I was planning on posting this on my birthday (sweet sixteen! Yay!) but that didn't happen, so here it is now. It's an experiment in a different writing style, and I've been reading waaaay too much Jonathon Stroud.
This is dedicated to Jenn1, for genuinely being an awesome person to talk to and for coming up with the title. :D
Lost
I feel her gaze on me. Seeking me out, watching me curiously without a trace of hostility or fear as only she can do. A burning tingle shoots up my spine, but it's unlike any spider sense I've ever felt before. I quickly roll my sleeve back down over my watch and turn my head to look directly into her eyes.
She's some distance below, craning her neck to look up at me. People rarely look up. It's why I use ceilings and not floors for stealth work, but somehow Mary Jane always looks up. Like she can sense me. Perhaps she can, after all, I am the other side of the city and completely and utterly lost in a place I've never been to before, and somehow she's here. She's always here.
"What are you doing?" She asks, in that cheerful, melodious voice she only uses when she's nervous. Nervous, Mary Jane? If only you could know how I feel around you… but you can never know.
"Just admiring the view." I answer flippantly, my gaze singularly on her and her alone. Perhaps she senses the innuendo, for she smiles coyly and plays with a knot of red fire between her fingers.
"There isn't much to see." She replies stoically, but tilts her head in a challenge. I smile beneath my second skin.
"Oh but there is." I disagree firmly. There's no doubt about it, the innuendo has blossomed into a flashing neon sign above my head that shows the world, plain to see, how I feel. She blushes adorably and drops her fingers from her hair.
I shift uncomfortably, well aware I've overstepped boundaries I set for myself long ago beside Uncle Ben's grave, and only just beginning to care.
"I hate to admit it, but I'm lost." I say eventually, and the air shifts perceptibly. Teetering passion gives way to lighthearted puzzlement.
"Lost?" She says, hands straying to her hips to create an obvious modelling pose. She raises an eyebrow and stares me square in the eye. "I thought the Amazing Spider-man didn't get lost."
All of a sudden it hits me that she's flirting. With me. And I'm flirting right back. Damn it.
I give a dry laugh. "Well so did I, until today. Got any suggestions?"
I have a suggestion. I bite my tongue and try to stop my gaze straying from her face. Bad Spidey. What would Aunt May say? I suppress another laugh as I imagine her response: "Oh Peter that's just wonderful! I've always said you and Mary Jane would be perfect together!" I can't suppress a snort and she tilts her head further curiously.
I force a cough and pretend that's what I was doing. Coughing. Yes.
"Suggestions?" She says, suddenly serious. She thinks for a minute. Then: "It would help if I actually knew where you wanted to go."
"Right. Of course." I say, overly-chipper and she grins. I move down the wall a bit so we're roughly at eye level, about a metre apart. I think furiously as the seconds tick by, wondering where I can tell her I want to go that isn't too suspicious. My apartment, her apartment and Aunt May's apartment are all quickly ruled out. That leaves…
"The Daily Bugle." I blurt suddenly. She stares. Then she laughs. I watch and wait in wonder.
"So you want to go to the Daily Bugle." She says at length. I nod cautiously.
"Yes ma'am. And may I say you have a wonderful talent for stating the obvious."
Crimson lips part in amusement, she even goes so far as to bat her eyelashes at me. Man, are those some killer eyelashes.
"Why, thank you. It's got me out of a few scrapes before." She says, face as straight as a … straight object. Ahem. Then her façade breaks and a dazzling smile bursts onto the scene, making me tingle in places I never knew could tingle. It's a good job I'm not too far from the ground, 'cause if she keeps smiling at me like that I may find myself much closer.
I open my mouth to say something - 'Damn, you're hot.' No, too forward. 'You look sexy in red?' No, too un-superheroish.
"Oh." I question distantly what possessed me to say that.
"You look sexy in red." She says slyly, stepping closer.
"Thank you. Wait a minute, what?" I say dumbly. I didn't know my ears were that filthy.
"I said, we should go to bed." She says with a delicious frown puckering her eyebrows and nose. Can she read minds? Dear God I hope not.
"What?" I'm alarmed to find my voice has reverted to how it sounded when I was about six.
Now she rolls her eyes in a mock-annoyed fashion. "What, are you deaf? I said I can show you the way, if you don't mind being led."
I blink. No mention of red or beds anywhere in that sentence. Definitely need my ears checked. I clear my throat back through puberty until it sounds mostly normal. "Um, sure."
