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Marinette brought the sheet music up to her face. “How do you even read this thing?”
“Practice.” Adrien jutted his chin at Plagg, who slept against Tikki on top of the piano. “He asked the same thing.”
“No wonder.” She squinted at the stave. “What are these things?” And pointed at the symbols beside the treble clef.
He peered over her shoulder, and shuffled closer on the piano stool (despite their knees already touching, and that Marinette could have lifted the sheet to show him.) “Those just tell you whether the note you’re playing is flat or sharp.”
“What does that even mean?”
“Well,” he said, and set a hand on the piano. Adrien’s arm stretched over Marinette’s torso while he reached to the lower end of the keys. Her grasp on the sheet music faltered. “You know how the keys work, right?”
She swallowed. “Explain it to me?”
“The white keys are natural notes. They’re either C, D, E, F, G, A, or B.” Adrien pressed all seven notes in a quick flourish of his fingers. Plagg and Tikki stirred when the piano hummed. “But the black keys are either sharp or flat.”
“Right.” Marinette lifted a tentative hand and pushed down a black note next to Adrien’s thumb. “What’s this one?”
“C-sharp,” he said. “But also D-flat.”
She looked up at him warily.
He snickered. “It really isn’t that hard. It’s just because this black note is in between C and D. It’s half a step higher than C, so it’s C-sharp, but because it’s half a step lower than D, it’s D-flat.”
Marinette examined the stave again. “You play from this like you’re reading a book. How can you possibly do it all so quick when you have to consider so much?”
Adrien blushed deeply. He scratched the back of his head, and turned his gaze back to Tikki and Plagg. He watched Marinette’s reflection in the dark polish of the piano as she looked up at him with wide, curious eyes.
“I-I’m really not that good,” he murmured through a smile. “You should see my father. He’s incredible.”
“I’m not talking about your father. I’m talking about you.” Marinette shoved him gently and made the stool squeak. “You’re incredible.”
Through the polish, Adrien saw Marinette look up, her eyes so soft he couldn’t bear not meeting them. So he turned around, catching her shy smile and the blush she so bravely faced him with.
His thumb twitched against her finger. Adrien cleared his throat and snapped his attention back to the keyboard, the sudden increment of his heartbeat leaving him flushed. He wished he could stand up and open the windows, but Marinette’s warmth beside him kept him rooted to the stool.
"I can teach you a song," he offered.
"I'm not musical at all." She removed her hand from the piano to play with her earring. "I'd mess up."
"Not if I help you." Adrien puffed out his chest. "I'd like to think I'm one of the most competent teachers out there."
And he wasn't a bad teacher at all. Under any other circumstances, (or rather, under any other family that didn't lock him up like the crown jewels), Adrien would have loved to help younger pianists with their Grade 4 or 5 pieces — but then again, under any other circumstances, he may have not picked up piano in the first place.
Marinette raised her eyebrows. "Right. I watched you jump at your own shadow last night."
He frowned at her, then pouted at his plimsolls. "That wasn't my proudest moment and you know that."
She giggled. Adrien felt her shift beside him, and their knees knocked some more, before she had an arm around his shoulders and was smiling by his cheek.
"I'd love if you taught me a song, though," she said. "Even if you jump at your own shadow, kitty cat." Marinette ruffled his hair.
He turned his head, and almost tumbled back when he realised how close they were.
The damned one-person stool.
Marinette's damned shiny lips and fair skin and freckles he could see from their damned proximity.
Adrien all but threw himself off the stool. “Okay, I have an idea.”
He came around to the back of the stool, arms flanking Marinette, before the curve of her spine pressed into his chest and he realised, dizzyingly, what a bad idea this was. On the stool, they didn’t necessarily have to touch. He had the choice to watch over her and instruct which keys to press and when, their knees perhaps knocking, his foot nudging hers against the pedal. But now Adrien was right against her, the dark baby hair sticking out at the top of her head brushing his chin.
“This was your idea?” she deadpanned.
“I’m offended that you’re doubting me.” He rested his hands on the keys. “Put your hands on top of mine.”
She paused, then turned to look at him skeptically. “I really doubt this will work.”
“You trust me that little, My Lady?”
Marinette watched him a moment longer, rolled her eyes, and turned back around. Adrien almost jumped when he felt her cold palm brush his knuckles. Her fingers stopped a few centimetres before his own did.
“I’d better be able to play a full song, after this,” she muttered.
“I promise you’ll be more confident, at least.”
Adrien’s hands drifted further apart, and Marinette’s followed. She kept them aligned perfectly — her index finger on his, her ring finger pressed against his Miraculous. Even her thumb curved against his perfectly, following his as it dipped down to hit the first key.
