17. Chapter 17

Disclaimer: I do not own Miraculous Ladybug.

Lucky Us

By: Princess Kitty1

Chapter 17

Chat NoirRE: Summer1 hour ago

Good morning, Ladybug! It's not even ten o'clock and I can already tell it's going to be disgustingly hot. These are truly the dog days of summer.

Coincidentally, do you know why they're called the dog days of summer? It's because Sirius, the dog star, rises at the same time as the sun this time of year, and makes it so miserable outside that no one wants to do anything productive—myself included.

Perhaps if the ancient astronomers had been smart enough to give us a cat star instead, it would have been too lazy to make the weather hot, and we'd all get a bit of a reprieve.

x.x.x

Marinette stood before a lineup of small cheesecakes. In front of each she'd written a list of ingredients with the differences marked in colored pen; beside each was a dessert spoon. "All right," she murmured, "which one of you lucky cakes will Adrien get to eat?"

She picked up the first dessert spoon, took a healthy portion out of the first miniature cheesecake, and popped it into her mouth. After a moment of consideration, she shook her head. "Too much cinnamon." She moved onto the next. The original recipe had yielded a tasty cake, but the person who developed it knew nothing of concinnity: the ingredients all competed for Marinette's attention without once settling into a whole product. She'd tasted cream cheese, vanilla, and cinnamon, but never a cheesecake. It was the culinary equivalent of a band whose members started playing the same song at different times.

"Not this one," she said to the second cheesecake, then the third. The fourth one made her pause, lift a hand to her cheek, and wriggle with delight. She marked it as a maybe, then sampled the last two. Nope, definitely the fourth.

With that matter settled, she sent Adrien a text message. She hadn't spoken to him since Friday and, fake dating or not, she didn't want to leave him with the wrong impression about her and Nathanael. She was a faithful fake girlfriend.

She eyed her phone. Well. Faithful for the most part.

She took another bite of the fourth cheesecake while she considered how to respond to Chat Noir's email. Did Chat Noir like cheesecake? Did he have a sweet tooth like her, or was he partial to other kinds of food? She'd never asked him. It was one of those perfectly safe conversation topics that had somehow managed not to come up in actual conversation.

Marinette spun her phone around on the kitchen counter with her little finger. The things she knew about Chat Noir could probably be summed up on one sheet of paper, and she had no one to blame for that but herself. Ladybug had been the one to impose restrictions on what they could talk about. She didn't even know when his birthday was. In the one year that they'd been friends, she'd had a birthday, he'd had a birthday, and they'd both been none the wiser.

Marinette picked up her phone.

What kind of desserts do you like?

She imagined sending him to her bakery on the first of September.

Delete. Delete. Delete.

When is your birthday?

She imagined herself standing at the register, waiting for the man who wrote her stupid jokes and cheesy declarations of love, who sent her pictures of his cat in the morning because he wanted to be the first person to make her smile that day.

She imagined him looking right through her, thanking her for the dessert, and walking away.

Delete. Delete. Deletedeletedelete.

x.x.x

LadybugRE: Summer1 hour ago

I don't think science works that way, chaton.

But a cat star would be nice.

x.x.x

Chat NoirRE: SummerJust now

Fun fact: There actually was a cat constellation for a while.

Another fun fact: It was invented by a Frenchman named Joseph Jerome Le Francais de Lalande, who may or may not have been me in a past life.

x.x.x

LadybugRE: SummerJust now

Fascinating.

Do you keep these fun facts on hand, or are you just Googling them for my benefit?

x.x.x

Chat NoirRE: SummerJust now

I went through a space phase in my teens. And an anime phase, but we don't need to talk about that one.

x.x.x

Adrien slipped his phone into his back pocket and returned to the business at hand. With his only meeting of the day concluded, he'd been about to return home when Marinette sent him a text inviting him over. Well, he couldn't turn up at her place empty handed, so he'd changed course and headed to the nearest craft store.

Adrien felt good about seeing her. Confident, even. He'd made a mistake and overreacted last week, but now that he'd rested sufficiently, he had no doubt in his mind that the moment he saw Marinette, she would be nothing more than a friend to him.

A friend, and a fake girlfriend. What was the perfect gift for a fake girlfriend? Fake flowers, of course.

He walked to the section of the craft store that sold plastic flowers for table arrangements and took his time choosing. He wished he'd have thought to bring Ladybug a gift the day before, something he could have passed along to the pink woman to give to her. But what sort of gift would he have gotten Ladybug? She was a designer—a sketchbook, maybe? A personalized sketchbook with a handwritten message inside, professing his undying love and affection? Perhaps something that would have been less embarrassing for a random stranger to peek into?

