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The phone buzzed against his thigh mid-swing, and the vibration pattern was wrong for his usual contacts. Peter caught the next web-line one-handed and pulled himself onto a water tower platform, crouching on the rim while he fished the phone from the hidden pocket along his hip.
Unknown number. Mississippi area code.
He thumbed it open.
Get your spandex ass to the Kensington Building. Roof. Now.
Three dots pulsed. Then:
It's Rogue. Don't make me ask twice.
Peter stared at the screen. He hadn't heard from Anna Marie in, what, fourteen months? Fifteen? That joint op with the X-Men in Madripoor, back when she'd been laughing and loose and stealing his fries at a street cart afterward, telling him he was the only Avenger-adjacent person she could stand for more than twenty minutes. Then nothing. Radio silence. He'd heard through the grapevine she was getting married. Gambit. Big ceremony planned, the whole Southern production.
He typed back: On my way. 10 min.
Her reply was instant: Make it 5.
He made it in four.
The Kensington was one of those old prewar buildings in Midtown that had been converted to overpriced lofts, its roof a flat expanse of tarred gravel and dormant HVAC units. Peter landed silently on the parapet and saw her immediately.
Rogue was pacing. Long, hard strides that ate the rooftop in straight lines, pivoting at each edge with the controlled violence of a caged animal. Her leather jacket was on, the green-and-yellow suit visible beneath it, and her arms were crossed so tight against her chest that the leather creaked with every step. The silver streaks in her hair caught the ambient city light. Her jaw was set like concrete.
She looked like a woman five seconds from putting her fist through a load-bearing wall.
Then she turned and saw him perched on the ledge, and something in her face cracked open. Genuine warmth, quick and bright, the kind that made her eyes go soft and her mouth curve before she could stop it.
"Sugar." She exhaled the word. "You came."
Peter dropped down to the roof, boots crunching on gravel. "You texted like someone who was about to commit a felony. Seemed rude to ignore."
She crossed to him in three strides and grabbed his arm, squeezed through the suit. Gloved fingers, he noticed. Full coverage tonight. "You're the only man in this whole damn city I trust, you know that?"
"That's either really flattering or really sad," Peter said. "Leaning sad."
"Both." She let go of his arm and resumed pacing, but slower now, orbiting him. The warmth had already bled out. Her mouth was a thin line again, and that emerald stare had gone flat and hard, the way it did right before she hit something that wasn't getting back up.
Peter pulled the mask up past his nose so she could see his mouth, a gesture of good faith. "So. You're, what, four days out from the wedding? Five?"
"Three."
"Three days out, and you're on a rooftop in Midtown at eleven-thirty on a Wednesday calling in favors from friendly neighborhood types. Brides usually save the crisis for the actual day, Anna. You know, cold feet at the altar, dramatic veil removal, somebody objects from the back pew."
She didn't laugh. Didn't smile. Didn't even blink.
Peter's stomach tightened.
"I called you here," Rogue said, slow and deliberate, each word laid down like a card on a table, "to hold me back. Because in about five minutes, I am going to kill somebody, and I would prefer to have a witness who can testify it was justified."
She reached into her jacket and pulled out a compact pair of tactical binoculars, the expensive kind with image stabilization, and shoved them into his chest hard enough that he took a half step back.
"There." She pointed across the street. "Ninth floor. Fourth window from the left. The one with the gold curtains."
Peter raised the binoculars.
The hotel across the street was the Langham, all cream stone and old-money elegance. Ninth floor, fourth window. The curtains were sheer enough to be decorative rather than functional, and the room behind them was lit warm and low.
Remy LeBeau was in there.
Peter recognized him instantly. The lean, rangy frame. The auburn hair falling across his face. The way he moved like everything in the world was choreographed for his benefit.
Gambit had a woman pressed against the window. She was tall, dark-haired, wearing something lacy and expensive that was mostly on the floor. His mouth was on her neck, her jaw, then deep in her mouth, tongue visible even at this distance. His hands were full of her ass, fingers digging into the flesh, pulling her against him while she arched back into the glass. The woman's head tipped back, mouth open, and Remy's hand slid up her spine with the practiced ease of a man who'd done this a thousand times.
Peter lowered the binoculars. Slowly.
He looked at Rogue. She was standing perfectly still now, arms at her sides, hands in fists. The muscle in her jaw pulsed.
"Yeah," Peter said quietly. "Okay. Restraining you seems fair."
"I've been standing up here for forty-seven minutes." Her voice was too calm. Controlled in the way that meant every ounce of self-discipline she had was going into keeping her feet on this roof. "Forty-seven minutes, watching him. Because the first time I thought maybe I was wrong. Maybe it was the light, maybe it was some innocent thing. So I watched. And I watched. And I watched him take her clothes off piece by piece like he had all night."
Her throat moved. A hard swallow.
"Three days, Peter. Three days before he's supposed to stand in front of God and my whole family and promise to be mine."
Peter tucked the binoculars into his belt. His chest hurt in a way that had nothing to do with patrol bruises. He knew that particular flavor of betrayal, the kind that rewrote every good memory into evidence of your own stupidity. He'd tasted it. Different circumstances, same poison.
"What do you want to do?" he asked.
"I want to go through that window and drain him dry." She said it flat, factual. "I want to put my bare hand on his face and take every last thought he's ever had about me and make him feel what this feels like. I want him to forget his own name."
She looked at Peter, and her eyes were bright and wet, and her voice didn't waver once.
"That's why I called you. Because you're the only person fast enough and strong enough to stop me if I mean it."
Peter pulled his mask back down. Tugged the lenses into focus. The city hummed nine stories below them, taxis and sirens and the ordinary machinery of a Wednesday night that didn't care about broken promises.
"We're going over there," he said.
"Damn right we are."
"But we're using the door. And you're keeping the gloves on."
She stared at him. Then something shifted behind her eyes, a decision made, a line drawn.
"Fine," Rogue said. "Gloves stay on." She started toward the roof's edge, boots grinding gravel. "But nobody said a damn thing about the furniture."
The Langham's ninth floor hallway smelled like fresh lilies and carpet shampoo. Expensive quiet. The kind of hush that cost four hundred a night.
Rogue walked past the elevator, past a brass luggage cart, past a room service tray with two champagne flutes still beaded with condensation. Her stride was measured, deliberate, each boot heel landing with purpose on the runner. Peter kept pace two steps behind, watching the tension build in her shoulders like a rope twisting tighter with every yard.
