Wedding of the Century 6 (Patreon)

When Mary Jane awoke, it was like sound had just been invented. She went from the quiet of sleep to learning, by degrees, the noise of the air conditioner rattling and car horns off in the ether and a radio playing somewhere on the floor either above or below them.

And Peter: she heard his heartbeat like some tiny gong, reverberating faintly through all his slender body. His lungs swelling and emptying. All of it so gentle, so soft. It could’ve been her own flesh breathing and beating—like that’s what she would’ve heard if she stepped outside of herself.

It was a sensation she was in no rush to decouple herself from. Mary Jane tried to remember the last time she had taken a nap, the last time she had been woken up by her body having its fill of sleep instead of the alarm clock or some grip telling her that she was on in five…

She felt all fuzzy… a little drained… numb and maybe even empty, but that sadness that had gripped her suddenly felt like it’d been left behind. It could still make itself heard, but she didn’t have to listen to it scream in her ears anymore.

Feeling a curious mix of abashment and shamelessness—maybe she really was becoming the wanton all the tabloids had her as—Mary Jane picked herself up. She’d fallen asleep in Peter’s arms, or with him in her arms, but he didn’t awake upon her detangling herself from him.

In sleep he looked… dignified, she supposed. Like Gregory Peck in To Kill A Mockingbird. Not as… adult, she supposed. But if he’d had a son… young and skinny and a bit on the intellectual side… yeah… Peter had that look of backbone, of bedrock, shining through the awkward impediments of his mussed hair and patchy five o’clock shadow.

Looking at him while he slept, unaware that he was being observed, made Mary Jane feel a giggly kind of naughty. He had great eyelashes… long and dark and fine… and it made MJ’s ears burn to know something so intimate of him when they were nothing to each other. Not really.

Maybe you’re reading too much into this, Red, she told herself. What do you really know about him other than that he felt sorry for you? You’re not that easy a lay, are you?

Maybe she was cynical. It was a cynical sort of day. In LA, land of the real tans and fake smiles, it seemed likely as not that Peter would be a wolf. Only doing this to get into her pants. But that was LA.

Her thoughts were a muddle. There were probably a lot of people who would do what Peter had done. Pat her on the back, smile at her, tell her it would all be alright. She believed people were good. Or at least that they could be good.

And maybe even most people were. Maybe she could’ve had her little breakdown on any street of any town and someone like Peter would be there to pick her up, brush her off, say the world hadn’t ended just yet.

But no. She wouldn’t believe that either. They might feel bad for her, they might try to cheer her up, but they would not be as special as her Peter.

Your Peter? the voice in her head insisted. Because he caught your eye at the exact right moment on the exact right day? Aren’t you making a tiger out of a housecat?

For some reason—Mary Jane tried not to put it down to the intensity of her gaze—Peter picked then to stir. She felt a sense of chagrin. It seemed like she’d barely gotten a good look at him; couldn’t he rest for a few more minutes, an hour tops, until she’d looked at him enough to see… whatever she was looking for?

She had to be looking for something. Why else did she want to keep looking at him?

His eyes came open. Peter saw her, unabashedly staring back at him, and started. Holding up his hands in a warding gesture.

“Sorry… sorry… I must’ve dozed off…”

“You must’ve,” Mary Jane said calmly.

Peter still seemed to feel the need to explain himself. “You dozed off first! I mean, I can see why, you must be under a lot of pressure… but you can see my situation.”

Mary Jane made a curious face—she wanted him to keep talking—and Peter obliged her.

“I mean, I didn’t want to wake you. I thought I’d just, that I would, that you would—wake up eventually. And when you did, obviously, then I could go. I wasn’t trying to get you to sit in my lap all day, obviously. Clearly. But I couldn’t just leave you on the floor or… or up on some of the folding chairs either…”

“The janitors could’ve swept me up,” Mary Jane agreed, nodding understandingly.

Peter seized on the agreement too quickly to realize what it was. “The janitors could’ve swept you up! The janitors could’ve swept you up? I don’t think they—they’d probably just tell you to leave the building before you got locked in.”

“That would be more responsible of them.”

Peter shut his eyes, seemingly realizing he couldn’t talk to her anymore without getting his bearings. “How long was I asleep? Oh, how would you know—” He checked his watch. His eyes had barely landed on it before they went blank. “I’ve been sleeping with Mary Jane Watson for two hours.”

Mary Jane blinked enough to bat her eyelashes. “How was I?”

“Not… obviously not. But you told every reporter in New York that you wanted to talk to me alone and now we’ve been alone for two hours and God knows they’re never going to believe that you fell asleep. I wouldn’t believe that you fell asleep—I’d believe I fell asleep, I would absolutely manage to fall asleep while I was in a room alone with Mary Jane Watson…”

“Do you think my fiancé will believe nothing happened?” Mary Jane asked.

Peter sputtered some sympathetic noises before realizing how deadpan she was being. “I don’t know how you’re calm enough to be sarcastic.”

“Maybe I’m just a morning person.”

Peter’s face set. His eyes were full of longing, but also all the worry he buried it under. Mary Jane could tell, she was an actress. She’d have an Oscar if she could say, like Peter said, “I should go.”

She wanted to tell him not to worry. To tell him, as he had told her, that it was alright.

But was it? He could be a serial killer. He could be a paparazzi. He could have every word of this typed up in his head, waiting to be a tell-all.

All very normal, rational, eminently sensible fears. And all that was stacked against them was Peter’s reassuring smile.

“I’m sure your girlfriend must be wondering where you are,” Mary Jane ventured.

“Oh, she won’t wait up. She’s too busy not existing,” Peter said offhandedly.

“You just need to find someone who, ah, needs comfort,” Mary Jane pressed. “You’re pretty good at that.”

Peter breezed out a laugh. “I know what you’re thinking.”

“You do?”

“Yeah. Trust me, you’re going to find a guy before I find a girl. Anyone would be lucky to have you. You could have people line up to cut off their right arms for you and judge them on, I don’t know, who gets the coolest robot arm after.”

Mary Jane snickered. “So. Anyone would be lucky to have me?”

“That’s what I was going for with the robot arm story. Don’t blame yourself if you don’t get it, I flunked Creative Writing.”

“And I wasn’t so hot at Statistics 101. But I do believe ‘anyone would be lucky to have me’… would include you?”

Peter could’ve been having a stroke. His eyes darting around. It was cute; trying so hard not to offend her. She was full up on people who loved her, who worshiped her, who adored her—how many of them tried not to hurt her?

He had to have realized how bad it looked to hesitate. “Yeah, of course,” Peter said finally.

“You’d be lucky to marry me.”

“I’d be somewhere between lotto winner and astronaut.”

“You want to marry me.”

“Yeah. What? Did I say that? I must’ve said that…”

“Okay,” Mary Jane said.

“Okay,” Peter said, like a ferret just now realizing it had made it into its hole ahead of an eagle, or whatever hunted ferrets. “I’ll just go now. I think on average, I did pretty well in this conversation—I don’t want to tank my mean.”

“I wouldn’t know, that Statistics 101 class was a bitch for me.”