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“I’m just saying, young fellas used to make a big deal out things like this.”
“Young fellas?” Peter repeated, exasperated.
He wasn’t sure how he’d ended up here, cosmically speaking—crouched on the edge of a rooftop, waiting for a drop to go down, with his girlfriend’s father strolling back and forth behind him, rambling on about the good old days.
Walter Hardy—the first and not the second, Peter was pretty fond of the second, but the first was about to earn himself a dip in the East River—heaved a long sigh.
“You know your problem, Pete, is that you’ve got no romance in your soul,” Walter Sr. said, removing his hat and pressing it to his heart.
“I’ve got a lot of violence in it right now, though,” Peter said, mostly to himself. “That has to count for something.”
“You came to me for my blessing,” Walter Sr. said.
Peter had, technically, done that. Some sort of brand new guilt had possessed him one night, lying on the sofa in surrender, Felicia pinning him down so she could snuggle up like an overgrown cat and Wally lording over his control of the remote.
This was a family, a real family, the kind Peter had been dreaming of since he’d been old enough to conceive of marriage as something that could happen to him.
“We all make mistakes,” Peter agreed.
“I’m thinking Studio 54,” Walter said, spreading his hands out like he was lighting up a marquis. “You know my kitten loves the limelight.”
“You’re thinking it’s 1979,” Peter said as patiently as he could. “Because if I propose to your daughter during a revival show of The Rocky Horror Picture Show, she might actually scratch my eyes out.”
“Wait,” Walter said. “When did they do that to Studio 54?”
“Oy,” Peter said. “With any luck, I’ll get shot tonight, and then I won’t even have to worry about proposing to your daughter.”
He’d almost proposed once before. Gotten halfway through dinner with the ring in his pocket and everything.
Then, around the time he was fumbling, sweaty-handed, in his pocket, trying to find the ring so he could stick it in a flourless chocolate cake that cost the same as the rent on his first apartment, Felicia cleared her throat.
“Looking for something?” she’d asked.
She held up the little velvet box, caught between two perfectly manicured fingertips.
Peter worked his jaw for a minute, his hand still caught, damningly, in his own pocket.
“I’m holding that for a friend,” he finally said.
Felicia snorted. She twirled the box, her bottom lip caught between her sharp teeth. She must have snatched the ring earlier, Peter realized, when he’d gone to the little arachnid’s room to splash water on his face and question all his life choices.
“It’s sweet, Spider, it really is,” she said, and Peter hadn’t survived this long without figuring out when a “but” was about to hit him in the face.
“You don’t want to marry me.”
“It’s not that,” she said. “I would love to marry you, Spider, but we have to be realistic. We’re just not ready for that yet.”
“We live together,” Peter pointed out. “We have an entire child together, last I checked.”
“You know that’s not what I meant,” Felicia said. “It’s so new, Spider. You’re only just getting used to being a father. You don’t have to rush into anything else. You’ve got time now, lover.”
She was right. Peter knew she was right. That didn’t make it sting any less.
“You grew up, Party Hardy,” he said. “I don’t like it. I miss the girl who used to blow up her apartment just to get my attention.”
The corner of Felicia’s mouth twitched.
“Don’t ruin a good thing, Spider,” she’d said, sliding the ring box back over to him. “Not until you’re sure it’s what you really want.”
It had been a year since then. A year of living together, of raising their son together. A year of fighting and making up and learning how to talk about what was bothering him instead of taking it out on the nearest nonagenarian dressed like a canary.
He wondered, sometimes, if his aunt and uncle would be proud of the life he’d made. If they’d approve, even with all the messy parts. He hoped they would.
It was a real, good life. The life that Peter wanted.
Now he only wanted to make it official.
“I’ve got it!” Felicia’s father said, snapping his fingers. “Here’s what we do. I disguise myself as one of your little sinister fellas and pretend to kidnap you.”
“Please stop talking,” Peter said, tilting his head back to the sky.
