Wade was pleased. The-Seduce-My-Friend-Peter-Parker Plan was well underway tonight. He was hatching a plan for Step Three, maybe even Step Four if he could help it.
He was at Peter's apartment, cooking. This wasn’t extremely unusual- Peter's apartment was cleaner than Wade’s crash pad, and Wade was an exquisite cook. He liked to show off, and he got to feed Peter a free meal at the same time. A win-win situation on all accounts.
Wade was pulling cheap tricks. He could admit that to himself. It was a low blow, ‘accidentally’ spilling sauce on his shirt so he ‘had to’ take it off. The issue was that Peter was apparently just as much of a fan of the long game as Wade was. It didn’t seem to matter what he did, or what reaction Peter had, Peter stayed as he was- tempting and out of reach. So yeah, Wade was spilling things on himself just to take his shirt off.
“Aw, shoot,” He exclaimed, untying his pink ruffly Kiss-The-Cook apron. Peter, in exchange for Wade's cooking, kept him company in the kitchen. They chatted, or sometimes Peter worked on some problem, but he always kept Wade company. It was an unspoken agreement. An agreement Wade intended to abuse the entire night.
“What?” Peter said, looking up from the trinket he was tinkering with.
“Ah, I spilled,” Wade said, motioning to the red-orange stain on his white shirt. He reached down, grabbing the edge of his shirt and lifting it over his head. He saw Peter look away.
That simply would not do.
He tossed his shirt to the side on the counter and retied the apron over his bare chest. He was long past worrying that his scars would gross Peter out, or drive him away. He had been terrified at first, of course, but after five or so times of showing Peter the lower half of face and Peter NOT gagging, he started to relax a little. Peter had never once shied away or flinched at Wade’s ungloved hand touching him. Taking off his mask entirely had been rather rewarding, actually. Peter had mumbled something about his jawline and blushed deeply.
Peter had only seen more of him in rather dire circumstances. Wade didn’t need patching up, but that didn’t stop Peter from putting his foot down the first time and making Wade take his shirt off to check the damage. He’d quickly realized it was futile, but he’d run his light touch over Wade’s bare back that night, and Wade wondered why he’d tried to stop Peter in the first place. He hadn’t been able to see Peter, but that was probably for the best because Wade wasn't sure he could control his own face.
There was only one time he’d seen Peter touch him, and it gave him the confidence he wielded tonight. A bullet had lodged itself in his forearm, and despite him reassuring Peter that it would pop out on his own as he healed, Peter insisted on extrapolating it himself. Wade had watched Peter's face as he ran his eyes and a hand over the bumping skin of Wade's arm, looking for the entry wound. Peter looked enthralled, enraptured, in awe. Wade was in awe of Peters awe. Enthralled by Peter's enthrallment. He had never seen someone look at him like that since he'd changed, not really. He wanted to see Peter look like that again, at Wade, in response to him.
All that to say, he didn’t question Peter's fascination with his skin and instead thanked the heavens Peter wasn’t completely nauseous just looking at him.
“Well?” He asked, dramatically turning to face Peter, spreading his arms in a what-do-you-think gesture.
Peter literally choked on the water he was drinking, sputtering out a “uh, you-you look good” before averting his eyes again. He dropped the piece he was trying to attach to his gadget and picked it back up again. A glorious, glorious blush spread across his face, obscuring those freckles of his.
Wade smirked, turning back to this work on the stove. The pasta sauce wasn’t going to make itself from scratch, now was it?
He felt Peter's eyes on his back. Good, he thought, it was one of his finer features. Tonight was going exactly how he wanted. The sauce was coming along wonderfully, but he wanted to be sure. He tasted a small bit and nodded in confirmation to himself. Yup, amazing. He carried a small spoonful over to Peter, one hand cupping underneath the spoon to catch any spillage.
He raised his eyebrows expectantly at Peter as he approached.
“Open up!” Wade said, leaning forward to feed Peter the spoonful himself rather than handing the spoon over. Peter flushed once more but opened his mouth. So obedient, Wade thought to himself. He tipped the spoon up, letting Peter's closed lips stop this from becoming a messy situation as he pulled the spoon back. His eyes lingered on Peter's slips for just a moment. He looked up to see Peter making eye contact with him. He met Peter's gaze with a small smirk and enjoyed Peter's increasingly reddening face.
Peter let out an appreciative noise, and Wade smiled. “Good, right?”
“Yes!” Peter said, giving Wade a small reciprocal smile.
