Wedding of the Century update

“MJ,” he began, not sure where to begin. “How did you get in here?”

Probably not there, Parker.

“I’m famous. The super let me in. Well?”

“Well?” Peter returned.

“Explain yourself!”

Peter felt pretty short on explanations at the moment—for anything. He resented Mary Jane acting like he’d cheated on her when the closest they’d come to dating was him showing her his safe house; which did sound close to dating now that he thought about it.

He didn’t like having someone break into his apartment and throw smartphones… even one that was about as thick as a sturdy bookmark… at his face. And he was just plain confused.

“Shouldn’t I be the one telling you I can explain while you yell at me and throw things? Because you’ve got the throwing things down.”

“Give me that back,” Mary Jane said, holding her hand out.

Peter held up the smartphone that had almost become his first facial piercing. “You want this back? Because you threw it like it was a write-off…”

“She has bigger boobs than me,” Mary Jane explained, almost apologetically. “Give it back.”

Peter tossed it to her. Underhand. “I’m not sure I should come within fingernail range of you at the moment.”

“Peter!”

He threw up his hands. “She hired me to photograph her. I went over there, she started hitting on me, I told her she wasn’t—I wasn’t interested, she wouldn’t let it go, so I left, and… I’m literally going out the door when she does that.”

“You started to leave, but before you could, she stripped naked and started kissing you?”

“Yes!”

Mary Jane’s eyes dipped downward. “Well, I’ve seen the way she dresses. It’s not implausible.”

“She might’ve taken her skirt off beforehand.”

Mary Jane emitted a growl, stalking through his apartment like she didn’t want to look at a bullseye while she had a smartphone in hand.

“Like I said, she was hitting on me! You can’t say—”

“What!?” Mary Jane demanded, whirling on him.

Peter had always wondered what you felt like when you took one of those cyanide capsules. “You can’t say you haven’t come on pretty strong yourself.”

“You don’t know what color my nipples are, Parker!”

“I didn’t… note… I mean, I wasn’t paying attention to her…”

Another growl and Mary Jane planted her hands against the wall like she was winding up to use her head as a wrecking ball. “I thought you were a good guy.”

Peter flashed with anger. This was it then. The big break-up. The end of the adventure. Third act, climax, denouncement. Had Mary Jane written it all out ahead of time? No, these big movies nowadays never had scripts.

What had she ever given him, besides a headache? And what had she wanted from him? Not him, surely. No, she wanted to playact being in love, having a relationship, big tiffs, big drama. Well, he’d been in love. He’d had a woman, a good woman, and now MJ wanted to pretend like she was her, caring about him, being cared about, like Gwen was a dead goldfish, flushed down the toilet and replaced.

Where did she get off? What gave her the right? This wasn’t a game to him; she could treat life like that, she could afford it, but he couldn’t reinvent himself with a fresh wardrobe and a PR campaign and a new movie to promote. He was stuck in amber, grieving, and he’d always be grieving, and Mary Jane wanted him to pretend it all had never happened, that he was just some guy she could kiss and fight and be photographed with, when it hurt.

Exercising those muscles was like trying to lift weights with a knife wound in his arm. Trying to just reminded him how much he hadn’t healed.

“No. No, I’m not the good guy. I’m the normal guy. With my normal little life, the life I chose, that’s mine, which you turned upside-down on a lark. And I wouldn’t even mind, but it’s only a game to you. A game I don’t know how to play, how to make you happy. So I’m sorry this stopped being fun for you, for one minute, but that’s what happens in the real world. We get hurt. We don’t have a million bucks to cry into.”

“I don’t get hurt?” Mary Jane demanded. “I should be married now! He walked out on me! And it’s just a big joke to people. Or a drama they can pick up and put down, because who cares what I’m feeling, right? I’m rich. I’m pretty. I have a good job. I’m trying to live my life and I have to deal with every piece of it being sold to some fan or some sponsor just so I can do what I love. I’m sorry that’s not fun for you, for one minute, but it’s my whole life.”

Peter felt like clapping sarcastically—Brava! Encore! Give her the Oscar now!—but he felt more like an asshole.

MJ didn’t know about Gwen. She didn’t know how much he liked her or didn’t like her, what he cared about or didn’t care about, what he hoped for and feared. He’d never told her.

And now she was at the door and she was out the door and she was gone, just like Gwen. Only unlike Gwen, he could go after her.

Peter stood there. His shoe beating a staccato against the floor. He should let her go. Why go after her? Why try to make it work? Why choose to believe that there was something there to work in the first place? Easier, by far, to say it was all a game and it was over and now things could go back to normal. No more exercising those wounded muscles. They could make a nice, still, motionless scar. No healing, but no pain either. Like an amputation. All he’d have to worry about was the phantom of a feeling, not the feeling itself.

