Reckless
Gwen finds two things at her doorstep when she arrives home. One is outside her door—it's a piece of cake wrapped in tinfoil on a paper plate with a note from MJ that says, Hope you're feeling better—got this at that bakery you like! Gwen can't help but smile, thinking that a girl who grew up in Queens probably shouldn't be so naïve as to leave a dessert out in the open in a city full of people just looking for an invitation to steal something. She figures the visit must have been recent, seeing as it's still here.
Only after Gwen balances the cake, unlocks the door and sticks the dessert in the fridge does she see the little note that must have been wedged under her doorframe. She only recognizes that it's from Peter because the handwriting is so sloppy.
Sorry for today. I called my aunt. I have to figure out who this guy is. I couldn't catch him. I'll call as soon as I can.
Gwen feels her face grow as red as a tomato as she inadvertently crushes the note in her hand. She should be annoyed, she should be angry, but she's standing here with her stomach fluttering like an idiot because Peter Parker left a note in her door, and is going to call her.
She takes a breath and fixes the note, smoothing out the corners, trying to gain some perspective. She can't let herself fall into this pattern again—she knows better, and Peter should, too. She doesn't know how this semester all of their painstakingly careful measures to avoid each other suddenly fell apart, she doesn't know why it's happening now and not last year or next year or tomorrow or never at all, but somehow she has always known it was inevitable.
That's the worst thing to admit to herself. She hasn't truly let him go, not once in these last few years. She never dated, and neither did he, and she knew that. She watched. She always watches. And in his own way, she knows he does, too, and it scares her and thrills her to think of it. Sometimes she thinks they will never be able to find other people; sometimes she is afraid this won't be finished until one of them is dead.
She lays back on her bed and texts a thank you to MJ. She closes her eyes even though her clothes are still on, just experimenting with the idea of sleep, and a few brief moments are enough to know she won't be able to settle down anytime soon.
Monday comes and Peter still hasn't resurfaced. Gwen knows this because he never calls, but she also knows this because MJ has officially received a "C" for her discussion board post now that Peter never responded to it in time for her to put up a second post. There is some comfort in knowing that Gwen isn't the only one annoyed at Peter Parker.
Gwen and MJ are eating in a dining hall when a couple of freshmen girls sit next to them and start loudly gossiping about the two Spidermans.
"I think there have been two all along," says one of the girls. "Perfect cover, right? Now nobody knows which one is good and which one is bad, but the truth is, they've been waiting for this all along."
"That's crazy, Lissy."
"But think about it! Genius, right? The police were right to be shooting at them! "
MJ looks at Gwen, rolling her eyes. She jiggles her tray and motions to a free table that just opened up, and Gwen follows her to it, her fists curled against the plastic of her own tray.
"They're idiots," says MJ.
Gwen nods, squishing a fry between her fingers. She thinks of her brother the other night, calling Spiderman a hero, and it makes the urge to pour her ice water on top of those girls' heads a little less demanding.
"I just can't believe it." Gwen takes another bite of her food, chewing it angrily, not even tasting it. "They don't even know him."
"Well, neither do we," says MJ. Her eyes drift away from her plate and she shudders almost imperceptibly. "But who knows what would have happened that night if he hadn't stopped that robber."
"Yeah," says Gwen.
"It's funny, he sounded kind of young, now that I think about it. I mean, weren't you expecting him to be, like—I don't know, not like, super old or anything, but I at least thought he'd sound a little bit more like a man, you know?"
Gwen finishes chewing another bite. "I thought he sounded perfectly manly," she says, trying to make the comment sound offhanded and failing miserably.
MJ's mouth curls into a grin. "That's because you looove him."
Maybe it's the sleep-deprivation, but Gwen actually laughs outright, remembering how MJ teased her about Peter with the exact same intonation only a few weeks ago. "Maybe I like him a little," Gwen says, letting herself slouch and smile a little bit and actually act like a girl for once.
MJ smacks her hand on the table definitively. "That's it. We gotta find you a real guy, Gwen, not an inaccessible one who runs around in spandex!" she says, not at all appreciating the irony of her words. "How about that Owen, huh? He was cute. And he basically walked through gunfire to impress you."