“We take you to the New York Aquarium and, bam, right in the shark tank,” Walter Senior said. “When she dives in to rescue you, that’s when you pull out the ring!”
“And the sharks?” Peter asked, just for the hell of it.
“We’d throw you in after their lunch,” Walter Senior said. “Obviously.”
Peter was mercifully saved from having to comment on that one when there was—finally—some movement down below.
“Wait here, old man,” he said, standing up and stretching. “Your daughter will never let me live it down if I let you break a hip.”
“I’ll keep thinking of ideas!” Walter Senior called after him as he leapt off the roof. “We could strand you off the coast! Women love a little vulnerability!”
Peter reconsidered the whole getting shot thing.
The apartment was quiet when Peter got back in the morning. Too quiet.
“Felicia?” he called out. “Wally? I brought bagels.”
“He’s out with some friends,” Felicia called from the kitchen. “They had a little sleepover.”
Peter paused and frowned.
“Which friends?” he demanded.
This was an ongoing discussion, according to him, and pointless little nitpick, according to her. He still didn’t love the company she kept, the contacts from years ago in the art theft world, and he didn’t want his—their—kid schmoozing with Black Fox’s nephew’s third cousin twice removed’s horrible little supposed piano prodigy of a fifth grader just because his mother had fenced a Matisse for Felicia five years ago.
Not that he was holding a grudge.
“Don’t worry, I’ve already thoroughly vetted all of them,” Felicia yelled back. “Complain, complain, complain. That’s all you ever do.”
Peter was about to argue when she rounded the corner, wearing a little black robe that covered barely anything at all, and a pair of black fuzzy slippers. Her hair spilled like liquid moonlight over her shoulder, a smirk on her lips.
“Coffee?” she asked, artfully dangling a half-full mug. She’d been the one to insist on the cream colored runner in the hall, but then she knew how danger got Peter going.
Peter manfully dragged his gaze away from her thighs.
“I know what you’re doing,” he said.
She batted her eyelashes at him and cocked one hip. Peter waved a finger at her.
“You’re not distracting me,” he said. “What friends? If I found out you’ve got him sleeping over at White Rabbit’s kid’s house, Felicia, so help me—”
“Oh, like I would be so gauche,” Felicia drawled. “It’s all perfectly innocent, just some little friends from school. None of their parents even own any interesting art.”
“I want to meet their parents,” Peter groused, his arms crossed over his chest. “I’m the dad. I have rights, you know, allegedly.”
He turned away, ripping his gaze away from her, and busied himself with an unread pile of mail before she won the argument just by standing there.
“Don’t be sore, Spider,” Felicia said, wrapping her arms around him from behind as she stood up on the tips of her toes. “We can throw a little dinner party and you can psychologically torture all the other parents, if it makes you feel better.”
Peter considered it.
“I want names,” he decided. “And criminal records.”
“You’re so overprotective,” Felicia purred his ear. “It’s sexy. How about I slip into something a little less comfortable and you can frisk me for old time’s sake?”
Peter snorted. Then he thought about it.
“On a rooftop?” he asked.
“You just pick the skyscraper, baby,” Felicia said, dragging one finger down Peter’s chest. “I’ll be there with bells on. Literally.”
She pulled away from him with a wink, a sway in her steps as she padded silent through the living room. Peter loved her.
Her father was right about one thing. A woman like Felicia deserved something more special than a ring from Zales hidden away in a cake.
She deserved a proposal as unique as she was.
The Cat’s Paw diamond was a brilliant tear-shaped stone, sparkling and flawless, but the best thing about it was that it came with a story. It had belonged to a reclusive millionaire in the 1920s, who’d spent her last years holed up in her mansion, surrounded by nothing by cats and her collection of jewels. The Cat’s Paw diamond had been found among the felines after her death, left abandoned in a pile of jewelry on the woman’s dresser. It had made headlines again in the 1960s, when it had been one of the jewels lifted from the Museum of Natural History during its infamous jewel heist.
