SCARLET SONJA SPIRAL SILVER Chapter 13

For all of Peter’s needed bluster, he turned out to be too inexperienced at driving to want the wheel for any period of time. Obviously, Sonja didn’t have a license, so that left Wanda. After growing up in rural Transia, with its carts and saddled horses as the chief means of transportation, she couldn’t believe she was the designated driver of the group. But Peter looked nervous enough just being driven through the pouring rain and slick roads. 

“I wouldn’t have pegged you as letting a woman drive,” Wanda said to him, wanting to get his mind off things. “It doesn’t fit with your macho image.”

“Macho image? Me?” Peter chuckled. “I’m as self-aware as you can get and still wear tights.”

Wanda grinned to herself, then blushed. However ‘unmanly’ Peter seemed to consider himself, how he’d handled her and Mary Jane that evening was hardly effeminate. But it seemed impossible to casually bring that up. Especially with Sonja in the backseat, like some living specter of uncharitable jealousy, a Mary Jane who was all id and not at all happy to share her husband.

“Maybe it’s just me then,” Wanda said. “In Transia, all I had growing up was a bicycle. I didn’t get behind the wheel until I was in my twenties.”

“You have me beat,” Peter said. 

“Get out of town.”

“I took some lessons, I found out how the stick shift worked, but I didn’t really drive until I was… twenty-seven?”

Wanda touched her chest. “Twenty-two. Maybe that’s why I went from the Brotherhood to the Avengers. Always needed someone to drive me around.”

“Like your brother? He doesn’t seem like the type to sit in traffic.”

Wanda darkened slightly. “No. He wouldn’t want me to go anywhere. But Vizh…” She shook her head. “No, no sense dwelling on the past. He’s moved on.”

Peter made a consoling expression, but in the rear-view mirror, Sonja was less generous. “Stop flirting with him.”

Wanda gasped, a cool puff of visible exhale springing from her lips. “I do not flirt!”

“This ‘Vizh’, he is your man?”

“He… once was…” Wanda stated uncomfortably.

“And now you feel the need to mention that you no longer belong to him.” Sonja’s eyes burned. “How interesting.”

Peter turned in his seat. “Look, Sonj, I don’t know what it’s like back home, but here, people actually make conversation instead of just chopping each other’s heads off. Besides, it’s not like it’s any of your business.”

“Mary Jane is my descendant. I will not see her abandoned.”

“No one is getting abandoned.”

“Abandoned for some trollop,” Sonja hissed. “Not that I would see any woman wronged in such a way, but especially not one with my own image upon her form. It would be an insult to my legacy.”

“Your legacy?” Peter asked incredulously. “So now you’re fighting for my wife’s honor by calling Wanda a skank? What is that, zero-wave feminism?”

“She didn’t call me a skank,” Wanda muttered.

“Trollop means skank,” Peter insisted.

“No, it is more… old-timey.”

“What does skank mean?” Sonja asked.

“Trollop,” Peter answered.

“It doesn’t mean—” Wanda saw flashing lights again, diffused by the rain-splattered windshield and tinting the car’s entire interior yellow, like they were trapped in amber. She automatically applied the brake. “English isn’t even my first language,” she simmered as they came to a stop.

A cop car sat at the side of the road, guarding a phalanx of road closure signs with warning lights on top. Beyond the stoppage, the street dipped precariously, the beginnings of a valley. Wanda could easily imagine that somewhere down there, a river had overflowed its banks and rendered the road impassible.

A policeman in a rain slicker came up to the car with a flashlight, signaled the window down, and told her about as much.

“Do you think the road will be open by morning?” Wanda asked.

“We have to get to Westchester,” Peter put in.

“You won’t be getting there tonight,” the cop said. “But tomorrow sounds about right. If you can’t go back to where you’re going, there’s a motel nearby. I think they have some room.”

Peter glanced at Sonja, trying to include her ever so tangentially in the conversation. “So like an inn. We can stay there tonight, finish the trip in the morning.”

Sonja gave him a look like he was addlebrained. 

“A motel sounds wonderful,” Wanda said. “Which way?”

The policeman gave her a few directions. “Say, you look familiar. Do I know you from somewhere?”

With her headdress replaced by one of MJ’s beanies—and her clothing much more modest in deference to the weather—Wanda doubted he would truly recognize her. “No, I just have one of those faces.”

The policeman slid the beam of his flashlight to Sonja, who scowled into the light. “And you—I could swear I’ve seen you somewhere…” He caught Peter in the flashlight beam. “You I don’t know.”

“We shouldn’t keep you out here in this weather, officer,” Wanda said. “We wouldn’t want you to catch cold.”

“Aw, shucks.” He waved her off. Then the flashlight dropped down. “Wait a minute,” he said to Peter, “I do know you!”

Peter screwed up his face. Cooped up in a car with an Avenger and a supermodel, he’d never felt more anonymous. “You do?”

“Yeah. If you’re getting a motel room with these two, you must be the luckiest man alive!”

Sonja roared with laughter, surprising them all. It seemed to end the meeting on good terms as Mary Jane rolled up the window and turned the car around.

“What?” Sonja asked. “That was funny.”

***

By the time they found the motel, it was raining harder than ever, or maybe it just seemed that way when Peter ducked out of the car, jacket raised above his head, to make the run through the neon-soaked puddles of the parking lot to the lobby. After their run-in with the policeman, Peter was more aware than ever that both Mary Jane and Wanda were celebrities, and the last thing this situation needed was paparazzi or autograph seekers. 

