Earth-617
Felicia was feeling a little better after her bath, but her funk hung over her. And here Mary Jane had thought her body had an understanding with alcohol. It seemed like Felicia's hangover included the curse of drinking an Indian burial ground or something.
Still, Mary Jane's presence prodded Felicia into moaning, groaning functionality. She tried hopping into a pair of black leather pants, but they resisted her. It was a little like watching a video of an astronaut bumbling around on the Moon.
"Have my pants gotten tighter?" Felicia asked.
"I don't think that's possible."
"Seriously, did you shrink them in the wash or something?"
"I've done a superhero's laundry through symbiote invasions, apocalypses, and
clones.
I know when something is dry-clean only."
The buzzer buzzed. Mary Jane wished Felicia a hearty farewell: "Please put on some pants if we're going to have company."
Felicia's apartment didn't just have an intercom. You pressed the button, you got a live feed of whatever it was at the door. Mary Jane tried it. The face was instantly familiar. A blast from the past.
Peter?
She didn't say it. She didn't like to hope that hard, and she didn't want to get Felicia excited. Already she knew that it wasn't. She could feel that it wasn't. He looked like Peter—could've been Peter's brother—but his face was different, it had been lived in differently. The soul underneath burned at a different temperature. The shaved head, the scruffy jaw, those could've been Peter's, but the look in his eyes: no, never.
"Mrs. Parker? Or, uh, Watson?" His voice was gruff, used to shouting, threats. It scaled down to conversation unevenly. "I'm Kaine. We've met before?"
"Yeah, you almost got my husband sent to prison for murder once."
"To be fair, when isn't he being framed for something?"
Felicia poked her head out of the bedroom. "Is it a clone?"
"Yup."
"I think I dated one of them. Don't tell him I'm here."
"Is that Felicia?" Kaine asked.
"M-aybe?"
"It's her apartment." Kaine held up a letter to the camera. The address was done in Peter's neat handwriting. "Look, Peter wrote to me. I owed him a favor—I owe him a lot of favors—and basically, if he ever went down, I was supposed to keep an eye on you two."
"
Peter's not dead
," Mary Jane insisted, her sudden vehemence like a cat extending its claws.
"He never is," Kaine agreed. "Can I come up? I'm kinda over the whole lonely hero thing. I'd rather bodyguard you where there's air conditioning."
Mary Jane looked to Felicia, blanking out the transmission for the moment.
Felicia sighed and, toying with her pants' fight against her water weight, she called up her inner Facebook. "Kaine Parker... Scarlet Spider... been in Houston, doing the superhero thing, but he packed it in a while back. Not that great at it. I can sympathize. Not quite as crazy as he used to be. And yes, I did think of swiping left on him, but that's probably start some inner competition to collect the whole set. If you know what I mean. Though I did fool around with that black Spider-Man."
"Seriously?" Mary Jane asked. "He was, like, a
kid
."
"Not anymore."
***
Earth-69
"How do you think your wife would feel, knowing you used her as an excuse not to have sex?"
Peter glazed his eyes up over Janice's long, slender legs. The water had turned her pants into little more than paint. She wasn't wearing garters either. She had nothing to hide. Her skin, even filtered through a layer of wetly clinging fabric, was flawless. Almost too silken, too smooth.
She scissored her legs, causing the waistband of her costume to ride down her hips, expose a swath of belly and loins, the warm shadows of lines beginning to curve, deepen.
"And what would she think?" Janice asked, rubbing her thighs together with obvious pleasure, making her wet costume tangle and bunch. "Of my legs?"
He shouldn't have told her he was a married man. It'd been an automatic response, a habit he'd fallen back into now that he and Mary Jane and Felicia were together again. He loved being married, wanted to tell everyone. Even dubiously moral villainesses. Who, technically, he was allowed to 'date.' Encouraged, in fact.
Something else Felicia had told him. Getting love all tangled up with intimacy and sex. And friendship. Maybe it would clear his head a little to take their advice—Mary Jane had backed her up on this—and just have some meaningless sex in Dimension Slut. Then he could figure out what to do about this threesome problem.
Walloping websnappers, had he just referred to it as his 'threesome problem'? The Parker luck...
"She'd think they were beautiful," Peter said at last. "Anyone would."
"That's all?" Janice asked, flinging her knees impressively wide, wide enough that on either side of her crotch, the tendons on the insides of her thighs stood out from the strain.
Peter swallowed hard. No, it wasn't all. They were magical. There was something about the shape of her calves, her thighs, the texture of her skin. Like Felicia's breasts, like Mary Jane's smile, it did something to him, a new taste all its own filling his waiting body. This was a different lust than he felt for any of them, but no less strong, no less valid. Taste—yes, that was the word for it. Felicia, Mary Jane, they were air, they were water, he needed them to live. Maybe this was just a nice dumpling, a foot-long hot dog just when he was in the mood, but satisfying this momentary craving wouldn't diminish how much he appreciated
them
.
