xp_logs | Miles & Becky, late Saturday night (Reply)

What do you expect to happen at a house party for high school students with no adult supervision? When Miles and Becky book it to escape the cops and (possibly worse) their parents, he reveals his great secret to her. It goes well. (Thank you, Cai, for socking Becky.)

"Para ti." Miles handed a refilled red Solo cup to Becky. He'd lost count of how many times he'd refilled his own, but it was enough that it all tasted like water now. A big improvement over the mouth-puckering bitterness he'd tasted earlier in the night.

The party continued to rage around them. Half of Bayville must have been trying to cram themselves into this house. Miles did not envy the host's cleanup job the next morning. Who even was the host? He'd forgotten by this point, but whoever it was, they'd guaranteed themselves legendary status and would receive a king's welcome come Mondaymorning.

Smiling, Becky accepted the drink and took a sip. "Thanks," she said, laughing a little. Resting one hand on Miles' shoulder, her fingertips trailed over his chest as she pirouetted slowly in front of him. Tapping a slow rhythm against his other shoulder through the cloth of his shirt, she asked, "What's in this stuff, anyway? I feel like I should've asked earlier, but then it killed off all my tastebuds and I kind of didn't really care... but I can't show up at home tipsy. My dad would totally know and I'd be grounded for the rest of forever."

"It's beer, so . . . yeast?" Miles offered helpfully, gently plucking her hand off his chest so he could raise it to his lips and kiss it all gentlemanly-like. It came off more slobbery than he'd intended, so he wiped her knuckles with this thumb and chuckled. "I think I saw some more of that Smirnoff whatever. Like Yana's drinking. If you want me to get you that. But can't you, like, be all drama!" — he waved a hand of spirit fingers — "And just pretend? He'll never know! You know?"

"I mean, I'm good... but Dad'll totally know. It's like in a dad's job description or something. Also, ew." Becky handed Miles the cup he'd given her. "You finish that... I knew it didn't taste right even though I can't actually taste much of anything right now..." Turning around, she let her shoulders rest against Miles' front as she scanned everyone around them. "I'll just..." She reached out and snagged a bottle from a passing girl's hand. "Thanks, Kennedy!" She laughed at the other girl's expression, wiggled the bottle and took a sip. "I'll just drink this. Much better. Wine coolers, for the win!"

Leaning back a bit, Becky stood on her tiptoes and gave Miles a non-slobbery kiss on the cheek. "What're we gonna do for the rest of the night? This is bound to wind down at some point..."

Accepting the second cup, Miles shrugged and downed its contents, thus demonstrating that he truly was ready for college. He didn't even need to take the ACT that morning. "Uh, I hadn't really thought that far in advance. I don't even know how I'm gonna get home. I def can't drive." Could he sleep in his backseat? Maybe he could just pass out here. As it looked, a couple of other classmates already had that idea. "Um, there's that Denny's at the shopping center nearby. You could watch me eat a couple thousand empty calories. My treat?"

"Sure," Becky said, laughing a little. "Buy me some hashbrowns and we'll be set. My curfew's still one, so we've got a few hours. I'll make sure you drink enough coffee to get home safely. And water."

Miles pulled Becky close leaned in for a real kiss, still a little sloppy but with considerably less drool. His head swam and knees buckled, and he felt blood rushing from his brain to other parts of his body. All attributable to the great time-tested combination of adolescent hormones and alcohol. But accompanied by the sudden buzzing in his head, he quickly realized it was something else entirely. "Oh shi . . ."

It probably would have behooved the party guests to have closed the front door. As refreshing as it was to let the cool night air into the hot house filled to the brim with excited, exuberant teenagers, it also would have meant that the trio of town policemen who arrived to investigate a noise disturbance would not have immediately stumbled upon a few dozen counts of underage drinking. There was a brief moment while everyone processed the situation and considered the future course that lay in front of them.

Once everyone seemed to be on the same page, chaos erupted.

