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After the first incident, Toby had made them send a stern warning to Peter's high school e-mail address: no skateboards in the West Wing.
The crest was official, the wording cribbed from the Patriot Act. But, like the various staff decrees for everyone to clearly label their lunches in the shared refrigerator, it went unheeded, his defiance heralded by an upswirl of official documents as he whooped down the hallways. It was only at the door to her office that he dropped down onto two sneakered feet, pawed back unruly hair, smiled sheepishly, and said: “Hey CJ. I need a favor.”
If she was being completely honest, she’d been a little in love with Peter Parker from the start.
Leo had come to them with the idea. It had to be Leo: even the craziest, most downright insane ideas gained undue weight and gravitas coming from him. The candidates for the next election, three years away at the time, had been generally experienced but uninspiring. Perfect for the early nineties, and precisely what this new era didn’t need. Various polls had been running, trying to gauge interest in younger politicians, politicians from minority backgrounds, anyone who might grab the attention of the voting public while also being the leader the United States and – loathe as she was to actually say it – the entire free world desperately needed.
“How about Ben Parker?” Leo said.
He said it to all of them, in different states at different times, sometimes by phone, sometimes in person. And, one by one, they all replied: “Who?”
Benjamin Parker was, Josh summed up, precisely the wrong guy. Old white men with a military background had died a death along with the McCain campaign. It wasn’t that today’s voters didn’t respect their elders, or what those elders had done for the country, but Vietnam was literally a lifetime ago. Several lifetimes ago. For the kids of today it was just a Coppola movie while the real apocalypse was happening on the streets. Besides, Parker barely had any real political experience to speak of on the national stage.
Then they’d met him.
Peter hadn’t played much of a part in the campaign. He hadn’t even been a teenager when she first ran into him, and the Peter Parker story was, on the face of it, great press: Ben and his wife May raising their young nephew after a tragic accident had taken his parents. Peter was quiet and bright, a straight-A student and a straight arrow besides. But what if he turned thirteen and started acting out, condemning his uncle’s policies, getting into scrapes with the paparazzi?
He had, indeed, turned thirteen. And fourteen, fifteen, sixteen. The net result seemed to be that he shot up in height and looked much better in a suit for family photos. Even when he started dating – girls, although boys wouldn’t have necessarily been an unsurvivable issue – and showing up in the tabloids’ Hottest Teen polls, nothing pinged CJ’s radar. Admittedly it would have taken quite a lot to ping CJ’s radar by that point, with Tony Stark being hauled before congressional committees and Captain Rogers causing mass swooning every time he strolled through the press room. (She’d had to politely request that he wear his army uniform or civilian clothes rather than the spandex, but it honestly hadn’t done much to resolve the problem.)
And then Peter had shown up asking for his very first favor.
“I need an invite,” he said – or, at least, that was what his mumbling and stuttering boiled down to.
Oh, here we go, she thought. He’s finally cashing in on those “President’s kid” privileges. He wants to get backstage at a Selena Gomez show, or whoever the hip kids have crushes on these days. He wants to have his ass personally kicked by Black Widow.
“Dr. Curt Connors,” Peter said.
CJ raised her eyebrows, preparing to become utterly absorbed in the papers she was holding. “Is that some kind of rapper?”
Peter gave her a withering look that reminded her so much of his uncle. “Um, no? He’s a geneticist. His lab is doing some truly pioneering work.” He elaborated on said pioneering work for what seemed like an age. “But anyway, I’d just really like to meet him. Oscorp’s having a fundraiser next week. If I could just-”
She wanted to tell him that, as the President’s nephew, he could no longer “just” do anything. Peter going meant the secret service going, which meant undue press interest in why he was there and what he was doing, and did this mean the President implicitly approved of whatever Frankenstein science this Dr. Connors was undertaking?
