shaee

shaee, she, asian, entp, multifandom <3

𝜗𝜚⋆

curls. the cranberries. how i met your mother. spotify. reading. ao3. mary janes. youtube. hot chocolate. paino. cross stitch. baking. pink. autumn. lillies. finn wolfhard. coconut. thrift store.

𝜗𝜚⋆ one shots. angst. headcannons

𝜗𝜚⋆ reqs always open - i love to yap :3

𝜗𝜚⋆ Tommorow? | Authors Note! this is a slow burn peter parker fic with a lot of mutual pining and very unserious communication skills. mj and ned suffer the most. enjoy :)

pairing : mcu peter parker x (not established) stark reader

genre : slow burn, fluff

warnings : slow burn / mutual pining,miscommunication and avoidance of feelings, light angst, mostly emotional tension,mild injury typical of superhero setting, kissing

word count : 7.2 K words

The lounge smelled like burnt microwave popcorn and someone's aggressive vanilla body spray, layered beneath the permanent musk of old upholstery that no amount of Febreze would ever fix. Rain tapped against the floor-to-ceiling windows in uneven rhythms, turning the quad outside into a grey watercolor. You were wedged into the corner of a couch that had seen better decades, highlighter cap between your teeth, organic chemistry notes spread across your lap like a cry for help.

Peter Parker dropped into the seat beside you, not the open seat across the table, not the perfectly available armchair two feet away, beside you, close enough that his knee knocked yours and stayed there.

"Hey, sweetheart."

You bit through the highlighter cap.

He said it the way someone says hey, pass the salt. Unremarkable. Easy. Like the word had been living in his mouth for years and just decided to walk out today without clearing it with his brain first.

She's doing the thing where she won't look at me. That's...okay. That's fine. Why did I say that. Why did I say that out loud. Peter's ears went pink from the lobes upward, a slow blush creeping toward his hairline, but his expression didn't change. He just pulled his own notebook out and flipped it open like a man who hadn't just detonated a grenade in casual conversation.

MJ, cross-legged on the floor with her back against the opposite couch, didn't look up from The Bluest Eye. She turned a page. Then she said, flat as pavement: "Interesting."

"What?" Peter's voice cracked on the single syllable.

"Nothing. Just—lexical choices." She licked her thumb, turned another page. Third time this week. He doesn't even know he's doing it. This is going to be unbearable.

Ned arrived fourteen seconds later, you knew because you'd been counting the seconds since sweetheart to keep yourself from spontaneously combusting, carrying two dining hall coffees and a muffin balanced on top of his laptop. He hip-checked the table corner, stumbled, saved both coffees by some miracle of core strength, and slid into the armchair.

"What'd I miss?"

"Peter called her sweetheart," MJ said, still not looking up.

"Dude." Ned's entire face illuminated. He set the coffees down with the gravity of a man placing evidence on a courtroom table. "Dude."

"I didn't—that's not—" Peter's hand found the back of his neck, fingers dragging through the brown curls at his nape. His jaw worked sideways. "It just—came out."

"Things that just come out," MJ said, counting on her fingers without lifting her gaze from the page, "include sneezes, hiccups, and repressed feelings."

You wanted the couch to open its velvet jaws and swallow you into the stuffing. Your highlighter had a deep tooth-mark crater in the cap now. Very dignified. You set it down carefully, dusted your notes like they contained national security intel, and absolutely refused to acknowledge the heat blooming across your cheeks.

"It's fine," you managed. Casual. Breezy. The vocal equivalent of a house fire.

Peter glanced at you sideways. Quick, almost furtive, brown eyes catching the grey window-light so they looked like honey stirred into black tea. His knee pressed a fraction harder against yours.

She said it's fine. Fine is good. Fine is...is fine good? Or is fine the thing people say before they stop talking to you forever? He clicked his pen. Unclicked it. Clicked it again.

"Peter, if you click that pen one more time, I will break it and your ego," MJ said.

He put the pen down.

It kept happening.

Three days later, you were in the compound kitchen at eleven PM, reheating leftover pad thai that smelled like peanut sauce and chili oil and slightly questionable shrimp. The fluorescent lights were off, just the under-cabinet LEDs casting everything in warm amber, and you were standing at the microwave watching the container rotate like it was prestige television.

Peter swung in from the hallway in sweatpants and a MIT hoodie with a thumb-hole he'd chewed into the left cuff. His hair was damp, shower-steam still clinging to him, carrying the clean sharp scent of that cedar bodywash he used. He opened the fridge, grabbed the orange juice carton, and drank from it like a barbarian.

"Save me some of that, baby."

The microwave beeped.

Neither of you moved.

Peter lowered the orange juice carton very slowly. You could actually watch the moment his own words registered, his throat bobbed on a swallow, his fingers tightened on the cardboard until it dented, and a muscle in his jaw twitched.

"The, uh—" He pointed at the microwave. "The pad thai. I meant. Save me some. Of the pad thai."

"I know what you meant."

"Cool. Great. Awesome." He put the orange juice back, closed the fridge, opened the fridge again, stared into it like it held the answers to the universe, and closed it a second time.

I called her baby. In Mr. Stark's kitchen. While drinking orange juice from the carton. This is the worst version of myself.

You pulled the pad thai out, split it onto two plates without being asked, and slid one across the counter. Your fingers were not trembling. That was the microwave's residual vibration. Definitely.

He picked up a fork. You picked up a fork. You ate standing three inches apart in the dim amber kitchen, shoulders almost touching, and neither of you said a single word about it.

November 1st. The university library, second floor, the table near the window that overlooked the courtyard where a maintenance guy was leaf-blowing in increasingly aggressive circles. The air tasted like old binding glue and the lemon wood polish the janitors used on the reading tables. Grey afternoon light fell in long rectangles across your textbooks.

Ned had commandeered the chair across from you and was building what he called a "study fortress" out of reference books. MJ sat at the end of the table, annotating a paperback with a mechanical pencil, radiating the energy of someone documenting a wildlife phenomenon.

Peter arrived late from his physics lab, backpack slung over one shoulder, collar of his flannel popped unevenly. He smelled like graphite and the metallic bite of the engineering building's ventilation. He dropped into the chair beside you, always beside you, never across, like the extra two feet of table width were personally offensive to him, and his hand landed on the back of your chair. Not your shoulder. The chair. Plausible deniability.

"Hey, sweetheart, did you get the notes from Morrison's lecture? I had the—" He gestured vaguely. The spider thing hung unspoken between the people at this table who knew.

"Mhm." You pulled the notes from your folder and slid them over. Your voice was steady. Your pulse was doing something illegal.

MJ's mechanical pencil stopped moving. She looked at Ned. Ned looked at MJ. A entire conversation happened in the span of two seconds, eyebrows, micro-nods, one very deliberate blink from MJ that roughly translated to I am going to lose my mind.

He's got his arm on her chair and he used the word again and they're just going to pretend this is normal. They're going to make me watch this. Every single day. MJ returned to her annotations with the quiet fury of a woman composing a grievance letter to the universe.

Okay, okay, this is it, this is the moment, I should say something, Ned opened his mouth.

"Don't," MJ said, without looking up.

Ned closed his mouth.

Peter was already leaning over the notes, his temple four inches from yours, muttering about Morrison's impossible handwriting. His thumb traced an absent circle on the wooden chair back, just behind your shoulder blade, and you could feel the ghost of it through your sweater like a brand.

You turned a page of your textbook with the composure of someone defusing a bomb.

November 7th. Movie night, your apartment. The place smelled like the cinnamon candle on the bookshelf and the buttered popcorn Ned had made, extra butter, enough that the bowl was practically translucent with grease. MJ had claimed the armchair with territorial precision. Ned sat on the floor with his back against it, laptop open on his knees because he was "watching the movie AND checking the Reddit discussion thread in real time, it's called multitasking."

You were on the couch. Peter was on the couch. There had been a respectful eight inches of space between you at the start of The Princess Bride, and that space had been shrinking at a rate of approximately one inch every twelve minutes, a glacial migration neither of you acknowledged.

By the time Westley said as you wish for the third time, Peter's thigh was flush against yours, warm through two layers of denim, and his arm had migrated to the back of the couch in a move so classic it could've been carbon-dated.

"Baby, can you pass the—" He reached across you for the popcorn, his chest brushing your shoulder, and the word just sat there in the room like a guest who'd shown up to the wrong party and decided to stay anyway.

Ned whipped around so fast his laptop nearly slid off his knees. HE SAID IT AGAIN. IN FRONT OF WITNESSES. THIS IS NOT A DRILL. His eyes were the size of dinner plates, mouth open, popcorn kernel stuck to his lower lip.

"Ned." MJ's voice was a warning shot.

"I didn't say anything!"

"Your face said plenty."

Peter grabbed the popcorn bowl and settled back into his seat, closer now, because the reach had been a convenient excuse to eliminate that last stubborn inch. His fingers, salty and butter-slick, brushed yours inside the bowl when you both reached at the same time. Neither of you pulled away. You just. Kept your hands in the popcorn bowl. Touching. Like that was a normal thing people did.

On screen, Inigo Montoya was delivering his monologue. In the armchair, MJ stared at the two of you over the top of her phone with the hollow expression of a woman who had seen too much. They're sharing a popcorn bowl like it's a romantic gesture. I'm living in a romcom and I didn't audition for this.

Ned typed something furiously on his phone. Two seconds later, MJ's screen lit up.

Ned: BRO HE CALLED HER BABY AGAIN MJ: I have ears, Ned. Ned: WHAT DO WE DO MJ: We do nothing. We let natural selection take its course. Ned: that sounds ominous MJ: Good.

Peter's pinky hooked over yours in the popcorn bowl. Deliberate. Tiny. Devastating. His eyes stayed fixed on the screen, jaw tight, a flush crawling up the side of his neck.

You matched his gaze forward, heart hammering so hard you were sure Ned could hear it from the floor. The cinnamon candle flickered. Buttercup rolled down the hill after Westley. Your pinky curled around his and held on, butter-slicked and warm, while the credits of the evening slowly, inevitably, rolled closer.

Rain had been hammering the fire escape for two hours straight, a metallic ting-ting-ting that turned your studio apartment into the inside of a tin drum. The radiator clanked and hissed in its ancient, asthmatic way, pushing out heat that smelled like scorched dust and the lavender dryer sheet you'd draped over the vent last Tuesday in a moment of domestic optimism. Your desk lamp threw a warm cone of gold across the organic chemistry flashcards you'd been staring at for forty minutes without absorbing a single molecular structure.

Three knocks on the window.

You didn't jump anymore. That was the alarming part, the realization that a man appearing on your sixth-floor fire escape at nearly midnight had become routine.

Peter crouched on the rain-slick metal grating in the suit, mask already pulled up to his nose, water streaming down the red-and-blue panels in rivulets. He was holding a white paper bag between his teeth. The lenses of the mask squinted at you in that expressive way that shouldn't have been endearing and absolutely was.

You unlatched the window. Cold November air rushed in, wet asphalt and ozone and the distant garlic-heavy exhale from the Dominican restaurant three floors down that never seemed to close.

He tumbled inside with the grace of a man who could stick to walls but chose chaos instead. One foot caught the radiator, his shoulder clipped your desk lamp, and three flashcards fluttered to the floor like leaves. He caught the paper bag before it hit the ground.

"Mochi donuts," he said, pulling the mask off entirely. His hair was plastered to his forehead in dark wet curls, dripping onto your hardwood. A bruise the size of a quarter sat high on his cheekbone, fresh, already purpling at the edges, the capillaries burst in a Rorschach of blue-violet beneath skin that still carried the cold from outside. "From that place on St. Mark's. The matcha ones you like."

I swung fourteen blocks out of the way for donuts. In the rain. While mildly concussed. She doesn't need to know that part. He set the bag on your desk with a careful precision that contradicted his entrance.

"You're bleeding," you said. Not the matcha donuts. Not the fact that he'd remembered your order from a single offhand comment six weeks ago. The cut along his jaw, shallow, a clean slice, probably a graze from something sharp and fast.

"Barely." He touched it with two fingers, looked at the smear of red, and wiped it on the inside of his mask like a heathen. "You should see the other guy."

"Did the other guy also show up at someone's window at midnight with pastries?"

"No. The other guy had a crowbar. Much less charming." His grin split wide and crooked, the left side pulling higher than the right, and a drop of rainwater rolled from his temple down the line of his jaw and caught in the stubble he hadn't shaved in three days, dark and sparse, more texture than coverage, the kind that would scratch if someone pressed their face against it.

You grabbed the first-aid kit from under the bathroom sink. When you came back, he'd peeled the top half of the suit down to his waist, the material bunching in damp folds around his hips. His undershirt was soaked through, white cotton gone translucent, clinging to the planes of his stomach, the raised line of a scar along his left ribs that he'd told you once was from a fire escape bolt, not a fight. The apartment smelled different now: rain-wet neoprene, copper from the cut, and underneath it the cedar bodywash that clung to his skin like a promise.

You stood between his knees where he sat on the edge of your bed. The antiseptic stung, you could tell by the way his nostrils flared and his fingers curled into the duvet, knuckles going white, but he didn't flinch. His eyes stayed on your face. Not the first-aid kit. Not the wound. Your face.

"Hold still."

"I am holding still."

"You're vibrating."

"I'm cold. There's a difference." But his voice had gone low and soft, that register he only seemed to find past eleven PM, rough at the edges like sandpaper wrapped in velvet. His hand came up, slowly, carefully, the way you'd approach something you were afraid of startling, and his cold fingers tucked a strand of hair behind your ear.

"Thanks, sweetheart."

Your hand with the butterfly bandage stopped mid-air.

He swallowed. You watched his Adam's apple bob, watched the tendons in his neck shift, watched the bruise on his cheekbone darken in the lamplight. His fingers stayed behind your ear, thumb resting against the hinge of your jaw, cold and damp and impossibly gentle.

You pressed the bandage into place. Smoothed the edges with your fingertip. His breath caught, a small, involuntary hh sound that he tried to cover with a cough.

"Eat your donut," you whispered.

"Yeah," he whispered back, and neither of you moved for eleven very long seconds.

Ned's room smelled like Doritos and the agarwood incense he burned to cover the Doritos smell, creating a fragrance profile that could only be described as "gas station temple." A Lego Death Star sat half-constructed on the desk between stacked textbooks and an empty Red Bull can being used as a pencil holder. Rain again, New York's November specialty, streaking the window in grey threads.

Peter sat on the floor with his back against Ned's bed frame, knees drawn up, a black Moleskine notebook open in his lap. He was supposed to be studying for thermodynamics. He was not studying for thermodynamics.

"Dude." Ned rolled his desk chair across the linoleum and peered over Peter's shoulder. "Is that—are you journaling?"

Peter slapped the notebook shut. "It's notes."

"Notes don't have hearts in the margins."

"Those are atoms. Orbital diagrams."

"Peter, I've taken chemistry. Orbital diagrams don't have eyelashes."

He drew eyelashes on the orbital diagrams. He drew her eyelashes on the orbital diagrams. I am going to be his best man someday and this is the story I tell at the reception. Ned spun the chair in a full circle, a victory lap. His grin was so wide it threatened to reach his ears.

Peter pressed the heels of his hands against his eyes. The hoodie sleeves fell back, exposing the tendons of his forearms and the faint web-shooter calluses on his wrists, rough, reddened patches where the mechanisms sat. "I keep calling her baby, Ned."

"I know."

"And sweetheart."

"I know."

"And she just—she doesn't say anything about it? She just lets me? What does that mean?"

Ned stared at him. Blinked. Stared some more. Somewhere down the hall, someone was playing Bad Bunny at a volume that suggested either a party or a breakdown.

"It means she likes it, Peter."

"You don't know that."

"I literally do. MJ and I have a shared Google Doc about this. It's called 'Operation These Two Idiots.' There are timestamped entries." He pulled out his phone and held it up. The document was nineteen pages long. Peter caught a glimpse of a color-coded chart before Ned pulled it back.

I should tell her. I should just, say the thing. The actual thing. With words. In order. "I like you. I like you and I want—" Peter opened the Moleskine again, stared at the page where he'd written her name nine times in different handwriting styles like a medieval monk illuminating a manuscript, and closed it.

"Just talk to her," Ned said, gentler now. He leaned forward, elbows on his knees. The Bad Bunny track switched to something slower. "You brought her mochi donuts at midnight, bro. In the rain. You wrote her name in calligraphy."

"It's not calligraphy, it's—"

"There's a serif, Peter. You added serifs."

Peter pressed the Moleskine against his face and groaned into it, a muffled, defeated sound that smelled like ink and his own regret.

The compound hallways always smelled like recycled air and the faint metallic tang of whatever Stark-grade filtration system hummed behind the walls. This particular corridor connected the training wing to the residential quarters, brushed steel panels, motion-activated strip lighting that cast everything in clinical blue-white, the distant thump-thump-thump of someone using the heavy bag three rooms away.

You were carrying a stack of mission briefs that Natasha had asked you to file, the papers still warm from the printer, smelling like fresh toner. Peter was coming from the opposite direction, gym bag over his shoulder, a towel around his neck, his compression damp with sweat and clinging to the architecture of his shoulders, broader than people expected, the deltoids and trapezius muscles defined in a way that had nothing to do with normal gym routines and everything to do with swinging between skyscrapers on tensile webbing.

You met in the middle of the hallway.

"Hey." His voice bounced off the steel walls.

"Hey."

He stopped. You stopped. Four feet of compound air between you, humming with the electrical current that ran beneath every surface in this building. His chest was still rising and falling from the workout, a vein visible along the side of his neck where the pulse beat fast and visible.

"I, uh—" He shifted the gym bag. His free hand came up, rubbed the back of his neck. Sweat had darkened the hair at his temples, and a single curl stuck to his forehead in a comma shape. "I was gonna find you. After. I wanted to—"

"To what?"

Say it. Just say it. Three words. Eight letters. Just... His jaw tightened. The muscles along the hinge flexed, released, flexed again. He took one step closer. Two.

"I brought you something." He reached into the gym bag and pulled out a paperback, dog-eared, spine cracked, a used bookstore find. Giovanni's Room, Baldwin. The cover was sun-faded to a soft blue. "Saw it at that place on Broadway. Thought of you."

You took it. Your fingers brushed his, still warm from the gym, a callus on his index finger catching against your thumb. The hallway lighting turned his brown eyes almost amber, fractured with darker flecks near the pupils, the kind of eyes that shouldn't have been allowed to look at anyone like that in fluorescent lighting.

"Peter."

"Yeah?"

Three feet. Two. The mission briefs pressed between your chest and his. You could smell him, salt-sweat and cedar and something warm underneath, skin-heat, distinctly him, so specific you could've identified it blindfolded in a room of a thousand people.

"Thank you," you said. "Baby."

His brain visibly short-circuited.

You watched it happen in real time: the parting of his lips, the slight widening of his eyes, the gym bag sliding off his shoulder and hitting the floor with a dull thwmp that echoed down the empty corridor. His hand found your waist, tentative at first, then certain, fingers spreading across the curve of your hip through the fabric of your sweater.

"That's—" His voice cracked. Cleared his throat. "That's not fair."

"What's not fair?"

"You can't just—you used my thing. Against me. That's—"

She called me baby. In the hallway. On purpose. I'm going to die here. This is where I die. In hallway B-7 of the Avengers Compound, because my girl called me baby. His other hand came up to your jaw, cradling it, thumb brushing the corner of your mouth.

And then he kissed you, not soft, not tentative, not the way first kisses in hallways were supposed to go. His mouth found yours like a thesis statement, warm and direct and tasting like the peppermint gum he chewed after workouts. The mission briefs crumpled between you. The paperback pressed into his chest. His fingers slid into your hair, tilting your head, and a sound escaped him, low, involuntary, a rumble in his throat that you felt more than heard, mmh, vibrating against your lips.

The overhead lights flickered, motion sensor timeout, the hallway deciding no one was moving enough to justify the electricity.

You kissed in the dark. His thumb traced your cheekbone. Your free hand fisted the damp nylon of his compression shirt. The heavy bag down the hall kept its rhythm, thump-thump-thump, and the compound hummed its electric hum, and neither of you said a single word about what any of this meant.

