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Michelle doesn’t like being woken up in the middle of the night unless someone has food or they want to give her an orgasm - and the latter only works 60% of the time. Whoever keeps calling and sending her messages clearly doesn’t care about her sleep schedule or her morning library session because when she squints against the brightness of her phone screen she can see it’s four am.
Grunting against her pillow because she doesn’t want to deal with this shit right now but ultimately knows whoever has sent her four more messages since she picked up her phone, clearly needs her for something. Reading the first of twenty-seven messages she only manages to figure out they aren’t meant for her before her phone lights up with a FaceTime request.
Ned, please pick up, your number is the only one I can remember and I lost…
If she was fully awake she might ignore the call because she clearly isn’t who they’re after, but her mind is only running at half capacity to she answers.
“MJ?!” She hears a voice squeak on the other end of the phone. Her eyes fly open fully for the first time since her sleep was rudely interrupted.
“Spider-Man?!”
“Er - no?”
“Do you think I’m blind?” She asks, trying to get her four am brain to start whirring.
“No - er -gotta go!”
“Wait!” She shouts and cringes at the fact her neighbour is going to leave her a passive-aggressive note on her door again. One time! She accidentally kept them up one time! Was it her fault the walls are paper-thin? No. Was it her fault she set her vibrator to the maximum setting because she just wanted to get off without the effort and came with a shout in the middle of the night? Perhaps.
“Ma’am?” Spider-Man asks tentatively as if that’s going to make her forget he said her name earlier. She shelves that in the think about obsessively later, pile.
“Why did you call?” She replies rubbing the sleep out of her eyes and then remembering she’s on a video call with Spider-Man and she’s in pj’s and can feel the bags underneath her eyes. Oh well, it’s not like he’s the Black Cat.
“I thought you were someone else. Sorry. I’m -” she hears him hiss and realises all too late that clearly he’s hurt.
“Where are you? And what’s your worst injury? Do you need an ambulance?” She rallies of while jumping out of bed, propping her phone on her nightstand to go and find some other clothes.
She hears Spider-Man wheeze again and she spins back around to check he’s not passing out in some sketchy alleyway.
“What?!”
“No - nothing. Nothing. Erm, it’s not that bad honestly, just lightly, so lightly stabbed.”
Michelle pinches the bridge of her nose and inhales deeply while resuming her mission of finding pants and a sweater. She bends to pick up some leggings from her bottom draw and he wheezes for the third time and she’s going to punch him for lying to her if she ever finds where he is.
“Can you stop lying to me and just tell me what’s -”
“I can see you.” He says with urgency to his voice that suggests she should understand what he’s referring too.
“Yeah? I can see you as well. We’re on a video call. You know what that is right?” She jokes hoping he’ll pick up on it. He does.
“Yeah, Michelle.” She’ll file that away for later as well. “I know what that is. I mean I can see you.” He replies and the eyes widen slightly on his mask like he’s trying to make it obvious, whatever it is. She raises her eyebrows in question as she slides her shorts down and shoves her legs through the flimsy material of her leggings.
“Your legs.” He stutters out and when she flicks her eyes over to the screen he runs a hand over his mask in an infuriatingly familiar way.
“You’re bleeding out in fuck knows where and you’re wasting time telling me you can see my legs!?” She semi shouts, residing herself to the knowledge that she’s getting a more aggressive than a passive note from next door.
It’s not until she whips her tops off and throws her arms around herself as she sees her bare chest on the screen does she figure out what he’s talking about. Just casually giving Spider-Man a strip show, no biggie. This is no big deal. She can deal with that.
“Fuck.”
She throws a t-shirt on and a sweater over the top. Bras are a ridiculous social construct that she has to follow at work and but she will most definitely not do that at 4 am.
“I closed my eyes, honest - I swear they are closed.” She hears Spider-Man shout out and when she’s unclenched every muscle in her face she sees the mechanical eyes on his suit are closed.
“It’s okay, dork.” She says around a strained laugh. “Now I’ve given you a show can you please tell me where you are or how to help you?”