But Peter’s big puppy-dog eyes stared out at her, and she reminded herself that it could be Justin Bieber he wanted to drool over. Hell, at worst she’d just put in yet another call to Pepper Potts or that nice young Englishman who often answered the phone, and arrange for Stark to do something outrageous. That usually got Danny Concannon off her back.
“I’ll see what I can do,” she said.
The invite was nothing to obtain and, although Peter was laid up in bed for a day or two afterward with a stomach bug – “a hangover," Josh said, nodding wisely – he was soon back in her office, practically bouncing off the walls as he thanked her, rattling off the names of all the scientists he’d met. She looked up the ones she remembered later: Erik Selvig, who did some kind of work for SHIELD these days, and Jane Foster, who was exactly the kind of girl a boy like Peter Parker would have pinned up on his bedroom wall.
After that, things changed. Peter was growing up, of course, looking into colleges and dating semi-seriously. He also took to dumping his secret service detail, which was problematic, but he always returned in one piece. More perturbing was his skateboarding, which left him with a black eye on more than one occasion, led to questions from the Post, and made happy-happy Parker family photoshoots a little tricky. But with the Lizard tearing through the city and giant mechanical caterpillars crashing into much of Manhattan, no one had much time to worry about Peter Parker’s busted lip.
And now here he was, fortunately unblemished on this occasion – a tall, handsome young man who had just completed his first year at Columbia and was now gracing them all with his presence in DC for the summer.
“A favor?” CJ asked.
Peter glanced left and right before ducking into her office, closing the door before Carol could raise a word of objection. “What do you know about the Avengers Initiative?”
There was a time when security concerns meant she’d been obligated to respond with “the what, now?” But that was before Steve Rogers and his band of merry men had almost singlehandedly saved New York (which was worth something no matter how they dressed). She shrugged, sweeping up a file from her desk and preparing to look very, very busy. “Just what I read in the papers.”
“They print what you say, and I know Captain America’s here all the time.” Peter edged closer to her desk. “What are the chances you could get me a tour of a SHIELD facility?”
She gave him a look perfected during all the times he’d begged to meet Aldrich Killian or join a random astrological surveying team in Texas, or maybe check out the latest gamma ray research. “Peter… your aunt and uncle have staff you should be asking to arrange these things.”
“Trips to movie premieres, charity dinners. Not this.”
“And did you think why that might be? It’s not as if I could even do it, but if I could… They’re classified and they’re dangerous. You’d be risking your life and at best wasting their time. I know you’re smart, Peter, but they’re not going to drop everything and let you in on the secrets of the universe just because you’re a Parker.”
Peter scratched his jaw. “Not just because I’m a Parker… Everyone knows about Avengers Tower, but that seems to be mostly a promotional front. Unlike us, they’re smarter than to hang out in a massive building that would be an obvious target for bad guys, and the other probable locations include security that’s just too tough to get past.” He met her eyes. “You know, I assume.”
CJ decided to ignore that swipe at their insistence on working in a huge white building that kept being destroyed by Roland Emmerich. She could almost sense Carol hovering on the other side of the door, the press corps going into some kind of meltdown, Josh about to cause a major diplomatic incident with the Thai ambassador… “Tell you what,” she said, as if negotiating Christmas presents with a five-year-old, “I’ll have a word with Captain Rogers if I see him, okay?”
Peter beamed. “I’ll be very, very good!” he assured her. He even walked all the way out of her sight like a normal, earthbound person.
Usually she made this kind of vague promise with the intention of utterly forgetting about it five minutes later. But Captain America (“please, call me Steve”) was hardly the sort of person she could miss, particularly when accompanied by that stoic friend of his who somehow managed to get a whole quiver of arrows through security.
“Ms. Cregg,” Steve said, waiting with Charlie for the President’s latest meeting to end. Every time she met him, she couldn’t help staring. Never mind the way you could tell he had biceps the size of both her thighs – how did anyone have skin that smooth, unblemished, and practically glowing outside of an Accutane commercial?