The coffee shop was called Groundwork, and it smelled the way all good coffee shops should, espresso oils, steamed milk, the yeasty sweetness of fresh croissants, and beneath it, the earthy funk of wet coats hung over chair backs. The windows were fogged from the temperature difference, turning the street outside into a smear of yellow cabs and moving umbrellas. A barista with a shaved head and three ear piercings was arguing gently with the espresso machine, which was making a sound like a distressed cat.

MJ sat across from you. She had a black coffee, no milk, no sugar, a drink that matched her energy, and she held it with both hands like a weapon she was deciding whether to use.

"It's been a month," she said.

"Since what?"

"Don't." She set the coffee down. Her dark eyes were flat, patient, terrifying. She wore a corduroy jacket the color of burnt sienna, collar popped, a silver chain disappearing beneath her neckline. Her curls were pulled back with a claw clip, one strand escaping along her temple. "Since the hallway. Since the first kiss. Since the second kiss. Since the sixth kiss, which, by the way, Ned has catalogued by date, location, and estimated duration."

"He what?"

"Focus." MJ leaned forward. The table between you was small and round, barely big enough for two mugs and the croissant you'd been shredding into anxious flakes. "He calls you sweetheart. He calls you baby. He brings you books and midnight donuts. He kissed you in the dark in a government facility. And you are still telling me there's nothing to talk about."

She's going to deflect in three, two, MJ watched your mouth open.

"We're just—"

"If you say 'figuring it out,' I will pour this coffee on your notes."

You closed your mouth. A couple at the next table was having a quiet argument about Thanksgiving plans, my mom said Thursday, your mom said Friday, we can't be in two places, their voices a low, familiar kind of bickering that sounded almost like love. The espresso machine screamed. The barista swore softly in Spanish.

"He journals about you," MJ said, quieter now. She traced the rim of her mug with one finger. "In a Moleskine. With serifs, apparently. Ned showed me."

"Ned shouldn't have—"

"Ned is the only reason I have not staged an intervention involving a locked room and a whiteboard with a timeline on it. Which, for the record, I have prepared." She reached into her bag and pulled out her phone, flashing the screen. A shared Google Doc titled OPERATION THESE TWO IDIOTS filled the display, color-coded in four shades, with subsections labeled Verbal Evidence, Physical Evidence, and Plausible Deniability Attempts (Exhaustive).

The exhaustive section was the longest.

You stared at the croissant wreckage on your plate. Butter flakes and pastry shrapnel. A metaphor you didn't want to examine.

"I'm scared," you said, so quietly the espresso machine almost ate it.

MJ's expression shifted, just barely, a softening around the eyes, the hard line of her mouth easing half a degree. She reached across the table and pressed her index finger to the back of your hand. Once. Brief. The MJ equivalent of a hug.

"He's scared too," she said. "He has serifs to prove it."

The cinnamon candle had burned down to a lopsided pool of wax, its flame guttering every time the radiator clnk-ed to life. Your apartment was warm, almost too warm, the kind of November heat that happens when old buildings overcompensate, the air thick with candle-spice and the remnants of the Thai takeout containers stacked on the kitchen counter. Rain had stopped an hour ago, leaving the fire escape slick and glittering through the window, the city below hushed in that rare late-night quiet where you could actually hear individual cars on the wet streets.

Peter was on your couch. You were on your couch. This was, by now, a geography that had its own gravitational laws.

His arm was around your shoulders, not the back of the couch, not the armrest, your shoulders, and your legs were pulled up beneath you, angled toward him so your knees rested against his thigh. The TV was on. Neither of you could have named what was playing. His thumb was drawing slow, absent circles on the ball of your shoulder through your oversized sweater, each rotation sending a cascade of sensation down your arm that you were aggressively pretending was normal.

"We should probably talk," he murmured. His lips were close to your temple. You could feel the warmth of each word against your skin, the slight catch of his lower lip when it formed the p in probably.

"Probably," you agreed.

Silence. His thumb kept circling. On the TV, someone laughed, a studio audience, distant and irrelevant.

"Tomorrow?" he offered.

"Tomorrow."

I'm going to say tomorrow every day for the rest of my life and die in this woman's apartment having never once used the word girlfriend out loud. Ned's going to put that on my gravestone. "Here lies Peter Parker, who said tomorrow sixty-three times." His chest rose on a breath that sounded like the beginning of something, a sentence, a confession, a word that started with L and ended in a place neither of them had mapped yet.

Instead, he pressed his mouth to your hair. Lingered. You felt his inhale, slow, deliberate, breathing you in like you were something he needed to memorize, his nose brushing the part in your hair where your shampoo, coconut and vanilla, was strongest.

"Baby?" His voice was barely a vibration.

"Mm?"

"Can I—"

You tilted your face up. His was right there, close enough to count the darker flecks in his irises, close enough to see the tiny scar above his left eyebrow, close enough that his exhale ghosted across your mouth warm and sweet with the green tea he'd been drinking.

He kissed you the way November rain falls, steady and unhurried and soaking through every layer you'd built. His hand slid from your shoulder to the back of your neck, fingers threading into your hair at the nape, and your own hand found the front of his hoodie, fistful of cotton, pulling him closer until the space between you wasn't a measurement anymore, just a memory. His mouth tasted like green tea and something darker, warm, the flavor of a word he wouldn't say yet. Your teeth caught his lower lip, gentle, barely a graze and the sound he made, a soft guttural nnh against your mouth, sent your pulse into arrhythmia.

When you finally separated, his forehead rested against yours. Both breathing hard. His hand trembling faintly at your nape, the tremor of someone holding something precious with too much care.

"Tomorrow," he breathed.

"Tomorrow," you breathed back.

His thumb found the corner of your jaw, traced it, settled there. Your fingers uncurled from his hoodie, smoothed the wrinkled fabric flat against his chest where his heart hammered so hard you could feel it through the cotton. The candle guttered one final time and went out, trailing a thin ribbon of smoke that curled toward the ceiling, and Peter Parker pulled you against his chest in the sudden dark, chin resting on top of your head, both arms wrapped around you like the word he couldn't say was something he could hold instead.

You wake up to the smell of scorched butter and something vaguely, dangerously sweet, like brown sugar left too long in a pan that nobody's watching. The radiator under the window clicks its usual Morse code against the baseboard, three short taps and then a long wheeze, the kind of mechanical breathing you've stopped noticing until moments like this, when the apartment is otherwise quiet enough to hear the November rain tapping the fire escape in uneven eighth notes.

Gray light seeps through the curtains you never fully closed. Your neck aches. The couch cushion beneath your cheek smells like Peter's hoodie, cedar and the faintly metallic edge of web fluid he can never quite wash out of his clothes, and you realize you're still wearing it. The blanket he must have pulled over you at some point during the night is tangled around your ankles, one corner dragging the floor.

The kitchen is eleven feet away. You know because you measured it once for a rug that never arrived.

Peter is in it.

You can hear him before you see him, the soft thwip of a cabinet closing (he forgets, sometimes, uses the wrong amount of force and the oak doors sound like they're spring-loaded), followed by a muttered "no, no, no, that's—okay" and the clatter of a spatula hitting the tile floor.

You sit up. Your spine makes a sound like someone stepping on bubble wrap.

He's standing at the stove in his socks, mismatched, one navy, one black with tiny Millennium Falcons, and a white t-shirt so old and washed-thin that the shoulder seams have drifted two inches down his deltoids. His hair is a catastrophe. Not the intentional, product-assisted kind of messy. The kind that says I slept for forty-five minutes and then lay in the dark with my eyes open thinking about something I can't say out loud for the remaining six hours. He's holding a spatula in his right hand and his phone in his left, squinting at the screen with the focus of someone defusing an explosive.

"Are you," you start, and your voice comes out like sandpaper dragged across felt, "following a recipe?"

He jolts. The spatula does a full rotation in the air. He catches it, enhanced reflexes, wasted on kitchenware, and turns around with an expression that can only be described as caught.

"Hey. Morning. Hi." Three greetings, each one less certain than the last. His ears are already pink. You catalog this because apparently your brain has decided that Peter Parker's circulatory responses are peer-reviewed data now. "I'm making—it was supposed to be—" He glances back at the pan. A thin ribbon of smoke curls toward the ceiling. "French toast."

Was supposed to be is doing extraordinary structural work in that sentence.

"It smells like a crime scene," you say, standing up and pulling the hoodie sleeves past your knuckles.

"It smells like caramelization."

"Peter."

"Okay, it smells like a crime scene." He turns back to the stove and scrapes something dark and vaguely bread-shaped from the pan's surface. The sound it makes, a dry, reluctant scrrk, is not the sound food should make. "But the first two were good. Those are yours. I ate the practice ones."

Two slices of French toast sit on the chipped blue plate he's pushed to the far counter, golden and actually beautiful, dusted with powdered sugar and cut strawberries. Beside them: a glass of orange juice. A folded paper towel as a napkin. The peanut butter jar, open, with a knife resting across the top because he remembered you like it on everything.

She's wearing my hoodie. She's wearing my hoodie and her hair looks like that and I'm supposed to form complete sentences right now. I had a whole speech. I practiced it in the shower. I practiced it on the ceiling. Where did it go. Where did any of it go.

He's looking at you with the spatula still raised, smoke alarm seconds from joining the conversation, and there it is, that look. The one he doesn't know he's doing. The one MJ screenshotted through a window once and added to the Google Doc under the subsection labeled "EXHIBIT J: HE'S SO COOKED."

Your phone buzzes on the couch cushion. Then again. Then four times in rapid succession, the particular cadence of someone typing in furious staccato.

You don't check it yet. You already know.

MJ [7:44 AM]: it's tomorrow MJ [7:44 AM]: it is literally tomorrow MJ [7:44 AM]: the tomorrow you both agreed on MJ [7:44 AM]: I have the doc open MJ [7:44 AM]: Ned is on standby MJ [7:45 AM]: if neither of you says anything by noon I am driving to Morningside and I am bringing visual aids

You pad across the apartment in your socks, his socks, actually, you realize, looking down at the way they pool around your ankles because his feet are two sizes bigger, and stop at the counter across from him. The kitchen is narrow enough that your hip almost touches the fridge. The rain picks up outside, fat drops now, and the window above the sink is cracked half an inch, letting in the smell of wet asphalt and the bakery on 113th that starts its ovens at five.

"These look really good," you say, pulling the plate closer.

"Yeah?" He sets the spatula down. Wipes his hands on his jeans, yesterday's jeans, the medium-wash ones with the small tear above the left knee from something he told you was a "fence-related incident" and you both knew wasn't. His fingers are still trembling, just barely, a fine vibration you can only see because you're looking.

You're always looking.

"Thank you," you add, quieter. You pick up a strawberry slice and eat it, and the sweetness of it fills your mouth alongside something tighter in your throat that has nothing to do with fruit.

He leans his lower back against the opposite counter. Four feet between you. He crosses his arms, uncrosses them, puts his hands in his pockets, takes them out. Settles on gripping the counter edge behind him, fingers curled over the laminate.

"So," he says.

"So," you say.

The smoke alarm beeps once, a single, pointed chirp, and you both flinch and then laugh, and the laugh is too loud and too short and when it dies the kitchen is smaller than before.

"I had a thing I was going to say," Peter says. He's looking at the floor now. The toe of his navy sock traces a grout line. "I had it—I had the whole thing mapped out. Like, organized. Paragraphs. Thesis statement. Supporting evidence."

"You wrote a thesis statement."

"Ned helped. Well—Ned gave unsolicited feedback. He said I needed a stronger hook." His jaw works sideways, the way it does when he's chewing the inside of his cheek. "MJ said I was overcomplicating it. She texted me at three in the morning. Just the word 'coward' and a link to a WikiHow article on—I'm not going to tell you what the WikiHow article was about."

It was 'How to Tell Someone You Like Them.' It had clip art. The clip art had a thumbs up. I wanted to die.

"Peter."

"Yeah."

"It's tomorrow."

His eyes come up. Brown—not the generic, placeholder brown that lazy descriptions settle for, but the specific, striated brown of rain-darkened pine bark, of the walnut ink you use for calligraphy, with those ridiculous flecks of amber near the pupil that catch light like a tell. They're wide right now. A little wet at the edges, maybe, or maybe that's the gray morning doing something to the contrast.

"Yeah," he says again, softer. "It's tomorrow."

He pushes off the counter. One step. Two. The kitchen shrinks to nothing. He's close enough now that you can smell the burnt sugar on his fingers and the sleep-warm cotton of his t-shirt and that underneath-it-all scent that is just him, soap and skin and something electric you've never been able to name.

"I don't have the thesis statement anymore," he says. His voice has dropped to the register that undoes you, low, half-broken, earnest in a way that would be embarrassing if it weren't so disarmingly real. "I don't have the—the hook, or the supporting evidence, or any of it. I just—"

His hand comes up. Hovers near your jaw. His fingertips are warm when they land, featherlight, against the curve below your ear.

"I'm in love with you," he says. No preamble. No hedging. Just the words, bare and blunt and slightly breathless, delivered in a kitchen that smells like burnt French toast and rain and November. "I've been in love with you since—I don't even know when it started. I think it was always—I think it was before I knew what to call it. And I know we keep not saying it, and I know we keep finding reasons to wait for another tomorrow, and I—I can't do another tomorrow. I don't want to."

Your vision blurs. The strawberry-sweet taste on your tongue goes thick.

"I wrote your name in my journal like a middle schooler," he continues, and there's a cracked laugh in it now, wet and shaky, his thumb brushing across your cheekbone. "Ned found it. I drew you from memory in the margins during Dr. Kaplan's quantum mechanics lecture. The proportions were wrong. Your nose was—it doesn't matter. The point is I'm so in love with you that I am producing bad art about it, and I think you should know."

Ned [8:01 AM]: bro Ned [8:01 AM]: did you do it Ned [8:01 AM]: peter Ned [8:01 AM]: PETER Ned [8:02 AM]: the doc is open. mj is pacing. we need STATUS

Please say something. Anything. My heart is doing the thing where it skips and I can't tell if it's the spider stuff or the you stuff. It's the you stuff. It's always the you stuff.

Your hands find the front of his t-shirt. You pull him in. Not gently—urgently, clumsily, with powdered sugar still on your fingertips leaving white smudges on the worn cotton over his chest.

"You absolute disaster," you whisper against his mouth, "I've been in love with you since the orange juice."

"The orange juice?"

"The orange juice. October seventeenth. You called me baby and drank from the carton and I thought, oh, I'm done for."

The sound he makes, half laugh, half exhale, all relief, is the warmest thing you've ever heard. His forehead drops against yours. His other hand finds your waist over the hoodie, his hoodie, and his fingers press into the fabric like he's confirming you're solid, you're here, you're not a version of this he rehearsed on the ceiling at four a.m.

"Say it again," he murmurs.

"I'm in love with you."

"Again."

"I'm in love with you, Peter."

He kisses you. It tastes like burnt sugar and orange juice and the specific, devastating sweetness of a word you both kept locked behind your teeth for weeks finally let loose. His hand slides from your jaw into your hair, and yours fist tighter in his shirt, and the smoke alarm beeps again, twice, shrill and indignant, and neither of you pulls away.

MJ [8:07 AM]: I just got a text from Peter that says "🙂" MJ [8:07 AM]: one emoji MJ [8:07 AM]: no context Ned [8:07 AM]: THAT'S THE SIGNAL MJ [8:08 AM]: I'm updating the doc MJ [8:08 AM]: new section title: "FINALLY, YOU ABSOLUTE WALNUTS"

These two beautiful, oblivious, emotionally constipated disasters. I'm framing this. I'm putting it on the fridge. I'm making it my senior thesis.

The rain keeps falling on the fire escape. The French toast goes cold on the blue plate. Somewhere across the city, Ned Leeds punches the air in his dorm room hard enough to knock a Lego X-Wing off his shelf, and MJ highlights the final entry in the Google Doc, changes the font to 24-point Garamond, and types: STATUS: RESOLVED.

Peter pulls back just far enough to look at you, his nose brushing yours, his hands cradling your face like you're the fragile thing in the room and not the boy who stops trains with his bare hands.

"So," he says, and the grin spreading across his face is slow and crooked and completely, irreversibly ruined. "Sweetheart."

"Baby," you answer.

He kisses the bridge of your nose, then the corner of your mouth, then pulls you into his chest, and you stand there in the narrow kitchen in mismatched socks with powdered sugar on both of you, his heartbeat fast and steady against your ear, while the radiator clicks its three-tap rhythm and the city hums its wet, gray, indifferent song eleven stories below, and none of it matters, none of it touches this, because his arms are around you and the word tomorrow finally means something you're not afraid of.

𝜗𝜚⋆ Broken Promises

| Authors Note! hiya!! this is a little mean at the begining.. there's missed expectations, emotional fallout and peter being an idiot. there will be fluff at the end trust. anyways enjoy <3

pairing : mcu peter parker x reader

genre : angst - fluff

warnings : emotional angst, miscommunication, neglect in a relationship, crying, hurt/comfort, temporary breakup

word count : 310K words

The apartment smells like buttercream frosting and the strawberry candles MJ brought over three hours ago, the ones she'd shoved into your hands with a flat "Happy birthday, don't make it weird." Streamers in dusty rose and gold curl from the ceiling fan that nobody can figure out how to turn off, so they flutter in lazy spirals above the kitchen island where a two-tier cake sits with your name piped across it in crooked purple letters. Ned's handwriting. He'd been so proud of it he took eleven photos from different angles.

Your phone screen stays dark on the counter.

"Okay, but I'm just saying—" Flash leans against the fridge in a jacket that costs more than your rent, one hand wrapped around a red Solo cup filled with what he swears is "artisanal punch" but is absolutely just Sprite and grenadine. His jaw is sharper than it was in high school, cheekbones catching the warm overhead light, hair gelled into that effortful-effortless swoop he's been perfecting since sophomore year. "—if Parker can't even show up on time to a birthday, how's he gonna handle, like, a mortgage? I'm just being realistic."

God, I'm so good at reading rooms. Somebody should be filming this.

"Flash." MJ doesn't look up from the book she's reading on your couchThe Bluest Eye, dog-eared to death, her dark curls falling across one sharp cheekbone. She's wearing an oversized flannel that swallows her narrow shoulders, legs tucked underneath her, and her voice carries the energy of someone who has been waiting for this exact disaster since breakfast. "Shut up."

He's not coming. I knew he wasn't coming. I should've said something this morning.

"No, no, he has a point," says Betty Brant from the folding chair near the window, and Ned physically winces from across the room.

Ned, sweet, broad-shouldered, nervous Ned, stands by the Bluetooth speaker with his phone in both hands with so much attention, thumb hovering over Peter's contact. His round face is doing that thing where he smiles with his mouth but his eyebrows betray absolute panic. He's wearing the birthday-party Hawaiian shirt, the one with little pineapples, stretched tight across his chest and belly.

Pick up pick up pick up pick up. Dude, PICK UP.

"He said he was coming," Ned announces to no one in particular. Third time in twenty minutes. "He literally texted me at four. He said, and I quote, 'Leaving soon.'"

"It's almost eight, Ned." Your voice comes out steadier than your hands. You set down the stack of paper plates. little holographic ones, because you'd thought they were fun when you picked them out last week. They catch the light and throw tiny rainbows across your fingers. Your nails are freshly done, a light baby pink. You'd gotten them done specifically because Peter once said he liked that color on you, offhand, months ago, and you'd remembered.

He couldn't remember today.

The playlist Ned built shuffles to something upbeat and it feels like a slap.

You pick your phone up. Lock screen: a photo of both you and Peter holding hands in Central Park, October light making everything amber. No new messages. You'd texted him at noon. At two.

At five-fifteen, a simple "Hey, don't forget tonight :)" with the smiley face because you didn't want to sound desperate, even though your chest was already tightening.

Read at 5:16 PM.

"I'm gonna—" You gesture vaguely toward the bathroom. "One sec."

The bathroom is small. Lavender hand soap, a crack in the mirror that's been there since move-in, and the muffled bass of whatever song is playing through the thin door. You grip the edge of the sink. The porcelain is cold and your knuckles go white around it.

He promised.

You'd reminded him two weeks ago. Then again last Monday. Then a sticky note on his backpack, an actual, physical sticky note, hot pink, with a little doodle of a cake on it. He'd laughed and kissed the top of your head and said, "Babe, I'm not gonna forget."

