"Good God, I thought you'd stopped brooding. You've worn red business suits, I've seen you in them."
"They're red?" Matt said, cracking half a smile. "I'm serious, Peter. If you truly love them, you'll want to be with them even if they decide to be abstinent for twenty years."
"Yeah, of course I would, but... I mean, Mary Jane's... and Felicia, whoa..."
"Tell me about it," Matt said.
"Wait, you and Felicia haven't..."
"Can't tell you. Attorney-client privilege."
The next emergency cut out the middleman. No sirens, just an explosion in Midtown. Peter quickly loaded his webshooters with fresh cartridges. "You stay here and catch your breath, I'll get out on the dance floor. And I'm telling MJ that you banged Felicia again."
"What makes you think she doesn't already know?"
Peter paused.
"I'm not saying she was hungry, I'm just saying she checked the menu."
"What is it with you Catholics? Do you enjoy confessing this sorta thing?"
"No, but my priest does."
***
As Peter swung for the source of the explosion—a yellow tongue emerging from a darkened building to lick the night, big slobbers of smoke rising out of every shattered window and reflecting the fire's brightness—he couldn't help but compare Matt to another of his friends, Johnny Storm. Both of them had a strong vein of boyish bachelorhood in their bedrock, but while Johnny expressed it in the ways of a frat party, Matt was more a wry quip, a knowing look. An older brother, while Johnny made even Peter look mature. Still, they had a lot in common. Johnny had never really looked at married life, and if Matt had ever made progress toward it, it was one step forward, two steps back.
Peter wondered if some of his own objection stemmed from that. He'd been in relationships before, with Mary Jane and with Felicia—both of them at once was new, but not exactly unprecedented. But being a father? That didn't go away just because he and Mary Jane had a fight. It was real—even realer than the ring, the piece of paper. Trying not to feel too much like Dr. Strange, Peter mused that a baby was their covenant made flesh. Next to it, everything else was words.
Maybe he was so reluctant because he didn't want to stop being a bachelor. Oh, superficially, it'd be business as usual. Felicia and MJ had been right to say that he literally could not do better than them. He could not love anyone more than them, couldn't have the history he shared with Mary Jane with anyone else, couldn't desire someone any more than Felicia and he had been on the receiving end of some classic Jessica pheromones. What was the point of being a bachelor when they were all he wanted? What more could he possibly bargain for? Hell, they wanted him for sex while freely allowing him to pick up strangers for one night stands. It was an arrangement that possibly only the cat burglar and the party girl could've come up with.
So what was in the balance? Just his freedom, that was all. Felicia had joked about him picking up Rocky Road on the way to save the world, but she had the right idea. This wasn't just responsibility, this was the ultimate responsibility. Whatever freedom he had would suddenly be burdened by it. Get a job teaching, just because he enjoyed it? No way. He'd have to put himself on Tony Stark's bankroll, rely on his Avengers connections for money, and while he was sure he could handle just about any science problem Tony threw at him, it felt dishonest to his blue-collar roots. Getting paid because he'd set out to help people and ended up on the Avengers? So after all this time, it ended up he really had put on the suit for a payday? Because that was how it had ended up.
He came in for a landing, swinging through a tide of heated air, black smoke, instantly sooting the lenses of his mask and basking him in sweat. Moving more by spider-sense than anything else, he landed in a crouch, floor solid but sweltering, and looked around beneath the miasma of smoke curling about on the ceiling before escaping through cracks and broken windows. The room seemed like any old abandoned warehouse, except a lot of the debris scattered around looked high-tech. Circuity, twisted metal sans rust, bits and bobs of really advanced stuff. Some kind of supervillain hide-out? Made more sense than someone with a grudge against unused loft space...
He heard the click of a Glock 7 being chambered and scrambled around, fingers curled into firing position, to see Black Widow coming for him through the flames. Seeing him, she relaxed her shooter's stance.
"Zvezda," she greeted, the brusque Slavic accent she slipped into when flustered now in full effect. "Heard you were back."
