Perpendicular
MJ wakes up the next morning to the sound of Lexie's laughter trickling in from under her door. She opens her eyes blearily, and realizes she never set her alarm last night after the incident with Peter. It's nine o'clock, a good hour later than she usually gets up to go for a run.
She suppresses a groan. There is a headache gnawing at her forehead and eyeballs, either a punishment for sleeping in or for the one drink she indulged in last night. She rubs at her face and decides to go for a run anyway, because she doesn't have anywhere to be this afternoon and can afford to go out a little late. She finds a running bra and shorts and ducks out of her room when she realizes she must have shed her sneakers in the living room and left them there.
She is shoving her left foot into a shoe when Lexie's door creeps open, and MJ sees the silhouette of a man walk out. She doesn't look up at first, because even in the few weeks she has been here she has gotten used to seeing strange men in the apartment and then never seeing them again. She finishes tying her laces and runs her fingers through her hair to pull it back into a ponytail when she sees, in her periphery, that the man has not moved, and appears to be staring at her from Lexie's doorway.
MJ looks up, an irritated expression already poised on her face. Then she catches sight of him and her hair slips through the cracks of her fingers and her mouth unhinges, open in incomprehension.
"Harry," she says, her voice sounding mangled and overly bright.
His expression is pained, some mixture of embarrassment and anger and shock. His eyes are squinting at her as if he can't quite believe what he is seeing, and he is holding a towel that looks as though it is about to fall out of his hand. He is bare-chested, and every bit as well cut as he was when they were dating, MJ can't help but notice with a calculated sweep of her eyes. His hair is wet from the shower and he is wearing nothing but boxers—it doesn't take MJ long at all to figure out what must have happened last night.
"It's you," Harry says back. "I—Mary Jane, I—I almost didn't recognize you."
She purses her lips, feeling suddenly over-exposed in her running clothes, in front of this man who has seen her naked a thousand times.
"It's my hair," she says, grabbing at it self-consciously, as if it can somehow shield her from his sight.
He shakes his head. MJ hears a distinct squeak and whirr of the shower turning on, and their eyes both flit over to the bathroom.
"Is Lexie in there?" MJ asks, without inflection.
"Where have you been?" Harry asks right on the heels of her question.
MJ gnaws at the inside of her cheek. There are a dozen things she is supposed to say here, things she has rehearsed in her mind over and over, because this was inevitable, wasn't it? Sooner or later she was going to have to have a conversation with Harry, and explain why she did what she did, why she up and left without a word and let herself disappear after Gwen's death.
But of all the worst case scenarios she imagined meeting him again, there is no way on earth she could have anticipated this. She stands, feeling awkward and bare, with the intention to cross the room and talk to him face-to-face, but he moves so quickly that she doesn't even have a chance.
She doesn't protest when he nearly knocks her over, embracing her, pulling her into him. His skin is still wet, and warm against her cheek. He smells like shampoo and nostalgia and Harry. It is remarkable, how easily their bodies still fit together, and for the first time she really feels as small as she has gotten since Gwen's death—his arms feel tighter around her, as if there is so much more of him there, but it isn't overwhelming. He embraces her without expectation or motive, and she relaxes, even when the hug goes on for a little too long.
He pulls away first, but only because she feels too guilty to.
"I looked everywhere for you," he says. His hands are still on her shoulders, steady and determined, the way she remembers him. "You scared me to death."
Her eyes are welling up. It isn't regret—she wouldn't take it back—but it's guilt, mingled with shame, because she never deserved to have Harry care about her this way.
"I'm sorry," she says.
She hears a clatter in Lizzie's room a few feet away, and creaking footsteps across the floor. MJ steps away from him, out of his grasp, and they look at each other uncomfortably.
"The thing is—last night—"
MJ shakes her head. "You don't have to explain," she says.
"No, I want to," Harry says urgently. "All this time, I—I've been looking for you, it's not like I've been wandering around the city, just—doing—things like this," he says, gesturing, his voice low so the other girls won't hear.