Room 914. Gold numbers on dark wood.
Rogue didn't knock. She didn't try the handle. She put her palm flat against the door and pushed, and the deadbolt tore through the frame with a splintering crack that echoed down the hall like a gunshot. The door swung inward and bounced off the wall hard enough to crack the plaster behind it, and Rogue walked through the gap the way she walked through everything. Like it owed her money.
The room was warm, dim, reeking of perfume and the musky aftermath of skin on skin. King bed, sheets tangled. A bottle of Veuve Clicquot sweating on the nightstand next to a phone playing some low French jazz. Clothes on the floor, a trail of them, his shirt here, her bra there, a sequined clutch purse spilling lipstick onto the carpet.
Gambit was standing by the window in his boxers. The dark-haired woman was behind him, pulling a sheet up to her collarbone with both hands, mascara already smudging. To his credit, Remy didn't flinch when the door came off its hinges. He just went very still, those red-on-black eyes tracking from Rogue to Peter and back, calculating angles and exits the way he calculated everything.
Then he smiled.
"Chère," he said, spreading his hands. "This ain't what it look like."
"Get out," Rogue said to the woman. She didn't raise her voice. She didn't have to. The word came out low and flat and absolute, a sentence delivered with the gavel already down.
The woman grabbed her dress off the floor and her heels from under the chair and was past Peter and through the ruined doorway in four seconds. He heard her bare feet slapping carpet, then the stairwell door banging open. Gone.
Rogue hadn't taken her eyes off Gambit.
"Now, listen." Remy held both palms up, that easy grin still in place, and took a careful step forward. The charm was on full blast, voice like warm honey, body language open and loose. "I know how this look. But you gotta understand, mon coeur, I been goin' through somethin'. The wedding, all the pressure, everybody watchin'. A man get cold feet, that's all this is."
"Cold feet," Rogue said.
Gambit moved closer. "A farewell, oui? To the bachelor life. Every man do this. Last taste of freedom before he settle down for good. It didn't mean nothin', Anna. Not a single thing. She don't hold a candle to you."
Peter leaned against the wall by the ruined doorframe and kept his mouth shut. He could feel his spider-sense ticking softly at the base of his skull, a low persistent hum. Rogue's body was coiled so tight the tendons in her neck stood out like cables.
"A farewell," she said. "Three days before our wedding. In a hotel six blocks from where I been addressing invitations all week."
"People deal with stress different ways, chère. You know Remy. You know my heart."
"I know exactly what I'm looking at."
Gambit shifted tactics. The grin faded. His eyes went hard and narrow, and he crossed his arms over his bare chest, and when he spoke again the warmth was gone.
"You want to talk about loyalty? Fine. Let's talk." He tilted his head, that auburn hair falling across one demon eye. "Let's talk about Magneto."
The air in the room changed. Peter felt it in his chest, a pressure drop, like the instant before lightning.
"Don't," Rogue said.
"You and Erik, non? You think I don't know? You think other versions of me ain't told me exactly what happened? You crawled into that man's bed, Anna. So don't you stand there lookin' at me like I'm the villain when you been….."
"Stop."
"…..when you been just as dirty, and at least I had the decency to do it with a stranger instead of the man who tried to kill my team……"
"Remy." Her voice dropped into that clipped register, each consonant bitten clean. Low and tight and stripped of every trace of drawl. "For the thirtieth goddamn time. Stop talking to alternate-universe Gambits."
Gambit's jaw set. "They wouldn't lie to me."
"That was another Rogue." She took a step toward him, and the floor seemed to groan under her boot. "In another universe. Another timeline. Another woman with my face who lived a different life. I never even met Magneto before I joined the X-Men. I have told you this thirty times. Thirty. You keep going back to those quantum mirrors or whatever the hell they are, fishing for dirt, and you keep finding stories about women who are not me."
"The multiverse don't lie, chère. Every version of us….."
"Is not us."
"……every version show the same pattern. You always end up with him. Always. So forgive me if I wanted one night where I didn't have to think about….."
"So this is my fault."
Gambit's mouth opened. Closed. He had the grace to look away.
"That's what you're saying." Rogue's hands were trembling at her sides. Not shaking. Vibrating. Peter saw the faint glow first, a pale magenta shimmer at her fingertips, like static building on a doorknob in winter. "You slept with another woman three days before our wedding, and it's my fault because some other Anna Marie in some other dimension touched a man I've never been in the same room with."
The shimmer spread. Her fingertips were sparking now, tiny pops of violet light crackling between her knuckles, and Gambit took a step back because he knew what that light meant better than anyone alive.
Peter moved.
He was across the room in one fluid step, arm hooking around Rogue's waist from behind, pulling her back against his chest. She was furnace-hot, the energy rolling off her in waves that made his suit fabric crackle. His spider-sense screamed, a white-hot spike behind his eyes, and he ignored it.
"Hey." He kept his voice light, easy, a quip laid over steel. "Friendly reminder that murder absolutely ruins the deposit on the venue. The caterer keeps the money, nobody gets cake, it's a whole thing."
She strained against him. Every muscle in her torso flexed, and she was strong, terrifyingly strong, and for one second Peter genuinely wasn't sure he could hold her.
"Let me go, Peter."
"In a second."
Her breathing was ragged. He could feel her ribs expanding against his forearm, rapid and shallow. The sparking at her fingers dimmed. Flared. Dimmed again.
Then she looked down at her left hand. At the ring.
It was a beautiful piece. Platinum band, emerald-cut diamond, two smaller stones flanking it. The kind of ring a thief would steal and a lover would save for.
Rogue pulled it off. The motion was slow, deliberate, her thumb rolling it over the knuckle and past the joint and free. She held it between her gloved forefinger and thumb, and the diamond caught the lamplight one last time.
She charged it.
The ring glowed hot pink, then white, energy humming through the metal and stone like a tuning fork. Rogue flicked it across the room with a snap of her fingers. It landed at Gambit's bare feet, bounced once on the hardwood.
He jumped back.
The ring popped like a firecracker. A sharp, bright crack, a flash of magenta light, a puff of carbon dust where the diamond had been. The platinum band skittered across the floor in two blackened halves and came to rest against the baseboard.
Rogue pulled free of Peter's arm. He let her go.