It wasn’t found in the same locker with some of the other stolen stones, but instead uncovered a year after that, when a cat drew a detective’s eye towards a hidden safe in a Lower East Side apartment. From then on, the Cat’s Paw had secured its name.
From the moment Peter saw it, chaperoning one of Wally’s field trips to the Museum of Natural History, he’d known, deep in his gut, that it was perfect for Felicia.
“Boy, look at that rock,” one of the other fathers said. He was a podiatrist that Peter had privately dubbed Sheldon the Snooze. But his daughter had a crush on Wally, so now Peter was in with the Bunion King of Madison Avenue.
“Which one?” Peter asked, too busy scanning the crowd of preteens to make sure his son didn’t pick that moment to inherit either of his parents’ sticky fingers. “We’re in Rock City, buddy.”
All the other parents thought Peter was hilarious, which at least did wonders for his ego. If he’d told that joke to Felicia, she would have patted him on the chest and told him to do better, but Sheldon the Snooze laughed like it was the funniest thing he’d ever heard.
Then he pointed, and Peter’s gaze landed on the Cat’s Paw diamond. Suddenly, Wally’s sticky fingers weren’t the problem.
“If I brought that home to my wife, I’d be off the hook for the next decade,” Sheldon joked.
“Yeah,” Peter said, barely listening. He snagged Wally, attempting to sidle by towards the Subway Garnet unnoticed, by the strap of his backpack by instinct alone. “Sure, buddy. Whatever you say.”
The wheels were already turning in his head. A Cat’s Paw was perfect for a Black Cat, after all.
There was just the whole problem where it was on exhibition in the museum, and also that it cost tens of millions of dollars.
Peter spent a long time outside of the museum that night, after it had closed, after he’d taken Wally home and eaten dinner with his family. After he’d watched an old Western with his son and then made sure he was tucked into bed. After Felicia yawned theatrically and pulled him into their bedroom by the collar of his shirt.
Afterwards, he mumbled something about going swinging, and left her curled up like a little cat underneath her criminally expensive sheets.
Twenty minutes later found him outside the museum, contemplating his life choices. It wasn’t like he didn’t know how to break in. He’d done it plenty of times before, bypassing all sorts of security systems, and besides, if he didn’t, Felicia would never let him live it down.
It was just the principle of the matter.
He was a not-completely-sanctioned-by-the-city-of-New-York hero. A father.
A soon-to-be husband.
“Screw it,” Peter said, and wrenched the security camera off the wall.
“I’m so angry I can’t even see straight.”
“You told me, honey,” Peter said, slumped backwards in his kitchen chair. “Repeatedly.”
He was exhausted. The plan had been simple—get in, get the diamond, get back out. The problem was, he wasn’t the only person who’d planned to hit the museum last night. The long line of puddles leading up from the cafeteria had piqued Peter’s suspicions almost immediately.
Finding Hydro-Man hiding behind the giant squid in Milstein Family Hall of Ocean Life hadn’t been in the plans, but it wasn’t like Peter could ignore him once he saw him. His was a victimless crime. Morris, probably not so much.
He’d almost gotten crushed by the model blue whale, but what else was new. By the time the fight was over, Peter was wet, cold, and the alarms were going off. He had a diamond the size of Kentucky stuffed haphazardly down a spandex pocket that was not meant to fit it. There were perilously few options before him.
So Peter had done what any desperate man would: he had framed the theft on the other guy and gotten the hell out of there.
Now it was morning, Hydro-Man was being blamed for the diamond theft, and Felicia was furious.
“It’s only been on my list since Wally was a baby,” she fumed, holding the Bugle in front of her. “I can’t believe one of your two-bit villains got there before me.”
“Hey,” Peter said, without heat. “I have good villains.”
And he did, maybe. He had one of them at this very table, because if Felicia found out he’d stuffed that diamond in his sock drawer, she wasn’t going to marry him. She was going to murder him.
