Babies Make Five update

Peter thought there had to be nothing more frustrating on God’s green earth than a supervillain throwdown where the bad guy got away. All the aches and bruises of a regular showdown, but at the end of the day you had nothing to show for it except “We’ll meet again, Spider-Man!” On top of a nearly half an hour battle with Scorpion, he spent forty minutes swinging around trying to track Scorpy down, but it was useless. The man had gone to ground, still out there to wreck more havoc and destruction whenever he felt like. All Peter had done was stop him from stealing a buncha rich guys’ money from a bank vault. Yaaay.

Inconsolably late, he got back to the apartment after dark to find that May was colicky, Mary Jane sitting up with her and trying desperately to rock her to sleep. “Where were you?” she demanded. “You were supposed to be home two hours ago!”

“You know… uhh, work.” Peter took off his mask demonstratively.

“Yeah. Great. Fine. Whatever,” Mary Jane said in a huff. Peter knew she was too mature to blame him for being out saving lives per se, but he also knew better than to push it. “Just don’t…” She patted her hand on her knee, trying to kickstart the memory of the proper word. In her bleary state, deafened by baby and sleep-deprived by motherhood, she might as well have been trying to remember her lines while on lithium.

“I won’t,” Peter said. He lowered his voice to keep from waking May--she was sort of slurring her way through her sobs, not crying so much as letting out a high-pitched whine that modulated up and down as she sucked in air. That sounded like about the tail-end of a temper tantrum. “Help you put her down in a minute.”

Mary Jane turned her head to follow him until he had disappeared into the kitchen, pulling his boots off. “What are you doing?”

“Getting some food.” Peter eased the refrigerator door open. Felicia wouldn’t mind if he stole her last slice of pizza; she was a thief after all. And if Mary Jane got pissed with him, Cat would be pissed off with him too—he was a man with nothing to lose. “I haven’t eaten all day.”

“Don’t wake the baby,” Mary Jane whispered, almost as plaintive as May.

“I’m not gonna wake her,” Peter protested as softly as possible. “I just need to eat something.”

“Pe-ter…” she insisted.

“Be done in a minute,” he said, just as insistently. Moving as stealthily as a ninja, he took the pizza from a crinkly Zip-Loc bag, set it down on a paper plate, and brought it to the microwave, where he used his body to shield MJ and May in the other room from the light inside the science oven. May was barely making a sound now, just taking gulping breaths.

Peter put the pizza in the microwave, shut the door as slowly as possible, pressed the Reheat button—

The moment his fingertip touched the button, a beep sounded. It might as well have sent an electric shock through May. She howled, she shrieked, she made herself heard throughout the tristate area.

With an audible, physical groan, Mary Jane came up, walked to Peter, and shoved the baby into his arms. “You deal with her.”

“I thought I changed the settings in the microwave so that it wouldn’t make—“

“Peter,” Mary Jane said, “if I spend one more second listening to these fucking dolphin noises, I am killing you, then her, then myself.”

“Dolphin noises?” Peter asked confusedly.

“Like your jokes are any better,” Mary Jane muttered, trudging toward the bedroom.

Peter started burping May. That was always a good trick for a colicky baby. “I tell funny jokes,” he told himself, before May spat up on his shoulder. “Honnneeyy, this is daddy’s symbol of the struggle against evil.”

May started crying again.

***

Three hours later, Peter had stripped, gotten his costume going in the washing machine, and found his bathrobe so that he wasn’t rocking his baby while wearing nothing but boxers. That would be weird.

May was no closer to not screaming her little head off. Bribery, TV, music, formula, nothing had worked. Not even eating pizza while rocking her, which would’ve been a nice secret weapon if it could’ve been effective.

Then Felicia came out of her bedroom. Peter was far too tired to really feel any lust, but even through the haze of baby-pleasing failure, he at least felt an acknowledgment of just how beautiful Felicia was. No matter how hectic things got, how she was forced to go without clothes or high fashion by the demands of the day, she always went to bed like the comeliest (and least virginal) virgin that Dracula had ever bitten. 

Currently, she was wearing a half-translucent nightie, almost backless, a swath of fabric crossing her hips to cover her buttocks without touching her upper thighs or lower back. In the front, the halter top ran over her torso with lazy idleness, leaving the sides of her enormous breasts bare, with only crystalline lace covering the upper slopes of her cleavage. A thin strap of shiny gossamer collared the nightie and ran around her neck, holding the nightgown in loose suspension from where her breasts swelled out from the front to where the hem hung about the very tops of her long legs. 

It was a remarkable production, even given how spectacular Felicia’s body looked without any effort put in at all, and for a moment, Peter entertained a fantasy of May shutting up and going to sleep. If she did, he wasn’t so tired that he wouldn’t try his luck with getting a quickie out of Felicia, to their mutual pleasure of course, before he collapsed to suck up what little sleep he could before morning.

“Night owls of the world unite,” Felicia deadpanned.

So as to spare the eardrums of one of them, at least, Peter picked up May’s bottle and tried again to feed her. That clearly wasn’t what she wanted, given how much baby food and crackers she had knocked away, but maybe if God smiled on him and May felt the slightest hunger pang and could be convinced to feed for a few moments, she would forget whatever else was bothering her and the inertia of her tiredness would finally hit her like a ton of bricks.

It was a nice theory.