Your reflection stares back at you. The outfit you spent forty-five minutes picking, a light pink strapless dress that matches your nails and that sits just right against your collarbones, and the heeled wedges you can't really afford, all of it suddenly feels like a costume for a show nobody's watching.

You don't cry. Not yet.

When you come back out, MJ's eyes flick to yours for exactly one second. That's all she needs.

Yeah. She's not okay.

Flash is telling a story about his Audi and no one is listening. Background noise: someone's phone buzzing on the counter, the clatter of ice in a glass, Betty laughing politely at something, the fan clicking on every third rotation.

Eight o'clock.

Eight-thirty.

Ned stops checking his phone and starts cutting cake with the grim focus of a field medic performing triage. He plates a slice and brings it to you with both hands, like an offering. "It's really good. I used, um, I used the Swiss meringue buttercream this time. Not the American. There's a difference. The Swiss is—"

"Oh, I'm not hungry." You say rushed. He insists. You take it. You don't eat it.

Nine o'clock. People start doing that thing where they check their phones and mention early mornings.

Nine-fifteen. Betty hugs you goodbye. Flash salutes, which is bizarre, and then pauses at the door.

"For what it's worth," he says, and his voice does something unexpected, drops low, almost gentle, entirely un-Flash, "you look really pretty tonight. And Parker's an idiot."

Okay that was smooth. That was actually smooth. I should be a life coach.

He leaves. MJ squeezes your shoulder on her way out, no words, her grip firm and dry. Ned lingers the longest, hovering near the door with his jacket half-on, mouth opening and closing.

"I can stay—"

"Go home, Ned. It's fine."

It is not fine.

The door clicks shut.

You stand in your apartment with gold streamers and a half-eaten cake and a playlist still going and the cinnamon candles burned down to stubs, wax pooling on the saucers. The smell has gone from warm to cloying. You blow them out one by one.

Your phone lights up at 11:48 PM.

Peter: oh my god Peter: oh my god oh my god Peter: sweetheart Peter: I'm coming right now Peter: I am SO sorry Peter: please don't be asleep

The buzzer goes off at 12:03 AM. You press the intercom without saying anything.

His footsteps in the hallway are fast, stumbling, and when you open the door Peter Parker is standing there looking like he lost a fight with the entire city. His brown hair is a wreck, curling in every direction, damp at the temples like he ran here. There's a scratch on his jaw he'll claim is from "a shelf" later. His hoodie is inside-out. Literally inside-out, the seams showing, the tag flapping against his collarbone. Those warm brown eyes, usually so steady, so soft, are wide and wet and terrified.

He's holding bodega flowers. Cellophane-wrapped carnations, half-crushed, obviously grabbed in a sprint. One of them is missing its head entirely.

She's going to kill me. She should kill me. I deserve to be killed. Is she—oh no. Oh no, she's been crying.

"Happy birthday," he breathes, and the words come out like an apology and a prayer stitched together.

You look at him.

You look at the decapitated carnation.

Something inside you, the thing that held all night, through Flash's commentary and Ned's cake and MJ's knowing glances and the bathroom mirror—cracks clean open.

"You forgot." It comes out quiet. Worse than yelling. "You actually forgot."

"I didn't—I got caught up with, there was a," His hands are shaking around the flowers. He steps forward and you step back and his face crumbles. "Baby, please, I know—"

"I reminded you seven times, Peter." Your voice splinters. Tears are falling now and you hate them, you hate every single one, warm and fast down your cheeks, dripping off your jaw onto the collarbone where the cropped top sits.

"I put a sticky note on your bag. A sticky note. Like you were a child. And you still—" A breath that sounds like it's been ripped out of you. "Everyone was here. Flash was here. Flash showed up to my birthday before you did. Do you understand how—" You press both hands over your eyes because looking at him hurts. "Do you understand how humiliating that is?"

He's standing in the doorway and his arms drop to his sides. The flowers hang limp in his fist, cellophane crinkling.

"I know," he whispers.

"You don't." You wipe your face with the back of your hand, mascara smearing across your knuckle. "Because if you knew, you would've been here. You would've," Your voice breaks entirely. What comes out next is small, fractured, barely a sentence: "I just wanted you here."

Peter's eyes are red. His throat bobs. He reaches for you.

"Don't." You pull your arms against your chest. "I think… I think you should go."

"No. No no no, wait."

"Peter. Go home."

"Can we just talk,"

"I don't want to talk to you right now." You say it to the floor. To the holographic paper plates stacked on the counter. To the cake with your name on it. "I don't think I want to talk to you for a while."

The silence that follows is worse than anything.

Peter Parker leaves your apartment at 12:11 AM on October 15th, still holding the crushed flowers, and the door shuts with a sound so soft it might as well be a gunshot.

He texts every day.

Not desperate essays. Not paragraphs. Just:

Peter: I'm sorry. Peter: I hope you ate breakfast. Peter: I'm so sorry.

You read every single one. You reply to none.

MJ brings you soup on Tuesday. She sits on your bed and reads aloud from her book while you lie face-down on a pillow and pretend you're not crying. She doesn't comment on the crying. She just reads. Her voice is low, steady, and she smells like eucalyptus shampoo and the library.

Ned calls on Thursday. "I'm not, like, taking sides," he says, "but he hasn't slept. Like at all. He's doing that thing where he sits on the ceiling and just… stares. It's really unsettling, actually."

"Good," you say, and then feel terrible, and then feel angry that you feel terrible.

A package arrives at your door. No note. Inside: a first edition of your favorite book, the spine slightly cracked from use, a pressed flower tucked between pages 113 and 114. You know Peter's been scouring every used bookstore in the five boroughs because Ned accidentally let it slip during a phone call he didn't realize was basically a hostage negotiation.

You put it on your shelf.

You don't text him.

Peter: I found that coffee place you mentioned in August. The one with the oat milk lavender thing. It's really good. You were right. Peter: You're always right. Peter: I miss you so much I can't breathe sometimes.

You stare at that last one for forty minutes in the dark of your bedroom, the screen light making your eyes ache, the sheets smelling like the detergent you both use, same brand, because you'd started buying the same one without discussing it, just one of those things couples do when they've grown into each other's routines. And now the smell of your own laundry makes your chest cave in.

Then Flash, of all people, DMs you on Instagram.

@flashthompson: okay I know this is weird but Parker literally showed up at my apartment to ask me what your favorite flowers are. YOUR flowers. He asked ME. I've never seen a man so down bad in my life. It was honestly disturbing. Anyway it's lillies right

You: How do you know that?

@flashthompson: you posted a story in june with lillies and the caption "obsessed" and I have a very good memory

@flashthompson: don't make it weird

You almost smile. Almost.

Peter shows up at the coffee shop where you study on a rainy Wednesday. You don't know how he knew you'd be there, Ned, probably, the world's worst double agent. You're tucked in the corner booth, laptop open, cold brew sweating a ring onto the wooden table, and the smell of espresso grounds and rain-wet pavement drifts from the propped-open door. You look up and he's just standing there by the register, soaked through his jacket, hair plastered to his forehead, water dripping from his jaw to his collar.

He looks thinner. Circles under his eyes dark enough to bruise, purple-brown, stark against his skin. His hands are stuffed in his jacket pockets and his shoulders hunch inward like he's bracing for impact.

He's here. Okay. Okay. Don't cry. Do NOT cry in a coffee shop. Be normal. Be a normal person.

He doesn't come to your table. He orders at the counter, quiet, and then walks over holding a cup, not for himself. Oat milk lavender latte.

He sets it down in front of you without a word.

Then he turns and walks right back out into the rain.

You watch the door swing shut behind him. The barista, a girl with blue hair and a nose ring, glances between you and the door and says, "Honey, whoever that is, he tipped forty percent and he looked like he was going to a funeral."

The latte is perfect.

You cry into it a little.

He sends a handwritten letter. Actual pen on actual paper, slid under your door. His handwriting is terrible, always has been, all sharp angles and inconsistent sizing, like a doctor raised by architects. But he tried. The paper smells faintly of his apartment, that specific blend of cheap bodywash and old wood and the faint metallic tang you've never been able to identify.

You read it sitting on the kitchen floor with your back against the cabinet.

I know I can't explain without telling you everything, and I know that's not fair. But I need you to know that there has never been a single second where you weren't the most important thing in my life. I just haven't been acting like it. And that's on me. All of it.

You reminded me seven times. I know. I counted after. I went back through every text and I counted and I felt sick.

I don't want you to forgive me because I showed up with flowers or books or coffee. I want you to forgive me because I'm going to be different. I'm going to be the person you already thought I was when you put that sticky note on my bag. The one with the little cake drawing. I kept it. It's on my wall.

I love you. I love you. I love you. I'm sorry I made you feel like that wasn't enough to remember a date.

— Peter

P.S. Flash says hi. I can't believe I'm at the point in my life where Flash Thompson is my emotional advisor. This is rock bottom.

You laugh. It's wet and shaky and it surprises you.

You pick up your phone.

You: Come over.

He's at your door in nine minutes. You know because you count.

When you open it, he's standing there in a clean hoodie, right-side-out this time, holding a bouquet of pale pink peonies wrapped in brown paper. His eyes are red-rimmed. His lip is bitten raw. He smells like rain again, and bodywash, and something warm underneath that's just him, that specific Peter-smell you've been missing like a phantom limb.

She opened the door. She opened the door. Okay. Okay. Don't mess this up. Don't—

"Hi," he says.

"Hi."

Neither of you moves for a long, terrible, beautiful second.

"I read your letter," you say. Your voice is hoarse from three weeks of not using it enough.

His mouth twitches.

"And you misspelled 'remember.'"

"I know that."

"And you told Flash Thompson about our problems, which means I'll never hear the end of it."

"Yeah, that…" He exhales a sound caught between a laugh and a sob. "That was a low point."

You look at the lillies. At his bitten lip. At the circles under his eyes that tell you he hasn't been sleeping, that Ned wasn't exaggerating, that Peter Parker has spent twenty-six days drowning in the absence of you.

"Get in here."

He steps through the door and you reach for his collar and pull him down into you and his arms wrap around your waist so tight your feet leave the floor, actually leave the floor, heels lifting clean off the hardwood, and the lillies get crushed between your bodies, petals pressing soft and cool against your arm. His face buries into your neck and his breath comes out shuddering and hot against your skin. You feel the dampness of his lashes against your throat.

"I'm sorry," he whispers into your collarbone. "I'm sorry. I'm sorry."

You thread your fingers into his damp hair, those ridiculous curls, still cold from the rain, and hold on. The apartment smells like cinnamon again because you bought new candles without admitting to yourself why. His arms tighten. Your toes brush the floor. The lillies shed petals down your hip, pale pink falling soft onto the wood below, and Peter Parker presses his mouth to the curve of your shoulder and breathes you in like he's been holding his breath for a month.

You tilt his face up with both hands, thumbs tracing the bruised skin beneath his eyes, and kiss him, slow, salt-tinged, his lower lip trembling against yours. His hands slide to the small of your back and press you flush against his chest and a sound escapes him, low and cracked, somewhere between relief and grief, muffled against your mouth.

When you pull back, his forehead drops against yours. His nose bumps your nose. His eyes are closed and wet.

"I heard you tipped forty percent at that coffee shop," you murmur.

Peter chokes out a laugh, broken and gorgeous. "He told you about that?"

"He screenshots everything."

Peter groans and pulls you tighter, burying his smile into your hair, and you let him, fingers curling into the back of his hoodie as the ruined lillies scatter their petals across the entryway floor.

𝜗𝜚⋆ Mask off PT II (PT I) | Authors Note! hi hi… this one is a little mean at first 😭 i needed peter to be a d!ck a bit before we got the soft ending okay. there’s miscommunication, bad decisions, and him being painfully stupid but i promise it gets better. also wrote this with a lot of feelings so… enjoy the angst before the comfort <3

pairing : mcu peter parker x blackcat! reader

genre : angst, hurt/comfort, romance, slow burnish, fluff (ending)

warnings : emotional angst, miscommunication, peter being an idiot, jealousy, mild love triangle, temporary rejection, avoidance, emotional confrontation

word count : 1660K words

You walk into school expecting everything to be different. Expecting Peter to talk to you without breaking a pencil. So you walk into chemistry like you usually do, your backpack slung over your shoulder, hair slightly curled at the ends, the faint scent of vanilla and something warm clinging to your fitted top if anyone gets close enough to notice. 

He’s already there. Of course he is. 

Peter Parker, hunched over the table like nothing happened, like nothing changed. Like Friday night didn’t split both your lives open and stitch them back together wrong. He’s wearing a white long sleeve pushed up, showing forearms that don’t come from just studying. The fabric of his shirt was taut across his shoulders. 

Something is wrong. It sits in the air like static. Not obvious, not loud, just out of place. 

He doesn’t look at you, that's the first thing. Not even once.

You notice it immediately. Of course you do. You notice everything about him. 

The empty stool beside you in chemistry. 

The way his jaw would clench when you walk past, as if you were a burden. 

You hear his laugh across the room. The laugh that always had the ability to tug a smile on your lips. But this time, the laugh was not with you, but with her, Liz. 

You don’t react. I mean you do, just not physically. You just slide into your seat, pull out your note book, and start writing like your hand doesn’t feel a little too tight around the pen and as if you were running out of time. “Okay..” Ned whispers behind you, not whispering at all. “Something is definitely happening.” MJ hums. “Yeah. He’s being stupid.” “Like.. more stupid than usual.” You keep your eyes on your own paper. 

Peter glances at you. Just for a second. And then he turned away like it physically burned. 

You’re at your locker when you hear it. “Yeah, Friday works for me,” Peters says, a little too casual. “We could, um, get food? Or a movie? Whatever you want.” Liz smiles at him. Soft. Easy. “Food sounds nice.” Your fingers are still gripping the edge of the door of your locker. For a second. Just a second. Then you shut it. Smooth controlled. You walk past them without turning your head to look. Peter stops talking mid-sentence. His throat works. You don’t slow down. You see how it is, and you weren’t going to slow down for anyone. 

“You’re not planning on stabbing him right? Please don’t stab him” Ned asks carefully. “Debating it” You say low without looking up from your food. MJ snorts. “Sounds tempting.” You shrug, picking at your rice and chicken, the faint scent of soy clinging to it. “I’m not his girlfriend, he can do whatever he pleases” “That is not what this is,” MJ says, watching you over the edge of her book. “It literally is.” Ned leans in. “No, like he’s been weird. Like really weird. You know he almost dropped his tray when you walked in” 

“Not my problem.” Your voice is even. Way too even. MJ notices. She closes her book. “He’s been avoiding you” That’s the moment when you finally look up. Your expression does not falter. “Good.” But your finger tightens around your fork just a little. 

The city is quieter here, above it all, above all the worries, and all of the paranoia. As much as you wish it was silent it wasn’t. It was never silent. Distant sirens, the hum of traffic, wind brushing against concrete. You land lightly on the edge of the roof, heels clicking on the ground. You already know he’s here. Of course you do. Your body always knows before your mind catches up. Spider-sense. Recognition. You don’t look at him. You just walk past him, as your hair blows in the wind. 

“Sweetheart—”  You don’t slow down, not anymore. 

His voice hitches. “...please.” That makes you pause, after all the time it took to convince yourself to not slow down, him saying begging is all it took to make you stop. You don’t turn. Just.. stop. You're back to him. Arms crossed. Heart leaping out of your chest. With the wind tugging at your hair. “You don’t get to call me that.. not anymore..” you say quietly.  You were met with silence. Then the soft thud of his landing behind you. Closer. Not too close. Like he’s afraid, terrified even. 

“You’ve been ignoring me,” you continue, still with your back towards him. “In school. In the halls. Like I don’t exist in your world.” “I know.” “You took her out.” His breath hitches. “Yeah” You nod once. “Okay.” That hits him harder than anything else. “Okay?” He repeats, his voice cracking slightly. “Is that all you have to say?” He scoffs. “What exactly do you want me to say, Peter?” You ask. “Do you want me to say please don’t leave, or Peter I can’t lose you?” Your eyes narrow, and your jaw tightens. “Remember, it was your choice to avoid me, I did no wrong.” You manage to get out, finally turning. 

Your eyes meet his. And there it is. That look. Like he’s already lost you. Like everything is wrong with the world, and you are the only solution. “I want you to—” He stops, his lip quivers. He runs a hand through his hair while looking at the ground like it’s the most interesting thing here. “I don’t know?!.BE MAD. YELL AT ME. CRY. HIT ME EVEN. JUST SOMETHING.. So I know that you cared about this” He yells while pointing at the distance between you and him. You scoff at him “You chose her. Don’t expect me to stand here and compete.”  

“I know you wouldn’t,” he says softly. “That’s the problem.” The wind picks up between you. Cold. Sharp. You take a step back. Distance. “Then why are you here?” He laughs once. Bitter. “Because I’m stupid.” You don’t disagree. His gaze drops to the ground between you. Then back up. “I love you,” he says. The words land heavy punches on your lips and your chest. Real. “I do.” Your expression softens, just a little. “...but I can’t have you.” There it is. 

The thing that has been hanging in the air between you since that night on the roof. Unsaid. Until now. Your jaw tightens. “...because I’m dangerous.” “Yes.” he doesn’t hesitate. “You are,” he starts, voice hoarse and rough. “You jump from building to building as if you actually have nine lives. You fight people who would kill without a second thought. Every time I see you out there I—” He cuts himself off to take a deep breath, shaking his head. “I can’t breathe, okay? I—I can’t— I just can’t lose you like that.” 

“And Liz is easier.” “..Yes.” The word is quiet. Careful. But it still cuts. You nod slowly. “Right.” Silence stretches. Long. Heavy. Then you step around him as if he was an active land mine. “Good choice, Spider.” “Don’t—” You keep on walking, trying to convince yourself that if you close your eyes and open them again, he’ll be gone. “Cmon sweetheart, don’t do that.” You stop again. But this time, when you turn, there’s something sharper, colder in your eyes. 

“You don’t get to have both,” you say.” You do not get to love me and choose someone else and still call me that.” His face crumples a little. “I know.” “Then fcking act like it.” You move to the edge of the roof. Ready to jump. “Wait—” You pause. Again. He steps closer. Slow. Careful. Like approaching something fragile. “Baby..please.” The nickname hits differently this time. Softer. Broken. You look at him. Really look at him.

His hands are shaking. By the way his eyes are red like he hasn’t slept. By the way he’s trying so hard to hold himself together and failing anyway. “I went out with her,” he says, his voice uneven. “I tried. I really did. I kept thinking, this is what normal is supposed to feel like. This is safe. This is easy.’’Okay..and?” His laugh is hollow. “And I just could not stop thinking about you.” Your breath catches. Just slightly. Ï kept waiting for her to say something that sounded like you. Or look at me like you do. Or—” he shakes his head in frustration. “It’s not the same. Because it’s never going to be you.”

You swallow. “Peter—” “I’m scared,” he admits, stepping closer to you. “Okay? I’m terrified of losing you. But I’m more terrified of pushing and pretending I don’t— ” He stops. Takes a breath. “I don’t want to be safe if it means it’s not you.” The city hums below. Your heart pounds a little too loud in your chest. “You said you couldn’t have me,”you remind quietly. “I know.” He reaches for you. Stops halfway. “...but I want you anyway." 

The honesty in his voice is almost unbearable. You look at his hand. Then his face. “You’re an idiot.” Ï’ve been told”. “...a lot.” “Frequently.” A small pause. Then, you step forward. Close the distance. Your fingers slide into his. His breath catches like he didn’t expect you to actually touch him. “Hi,” you murmur. His lips part. “...hi.” You squeeze his hand. 

“Don’t ignore me again.” “Never, baby,” he says almost immediately. “You date someone else again—” “I won’t.” “You better not.” His eyes soften at that. “Yeah,” he breathes. “Okay. Yeah.” You lean in slightly, resting your forehead against his. The tension finally cracks. Just a little. “You’re still stupid,” you mumble. “He huffs out a quiet laugh. “Yeah. But I’m your stupid, right?” You pretend to think about it. “...unfortunately.” He grins. Soft. Relived 

And when his fingers tighten around yours, it feels like something steady for once. 

Not safe. 

Not easy.