“Why didn’t you ever steal it before?” he asked, because apparently he couldn’t keep his mouth shut.
“I was busy, you know, raising your child, staying away from the Maggia. Only for the Hydro-Man to steal my diamond?!” Felicia said. She turned the newspaper upside down like that would change the words. “That walking fishtank reject? That loser? Morris Bench?”
“Full naming the villain seems cruel, Cat.”
“He stole my diamond!” Felicia said. Like she’d had her name on it. If Peter had known, he would have snatched another one. Maybe it wasn’t too late. He could swap them out while they still had Hydro-Man in custody.
“Well, next time, skywrite it so everyone knows it’s yours,” Peter said. “And I thought you were out of the thief game.”
She wasn’t, and they both knew it, but at least Peter hadn’t come home to a Picasso in the living room yet, so there were certain things he could ignore.
“I wanted to steal it,” she said, crossing her arms over her chest. Her lower lip stuck out in a pout, and Peter couldn’t resist the urge. He tilted her chin up, his knuckles tucked underneath it, and pressed a biting kiss against her lips.
“There, there,” he said, only a little bit mocking. “You’ll get the next huge diamond, I promise.”
“You’re making fun of me,” she accused, dragging one nail down his cheek.
“I would never dare,” Peter said, half-sincere.
Felicia was a woman of many talents. Holding a grudge was one of them. Peter had additional pressure now to pull this off the right way, or just throw in the towel and hope she decided to pop the question herself sometime in the next decade.
Gently but firmly, he pried the Bugle out of her hands and leaned over the table, pressing a kiss against her forehead.
“You’re going to be late for your thing,” he said.
One of the other parents at the ridiculously expensive private school Felicia had insisted on had gotten her involved in some SoHo art gallery, and now three days a week she swanned off to walk around it in slinky black outfits.
Peter was pretty sure she was planning something, but he couldn’t figure out what. The one time he’d been to the gallery, it had been covered in paintings of little dogs dressed up like Italian clowns. Their eyes had followed him wherever he went.
If there was money in that, they deserved to be robbed.
Felicia looked up at him, her pretty mouth stuck in a perfect moue, and Peter couldn’t help himself. He cupped a hand to her face and kissed her, deeper than he’d initially intended, chasing the taste of coffee and strawberries on her tongue.
“I love you,” he said. “And it’s all going to work out.”
Slowly, she smiled.
“You always know how to make me feel better,” she said, hooking her fingers in the collar of his shirt. “I love you, too, Spider.”
That was why Peter was doing it, all of it. To see her smile at him and hear her say that. None of it mattered when compared to that—not the museum, not Hydro-Man, not his own questionable life choices.
That was what really mattered. Just him, Felicia, and their son.
Their suspiciously quiet son.
Peter didn’t realize anything was up until Felicia left the apartment, smacking a kiss against his cheek on the way out. The door closed behind her, and he was left standing their silent apartment.
They had a ten-year-old. Their apartment was never silent.
“Walt?” he called out, starting down the hallway. “Wally?”
His spider-sense was silent, so he didn’t think anything was wrong, but his child’s absence was starting to gnaw at him, a pit in his stomach. He peered into Wally’s room, but it was empty. Bed unmade, toys all over the floor, bootleg Spider-Man plush abandoned on the windowsill.
“I have the day off,” he continued. “Do you want to go to the park, throw a frisbee around? We can call your grandfather, maybe hit him right in his smug fa—”
He stopped in the doorway of his and Felicia’s bedroom.
Wally was standing in the middle of the room, holding the Cat’s Paw diamond in his hands. Peter froze, his hand on the doorknob.
“I can explain,” he said.
“Dad,” Wally said, his eyes wide. “Mom is going to kill you.”
“So that’s what happened,” Peter admitted at the end of his sad tale.
Wally sipped his ice cream soda judgmentally. He’d somehow tricked Peter into taking him out to a fancy café he and Felicia favored, and was now swinging his feet in the sunshine. His sneakers had little cats on them and his designer hoodie had tiny cat ears.