Peter folded his arms regally. "'Zvezda'? My, aren't we familiar. You may refer to me as Zvezda-Man, Mr. Zvezda, your Zvezdaness..."
"Right, you're being funny. I remember that."
She looked good as ever, a little shockingly so with eight months' worth of changes to her look hitting Peter all at once. She'd cut her hair into that jaggedly short style she'd used to wear it in when she was hooking up with Matt, a close crop with the sheer coming down to the nape of her neck. Her costume was all business, matte black leather relieved painfully little by her red sigils, zipped up to her throat, the armor of it nonetheless adhering tightly to her breasts, displaying them with vicious pressure.
The skintight catsuit showcased her body to perfection, hiding the muscle but showing off the luscious curves, providing all the more contrast to the clean, powerful lines of her perfect face—high cheekbones, razor-sharp chin, almost ethereal in its perfection. Without the lushness of her long mane of hair to cloak it in glamour, without the hint of flirty sexuality provided by her undone zipper, the costumed body shifted away from the all-sex-appeal look that Felicia, in her lycra-blend zentai suit, achieved, and became more militaristic, more dominatrix. Perhaps it was the frustrated interlude of the previous hour, but Peter found his mind wandering in a way that (it shocked him) he had complete permission to indulge in.
Assuming Natasha wanted to.
And her wanting to was a happy thought worthy of Neverland.
Business, Parker. Keep it professional—don't wonder about professions that require skintight black leather polished to a sheen... "So, hey, maybe this is a stupid question, but why is everything on fire? You try to work the microwave without reading the manual?"
"This is a OSB front," Natasha said in clipped words, scanning the area with pistol at the ready. "They had information I needed. Plan A didn't work. This was Plan B."
"Plan B is high explosives? What's Plan C, a suitcase nuke?"
"Plan C is I get mad," Natasha replied tersely. Peter now saw that she had a hard drive gripped in her non-gun hand. "If you'll excuse me, I think no more bad guys, so—good team-up."
"Hold on a second! I know I'm not up much on current events, but last I'd heard, SHIELD'd branded you as a traitor and you'd been kicked off the Avengers."
Natasha smiled. Dangerous. "Zvezda... you're not going to let a little thing like that get in the way of our friendship? After all—it is not as if you have never been accused of... naughtiness?"
"True enough. But we've got Skrulls, body swaps, demonic possessions... and you just blew up a building to snag a hard drive. I'm thinking maybe that should go with me until we get this sorted out. Just in case."
"You? Why, are you intending to crack Level-9 encryption?"
"No, I'm intending to keep it out of the wrong hands until I can figure out the right ones. So why don't you hand it over, then we can both get out of this oven and let the nice firemen do their job."
"So soon? I was enjoying working up a sweat. It's a little like sauna, no? Invigorating." Natasha pulled her zipper down her sternum. Her breasts didn't explode out from confinement as Felicia's did, tightly compressed and swollen as ripe fruit. That wasn't... classy enough for Nat.
The zipper crested the bulge of her high, firm breasts, then sidled right down the slope of the lapsing catsuit, either half of it unspooling from its release to expose the canyon that the zipper had straddled. Her catsuit pooled to either side, instant dishabille, allowing the inner contours of her breasts to expose themselves to the glimmering light, sweaty and jiggling slightly with her excited breaths. Peter was absolutely enthralled by that slightest of trembles, testifying to the realness of her voluptuous cleavage, even while making it clear that the majority of the mass was firm and high-set and perky.
"I know you, Zvezda," Natasha continued, still pinching the zipper between her fingers, toying with it like she was bored and needed to occupy her hands. "If you let me get away with it, you'll worry I'll do something bad. If you hold onto it, you'll worry I would've used it for something good, and that you've ended up getting people hurt."
"At least I'll have done something," Peter reasoned. He also reasoned that if he kept drooling, it should show up on his mask.
