#printed.

You glance at your phone. Seven minutes. Some awful part of you twists at the idea that maybe he’s wondering where you are, if he’s waiting for you; or if he’s being normal about it, like a normal person. Peter’s more normal than you, he wouldn’t take seven- no, EIGHT minutes to knock on someone’s door, even if his hands were clammy and his heart was thumping so loudly in his ears he thought his eardrums might burst. You’ve still got your earphones on even though you paused whatever you were listening to long ago, the sound of your breath thrumming through your head. When you move to finally take them off, you fumble and swear as they clatter loudly to the floor. 

Immediately, you cringe, wanting the floor to swallow you up as muffled movement stirs behind the door in front of you. You’ve probably got about ten seconds to pull yourself together and appear fine enough for him not to be immediately concerned - a difficult task, considering that you have dark circles the size of plates, and you’re pretty sure you’ve got some sort of stress-related rash breaking out on your hands, but the door is already opening, and life (as it turns out) isn’t merciful.

All of a sudden, Peter is there, and you’re on the floor, frantically chasing your earphones as they scatter across the lino. When you look up at him, you’re suddenly relieved to find that he’s mostly just confused. Lamely, you flap your mouth for a second, and then blurt out the first thing that pops into your head. 

“I was just about to knock.”

“What?”

“Never mind.”

Peter’s apartment smells like Peter - which is obvious when you think about it, but it didn’t cross your mind until this moment how painful this might be. There’s his soap, his deodorant, the faint oil fryer smell of any Joe’s uniform, which is currently half hanging out of a laundry basket near the door. It was like you were seeing him properly for the first time; this new, unknown Peter who exists beyond the confines of a kitchen. This isn’t the Peter you know or Spider-Man - this is Peter outside of Joe’s. Peter who does laundry. Peter who has a coffee mug on the drying rack that says ‘World’s Greatest Pop-Pop’, and some complicated calculations splayed out in sheets on the rickety little dining table. 

“It’s a bit of a mess right now, I haven’t had time to clean up, because of the-“ He’s babbling and flitting about, picking up different bits of odd clutter only to put them down again. His hair is damp against the collar of his sweatshirt; shiny and dark and curling up in little spirals around his ears that you had the sudden urge to wrap around your fingers. You step inside, and Peter’s pottering about the kitchen, preparing mugs and rooting through his cupboards. When you make your way into the main space of the apartment, barely a separate room, Peter looks up at you through his hatch and brightly chimes, “Would you like anything to drink?”

You quirk your brow. Suddenly, whatever haze had fallen over his face dissipates, and he blinks, dazed.

“I’m still in Diner Mode.” Peter rubs his eyes, then rakes a hand through his hair, disturbing the wet clumps of curls. No wonder it's always so frizzy, with the amount of times you've seen him tug and ruffle at it. The movement exposes the tips of his ears, shiny from the moisture, and their usual shade of flustered pink. He’s back into the cupboard in an instant, searching through boxes and jars before he finds what he’s looking for. “Okay, so I have coffee and…”

“I’m on the edge of my seat.”

“…Actually, that’s it.”

“Then I guess it’s my lucky day.”

You can’t help it, but your voice comes out dry and flat, and his eyebrows knit, something shifting in his expression. Your fingers go numb, and you remember what you came here to do - you just didn’t think you would get into it so quickly. Peter sets his shitty instant coffee on the side (and you would know it’s shitty, because you buy the same stuff) and just looks at you. You’re not sure what sort of look it is, something between his usual awkwardness, and some entirely new face you’ve never seen before. He’s planting his hands on the counter now, squaring his shoulders, and your breath hitches.

Maybe, you think, this is the face behind the mask. 

“I don’t know what to say.” It sounds awful and croaky, and it’s nowhere near covering the sheer amount of thoughts currently rushing through your head, but it’s all that comes to mind. 

What is there to say? Nothing much had really happened; coworkers hook up with each other all the time (granted, usually not on shift), but even then, you never even had sex. You can’t call him a ‘hook up’, he was somehow both more and less than that - just some guy you’ve kissed a couple times. Whatever the hell the two of you have been doing for months has never been labelled anything past ‘friends’, which you’re now quickly realising is nothing like what you actually are. You’ve been tormenting yourself, tormenting him, all because you couldn’t suck it up enough to admit to yourself that you care about him more than you want to, and because it’s easier to live with the possibility that something could, might happen. 

And now a new, worse feeling is looming over you; the possibility that Peter might not feel the same way about you.

Deep breath. Push it down. Bury it. 

“Then let me say it.” Peter is clearing his throat now, your heart rate spiking like a hummingbird, your teeth clenched shut. It takes one, two, five, seventy drips of the faucet before he speaks again - or maybe he doesn’t hesitate at all. 

“I’ve been thinking about something you said a while ago, before…” He trails off. Before everything. You grimace a little, suddenly feeling nauseous when you remember how rude you were to him, all the times you’d snapped at him when he was just trying to help. He’s the kind of person who helps people, and you’re the kind of person who pushes them away, apparently. All of the hate and grudges you’d held against him, all of the resentment, instantly falls onto your shoulders. You punished him for the crime of being happy and content, when his other job is being beaten to a pulp and worked to the bone, and you were stupid enough to not realise it was only because you hated yourself. 

“You said something about how shit happens, and Spider-Man won’t always be there. How I’m ‘just some guy’.”

“Peter, I-“ Your lungs are burning so hot you think you smell smoke again, and you try to hold your breath, even though you currently feel like you’re suffocating, “I didn’t… I don’t think that anymore. I’m-“

Deep breath. Push it down.

“I don’t know if you’ve noticed, but I’m fucked up.” You’re laughing, but it doesn’t reach your eyes, or Peter’s. 'Fucked up’ is an umbrella term, apparently, for having nightmares about a fire that happened over a year ago, shutting everyone out of your life, smelling smoke in every dark corner or pantry. ‘Fucked up’ covers being so desperately lonely that you have to compulsively hurt the first friend you make after isolating yourself for so long; stringing him along in some ‘will-they-won’t-they’ bullshit and letting him down every step of the way. He probably wants to cut you off. It’s probably better if he does.

“You’re not fucked up,” His face is soft, like ricotta against your tongue. Like the skin across his collarbones. “I just… About the fire-“

He’s not broken eye contact with you until now, but his gaze flicks to the dish rack, the walls - he fiddles with the faucet for a fleeting moment. You wait.

“I want to apologise for everything,” It’s slow to start, but once the dam is broken, it all comes out in a rush and drowns you. “I know we didn’t know each other then, but I want- I need you to know that I’m sorry. It’s my duty to protect people, and I didn’t protect you, and I’m sorry.”

“Peter-“

“Hold on. Last night, when you were talking about how it was your responsibility to-“ His voice wavers. You realise you’re still holding your breath. “How you had, like, a sense of duty towards Joe’s, and you were so brave, and all I could think about was how I let you down. Even before I knew you, it killed me just knowing that there was someone who needed me, and I didn’t come through for them. It- It messed me up.”

There’s a pang where your heart used to be, when you realise he’s not talking about you specifically, but just someone in general. Some poor citizen needing to be saved. There’s nothing else there, just hollowness and cold, stretching back and back into you like an abyss. This must be what heartbreak feels like, you realise; you’re not special to him, you’re just something else on his plate. Maybe, something in the back of your head leers, maybe you’re nothing to him after all.

Spider-Man, your coworker, is staring into you so intently that you can feel the weight of the city on his shoulders. 

“I nearly quit.” His voice hangs like a loose thread - like the ones on the diner tablecloths that if you pull, make the whole thing unravel. You twist your finger around it and tug, even though you know you’ll come apart too.

“Joe’s?”

“Being Spider-Man.”

“Oh.” 

Peter huffs a breath, twirls the faucet knob between his fingers with the same dexterity and fluidity he demonstrated between your legs last night, and your gut churns. The pipes groan to life, and he shuts it off again before any water has the chance to flow through. Then, he’s coming around the corner, out of the kitchen, and all of a sudden you’re in Peter’s living room, with Peter, and that's what he looks like at home. There’s no pretence, no uniform, no employee code of conduct between you. 

“I want to be just some guy. More than anything.” He’s so close to you now that you can smell lime body wash and shampoo, see a drip forming at the tip of that one curl at his left temple that’s more like a ringlet than the rest of them. And you only know it's there because you haven’t stopped thinking about him, looking at him only when his back is turned and no one could catch you staring. You can barely hear him over the shame spinning in your ribs like a catherine wheel.

“But after the fire, I sort of took it as a sign that I was meant to be Spider-Man. You were there, you lived it. It’s my responsibility to stop that from happening.”

You can’t help it, but your eye twitches. It’s the same thing that’s been bothering you about Spider-Man since before; the promise of selflessness and responsibility and duty that Peter is now forever bound to. Before last night, you would have told yourself that you hated Spider-Man because you felt like he abandoned you, because he broke some kind of stupid, city-wide promise - but now that you know it’s Peter behind the mask, blaming him feels too harsh when the world gives him enough shit to begin with.

He doesn’t deserve it. He doesn’t deserve the beatings, or the sleepless nights, or the working minimum wage just to go home to an apartment that will only get more expensive to rent. And all it does is make you angry. It’s unfair - everything’s unfair - and now it feels like your life, your near-death, was the event that made him keep giving himself and getting nothing in return. At the end of the day, you’re both just two twenty-somethings, trying to keep their heads above water.

It’s your fault that he’s still here, still hurting.

He’s still staring at you when you realise you’ve been silent for some time now, your mind blank and stuttering as Peter just looks on, almost concerned. The vice that’s been slowly tightening around your chest for months gives one final clench, and some long-buried string in your heart finally, finally snaps. 

You’re so tired. 

You knew it would happen eventually; that you’d run out of steam, or your knees would give out, and you wouldn’t be able to keep this up anymore. You’d always expected it to be while you were alone, or in Sal’s office, when you wouldn’t be able to keep up with all the silly little lies you’d been telling yourself - but not here, not in front of Peter, and not like this. 

And you’re not sure you’ve ever said any of this out loud - but the same tug in the back of your head that wanted to protect him last night is now thrumming away like a rubber band pulled taut. That pull, that itch, that simmers in your lungs and makes you feel like you’re responsible for him, or that he’s responsible for you. 

When you think about it, it’s guilt. Guilt that burns hot and acrid at the back of your tongue - guilt that puts you in debt to him, to everyone at Joe’s. You don’t just owe him an apology for lashing out, and running around the diner like a shithead; you owe him the truth. 

Deep breath. 

“Peter, I have to tell you something.”

Your voice sounds miles away - echoing in his box apartment, or maybe just in your head. You try not to notice the way his face twitches, or the way he stiffens slightly, or his eyes darting over you. His voice is tense, but not quite strained when he speaks. 

“What is it?”

Something scratches at the back of your throat, squeezing, constricting, scratching. This is it, this has to be it. 

Say it. 

Say it.  

“The fire was my fault.”

You weren’t sure what was going to happen. Sure, you’d imagined this scenario multiple times, all of them ending in various, and increasingly wild forms of punishment - losing your job, being arrested, getting cut off from the people who had been your whole life for years - but you’d at least imagined some form of relief. Perhaps the relief was the driving force of this whole confession, laying yourself bare and raw and bleeding in front of Peter in the hopes that he’d do something about it, take it all away, and still like you enough to speak to you afterwards. 

Only now, in practice, the relief never comes, and Peter just keeps staring at you. Instantly, you want to vomit. 

"What?”

You can’t read his voice. You can’t read his face. To compensate for this, your brain cedes all control, and your mouth keeps moving. 

“I was smoking out the back door and Sal called me in for some stupid reason - something about the pans or the sauce, or whatever - and I forgot to stub it out, and-“

That’s done something. Peter holds his hands up, eyes drawn wide, as if you were some sort of wild animal. Maybe you are. Maybe this is all some sort of twisted defence mechanism - spilling out the one thing you swore you would never tell anybody, in one last-ditch attempt at pushing him away. 

“Hey, hey-“

“I didn’t get to see the full report, but I’m not stupid. I know it started near the back door, and that some- some spark, or something, caused it. If I'd just-“ Your voice sticks like glue in your dry throat, like you’re trying to swallow cotton. “I nearly killed people. So much of it was destroyed - stuff that had been there for decades, family pictures, wedding presents.”