But real.

And that’s enough for the both of you.

| Authors Note!

𝜗𝜚⋆ Mask off PT II | Authors Note! hi!! this fic is a little chaotic, a little soft, and a lot of tension finally snapping so… enjoy the ride 😭 this is just for fun, don’t take anything too seriously, and thank you for reading <3

pairing : mcu peter parker x blackcat! reader

genre : fluff, smut 18+ mdni

warnings : explicit smut, strong language, mild violence, identity reveal, suggestive themes, public intimacy, mild violence

word count : 4443K words

summary : You and Peter can’t ignore the tension between you at school, and when you meet again as Black Cat and Spider-Man, everything finally clicks into place.

The lab smelled like formaldehyde and cheap lemon disinfectant, the kind that never actually cleaned anything but convinced the school board the budget was being spent. A Bunsen burner hissed two tables over where Jason Ionello was trying to light a gummy bear on fire while Mr. Harrington's back was turned. Someone's phone buzzed against a textbook. The fluorescent tubes overhead gave everything a sickly, flat pallor, the color of gas station milk.

Peter Parker sat on the stool beside you and smelled like drugstore deodorant and pencil graphite, with something else underneath, something clean and warm, like dryer sheets left too long in the sun. His hair was a disaster, brown curls crushed flat on one side like he'd slept on his arm during fourth period, which, knowing him, he absolutely had. Dark circles sat under his eyes, purple as bruises against skin that hadn't seen proper sunlight in weeks.

She smells like, okay, focus. Stoichiometry. Moles. Avogadro's number. Not whatever that vanilla-and-something scent is. Not her.

"You're doing the conversion wrong," you said, pulling his notebook toward you without asking. Your handwriting was sharp, angular, nothing like the looping cursive you used in other contexts, other lives. You scratched the correction into the margin with his own pen, your knuckle brushing his thumb.

Peter yanked his hand back like you'd burned him. "I, yeah, no, I knew that. I was testing you."

"Mhm." You didn't look up. You could feel him staring at the side of your face, that fidgety, almost distressed attention he always gave, like you were a word problem he couldn't parse. Your hair fell forward, and the silver ring on your index finger caught the overhead light. Peter's gaze dropped to it. Stayed.

Two rows back, Ned Leeds leaned toward MJ without lowering his voice at all. "Dude, he's doing the thing again. The staring thing."

MJ didn't look up from her book. "He does it every Friday."

"It's painful."

It's nothing, Peter told himself, dragging his eyes back to the beaker. She's just, she's in my class. She sits next to me. That's the whole thing. That is the entire thing.

But his fingers kept flexing under the table, and when you leaned close enough that your shoulder grazed his, something at the base of his skull hummed, a low, electric whisper that he'd learned years ago to never ignore. Spider-sense. Faint, not danger-faint. Recognition-faint.

He ignored it anyway.

The bell split the air at 2:15. You were gone before he'd even capped his pen, backpack slung over one shoulder, silver ring catching light as you pushed through the door and dissolved into the hallway current of three hundred bodies smelling like Axe and anxiety.

Peter watched you go. His pencil was broken clean in half inside his fist.

October in New York bit with teeth. The wind came off the Hudson carrying diesel, brine, and the grease-sweet rot of the Meatpacking District two blocks south. The skyline was a jaw of lit windows, and the rooftop under your boots was old tar paper gone soft and tacky from the day's weak sun, now cold and gritty beneath the balls of your feet.

You crouched on the ledge in a suit that fit like a second pulse, matte black Kevlar-weave, articulated at every joint, with a neckline that plunged to a silver zipper resting just below your sternum. The mask covered your eyes and cheekbones, leaving your mouth bare, your lips painted a shade of plum so dark it looked black in the sodium-vapor light. Your hair was loose, platinum-white, whipping across your jaw in the crosswind. The claws on your gloves were real, titanium-carbide tips that could open a Brink's safe or a man's throat with equal disinterest.

Below you, the Galerie Lefèvre had just closed its doors. Inside: a Fabergé egg worth four-point-two million dollars, insured for six, guarded by a system you'd already mapped, memorized, and mentally dismantled during a gallery walk last Tuesday in a sundress and borrowed glasses.

You stretched your fingers. The claws caught moonlight.

"You know," said a voice from directly behind you, too close, too casual, "most people just buy stuff from the gift shop."

You didn't flinch. You never flinched. Instead you turned your head slowly, letting the motion pull your hair across your throat, and there he was.

Spider-Man. Perched on the water tower's rusted strut like a gargoyle who'd been redesigned by someone with a sense of humor. The suit was the red-and-blue Stark-tech number, nanofiber, lensed eyes that whirred and refocused like camera apertures, every line of it vacuum-sealed to a body that had no business being that well-built under spandex. Broad shoulders tapering to a narrow waist, thighs like a sprinter's, the suit leaving exactly nothing to imagination and offering zero apologies about it. He was crouched with his forearms on his knees, head tilted, the mask's eyes squinted in what you'd learned to read as his version of a grin.

God, she's already here. She's always already here. How is she always already here? And why does she always sit like that, like she's posing for a painting no one commissioned?

"Gift shop's closed, Spider," you said. Your voice through the mask was lower than your daytime register, something you did on purpose, a contralto purr that you knew, from documented evidence, made his web-shooters misfire. "And I don't buy what I can take."

"See, that's the thing." He dropped from the strut, landing on the tar paper with a sound like a palm slapping a desk, thwap, and straightened to his full height. Five-eleven, maybe six feet in the suit. He rolled his shoulders, and the nanofiber rippled. "Every time you say something like that, I have to do the whole 'I can't let you do this' speech, and honestly? It's getting kind of,"

"Boring?"

"I was gonna say repetitive, but sure."

The wind gusted. You caught the scent of him beneath the October cold, something mechanical and clean, like ozone and polymers, but under that, buried: warm skin, boy-sweat, and whatever bodywash he used that you could swear you'd smelled somewhere before. Somewhere with fluorescent lights and formaldehyde.

You shoved the thought away.

"Then don't do the speech." You rose from the crouch, unfolding to full height on the ledge. The suit creaked faintly, leather and Kevlar whispering against each other. You were close enough now that you could see his chest move with his breathing. Faster than it should've been. "Let me work. Go save a cat from a tree. We both go home happy."

"Can't do that either." He took a step closer. The lenses on his mask dilated. "You know I can't."

Her mouth. I'm staring at her mouth again. Stop staring at her mouth. She's a criminal. A literal criminal. Who steals things. With those hands. Those very specific hands that, STOP.

"Then what," you murmured, tilting your chin down so you were looking at him through your lashes, through the mask's cutout, the plum-dark lips parting just enough, "are you going to do with me?"

The air between you tasted like diesel and something electric, ozone from his suit, maybe, or just the static that always built when you got this close. Your clawed finger came up and traced the spider emblem on his chest, the titanium tip dragging a faint shhhhk across the nanofiber. Beneath it, you felt his heartbeat. Jackrabbiting.

Peter's hand caught your wrist. Fast, spider-fast, five fingers wrapping around the Kevlar with a grip that wasn't playing. His thumb settled over your pulse point, pressing hard enough that you knew he could feel yours racing right back.

"You do this every time," he said, and his voice had dropped too, gone rough at the edges, the quippy bravado bleeding out of it like air from a tire. "You get close and you, you make it."

"Make it what?"

"Impossible." He let out a breath that fogged between you. "You make it impossible to do my job."

"Maybe your job's overrated." You stepped off the ledge, toward him, not away, your body a blade's width from his. The height difference meant your mouth was level with his jaw, and you could see the tension in it, the clench and release. Your free hand landed flat on his chest, claws retracted, just your palm against the nano-suit's warmth. "Maybe you want something else tonight, Spider."

Yes. No. Absolutely not. She's, this is a trap. This is always a trap. A really, really well-designed trap that smells like vanilla and wears a catsuit.

He kissed you.

No preamble. No warning. He yanked his mask up to his nose with one hand, you caught a flash of jaw, the faintest shadow of stubble, lips bitten red from the cold, and then his mouth was on yours, hard and graceless and tasting like cheap mint gum and desperation. His hand was still around your wrist, and his other arm locked around your waist, pulling you flush against him so that your breasts compressed against the spider emblem, your hips slotting against the V of his, and the sound you made, "mmnh", was swallowed right off your tongue.

He kissed like he fought: all instinct, no restraint. His teeth caught your lower lip, nnh, tugging, and when your lips parted he licked into your mouth with a groan that vibrated through his chest and into yours. The mint mixed with the plum of your lipstick, and beneath it the taste of him was warm, salt-sweet, human. His arm tightened. Your spine arched. The city noise, sirens, distant bass, a car alarm cycling through its tantrum,all of it dropped to static.

Your clawed hand slid up the back of his neck and found skin where the mask had ridden up, hot, damp at the nape, the short hairs there bristling under your fingertips. He shuddered so hard his whole frame jerked, and the sound he made against your mouth "fffuck"was barely a word.

You pulled back half an inch. Your lips were swollen. His were smeared plum.

"For someone who can't let me do this," you breathed, "you're doing a lot of this."

"Shut up." His fingers dug into your waist. "Please, for once, just.. "

He kissed you again, and this time there was nothing graceless about it. Slow. Devastating. His tongue traced the seam of your lips like he was memorizing the shape, and when you opened for him the sound between you was wet, obscene, mmlh, slck, his hips pressing forward so you felt exactly what the suit couldn't hide. Hard. Thick enough that the pressure against your lower belly made your breath hitch, your thighs tighten. The nano-suit was thin. Cruelly thin. You could feel the heat of him through it, the rigid line of his cock straining against the material, pressed between your bodies with nowhere to go.

"Spider—"

"Peter."

It slipped out of him like a secret he'd been choking on. His whole body went rigid. You felt his heartbeat spike under your palm, a wild, arrhythmic stutter.

I just, I told her. I told her my name. What the fuck. What the FUCK. Why did I, she was, and I just.

You didn't move. The wind howled. Somewhere below, a taxi laid on its horn, a long, bleating BWAAAHHHH that echoed off the brownstones.

"Peter," you repeated, and the name felt like a key turning in a lock you hadn't known was there. Your voice was barely audible. Your hand slid from his chest to the edge of his mask. "Can I"

"Yeah." He swallowed. You watched his throat work. "Yeah."

You peeled the mask up. Slowly. Past his chin, squared, a small mole beneath the left corner of his jaw. Past his mouth, red, wrecked, smeared dark with your lipstick. Past his nose.

Brown eyes. Enormous, wet, terrified, burning. Lashes so dark they looked lined. Curls matted flat from the mask, the same curls that had been crushed from sleep that afternoon in chemistry, the same face, the same boy who sat beside you and smelled like drugstore deodorant and graphite and your stomach dropped through the roof.

Oh.

Peter Parker stared at you with every defense he'd ever built crumbling visibly behind his eyes, and his hand came up to the edge of your mask, trembling.

"Fair's fair," he whispered.

You let him pull it off.

The recognition hit him like a truck. You watched it happen,the dilation of his pupils swallowing the brown, the parting of his lips, the way the air punched out of him in a single syllable: "You."

"Me," you said. And despite everything, you smiled.

His hands cupped your face, both of them, the mask dangling from his fingers, forgotten, and his thumbs traced your cheekbones, the real ones, unmistakable, the same ones he'd stared at over a graduated cylinder eight hours ago.

It was her. It was always her. The spider-sense, the ring, the way she moves, the, oh god, I've been jerking off thinking about my lab partner in a catsuit and she IS my lab partner in a catsuit.

"Every Friday," he said, his voice cracking. "You, every Friday you sit next to me and you knew?"

"I didn't." Your hands were on his wrists, holding him there. The wind was pulling your platinum hair across both your faces. "Not until right now. Not until you said your name and I." Your throat closed. You swallowed past it. "Peter. I had no idea."

"But the spider-sense, I felt it, around you, I always,"

"Maybe it was trying to tell you something that wasn't danger."

He stared at you. The city hummed below. His thumbs kept moving on your skin, a compulsive back-and-forth, like if he stopped touching you you'd disappear.

Then he laughed. A broken, gorgeous, completely unhinged laugh that echoed off the water tower and startled a pigeon from the ledge. His forehead dropped against yours, and you felt the laugh in his whole body, every vibration.

"I am," he managed, "so incredibly stupid."

"Yeah." You kissed the corner of his mouth. Tasted mint and plum. "But you're pretty, so it evens out."

"Oh my god."

His mouth found yours again, and this time there was no pretense. His hands slid from your face down the column of your neck, over your shoulders, down the zipper line of your suit with deliberate, mapping slowness, like he was reconciling the body he'd pressed against in the dark with the girl who corrected his stoichiometry. His fingers found the zipper pull between your breasts and stopped.

"Can I," he breathed into your mouth.

"Peter, if you don't, I'm going to claw this suit off you, and Stark tech is expensive."

He laughed again, shorter, darker, and pulled the zipper down.

The sound of it was obscene in the quiet: a long, metallic zzzzzzip that split the night air. The suit parted beneath it, and the October cold hit your sternum, the valley between your breasts, your stomach. You weren't wearing anything underneath. His eyes tracked the opening like a man reading scripture.

"Jesus," he said, barely voiced.

Your skin prickled, cold and want in equal measure. Your breasts were bare in the city light, nipples drawn tight from the wind, and when his hand came up and cupped the left one, his palm was furnace-hot from the suit's thermal lining. The contrast made you gasp,a sharp, bitten-off "ah—" that you felt in your cunt, a sudden wet pulse.

She's, there's nothing under the, she's been sitting in class with nothing under, no. Focus. She's here. She's real. She's letting me.

His thumb dragged across your nipple. Slow. Deliberate. You arched into it and his other arm tightened around the small of your back, pulling your hips against his again, and this time with the suit half-open the sensation was sharper, his cock pressed against your lower belly through the nano-suit, twitching at the contact.

"How do I." He glanced down at himself, frustrated. "The suit doesn't exactly have a—"

You pressed your palm flat against his chest and pushed. Not hard just enough. "Nanotech, right? Think it off."

He blinked. Then closed his eyes. The suit rippled, retracted from the waist down like liquid mercury pulling back into a vial, and then he was bare from the hips to mid-thigh—, he suit reconstituting as a kind of truncated top, red-and-blue ending at his navel. Beneath: skin. Pale, goosebumped, a thin trail of dark hair running from below his navel.

You looked down.

His cock stood hard against his stomach, flushed dark at the head, thick enough that the sight of it sent a visceral clench through your abdomen. Curved slightly left, a prominent vein running the underside, the tip wet and shining in the ambient city glow. His balls were drawn up tight, and he was trembling, not from cold.

"Don't," He was red to his ears. "Don't just look at it like"

You wrapped your hand around him. No preamble. Your bare fingers, claws retracted, just skin, closed around the shaft and his hips bucked involuntarily, a choked "nngh" punching out of his throat. He was hot in your grip, the skin silk-smooth over rigid hardness, and when you stroked once, base to tip, thumb sweeping the leaking slit, his hand shot out and grabbed the water tower strut behind you hard enough to dent the metal.

"Hah, fuck, your hands, your, you have no idea how many times I, " He bit his lip bloody. "In class. Your hands."

"I know." You stroked him again, slower, twisting at the head, and his cock jerked in your fist, a bead of pre-come spilling over your thumb, slick and warm. "I always know when you're staring, Peter."

"God."

You shoved the suit off your shoulders. It peeled down your arms, your waist, your hips, puddling around your heeled boots in a heap of black Kevlar. The wind hit every inch of you and you didn't care, because Peter's eyes were running down your body with an expression caught somewhere between reverence and ruin. Your waist, the flare of your hips, the trimmed strip of hair between your thighs, the muscle definition in your legs from years of acrobatic theft.

He pulled you against him and spun you so your back hit the water tower, the metal was freezing and you hissed, but then his mouth was on your neck, open and hot, sucking a bruise into the tendon while his hands ran down your sides with a desperation that made his fingers shake. His cock pressed against your inner thigh, smearing wet, and you wrapped one leg around his hip and pulled him closer.

"Mmmh, Peter, I need,"

"Tell me." His mouth moved to your collarbone, teeth scraping. His right hand slid between your thighs and his fingers found your cunt, slick, swollen, embarrassingly wet. The sound his fingers made parting your folds was a soft, slick schlck that made you both groan. He pressed two fingers in without hesitation and you clenched around them, your head falling back against the metal with a thunk.

"Aahhn, fuck, right there, right."

He curled his fingers. Spider-enhanced dexterity meant he found the spot on the first try, the textured patch of your front wall, and pressed with a precision that bordered on cruel. Your thighs shook. Your claw-tipped hand found his shoulder and gripped hard enough to leave marks through the remaining suit.

She's so wet. She's dripping on my hand. Is it always, has she been, when she sits next to me, does she, oh god I'm not going to survive this.

"Inside me," you managed, barely coherent, your hips rolling against his hand. "Peter, I swear to god, if you don't—"

He pulled his fingers out, shlkk, glistening, and brought them to his mouth. Tasted you. His eyes closed and the sound he made was guttural, animal, a bass "mmmnnh" that you felt in your bones.

Then he gripped your thighs, lifted you, effortlessly, stupidly, one-handed-stopping-a-bus effortlessly, and pinned you against the water tower with your legs around his waist. The head of his cock nudged your entrance, slick sliding against slick, and he paused there, forehead against yours, panting.

"You're sure." Not a question. A confirmation. His arms were trembling with restraint, every muscle in his abdomen taut.

"Peter Benjamin Parker, I have wanted this since the first time you webbed me to a fire escape in SoHo."

He thrust in.

The stretch was immediate, thick, insistent, splitting you open around him inch by inch while the city screamed below. Your mouth fell open in a silent cry that found its voice halfway through, "aaahh, oh f-fuck", and your nails raked down the suit fabric on his back, leaving long white lines. He bottomed out with his hips flush against yours, his pubic bone grinding your clit, and the fullness was overwhelming, you could feel his cock twitch inside you, could feel every ridge and vein.

"Hhh, you're so, you feel," Peter's jaw was clenched, tendons standing out in his neck, his eyes screwed shut. He was shaking with the effort of not moving. "Tight. You're so fucking tight, I can't,"

"Move."

He pulled back and slammed in. Your spine scraped the water tower and you didn't care, the thrust punched a sound out of you that wasn't a moan, wasn't a word, was something between, a raw "UNH" that echoed off the adjacent building. His hands gripped the backs of your thighs, fingers sinking into the muscle, and his hips set a rhythm that was devastating, deep, grinding, each stroke bottoming out with a wet slap of skin on skin that cut through the ambient noise of the city.

"Ah, ah, Peter, oh my gah, ah, ah"

His mouth found the junction of your neck and shoulder and he bit down, not gently, and the pain-pleasure of it arced through you like current, your cunt clenching around him so hard he groaned against your skin, a vibrating "fffuck, do that again"

You clenched on purpose. He whimpered. The sound was devastating, this boy who stopped trains and caught falling cranes, whimpering into your throat because you squeezed around his cock.

The position shifted, he adjusted his grip, lifted you higher, changed the angle so the next thrust hit something deep and electric and your vision whited at the edges. Your mouth was open against his temple, breathing ragged, tasting salt-sweat on his skin, and every exhale was a sound,"mmnhh, nnhh, ah, ah, ah" a rhythm matching his.

"Wanted this" he panted between thrusts, each word punctuated by the slap of his hips, "every time, ugh, on the rooftops, haa, when you'd,nnhget close and I could smell you and I"

"Me too." You pulled his face up and kissed him, all tongue and teeth, tasting yourself on his lips. "Mmmlh, every time, Peter, I'd go home and touch myself thinking about"

"Don't, if you say that I'm going to," His rhythm stuttered, hips jerking, and you felt his cock swell inside you, the throb of it, the urgency. His hand slid between your bodies, thumb finding your clit with that same terrifying precision, and he rubbed in tight, fast circles while he fucked up into you, and the dual sensation was..

"Aah, AAH, I'm, ngaa, Peter, I'm gonna"

"Yeah, yeah, come on, let me feel it, I want to,"

You came with a sound like breaking, a full-throated "AAHHN" that you bit down on his shoulder, your entire body seizing, cunt spasming around him in waves that pulled him deeper. Your thighs locked around his waist, heels digging into the small of his back, and you could feel yourself gushing around him, wet and obscene, dripping down his cock and his thighs and onto the tar paper below.

