Chapter Text
-A few months before the epilogue of Take My Hand-
The thing about New York was that it was never quiet.
‘The city that never sleeps’ just about covered it, because the damn thing didn’t let up for a moment - and so, for the better part of his life, neither had Peter.
Well, maybe that was an exaggeration. He’d slept a couple hours each night, maybe snagged an afternoon nap on a rooftop where he could, but mostly he spent his days in school (or working, or fighting villains) and his nights patrolling (or working, or fighting villains). He hadn’t had a lot of time on his hands for other, more important things - like, say, showing up to dates, and weddings, and funerals.
Or that was what he’d told himself back then, anyway. A lot of the time it was even true.
But sometimes, the needs of the city were a convenient excuse to get out of things that Peter B. Parker was a little too much of a coward to face.
Peter huffed out a frustrated sigh and slung a web that snagged the side of a crane, flung himself around it in a lazy, graceful arc that sent him sailing up to land on all fours at the top. The metal was cold through his gloves. Winter still had yet to let up.
Crouched on his finger and toe-tips, head tilted, Peter gazed down at his city. If he concentrated on it hard enough, let the cacophony of car horns wash over him and listened idly for sounds of distress, he could almost pretend that he wasn’t in the process of employing his most ineffective problem-avoiding method at the ripe age of thirty-eight.
That being, obviously, running away.
He took the opportunity of being too high up for prying eyes to yank off his mask so that he could scrub at his stubbly face with both palms. God, he thought bitterly, What am I doing? MJ didn’t deserve this. MJ didn’t deserve his shitty attitude and shittier priorities.
He had been late. Again.
All logic dictated that he should have learned from last time - it’d only been a few months since getting caught up in hero-ing had gotten MJ kidnapped - but today, the city had called, and so Spider-Man had answered.
Peter had been on his way home from work, and something had exploded. And nights off with MJ or not, he couldn’t ignore that call when it was right beside him, and he always had a web-slinger on and at the very least the mask in his pocket, if not the whole suit bundled away in the bottom of the messenger bag on his shoulder, and so he’d slipped down an alleyway and tugged it on without a second thought. Spider-Man had saved the day, because it was what he did.
By the time he was on the subway home, two hours later than he should have been, he’d turned his phone on and seen two messages from MJ, and then he’d remembered the ultrasound.
Peter considered biting down on his balled-up mask to muffle a scream of inadequacy. MJ was just about eleven weeks along now, and apparently that was prime time for a checkup, so they’d planned the visit together - compared schedules and everything, made sure they’d both be free. But Spider-Man, as Peter had learned again and again and again, didn’t exactly get off hours.
He did the mask thing. It didn’t help. All it did was disturb three raggedy pigeons from their perches next to him, who flew off in a cloud of filthy feathers, giving him dirty looks over their shoulders.
This appointment was supposed to have been a learning experience for the both of them, and on top of that to see what their child looked like for the first time. And he’d missed the whole thing.
MJ’s first message asked if he was going to be able to make it, and if yes, what time (not where he was or why he was late, because she knew those things). The last text was just a run-down of everything MJ had learned. The baby was doing good, thank God.
She’d attached a picture. The little guy was mostly a bulbous head, with a round body and tiny feet sticking up at the end, like one of those squishy alien things from the nineties, and Peter went misty-eyed looking at it. He couldn’t see much of a family resemblance yet, and honestly, it was pretty ugly, but he guessed there was some kind of innate evolutionary thing that made him love it automatically.
Shame there isn’t an evolutionary response that makes y’ a present father, huh, he thought, with a bitter chuckle.
Peter flopped down on his ass on the edge of the crane arm, let his legs dangle over the sidewalk far below, and opened the texts again.
Crap, he thought wearily. Maybe this should be some kind of an event - his very first time missing something of the baby’s! He should take a photo to commemorate it. Buy some champagne.
It was bound to be the first of many brand-new, shiny failures, given his track record with MJ.
He hadn’t been able to go home and face her, coward that he was, and so when he’d trudged off of the subway in Forest Hills, instead of going home and apologising, or at least asking how it went in person, here he was. Late again. Running away.
