I Can't Make You Love Me || Peter Parker x OC

Chapter 15: Mixed Signals

Peter's perspective

The dinner that we had made, food about as simple as it could get, but the atmosphere that we built around it that amplified the whole thing to an almost comical level, was amazing. Once we finished up with eating, I washed up our dishes while Anneliesa put the leftovers away in a tupperware dish to put in the fridge.

Maybe I had just been too preoccupied to realize it, or maybe it was just the full belly that allowed it to catch up to me, but my exhaustion hit me rather suddenly. If I had to take a shot in the dark, I would say that I was going to sleep out on the couch for the next two nights, and Anneliesa would probably just be in her own bed. I wasn't mad about that arrangement either. I could sense the tension between us with something akin to a spidey-sense of the heart. Something about the way she was behaving around me was giving me all the wrong intuitions. I still respected her and cared about her well-being, but like I told myself on the first night, staying here with her was just a mission. At first I was daunted by that prospect, and was basically blinded by the fact that she was a somewhat-attractive girl, but now my head was a lot clearer and I could focus on the task at hand.

I can't say with certainty what specific thing triggered me to accept this, because these sort of revelations have been slowly growing over the past few hours. None of it had to do with the fact that she was a Malcolm though, that was one of the few things I knew for sure. No, I didn't judge her any differently, nor did I envy or despise her in any way, but it was becoming more and more clear to me throughout the day, and even more so in these last few hours, that we were looking for different things in the other. Painfully obvious might be a bit of an overstatement, but it was clear as crystal to me that Anneliesa was a really lonely girl. As a whole, she was just a really cool person to be around, so I didn't mind spending time with her as a friend, but this morning in the park made me really tuned in on something else too. I think Anneliesa liked me romantically. And yes, I know that I'm far from innocent, what with the mild flirting all that I did at the park earlier, but to me, that kiss, if whatever that was could even be classified as a kiss, didn't mean a whole lot to me. She's the one who started it, and yes, maybe I was instigating it a bit by not denying her, but she didn't really do anything wrong enough to warrant denying.

Had I been in her position, receiving really any sort of backlash from that would have absolutely devastated me. She wasn't at fault, and I wasn't either, so reacting the way that I did, just being kind and relatively neutral about the whole thing, seemed like the best idea. Part of me still thinks that I did the right thing, because neither of us got overtly upset by the whole ordeal, and no feelings were hurt. But at the same time, I think it might have worked a little toowell. Again, shots in the dark here, but I think she took my acceptance of the kiss as a green-light to harbor whatever she felt towards me. I still didn't know exactly what the feelings were, but I was confident that they were not the same as the ones I felt towards her.

She was still very lonely though, and I felt really bad about leaving her. That's why I promised her that I would still visit her after my 'mission' with her was over. So far as I could figure, I was her only friend, so I didn't want to take myself away from her, but I needed to keep enough distance from her so that she could hopefully lose some of the misplaced feelings she had for me.

Not only am I still new to this whole independant mission thing--on top of the fact that this was a civilian case, but I am also not the most lingual in the language of girls, even if I am just navigating a one-sided romance with them. I had a whole plethora of questions that were burning to be asked, and I knew a person that would hopefully have a fair amount of answers for me. Mr. Stark would know how to help me deal with being a good person in her life while also not hurting her, but he could also help me with missions in the future. Big fork in the road here though, my phone was down, so I had no way of contacting him for the time being.