Peter lasted exactly three more thrusts. His hips stuttered, slammed deep, and held, and the sound he made as he came was wrecked, a shattered "*nnNHH, ah, oh god, oh fuck" his cock pulsing inside you, spilling hot and thick, each throb accompanied by a full-body shudder that rattled the water tower strut his hand was braced against.

The city was loud below. The wind was cold. Neither of you moved.

His face was buried in the crook of your neck, breathing like he'd run a marathon, his heart hammering against your bare chest. Your fingers were in his hair, the curls damp, impossibly soft, and you were shaking too, aftershocks clenching around him in diminishing waves that made him twitch and hiss through his teeth each time.

"Peter," you murmured into his hair.

"Mm."

"You're still inside me."

"Aware."

"My back is freezing."

"…Also aware."

He lifted his head. His face was flushed, lips swollen and stained plum, eyes glassy and half-lidded with a dopamine-drunk softness that made your chest ache. A strand of your platinum hair was stuck to his cheek. He peeled it off with clumsy fingers.

I just had sex with Black Cat on a rooftop in Chelsea and she's my chemistry partner and I think I'm in love with her and my legs are shaking and I can't feel my feet. This is either the best or worst night of my life. Both. Definitely both.

"So," he said. His voice was hoarse. "Monday. Chemistry. Are we gonna"

"You're going to sit next to me," you said, tracing the line of his jaw with your thumb, "and you're going to stop breaking your pencils every time I lean over."

"No promises." He turned his head and kissed your palm, lips warm against the center of it. "I broke a lot of pencils over you."

His laugh was quiet this time, just breath, pressed into your skin. He pulled out carefully, you both winced at the loss, the slick slide of it, the mess of it, and eased you down until your boots hit the tar paper. His hands stayed on your waist. Your forehead rested against his collarbone.

Below, a siren wound through the streets and faded. The Hudson lapped somewhere unseen, tidal and constant. The rooftop smelled like sex and city air and the ghost of cheap mint gum, and Peter Parker pressed his mouth to the crown of your head and held it there, breathing you in, his hands pulling you tighter against the warmth of his ridiculous half-suit while October carved its cold teeth along every inch of exposed skin between you.

You reached down and laced your fingers through his, his knuckles still faintly trembling, and squeezed once, a promise shaped like a fist.

𝜗𝜚⋆ 103.4° | Authors Note! hi !! this is just a silly little sick fic that I wrote for fun, so don’t take anything too seriously 😭 it’s very much chaotic, slightly unhinged, and full of finn trying his best (and failing… but in a cute way) there’s a lot of dumb humor, soft moments, and very questionable cooking decisions ahead, so just sit back and enjoy the vibes hope it makes you smile a little <3

pairing : finn wolfhard x singer! reader

genre : fluff, lowk a crack fic

word count : 1077K words

summary : You get sick, Finn tries to nurse you back to health, but he’s so bad at it… while also being weirdly sweet.

"cmon you need soup", you didn't even turn around. "I just, I just need you to shut up," you struggled to get out. Your voice was wrecked, and scratchy in a way that made your chest tighten with annoyance. You exhale heavily. "I also need my vocal chords back:.

Behind you sat Finn, he scoffed and rolled his eyes, "Not right now you don't. You need soup." "I literally need them back though", you said, finally rolling over to face him. "I have that recording session in two days. My career is officially ending"

"You have a cold."

"I have a brand."

"You have a tissue box," he shot back

you grunted and pulled the blanker over your head. "Tell my fans I loved them"

"You tweeted that this morning."

"I was brave about it."

There was pause. Then footsteps Then the cabinet doors opening. The immediate chaor. You froze "...Finn."

"Yeah baby?"

"Making soup."

You slowly lowered the blanket and stared toward the kitchen like it had personally betrayed you. "Uh.. you don't know how to make soup."

"I googles it."

"That's worse"

"I resent that"

A loud clutter echoed through the apartment. You sat up. Instantly regretted it. Your head throbbed like someone installed a speaker inside of your skull and cranked it up to max volume.

"..What was that."

"Nothing sweetheart."

"Don't sweetheart me, that was not nothing"

"It was just a bowl"

"So you broke a bowl"

"It died doing what it loved"

You presse your fingers to your temples. "I cannot deal with this right now"

"You're not dealing with anything," he called. "You're just being dramatic in bed."

"Wow"

"Not like that"

"Sure.."

You coughed, wincing at the strain. Your throat felt like sandpaper and regret. Even speaking hurt, which was deeply offensive considering your entire life revolved around your voice.

“Finn,” you called weakly, “if you ruin my voice, I’m suing you.”

“I am literally helping you.”

“You are a liability.”

Another pause.

Then, cautiously: “Hypothetically… how bad is it if something smells like it’s burning.”

You were out of bed instantly. “FINN.”

“I said hypothetically!”

You stumbled into the kitchen wrapped in a blanket, hair a mess, voice gone, dignity barely hanging on.

The scene was catastrophic.

The stove was on full blast. A pot was boiling like it was angry. There were vegetables everywhere, unevenly chopped like they’d been attacked rather than prepared. And Finn stood there, holding a spoon like it had personally wronged him.

“What did you do,” you whispered hoarsely.

“I followed the instructions.”

“Whose instructions.”

“The internet.”

“That’s not specific enough.”

You stepped closer, peering into the pot.

“…Why does it look like that.”

“It’s soup.”

“It looks violent.”

“It’s simmering.”

“That is not simmering,” you rasped. “That is a musical breakdown.”

He frowned. “It was calmer earlier.”

You grabbed the knob and turned the heat down immediately.

Then you looked again.

“…Finn.”

“Yeah.”

“Why is there so much salt.”

“I thought it said a cup.”

You stared at him.

“A cup.”

“In my defense,” he said quickly, “that seemed like a lot while I was doing it.”

“And you didn’t stop.”

“I committed.”

You just looked at him. Completely speechless. Which, honestly, was saying something.

Then you laughed.

Which turned into coughing.

Which turned into you leaning against the counter like your body was betraying you mid-tour.

“Okay, nope,” Finn said immediately, dropping the spoon and grabbing your arms. “You’re not allowed to pass out in the kitchen. That feels like bad press.”

“I told you I’m dying,” you wheezed.

“You’re not dying, you’re just… vocally compromised.”

“That is worse.”

He guided you back to your room, muttering something about “high maintenance pop stars” under his breath.

“I heard that,” you croaked.

“Good.”

He got you back into bed, wrapped you up like you were fragile (you were), then disappeared again.

You stared at the ceiling.

Listened.

More clattering.

“Finn,” you called, “if you’re making more soup—”

“I’m fixing it!”

“You cannot fix a cup of salt!”

“Watch me!”

Pause.

“…Okay I can’t fix it.”

“I knew it.”

“But I can pivot.”

You narrowed your eyes. “To what.”

A moment later, he walked back in holding a bowl.

You stared at it.

“…Is that instant ramen.”

“It’s soup,” he said defensively.

“You gave up.”

“I adapted.”

You took the bowl, sniffed it cautiously.

It smelled… normal.

Safe.

You took a careful sip.

Your shoulders dropped slightly. “Okay. That’s actually good.”

“I know,” he said, sitting on the edge of your bed, looking way too proud. “I thrive under pressure.”

“You panicked.”

“Leadership.”

You rolled your eyes, but kept eating. Slowly. Carefully. Protecting your throat like it was made of glass.

He watched you.

“You’re staring,” you mumbled.

“I’m monitoring.”

“You’re being weird.”

“You’re a singer with a dying voice. This is a crisis.”

“That’s dramatic.”

“You literally held a funeral for your vocal cords five minutes ago.”

“That was justified.”

He laughed softly, then reached over to pull the blanket up around you more securely.

“Drink water too,” he said. “And don’t talk so much.”

You gave him a look. “That is literally my job.”

“Not today.”

You huffed, but obeyed, reaching for the water on your nightstand.

The room felt quieter now. Softer.

Finn shifted, settling beside you on the bed, not too close, but close enough that you could feel the warmth of him.

“You’re staying,” you said.

“Yeah.”

“You’re not going to attempt cooking again.”

He grimaced. “I think I’ve done enough damage to your career for one day.”

“Correct.”

You leaned back into your pillows, exhausted.

There was a pause.

Then, quietly, he said, “You’ll be fine, you know.”

You glanced at him.

“Your voice,” he added. “It’s not going anywhere.”

You smiled a little, tired but real. “You sound very confident for someone who put a cup of salt in soup.”

“That was a learning experience.”

“For who.”

“For everyone.”

You laughed, soft this time, careful, and it didn’t hurt as much.

“Get some sleep,” he said gently.

You closed your eyes.

“Hey,” you mumbled.

“Yeah?”

“If I lose my voice…”

“You won’t.”

“…you’re telling everyone you ruined it.”

He snorted. “Absolutely not. I’m protecting my reputation.”

“You don’t have one.”

“Rude.”

You smiled into your pillow.

And even with the sore throat, the headache, and the very real fear of sounding like a dying frog in two days,you fell asleep a little easier.

Because he stayed.

𝜗𝜚⋆ Misread signals | Authors Note! okay so rn i've been so excited for the bnd and obsessed with Spider-man lately. And this kind of took a while to write, so I hope you enjoyed reading it and much as I enjoyed writing it.

pairing : mcu peter parker x stark!reader

genre : minor angst, fluff,

warnings : pining, underage drinking, sexual innuendos, text with italics are inner thoughts.

word count : 9213K words

summary : you've dropping hints that you like peter, but he just doesn't seem to be picking up what you're putting down

The moment could be pinpointed with embarrassing precision.

Not the vague, cinematic kind of falling. No slow-motion hair toss, no swelling orchestral score. It happened on a Tuesday, third period, in a chemistry lab that smelled like sulfur and the industrial lemon cleaner the janitor used too liberally on the countertops. The fluorescent tube above bench six had been flickering for three weeks straight, casting Peter Parker's face in this stuttering, almost strobe-like quality that made him look like a stop-motion version of himself.

You had been his lab partner since September. Six months of proximity. Six months of his elbow brushing yours when you both reached for the graduated cylinder. Six months of his handwriting, cramped, slanted left, the kind of penmanship that suggested a brain moving faster than the hand could manage, filling the margins of your shared notebook with corrections you didn't need but never stopped him from making.

Six months, and you'd filed him under friend with the same ruthless efficiency you filed everything. Stark women, well, Stark woman, singular, since it was just you, didn't pine. They strategized. They acquired. They did not sit in chemistry class watching a boy from Queens chew on the end of his pen and think about his mouth.

Except.

Except.

Peter was hunched over the Bunsen burner adjusting the flame height, his lower lip caught between his teeth in concentration, safety goggles pushed up into hair that was doing something devastating and entirely accidental. Brown curls gone bronze where the overhead flicker hit them, messy from the way he kept shoving his fingers through when he was thinking. He wore a flannel over a science pun t-shirt that read I THINK, THEREFORE I AM… PROBABLY WRONG in cracked white lettering, the flannel rolled to his elbows, forearms bare.

And then your solution over-bubbled.

The beaker lurched, and your hand shot out on instinct, and Peter's hand shot out faster, impossibly faster, fast enough that the motion didn't quite track, and his fingers closed around yours and the beaker simultaneously, steadying both. Hot glass. His palm against your knuckles. The faint, damp smell of his deodorant, something cheap and woodsy, cedar maybe, the kind that came in a two-pack from CVS, cutting through the sulfur.

"Whoa, got it, got it." He laughed, this breathy, startled sound, and his thumb grazed the inside of your wrist before he let go. "You okay? That would've been, like, a really lame way to get a scar."

You looked at the pink bloom spreading across your knuckles where his grip had been and felt something tectonic shift behind your sternum.

"I'm good," you said, and your voice came out normal, which was a miracle, because inside your skull a very calm, very detached voice was saying oh, no.

Two rows behind you, MJ turned a page in her sketchbook without looking up.

She's drawing him again. The third sketch this week where Parker's in frame. She doesn't even realize she angles her stool toward him. MJ's charcoal pencil moved in short, deliberate strokes. Give it two weeks before she cracks.

It took nine days.

The cafeteria ran on its own ecosystem: burnt pizza grease, industrial dish soap, the ghost of every energy drink ever spilled on the linoleum. Someone's Bluetooth speaker leaked tinny reggaeton from the far corner. Two freshmen were having a loud argument about whether a hot dog was a sandwich. The lunch line snaked past the salad bar nobody used.

You set your tray down across from Ned Leeds and next to Peter, close enough that your knee bumped his under the table. Deliberate. Calculated. You let it stay.

"Pete." I said it low, the way you'd say someone's name if you wanted them to feel it in their sternum. His eyes came up. Brown. Not just brown, the kind of brown that looks almost amber when the light catches the outer ring of the iris, like someone had poured honey over coffee and held it up to a window. He blinked once, twice, the way he always did when I addressed him directly, like his operating system needed a second to switch modes. "Yeah?" "You look like you slept in a dumpster".

Peter blinked at you, mid-bite of a sandwich that appeared to be peanut butter and something questionable. Shadows sat heavy beneath his eyes, bruise-purple, the kind that spoke to nights spent doing things significantly more strenuous than homework. His hair was unwashed, curling at the temples where sweat had dried. A faint scratch ran along his jaw, pink and freshly healed.

"I didn't, I was up late. Studying."

"Studying." You leaned your chin on your palm, elbow on the table, angling your body toward him. "Is that what we're calling it?"

She's teasing, Peter thought, stabbing a limp carrot with his fork and very deliberately not looking at the way your sweater had slipped off one shoulder, exposing the strap of something underneath. Black, thin. Don't look, don't look, Parker. This is what she does. She teases everyone.

"Calc exam," he said. "Vectors."

"Mmm." You reached over and picked a piece of lint off his flannel collar, your fingertips grazing the side of his neck. Lingering one half-second longer than necessary. "You've got… there. Better."

Ned's eyes went wide across the table, the size of the cookies on his tray. He looked from your hand to Peter's neck to the space between you, which was approximately four inches of charged, electric nothing.

OH MY GOD. She just touched his neck. She TOUCHED his NECK. That was not a friend-touch. That was a… I need to text MJ. Where's my phone. Where is my PHONE. Ned's hand dove into his pocket so fast he elbowed his milk carton.

"So, the compound this weekend." I said it like it was an afterthought, like I hadn't been engineering this invitation for a week and a half. "Dad upgraded the training sim. New obstacle sequences, recalibrated resistance sensors. He wants fresh data from non-enhanced users, but honestly, it's way more fun than that sounds." I pointed my fork at Ned and MJ. "You're both invited. Obviously." Then at Peter, holding his gaze one beat longer than necessary. "You too. Unless you're busy."

Peter's jaw tightened. Just fractionally. I knew what he was calculating, the mental arithmetic of being in Tony Stark's house, near Tony Stark's daughter, under Tony Stark's surveillance system, doing anything that could remotely be interpreted as flirtatious by the most paranoid man in North America. "I'm in," Ned said instantly, milk carton rescued.

Peter hesitated. The compound meant Tony Stark's home turf. Tony Stark, who had once looked Peter dead in the eye during a suit fitting and said, "You know she's off-limits, right? That wasn't a question." And then had laughed like it was a joke. It was not a joke.

"Yeah," Peter said. "Yeah, I'll come."

You smiled at him. Not the performative one you used for press events, the one Tony called your camera-ready kill shot, but the real one. Small. Lopsided. A dimple on only the left side.

Peter forgot what food was.

The training floor smelled like rubber mats, ozone from the arc-reactor powered sim projectors, and the sharp, metallic bite of recycled air pushed through vents two stories up. The space was massive, cathedral ceilings, reinforced walls scarred with blast marks nobody bothered to patch, a viewing gallery behind tempered glass where Natasha Romanoff sat with one ankle crossed over her knee, peeling an orange.

Below, you were getting your ass handed to you.

The sim had spawned six holographic hostiles, basic humanoid models, glowing that eerie Stark-tech blue, and you'd dropped four with the compact repulsor gauntlet Tony had designed for you. Precise, efficient, two shots each. The fifth you'd caught with an elbow strike that would've made Steve Rogers nod approvingly.

The sixth clipped your shoulder, and you hit the mat hard enough to knock the air out. The smell of rubber filled your nose, warm and dense. Above you, the ceiling lights buzzed.

"Shit," you muttered, rolling onto your back.

"You dropped your elbow." Peter's voice came from the sideline. He was leaning against the wall in a t-shirt that was doing criminal things to his shoulders. When had his shoulders gotten like that, wide and defined, the cotton straining across them when he crossed his arms. Track pants slung low enough to show the elastic band of his boxers. One ankle crossed over the other. Casual. Like he wasn't a six-foot catastrophe of brown curls and earnest eyes.

"Excuse me?"

"On the sixth one. You dropped your lead elbow after the fifth takedown. Left your whole right side open." He pushed off the wall and walked onto the mat, feet bare, and you were suddenly very aware that you were flat on your back, sweaty, breathing hard, and he was standing over you, backlit like some kind of absurd Renaissance painting.

He extended his hand.

You took it. His grip was warm, slightly calloused across the palm, webshooter calluses, you'd learned to recognize the pattern, and he pulled you up with an ease that made your stomach flip, the kind of effortless strength that reminded you what he was under all the stuttering and self-deprecation.

"Show me," you said, and didn't let go of his hand.

Peter blinked. Looked at your hands. Looked at you.

She's still holding on. Okay. That's… she probably just hasn't noticed. Her hands are sweaty from the sim. She's not thinking about it. Don't make it weird, don't make it…

"Uh. Yeah. So, here." He stepped behind you, and his chest was right there, not touching but close enough that you could feel the warmth radiating off him through his t-shirt. He adjusted your arm, fingers wrapping around your elbow, positioning it. His breath hit the back of your neck, damp and warm. "Keep this locked. Like, yeah. Like that. And when you rotate…"

His other hand found your hip. Light. Guiding. His thumb pressed against the jut of bone above your waistband.

You forgot the entire English language.

"…you pivot from here. Not the shoulder. The hip. See?"

"Mhm." It came out approximately two octaves higher than intended.

Up in the gallery, Natasha bit into an orange segment and watched with the detached precision of a woman who had made a career out of reading body language.

His hand's been on her hip for six seconds longer than instructional. Respiration elevated on both. Pupil dilation visible even from here. She chewed slowly. Stark's going to lose his mind.

In the adjacent corridor, Tony Stark was walking toward the gallery with a tablet in hand, arguing with FRIDAY about power distribution ratios, completely oblivious to the slow-motion romantic disaster unfolding on his training floor.

Spring compressed into a montage of escalation.

You did not do things halfway. You were, after all, your father's daughter, and Tony Stark's approach to any problem was to throw increasingly sophisticated resources at it until the problem either solved itself or caught fire. So you threw everything at Peter Parker, and Peter Parker, bless his dumb beautiful face, caught none of it, zero, nada, nothing.

You started wearing his flannel. The gray one he'd left draped over his chair in the lab after a late session. You wore it to school the next Monday, sleeves rolled to your elbows, collar popped, still smelling like his cedar deodorant and the faintly sweet, papery scent of his apartment. Peter saw it. Peter said, "Oh hey, I was looking for that." You said, "It looks better on me." Peter laughed and said, "Yeah, it sure does," and then turned back to his textbook.

You started finding excuses to touch him. A hand on his forearm when you laughed, pressing in, your thumb drawing a small circle against the inside of his wrist. Straightening his collar before Decathlon meets, your knuckles brushing his Adam's apple. Leaning into his side during movie nights at the compound, your head finding the hollow between his shoulder and his neck, fitting there like the space had been engineered for you.

"You're being pathetic," MJ said one Thursday, not looking up from Beloved, her bookmark a torn receipt from the bodega on 42nd. You were sitting on the bleachers during a free period, the track below empty, the air thick with cut grass and warm asphalt.

"I'm being strategic."

"You literally sniffed his hoodie yesterday."

"I was checking if it was clean. He asked me to hold it."

"He didn't ask you to bury your face in it."

You stared at the empty track. A bird landed on the long jump pit, pecked at nothing, left.

