Three Marks
She'd moved in the night. When he'd fallen asleep she'd been on his chest. Now she was on her stomach, face turned away, one arm hanging off the mattress edge. The sheet had pulled to her waist and her back was bare and the white hair was everywhere, covering the pillow, covering half her face, a strand caught in the corner of her mouth. The scar on her ribs was visible.
He looked at her for a while. The room was grey with early light through the window and the space heater had cycled off and the air was cool and she was warm next to him. Felicia Hardy without the costume or the attitude. A twenty-year-old girl sleeping in a room full of stolen paintings.
She didn't do mornings. He'd figured that out. Mornings implied staying. Staying implied commitment she wasn't ready to name. The first time they'd slept together she'd kicked him out at 4 AM and the second time she'd pretended to be asleep until he left. He'd started leaving before she woke up because it was easier on both of them.
He sat on the edge of the mattress and she made a sound. Small, unconscious. Her fingers curled against the sheet. He waited until her breathing evened again and got up.
The bathroom was down the hall. A curtain instead of a door. The mirror above the sink was cracked in the upper left corner and the light was a bare bulb and it turned his skin yellow.
He looked at himself.
Cindy's web-marks around his right wrist. Fading. The organic adhesive left a faint pattern on the skin, like lace, and it lasted about a week before it dissolved entirely. She'd grabbed his wrist during the pheromone night and held on and the silk had left its trace. Five days old, maybe six.
Felicia's bite on his neck. Fresh. Dark purple at the center, red at the edges, and it sat right below his jaw on the left side where a collar wouldn't cover it. She'd put it there on purpose. She always put them where they'd show.
Scratches on his shoulders. Older. Cindy's from a week ago. And on his back, Felicia's from last night, the long ones between his shoulder blades that burned when he'd swung through Chinatown.
Three girls. One body. If you were reading him like a map you'd know he'd been busy and you'd know he wasn't careful about it and you'd know at least two of them had nails.
He put his shirt on. The collar didn't cover the bite. He tried adjusting it. The collar still didn't cover the bite. He tried the other direction. The bite was visible from every angle.
He went back to the bedroom. Felicia was in the same position. He picked up his bag and his jacket and put his shoes on by the door. The stolen paintings leaned against the wall. The space heater had kicked back on and the orange light painted the floor.
He left.
MJ was at the kitchen table when he came downstairs.
She had a pencil behind her ear and a sketchbook open in front of her and a mug of coffee that had been there long enough for the cream to form a skin. Her hair was in a messy bun and she was wearing a shirt he was pretty sure was his and the morning light through the kitchen window turned the red of her hair into copper.
She'd been staying over more. Three nights a week, sometimes four. The guest room had her books now. Her phone charger. A toothbrush in the bathroom. May had started buying her cereal without being asked and Ben included her in the crossword discussion at breakfast.
"Morning, Tiger." She didn't look up. Her pencil moved across the page in short confident strokes. Fashion sketches, from the angle.
"Morning."
He walked past her to the fridge. Opened it. Orange juice, leftover pasta, the milk Ben liked that nobody else drank. He grabbed the juice and closed the fridge and when he turned around MJ's pencil had stopped.
She was looking at his neck.
Her eyes went from the bite mark to his face. Back to the bite mark. Back to his face. Her expression didn't change.
"That's new," she said.
He adjusted his collar. Uselessly.
She went back to sketching. The pencil moved. Her strokes were harder now. He could hear the difference. The graphite pressing into the paper with a force that hadn't been there thirty seconds ago.
"There's coffee," she said. "May made it before she left."
"Thanks."
He poured coffee. She sketched. The kitchen was quiet. Ben was at the hardware store. May had a shift at the hospital.
He sat across from her. She didn't look up. Her pencil kept moving. Harder.
He drank his coffee and didn't say anything and she sketched and didn't say anything and the bite mark on his neck throbbed in the warm kitchen and MJ Watson's pencil pressed into the paper hard enough that the line she was drawing went darker than every other line on the page.
Oscorp Tower was glass and steel on the East River and the lobby had a waterfall that ran over polished stone and Peter's spider-sense hummed the moment he walked in. Low. Ambient. The building was fine. What was inside it wasn't.