Everything suddenly came into sharp focus. Miles set down his second cup and plucked the bottle from Becky's hand before grabbing her wrist and rushing with her out the back door to the backyard, where a group of fellow partyers were scrambling to avoid the cops. Miles cursed when they came to the fence, which was at least as tall as he was. He could jump it, he was sure, but that would mean finally telling Becky the truth. The whole truth. But it was that or risk arrest and that simply wasn't an option.

"Do you trust me?"

Eyes focused behind them as she gripped Miles' hand, Becky blinked and turned back toward him. "Of course I trust you," she said. "You have a plan to keep us from getting caught and ruining our futures?"

No one was paying any attention to them, so he lifted her into his arms with ease as if she didn't weigh a thing, took a few steps backwards, and then took a running leap at the gate. His shoes nearly grazed the posts, but he landed safely on the other side, slightly out of breath. "Ta da," he said weakly, letting Becky get back to her feet.

Becky blinked in the sudden darkness on the other side of the fence. They were well hidden from the backyard's lights, but she knew they definitely shouldn't stick around any longer than absolutely necessary. Still, she couldn't help herself when she pointed farther down the fence and said, "Um... there was a gate." Then she turned her pointing finger toward Miles and whispered, "And — and. We are totally — definitely — going to talk about the — how did you even do that? Wait, no. Tell me later. Soon-later."

"Oh. Duh."

It was a small forested area behind the backyard, the kind designed to afford some privacy from the nearby roads, and not the place a couple of drunk, terrified teenagers wanted to be out late at night. Miles took her hand again and walked past a couple houses before going around one to get back to the sidewalk illuminated with streetlights. He looked back at the party house; neighbors were coming out of their own homes to see what all the commotion was about, but all of the attention was down there and not on them. Satisfied, he took a stabilizing breath and led her down the road back to her house.

"I'm a mutant," he said finally, looking every which way but at her. "And more than that . . . I'm Spider-Man."

Becky's chin dropped for a brief moment before she tugged Miles' hand to pull him closer to her. "The Spider-Man? From the news?" She whispered, half-disbelieving.

Miles rubbed his chest with his free hand, as if trying to keep his fiercely beating heart from exploding out of his chest. Words were becoming hard to form in his now dry mouth. "Yeah," he finally managed to say. "The second one. Not the . . . not the first one."

Checking to make sure they'd put a good bit of distance between themselves and the party, Becky dropped Miles' hand and stepped in front of him so she could see his face properly in the light from a streetlamp. She slid her arms around his waist and pressed her forehead into the crook between his neck and shoulder. "That was you dealing with those weird robot animals who tried to assassinate the doctor a couple months back? Miles! That creepy rhino guy threw you all over the street — I'm so glad you're okay."

"What? Oh, I guess that was on the news, wasn't it?" He was taken aback by the hug, but once it occurred to him she wasn't yelling at him or scolding him, he wrapped her in a tight embrace of his own. "I'm sorry I didn't tell you before. And that you had to learn from something really freaking dumb like this. It would've been better if I'd, like, saved your life all dramatically. And then you started writing 'Mrs. Spider-Man' all over your notebooks and then one night in the rain, I come to you, hanging from a web, and you pull down my mask and . . ." It was obvious Miles had spent a lot of time fantasizing about this.

Becky laughed a little despite herself and the situation in which they found themselves. "And what? Kissed you? You don't have to save me all dramatically to get a kiss, Miles. Though I do appreciate your sense of grandeur."

"I mean." Miles chuckled but it came out more as a guffaw. "Just, you know, I kept it a secret from Bobby and Nica and everyone until just after that fight, and they were mad as hell when I told them because I kept it from them for so long. So, you know, like, I'm sorry."

"It's okay," Becky said, shaking her head a little in an attempt to clear it. Adrenaline managed to get her there, but she'd had enough to drink at the party that the alcohol was creeping up on her again as her heart stopped pounding. She smiled, though. It was a wide, happy smile and her eyes were bright when she leaned back enough to look at Miles. "I'm glad you told me. And... I dunno. Sorry that you felt like you had to keep it a secret for so long? And that they were mad. I can sort of see why they were, but it's not like you've hurt anybody. Miles, you're a hero."