She walked out of Room 914 without looking back. Through the splintered doorframe, past the champagne flutes, down the hall toward the elevator. Her boots were steady on the carpet. Her spine was straight.
Peter lingered in the doorway. Gambit was staring at the two halves of the ring, bare-chested, barefoot, standing in the wreckage of a four-hundred-dollar hotel room that smelled like someone else's perfume.
Peter winced at him. Genuine pity in it, buried under the mask.
"She kept the gloves on," he said quietly. "Think about that."
He followed Rogue down the hall.
They ended up back on the Kensington roof. Rogue sat on the parapet ledge with her legs dangling over nine stories of nothing, boots swaying like a kid on a dock. Peter lowered himself beside her, leaving a careful foot of space between them, and for a while neither of them said anything.
The city filled the gap. Horns. A distant siren winding down. The bass thump of music from a bar somewhere below them, muffled and shapeless.
Rogue pulled off one glove, examined her bare hand in the light, then put the glove back on. The motion was slow, almost ritualistic. Peter watched the silver streaks in her hair lift and settle in the warm updraft from the street.
"He's an idiot," Peter said.
"I know."
"I mean a specific, quantifiable idiot. Like if you could measure stupidity in joules, this would power a small city."
"Sugar, I really don't need you to….."
"The man had you," Peter said. "Had you. And his big play was to go trawling through alternate dimensions looking for reasons to feel insecure and then use that to justify sleeping with someone else three days before the wedding. That's not cold feet. That's a guy who needed an excuse and built himself a multiverse-sized one."
Rogue's hands were folded in her lap, gloved fingers laced together. She was looking out at the skyline, at the dark gap where the Hudson cut through the lights.
"You deserve somebody who doesn't need alibis from other timelines," Peter said. "Somebody who looks at you and that's it. That's the whole story. No footnotes, no alternate versions, no 'well technically in Earth-295 you did this so I get to do that.' Just you."
She was quiet. Quiet in a way that Peter associated with Rogue deciding something, turning it over in her mouth like a hard candy before she bit down.
"You practice that speech on the way over here?" she asked. Her voice was soft. The drawl had crept back in, slow and warm.
"I'm workshopping it."
"It's pretty good."
"Thanks. I'll punch it up for the second draft."
She laughed. Low, short, with no humor in it but no bitterness either. Just a sound her body needed to make. Then she turned her head and looked at him, and there it was, that slow half-smile, the one that started at the corner of her mouth and pulled up just enough to show the edge of her teeth. Her green eyes were steady and clear.
"Peter."
"Yeah."
"You want to fuck?"
His brain went white. Completely, utterly white, the mental equivalent of every browser tab crashing at once. He was aware of his mouth opening. He was aware that no sound came out. He was aware that his pulse had tripled in the span of the question and that his suit was suddenly very tight in a way that had nothing to do with the stitching.
"I, uh." He blinked behind the mask. "Could you repeat the….."
Rogue grabbed the jaw of his mask and yanked it halfway up his face. His mouth, his nose, exposed. Before the night air finished hitting his skin, her lips were on his.
The kiss was hard. Deliberate. Her mouth pressed into his with purpose, her gloved hand gripping the bunched fabric of the mask at his temple, holding him in place. He tasted coffee and salt and the faint metallic charge of her power, leashed tight, pulled back from her skin like a dog on a chain. Her tongue found his, slow and searching, and she kissed him the way she did everything, with her whole body committed to the act.
Peter's hands hovered at his sides for one stupid, frozen second. Then they found her waist, the warm leather of her jacket, and he pulled her closer and kissed her back, and the foot of careful space between them ceased to exist.
She broke the kiss first. Pulled back just far enough to look at him, her lips wet, that half-smile still in place.
"That wasn't a question, darlin'."
Peter's mouth tingled. His whole face tingled. Something deep in his gut was pulling tight, and the bulge in his suit was now a problem he could not have concealed from a blind man.
"I'm, uh." He swallowed. "I'm very persuadable. As it turns out. Extremely open to suggestion."
This is insane. She just broke off her engagement forty minutes ago. She's hurt, she's angry, you're a rebound at best and an emotional support spider at worst.
And you're going to say yes anyway, aren't you.
Absolutely.
Rogue stood up on the ledge. The wind caught her hair, silver streaks streaming back from her face. She looked down at him with those green eyes and the city behind her, and the angle did impossible things to her silhouette, the heavy curve of her chest against the tight suit, the flare of her hips, the long line of her thighs.
"I've got a hotel room," she said. "Other side of Midtown. Honeymoon suite at the Carlisle. Remy was supposed to take me there after the wedding." She tilted her head. "Paid for it out of the honeymoon fund. Nonrefundable. And I intend to get every last cent's worth."
"The Carlisle," Peter said. "That's like eight hundred a night."
"Twelve."
"Twelve hundred dollars."
"Two nights." She let that settle. "So you better pace yourself."
She stepped off the ledge.
For one lurching instant his spider-sense fired and his hand shot out, and then she was floating, suspended in the air ten feet from the building, the wind catching her jacket, her body rising with the effortless control of someone who'd been flying since before he'd been bitten. She hung there against the skyline and crooked one gloved finger at him.
Peter shot a web-line at the building across the street and launched himself off the parapet. The city opened up beneath him, blocks and avenues and yellow rivers of traffic, and he arced through the gap between towers, following the dark shape of Rogue as she banked west toward the park.
Terrible idea. Catastrophically terrible idea. The kind of idea that shows up in a montage of bad decisions in the documentary about your life.
He fired another line, swung wide around a water tower, and caught a thermal that carried him level with her. She looked over at him, hair whipping, and grinned. Full and real and fierce, the first genuine smile he'd seen from her all night.
The worst idea you've ever had.
He grinned back, mask half-up, wind in his teeth.
And you don't believe a word of it.
The Carlisle's honeymoon suite was absurd. Cream walls, crown molding, a king bed draped in white linen that probably cost more than Peter's monthly rent. Fresh peonies on the nightstand. A bottle of champagne in an ice bucket with a card that read Congratulations, Mr. & Mrs. LeBeau in gold calligraphy. Rogue had flipped the card facedown when they walked in without breaking stride.
Now Peter sat on the edge of the bed, suit peeled down to his waist, bare-chested, one knee bouncing. The shower hissed behind the bathroom door. Steam crept through the gap at the bottom, curling against the marble threshold.
He picked up the champagne card. Put it down. Picked it up again.