You think he says your name. You don’t hear it. 

“That burn on Sal’s arm is only there because of me. Because- Because he tried to get me out of there.”

It’s all too much now - even here, even in Peter’s apartment, you can smell the smoke, feel the heat. Through the hatch into the kitchen, you swear you can see a flame, licking up the walls, swimming in your vision like molten glass. It’s burning in your eyes, curling in your throat and nostrils, burning and burning and 

“Please, look at me.” 

When you finally make eye contact, a breath forces its way past your lips. His hands are steady and warm on your forearms, slipping down to clutch at your palms, as if weighing you down to reality. It’s as if everything else had slipped away, and he’s in the middle of it all, grounding you like a tether. You cling to him. 

“I’m sorry.” It tumbles out like an impulse. Peter shakes his head, soft and smudged in the lamplight. 

“Don’t be.” He says, firmly. Every wet curl shines and shimmers as he shakes his head, and the smell of soap pushes the soot that little bit further away. Maybe if you were to look out of the window, you’d see plumes of dark smoke rising from a building a few blocks away, but your gaze is stuck to Peter’s like a magnet. “You didn’t do anything wrong."

“I did,” The awful creature that’s been churning in your chest rears its ugly head again, “I caused so much hurt. And I’ve been hurting you, too - holding a grudge for something that was my own fault. You- You don’t deserve-”

“No.” Peter hasn’t let up, watching every twitch and flicker on your face. Is this how he speaks to the maniacs he fights in the street? Is this how he handles every catastrophic responsibility that falls into his lap? “You didn’t.”

“Peter, I did-“

“You didn't.” He says again, only this time, something sticks. The look on his face, the sadness in his eyes - it snaps your mouth shut. It’s the way he hovers around it, the unsureness in his face, that almost confuses you. “I… After the fire, I did some investigating.”

Your feet have gone numb. So have your hands, and arms, and legs, and just about everywhere else. When you don’t protest or interrupt, Peter continues tentatively. 

“I got access to the NYPD files, I watched the clean-up like a hawk, I-“ He cuts himself off, clearing his throat. His fingertips worry over your knuckles, back and forth, like a pendulum. “I did some stuff I wasn’t necessarily allowed to, but I needed closure. Joe’s was- It was one of the last things I had left of Ben’s, and…”

“What do you mean?” Your voice comes from another room, another planet. How could he know something you don’t? How could he have answers that you don’t have? Sal never told you anything about the report, about the cause, about any kind of investigation. Something is clawing inside your stomach. How? How? “Peter, what are you saying?”

His voice is softer than anything you’ve ever heard when he finally answers. 

“It was a fault with a fryer. Some electrical issue.” You can barely hear him, but he keeps talking anyway, even though it sounds like he’s on the other side of Manhattan. “Suppose it’s why Sal is so insistent on fryer training now, and- hey-?”

It takes a moment to register what you're doing, but you realise that you’re laughing. You can’t help it, but you’re laughing. Peter's utterly lost, his eyebrows tangled into that familiar furrow, the one you only see when you've completely perplexed him.

All this time, all this energy, spent tying yourself in knots and swallowing bile - and it was all the fault of a fucking fryer. Even now, the relief doesn't come, doesn't take all of the pains and aches of it away. Instead, it melts and morphs into something new - awful, burning, searing shame. And there's Peter in the middle of it all, just waiting for you, wanting the best for you. There's something hot on your cheeks, and it turns out that your laughter has quickly merged into crying.

You're actually crying. In front of him. You'd probably prefer being vaporised into a million pieces by whatever supervillain is calling themselves Spider-Man's arch nemesis these days.

"Oh my God," You blurt out, every cell trembling. It sounded like the beginning of a sentence, but any other words dissolve on your tongue.

Something warm wraps around you, and of course, it's him. He's holding you, and while you've had the odd bit of skin contact with him here and there - hands clapping on your shoulders, fingertips as he passes you ketchup bottles, lips pressed to yours in the snow - you'd never expected it to be like this. This close, you can hear his heart pounding away, the scent of his deodorant drowning out any scrap of smoke or burning oil, and your hands - against your will - fist into the back of his t-shirt.

You stay like that until it subsides, whatever it is, Peter murmuring things you can't quite hear with your ears muffled by his arms. Eventually, though, he pulls back, and fixes you with a look you can't really identify. It's the same one from last night, where he'd stood in the middle of your apartment in his spandex and his mask, wanting something from you that you aren't sure you can give him.

"I know that doesn't... fix it," He says, his voice rumbling through you like a wave - like you were one of his webs, and you can feel his feet tugging at the threads, knowing exactly where he was, and how far away, with one tiny movement. Even if you weren't a web, if you weren't coworkers, if you weren't people (though you suppose, he technically isn't, at least not all the way) you'd probably still be able to find him. "But it's the truth."

Even if you could dredge up something meaningful and coherent to say, you don't think you'd be able to actually say it - not with your tongue feeling so heavy and sluggish in your mouth. You settle on the first thing that comes to mind - the onlything your mouth can remember the shape of.

“I’m sorry.”

Peter shakes his head. “Nothing to be sorry about.”

Your diaphragm is still convulsing with the aftershocks of tears, and your breath trembles in your lungs. It's all coming out now, and you don't think you'd be able to stop it if you wanted to - not now that dam is broken, and Peter hasn't gone running for the hills. Apparently, that's given your brain the go-ahead to spew out pure, babbling nonsense.

“I was awful to you.”

"You really weren't."

"I, I just-" Your breathing hitches again, your face burning hot and bleary, “God, this is pathetic. I’m supposed to be apologising to you.”

You're bowing your head, avoiding eye contact, but you can hear the way his face looks, just from the gentleness in his voice, the concern that soaks the room like gasoline, threatening to be set alight.

“You really think about yourself like this?” 

“I’m- I really am sorry Peter. I was so mean. You don’t deserve that.” 

It’s instant. It's genuine, and it's absolute. “I forgive you.”

There goes that familiar feeling again, the one that claws at you from the inside, and hates how nice he is, how soft he is when the world is so hard to him. You swallow thickly, forcing it down, and choke out a dry laugh, your face scrubbed raw from the heels of your hands. You probably look awful, but he's still looking at you like he always does - whatever that is.

“You know you’re allowed to hate me. You don’t have to be nice to me just because I’m snotting all over your couch.” 

“I could never hate you.”

There's a pang in your chest, and you're bent double, winded, by the gentleness of his tone. It hurts like a knife. 

“Don’t-“ Another shaking breath as you shake your head, “You can’t say things like that.”

“Look, I don't-" He begins, before he reshapes the words in his mouth, shuffling them like a pack of cards. That's how he's better than you, you think, he thinks before he speaks - he approaches things with kindness and care, instead of months of anger and resentment towards nothing in particular. "With the fire, even if we didn’t know each other then, when I think about what could have happened, if, if you-“

There it is, the unspoken part. The part that keeps you up at night with nightmares and the smell of ash in your hair that you can’t scrub out. Peter looks almost pained, his face screwed up as he debates between speaking his mind and holding his tongue - he seems to go on a whole journey in his head that’s plain as day across his face. He’s tense and strung tight, hands wringing themselves over and over and over, like he’s cleaning the countertops at the diner, and all of a sudden he’s your coworker again, and you think you taste bile. Eventually, he makes a decision, and speaks. 

“I guess I'm trying to say that I would miss you."

You’re almost winded by it. He says it so plainly, but it stabs you through the chest like a knife. Whatever emotion you’re experiencing right now is entirely new to you, and hurts like a bitch. 

Peter would miss you. He saves your life, he kisses you at work - and he would miss you. He just says it like it’s nothing, like it doesn’t knock the air out of you. 

It’s stupid - whether it was because he frustrated you, or confused you, or made you get that funny, swooping feeling in your stomach, you haven’t stopped thinking about him since you met him, and you’ve never even stepped foot in his house. And he looks like an angel by lamplight. And he would miss you. 

You don't remember much of the rest of the evening, between mumbles and awkward sips of shitty coffee, and the city growing louder outside as the sun sinks below the horizon.

Perhaps this is why people go to church, or believe in something bigger than themselves - in pure, desperate hopes that despite whatever they've done, there will be someone at the end who will forgive you, and treat you kindly. But Peter isn't one for spite, and his kindness is all the more special to you because of that. His forgiveness, however, is something closer to sacred - washing you over in its totality, its absolution. For the first time in a while, Manhattan's clatter and din isn't overwhelming, or undercutting all the shit going on inside your head, it simply exists; cutting through the wind and rustling the trees, like the pigeons that scavenge the back end of Joe's for pizza crusts and stray fries.

It's been a while, but when you leave Peter's, and take in another deep breath on the steps of his building - it feels clean and new. It's only on the walk home, when his voice is pinging around inside your head, that you realise - and it hits you like a train. 

He’s been more than a co-worker this whole time. 

How could you not have realised that? You used to have your head screwed on, the sensible one, and here you were; only just realising how absolutely, positively stupid you’ve been. Of course everything has felt so frustrating and complicated - you’ve been so blind to your own feelings that the realisation of it practically knocks the air out of you.

You’re not even sure when the world started looking brighter and the city started smelling sweeter, and you’re not even sure when that feeling became so all-encompassing and vast and deep and hot and cold all at the same time - but you know it’s all Peter’s fault. You want to hate him for it, at first, but you’re not sure that hating Peter would even be possible. Not when there’s no one in the world that looks at you like he does, no one who goes out of their way to make you smile. He makes you feel special, special enough for you to wonder why no one else has been looking at you like this all along. It’s not that the job has gotten easier, or the fancy coffee you can afford with your pay rise; it’s just that you’ve been stupid enough to develop stupid fucking feelings for the stupid guy you work with. 

Realising this feels like falling off of the Empire State Building. A familiar feeling, yes, when you tally up all of the emotional turmoil you’ve experienced - except now, there’s a small part of your brain that really, truly believes that Spider-Man would catch you.

beneath you, new york is awake.

it's sort of childish, the way you expect the city to sleep. the anticipation that eventually, after dark, the lights will go out and everyone will disappear, that there will be quiet. maybe in other places, but here, the streets toss and turn; lights burning brightly and the sidewalks humming with noise. in the evenings, you enjoy sitting on your fire escape, legs dangling from between the railings, nursing a cup of noodles. steam from grates and bin juice and sirens and chatter hang in the air, rising up and up past the fire escapes until the clouds swallow them up. new york smells like noise. bins and noise.

you wonder if you can smell new york from the top of the empire state building. peter would know.

but you don’t want to talk to peter right now. despite the fact that he’s currently sat on your fire escape, stuffed into your hoodie, and holding your bag of frozen peas to a bruise on his forehead. you don’t want to talk to him, but you’re sat here, hunched over a roll of body tape and gauze trying to fashion some sort of bandage to cover the cut on his cheek.

“talk to me.” he nudges at you with his foot, his legs splayed out across the grate and reaching for you as you work. you glare at him, your nail scissors nearly slipping out of your hand and onto the street below. under you, there’s a group of girls under a streetlight - arguing or laughing, you can’t quite tell - jostling under the glow like moths.

“sorry.” he sounds sheepish. like he knows you’re mad at him. like he’s doing that face he always does. you toss the scissors and the supplies back in through your apartment window and shift nearer to him.

“cheek.” you order, and he proffers it to you. you don’t look at him longer than you have to anymore, because you know if you do you’ll start going back on everything you promised yourself. it’s hard to look at him, like looking at the sun.

you concentrate on patching him up. you ignore how pretty he looks bathed in the dusk and the warm glow of streetlights, hints of far away neon casting pink and blue threads into his hair. you ignore the terse column of his neck, the slope of his nose and you certainly ignore his mouth.

he winces, a noise forcing its way between his teeth that sounds just like when you’d kiss him against the wall in his bedroom, just like when you would pull at his hair. he looks the same now, throat exposed, trusting, his adam’s apple bobbing as he swallows thickly. a plea forms behind his lips, breath hitching as you-

and then you frown before you think any further.

you don’t want to think about him.

