Daylight
Morning light turned the apartment into a different room.
The stolen paintings looked like stolen paintings. The Monet, which had looked warm under the space heater's glow, was just a painting leaning against a baseboard in a squat, the frame dusty, the wall behind it water-stained. The space heater had clicked off sometime in the night and the cold had come back. The sleeping bag was thin. The floor under it was hard. There was a dent in the wall where his hand had gone through the plaster and the cracked edges were sharp in the daylight.
Felicia was watching him.
She was on her side, head propped on her hand, wearing the t-shirt he'd had on under the suit. It hung off one shoulder and ended at her thighs and her white hair was loose and tangled and her face was bare and her eyes were green and lighter in the grey morning than they'd been in the dark. The scar near her eyebrow was more visible without makeup. She'd been crying last night and the evidence was in the skin around her eyes, slightly puffy, slightly raw, and she was looking at him with an expression he couldn't read because he'd only ever seen her face in the dark or behind a mask.
"Hi, Felicia Hardy," he said.
"Hi, Peter Parker."
The names sounded different in daylight. On a rooftop with masks they were playing characters. In a grey morning on a sleeping bag they were two people who'd slept together and one of them had school.
"You were staring," he said.
"I was looking. Staring implies commitment."
"You've been looking for a while."
"You looked different asleep." She sat up. The t-shirt rode up on her thigh. "Younger."
"How old did you think I was?"
"Old enough." She got up and walked to the mini-fridge and she was wearing his shirt and nothing else and the morning light was on her legs and her hair and Peter lay on the sleeping bag and forgot what he'd been about to say.
She pulled out a carton of orange juice. Drank from it standing by the window, one hand on the sill. Her white hair caught the light. She stood there and drank and looked out at the rooftops and the water towers and the November sky and Peter watched her from the sleeping bag. His shirt on her body. Her legs. The line of her neck where his mouth had been six hours ago.
"Stop staring," she said.
"You're wearing my shirt."
"It's comfortable."
"It looks better on you."
"Everything looks better on me." She took another sip. "I need to call about my father."
"I have school."
She looked at him. The corner of her mouth pulled sideways.
"School," she said.
"Midtown High. Home of the Fighting Tigers. We have a mascot."
"I had sex with a guy who has a mascot."
"The mascot is a tiger in a baseball cap. Very dignified."
She laughed. Short, surprised, the kind that leaked out before she could catch it. She covered her mouth with the back of her hand and the orange juice carton was in the other and the shirt was slipping off her shoulder.
She called the Black Fox's contact from a burner phone she kept in the mini-fridge, which was a strange place for a phone but Felicia had a system. She stood by the window and talked in a voice too low for him to hear and her free hand gripped the windowsill hard enough that her knuckles went white. The call lasted about a minute.
"Stable," she said. "Still stable."
"That's good."
"That's the same word as yesterday." She put the phone back in the fridge. Stood there with the door open, looking at the water bottles and the cheese and the apple that was beyond help. Then she closed it. "He's stable and I'm in a squatted apartment wearing a high schooler's t-shirt."
"It's a nice t-shirt."
"Peter."
"Sorry."
She looked at him and her eyes were wet and her mouth was trying to be funny and wasn't getting there and he crossed the room and kissed her forehead. She went still. Her hand found his arm and held it. She didn't say anything. Then she stepped back and wiped her eyes with her wrist.
"I need to get dressed," she said. "You need to go to school. We need to stop standing in this apartment."
"I agree with at least two of those."
He had a web-stash on a rooftop three blocks east. Jeans, a hoodie, sneakers, his phone. He'd kept stashes around the city for patrol changeovers and until now that was the only reason he'd ever needed one. He swung over, changed, checked his phone. Two missed calls from Harry. A text from Liz about a movie on Friday with a question mark and a popcorn emoji. Three texts from Cindy, spaced across yesterday and last night, each one shorter than the last. The final one was just: 🔪
He looked at that for a while. Then he put the phone in his pocket and swung back.
Felicia was dressed when he got back. Jeans, jacket, boots. Her white hair was pulled back and tucked into a black beanie and with the hair hidden she looked like anyone else in Chelsea except for how she moved. She checked the hallway before opening the door. She tested the deadbolt after locking it. She walked on the balls of her feet.
"You walk like you're casing the building," he said.
"I am casing the building."
"We're leaving the building."
"You can case a building while leaving it."
