Peter walked away from the girl of his dreams with painful assurances of friendship, determined not to turn back. If he caught sight of Mary Jane crying again, it might be enough to shatter his resolve. He couldn't afford to be broken. She would be the one most likely cut by the cracks and shards.
Peter went blind to the peace and quiet of the graveyard, forced himself to picture instead the terror on her face as she was held up in the blackest night, her robe crumpling in the wind and fuzzy slippers spiraling end over end far, far beneath her feet. He had powers. He had responsibilities. Spider-Man could do a lot of good, could save a lot of people, but he'd been ambushed by the realization that for every one he saved, he stood to infuriate just as many. If Mr. Osborn hadn't figured out his feelings for MJ, she never would have been taken from the coziness of her bed to function as one half of the Goblin's twisted ultimatum.
His love was a bullseye projected upon her back, an anvil dangling on a frayed rope from unseen rafters. No one could be allowed to know how much he cared about her, even—especially—Mary Jane herself.
Peter had been a boy with a secret long before the spider bite. The only way he learned how to love was in silence and from afar. He just had to stick with that—with what was safe. And familiar. That should be easy, except now, somehow, in some way he could never hope to hypothesize or isolate into believable components, Mary Jane said she'd come to love him too.
All he'd ever wanted was to be with her.
Miraculously, she was asking him to follow his heart, to act on the yearning that burned hot enough to bake his throat dry and speechless and tugged at him so insistently, it had been a challenge to be within a few feet of her without falling flat on his face. His balance got better. Freakishly better. But that didn't make it any simpler to keep moving farther from her. The retreat from the cemetery sapped the strength from his legs, reduced Peter to an uncoordinated, knobby-kneed wreck all over again, but leaving was the one right thing to do.