"No, no, he wasn't trying to—no," says Gwen, shaking her head, even though she knows it's true.
"Oh, please. He practically had puppy dog eyes. Haven't you ever once considered—"
"Hold on, my brother's texting me," says Gwen. She pulls out her phone. It's from Bradley, her youngest brother, the one who really is too young to even have a cell phone, but it's New York and who can really blame her mother for giving her one with madmen crawling around the streets all the time? She opens the text, thinking it might be serious if he has broken a rule to text her in the middle of the school day.
Left sci proj at home plz bring it mom at work will kill me!11!
"Which brother?"
"Bradley. He left his science project at home, I think, and wants me to bring it to him." Gwen looks down at their half-finished meals. "Sorry, you mind if I duck out?"
"No, it's fine. You want company?"
"Nah, you've got class in like an hour anyway, right?"
MJ moves her jaw in frustration. "Yeah. Maybe Peter Parker will be there so I can sock him in the jaw."
Gwen laughs, harder than she probably should. "I'll see you later."
Ten minutes later Gwen has taken a cab up to her family's building and is waiting for the elevator to scale the twenty floors. Ordinarily she would walk, but she knows Bradley, for all his obnoxiousness, really does take school seriously, and Gwen doesn't want to risk him losing points on the assignment. And that aside, she doesn't want to discourage him from texting her for help. Her mother has enough on her plate these days now that she is working again and doesn't need this kind of hassle.
The elevator dings when it arrives and she steps out, fumbling for the apartment key in her bag. She twists the key into the lock but it appears the door is already open. Gwen supposes there is a chance her mom came home for a lunch break, and although she sort of dreads encountering her after outburst on Saturday, she figures she had better just make amends now before she has to come to dinner again tonight.
The door opens, and when Gwen takes a few steps forward she gasps
Captain Johnson is shirtless on her living room couch.
Captain Johnson is shirtless on her living room couch.
When he sees Gwen his entire body seems to flinch. "Gwendolyn—" he stammers, but Gwen has already backed into the doorway and dropped her purse and the keys with a loud crash.
"Mom!" Gwen screams.
Captain Johnson is frantically groping around the coffee table, his hands latching onto what appears to be his shirt and jerking it up so violently that a vase falls to the floor, partially smashes, and then noisily rolls on the hardwood floors as Gwen continues to scream for her mother.
Her mother spills out into the hallway, her own shirt not quite secured on her body and her pants alarmingly unzipped and unbuttoned. She takes one look at Gwen and her eyes widen like moons.
"Gwen," says her mother, her voice shaking, "just hold on a minute, sweetie—"
"Are you—are the two of you—"
Captain Johnson has thrown on a sweater and is grabbing his keys. "I'll call you, Helen," he says lowly.
"No, no, you—hold on here!" Gwen shrieks, still blocking the door. "What the hell is going on, are you two seriously—?"
Her mother flounders in the hallway, alternately between Gwen and Captain Johnson, a man Gwen had previously grown to respect and look up to over the years who is now fiddling with his god damn belt in her foyer and looking more humiliated than she has ever seen anyone in her life.
"You're screwing each other, aren't you?"
Gwen has never seen her mother's face harden like this before. "That's none of your business."
Gwen is so stunned that her mouth falls open. She splutters uselessly for a moment, then spits out, "Jesus fucking Christ—"
"Language!" her mother barks.
"Are you fucking serious right now?"
"Gwen, if you would please just calm down, you are completely overreacting—"
"I'm overreacting? My mom is fucking some guy in our living room and I'm overreacting?" she demands, not even stopping for one moment to consider whether or not there is any truth in her mother's accusation. Her blood is boiling, she can practically feel the hurt, the betrayal, the frustration that has been just simmering under the surface for far too long threatening to erupt. Her mother is fucking the man who is trying to kill Peter. She suddenly hates them both, hates this man for trying to replace her father, hates her mother for letting him.
"I'm very sorry you had to find out this way, Gwendolyn," says Captain Johnson in that calm, practical manner that she has seen him use in action a dozen times, that voice that typically reassures even the most strung out teens on meth or crazy paranoid gunmen, but Gwen isn't having any of this shit. "We were planning to tell you and the boys at dinner tonight."