“ow.” he cringes, a hand grasping at the wrought iron railing, and your eyes dart to his fingers before peter hisses again. you, admittedly, respond harsher thank you probably have to.

“do you want me to get the alcohol again?”

“you terrify me.” even now, he’s joking. god, you hate him.

you don’t.

“good.”

you step back to review your work, his face all patched up, and then he looks up at you and you want to throw yourself over the rail. there’s some small tangle in his hair, and you move to fix it, your fingers aching to smooth over his scalp the way you know he likes it, but then you see him watching you and you withdraw. instead, you return to your seat, as far from him as you can get.

“thanks.” he says, and you sip at a mug of now-cold tea, fighting the grimace that pulls at your mouth. you sniff, pouring the rest of it into your plant pots, and avoiding his eye contact, even though it bores into your temple like a drill.

the city chugs away. there’s a murmur in the grates, some sort of hum along the jagged horizon. he’s still staring at you, you can feel it.

you give in and glance at him. he’s just staring, all wide-eyed and pitiful. it's darker now, so the lights stand out on the rises of his cheeks, casting shadows over the brick and mortar of your apartment building. the bruise on his forehead looks almost luminous, and he’s holding the peas in the wrong spot so you lean in to correct him.

his breath hitches as you brush his hand. you want to hit him. you want to kiss him.

then you’re backing away before you can do anything, like you’ve been burnt, and you scowl.

“we need to stop doing this.”

“doing what?” peter is confused. you never knew if he was just oblivious or if he was purposefully playing dumb. or if you were just expecting too much from him.

“this. i’m not your nurse anymore, peter.” well, you weren’t supposed to be. you spent your formative years in this very situation - dragging him through your bedroom window, half-conscious, and stitching whatever was left of him together again.

it felt necessary at first; you were seventeen and they were emergencies, and you enjoyed looking after him. but then it felt like choking. there was all this waiting around, just to see if he would make it back alive, and then the constant exhaustion that came from three hours of sleep afterwards. sometimes he would forget to text you that he made it home, and you’d be trawling the streets at the crack of dawn, heart squeezing at every scrap of red you saw.

“sorry, i was just in the neighbourhood-“ he stammers, one of those white lies he thinks he can get away with - to cover his own ass because he knows you’re going to be upset.

“you were up in harlem.” he was on the news earlier, stopping some atm robbery. the news is always blaring, waiting to tell you that spider-man has been killed by some lunatic in a metal suit, and it was just some college kid this whole time. you hate the news.

“i was.” he admits, caught. he looks like you’ve stabbed him. like you’ve dug your fingers into his chest, through the sinew and muscle and the column of his sternum and ripped his heart out. like it’s beating in your hand. you squeeze it, digging your nails in.

“and you dragged yourself all the way downtown to my window again.” another wince from peter, the same one as when you pierce a suturing needle through his skin without anaesthetic.

“i did.” he’s uncomfortable now, like he never should have come and though part of you is glad he did, you wish he didn’t.

“and you know i can’t keep seeing you like this. i can’t just drop everything for you to patch you up because we’re not seventeen anymore-“

“i just miss you.” he says, fidgeting uncomfortably. “i wanted to see you.”

there’s silence between the two of you, but the city drones on. the girls at the lamppost are gone now, but in the distance, the b train rattles at the tracks, stirring them into a thunderstorm. his head is dropped like a sinner in prayer, picking at the stitching on the hoodie with a thumbnail. the fabric swamps him - it’s yours from midtown high, purposefully bought about three sizes too big. he looks sixteen again, all small and lithe, like when you met him. you’d nearly concussed him slamming your locker door open on the first day of junior year.

he’d worn a jumper that was too big on him, riddled with holes. the same jumper he wore a few months later after you kissed him and cuffed the sleeves to free his hands, revealing odd devices around his wrists and a red suit underneath. he tried to pass them off as handcuffs, then as bracelets. then he confessed.

“i miss you too, peter.” true, but you don’t like to say it. he needs to hear it, you think. it's not that you don’t want to be honest with him, it’s just that it’s easier not to. maybe one day you’ll just start being horrible to him - make it quicker for him to hate you, make it easier. “but i was kind of hoping that breaking up would mean that we’d get some space from each other.”

“you want space?” his head jolts up, strands of his hair falling over his forehead. they’re damp from the condensation of your homemade ice pack, shiny and dark. you want to push them back from his face, push your fingers through his hair, trace fingertips along his jaw and kiss him. he seems pitifully, painfully eager. he loves the idea of a problem, a real one he can tinker with and fix. “you said we broke up because we wanted different things. i can give you space. i’ll go to the moon.”

sometimes talking to peter is like trying to reason with a brick wall. you can say all you want, but he’ll be so stubborn you’ll want to tear your hair out. you can’t count the times he’s ushered you away from helping with a fight or set you down on some rooftop out of harm’s way. you need to be protected, even though it’s been four years of him being spider-man and apparently he still can’t put the damn bandages on himself.

“we broke up because we wanted different things. because it was always like this.” you gesture back and forth, drawing a line in the air from your chest to his. his face barely changes expression, he just looks at you like you can fix everything. you’re tired of fixing everything. of fixing him. “i’d have to drop everything to take care of you when you got fucked up, and you would drop me to go and be spider-man.”

“i-“

peter looks hurt, but somewhere inside you want to hurt him. you twist the knife.

“we broke up because we’re adults now, and i want more from a relationship than sitting around on until five in the morning hoping you’ll turn up, and the blood on your face will be someone else’s for a change.” there’s an attempt at your name, but you speak over him. there are barbed wires in your throat, all in a tangle, scratching and slashing. something rises in your chest, flooding your eyes with something sharp.

“we broke up, peter, because you’ve missed three of my birthdays getting the shit kicked out of you - and somewhere down the line, i realised it’s important that i get to see the person i'm dating. that they’re at least around. i don't even see you between classes anymore.”

his face crumples a bit, and there’s a stab in your stomach, like you’ve gone too far. there’s a part of you that wants to take it all back, kiss him hard and tell him you love him and apologise. you won’t, but you want to.

“i don’t think that’s fair, i can’t help that i have to do this-“ he was right. his stupid moral compass is both the best and worst thing about him. you want to beg him to be selfish, to do what he wants, not the city - but he won’t.

“i know. but i-“

“i can stop if you want. i’ll do it.” he doesn’t mean it, but it sounds like a threat. peter scrambles a little, pulling himself to his feet, despite your protests. ”i’ll stop being spider-man. i can give the suit to miles, he’s ready-“

“you don’t mean that.” he follows you inside through your bedroom window, manoeuvring his aching limbs through the frame and trying his best to avoid damaging the plants on your windowsill. there’s another hiss as he twists something that’s still healing, and he stumbles, nearly a heap on the floor.

“of course i mean it. i’ll stop if you want me to.” you’re practically fleeing him at this point, trying to manoeuvre him towards your front door. he’s being difficult, like always, eyes wide and shiny, like buttons. “i’ll do anything you want me to. please.”

you’d seen him cry a few times as a kid, when you were in grade school. once, flash thompson had pushed him over at recess, and his knees were skinned raw and bloody on the tarmac. he’d tried to stifle it to be brave, but you saw him at the nurse's office, scrubbing his cheeks red while she held wet paper towels over the scrapes.

it wasn’t very frequent. he was perhaps prone to a few tears at sappy films, but you didn’t see him actually cry that often since high school. for your birthday a while ago, he spent all of his bugle money on taking you to see falsettos on broadway, with no idea of what the show was about. when the house lights came on after, he'd buried his face in his jumper, pretending that he was fine and that 'it's just dusty in here', even though he would mope around for about a week after, sighing whenever he saw a chessboard.

the first year of college, you both snuck into the student radio station, all full of alcohol and giggles, and subjected the campus to ten play-throughs of 'class of 2013'. you'd both gotten more and more passionate and emotional with each sing-along, using a mop as a microphone. it was fun at first, but then it got a bit too real - the two of you had crawled under the desk to hide from it all, waking up in the morning with your limbs in a tangle. you'd held him, his cheek pressed to your shoulder, and you pretended not to notice the trembling strung through him.

it had been bad after uncle ben, you remember. it was like hide and seek between classes; he’d be late and you’d be excused to go and look for him, finding him shrunken in on himself under staircases, shoulders heaving, hands tugging and clutching at your jacket as you comforted him - but not much since then.

yet here he was, like his knees had been scraped, like whizzer had died, like he was figuring out how to pay for his own life too, like he’d held his uncle as he was bleeding out.

you don’t say anything, just look at him. there’s a hum about him, the air vibrating with the intensity of his gaze, the tremor in his voice.

“please.”

peter’s voice cracks so painfully it makes you wince a bit. tears brim at his waterline, shining like diamonds despite the dim lamplight of your bedroom - they could spill over any second now, like ripe fruit or fresh-bloomed flowers. his skin is blossoming with that tight, uncomfortable flush, his cheeks and nose reddening by the second. the hatred that simmered under your skin dissolves so quickly you wonder if it was ever there at all. you want to take care of him properly, like you did when you were teenagers and you were hellbent on having a first aid kit on you at all times. you say the only word you can muster.

“peter.” his name is a prayer, a plea for him to leave. to get away from you before you did something really stupid. his hands, his warm, strong hands, are on your arms. holding, begging.

“i love you.” he says it like it's a reason, not a fact. like it’s a confession, even though he’s been saying it to you for years now, over and over again. but now there’s some strange, forbidden quality to it; an unmarked map, an open door, the proverbial fruit that tempted eve. he’s scrabbling for something to hold onto, a foothold, anything, before you slip away from him. he grips you as if you’ll disintegrate. the pain that comes from not saying it back is what you imagine dying feels like.

peter stares, eyes wide and glossy and searching, digging for any sign of emotion from you. you try your best to set your face into something stoic, but his chest shudders, and next thing you know there are tear trails on his cheeks. he doesn’t wipe them away or hide them like before, just stands there as if he’s forgotten how, bent at the waist like a willow, heavy in the limbs.

he repeats himself. twice. he begs you to say it back. you just stand there, limp.

you watch your hands come up from your sides, finding themselves at the corners of his jaw, clenched tense. you feel the bones and sinew as he releases the tension there, the muscles shifting under his skin, and he presses his cheeks into your palms. there’s a sob from deep in his chest, pulling at the pit in his stomach. his eyebrows are low and knitted, betraying the seed of anger, of guilt that propels him. his face turns as if trying to hide from you, burying his mouth into your hand and kissing your palms - the image of cabanel’s angel.

he’s mirroring you, you notice, his hands at the back of your neck, and he’s pulling you towards him. your foreheads press together, and he brushes a tear from your cheek. there’s arguing outside from your neighbours, but then you wrap your arms around him and you can only hear his soft sniffling, and the drum of his heartbeat. his head sinks, burying into the crook of your neck, his breath hot and damp on your collarbone. your hands card through his hair, fingernails scratching lightly, and he squeezes you tighter, letting his body be held - cupped like a handful of holy water.

and then he shifts again, and you kiss, lips melting into each other like butter into sugar and your gut twists instantly with guilt. it hurts, but it’s peter. you just stand there and breathe each other in, like it’s the last time. it probably is. it hopefully is.

you pull away, tearing away from him slowly and agonisingly, ripping the seam. he looks at you like you’ve betrayed him, some wild, dismayed look in his eyes. panic. he’s already grabbing at your shirtsleeves again.

“no, no-“

“you need to go, pete.”

“please don’t do this to me.”

he catches your gaze, forces you to look at him, and it’s painful. you’ve stabbed him in the back.

“we can’t keep doing this.” your voice is thin and watery, wavering. you're screwing your eyes shut to avoid him, even though he’s flooding the rest of your senses, wrapping around you like a cloak. “we can’t keep seeing each other because we just end up backsliding, and-“

“let’s just backslide then.”

“we can’t, pete. you can’t come anymore.”

“then stop kissing me every time i do.” he looks wrecked, eyes bloodshot and dark-ringed, his hair in messy tufts. the bruise is blooming into a sickly green-yellow, reaching its fingers across his cheek. you want to kiss him again. “don’t be kind to me. don’t- don’t feed it, because i’ll just keep coming back.”

