Wedding of the Century 4 (Patreon)

Mary Jane wore her wedding dress to the press conference. She probably shouldn’t have. It drew eyeballs, made her look like a publicity whore, like she was trying to make the front page at the check-out line of every supermarket—as if she had a choice.

But she couldn’t bear to take it off, admit her wedding day was a failure. She knew it was, but her body wouldn’t accept that until it felt all the silk and tulle come away from her skin. It’d be like ripping away a part of herself—the woman she’d been becoming with Paul.

Mary Jane wasn’t ready.

Still, she knew it would hurt, being seen that way, and it did. Strobe light camera flashes stabbed at her, each one a different headline. They went with the shouted questions chiseling at her, Sal trying to field a defense, but it was just access. People who gave favorable reporting got called on. Not even to do with her.

If Mary Jane cut herself open answering a question, it was thanks for the reporter playing nice with someone else in the stable. Squashing a story or losing a photograph. It barely had to do with her… it was all her image… only the image had used to be her. It all made her hurt more…

“Did you agree to be Paul’s beard?”

“Were you intimate with Paul?”

“Was this all a publicity stunt?”

“When you were intimate with Paul, were other men ever involved?”

“Did you know about Paul seeing other men?”

“There were visits to a resort in Miami—”

“Do you have any interest in women?”

“Did you really have no idea—”

“Anal sex—”

“Career—”

“How could you not know?”

“Gay rights—”

“Your fans—”

Mary Jane tried to answer, like it was all a performance, but it was like trying to recite Shakespeare when she kept getting belted in the stomach. And the real question—the one they never asked, but that she kept asking herself—was why?

Why was she putting herself through this? What was the point of it all? She’d bled and sweat and cried, for what? To be hectored like this on the worst day of her life? What good was the money, the fame, any of it, when she had to be excoriated like this?

It wasn’t even her job. She was an actress, a model—why did that entitle people to her personal feelings, slices of her life and her pain that she barely wanted herself? They were hers, but she couldn’t keep them. Every little scrap of her identity was worth enough to someone for these people to rip it out of her.

Mary Jane realized she’d stopped talking. In the middle of some pat answer, a vague aphorism, she’d stopped cold like a stroke victim. Now she just sat there, frozen, and the photographs poured in. Or out. Moments of her time and anguish, captured for eternity.

Maybe it was true what the indigenous said about photographs taking your soul. Mary Jane didn’t feel like she had a very big soul at the moment.

Only one of them wasn’t taking her picture. He wasn’t a reporter, that was plain to see. He had a camera, a good one, but it was down at his waist, untouched. He was good-looking, but in a way that took a while to see. Not the obnoxiously manicured prettiness that she was so tired of but not the effortless, square-jawed handsomeness either. His face was a bit too long for that, his eyes too dark, his stubble too real and not some mannered shading to bring out his cheekbones… no, it wasn’t pretty, but it was memorable, in its own odd way.

She didn’t think she’d forget it. And that look in his tired eyes… his tired, pained eyes… could it be sympathy? For her, the woman with the million-dollar bank account and the face on the cover of Glamour and everything she could ever want? Everything she could ever want and he still didn’t want her to feel this way.

“Um, excuse me,” Mary Jane said, and realized that she’d wandered away enough from the microphone that it couldn’t pick up her small voice. She leaned closer to it. “Excuse me, I don’t think I have anything more to say… could all of you please go? Yes, just go, I’m not going to answer any more questions, there’s no reason for you to be here. Except you.”

She pointed at the contradiction: the photographer who hadn’t taken a picture of her. He made a face—a she couldn’t possibly be talking to me face. It was so charming in its befuddlement that Mary Jane could’ve laughed. It was the first time she’d felt like laughing since she was Paul’s fiancée.

“Yes, you. Would you stay here, please?”

***

Peter wondered if this was what having an aneurysm felt like. Yesterday, he’d be lucky for a girl to notice he existed. Now, the Queen of All Girls wanted to speak to him in private. It was something out of a coma dream.

At her insistence, everyone else filed out, even her own publicist. The photographers snapped a few pictures for the road. And Peter just sat there. Thinking, surely someone would notice there was something wrong with this picture. Someone would tell him he should be leaving with everyone else. Girls up on a stage, behind a podium, didn’t look into milling crowds and see people like him.

Only she did. She was. She kept looking at him with this insatiable… curiosity and Peter had no idea what to do about it. He could barely meet her eyes.

It wasn’t that he had no experience with women. It was just that he had no experience with Mary Jane Watson.

And then they were alone. The double doors shut. The big room seeming much too large for the two of them… and very, very cramped.

Just pretend she’s about to shoot at you, Peter told himself. You always do good when someone’s shooting at you.

“How are you doing?” he asked, his voice weakly bouncing around the vast open space of the almost empty conference room. He cleared his throat, not liking how the echo sounded to him. “Can I get you anything?”

Mary Jane leaned against the podium. Folding her arms across the top of it and resting her chin on him and suddenly she could’ve been the girl next door, in a better world, a perfect world, where every man was a hero and every woman looked how she looked to a man in love with her.

“Why didn’t you take my picture?”

“Excuse me?”

Mary Jane pursed her lips and blew into the microphone, gathering some feedback before she spoke into it. “Everyone else was taking my picture, the photographers at least. You didn’t. You’re a photographer. So…?”

“I—”

Mary Jane leaned close to the microphone. “Speak up, please.” So close that her voice boomed through the speakers attached to the mic.

Peter moved along the rows of folding chairs from the back of the room to the podium where Mary Jane and her team of entourage people were meant to hold court. Hoping she could now hear him when he couldn’t bring himself to raise his voice. “I take pictures to put a face on the news. To make it real to people. I saw you and I thought… it is real to you… this whole messed up thing. It doesn’t need to be real to other people.”

“Don’t you need the money?”

Peter laughed haltingly. “Yeah. Yeah, that’s my life story.”

“All those other photographers took pictures of me. It’s not going to make any difference that you didn’t.”

He could only shrug. “I told myself that once—that it wouldn’t make a difference. And I did the wrong thing.”

“And now you always do the right thing?”

“Now I always know it makes a difference.”

Mary Jane stepped past the podium. She crouched on the edge of the stage, kicked her feet out into empty space, and sat down.

“Take a picture of me now,” she said. “No sense in disappointing your boss.”

Peter was suddenly very close to Mary Jane. No podium between him and her. “He likes being disappointed. He gets to yell with a clear conscience.”

“You’re a photographer. I’m a model. Take the picture.”

Peter lifted his camera, adjusted the lens, and saw Mary Jane in the viewfinder. Something tragic about someone looking that brave when they were in that much pain. His forefinger hovered on the shutter button.

He saw tears in her eyes. No Daily Bugle subscriber had a right to that. He didn’t even have a right to it. Peter didn’t know what he was doing here, why Mary Jane wanted him in the middle of this… surely she had someone else, someone she could go to, someone who would be of more comfort than him.

Only that person wasn’t there. And Peter couldn’t leave her all on her own.