"A super hero," he corrected her, because that was the thing that needed to be said right then. "Wow, though. I'm really, I dunno, relieved about what you're saying. It's like a really really big weight off my shoulders, sabes? I mean, I can lift a lot of weight." He flexed a bicep to demonstrate because that was also a thing that needed to be done. "But still."

Becky let her forehead bump against Mile's shoulder. "That was terrible," she said, laughing again. "Really, really terrible. But that's okay, too. I'm sure we can work on the quality of your puns and jokes over the summer. You've gotta have all those witty one-liners ready to go for bad guys, right?"

"I'm drunk and I'm not in spandex, you can't expect my A material right now."

"Still wanna go to Denny's?"

"I mean, I do but . . ." He glanced back over his shoulder again. "I should probably take you home because everyone in the city's gonna hear about this soon and I don't want to get you in trouble. Your dad, you know."

"Ugh, logic," Becky muttered. Then she straightened up and gave Miles another hug before stepping back and reaching for his hand. "Okay, home. Because yeah, my dad."

"It's so hard to make that man not hate me, I've gotta keep it up. And, you know, superhero, great power, responsibility, et cetera." They spent the rest of the walk in tranquility, the silence punctuated occasionally by the far-off squeal of a police siren. They stopped one house away from Becky's and he took her hands in his.

"So. That was fun. I had a good time, at least, even with almost getting arrested."

Becky bit her lip and looked up at Miles for a moment before asking, "You can... climb walls and things, right? Being a superhero and all?"

Miles raised an eyebrow, his expression curious. "Yeah, it's like this static cling thing that attracts me to . . . wait, never mind, you're not asking how I can do it. Why you wanna know?"

Smiling, Becky squeezed Miles' hands briefly, then rose up onto her tiptoes to press a kiss to his lips. "I need to go in, but I'll leave my bedroom window open, okay? Wait fifteen minutes, then come up? Please?"

Miles's physiological reaction to Becky's suggestion was audible. If not an actual board springing up, then at least the excited/scared/worried/thrilled noise that left his mouth. "Yes. Yes, I will do that." He watched her go the rest of the way to her house and then practically fainted. The ground spun underneath him, and he had to grab a tree branch to keep steady. Had he heard right? Was all the beer playing a trick on him? Oh crap, he wasn't just dreaming and really lying unconscious on the floor of a paddywagon, was he?

Clearly the way to resolve the confusion was for Miles to slap himself. Which he did. Perhaps too hard, assisted by super strength and unimpeded by inhibitions thanks to drink. He rubbed his jaw gingerly, but it confirmed this was reality. So now he had fifteen minutes to waste until impending manhood.

He lasted all of three and a half. He couldn't wait out here on the street at this time of night without rousing suspicion (and potentially violence in this majority white neighborhood), so he turned on his camo mode, disappearing from sight, and stealthily made his way to the backyard of Becky's Victorian-style house where he climbed the wall up to the window he was pretty sure was to her room. The ground beneath his feet ebbed and flowed, like he was hovering over moving water. He prayed she came back soon.

After assuring her parents that she had been nowhere near the house party that had been all over the eleven o'clock news, Becky climbed the stairs toward her bedroom and called out a soft 'goodnight' to her parents. Once in her room, though, she closed and locked the door before moving toward her window sliding it open as quietly as she could.

Miles slithered inside once she was clear of the window, and shimmered back into sight when he landed on the floor. He didn't wait for her to say anything, nor did he say anything himself, not even a clever little quip to break the ice. He just took her in his arms and pressed his lips against hers. They continued to her bed as one, anxious hands fumbling at each other's clothes, guiding one another to pleasure. His spider-sense, which had been sounding the alarm in his head ever since the police arrived, was now silent. The danger was past. Now came the peace.