"He doesn't see it," you said quietly. "I keep putting it right in front of him and he doesn't see it."

MJ closed her book, finger holding her place. She looked at you with an expression that, on anyone else, would've been soft.

She's genuinely hurt. Not performing it. There's no audience here, just me and a bird. MJ studied your profile, jaw tight, eyes fixed forward, the barely-there tremor in your lower lip that you were clamping down on with every ounce of Stark composure you had. I should say something useful. Something that isn't sarcastic.

"He sees it," MJ said. "He's just scared."

"Of what?"

"Of your last name. Of the fact that you're the best thing in his life and if he reads the signals wrong, he loses you." MJ opened her book again. "Boys are stupid. Even the spider ones."

"She keeps touching me, Ned."

Peter was pacing. The apartment was small. May was working a double, so it was just him and Ned and the remains of two pizzas on the coffee table, the room smelling like cardboard and garlic and the faint mildew of the window unit AC that never fully worked. Outside, Queens hummed its nighttime frequency: a car alarm three blocks over, someone's music bleeding through the walls, the distant clatter of the 7 train.

"She keeps touching me, Ned."

Ned sat cross-legged on the couch, a pizza crust in one hand, watching Peter wear a groove into the carpet.

"Dude. She likes you."

"She doesn't… you don't know that."

"She wore your shirt to school."

"She was cold!"

"It was sixty-eight degrees."

Peter stopped pacing. Ran both hands through his hair, leaving it standing in every direction. The scratch on his jaw from last week's patrol had faded to a thin silver line. He was shirtless. He'd been shirtless when Ned arrived, fresh from a shower, and hadn't bothered to put anything on because the apartment was stifling and his brain was short-circuiting. The light from the single floor lamp caught the lean, defined topography of his torso, the faint scars mapped across his ribs like a constellation of near-misses.

He's doing the hair thing. He only does the hair thing when he's really freaking out. Last time was when Mr. Stark found the suit under his bed. Ned set down his crust. I should be supportive. I should also be honest. Both? Can I do both?

"Pete. My guy. My brother in Christ. She literally traced a circle on your wrist with her thumb while staring into your eyes."

"She's tactile. She's like that with everyone."

"She is not like that with everyone! She high-fives Sam. She nods at Bucky. She drew circles on your wrist."

Peter dropped onto the couch, the cushion exhaling under his weight. He tipped his head back, staring at the water stain on the ceiling that looked vaguely like Italy.

"If I'm wrong," he said, and his voice was quieter now, stripped of the frantic energy, "I lose her. You get that, right? If I say something, and she laughs, or she's just being friendly, and I made it weird, she's my best friend, Ned. After you. She's…" He swallowed. "I can't lose her."

The apartment was quiet except for the AC's rattle and the distant train.

"You're gonna lose her anyway if you keep pretending you don't feel it," Ned said softly.

Peter closed his eyes. His hand rested on his bare stomach, rising and falling with his breathing, and he pressed his thumb into the space just below his ribs where the ache lived.

The party was already a living thing by the time you arrived.

Here’s your passage rewritten fully in second person, keeping your tone, flow, and intensity intact:

The bass hits your chest before you even make it through the front door, physical, a pressure wave that vibrates in your molars and throws your heartbeat into something syncopated and unfamiliar. Flash’s townhouse sprawls across three stories of marble floors, too much furniture, and the specific kind of wealth that announces itself through recessed lighting and a sound system strong enough to rattle windows.

The air inside is thick, body heat, spilled beer, someone’s cologne applied with the subtlety of a crop duster, and underneath it, the sweet-sour funk of cheap vodka and Red Bull that seems baked into the walls. Clusters of bodies move through rooms that are too warm, too loud, too much.

You dressed with intent.

Hair down, loose, freshly washed with shampoo that smells like vanilla and something darker, woodsy, maybe sandalwood or amber, the kind of scent that clings to fabric for days. And behind your ears, at the base of your throat, on the inside of each wrist: Mon Paris. The YSL perfume saved for exactly this kind of night, raspberry, peony, and a musky drydown engineered by people who understood desire at a molecular level.

You are not here to be subtle.

MJ stands beside you just inside the entrance, surveying the room with the detached focus of an anthropologist studying a culture she finds vaguely repellent. Her dark curls spill over a vintage leather jacket, and she holds a red cup she has no intention of drinking from.

“You’re doing it again,” she murmurs, not even looking up.

You don’t take your eyes off Peter.

“Doing what?”

“Mentally undressing him or planning his murder. It’s a very fine line.”

Your head snaps toward her. “I am not—”

“Just go talk to him before I get an aneurysm,” MJ says calmly, nodding toward the living room.

“Michelle.”

“You’re Tony Stark’s daughter. You’ve addressed the United Nations. Walk over there and tell the boy you want to sit on his face.”

You choke on your vodka cranberry.

Peter’s at the dining table, playing beer pong.

Of course he is.

Ned texted you the location fifteen minutes ago.

He’s wearing a dark long-sleeve that actually fits, rare cotton pulling across his shoulders and chest in a way that makes you realize, not for the first time, that whatever the spider bite did to his DNA also did something borderline obscene to his deltoids. His hair is slightly less chaotic than usual, like he tried, and his jaw is set in that half-smile he uses when he’s being social but running eight separate calculations in his head.

You don’t tell him what MJ suggested.

Instead, you finish your drink, pour another, heavier this time, and cross the room.

You slide into the space beside him at the table.

Your hip bumps his.

“Hey.” You tilt your chin up. Smile.

Peter looks down at you. The height difference forces you to angle your face just slightly, putting your mouth dangerously close to the hollow of his throat. Even through the beer-and-sweat haze of the party, you can smell him.

“Hey yourself.”His voice is barely audible over the music, felt more than heard, and his gaze drops. Just for a second. A flicker. From your eyes to the curve of your chest, then snapping back like he’s been burned. His throat works.

She smells like, God, what is that? Something sweet and warm. I want to bury my face in her neck and just breathe. Don’t look down. Don’t look at her chest. Don’t think about the fact that her hip is against mine and I can feel the heat of her through two layers of denim. Think about the game. Think about the trajectory. Physics. Physics is safe.

“Room for one more?” You pick up a ping pong ball, rolling it between your fingers.

“You any good?” someone across the table asks, AP Gov, maybe. You’ve forgotten his name.

“Terrible,” you say easily. “Peter’s going to have to carry me.”

You shoot him a look.

He catches it.

His ears turn red.

"Cool," Peter said. "Cool cool cool. Great."

Ned, across the table, locked eyes with MJ in the crowd and mouthed HELP ME with theatrical desperation. MJ raised her cup in a silent, sardonic toast.

The game started. You were, by objective measure, terrible at beer pong. You'd been raised around repulsor technology and quantum computing; your spatial reasoning was excellent when applied to ballistic trajectories involving actual projectiles, but the lightweight, air-caught float of a ping-pong ball confounded you. Your first three throws went wide. One hit Flash in the back of the head, which you did not apologize for.

"Okay, you're… here." Peter moved behind you. The same configuration as the training floor, but closer. No mat between you. His chest pressed against your back, solid and warm through the thin cotton, and you could feel the distinct topography of him. The firm plane of his pectorals, the ridged line of his abs against your lower back. His right hand closed over yours, the one holding the ball, and his left settled on your waist. His fingers spanned from your hip to the edge of your ribs.

His mouth was next to your ear. You could feel each exhale, humid, slightly beer-sweet.

"You're releasing too high. Drop your elbow," his hand guided yours down, "and flick from the wrist. Like this."

The ball arced, dropped, plunk into the center cup.

"That was all me," you said, turning your head, and your faces were right there, inches apart, close enough to count his eyelashes. Brown, long, faintly gold at the tips.

"Sure it was," Peter murmured, and didn't move.

The music shifted to something slower, R&B, heavy on the bass, and the party throbbed around them like a second heartbeat.

From across the room, Flash stared at the both of you. "That's supposed to beer pong, not foreplay. My table. My house. That is just disrespectful."

It happened fast.

You had gone to refill your cup, your third, maybe fourth, the vodka someone had added to the punch making the count unreliable, and when you came back through the archway between the kitchen and the living room, you saw them.

Peter. And a girl.

Blonde. Pretty in that effortless, unlabored way that you had never managed to achieve. Hair straight and shining under the warm overhead light, falling past her shoulders like silk. She was tall, almost Peter's height, with delicate features and a laugh that carried. She had her hand on Peter's arm. Not casually. Purposefully. Her fingers wrapped around his bicep, squeezing, and she leaned into him to say something near his ear, and Peter smiled.

Gwen Stacy. Lab partner. Biochem. You knew the name, knew the face from the few times you'd picked Peter up after late labs and seen them walking out together, Gwen's notes in Peter's handwriting, Peter's coffee in Gwen's hand.

The cup in your grip dented.

It's nothing, you told yourself. Your vision swam at the edges. The vodka was hitting now, heavy and warm, turning the room syrupy. She's his lab partner. They're friends. People touch their friends' arms. You touch his arm. This is…

Gwen laughed again, and Peter ducked his head in that shy, pleased way he did when someone complimented his work, and Gwen's hand slid from his bicep to his chest, resting flat against his sternum, and your throat closed.

You turned. Walked. The hallway was crowded and you shouldered through, someone saying "hey, watch it," the bass vibrating in your molars, the smell of beer and sweat and too-sweet perfume cloying, suffocating. You found the kitchen. Poured vodka into your cup. More than you should have. Drank. The burn hit like a slap, your eyes watering, and you poured again.

Ned found you twelve minutes later, leaning against the kitchen island with mascara tracking down your left cheek, cup empty, a sixth or seventh pour of straight vodka sitting in your bloodstream like a slow-detonating charge.

"Whoa, hey." He reached for your arm. "Are you okay? You look…"

"I'm fine."

She is not fine. She is the opposite of fine. Her makeup is… oh no, she's been crying. She's been CRYING and I wasn't… was it Peter? It was Peter. Something happened. Oh god. Ned's gaze darted to the living room archway. Where is he? What did he do?

"You're not fine, you're…"

"Ned." Your voice was flat, stripped of its usual warmth. "Is Peter with Gwen right now?"

"What? No. I mean, she came over to talk about their final project. Something about enzyme inhibitors or… she has a boyfriend. She literally has a boyfriend named Miles."

You blinked. The information processed slowly, swimming through vodka.

"She was touching him."

"She touches everyone! She's from California!"

But the damage was done. The alcohol had dissolved the careful architecture of compartmentalization you had maintained for three months, and underneath it was something raw and desperate and young. A seventeen-year-old girl in a cropped top and weaponized jeans who had spent ninety-two days learning the exact temperature of a boy's skin against hers and never once heard him say he wanted to stay.

"I need to go," you whispered, and your face crumpled.

The patio was concrete and dead potted plants, a string of fairy lights half-burned out sagging between the fence posts. The air was different out here. June nighttime, humid and heavy, smelling like the neighbor's jasmine bush and distant exhaust and the mineral-wet of a garden hose someone had left running. The sounds of the party were muffled, bass thumping through the walls like a drugged heartbeat.

You sat on the steps. Crying.

Not the pretty kind. Not the single-tear, chin-wobble, photogenic grief that happened in movies. You were drunk-crying, the ugly, gasping, can't-catch-your-breath kind where the sobs came from somewhere below the diaphragm and brought everything with them. Snot and mascara and spit. Your shoulders heaved. The concrete step was cold through your jeans, and you could feel every ridge of it, every crack, pressing into the backs of your thighs.

You didn't hear the door open.

"Hey."

Peter stood in the doorway, backlit by the kitchen's warm spill. His expression was something you'd never seen on him before. Not worried, exactly. Something deeper. Something wrecked. His jaw was set hard enough to make the muscle jump in his cheek, and his hands hung at his sides, fingers curling and uncurling like he was fighting the impulse to reach for you.

"Go away, Peter."

He didn't go away. He stepped outside, let the door close behind him, and the party sound dropped to a murmur. He crouched in front of you, elbows on his knees, putting himself below your eyeline. Close enough that you could smell him. The cedar, the laundry detergent, the faint tang of beer. Close enough that the heat from his body pressed against your shins.

"Ned told me you were upset," he said carefully. "He said you saw me talking to Gwen and…"

"I don't want to talk about it."

"Listen…"

"I said…"

"She has a boyfriend." His voice was steady. Quiet. "Miles, uhh I don't know his last name. Anyways, but they've been together since sophomore year. She was telling me about their anniversary plans. That's what she was saying. When she was close. She was showing me a picture of a necklace she bought him."

You stared at him through blurred, waterlogged vision. The fairy lights painted him in faint gold, catching the worry lines between his brows that shouldn't exist on an eighteen-year-old's face.

"That doesn't matter," you said, and your voice broke on the last word.

"What do you…"

"It doesn't matter if she has a boyfriend, Peter! It matters that…" A sob tore through you, bending you forward, and you pressed the heels of your hands against your eyes until you saw static. "It matters that I've been trying, for months, and you don't, you never…"

The words came out mangled, half-drowned, but Peter heard every one.

Oh.

Oh, no.

Oh, no no no…

"You think I don't notice," you gasped. You were past the point of dignity. The vodka had burned through every wall, every defense, every Stark-inherited instinct for composure, and what was left was just you. Raw and terrified and shaking on a stranger's back porch. "You think I just touch you like that because I'm friendly? I wore your shirt, Peter. I wore it to school. I slept in it first. I sleep in it every night. I…"

"Please just…"

"I put on sex perfume for you tonight. Natasha's. The Tom Ford. I put it on my knees, Peter. Who puts perfume on their knees? I do. For you. Because I'm… because I…"

You couldn't finish. The sobs swallowed the rest, and you folded forward, forehead nearly touching your knees, shaking so hard the fairy lights blurred into a single wavering line.

Peter didn't move for four seconds. Later, he wouldn't remember those four seconds. His brain whited out, a full system crash, every synapse firing and misfiring simultaneously, three months of she's just being friendly and don't ruin this and you're not good enough for Tony Stark's daughter detonating in a single chain reaction.

Then he was on his knees on the concrete, and his hands were on your face, tilting it up, thumbs sweeping through the wreckage of mascara and tears and snot, and his own eyes were bright, red-rimmed, suspiciously wet.

"I'm an idiot," he said.

"Yes! Yes you are!" you cried.

"I thought you were joking. I thought, every time you touched me, I told myself you were just like that, because the alternative… if I let myself believe it…" His thumb caught a fresh tear, tracked it to your jaw, held there. "You're a Stark. You're the smartest person I've ever met. You're funny and you're kind and you're everything, and I'm a kid from Queens with a secret identity and a one-bedroom apartment and I thought there was no way…"

"Peter Benjamin Parker, if you finish that sentence I will throw up on you and it won't be from the alcohol."

He laughed. Wet and broken and real, this cracked-open sound that had no performance in it, and you could feel it in his hands where they held your face, the vibration of it, the aliveness.

"I like you," he said. "I like you so much it makes me stupid. Ned's been yelling at me for weeks."

You hiccuped. It was not attractive. "How much?"

"How much what?"

"How much do you like me? Be specific. I'm a scientist."

His forehead dropped against yours. His nose bumped your nose. The jasmine and exhaust faded until there was nothing but cedar and clean laundry and the salt of your tears drying on his thumbs.

"Enough that I've rewritten my college essay three times because I keep accidentally writing about you," he whispered. "Enough that I swung past your window twice last week just to make sure your light was on. Enough that I…"

You kissed him.

Or tried to. You were drunk and crying and aimed slightly wrong, catching the corner of his mouth, and he made a soft mmph sound of surprise against your lips before his hand slid from your cheek to the back of your neck and corrected the angle, drawing you in, and…

He pulled back.

"You're drunk," he said softly. "You're really, really drunk."

"I'm emotionally compromised, there's a difference."

"Come on."

"Okay, I'm also very drunk."

His thumb stroked the nape of your neck. He exhaled, shaky, controlled, like a man disarming a bomb.

"When I kiss you for real," he said, "and I am going to kiss you for real, you're going to remember every second of it. That's not negotiable."

You stared at him. Blinked. A tear slid free.

"You're not my boyfriend yet," you said, which was a stupid thing to say, and you knew it was a stupid thing to say even as it came out.

The corner of his mouth lifted. "Not yet, I'm not."

Yet. The word sat between you, warm as a held breath.

Then you pitched sideways and threw up into one of Flash Thompson's dead potted plants.

"Okay. We're going."

Peter hoisted you off the patio steps with an efficiency that betrayed exactly how many injured civilians he'd carried off rooftops. You protested, a garbled, slurred "m'fine, 'm totally…" that dissolved into a hiccup, and he ignored you completely, one arm hooking under your knees and the other around your back, lifting you in a single motion that drew stares from the kitchen stragglers.

You were not cooperative. You squirmed. You swatted at his shoulder. You declared, loudly, to no one in particular, that you were "a Stark and Starks don't get carried."

"Your dad literally has a suit that carries him."

"That's different, that's engineering…"

"Okay, change of plans."

He shifted your weight, effortless, insultingly effortless, the kind of casual strength that came from regularly stopping buses with his bare hands, and flipped you over his shoulder in a over the shoulder carry. You yelped. Your face pressed against his back, the dark henley warm and smelling like cedar and beer and him, and the blood rushed to your head, and you went limp.

"Peter. Peter Parker. Put me down."

"No."

"I am going to…"

"If you throw up on my back, we're over before we started."

You made a choked sound that was half-laugh, half-sob, and gripped the back of his shirt with both fists.

The crowd parted for you. Or more accurately, the crowd was too drunk to notice except for two people. Ned, standing by the speaker with a cup in his hand, watched Peter carry you over his shoulder toward the front door and experienced what could only be described as a religous awakening.

This is the greatest thing I have ever witnessed with my own two human eyes. THANK YOU JESUS. This is better than when he caught the bus. This is better than when he showed me the suit. I need to remember every detail. I need to JOURNAL about this. Ned's mouth hung open. Should I help? Should I follow? He's got her. He definitely… yeah, he's got her.

"Pete!" Ned called. "Do you need…"

"I got her."

"Her purse is…"

"Ned. I got her."

MJ appeared beside Ned like a shadow materializing, Margaret Atwood tee slightly rumpled, arms crossed. She watched Peter's retreating back, you draped over it like a very expensive, very drunk scarf, and took a slow sip from her still-full cup.

Finally. MJ's mouth twitched at the corner. Took them long enough.

"Should we be concerned?" Ned asked.

"No," MJ said. "That's a boy who's not going to let anything happen to her."

The front door closed. The party swallowed the space they'd left behind. The bass kept thumping.

The apartment was dark when he shouldered the door open, you still draped over his back, your protests having faded somewhere around 68th Street into a mumbled, intermittent monologue about how his shoulder blade was "architecturally hostile to human cheekbones."

He flicked the light with his elbow. The single floor lamp came on, casting the small space in warm amber. The couch with its sunken middle cushion, the pizza boxes Ned had left three days ago stacked by the door, the window AC rattling its permanent death rattle. May's shift didn't end until 6 AM. The apartment smelled like it always did: slightly stale, slightly warm, the ghost of dish soap and the fabric softener May bought in bulk, lavender something.

Peter carried you to his room, small, just a twin bed and a desk buried under textbooks and web-fluid cartridges, and set you down on the mattress with a gentleness that contradicted the fireman-carry energy of the previous twenty minutes. You sank into his pillow, and the sound you made was barely human, a long, dissolving "mmmnngh" that came from somewhere primal.

"Stay here."

"Where'm I gonna go? Mars?"

He left and came back with a glass of water, two ibuprofen, a warm washcloth, and a t-shirt of his. The soft, worn MIT one May had gotten him as a joke, washed so many times the cotton felt like tissue paper.

"Sit up."

"No."

"Come on."

"The room is spinning and I need it to stop spinning before I engage in vertical activity."

He sat on the edge of the bed. The mattress dipped under his weight, tilting you slightly toward him. He pressed the washcloth to your face, and you flinched at the warmth, then sighed, a real sigh, the kind that released something held too long. He wiped away the mascara, the tear tracks, the smeared foundation, with the same steady, precise hands that rebuilt web-shooters and rewired circuit boards. Methodical. Tender.

"You look like a raccoon," he said quietly.

