Chapter 4
“What the hell happened to Miguel?” Gwen asked, walking into the room and closing the door behind her.
Peter looked up from the web shooter he was tinkering with, alarmed. “What do you mean? Is he okay?”
This turned everyone’s eyes to Peter. He wilted slightly under the multitude of gazes, but regained his composure quickly.
“Have you not talked to him today?” Miles asked, equal parts suspicious and concerned.
“I have,” Peter replied, a hint of defensiveness in his tone. “I didn’t notice anything weird.”
Gwen raised an eyebrow at him. “Yesterday he was ready to tear your arm off for daring to offer him a coffee, and today he’s all smiles and rainbows even when you interrupted his meeting with Lego.”
“I did not interrupt anything.”
Now eyebrows were raised all across the room. Hobie and Pav shared a look that communicated what the whole room was thinking.
“That's a real weak defense, Pete,” Hobie said, the amusement in his voice clear. Most of the people in the room had adopted postures that communicated their interest in the conversation, but not Hobie. He stayed in his relaxed pose, with both feet up on the table and a pastry in one hand. It was so pointedly uninterested that it communicated exactly how interested he actually was.
Peter took a slow, appraising sip of his coffee, almost spitting it out as it burned his tongue. “It’s not a defense. I don’t have anything to defend.”
Hobie snorted out a laugh, and nobody else said anything. The silence in the room was complete, except for the faint sound of Peter blowing on his coffee and Gwen’s quiet, rhythmic tapping on the tabletop.
Those were the only noises for a full minute, and even Hobie, who was skilled at not being uncomfortable in practically any situation, was shifting in his chair. The spell was broken by Jess bursting through the door, a file in her hand. She stopped in her tracks when presented with the situation in the makeshift breakroom.
“Did somebody die in here or something?” Jess asked, glancing from Peter to the rest of the room.
Peter blew on his coffee one last time before taking a careful sip. Jess raised an eyebrow at his silence, and looked to Gwen for an answer.
“It’s now two days in a row that they’re both being weird,” Gwen explained.
“They?” Jess asked, though she already knew the answer.
“Peter and Miguel.” Gwen nodded her head towards Peter as she spoke.
He glared at her over the top of his coffee cup, which he held with both hands. “I am not being weird.”
“Sure, Peter, sure,” Gwen said. “But Miguel sure is. I swear, I have never seen him so happy.”
Jess chuckled. “Is that what this is about? Miguel being happy? Maybe he just had a good night, yeah? Not everything has to be a conspiracy, you guys.”
“Miguel doesn’t have good nights,” Pav said. “Miguel has nights that are spent in the lab working on stuff. I swear to god that I walked in one night and he was sleeping standing upright, like a horse.”
Peter coughed pointedly into his coffee cup. “I seem to remember a certain someone falling asleep standing up.” He punctuated this with a pointed glance at Noir.
“Okay, but to be fair, that was a completely different situation,” Miles argued.
Pouring herself a cup of coffee, Jess sat down next to Hobie, watching the situation with a slight smile on her face. She let the banter go on for a few moments more before pointedly dropping her file on the table.
“As much as I would love for us to get to the bottom of the happy Miguel debate, we have work to do.”
Each person in the room, with the exception of Hobie, who had just gotten an alert on his watch, reorganized to form a circle with Jess. Peter took the seat Hobie had vacated, and they got to work.
An hour later, Jess and Peter walked out of the breakroom together, and Peter took the opportunity to stretch his arms above his head.
“You might be more successful in convincing the kids that you and Miguel aren’t a thing if you came up with a better lie than ‘That’s not true’,” Jess commented pointedly.
Peter glanced at her, annoyed, and then he sighed and any hint of anger vanished from his gaze. “Was I that obvious?”
Looking at him pityingly, Jess replied, “I was only in there for a few minutes before we started work, and even I could tell that something was up.”
He rubbed his eyes and smiled. “I guess they were gonna find out at some point. Also, Miguel and I are not a thing. We haven’t even gone on a date.”
“Maybe you should work on that, then.”
Peter considered that for a few moments. “Maybe I should. I don’t know what I would do for a date with the world’s busiest, most successful spiderman, though.”
“Start with the basics,” Jess replied. “A dinner date. Go out to a fancy place, have a nice meal.”
Dodging around a sprinting spider-person, Peter chuckled. “I’m not sure if you’ve noticed, Jess, but I’m not great at fancy meals. I tend to talk too much and make an absolute fool out of myself.”
Jess raised an eyebrow at him. “I don’t know if you’ve noticed, but Miguel tends to look at you like you’re the only person in the world when you talk too much.”
Startled, Peter opened his mouth to reply and then closed it again.
“What?” Jess asked playfully. “You are literally the last person here to know that Miguel likes you.”
“Oh, god,” Peter sighed. “And you let me worry about asking him out the first time for months without telling me!”
“If I’m remembering right, you didn’t actually ask him out the first time. You just kissed him and ran away.”
“Oh, don’t remind me. That’s not the point anyways.”
Jess chuckled, but didn’t reply. They kept walking, close to reaching the end of the corridor. Jess gestured to the left, the way to the trains.
“So you think I should just ask Miguel? Just walk up and ask?”
“Ask me what?” Miguel asked, genuine curiosity in his voice. He was coming from the right, and was still a few dozen feet away. Peter mentally cursed the increased hearing that came from radioactive spider bites.
Quietly, Jess patted Peter encouragingly on the shoulder and faded into the hoard of spider-people who had just finished their lunch break and were now returning to work.
Miguel raised an expectant eyebrow, stopping a few feet away from Peter with one hand planted firmly on his hip.
“So, uh, I was wondering,” Peter began, and then stopped to regroup, clearly embarrassed.
“Yes?” Miguel asked, no annoyance showing itself in his tone yet.
“Do you want to go on a date with me?” Peter blurted it out so quickly that it was almost one word. It took Miguel a few moments to sort through what he’d heard, and then the surprise showed clearly on his face.
“What?” He asked. Out of everything that he could have been expecting, that was clearly not it.
Not being rejected immediately calmed Peter’s nerves a little, and he took care to speak more slowly this time. “A date. With me. Maybe we could go out to dinner somewhere, in your dimension, or mine, or somewhere else. I don’t know, I just thought that maybe-”
“Yes.”
“What?”
“I said yes,” Miguel repeated. “Yes, I’ll go on a date with you.”
He sounded slightly exasperated, but Peter was more focused on the way he was smiling.
“Okay. Yes. That’s good. That’s great! Do you want to do tomorrow at eight?”
“No, that won’t work. I could do Wednesday at eight, though.”
“Okay! Wednesday,” Peter replied, almost relishing the word on his tongue. He tore his eyes away from Miguel’s smile, because the urge to kiss the taller man was growing every second he looked at Miguel’s face. “I’ll see you then, Miguel!"
“I’ll definitely see you before that, but yes, see you on Wednesday. At eight. You choose the restaurant, just let me know about the dress code in advance, okay?”
Peter nodded, smiling. “Will do, boss.”
He hurried down the corridor after Jess, now fully late for his next meeting, but stopped a couple dozen feet away. He turned, calling back, “Wednesday! Don’t forget, Miguel!”
Miguel chuckled, turning left and making his way to his own meeting. “I’m not sure if it’s possible to forget, cariño.”
The words were meant for Peter, but he murmured them to himself instead, not willing to risk the pet name in the crowded halls.