He did this to show off, mostly. Make it known to Marinette how impressive a pianist’s skills are, with his seamless performance and her hands atop his to feel for herself the vigour in which he has to play. Nothing could usually sway his concentration — Plagg had leapt across the keys before while he practiced his pieces and Adrien snickered at him while his hands played the piece without skipping a beat.
However, this was different.
Marinette was in front of him, Marinette was warm and soft and smelled like vanilla right behind her ear, which he noted, breath hitched, had freckles along the shell. His chest tingled whenever she breathed, whenever her shoulders and back rose that half a centimetre — and sometimes, when she sighed, two centimetres — and touched him. He inhaled deeply and almost tumbled over the piano stool.
She almost made it too easy to prove himself wrong.
He began to play — a major key, a silly love song he learned one night after patrol, in a particularly romantic mood after seeing Ladybug smile at him. The keys are soft and diminuendo, light and sweet like the perfume wafting off of Marinette. He closed his eyes, swaying, leaning into the melody and thus, into Marinette.
Marinette, who smiled at him that night — on so many nights — and made him want to learn love sonatas when he should have been asleep.
Marinette the melodramatist, whose line of stitches once went just a little awry, and she had insisted it was a disaster .
Marinette. Marinette. Marinette.
Oh, God, he loved her.
His fingers clattered over the wrong keys, and Adrien stopped. Marinette didn’t move her hands from his.
Heart pounding, he stared at the back of her head. Not even at the piano. Not at the keys his clammy palms tumbled over that weren’t apart of the sheet music sitting on the stand — not that Adrien was paying much attention to that in the first place.
“Adrien?” Marinette said.
He stepped closer to her. His chest on her back. Her collar crumpling under his shirt.
She looked up.
The path Adrien’s brain took was a peculiar one.
He saw her lips — parted and shiny and a question already on them — and remembered his own, and how bad he wished he could remember them together. He couldn't count the times he daydreamed about how those lips tasted, but never did he think he'd be so close to them.
It was unfair. Marinette couldn't just sit between his arms without being kissed.
So Adrien kissed her.
He kissed her like they’d done it before, and when she started kissing back — after a little gasp he swallowed from her — he realised they had done it before.
Perhaps that’s why it felt so right.
Perhaps that’s why he didn’t stop kissing her. Why he pushed himself forward, braced himself against the piano, and kissed her harder, like her lips were his to kiss and hers to kiss back.
Marinette picked up her hand and moved it into his hair.
Then Adrien’s eyes burst open.
They were meant to be friends.
He tore himself away from her mouth. stumbled backwards, kept a hand on her shoulder to maintain a distance he deemed enough for him to not jump across and get another sip of her lips — run his mouth over the forbidden lines on her underlip and pull her in by the back of her neck like friends had no business doing.
“Whoa,” he breathed.
The fog in Marinette’s eyes lifted.
She jumped back in the stool and smacked a hand against her mouth.
“Oh my God,” she muttered into her palm. “Oh my God, oh my God, oh my God.”
“I’m so sorry,” he tried.
“Oh my God,” she said over him. Marinette covered her face. “I shouldn’t have done that. I’m so sorry. I shouldn’t have kissed you.”
“No, it wasn’t your fault!” He let go of her shoulder. “I was the one who kissed you .”
“No, I kissed you .”
“No way. I saw you sitting there and looking up at me and—”
Marinette lowered her hands. “But I saw you looking down at me and your lips were right there and I just forgot we don’t usually do things like that so I—”
“I should’ve asked for permission—”
“I should have looked away—”
They stopped to stare at each other.
Though they didn't stop blushing, Adrien and Marinette started to laugh.
She tucked some hair behind her ear which Adrien realised, flushed, that he dishevelled. "Well…”
“Did you like it?” he asked before he could stop himself.
“Huh?”
“W-well, I mean, it wasn’t—it wasn’t bad, was it?”
Marinette blinked at him. Adrien wanted to slam his head against the piano keys and ask her to shut the lid on top.
“God, I’m sorry,” he backtracked. “That was a stupid question, just ignore—”
And Marinette launched forward on the stool, and kissed him again.
Her long eyelashes cast shadows on her cheeks, and up close, Adrien noticed how her freckles got darker as they travelled down her nose. He saw this before he closed his eyes — before he could close his eyes — because Marinette’s lips were on his, then not on his, then suddenly on his again, and that plus her small hands taking purchase on his waist was making his brain draw blanks.
Adrien was always a little slow with addition.
By the time he thought to kiss back, Marinette had already pulled away. She was there and gone like a lightning strike, swooping in, rearranging his nervous system, and leaving just like that.
“It wasn’t bad,” she said softly.
He trembled. “G-good to know.”