#peterparker

"Peter," you say. Less of a question, more of you testing his name into the air.

"Yeah?"

"How fast are you?"

"I'm not—"

"How fast," you say, "are you?"

He opens his mouth. He closes it.

"Faster than average," he says carefully.

Once you know what to look for, you can't stop seeing it.

This is the thing about Peter's reflexes — they're subtle enough that you can attribute each instance to coincidence, but once you're paying attention, the pattern is undeniable. He’s always slightly ahead of you. There’s always a fraction of a second where his body has registered the incoming disaster before your own body has, and acted on it, and the only evidence is the thing not breaking, the thing not spilling, the thing not—

"Did you catch my keys?" you ask, on a Wednesday, watching them not hit the floor.

"They fell," Peter says.

"You caught them."

"I was right there—"

"I didn't see you move," you say. "Peter. I literally didn't see you move."

He hands you your keys. "You're going to be late," he says.

You start testing it.

Not in a mean way. In a curious way. In the way of someone who has discovered that the person they're dating has an ability that intersects with a fundamental characteristic of their own personality, and wants to understand the full extent of the overlap.

You drop a pen over the edge of his desk one afternoon while he's reading. His hand catches it eleven inches from the floor without him looking up from the page. You try to let a library card slip from your fingers while standing at a checkout counter. His hand appears underneath it before it falls four inches.

You knock a water bottle off the kitchen counter. He catches it behind his back.

This one makes you stop.

"Baby," you say.

"Mm?"

"You just caught that behind your back."

He looks at the bottle in his hand, which is behind his back.

"Reflex," he says.

"Your back was to the counter."

"I heard it start to fall."

You blink. He doesn’t falter. You don’t have it in you to expect him to.

"Right," you say.

The conversation happens properly on a Thursday evening.

You’re cooking, reaching for the wooden spoon above the stove when your sleeve catches the handle of the saucepan, and the saucepan goes sideways. Peter, who is sitting at the kitchen table six feet away, is across the room and has the saucepan's handle back in position before anything reaches the stovetop coil.

Six feet. You watched it happen. He didn't walk. He didn't run. He was simply there.

You turn around, and he's standing beside you with an expression that finally, finally has given up on claiming coincidence, looking at you like he’s been caught and is deciding how to proceed.

"That's—" you start.

"Spider thing," he says.

"The reflex."

"The reflexes, yeah. And the — I sense things before they happen sometimes. Movement, trajectory." He makes a vague gesture. "It just fires. I'm not always choosing to do it."

You stare at the freckle on the corner of his mouth. He’s so pretty, and so cool, and he amazes you sometimes so much it hurts.

"How long have you been doing this?"

"Since we started dating, pretty much," he says. "Maybe a little before."

"A little before?" you repeat. "We weren't even — Peter, we'd only been talking for like two months before we started dating."

"You knocked a display off a shelf in the campus bookstore during the third conversation we had," Peter says. "And then you caught someone else's display with your elbow, trying to fix it. I was paying attention after that."

You stare at him now. You try not to smile, but you’ve never been good at that, especially around Peter. 

"You've been running point on my clumsiness since the third conversation we had," you say.

"I wouldn't call it running point—"

"You caught a saucepan from six feet away without breaking stride."

"That's a slight exaggeration of the geometry—"

"Honey."

Something in his face is waiting to see whether this is funny or whether this is something else. Whether you find this sweet or whether you find it unbearable to have your life quietly managed by someone's involuntary superhuman crisis response.

You think about all the things that haven't broken.

You think about the mug. The orange juice. The library books. The keys. The saucepan. The water bottle he caught behind his back without looking.

You think about the ceramic frog your mother mentions.

"I broke a ceramic frog when I was four," you tell him. "I've been knocking things over my entire life. It's been twenty-something years of things hitting the floor."

"I know," he says. "You've told me."

"And since September," you say, "nothing has hit the floor."

"A few things," he says. "I miss occasionally."

"Name one."

He thinks about it. He hides a smile.

"Your sunglasses," he says. "In October. I was on the phone."

"I don't remember that."

"They were fine, they just fell."

"Peter Parker," you say.

"Yeah."

"Have you been providing continuous covert property protection since September?"