Ten minutes later, he left the craft store with a bouquet of random white and pink flowers. No roses, nothing red. No reason for Marinette to think that it meant anything more than it did. Because it didn't mean anything. It was a friendly gesture. An inside joke. Surely she would appreciate that.

Adrien took the metro across town to get to the bakery faster, smiling at the cleverness of his own joke. But as he stepped out into the sweltering afternoon—dog days of summer, indeed—his smile slipped. He looked at the flowers in his hand and his thoughts took a turn for the forbidden. Instead of dwelling in the comfort and safety of his denial, he pictured Marinette, her t-shirt dress, her red fingernails, her braid. He imagined her on a date with that redhaired guy, laughing and flirting and hoping it went well because why shouldn't she want it to go well? She was young and beautiful and technically available.

A crack formed in Adrien's denial, widening with every step he took, until he found himself in front of the bakery's side door, too afraid to knock.

Because the sane, rational adult side of him knew that no amount of denial would make it to the end of this encounter.

And the sane, rational adult side of him desperately wished he'd gotten Marinette real flowers instead.

He knocked on the door.

She answered almost immediately, her hair pulled into pigtails so unexpectedly cute that heat rushed to Adrien's face. His mutinous eyes shifted downwards. Shorts. She was wearing shorts. Suddenly he understood why Nino had almost ceased to function at the movie theater.

"Hey," Marinette greeted him with all the warmth and pleasantness of a long bath. The scent of cinnamon drifted out of the bakery behind her. "I hope you're ready for this cheesecake, because it's—are those for me?"

Adrien stared dumbly at her for a moment before he remembered the flowers in his hand. The joke. The meaningless gesture. "They're fake," he said. "You know, fake flowers for my fake girlfriend?" He threw in a grin, all the while praying for a sinkhole to open up and swallow him. Losing his mind over a pair of shorts when he'd seen her legs several times before—he was in trouble.

Marinette clasped her hands together and swooned against the door. "How romantic," she cried. She stepped backwards. "Come on in, make yourself at home while I find some fake water for those."

"Yup," Adrien said. Pretty and funny. Did he say he was in trouble? What he meant to say was he was screwed.

He held the flowers out to Marinette and almost jumped when her fingers brushed his.

Worse than screwed. He'd somehow managed to shave ten years off his current age and land right back in smitten schoolboy territory.

In the time it took for him to get from the threshold to the bakery's sitting area, he mentally treated himself to every insult he knew. At least now he could tell Chloe he understood why she'd called him stupid. Stupid didn't even begin to cover it. He was a certified imbecile with a dash of two-timer and he deserved neither Ladybug nor Marinette. He was an embarrassment to his sex. A cad masquerading as a gentleman. A good-for-nothing tomcat.

"So I wanted to apologize for Friday," Marinette said from the kitchen, snapping Adrien out of his frantic thoughts. He couldn't see her, but he heard the refrigerator door close, plates clatter.

"Nothing to be sorry about," he said. Friday came back to him in a rush. The redhaired guy. The ribbon in her braid. The obvious dismissal. "You were going on a date, weren't you?"

Marinette poked her head out of the kitchen. "Absolutely not!"

Adrien blinked as she disappeared again. Absolutely not? As in, no date? As in, judging by her tone of voice, there was no way in hell she'd been on a date with that Nathanael guy? An inappropriate amount of happiness flooded Adrien's brain, followed closely by the parade of insults: Two-timer. Idiot. Tomcat.

"I realized after the fact that you might have interpreted it that way," Marinette said. She walked out of the kitchen, this time carrying a dessert plate in each hand. "But no, I wasn't on a date. Nathanael's an old friend of mine. He just wanted to talk some personal things over, which might have been awkward to do in front of a stranger…" She shrugged. "Otherwise I would have invited you in a heartbeat."

In a heartbeat. Adrien fought off a grin.

He thanked her as she set the plate down in front of him. A handsome slice of cinnamon cheesecake sat on it, perfectly centered, drizzled with some kind of sauce. His mouth watered. He forced himself to look at Marinette as she took the chair across from him, her beautiful blue eyes already searching for a reaction to the dessert. He cleared his throat and said, "I guess I figured that since we aren't really dating, you might want to keep your options open."

Marinette wrinkled her nose. "No way," she said. "I'm a hundred percent committed to our cause. It'd look suspicious to Alya if I suddenly started dating other guys, right?"

"Right," Adrien said. There was that inappropriate happiness again. He stamped it down with words straight out of Marinette's mouth: she only did it because it would look suspicious to Alya if they "broke up." A real romantic interest was out of the question.

But what did that matter when he was in love with Ladybug?

