Spider-Man: Wedding of the Century (Patreon)

Mary Jane took a slow, deep breath. Her eyes were once more drawn to the full-length mirror, showing her in her wedding dress. Something so unbelievably exquisite she wasn’t sure it counted as clothes. All the tulle that frosted her hips, the tasteful rhinestones outlining the mesh further hiding her cleavage on her high-cut neckline, the sheer sleeves with pearls woven against her skin.

Shocking to think of it as part of her life. That this would all be a memory of hers, the same as her childhood and her father and all the crap that she’d ever been through. It was like being born on the bottom of the Grand Canyon, then looking back at that from Mount Everest.

And it did. It did make her feel better about the hand-me-down clothes and the chores that were enough to callus her fingers. All of that was in the past, drowned out by a glorious happily ever after.

“I know you look good, but don’t breathe too hard, girl,” her best friend, Gloria Grant, advised her. Making another stitch to literally sew Mary Jane into her gown. “One big breakfast and this dress stops being your size.”

“I skipped breakfast,” Mary Jane told her. “Couldn’t eat anyway.”

“What’d you have yesterday? Carrot sticks?”

“Celery,” MJ corrected. “And a cigarette.”

“Well, you do look damn good. Shame you won’t be able to have any of the wedding cake.”

“We’ll put some in the fridge for after they finally cut me out of this thing.”

Carefully, but with relish, Mary Jane ran her hands over the second skin the wedding dress formed on her—an homage to the perfection of her physical form. No plastic surgery, no fad diets, no secondary mutation that gave her abs like every X-Man seemed to have.

At age 28, she was just entering her prime. The dress wasn’t just an advertisement of that; it was a promise of her future.

“I love this but I hate it,” Mary Jane said, only belatedly realizing she could’ve been talking about her own cold feet as well. She blamed it on knowing too many screenwriters. Everything seemed to hold a double meaning after a talk with those types.

“We’ll buy another wedding cake, just for you,” Gloria suggested.

Mary Jane laughed. “Maybe for our anniversary. I want to keep looking this good for at least a little while after the honeymoon.”

“Or until you get a family started,” Gloria hinted. “No going back after that.”

Mary Jane felt a lump develop in her throat. Her cold feet—usually buried under a rush of enthusiasm for the process—now felt frostbitten. It was impossible for the wedding date to have finally fallen and for her to ignore the end result of all this pageantry. A home. A husband. Kids.

She should be looking forward to that. It wasn’t like she wanted to be closing out nightclubs when she was in her forties. But she was always so sure that without the dancing and the music and the fame and the glamor… sometimes, she barely liked herself without any of that. How could she trust some man to love her more than she loved herself?

Deftly, MJ changed the subject, holding the white satin glovelette of her ensemble up to Gloria’s dark brown shoulder. “You know you’re going to look so good in one of these when it’s your turn to get hitched?”

“When don’t I look good?” Gloria retorted.

Mary Jane nodded, but wasn’t put off. “But you’ll look so good. The veil and the train… little silver heels… how do you feel about purple lipstick?”

“It’s too bad you’re already taken,” Gloria told her. “You sound excited enough to make me an honest woman yourself.”

“But then one of us would have to wear a tux,” Mary Jane quipped. “I could pull it off, sure, but…” She glanced at the mirror again. “Look how good I look.”

Gloria hugged her. “He does not deserve you.”

They’d been friends for years now, the aspiring actress and the struggling fashion designer. Mary Jane’s ship had come in after years of paying her dues and she’d brought Gloria with her. Losing out on tens of thousands by wearing her best friend’s dresses on the red carpet instead of more high-powered endorsements, but making Gloria’s boutique a chic stop for the rich and famous.

In a way, wearing a wedding dress by Gloria seemed more of a culmination of her life and career than the ceremony did. She’d met Paul so suddenly, been courted so aggressively—but there was something old-fashioned about him that had made her not mind so much how abrupt everything was.

He’d never pressured her, barely even evinced an interest in the Hollywood beauty queen, and that told MJ he saw her as more than just a sex object. That he, like her, wanted someone to build a life with. Kids and a house and a photo album.

But try telling that to her chilly feet…

“Since he’s getting you, though,” Gloria went on, letting go of Mary Jane to flounce over and pick up a lunch box from her things. “And since you’ll be teasing him with that dress all evening, a little something for the honeymoon.”

“Do I even want to know?” Mary Jane deadpanned.

Gloria opened it up to show the contents. “Cheese. Crackers. Sliced salami. And a thermos of sweet tea. Everything you need to keep your strength up. I even threw in a candy bar, just because you’re my girl.”

“You’ll ruin my figure,” Mary Jane quipped.

“Nah, I’m leaving it to the boy toy to do that. Assuming he eats at the reception—I don’t think he needs any help fitting into his tux.”

Mary Jane grinned. She knew it was unfair that she had to sweat and starve to fit into her wedding dress, while Paul didn’t even have to jog an extra mile in the morning, but she wasn’t going to rail at the injustice of it all on her wedding day. Let Gloria do that for her.

