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They were on their way home from their fourteenth official date, still trying to get to know each other, and the question had seemed innocent enough when she'd asked it, but Peter had immediately started rubbing the back of his neck and talking mostly to the pavement.
"Well -- actually, I mean. It was -- last year," he confessed. "I, I mean, I swear I wasn't -- wasn't stalking you, or anything. I just... You made the debate team that year, remember? There were tryouts and the whole school was 'encouraged' to attend, we were supposed to give you guys a -- a practice audience, or... something. You know, I honestly don't remember?" A tremulous smile, warm and soft and almost painfully shy. "I don't remember what the topic was, or who was arguing the other side. I just remember when you got up to talk. You were so -- bright, and passionate, and I... I couldn't look away."
Gwen stopped walking, so he had to stop too, but still he wouldn't look at her, craning his neck to stare instead at passing traffic.
Peter Parker had been an easy boy to overlook: small for his age, mousy brown hair, and he tended to keep his head down in class. For the first few weeks of their first semester together, Gwen knew him only as one of the many names called for attendance before her own. Parker, Peter? teachers would say, and somewhere in her peripheral vision a small boy would look up briefly from his notebook to nod.
He'd just been so quiet, almost never talking in class at all. Like the ghost of a boy, flickering in and out, only sort of there. And Gwen herself had been so distracted, taking on extra credit assignments and picking up every extracurricular activity she could, because she wanted to go to a good school and her parents weren't rich so the onus was on her to make that possible. She couldn't blame herself for not noticing him sooner.
It was just that sometimes, she really wished she had.
Like right now, for example.
Gwen took two small steps towards him and reached out to take his hands. They twitched in her grasp with impossible strength that could have ripped away effortlessly if he hadn't kept it under such rigid control. Strength she knew he must have been afraid would hurt her someday accidentally, though he tried not to let it show.
She squeezed his hands, because she was not afraid of that. When Peter hurt her, it wouldn't be that kind of pain, and he would do it by saving lives. Just like her father had.
"So, just since last year?" she summarized, trying to make the smile clear in her voice because he was really invested in her shoes at that particular moment. "That's not stalking. Any real stalker would be insulted by the comparison."
Peter laughed, stuttery with nerves, and screwed up his mouth into an amused grimace. "Thanks. Thanks a lot. I feel -- I feel so much better now."
She tugged him closer still, and he tried to twitch away but she held on and he relented. "Me, for example," she told him loftily. "I feel pretty insulted."
It took him a moment to understand. "--You're not a stalker," he protested.
"I am by your standards." Gwen rubbed her thumb over his, soft. "I've liked you since -- oh, biology. Freshman year."
She could still picture it so clearly in her mind: the first day Mr. Lewis had asked them one of his now-famous stumper questions. How she had understood immediately what the purpose of the question was -- how none of them were really supposed to know the answer yet -- and how much she had burned to piece it together anyway.
So of course she remembered how, after two full minutes of silence, that semi-invisible boy had raised his hand for the first time all year.
"Since freshman year," Peter repeated, completely disbelieving. "No." He was shaking his head, stepping back from her, laughing anxiously. "No, no, no. You don't mean that. What would you even have seen to-- I mean. Come on."
Gwen put her hands on her hips, amused. "What, so only guys can be stalkers? That's not very egalitarian of you."
"You're not just a girl." If anything, Peter was only shaking his head harder. He looked down at his shoes, then up at her again. "You're a beautiful girl. A beautiful, brilliant girl. Beautiful, brilliant girls don't -- don't stalk skinny dorks. That's not how it works."
Because Peter Parker knew he was easy to overlook.
She gazed at him, running her eyes over his face. His big brown eyes, his permanently-flyaway hair, the nervous smile that came and went. Slowly, she stepped closer to him again, and this time she reached up to cup his jaw in her hands.
"I think that's exactly how it works," she told him.
For just an instant, the smile slipped away from his face; for an instant, he almost took her seriously. And then he laughed again, pointing his eyes off to the side, and said breezily, "Well, you sure picked the right horse. I had a rough start, sure, but look at me now. You're the only girl in Manhattan dating a superhero! It was -- probably smart of you to get in on the ground floor, before all of this went public."
The mixed metaphor was pretty incoherent -- Mr. Campbell would not have approved -- but the gist made her chest tight. Gwen shut her eyes, then kissed him as hard as she could.
Intelligence was usually a virtue, but sometimes you just had to shut the prefrontal cortex down completely and talk directly to the amygdala.
"I was going to say you're not so bad yourself," she told him, right against his lips, and was pleased when he met her stare with unfocused eyes. "But to be honest, you're being really stupid right now. You weren't Spider-Man in freshman year, and that isn't all I like about you, and you know that."
"Well -- sure, but... the mind can -- retroactively..."
Not good enough, Gwen could see, so she kissed him again.
"Was it Spider-Man who stood up to Flash that day at lunch?" she asked, because she knew it hadn't been. "Was it Spider-Man who made honor roll three semesters in a row? I guess it must have been Spider-Man who took that beautiful picture of that little house on a lake that's hanging in the hall outside the lab."
She punctuated each question with another kiss, until finally they were both breathless and Peter could only gape at her like he'd never really seen her before.
Gwen smiled at him, determined, and hesitantly he smiled back at her.
"For three years?" he asked, this time without looking away or preemptively making the idea into a joke.
It was one of the bravest things she'd ever seen him do, and Gwen had never loved him more.
"Almost," she corrected. "More like two-point-seven."
Peter licked his lips. Like hers, they were probably chapped from all the distractions in this conversation. "...Why didn't you say something?" he asked. Maintaining eye contact was obviously even harder for him this time, but he did it anyway.
Dozens of answers flitted through her mind.
Because my dad was the chief of police, and the last boy I tried to bring home never talked to me again.
Because it was my freshman year, and I wanted to focus on school.
Because you didn't seem to like anyone.
Because I'd never met a boy as smart as me, and for months all I wanted was to get better grades than you.
Because I want to be, I really do, but I'm not as brave as you.
None of them were what she wanted to say to him in this moment, even though all of them were true.
After a moment, Gwen just smiled at him. "Girls can also be shy," she informed him helpfully, and watched as he struggled to process that. From the way he sputtered and stared at her, it was even more unbelievable than the idea that girls could be stalkers.
Again, she wished she had never overlooked him at all. That their eyes had met from across the room on the first day of class, that everything had been perfect and effortless -- that Peter knew he was no more lucky to be dating her than she was to be dating him. But she couldn't do anything about that.
All she could do was kiss him again until his prefrontal cortex shut up and hope that by their sixtieth date he'd believe her.