Ring ring ring!
Klein's phone went off just as he was heading for the door.
He glanced at the screen. Peter.
"Hey — what's up?"
Two seconds of silence on the other end. Then a voice came through that sounded like it had been left out in the rain overnight.
"Klein. It's me."
Klein's eyebrows went up. He'd known Peter long enough to recognize the register — that particular flatness that meant something had gone genuinely wrong.
"I can hear that. You sound terrible. What happened?"
"Where are you right now?"
"Home. Just got up, no classes today, was about to head out." He wedged the phone against his shoulder and reached into the shoe cabinet. "Why, you want to come? I'll show you how to spend money properly for once."
"Come here instead." A pause. Something in Peter's voice that wasn't quite stubbornness and wasn't quite surrender — something in between. "Come have a drink with me."
Klein stopped moving.
"...Drink with you."
"Yeah."
"Peter. Are you okay? What happened?"
"Don't ask right now." A brief, effortful pause. "I got dumped. Come drink with me. There's a bar on 3rd Avenue, down the alley — place called Sorrow's End. You know it?"
Klein searched his memory. Small, dim, tucked back far enough that you had to be looking for it. Blue-collar crowd, cheap drinks, the kind of place that minded its own business.
"I know it."
"Then hurry up." Peter hung up.
Klein stood in the entryway for a moment, phone still raised, listening to dead air.
Dumped. Peter Parker, asking to go drink.
He put his shoes on and went downstairs.
He caught a cab, gave the address, and watched the Queens afternoon slide past the window while he turned it over in his head.
By the timeline as he understood it, Peter and Gwen should barely have gotten to the "definitely mutual, hasn't been said out loud yet" stage. They weren't officially together. So what exactly had fallen apart?
Unless — he'd pushed Peter into moving sooner than he would have on his own.
Oh.
The cab pulled up at the mouth of the alley. Klein paid, got out, and pushed through the bar door.
Dim inside, warm in a dingy way. Beer smell, fried food, old wood. A handful of customers scattered across booths in the middle of a Tuesday afternoon, minding their own business.
Peter was in the back booth, hunched over a half-finished beer, tracing the water rings on the table with one finger. He looked up at the sound of the chair scraping, and the expression on his face — a smile that immediately collapsed back into something worse — said everything.
"You're here." He hiccupped. Beer burp.
Klein looked at the single half-empty bottle in front of him.
"You called me out for an emergency drink and you're nursing one beer?"
He pulled out the chair across from him and dropped into it, then raised a hand to the bartender. "Two whiskeys, rocks. And—" he looked at Peter "—a non-alcoholic mojito."
"Klein, don't—"
"I made some money recently. Relax." He looked back at the bartender. "The mojito too. Thanks."
Peter opened his mouth to argue and then seemed to decide he didn't have the energy. He stared at his beer bottle instead.
"So," Klein said. "Tell me what happened."
Peter didn't answer immediately. He took another pull from the bottle and immediately coughed like someone who had forgotten how swallowing worked.
Klein leaned over and patted his back.
"Okay, you're done with that." He slid the beer bottle to his own side of the table. The bartender arrived with the drinks; Klein pushed the mojito in front of Peter. "Talk."
Peter wrapped his hands around the cold glass. Stared at it.
"I did what you said," he started. His voice was thicker than normal, unsteady at the edges. "After that day in the cafeteria — I thought about it for three weeks. Worked extra shifts. Saved up enough to get her a necklace." He almost smiled at the memory, and then didn't. "Then I went and told her."
"And she said yes," Klein said.
"Yeah." A brief, genuine light crossed Peter's face before fading. "She said yes. And the past week — Klein, I don't know how to explain it. We'd get lunch together, go to the library, I'd walk her back to her dorm at night. She'd laugh at something I said and I'd think—" He stopped. "It was the best week of my life. Genuinely."
"Okay," Klein said. "So how did it end?"
The light was gone completely now.
"Yesterday morning Captain Stacy called me. Gwen's dad." Peter took his glasses off and rubbed his face. "He asked me to meet him at a café. Said he'd looked into me. Said I wasn't a bad kid, knew I worked hard, knew about my parents, knew about my aunt." He set the glasses back on. "And then he told me I don't have the ability to give Gwen the life she deserves. That I'd only make her smaller by being with her."
The table was quiet for a moment.
"He was polite about it," Peter added. "That almost made it worse."
Klein picked up his whiskey and took a slow sip.
"So you went home and thought about it."
"All day." Peter's jaw tightened briefly. "And he's not wrong, is he? That dress she wore last week — I'd have to skip meals for two months to afford it. She wants to go to Cambridge after graduation. Her dad wants her in the FBI or the DOJ. These are things I can't even see from where I'm standing right now."
His voice cracked on the last word.
"So last night I called her. And I—" He stopped. Pressed his lips together. Tried again. "I broke up with her."
He lost the fight with it then. His eyes went bright and spilled over, and he didn't try to hide it, just let the tears fall onto the table.
"I hung up and cried until I fell asleep. Woke up this morning feeling like the walls were closing in. So I came here." He laughed once, a broken sound. "I know. One beer. Very dramatic."
Klein set his glass down.
He sat with it for a full ten seconds, looking at Peter — this decent, earnest kid who had summoned every scrap of courage he had to take a shot at something good, and then talked himself out of it twenty-four hours later because someone with authority told him he wasn't enough.
Klein picked his glass back up and finished the whiskey.
"I'm going to be honest with you," he said finally.
Peter looked up.
"George Stacy's not a bad man. He loves his daughter and he was trying to protect her." Klein set the glass down. "And he was also completely wrong."
Peter blinked.
"He looked at where you are right now and made a permanent judgment about where you're going to be. That's not the same thing." Klein leaned forward. "You're twenty years old. You're broke and your parents are dead and you're still in school. That's where you're starting from — it's not where you're ending up."
"Klein—"
"I'm not done." Klein's voice stayed even. "You took his assessment of your current circumstances and made it mean something it doesn't mean. You broke up with a girl who said yes because a man told you that you weren't enough yet." He paused. "Not that you'd never be enough. Yet."
Peter was very quiet.
"I'm not saying George Stacy is the villain. I'm saying the decision you made last night was made from fear, not from what's actually true." Klein sat back. "And I think you know that."
Peter stared at the table. His jaw worked silently.
Klein picked up the second whiskey.
"Drink your mojito," he said, less gently. "You look terrible."
Peter picked up the glass. His hands weren't fully steady.
They sat there in the dim afternoon quiet of the bar while the ceiling fan turned slowly overhead and Klein let the silence do the work it needed to do.
[End of Chapter 12]