“you used to like it when i was mean to you.” it’s a shitty attempt at a joke, and it doesn’t land with him.

he says your name. a warning.

“you don’t understand how easy you are to need.” his voice is shot, run ragged. “i’m someone else when i’m with you. not spider-man- ”

“peter.”

“not peter, either. i can’t just give that up.”

you make it easier for him. ripping open the stitches, making it bleed. making him hate you.

“get out, pete.”

something else breaks inside of him, and the splinters dig their way into your chest. it’s perhaps the worst thing you’ve ever said, and it’s mumbled out through tears that mar your vision and scald your cheeks. he shakes his head, bordering disbelief.

“no, don’t do that. don’t do that.” you’re leading him to the door of your apartment, and he’s being surprisingly non-resistant. like he’s lost his fight. the grief of losing him is already pulling at you, not all at once, but in waves and pangs. “i couldn’t handle it.”

“i’m sorry.”

you don’t remember how, but at some point, peter had migrated to his knees, under your desk, and gotten to work there.

maybe it had something to do with your job; you’d been stuck at your desk for hours, sending email after email, and it apparently wasn’t fair that you were so busy, because you were ‘too pretty’ for it. then, while he’d been begging for your attention, pestering you, and you’d told him that there was one way he could get it - you’d originally meant that you quite fancied a cup of coffee, but this was much, much better.

he was good at it, you wouldn’t lie, using that mouth of his for something better than slinging quips and sarcastic insults at new york’s finest supervillains. he was even better at it when you’d grasped a handful of those dark curls - he needed a haircut, but you certainly weren’t complaining - and tugged, the guttural moans he made vibrating through you. he liked being directed, told what to do, you think, so you guided him by his hair, tugging him towards you and grinding up, into his mouth.

“fuck.” he whines to the inside of your thigh as he pulls away, lips slick, a shiver sparking down your sides at the pitch of it, the puff of his breath hot against your skin. his skin warms you where he touches, the strength of his hands on your legs, hooking them over his shoulders as he pleases you, tugging you down in your seat. your computer was long asleep, the ghost of your reflection in the darkened screen - slumped in your seat, chest heaving, the back of peter’s head between your legs.

“jesus christ, what’s gotten into you?” you murmur as he resumes his work, pleasure sparking along your spine. he’s incredibly talented with his tongue, too talented even, and he knows it, looking up at you from under his eyelashes, pupils dark and widened with arousal. there’s some of you - well, you or him - on the tip of his nose, but he doesn’t care, too engrossed in pleasing you.

“want your attention.” peter’s rasping out, pulling away for a split second before resuming his activities, and shit, he’s not letting up with the intensity of it. it’s almost desperate, the grip he has on your thighs, the vigour with which he consumes you, like you’re hades’ last pomegranate, and he’s the starved persephone, his tongue craving every last drop of you. he keeps adjusting his grip, squeezing and grasping at you, like he can’t decide where he wants to hold onto you, and you’re slipping away from him. “want you.”

“you have me.” you answer, and he moans again, low and long, a bassy hum. the sound of it reverberates in your fingertips, and he dissolves into another cracking whine, swirling that deft tongue of his with the determination you see when he fights for new yorks safety. there’s a mumble that comes from his chest, thrumming against you, but you don’t quite catch it.

“what?”

the same noise again. he’s avoiding your eye contact, and even though the light reaching under the desk is minimal, you can see his cheeks are flushed a hot and bashful pink. he’s always been like this, since you met, burying himself in his work when he was embarrassed. he once spent a whole month avoiding you at school, all because he’d accidentally walked into a glass door while making googly eyes at you across the room. now, though, you can sense him holding back, the tension of it like a terse thread; and when he mumbles one more time, you snap it for him, the tone of your voice eliciting a pleasured whimper.

“speak up.”

“can you tell me i’m doing good?” peter blurts out, and this time he doesn’t return to you, the absence of him making your stomach tie itself in knots. the two of you just stare at each other as he cleans himself off, swiping at his chin and licking every trace of you from his mouth. he’s panting, hair mussed into a chestnut halo, eyes half-lidded and round with want. he looks wrecked, but his hands still knead and grasp at your flesh, glued to your waist, scrabbling for purchase - a heathen clung to the homily. it’s something akin to begging, the aching, longing, yearning of him straining hard against the cotton of his underwear, looking at you like you could fix everything wrong with the world - like you could break him and put him together again. “tell me i’m good. i know it’s-”

“you want to be told that you’re a good boy, peter?” you ask, and the effect of it ripples through him; a stone dropped into a pond, the pleasure shuddering his spine and shoulders. his arms flex as he draws you closer with a new vigour, diving back into you, pleading against your skin with his friction-pinked lips.

“shit, shit, yes, please, i-”

the tangle that had been growing in the pit of your stomach tightens, and your body flexes against him, your hand flying back to his head and pushing him down, further down. there’s praise running from your lips like a waterfall, hitting him full force as he bathes in it, his hips curving and stuttering, searching for friction against the thin air. the eagerness of him spurs you on, wanting to stoke his desperation, and you keep feeding him compliments, telling him that he’s a good boy, good boy, good boy, the meaning of it giving way to pure, animalistic clarity

peter swears against you again, moving with you as you twitch and gasp out, like he’s stitched himself to you, arms locked tight around your legs and anchoring you close to him. there’s a brief, explosive moment of silence, where you’re almost certain the world stops spinning, when you squeeze, forcing his head down, and his mouth opens against you. a single, soundless moan, as he devours you, lapping up your manic rhapsody with his tongue and swallowing it down.

after the ringing in your ears and the fizzing in your veins has stopped, you see he’s collapsed against your thigh, panting and looking up at you for approval, shiny with what was left of you. you’re plastered to the leather of the chair, and it squeaks uncomfortably as you prop yourself up on the armrests, hearing the barely-audible keen that comes from his chest as you make eye contact with him.

If it was any other time, the expression on Peter’s face, marred by his waiter’s cloth, would be hilarious. However, your brain is still dealing with the emotional whiplash of the moment, every fuse in your brain simultaneously shorting out and melting the whole thing into a puddle. Your ears ring with panic, the both of you completely still, sprung like a trap ready for prey.

“That was like, a rat, right-?” You whisper, and Peter shushes you, eyes wide, grip tight on your hips. His eyes are on you, but his focus is clearly somewhere else, the hairs on his forearms pricked up, and you can practically see him calculating. It’s semi-ridiculous, the both of you naked from the waist down, but the heartbeat pounding in the back of your throat is making it hard for you to see the comedy.

When you say his name, a soft murmur, he straightens a little, taking in a sharp breath. He seems to have figured out whatever he was deducing in his head, and he helps you down, setting you on the floor and gathering your uniform trousers and underwear.

“Pete, it’s probably nothing-”

“Get dressed.” He whispers, barely audible, a finger over his lips, and you comply almost robotically. It’s odd, the way he’s moving, tiptoeing around all silent, like some sort of cat. He’s always been strong, you knew that, but every step is incredibly controlled as he redresses, limbs tense and firm like a gymnast. You’d have to ask about it later, if he'd had any training. He’s over at the door in an instant, while you’re still struggling with your fly, cracking the door open a sliver and peering through it. You attempt to speak again, fill the awkward, crushing silence, only for him to shush you.

You’d be lying if you weren’t a little disappointed, the anticipation of everything still wound up in your gut like a coiled spring, your flesh still hot and sensitive to the touch. Everything else has been replaced by a sheer, dreadful feeling, though - oscillating wildly between the anxiety of maybe being caught nearly fucking your coworker in the pantry, and the embarrassment of nearly fucking your coworker in the pantry. Maybe this whole thing was a blessing in disguise; nothing good would have come of whatever was about to happen between you two, no matter how bad you really, really wanted it - and still maybe, kinda did. You could brush off a kiss (well, in theory) but you can’t brush off knowing what Peter looks like naked, how he feels in your hand, how he sounds when you find just the right pace. The acrid burn of regret is already charring your tongue, your face burning in the pitch dark.

Oh, God. Peter has seen you naked.

“Uh, so, about the-” You begin, barely at a whisper, deciding to do damage control to avoid as much awkwardness as possible. Trying your best to tiptoe over to the door, Peter shushes you again, clamping a hand down over your mouth. Almost instinctively, he’s pulling your body close to his, tucking you in to his chest and wrapping an arm around you. He’s still staring intently into the crack in the door, pupils moving a mile a minute. If it was any other moment, you'd be melting away into his touch, but the tenseness of him is seeping into you, your heart pounding.

There’s a horrid, weighted moment of silence, waiting for whatever it was to make another noise, or for the coast to be clear, and you can feel Peter’s heartbeat strong and paced against your shoulder blades. The clock in the dining room ticks, ticks, ticks, and what must be a century passes.

And then, another noise.

Peter’s hold on you tightens, and he jolts from the door, shutting it over and pushing you into the furthest corner of the pantry. It’s unmistakable what the noise was, you heard it hundreds of times a shift, and only now do you fully realise just what’s happening. In the front of Joe’s, the till must be about forty years old, the numbers worn away with countless greasy, callused fingers, then drawn anew with a sharpie. It’s sticky and rusted slightly on the drawer, and makes a heavy groaning sound when it’s opened, followed by the rolling of the hinge tracks and the tinkle of quarters rattling in the chipped plastic drawers.

And unless Joe’s has suddenly become haunted, someone is in the front of the diner, and they are opening up the cash register.

“Oh my God.” You’re panicking, eyes wide, voice only just reigned into a hissing whisper-shout, watching Peter root through all of his pockets, then his apron. Then, he starts ransacking the pantry, clearly looking for something.

“Please, you have to be quiet.” He’s almost begging - he was doing something akin to begging not five instants ago, but this was different, more selfless. Whatever moment you had was long gone; replaced by an awful, palpable fear that lingers in the air like smog that burns your lungs. There’s no time to mourn the almost, because Peter’s practically turning the whole pantry upside down, somehow completely silently.

“Oh my God, the diner’s being robbed.”

“Yes, I know.”

“Oh my God.” You can’t help it, your brain is barely working now, sparking and smoking from having to shift gears this quickly, and you can’t really bring yourself to say much else. You’ve been scared before - Sal offered to drive you home once, and you only barely lived to regret it - but that seemed trivial, surface-level. This was something rawer and colder, deeper, a flood of pure fear. Your hormones are all over the place, drowning you, the adrenaline slowly plummeting you from arousal to a pent-up, jumpy sense of terror. Checking your pockets, you notice a distinct lack of your phone.

You’re doing really well at the whole manager thing so far. Good job, idiot.

“I don’t have my phone.”

“Me neither.” Peter’s looking you up and down, frowning, like he’s weighing things up in his head, but you’ve got no idea quite what. He seems to come to a decision though, pulling a folding chair from a gap in the shelves and propping it against the door to wedge it shut.

“We’re, uh, gonna just have to stay put and wait for help.”

You can’t help it, but through the panic, you’re rolling your eyes at him. It’s definitely the safest plan of action, but something irks you about just having to sit there and let some random rob Joe’s dry, twiddling your thumbs. Something irks you even more about who ‘help’ might come from, because if you couldn’t call the police, there was only one other person who ‘help’ could possibly be.

“Oh, from who, Spider-Man?” It perhaps comes out more venomous than you mean it to, and Peter’s alarmed, more panicked by the idea of Spider-Man than an actual, genuine burglar stealing his wages.

“No!” He blurts out, before taking a breath and trying to wrestle his voice back to a whisper. He’s hesitant, trying to style it out, but it’s just sort of awkward and stilted. “I mean, maybe - I don’t know!”

“I was joking, man, why would he help us?” Suffice to say, your opinion on Spider-Man hasn’t improved since you last spoke about him - if anything, Peter’s joined the ranks of your coworkers in poking fun at your Spider-based opinions, elbowing you and bringing you tiny house spiders he finds in the dirty corners of the diner, holding up the glass and coaster he caught it with. The jokes were fine, you could handle them pretty well at this point, but the actual presentation of insects was far too much - they were weirdly attracted to Peter, you think. He never had too much trouble catching them and if anything, he liked being able to set them free outside. He’d always have this funny look on his face, the same expression as when he’d serve a customer a perfectly fried egg, like he’d done a good job and got to be all proud of himself.