She made the inquiry in a tone she rarely ever used, the one that indicated she was only asking because she was obliged to, and fully expected, even wanted, to be turned down. But he smiled and considered it. “You know, I’ll have to run it by some people, but Peter’s a good kid. I’m sure we can work something out.”
With the events of the next few weeks – the entire Mandarin business – CJ was far too distracted to think much about either Steve or Peter, except when the press asked why Captain America wasn’t sorting out this mess (“Colonel Rhodes is more than capable”) and whether the First Family was safe (“SHIELD has excellent security measures in place”). Peter, she assumed, was perfectly secure within his fortress of physics textbooks.
Even when she received an e-mail from Peter’s Columbia account, saying simply “Thanks!”, it raised no particular suspicions. Presumably Steve and Colonel Fury had arranged for him to see a sanitized lab or facility somewhere, the type they must show to politicians, where he could chat to scientists about pre-approved topics without compromising national security.
She’d barely made it home one evening to find Toby leaving an irate message on her landline: “-thinking? Sam and I just spent an entire day trying to find suitable euphemisms for supervillain and somehow you assume that sending the President’s nephew to-”
CJ snatched up the receiver. “What happened?”
Back in the West Wing, where there was a flurry of activity usually unseen past the early evening, she found Peter parked on the edge of her desk, applying a dishcloth-wrapped icepack to his cheekbone. Two of his fingers were taped together. He held up that hand as soon as he saw her. “I know, I know. My aunt’s looking for me.”
“Are you hiding out or just trying to make her hysterical with worry?”
He winced, gingerly removing the icepack. “It was fine. I didn’t even see anything. Two seconds after they burst in, I had three SHIELD guys throw me into a bathroom. That’s what I got this from, by the way. I’m going to have to read the newspapers to figure out what happened, just like everyone else.”
CJ folded her arms. “You could’ve been killed.”
“Are you kidding? That place has more security than the White House. Probably the safest place I could be.” He hopped down from the desk. “I’ll go find Aunt May. But listen CJ, don’t worry about me, okay? I’m a kid. I bounce.”
Minutes later, in the press room, Danny threw up a hand and asked if the White House had an official position on Spider-Man.
“Well do we?” Sam seemed impressively open to the idea afterward, the four of them huddled in Toby’s office with back editions of the Daily Bugle fanned out on the desk.
Toby was trying, and failing, to master the art of twiddling a pen around his fingers. “A position? On a guy in a Halloween costume who sticks to walls? Maybe I’m missing something, but I don’t see a big block of cheese in here, figurative or otherwise.”
“On a masked vigilante who seems to be branching out to Washington from New York.” Josh raised a placatory hand. “Admittedly he’s not Stark. He’s not Banner. He’s not got the firepower to blow up a city if we piss him off. But he’s not Captain America either. We have no idea who he is or what his agenda is. All we know is he’s a masked man who gained access to a secure government facility.”
“And he fights crime,” Sam said.
“He takes justice into his own hands.”
Sam’s brow furrowed. “Spiders don’t have hands, do they?”
“Of course not, they have legs.”
“But what about the little things at the-”
“Feet?”
Toby’s pen flew out of his fingers and snapped Sam across the ear. “Our official policy is exactly what it always is. We defer to the national security advisors and Colonel Fury, all of whom have bigger problems than some guy who, as far as I can make out, doesn’t even carry a gun.”
“He’s like Batman,” Sam said, hand now cupped protectively over the side of his head. “Except with more primary colors.”
Josh was staring at the newspaper headlines. “Why is there a hyphen in Spider-Man? Doesn’t that look really sixties?”
CJ left them to it.