Peter pulled a leg up so he could slump his torso over it and ground his forehead into his knee, groaning tiredly. The worst part was that he’d known this would happen. When he’d said yes to MJ, when she’d said yes to him, when she’d told him that she would be there to help him up and he’d told her that they could be partners. But he’d pushed it down. Maybe, like an idiot, he’d thought it was one of those fears he’d overcome. Like he just could get over what was a fact of Spidey’s life, or his worst personality trait, and they would go away. Sure, ok, he wasn’t scared to death over the concept of having kids any more. Go figure! But maybe that terror was inevitably gonna be replaced by guilt.
How many missed milestones would it take for MJ to tell him she’d made a mistake taking him back? He didn’t think she’d ask for a divorce, for the sake of the baby, but he didn’t know if he had the strength to be the one to make that call again. Besides, he couldn’t leave the kid missing a parent if there was a way to avoid it. He wanted to be a father. One who actually did school pick-up and came to graduation because he didn’t have to worry about bleeding out in an alleyway or stopping an alien race from abducting the Mets.
Peter sighed, scratching weary fingers through his scruff a little harder than necessary. Of course he couldn’t ask for another divorce. As soon as that thought had wandered through his head it had been met with a pang like being hit upside the head with a frying pan, because it was a dumber idea than throwing away his web-shooters and jumping off the Empire State Building. Kids or no kids, Peter Parker adored Mary Jane Watson with every fibre of his being, and there was nothing he could do about it.
Also, two divorces in one relationship just felt like way too many. Leave some divorces for everybody else, guys, jeez.
Below, a cop car wailed its way down the street, and Peter’s eyes vaguely tracked its passage until the siren was too far away for even his enhanced hearing to pick up. The wind ruffled at his hair.
What an unholy mess this all was. He was, and had always been. MJ had said she’d stick by him, and she was a saint for it, but what about her? What about when he wasn’t there to pick her up? He didn’t know.
Peter was exhausted. Utterly. Not physically (although he was also pretty beat), but mentally. That familiar, crappy feeling of it all being pointless was starting to creep back in, because what was the point of all those years doing what he did when he wasn’t there for the stuff that mattered with the woman he loved? All those times they’d nearly lost each other for good, all those tears and all that effort, and for this. Her waiting for him. Him all alone. On a crane.
The crane wasn’t a vital part of this, but Peter was starting to feel vaguely resentful of it anyway. Projection, much?
Ping, went his phone, and Peter re-focused his slightly damp eyes on the screen. A notification from one of his many (a little bit illegal) homemade apps told him that the police were receiving reports of shots fired in a parking lot in Brooklyn.
Peter tugged down his mask and flipped off the crane, twirled through the sky for a second before he caught himself and began to swing toward the address. Nothing like some good ole-fashioned crime to take your mind off of things.
-
It was a gunfight. Rival gangs, or mafia families, or something (same old), and Peter got there before the cops. Thirty or so mean-looking guys in dark clothes taking potshots at each other from between other people’s cars.
Peter landed perched on a flat roof overlooking the parking lot and was about to muster up one of his trademark quippy greetings when he decided he just didn’t have the energy. So he webbed a pistol out of one guy’s grip (who took a couple seconds of staring at his empty hands to process what had happened) and flipped it around, studying it with pantomimed interest before he snapped it in two and tossed it aside. The guy whose gun he’d confiscated cottoned on then, and his frantic gestures appeared to be getting some notice.
‘Ah, shit,’ said someone. The sound of gunshots died down as heads began to turn towards Peter.
‘Change of plan!’ yelled a scratchy voice, ‘Fire on the spider!’
‘If I had a nickel for every time I’d heard that,’ mumbled Peter, rubbing at the spot between his eyes. How much am I gonna regret not stretching? he mused idly, as gun barrels whipped around to face him. Experience told him the answer: a lot.
It was kind of beautiful how quickly both sides of the skirmish abandoned their dispute in favour of shooting at him instead. Just call me Mr Unity. Bridging gang divides. Don’t let anybody tell ya I do nothing for this city.
Dodging the first few shots with practised ease, Peter hopped down from the roof to crouch behind a station wagon for a moment or two, listening to the sounds of hurried footsteps on the gravel with his head cocked.
Wait for it…
His spidey-sense tripped and he shoved his shoulder into the car, launching it out at the first row of guys and knocking them off their feet. Then he leapt over his makeshift projectile, webbed two guys in the face, and brought them stumbling straight into a painful introduction between the car roof and their faces, before pivoting to neatly rid another couple guns of their owners. The thrum of adrenaline in his veins was as electrifying as it had been since the collider - but it wasn’t shutting his brain up about MJ and the kid.
