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Music and laughter spilled out of the crowded nightclub as Marinette and her friends piled out onto the sidewalk. It was amazing, Marinette reflected, how tight knit a friend group composed of two broken-up couples could be. She, Adrien, Alya, and Nino just worked. It was possible that all the cocktails in her system were making her overly sentimental.
“One last best friends selfie for the road!” Alya cried. They all crowded around her as she held up her phone to snap a picture. “I’ll text it to all of you, of course.”
Adrien leaned over to swipe Nino’s hat. “Look at me,” he said, affecting an exaggerated imitation of Nino’s voice. “I’m Nino Lahiffe, dudes! But after tomorrow, it’ll be Professor Nino Lahiffe. Who are you nobodies again?”
Nino laughed out loud as he lunged to steal his hat back. “As if I’d ever forget about you guys,” he said once it was securely situated on his head where it belonged. “Teaching film students is the dream, but I wouldn’t call it prestigious.”
Adrien clapped Nino on the back so effusively that an outsider would never have guessed that he was the group’s designated driver. “It’s a pretty stepping stone, that’s for sure,” he declared.
Nino reached up to tousle Adrien’s hair. “Go sleep off the contact high before you start singing, Agreste.”
Adrien shoved him. Nino shoved back, grinning.
“Fuck,” said Nino. “What am I going to do without all of you?”
“You’d better text us a ton of pictures of that fancy film school in Morocco, for a start,” said Alya.
The group started to dissolve. “I know I’m driving Alya home,” said Adrien. “What about you guys?”
“I like to walk,” Marinette told him. “My place is close, and it’ll sober me up.”
“Then I’ll go with you,” Nino decided.
Streetlights shone down at them as Nino and Marinette wobbled vaguely in the direction of her apartment. The warm buzz of the cocktails was starting to die away, and a cold wind was rising.
“You’re shivering,” said Nino, shrugging out of his jacket. “Here.”
Marinette made a half-heated protest, but in the end she had to give in. Alya had talked her into wearing a tiny, sparkly number that did very little to shield her from the wind. “Thanks.”
Nino shrugged. “Gives me a reason to visit, right? So you can return it. Just give me my wallet, and you can keep whatever else is in the pockets until I see you again.”
Marinette dug out Nino’s wallet and handed it over. She tried not to savor the way his jacket smelled like him. Nino’s scent filled her nose, calming her the way he had since they were little. “I’ll miss you,” she said, and there was an awkward moment where she almost reached for his hand and he almost seemed to want her to.
“I’ll be back,” said Nino. “I have to visit Adrien often enough to keep him out of trouble, and you know he’ll foot the bill.”
“Right,” said Marinette, and then they were standing outside her building. “Well, goodnight. Goodbye.”
When the door closed behind her, Marinette leaned back against it and sank all the way to the floor. She pulled Nino’s jacket tighter around herself. Now that she was alone, she could no longer resist smelling it.
“I’ll never be over him, will I?” she asked Tikki, pinching the bridge of her nose. Her head was swimming in a way that was no longer pleasurable.
Tikki nuzzled Marinette’s cheek. “He’s going away,” she said. “So what does it matter?”
“I’ll know,” said Marinette. She sighed. “And isn’t absence supposed to make the heart grow fonder? That’s the opposite of what I need! I just want to get over him!”
As she spoke, she jammed her hands into the pockets of the jacket. She touched something cold and metallic. Feeling a twinge of guilt for snooping, Marinette closed her hand around the metal thing and pulled it out to inspect.
It was an older-model MP3 player.
“I should put this back,” said Marinette aloud. “I should put it back, hang up the jacket, and not touch it again until he comes back for it in a few months.”
“That sounds like a good plan,” said Tikki brightly. She and Marinette made eye contact. “You aren’t going to…”
“I have to look,” said Marinette miserably. “He’s a music guy. Back when he and Alya were together, he was always giving her custom playlists.” A thought struck her. “Maybe this could be my closure! Maybe there’s a playlist for whatever girl he likes now!”
The MP3 player wasn’t passcode-protected. Even with her unsteady hands, Marinette got into it easily. She navigated to the playlist tab, and stared.
Nino’s newest playlist, dated earlier that week, was called Marinette 6.
“Fuck,” she whispered.
Apart from a three-year gap during his relationship with Alya, Nino had been making Marinette playlists regularly since they were fourteen. They were mixed in with other personal playlists, but only the Marinette and Alya playlists were titled with someone’s name.
Marinette locked the MP3 player so quickly that she almost dropped it. She stuffed it back into its pocket.
“He likes me,” she whispered to Tikki. Years of confusing interactions with Nino replayed themselves in her mind. Marinette had had so many chances to say something to him, but so had he.
She wiped her eyes. Alcohol always turned Marinette into a crier. All of a sudden, a paralyzing sense of the distance between her lonely child-self and her lonely adult-self overwhelmed her. Marinette had changed so much, but she still couldn’t bring herself to tell the boy she liked how she felt.
“And he’s going away, anyway,” she said. “Even if I told him, we couldn’t do anything about it. It’s just bad luck.”
“What are you going to do?” Tikki asked her.
Marinette stood up. “I’m going to wash off my makeup, drink a big glass of water, and go to bed,” she answered. And she did.
But somehow, in spite of herself, Marinette still found herself lying in bed in her dark, empty bedroom, listening to Marinette 6 with her eyes closed. It was a beautiful playlist. Nino’s always were.