#welcome to the lukanette hydration station

[omniswords]

lukanette for kiss #1

1.  Small kisses littered across the other’s face.

leave me a pairing and a number and i’ll write you a kiss! [CLOSED FOR NOW]

i think we can all agree that we could do with some good old-fashioned luka(nette) sugar right about now, yeah? enjoy!! <3

“Okay,” Luka says. “Talk to me.”

He must really mean it, because he’s actually stopped playing to listen to Marinette, even though she hasn’t said anything. He’s patient with her, has been in all three years they’ve been dating. (Three and a half, she reminds herself.) If there’s something she needs to say, he’ll spend all the time in the world waiting for it—even waiting for her to realize she needs to say something at all. “What do you mean?” she asks, hardly looking up from her work.

“You’ve got the wrinkle,” is all he says.

Marinette rolls her eyes. “I do not.”

“I can see your face right now, babe.” Luka sets his guitar aside, moving from the couch—their couch— in favor of the spare swivel chair at her desk. “You only get that look when you’re unhappy about something and think it’s better to bottle it up instead.”

Marinette scrunches up her lips, pretending to look more focused than she actually is. “How do you know I’m not just unhappy about how this dress is coming out?”

She can practically feel how his gaze flickers to the dress form in front of her. The wide-brim straw hat, decorated with a plain white ribbon, that’s supposed to bring this whole summer ensemble together. “Because you’re never really unhappy with your work,” he says, rolling his chair closer to her stool. “Even if you think it sucks, you’re always sort of happy that you made it anyway.”

“That’s just being an artist,” Marinette argues weakly around the stick pins in her mouth. “You get the same way about your music.”

“What are you thinking about?”

It’s hard to say anything to that besides what she’s actually thinking, especially when he starts to rub her shoulders in an attempt to coax her away from her work. She knows she’s done for when he thumbs at the baby hairs at the back of her neck, kisses the top of her head, eases the pins out of her mouth one by one. “Do you think I’m boring?” she blurts out.

Luka’s in the middle of taking down her hair from its messy I’m-on-a-deadline bun by then, but he stops. His fingers still thread through the locks like they're looking for something to do while he mulls over what he wants to say next. She’s always appreciated that about him, the fact that he always thinks before he speaks, but now the silence is anxiety-inducing. Maybe almost as much as it is when he calmly says, “Did… I do something to make you feel that way?”

“No! No, I just… I guess I was just… thinking. About it.” She slumps forward in her seat a bit, and Luka’s hands are back on her instantly, soothing the words out with every knot he works. “Just how it feels like… you know when you go out and you see new couples being all… couple-y?”

She can almost hear the smile in Luka’s voice. “I’m familiar with it, yeah.”

“Were…” Marinette trails off, holding her breath and pushing it out through her teeth while he targets a finicky crick in her neck. Maybe she’s been more of a workaholic than she thought. “Were we ever… like that, when we started dating? Showing each other off and being so public about it? It just… it feels like so long ago.”

She’s still got her thimble on—porcelain with a polka dot design she painted herself—and she toys with it like she needs something to do, too, while Luka takes care of her and pieces together just what it is she’s trying to say. “Nah,” he murmurs, not rejecting or judgmental, just matter-of-fact. “I don’t think we were ever like that. But I also don’t think we ever really needed to be like that.” He pauses. “Unless you wanted to be, and I just totally whiffed on that the whole time—”

Quickly, Marinette shakes her head. “No, no, I was just thinking about it recently.” Her body seems to relax almost entirely in his grip, and for a moment she nearly forgets just what she has to do to make this dress work. “I guess I… was thinking about how I used to think about love. How I felt like I always had to be nervous all the time around whoever I liked because that meant I really felt something. Or like whatever relationship I was in had to be exciting, and emotional, like a rollercoaster all the time, because I thought… life was always better if it kept you on your toes.”

Luka hums in thought. “How’d that work out for you?”

She laughs, quiet, sheepish. “I guess it didn’t. Except for the part where it led me to you.”

“Yeah, I kinda like that part.” He kisses the top of her head again, thumbs finding a home at her shoulder blades. “Do you want me to tell you what I think? Or do you have more to say?”

Marinette closes her eyes. “Go ahead.”

Sometimes she feels as though, when Luka touches her, cares for her with those hands of his, he’s playing her the way he might play his guitar. As though, when he speaks to her, he’s singing. He’s told her before, that music somehow makes its way into just about everything he does—especially when it comes to her. It happens even now, as he pauses only to press his lips to her hand.

“I think,” he says, “that we’ve always been kinda comfortable with each other, and that maybe that’s a good thing. Being comfortable… well, it makes for a good relationship in the long run.” There he goes again, playing the strings in her shoulders, the chimes in her hair. “But I also don’t think it’s so bad to want a little extra excitement every so often. Life’s gonna keep us on our toes anyway, so why not make it for the better? Maybe we deserve that.” He rests his chin atop her head. “Maybe we deserve to fall in love with each other all over again.”

Marinette will never understand why he thinks he’s not so good with words when he can so easily take her own and make such sense of them. She swivels around in her seat, unable to help the smile that erupts across her face. “Have I ever told you how much I love you?”

Luka grins right back. “You’ve told me,” he teases. “But I won’t complain about hearing it some more.’’ He cradles her face then, littering soft kisses all over her forehead, her cheeks, the tip of her nose, as though he’s dead-set on doing it until he makes her giggle. And once he does, and chuckles along with her, he leaves one last lingering one on her lips, pulling away far too soon for her liking. “C’mon. Let’s get ready.”

“Mm?” She blinks slowly, coming back to herself. “For what?”

“Date night.” His fingers trace her hairline, catch delicately on the curve of her jaw. “We haven’t had one in a while, huh?”

Her brow furrows. “We didn’t plan a date night.”

Luka’s still smiling. “I know.”

Within seconds, that dopey grin of hers is back with a vengeance, and she doesn’t even try to fight the warmth or the onslaught of butterflies that fills her stomach. She doesn’t want to. She wants Luka to see what he still does to her.

“That’s my girl,” he tells her with one more kiss. “Let’s go fall in love all over again, huh?”

Marinette already misses the feeling of those comfortable, musical hands on her face once he gets to his feet. And she might be hallucinating from the leftover dregs of stress, but she thinks she might see the outline of a little box in the back pocket of his jeans.