Now, though, it seems his patience with you is finally beginning to wear thin. It’s oddly serious, more serious than talking about his Uncle Ben, and even more serious than when he was fully ready to have sex in the diner’s pantry, kissing you hard against the very same shelf that had nearly crushed you a few months prior.

“I don’t want to talk about this right now.” His voice hits a tone you’ve never heard from him before, something lower and straighter than usual, roughed by the hushed volume of it. You feel your stubbornness kicking up for the first time in a while with him, wanting to dig your heels in.

“Neither do I, but Spider-Man’s not gonna be at Joe’s of all places, Peter. Why would he care about us? There’ll be something blowing up across town that’s more important.”

“What is your problem with him?” Your tone ignites something else in him now, and it seems you’ve finally managed to strike a nerve with him. If it was still the summer, the younger, bitterer you would have rejoiced at finally getting a rise out of him - but now, it just produces some sort of sinking feeling in the pit of you.

“He doesn’t rescue people in real life, we’re not special. We’re two normies in a shitty diner on the closing shift - he’s got bank robbers to stop.” You can tell Peter wants to say something, and part of you wants him to argue with you, but he won’t. His face shifts, it's minuscule but you see it anyway, and he swallows whatever he wants to say, taking a breath instead.

“Please, we have to just hide and be quiet, okay? We’ll call the cops when they leave.” He’s trying to save the situation, and even though he turns around, you can tell his brain is computing, calculating how to barricade the door, or lock you in - keep you safe. You’re scowling now, and you grab at his arm, spinning him back towards you again - he doesn’t fight you, just looks alarmed. Guilt twists in your gut.

“What? No way dude, those are our fucking wages - we don’t get paid if they get stolen.” That rings in Peter’s head, you can see it echoing around behind his eyes, and his expression shifts slightly. It sounds dramatic, but it was true - the diner was old school and family-run, there was no ‘upper management’ or well of resources to pay you from. If there was no money in the till, there was no money going into your bank account. This usually meant that your wages were quite high, because the staff was so small, and Joe’s was popular with the city - but getting robbed before you had managed to lock the money in the office was a certain downside.

“So you want to get shot?” Something in you drops.

You didn’t know there was a gun involved. What seemed like pretty moderate danger had now escalated very quickly, and you weren’t quite sure what to do about it.

“They have a gun?”

“I mean, I don’t know!”

“Oh, Peter!”

Somewhere in the past, you’re stuck in the staff room, watching the kitchen slowly fill with smoke and left to wonder if your coworkers even got out of the diner unharmed, unable to help. In the present, you feel like you owe them something, some level of risk, to get even. People need that money, you need that money, but other people have, like, kids and shit - so you’re going to make sure they get it.

Ah, fuck. Goddamn whatever complex you have going on at the moment. Goddamn crime. Goddamn Spider-Man especially.

“Stay here.”

“What? What are you doing?” Peter watches you with a grave look on his face, pale and ragged, as you search through the cupboard clutter for anything that may be of use. You find a large pizza pan - maybe useful as a shield? - stained brown from the oven and heavy in your grasp. It’ll do, and you realise with a biled taste in your mouth that it’s really all you have to defend yourself. Pete grabs at you, tugging at your uniform shirt in an entirely different manner now; you know whatever expression he has on his face will wrench your heart from your chest, so you avoid looking at it despite the comfort it usually brings you. 

“You’re not going out there.”

“I’m the most senior member of staff here, you have to do what I tell you to.”

“No, I don’t!”

“Just stay here, Pete. Please.” He’s trying his best to be defiant, but you’ll get your way - you don’t really have another choice. You’re technically responsible for him, the restaurant, and the wages currently being ripped from the till and stolen from the people you’ve worked with for years. Spurred on by some stupid sense of duty, and what can only be described as a flight response to the intimate moment not a few minutes prior; there’s nothing else to do about it, you have to keep Joe’s safe, and this - apparently - is the only viable way your brain can cook up right now..

“I’m in charge, okay? I’m in charge of you, and the rest of these people, and I have to look after them.”

“Stop it.” Peter’s eyes are wide and oddly shiny, too glossy for you to look at comfortably, and you avoid his gaze as if to give him privacy in whatever moment of emotion he’s experiencing. This just seems to upset him more, and he takes your face in his hands, his palms warm against your cheeks, the skin roughed from labour. “I’ll deal with it, okay? Let me do it.”

“Pete, these people rely on me to look after them and make sure they get paid. I’m their manager.” You’re trying to get away from him, no matter how much his touch quiets the panicked thumping in your chest, and he looks at you like you’ve broken his heart. “And with that role comes responsibility-”

Peter pales almost instantly, his face falling, tears springing to his eyes. Something inside you rips into a deep chasm at the sight of him, his voice intense and desperate.

“Don’t. Don’t finish that sentence. Please.” He’s tugging, grasping, at you now. Fingers scrambling along your skin for anything to hold tight. “You can’t go. Not after you’ve said that.”

The moment is raw, and there’s something underneath his skin that you seem to have pricked, some nerve you’ve accidentally struck. You’re trying to find something to say, to make it better, but you can’t think of anything.

“You can’t. I can’t lose-” Peter cuts himself off, his words dying away on his tongue. He’s looking you up and down, hands flexing at his sides. For a millisecond, you can tell he’s considering something, fingers stretching towards his palms. Then, nothing. “Please.”

And before he can protest any further, you’ve slipped through the pantry door, and slid the metal bolt into the slot on the doorjamb, locking it behind you.

The diner itself is eerily quiet and dark, brief flashes of light coming from the robber’s cellphone light as they illuminate the cash register. The atmosphere is thick, but you can hear the rustle of dollar bills in their hands, even though you’re a good few meters away from them. Crouching, you sneak across the kitchen, to the serving hatch, then dare to take a peek.

You can see a dark figure now, dressed in black, stuffing the day’s earnings into a backpack, backlit by the streetlights. All of a sudden, everything’s very real, and you feel as if your heart fell out of you a good while ago - like you left it with Peter on the pantry floor. This was no longer a hypothetical matter of moral duty, this was happening and it was happening now.

And somehow, the only part of your brain still working (the part that isn’t focused on the way your skin tingles after Peter kissed it) has decided that if the real Spider-Man isn’t coming, you’ll just have to be Spider-Man instead. A lot easier to say than do, probably.

Waiting until the intruder has turned away, you scurry along the floor, crouched low, until you can get yourself pressed flat along the back wall, and under the counter behind them. Your fingers are cramping from holding onto the pizza pan so tight, slippy in your nervously sweaty grasp. You adjust your hold on it, though you’re not quite sure what you’re going to do with it. You really should have thought this through. You probably should have stayed in the pantry with Peter.

Then, on the ceiling, something moves.

You swear for a second, that there’s a big, dark mass, creeping along the ceiling like a cockroach; the sight of it sending a bolt of fear through your spine. It’s something eldritch and awful, all limbs and joints but still vaguely human under the shadows cast over it. The stranger, nearly finished with their ransacking of the cash register, drops the wad of cash they were clutching, gasping at the shape on the ceiling. The bills fall inches from your toes, and the thick, hard hands of a man come scrabbling into view to try and collect them. The back wall is cold and hard against your back as you press yourself into it, tucking your body in on itself to make yourself as small as possible.

You think he’s still looking at whatever’s on the ceiling as he tries to gather the money, because he only hesitates when his fingers accidentally brush one of your undone laces.

Fuck.

Your heartbeat pounds in your ears as he stills, as he turns his head to look down. You can’t see his face, just hear his rattling breath and the rustle of his clothes, watching his hand collect the rest of the bills and then inching towards your foot. Your mind is racing, trying to decide whether or not to attempt to kick him, his dirty fingers outstretching towards your ankle as you push yourself further and further into the back wall.

That is until an odd thumping sound pierces the diner - rubber on tile, and silk shot through the air.

The stranger makes an odd sound, gravelled and rough as his hands, straightening up. Then, there's a strained grunt as some force slams him backwards against the back counter, the cutlery clattering in the trays. You’re scrambling out from behind his legs in an instant, checking the ceiling again for whatever thing you saw. It seems to have disappeared without a trace, but the stranger isn’t bothered about it anymore, because he’s regaining his footing and looking straight at you. You’re not sure if you recognise him or not, he’s just sort of generic-looking, but he’s freaked out, eyes alight like a caged animal. You attempt to gather the momentum to vault the serving counter, but it’s like you’re moving through syrup, your legs weighted and stuck.

He’s wiping some odd, tacky substance from his chest that you can’t make out in the low light, something that clings to his fingers like glue, then he’s reaching into his pocket and grabbing around for something you’re not sure you want to see. There’s movement behind you, in the front of the house, and someone calls your name from miles away, but you’re too focused on whatever’s about to happen in front of you. You blink, and a series of things happen.

One; something sends you stumbling to the side, a firm force planted into your shoulder blades, the warmth of it blossoming on your skin. You manage to catch yourself on the edge of the back counter before you fall into it and hurt yourself.

Two; there’s a gunshot, and the shattering of glass, a hair away from where you were just standing. The sound reverberates within you, turning your bones to puddles, and humming in the pizza pan that has managed to stay in your hand this whole time.

Three; you look up, and you’re greeted with none other than the business end of a pistol, a dark, unblinking eye. In that same moment, something flies into vision - some white streak of fluid - and rips the gun from his hand, sticking it to the back wall.

Four; before you can process anything that’s just happened, your body takes its own initiative, and slams the pizza pan down on his head. Whoever the fuck was in the diner is knocked out cold now, collapsing in a crumpled pile at your feet.

Your hands are still shaking when you come to, looking at the white substance that seems to have stuck the guy’s pistol to the wall. It’s thick and tacky, it forms tendons and limbs, it stretches its fingers out across the wallpaper like a hand, the gun nestled in its palm. It’s stringy, like the stuff you found on the jar in the pantry, all those weeks ago, after you sent everything tumbling to the floor and Peter caught you.

Looking in the direction of the gunshot, you almost want to laugh. On the photo wall, one of the frames has been blown to pieces, the bullet buried deep through the plaster right where your shocked, reindeer-antlered head would have been. You suppose you got your wish after all. Maybe you could get Sal to keep it with the hole instead of replacing it with a new one; make up some bullshit about preserving the history of the diner. You’d have to show Peter.

Peter.

“Peter!” You say his name in a gasp, shocked back to the situation at hand, unsure if he’s safe or not. What if more people came in through the back and ransacked the place? Stabbed him up? Left him for dead on the kitchen floor? Despite this, you still hope that when you look behind you, he won’t be there. You don’t even want to think about what could come after.

You’re turning, hoping you just spoke out loud to an empty diner; you’re turning with no idea what you’re going to do, about Peter or the ceiling monster you apparently now have to deal with.

“Are you okay?”

Great. You’re not sure to be upset or relieved.

Peter says your name about a hundred times, between strings of fervent apologies and other anxious ramblings. His hair is ruffled into a wild thatch from raking his fingers through, his face sparked into a hybrid of focus and panic. The vice on your chest relaxes from sheer relief that he’s close to you and unharmed - then immediately clutches you again when you realise he did the exact opposite of what you asked.

And then there’s that gaping pit in your stomach. The one that’s been growing since you had to lock yourself in the staff room and plug the door with old tablecloths to stop the smoke from getting through.

He’s alert and wound tight, that beautiful brain of his working a mile a minute; his hand is outstretched towards you, his eyebrows furrowed low. He’s still mumbling and you’re not listening, your ears ringing from the gunshot; his voice just adding to the din.

“Peter.” You say again, dumbstruck, and he cringes, screwing his eyes up as he keeps talking, the whole thing coming out in one long sound. Something simmers under your skin and in your gut.

“I’m sorry, I know you told me to stay, I’m sorry, I just kept thinking about Ben, and the gun, and-“

“Peter.”

“And what you said before, I couldn’t just sit there knowing you could get hurt, and after I lost-“

“Peter!” This one cuts through to him, puts a stopper in his mouth. You’re mad, that’s what it is, and the adrenaline pumping through you doesn’t help. It’s confusing, you can’t quite pinpoint what you’re mad at, but it’s got you wound up - so you pick something to vent your frustration at; your hand flung towards the white shit on the wall, glueing down a weapon that could have killed either one of you. “What the fuck is that?!”