Shaking off what he could of being soaked to the bone, Peter approached the front desk. The clerk didn’t look the full Norman Bates, but seemed definitely well-suited to a career of waiting by the roadside for human contact. Peter dropped his credit card on the desk.

“The sign said vacancies. Can I get three rooms?”

“Big spender,” the clerk said, picking up Peter’s MasterCard like she was about to examine it with a loupe. “Not many people driving in the middle of all this.”

“It’s an emergency.”

“Staying in a motel is an emergency?”

“Hey, no-tell motel, no-ask motel, okay?”

The clerk was nonplussed. “Ninety dollars a room.”

“Fine, put it on the card.”

The clerk pushed a sign-in sheet to Peter and swiped his card. The computer beeped inconsolably. 

“Your card’s been declined.”

Peter paused in the middle of signing his name to shut his eyes and think back through his last few purchases, as if he could argue that no, he hadn’t ordered a milkshake at IHOP or used a two-for-one special at the flower shop to get Mary Jane a bushel of roses, so she should totally run the card again.

“Fine,” he muttered, returning the card to his wallet and digging into his billfold. He flicked through all the twenties he had on hand before offering them to the clerk. “How much does that get me?”

“Two rooms. One night.”

It would have to do.

***

The storm was such that the radio was riddled with static, although maybe that was just the age of Mary Jane’s sedan. Optimistically, it was a classic. Cynically, it was old enough for Steve Rogers to drive. And now, even the short drive to their assigned rooms seemed ready to give its shocks a work-out.

“I won’t sleep with her,” Sonja said, arms firmly crossed. “She’s a harlot.”

Wanda was fed up. “Okay, that does mean skank! What makes you think I’d even want to—“

Peter hung his head. All he wanted was a hot shower and a long night under a thick comforter. “I thought this would make the most sense. I’ll sleep in one room, you girls sleep in your own room, we’re all reasonably comfortable.”

“You in your own private room?” Sonja asked, and Wanda looked at him too like she’d actually made a good point.

“Well, I can’t sleep with you, Sonja—”

“Why not? I’m your wife.”

“No, you’re not!”

“Then sleep with Wanda.”

“I’m not married to her!” Peter protested.

“You’re not married to me either,” Sonja pointed out.

“Then sleep with Wanda,” Peter told her.

“She’s a—“

“If one more person casts aspirations on my chastity,” Wanda interrupted threateningly.

Peter folded his arms. “Well, I can only afford two rooms, so two of us are going to have to bunk up.”

Sonja tilted her head to the side. “I could take another room…”

“No!” both Peter and Wanda said to her.

They glanced at each other after the shared moment.

“We should sleep together,” Wanda said.

“What?” Sonja demanded, and though Peter seemed to share her sentiment, he was too stunned to voice it.

“Not like that!” Wanda insisted. “We’ll share the same bed. That’s all. And Sonja can sleep in her own room.”

“Oh, you’d like that, wouldn’t you?” Sonja sneered.

“Yes,” Wanda said innocently. “That’s why I suggested it.”

Sonja scowled at her beaming, beatific smile.

“Sonja,” Peter reasoned, “it’s either this or you and I share a bed.”

“And let Wanda have her own bed?” Sonja spat. “Never.”

Wanda rolled her eyes. “You met me two hours ago!”

“I’m a good judge of character,” Sonja said. Her eyes flicked to Peter. “You want him.”

“I do not!”

Peter looked slightly put out by that. “So, what’s the idea here, we just keep arguing until everyone’s too tired to do anything anyway? Because I’m too tired now.”

Wanda automatically made a scoffing noise of doubt, which had Sonja looking at her disgustedly. They glared to each other.

Peter tossed one of the two room keys between them. They both grabbed for it. “I’m going to bed,” he said. “You can sort out the rest however you want.”

The two women watched him unlock and walk into the room on the left.

“You could always sleep in the car,” Wanda suggested to Sonja helpfully. Sonja glared at her. “Well, I’m not sleeping in the car…”

***

After a long shower, Peter felt about human again. He stepped out of the bathroom in the motel’s complimentary robe to see that Wanda had colonized his room. Her overnight bag was at the foot of the queen-sized bed and she’d changed into a nightie. The stark white fabric and the equally pale sheets set off her dusky skin, melding with the room’s shadows like some spiraling mixture, drawing his eyes down into the only light in the room. That of the bedside lamp that illuminated her.

Peter looked away. The curtains were drawn and the blinds were down; the neon vacancy sign trickled through the slats and lit up the window’s edges. “So. I guess that settles that.”

“We have to be the adults,” Wanda said. “Sonja is… she’s like a child. Used to doing whatever she wants and getting her own way.”

Peter chuckled. While Mary Jane wasn’t anywhere near as bratty as Sonja was proving, on edge in a time and a place not her own, he could definitely see a family resemblance.

He went to the clean clothes he’d set up before his shower, pulling on his underwear and a pair of gym shorts over them. He wondered if Wanda was staring at the window, picking out the fine details of how the neon came through. He sat on the bed.

“Well, we won’t have to deal with her for long,” he said. “Tomorrow we’ll hit up the X-Men and that will settle that.”

“Yes,” Wanda said, staring up at the ceiling fan. As it spun, the blades caught a shimmer of light from outside at one particular point in their orbit. She focused all her attention on that. “Good night.”

“Good night,” Peter said, shucking off his robe and disappearing under the covers.

Wanda turned the light off.

***

In the other room, Sonja pressed a glass to the separating wall, listening through it to the sound of Peter and Wanda breathing. She wasn’t tired. Until she was, she would find out exactly what they were doing.