The official, rubberstamped statement said much the same thing when it came to her via a Leo adamant that the country was going to hell if the President had to have opinions on a person who could perform any, all, or some of the activities traditionally associated with arachnids. In recent months there had been various stories about costumed heroes and vigilantes braving the streets. Most were just ex-marines or MMA enthusiasts, and most wound up in traction. Spider-Man had received some press in NYC, but so long as he stayed in NYC, the federal government could turn a blind eye. Now that he was in DC, tangling up with SHIELD…
But that was an issue that largely stayed out of the press room, even if half the questions these days surrounded robot suits and thawed-out WWII mascots. “Once,” she said to Peter when he brought her coffee prior to an official banquet, “my job didn’t consist of telling the English-speaking world how robot arms might work.”
“How do robot arms work?” Peter asked obediently. His fingers were now untaped, and the swelling on his cheekbone had gone down.
“My point is, it’s nice to have to bone up on interest rates and the prevailing political forces in Hungary instead of trying to explain to the Post every last detail of the entire Mandarin affair without offending half our Asian and Middle Eastern allies.”
A pause. Peter looked up from the papers he’d scooped from her desk. “Uh… what are the prevailing political-”
“Why exactly are you here?” Once upon a time he really had spent most of his summers hanging around the West Wing, when he would just hunker down to read on someone’s couch or even under a desk. They’d trip over him in the middle of a crisis, had probably discussed national secrets with Peter two feet away, although thankfully he’d usually been in Mordor or Gotham City at the time. It had gotten so the oddness of his being in the White House so often barely occurred to her, even though Peter was now what they called a strapping young man, with girlfriends and interests and money in his pocket.
“Well…”
CJ plucked the papers from his hands. “Josh is right over there. Donna too. Donna would love to do a few favors for you… And that sounded dirty, to be honest, but I’m not sure it’s untrue.”
Peter was doing the puppy-dog eyes thing again. CJ wondered if that would still work for him when he was thirty. But, heck, it still worked for his Uncle Ben. It had won him the election.
“Is it because I’m the woman?” she demanded, already knowing she was going to give in. “There’s no reason Sam or Toby can’t help you. Or do they? Am I just getting every third or fourth request?”
Peter stuck a little bit of tongue out the corner of his mouth. He was dressed in what was considered formal attire, was in fact formal attire, but his artfully rumpled hair and wonky collar were going to make him look like a ruffian playboy in front of ambassadors and royalty. “It’s not much,” he said. “I’m just looking for Dr. Banner’s e-mail address.”
There was an angle on this, she was sure of it. But maybe it really was the case that growing up as the First Nephew had meant Peter was blissfully unaware of his own mortality. He was surrounded by people who would take a bullet for him, after all. “Dr. Banner,” CJ said. “Large man? Somewhat green around the everything?”
“He’s a genius in the field of radiation research,” Peter said. “I’m not asking you to get me within arm’s reach of him. I’d just like to introduce myself over the web. I’m thinking of doing a study in the same field, and my professors think I have a real chance to expand our understanding of-”
“You think the Incredible Hulk has e-mail?”
Peter looked at her blankly. “CJ, everyone has e-mail.”
In what she considered a show of restraint worthy of any actual mother, she didn’t even ask anything else. She just made him stand still while she straightened up his collar and hollered at Toby to come and put a proper bowtie on the young man. No one had a comb handy, but really they’d already done as much as anyone could be expected to do.
When she saw the photos from the event online a few hours later, he did indeed look very handsome, standing next to his uncle and dancing with a Scandinavian princess and appearing admirably attentive when a Latverian diplomat was droning on about satellite launches. None of those pictures, however, made it onto the news sites. All of their front pages were green.
“I’m sure he’s a lovely fellow,” Danny said, hopped up on coffee, trailing her around desks, dodging Carol on the way. “But how long can the President or SHIELD justify letting Banner roam around free when things like this keep happening?”
It was late, very late, at least two hours past when she’d fully expected to be asleep. “Things like this don’t keep happening, and there’s the little matter of him saving half of New York from alien invaders, so… I’m not sure I need to finish that sentence.”
“He more or less trashed a government building, CJ.”