You smiled. Small and wobbly, your eyes still glassy, makeup half-removed, hair tangled from the shoulder carry. He thought you were the most devastating thing he'd ever seen, and that included the time he'd watched a star collapse through Mr. Stark's orbital telescope.

She's so beautiful. Even now. Especially now. She put perfume on her knees for me. Who does that? Who thinks of that? She does. She sleeps in my shirt. She SLEEPS in my…

"Can you change? You'll be more comfortable in this." He held up the MIT shirt.

He turned. Studied the web-fluid equations on his desk with an intensity they did not warrant while behind him you wrestled with your top, swore, dropped it, swore again, and eventually said, "Okay."

He turned back. You were swimming in his shirt. The collar gaped, showing your collarbone, and the hem hit mid-thigh. You'd kept your underwear on. Your jeans were crumpled on the floor.

"Water," he said. "Drink."

You drank. Took the ibuprofen. He eased you back against the pillow, pulled the comforter up to your chin, the blue one, slightly threadbare, smelling like his fabric softener, and you caught his hand.

"Stay," you murmured. Your eyelids were heavy, dragging.

"I'm not going anywhere. I'll be on the couch."

"No. Stay."

"Hey." His voice was soft. His thumb traced your knuckles. "I'll be ten feet away. You'll hear me snoring. I'm told it's, quote, 'medically concerning.'"

You tried to glare. Achieved a sleepy squint.

"You're the best person I know," you whispered.

Something moved across his face, fast, raw, there and gone, and he lifted your hand and pressed his lips to your knuckles. Brief. Warm. You felt the shape of his mouth against the ridges of your fingers and memorized it.

"You're the best person I know," he said. "Get some sleep. I'll be right here."

Your eyes closed. His hand slipped from yours. You heard him pad out, heard the couch creak, heard the AC rattle and the distant nighttime hum of Queens through the window.

You fell asleep in his bed, in his shirt, with the taste of toothpaste water and ibuprofen on your tongue and the ghost of his lips on your hand.

Morning arrived like a blunt instrument.

You opened your eyes to an unfamiliar ceiling. A crack that ran from the overhead light fixture to the wall like a river on a map, water stain in the corner shaped like something, Italy maybe, too hungover to assign geography. Sunlight came through the window in aggressive, unfiltered slabs, warming the sheets and painting the small room in shades of amber and white. The AC had surrendered at some point in the night; the air was close, warm, thick with the smell of laundry detergent and something cooking. Butter, eggs, the unmistakable char of toast that had been in the toaster seventeen seconds too long.

Your head was a war crime.

The pain lived behind your eyes and radiated outward, a pulsing, architectural pressure that felt structural, like the bones of your skull had been rearranged. Your mouth tasted like copper and bad decisions. You were wearing, you looked down, a t-shirt that was not yours. MIT. Worn thin enough to see your own skin through the fabric.

Memory returned in fragments. Not sequentially. More like shrapnel.

Beer pong. Peter's hands. Gwen. Vodka. Crying. Concrete steps. His thumbs on your face. "Not yet, I'm not." Oh god. Oh god you threw up in a plant. He carried you. Over his shoulder. In front of EVERYONE. You said… what did you say? Sex perfume. You said sex perfume. You told him about the KNEES.

You pressed your face into the pillow and made a sound like a dying animal.

The pillow smelled like Peter. Cedar, clean cotton, the faintly warm, specific scent of his skin that you'd been cataloguing for months. You breathed it in, and the ache behind your eyes softened marginally, and you hated yourself for finding comfort in it because you'd told him everything last night and now he probably…

Footsteps in the hallway. The creak of the bedroom door.

"Hey. You're up."

You lifted your face from the pillow.

Peter Parker stood in the doorway holding a plate of scrambled eggs and toast, a glass of water tucked in the crook of his elbow with the practiced ease of someone accustomed to multitasking while wall-crawling. He was shirtless.

He was shirtless.

The morning sun hit him like it had a personal agenda. Golden light poured across the planes of his chest, broader than his t-shirts suggested, defined without being bulky, the lean musculature of someone whose core strength came from swinging between buildings rather than lifting weights. A faint trail of dark hair ran from his navel downward, disappearing into gray sweatpants that sat low on his hips, revealing the twin ridges of muscle that framed his lower abdomen like parentheses.

The scars she'd glimpsed before were fully visible now: a starburst of silver-pink tissue below his left collarbone, a thin line along his ribs, a cluster of smaller marks across his right shoulder like he'd been hit with something that fragmented. His shoulders caught the light, smooth and warm-toned, and the muscles in his forearm flexed as he adjusted his grip on the plate.

You stared. All the blood in your body relocated to your face.

"I made… it's just eggs. And toast. The toast is a little burned because the toaster's been weird since Ned tried to make a grilled cheese in it, but…" He set the plate on the nightstand. Set the water beside it. Straightened. Noticed you staring. Looked down at himself.

I forgot to put a shirt on. I forgot to… I was cooking and it was hot and I… she's looking at me. She's looking at my… is she looking at my stomach? Her face is so red. She's the color of the ketchup bottle. Should I go put a shirt on? Do I want to put a shirt on? Honestly? No. Absolutely not. She's wearing MY shirt and looking at me like that and I am not putting on a single additional garment.

"Sorry, I… the kitchen gets hot when I use the stove, and…"

"Don't you dare put on a shirt."

It came out before you could edit it. Raw. Hoarse. Morning-voiced and hungover and entirely, devastatingly honest.

Peter's ears went red. The blush spread down his neck, across his collarbones, and you watched it travel with the academic fascination of a woman studying the migration patterns of a phenomenon she'd caused.

He sat on the edge of the bed. The mattress dipped. The plate of eggs steamed gently on the nightstand, and the burnt-toast smell mingled with his skin. Cedar and warmth and sleep.

"How's your head?" he asked.

"Like someone filled it with concrete and then played drums on it."

"That's the vodka."

"That's the bad decisions."

"Were they all bad?"

The question sat between you. You pulled the comforter up to your chin, as if his MIT shirt and a threadbare blanket could constitute armor.

"I said things last night," you started.

"You did."

"I told you about the perfume."

"The knee perfume. Yes." He was fighting a smile. Losing.

"And the shirt."

"The sleeping-in-my-shirt thing. Yeah."

"I'd like to die now, please."

"Request denied." He turned toward you on the bed, one leg folded beneath him, the other hanging off the edge. His knee brushed your thigh through the comforter, and he didn't move it. His eyes were soft, brown in the morning light, with flecks of gold near the pupil that you'd never been close enough to catalogue before. "Did you mean it?"

"Which part?"

"All of it. Any of it."

You looked at him. The light was too bright and your head was splitting and your mouth tasted like a biohazard, and he was sitting there shirtless and beautiful and asking you if you meant it, as if there were a universe where you hadn't meant every single syllable.

"I meant all of it," you said. "I mean all of it. Present tense."

The smile broke through. Not his shy one, not the ducked-head one, not the performative one he used when adults praised him. The real one. The devastating one. Full mouth, crinkled eyes, the left dimple that matched yours.

"I meant what I said too," he told you. "The 'not yet I'm not' thing."

"Yeah?"

"Yeah." He reached for your hand where it clutched the comforter's edge, threading his fingers through yours, his palm warm and calloused. "Eat your eggs. Drink your water. And when you're not actively dying…"

"What?"

"I'm taking you on a real date. A proper one. Not a party. Not a training floor. An actual date, where I pick you up and you meet May, I mean, you've met May, but like, officially, and I hold your hand the whole time because I've wanted to hold your hand for three months and I'm never letting go of it again."

Your eyes burned. Not from the hangover.

"You're going to make me cry again."

"Happy tears this time."

"Still ugly. Fair warning."

"I've seen the worst of it. I'm in."

You laughed, a broken, waterlogged, beautiful sound, and tugged his hand until he leaned down and pressed his forehead against yours. His nose bumped your nose. His breath was warm, toothpaste-mint and something sweet, and the closeness was the same as the patio but entirely different. Sunlit and sober and yours.

"Eat," he whispered.

"Kiss me first."

"You have morning breath."

"And you have no shirt on. We all have our crosses to bear."

He kissed you.

Gentle. Close-mouthed. Tasting like mint toothpaste and burnt toast, his hand coming up to cradle the side of your face the way it had on the patio, thumb against your cheekbone.

And you meant to let it be that. A first real kiss. Tender. Sweet. The kind of thing you'd replay in your head for weeks, soft-focus and cotton-candy.

But three months of wanting had calcified into something heavier than tenderness, and the moment his lips touched yours the weight of it cracked open, spilled. Your fingers curled into the hair at the nape of his neck, short and warm and still sleep-mussed, and you pulled. Not hard. Just enough.

Peter made a sound against your mouth. Low, involuntary, caught somewhere between a groan and a sigh, "nnh," and his hand slid from your cheekbone into your hair, fingers threading through the tangled mess of it, cradling the back of your skull. The kiss changed. His lips parted, and you felt the soft, slick heat of his tongue trace your bottom lip, tentative, asking, and you opened for him without thinking.

He tasted like toothpaste and something darker, warmer, the black coffee he must have had while he cooked, and the sound you made was embarrassing, a breathy, broken "ahh" that vibrated between your mouths. His tongue slid against yours, slow, exploratory, then deeper, and your back arched off the pillow, your free hand finding his bare shoulder, his skin hot and smooth under your palm, the scar tissue beneath his collarbone a raised ridge under your fingertips.

"Come here," you whispered against his lips. Not a request.

His weight shifted. He braced one hand on the mattress beside your head, forearm flexing, and his other arm hooked under your lower back, pulling you up into him as he settled his body over yours. The twin bed groaned. The comforter bunched between you and you kicked at it, shoved it down, until there was nothing but the worn cotton of his MIT shirt on your body and nothing at all on his chest, and the contact when it came was electric. The heat of his bare torso pressing through the thin fabric against your breasts, your stomach, your ribs. You could feel his heartbeat, rabbit-fast, hammering against your sternum.

"God," he breathed, and his hips settled between your thighs, the gray sweatpants doing absolutely nothing to disguise what was happening to him. He froze. Pulled his mouth back an inch. "Sorry. Sorry, I…"

You grabbed his face with both hands and pulled him back down.

The kiss turned messy. Wet. Open-mouthed and graceless in the way only real wanting could produce, teeth catching on lips, his tongue curling against the roof of your mouth, your hips tilting up into his on instinct and dragging a sound out of him that was barely human, this guttural, wrecked "fuhhck" gasped between your teeth. His hand fisted in the sheets beside your head. The mattress springs whined beneath you both.

His forehead dropped to your shoulder. He was shaking. Fine, full-body tremors, the muscles in his back twitching under your palms, and you realized with a lurch of something enormous and tender that he was holding back. Holding himself still. Every superhuman ounce of strength in that body directed at the singular task of not moving.

Three months. Three months of her hands and her perfume and her sleeping in my shirt and she's under me. She's under me in my bed wearing my shirt and making those sounds and I'm going to lose my mind. I am going to lose my actual mind. Slow down. Slow down, Parker. Don't ruin this. Don't…

"Hey," you murmured. You cupped his face, brought it up. His eyes were blown, the brown almost entirely swallowed by black, his lips swollen and wet, a flush painting his cheeks and throat and chest. He looked destroyed. You wanted to destroy him further. You kissed the corner of his mouth. His cheekbone. The bridge of his nose. "Hi."

"Hi." His voice was wrecked. Gravel and want.

"You're shaking."

"Yeah, I… I'm aware." A stunted laugh, his breath fanning warm across your chin. "You're, uh. You're kind of a lot."

"Too much?"

"Not enough." He said it with his whole chest, no hesitation, and then his mouth was on yours again, slower this time but no less deep. His hand slid down your side, fingertips tracing the curve of your waist through the MIT shirt, the dip and flare of your hip, the bare skin of your thigh where the hem had ridden up. His palm spread wide against the outside of your thigh, warm and calloused, and he hitched your leg higher around his waist, changing the angle, and the pressure of him against you turned precise, deliberate, your breath hitching into a choked "oh."

His answering groan was muffled by your mouth. "Mmnh, yeah, okay… okay."

You kissed like that until the eggs went cold on the nightstand. Until the sun climbed higher and the amber light turned white. Until your lips were swollen and raw and his neck was marked in three places and your hair was a catastrophe and his sweatpants had shifted low enough that the defined V of his hips was fully visible above the waistband, and at some point your hand had flattened against his lower abdomen, feeling the muscles tense and jump under your touch, and he'd made a sound so close to begging that you tucked it away in the deepest vault of your memory to revisit for the rest of your natural life.

He pulled back. Finally. Panting. Hovering over you on trembling arms, his chest heaving, a bead of sweat tracing the line of his sternum. His lips were bitten-dark, nearly bruised. The scratch on his jaw from patrol had gone pink again from the friction of your chin.

"Eggs," he managed.

"What?"

"Your… the eggs. They're cold now."

"Peter Parker, if you think I care about eggs right now…"

"You need to eat. You drank enough vodka to kill a horse."

"You can't just kiss me like that and then pivot to breakfast."

"Watch me." He dropped one more kiss against your mouth, quick and firm and smiling, and rolled off you onto his back. The twin mattress barely held them both. His shoulder pressed against yours, hip against hip, the narrow bed forcing a closeness that neither of you fought. He stared at the ceiling. You stared at the ceiling. The crack shaped like a river. The water stain shaped like Italy.

"I'm going to reheat those eggs," he said to the ceiling.

"You're going to kiss me again after."

"Yeah." He turned his head. Looked at you. The gold flecks in his eyes caught the morning sun, and his smile was so open, so unguarded, that your chest ached like a bruise. "Yeah, I am."

He swung himself off the bed, bare feet hitting the floor, and offered you his hand. You took it. He pulled you up, steadied you when the hangover swayed the room sideways, and kept hold of your fingers as he walked you to the kitchen.

The apartment was small and warm and smelled like cold eggs and burnt toast and cedar and the faint lavender of May's fabric softener. Sunlight flooded the narrow kitchen window, catching the dust motes, catching the pink marks on Peter's neck where your mouth had been. He moved the plate to the microwave with one hand. His other hand stayed tangled with yours, thumb pressing slow circles into the cup of your palm, and you leaned against the counter beside him, shoulder against his bare arm, the MIT shirt hanging to your thighs, his warmth bleeding into your side.

The microwave hummed. The AC rattled. Somewhere below the window, Queens woke itself up in layers: a delivery truck backing into the alley, a dog barking three flights down, the 7 train threading its distant steel-on-steel melody through the walls. Peter lifted your joined hands and pressed his lips to your knuckles, lingering, his eyes closing, and you turned your face into his shoulder and breathed him in.

𝜗𝜚⋆ Angels and Serial Killers

reader x mike wheeler brothers best friend

warnings: smut, ass slapping, mdni 18+

The October air was crisp as I adjusted my costume in the mirror, the white fabric barely containing my curves. My angel costume was anything but heavenly, a scandalously short, pleated minidress with a plunging neckline that showed off the generous swell of my breasts. The halo tilted precariously over my curled hair, and the small, feathered wings strapped to my back did little to hide the fact that the dress ended just below my ass. I was the head cheerleader, the queen of the social scene, and tonight, I was playing the part.

"Jesus, you look like you're selling something, and it ain't Bibles," my brother Dustin commented from my doorway, his Ghostface mask dangling from his hand.

"Jealous?" I shot back, turning to face him with a smirk. "Not all of us can hide behind a cheap mask."

Dustin rolled his eyes. "Mike's here. Let's go, the party's already started."

My stomach did a little flip at the mention of Mike Wheeler. Dustin's best friend. My personal tormentor. The guy who looked at me like I was something he wanted to devour and destroy in equal measure. We hated each other, or at least, that's what we told everyone. The truth was far more complicated.

I found him waiting by the door, and my breath caught. He wasn't wearing the cheap store-bought version like Dustin. Mike's costume was custom, the black fabric clinging to a body I hadn't realized was so... developed. He'd always been lanky, but now, beneath the robe, I could see the clear definition of muscle, a soft, powerful build that spoke of hidden strength. The mask was in his hand, revealing his sharp jawline and those intense, dark eyes that were currently raking over my body with a hunger that made my knees weak.

"An angel," he drawled, his voice low and mocking. "How fitting. Too bad we all know you're anything but."

"At least I don't have to hide my face, Mike," I retorted, my chin jutting out defiantly. "Some of us don't need a mask to be scary."

His lips curved into a dangerous smile. "Oh, I think you're plenty scary without a mask. The kind of scary that ruins good men."

The party was already in full swing when we arrived, the house pulsing with music and bodies. I immediately became the center of attention, as usual, accepting compliments and drinks while my eyes kept drifting to Mike, who watched me from across the room, his presence a dark, magnetic pull.

As the night wore on, the drinks flowed freely, and the line between hate and something else began to blur. I found myself seeking him out, our verbal sparring growing more charged, more personal.

"Having fun playing saint?" he asked, cornering me by the makeshift bar.

"I'm not the one dressed as a serial killer," I shot back, but my voice lacked its usual bite.

Mike stepped closer, his body heat radiating through the thin fabric of my dress. "You know what they say about angels and demons, don't you? Two sides of the same coin."

"Is that what we are?" I challenged, my heart hammering against my ribs.

His eyes darkened. "I think you know exactly what we are."

Before I could respond, he pulled me away from the crowd, his grip firm on my wrist. He led me upstairs, pushing open a door to an empty bedroom and locking it behind us.

"What are you doing?" I demanded, but my protest was weak.

"Ending this," he growled, backing me against the door. "This dance we've been doing for months."

His lips crashed against mine, hungry and demanding. I responded immediately, my hands tangling in his hair as I pulled him closer. This wasn't gentle or sweet, it was a battle of wills, a clash of all the pent-up frustration and desire that had been simmering between us for years.

Mike's hands roamed my body, squeezing my ass through the thin fabric of my dress before moving up to grope my breasts, his thumbs brushing over my nipples, which hardened instantly at his touch. I moaned into his mouth, hating how my body responded to his rough handling, loving it at the same time.

"You drive me insane," he murmured against my lips, his hands finding the zipper of my dress. "Walking around in this... this costume. Like you're begging for it."

"I'm not begging for anything," I gasped as the dress pooled at my feet, leaving me in just a pair of white lace panties and my wings.

"Aren't you?" Mike challenged, his eyes raking over my nearly naked body. "Look at you. So perfect. So fuckable."

His hands were on me again, rough and possessive. He turned me around, bending me over the edge of the bed. His palm connected with my ass with a sharp slap that made me cry out.

"Mike!" I protested, but the sound was more pleasure than pain.

"You like that, don't you?" he asked, his voice husky as he rubbed the reddening flesh. "You like it when I'm rough with you."

I didn't answer, couldn't answer. Instead, I pushed back against him, a silent invitation for more.

He delivered another slap, harder this time, followed by another. Each one sent a jolt of electricity straight to my core, until I was trembling with need.

"Please," I begged, my voice barely a whisper.

"Please what?" he demanded, his fingers hooking into my panties, pulling them down slowly.

"Please... I need you."

Mike chuckled, a low, rumbling sound that vibrated through me. "I know you do, angel."

He freed himself from his robes, and I risked a glance back. My eyes widened at the sight of him—thick and hard, ready for me. He was bigger than I'd imagined, and a thrill of fear and excitement shot through me.

He positioned himself behind me, teasing my entrance with just the tip. "Ready to be defiled, angel?"

I nodded, my body trembling with anticipation. With one smooth thrust, he entered me, filling me completely. I cried out at the sudden stretch, my hands clutching the bedspread.

"God, you're tight," he groaned, holding still for a moment to let me adjust. "So fucking tight."

"Move," I begged after a moment. "Please, Mike, move."

He started with slow, deliberate strokes, each one hitting deeper than the last. His hands gripped my hips, pulling me back to meet each thrust. The sounds of our bodies meeting filled the room, skin slapping against skin, my cries, his grunts of exertion.

"Look at you," he growled, his movements becoming more erratic. "Taking my cock so well. Such a good little angel, letting me ruin you."

His words sent a thrill through me, a dark, shameful pleasure that I couldn't deny. I pushed back against him, meeting his thrusts with equal fervor.

"Mike," I gasped, my body beginning to tremble. "I'm close."

"Not yet," he commanded, his hand snaking around to find my clit. "You come when I say you come."