Peter flinches. Strong, brave Peter flinches at you. He’s small, tiny even, shrinking under your gaze and betraying his every emotion with his eyes. He’s caught, cornered, backed into something he couldn’t possibly get himself out of.

“Is that your question for the day?” He asks, breathless, and you grow more exasperated.

“What?”

“Is that your question for the day?” When he repeats himself, he’s louder, but his still voice trembles. Usually, he fidgets, but he’s unnaturally still - rigid in what you can only describe as not a fight or flight response, but a freeze. “Because if it is, I have to be honest.”

You don’t want to push him, but it seems like you’ve fallen into your old ways of snark and bitterness, because you’re snapping at him, even though his reaction makes you want to cry.

“Yeah, it is! Does it matter?”

He’s upset - you’ve upset him, you horrid thing. Peter opens, then closes his mouth, and repeats this a good few times before he finally settles on what he wants to say. He’s shaking, you can see it in his hands as he turns to check that the intruder is still out cold on the diner floor.

In that same moment, you realise what all this mysterious tacky stuff has been - what you found on that jar, what’s glueing the gun to the wall. You’ve seen it before, splatters of it on the sidewalk, hanging from streetlights and awnings, trailing in the wind from skyscrapers. It’s not glue, or streamers, or spray paint - it’s a web.

Peter Parker takes a breath, and holds your gaze.

Being Peter’s friend isn’t as bad as you thought it was going to be. 

It was oddly tentative and gentle, like you were some sort of rescue animal that he didn’t want to scare, but you didn’t necessarily mind. You liked that you were taking it slow, even though you’d seen Peter typing away on his phone during breaktimes, adding random questions to ask you to a list that was already miles long. The questions he did ask were mercifully vague and simple, beginner stuff like your favourite colour, and your favourite TV show; it was nice and easy, you didn’t have much of ‘nice and easy’ in your life.

The whole ‘one question a day’ thing had turned out to be quite fun, and you were now the proud keeper of Peter’s most precious secrets; such as his birthday, the existence of an Aunt May, and a phone number. You’d initially been reluctant to open things up outside of the diner, but so far it had been nothing but pictures of cats he saw on his walks, and (nearly as) beautiful photographs of the Manhattan skyline, so you supposed it was worth it. It was a lovely little surprise every time, a new stroke of paint on the canvas of Peter Parker, and it had become something to look forward to when you saw you were on shift together.

And sure, maybe he did end up knowing Spider-Man, but he’d promised you that he didn’t tell him any of the stuff you said in the pantry, and that was good enough for you. He’d assured you many times that Spider-Man wouldn’t care about what you’d said - not that you were too bothered about it, but you supposed that if you were to be on any of Spider-Man’s ‘sides’, you may as well be in his good books, just in case. You’d been tempted to ask about Spider-Man himself, as your Question, but you’d given it a good think over and decided that you’re only supposed to be invading Peter’s privacy, not Spider-Man’s.

All in all, it was going quite well. Since Christmas, you’d been promoted to manager, which meant absolutely nothing in terms of pay or responsibility, just that you were now entitled to be even bossier than usual, which was greatly welcomed. It’s great - until the rota comes out for the last week of January, and you’re on the closing shift on Saturday. 

And if it couldn’t get any worse, Peter’s name is printed next to yours in what seems to be the boldest, blackest ink you’ve ever laid eyes on.

Don’t get you wrong, you like Peter, you can admit that now, freely. But it’s all been a bit confusing trying to figure out whether it’s a friend-like or a like-like - a closing shift together would ruin all of the progress you’d made. The last time you were alone together you, well, you remember it well.

That stupid kiss seems to haunt your dreams. Sometimes you wake up in a cold sweat, the ghost of his fingers tangled in your hair, your stomach sinking at the realisation you were no longer in that moment. Sure, it may have been one of your biggest mistakes, but Goddamn if you don’t think about it every day, and wish that it had gone on for just a millisecond longer. One more second, and you’d be happy, even though you wanted to be greedy and keep him there forever. There was an absence of him that you were feeling, through to your core; not all at once, but in waves that ebb and surge against your spine. 

All of a sudden, he’s appeared at your side, like usual, looking at the shift schedule. You’ve learnt to just expect him to be there now, even though he’s as quiet as a fucking mouse and it makes you jump every time. He needs a haircut, you think, but you’d miss the little duck-tail curls at the nape of his neck, tickling the collar of his uniform. They’d been soft when you’d held the back of his head, pulling his lips to yours as you’d held him against the wall in the alley, wanting to grab a fistful and tug. If you’d just had a little bit more time, if you’d been thinking clearly, you would have-

“Well, lookie here.” He says and he snaps you out of whatever Campari-hazed daydream you’d been living in, all self-satisfied, holding a hand across his brow and squinting at the rota board. He’s being annoying as per usual, inching closer towards the sheet and following your name with his finger, sounding it out. “I wonder who that is. I hope I’m not all alone on the closing shift with a stranger.”

“Shut up, man.” The rest of your coworkers are clearing off, grumbling about opening shifts, and people they don’t like working with, but Peter seems to want to keep you from wiping down the tables - not that you’re complaining, that shit was boring as hell. He pokes at you, and you smack him away, watching him pull out his phone to mark the new shifts in his calendar.

“And just after I finally unlocked friendship status. This is devastating.”

“Dude, what?” Sal is staring at you through the service hatch, doused in flour, and points to the spray bottle of table cleaner on the back counter. You roll your eyes, then pick it up and pretend to start cleaning until he disappears again. Peter is still keying in his shift times when you chuck the bottle and rag down in the cleaning kit.

“‘The day I’m on the closing shift with you is the day we’re not friends anymore.’ That’s what you said at the Christmas- I mean, the Multi-faith Festive Coworker Gathering.” Huh. You don’t have much memory of saying it, granted, you’d sacrificed precious memory space for other more important parts of that night, but Peter certainly doesn’t need to know that. Still, you decide to stick to past-you’s guns, and double down on whatever spite was driving you that evening.

“And I stand by it.” He seems to think you’re joking, but you kind of aren’t. It’s been a while since you’d been left alone together; in fact, you’d been trying to avoid it, and there was no telling what would happen. It was stupid really, but there was this odd vibe between you two, humming with tension, and it was almost always worse when you were vaguely alone. Once, you’d bumped into him at the walk-in when you’d been sent to unload the grocer’s delivery, and the atmosphere had been crazy. 

“Is this new?” He’d said, gesturing to your hair, before hooking those stupid, strong hands under the pine slats and lifting the weight from you like it was nothing. It was new, ever so slightly, and you’d been surprised he’d even noticed, considering your hair was stifled by the diner cap for hours at a time. You’d been a little lost for words, distracted by the way his sleeves were pushed up to his elbows and how his hair fell in front of his eyes, a streak of passata across the apple of his cheek and his hands dusted with flour. Sal was shouting him from the kitchen - he must have been in the middle of making pizzas, but he’d come to help you anyway. There’s just no way he was allowed to be that pretty, and you’d still found him pretty when he’d laughed at the dumbfounded look on your face, throwing you a wink.

“Oh, what, you like the kitchen look? Eau de pomodoro?” For fuck’s sake, and now he had the audacity to speak Italian again; he had to want you dead. His accent was getting better, and it was something close to Hell for you to hear him speak it. God must have known you’d be too powerful, that’s why he had to give you a weakness in the form of being attracted to Peter Parker; just to level the field and make it fair.

But current Peter, the Peter he is when he’s around other people, and not the Peter he is when he’s alone with you, has taken up wiping down the counter for you, waiting for you to speak. You haven’t really got anything to say to him, your train of thought clouded by whatever possessed him to have a smile that may as well be illegal.

“You’re not allowed to play any of your stupid indie shit. We will suffer in silence and be done as quickly as possible; do you understand me?”

“I thought you liked my music-”

“Do you understand me?” Peter pulls some odd, sheepish face at the sudden intensity of your voice, tucking his chin to his chest. It takes him a second to answer, and he draws the syllables out reluctantly.

“Ye-e-e-es…” 

“Then we won’t have any problems. It’ll just be a normal closing shift, and everything will be fine.”

Then Saturday comes and it is, most decidedly, not a normal closing shift.

Peter starts blasting his stupid indie shit the second the last of your coworkers walks out of the door. You’re armed with the keys to the diner, ready to come at him with all the force you’ve got in your exhausted, pizza-scented body, watching him use a mop as a fake microphone. Mercifully, it’s only short - some fast-paced sixties sounding thing with a fuzzy quality, though you’re not quite sure if that’s the speakers - so you don’t see much of a performance before it’s over. You like Peter, you really do, but his awful attempts at the high notes start up a twitch in your eye, and it only intensifies watching him whip around his waiter’s cloth, pretending to dab stage sweat from his face. 

“Thank you very much, I’ll be here all night.” 

“I hate you so much.”

“Join in!”

“Die.” He’s barely offering up a fake pout before you’re snatching the mop from him and resting it against the counter. The floor is as mucky and perpetually sticky as ever, but Sal still insists on people wiping it down, even though it makes absolutely no difference. “You have to put this all shit away, and then we have to actually clean the place, dude. I want to be home before midnight.” 

He’s tailing you as you head into the kitchen again, intercepting you by scrambling over the counter and catching you on the other side, a hand on your upper arm. It’s small, a flash of contact with him, but your stomach drops at the sensation of it. Every single thing with this guy feels like a bullet to the chest, and he doesn’t even know.

“You don’t want to eat the leftover fries first?”

Well, now that he mentions it, it would be a waste. 

It was a stupid decision, you knew that the second you made it, because you had now spent entirely too long sat up on the counter, devouring a plate of fries between you. And it was not worth it, those things were gross and soggy, yet neither of you could stop eating them, chewing in near silence save for the distant murmur of Peter’s music. He’s straddling the tabletop of the counter, the aglets of his untied laces clinking against the metal of the stools as he swings his legs. You have your legs crossed, shoes kicked onto the floor to prevent germs transferring to the surface, drenched in the harsh, fluorescent overhead lighting.

“I’ve always wanted to sit on the counter.” He says after a while, muffled by a mouthful of grease and salt and potato; and you nod at him, watching him shovel more of the pathetic things into his mouth. “Like in the movies.”

“I’ve only gotten to do it a few times.” It seems you've reached your endpoint with the fries, because the next one you pick up is barely solid, and you throw it back down to the plate, face wrinkled in disgust. “Blegh, why are fries always gross when they’re cold?”

“Well, they’re starches.”

“Yes, and?”

“Starches need hydration to taste good, which can only really be absorbed when they’re hot. After they cool down, the moisture leaves the starches and goes into the crust, which makes them soggy; also- what? Why are you looking at me like that?”

He’s barely done with his mini science lesson before he notices the way you’re staring at him, practically speechless. It’s entertaining to see him suddenly become bashful, hiding behind the limpest fry you’ve ever seen, used as an example not two seconds prior. He only dares to probe further when you start chuckling to yourself, shaking your head.

“What? What is it? What did I do now?”

“Dude, you need to quit this job.”

“Because I know fry science?”

“No, because you deserve better. You have this crazy genius brain and you’re so nice to everyone even though they yell at you, and you decide you want to work here?”

You’ve been sitting on this for a while, since you found out just how insanely smart he was, and the extent of his college education. You were desperate to know how this man was pulling all As at one of the most prestigious universities in the country, and was still finding time to mess around on the closing shift with you. At first, you were impressed, but that soon gave way to disappointment; not towards him but on his behalf, that he’d been forced into a minimum wage job to afford to live instead of being allowed to just enjoy his time at college and invent robots, or whatever the hell it was he did. He’s frowning at you slightly, but he’s got that moony-eyed expression again, when he gets a compliment he doesn’t know how to accept.

“You’re smart, man, you’re too good for a diner.”

“But this is good!” Peter has always been far too enthusiastic about the diner as a whole, you think, to the extent where his relentlessly positive attitude severely unnerved you for the first few weeks of knowing him. He’s all animated in the body, eyes bright and warm like amberstones, like he’s just seen colour for the first time. “Joe’s is a cultural landmark - best pizza in the country!”

