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Peter Parker doesn’t hate people, but Michelle Jones gives him a run for his money. On the first day of his first class of grad school, his actual, honest-to-god nemesis reveals herself in true Shakespearean fashion. Michelle Jones, fellow TA, sulks into the lecture hall for Banner’s 100-level chem class and peers at him over the rim of her vintage sunglasses, which she has the sheer audacity to wear indoors, and says, “You’re shorter than I thought you’d be.”
The offhanded comment, the sheer casual cruelty, the slight on his person is so appalling he flounders like a fish. That, and regretfully, on the first day he met Michelle, Peter had foolishly been dumbfounded by her beauty. Evil things always did come in the most alluring packages.
Her comment, short and ice cold, spurns a rivalry that the likes of the chemistry department has never seen before. It should make Peter ashamed that they have a running how-many-days-without-a-peterchelle-incident, but he is kind of proud. Especially when she is the party to ruin the board. Take that, Jones.
“Have you marked up those reports yet for Banner, Parker?” she snipes, as she skirts into the TA-lounge after her office hours with freshman.
He scowls into his work and harshly flips to the next page. She makes him so mad he can barely see straight. The words of the paper he had been writing lift off of the page and melt away. “He’ll get them by end of day.”
“No problem,” she shrugs. “I can always do it. Take it off your plate.”
It shouldn’t make him mad, the insinuation that he is incompetent and she is brilliant, but it makes him livid. As a naturally reserved person, cowardly, Flash used to snap in high school, Peter does not want to get into with Michelle. They did nine days ago, if the board is to be believed, and he doesn’t have the energy for a sparring match. He does really have to get reports marked for Banner as soon as he is able to read properly again. “I can do it.”
“I don’t mind,” she says cooly. “Really.”
It is the really that sets the sirens off in Peter’s mind. He feels like some kind of shitty Tarantino-lead that sees some film noir red whenever his villain is around. It is so juvenile of him, but MJ brings out his inner demon. His voice cracks unimpressively as he says, “I can do it.”
She raises one eyebrow. “Sure about that?”
“Jesus, Michelle, if I say I can do it, I can do it.”
Her lip quirks in the left hand corner. He hates that smirk. It means she knows she has gotten under his skin. He buckles down for her retort. But all he gets is a smart, “Testy.”
Ned wordlessly points to the incident board. It reminds Peter to intentionally lower his hackles. He is so mad. And it is so dumb. In the grand scheme of his graduate degree, Michelle Jones doesn't matter. "Whatever," he mumbles, rubbing his worn eyes. "I'll do it."
"Okay," she breezes and sits beside Ned. "Heya Ned." His best friend has the disrespectful gall to smile at her when she sits down.
"Heya MJ," Ned stretches. That is another thing, Peter seethes, Michelle has all of her friends call her MJ. The fact that he is barred from the nickname is some petty, high school shit. "How were the freshmen?"
"Oh, you know, hungover."
Ned snorts. "Eighteen year olds."
"Too much sex and not enough water." Peter groans audibly at her candor. Michelle addresses him with a frown, "What?"
"Can we not?"
Michelle tilts her head curiously. "What? You squeamish about sex, Parker?"
Ned exhales heavily. "C'mon you guys."
"No." Peter feels his eartips flush a blazing red. "I just don't think it's appropriate to talk about at work."
"We're TAs," she replies flatly.
"They pay us."
"We're TAs."
"You're unbelievable, you know that?" Peter lashes out.
Michelle's voice rolls over in dark fury. "I'm unbelievable? Me? I'm unbelievable."
"Yep," Peter says, making a concerted effort to pop the 'p' in the word. "That's what I said."
"We'll you're a blowhard, Parker. And I don't like you."
"Oh no. Whatever will I do?"
"Damn it," Ned says, slamming his laptop shut. He marches across the room and wipes the incident board clean.
They are back down to zero.
"They hate each other," Ned laments.
Betty rubs her boyfriend's back in easy circles as the other Science Department TAs debrief about the latest PJ-scandal. Today the pair faced down outside Stark's office in full view of the entire department. When Ned asked Peter later what the fight had been about, he had grumbled something about double booking lab space. Instead of finding some amicable solution, the two had decided screaming at each other over a botched reservation was a better use of their valuable time.
Banner had formally reprimanded them in-sight of all of the students that had gathered. It was undoubtedly a low point in their on-going feud.
Abraham commiserates with his peers, "It's never going to end." Charles clinks his half-empty beer bottle against Abraham's glass in solidarity of their mutual misery.
"Its only because they wanna fuck each other," Cindy says, returning from the kitchen with a fresh ale. Her peers all stare at her in abject horror. "What?"
Ned loudly guffaws. "What? No."
"Uh. Yeah." Cindy insists. "They have for over a semester now." The other TAs gawk at her in disbelief. "Seriously? Guys. C'mon."
Sally shrinks into the plush safety of Betty and Ned's shitty couch. "Make it stop."
"Why would you introduce such an evil into this sacred place? Peterchelle Vent Time is to be respected," Charles says.