His fingers worked magic, circling the sensitive nub in just the right way to bring me to the edge, only to back off at the last moment.

"Please," I begged, my body trembling with need. "Please, Mike, let me come."

"Tell me what you want," he demanded, his movements becoming more urgent.

"I want... I want you to come inside me," I breathed, the words shocking even as I said them. "I want you to fill me up."

Mike groaned, his grip tightening on my hips. "Fuck, yes. That's what I want too. Want to breed this perfect little pussy, make you mine."

His dirty words sent me over the edge. I cried out his name as waves of pleasure washed over me, my body convulsing around his thick length. Mike followed moments later, burying himself deep inside me as he found his release with a guttural groan.

We collapsed onto the bed, both breathing heavily, our bodies slick with sweat. For a moment, we lay in silence, the only sound our ragged breathing.

Then Mike rolled me onto my back, his body covering mine as he captured my lips in a surprisingly gentle kiss. His hands roamed my body, no longer rough and demanding, but exploring, worshiping.

"I've wanted to do that for so long," he murmured against my lips.

"Me too," I admitted, my voice barely a whisper.

He pulled back to look at me, his expression softening. "This doesn't change anything, you know. We still hate each other at school."

I nodded, understanding the unspoken rules of our complicated relationship. "Of course."

But as he kissed me again, deep and slow, I knew that everything had changed. We might still play our parts in public, but here, in the darkness of this room, we were something else entirely, something more dangerous, more intense, more real than anything I'd ever experienced.

𝜗𝜚⋆ That's my shirt

You hear your name from downstairs before you hear his voice. “Mike’s here!”Your mom doesn’t even sound surprised anymore.You sit up a little in your bed, blinking sleep from your eyes. “Tell him to come up!” you call back, voice still thick and quiet.

A minute later, there’s a soft knock, barely there. “Come in,” you mumble, trying so hard not to fall back asleep. The door opens slowly, and there he is, standing awkwardly in the doorway like he doesn’t know where to look first.

“Hey.”

“Hey.”

He steps inside, shutting the door behind him, and that’s when it hits him. His shirt. On you.

The Hellfire Club logo is slightly stretched across your frame, the fabric way too big, the collar hanging off your shoulders. It’s clearly the first thing you grabbed this morning, or maybe last night and never bothered changing out of.

He blinks. Once. Twice. “You’re wearing my shirt.” You glance down like you forgot. “Oh. Yeah.” A pause. “You left it here.” “I didn’t leave it—” He stops himself, then exhales, running a hand through his hair. “Okay, maybe I did. But I didn’t think you’d actually wear it.”

You shrug, pulling your knees up onto the bed, the hem of the shirt shifting slightly. “It’s comfortable.” “That’s not—” He cuts himself off again, looking away for a second before forcing his eyes back to your face. “It looks better on you.” You smile at that, softer this time.

“Thanks.” There’s a quiet stretch between you, not awkward—just full. Like something’s sitting there, waiting to be noticed.

"Can I—” he starts, then hesitates. You tilt your head. “Can you what?” He gestures vaguely toward the bed. “Sit?” “Mike, you don’t have to ask,” you laugh lightly, moving over to make space. “You’ve been in my room like a hundred times.” “Yeah, but—” He sits anyway, careful, like always. “It feels different today.” You lean back against your pillows, watching him. “Why?”

He glances at you again—and this time, he doesn’t look away as fast.

“Because you’re wearing my shirt.” Your heart does something small and stupid in your chest. “You’re such a loser,” you say while throwing a pillow at him. “Yeah,” he says, but he’s smiling now. “But it’s my shirt, so I think I get to care.”

You shift closer without really thinking about it, your shoulder brushing his arm. “Do you want it back?” you ask quietly. He shakes his head almost immediately. “No.” “No?” “No.” His voice softens. “I think I like it better on you.”

You hum, leaning into him just slightly, enough that he notices—but not enough to make a big deal out of it. His hand finds yours where it rests on the bed, fingers hesitant before lacing with yours.

Everything feels slow.

Easy.

Like this is exactly where you’re both supposed to be.

𝜗𝜚⋆ Boyfriend!Mike Wheeler x Harrington!Reader Headcannons

Helloo!! Sorry for not posting in a while lmaoo, but we are so backk!!

BOYFRIEND!MIKE… who calls you “sweetheart” without even thinking, especially in front of others, but when it’s just you two his voice softens and it turns into quiet little “hey… c’mere” and “you okay, sweetheart?”

BOYFRIEND!MIKE … who is lowkey terrified of your brother Steve Harrington, so he refuses to use the front door and instead climbs into your window like it’s a life-or-death mission every single time.

BOYFRIEND!MIKE … who misjudges the climb at least once and almost falls, and you have to grab his arm and pull him in while whisper-yelling “you’re gonna wake Steve up!” and he just breathes out “worth it.”

BOYFRIEND!MIKE … who immediately relaxes the second he’s in your room, like your space is the only place he can fully be himself.

BOYFRIEND!MIKE … who sits on your bed awkwardly at first, like he’s not sure what to do with his hands, until you grab them and suddenly he melts.

BOYFRIEND!MIKE … who loves holding your hand—like he laces your fingers together and absentmindedly rubs his thumb over your knuckles while you’re talking.

BOYFRIEND!MIKE … who gets so soft when you’re close, like if you sit next to him he’ll slowly lean into you until your shoulders are touching, then just stay there like that’s where he belongs.

BOYFRIEND!MIKE … who whispers everything in your room because he’s convinced your brother can hear everything.

“Sweetheart, seriously, is he asleep?” “Mike, it’s 2am.” “…that doesn’t mean anything.”

BOYFRIEND!MIKE … who panics when he hears footsteps in the hallway and immediately pulls you down with him onto the bed or hides behind your door, heart racing, while you try not to laugh.

BOYFRIEND!MIKE … who brings you random things when he sneaks in:

snacks from the kitchen

a hoodie he thinks you’ll like

sometimes just himself, because he “missed you”

BOYFRIEND!MIKE … who gets really distracted during “study sessions” and just ends up staring at you until you notice.

“What?” “…nothing.” “Mike.” “You’re just— distracting.”

BOYFRIEND!MIKE … who loves when you steal his hoodies but pretends to be annoyed.

“You literally have your own clothes.” “Yeah, but yours are better.”

“…fine. Keep it.”

BOYFRIEND!MIKE … who is surprisingly clingy in private—like he’ll wrap an arm around your waist and just keep you close without saying anything.

BOYFRIEND!MIKE … who rests his forehead against yours when things get quiet, like it’s his favorite way to be close to you.

BOYFRIEND!MIKE … who gets all soft when you’re tired and gently tucks you into bed if you fall asleep while he’s there.

BOYFRIEND!MIKE … who whispers “I should go” but never actually leaves until way later because neither of you wants the night to end.

BOYFRIEND!MIKE … who always makes sure to kiss you goodnight before climbing back out the window, even if he’s in a rush.

BOYFRIEND!MIKE … who pauses halfway out your window and looks back at you like he’s memorizing the moment.

“Text me when you wake up, okay, sweetheart?”

BOYFRIEND!MIKE … who will absolutely risk getting caught by Steve Harrington just to spend a few extra minutes with you.

BOYFRIEND!MIKE … who loves you quietly, awkwardly, but completely. 💗

𝜗𝜚⋆ seven?

Mike Wheeler was normally good at remembering things. Well… the important things. Not the little things, he often forgot which classroom a lecture was in, where he left his coffee, or what day the campus bookstore had sales, but you? He never forgot you. Not for a second.

So when he asked you out on a proper college date, dinner at that little diner just off campus, you didn’t hesitate. “Seven?” he had asked, leaning against your dorm door, the way he always did when he was nervous.

“Seven,” you said, grinning. “You’re sure?” You rolled your eyes playfully. “Mike Wheeler, I’ve been dating you for almost a year. I know what a ‘seven’ means to you.”

He laughed, rubbing the back of his neck nervously. “Okay… just making sure. I… I really want this to be special.”

“You’re always special to me,” you said softly.

He smiled, leaning down to kiss your forehead. “See you tomorrow, sweetheart.”

You woke up the next day feeling lighter than you had in weeks. No classes until the afternoon, no cheer practice until later. You had a full day to get ready, maybe even sneak in a nap before dinner. But the thought of seeing Mike in the diner at 7 PM kept you smiling all morning.

By 6 PM, you were done getting ready. You’d chosen a soft, pink-colored sweater he once said looked “dangerously cozy,” paired with denim skirt and your favourite mary-janes . You fixed your hair, checked your makeup, and for the first time in a while, didn’t feel rushed.

Mike, of course, didn’t account for the D&D campaign scheduled with his friends in the dorm lounge that night.

Dice clattered across the table. Maps sprawled out. Dustin was shouting about spell damage. Lucas and Will were arguing over a puzzle they couldn’t solve. Mike was in the zone.

“The dragon is awaking,” he muttered to the group.

At first, he thought he was forgetting something, but brushed it off as the story became more intese, as more monsters appeared and tensions rose, he completely forgot.

You arrived at the diner at 6:55 PM, just in time to snag a booth by the window. Warm light washed over you, and the smell of fries and coffee made your stomach rumble. You were early, but early was fine you guess. Mike was always a little late, especially with college schedules. You ordered a soda while waiting. 7 PM came and went. 7:15 PM. 7:30 The sky outside darkened. Thunder rumbled softly.

At 7:50, rain began to pour. Not a light drizzle, the kind of rain that soaked through sweaters and made makeup run. By 8:10, you were still waiting. Your phone battery was almost dead.

You told yourself not to panic. Maybe he was stuck in traffic. Maybe something urgent came up. But part of you burned with embarrassment. Other students at the diner whispered as they passed by, and you couldn’t help but feel like everyone could see your disappointment.

Eventually, you paid for your soda and started walking back toward campus, rain soaking through your sweater and jeans. Each step was heavier than the last, each one accompanied by the thought: Why didn’t he show?

You didn’t reply to his texts. Not one. You didn’t answer his calls. You avoided him in the cafeteria, in the library, on the quad.

Mike didn’t understand at first. He assumed you were just busy. Maybe annoyed, but not really upset. But by the third day, it became clear: You weren’t just busy. You were avoiding him. He tried again. Walked toward you after class, called your dorm room, left messages. Nothing.

The silence was worse than any confrontation.

For an entire week, you ignored him.He tried to smile when you walked past. You looked straight ahead. He tried to talk after class. You had headphones in, pretending he didn’t exist.

By day seven, Mike was desperate. Finally, he saw you leaving the library, headphones in, phone in hand. He stepped into your path. “Hey—wait,” he said softly.

You sighed and stepped around him.He caught your wrist lightly. “Sweetheart, can we talk?” You pulled your wrist free and shook your head. “There’s nothing to talk about.” Mike’s stomach twisted. “Of course there is. I can tell something’s wrong.”

You stopped, exasperated. Your arms crossed. “Seriously, Mike… you don’t even know?” “No…” he admitted. “You stood me up!” you finally said, voice cracking slightly.

Mike froze. “…What?” “At the diner,” you said, your voice tight. “Seven o’clock. I waited. You didn’t show.” “Oh…” The guilt hit him like a truck. “Sweetheart, I—”

“Don’t,” you snapped.

Mike rubbed both hands over his face. “I— I forgot.” Your jaw tightened. “Yeah.” “I was playing D&D with the guys and—”

That’s when you snapped.

“D&D?” Your voice cracked.

Mike froze.

“Are you serious?” You laughed again, but this time it sounded dangerously close to breaking. “You forgot our date because you were playing a game?”

Mike stepped forward quickly. “It wasn’t like that—”

“I waited there for an hour and a half, Mike!”Your voice rose despite yourself. People passing nearby glanced over. You didn’t care.

“It started raining,” you continued, voice shaking. “My phone died. I walked all the way back to campus soaked and you were—” Your voice broke. “—rolling dice?”

Mike’s heart dropped straight to the floor. “Sweetheart, I—” “Don’t call me that right now!” The words came out sharper than you meant them to. Your eyes were already filling with tears. You quickly looked away, embarrassed. But it was too late.

Mike saw.

And the guilt hit him like a punch to the chest.“ Angel, I'm sorry, I didn’t mean to forget,” he said quietly.

A tear slid down your cheek before you could stop it. “You still did.”

Your voice sounded small now. “I thought maybe you just… changed your mind about the date,” Mike admitted. You stared at him.

“Why would I do that?” He shrugged helplessly. “I don’t know.”

Your shoulders slumped. “I sat there thinking you didn’t care enough to show up.” Mike’s chest physically hurt hearing that. “That’s not true,” he said immediately. Another tear slipped down your face. “You forgot me for a game.” Mike stepped closer, carefully this time. “Sweetheart—” You sniffed and wiped your eyes angrily.

“Stop calling me that.” He paused. “…Okay.” There was a long silence.

Then Mike said quietly, “I’m an idiot.” You huffed out a shaky breath.

“Yeah.”

“I messed up.”

You nodded.

“Yeah.”

Mike looked at you for a moment before gently reaching for your hands. You hesitated. But you didn’t pull away this time. “Sweetheart,” he said softly.

You didn’t stop him. “I should’ve remembered. I should’ve set alarms or something. I should’ve left the second it hit seven.”

His thumb brushed across your knuckles. “You’re more important than any stupid campaign.” Your eyes were still red. “You really hurt me, Mike.” “I know.” His voice sounded rough. “I’m really sorry.”

You studied his face. He looked genuinely miserable. Hair messy, eyes worried, shoulders tense like he’d been carrying the guilt all week. “…You made me walk home in the rain,” you muttered. Mike groaned quietly. “God.”

He pulled you into a hug before you could protest. You stiffened at first. Then slowly relaxed into him. His arms tightened around you. “Baby, I'm so sorry...”

You sighed against his hoodie. “…You’re buying me dinner.” “Obviously.” “And ice-cream.” “Done.” You pulled back slightly, still sniffling. “And if you ever miss a date because of D&D again—” “I’ll burn my dice.” You blinked and tilt your head. “would you..?.” Mike cracked a small smile. “Okay, maybe not burn them.”

You rolled your eyes. “But I will set twelve alarms.”You finally laughed a little. Mike looked relieved just hearing it. He kissed the top of your head gently. “Still sorry, sweetheart.”

You leaned into him again. “…Yeah, you should be.”

But you didn’t let go.

i js wanted to say how good your writing is, i was browsing through mike wheeler fics(as one does) and i saw yours, literally love at first sight.

it’s like this is such a classic trope but i haven’t seen it done this way with these characters and it was very fun to watch the banter

also so i clicked on your acc to see more fics because i assumed it was from a writer with a big library but i realised it was your first fic

damn because it’s pretty good and surprising considering the way it was written

so just wanted to give you an appreciation note:)

take care and have a good day ahead💗💗

aww thank you smm so sorry i anwsered this so late, but thank you so much for your message and i really appreciated it :P

𝜗𝜚⋆ you like it when i'm mean.

you and mike were not strangers, far from it even. you and mike were neighbors, houses right beside eachother, his window looking into yours and yours looking into his. he was barely a year older than you, but the way he acted, you’d think he’d been appointed everyone’s moral authority. and you hated it.

both your moms were close, being in the same book club and whatnot. you're friends with everyone in the party, all except mike, sure you have common interests but, god you couldn't stand him.

everytime you go and talk to dustin he always has something to say, "dustin, do yourself a favour and and stop talking to her. i can feel my iq dropping just by listening" he says while blocking his ears. you roll your eyes,you stay silent biting the inside of your cheek, while you fight back tears and heat rushes up to your cheeks. mike leaned back in his seat, tilting his head, as a infuriatng smirk spreading across hs face like he enjoyed getting under my skin.

early one morning, you were on your way to fetch something from your locker, still half-asleep and tugging your backpack straps tighter. The hallways were quiet, save for the faint hum of fluorescent lights. you paused outside a classroom when voices drifted out through the cracked door voices you knew all too well.“why does she even hang out with us?” one voice asked, sharp and mocking.

your stomach sank. heat rose to your cheeks before you even realized it, and your hands tightened around the strap of your backpack.“she’s funny,” another voice replied, softer, almost like a defense. “and nicer than girls her age.”you froze, barely breathing, your heart thudding painfully in your chest.

your chest tightened, and you shifted your weight, gripping the strap of your bag a little harder. you knew Mike didn’t like you, that much had always been obvious , but hearing it said like that felt different.You stayed there for another second, listening, before quietly stepping away from the door and continuing down the hallway like you hadn’t heard anything at all.

but the words followed you the whole way to your locker.

you were halfway through zoning out in class when your teacher clapped her hands once.“alright, everyone. for this project you’ll be working in pairs.” a quiet wave of groans spread across the room as people started shifting in their seats.

you didn’t think much of it until the teacher started reading names. “(Name)… and mike wheeler.” your head snapped up immediately. across the room, mike looked just as unimpressed.

“You’ve got to be kidding,” he muttered under his breath.

a couple people nearby snickered, clearly aware of your usual arguments.

you slowly stood up, grabbing your notebook and walking over to the empty desk beside him. mike leaned back in his chair, watching you approach with that same irritating half-smirk.

“you look thrilled,” he said.

You dropped your bag beside the desk. “trust me, wheeler, the feeling’s mutual.”

for a moment neither of you said anything. the tension between you was thick enough that the people around you kept glancing over like they were waiting for something to happen.

mike tapped his pencil against the desk.

“so,” he said dryly, “are you going to actually help with the project, or are you just here to make my life harder?” you shot him a look. “you say that like you don’t enjoy arguing with me.” He raised an eyebrow. “enjoy it?” he scoffed. you leaned back slightly in your chair, crossing your arms. “come on. you start half the arguments.” “that’s because you say ridiculous things.” “or,” you said calmly, “you just can’t handle someone disagreeing with you.”

Mike let out a short laugh, shaking his head.“you’re unbelievable.” “and yet,” you said, tilting your head slightly, “you keep talking to me.” for a second he didn’t respond. his eyes narrowed just slightly, like he was trying to figure something out. then that smirk came back. “careful,” he said quietly. “you almost sound like you think I like you.”

You rolled your eyes. “don’t flatter yourself.”“good,” he said, leaning forward onto the desk. “because the last thing I need is you getting the wrong idea.” But the way he said it sounded more like a challenge than an insult. And despite yourself, you couldn’t help the small smile tugging at the corner of your mouth.

You started toward the door again, adjusting your bag on your shoulder. “see you tomorrow, Wheeler.” you had almost made it out of the classroom when his chair scraped loudly against the floor. “wait.” you turned, surprised. mike was already walking toward you, running a hand through his messy curls like he was trying to figure out what to say. he pulls you into the janitors closet.

for once, he didn’t look smug.

“what?” you asked. he stopped a step away from you, close enough that you could see the small crease between his eyebrows. “you heard what I said this morning,” he said. You shrugged lightly. “yeah.” “and you’re just… fine with that?” “why wouldn’t I be?” you replied. “you’re always so mean to me.”

mike let out a short laugh under his breath, shaking his head.“that’s not—” he stopped himself, exhaling. “you’re impossible.” “there it is,” you said, gesturing slightly. “back to normal.” you turned again, but before you could take another step, mike reached out and caught your wrist.

not hard. just enough to stop you. your heart skipped.

“you’re seriously just going to walk away?” he asked. “what do you want me to do?” you shot back. “argue with you? that’s usually how this goes.” mike stared at you for a second, like he was debating something with himself. then he said quietly, “you’re the one who started that.” you blinked. “started what?” “all the arguing,” he said. “you push back. No one else does.”

“sorry for having opinions.” “i didn’t say i minded.” the words hung there for a moment. your stomach flipped slightly, but you crossed your arms anyway. “you literally said I make people lose brain cells.” mike smirked a little. “you do.” “oh my—” before you could finish the sentence, he leaned forward and kissed you.

it was quick at first, like even he hadn’t fully planned it. your brain barely had time to catch up before you kissed him back. when you finally pulled away, both of you looked a little stunned. mike rubbed the back of his neck, half-smiling. “...okay,” he said. “maybe i don’t hate you.” you stared at him for a second, then let out a small laugh.

“wow,” you said. “romantic.” he shrugged. “don’t get used to it.” but this time when you turned to leave, mike walked beside you instead of staying behind.