Wedding of the Century update

Mary Jane didn’t know what was happening to her. She didn’t know how she felt, what she was feeling. Then it occurred to her. In one, all-consuming burst like a brilliant scientific discovery. The apple falling on Newton’s head. Archimedes jumping naked from his bath.

She was a woman. She felt like a woman.

Not a product. Not an amalgamation. Not a focus-tested, mass-marketed, manicured, Photoshopped gestalt of acting coaches, social media managers, directors, writers, PR men, make-up artists, fashion designers, and talent managers—invented out of the raw material of her own hopes and hang-ups and problems and strengths to be nothing but a commodity, a façade that women could wear and men could desire. Mother, kween, sex symbol, a thousand other names she would never answer to in real life because they weren’t hers.

She was a girl. He was a boy. That’d seemed so simple once—in a bad way—provincial. Now it seemed true, and everything else seemed like a lie.

A quote flittered through her head: You like me. You really, really like me.

Mary Jane had never really thought about the ‘you’ there. It was vague, impersonal. Meaningless. What mattered was the ‘like’ and ‘me’. But suddenly… well… it did matter. It was something.

This man liked her. A good man. Handsome, even, in an unprepossessing way. No, no seaweed wrap for Peter Parker—his beauty routine was a shower, a shave… maybe trimming a nose hair if it’d gotten too long. She giggled at the thought and then Peter was smiling back at her, confusion in his eyes, like he didn’t know quite why he was joining her in good cheer. Except that he was a boy and she was a girl.

“What’s so funny?” he asked, a bit of chuckle in his voice, and oh.

Oh, she liked making him laugh.

She’d always liked him, but…

He really was someone who deserved to be liked.

Feeling uncertain of herself and yet not at all uncertain, Mary Jane lifted herself onto her tip-toes and put her mouth to his. Gradually, her lips parted and she felt his tongue touch hers. Her hands went to his face, cupping the shy stubble across his cheeks, and she felt his heartbeat going a mile a minute.

Mary Jane didn’t want to take her lips away from him, but she had enough of a sense of timing to know when a thing was over. Still, as soon as they’d parted, she was kissing his cheek, his chin, his nose. Little, dainty kisses, as if they might not count. And then she peeled away from him. When she smiled now, it felt a bit more right. Like her last grin had arrived a little early and now she’d sorted everything out.

“As good as Felicia?” she asked, a little mischievously.

“I can’t remember Felicia.” With anyone else, Mary Jane would’ve thought it was a line. With Peter… all she could think of was that it was a good line.

Peter’s head turned to the side sharply. Mary Jane followed his gaze. Her adoring public on the sidewalk across the street. All of them with cameras in their phones and social media likes to gain. Peter stepped in front of her, blocking her from view—she wouldn’t have thought he was able to, but he seemed taller just now, and a bit more muscular…

Mary Jane patted him on the shoulder to get him to stand down. “You get used to it.”

“Do you?”

“No. But you get used to saying that.”

Peter shifted to face her, reaching out to lean against a tree that fed through the sidewalk, a little railing around it to protect it from New York—or maybe New York from a bit of nature. His new posture seemed designed to ruin all those photographs Mary Jane could still feel poking her third eye. For just a moment, she’d been wholly herself and now she was a creature of pieces. The side of her face, a strand of her hair blowing in the wind, a slice of her photographed past Peter… it was all worth something.

“I know this is a bad idea,” Peter started, which always got Mary Jane’s attention. “But wouldn’t it be a little funny if I got down on one knee and took something out of my pocket just now?”

“Peter, try to live your life in such a way that you avoid bloody accidents as much as possible.”

“I said it was a bad idea.”

“You said it’d be funny.”

“A little funny,” he pointed out. “I wouldn’t get out of bed for less than uproariously funny.”

“And who wants you to get out of bed?” Mary Jane cooed.

That seemed to crash his hard drive. He wore a dazed smile; an infectious smile. A pandemic of a smile. Mary Jane smiled back at him and that snapped him out of it.

“Okay,” he said, “as nice as it is to have a ready-made alibi in case our evil twins commit a crime across town…”

“I’m glad you assume I’m the good twin,” Mary Jane interjected. “Probably because you haven’t seen my underwear yet.”

“As nice as it is—” he persisted.

“My underwear?”

“Maybe we should do this in a less public setting,” Peter concluded.

“What’s this?”

“Talking.”

“What do you want to talk about?”

“Something other than the paparazzi.”

“My underwear it is, then.”

“Are you obsessed with underwear?”

“Oh, no, if I were, I’d definitely be wearing some.” Mary Jane clapped her hands together—Peter was getting that stunned look again. It was fun, but she wanted to talk to the fronts of his eyeballs, not the bottoms. “Tomorrow evening, seven o’clock, I’ll bring over some groceries and cook you something.”

“People do that?” Peter asked.

“They must. I’ve seen it in three scripts this month.”

Peter nodded. “I’ll, you know, try not to fill up on snacks. Or anything.” But he was staring at her lips, her eyes, each little meeting when his eyes looked into hers and hers looked into his a scintillating shock. He wanted to kiss her again. She could tell. She wanted to be kissed again.

Mary Jane subtly canted her hips, arching her back to make her breasts larger. Peter kept staring at her lips. The tiny, shaky smile that she couldn’t help. She really wanted to be kissed, kissed by him, and to kiss him back until he knew it wasn’t just some girl he’d found himself with, it was a woman.

Peter closed his eyes tight and, after a moment, opened them. “So I’ll see you.”

Mary Jane thought fleetingly of kissing him. Just outright kissing the hell out of that boy. It seemed too much like throwing herself at him and she didn’t like the thought, however fleeting, that he wouldn’t kiss her back.

She talked herself out of it, the tiny argument making her lips shift soundlessly, not that he was watching anymore. Mary Jane wanted him to kiss her, to want her, court her—to push and push and push until she herself knew how far he could get.

But he wasn’t ready for that. There was something in the way, and she sympathized; if it weren’t Peter, it would be her, whatever psychic scars were left over from Paul that held them up.

But it wasn’t her. It was him. Whatever he was going through.

Maybe he was just intimidated by how famous she was. But she didn’t think that was it. Peter didn’t seem the type to scare easy. If he was afraid of intimacy, it was because someone had put the work in to teach him to fear it.

If Mary Jane opened up to him, perhaps he would do the same to her. She’d give it a try. If nothing else, she felt certain she could trust Peter. He might love her, he might not love her, but either way he was good in a capital-G sort of way—a Good man.

But they weren’t going to unpack any deep dark trauma over burnt spaghetti. Mary Jane suddenly had some calls to make; this dinner would have to be perfect.

“See you,” she said, and walked off, breaking into a jog when she remembered her town car and it being illegally parked.

She had money, sure, but that didn’t mean she wanted any of it going to meter maids.