You're sitting in the honeymoon suite that her fiancé paid for. Her ex-fiancé. As of forty-five minutes ago. She's in the shower. You're half-naked on a bed that costs more than your camera equipment. This is fine. This is a thing that's happening.
He ran both hands through his hair, scrubbing hard at his scalp. The room smelled like peonies and clean cotton and the faint mineral tang of Manhattan tap water through expensive pipes. His cock was already half-hard against his thigh, the thick weight of it pressing against the bunched fabric of his suit, and he shifted on the mattress trying to find a position that wasn't obscene.
She kissed you on a rooftop. She flew you across Midtown. She's in the shower. Relax. Be cool. You've fought the Sinister Six. You can handle this.
You cannot handle this.
The shower cut off.
Peter straightened. He had a joke ready, something about room service and whether the minibar was also on Gambit's tab, something light and easy that would fill the air and keep his pulse from hammering through his throat.
The bathroom door opened.
The joke died in his mouth. Every joke he'd ever known died, a mass extinction event, nothing left alive.
Rogue stood in the doorway in her wedding dress.
Ivory silk, crushed tight to her body like it had been poured on. The bodice was structured, boned, and her breasts strained against it, heavy and full, the fabric barely containing the deep line of cleavage that started at the sweetheart neckline and disappeared into shadow. The silk pulled taut across her waist and then flared over the wide swell of her hips, clinging to every curve of her thighs before pooling at her bare feet on the marble. Her hair was pinned up in a bridal bun, silver streaks twisted in with the brown, a few loose tendrils framing her face. Red lipstick, immaculate, the color of arterial blood against her skin.
She looked like a painting. She looked like a weapon. She looked like the answer to a question Peter hadn't been brave enough to ask.
She tilted her head. That half-smile.
"I had it hanging in the closet," she said. Her voice was soft, unhurried, the drawl thick as honey. "Custom fitted. Six weeks of alterations. Remy's mama cried when she saw me in it at the final fitting."
She stepped into the bedroom. The silk whispered against her legs. Every step made her breasts shift against the bodice, a slow, heavy movement that the structured fabric couldn't contain.
"Ten thousand dollars," she said. "His money. His mama's taste. His big romantic gesture." She stopped in front of Peter, close enough that the ivory silk brushed his bare knees. She looked down at him, green eyes half-lidded, lips parted, and her voice dropped to something low and private and devastating. "I want you to ruin it, sugar. I want you to use me like a whore in this dress. I want your hands all over it, I want your cum on it, I want to send it back to him in a box and let him smell you on the silk."
Peter's throat clicked. His cock lurched against his thigh, fully hard now, the outline of it straining visibly through the bunched suit at his waist.
Rogue sank to her knees between his legs. The silk pooled around her in a circle of ivory, spreading across the carpet like spilled cream. Her gloved hands found his waist, fingers hooking into the fabric, and she peeled the suit down over his hips with the focused patience of someone unwrapping something they intended to savor.
His cock sprang free. All ten inches, thick and flushed dark, the broad head slick with precum that caught the lamplight. It stood heavy against his stomach, the shaft rigid and veined, and his balls hung full and low beneath, drawn tight from the ache that had been building since the rooftop.
Rogue went still.
Her hands stopped on his thighs. Her lips parted. Her green eyes widened, dropped, and locked onto his cock with an expression Peter could only describe as reverent disbelief.
"Lord have mercy." She breathed it out, the words barely voiced, her warm breath ghosting across the wet head of his cock and making it twitch. "Sugar. Christmas came early."
She wrapped one gloved hand around the base. Her fingers didn't close. The leather creaked as she squeezed, testing the girth, and a low, throaty sound rolled up from her chest.
"You been hiding this in that little spandex suit?" She looked up at him through her lashes, red mouth curving. "That's a crime, Peter Parker. A genuine crime against womankind."
Her tongue touched the tip. Flat, wet, dragging slow across the slit, collecting the bead of precum and pulling it into her mouth. She closed her eyes. Savored it. Then she opened her mouth wide, red lips stretching around the broad head, and swallowed him.
"Oh, fuck." Peter's hand found the back of her head, fingers curling into the pinned hair, loosening the bun. "Oh, God."
She took him deep. Past the head, past the first thick inches where most people stopped, her throat opening with a practiced ease that sent a white spike of pleasure up his spine. She gagged once, wet and deliberate, her throat clenching around him, and then pushed further. Her nose pressed into the coarse hair at his base. All ten inches, buried. Her lips sealed around the root of him, and she held there, throat working, eyes watering, mascara just starting to run at the corners.
She pulled back slow. A thick rope of spit connected her red mouth to the head of his cock, stretching and snapping. She gasped, wiped her chin with the back of one gloved hand, and grinned up at him.
Then she went back down.
Sloppy. Purposeful. She worked him with her mouth and both hands, one gloved fist twisting the base while her lips and tongue handled the upper half, then abandoning technique entirely to deepthroat him again, gagging herself on purpose, the wet choking sound filling the quiet room. Red lipstick smeared down his shaft in rings, each one marking how deep she'd taken him, a descending trail of crimson stamps from the head all the way to his balls. She pulled off long enough to drag her tongue down the underside and take one heavy ball into her mouth, sucking gently, her hand still pumping him, and Peter's hips bucked off the mattress.
"Yes." His voice came out wrecked, hoarse, stripped of every quip he'd ever used as armor. "God, yes. Whatever you want. I agree to all of it. The dress, the box, whatever, yes."
Rogue hummed her approval around his cock, the vibration running through him root to tip.
Rogue pulled off his cock one final time, spit trailing from her swollen lips, and rose from the pool of ivory silk at his feet. She turned away from him, climbed onto the bed on her hands and knees, and reached back with both gloved hands to gather fistfuls of the wedding dress. She dragged it up her thighs, past the backs of her knees, over the heavy curve of her ass, and bunched it at the small of her back in a crush of wrinkled silk.
Nothing underneath. No underwear. Nothing between Peter and the sight of her bare from the waist down, the thick, rounded cheeks of her ass lifted and spread by the arch of her spine, her cunt already swollen and glistening, a thin strand of slick connecting her inner lips. The ivory dress framed it all, crushed and bunched above like a curtain hauled aside, the ten-thousand-dollar fabric twisted in her fists.
