Wedding of the Century 7 (Patreon)

Thank God for the 24-hour news cycle. New stories needed to be chased, reaction videos shot, pictures taken and sold and uploaded. A closed door didn’t sell newspapers, so after a half-hour of Peter and Mary Jane being locked in together, a rumor spread that the whole thing was an excuse by MJ to sneak out the back.

The paparazzi rushed to find where she had escaped to, not thinking that there wasn’t much reason to slip out of a news conference you yourself called. They didn’t return. When Peter opened the door and slid out, there was just Sal, trying to find out from his shrink what candles he should light for the aroma therapy he would need.

“Hey,” Peter said to him.

“Hey,” Sal said back, lowering his phone to his breast.

Peter considered that he’d been about as socially cunning as he could manage for one lifetime, so he simply, brazenly, walked away.

Sal looked into the room to see if Mary Jane was still there and caught her coming out, lithe body animated by a small, indomitable spark of energy that held her up as she leaned against the door and watched Peter go through make-up so streaked that Sal pulled her veil down to hide it.

“What’s going on?” Sal asked. “Who was that guy?”

“No one,” Mary Jane murmured. “Nobody. Just the man I’m going to marry.”

And on the other end of a cell phone tower, Sal’s shrink heard every word.

***

That night, Peter dreamt of Mary Jane being in his arms.

It wasn’t that kind of dream. It was simply that she wasn’t sad, didn’t need comfort—she simply wanted to be in his embrace. He didn’t soothe her of anything but the loneliness of being without him.

From there, his subconscious called up memories of Mary Jane from a dozen movies. How she moved, how she danced, the way she looked in outfits that always suited her. The same way she was too beautiful to be real, be an everywoman, they looked too good on her to be anything but the result of a gifted costume department with one hell of a budget. She has to have a clause in her contract, he thought, within the thought that was this entire dream. ‘I get to spend at least one scene in a Valentino dress.’

And she spoke to him. Regurgitated dialogue from rom-coms, little one-liners from slasher movies… even just saying goodbye or good luck from action movies, with the heft of the emotion she put into such simple exchanges.

It made Peter feel self-conscious, even in a dream. Putting himself in the place of some fictional character, living out an imaginary scenario where Mary Jane loved him instead of playing a part. It made him feel like a stalker, like next he’d have a shrine to her.

But his subconscious took all his reasonable, rational objections to obsessing over not even a person, but a bunch of actorly performances rolled together like that was what the actual actress was like—and proceeded to dream of meeting Mary Jane’s parents, playing with her dog.

It bothered Peter how much he knew about her, this woman he didn’t know and wasn’t even trying to pursue. He didn’t read tabloids or watch E!—God knew he didn’t go in for those creepy pictures online taken without Mary Jane’s awareness of her bending over or getting out of a car—but still he knew about her.

Late night talk show jokes, online memes, friends on social media that reposted things about her while Peter couldn’t care less. He actually had a working knowledge of her life; a secondhand parasocial relationship.

He wondered what it was like for Mary Jane to date or even befriend people in a world where everyone knew enough about her to be a casual acquaintance, even when they’d never met. And he had literal firsthand knowledge of her. The way she smelt, how she felt… how she grieved.

Peter supposed that, especially in New York, it was impossible not to have these strange, elliptical, yet intimate intersections with total strangers. It still made him wish that there was some way for them both to be totally anonymous—just two strangers, on equal terms, learning about each other without some blaring news-gorgon to haphazardly do the work for them.

But then, Peter supposed he, of all people, had issues with boundaries. He liked his walls high; couldn’t imagine living life out in the open, all but naked, laying out secret after secret because that was what got likes and retweets and followers. Private moments. An illusion of connection. Even Peter found it intoxicating.

And maybe you shouldn’t, he told himself. Maybe you’ve been keeping yourself to yourself for so long that you’re making a big deal out of nothing. Even though you know better, that subconscious of yours isn’t answering the phone.

He woke up and went through his morning routine still arguing with himself about that brief, meaningless and meaningful encounter with Mary Jane. Maybe he should just give in, indulge himself with some totally unbelievable daydream where she tracked him down and insisted that he was the only comfort that worked for her in this cold, unforgiving world.

Yeah, right. Caviar and pet manicures just don’t do it for her. She needs you, Parker.

He didn’t really come back to himself until he was on the bus to Midtown High. There, he realized Mary Jane wasn’t the only one who had to deal with a ravenous public. Even if Peter was only a reflection that had caught a smidgen of her light, it was still enough to mark him as special to people who wanted a taste of something special.

His spider-sense trilled gently, alerting him not to an immediate threat, but to an intrusion at the edge of perception. He was being recorded.

Peter looked subtly to his left, wondering if it was some kind of assassin moving in for the kill. The guy holding the cell phone stealthily at his midsection, the camera aimed blindly at Peter, didn’t look like any sort of killer. He didn’t have the mannered blandness of a real psychopath trying to fit in. He was just odd enough to be an actual New Yorker.