He gives her his location and asks her to bring a couple of supplies and she thanks the high heavens he’s sat in some urine-stained alleyway that’s only like six blocks from her place, instead of on top of a roof. She changes the call to audio-only and races down the stairs.
“I can come pick you up?”
“Spidey -” she starts with a sigh, “I’m coming out in the cold because you’ve got a stab wound - don’t you dare move.”
“But it’s dark, Michelle.” He replies with a whine and she decides she’s awake enough to figure out who he is, and why he knows her name.
“Don’t worry about it, I have pepper spray and can take down a mugger with my spaghetti arms.” Usually, she’d be able to come up with a better line of defence but all her brainpower is spent on remembering all the times he’s slipped up in their seven minutes phone conversion.
“Just keep pressure on it, okay?” She requests and he hums in response.
Now for her detective work.
First, he called her and not Ned. Ned? Like Ned Leeds? Interesting.
Second, he immediately called her MJ - and oh , it’s Peter.
She rolls her eyes so hard because come on, MJ. She was 67% sure it was him in high school and if she weren’t humiliating obsessed with him and was able to form coherent sentences whenever he so much as looked in her direction she would have called him out on it. But as his luck would have it, her crush solidified itself behind her ribs somewhere between eighth and ninth grade, long before he started beefing up and missing class on the regular.
She wouldn’t necessarily say they were friends in high school, more like, they wanted to be friends but they could never seem to make it work. He seemed to stutter every time she was brave enough to look at him and she assumes he got scared because she was admittedly, scary in high school. Crushes are petrifying and do not allow you to be calm and kind and she will write an essay on it if needs be.
She hasn’t seen Peter since graduation almost a year ago and if you were to ask her outright if she kept half an eye on Spider-Man’s business and Peter’s Instagram page then she’d say no. Or yes. Whatever, it’s not her fault Spidey makes the local news almost weekly and Peter refuses to have his Instagram set to private. It’s also not her fault she’s been in love with him for years. Whatever, no big deal.
“I’m halfway there, nerd.”
“Okay, MJ.” He says and he sounds so much like Peter she’s annoyed at herself for not figuring it out the second he squealed her name when the call first started. She goes to call him his name, but he sounds a little too sleepy for her liking and she doesn’t wanna like freak him out or anything and make him swing away - she didn’t bring bandages and antiseptic cream for nothing.
“So, how come you called me and not Ned?” She asks lightly.
“Ned?” He asks, his voice the highest she’s ever heard it and she knew pre-puberty, Peter Parker. “Er, Ned? Who’s Ned, ma’am?”
Jesus. She’d be chastising herself about not figuring this out sooner but honestly, she’s basically known since the beginning.
“The person you texted like thirty times while waking me up.”
“I’m really sorry about that, it was - I thought I knew their number of by heart but I must have a number wrong.”
She mulls that over for a second. The likelihood that her and Ned’s numbers are that similar that he would get one digit wrong makes no sense. She knew Ned’s number once, and she loves numbers - she definitely would have figured that out. So maybe he still has her number saved from decathlon practice and accidentally tapped her name instead of Ned’s. That’s reasonable. She should cling to that option.
M and N are close in the alphabet. So that’s definitely what it is. Yeah. Yep. Just accidentally clicked the wrong name.
There’s no way he knows her number by heart. That would mean he would have had to think about her at least some of the time in high school and that never happened. It’s cruel and annoying of her mind to even put that thought into her head. She successfully got over her crush on Peter like three days ago at least so to throw her back in with no warning? Selfish. Rude. Unfair.
“Em - ma’am? Are you alright?” Peter asks and she hears him through the phone and in real life, coming to the opening to the alleyway. She sees his feet sticking out from behind a garbage bin at the end of the alley and she says a prayer to whoever that it hasn’t rained in a couple of days so the alley only smells slightly of weed and a little like stale cat urine.
“Spidey.” She says to him, noticing that he does seem shocked at all that she’s here - like he heard her coming or something.
“Hey.” He replies a little breathless, it makes her heart stutter until she realises he’s probably in a lot of pain. So she throws her bag to the ground and kneels next to him and look for a cut and realises that ‘lightly’ stabbed may not have been an under exaggeration. ‘Tis but a scratch.
