"
So you bought our love or our marriage or whatever you want to call it. So what? Peter and I found each other before. We'll find each other again."
"That's not what I'm interested in, Mrs. Parker. My father is looking to... siphon goodness from the world. He wants to hoard what he's bought. Me, I want to grow my stock. Get more power from it."
"And how would you go about doing that?"
"It's simple,
Mr. Parker.
And you can even do it together, if you like it..."
Upon waking, it took Mary Jane a moment to remember where she was. Long night. Long day. She'd been up half the night...
more
than half the night... and now she's woken up at dusk. Perfect. Great for her tan.
Last night/day had been another fawning period of celebrity. She'd gone with Millie and Patsy to Mortimerville, where they'd been greeted by Jason Wyngarde and his famous hospitality. MJ was pretty sure Patsy had slept with him.
At least
Patsy.
Everyone had put on their Caribbean garb and flowered around his personal suite, been treated to a seafood dinner... Millie was too nervous to eat much, but Mary Jane never turned down lobster. And then Wyngarde had said he didn't just want one of them for the new modeling contract, but all three of them. They'd jumped up, squealed, hugged each other... Patsy had practically wrapped herself around the redhead like a car crashing into a streetlight... (Maybe it
wasn't
Wyngarde she had slept with.)
Then there'd been signed papers, uncorked champagne, and just enough uppers to get Mary Jane through the shuttle ride for the flight back to New York. She'd spent the flight better medicated than a cancer patient. Then somehow she'd ended up back in her apartment...
She
hoped
it was her apartment. She really wasn't in the mood for 'you call me' 'no, I'll call you'...
She wasn't in much of a mood for anything.
Sweeping her legs off the bed, Mary Jane settled her feet on the carpet. Yes. Definitely her apartment. And she'd come home alone. Not even a flight attendant as a souvenir. Well, that fit her mood as well. She stumbled at first, heading to the bathroom, then put on a sultry stroll just for the hell of it, impressing herself as she approached the mirror.
MJ, you look simply delectable.
She had tawny crimson hair that bounced from her shoulders like it had its own personal wind. Her eyes were large, only slightly narrowing with her usual large smile, that crinkled her lips and lifted her cheeks and seemed almost too wide to leave room for the green orbs to shine with merriment, but there was always enough space for them. And if she was adorable from the neck up, then from the neck down she was outright sensual. High, round breasts, a tight trim ass, a set of legs that seemed to have designed to wrap around a man... all spun together into the nubile, bouncy sort of flesh that seemed almost too sexual for her adoring smile and bright eyes.
And she was naked.
Getting on in years, tigress... but who the hell can tell?
Surveying her naked body, Mary Jane couldn't find the slightest flaw, anything that would give a man pause in pursuing her. There was nothing. At twenty-nine, she looked almost the same as she had when she'd started acting with Peter, fresh out of high school, and she had the nudes to prove it. It took exercise, Yoga, a very exclusive mutant's very high-priced power, and more jogging than anyone not named Quicksilver should do, but she'd avoided both the scalpel and wrinkles. And she hadn't put on a pound in years.
Her breasts were still full and high, smoothly separated, capped in small dark nipples that seemed to carry all the perkiness in her body. Her abdomen was trim and long, flaring out into womanly hips and a curvy ass that turned yoga pants into ripe fruit. Below that, slender legs carried her with long, gliding grace. She could still walk a runway, dance in a music video, even pirouette if the Spider-Man movies ever remembered she (or rather Gwen) was a ballerina. And certainly, there'd been plenty of men and women who'd enjoyed her body, even more than they had when she was younger. Back then, after all, she was just Mary Jane Watson. Now she was
The
Mary Jane Watson, supermodel, actress, secondhand Gwen Stacy, Mrs. Spider-Man...
The only problem was that none of it seemed real.
It wasn't just the dreams. She was an actress—if weird dreams were the worst of her issues, even
she'd
think she was boring. It was how real...
some
of it felt. Acting scenes with Peter. Playing his wife. Kissing him. Or even just joking around at press conferences, doing photoshoots together, getting to pretend to be the dutiful wife. Everyone else talked about how underwritten Gwen was, what a lame part it was, but MJ had always had a soft spot for it. Just being Mrs. Spider-Man in those ridiculous movies.
Only now it was more than that. Now it barely even felt like acting. Playing hide and seek with the paparazzi, getting pampered at spas, making it rain at the hottest nightclubs or watching the Superbowl from a private skybox—that was acting. That was someone else.
She wondered if Peter knew she'd been writing her own dialogue. Hell, in the Gwen scenes, she rewrote his dialogue too. And he seemed to be delivering it better, more passionately—he was no Julliard graduate, but he seemed downright naturalistic in the scenes she wrote. Like that was really how he was with...
Gwen Stacy.
Mary Jane would call Patsy. If they hadn't slept together yet, there was no reason they shouldn't. Or no, maybe a brunette.
A brunette with short hair...
***
Peter got back to Queens late. He ran out of skyscrapers to swing from fast, but it was probably good for him to walk the rest of the way, slowing down, cooling off. The streets were deserted this deep into the evening, so he was able to avoid the usual mob that his costume would bring.
Queens barely resembled his childhood memories anymore. Since the House of M, it had been gentrified for mutant yuppies. His aunt and uncle's place had doubled in value several times, and Peter was well aware that the only reason they hadn't been forced out was his good graces. He'd bought out the entire block, transforming it into the Parker compound, the old house scalped and retained as Ben and May's wing of the place, sans exterior walls and roof. The rest had been built up by the mutant Frank Lloyd Wright.
Gwen was waiting up for him inside the gate, pushing it open as he came through. She didn't seem angry, but strangely excited. He asked her the reason, but she was coy and evasive, only offering him a martini she'd had waiting for him. Peter took it and, though he rarely drank, thought that this was a good time. It wasn't like he didn't want to be in Gwen's good graces...
Peter knew it was supposed to calm him down, but it didn't do much for him. He usually had an uneasy suspicion that the other shoe was going to drop, and the interludes with both Karla and then Lily had raised that suspicion to Threat Level Orange. Bad enough he'd fucked his therapist, but his best friend's girl? He'd never been the tabloid fodder type, the guy cheating on his wife with the nanny or going to cocaine orgies with a girl half his age, but all of a sudden it was like he was making up for lost time, filling entire episodes of TMZ with his shenanigans.
Fuck,
what was wrong with him?