"Count me out," says Gwen, wrenching her purse from off the floor. She swings the door open and for extra measure she turns back and says, "You can play pretend with my mom if you want, but you will never be half the man my father was."
Then she slams the door behind her, thinking the noise should be at least a little bit satisfying, but it isn't. And to add to the already sinking pit in her stomach, she has completely forgotten Bradley's science project and she can't go back inside now, she just can't, no matter how guilty she feels about letting him down.
She thought maybe she would drop by OsCorp today, but suddenly that is the furthest thing from her mind. She finds herself wandering back to her apartment. She needs to be alone, she needs some time to think about this or some time to not think about it at all. It's fine when she's walking but every time she has to stop at a crosswalk she sees them, sees Captain Johnson perched in her living room half-naked like he owns the place, sees her mother red-faced and hair all tangled and ew, God, yuck, the light changes and she darts across the stopped traffic with her head ducked down walking as fast as she can.
When she reaches her apartment building she practically runs up the stairs. She's out of breath and already furious when she sees Peter Parker standing in the hallway, rooting through his pockets with his cell phone in his hands.
"Really?" is all Gwen can manage, because here is this boy who said he would call, and is decidedly alive and present and trying to get into his apartment and not calling her.
His head snaps up at the sound of her voice. "Hey," he says, holding up his phone. His eyes are tired but his hair is wet and his clothes are different. She walks straight past him—she's not angry really angry at him, she's just angry at everything, but he's here and nobody else is and maybe he deserves it a little bit.
"Hey, whoa," he says, jogging to catch up with her. "I was literally just calling you, listen, your phone's about to—"
Sure enough it starts buzzing in her hand. She lifts it up and sees his name on the Caller ID, and hits reject call since he's standing right there anyway.
"See?"
"Great. Thanks."
Peter puts a hand on her shoulder. "What's going on, are you—you're mad at me?"
"No, Peter, I just—"
"You can be mad at me. I mean, I get it, I owe you a huge explanation—"
Gwen finally shoves her apartment door open. "I'm not mad at you," she says, trying to keep her voice even. She walks into her apartment and he shuffles in the doorway. "You can come in."
He shuts the door behind him carefully. "Well what's going on, then, did something happen?"
"Nothing," says Gwen petulantly. "Nothing, it's—what happened to you, anyway? Did you find your dad?"
"Don't change the subject."
"Seriously, did you—"
"No, I'm going back out tonight," says Peter. "Tell me what happened."
She feels her book bag sliding down her shoulder and jerks it back up. "I—" The idea of it still so disgusting to her that she can't even look Peter in the eye when she says it. "I saw my mom … and some guy … in our apartment."
When she looks up at Peter it's clear from his vacant, slightly curious expression that he has no idea what she's getting at.
"They were sleeping together," Gwen elaborates.
"Oh," he says, his eyebrows shooting up comically. He throws his hands up, maybe to make some kind of gesture to comfort her, but then he just sort of stands there awkwardly and she can't really blame him. "Uh."
"Sleeping with a guy my dad used to work with," says Gwen, and now the anger seems to come in another fresh wave. She lets the bag slide off her shoulder and thunk to the ground. "It's disgusting, I mean—I grew up with him, he was practically my dad's best friend."
"Jeez, Gwen … that really sucks," says Peter.
"No, it doesn't just suck, it's—ugh!"
"Hey," he says, trying to calm her down, and when she turns to look at him it almost makes her laugh, because he looks ridiculous himself—his eyes still red-rimmed, his whole posture exhausted and a little crazed, a noticeable stubble that she has never seen before that only seems to exaggerate the whole effect of him. "Do you want to go for a walk or something?"
"No," says Gwen, shaking her head.
"We could, uh—I don't know, get a milkshake?"
"No," says Gwen, and the back of her eyes start stinging because right here and right now this boy she has loved and tortured herself over for so long is trying to help her, is actually trying to spend time with her, and now this whole thing with her mother has ruined everything.
Peter's expression is pained, obviously trying to think of some way to make her feel better and knowing he is falling short. It used to be so easy, so natural. She thinks of a time even when they might have claimed to hate each other that she could fall into his arms and just let herself cry, but she knows it won't happen now and so does he. She doesn't even know how their bodies would fit together anymore.