She looked back at him over one shoulder. Mascara tracked in dark lines beneath her lashes. Red lipstick smeared past the corner of her mouth. The bridal bun was half-collapsed, silver-streaked curls falling loose against her neck.
"Well?" The drawl was thick, unhurried, her voice pitched low enough to vibrate in Peter's sternum. "You waitin' for an invitation? I already sent one of those. You're four years late, but I'll take a walk-in."
Peter was off the edge of the bed and behind her in one motion, suit kicked free of his ankles, bare knees sinking into the white linen. His cock hung heavy between his thighs, flushed and slick from her mouth, lipstick rings still visible along the shaft. He gripped her hips. Thumbs pressing into the soft flesh just above the swell of her ass, fingers wrapping around the front where her hip bones jutted beneath warm skin. She was furnace-hot, her body radiating heat that had nothing to do with her powers.
He lined up. The broad head of his cock pressed against her entrance, parting her slick folds, and she inhaled sharp through her teeth.
He pushed in.
"Ohhhh, fuck." Rogue's voice cracked open. Her back dipped, shoulders dropping toward the mattress, her fingers twisting in the sheets. "Oh, God. Oh, that's....that's big, sugar, that's so goddamn...."
Peter groaned. Low, guttural, pulled from somewhere behind his ribs. She was impossibly tight, impossibly wet, the heat of her clenching around him in rhythmic waves as her body adjusted to the stretch. He sank inch by inch, watching himself disappear into her, the thick shaft splitting her open, her lips gripping him, and he didn't stop until his hips pressed flush against the heavy swell of her ass and his balls hung tight against her clit.
Buried. All ten inches. The weight of him seated deep enough to feel the resistance at the end, and Rogue whimpered into the pillow and rolled her hips in a slow grinding circle that made white light pulse behind his eyelids.
He pulled back. Pushed in. Found the angle. Found the depth. And then he stopped thinking entirely.
The rhythm built fast. Peter's hips drove forward in deep, measured strokes that accelerated into something harder, sharper, each thrust punctuated by the heavy slap of his pelvis against her ass. Her cheeks rippled with every impact, the thick flesh bouncing and spreading, and the sound filled the honeymoon suite like applause. Wet, dense, obscene. The dress rustled with each stroke, silk whispering against linen, the bunched fabric sliding and catching at her waist as her body rocked forward under the force of him.
"Yes." Rogue fisted the sheets and pushed back to meet him, her spine curving deeper, her ass lifting higher. "Yes, yes, yes, right there, don't you dare let up."
The bed groaned. The headboard tapped the cream wall in a quickening tempo, and the ice bucket on the nightstand trembled, champagne bottle clinking against the rim. Peter's fingers dug into her hips hard enough to leave marks, pulling her back onto him as he drove forward, and the collision of their bodies sent shockwaves through the mattress that made the peonies scatter petals across the pillow.
She turned her head. One green eye, bright and wild, finding him over her shoulder. Her red mouth was open, lips wet, and the words that came out were slow and deliberate and designed to burn a hole through him.
"Gambit never fucked me half this deep, darlin'." She punctuated it with a roll of her hips that made his vision swim. "Not once. Not even close. He'd be done by now, rolled over, lightin' a cigarette."
Peter's grip tightened. His next thrust came harder, sharper, driving a gasp out of her.
"So don't you hold back on me." She licked her bottom lip, tasting the smeared lipstick. "Smack my ass, sugar."
He hesitated. One fractional second where the responsible part of his brain, the part that caught purse snatchers and helped old women with groceries, tried to interject.
"I said smack it." Her voice dropped to something commanding and raw. "Like you mean it."
Peter pulled his right hand off her hip and brought it down. Open palm, full contact, the crack echoing off the high ceiling like a whip snap. The force of it sent her lurching forward, and a red handprint bloomed bright and immediate across her left cheek, the skin flushing hot under the overhead light.
"Ahhhh!" Rogue's cry was sharp, electric, her back arching, her fingers tearing at the sheets. The sound died into a moan that came from somewhere deep in her belly. "Again. Harder. Like you mean it, Peter, God, do it again."
He did.
The second slap landed on the opposite cheek, hard enough to sting his palm, and the crack was louder than the first. Her ass bounced from the impact and he was already thrusting back into her before the ripple settled, driving deep while the handprint darkened from pink to angry red. She screamed into the pillow, muffled and raw, and shoved her hips back against him with a violence that jolted the whole bed frame.
Peter stopped thinking about being careful. Stopped thinking about rebound logistics, about broken engagements, about the champagne card facedown on the nightstand. There was only the wet heat of her clenching around him, the thick clap of her ass against his hips, the gorgeous wreckage of the wedding dress twisted around her waist, and the sounds she was making. Filthy, unguarded, each moan punched out of her by the force of his thrusts.
"God, your cock....that thick fuckin' cock....splitting me open...." She gasped the words into the crushed linen, face half-buried, bridal bun fully collapsed now, hair spilling wild across the pillow. "Harder, harder, don't stop, I swear to God if you stop...."
He spanked her again. Left cheek. The handprint overlapped the first, deepening the color, and she wailed and ground back onto him, taking every inch, her inner walls fluttering and squeezing in a way that told him exactly how close she was.
"Oh fuck....oh fuck, Peter, I'm close...." Her voice was breaking apart, the drawl cracking into breathless fragments. "I'm so close, sugar....right there....right there, don't you dare stop....don't you fucking dare...."
Her hand shot back and grabbed his wrist, pressing his palm flat against the hot, stinging skin of her ass, holding him there. Her other hand fisted the sheets so hard the fitted corner popped free from the mattress. Her thighs were trembling, the thick muscle quivering with tension, and her back was arched so deep that the ivory silk pooled in the hollow of her spine like water.
Her orgasm hit like a power surge. Her whole body locked, spine rigid, thighs clamping, her cunt squeezing him so tight he saw stars. The moan that tore out of her was long and ragged and shameless, vibrating through the pillow and into the mattress and through the bed frame into the floor.
Peter's hips stuttered. He buried himself deep and held, grinding against her, feeling every pulse and flutter of her release milking him, and it took everything he had not to follow her over.
Then her hands found his forearms, and her grip changed. Fingers locking around his wrists with a strength that would have snapped a normal man's bones. The air beneath them shifted, a subtle pressure change, like the room had inhaled.
They lifted off the bed.