With a groan, he went after her. He knew he should take the time to think twice about this—only he didn’t have the time to take.

***

To think, how Mary Jane worked for years with her only ambition to be part of the world’s most exclusive club. Rubbing shoulders with Spielberg, Cameron, Scorsese, Tarantino. Mentioned in the same breath as Kidman, Clooney, Hanks, Cruise. Trying to get away from the average, the ordinary, the everyday.

Then there was Peter. Normal as it got. Wonderfully, breathtakingly normal. Stable. Dependable. No surprises there, except for the depth of him. That there was always more care, more attention, more consideration. It was enough to make her want to chuck it all and try out being a housewife.

(She couldn’t, of course. Membership in the club was too hard-won. Like Shangri-La, if you left, you left. Mary Jane couldn’t give that up on a whim.)

And now, here was why she’d spent half her childhood and all of her adult life running from the average joes of the world. Because she ended up on the sidewalk, looking like dogshit, hoping to God no one recognized her—

“Mary Jane!”

When she was a kid, Mary Jane’s sister had shown her a trick. You blew out a candle. Then you took a lit match and touched it to the smoke coming off the extinguished wick. For some reason, the fire went right down the smoke and back onto the candle without the match ever touching it.

That was what Mary Jane’s heart felt like. There was some weird quirk of physics and Peter had gotten to her through the layer of bitterness that should’ve kept the candle wick as cold as a Popsicle.

She walked faster. She wasn’t doing this. She was not giving him another chance. She didn’t have to, she had plenty of men who would kill to be in Peter’s shoes, and they were through the press cycle and she could just go back to normal, forget Peter and Paul, put some feelers out to Scientology and see if Tom Cruise needed a new wife…

“Can you stop moving, please?” Peter called, coming up fast behind her. “You can’t run in those heels and my legs are longer than yours.”

Mary Jane whirled on him: “But mine are better looking!”

Facing him was a mistake. Peter put his hands on her elbows and oh, great, now they were having a moment. “Look—I meant what I said, okay?”

“Which part? That I’m a vapid bimbo or that I’m going to die alone without ever winning an Oscar?”

Peter blinked twice. “I didn’t say either of those things—”

“Well, that’s what I heard! I’m insecure, okay, and what you said was bad enough! It’s not a game to me and I do live in the real world. Now if you’ll excuse me, I already called my chauffeur, and if he parks at the curb for more than five minutes, he’s going to get a ticket.”

Peter dug the heel of his hand into an eyebrow. “The part about…” While he had one hand off of her, Mary Jane pulled her other elbow away. “The part about how I don’t know how to play this game and make you happy…”

“It’s not a game.”

“Okay, whatever you want to call it. This… back and forth, and don’t say this, and don’t do that…”

“Don’t kiss other people,” Mary Jane said. “Don’t kiss naked people.”

Peter started to reach for her, thought better of it, and clasped his hands in front of his nose instead. “I realize this is a sore subject for you. But I really didn’t go there to be seduced and I wasn’t seduced and c’mon, it’s the Daily Bugle, what kind of dickheads work there, honestly?”

“Huge dickheads,” Mary Jane admitted.

“If you don’t believe me, okay, I can’t make you believe me. But—I don’t know. All I can say is whatever this is, I don’t want it to end like this. And I don’t want you to think about me like I’m just some jerk. And… and…”

“And?” Mary Jane prompted.

Peter wilted a little. “I don’t know, I think I’m so afraid of what you’ll say that I want to keep talking. Wait, wait, I’ve got it: it kinda sucked just now, having you not understand me and thinking you knew what I was all about, you not seeing me because there’s some dumb thing on TMZ… And maybe that’s how I’ve made you feel, once or twice, with me thinking I knew you, acting like I knew you, instead of getting to know you. And if you give me another chance, maybe I could try to see you instead of assuming I already have.”

He shut up then, looking truly drained, like he’d been a raging fire lit by the heat of what he had to say and now there was only ashes, the firewood almost totally gone. And he was looking at Mary Jane, seeing her… waiting like a man dying in the desert would wait under a dripping tap for just one drop of water.

Mary Jane didn’t think she’d ever been listened to so avidly in her life. So many people who wanted to hear what Mary Jane Watson had to say, but what was talking was the filmography and the fashion and the gossip and the worship-for-the-sake-of-worship. Peter wanted to hear her.

She had no idea what to say. The son of a bitch had stepped on any line she could come up with.