CJ unlocked her office door. “Less, actually, which when you think about it shows admirable restraint from a giant green id.”
“I couldn’t agree more.” Not Danny’s voice, this time. Something much less excited.
She looked up. Steve Rogers had appeared, the blues of his costume striking in the dull browns of the office. There was a thin sheen of sweat on his otherwise pristine forehead. “I’m sorry to interrupt, Ms. Cregg, but I’m looking for Peter.”
“What’s wrong?” Steve must have come from the Hulk incident, possibly on his way to the Situation Room to make a report. And yet he was asking about a teenager who should have been asleep in his own bed. Should have been...
Captain America had the best matter-of-fact face she’d ever seen. “Nothing out of the ordinary, ma’am. Peter asked me for some assistance with his homework a few days ago, and I can’t seem to get in touch with him.”
If she were alone in her office, the door safely closed, CJ might have let a flicker of her worry show. But Danny was standing right there. Danny who, despite being a good guy, despite even being a friend, would also feel obliged to get on the phone the instant he thought the President’s nephew was actually missing or in harm’s way.
So she shrugged. “He mentioned he’s working on some sort of article he wants to submit to his school science journal. I’d check with the First Lady’s secretary. Or maybe Charlie’s seen him. Failing that, look under desks.”
When Steve had smiled again and walked off in what certainly wasn’t a jog but looked as if it wanted to be, and when Danny had decided his deadline really was rapidly approaching, she slipped into her office, closed the door, and turned the key. If she had had a “stay the fuck out” sign, she would have hung it.
Peter Parker was a kid. She’d known him since he was twelve years old. He was a nerd. He needed glasses (however much he didn’t like wearing them). He had zits. He dated. He was the closest thing Washington had had to JFK Jr. in years. And if it wasn’t for all of those factors, all of the little details, the memories of a little boy wide-eyed at everything his uncle’s career path had opened up for him, surely she would have put it together much sooner.
The skateboard injuries. The sudden interest in Curt Connors, SHIELD, and Bruce Banner just before disasters occurred. Spider-Man’s on-cue relocation to DC when Peter was on his summer break. Captain America’s sudden, not-just-polite interest in the “homework” and whereabouts of a teenager who, despite his high profile, was still just a teenager… CJ drew a hand over her eyes, tipped her head back against the door, and looked up.
“Hey,” Peter said. He was, indeed, still a teenager. A teenager with unruly hair and zits and a goofy smile. A teenager who was currently wearing a skintight blue-and-red costume and clinging, quite impressively, to her ceiling. “I need a favor.”
She decided they could both pretend that she hadn’t just let out a very unprofessional squeal of surprise.
Peter somersaulted down, dropping to her desk and then the floor. She could see now that the costume (suit? uniform?) was ripped alarmingly in several places. Over his ribs, beneath a flap of scaled blue, she could see black bruising that was extensive enough to be truly worrying.
“The Hulk, huh?” she said.
Peter nodded. He winced. “It’s not as bad as it could be. I managed to get word to Cap through an old friend of his I found by going over microfiche in the library, but… He’s the Hulk and that psychic disruptor tech meant Banner had absolutely zero self-control.”
Even that little speech made him gasp for air, like a kid having an asthma attack. “Sit down,” CJ said. Dealing with the problem of Peter, regular Peter, being injured was a lot easier than dealing with the Peter who stuck to walls. Once he gingerly sat down on the edge of her desk, she peeled back the flap at his side as if she actually had any medical training to speak of. It didn't look any better up close. “You need to get to a hospital.”
Peter looked at her.
“So I’ll get you some clothes.” She could swipe some out of Sam’s gym bag if necessary.
“I think this goes beyond a skateboarding accident, CJ.”
She cycled through the possibilities. Jumping off a building would crack more than his ribs. A car accident would require an actual busted car and a police report. The President’s nephew couldn’t just get mugged, and no ordinary mugger punched as hard as the Hulk. “Steve Rogers can take you to a SHIELD medical center. They have blacked-out vehicles. No one needs to know.”