Did the name Ladybug ring any bells? Sweet, mysterious Ladybug, who'd bought him lunch the day before?

Oh God. He'd let Marinette treat him to lunch the day after he let Ladybug treat him to lunch. Would his villainy never cease?

"Are… you okay?" Marinette asked.

Adrien had the dessert spoon in his hand, but he hadn't gotten any closer to trying the cheesecake. Instinct told him to run. Flee the country. Shave his head and become a monk until he mastered his emotions and detached himself from his worldly desires.

But it would be rude to refuse such a beautiful cheesecake.

"I'm fine," he said. The lie came easier every time. "Just trying to decide which direction I should attack this thing from."

Marinette picked up her own spoon. "Most people start from the front," she said. She scooped the tip of the cheesecake, lifted the spoon to her mouth and—

Adrien looked away. Good boys didn't need to see what pretty girls did to spoons.

He went for the tip of the cheesecake as well, dragging it through the sauce before taking his first bite. A symphony of flavor erupted on his tongue. The cheesecake's ingredients had been blended so perfectly that he couldn't even describe what he was tasting as food. He felt as if he'd taken a bite straight out of the holidays. He looked at Marinette with wide eyes. She covered her hand with her mouth and laughed.

"Good, right?" she asked.

"Oh my God," he replied. He went for another bite.

Marinette smiled. "I got the recipe online, but it needed some tampering with, so I made a couple small ones with different ratios of ingredients until this cheesecake happened," she said. "But my parents could probably do a better job of perfecting it."

"You mean this isn't perfect?" Adrien asked.

She paused with her dessert spoon stuck in the cheesecake. "You think it's that good?" She considered it. "I mean, I wanted to propose this as a menu item for the autumn months, but my Mom and Dad have ridiculous standards. They'll need to taste it themselves, then they'll probably want to add a thing or two…"

"Tell them I said it's perfect," Adrien said, "and if they don't think so, then Chloe's father will hear about it." That got Marinette laughing, which sent butterflies knocking around in Adrien's already happy stomach. He focused on the cheesecake. If all else failed, he could elope with that instead.

Marinette spent the next ten minutes filling him in on the week's events: her boredom, Nino's show, the development of his relationship with Alya. "I can't decide on a cute couple name for them," she complained. "Ninalya rolls off the tongue nicely and it doubles as something they can call their future daughter, but Alyino is much more fun to say."

"You think they'll get married?" Adrien asked. "Isn't it a little early for that?"

"All I know is I've never seen my best friend look at anyone the way she looked at Nino last week," Marinette said. "Sure, they're not even officially dating yet, but it happens sometimes, you know? People find their soulmates and they click in such an instant and profound way that they get married almost immediately."

"My parents were like that," Adrien said, surprising himself. He hadn't thought about his parents' relationship for a long time. "They were in a fashion class together and it was pretty much love at first sight. But instead of asking her on a date, my father asked Mom to model one of his designs. And when he was too nervous to ask her out after that, Mom took the initiative in front of the entire class. They got married six months later." He remembered his mother giggling as she told him that story. She'd warned Adrien not to be like his father, that if he liked a girl he ought to come out and say it.

Which he had done. With Ladybug. And Ladybug hadn't taken him seriously.

"That's so sweet," Marinette said. Her eyes practically sparkled. "I always wanted my relationships to turn out that way." She gestured around them. "Obviously, they haven't."

"Someday," Adrien said, "one of them will."

"Someday," she agreed.

He smiled at her and wondered who would come into the bakery and sweep Marinette off her feet.

It wouldn't be him. People developed small crushes on new acquaintances all the time. Whatever infatuation he had with Marinette wasn't permanent. It couldn't be, because he wasn't a two-woman guy. Either his feelings for Ladybug would go away—which was unlikely—or his feelings for Marinette would go away once he got to know her better.

But did it make sense for him to hold a candle for Ladybug when she'd been turning him down for months?

Marinette collected the empty dessert plates and carried them into the kitchen. "We should hang out with Nino and Alya next week, just to make sure things are running smoothly," she said. "After that we can decide if we want to keep this charade going or come clean."

"Tired of me already?" Adrien asked. He said it jokingly, but the panic alarm blared in his head.

"No." Marinette came back in and joined him at the table again. "But we can't keep faking it forever. Next thing you know, we'll be staging a fake wedding. Going on a fake honeymoon."

"Adopting a fake kid?" Adrien suggested.

She laughed out loud. "And by then it'll be too late to come out and say it was all just a plot to get them together. We'd be stuck with each other."

Chat Noir reared his devilish head. "Getting stuck with you wouldn't be the worst thing in the world," he purred.

Marinette's eyes widened. Was… was that a blush? She leaned forward. "Because I make delicious pastries, right?"

