Reckless
On Fridays Gwen heads out to OsCorp early, around seven in the morning. She doesn't have class until noon and she figures she'd rather get her work done earlier in the day than spend the rest of her Friday afternoon in a lab. At the very least having her Friday free gives Gwen some illusion of being a normal college student, even if she knows she is probably just going to go back home and help her mother with dinner.
Gwen hits the sidewalk outside their apartment to the sound of beeping and grinding and the whirr of construction vehicles that she has all but phased out of her consciousness, growing up in New York. She looks to her left and sees that the tiny alleyway by their apartment is now home to several machines and a dozen grumpy looking construction workers. In the summer, particularly, this city seems to have no regard for its residents' sleeping habits, because workers are scrambling to get everything done in the hours between when the sun comes up and when it starts frying the pavement, somewhere between six thirty and ten.
She wonders how Peter will sneak in through the alley with all that equipment, but she's sure he'll find a way. It seems like he always does.
"You're here early."
Gwen looks up and sees her coworker, another intern-turned-part-timer, Owen. He is perched at a chair, his body craned awkwardly over a microscope he must have been peering into. She looks around to see if anyone else has arrived, but it seems to be just the two of them. Gwen smiles politely and chooses a seat a few chairs away from his to set down her bag and get herself collected.
"Yeah," she says. Ordinarily she would say something friendly, something along the lines of "look who's talking," but Gwen is cautious around Owen—not because she thinks of Owen as a threat in any way, but because it is glaringly obvious that he has had a crush on her since they first started here a few years ago and she doesn't want to say or do anything that might give him some false hope. She's been on the receiving end of that stick for enough years and she wouldn't wish it on anyone.
They sit in silence for a moment as Gwen retrieves her papers from her bag. She feels him watching her and shifts her face away, feeling some gnawing guilt about the situation. She considers Owen for a moment—he's attractive looking enough, he's polite and ridiculously intelligent. He has that sort of oafish charm that boys with big shoulders have. She thinks she should like him, that most girls in her position would, but Gwen seems to have a type. A type that decidedly and unfortunately looks, walks, and talks like Peter Parker.
"Got any plans this weekend?" asks Owen after a few minutes of working in silence.
"Um," says Gwen, trying to organize her thoughts. She will probably go home. She will probably follow Mary Jane to some party to make sure she gets home alright. She will undoubtedly visit her father's grave the same way she does every Sunday morning.
"I might have dinner with an old friend," she says.
He smiles. "That's always nice."
"Yeah," she agrees, ducking her head back into her work. She can sense him waiting for her to talk again, to ask him what he's doing this weekend, but she doesn't. She doesn't mean to be rude, but she is afraid the question would be an invitation for him to try and ask her to do something, and she isn't in the mood to let him down.
"Hey, listen," he says.
"Hm?"
"How about we get coffee sometime next week?"
"Coffee?" Gwen bites the eraser of her pencil. She hates coffee. It isn't something she'd bother to tell him, though, because she isn't going to go.
"You know, if we ever catch a quick break in here," he says, and it pains Gwen how anxious he looks, waiting for her to answer.
She isn't a monster. "Maybe," she says noncommittally, praying that he'll understand that she doesn't want him to bring it up again.
The way his face perks up indicates that she has had no such luck. "Tuesday?"
"I don't know what my schedule looks like yet. Start of the semester and all." She glances at her watch. It's nine o'clock, way too early for her to have to be in class, but nobody else has arrived and she doesn't want to be sitting in here with him alone any longer. It makes her feel kind of rotten, as if her mere presence is sending him the wrong message.
She finishes packing up her stuff. "I'll see you around."
Gwen meets MJ for a quick brunch before class when MJ looks at her buzzing phone, smiles apologetically, and gets out of her seat.
The only times MJ doesn't loudly advertise her phone conversations in front of Gwen are when she is talking to Richard, her long-distance boyfriend. MJ always ducks out of the room or keeps her voice down low, still a little bit embarrassed about dating him after all this time, because he had briefly dated Gwen in high school. MJ said once that she doesn't want to make Gwen feel uncomfortable with all their carrying on. Gwen told her she didn't care, because it was the honest truth and still is—in fact, it alleviated some of the awkwardness of the way she broke up with him, that he glommed onto MJ so soon.
That aside, it was almost three years ago, so Gwen doesn't understand why MJ has to make a big production out of keeping that part of her life so separate from Gwen. Gwen suspects that a part of her is uneasy that Richard liked Gwen first; rarely has MJ ever been the second choice to Gwen. Boys tend to flock to MJ like moths to a lamp. It's the kind of thing that doesn't bother Gwen, who doesn't have the time for or any interest in boys at the present, which is most likely why she remains MJ's one and only girl friend.
