Aftershock
The scratches were gone by morning. He checked in the bathroom mirror, shirt pulled up, turning sideways in the yellow light. Nothing. The skin was smooth from his collarbone to his navel. His spider healing had eaten four claw marks overnight and left nothing behind and he stood there with his shirt bunched against his chest looking at skin that had no business being that clean.
His fingers traced the path anyway. Collarbone to stomach. The drag of her claws through fabric and skin.
He put his shirt down. Brushed his teeth. His toothbrush was running low and he kept forgetting to tell May.
School was the same as it always was, which was the problem.
He'd been swinging between buildings ten hours ago. He'd stopped a carjacking. He'd chased a girl in a catsuit across four rooftops in Chelsea and she'd put her hand on his chest and dragged her claws through him and called him Spider. And now he was walking into Midtown High at 7:45 AM with his backpack over one shoulder and his shirt untucked and the hallway smelled like floor wax and he had four scratches on his chest that nobody could see.
He'd slept maybe two hours. He wasn't tired. His body didn't seem to need as much sleep anymore, which was useful but also meant he'd spent four hours lying in the dark thinking about leather and green eyes.
The hallway was crowded. First bell hadn't rung yet. Lockers slamming, sneakers squeaking, somebody laughing too loud near the bathroom. Peter was walking toward homeroom with his hands in his pockets when the shoulder hit him.
Flash Thompson. Same shoulder, same angle. Letter jacket, jaw, grin. A shoulder-check aimed at Peter's chest with two hundred pounds of high school quarterback behind it.
Peter didn't move.
He just didn't go anywhere. Flash hit him and the impact went into Peter's frame and stopped there, absorbed, like hitting a post. Flash's sneakers actually squeaked on the tile when his own momentum bounced back.
Flash's jaw dropped open. Closed. His eyes went narrow, then wide, then narrow again. He shoved again. Harder. Both hands this time, palms flat against Peter's chest. Peter's feet didn't slide. His backpack didn't shift. He stood there and Flash pushed him and it was like pushing a wall and Flash's arms were straining and Peter wasn't doing anything, he was just standing.
Peter's hand came up. Reflex. He caught Flash's right wrist. Just holding it. His fingers wrapped around Flash's wrist and his grip was steady and his thumb sat against the pulse point and Flash's pulse was fast.
"Not today, Flash."
His voice came out quiet.
The space around them went quiet too. Flash was standing with one wrist in Peter's grip and his other hand still flat against Peter's chest and he was looking at Peter's face and he wasn't grinning anymore. His jaw was working. He was staring at Peter like he was seeing him for the first time.
Peter let go. Flash stepped back. Rubbed his wrist. Looked at Peter for another second, then turned and walked toward the gym with his shoulders tight and his hands in his jacket pockets.
Peter picked up his backpack strap and walked toward homeroom.
Twenty feet ahead, MJ Watson was leaning against a bank of lockers with her bag over one shoulder and her phone in her hand. She'd been watching. Her thumb had stopped moving on the screen. Her mouth was closed, one corner pulled sideways, and she looked at Peter and said one word:
"Huh."
Then she went back to her phone.
To the right, coming out of the girls' bathroom, Liz Allan stopped mid-step. Her eyes moved from the spot where Flash had been to Peter. She blinked and kept walking.
At the far end of the hallway, Jessica Jones was watching from the stairwell, hand frozen on her bag strap.
Peter walked into homeroom. The bell rang.
Science was fourth period. Mrs. Ritter was in one of her restructuring moods. She'd shuffled the seating chart and the lab partner assignments and was reading the new pairings off a clipboard while the class settled in. Peter was drawing a spiral on the corner of his notebook and not paying attention until he heard his name next to another name and the chair beside him moved.
Gwen Stacy sat down. Headband. Blue cardigan. Pen already in her hand, cap between her teeth.
"Parker."
"Stacy."
"Mrs. Ritter said to catch you up on the enzyme kinetics lab. You missed the pre-lab."
"I was here for the pre-lab."
"Your worksheet was blank."
"I was absorbing it through the paper."