“Nice phone,” Peter said offhandedly, only looking at the camera phone out of the corner of his eye. “Looks sturdy. Could probably survive getting chucked out of moving bus. Wanna find out?”

The man wasn’t much older than Peter’s students and he was shameless. Not cowed by Peter’s authority or moved by consideration for a fellow devotee of public transportation. He lifted his phone up for a better angle on Peter and said “Hey, you marrying Mary Jane?”

Peter scoffed inwardly to hear his own ridiculous thoughts echoed back at him, but he’d trained his poker face. With perfect deadpan he said: “Yeah, sure, I’ll make an honest woman out of her, right after I walk on the moon. Now get that out of my face.”

The man lowered his phone. He was no journalist, just another blogger, and he wouldn’t ‘interview’ Peter any further when he could edit out that last bit of sarcasm and have a viral video on his hands.

***

Mary Jane knew she wasn’t thinking too clearly. She felt as exhausted as she would at the end of a hectic shoot. It’d been four weeks since she wrapped on Five Soldiers—she’d detoxed and dieted and primped and preened in anticipation of her big day. Probably been in the prime of her life that morning.

And then, like a switch had been thrown, she’d gone from pleasing exhilaration to pure weariness. Her thoughts were muddled. She probably needed a spa day, or month, but that felt too much like surrender. Relinquishing the narrative to Paul while she went into exile like she’d done something wrong.

Then Peter had come along and Mary Jane didn’t know quite what had happened then. She’d talked to him and she’d said some things… she’d acted a certain way. The usual rejuvenation process where she went to someone’s private beach, basked in social media adoration, and read her most glowing reviews repeatedly (while fending off Sal’s suggestion to meet with a plastic surgeon)… she hadn’t needed it this time. She was just… better.

Mary Jane had realized a long time ago that most actors were almost never genuine. They were hurt deep inside, or were simply born freaky enough to want people to think they were hurt, and so they played a role in real life. The bad boy, the sophisticate, the relatable girl next door, the nerd… it was all personas. Maybe that was the case for most people, period, except Peter—she didn’t know about Peter.

But she knew she had to get back to playing her part. She’d been cast in two ‘movies’: one as a heteronormative bitch who had stood in the way of her fiancé and gay happiness. The other as a poor, heartbroken wretch who’d been jilted on her wedding day. Now America got to performatively feel sorry for her, support her with billboards and hot-air balloons… there’d already been a fireworks display in Montana which spelled out WE STILL LOV YOU MJ.

That was a good part. Mary Jane would be tempted to take it, only she wasn’t relating to it. Not since that talk with Peter.

She wanted to play the blushing bride… the romanced ingenue… she wanted to be courted and wined and dined and tease and be teased. She didn’t want to wait until the media cycle on her heartbreak had ended.

Mary Jane wanted her day as a lover.

She knew she was easy to love. She knew she looked like a million dollars. She was making her movie, playing the part she picked, and it would not just be a self-indulgent revenge fantasy, oh no. She was going to outdo her relationship with Paul by a million and get exactly the man, the marriage, the wedding she knew that she deserved.

When Sal barged into her breakfast nook, she could just tell the universe had decided not to stand in her way.

“Have you seen this?” he demanded, and dropped a tablet next to her omelet.

Mary Jane spun the tablet around to read the news article right side up.

BREAKING: OLD SWEETHEART CONFIRMS HE WILL WED MJ

Mary Jane Watson and Peter Parker went to the same high school—“You could always tell there was something special between them,” says a source close to the couple.

“’Source close to the couple,’” Mary Jane mused. “Do people still fall for that?”

“You didn’t tell me you and this Parker kid were high school sweethearts!”

“It’s news to me. Literally.” Mary Jane tapped the tablet. “I think I remember this real quiet, nerdy kid whose dad died in senior year. Can’t have said two words to him. But, if it makes a good story—”

“We need to deny this story now, before he does!”

Mary Jane kept scanning down the article. “’Yeah, sure, I’ll make an honest woman out of her,’ Peter Parker was heard to say, in a paparazzi video that is much of the world’s first introduction to Watson’s new beau.’ He’s confident, I’ll give him that.”

Sal snatched back the tablet. “Are you listening to me? We have to shut this down!”

“Why? Dowry wasn’t big enough? Too few goats?”

“You don’t know anything about him!”

“We went to high school together.”

“You don’t know him,” Sal reiterated.

“So I didn’t know him for four years. That’s a very stable relationship.” Mary Jane stood up and patted Sal’s cheek. “Get me his number.”

Sal was so flustered he tried to fold up the tablet like it really was a newspaper. “You can’t call him! You should get a restraining order against him, just to be on the safe side—”

“Sal,” she interrupted definitively. “I know him. I know he’d rather hold my hand than make thousands of dollars taking a picture of me with snot running down my face. If I don’t need that, what do I need?”

Sal paused before answering: “You know, there’s this new beauty treatment, they take the amniotic fluid from a goat birthing…”

“Get me the number, Sal.”