Cindy rolls her eyes. "Look, think whatever you want, but all of that fighting is just some weird, public foreplay."
Abe gesticulates in Ned's direction. "Leeds. You're his best friend. Tell her!"
"Abe is right, Cindy. They hate each other. Peter literally can't hear MJ's name without losing his mind."
"Whatever," Cindy says. She takes a hearty sip of her drink. "I'm just saying. They wanna fuck. And it would be nice if they took all that chaotic energy they are polluting the department with and channeled it into the bedroom."
"This is all your fault," Michelle discerns from across the room. Peter tries not to snap back at her meanly. Banner had as good as said if the pair of them did not work through their issues or, at the very least, endeavor to be nice, there would be serious consequences. He needed his place in the department. His TA gig was the only reason he could afford his Masters. If it was taken away-- well, Peter didn't want to have to explain why he had to hang up his Masters degree to his Aunt May. Still. It was as much her fault that they had been assigned the late shift for lab hours as it was his.
He breathes deeply. "I'm not going to fight with you, Jones."
"Now," she mutters.
"Jesus. Do you always have to have the last word?" She lowers her eyes and she looks hurt. Peter is appalled. He can't believe Michelle has the audacity to look upset with him. "Are you seriously upset?"
"No," she overtly lies.
The room fills with silence. Peter doesn't mind. None of the students are going to use the lab this late, anyhow. He wants to do his time and get out unscathed. He prefers if they don't talk. If they don't talk, then they won't fight and he is bone-tired of fighting.
They spend near an hour in blissful silence. Peter is halfway through his assigned grading when Michelle sits opposite of him at his lab table. He looks up from his work and his lead stomach flares with confusion and trepidation, like bracing for an attack. She, on the other hand, looks utterly calm.
"Why do you hate me?" she asks. Her question smacks him across the face. It must show because she comments cooly, "Close your mouth."
He snaps his jaw shut. "I'm sorry. But what kind of question is that?"
"An honest one," she replies.
"You hate me," he says, dumbly.
"No," she shakes her head. "I don't."
His contradiction is practically an auto-pilot response. "Yes, you do."
She breathes out of her nose in frustration. "No, I don't. Don't tell me what I do and don't feel."
"Then what have the last six months been, huh?"
Michelle smooths her hands out on the report she brought over to review. It strikes him as a sweetly insecure gesture. "Disagreements."
"Disagreements," he repeats, tasting the word.
She tucks a windswept curl behind her ear. He loathes that he takes the time to notice how beautiful she is and he curses his dumb, lizard boy brain. Peter isn't an imbecile. He knows Michelle is gorgeous, but she is also Michelle. His undisputed arch-nemesis.
"Loud disagreements," she concedes. "But I don't hate you. You frustrate the hell outta me, Parker. Don't get me wrong. But I don't hate you. You just always made it clear that you hated me. So."
He feels himself floundering. He figures this has to be some kind of plot to catch him off guard. To dazzle him with her big brown eyes and freshly wet lips. She keeps licking them and he knows, just knows, she must be aware of what it does to him. His eyes are as good as tracking every movement.
Peter swallows. His throat is strangely dry. "You said you thought I'd be taller. On that first day. It was the first thing you said to me," he says as he recounts the memory. He remembers everything about that day and how his first impression of Michelle had been absolutely wrong. Peter had felt inexplicably warm when she walked into the room. Like some kind of deep knowing had swept over him. Now he knows that was his body or fate or whatever larger power telling him to steel himself for the introduction of his nemesis.
She snorts. And he tries not to scowl. He won't give her the satisfaction. "Seriously?"
"Yes, seriously," he frowns. "I remember."
"You've carried a grudge for six months, turning our relationship into a battlefield, because I imagined you taller?"
Peter flushes. "It's--it's more complicated than that."
"No," Michelle disagrees. "You're a lunatic. All I meant by that was I thought you'd be taller. When I saw the department pictures."
"I know what you meant."
"Oh yeah?" she says, sitting back, appraising him with her arms crossed prettily across her chest. "Enlighten me."
"You were cutting me down."
"No. I made an off-handed remark. You're the one who internalized it and made it a huge deal, making our working relationship nearly impossible for six months. You, Peter. Not me."
"If that's the case, why can't I call you MJ, huh? Only your friends call you MJ, you said. But I have to call you Michelle."
"Because you weren't being friendly."
"You hate me."
She throws her hands up. "I give up."
He leans forward, brushing his grading out of the way, and rests his forearms on the desk. His eyes are trained on hers. They are narrowed but alert. He speaks slowly, as if the rhythm of the sentence will help her better absorb his words, "You hate me."
"Well, you hate me," she counters, tilting over the desk.
"Oh yeah?" he says.
"Yeah," she grounds out.
He grinds his jaw. "Oh you are the absolute worst person I have ever met."
"Ditto, Parker."