“Yeah, except SHIELD!” Peter wearily mopped sweaty hair from his forehead. He skin was getting paler and clammier by the second. “Which is practically the entire government.”
“Your uncle is the President, Peter! And you were pretty eager to get to know SHIELD before.”
He nodded. “To warn them. The threats these days aren’t from aliens Stark can keep tabs on with radar. They’re coming from the labs, just like Dr. Connors and Dr. Banner. I don’t know why all these breakthroughs are happening, why they keep going wrong, causing mutations, driving good people insane. There’s something more at work here, whether it’s the alien influence or from the bridge Dr. Foster’s trying to build… But until I figure it out, we just have to deal with the symptoms.”
“You should share this with SHIELD. Peter, you’re…” The phrase just a kid seemed both all wrong and entirely right. “You’re just one person.”
He was struggling for air still, but he looked up. “I’m Peter Parker, Ben Parker’s nephew. You’ve worried about what might happen if I was caught kissing a guy or smoking pot. How many coping strategies do you have if I’m caught being Spider-Man?”
CJ picked up the phone from her desk.
“Who’re you calling?” From the sound of things, Peter was about to faint onto her carpet any second.
There were five seconds of the Stark corporate music and then: “Good morning Ms. Cregg.” That nice, perpetually-bright sounding Englishman picked up. “How may I be of assistance?”
“I have Spider-Man in my office,” she said. If anyone could be unfazed by this news, it would be Stark's personal staff. “He’s hurt and he needs help. Very discreet help.”
“Ah.” She could almost see him smiling brightly. “Discretion is the word of the day at Stark Industries. One moment, please.”
Two minutes later, after she’d hung up, there was a light tap at her door. “Who is it?” CJ called. Asking for a password felt a little corny… and yet.
“Captain Rogers, ma’am.”
He was carrying a backpack when he slipped inside and locked the door again, nodding at Peter. He didn’t even seem surprised. “Put these on over your suit,” he said, holding out baggy sweatpants and a jacket. “I’d bind up your ribs, but I don’t think we have time.”
Peter numbly took the clothes. “Where are you taking me?”
“Natasha knows a little clinic. It’s not SHIELD. We’ll keep your name out of the papers and out of their databases.”
“I thought you were SHIELD?”
Steve smiled. “Son, I’m an Avenger. And you saved my ass at least twice tonight. Saved Bruce’s butt too, if I’m not mistaken. So just tell me how to get that webbing of yours out of my hair and we’ll be even.”
“It dissolves in a couple of hours…” Peter mumbled, slinging the jacket around his shoulders and letting Steve help him with the sleeves before he zipped it up to his chin.
They were both gone in a matter of minutes, Steve’s arm around Peter's shoulders, talking enthusiastically about something that sounded like it might be 1941 baseball stats, Peter nodding at whatever he considered to be appropriate intervals. CJ leaned back against her desk. Taking any further action tonight appeared to be entirely useless by comparison.
Her phone rang. “…yeah?” she said warily.
“Hello. Jarvis speaking, from Stark Industries. I’m happy to report that young Mr. Parker has checked into the Ritz-Carlton this evening with a young lady matching the description of… Well, I’m sure the name would mean nothing to either of us, but Ms. Potts assures me she’s quite the box office draw these days.”
“And the actual young lady?”
“Is indeed in our nation’s capital, but the type to enjoy a quiet night in. However, her agent will likely be delighted by the resulting publicity.”
CJ sighed. “I don’t know about you, Jarvis, but I’m going back to bed.”
In the morning the questions were all still Hulk-related, but the SHIELD damage control machine had evidently kicked into overdrive during the hours she’d been trying to sleep. Most of the questions she received, she directed to them. Toby and Sam were chomping donuts and swapping drafts, arguing back-and-forth about the connotations of “incredible”. Leo spent much of the day shaking his head in disbelief. No one remarked on Peter’s absence or his alleged escapades. When she called his cell, no one answered.
