𝔼𝕞𝕞𝕒 ⋆

Either way, you’d started trying to avoid that gnawing feeling in your chest. Besides, you were growing out of the phase where going to every party and meeting every person you could fascinated you. Maybe one day that deep, dreadful sinking would go away. Maybe it would stop appearing at parties, on every birthday you turned a year older, on the small amount of dates you’d gone on where the feeling got so strong it made you nauseous.

Today, though, was an exception. You’d graduated this past summer and moved back to New York with MJ and Ned, and they were determined to throw one last party with all the college friends that had wound up back in the city, too. 

Well, Ned was determined. You and MJ were lukewarm about the whole thing. 

Which is why you were in your—abysmally small—bedroom, working through this line of code that you were pretty sure was going to get you fired from your shiny new job if you didn’t figure out why it wasn’t working, with your door open to the noise beyond. It was to keep an eye on MJ and Ned, you told yourself, even as you eyed all the swaying people around the TV you’d just spent fifty dollars on from Facebook Marketplace. Ugh, you should have moved it before. If they broke it, you were totally making Ned buy you takeout for a week.

You went back to work, thankful everyone seemed to be too preoccupied with the party to worry about the weird girl staring at her computer screen on her bedroom floor. You couldn’t figure this out. It was driving you crazy. You were sure it had worked yesterday evening, and then when you’d come into work this morning it was all wrong and every single test you did didn’t fix it and you were going to throw your computer—

A knock on your open door. A cleared throat. “Um, hey.” 

You looked up.

A guy around your age stood in your doorway. The first thing you noticed about him were his eyes, wide and expressive, looking at you as if you were the one who’d shown up in his bedroom. But…reverent too, almost in disbelief. He was looking at you like he’d never seen a girl before. 

But he was cute. And something about him…

He seemed familiar. 

“Are you okay?” he asks you. His gaze starts to bounce around the room the second you meet it, avoiding your eyes. “You looked, um, mad?”

“Oh!” You laugh a little at yourself. “I’m just doing some work. I’ve been told I look mad when I can’t figure something out. I don’t even realize it.” But who had told you that? It wasn’t your family, or Ned or MJ. But someone had told you. Who had it been?

The guy shifts on his feet. You realize he’s holding a bouquet of flowers, which is a weird thing to bring to a party, but you find it charming. He squints his eyes at you, but the corner of his mouth is lifting like he wants to smile. It makes something in your chest flutter. “You’re doing work during a party?”

He’s teasing you. You feel yourself smiling back. “Yes, I am. Super important work, I might add.”

“Oh, yeah?” He leans a shoulder against your doorframe, eyes on yours now. 

You can’t look away. 

“Yep. Keep an eye out because I’m gonna dethrone Spider-Man from the first page of the Daily Bugle tomorrow with my amazing work on debugging this finance app that only has three hundred downloads. Really groundbreaking stuff.” 

He smiles fully, now. It makes you feel triumphant, nervous, and warm. “That’s awesome because I love—What’s the name of the app?”

“Financipply” Stupid name. From the doubtful look he sends you, he agrees.

“That’s perfect because I love Finacnipply. Can’t wait to see you on the front page.” You roll your eyes, but you laugh. You both do, his shy and small, as if he hasn’t done it in a long, long time. As if he shouldn’t be laughing at all. But his eyes are bright. They turn towards the floor as your laughter dies, shy.  “So what can’t you figure out?”

And you just can’t stop looking at him. You motion towards your computer screen vaguely. “Just this code. I don’t know what’s wrong with it. It’s just not working.” 

He takes a small step forward. “Do you think…Can I…look at it?”

“For real? You code?”

He shrugs, one hand in his pocket. Adorable. “I…dabble?”

“Are you sure about that?” 

Another flash of a smile. “Yes, I’m sure.”

“Alright then. Knock yourself out.”

He comes to sit next to you on the rug you found at the thrift store a couple blocks away, rubbing his palms over his jeans and looking intently at your computer screen. He smells like clean laundry and the rain the city had earlier in the day, and he’s looking at your code like he actually understands it. “Oh wow. Cool.” He scrolls through it a couple times, up, down. You’re entranced by his profile, so close.  He stops to type. “Did you try this?” 

You blink. Look at the screen. “Oh my gosh, no.” A simple line edit. You know when you see it that it’ll work. “Holy shit. You did it. Holy crap. Thank you. You’re, like, awesome.” 

“It was nothing.” But he's ducking his head with a blush.  “Seriously.” 

“What’s your name, anyway? Since you saved me from getting fired.”

“Um, May..nard.” 