His internship was on Tuesdays and Thursdays. He'd been coming for three weeks now, badged through the lobby, assigned to the biomedical wing on the fifteenth floor. The work was legitimate. Dr. Chandra, the neural enhancement researcher, was brilliant and kind and the lab was clean and well-funded and everything about the fifteenth floor was exactly what Oscorp wanted you to see.
Peter hadn't been to the basement yet.
Today he had a reason. Dr. Chandra had sent him to retrieve a sample tray from cold storage, which was on sublevel two. He took the elevator down. The lights were fluorescent, the air was colder, and the hallway forked at the bottom. Left to cold storage. Right to a corridor that dead-ended at a steel door with a keypad and a biometric scanner.
He went left. Got the sample tray. Came back to the fork.
The steel door was on the right.
His spider-sense spiked. Sharp, localized, originating from behind that door. The same kind of warning he'd felt near the irradiated spider before it bit him. Danger in potential. The kind that waits.
A security guard sat in a chair next to the door. Older guy, grey at the temples, reading a paperback he'd folded in half.
"Wrong turn?" the guard said.
"What's down there?"
"Dr. Osborn's private lab. Nobody goes in." He went back to reading. The conversation was over.
Peter looked at the door. The spider-sense buzzed. He thought about the Goblin from the movies. Willem Dafoe's face. Green mask. Pumpkin bombs. The way the character split between Norman and the monster inside him. In the movies it had been dramatic and loud. Standing here in a fluorescent basement with a bored security guard reading a paperback, it felt small and close and real.
He took the sample tray upstairs.
On the way out of the building, Norman Osborn was in the lobby.
He stood near the waterfall, talking to a woman in a suit who was nodding at everything he said. Tall. Silver at the temples. He stood like he knew people were watching. He saw Peter and his face rearranged into warmth. Practiced.
"Peter." He broke away from the woman without excusing himself. "Enjoying yourself?"
"The neural lab is incredible. Dr. Chandra's work on synaptic mapping could change how we treat degenerative-"
"Yes, yes." Norman waved a hand. Impatient with the details he'd funded. "Chandra's good. But she's phase one. Wait until you see what comes next."
His smile stayed in place. Peter watched for the rest of his face to catch up and it didn't. The eyes behind the smile were somewhere else entirely.
"Can't wait," Peter said.
Norman put a hand on his shoulder. The grip was firm and brief and Peter's spider-sense flared once, quick, and then Norman's hand was gone and he was walking back to the woman in the suit and the moment was over.
Peter left the building. The spider-sense settled. The East River was grey and flat and a tugboat was pushing a barge toward the harbor. He walked three blocks before the humming in his skull went completely quiet.
The Bugle smelled like printer toner and old carpet and the coffee that Robbie Robertson made was bad enough that Peter suspected it was deliberate.
JJJ's latest editorial was pinned to the corkboard in the bullpen. He read it standing in front of the board with his messenger bag over his shoulder and a stack of Spider-Man photos in his hand that he'd come to sell.
SPIDER-MAN: MASKED CRIMINAL COSTS NEW YORK MILLIONS. The subhead was worse. Property damage estimates from vigilante encounters exceed city budget for road repair. When will New York hold the mask accountable?
He'd saved three people last week. A woman whose car had been T-boned on the FDR. A kid who'd gone over a railing on the Williamsburg Bridge. A store owner on Amsterdam whose register was being emptied at gunpoint. The store owner had been in the paper. The headline had been about the broken window. The store owner had been quoted saying he wished Spider-Man hadn't gotten involved.
Peter had swung over Amsterdam two days ago and the store owner had crossed the street.
"For what it's worth."
Betty was behind him. She had a filing folder in her arms and her hair was down today and she was wearing the glasses she only wore when Jameson wasn't looking because he'd told her once they made her look like a librarian.
"I don't believe what he prints," she said. She was looking at him. At him specifically, Peter Parker, freelance photographer. "The photos you bring in. The angles. You'd have to be right next to him to get those shots. Whoever Spider-Man is, you're closer to him than anyone in this building." She paused. "So I think you'd know if he were a criminal."
The printer clicked and reset behind them. Someone's phone rang at a desk near the window.
"I'll tell him you said so," Peter said.
Betty's mouth tightened. She adjusted the filing folder against her chest. "Just- be careful." She walked away. Her heels clicked on the tile and she didn't turn around.
He sold the photos. Forty bucks for the set. Jameson didn't look at him once.