MJ whispers something into the phone and heads back over to Gwen, who is picking at the last of her scrambled eggs.
"There's a broadcast on the TV in the front," MJ reports, pointing a few feet away. "Spiderman might have drowned."
Gwen's teeth dig into each other, her jaw already starting to ache with her effort not to react. This seems to happen at least once a week. Something happens to Spiderman, and Gwen gets all worked up, wondering if and when she'll see Peter again and confirm that he's okay. It's almost absurd, to be so worried about him. Almost nothing about her life would change if he died tomorrow, because they both live their lives as if the other doesn't exist.
Except for those brief but telling moments she sees him every now and then and her heart leaps into her throat and her palms sweat and the portion of her brain devoted to any form of common sense seems to turn into mush. Sometimes she is afraid she lives for them.
"What happened?" Gwen asks.
"Some truck's brakes failed or something and flipped off the bridge, a bunch of other cars almost toppled in, too. Scary."
"What—what was he doing in the water? How did he fall in?"
MJ shrugs on their way out of the café, holding open the door for Gwen to walk out. "The reporters only just made it on the scene, looks like they don't know much."
Gwen's eyes are riveted on the screen, which is showing a view from the bridge, where the railings are twisted and mangled and there seems to be no sign of Spiderman.
"You coming?"
Gwen doesn't answer. Peter grew up in Queens—she can't imagine he's the best swimmer, but wouldn't his abilities be more than enough to compensate for that? What could have possibly happened for him to fall in and not resurface? Why couldn't he react fast enough to sling a web and keep himself above water?
The only thing that made sense was that he must have lost consciousness before he plummeted.
"Gwen? Gwen."
Mary Jane walks directly in front of the screen, blocking Gwen's view, and only then does Gwen realize that she has a hand to her mouth and that her face has unconsciously twisted with dread.
"We're going to be late to class," says Mary Jane, following Gwen's gaze to the screen. She regards it for a moment. Still no Spiderman. "C'mon. I'm sure Spidey'll be fine, but I'm going to get locked out of Acting Lab if we don't get a move on, like, five minutes ago."
"You go on," says Gwen. "I—I forgot something at my place."
"Shoot," says MJ. "Well—my place later?"
Gwen nods vaguely as MJ departs, then stands there in the café and watches the coverage for another hour. In that time they manage to clear the wreckage on the bridge, evacuate all of the crash victims, and redirect all of the traffic. At some point they stop pointing the camera toward the water, which is maddeningly flat and still and ominous, and start interviewing people on the bridge.
Spiderman doesn't resurface. Gwen misses her class and can't even remember which class or where it was. She palms her cell phone in her hand. Does he even have the same number? It occurs to her that she deleted his contact information years ago, but as soon as she holds the phone up her thumbs instantly remember the familiar pattern, tracing over the keys as if she has dialed it a thousand times since then.
She won't call him. What if he picks up? Or worse, what if he doesn't?
She finds herself at Washington Square Park and sits down at the fountain, listlessly refreshing the news page on her cell phone and watching people idly sink in the last few rays of the summer. There are couples sitting and leaning into each other all over the park. Normally she doesn't begrudge them their happiness because normally she's too busy to even pay them any attention, but right now she hates them. Hates them for their slow-beating hearts and their lazy smiles and bare feet. The more she stares at them the more irrationally her hatred of them grows, until she shoves her cell phone in her pocket, flies back to her feet and stalks out of the park.
Sometime around three o'clock in the afternoon she forbids herself from worrying any longer. She turns her phone off and walks to a street vendor to buy a hot dog. She takes a bite and resists the urge to spit it out—it's offensive tasting, she can't eat anything with her nerves worked up like this. She does a lap around the campus, harboring some false hope that maybe she'll run into him, or even MJ, or anyone she knows who can distract her, but she has no such luck.
Her mother calls. Gwen doesn't pick up. Later she listens to her mother's voicemail, asking her if she can pick up some milk before she heads over for dinner tonight—Gwen completely forgot she agreed to come home for dinner at all. She looks down and considers herself. Her shirt is sticking to her, her feet are grimy in her sandals, and she can feel her bangs matted to her forehead. She decides to stop at her apartment and take a quick shower before she heads out.
It isn't the first time she has run into a member of the Parker family in her hallway this week, but seeing Peter catches Gwen so off guard that she audibly gasps. He is fumbling to put his key in the lock and he looks back up at the noise, sees Gwen, and immediately looks down—but not before she sees the thick stream of blood running down his forehead to his chin.