Wally looked so much like Felicia. People said he looked like Peter all the time, and it was partially true—he had Peter’s coloring, his curly hair, the stubborn set of his mouth. But his mannerisms were pure Felicia, right down to the way he cocked his head to the side and sighed, as if the weight of the world was on his little shoulders.
Peter was going to be blackmailed for the rest of his life. Their son had gotten that from Felicia, too.
“Level with me,” Peter said. “Is your mother going to kill me?”
Wally made a face.
“I don’t think Mom’s going to kill you,” he said. “But I do think you need to do this carefully. Mom likes doing the surprising, not being surprised.”
Peter had noticed that, what with the ten-year-old child he hadn’t known about for the first eight years of his life sitting in front of him.
“She could say yes because she loves you,” Wally allowed. “Or she could say no and we’ll be on the next flight to Monaco.”
Peter groaned, pushing his hands up into his hair.
“I thought it would be romantic,” he said.
“It is romantic,” Wally said.
“I nearly had a whale fall on me.”
“It’s okay, Dad,” Wally said, patting his hand. “I’ll help you. I didn’t really want to go back to Monaco, anyway.”
Peter had a lot of regrets.
Once upon a time, Felicia had led him on a merry chase through the city, following a trail of child’s drawings of the two of them. He just hadn’t known back then what child had drawn them.
Now, he knew, though, and he knew how bad he wanted this. How badly he wanted Felicia.
He and Wally retraced the path she’d taken all those years ago, hanging up the drawings, leaving riddles as clues. The drawings were more sophisticated now, Wally’s hand surer, and the little spider and the fluffy cat had been joined by a kitten with extra spider legs.
“Disturbing, but cute,” Peter told his son, who just beamed at him. He’d webbed him up out of the way, secure at the top of the Empire State Building. He had Peter’s old camera in his hands, practically giddy, part-photographer and part-hostage all rolled into one.
Felicia wouldn’t scratch Peter’s eyes out in front of their son.
He had a separate camera webbed discreetly out of the way, that one rigged to a spider-tracer in his belt, the same as his old setup. The diamond was in his hand.
Now all that was missing was his dream girl.
She showed up a fashionable five minutes later than his estimated time of arrival, a stack of drawings loosely clutched in one gloved hand.
“What kind of game are you two playing?” she asked.
“A fun one,” Peter said, because it was true, at the end of the day. She was just about the most fun he’d ever had, in or out of the costume. He wanted to keep it that way.
He held up the diamond and got down on one knee. He watched as her eyes went wide behind her mask.
“I heard you were looking for this.”
“Oh, Spider,” Felicia said, smiling ear to ear. She shook her head, her platinum hair dazzling in the city lights, and blinked hard behind her mask, her eyes shimmering. “As soon as I stop crying, I’m going to murder you.”
“Yeah,” Peter said, fond. “I figured you’d say that. So, what do say, Cat? Will you make me the happiest man alive?”
Felicia bit her lip. She glanced behind Peter, looking to Wally, and raised her eyebrows.
“Should we keep him?” she asked.
“Hey,” Peter said at the same time as Wally shouted, “Yes!”
Felicia flung her arms around Peter’s neck and kissed him.
“Yes, Spider,” she breathed against his lips. “I’ll marry you.”
Later, after they’d popped the champagne (for Felicia) and the sparkling apple cider (for Wally), they sat at the edge of the building, staring down at the city beneath them, the lights and the people and a thousand stories, all theirs for the taking. Felicia tossed the diamond from hand to hand, grinning, and Peter leaned over to nose at her temple.
“I have one little caveat,” he said. “You can’t actually keep the diamond.”
She’d known it was coming. The huge, theatrical sigh was a tip off.
“You’re no fun, Spider,” she said. “Making me give back my engagement diamond. What kind of man does that, hm? Why should I agree to that?”