“He just doesn’t want to outshine me.”

“Uh-huh. As long as he manages to get out of the tux…”

Mary Jane rolled her eyes. Despite her sexpot image, her real life was barely anything like the redheaded vixens she played on screen. But even for her, the engagement with Paul had been chaste. It made Gloria suspicious, thinking he was hiding some kind of kink or fetish to spring on Mary Jane when the ring was on her finger, but MJ knew he was just old-fashioned.

“This from Gloria Grant, who thinks the Sexual Revolution was worse for women than the corset?”

“It was,” Gloria stressed. “But just because the answer’s no doesn’t mean the question can’t be entertaining. You buy everything you see advertised during the Super Bowl?”

“You’re why I’m grateful I’m leaving dating behind,” Mary Jane told her.

“A guy should show a little interest. Make a girl feel wanted. If he takes you to see The Music Man, it should be because he thinks he’s getting something out of it, not because he likes musical theater.”

“Lots of guys like musical theater,” Mary Jane argued.

“Uh-huh,” Gloria said straight-faced. “Look, you weekday in New York, you weekend in LA, of course you’re going to end up with a bi guy…”

“Paul’s not bi.”

“I’m not judging. At least he has sense enough to realize there’s not a twink in the world that can compare to you.”

“He’s not bi,” Mary Jane emphasized, just as her phone started buzzing. “Hand me that, will you? I don’t wanna bend too much at the waist.”

Gloria picked it up for her, rolling her eyes. “Sure thing, Scarlett O’Hara, but only because it’s your special day.”

Mary Jane took the phone from her and answered it. As she’d just known, it was Paul, his handsome face on her lockscreen, grinning at her in greeting just as he would if he were there. “Hello, my lion. If you want to see me in my dress, forget it. You’ll just have to wait for me to make an Instagram post like everyone else.”

Paul took a breath deep enough to blow out her phone’s speaker momentarily. “MJ, something’s come up. My guy’s putting out a press release now—it’ll have the details—but I thought you’d want a heads-up from me, personally, so here it is: I’m gay.”

Mary Jane hadn’t heard that right. She rewound it in her head, playing her memory over the last several words, trying to find where she’d misunderstood him. When she couldn’t find any place for his speech to have veered off from her following of it, the shock was like that of being in an auto accident.

“You can’t be gay,” she said, virtually browbeaten with surprise. “We’re getting married.”

“I know. It’s a lot to spring on you. And I’m awful, I’m awful for putting this on you all at once, without even dropping any hints. I hope we can still be friends.”

“Friends?” Mary Jane gasped. “We’re going to be spouses. That’s today, Paul. Today!”

“I know, I know—“ Paul began, voice oozing with sympathy.

“Stop saying you know!”

“I understand you’re upset, so so upset, and you’re right to be. I’d be upset too. It’s not you. The wedding was great—you planned a great wedding—I wish I could go through with it. But now I’ve upset you and you’re upset and you’re feeling confrontational… I could never deal with you when you’re being confrontational. So I think what I’m going to do is hang up now… you really have to read the press release, it covers everything… and I’ll call you back later. You’ll feel better, I’ll feel better—we won’t say anything we might regret later on.”

“There is nothing I could say to you that I’d regret,” Mary Jane hissed. Then she sputtered… distantly thinking that she was going over the top, that her acting coach would hate how overblown she was making her character’s experience, if only this were a movie. “We were engaged for six months! W-where is this coming from?”

“We were engaged,” Paul agreed mournfully. “And it was a great ride. Lots of fun. But, honey—“

“Don’t ‘honey’ me!” Mary Jane cut in.

“Look at our wedding registry. You’re asking for rice cookers and a smoothie bullet… I just can’t picture us in the kitchen together, making our smoothies and our rice. Can you?”

“Yes!” Mary Jane shouted. “That’s why I agreed to marry you!”

“Well, I think that could be the problem. You wanted a marriage. As it turns out, I just wanted a wedding. And it would’ve been one for the ages. The wedding of the century.”

Mary Jane sucked in a breath and forced calm. “Paul, listen to me very carefully.”

She hung up. She knew it was what he wanted, even if she’d done it in a way that was petty enough to make him feel like a fool—she didn’t care. She didn’t have the energy to excoriate him.

Her sinuses were full of snot and tears swamped her eyes, trailing down her cheeks. She looked around for a tissue, hoping to act fast enough to save her make-up, then realized it didn’t matter. She wasn’t getting married.

“I’m not getting married,” Mary Jane spoke, saying it out loud to see if that would make the thought feel more real.

Gloria moved in to hug her and MJ was struck by how different her touch was. Before, it’d been celebratory, as tight as the fragility of Mary Jane’s wedding dress would allow. Now it was like Mary Jane was made of cracked glass and Gloria had to be careful not to shatter her.

“You were right,” Mary Jane said numbly, barely recognizing her sorrow-thick voice. “He’s not bi.”