She hadn’t meant to tell him like this. She hadn’t meant to practically ambush him just as his feet had landed on her living room rug, hadn’t meant to ruin the dinner they’d planned. Especially since he actually managed to show up this time, and only twenty minutes late.
She hadn’t meant for the look that had flashed across his face like she’d slapped him. His chest was heaving, as though the wind had been knocked out of him, and even from across the room she could see that his eyes were now glassy.
I can’t be your girlfriend right now. She hadn’t meant to use those words, either, or sound so callous when she said them. It had all tumbled from her lips unwillingly, like her mouth had lost the ability to keep the thoughts and feelings that had been swirling around her brain at bay.
“I love you,” Peter says when he’s able to speak again, as though it’s the only thing he can say. Like it’s the only thing that matters.
MJ takes a deep breath, lets it out. Her heart is pounding and her head hurts and she wishes it could be different. She wishes it wasn’t so hard.
“It doesn’t matter,” she tells him, looking at her hands. There’s ink stains on her fingers and a cut on her palm that’s just starting to heal. This isn’t how she wanted to have this conversation. I love you too. Of course I love you too.
“How—how can you say it doesn’t matter?” his voice is filled with strain, like it physically pains him to keep himself from crossing the apartment and closing the distance between them.
“It—it can’t, Pete. Not when I…I can’t be with you this way, not when I’m like this.” MJ can’t look at him, can’t look at anything except her now shaking hands, and she’d do anything to be able to turn it all back so she can save him too.
There’s a long winding road that leads back to the beginning of them, a dorky boy in glasses and a girl that was taller than everyone in their class. Furtive glances and nervous confessions had led to promises and forgotten memories, all leading up to this point, to their end. She feels the bits of herself that she lost, the pieces that she’s given up in being Spider-Man’s girlfriend. Secrets and canceled plans and building resentments until she felt like she could erupt and no one around her would notice.
It’s quiet between them, the air still and heavy. Once upon a time MJ would’ve known exactly what to do to fix this and it wouldn’t have been a second thought. It would’ve been enough to be here with him and love him after years of separation and fighting their way back to each other, and she could figure out the rest of it later. They would figure it out together, just like they always had. Peter and MJ, something the universe was so sure of that not even one of the most powerful sorcerers could break them.
But that was then, and this is now, and she’s tired.
“I need time,” she tells him, finally managing to look at his torso. The spider emblem on his chest stares back, mocking her.
MJ can feel his eyes on her, searching her. She wonders what he’ll find. “I can—I can give you time.”
She feels like she owes him an explanation, or at least a semblance of one. He doesn’t have to say anything for her to know that his mind is running at a million miles a minute right now, trying to pinpoint when he messed up, when it all changed. She doesn’t know how to tell him that he won’t find one, and that she doesn’t know either.
She loves him. She loves him just as much as she did when they were seventeen, loves him more, even, now that she knows him as an adult. She loves his smile and the way he smells and his overwhelming sense of responsibility, even when it drives her crazy. She loves the way he looks at her and the sound of his laugh when she tries to cook for them, and she loves the way he thinks.
She doesn’t know when it stopped being enough, or if it actually has. She doesn’t know if this is a passing feeling, if the noose that’s been slowly tightening around her lungs for weeks now will loosen when she doesn’t have to sit up at night waiting for him anymore, or if this is just what it means to have Peter Parker in her life. She doesn’t know if she’ll regret this as soon as he leaves, if she’ll call him back and tell him she didn’t mean it, that she loves him too.
MJ feels like she has to try, though. For them, for herself. For the thrumming anxiety that’s been building in her chest, for the nights she’s spent tossing and turning even though he’s been right beside her. It’s been piling up; she’s missed deadlines at work and canceled plans with friends in favor of locking herself in her bedroom, trying to escape the pounding in her heart.
She finally looks at Peter. His hair is a mess like he’s just run an anxious hand through it, and he seems to be wrestling with himself with something. There are red rims around his eyes that make her heart ache. He looks at her, too, and she hopes he can hear everything she’s not saying, not able to say.
Peter squares his shoulders, comes to a decision. Steeles his expression. “Am I losing you, Em?”
He’s being brave right now for both of them, and she wants to thank him for it. He always knows what she needs, can sense it like it’s one of his powers. She’s never been loved like this before.
“I don’t know,” she tells him, and she’s numb. It feels stupid, a distance between them of her own creation, but she can’t drag him down with her. She has to shoulder this alone.
Peter looks at her, really looks at her, and something inside him seems to click. He smiles at her, a soft sort of smile that tells her everything she needs to know about what’s to become of them, and she’s not so afraid anymore.
“Okay, Michelle,” he says. “Okay.”