“Because I can do one better than a stolen diamond, Felicia,” Peter said, snorting. “Trust me, when this is over, we’re going to be the talk of the town.”
“Oh?” Felicia said, tilting her head to the side. Her hair spilled down her back as she twined her arms around his neck, smiling up at him. “Don’t leave me in suspense, Spider.”
“I’ll tell you everything,” he promised. “But only after you let me take you to City Hall.”
They got married on a Wednesday, with Wally and Felicia’s parents and a handful of friends in attendance.
On Friday, they broke back into the museum together. They dashed through the empty halls, laughing, Felicia dancing just out of Peter’s grasp and then twirling on the tips of her toes, waiting for him to catch up, her hands outstretched.
They kissed in front of half a dozen exhibitions, the Hall of New York State Environment, the Hall of Biodiversity, the jellyfish model shining above them and one of the most beautiful women Peter had ever seen in his arms. They stopped at the Insectarium, Felicia swaying against him, and then she took his hand and led him back through the Zoology Collections, towards the collection of spiders. Peter hadn’t had so much fun in a museum since he’d been a kid.
It was perfect. She was perfect.
Felicia walked through security systems like she’d been born for it, so they took their time, their hands linked, as they made their way back to the Hall of Gems and Minerals.
They left the diamond there, in the artfully shattered display case, with a note and a photograph. Peter had snapped it with the automatic camera the night he’d proposed to Felicia, a picture perfect moment. The wind in her hair and her gloved hand cupped to his cheek, his mask rolled up just enough to kiss him. The diamond flashed in her other hand, pressed between them, held between their beating hearts.
In celebration of their wedding, this contribution has been made possible by Mr. and Mrs. Spider-Man.
Felicia had crossed out Man and left, in her looping, delicate handwriting: Cat.
“Parker,” J Jonah Jameson said, leaning back in his ergonomic desk chair. There was a cigar in his hand and a half-empty bottle of antacid pills on his desk. “You come to me, on this day, when Spider-Man has admitted to robbing the Museum of Natural History, to ask me for a favor?”
“It’s not a favor if we’re both getting what we want, Jonah,” Peter pointed out.
“And what do you have, Parker,” Jonah said, “that I could possibly want?”
So he was still taking Peter’s resignation from the Bugle well. Peter shrugged, pulling the photographs out of his battered teacher’s briefcase and laying them facedown one by one on Jonah’s desk.
“I just happened to be out for a stroll the other night,” he said. “You know, taking pictures, just for fun, when I caught something a little interesting.”
He flipped them over, one by one by one. Each one was a glimpse of him and Felicia dancing between rooftops, their second trip out that night after they’d taken Wally home and snuck back out their own bedroom window, giddy like teenagers.
It was all very tasteful. He’d never sell the risqué photos. A flash of skin here, a lingering touch there, and Felicia with her head thrown back and a diamond dangling from her fingertips, caught in a beautiful near freefall, the only thing anchoring her to the side of a building Peter’s sticky fingers.
The cigar fell out of Jonah’s mouth.
“I can always take them to Bushkin over at the Globe,” Peter said. It was an empty threat. He’d rather eat that cigar than talk to Bushkin again. But Jonah didn’t know that.
“Peter, my boy,” Jonah said, wiping a tear away. “Did I ever tell you that I think of you like a son to me?”
“Save me the spiel, Jonah, you know I’m not giving you the friends and family rate,” Peter said. “They’re good photos. Pay me what they’re worth.”
He and Felicia still had a honeymoon to go on, anyway. Peter was determined to pay for at least part of it. He’d caught Felicia on her phone the other day, looking up private villas in the Seychelles, so it was either selling photos or seeing if his spider-irradiated kidneys were worth anything.
“You haven’t lost your touch, kid, that’s for sure,” Jameson grinned. “What have you been doing all these years, anyway?”
“Oh, you know, this and that,” Peter said idly, twisting his ring around his finger. “I got married.”