"Great. Follow me." She says with a sway of her hips that makes me lose my grip on the wall. I come crashing down half into a dustbin and only just manage to get my feet under me before she turns around.
"Coming?" I nod and quickly disentangle myself from a milk carton, wondering when I lost control of the conversation. If I ever even had control.
We walk down the street together, side by side, unfortunately not hand in hand. People give us a wide berth and stare long after we've passed them, but I don't care. Neither does Mary Jane, she just laughs playfully whenever someone comes up to me and asks what the hell I'm doing.
And what the hell am I doing? I don't know any more than the teasing lilt to her voice, the seductive sway of her walk, the spun copper streaming out behind her.
Hours pass by in friendly conversation and leisurely walking. I am not unaware of the undertone to our voices, though I'm not sure she acknowledges it. She plays the game, but does she know what game she is playing?
A dangerous one. One I should know not to let her get mixed up in, yet still my feet fall one after the other on the patch of pavement next to hers.
She asks me things, things that are personal but strangely impersonal at the same time. Questions I don't mind answering honestly. My favourite food. What subject I did best in at school, if I even went to school, she added in a teasing laugh. Why spandex is better than lycra.
I told her, it's much warmer in the winter, and began explaining the ins and outs of sewing when her giggle interrupted me and I found out she was only joking.
This time I blush and duck her gaze. But she draws my head up with just the pressure of her alluring stare, and somehow we've stopped in the centre of the sidewalk, harried shoppers and businessmen and women cursing us and calling me a lunatic for wanting to be like 'that Spider-man creep.'
"Spider-man?" She says softly. I want to reach out and touch her. Feel her delicate china skin beneath my fingertips, except my fingertips are hidden by a constricting red material that suddenly makes me want to gag and choke and rip it off forever.
Instead I suck in an unsteady breath. "Yes, Mary Jane?"
"We're here." She replies, just as quietly. Disappointment laces her voice, turning her face bleak and eyes dull. I drag my gaze from hers and register that we've moved behind the Daily Bugle offices and away from prying eyes, but still standing that ever important metre apart. There's a rat scurrying underneath a rubbish bin nearby, but I keep quiet. It'd break the moment if she ran screaming from the alleyway. I clear my head and fix my attention on her.
"I see." But I don't. I don't see why I should leave her now, I don't see why I should go back to my cold empty apartment. I don't even see why we shouldn't be together, not anymore.
I take a step closer. Then another. Her bleak eyes lose some of their lonely isolation, and she takes a step too.
"Mary Jane…" I breathe, my low voice a husk of what it once was.
"Yes?" She breathes back so lowly I could only distinguish the word from watching the way her full lips curved the syllables. Tantalising, watching those lips. They dip and move as she smiles hungrily, exposing perfect white teeth and a tongue that I wish was next to mine.
I forget what I wanted to say. Her hands are trailing up the side of my neck, hunting purposefully for the seam between the costume and the mask. A shiver runs up my spine and into my head, making me deliriously happy. She finds the gap, runs her fingers under it and leans in as she does so.
We're a hair's breadth apart when the sirens sound and I realise the shiver in my head is my spider sense.
"Shit." It's the first time I've sworn in front of a lady. The word sounds foreign coming from my mouth. If only Aunt May could hear me now. But there's no time for that.
"I'm sorry, I can't do this - we can't do this. Goodbye, MJ."
Her hands grasp out to touch me, maybe to hold me, but they soon drop lifelessly to her sides. She nods, a sharp, controlled motion that leaves her staring at my feet instead of my face. I can still see the tears pooling in her eyes.
She wraps her arms around herself protectively and talks to the floor. "I understand." Those two words have never been so painful. I'm always saying them in class, or after an officer has briefed me on some emergency situation, but after hearing them spoken so harshly from Mary Jane's lips I'll never say them again.
I nod too, the movement seeming false and clumsy. I'm backing away from her quickly, stumbling away from the pain I see encompassing her, the same pain I know mirrors mine.
There's only time to rush another hurried apology and remember the look on her forlorn face as I swing away. She still watches me, lifts her head defiantly and stares as I fade into the distance. I still feel her gaze, even now as I pry a dead child from the wreckage of a car crash I should have arrived earlier to prevent.
It is in the moments that I allow myself to love that people get hurt, and I don't just mean the lifeless little boy staring straight through my mask to my soul.
Mary Jane had a lucky escape.
Fin
I'll do a deal: you give me a review and I'll give you birthday cake. ;)