Dammit, thought Peter sullenly, casually taking the legs out from under a guy with a nasty-looking scar across his cheek, and then, making mental calculations so fast they were barely conscious, he pulled back a powerline and used it to slingshot himself fifty feet into the air. What’s a guy to do when his avoidance strategies are collapsing around him?
On the bright side, he got a little grim satisfaction out of webbing three guys together, still midair, and using his landing to conk a fourth on the head. Still got it.
On the far side of the lot, two men were crouched together behind somebody’s old broken-down Ford, clearly having thoughts about turning tail and running. While Peter punched and dodged their buddies, he heard one whisper, ‘Hey, ain’t this guy supposed to be chatty? Swear to God all I’ve heard about ‘im is that he don’t shut up. So what’s he doin’ playing the strong but silent type?’
‘Shit,’ said the other nervously, ‘You think we really pissed him off?’
Peter wanted to laugh. If only he was pissed at somebody other than himself right now.
With a couple more well-placed kicks, only five guys were left standing (not counting the two hiding by the exit), and they were trying to get themselves into some kind of slap-dash formation, guns cocked and aimed at him.
Peter sighed. He wished more criminals would give up and hide when he showed up.
‘On my mark,’ said the one in the middle (apparently the de facto leader), out of the corner of his mouth. Nice of ‘em to give me a heads up, thought Peter tiredly.
They fired. He folded backwards, bent so far his head almost brushed the ground, then sprang up just as fast as he’d gone down and used his momentum to throw himself up and over their heads, webbing the small of leader-guy’s back and dragging him along on his way, to the panicked shouts of the others. Peter landed on the fence of the parking lot with leader-guy dangling and thrashing from one hand.
‘Lemme down from here!’ he squawked, flailing comically. The remaining men shot glances at one another all like, ‘Well crap, now Spider-Man’s gonna use Tony like a human shield.’
Uncertainly, one of them raised a gun, and Peter looked from Tony (he’s gotta be a Tony, right? They’re all called Tony) to the others. He shrugged his shoulders and said, ‘If you end up shooting him, it’s your fault you got cruddy aim.’
Abruptly, he tossed Tony up, screaming all the way, caught him by a web and swung him round and around his head, then sent him flying into his buddies, who went down like bowling pins.
Peter wandered over to the pile of groaning goons and webbed them to the floor for good measure.
He was staring down at them with slumped shoulders, hands on his hips and wondering if he really had to go home now, when the scrape of a shoe against gravel behind him made him straighten up and turn.
‘Shit,’ whispered the nervous guy from before, frozen halfway to the street exit like a deer in the headlights.
‘Go, go, go!’ his friend hissed, shoving him, and Peter lazily fastened a stream of webbing in the centre of each of their chests.
‘Going somewhere?’ he said drily.
‘Don’t do it!’ squeaked the nervous guy, sticking his hands as high in the air as they would go. His friend, the one who’d called Peter chatty, who had a shock of ginger hair peeking out from under his beanie, scoffed and said, ‘Seriously, man? ‘Don’t do it’? You think the Spider-Guy is gonna kill us?’
Peter snorted and began to reel them in on the web, making them stumble toward him, and they both clammed up very suddenly, eyes wide - until the ginger guy, looking as though he was regretting it even as he said it, went, ‘Fuck, dude, what’s up your butt?’
Peter paused. Laughed at the bluntness of it.
‘What?’ he said, bemused.
Nervous guy looked like he was going to pee himself. Ginger guy said, ‘I dunno, you seem kinda pent up, y’know?’
‘Pent up?’ said Peter wryly, ‘Well jeez, thank you, Doctor Phil.’
‘What is it, personal issues? Marital issues?’
Goddamn, thought Peter, simultaneously unnerved and exasperated, Am I that obvious?
Apparently, his surprised silence was enough confirmation for the guy, who twanged the webbing attached to his chest with a finger and sympathetically said, ‘I guessed right, huh? Look, it might not be my place, but - well, we’re not bad guys. Right, Bobby? And-’
‘Aw,’ said Peter, almost disappointed, ‘You’re tellin’ me you aren’t all called Tony?’
‘No, we’re - what are you, dumb?’
‘Don’t call Spider-Man dumb!’ hissed Bobby, ‘He’s gonna bite us, or some shit!’
‘Shut up, dude,’ said ginger guy, while Peter stared between them, unimpressed, ‘Look at him, he’s just having a bad day. Hey, Spidey, like I said, it might not be my place, but you want my advice?’