"Harry," she says, about to tell him that he has nothing to be sorry for, that she never left with the assumption that he would wait for her. But just as she opens her mouth to say it, she hesitates. It sounds insulting, she thinks, to tell him that she doesn't care who he sleeps with, doesn't care what he has been doing all this time, when he just told her how worried he has been and how he spent so much time trying to track her down. She stands there, trying to recover, and is saved by the grace of God with the sound of Lexie's voice reverberating from the shower: "Any chance you wanna join me in here, stud?"
Harry cringes. MJ fights back a biting laugh.
"I'd better go," MJ says. "Before …"
"Listen," says Harry, his voice near whispering but still intense. "I want to talk to you. Do you have any time tonight? Please," he adds, before she can hesitate. "Please, just agree to a meal, or coffee, or something."
She remembers Peter's face from last night, hard and unyielding.
"Alright," she says. "Um—I finish a show tonight around ten. Is that too late?"
"No, that's great. Name the place."
They decide a diner close to the theater and hastily agree to find each other there. The water shuts off from the shower and MJ backs away from Harry, not wanting Lexie to catch them at such an intimate distance away from each other.
"I'm going to head out," she says, feeling a comical kind of guilt for talking to Harry like this, knowing how hurt and confused Lexie would be if she had walked out and caught them.
He nods solemnly. "Don't disappear again, Mary Jane."
"There's just something so dark about him. Like, mmff, I don't know. So intense. And did you see those abs? Did you see them? Plus you can just tell he's loaded. His watch probably cost a fortune and he almost just left it on my end table—ohmigod, do you think he was trying to do that so I'd have to call him, so he'd have to come back? Ohmigod, I shouldn't have said anything when he left it there!"
MJ nods and laughs during the appropriate pauses, and Lizzie picks up the slack with random dirty interjections. The entire day spans on and on like this, with the three girls perched in front of the television, all three drinking some nasty concoction of lemon juice and cayenne pepper for a cleanse. Lexie touches up her roots while MJ and Lizzie give themselves unsuccessful French manicures from a kit. The hours are almost unendurable, the girl talk and the unnecessary detail about Harry's downstairs situation and the growing pit in her stomach thinking of meeting Harry tonight after Peter's stern warnings.
By the time MJ leaves the show to meet him she is late, and in a tizzy, having changed her mind about meeting him ten times in the last hour. She decides at curtain that she will meet him, and then gets held up by a bunch of tourists asking for pictures at the stage door. She clambers into the restaurant breathless, her feet aching on their high heels, her face still caked in make-up and her hair still voluminous and blown out of proportion.
The instant Harry sees her he stands up at the table, like a soldier at attention.
"I thought you weren't coming," he says. "I really thought you weren't."
"Well." MJ smiles uncomfortably at the hostess, who has followed her to the table. "I'm here."
"You look …" Harry scans her up and down. The skimpy dress, the heels, the bright coat and the hair and the mascara. She wishes she had taken some time to change into something a little more modest, because she is afraid he thinks she is trying to put on a show for him. "Different."
MJ blinks at him. "Um. Thanks."
"No, no, I just mean—god. I'm sorry. I don't know what I'm saying. You look great," he says, pulling out a chair for her. "Here, here, sit."
MJ obeys. He is so palpably on edge that she feels her own anxiety fade, and start to replace itself with a mild and familiar irritation. She shakes it off and stares at him politely as they sit down, giving him her full attention.
"So you're in a show," he says.
MJ nods carefully, wondering how much he actually knows, how much Lexie unwittingly revealed by talking to him. "Yeah," she says. "I am."
"Congratulations. You must be really happy."
She wraps her hand around the glass of water in front of her, her palms slick with the condensation. "It's kind of hard to believe."
Harry offers the barest of smirks. "Well, not that hard. You've always been talented. It was only a matter of time."
She has to stop herself from wincing. She doesn't want him to think that she is fishing for compliments, because the truth is she doesn't want any kind words from him. It only makes her feel even more as if she has taken advantage of him.
"How have you been? Are you … keeping busy?" MJ asks. She stares at him, his face relatively unchanged, not full or gaunt or betraying some darkness like Lexie made him out to be. She can't study him for too long without making some sort of implication, but at a glance he just seems like Harry. A little older, maybe—it has, after all, been almost two years—but she wonders what on earth could be so bad about him that Peter felt it necessary to stalk her down last night the way he did.