He returned to his cooking, and Peter to his tinkering. The food was ready after another ten minutes of Wade being a perfectionist plating everything. He turned, plates in hand, placing one on the counter next to Peter and the other in front of himself. He leaned his elbow on the counter, using the other to shovel the spaghetti into his mouth. I outdid myself, he thought.
Peter seemed to agree, immediately abandoning his project for the dinner Wade had brought him. The noises Peter made while eating Wade's cooking would have made a weaker man buckle, but Wade just chuckled to himself.
When plates were empty of seconds and thirds, they were abandoned in the sink while the two unloaded the dishwasher of its clean contents. In the spirit of seizing every opportunity, Wade decided to continue being a pest. Peter was placing a stack of plates on the lower shelf of a cabinet, so Wade decided to place a series of bowls on the upper shelf of the same cabinet.
He crowded Peter between his chest and counter for just a second, not intending to make Peter feel trapped just letting himself be close to him. Peter didn’t say anything about it, but Wade caught the blush on the back of his neck as he turned to grab more clean dishes.
Wade was placing another bowl on the top shelf when Peter slipped under his arm with another plate, sandwiching himself between Wade and the counter.
Well, that was new.
Wade didn’t say anything, but let his hand brush Peter's shoulder as he moved back. Peter’s breath stuttered once, ever so slightly. Wade almost didn’t notice.
They continued putting the rest of the dishes away and loaded the remnants from dinner with minimal shenanigans. Wade bent down to retrieve dish soap from beneath the sink and was met with Peter standing very close to him when he rose back up.
“Soap?” He said, popping the P at the end, taking a step further into Peter's space. Peter had to tilt his head back to meet Wade's eyes.
“What?” Peter asked lightly, blinking up at him. He seemed a bit dazed.
“Soap, Peter?” Wade repeated in a low voice, raising one eyebrow down at him.
“Oh, yes,” Peter said, taking the soap from him. He turned back towards the dishwasher, but that did nothing to hide his smell from Wade. He’d smelled Peter interested enough to know exactly what it smelled like, no questions asked. He scented the air as Peter's back was to him, holding back a groan. Why the fuck did he have to smell so wonderful. Was it just to spite him? Probably. Peter smelled like the air just after rain, but sweeter and warmer.
***
What the fuck was going on tonight, Peter wondered to himself as he turned away from Wade's towering, shirtless body. Wade, who was right behind him. Wade, whose arms and back were tantalizingly muscly. Wade, who was hand-feeding him a home-cooked meal. Wade, who apparently wanted to drive him crazy.
Peter could smell Wade, all satisfied with himself, so there was zero chance Wade couldn’t smell him back. What did he smell like? Probably incredibly turned on. He cringed internally. Why did it matter? What was the point of playing this game?
It was about the principle of the thing. Recently, it had become increasingly obvious to Peter that Wade thought this was a game. There was some invisible line, where Peter had accepted his feelings for Wade and felt confident in Wade's feelings back (like it was hard), that they'd crossed. Once they’d crossed it, Peter knew that Wade knew. So they both knew and were both refusing to make the first real move. Peter would be damned if he was the one to break.
The issue was that Wade was playing chess and Peter only knew how to play checkers.
Peter could resist (mostly) and hide his reactions (actually, not at all) but he was at a loss as to how to hit back. He didn’t have the brazen confidence that Wade did. He also wasn’t sure what Wade liked about him, so he wasn’t sure what to emphasize. He didn’t know which buttons he could press. Wade liked…Peter's hair? That was the only thing he could pinpoint because Wade always played with it eagerly when Peter dared to rest his head on the larger man's thighs. He didn’t know how to do anything with that particular piece of information other than that.
Wade clearly knew what Peter liked. Peter liked feeling small, he liked Wade's muscles, his voice, his eyes, his trash talk, and his cooking. Wade stepped into Peter's personal space bubble and he just melted, but Wade never seemed phased. He never blushed, his breath never caught in his throat, and he certainly never looked away first.
Peter turned around with the soap in his hand to find Wade just as close as he’d left him- which was to say, nearly chest to chest.
Fuck it, he thought, I guess trial and error is the best way to find out.
“Thank you,” He said in a sweet voice, looking up at Wade in what he hoped was an attractive way. He fluttered his eyes just once, ever so slightly, before turning away to close up the dishwasher. When he turned back to Wade, Wade seemed to be rebooting with the soap still in his hand.
That seemed to work pretty well, even if it felt silly to do it.
Peter made his way over to the couch, leaving Wade to his resetting in the kitchen, settling in for their usual post-dinner movie. Wade was close behind him after a minute or so, hopping over the back of the couch to sit next to him. He was wearing one of Peter's baggy zip-up hoodies, unzipped, likely because it wasn't baggy on him like it was on Peter.