"Exactly," he said. Adrien wished Chat Noir was a physical entity—an imp on his shoulder, a terrible wingman—so he could drag him into the alley and punch his lights out. "But you're right. We should call it quits on the fake dating soon, preferably once we're sure Nino and Alya will get along fine without us." The thought of not dating Marinette made him sadder than he wanted it to.

"It'll be an amicable, mutual decision," Marinette said. "In the end, we just weren't right for each other." She put on a stern frown. "But we're still friends, so you'd better not start avoiding me afterwards. I need a guinea pig to feed all my baking experiments to."

"At the risk of getting murdered by my personal trainer, I will happily be that guinea pig," Adrien said. And then he had to explain that no, Nino had not been joking when he'd mentioned Adrien's personal trainer, and that he had one because if there wasn't someone threatening him to exercise he'd probably get fat. Not that he would mind getting fat if it meant he could come to the bakery every day—as a regular customer, not a stray cat that slunk in after hours for scraps and chin scratches from a beautiful woman.

Adrien left the bakery some twenty minutes later with Marinette's promise to come up with a scheme to get the four of them hanging out again. He staggered down the street, feeling the heat rise off the pavement in an attempt to cook his legs, and patted the seat of his jeans until he found his cell phone. He called Chloe.

"What is it?" she snapped the moment she picked up, which meant that she was either in the middle of a meal or getting some kind of spa treatment done.

"Breakfast tomorrow. I need to talk to you," he said.

Chloe was silent for a moment. "Sure. Is everything okay?"

"Everything's fine." Adrien winced the moment the words left his mouth. If there was one surefire way to raise a red flag in Chloe's mind, it was by telling her he was fine. "I'll pick you up at the usual time." He paused. "And Nino's coming too. Bye!" He hung up before Chloe could yell at him, then scrolled down his contact list, called Nino, and repeated the message.

He needed help. The Ladybug-Marinette situation had unsettled him. He couldn't keep bottling things up anymore, couldn't keep sneaking around behind his best friends' backs and then never talking about the things that upset him. It wasn't healthy, and it wasn't fair of him to worry them.

Tomorrow, he would get Chloe and Nino up to speed on the past year of his life.

He stared at his cell phone screen. The wallpaper was still set to the meme Marinette had sent him. He changed it to a picture of Plagg, then told himself to stop procrastinating and opened his email inbox.

There was someone else he had to come clean with.

x.x.x

LadybugRE: Summer2 hours ago

Are you sure we don't need to talk about the anime phase?

Because I kind of want to talk about it. :-)

x.x.x

Chat NoirRE: SummerJust now

Oh boy, would you look at that? It's time for me to change the subject!

You remember when I told you about that acquaintance of mine? The one my best friend was convinced had a crush on me? Well, she definitely doesn't have a crush on me.

But I might have a thing for her.

x.x.x

LadybugRE: SummerJust now

Seriously?

x.x.x

Chat NoirRE: SummerJust now

Yes. And I know you and I aren't dating or anything, but it doesn't sit well with me, flirting with you the way I have and then developing feelings for someone else. I swear to you I'm not that kind of guy.

x.x.x

LadybugRE: SummerJust now

Okay.

x.x.x

Chat NoirRE: SummerJust now

Okay? It's not okay. I feel like an ass.

x.x.x

LadybugRE: SummerJust now

You said yourself that we aren't dating, so what do you want me to do about it?

Give you permission?

"Chat Noir is free to like whoever he wants to like because he's a grown man." Signed, Ladybug.

If you need my permission to get married to Cute Acquaintance, let me know so I can give it to you ahead of time.

x.x.x

Chat NoirRE: SummerJust now

I'm being serious.

x.x.x

LadybugRE: SummerJust now

And you think I'm not?

Whatever, Chat Noir.

Do what you want, it's no skin off my nose.

x.x.x

Chat NoirRE: SummerJust now

Then why are you so upset?

x.x.x

LadybugRE: SummerJust now

Because your little victim act is annoying.

If you're going to like someone else, then like her.

And don't bother me about it.

x.x.x

Marinette shut her phone off, threw it across the sofa, got up, and marched towards the stairs. She had designs to work on.

To Be Continued

A/N: Uh… Happy Valentine's Day?

Announcement! I got my thesis novel back from my advisor a while ago, so this fic will be on hiatus while I work on the second draft. Hopefully that won't take too long. It really depends on how much needs fixing, but it could be a few weeks before you see another update. Just wanted to let y'all know. And by the way, that's my nice way of saying that I'll kill anyone who asks me when I'm going to update.

Now I'm sure you're all eager to scream in my review box, so have it!