Peter's knees left the mattress first. Then his shins, his feet, the tangled sheets trailing below them like a banner before gravity peeled them away. Rogue was laughing, breathless and wild, her body still shuddering with aftershocks, and she pulled him with her as she rose, his cock still buried inside her, the angle shifting as vertical became negotiable.
"Hold on, sugar," she managed between gasps. "I got an idea."
They were six feet above the bed. Eight. The ceiling approached, cream plaster with ornamental molding that probably cost more than Peter's apartment. Rogue rotated them in the air, slow, deliberate, until Peter's back faced the ceiling and she pressed against his front, legs wrapped around his waist, the ruined dress bunching between their bodies.
Peter looked up. Down. Whatever direction the ceiling was now.
Oh.
He understood.
He pressed his palms flat against the plaster and stuck. Then his feet, soles flat, toes gripping through the wall-crawling adhesion that lived in every cell of his skin. The bond held. He was pinned to the ceiling like he'd been bolted there, upside down, knees bent, and Rogue hung from him by his cock and the grip of her thighs and the invisible hand of her flight that kept her from being dead weight.
She looked up at him. Or down. Gravity had opinions about the direction, but neither of them were listening. Her half-collapsed bun finally surrendered entirely, pins scattering, and her hair fell in a silver-brown curtain that swayed beneath them, twelve feet of open air between her dangling curls and the wrecked bed below.
Her eyes went wide. Then she cackled. Full-throated, head thrown back, the sound bouncing off every surface in the honeymoon suite.
"This is the single stupidest, hottest thing I have ever seen in my entire life." She gripped his shoulders, gloved fingers digging in. "You absolute lunatic. You are fucking me on the ceiling."
"Technically you're fucking me on the ceiling." Peter adjusted his stance, feet finding better purchase on the plaster, and rolled his hips. The thrust drove her body upward against his, her breasts crushing against his chest through the silk bodice, and the sound she made was worth every law of physics they were currently violating. "You did the flying part. I'm just providing the venue."
"Shut up and move."
He moved.
The first stroke was experimental, a test of angles and adhesion and whether the hundred-year-old plaster could handle what he was about to do to it. It could. Barely. He pulled back and drove into her, and the ceiling groaned, and a fine mist of white dust sifted down from around his left foot like snow.
"Ohhhh, God." Rogue's legs tightened around him, ankles locked at the small of his back. Her flight held her steady, took the weight off his grip, let him use both hands on her hips to pull her onto each thrust. "That fat cock, Peter....I can feel it throbbing inside me....every fuckin' inch of it...."
He set the rhythm. Hard, deep strokes that used gravity and his core strength and the adhesive grip of his feet to generate a force that would have shattered the bed frame. Each thrust pressed her body against his, then drove her into the ceiling as the motion reversed, plaster dust raining from the contact points, white powder settling in her dark hair like confetti.
"The wall-crawler." She was grinning, flushed, sweat beading at her temples and running upward into her hairline. "The wall-crawler finally found a use for those powers worth a damn. Years of climbing buildings and shooting webs and all along you could've been doing this."
Peter growled against her throat. His lips found the tendon in her neck, teeth grazing skin through the thin barrier of her bodysuit collar, and he bit down just hard enough to make her gasp.
"You asked to be used like a whore," he said into her neck. "I'm just being thorough."
"Yesss." The word dissolved into a moan that vibrated against his mouth. "God, yes, that's exactly right, don't slow down....don't you dare slow down, Peter, I swear...."
He didn't slow down. He drove harder, faster, each thrust forcing a grunt from his chest and a cry from hers, and the ceiling was losing the fight. Cracks spider-webbed outward from his left foot. Plaster chips the size of quarters broke free and tumbled the long way down to the bed, bouncing off the scattered rose petals and the twisted sheets. The champagne bottle rattled in its bucket far below like a metronome nobody had asked for.
Rogue's hair swung beneath them with every impact, a pendulum of silver and brown, and her breasts were crushed so tight against his chest that he could feel her heartbeat hammering through the silk and through his ribs, two pulses out of sync and racing each other.
"Right there....right there, sugar....that thick fuckin' cock stretching me out...." Her gloved hands slid from his shoulders to the ceiling on either side of his head, palms flat, bracing herself so she could grind back against him with every thrust. "You feel so goddamn good inside me....Remy never....he couldn't...."
"Don't." Peter's hips snapped forward and she choked on the name. "Don't say his name up here. Up here it's just us."
Her eyes found his. Green and bright and wet and fierce.
"Just us," she whispered. "Just us, darlin'. Now fuck me through this ceiling."
The plaster cracked wider. His right foot slipped half an inch and re-stuck, and the adjustment shifted his angle, and Rogue screamed. The sound rang off the walls and the marble bathroom and the window overlooking Central Park, and she didn't cover her mouth, didn't muffle it, let it fill every corner of the twelve-hundred-dollar room.
Peter's thighs burned. His calves were shaking, the adhesion flickering at his toes as lactic acid built in muscles that were never designed to maintain a rhythm like this at this angle in defiance of basic architectural integrity. Plaster dust coated both of them, white powder streaking the ivory dress, frosting his dark hair, settling in the creases of her gloves.
His left foot lost purchase.
They dropped.
Two feet of free fall before Rogue's flight caught them, and then she was laughing and he was laughing and they tumbled the rest of the way in a controlled spiral, her arms around his neck, his hands on her waist, both of them hitting the wrecked bed in a tangle of sweaty limbs and crushed silk and plaster dust.
The mattress bounced. Springs protested. A pillow launched off the far side and knocked the champagne bucket sideways, ice water sluicing across the nightstand and soaking the facedown card.
Peter lay on his back, chest heaving, covered in white dust and sweat. Rogue was draped across him, face pressed into his collarbone, her body shaking with laughter that kept breaking into breathless wheezes.
"Oh, Lord." She wiped plaster dust from her eyelashes. "We destroyed the ceiling."
Peter looked up. A crater of missing plaster the size of a manhole cover gaped above them, bare lath slats visible, white dust still drifting down in lazy spirals.
"Twelve hundred a night," he said. "Pretty sure that's extra."
Peter rolled her onto her back and followed her down. His hands caught her behind the knees, pushed them up, folded her in half until her calves bracketed her own head and her spine curved deep into the mattress. The ruined dress bunched between them, silk crushed to nothing, and her bare ass lifted off the sheets at the angle, exposed, his cock still buried to the root.