She didn't laugh. Her mouth moved, a twitch at one corner, but she caught it and put it away. She opened her notebook. He opened his. They worked.
Gwen Stacy was fast. He already knew that from watching her in class, the hand that went up before the question was finished, but working next to her was different. She wrote in a small precise hand that was almost mechanical in its evenness. Every letter the same size. Every equation centered on the line. She didn't cross things out. She erased them, rewrote them, erased again until the page was clean.
The worksheet was enzyme kinetics. Michaelis-Menten. Vmax, Km, substrate concentration. The chemistry came naturally and the adult riding along had passed college biochemistry, barely, and the math was straightforward.
He wrote the answers. He used the notation he'd been trained on, which wasn't the notation Mrs. Ritter used, because he defaulted to what he knew and wasn't thinking about it.
Gwen's pen stopped.
She was looking at his worksheet. At the notation. She leaned sideways, her shoulder almost touching his, and her eyes moved across his work.
"You're using PDG format."
Peter looked at his paper. He'd written the rate constants in Particle Data Group notation. Standard in academic physics journals. Not standard in tenth-grade chemistry at a public school in Queens.
"What?"
"Particle Data Group. The rate constant notation. You've got the propagated uncertainty formatted the way they do it in the Review of Particle Physics." She tapped his paper with the end of her pen. "Nobody at Midtown uses that. I've only seen it in the Columbia summer lecture PDFs."
He looked at her. She was watching him with her head tilted, blue eyes sharp, the pen cap between her teeth again. Cataloging.
"I probably picked it up online," Peter said. "YouTube."
"YouTube doesn't teach PDG notation."
"The good channels do."
She held his eyes for another two seconds. Then she turned back to her own worksheet and said, without looking up: "You're smarter than you pretend to be, Parker."
He watched her write something in the margin of her notebook. Not on the worksheet. In her own notebook, at the edge of a page that already had other notes on it. Small print. She angled it away from him when she wrote and she didn't show him what it said.
He went back to the worksheet. Used Mrs. Ritter's notation for the rest of it. His handwriting got deliberately worse.
Cindy texted him at lunch. Outside. Side entrance. Don't make it weird.
She was leaning against the chain-link fence by the faculty parking lot when he came out. Hoodie, jeans, hair in a ponytail, her school bag over one shoulder. Queens Metropolitan let out at 2:30 but she had a free period last block and had taken the bus over.
"Hey," she said.
"Hey."
They went inside. The cafeteria was half-empty because fifth period lunch was the unpopular slot and most of the kids who could leave campus had left. They sat at a table near the windows. Peter had a sandwich from home, turkey and cheese, May's handwriting on the bag. Cindy had a granola bar she didn't open.
Their knees touched under the table.
Neither of them moved.
It was accidental. The table was narrow and the bench seats were close together and their legs just met, his right knee against her left, through jeans and denim, a contact point about the size of a fist. And the hum started. Low. Underneath everything. Their heartbeats locked and the warmth spread from the knee outward and Peter went a little sideways. Lower than the sparring pin. Steady. It hummed through the contact and didn't stop.
Cindy was looking at her granola bar. She unwrapped it. Took a bite. Chewed. Her jaw was tight. Her knee didn't move.
They sat like that for twenty minutes. He ate his sandwich. She ate her granola bar. They talked about school and her hockey schedule and whether the Q65 bus driver was the same guy who'd been driving the route since 2003, and their knees stayed together under the table and the hum stayed constant and neither of them acknowledged it.
"Hector texted me," she said. Quiet. Looking at the table.
"Yeah?"
"He wants to get back together. He said he misses me." She turned the granola bar wrapper over in her fingers. "We had a fight last week. About me being distant."
"What did you say?"
"Nothing. I read the text and I felt nothing. Not sad, not guilty, not anything. I read it and my chest was just empty." She looked at him. "Then you walked in."
He waited.
"And I couldn't breathe." Her voice was flat. Controlled. Like she'd rehearsed this on the bus. "You walked through the door and my heart rate went up thirty beats and my hands got warm and I couldn't breathe. Because of a guy I've known for three weeks." She put the wrapper down. "I know it's the bond. I know. It doesn't help."