“She didn’t wake you?” Peter asked hopefully.

“Nah. I thought getting an apartment with soundproof walls would only come in handy for superhero junk, but it’s letting Mary Jane sleep, Nathan’s sleeping…”

“So what’s your excuse? Crown jewels on exhibition?”

“Nah. I always wake up in the AM and spend a few hours kinda anti-hibernating. Sleep cycles, man. Who has one that works? It’s made for some pretty great masturbation over the years, though.”

That deserved better than a yawn, but Peter’s exhaustion wanted a rematch just then, and he had to give in a little just to keep from passing out. Felicia looked at him with concern as May succeeded in batting the bottle away and crying some more. 

“Fuck, dude, you’re stressing me out just looking at you. Let me take her. You get some rest.”

“You sure?”

“Yeah. I’m up anyway. And babies like women more than men.” She smiled, dazzlingly. “Who’s more woman than me?”

***

Peter didn’t remember stumbling to the master bedroom and climbing in with Mary Jane, but he must have managed it without waking her. In the morning, he woke up to MJ nuzzling into them. She couldn’t have done much more before bed than remove her make-up and wash up a little, and she didn’t wear anything more than pajama bottoms and one of his T-shirts—it was a point of pride for women, Peter had decided, that they never bought clothes when they could steal something off their boyfriends. 

But she was every bit as tempting as Felicia had been, her pajamas riding low on her womanly hips, her voluptuous curves emerging with alluring mysteriousness from the depths of his overlarge shirt. As sensual as Felicia was, she would never be as cute as Mary Jane. Probably by choice. MJ relished her girlishness. Felicia insisted on being all woman.

Seeing he was awake, and coming awake herself from some weird wifely symmetry, Mary Jane butted her head against his with early-morning clumsiness and caring. “Morning, tiger.”

“Good morning.”

“Sorry I was a bitch the other night.”

“No, no,” Peter protested. “The baby was being a bitch. You were awesome.”

Mary Jane gave him a push to help him on his way out of bed. They both had the same thought of checking on May. Peter threw on an unwashed pair of jeans and, when Mary Jane took off his shirt to put on a remotely fashionable top, he took it and put it on himself. It smelled vaguely of her perfume, which he liked, but might give people some funny ideas if he didn’t abandon it to the laundry machine before leaving the apartment.

“So what’s on the agenda for today?” Peter asked Mary Jane.

“We’re having Matt over for that lawsuit talk. Luckily, he’s blind, so I don’t have to clean.”

“He has Daredevil senses,” Peter pointed out.

“Oh, for the love of—can we come up with something where one of us doesn’t know who he really is, so he has to keep up the masquerade?”

“I’m his best friend and Felicia slept with him.”

“Really?” Mary Jane asked. “Good for her.”

Peter winced. “Why good for her?”

Before Mary Jane could answer, they emerged from the soundproof cocoon of the bedroom and hear May’s thunderous sobs rolling through the apartment.

“Oy,” Peter said simply, as they rushed to the living room to find Felicia desperately trying to interest May in her bouncer.

“She’s still crying?”

“I wouldn’t know,” Felicia said. “I think my ears have stopped hearing on that frequency.”

“Really?” Peter asked. 

“No. Could one of you go check on Nathan? I don’t want him getting any ideas from this one—“ Felicia said dismally. 

In another moment of married telepathy, Peter went to check on the other baby while Mary Jane took May off the more-than-frazzled Felicia. Felicia sat down in an easy chair while Mary Jane walked May to another part of the apartment to try and calm her down, and she was so relieved to have the baby taken off her hands that she nearly passed out before Peter reappeared.

“Nathan’s fine. Needed a diaper change, but I took care of it.”

“Great. Good. If I had to deal with two of these things going off, I would kill you, then MJ, then myself.”

“Why do they always start with me?” Peter wondered, helping Felicia to her feet. “C’mon. You need a nap?”

“Don’t patronize me. Yes. And a bottle.”

Peter’s face twisted. “Formula?”

“Tequila. And tell me how much you want to do me.”

Nothing took up time like babies. An hour later, they had accomplished none of the morning routine except for passing May from one parent to the next. Burping her, changing her, feeding her—everything proved ineffectual. 

“We need to get her calmed down soon,” Mary Jane said. “Matt will be here any minute, we need to give Nathan some attention or he’ll grow up to be a psychopath—“

“I’m growing up to be a psychopath right now,” Peter said. There was a knock at the door.

Groaning, Peter threw on his robe and belted it to give him some semblance of preparedness. He opened the door to find Matt poised in a business suit and tie. The man looked like he could’ve been in a display of the theory of evolution, with Peter right behind him and in front of a Neanderthal. 

“Sorry,” Peter said. “Baby troubles.”

“I heard.” Matt cleaned out one ear with his pinky. “In Brooklyn.”

He stepped inside, unerringly placing his briefcase on the kitchen table—so much for convincing him to play it civilian—and sensed May looking at him from over Mary Jane’s shoulder. He gave her a look and asked in a lawyerly tone “What?”

May fell silent, as if pondering the question herself. Then she tentatively started crying again. Matt held her gaze. “What?” he asked again.

May broke off her sobs. Then she just… fizzled out, laying her head down on MJ’s shoulder and conking out into unconsciousness.

“So that’s why ‘good for her’,” Peter muttered.