At first she isn't sure what to do. Should she say something? Should she try to help him? He seems to be doing just fine standing on his own, and she doesn't want to offer her help unnecessarily, not if it means an hour of painful silence interrupted by even more painful attempts at small talk.
"I—I can't open it," says Peter, holding up the keys, keeping his head down. He seems embarrassed. "I think the lock is stuck."
The only reason she knows it's her he is addressing is because they are the only two people in the hallway. He doesn't look at her or give any other form of acknowledgement.
Gwen takes a few steps forward. She isn't sure if he's asking for help or not. "Um," she says, "you kind of have to—well, jerk the lock upwards a little bit, like—well, here," she says, taking the keys from Peter. She feels his stare on her hands, on her forearms, on the back of her neck as she twists the key into the lock, jerks it upward instinctively, and pries Peter's door open.
He laughs lowly. "Thanks," he says.
She wonders why he needs help getting into his apartment, if he's even worse off than he looks, but it occurs to her that he hardly ever has to use the lock since he's always coming in through the window—and now that the construction is blocking his path he has to come through the hallway like the rest of the mere mortals living in this building.
"They're tricky," she says, ducking out of his way so he can get inside.
They're both turning away, but in the process it almost seems like their eyes get stuck on each other and they can't look away. He is bloodied and bruised, but once she gets past the initial shock of his gashes, she feels an alarmingly familiar tug in her gut and an almost irresistible urge to reach out and touch him—his shoulder, or his cheek, the way she used to do in those brief few days they were happy together, those brief few days she has immortalized and maybe exaggerated in her mind.
"How have you—how have you been?" asks Peter.
They both cringe a little at the awkwardness of it.
"Good," says Gwen.
"Good, that's—I'm glad."
He's taller seeming that she remembers, standing so close to him now. There are a lot of things she is remembering now that she would rather not. The way his nostrils flare just the slightest bit when he laughs, the way he smells like whatever off-brand shampoo he uses, the way his voice sort of tapers off uncertainly at the end of his sentences.
She takes a step back from him. "You know I'm coming to dinner Sunday, right?"
The smile on his face is crooked, disbelieving. "Huh?"
"Your aunt invited me."
Peter looks like he might choke. "That's—oh. She didn't tell me."
It's unexpected, how two years of bitterness and anger seems to dissipate in just a few words. Gwen wants to want to be furious with him, to yell at him, to grab him by his skinny shoulders and shake him, but instead she finds herself starting to smile like she's still some lovesick senior in high school.
"Yeah. I'll see you Sunday, then," says Gwen.
Peter looks a little stricken, but not unhappy. He tries to walk into his apartment and staggers just a bit. Gwen grabs his arm to steady him.
"Are you going to be alright?"
He blinks at her, surprised that she has asked. She finds herself wondering if he has any friends here; she finds herself wondering if anybody bothers to ask him that at all these days.
"Yeah, I'm fine," he says. He offers her a little salute from the side of his face that isn't oozing blood. "Sunday, then."
The door shuts behind him and Gwen stands there in the hallway for a moment, wondering if she just hallucinated the entire encounter. Her heart is so inexplicably swollen that she thinks it might burst. It seems like this is the most monumental thing that has happened to her in two years, just talking to some boy outside his apartment, but it's Peter, and it's almost normal, and she just feels this irrational need to call someone and tell them about it, to make sure it was real.
She sticks her phone in her pocket and takes a breath. She recognizes this euphoria all too well, recognizes her stupidity in her rush to embrace it—it has only led to heartache, but right now Gwen is beyond caring. She hasn't felt anything in such a long time. Even heartache is better than nothing at all.
IMPORTANT ANNOUNCEMENT TO ALL ANDREW FANGIRLS: if you have access to Netflix, his naked body is now STREAMING ONLINE. I don't know when it got on "instant play" but the first part of the Red Riding trilogy is up ... and so is Andrew's butt. Also he speaks British the whole time!
Err, for the kiddies out there, it's maybe not so appropriate, though. Save Andrew's butt for your seventeenth birthdays, maybe (I believe it's rated R?).
WISH ME LUCK, I HAVE TO GO BACK TO SCHOOL TOMORROW, and this place is just chalk full of baby freshmen ... who think I am one of them. Curse my round face and vertically challenged body. It's actually my last semester, I should be all sentimental but I'm like, guys, get out of my way, I don't want to be here LET'S GET A MOVE ON, etc.
I mean ... college! Go do that, kids! For learning. And reasons. Whoopee.