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“Hey.” Her voice rings out, sharp and a little stale, rough with too many nights’ missed sleep, because of a fresh pile of problems, most of them hers but some of them not; none of them solved.
The floor is littered with pizza boxes and cast-off items of clothing, and—is that a stuffed unicorn? Jessica rolls her eyes. Shit, seriously; if Jessica’s apartment looked like this, she’d be halfway into a bottle of whiskey or four by this point.
Which is, actually, why she’s here, though she shoves her hands further into the pockets of her leather jacket and darts her gaze around sullenly to put up a wall around that particular feeling. He hasn’t been around, and she doesn’t let the word “worried” cross her thoughts, but she does kick a hilariously-patterned shirt aside and peek around the corner.
“Wade. You here?”
Impossibly, he swings himself down from—somewhere on the kitchen ceiling and leans toward her, the teasing twinkle in his eyes shallow and false, if Jessica has it right, and she thinks she does, by now.
“What, are you fucking Spider-man now? Get down from there, you jackass.”
Wade complies, in a swift movement, but twists to the side once he’s down, setting off a chain reaction of popping sounds.
“How did you get past my complicated security system?”
“The old lady with the gun is blind and your deadbolt is loose. Also there’s the whole—” She shrugs, awkwardly, still not sure how to describe it.
“The fact that you picked up and threw a station wagon by yourself a few weeks ago. Yeah, no keeping you out of somewhere you wanna be, I guess. Thanks for not blowing a hole in my drywall.” He fishes something out of a weird-looking breadbox. “Corn nut?”
“That was one time. And ugh, no.”
“No, it wasn’t.” He holds up a finger like he’s going to start ticking them off, but she interrupts him.
“Shut it.”
“Hey, I’m not complaining.” He strikes a seductive pose behind the counter. “Maybe one of these days you’ll step on me like I deserve.”
She looks away in shock. “Jesus, Wade, dial it down.”
He blinks at her in mock surprise. “You know, for the bad back. I hear that’s useful. What were you thinking?” He waits a beat, then drapes dramatic fingers over his chest. “Oh my god. Pervert.”
“Seriously, stop talking for three seconds, please.” She is doing her absolute best not to smile and really, really hoping she’s succeeding.
“Malcolm was worried. You’re not answering your phone.”
We didn’t”—at a smarmily knowing glance from Wade, she rolls her eyes and revises—“ I didn’t want you to just disappear—be someone we talked to once and never heard from again.”
“Like Green Lantern?”
“Who?”
“Exactly.”
“Whatever.” Jessica can’t suppress another eyeroll, and she adds a disinterested hand wave for effect. He’s not making a lot less sense than usual.
“You know what? Put—something on that doesn’t have dinosaurs on it, and we’re going for a cup of coffee.”
“I have coffee here.”
“Bet you don’t.” She narrows her eyes at him; pinning him down isn’t exactly comfortable, but he clearly needs to get out of the apartment.
As predicted, he avoids opening the fridge or the cupboards, sauntering off to change. “My dinosaurs look great, thank you very much. Besides, can’t be worse than the face, right?”
His voice trails off, and the tiny amount of strain behind the humor seeps through and makes Jessica stare at her shoes. Does she feel sorry for him? No, that’s not it. She’s pissed. Pissed at him for letting things get this bad without doing something about it, calling someone. Calling her? She’s not sure. It’s confusing and angers her to think about, so she balls up her fists and paces to the kitchen instead.
Wade had failed to mention that she’d thrown an (empty) station wagon over his head, directly into the path of another one of the overpowered crazytown monsters that seem to proliferate wherever freaks like her—and Wade, too, she supposes—show up. He’d thanked her with a firm handshake and a “pleasedon’tbreakmyhand,” and both had caught her off guard.
Wade emerges from the other room again, all brash indifference, and Jessica almost doesn’t want to look, fearing hammer pants or jorts or worse. But he just looks normal: a dark red sweater and some nicely tailored jeans. She nods with approval and turns toward the door.
“Alright, Bellatrix, coffee on you, let’s go.”
“Bellatrix? Save that shit for Strange; I don’t know any spell bullshit.”
“Ok Daria, let’s hustle.”
“Who the fuck is Daria?”
“Oh my God you’re a literal baby.”
Their voices cascade down the stairs, and Jessica tosses Wade a look as he ostentatiously locks the deadbolt she picked earlier. She knows he doesn’t really care; that anyone who finds their way inside is going to have a bad time, and she grins in recognition of this odd thing they share.
He catches it, and when he smirks back there’s a little bit of smugness and a little bit of gratitude wrapped up in the expression, too.
“Can’t wait to hear all about how your coffee is black, like your soul, and—ooh this place around the corner has strawberry pie. Do you like strawberry pie?”
She does, and she knows exactly the overdone, larger-than-life dessert he’s talking about, held together by a gelatin redder than anything that exists in nature, and again the grin’s not suppressed as she nods.
They walk in silence for a minute, and Wade’s curious, light tone doesn’t fool her.
“Why’d you come by, really?”
Jessica finds herself swinging an arm in the sunshine, and shrugs.
“I was in the neighborhood.”