"Oh, God." Her voice was thin, breathless. "Oh, that's deep. That's so fuckin' deep, sugar."
He drove down.
The first stroke bottomed out with a force that shoved her body into the headboard, the ornamental wood cracking against the wall hard enough to split the wallpaper. The second matched it. The third was harder. Peter braced his palms flat on either side of her head, fingers splayed on the linen, and put his weight behind each thrust, gravity and muscle and the coiled strength in his core compressing into a downward piston stroke that punched the air from her lungs.
The headboard hammered the wall in a relentless percussion. Plaster dust from the ceiling crater above drifted down between them. The mattress springs shrieked, a metallic keening that harmonized with the wet, heavy slap of his hips driving her into the bed. His balls swung forward with every stroke, heavy and full, connecting with the slick skin below her cunt, and the sound was obscene, dense, liquid.
"Ohhhhh....fuck....fuck, Peter...." Rogue's thighs shook against his shoulders. The tremor was visible, the thick muscle quivering in rapid spasms she couldn't control. Her mascara had given up any pretense of structure, black streaks tracking from her lash line to her temples, disappearing into the wild tangle of silver-streaked hair fanned across the pillow. Her red lipstick was a memory, smeared past the borders of her mouth, and her swollen lips hung parted, each exhale a ragged moan that broke into fragments between his thrusts. "Don't stop....please don't stop....fill me up....I need you to fill me up, darlin'....every drop....give me every single drop...."
He didn't stop. His arms burned, his abs cramped, and he didn't stop. He watched her face through the haze of his own approaching edge, watched her eyes roll back, watched her fingers claw at the sheets and then at his forearms and then at the ruined bodice of the dress, tearing at the silk. Her third orgasm built in stages he could feel, her inner walls clenching in rippling contractions that gripped his cock in waves, tighter and tighter, her body winding toward something that made her voice go high and thin and desperate.
"I'm gonna....oh God, I'm gonna....Peter, I'm....please, please, cum in me....cum inside me, I need it, I need to feel you...."
Her back arched off the mattress. The orgasm seized her whole body, spine bowing, thighs locking against his shoulders, her cunt clamping down on him with a ferocity that dragged him over the edge with her. Peter buried himself as deep as the angle allowed and came.
The first pulse ripped through him like a current, white and blinding, his cock jerking hard inside her. Thick, heavy ropes, pumping into her in rhythmic surges that he felt from the base of his spine to the soles of his feet. He groaned through it, the sound low and broken and animal, his hips grinding against her in tight circles as each spasm emptied more into her. Her cunt was already full, the pressure building around his shaft, and by the fifth pulse, cum welled out around his cock in a thick, milky overflow that drooled down the crease of her ass and pooled warm on the sheet beneath her.
"Ohhhhh....yes...." Rogue's moan was liquid, her body still shuddering, her hands finding his shoulders and gripping hard. "Oh, sugar, I can feel it....I can feel all of it....God, you came so much...."
He pumped through the last of it, each diminishing pulse pushing more out of her, the mess spreading beneath them. The sheets were destroyed. The dress was destroyed. The wall behind the headboard bore a splintered dent the size of a dinner plate. Plaster dust settled on her collarbone like snow on a battlefield.
Peter's arms gave out. He lowered himself onto her slowly, his forehead dropping to the hollow of her throat, his cock still buried, still thick, still twitching with the aftershocks. Her legs slid off his shoulders and fell open on either side of him, thighs splayed, and the shift in position pushed a fresh trickle of cum from where they were joined. It ran warm down her skin and she sighed at the sensation, a long, satisfied sound that vibrated through her sternum and into his cheekbone.
They lay there. Breathing. The room was wrecked around them. Peonies on the floor, champagne soaking the nightstand, ice cubes melting on marble, the ceiling cratered, the headboard cracked, the sheets unsalvageable. The card that read Congratulations, Mr. & Mrs. LeBeau was a wet pulp in the puddle of ice water, gold ink bleeding into nothing.
Rogue's gloved hand found his face. Her fingertips traced the line of his jaw, slow, featherlight, following the bone from his chin to the soft spot below his ear. The touch was different from everything else tonight. Gentle in a way that made his throat tight.
She pulled him down and kissed him. Soft. Her swollen lips pressing against his with no urgency, no desperation, just warmth, and the salt of sweat and the ghost of champagne and something underneath it all that tasted like the beginning of a thing instead of the end of one.
"Peter Parker." She murmured it against his mouth, eyes half-open, those green irises inches from his, glittering in the lamplight. "You may have just made yourself a mutant baby momma." Her thumb traced his lower lip. "You came like a horse, darlin'. I'm gonna be leakin' for days."
"That's, uh." He swallowed. His voice was wrecked, barely a whisper. "That's a conversation that needs more than the one brain cell I have left."
She smiled. The real one. The one that reached her eyes and softened everything about her, stripped the swagger and the armor away, and left the woman underneath exposed. Tender in a way that Peter hadn't seen from her all night.
"Peter." Softer now. Softer than the rooftop, softer than the kiss. Softer than he'd ever heard her sound, the drawl dropping to something almost fragile. Her fingers stayed on his jaw, tracing, memorizing. "Would you maybe want to....I don't know." She paused. Swallowed. Her eyes flickered away from his, then back. "Go on a date with me? A real one. Dinner, somewhere nice, the whole thing. Like normal folks do when they actually like each other."
Peter looked down at her. Mascara-streaked, lipstick-smeared, hair wrecked, wedding dress in tatters, plaster dust in her silver streaks, his cum leaking out of her and soaking into twelve-hundred-dollar sheets. She was asking him on a date.
"Anna." He brushed a strand of hair from her forehead. "I would've said yes before the blowjob."
Her breath caught. Her eyes went bright and liquid, and she grabbed the back of his neck and pulled him into a kiss that was nothing like the first one on the rooftop. Her tongue found his, deep and slow, exploring, tasting, and there was something new in it, something deliberate and growing and unguarded that sat warm in his chest like a coal catching flame.
She broke the kiss just far enough to speak, her lips still brushing his.
"I'm gonna drain those balls dry, sugar." Her voice was a low promise, thick with the drawl, her fingers curling in the hair at the nape of his neck. "Every last drop. Again and again until you can't remember your own name."
"That might take a while," Peter said. "Enhanced stamina. The spider thing. It's a whole deal."
She laughed. Low, throaty, the sound rolling through her chest and into his. Her legs wrapped around his waist, holding him inside her, and she pressed her forehead to his.