He seems to be deciding how to frame this. "I'd call it more of a—"

"Continuous covert property protection."

"A passive safety feature," he says, with the expression of someone proud of this reframe.

You put your hands over your face. You hear him make a small, uncertain sound. "Is this — is this okay? Because I can try not to, if it bothers you. It's pretty involuntary, but I could probably—"

You take your hands off your face. He's looking at you with genuine concern now, the expression of someone who has done a thing entirely out of instinct and love, and is suddenly worried the thing was wrong.

"It doesn't bother me," you say.

"Yeah?"

"I've accepted approximately three thousand apologies to approximately three thousand pieces of crockery in my lifetime," you say. "The saucepan staying on the stove is a gift from the universe, actually."

Something loosens in his expression. "Okay. Good."

"I want full disclosure going forward, though," you say. "Every time you catch something. I want to know."

"Every time?"

"Every time."

"That's going to be a lot of notifications," he says.

"I want all of them."

He looks at you with a specific expression — warm and slightly overwhelmed and entirely fond — that he has in certain moments you keep mental records of.

"Okay," he says. "Deal."

—

The ceramic frog comes up again six months later.

You're on the phone with your mother, and she mentions it, as she does, casually, like she’s fully processed a loss and has now converted it into a reliable conversational touchstone, and you mention it to Peter afterward.

"A ceramic frog," he says. "From when you were four."

"She's mentioned it in approximately sixty percent of our conversations since I was four," you say. "It's a thing."

Peter is quiet for a second. "Could you describe it?" he says.

"It was green," you say, "with spots, and it had a little lily pad. It was on the windowsill. I knocked it off. Irreplaceable, apparently."

"Irreplaceable," Peter says.

"This is the word she uses."

"Okay," he says.

You don't think anything of it.

Three weeks later, your mother calls you and says, with a voice that is doing several things at once, "Someone sent me the most extraordinary thing in the post."

A ceramic frog. Green, with spots, on a small ceramic lily pad. Not the original — the original was thirty years gone — but close enough, found by someone who apparently spent three weeks on a very specific antique hunt, that your mother holds it for a full minute on the phone while you sit on your bed and look across the hall at Peter's closed door and feel something in your chest do something large and complicated.

You find him.

"You found her a frog," you say.

"Similar frog," he says. "Not the same frog. Different provenance."

"Peter."

"It wasn't that hard," he says, in a tone like he did something hard and is embarrassed about it. "eBay, mostly. Few antique dealers. Took a couple weeks—"

"You spent three weeks finding a ceramic frog for my mother," you say.

"She mentioned it," he says. "And you mention it when she mentions it. And it seemed like a fixable thing."

You look at him in the doorway.

You think about all the things he catches before they hit the floor. All the quiet invisible work of being around you, the constant background attentiveness, the reflexes that fire for you specifically and which he has described, simply and completely, as something he finds useful because it's for you.

"Hi," you say.

"Hi," he says.

"I knocked over the mug on my desk this morning," you say.

"I know," he says. "I was in the kitchen. I heard the trajectory."

"And?"

"And I made a judgment call," he says. "You were in your room. I was in the kitchen. Seemed like a reasonable miss."

"It was a reasonable miss," you confirm. "Luckily, the mug is fine."

"Good."

"Peter."

"Yeah."

"I love you," you say. "Please know that I mean it with the full weight of the ceramic frog and everything that came before it."

He grins.

"I love you too," he says. "Please know that I mean it with the full weight of approximately seven hundred intercepted falling objects and counting."

"We're going to count now?"

"I've been counting since September," he says. "I have a spreadsheet."

You stare at him. Your eye twitches. 

"You have a spreadsheet," you say.

"It's colour coded," he says.

"What?"

"By severity," he says, backing slightly into his room. "Green is minor, yellow is moderate, red is would have been a bad one—"

You follow him through his door. "Show me the spreadsheet," you say.

"Absolutely not," he says, and he's already laughing, and you're already reaching for his laptop, and somewhere across the city the night is going on without you, unbroken things still unbroken, the ambient disaster of you held carefully and specifically and entirely on purpose by someone whose reflexes fire for you before they fire for anything else.

This, you think, is what it is to be loved by Peter Parker.