They breathe heavily. He can feel the anger and frustration of the last six months swelling between them, surging like a live-wire. His eyes flick down to her mouth to check if it is still wet from all of her incessant licking. Of course it is, he nearly curses. It is so like Michelle to do that to him. Perfect. Just freakin' perfect.
"Stop it." She is so close he can smell the faint aftertaste of tea on her tongue.
"Stop what?" Her chest heaves.
Before he rightly knows what he is doing, Peter grabs the back of Michelle's head roughly and slams their mouths together. Their teeth clack from the force. It should piss Peter off but some gremlin in his chest, one that purrs finally, is thrilled at the brute nature of this kiss. His insistent mouth presses the advantage against her shaky one, sweeping his tongue into her mouth.
He braces himself for her shriek and fury, but it never connects. The fists he expects to slam against his chest turn into kitten gloves, clawing at his clothes in a bid to get him closer. She is not idle, this terrible girl, and Peter likes the scratch of her teeth when she snags on his bottom lip between kisses.
"I hate you," she reminds him as she unbelievably climbs over the desk to settle herself in his lap.
"Shut up," he says.
It is unreal, the part of his brain that is still capable of rational thought, he thinks. She is so much warmer than he could have ever imagined. Not that he has imagined Michelle Jones perched in his lap with her blunt nails dipping beneath his sweatshirt in the middle of the 4A lab. He most definitely has never imagined anything like this ever in his life.
Nope. Not him.
"Get your clothes off," she demands.
He pulls away long enough to gasp, "We're doing this here?" She shoots him the look he is so accustomed to from Michelle Jones. It is pointed and irritated. "Right," he nearly chokes as he rips off his outer layer. "We're doing this here."
She makes a mind numbing noise, something caught between a groan and a wilted sigh, and Peter feels his inside congeal. But it has nothing on what his brain does when she tears off her own shirt and reveals she is not wearing a bra underneath. His eyes feast on skin. So much skin.
He rolls her back on the desk, knocking her report and his grading off somewhere in the distance, and settles between her open legs. He swoops down for another kiss and she bites at his lips.
Peter realizes something as the bittersweet combination of pain and pleasure blooms in his lip. This is familiar. This is fighting. They have been doing this all along.
Fuck it, he thinks, as he settles back on top of her, still kissing her treacherous mouth. This is a much better way to fight.
He pulls a now-damp piece of paper out from underneath his bare bottom and tosses it on the floor. He can't be sure if that is her report or if that is his grading. Either way, the document is as good as ruined.
She muffles a laugh into his tacky chest. He can't help but smile as he peaks down at her grinning face. "What?"
"You got ass sweat on your grading," she muses.
"No," he contradicts her like nothing has changed. Like he hasn't just fucked her in the middle of the lab on a desk he knows Professor Stark uses. "Could be your ass sweat."
"You're an idiot."
He rolls his eyes. "Give a girl three orgasms and she calls you an idiot. I see how it is." But all of the bite is gone from his usual tone. He is too blissed out from the best sex of his life to properly fight with Michelle. Besides, now that he has seen her naked, he isn't sure how invested he is in fighting her with his full chest ever again. Bickering is their language. But the fight from earlier, the one in the hallway with Banner, seems so trivial now.
She traces a useless figure eight on his chest and says, "I'm sorry I made you self-conscious about your height that first day."
He drops his head back on the desk and stares up at the ceiling. "I'm sorry I took it so seriously. You know, before you opened your mouth that day, I thought you were the most beautiful girl I had ever seen."
Michelle hoists herself up to look down at him. Her forearm is perched on his chest. She has one hand in his hair. "Oh yeah?"
He nods. "Still think so. Even if you drive me nuts."
She rolls her eyes. "You're no walk in the park, either, you know. You're a ridiculous person."
"I'm actually pretty level-headed. And shy. You just," he brings her head down for another long, heady kiss. "Mm. You drive me crazy."
"I thought you were beautiful, too. That first day. Still do." She ducks her head like she is embarrassed. "Obviously."
He pulls on a hanging piece of her hair. The curl bounces back when he releases it. "You wanna go out with me sometime?"
"Let me think about that." She kisses him lightly. "Yes."
His eyebrows shoot up into his hair. He is so delighted he can't help the stupid little face he knows he is making. "Really?"
"I let you fuck me on a desk in the middle of the lab, Peter. Pretty sure I'm down for coffee."
"Tea," he corrects her. "I noticed you like tea."
She kisses him again and it is featherlight. "Tea it is."
This, Peter thinks, is so much better than a nemesis. He isn't sure what new thing to call Michelle yet, but he isn't sad to lose an enemy. Having an arch-nemesis is so much work. Sex with a really pretty girl who happens to be witty and brilliant and probably 1000x smarter than him is better. Way better.
He pulls her in for another kiss when the familiar creek of the doorknob turning cracks. He only has enough time to flip Michelle over to hide her naked body from unwelcome eyes under the blanket of his own when he hears the scream.
"MY EYES!" Ned shouts in despair. "MY BEAUTIFUL--" His friend lets lose another ear-piercing shriek. "Peter??? MJ!!?!"