"I got one more piece of business first," she murmured. Her hand slid off his neck, reached sideways across the wrecked nightstand, and found her phone.
The park was one of those narrow green corridors squeezed between brownstones on the Upper West Side, a strip of grass and old elms and iron benches where dog walkers and joggers moved through the dappled light in predictable orbits. Gambit walked the main path with his hands in the pockets of his long coat, collar turned up despite the mild afternoon, auburn hair falling across his face in a way he'd calibrated to look careless.
He was rehearsing.
"Anna, mon coeur, what happened last night, it was the worst mistake of my life and I know that, I know it in my bones, and if you give me one chance...."
Too desperate. She'd smell weakness like blood in the water.
"Chère, I ain't gonna make excuses. What I did was wrong. But we built somethin' real, and one bad night don't erase...."
Better. Steadier. But that word, real, she'd throw it back at him. She'd say real is what I saw through that hotel window, Remy. And she'd be right, and he'd have no foothold.
He tried again. His boots scuffed the asphalt path. A woman with a stroller gave him a wide berth, something in his expression warning her off without a word.
"I love you, Anna Marie. That ain't changed. That ain't ever gonna change. I was scared, and I handled it the worst way a man can, and I'm askin' you to let me spend the rest of my life makin' it right."
That one. That was the one. Humble enough, honest enough, and the rest of my life callback to the vows she'd never hear now. He could work with that. He could sell it. Remy LeBeau could sell anything.
His phone buzzed in his coat pocket. Then again.
He pulled it out. Two notifications from Rogue's number. The first was a video. The second was a photo with a text caption beneath it.
He tapped the video.
The screen filled with Rogue.
She was facing away from the camera, straddling someone on the white bed he recognized instantly as the Carlisle honeymoon suite, the bed he'd paid for, the sheets he'd picked out from the hotel's premium linen catalog because Anna liked high thread counts. Her back was bare, the wedding dress pulled down to her waist, the ivory silk crushed and twisted around her hips like a discarded flag. Her hair was wild, silver streaks tangled with dark brown, sweat-damp curls clinging to her shoulders.
She was riding.
The motion was violent, deliberate, her hips rising and dropping in a hard, punishing rhythm, and each descent produced a sound that came through his phone speaker with devastating clarity. A thick, wet clap of flesh on flesh, her heavy ass cheeks spreading on impact and then bouncing back, rippling from the force. The cock beneath her was visible on every upstroke, thick and flushed and gleaming, disappearing into her as she dropped her full weight back down. The man's hands gripped her hips, and Gambit could see the lean forearms, the wiry muscle, and he knew before she said a word.
"Peter!" Rogue's voice, raw and breaking, her head thrown back. "Oh God, Peter, right there, right there, sugar!"
She leaned back, her spine arching, and her heavy breasts fell free of the ruined bodice. She cupped them in both hands, lifted them, and buried the man's face between them, pulling him up from the pillows by the back of his neck. The dark hair between her breasts was unmistakable. Peter Parker's muffled groan vibrated through the phone's tinny speaker.
"I love you." She said it grinding down, the words punched out of her between the slaps of skin. "I love this cock, I love these hands on me, I love every goddamn inch of you, Peter Parker."
Then she turned her head. Looked directly into the camera propped on the nightstand. Green eyes bright, pupils blown, mascara tracked down her cheeks, red lipstick destroyed. She smiled. Slow. The half-smile. The one Gambit had seen a thousand times, the one he'd thought belonged to him.
"Hey, Remy." The drawl was syrup-thick and mean. "This is what a real man feels like, darlin'. A real man who don't need to go crawling through other dimensions looking for reasons to cheat." She dropped her hips and gasped, her eyes fluttering, and when they opened again they were locked on the lens. "This right here? This is everything you couldn't give me. Every time you rolled over and lit that cigarette and left me wanting. Every time you finished before I even got started." Another drop, another clap of impact, her voice breaking into a moan that she rode back to words through sheer willpower. "He's still hard, baby. Been going for an hour. You couldn't last ten minutes on your best night."
She reached back with one hand and smacked her own ass, the crack audible, then grabbed a fistful of the ivory silk bunched at her waist.
"Your mama's gonna love the dry cleaning bill."
The video ended.
Gambit stood on the park path. The phone screen went black and showed him his own reflection, hollow-eyed and gray.
He tapped the photo.
It loaded in high resolution. Twelve megapixels of ruin.
Rogue lay on the white sheets, propped against the headboard. The wedding dress was still on, technically. The bodice hung open, one strap torn, the silk stained and wrinkled beyond any tailor's salvation. Her hair fanned across the pillow in a tangle of silver and brown. Her face was wrecked. Mascara in dark rivers from lash to jaw. Lipstick smeared past the corners of her mouth, the red faded to a pale stain across her chin and left cheek. Her lips were swollen, bitten, parted enough to show teeth. A thick line of cum trailed from the corner of her mouth, down across her jaw, and dripped onto her bare collarbone.
Peter's cock was beside her face. Resting against her cheek, the broad head near her temple, the shaft angled down along her jaw. Red lipstick ringed it from tip to base. Distinct bands of crimson, each one a separate depth marker, each one proof of exactly how far she'd taken him. The rings grew closer together near the root where the lipstick had smudged into a solid field of red.
His balls rested against her chin. Heavy, full even after everything, and stamped with lip prints. Clear, deliberate impressions in red, pressed onto the skin like seals on a document.
Gambit squinted. Tilted the phone. There was another mark, further back, visible at the edge of the frame where Peter's body twisted. A single perfect lip print, red and unmistakable, stamped on his asshole.
The color left Gambit's face in stages. Tan to pale to gray, the progression visible even in the park's forgiving light.
Rogue's right hand was in the frame. Gloved. Raised beside Peter's cock, her middle finger extended, aimed at the camera with the precision of a woman who'd practiced the angle.
The caption beneath the photo was two words:
Wedding's off!!!
A pigeon landed on the back of the bench beside him. Cooed once, shifted its weight, and released a fat white streak of shit that landed square on the shoulder of his coat. The splat was audible. Gambit didn't move. Didn't flinch. Didn't brush it off.
He stood on the path with the phone in his hand and the pigeon on the bench and the jogging strollers moving past him like water around a stone, and the rehearsed apology died in his mouth, every word of it, gone like smoke.