“Sorry -” he says, running his hand over his mask again, “- it was really bad earlier and I - sorry.”
“Are you okay?” She asks, because although she does want to be mad at him because it’s four-thirty and she lugged half her first aid box down here and he’s fine. But her traitorous heart just beats faster when he looks up at her.
“Yeah, I just -”
“Needed someone?”
“I needed you.” He replies, crossing his legs with a slight wince. She sits down opposite him, mirroring his position.
“Me?” She replies with her heart trying to force itself up her throat. Listen, Michelle rebranded in college. Not that she really needed too, it’s more the people in college accept her for what she is in a way she never found in high school. So this whole vulnerable thing that’s happening right now? She’s not here for it.
“Spidey. It’s four-thirty, can you like, answer me or whatever.”
“Sorry, God this was really stupid. I’m sorry Mich - ma’am.”
“Don’t do that. Don’t pretend you don’t know who I am.”
“I want to tell you. I’ve been thinking of a way to tell you for years at this point.” He replies with a weak laugh. Her? Why would he want to tell her? Michelle would be convincing herself she got his identity wrong if she hadn’t spent the entirety of high school cataloguing everything about him. She has enough sketches of the side of his face to be thoroughly embarrassed if someone ever found saw them. She’d show Peter if he asked. She desperately tries not to think about why that is. Why she has a wall built up around her and has ever since she realised she could but she’d knock it down herself if Peter so much as whispered that he wanted to know her.
“Why?” She stutters out, and she wants to ask why not but she can’t get the words out. She’s never been able to.
He laughs a bit but she doesn’t think it’s at her.
“You - you make me feel breathless and you don’t even - God you have no idea.” He looks from his hands in his lap, up to her, and back down again. “I thought about you consistently in school you know. I’d look up books I saw you reading and write down questions I saw online about them because I didn’t have enough time to read them but then I never - I could never just talk to you.”
She swallows and it must be audible because his head snaps up to her level.
“And –“ he continues when she doesn’t say anything, “- there was no reason to not talk to you.”
“I dunno, I was pretty scary, right?” She asks, upset that the self-conscious part of her that she swore she left in high school was creeping back out.
“Scary? As if. Was I terrified to talk to you? Sure, but that had nothing to do with your personality or how scary you were – it’s because you’re the prettiest person I’ve ever seen and I know that I shouldn’t say that to you as a reason to want to ask you to sit closer to us at lunch –“ he says fast and she’s not entirely sure when he last took a proper breath, “- and it’s the least interesting thing about you but anytime I saw you down the corridor my mind just went, fuck she’s so pretty.” He finishes with a light laugh and her chest feels fuller than it ever has because he likes her face. And she shouldn’t care because beauty is a social construct but he likes her face.
“I think you’re pretty too,” Michelle replies in a moment of bravery. It’s worth it because he wheezes and it’s a cute sound when it doesn’t come from over the phone.
“Ned used to tell me to talk to you all the time. He used to try and invite you to movie nights, and to study with us but I always chickened out and stopped him because I always had to leave and how was I supposed to explain to you that I desperately wanted to be around you but oh I have to disappear for six hours at a time. And yeah I could have told you about Spider-Man but I couldn’t even ask you how your weekend was without stuttering and going bright red and I didn’t want you to think I was a gigantic loser and –“
“I don’t. I mean – you are a loser but a good one or whatever.”
“I haven’t even taken my mask off, I could be anyone.”
“Sure, dork. I’ve known it was you since ninth grade.”
The eyes on his mask widen considerably but his words are soft, “of course you did. Of course, you knew.”
“Well like 67% sure. I only knew for definite tonight.”
“You’re amazing. Like, unreasonably so and I should just –“
“Wait!” She says in a loud whisper, moving forwards to find the hem of his mask. His hands come to rest over her wrists but he makes no move to stop her. “Is this okay?”
“Yeah, MJ whatever you want.”
“What do you want?”