They took the stairs down and out through a side entrance that opened onto an alley that smelled like wet concrete and pho from the Vietnamese place next door. Chelsea in the morning was different from Chelsea at night. More dogs. More people in athleisure walking those dogs. A construction crew setting up on the corner of Twenty-Third and Ninth, orange cones out, a jackhammer sitting idle. A woman walked past holding three coffees in a cardboard carrier and talking on the phone about someone named Derek who apparently couldn't be trusted with a lease.
Peter walked next to Felicia and the strangeness of it kept hitting him. She was tall. Her stride was longer than his. She kept to the building side of the sidewalk, away from the curb, one hand in her jacket pocket and the other hanging loose. She didn't touch him. They looked like two people who happened to be walking in the same direction.
She walked differently out of costume. In the catsuit she performed. The hips, the shoulders, corners turned like the corner should be grateful. In jeans and a beanie she was tighter. Shoulders up, jaw set, someone used to being watched who didn't like it.
A guy on a bench was eating a bagel and his dog was eating the newspaper the guy had put down to eat the bagel. Peter watched this longer than he should have. The dog was winning.
"This doesn't make us a thing," she said.
"Sure."
"I mean it."
"I believe you."
"You're smirking."
"I'm absolutely not smirking."
She punched his arm. Below the shoulder, real fist, Black Fox training behind it. He rubbed the spot.
"Don't tell anyone about last night," she said.
"Who would I tell?"
"The other one." She adjusted the beanie. Didn't look at him. "With the scratches."
"Her name is Cindy."
They walked half a block without talking. A bodega with a cat asleep in the window. A dry cleaner with a SAME DAY sign that probably didn't mean it. A bike messenger cut between them at the intersection and Peter pulled Felicia back by the arm, spider-sense firing before the bike arrived, and she looked at his hand on her arm and then at him and she pulled free. Slowly.
"Cindy," she said. "Is she the webbing one?"
"How do you know about the webbing?"
"I investigate."
"You investigate my girlfriend's webbing?"
Felicia stopped walking.
"Girlfriend," she said.
"It's- yeah."
She looked at him. Green eyes under the beanie. Her jaw was tight.
"She know about me?"
"Not yet."
"You going to tell her?"
"Yeah."
"What are you going to say?"
"I don't know. Something honest and probably stupid."
"That tracks." She turned and kept walking. Her shoulders were higher than they'd been a block ago and the hand closest to him had curled into a fist inside her jacket pocket. They walked another block. She didn't say anything. He didn't push. A cab went by too fast and hit a puddle and the water sprayed across the sidewalk and they both stepped back at the same time, spider-reflexes and thief-instincts producing the same result.
"She going to be okay with this?" Felicia said.
"I don't know."
"You don't know a lot of things."
"That's fair."
"Is she going to come find me?"
"Cindy?" He thought about it. The webbing. The compass. The possessiveness that ran through everything she did. "Maybe."
"Good," Felicia said. She said it the way she'd say it about a lock that turned out to be more complicated than she'd expected.
They reached the subway entrance at Twenty-Third Street. The stairs going down into fluorescent light and the underground smell of metal and old water. A man at the bottom was playing saxophone, case open with a few bills in it. He was playing "My Funny Valentine" and he was pretty good.
Felicia stopped at the top of the stairs.
"Same time tonight?" she said.
"The fire escape?"
"The fire escape."
She looked at him. In daylight, in jeans, with her hair tucked away, she could've been anyone he passed on the street. Except for the eyes. Those were the same ones that had watched him from behind a domino mask on a rooftop in September.
"Peter Parker," she said. Quiet.
She went down the stairs. Through the turnstile and onto the platform. She turned and looked at him through the glass barrier and the train pulled in and she got on and she was looking at him through the window. She didn't wave. The doors closed and the train moved and she watched him until the window carried her out of sight.
Peter stood at the top of the subway stairs on Twenty-Third Street. November morning. Cold. The construction crew had started the jackhammer. The woman with the coffees was gone. Derek's lease situation remained unresolved.
The knife emoji was on his phone. Cindy had sent it at 11:47 last night. While he was inside Felicia on a wall in Chelsea, Cindy had been in Queens sending a knife emoji and the compass had been doing whatever the compass did when Peter was with someone else.
He put his hands in his pockets and walked toward the other subway entrance on the far side of the street and the knife sat in his chest and he had forty minutes to get to school and figure out what honest and stupid looked like when you said it to the girl whose scratches were on your back while you were sleeping with someone else.
He didn't figure it out by the time the train came. He got on anyway.