Peter raised an eyebrow. This oughta be good.
‘Sure, Mr Mafia,’ he said flatly, ‘By all means. We got time before the cops show up, I’d love to hear your pointers.’
‘Go talk to her, man,’ said ginger guy earnestly, ‘Lemme tell ya, I fixed my relationship with my girl just through conversation, plain and simple. You feel me?’
He looked pretty proud of himself. Peter, frankly, was just a little unsettled by the guy’s uncanny intuition. As usual in the face of awkwardness, his incorrigible word vomit surfaced, and without any input from his brain, his mouth produced, ‘Well why do you assume I’m straight?’
His brain facepalmed. The guy looked surprised, and he made an apologetic motion, ‘Sorry man, didn’t mean to assume. Uh, talk to him, then.’
Bobby’s mouth had fallen open and didn’t look like it would be closing any time soon. He stared at Peter like he’d just confessed to a hatred of cheese. Good save, Spidey, thought Peter sardonically - and then, very helpfully, the police arrived.
Peter beat a retreat to the top of a lamp post to keep an eye on proceedings, and as the cops were loading Bobby and his psychic friend into the back of their van, Peter heard him happily informing a dude who looked like he was recovering from a concussion, ‘Hey, did you know Spider-Man’s gay? Yeah, I know, I know. Good for him, man. Unlearning prejudices every day, that’s what I’m talking about.’
A policeman shot Peter an incredulous look. Yep, ok, thought Peter, cracking out his back and wincing, it is definitely time to go home.
-
The window screeched gently as Peter tugged it open, and he winced at the sound. On the bed, MJ stirred.
Crap, thought Peter. He crept inside on silent feet, shut the window carefully behind him, dragging it down with a touch of two sticky fingers to the pane, and he began stripping out of the suit as quietly as possible - but it was too late. MJ was blinking at him, eyes shining in the lamplight leaking into the room.
‘Hey there, Tiger,’ she whispered. Peter sagged a little.
‘Hi,’ he said hesitantly, voice low and gravelly with shame, ‘Look, MJ, I’m so sorry, I - you -’
‘It’s late, Pete,’ said MJ quietly, ‘Just come to bed. It’s ok.’
‘What, you’re not even gonna tell me to take a shower?’ said Peter, trying for humour to cover up the writhing guilt in his gut, and she wrinkled her nose and acquiesced, ‘Ok, take a shower.’ She yawned, rolled over, and the conversation seemed to be done. Peter stared at her a moment, feeling wholly inadequate, then slunk off to the shower like a chastised dog.
The water was warm, but not hot enough to burn away his thoughts, and maybe he deserved that. Only thing worse than screwing up was running away instead of apologising for it, he guessed. So why couldn’t he seem to stop?
MJ, already half asleep, reached out unseeingly and grasped for him as soon as his weight made the mattress dip, and she pulled him into her arms and held him there. ‘Love you,’ she whispered into his chest, her breath warm on his skin. She smelled like shampoo and laundry detergent (had she washed the sheets?) and like home.
‘Love you too,’ he whispered back. He put his arms around his wife and held her, one hand ghosting over her stomach.
Jeez, he thought morosely, What have I gotten this family into?
-
-A little over a year ago-
Mary Jane Watson had been called a lot of things in her thirty-something years.
The papers changed their minds on her often - sometimes she was gifted, tenacious, strong-minded, and sometimes she was washed-up, aggressive, confrontational - as close as they could get to calling her bitchy without losing their PG rating. Coworkers called her put-together, resilient in the face of hecklers and voracious journalists alike, unshakeable against the white-toothed smiles of agents and directors and all the rest of those showbiz bigwigs who were waiting, jaws wide, to snap up a talented girl like her.
MJ was not the kind of woman who would let herself be eaten.
She’d been called plenty of things that she didn’t like to think on so much. Cutting things, things she had to cover up with flippancy instead of makeup. By her father, in one of his moods, by ex-boyfriends, by boys she’d turned down who couldn’t take a rejection. By women she’d thought she’d had some kind of bond with. Those insults always stung the worst.
To most people (the people who didn’t want to cut her down or butter her up) she was Mary Jane. Mary, to some. MJ, by - well, by a lot of the people she liked most.
One thing she’d never been called was ‘mom’.
Except once. A lost child had wandered up to her one day in Times Square, looking for a mother with hair the same shade as hers, and MJ had been struck almost dumb by his smallness.
