish these days, from what he’d seen of it. So he could either stay home and watch TV with however many cold Buds he pulled from the fridge or face the long drive into the city to see if he could find some excitement there.

Eddie was too young to be some boring retiree, but he was still too old for the Reserve. And he just wouldn’t fit into any of those hale-and-well-met fraternal groups like the Elks, even if he were old enough for them, which he didn’t think he was.

There was the Emerald Acres Club for people with money. A loophole would’ve made Eddie automatically eligible, since he’d come by the house, but he knew better than to try to be one of their charity cases. They were front-office boys; he was on the loading dock.

So he sat in his favorite chair, a vinyl recliner that vibrated against his spine—well, when it worked. A gift from his last wife before she’d run off across the border. It was all that was left of her in the house. Everything else he’d pitched. Pictures, their wedding silver… he’d even gotten rid of the clothes she’d picked out for him. He didn’t know why he’d kept the chair. Maybe because he didn’t have to look at it when he sat in it.

He leaned out over the left armrest and opened a drawer in the telephone table. Probing fingers sought out a worn metal frame, the glass long since vacant, and he took it out carefully. Making sure not to touch the unvarnished picture within.

He stared at it with a bitterness that was exquisite in how it simmered. Years ago he’d given up his hatred and anger at Parker, but he still felt a sense of rivalry with the guy who’d had everything just work out for him: the big-shot assignments, the beautiful wife, the loving family. The guy had climbed as high as a hero could go and now he’d saved the whole world from the Regent. Eddie’d never gotten a break like that, not even once. Even the symbiote was just table scraps from Peter’s silver platter; something the geek hadn’t even wanted.

So that rivalry—and even that word seemed inadequate to express how Eddie wanted to show the nerd up—came to center on what Eddie envied most in Peter’s life. The gorgeous, besotted wife. Eddie could take or leave being an Avenger or a cool teacher or a star photographer, but if he just had a chick like Mary Jane… yeah, that would make it all worthwhile.

He looked down at the photograph in his lap. It was nearly ten years old now; not too clear even when it’d been new. It’d been taken back when he’d been ‘inverted’—a brief period when he’d been all nicey-nice, no killer instinct at all, and the Parkers had taken him in.

For a while there, he’d been a regular friend of the family. They’d even gone up to the state fair in Westchester together. And there, he’d gotten the only photo he had of Mary Jane. Oh, sure, he could’ve clipped one out of a magazine or printed one off the internet. But this one was his.

She hadn’t wanted to pose for the rip-off artist charging a dollar to take your picture with a vintage Polaroid camera, but after Eddie asked her to, she agreed reluctantly. Her expression was perfect: a mirror of the sullen boredom she felt at the imposition, but transformed by her incredible beauty and sense of aesthetic into the alluring, coquettish reserve of the truly gorgeous.

She was a woman who could’ve done just about anything with her life, but she stayed in Queens with a husband who didn’t appreciate her because she was just one of a hundred amazing, spectacular things that happened to him every day.

Eddie spoke just to hear himself instead of the straining silence. “God, you’re a good-looking woman, MJ. Bet you look even better now that those child-bearing hips have been put to good use. You coulda had me or a hundred other guys just by asking, but you chose that lucky bastard Parker. Smart girl, I guess. Stick to the guy who has everything coming his way.”

As always, he felt an erection coming on as he stared at the faded pictures. His eyes undressed Mary Jane; his fevered imagination conjured up the feel of her smooth, voluptuous curves under his hot hands. He remembered those firm, beautiful breasts—their ripe, proud fullness as she came out of the shower that stupid night at Parker’s, the night even his inverted self proved to be a putz… the last night that Mary Jane so much as looked at him.

He imagined his hands unfastening those tight little cut-offs. As he stared at her photograph, his desperate wishes seemed to bring her image to life—smiling at him with that pert little come-on in her eyes that always made her so attractive, her head cocked to one side like she was sizing him up for whatever sex act she was in the mood for.

She had one hand on her hip as she stared at him from the photograph with the same boundless devotion she’d had for years now, the same mysterious model’s look on her face… and the same delicious body, barely contained inside her jean shorts and the tight-fitting T-shirt that Parker somehow let her go out in public wearing.

It was silk-screened in day-glo colors and Eddie remembered it had made such an impression on him that she seemed to wear it night and day. The sight of Mary Jane in it just blew away all the times she wore some other piece of laundry. Even at night, he could see her from blocks away.

One late night, coming back from a swing shift, he’d seen her and Peter through the window. They were dancing in the moonlight to something on the radio and he’d seen the phosphorescent colors on Mary Jane as she wiggled and writhed like the music had gotten into her and this was the only way to let it out.

He’d wanted to break through the window, to grab her and take her away from her unjustly blessed husband and show her what a real man was like, a man who struggled for what he got. But he didn’t. He walked off, like he’d been doing ever since, home to his loneliness and eventually an ill-fated attempt to replace her with a wife of his own.

And now there wasn’t even some shabby substitute to come home to after a day’s work. He missed his ex more than he cared to admit, but still, he would’ve traded all his time with her for one night with Mary Jane. The real thing.

Eddie heard his phone ring and he hurriedly put the photograph back in its drawer, as if his caller might see. But no, no one would see. This was a company town now and the executives never slummed with working men like him. And his guys never bothered to come around. Who wanted to spend their off-hours with the boss, even if he was just a foreman?

He picked up the phone, sure it would simply be a wrong number, and could not have been more surprised to hear Mary Jane’s voice like his photograph had finally decided to talk back to him.