Wade reached to steal the remote from Peter, but he dangled it out of reach.
“It’s my turn, don’t even try it,” He warned, satisfied when Wade leaned back.
“Fine, fine,” Wade acquiesced, stretching his arm across the back of the couch around Peter.
Peter chose some random spy movie that looked good. He enjoyed the ‘solving’ aspect of it, and Wade enjoyed basically all movies. Peter settled on the couch, leaning into Wade's side.
40 minutes into the movie, the main characters were in some sort of club searching for a lead. It wasn’t just any club, Peter realized, it was a dungeon. After the obligatory montage of things like whips and gags, the scene shifted to the main characters interrupting a ‘session’ between the dominatrix they needed to talk to her her client.
It wasn’t like they never watched R-rated movies with sexual content- they had- but it had never been this. Usually, they just sat through it like any other part of the movie, maybe even joking about how unrealistic and planned the sex looked.
Peter had no experience with anything like it and found himself curious watching the screen. The woman, dressed in head-to-toe black leather, was hitting the man kneeling in front of her with what appeared to be a riding crop. That was…something. The man remained kneeling, muffled sounds slipping past whatever it was that was shoved into his mouth.
Peter wondered what the experience was like- being tied, kneeling like that, getting hit with a crop. Suddenly, Peter felt very aware that Wade was next to him. He made a conscious effort to breathe normally.
The main character forcefully interrupted, and the woman reprimanded him saying it was incredibly disrespectful to interrupt while her submissive was deep in ‘subspace’. Peter wasn't sure what that was and filed the word away for later. The scene moved on quickly to the main characters disregarding the woman's boundary and forcing her to give them the lead they wanted. They left the dungeon and moved on to another action-packed chase scene.
Peter lingered on the man from the movie, long after the plot had moved on. He wondered what it felt like to be in that position. Peter got beat up often on the job, but it was always hard punches, knives, and bullets. It didn’t make sense, but something about the idea of a riding crop felt…different. He felt curious, and he felt that curiosity swirling around in his stomach.
He glanced at Wade out of the corner of his eye, who hadn’t seemed affected at all during the movie and found him to be as he always was. Wade absolutely knew about these things, and Peter knew that. If Peter didn’t cut him off soon enough, some of Wade's sexually descriptive tangents would become laced with things in the realm of BDSM and dynamics. Peter mostly just cut him off and moved on, but he couldn’t ignore that information about Wade.
Peter wasn’t sure how to feel about it. From what he knew, Wade had been on all possible sides of the equation. He’d been very open about the fact that he was up for basically anything once, and most things again. His brain conjured up the image of Wade, standing above him with- Nope. no, no no. Peter clenched his jaw, willing the thought away. This was movie night, for god's sake. He tried desperately to override the feeling in his groin with grandmas and sick puppies. It mostly worked.
***
Peter did not notice Wade looking at him, Wade was sure of it.
Wade had seen this movie before, and he’d remembered the scene in question as soon as Peter had clicked on it. He hadn’t said anything about it and had agreed it looked like a good choice when Peter had asked.
When the dungeon came on the screen initially, Wade had peeked at Peter out of the corner of his eye. The smaller man didn’t seem to change at all, his breathing and posture consistent. Wade heard that first whistle of the crop on screen and watched Peter swallow and sit up ever so slightly. Wade didn’t think Peter even realized he’d done it, because he didn’t glance at Wade or blush in the least. A second hit landed on the kneeling man's thigh, if Wade remembered the scene correctly, and Peter leaned forward towards the screen a fraction. Wade studied Peter's face as the scene progressed, quietly watching Peter unconsciously lick his lips and shift again beneath Wade's arm.
He dared to look at Peter's face outright for a second and saw his pupils were dilated.
Fuck yea, Baby boy.
Please let me be right about this, he prayed to no one in particular. Peter remained in thought as the movie progressed, and Wade cursed himself that his mutation didn’t include reading minds. At one point Peter’s smell abruptly shifted towards arousal, and he seemed flushed, but Wade hadn’t moved and the movie was in the middle of some dumb plot about underwater espionage. He must still be thinking about it, Wade figured.
He caught Peter glancing at him once, but Peter relaxed into him shortly after so he disregarded the glance and focused on trying to find a way to get his hands in Peter’s gorgeous golden hair again.
He was successful, and their movie night ended as they increasingly did these days- Peter's head in Wade's lap, Wade's hand in his hair, and Peter's soft purring in the background.