“Bestie, you think the job is worth all this shit because we have good pizza?”

“No- look.” He scrabbles around in his apron pocket for his phone, then scrolls for a moment, eyes scanning over the screen. It takes a second, but then he lights up with recognition, and flips the device so you can see whatever relic he’s unearthed from his camera roll. 

There’s a picture of a young boy, around seven or eight with an older man, sitting in what is unmistakably the corner table by the back wall of Joe’s, the photo wall looking considerably barer behind the two of them. It must have been taken a while ago, even all of the pre-fire decor in the background looked considerably newer than it did when you’d started working there. They’re smiling over a pizza, the child expressively wielding a cutting wheel, and the man trying to subtly prevent him from slicing anyone’s eyes out. It’s only when you look closer that you see a sliver of a familiar, awful scarf among the coats and jackets in the back of the picture, that the kid suddenly bears a striking resemblance to the man sitting in front of you.

“Holy shit, that’s you?”

“That’s me and my Uncle Ben. We used to come here all the time on Fridays after school.”

“Ugly Scarf Uncle Ben?” He lets you take the phone from his hand, and you zoom in on the kid’s face, holding it up next to Peter’s to compare the two. It feels like you’ve been handed something priceless and private, worth more than anything else in the world - your own personal Mona Lisa. He was a cute kid, the same lopsided smile as the bigger version, but his hair was longer and messier now, a thatch of brown curls and fuzz where it’s been slept on funny. “You were a cute kid, what went wrong?”

“Shut up, I’m trying to give you backstory here.” He’s laughing, and it’s the most beautiful sound in the world, as always. Something about his laugh made you want to drop everything and just breathe it in, to witness and savour it. “It was special. Everyone here was always so happy, I mean, look at the photo wall.”

Sal has, to your very vocal disdain, printed and hung the staff photo from the party, your expression looking even redder and bashful as if out of spite. Peter makes his debut on the wall behind you, grinning away as usual, and strung between you and Sal like he’d always been part of the Joe’s family. It would have been a great picture, if he’d decided to keep his mouth shut for just a millisecond longer. Somehow, though, you still manage to look happier than last year, quite comfortable tucked under Peter’s arm, and the ghost of a smile still hidden behind the wide-eyed surprise on your face. Across from you, Peter is looking at the photo, smiling to himself, completely lost behind the eyes.

“Well, why doesn’t he come anymore? He didn’t like the Great Sauce Change of 2016?”

“He actually passed away a few years ago.” 

Ah, fuck, that really does explain a lot. He’d been talking about his aunt more often these days, and you really should’ve picked up on the absence of an uncle, especially considering how much he’s been toting around that awful scarf all winter. Shit, you were so mean about the scarf - your gut twists in discomfort, fighting the urge to cringe at all the times you'd ragged on him about it. This is why you needed to learn how to hold your tongue.

“Oh, Peter.” You’re doing that tone of voice you know that you’d hate, but it’s almost involuntary at this point, and you’re not really sure what else you can say about it. It’s odd; you feel useless about it, in the mammoth shadow of his grief, but there really isn't anything you can do. There’s nothing to fix. “I’m sorry, man, I know saying that does jack shit, but-“

“No, it’s fine. I get what you’re trying to say.” He’s shrugging and fidgeting with the fries; ripping them in half, peeling the crust, pretending to stub them out on the surface of the plate like cigarettes. “I like this job because I get to give that to other kids, y’know? That time with their family or their friends. It means a lot.”

“I’ve never thought about it like that.” Peter looks up at you, gifts you a small smile, and returns to playing with his food. He’s stacking them now, building an odd-looking, greasy Jenga tower.

“It’s like I owe a lot of people a lot of different things-“

“We’re all in debt to the government, Pete, there’s no need to mince words.”

“No, not government debt it’s… different. Like a people debt.” He’s all soft in the face again, a slight knot in his brow with concentration, the glow of the streetlights casting a warm glow across his cheeks and shining on his eyelashes. The world outside is otherwise dark, but you’re safe in this little, bright cocoon with Peter, watching his hands work, as you usually are. He is, unfortunately, perhaps the prettiest person you’ve ever met, and so very, incredibly interesting to listen to. Something in your stomach turns; you need to put a stop to these thoughts, no matter how nice they might be to indulge, because you’d only just become his friend, and there was no way in hell you were ruining that.

“I get to pay my debt through serving the best pizza in the world, and I get to spend some time with my uncle. It’s a win-win. Also, my other job is stressful as hell, and it’s nice to come in here and have the biggest problem in my life be a mozzarella shortage.” He’s done with his tower, because it falls over for the third time and he seems to give up. He looks up at you, checking you’re done with the fries, then leaves the counter to sweep the rest into the trash. “It’s low risk; sure, I get yelled at, but nobody dies.”

“What the fuck is your other job? It sounds dramatic as shit.” It’s a lame attempt at brightening the mood, but it works, a smile breaking out on his face and laughter rumbling through him. “What are you, Spider-Man?-”

“I’m not having the Spider-Man conversation with you again!” Peter rolls his eyes at you, then nudges you with the rim of the plate, signalling for you to get off of the counter. You dismount, then follow him as he circles the diner, collecting the used plates and crockery. In the far corner, while you’re stacking up glasses, he gets distracted by the staff photo, grinning to himself as he looks it over. He spends a lot of time there, when you think about it, pointing himself out to customers and then pointing you out and laughing, making jokes and people-pleasing like he usually does. Once, you’d interrogated him about what he’d told them, and he just shrugged at you, miming zipping his lips like the first time you’d met him. You’d even asked the customers and apparently he’d sworn them to secrecy or something, because they wouldn’t budge.

“You gonna take advantage of your new managership to break the staff photo and blackmail me to stay quiet?” He says, tapping on the glass, and you frown at him, using your waiter’s napkin to wipe the fingerprints from the glass. Someone should dust these, the newest one is already a bit gross along the top of the frame. You hate the photo, but there’s not really any point in destroying it, because everything was digitised now. Maybe you could have gotten away with it a few years ago, before Sal had gotten his head around how phones work, but knowing him, he probably doesn’t know how to delete stuff, and it would just keep getting reprinted and replaced. Besides, it was the only souvenir you had of the party, aside from the hangover to end all hangovers you’d had to nurse for three days straight.

“Nah, I’m quite fond of it now.” One of the forks is slipping from the stack of plates in your hand, but Peter manages to catch it and put it in his own pile, without even a glance in its direction. He was weird like that, he had these creepily good reflexes, but you supposed it was just a genetic thing. He finishes his examination of the photo, then turns to catch your gaze, the moment quickly softening like syrup. 

“It was a good night.”

“It was a good night.”

There’s a second between you, where you’ve captured each other, and then you break from it, clearing throats and turning away, hiding bashful faces. Your heart is thrumming quick and fast in your chest, and practically rattles the dishes in your grasp, stirring the chipped, patterned ceramic into a frenzied racket. Peter takes them from you into his sturdy grip, and the brush of his fingers against yours sets your mind scrambling for something to change the subject, wiping the sensation of him away on your apron. 

“Right, let’s get the cleaning supplies out before we bump into the morning shift.” You’re turning to leave, and he’s following you, making a detour to dump the dishes in the sink and practically running to catch up to you as you open the door to the pantry, calling your name. It’s odd to keep the cleaning supplies in the same place as the food, but there’s not really much space in the restaurant to do anything else with them - and it’s not like someone’s gonna accidentally put bleach in the pasta sauce. He’s fumbling with his words as you flick the light on, and then he shuts the door behind the two of you, enclosing you.

“Do you ever think about it?” Peter’s on edge, the whole sentence tumbling out of him in a haphazard tangle, and you’re already jumping to wild, inappropriate conclusions about what’s making him so nervous. You want it to be you, but you take a breath, hoping he doesn’t see the shaking in your hands.

“The morning shift? Not really, I try to think about it as little as possible. Law of attraction and all that-” The cleaning box is in your hands, you’re so close to being free of this cursed, cramped space, where all you can smell is him and his detergent and whatever he’s been helping Sal out with, but there’s the clatter of plastic as Peter sets his hands on your upper arms, turning you around to face him. The contact burns, burying into your bones, and festering into a deep ache. When he speaks, your blood runs cold.

“No. The kiss.”

Part of you feels stupid for genuinely believing that the kiss wouldn't get brought up again. So, you guess you have to talk about it now - now that he’s throwing The Word around and acknowledging the elephant in the room. Not just the room at this point, this goddamn elephant was everywhere; it followed you home, slept in your bed, lived in your chest. Something cold spreads through you, stabbing in your gut, and you would rather be swallowed by the ground than talk about the fucking kiss right now.

Because what was there to say? That even though you kissed once, a month ago, you hadn’t stopped thinking about him? That you spent every shift watching him while simultaneously pretending you didn't care about him? That he’d single-handedly derailed what felt like your whole life, with what was turning out to be the best and the  worst  kiss you’ve ever had. 

“We agreed it was a mistake.” You shake him off of you, then reach past him to turn off the pantry light so you can leave. Peter doesn’t let you go that easily, though, and he flicks the light back on, blocking you in. You shouldn’t have let him trap you, he’d tried to rope you into talking about it before but you’d always had an out - an escape route disguised as a customer upset that his orange juice was too orange. Now it was just you and him, alone . 

“I didn’t ask if you thought it was a mistake, I asked if you thought about it.”

“Is that your question for the day?” You’re dodging him, but it’s a risky game, despite the fact you’re willing to lie through your teeth. The kiss played in your head on repeat, constantly, but you’re not letting him have that; that’s for you to know, and take to the grave. You try to turn the light back off, but he’s right behind you, fumbling with the switch. You’re in a few, sweet seconds of total darkness, before the harsh bulb sputters back to life, drenching the both of you with the dim, white wash. He’s closer now, eyes wide with something you don’t want to think about, his voice pleading as he says your name.

“Just tell me.” 

“I don’t.” It’s probably the worst lie you’ve ever told. You can’t even put a sliver of your heart into making it believable, and he clearly doesn’t buy it. The hammering in your chest gets louder, spurned on by the proximity of him, the pure anxiety in his eyes. The air feels charged, pumped with a current that would shock either of you if you touched - which you very well might, he’s inches away from you now - and it crackles along the starch in your uniforms. You fight with the switch once more, and he wins out, taking the box from you and leaving your arms useless at your sides. It’s on the floor behind him within seconds, and he comes closer. The sight of him steals your breath from you, and you itch to touch him, before you lose the chance to again.

“Please be honest with me.”

“I can’t, Pete.” There’s one more attempt at the lightswitch, and some fuse somewhere must blow, because the whole diner is plunged into darkness, save for whatever small beams of streetlight can eke their way through the windows. Neither of you seem to notice, because Peter’s all nerves and momentum, his voice taking on a new hardness.

“Fine, question of the day; how do you  really  feel about the kiss?” Your heart leaps to your throat, and you feel as if you’re gonna throw up months and months of feelings, all strung together in a tight, barbed knot. You’re a liar, you’ve been lying to him for months, and you know you can lie now, but you won’t, because you promised you wouldn’t, and Peter was looking at you in a way that made your chest squeeze. It’s slowly paralysing you, and there’s only one way out; so you end up doing what you know you would have to do eventually, you’d just hoped it wouldn’t be so soon. It feels like throwing yourself off of the Empire State Building - like wind whipping past your ears.

You say how you really feel.

“I haven’t stopped thinking about you.” 

He exhales, and even though it shakes him, he’s steady and still, the warmth of him filling the tiny little cupboard. You’re eighty percent sure the world has stopped spinning, but you can honestly say that you don’t care, because you can see the emotions flooding through him, the weight on his chest either tightening or loosening - you can’t tell.

“Then do it again.”

“We can’t.”

“Kiss me again.  Please .” 

Peter - beautiful, kind,  merciful  Peter, does what he always does, and lets you take the lead. You know you shouldn’t, but you’re placing your hands on his jaw, feeling the way it tenses under your fingertips, brushing the light stubble there, and pulling him in towards you. Your lips meet, and you’re flooded with the same euphoric rush you had felt that night, at the party, your nerves tingling with the realisation that you’re kissing him -  you’re kissing Peter Parker again.