“We live in amazing times,” the President said when she finally nabbed two minutes with him. He squinted at the papers he was supposed to sign, as reluctant as his nephew to wear glasses. “Just as fascinating as it is dangerous to be alive to see them.”
“I’d have to agree, sir.”
He signed with a flourish and handed it back to her, folding his hands on the desk before him. “My nephew’s been in the papers.” She wasn't sure if this was an accusation
“He’s a young man.”
Ben nodded. “Yes. Studious. Responsible. But in the media for all the wrong reasons.” He looked up to meet her eyes. “Of course, in Peter’s case the right reasons might be even more problematic, given the events of last night.”
“I’m not sure that I-”
“I’m not sure I do either. I haven’t talked to him about it. He’s better off not knowing that I have the slightest idea about his alter-ego, and May would likely have conniptions. But it’s hard not to put two and two together when your nephew starts dropping his security detail on the same nights Spider-Man’s saving college kids from would-be robbers and rapists. Not to mention his sudden interest in sewing.”
CJ brushed strands of hair from her face. She cleared her throat. “We should discuss this with Leo. With some of the others. If this gets out, we need to have a strategy in place…”
“Ah yes, a strategy.” Ben smiled. “I imagine Josh would want to call up that lovely Joey Lucas and have her run a poll, maybe asking voters their reaction on hearing that the son of, say, the Governor of Delaware has been running around dressed up as a… beetle?”
She wanted to say “Of course not,” but the canny solution she needed to follow it up was somewhere out of her grasp.
Ben really was precisely the reassuring figure the American public needed. He spoke and they all wanted to believe him. CJ wanted to believe him now. “We can’t stop him,” he said. “He’s got a good head on his shoulders and Steve Rogers looking out for him. But if it happens, if Spider-Man is someday unmasked, I’d like to hope that the American public would see a young man risking life and limb for innocent lives, with no political agenda and no expectation of reward. I’d like to hope that there are many more young men and women out there like Peter, not with the same abilities, but with the same heart.” He smiled again. “Some of them might be closer than you think.”
Walking back to her office, it was difficult not to wonder if Charlie had nunchucks in his bag, or if Donna eased on a leather suit after dark and battled enemy agents on Washington rooftops. She was so fervently hoping not that she barely heard the trundle of wheels behind her, the whoosh of papers, the dismayed call of the Ziegler disturbed in his natural habitat.
She rounded on him. “I’m all out of favors.”
Peter kicked his board up into his hand. “I can’t come by to say thanks?”
“I liked you better when all you did was read.” But the glower she was working on just wouldn’t hold. She ushered him into her office. “How are the ribs?”
“Not too bad.” Peter lounged against the door. “I heal a little faster than average, and the Avengers have some more advanced medical tech… Not sure I’ll be doing much web swinging for a while. Anyway, Dr. Banner was really apologetic.”
“I’ll bet.” She sighed. All the questions, everything that had occurred to her in the night - including how on earth he was suddenly able to stick to her ceiling - were too many to even know where to begin. And maybe that was for the best. “So did they give you a membership card?”
He grinned, practically blushing. “Not exactly. I need to go back to school in a couple of weeks. I can’t be free to save the world at a moment’s notice. And besides, someone’s got to keep the low-level crime in check. The guys still trying to use their superhuman abilities to rob banks.”
“And giant lizards?”
“Hey, Iron Man can’t be everywhere.” Peter leaned in, a bit tentatively, and kissed her cheek. “I promise Peter Parker’s going to be as low key as possible. At least until my uncle’s re-elected.”
She didn’t even want to ask. “And then?”
Peter backed up and opened the door. “Yeah, CJ,” he said, dropping his skateboard to the floor and giving her just a hint of that patented Parker grin. “Then I might need a few more favors.”