She came back out in time to see me crouched on the ceiling, trying to get the stupid smoke alarm to shut up. She got that I'm-not-laughing face again and went to the oven to see what she could salvage.
I finally pulled the battery out of the smoke alarm and opened a window. "Hey," I said. "Are you all right?"
"Of course," she said. "Why would you ask that?"
"My husband sense is tingling." I frowned at her, then hit the side of my head with the heel of my hand. "The audition. It was this morning, right?"
She hesitated for a second, and then nodded.
Oh, right, I got it. She'd been bothered by something about it, but I'd been quicker on the draw in the gunfight at the co-dependent corral, and she didn't want to lay it on me when I'd been stressed myself.
Like I said. I'm a lucky guy.
"How'd it go?" I asked her. We got dinner (such as it was), a couple of drinks, and sat down on the couch together.
"That's the problem," she said quietly. "I got the part."
I lifted my eyebrows. "What? That's fantastic! Who'd they cast you as?"
"Lady Macbeth."
"Well of course they did!" I burbled at her. 'You've got red hair. Redheads are naturally evil. Did I mention that this was fantastic?"
"It isn't, Pete."
"It isn't?"
"It isn't."
"But I thought you said it was a serious company. That working with them would give you some major street cred for acting."
"Yes."
"Oh," I said. I blew on my slice of pizza. "Why?"
"Because it's showing in Atlantic City."
"Ugh. Jersey."
She rolled her eyes. "The point being that I'm going to have to get over there several times every week."
"No problem," I said. "We can swing the train fare, I'm sure."
"That's just it," Mary Jane said. "I can't trust the train, Peter. Too many things could happen. If it's delayed, if I'm late, if it takes off a couple of minutes early, and I don't show up, that's it: I can kiss my career good-bye. I've got to have a car."
I scratched my head, frowning. "Does it have to be a nice car?"
"It just has to work," she said.
"Well," I said. "It's more expensive, but we might be able to—"
"I bought a car, too."
I looked down at the suddenly too-expensive pizza on my plate. MJ's career as a model had been high-profile, but not necessarily high-paying. I was a part-time science teacher, and the paycheck isn't nearly as glamorous and enormous as everyone thinks. We weren't exactly dirt poor, but it costs a lot of money to own and operate a car in New York City. "Oh."
"It didn't cost very much. It's old, but it goes when you push the pedal."
"That's good," I said. "Um. Maybe you should have talked to me first?"
"There wasn't time," she said apologetically. "I had to get it today because rehearsal starts Monday afternoon, and I still had to take my test and get my license and…" She broke off, swallowing, and I swear, she almost started crying. "And I failed the stupid test."
she said. "I mean, I thought it would be simple, but I failed it. I've got a chance to finally show people that I can really act, that I'm not some stupid magazine bimbo who can't do anything but look good in a bikini in movies about Lobsterman, and I failed the stupid driver's test."
"Hey," I said quietly, setting dinner aside so that I could put my arms around her. "Come here."
She leaned against me and let out a miserable little sigh. "It was humiliating."
I tightened my arms around her. "But you can take the test again tomorrow, right?"
She nodded. "But Pete, I… I got nothing on the test. I mean, nothing. Zero. If there'd been a score lower than zero I would have gotten that, but they stop at zero. It isn't fair. I've lived my whole life in New York. I'm not supposed to know how to drive."
I wanted to laugh, but I didn't. "It isn't a big deal," I told her. "Look, I can help you out, you'll take the test tomorrow, get your license, and then we can plan your outfit for the Academy Awards."
"Really?" she said, looking up at me, those devastating green eyes wide and uncertain. "You can help?"
"Trust me," I told her. "I spent years as a full-time underclassman while spending my nights creeping around rooftops and alleys looking for trouble. If there's one thing I know, it's how to pass a test you haven't had much time to study for."
She laughed a little and laid her head against my chest. "Thank you." She shook her head. "I didn't mean to go all neurotic on you."
"See there? You're becoming more like the great actresses by the minute." I kissed her hair. "Anytime."
I heard a low, faint rumbling sound, and glanced out the window. I didn't see anything, but it took only sixty seconds for the sirens to start howling— police as well as fire department, a dozen of them at least.
"Trouble?" Mary Jane asked quietly.
I grabbed the remote and clicked on the TV. Not a minute later, my regular programming was interrupted by a news broadcast. The news crew camera was still jiggling as the cameraman stumbled out of a van, but I got enough to see what was going on: a panic, hundreds of people running, the bright light and hollow boom of an explosion and clouds of black smoke rising up in the background—Times Square.
"Trouble," Mary Jane said.
"Looks that way," I said. "Sorry."
"Don't be." She looked up and laid a swift kiss against my lips. "All right, tiger. Get a move on." She rose and gave me a wicked little smile. "I'll keep something warm for you."
Chapter 4
Ah, New York on an autumn evening. Summer's heat had passed by, and let me tell you, there's nothing quite as miserable as webbing around the old town when it's so hot that my suit is soaked with sweat. It clings to and abrades things which ought not be clung to or abraded. My enhanced physique runs a little hotter than your average human being's, too—the price of having muscles that can benchpress more than any two X-Men, and reflexes that make Speedy Gonzalez look like Aesop's Tortoise. Autumn, though, is different. Once the sun starts setting and the air cools off, it feels just about perfect. There's usually a brisk wind that somehow smells of wood smoke, a golden scent, somewhere on the far side of eau de New York, that heralds the end of summer. Sometimes, I can stand on one of the many lofty rooftops around town, watching the moon track across the sky, listening to the passage of geese heading down to Florida, and letting the traffic-sounds, the ship-sounds, the plane-sounds of New York provide the musical score. Nights like that have their own kind of delicate beauty, where the whole city feels like one enormous, quietly aware entity, and though the sun was still providing a lingering autumn twilight, tonight was going to be one of those times.
Assuming, of course, that whatever had caused a third column of smoke to start rolling up through the evening air didn't spoil it for me.
I was making pretty good time through Manhattan when that twitchy little sensation of intuition I'd dubbed my "spider sense" (because I was fifteen at the time) let me know that I wasn't alone.
I managed to catch a blur in the corner of my vision, moving along a window ledge on a building parallel to my course, above and behind me, staying in the shadows cast by the buildings in the fading light, and rapidly catching up with me. If I continued in my current line of motion, my pursuer would be in a perfect position to ambush me as I crossed the next street—one of those midair impacts, when I was at the top of a ballistic arch and least able to get out of the way. The Vulture loved those, and so had the various Goblins. If I had a chiropractor, he'd love them too, on account of every one of them would make him money.
Me, I'm not so fond of them.
So at the very last second, just as I would have flung myself into the air, I turned around instead, hit the building my chaser was on with a webline, and hung on. The line stretched and recoiled, flinging me back toward the would-be attacker, and I added all of my own oomph to it and shot at my pursuer like a cannonball.