"More or less," says Harry. "Yeah. But Mary Jane—you have to tell me where you've been. What happened to you, why you just—why you never said a word."
She looks away, her hands locked together tightly on the tabletop.
"I'm not angry. I just want to know. I feel like I need to know, to understand."
MJ nods without looking at him, and tries to grasp for words that are adequate enough. Everything sounds so cliché and self-indulgent. She can't just say that she needed time alone, that she needed to discover herself and she wasn't ready to commit. And she can't fall back on the truths that she is not willing to admit—that she was terrified, not of the Goblin, but her feelings for Peter and the way that they seemed to consume her, and the grief that she couldn't even let herself properly acknowledge without feeling like a traitor.
She hasn't consciously decided what to say when she finds the words spilling out of her: "I miss her," she says. It's the first time she has talked about Gwen to anyone since it happened. She did not attend the funeral, or tell anyone in Chicago what had happened. She did not call Gwen's mother or even check for an obituary after she left the city. None of that would bring Gwen back.
Harry is waiting for her to continue. It isn't really an answer, and she knows it, so she tries again: "She was my best friend. After I left home, she was the only real family I had."
She can see Harry opening his mouth to protest, but he stops, and they are both surprised by the fat tear that streaks down MJ's cheek and thuds on the table. She touches a hand to her face, surprised by how unexpectedly the tears come. It hurts in a way she has never let herself hurt, to really think of what she has lost. Gwen was the first person she called, good news or bad news or any time of day. Gwen was her sister, her champion, her voice of reason and her safe place to land. Gwen was the person she most relied on and the person she most took for granted, and then in an instant, in a singular and unforgiving instant, she was gone.
"And she was supposed to get married, and she was so perfect, and loyal, and smart, and—" MJ is trying to keep her voice down, because even though they are in a corner booth and it's late she is suddenly painfully aware of the spectacle she is making—"Gwen deserved it, all of it, and it just got taken from her. And I couldn't … it didn't feel right, everything here, I just couldn't stand it."
Harry, to his benefit, doesn't try to calm her down or shrink away from the few people who have started glancing over at them. He takes a moment and nods calmly, considering what she has said. "I miss her too."
She stares at him. Of course he misses her, but he will never really understand what MJ is feeling, what she felt back then. But he seems to accept this explanation, at least for now, in this crowded diner full of strangers. MJ swipes at her eyes inconspicuously to get rid of the mascara she is sure has dripped down her face. Peter was wrong. Harry is mature, and patient, and understanding. The way she expected he would be. The way she wishes he weren't, so she could justify all her wrongs.
"Tell me," she says, weakly, trying to change the topic. "How everything has been … with OsCorp, the foundation, your father …"
Harry's eyebrows shoot up. "My father?"
MJ pauses, trying to gage his reaction. "Yeah," she says hesitantly.
"My father—" Harry stops himself, his mouth puckering oddly. The hand he has on the table, the one that she can see, is tense around a fork, twisting it between his fingers. He stares down at it and says, "I guess you haven't heard."
MJ feels her stomach sink. "Heard what," she asks in a careful voice.
Harry gives her a rueful, bitter grin. "You must have been living under a rock. My father's dead."
"Oh," MJ exclaims, a hand to her mouth. She shakes her head, feeling her chest seize with sympathy. She has been so selfish, so overwhelmed by her own troubles that she never even thought there was a chance another tragedy would strike, so close on the heels of Gwen's death. How could she not have even checked on Harry? How could she have missed this monumental and terrible thing, that he probably went through alone? And why didn't Peter tell her about this?
"Harry … I'm so sorry."
Harry just shrugs, his eyes downcast. "It happened like a year ago."
How? she wants to ask. Norman Osborn was a lot of things—loud, crude, bitingly intelligent and insanely driven—but among those things, he was certainly healthy, certainly fit. He saw to it, didn't he, with all those fancy personal trainers and nutritionists? MJ knows he had heart issues at some point or another, so she just assumes it must have been a heart attack, because she doesn't want to ask Harry herself.
It turns out she doesn't have to.
"Can I tell you something?" Harry asks.
