"So, Gwen…"

"Uh huh?"

"I've been thinking…"

"Mmm?"

"I think we should get married."

Gwen put down the plate she was drying, placing it slowly and carefully on the bench next to her. After precisely folding the tea towel and laying it on top of the plate, she straightened her top, tucked a stray bit of hair behind her ear and gradually looked up to meet Peter's eyes.

"You what?"

"Ok, perhaps I could have introduced that topic a little more carefully."

"You think?"

"Ok, we can change the subject."

"Have you finished that chem assignment?"

"Hang on, one more thing on that other topic."

"Yes?"

"If I were to bring it up later…"

"Mmm?"

"Do you… umm, would you… would you hear me out?"

"Well, I guess I could consider myself warned."

"It was a bit out of the blue, huh?"

"Just a bit."

"But the whole idea, is it totally repugnant? Like on a scale of 1 to totally repugnant, where would you put it?"

"Remember that whole thing about later that you mentioned?"

"Ok, ok… Hang on though, how much later does later have to be?"

"By that, do you mean 'How much time to you need to come to terms with the fact that your seventeen-year-old boyfriend almost proposed to you while you were doing the washing up at his aunt's house?'?"

"I'm eighteen next week. Your birthday is the week after that."

"Ok, sorry, 'your almost-eighteen-year-old boyfriend'."

"But yeah, I guess I do mean that. So, how much time do you need?"

"Can I answer that question with another question? How much time did you give yourself between thinking it and saying it out loud?"

Peter looked sheepish.

"'Bout thirty seconds, right? Thought so."

"Gwen? You put a foot wrong there in your jump from my face to your conclusion."

"Oh, yeah? Was it a whole minute?"

Peter sighed and rubbed the back of his neck. "Umm, Gwen? Could we maybe go for a walk?"

Gwen took Peter's hand, intertwining her fingers with his as he scuffed dejectedly down the street away from his place. "Sorry, Peter. I was pretty mean to you in there."

"It really wasn't how I envisioned that conversation going," he replied.

She took a deep breath. "Look, Peter, even though we're only seventeen, isn't it kind of a given that we're going to be together? I mean, we're connected now – minds, hearts, bodies – how could we be with anyone else?"

Peter walked along quietly for a while. "It wasn't thirty seconds, you know." He stopped. "Hey, let's get out of here."

"Where do you want to go?"

"I found somewhere great. Can I take you?"

Gwen nodded and Peter slid his left arm around her, pressing her close to him. With his right arm, he aimed a web at the corner of a building above and the two of them launched effortlessly into the air.

They swung into the alcove under the city clock and nestled together in the warm glow emanating from it's enormous face.

"When did it first occur to you?"

Peter grinned sheepishly at his feet. "About August 2009."

"Freshman year?" Gwen asked incredulously. "You decided you wanted to marry me in freshman year?"

"Do you remember me in freshman year?" Peter replied helplessly, palms up. "It was about then that I started feeling the loss of my mom and dad the most. You know, I was really old enough then to understand what I didn't have, or maybe I just began to understand it in a more real and painful way that year. I loved my Uncle Ben and Aunt May but I knew they weren't my parents and I just wanted to know everything that I could about my mom and my dad." Peter shrugged. "There seemed to be almost nothing to learn. Uncle Ben and Aunt May didn't seem to want to talk about them much because they knew they could never answer all of my questions. Those conversations always used to end with me being really frustrated and probably pretty painful to live with for a few days." He rubbed the back of his neck. "Anyway, that summer, just before school started, I had found their wedding album. I felt like I had more information about them than I'd ever had before. I could see all of their different facial expressions, the way that they looked at each other, the fun they seemed to be having. To me, getting married looked like the best thing ever, probably because there was so much more invested for me in those black and white photos. I was a little obsessed with the idea of it for a while."

"Oh, Peter, of course you were," Gwen whispered sympathetically.

"Anyway," Peter went on, "There's no way you would remember this, but it was about three weeks in to school and we were still all pretty new and trying to work out where to sit and who to sit next to and you came in late one day, maybe you'd had a music lesson or something, and the only seat left was the seat next to me."

Gwen smiled. "I do remember that day, Peter."

"Really?" Peter asked, grinning.

"That's the day you first entered my consciousness," she giggled. "Then you kind of settled in there."

"How on earth did I manage to make an impression? You asked me what page we were on and I couldn't even speak! I had to point!"

"Well, obviously I found your pointing endearing because your name was the first boy's name I ever wrote in my freshman journal."

"Will I ever see the proof of that?" Peter asked eagerly.

Gwen looked scandalised. "No way! What if it turns out there's a little heart drawn around it?"

"So what? You always draw a heart around my name now, right?"

Gwen snorted.

"It'll just show what an intuitive fourteen-year-old you were."

"Either way, Peter, don't be banking on seeing that journal."

"Whatever," Peter shrugged. "Anyway, we were sitting there in class, after the text-book incident, and…"

Gwen chuckled. "And my biro leaked all over my exercise book."

"Yes! You do remember!"

"And, for a fourteen-year-old boy, you were so thoughtful! Without drawing anyone's attention, you got up and grabbed the tissue box from the back of the room, you lent me your ruler to help me rip out my ruined pages and you gave me one of your fresh biros."

Peter looked at her with eyebrows raised. "Gwen, I wasn't a thoughtful fourteen-year-old boy. I was a fourteen-year-old boy in love."