“Maynard.” It sounds wrong. You’ve never had that thought before—that someone’s name is wrong. But it’s a sure feeling in your chest. The one you have when you know your code tests are going to work, and when you decided you wanted to move back to the city. It’s really the only feeling you trust anymore. 

“Yep.” He leans back on his palms, and your eyes run down his arms unconsciously, tracking muscles and veins. You have a brief, overwhelming urge to curl closer to him, to run your hands down his biceps, to take his hands into yours and trace the lines of his palms. And it feels normal, to have that feeling. So normal, your body almost starts moving on its own accord. But his voice breaks you out of it. “So, is this what you want to do? Program apps?” 

You tell him that your dream is to work on developing video games, and he nods like it makes complete sense and gets you to tell him that you’d love to make a game based off of Star Wars, which makes his eyes light up in a way that has your breath catching. 

And that’s how you end up talking to a cute boy on the floor of your bedroom for an hour, about Star Wars and your favorite video games and what got you into them in the first place. He makes you laugh, and talking to him is so easy. It’s hard to believe you just met him now and not in high school. He would fit right in with MJ and Ned. You can almost see it for a moment; the four of you hanging around the diner MJ used to work at before college, laughing and teasing and studying. The image is so visceral that for a moment it feels real. 

You’re just about to invite him over sometime because you’re so sure that they’d love him and that you want to get to know him better, when there’s a crash from the living room. 

Both of you turn, and your face immediately drops. That better not have been your TV. 

You sigh. “I need to go make sure nothing important is broken.” You almost add on a desperate wait for me, but he’s already standing up and holding out a hand for you. 

That would have been too weird to ask for, anyway. Right? 

You let him pull you up. When your hands touch, it’s almost as if the warmth radiates from his calloused fingers, grips your heart, and drags it all the way down to your toes. He lets go quickly, as soon as you’re on your feet, but you stand there for a moment, disoriented. Feeling like…feeling like you’re right where you need to be. But also like you’ve forgotten to do something. It pulls at your brain like a grocery item list you know you were thinking about five minutes ago, but no matter how far you reach, you can never remember what it was. 

It shouldn’t bother you this much—you’ve been feeling it since you went to college. It hung over you during orientation, and move-in day, and every visit home. It reaches you in dreams, and weirdly, whenever Ned shows you the thousands of videos he gets of Spider-Man swinging across the city. 

But you’d never felt this close to grasping it before. You can almost see an image in your brain, faded around the edges like an old photograph, a word floating just on the edge of your consciousness. 

“You okay?” He’s asking you. Maynard. God, why does that name sound so wrong to think?

He looks about a second away from grabbing your hand again. 

You want to let him. 

But you hear MJ’s voice from the living room, firm in the way she only uses when she’s annoyed, and you know that your TV is probably done for. Maynard seems to be able to sense it too, because he urges you to go. 

And your TV is broken, thanks to some idiot and his friend who decided to start play-fighting for no reason. He gives you a twenty from his pocket, but you can’t even focus. Your mind is too busy playing back your night. Warm brown eyes, messy curls, soft smiles. You end up just waving it off—but you keep that twenty—and rushing back to your room to find Maynard. 

Only, he’s not there when you return. 

Your laptop is closed and placed at the foot of your bed. On top, the bouquet he showed up with. 

You stand there, in the middle of your tiny room, touching your fingertips to the carnations and grieving. 

Grieving for what? You keep asking yourself. Why do I feel this way?

But you can’t figure it out. It stays, stays, stays. 

Later that night, his face comes to you in your dreams. It’s younger, unburdened with the sadness you’d seen lying underneath. He’s laughing, bright and beautiful, and he’s looking at you. You’re on a rooftop somewhere, both of you golden in the sun, and he’s saying your name with a fondness that notches into your spine. 

I love you, he says, and he means it. It’s in his eyes, in the way his expression melts into softness, in the way he traces his fingers across your shoulder and pulls you into him. 

Peter, your voice sounds just as yours does now, weighed down by adulthood. You run your fingers through the hair at the nape of his neck, and there’s a peacefulness in your body that you know you haven’t felt in years, even through the haze of the dream. I’ll always love you.

You feel the press of his lips to your hair, the curve of them as he smiles.

You wake up. Gasping, gripping the thin sheets of your bed, sweat gleaming on your collarbone. 

Peter, your mind whispers to you in the dark.

“Peter.” You murmur it into the moonlight shining across your floor, to your heart beating against your ribcage, to the knot in your stomach that finally releases. 

“Peter.” You say again. Taste it on your tongue, certain you’ve said it a thousand times, in a million different ways.