His words are strained, like he is desperate to say whatever is on his mind. He leans forward, his eyes compelling, his nostrils flared. She has looked at him now and she has no choice but to nod.
"This is going to sound … I haven't told anyone this, but I know what I saw, Mary Jane, I know what I saw."
She bites the inside of her cheek. "Okay," she says, prompting him to continue.
"Everybody thinks my father died in an attack from the Goblin." Harry's voice is so low and his expression so surprisingly intense that it steals her breath, waiting for what he is going to say next. "But I know the truth. It wasn't the Goblin."
The noises of the diner seem to fade away as he holds her stare, so steadily that she feels like she is getting sucked into it. The clatter of forks against plates, cooks calling out orders, the steam and the heat of cooking food from the kitchen a few feet away, all of it seems separate and ordinary and inaccessible. Just before he takes in a breath, just before he finishes the thought, she feels the first pang of regret for ignoring Peter.
"It was Spiderman."
MJ doesn't move. She knows however she reacts to this is very important to him, and even though she is stunned and disbelieving, she doesn't want to give herself away. Harry is still looking at her, almost daring her to contradict him, to say all the words that are threatening to fall out of her mouth.
"How do you know?" she asks instead.
Harry looks agitated that she has to ask. "I saw him. I saw him kill my father."
MJ doesn't want to risk working him up any further, but she has to know. "How?" she ventures.
"He killed him, and then I watched him crawl in through my father's window, and just dump him there. Bloody and beaten and dead. It's no mystery that my father has always hated Spiderman," says Harry, "anybody working at OsCorp with half a brain knows he must have stolen OsCorp technology for those webs he uses—but whatever the reason, he felt threatened enough to murder my father in cold blood."
At some point MJ stops hearing his words and starts hearing the mania that lies just beneath the surface of them, the strange new cadence of the way he talks, a little off-kilter and imbalanced. She knows in her heart that Harry is wrong, and he practically just admitted himself that he hadn't seen the murder happen only seconds after insisting that he had.
Harry sucks in a breath through his teeth. "My father," he practically growls, "who worked tirelessly funding weapons, developing strategies, anything he could to stop the Goblin. I barely ever saw him, he was always working, trying to save this city." Harry swallows, hard, and it looks like he is swallowing poison at the thought of it. "And then Spiderman gets all the credit for it. He kills my father and everyone thinks he's a fucking hero."
MJ's heart is racing but her thoughts are too sluggish to catch up with her. "Harry …"
"You believe me, right?" His eyes are flashing, and the skin on his face is red and throbbing. She is staring at him, not answering quickly enough. "Mary Jane, Tell me you believe me."
"I believe you," she says. She glances around to make sure nobody is listening, that nobody has overheard.
Harry relaxes, but barely. He settles back a few inches into his seat and puts a weary hand to his face. "I knew you would," he says. "You know me, Mary Jane. You know me. You believe me, even when nobody else does."
MJ nods, knowing now that there must have been a conversation like this with Peter that ended very differently.
"Look," says Harry, the flush in his skin starting to even out, his voice calmer. "We have a lot of catching up to do. I mean, I know it's been a long time, but since you're back now … I've really missed you."
"Oh," MJ says, a little startled by how drastically the conversation has twisted. "Um. Harry."
"Of course I wouldn't expect everything to just go back to normal," Harry says, with a nervous laugh. "But the way I see it … if the Goblin hadn't happened, if Gwen and my father hadn't died last year, we would still be living together. And even now, we've found each other again, haven't we?"
Because you were banging my roommate, MJ thinks to herself, but he looks so painfully earnest that she keeps the thought to herself. It is irrelevant anyway. She has known for a long time that she is finished with Harry, and if she were afraid that seeing him again would stir up old feelings, if she were afraid the insecurity of being alone and knowing Peter doesn't want her would shove her back into Harry's arms again, she isn't afraid anymore. She is a different person now, for better for worse. The kind of person who doesn't need anyone to love her.