She had taken his tiny hand and they’d found a police officer, and she’d stayed with him until his mother rushed out of the crowd, harried and windswept, and gathered him up in her arms with a barrage of thank-yous to MJ and rapid-fire admonishments to the kid all wrapped up in each other, and then she’d bustled away with him again.
A pang of something had reverberated through MJ’s chest, then, and at first she thought it was jealousy, which she abhorred. Jealousy, she thought, wasn’t a good look on anyone, least of all her. Although green was her colour. But after a while, she’d realised that that pang had been plain old longing. MJ wanted to be a mother.
It seemed kind of cruel, the way things had worked out.
She’d always kept Mary Jane Watson as her public name, her stage name. That was the name that went on programmes and movie credits, and it was the name interviewers knew her by. Ms Watson.
So to the outside world, nothing would have changed. Not when she’d gotten married, and not - not now.
MJ felt herself shudder with fresh sobs where she was curled up in a pathetic little heap at the foot of the bed. Her bed. Just hers. He wouldn’t take anything from the house except some of the stuff he’d brought when they’d moved in together, all those years ago. Stacks of sciency books from his college days he thought would bore her, favourite shirts, things that’d belonged to May and Ben. No matter how hard she’d tried to press the coffee maker into his hands (he always said it made the perfect cup) or to slip a novel he’d stolen from her collection and kept rereading into one of those boxes that had grown up into an awful pile in the living room, he wouldn’t take them. He’d always been so damn stubborn.
Actually, he’d left more of his things than he’d taken. The closet in the bedroom still housed tonnes of his clothes. There were little parts of him scattered all over the house, and they made MJ burn when she looked at them. He’d always felt like he took more than he gave, she knew. It was fucking infuriating.
But now she would never even get to have an argument with him again, with how wholly he’d scraped himself out of her life. She was half surprised he hadn’t blocked her number.
And she would never be called Mary Jane Parker again, not by anybody. Her Aunt Anna was gone, a few years before Aunt May. Her mom had died, her dad was a thought best left buried, and Gayle and her kids lived hours away. And, oh, how was she supposed to tell Gayle about this? Gayle would blame him for it, MJ knew. Old wounds from her run-away husband that had never quite scabbed over.
MJ supposed she blamed Peter too. What kind of a superhero could be so much of a coward, huh?
She would never be Mary Jane Parker again. What was she supposed to do with that? That name had represented what had broken utterly when they had each signed the divorce certificate in that prettily bland office with the lawyer smiling vapidly as the two of them cracked firmly and finally down the middle.
Right now, Mary Jane wasn’t strong or resilient, and she couldn’t even muster up the strength to be half as angry as she wanted to be. She was just some ridiculous little girl, crying over her boyfriend, except it wasn’t her boyfriend, it was her husband of fifteen years, and now there was an ‘ex’ in front of that and she was alone in the house that they’d shared.
MJ coughed weakly. She scrubbed at her eyes and pulled a face at the mascara that came off onto her hands.
She had to be on set at seven am tomorrow. Her mind seized onto that. Seven am. So if she went to bed now, at - she checked the alarm clock on her nightstand - at ten pm, she should be more than alright.
She got to her feet with purpose and went into the bathroom, where she removed her makeup with practised efficiency, washed the crust from her eyes at the same time as she washed the rest of her face, and then she brushed her teeth, pulled on some pyjamas (steadfastly ignoring the messy pile of Peter’s T-shirts in the drawer beside them), and got in on her side of the bed, and Mary Jane Watson closed her eyes and tried, really tried, to pretend that Peter was just out on patrol. Stupid, she knew, but if that was what it took to fall asleep, that was what she would do.
He would be back in the morning; he always was.
She left the window open. Just a crack.
-
‘Hey, Pete.’
‘What?’ grumbled Peter, scrubbing sleep from his eyes and blinking. White winter sunlight was streaming mercilessly into the room, and he recoiled.
‘Look, look,’ MJ said, sounding way too excited for a Sunday morning, ‘I opened Twitter this morning, and you gotta see what’s trending.’
Peter cracked his eyes open properly and frowned at her where she was kneeling on the bed beside him, dressed but not made up. ‘Since when do I care about Twitter?’ he said grouchily, rubbing a hand over his face, ‘Since when do you care about Twitter?’
‘Come on, grumpy-guts, just look!’