She looks up at him. It's odd, but with that sort of dazed, sleepy look about him he almost looks eighteen again, and she almost feels eighteen again. It isn't the first time she has felt like she is existing on two different planes almost, or between two: the time when she and Peter made sense and then all this in between time where she has been waiting for it to make sense again.
"Do you want me to leave?"
She closes her eyes. "No."
"Okay." He doesn't move and neither does she.
"He's trying to kill you," says Gwen. "The guy my mom is—he's the new captain. He's the one setting the police after you."
Peter digests this with surprising ease, nodding his head in understanding.
The next words feel like a confession. She has only known for a week, and it is nowhere near her fault, but somehow just because she was there that night she feels guilty for not having realized sooner, for not having tried everything she could to defend him. "They're after you because they think you killed my father."
Gwen holds her breath, anticipating his reaction, but Peter just Peter nods again and says, "I know."
"You—you know? Have you known the whole time?"
"Yeah."
"Jesus, Peter," says Gwen, "why didn't you tell me?"
He shrugs. "What good would that have done?"
It's near exactly the answer her mother gave her when confronted with the same question. Gwen opens her mouth to protest, to say that he had no right to keep something this monumental from her under some patronizing belief that he is doing right by her, but it's kind of nice, in a way, to come out of this weird, murky haze of the last few years and realize that he didn't forget about her, that he's been protecting her the whole time.
He is watching her carefully, expecting her to be angry. She looks away from him and is glad for the pressing and relevant subject change that occurs to her now.
"Tell me what happened with your dad."
"Nothing," says Peter, shaking his head ruefully.
"And the imposter Spiderman—"
"Gone," says Peter. He paces across her room and doesn't get very far because the place is the size of a shoebox. He looks at Gwen, and now that he is a little closer to her she can see his eyes are completely bloodshot and there are some shadows of recently healed bruises. "It's crazy, I can't even explain it. He has the same abilities as I do, the exact same ones, the wall-crawling, the strength, the reflexes, it's like trying to fight myself. I have no idea where he came from."
"Your dad had a serum that altered your DNA, right? What if—"
"That can't be it. It's destroyed, he made sure of it, and so are all the traces of whatever Fisher used—and besides, that can't be it, because whatever this guy is doing, it's not temporary. He robbed three banks that night." Peter runs a hand through his hair and sucks his lips under his teeth in frustration. "It's just—how am I supposed to find my dad if I'm chasing this lunatic all over the city? Who even knows what he'll do next?"
"Peter."
He turns to her wildly, the sound of his name jerking him out of the rant he was mostly aiming at the window. "What?"
"Tomorrow is Tuesday," she says.
He waits for her to continue, looking a little agitated. "And?"
"You're going to go to sleep tonight. And wake up at a reasonable hour. And eat breakfast, and walk in the daylight, and go to class."
Peter looks at her, and his face is so sunken looking that for a moment she thinks he will cave. Then he shakes his head, almost imperceptibly. "What if something happens?"
"An hour, then," says Gwen. "Just take a nap or something. You can't keep going like this."
"I don't have an hour—"
"I'll wake you up if something happens," says Gwen, holding up her phone.
He hesitates.
"Trust me," says Gwen. Trust me, even though she was not honest about the breakthrough at OsCorp, even though she still hasn't told Peter about her visit to Connors' cell.
She stares him down and she can practically imagine his feet sinking into the floor. She has seen him tired before, she has seen him beaten down, but not quite like this. It looks like exhaustion has seeped into the marrow of his bones and is weighing down his entire body.
It's still three in the afternoon and Gwen is supposed to go to class or go to work, she isn't quite sure which one without her planner, but she isn't going now. She motions to her bed. "Lay down. I'll be right here."
He is standing next to it so all he has to do is let his knees give a little bit and he's down. "You promise?"
Gwen waits until his head sinks down to the pillow. She suspects some part of him is already asleep before his eyes even close. She is glad he doesn't wait for her answer, because she would have to lie; Gwen has spent most of the last few years since her father's death trying not to believe in promises.