A kid dropped a tray somewhere behind them. The crash echoed in the half-empty cafeteria. Cindy flinched. Peter didn't.
Their knees were still touching.
"We should train," Peter said.
"Yeah," Cindy said. "We should."
The backyard was warm. May was at the church. Ben was at work. The neighbor's dog was asleep at the fence and a sprinkler was going three yards over, the sound of it rhythmic and soft.
They started with footwork. Cindy was better at lateral movement, Peter was better at closing distance. They'd figured out their styles over the past few sessions. She was a counterpuncher. He was a presser. The sparring worked because they covered each other's gaps.
"Your stance is still wide," Peter said. "You're leaving your right side open when you shift."
"My right side is fine."
"Your right side is going to get you kicked in the ribs."
She planted her feet. Dropped into her guard. "Show me."
He stepped behind her. Put his hands on her hips. Standard training, him adjusting her positioning, but his hands on her body fired the bond and they both pretended it didn't.
"Narrow," he said. He pushed her right hip forward. She adjusted. "More." She adjusted again. His thumbs were against the jut of her hipbones through the denim and his fingers were on the curve below and her ponytail was in his face and her shampoo was in his lungs.
"Like this?"
"Close. Bend your knees more."
She bent her knees. And leaned back.
Her back pressed against his chest. Full contact. Shoulders to hips. Her spine against his sternum, the back of her head against his collarbone. Her weight settled into him and his hands were still on her hips and the hum went from background noise to a roar and his heartbeat was in his throat.
Half a second. Maybe a full second. She was against him and her breathing was against his chest and the warmth of her through two layers of fabric and the inch between them had disappeared.
She stepped forward. Turned around. Her cheeks were red. Her eyes were on his chest.
"Show me again," she said. Her voice had dropped. By enough.
They looked at each other across three feet of grass with the sprinkler going next door and the dog asleep at the fence.
"From the top," Peter said.
They went from the top.
Harry called at six.
Peter was in his room, door closed, lying on his bed with his legs hanging off the edge and his phone on speaker on his chest. The crack in the plaster was above him. He'd been looking at it since he lay down.
"Dude," Harry said. "Have you seen the Bugle website?"
"I don't read the Bugle website."
"You should. There's a headline. 'NEW YORK'S NEWEST MENACE — SPIDER-MAN TERRORIZES QUEENS.' With a question mark, but the question mark is doing a lot of work."
Peter sat up. "What?"
"Some guy in a spider costume stopped a carjacking last night. There's a blurry photo from a dashcam. You can barely see anything. The Bugle's calling him a menace already and the costume looks terrible." Harry laughed. "They're paying freelance for photos of him. Five hundred bucks for a clear shot. Jonah Jameson wants to 'expose the wall-crawling threat,' quote unquote."
Five hundred dollars for a photo. He looked at his phone.
"Five hundred bucks," he said.
"Right? That's a lot for a photo of some guy in tights."
"That's a lot for a photo of anything."
"My dad was reading about it this morning. Over eggs." Harry's voice went casual. Too casual. "He said the police response was interesting. The webbing left residue that dissolved in about an hour. He said someone smart made that."
Peter's fingers curled against the bedspread. Norman Osborn. Reading about Spider-Man over eggs. Analyzing the webbing.
"Your dad reads the Bugle?"
"My dad reads everything."
"Huh."
They talked for a few more minutes. The gala in two weeks. Harry's tie complaint. The food being genuinely good and the speeches being genuinely bad. Normal stuff. Easy stuff. Peter said the right things at the right times. Green mask. Pumpkin bombs. The man reading about webbing over breakfast eggs didn't know the kid his son brought home was the wall-crawling threat.
Harry hung up. Peter lay back down.
Five hundred dollars for a photo.
He had a camera. Ben's old Pentax, in the hall closet, with a zoom lens that still worked. May had mentioned it last month when she'd been cleaning out the shelf above the winter coats.
His fingertips were still warm from Cindy's hipbones through the denim.