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After we went home, I sat May down and we had a serious discussion about selling the clarinet. She tried to be brave about it and I held her and she managed to only cry for a little while. I told her that it was all right to feel the way she did, which made her cry a bit more, so I kissed her cheek and held her for quite some time afterwards.
The next morning, I wasn't surprised when Liz accepted when I asked her out. She even insisted that we make a whole day of it, considering how well the impromptu dinner the night before had gone. In fact, she even invited Aunt May to come along, because her mother would be at the house, too.
Of course, once we were all at Liz's house, I had to make the joke that I was now dating three women and I was happy that they all seemed to get along. I received three nearly identical smacks on the 'good' side of my head and my exclamation of faked pain made them laugh. That wasn't the best part of the day, though. Nope. It was that Liz had a heated pool.
Even though it was only a couple of weeks before the Christmas break, I got to see Aunt May, Doris, and Liz wearing bathing suits. Nice, thin, bathing suits. The wind was bitter as well, so it was a double treat for me. Well, six treats to be exact. Yep, those treats. So, I specifically made a point to compliment each woman for looking so beautiful. May blushed, Doris laughed, and Liz smacked me good.
"Put your eyes back in your head, Ben." Liz warned me.
"Huh?" I faked being confused, which kept Doris laughing and made May smile.
"It's not nice to stare." Liz said, pointedly.
"But, if I can't stare at my girlfriends, who am I supposed to stare at?" I asked and started to grin, which let her know I was joking.
Liz almost growled and then she chuckled and covered my eyes. "Get into the pool."
"Yes, ma'am!" I said and slipped out from her grip and then ran for the diving board, jumped and did a cartwheel, and landed in the water with a huge splash. I was up an instant later. "Come on in! The water's great!"
"You did not just do that!" Liz exclaimed and stared at me.
"Do what? Dive?" I asked.
Liz shook her head as she hopped in from the side of the pool and bobbed in the water beside me.
"Show off." I said and she put a hand on my head and pushed me under the surface. I made appropriate gurgle sounds for her and waved my arms in a panicking manner. I could almost hear her laughing, too. She let me up and I spit and sputtered, so she hugged me and kissed me to apologize.
"Liz, stop trying to kill your new boyfriend." Doris said as she and May calmly walked down the stairs at the shallow end of the pool. "Ben's right. The water is the perfect temperature."
May shivered and dipped down to swim a bit and then turned over to float on her back. "This actually is nice. Thank you for inviting me."
Doris waved her thanks away. "Addy's in the office doing paperwork for a few hours and we needed to do something to distract those two." She said and waved at Liz and myself.
"I have super-vision!" I said and Liz giggled. "Wait, that's not as great as it sounds."
Doris and May laughed as well and we spent an hour floating around in the warm water and talking about school and work. I was a little surprised that the three of them were so relaxed and didn't seem to mind having me around. I did try to not be too big of a disturbance, too. I mean, I'm a guy with three women to impress. I had to show off a little, right? It's in the guy code.
"He is definitely trying too hard to impress us." Doris said after I made a particularly cool dive with a somersault.
"You need to relax, Ben." May advised me and motioned to the end of the pool. "Go float over there for a while."
"Aww, sent to the corner already." I pouted and gave Liz a quick kiss and pushed off from the side of the pool as I put my face down into the water. I did the dead man float all the way to the shallow end and held my breath the whole time. No one reacted.
When I lifted my head and turned around to look, Doris, May, and Liz were completely ignoring me.
Well, it was fun while it lasted. I thought and laid back in the water as I stared up at the sky. I actually lost track of time as I did so.
I felt someone approach in the water sometime later and turned my head slightly to see Liz. I stood up to greet her and we all left the pool, dried off, and dressed. Lunch was a semi-quiet affair as we ate sandwiches and waited for Adrian to come home. He did so, only a little later than he was supposed to, and the party games began.
I knew he wasn't enjoying it much and just went along with it, because his wife and daughter wanted him to, so I made sure to stick beside him and always took as much attention onto myself as I could without being annoying about it. He actually looked grateful for my efforts.
I had to leave them at a certain point to start cooking supper. Doris actually bought steaks like I suggested and she just had to follow me into 'her space' like Liz said and she watched as I prepared everything. Marinating sauce to tenderize the steaks, a nice garden salad, some rice, and a few spices to add to the meat when I grilled it.
I could tell that Doris was impressed when I had everything ready. After I started up the grill and put the meat on, Adrian looked impressed as well. They each liked their meat cooked differently, so I had to constantly watch the steaks. I had marked each of them, just so I wouldn't get them mixed up, and served them when their meat was ready.
Everyone fell silent as we all started eating. The happy and pleased sounds they all made as they ate, gave me a happy feeling. It was at times like these that really drove home that these people were real, just like I was, and I cared about them. I resolved to do everything I could to improve myself and to get ready for what was coming.
*
Monday was a full work day, so I worked my ass off. We were stripping the building down, floor by floor, and we were making short work of it, which meant that we were definitely going to make the February first deadline.
I took the lunch break off and went to the best music store in the city, the one where May had bought the clarinet, and sold it back to them at a small discount. They were impressed at the condition of the thing, considering how long Peter had it, and they were glad that I added in the case and extra parts for only another two hundred dollars.
I barely made back the original price of the clarinet and went back to work with almost $1,500 in my pocket. I checked with Adrian and he told me it would only be a few hundred dollars to get the truck door repainted. I gave him a pointed look for several moments before handing him $500 and thanked him for making up the price. He laughed and told me to get back to work.