It’s only when you both remember that you’re both completely alone with no prior commitments, and Peter makes that noise you’ve been wanting to bottle since December, that the weight of the whole thing really sets in. And that weight is hard and warm against your thigh now, as you fall against the pantry shelves, pressed there gently by his hands like a flower between the pages of a book. And that weight makes Peter breathe out this precious little noise when you brush against it, and your head spins with the knowledge that you can get him to do it again and again and again. 

You guess were right, you really aren’t friends anymore, because there’s no coming back from whatever’s about to happen next.

What happens next, it turns out, is that you pull Peter closer, tugging and fumbling with the belt loops of his uniform, hooking your thumbs in and pressing his hips to yours. He hisses, like he’s been burnt, but rasps against you through the sensation of it, his face flushed pink and gasping into the mess that your hair has become. His hands are already roaming, in that panicked, indecisive way they were at the party, not quite sure where they want to sit, until he feels your hands under his shirt, realises that all pretences of pretending not to want each other are off, and then he’s grabbing at your ass, running his palms over the starched fabric of your  Joe’s  trousers.

His skin burns at you - almost as if the heat of him would scorch your fingerprints away - and his roaming hands spur on your own exploring. You’ve never been this close to him, seen this side of him, and the moment rings with newness and novelty, the rush of it pumping through your veins like liquid fire. Your hands shift at his neck, taking the waiter’s cloth from his shoulder and stuffing it on the shelf behind you, then return to his shoulders, feeling the slope of them. Under his uniform, his skin is pliable and soft, but there’s a quiet strongness underneath, his muscles flexing under your touch as his hands map your shape into his mind. His head bows, body curling in on itself, a ragged breath wracking him as he tries to reorientate himself. 

“I’m sorry.” He says, voice crackling, and his forehead presses to your shoulder, trying to hide his face. When you jostle him off of you and get a good look at him, his face is that same beautiful pink flush you’ve seen so many times before, blossoming across his lips. His eyes are darker now, overtaken by his widened pupils, but their usual honeyed brown colour brings you an odd sense of comfort. A hand of yours, the one gripping the back of his shirt, snakes up the back of his neck and rakes through his hair, pushing it back from his face and smoothing it into something semi-presentable. He leans into the feeling of it, sighing, but something clearly isn’t sitting right. 

“For what?” You scratch at his scalp, and the tension in him eases a little as he tips his head back into your touch, exposing his throat and the bob of his Adam’s apple as he swallows thickly. When he speaks again, his voice is a rambling hum, too absorbed in the scratching of his head to wrestle his voice out of its pleasured slur.

“This all happened pretty suddenly-“

“Hey, hey, it’s okay. We can stop if you want.”

“ No!  Uh-” Peter somehow gets even redder at how embarrassingly fast his answer is, and you see him fight the urge to hide his face again, mumbling into the charged air. “I don’t wanna stop.”

“Then shut up.” You kiss him again, bruisingly, and you sink your teeth right back into the moment, savouring every noise that falls from him, feather-light. Your fingers scramble to your shirt buttons and with some fumbling, your uniform is falling open, further exposing you to him. He hesitates for a second, pulling away from you to stare down at you, and you’re almost instantaneously embarrassed at the way he’s taking you in. 

“It’s rude to stare.” His collar is bundled into your fist, yanking him back to you for another searing kiss, his lips parting in a gasp, and his tongue doing something that makes your head spin. Peter murmurs against you between kisses, pressing himself harder against you, the length of him straining against the polyester. 

“I wanted to look at you properly.” 

“We’re in the dark, dude.”

“Don’t call me that.” He pulls away, and mutters against the shell of your ear, his breaths coming in hot pants as he cants his hips up towards you. Some part of him brushes against you at the perfect angle, and he swallows whatever noise you dare make like a starved man. “Say my name,  please . Call me my name.”

“ Peter! ” You mean for it to come across as scandalised, you really do, but Peter’s too in the zone to notice, and the effects of it wrack through him. There are a few breaths shared between the two of you, then his hands flex on your ass and you both stew in the newfound silence. Something heavy and  dangerous  was in the air, strung between you, and you know exactly what it is. 

The S Word. 

Neither of you wants to bring it up, but neither of you are entirely sure just how far this is going. It’s not like you’re a prude, or shy about this sort of thing, it’s just that it was  Peter . Peter made it different. Being in the cupboard at your job on the Saturday night closing shift made it different. Suddenly, saying  The Word  would open up all of these possibilities that you were certain you would never be able to come back from;  The Word  meant that you would stop being friends. Whether that was through never speaking to each other again from sheer shame, or something far scarier;  that you would like it. 

The worst part is that you  wanted  to, and by the looks of it - as well as the feel of him against you - Peter wanted to. Eventually, he speaks. 

“Are we…doing this?”

“No follow-up questions.” You quip, almost automatically, and you share a few nervous bubbles of breathless laughter, the sensation of him prickling goosebumps along your skin and tickling your nerves like champagne. Your bravado fizzles away quickly, leaving pure curiosity and a soft anxiety in its wake. “Do you want to?”

“Yes.”   Peter spares you from the anticipation any longer, clearly much more interested in something else than trying to keep up the charade of feigned nonchalance with you. His hands are higher now, skimming the flesh of your stomach, and moving up to your waist and rib cage. It’s important work to him, it seems, committing every inch, hair and mark to his memory, nestling you into the fabric of his being. “I don’t bring condoms to work, though. Or lube. We could use Sal’s marinara sauce-“

“Oh my God, shut the fuck up, Parker.” You’re rolling your eyes, and he’s smiling, a chuckle moving through him as he dips his head again, turning his attentions to the delicate skin of your neck, migrating upwards to the sensitive spot nestled under your ear. It prickles along your spine, and sings in the dip of your ribcage. 

“Ah, there’s - um - there’s condoms and lube packets under the shelves somewhere, actually. We got them in for World Sexual Health Day, Sal is  weirdly  passionate about national holidays-”

“Now, that’s just ridiculous.” His voice is muffled in your neck, but it rumbles through him and resonates into you, tingling your spine. 

“I was supposed to move them to the staff room like, three months ago. This is why being lazy is a good thing.”

“I’m not sure about that.” He comes away from you, stooping low to pull out one of the large Tupperware storage boxes that lived under the shelves. He rifled around for a moment, hunting, before resurfacing from the clutter with a string of condoms, the wrappers printed with the Italian flag. 

“Oh, great. They’re Italian.”

“They’re condoms, they work. Get one on.” You’re undoing the button of your pants now, wrestling with the zipper, frustrated with the lack of skin contact currently being used to torture you. Every inch of you seemed to cry out for his attention,  some  definitely more than most - you’d never considered pants to be evil before this moment, but now you’re convinced. In an instant, Peter is in front of you again, condom wrapper caught between the teeth, taking the task from you and you’re practising melting in his presence. His strong hands thumbs over the waistband and your hips, shucking them from you in one smooth movement. 

“I can take my own pants off.” You sputter, but the indignancy of it is only half there, more of an act than anything. He’s shushing you, shelving the condom behind you and kissing you again, shutting you up, dissolving your stubborncies into syrupy noises that coat his tongue. He’s damn skilled with his tongue, just like his hands, and your head whirls with the possibilities now open to you. 

Not that this was going to become a regular thing.  By fuck, though, you hoped it did. 

“I wanted to make you feel special.” He murmurs, a little self-conscious, and when you look down, his pants are unzipped. The fly hangs open, unleashing a whole new host of sights you’d only been accidentally-but-not-really thinking about since December. 

“ Oh .” You, can’t help it, it just sort of slips out, and you clap a hand over your mouth, his eyes widening - somewhere between amusement and offence. 

“' Oh '? Oh, what?” 

“‘ Oh ’ nothing.” 

It all becomes sort of a blur after that, and it’s almost worryingly easy how quickly you settle into the rut of it, the rest of the world falling away and leaving only Peter, and the searing, all-devouring want that festers in the pit of your stomach. He double, triple, quadruple checks that you’re absolutely certain you want to do this, and then he allows himself to enjoy it, grasping at your skin as if you were about to disappear. One of his warm, strong hands reaches the apex of your thigh, teetering there for an agonising second, then shifts between your legs. 

The gasp that comes from you is completely involuntary, and you grab fistfuls of his shirt, kissing him harder to muffle out whatever other noises you would make. He’s as talented as you’d hoped he’d be, his fingers hitting every spot and curve of you, playing you like a damn fiddle. Peter, because he’s actually insane, kisses you and swallows whatever noises slip out of you, unrelenting. 

“Jump,” Peter murmurs through kisses, adjusting his grip on you. His other hand is trailing down now, kneading at the flesh of your ass and his head is sinking to the curve in your neck, burying kisses there like treasure. You’re suddenly hyper-conscious of the sound you’re making when he’s not muffling it, obscenities filling the small pantry and weaving themselves into the rows of seasonings and cheeses. 

“What?” You ask, despite the fact you’ve already registered what he’s said; and the way he’s pulling at your legs is a clear give away as to what he wants. “Pete, you don’t have to pick me up-“

“ Jump .” He repeats, and your body responds automatically to the tone of his voice. He catches you effortlessly - this dude is ridiculously strong, it’s actually kind of weird - and presses you up against the shelves, your legs parting to let his hips rest against yours. You both shudder at the new sensation, a moan catching in Peter’s throat, the length of him pressed against you. 

He props you up on a shelf, and when your weight has been shifted, it’s easier for your own hands to wander, slipping along the front of him and brushing over whatever amount of his underwear is currently shown from behind his unzipped fly. He jolts at the contact, huffing, and when you hook a finger into his waistline, freeing him, he murmurs at the sensation of the cool air against his skin.

You nearly freeze. You knew you weren’t going to be able to come back from this but seeing him -  all of him  - really cemented it. Something in the back of your mind murmurs, the same anxious monster that filled your veins with ice after you’d pinned him against a wall and kissed him; but when you take him into your hand, swiping your thumb across the lubrication that has collected across the tip, he groans and hisses, drowning it out.  Goddamn it , you should have known he would be this noisy - he’s noisy enough the rest of the time. It’s like music to your ears, though, the little hums and pants you pull from him as your hand moves, his own fingers stuttering against you. It’s only when his mouth falls open, his moan echoing on the walls alongside your name, begged like a prayer, that you realise the extent of it.

“You have to be quiet.” The diner is empty, you know that, but some part of you is paranoid anyway. Peter’s body waivers, twitching in your palm, and the tiny movement elicits a thrill in you. He’s heavy and hot in your hand, skin as smooth as a pearl, pre-ejaculate illuminating the shaft in whatever minuscule peals of light fought their way into the pantry.

“Sorry, it-it’s been a while, and it feels really good-” You notice the way he responds to your tone, the way you feel his heartbeat against the heel of your hand, and the great, raging beast of desire within you rejoices at the discovery he likes to be ordered around a little. Looking back, it was obvious from the start; the way he’d turned red whenever you’d grill him a little, the way he’d suddenly got awkward with you following your promotion - you should have known. Maybe then, you could have made fun of him for it, and avoided the absolutely insatiable desire you now had to indulge him in it. Some risky thought pops into your head, and you consider it for a moment, before biting the bullet. He moans again, long and low, as his hips flex and the tip of him bumps at your crotch, slipping over the skin where you need him most.

Reaching behind you, you feel blindly for his waiter’s cloth, patting around where you’d tucked it earlier. Finding it over your right shoulder, you pull from him, watching a desperate, needy spark dance in his dark eyes, and stuff the fabric into his mouth. Almost instantly, he’s melting away, eyebrows crumpling, the fabric stifling the next noise that comes from him - louder than the others. His fingers brush up against some tender spot, and your core shocks you, the slowly mounting pressure within you beginning to crest itself into a wave. Holding his starried gaze, Peter’s chest is heaving with need, his hand squeezing at your thigh, signalling his consent.

You feel around behind you again, grabbing the condom wrapper, and ripping it open, the latex disc nearly slipping from your hands as he changes the rhythm of his movements, your body shuddering. And then, while you’re feeling for the tip of the condom, you hear something that makes you both freeze in your tracks.