Wrong Text, Right Person - Peter Parker

Your phone buzzed twice in the same minute, which never happened, because you had exactly two people who texted you with any regularity, and they never seemed to want you at the same time.

The first text was from Peter.

Peter: hey. this is going to sound weirder than i mean it to but. are you busy tomorrow

Peter: like. at all. even a little. no wrong answer

You smiled before you'd even set your mug down. Peter Parker texted like he had never owned a phone before in his life, all stops and restarts, like he'd typed and deleted the sentence four times before landing on the version that still sounded like he was chewing on his own tongue. It was, annoyingly, one of your favorite things about him.

The second text was from Marcus

Marcus: you still got those pics from the other night send em over

You looked at it the way you looked at junk mail. His texts always had the tone of someone ordering a sandwich, like you were a service and not a person he'd been almost-kinda dating for three noncommittal months. There was no hey, no punctuation, and -notably- no please.

You typed back to Peter first, because that was simply the order your thumbs wanted to go in.

You: depends what you mean by busy. i have very important plans to lie in bed

You: so. free. i'm free

Then, begrudgingly, you swiped over to Marcus's thread, found the photo and hit send without much ceremony, because that relationship had never asked for ceremony and you weren't about to start providing it for free.

Except your thumb was faster than your brain, and your brain had clearly still been three to the left, sitting in Peter's message thread.

You didn't notice. You put the phone face-down on the couch cushion and went to go actually lie in your bed.

---

Two apartments down, through a wall that did nothing for sound and even less for insulation, Peter was rereading your text for what was probably an unreasonable amount of time. she's free, okay, cool, that's- okay, don't be weird about this — when his phone buzzed again.

He opened it without thinking, the way you open anything from a name you like seeing on your screen.

It was not plans. It was not a time. It was a photo of you. and it took his brain a solid three seconds to catch up to what he was looking at.

Oh.

Oh okay, that's — that's not for me. That is very clearly not for me.

He sat up so fast he nearly took his laptop down off his knees. His first instinct was to close the message like it was radioactive, and his second instinct, immediately after, was that closing it might somehow make it worse, more suspicious, like he'd have evidence on his phone forever.

He typed. Deleted it. Typed again.

Peter: hey so

Peter: i think this

Peter: okay so i just got a picture i'm pretty sure wasn't meant for me

He read it back and grimaced.

Peter: not that it wasn't a nice picture!! you look — i mean it's a good photo. of you.

He stared at that one in horror for a full ten seconds. That's worse. That is so much worse.

Peter: i'm so sorry i think you meant to send that to someone else. i didn't mean to see. Peter: i mean i did see it Peter: i just mean i wasn't TRYING to

Peter: i'll forget i saw it. i'm forgetting right now. actively forgetting

He hit send before he could stop himself, dropped the phone onto the futon cushion like it had bitten him, and put both hands over his face.

Smooth, Parker. Incredible. Truly the coolest man in the building.