Peter grabbed the phone out of her hands and squinted at it. Sitting squarely at the top of trending was the phrase ‘Does Spider-Man Is Gay’.
‘What - aw, no,’ said Peter, with feeling. The events of last night were beginning to creep back to him, and he really wished they’d creep someplace else.
‘Well? Does he? What did you do?’ asked MJ delightedly, snatching her phone back off of him and starting to scroll through the hashtag with unfiltered glee.
‘Shouldn’t you be more… I dunno, threatened?’ said Peter, whose morning was really not starting out how he wanted, and MJ cackled. ‘This is hilarious!’ she exclaimed, ‘Tell me you kissed a guy to get information out of him or something.’
Peter groaned, slung his legs over the side of the bed and sat up slowly, listening to every bone in his body crack. ‘Why are you so excited about this?’ he said morosely, as MJ pecked him on the cheek and went to grab her hair-straightener-curler thing, ‘You just like seein’ me suffer?’
‘You know I do,’ she said smugly, ‘And besides, isn’t this just an extra layer of cover for us? Nobody’s gonna be accusing me of being Spidey’s beau if they think you’re fooling around with Daredevil - ooh, this guy’s saying you told somebody you had a boyfriend. Did you? Please tell me you did.’
‘Well, since you’re so happy about it,’ mumbled Peter, getting to his feet and beginning to cast around for clothes, ‘I fumbled a mafia interrogation and ended up saying somethin’ of the sort, yeah.’
The rest of the night had filtered back into his brain by then, and Peter paused with a T-shirt halfway out of a drawer, sighed, and said, ‘MJ, honey, I, uh - I still owe you an apology for yesterday.’
‘Yesterday?’ she said vaguely, applying lipstick, ‘Oh, right. It’s fine, Tiger, honestly. I mean, I took notes for a reason. I was kinda expecting it.’
‘Yeah,’ he said heavily. She’d told him before that she’d just sorta gotten used to him missing things. Date a guy as flaky as him for long enough and you start to predict failure, he figured.
MJ, already finished with her hair and makeup (it was amazing what she could do with a hot stick and years of skill) said, ‘C’mon, Pete, don’t be so down in the dumps. I made breakfast.’
‘You made - how long have you been up?’
‘Ah, not too long. You looked like you could use a lie-in. You came in pretty late last night.’
She had already wandered out of the door and down the stairs, so she didn’t see him grimace and bury his face in his hands before he composed himself and followed her.
‘Hey! You didn’t burn down the kitchen!’ he said approvingly, taking a seat at the table, and MJ laughed and swatted him with a dish towel. ‘No, I did not,’ she said proudly, ‘And I made an omelette.’
The omelette looked a little worse for wear. She’d already plated it up, and had clearly taken the cooked (bordering on burnt) bits from around the edge for herself and left him the raw-ish mess in the centre. Given that she was pregnant and he had a pretty resilient healing factor, he couldn’t complain.
‘Looks great!’ he told her, as earnestly as possible, and she snickered. ‘Still working on the whole cooking thing,’ she said, eyes shining, then pulled a face as she met a particularly chewy mouthful.
‘Well, I think it’s delicious,’ said Peter, taking a sip of his coffee to try and wash the taste away, ‘And I’m on cleanup, because you cooked, and also you’re late for work.’
‘I’m - ah, shit,’ said MJ, checking the time on her phone and wincing, ‘Thanks. I gotta arm myself, hold on.’
She ran up the stairs to grab her purse, and when she’d dashed back down them again, Peter was waiting at the bottom to catch her in his arms.
‘I gotta say goodbye properly, right?’ he said, and she smirked as he drew her in close. He tried his hardest to put the apology she didn’t seem to want to accept into the kiss, and when MJ surfaced for breath, she was smiling dazedly.
‘Goddamn, Tiger,’ she said, ‘That was a little too much passion right before I gotta leave.’
‘You know you love it,’ said Peter cockily, ‘Don’t forget your keys.’ He webbed them into his hand from across the room and presented them to her, and she rolled her eyes.
‘My hero,’ she said indulgently, tapping the end of his nose with a playful finger. ‘Yeah, yeah,’ he said fondly, and spun her toward the door, ‘Get outta here, Ms Watson. The spotlight calls.’
She blew him a kiss and left the house with a wave and a clink of metal.
My hero, thought Peter ruefully, staring at the closed door. It seemed an awful lot like so far, he’d been something like the opposite of that.