“I want to kiss you.” He whispers, and her eyes widen with the knowledge that the guy she’s hopelessly liked for years apparently likes her back. And he moonlights as a vigilante but she doesn’t really care about that right now.
“Em? If you don’t – if this was –“ he stutters and she pulls his mask off in one swoop. He’s flushed, and his eyes are wide in her favourite kind of way and he still has one of her wrists in his hand.
“Hi.”
“Hi.”
“I’m Spider-Man.”
“I’m in love with you.” She practically shouts in his face, and look – Michelle has read her fair share of romantic novels and it’s supposed to be easier than this. His answering smile takes her breath away in the same way it did back in high school though. And although she never thought they’d be this close, let alone that she’d be able to talk to him without sounding insane - she doesn’t hate the development.
“I’m crazy in love with you, MJ.”
“Yeah?”
“Yeah. You’re kinda, sorta, basically, like, pretty much always on my mind.”
Her smile feels like it might split her cheeks apart, and there’s a firing squad deep in her chest and she feels like she could probably take a bear down right now.
“I think about you a normal amount. Like –“ she swallows and looks anywhere but his eyes, “- once a week, when something nerdy happens.”
“Uh-huh.” He says with a smirk and she knows there’s no way he believes her, but she also knows he won’t call her out on it.
“It was an accident.” He starts, “I did mean to call Ned. But it’s like everything in my body was calling out for you and obviously, I’ve had your number uselessly stored in my brain since like, the eighth grade and – well here you are.”
She’s nervous because of course Peter would be so much better at just expressing his feelings now they were apparently at that point. Of course, he could tell her all these things and not sound like a bumbling fool, he just sounds charming and it makes her want to tell him things.
But how is she supposed to say his smile makes her want to claw her heart out and place it in his hands. She’s pretty sure he wouldn’t let her even scratch the skin but the sentiment is there anyway.
She nervously bites her bottom lip while she shuffles through the appropriate thoughts in her head, searching for something that will make him feel like she feels whenever he looks at her.
“That drives me insane.” He says, a little strained and with eyes darker than a second ago. He lifts his thumb to run along her lip.
“Hngh?” She uselessly replies, but he understands her anyway.
“That.” He says, his eyes tracking the movement, his face moving closer. “You drive me insane Em, you always have.” He whispers against her lips.
Michelle closes the distance, their first kiss is quick - she pulls back too soon, and laughs lightly when he chases her lips. She presses her lips against his for a second time, letting herself settle into it more. When he pulls back there’s a blush on his cheeks that she’s never successfully been able to find the correct watercolour for – hopefully, it will be easier now she’s allowed to look at him whenever she likes.
Her eyes flick over his face as she thinks about what to say to him, how to tell him she’s wanted this for as long as he has – probably longer. But everything sounds too, well too much like something she would say and although he’s already said he loves her, she doesn’t want to scare him off.
“It’s okay.” He says, lifting his hand from her waist to move a piece of hair behind her ear and she curses him for being able to do all of this so naturally. “I’m nervous too. You don’t have to say anything. Maybe just, tell me whether or not you want to get dinner with me tomorrow?”
“I want to give you my heart.” She whispers, continuing before he has a chance to laugh at her. She’s pretty sure he never would, but demons are demons. “Like, erm – I give you mine and you give me yours. Or you know, like boyfriend and girlfriend.” She says in a way that comes out more a statement than a question, and she looks down, very aware that she’s straddling him now and she’s not sure when that happened. “Sorry, I don’t have much luck getting close to people. And I don’t know how to express how much I like you, without – well this happening.”
“Em –“ he says, slowly lifting her chin and when she sees his face nothing is mocking about it, just a light gleam to his eye that she enjoys. “My heart has been yours since the day you squared up against the junior who was picking on the new kid. It’s been yours since you called out Mr Harrington on his sexist syllabus. It’s been yours for years.”
“Mine too.”
“Yeah?” He replies with the same awestruck look she used to brush off in high school. She’s the smartest person she knows and she’s not sure how she missed it.
“Yeah, nerd.” She says around a smirk, leaning in to kiss his smile again.
And again.
And again.