She keeps her voice firm when she speaks. "I've missed you too, Harry. And you're right. We should catch up. But—"
"Wait," Harry cuts her off. "Just—I didn't mean to put any pressure on you," he says, as if she is the fragile one and not him. "We don't have to jump right back into everything. But I couldn't live without you, Mary Jane, and now that you're here again …" He struggles for a second, and she knows why: he is trying to make this sound like a decision that they are making together, not one that he is making alone. "What I'm trying to say is, I love you. And I know you loved me, before everything happened, and that doesn't just go away. I think if we give it time, we can make this work."
He makes it all sound so sensible. What he doesn't realize is that it is too late to sway her. That even before Gwen's death she intended to leave him, and nothing that has happened since then would make her change her mind.
"I will always be here for you," MJ says, trying to sound diplomatic and mature.
The nervous smile slides off of Harry's face. The waitress walks by and asks if they'd like to order. MJ tells her no and Harry doesn't even look up, pretending to scrutinize the menu, hiding his embarrassment.
The waitress leaves and they sit there in silence for a few moments.
"God, I must seem pretty pathetic to you right now," Harry says bitterly.
"No," MJ is quick to assure him. "What would make you—"
"Is it because I slept with that girl? I was telling the truth, Mary Jane, I never do that kind of thing. But I hadn't seen you, hadn't heard from you, for all I knew you were dead, too—is it so wrong that I moved on?" he says, completely misinterpreting her reluctance.
"No, of course it isn't." MJ says what she held back earlier, in hopes that it will convince him to let her go: "I'm glad that you did. I wouldn't want you waiting around for me."
His expression is tight. "So you're telling me there's nothing left to wait for."
She closes her eyes and takes a breath. "I'm sorry," she says, steeling herself, "if I gave you the wrong impression."
He just shakes his head with a rueful little smile. "You know what, don't worry about it. You never do."
She deserves to hear that, but it still hurts. He gets up from the table and she sees the slightest hesitation. He still thinks that she might try to stop him, that she might change her mind. It breaks her heart to see that second flit by, the one he is counting on, the one where she is supposed to grab his hand and beg him not to go.
"Hey," he says, without looking at her. "When you realize you made a big mistake—you know where to find me."
He means for the words to sound flippant, maybe even funny, but they don't come out that way. He leaves the diner, and MJ doesn't even turn around to watch him go. She folds up the menus and leaves two dollars on the table for the time that they wasted and the food they didn't get. Then she gathers up her purse, buttons her coat back up and leaves.
She feels a selfish kind of relief when the cool night air hits her face. Harry was the one loose end left here, at least the one loose end that she could do something about. As for everyone else—well, she is finished with her father, and it seems as if Peter is finished with her. So she walks out of the diner toward her apartment feeling a quiet peace she hasn't felt in a long time. Her world is predictable and orderly. She has a routine, she has friends, she has goals and motivation and nothing to tie her down.
By the time she nears her apartment almost midnight. Her feet are killing her, so she slides out of her heels and puts on her spare pair of flats, stopping on a street corner a few blocks from her apartment. A drop of rain falls from the sky and hits her nose; she looks up just as a few indecisive drops follow it, and just as she is about to turn her attention back to her shoes, she sees it: an unmistakable flash of red, swooping low and then shooting up high above her, so quickly she might have imagined it.
There he is. Spiderman. She is certain of it, even though he was barely in her line of sight. She tucks her toes into the worn out shoes and keeps walking, occasionally looking back up, knowing that he is long gone.
She wonders if Peter will ever find out that she met with Harry. She wonders if he will be angry with her. She both hopes that he will and that he won't. She would never want to disappoint him, but at the same time it is the only thing that has kept him near—if he hadn't been so adamant about warning her about Harry, would he have even bothered to find her at all?
Which makes her address a question that was too bewildered to think of—how did Peter know where to find her last night? Without knowing how long she had been in town, or that she was even in a show—without knowing her new phone number and without any mutual friends who could have pointed him there—how did he end up at their door, waiting for her, certain he had the right address?
A gust of wind blows by, nipping at her exposed calves and ankles. She knows why, or at least she thinks she might, and suddenly she knows she is wrong to think that she has nothing to worry about, nothing left to fear. Because if Peter is afraid of what Harry is capable of—Peter, who has the least to be afraid of than anyone in the city, if MJ's suspicions have any truth—then they should all be afraid.
She just wishes she understood what she should be afraid of.