One of the guys had to empty the dump truck at a designated landfill area and I was asked to go along to see where it was. I was shocked that they were using it as back-fill to reinforce the docks. Since it was concrete and the steel rebar had been removed, another company was mixing it with more concrete to secure the land and to stop the water from eroding the docks away.
My updated civil engineering report for class on Wednesday was going to make my teacher quite happy.
Tuesday was chemistry lab day and I had my chance to brew up a huge batch of web fluid. Since I no longer had a lab partner, thanks to Ned's suspension for the last couple of weeks before the holidays, it had been easy to use his set up as a hidden brewing lab under my lab table.
It had huge cabinets that I tucked everything inside and performed the real lab above the table and tended to the large vat of white snot I was making. No one noticed what I was doing, so it all worked out and I completed both tasks by the end of class.
I had emptied my old backpack and lined it with several layers of plastic the night before and used a neutral chemical sealer at the end of class to ensure there would be no leaks. I dumped in the cooked web fluid and sealed the bag to stop the air from causing any more of a reaction than necessary.
Instead of going home after school, I stopped at a hardware store and picked up a good air compressor and the proper attachments for making pressurized containers. I had the excuse now that I had extra cash from the clarinet sale and used the money I had appropriated from my victims. My hand only shook a little as I handed the money over to the sales clerk.
"You don't have to be nervous over such a large purchase, sir." The young woman said and rang up the things I had. "It has a one year in-store warranty and another year from the company."
"As long as it's inherent parts failure and not from misuse, right?" I asked with a smile.
She softly laughed. "You have some experience with the unwritten rules."
"Only with nearly everything I buy." I said and she smiled. "I'm actually using this to pressurize containers, so the regulator and everything else is going to be used as intended."
She nodded and wrote on the back of the receipt before she handed it to me. "If you have any problems, just bring it back and we'll replace it."
"Thank you." I said and saw the number on the back of the slip of paper. "I'm sorry. I just asked another girl to be my girlfriend."
She smirked at me. "I'm not particularly worried."
I raised my eyebrows at her and she laughed.
"If you last past Christmas, call me and let me know." She said and slid the bag with my things in it to the end of the counter. "Good luck." She said and turned to the guy in line behind me.
Okay, that was a little weird. I thought and carried the bag out of the store. I wonder what she meant?
I went home and put my things into my room. I had rearranged things a little to give myself more room to work in and the top bunk bed was now a large storage area for everything, which left nearly the entire rest of the room free for me to set up some things. I still had to be discreet about it, though.
I started taking out the robotic parts I had hidden under my bed and that reminded me I didn't have a computer. I knew I could get a half-decent laptop computer for about six hundred bucks and I seriously considered it. I sat at my desk and stared at the components in front of me and I knew that a half-decent computer was not going to cut it. I would have to splurge and see what I could get.
I took out my cell phone and the signal strength was pretty low. I sighed and went out my window to climb the fire escape to the roof. I had full signal then and I browsed the local area for good laptops and even tried desktop models. The choices were crap. Like, really crap. My estimate of half-decent was apparently well above what I could actually afford.
Where's the Stark tech? I asked myself and searched specifically for that.
I almost choked on my own spit when I saw the cheapest laptop available was nearly $3,000 and it was crap. It barely had any memory, the processor was two generations below what they had been before I became Peter, and the hard drive was barely enough to hold the outdated operating system, which was also crap.
I cursed in my head and tried to not be discouraged. It was apparently the proprietary programming and the technology owned by Stark that was the primary cost. So, I abandoned pre-made things and started searching for components. Thanks to the books I had read at the library, I knew what all the main components would be and what to look for.
I stopped half an hour later, because it was ridiculous. Building things on your own was even more expensive, because they only sold 'replacement' parts and not components. It was a lucrative market, too. I sighed at that and went back down into my room. I closed the window and sat down on my bed. I heard a light jingle of the keys in my pocket and remembered the other sets of keys I still had.
My mind immediately went over what I could do with those keys. Throw them in the nearest dumpster. Throw them into the river. Throw them into the closest storm drain. Use them.
My thoughts stopped at that and I dug them out of their hiding spot inside an old pair of socks. I took out the keys and the IDs I had taped them to. I avoided reading the names again and didn't look at the bored faces, because I saw enough of them when I had an occasional nightmare.
Normally nightmares didn't bother me. It was when they went really dark and I did things much differently than what I actually did that night, that it made me not regret what happened. I could have handled things differently, especially if I had developed web shooters right away. Not that I could have. It was already progressing much faster than I had planned and I was going to keep working on it.
The nightmare was now lodged in my head and I groaned as it seemed to play through in its entirety. I could now see the web cocoons that Nightmare Me had tucked in the basement of the abandoned building and the blood flowed from my mouth as I fed from my captured prey. They were still alive, too.
I shivered and pushed those thoughts from my head. I had some web cartridges to prepare and then fill with web fluid. I started to stand and remembered that I had nothing to check the pressure with, namely a monitoring program, and looked at the keys and IDs once more. One of them was for the guy that lived in this building and I would avoid that, if possible.
The other two were several streets over and in different apartments. I looked at my part covered desk and looked back at the keys. I needed a computer and those guys seemed to be fairly well-off and had money. The odds that they would have a laptop were pretty damn high, as were the odds that the apartments would be watched or monitored if anyone realized they were missing.
I think I'll be making a late night side trip on the way home to see what I can find. I thought and looked at the closet where I had my dark clothing that I wore after work. It shouldn't hurt to go have a look.
I checked the time and packed the things away again. I left my room to go and make supper for May and myself. She was still a little depressed since I sold the clarinet, so I decided to make an elaborate dessert. The extra work I had to do, in order to see the smile on her face, was always worth it.
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