Spiderman 3 Read Free Page B

nodded in reaffirmation, and she pulled him into the dressing room, leaving the door open behind him.
    He immediately saw the simple, tasteful assortment of flowers that he had sent, sitting on a table nearby. But they were dwarfed by another arrangement so ostentatious that it might have looked at home atop the coffin of a dead princess. MJ had to push past them to rest a hand on the flowers that Peter had sent. "I got your flowers, thank you. They're beautiful. And these…"
    They're from Harry
, he thought grimly without even having to be told.
    "… are from Harry," Mary Jane finished. She looked confused, glancing over Peter's shoulder as if she expected Harry to be walking in right behind him. "Was he here tonight?"
    "I saw him, but…" Peter paused, not wanting to say too much, but not wanting to say so little that it was obvious he was holding back. "He wouldn't talk to me."
    Peter tried not to introduce any melancholy into the moment, but there it was anyway. MJ's face fell as she said, "I'm so sorry. What is it with you guys, anyway?"
    Well, his father was the Green Goblin, and Harry thinks I killed him, and…
    "It's complicated," he said with an air of finality, hoping that MJ wouldn't pursue it.
    His wish was granted. It wasn't all that surprising: ultimately, Mary Jane was an actress on opening night of her play, and her thoughts weren't going to wander far from the performance for long. "Tell me again, did you really like it?" she asked, all concerns about Harry forgotten. She laughed, although it was a laugh tainted with an edge. "I was so nervous. My knees were shaking."
    "Your knees were fine," he assured her.
    Clearly she still had doubts. "The applause wasn't very loud."
    Peter had noticed the same thing, but he had an answer at the ready that he had even managed to convince himself was completely true. "Yes, it was," he said quickly… perhaps too quickly, but she didn't notice. "It's the acoustics. It's about diffusion, which keeps sound waves from grouping." Mary Jane didn't look entirely convinced, so he spoke faster, random technical words spilling over each other in a suicidal rush, like lemmings. "It's all about slap and flutter and nulls and hot spots—"
    Mercifully, the celebrity that Peter had spotted earlier drew Mary Jane's attention away from Peter. He was walking past the open door of the dressing room, and he saw that Mary Jane had noticed him.
    There was a brief silence, which Peter might have considered uncomfortable if he hadn't been distracted by the hopeful look on MJ's face. The celebrity cleared his throat and said, just a little stiffly, "Congratulations, my dear. You were quite good."
    As he walked away, MJ clapped her hands together in delight. "Peter!" she almost squealed. "Do you know who that was?!"
    "No." He was looking forward to finally learning for certain.
    But Mary Jane was clearly enraptured, lost in her own little world of sudden notoriety. "He won a Tony Award… he liked me!"
    "I thought that was him," Peter said, as if that settled it.
    She grinned so widely that, had New York suffered another blackout, her smile would have illuminated the room.
    "I think I'm happy," she announced. "Let's celebrate!"
    "Got my bike!"
    The traffic out of the city had been formidable, but Peter had deftly maneuvered his motorbike between the lines of traffic that were stacked up in the Lincoln Tunnel. His natural agility helped him keep it steady no matter how hair-raising the maneuvers. Mary Jane clung to his back the entire time, her warmth suffusing him, and she got to burbling about the play. With the helmet over his head, he couldn't hear half of what she was saying, but it didn't matter. All he had to do was nod and say "Yeah!" or "That's great!" or just laugh loudly every so often, and that was sufficient.
    Soon the city had been left far behind. He drove them up to the Palisades, to a beautiful section of the woods where his uncle Ben had used to take him when he was very young.