"Even then you were a sucker for a damsel in distress."

"As if!" Peter rejoined. "I hate damsels in distress. You'd already soundly thrashed me in the placement test. Right from the start I loved you for your mind."

"Soundly thrashed you?" Gwen repeated sceptically. "As I recall, I came first and you came a pretty close second."

"Yeah, well," Peter scratched his head. "I'd never known what it was like to come second before. It felt like I'd been thrashed."

"Now that's endearing," Gwen grinned. "The first girl to beat you in a test and you fall in love with her. Peter, do you even have a competitive bone in your body?"

"Err, have we met?" Peter shook his head. "Actually, that's totally depressing. Here I am trying to suggest that your firsts have always been hotly contested but from your perspective I'm just not competitive." He hung his head for a moment. "Anyway, sad delusion aside, after all of those book-rescuing heroics from me, you just turned your head, you know, the full ninety degrees, to look right into my face. You looked at me, so open, so confident and you just smiled and said 'Thanks'. That was it. I spent the rest of the lesson imagining myself lifting your veil at our wedding after some guy in a dog collar had said 'You may now kiss your bride.'"

"Peter, you incurable romantic!" Gwen gushed, laughing.

"Yeah, yeah. Anyway, so mine was the first boy's name that made it into your journal, you were the first girl I ever pictured in a white dress. And for the rest of that year, I developed this elaborate wedding daydream – it's never been anyone else."

Gwen looked unsure. "So we need to get married because of your freshman daydream?"

Peter shook his head vigorously. "No, no. Not because of that. But because of exactly what you said the minute we walked out of the house."

"What did I say?"

"You said, you know, because of all of the things that connect us, you said, 'how could we be with anyone else?'"

Gwen laughed. "Well, don't you think it would be a little bit awkward? Imagine if you were trying to make out with someone else and you could hear my voice in your head."

Peter shook his head sadly. "Gwen, don't even joke about that. There's no one else for me."

Gwen shrugged. "That's what I've been trying to say!"

"No. Gwen, I don't think you understand." He stopped and turned to face her, taking both her hands in his. "Before you were bitten, before I was bitten, before we'd even had a real conversation, I wanted to spend the rest of my life with you. And back then, I had all the choice in the world, you had all the choice in the world. There was nothing tying us together, we just chose each other."

Gwen nodded, but still looked uncertain.

"In a wedding, the couple make promises to one another, right?"

"Right."

"And the movies always make it out that the vow goes 'I do.' As in 'Right in this moment I promise to love and cherish and all of that stuff.'"

"It doesn't go like that?"

"No," Peter smiled, "You know what they vow? They vow, 'I will.'" As in 'I will promise' – they vow that they will continue to choose to love one another even in the face of all of those different possibilities – better, worse, richer, poorer, sickness, health."

"So they're preempting the hard times and promising that even then they will choose to love the other person?"

"Exactly."

"That's kind of nice."

"Nice? I guess. But think of the alternative for us, right? Like you say, who else could we be with? But you've got to admit, that's a pretty sad and negative way for us to imagine the future of our relationship – 'I'll be with you because there's no way we could possibly be with anyone else, not because we love each other, but because we've got all of these other things tying us together.'" Peter chewed on his lip for a moment. "I don't want to come to resent those elements of our connection because they inconveniently tie me down."

"So," Gwen replied. "Say we did decide to get married. Explain to me how that would change your thinking. Not for married people in general but for you, and for me."

Peter took a deep breath and launched into his monologue. "Here I am, at seventeen-almost-eighteen, and I've already fallen in love and this amazing girl I've fallen for inexplicably loves me back. I want to do whatever I can to make it possible for the two of us to be happy. We have some things going for us that are completely unique and amazing but we also have some unique and incredible challenges ahead. I want us to begin our lives together with the mutual understanding that whatever happens, we're not the victims of circumstance. We have chosen to love one another and we're going to keep choosing to love one another for the rest of our lives, even when it's hard. Especially when it's hard."

Gwen half-laughed as she wiped away a tear. "You're beautiful, Peter."

"Shucks," he laughed. "And I haven't even told you about the practical benefits."

"Practical?" Gwen asked.

"We get married. Your family is there, Aunt May is there. We're young, they might be a little freaked out, but we do it, we commit ourselves to one another. We're married."

A light dawned. "And we move in together."

Peter nodded. "Yep, completely without scandal or lectures, we get our own place near campus. We pick it out carefully – some good surrounding alleys, sewer access, lots of sneaky ways in and out."

"Our families don't worry about us coming and going."

"Nor are they concerned that we're spending the night together. After all, spending the night together is what married people do."

Gwen smiled sadly. "Not even Oprah or the spirit of Captain George Stacy can object to that." A tear rolled down her cheek. "He won't be there to give me away."

Peter's face fell. "Even if he were, he wouldn't be giving you to me."

"Remember, Peter," Gwen whispered through her tears. "You didn't make any decisions for me. Now I'm just as much Spiderman as you are. Dad would have had to learn to cope."

"Umm, Gwen?" Peter whispered, sounding slightly awed. "Am I going crazy? Or have you come around to my idea?"

Gwen nodded.

"I'm crazy?"

She shook her head.

Peter dropped to one knee on the cold cement and, because it was part of the wonder of what the two of them had, asked without uttering a sound.

I love you with everything I am. I want to love you, and love you well, for the rest of my life. Gwen, will you marry me?

She beamed down at him through her tears. I will.