Natasha straightened her shoulders. Her breasts thrust out proudly, straining against the partially undone catsuit which now seemed to face an uphill battle in concealing them. Peter could see long, erect nipples denting the leather from the inside... "Surely there must be some way we can come to an arrangement you feel good about," she said, her accent deepening. She wasn't flustered. He wondered if it was just lust.
"I'd like that, Widow, really I would, but maybe you could just tell me what's going on—if there's someone who can verify all this—Clint, maybe, he'd know whether or not you've been..." Peter gulped. "You know... whammied."
"Do you really want a man right now, Zvezda? That's very typical—you're usually a more enlightened, a more egalitarian sort. You should take a woman at her word, not need a man's approval of her." Despite her harsh words, she was cooing. "Do you really think I would be doing this if it weren't important? Showing you this if it weren't important? This is just how desperate the situation is. I'll let you look at them, if that'll convince you..."
"That won't be necessary!" Peter said quickly. "And, really, that wouldn't prove—"
"I have not shown many people this," she purred. Her catsuit fell loosely away from her décolletage, her shoulders, exposing a swath of the skin of her throat, her collarbone, all of it almost being shrugged off... "Barely any. You would be one of the rare few. Why don't you want to see them?"
"I do—I mean, I don't—"
"Is it because it would make you hornier? I can see your erection, Zvezda. It is no wonder you have two beautiful women at your beck and call. And one of them a redhead." Natasha tossed her hair. "Who, of course, could have her pick of men. Do you like redheads? Are you worried about your cock getting bigger when it is so big already?"
"Y-yes?" Peter tried. Was it getting harder to breathe or were her breasts just heaving on their own? They were double-Ds, had to be, and with them shifting so inside the loose confines of her undone catsuit, he could see the shadow of either nipple inside the dark leathers.
"Perhaps I am doing favor for fellow redhead. Getting you all hot for her. You can fuck her, yes? As soon as we finish here, you can go home and think of me as you come inside her. And what if I told you about a safehouse where some of my spare costumes are? I think they would fit Miss Mary Jane Watson very well. Even I would like to see her wearing that." It came out zat. Her accent was stronger than ever, why was that so hot?
Natasha brought her hands to the neckline of the catsuit, which was practically hanging off her by now. She peered intently at Peter as her fingers curled inside, gently lowering the leather down her body. More and more of her perfectly round breasts came into Peter's view, and he became aware that the violent pounding sensation in his groin was his hardening cock.
"Perhaps it would be too much for poor Mary Jane. That is why you have pet cat, yes?" Natasha's lips quirked wryly at her little joke. "But she is only human as well. And I am super-soldier. You can fuck me and I can take it. So perhaps... just once... so you can cool down... and then the others. It will be like a taste test for wines. We can see which you prefer, red or white. Only it will not be wines you are sampling."
She peeled the catsuit down from her shoulders. Her truly sumptuous breasts lifted up and out as the leather slid off them, hoisting mouth-watering pink nipples that aimed themselves at Peter like a meal prepared especially for him.
"Gorgeous..." Peter rasped, his eyes burning into them.
Natasha's smile widened as she petted her nipples like obedient animals, letting them spike from Peter's hungry gaze. She walked forward and her tits thrust up tightly before Peter's eyes. They could not have bounded anymore perfectly, not too delicate, but not too weighty either. He could see drops of sweat poised like inlaid jewelry on the beaming curves, motionless, only to sprint into gravity with the next artful step.
"I am not a slut," Natasha said. "I would not give myself to you just as a courtesy. But as a token of my appreciation—you could kiss them. Suck them. We would both enjoy this. But you must promise not to touch me. Only suck. If you earn touching me—if you do a good job—I will let you know, yes?
Peter grinned in helpless victory. It was true there was no one he desired more than Mary Jane and Felicia—but Natasha hardly counted. She wasn't on the spectrum, she was more like a Celebrity Exemption. Fucking her wasn't a possibility, it was like waking up next to Marilyn Monroe.
Well, just call him JFK...
"Come here."
Natasha bit her lip, seeming as turned on as he was, but holding back. "Promise me. Promise me not to touch?"
