I AM NOT JOHN LENNON

The soft crevice of Claudia’s palm slipped up his shoulder to rest on the curve of his neck. Whatever short and agonied breathing he’d made from the cuts being touched (It was happening, he was sure of it), the music was just loud enough to disguise the noise. Claudia did not hum to it, though she would hum to herself on occasion— Adrien sat up as he felt her weight lift from his back, his own hands finally free of their wishing to play with the lip of a mattress beneath a fitted sheet and raising itself to meet where she’d touched his neck. The playlist continued; Something soft like a flute over howling noises; They looked each other in the eye; Her room was dark, dark enough to be a million layers of velvet sandwiched into three-dimensional shapes; The hand on his neck went to his jaw, then fell down.

“Uh, so, y’know,” she muttered, “Sorry for the scratches.”

“There’s no need to be sorry.”

“Yeah, well- Still.” She was hesitant to even touch him. The film of Vaseline on her hands was a decent excuse, but not airtight. “-I told you about this band, right? What the main guy did.”

He shook his head ‘no’.

Claudia’s eyes widened, and Adrien had every right in the world to lie directly to her face in feigned ignorance when it led to her grinning at him with almost predatory delight, so gorgeously self-satisfied to torture him with the information. It was as if she’d already decided in her own head that he’d be appalled by the story (he was) and that he thought it was indicative of every problem in the modern world from men as a social class to capitalism to the rapid-onset nihilism of the 21st century (he did, and it was, it was, it absolutely was) and that nothing short of all those four things would have convinced her to tell him. The words formed restlessly on her full lips, and she whispered out the first. 

“Murder. He bashed Marie Trintignant’s head in 19 times against a radiator and waited seven hours to call an ambulance, isn’t that fucking insane?” Claudia smiled. “Her brain was fucking swollen from how hard he hit her, and, like, nobody has photos of the room, what it looked like after, but…”

Adrien found himself wedged in the corner between the back and arm of the couch, Claudia stalking closer on knees and palms. Past her grin, that heavy, hot breath of hers would dissipate to touch his throat and it kept him at knifepoint. A hand planted itself on his knee without much thought—Claudia continued, iniquitously keen. 

“And he’s out. He’s so fucking famous he’s on parole after four years. They basically let him off for nothing. You saw the broadcasts, right? I- I saw the broadcasts of the trial and everything. It’s fucking nuts. It’s cra-zy.”

“I suppose.” His jaw hung open ever so slightly. “Though I’d describe it with different, uh, vocabulary.”

“Yeah, but, like- Think about it, right?”

“About…?”

“Would you ever kill someone?”

Adrien raised his brows in surprise. In all truth—his tongue darted out to lick his lips as he thought, as he accepted the notion she’d floated and it slowly arrived to his brain—he could distract her by mentioning every ‘almost’ or otherwise reckless cataclysming he’d done as Chat Noir, but she’d been so transparently specific with her tone that he knew the fact that he was Chat Noir hadn’t even crossed her mind. It was the abhorrent idea she so craved to discover, that he, as Adrien, could be capable of murder. That he could consider himself capable of it. His elbow dug into the arm of her couch, far enough off its edge to hang in the open air but not too far so as not to bash Claudia’s dresser, and Adrien kept himself silent to politely feign extra, hard-earned thought. 

It was reprehensible that Bertrand Cantant had done it, but that was because it was a case of domestic violence gone fatal. Sometimes it might- It would simply depend.

“I mean,” he began, which was a great start when answering the question of murder, “I would wonder if ‘myself’ counts.”

A snort escaped her nose: Wrong answer. 

“No,” Claudia scoffed, rolling her eyes bemusedly. “I mean really kill someone. Like, if I asked.”

So all at once, a chill crept up Adrien’s body as one thousand billion thrumming corpuscules stood still. He licked his lips again, swiping the edge of his tongue over the top first before the bottom; The lower lip folded in sheepishly beneath his tongue, trembling. Just a few feet out, his rings sat in a stack on the floor next to an empty e-cigarette and a grease-spotted napkin. Breaking eye contact with Claudia as an act of deference did little to resolve the tension, but his eyes lingered on the sight of his amok anyways. He couldn’t describe the feeling as anything less than giddy, if camouflaged, anticipation. Adrien raised his eyes again—She hadn’t noticed. He looked other places, with breath still bated, scanning the way her breath would push out her chest ever so slightly, the hand on his knee, her foxlike stare, the next idea forming on her tongue and the delicate opening of her lips. 

“See the knife I have on my desk?”

Claudia had a few. Boxcutters if they counted, switchblades and folding knives. It was a butterfly knife on the desk—deep purple, yet so deep in that unlit room that the handle became a noxious, inky black—and it sat there closed, but Adrien had seen her twist and turn the knife in her wrist enough times that he knew, if prompted, how to get the blade showing. 

“Say I told you I wanted you to pick up that knife, go out into the street, and stab the first person you saw until you knew they were dead.” Claudia’s voice was slow, each phrase spoken like she was addressing a dog, an idiot dog. “And I really wanted you to do it,” she grinned, eyes burning holes through Adrien’s own. “Would you?”

Adrien hoped to propose a hypothetical of his own, just to himself. Say he didn’t give her the answer she so desperately wanted. Would she bully a response out of him? Maybe. Would she… He looked to his rings, where he’d set them down on the floor. He looked back to the knife. Would she stand up, the gauzy residue of light sticking like honey to the bare flesh of her thighs, grab the knife itself and force it into his hands? Would… He looked back to her, would she notice he was hesitating on purpose, hold him down by the neck with his ricocheted pulse in between her fingers until she could prise a “Yes” out of his open mouth? Maybe. Maybe maybe maybe maybe, that would get him to say “yes”, “Yes God I’ll do anything you ask, of course my love of course

Claudia’s brows furrowed. Not having moved an inch from where she was on the couch, she leaned in closer to him.

“.....So?”

“Yes,” Adrien coughed. “I would.”

“No the fuck you wouldn’t.”

She pulled away.

“I- No, seriously!” he insisted, shoulders squaring. “I’ll do it right now. Nobody would know, I’d get away with it. Do-” Adrien stole a glance at the butterfly knife. “-Do you want me to?”

“Not actually.”

“Well, why not?”

“I just wanted to see what you’d say!” 

Adrien could follow her silhouette best he could as she got up off the couch, but at a certain distance the edges of her form would blend with everything else. Somewhere, he knew he’d set down that backpack of his, and the duffel bag full of cash and cereal bars; And his glasses were on Claudia’s dresser, guarding a slowly-charging iPhone and a Nokia, and the PC hidden under Claudia’s desk blinked like the tiniest one-eyed lynx perched in darkness and the chair in front of it sighed from being touched. She began to filter through the clothes thrown on top of it, and he continued to watch, and her face twisted in time to the awful moaning of Bertrand Cantat. Adrien could admit to being somewhat of a voyeur. The habit used to be innocent when he had innocent thoughts. But in times where there was nothing productive to say and it was worth naught to say anything at all, he would stare quite intently and let all that thinking busy him, and he would have much worse and much more grotesque thoughts than any man who never shut up and thus was too busied with talking to think. Adrien swallowed a dry heap of saliva. His heartbeat had quieted since imagining all those hypotheticals.

“...I really would.”

This time around, Claudia pouted at his insistence like he didn’t know what he was saying. “You’re a sweetheart, you’d never.”

“Not without reason.” Her asking was a reason. A damn good one, at that. “When we leave for Marseilles, we might be there forever so it’d be a much worse time to try it.”

“Right, cause, like, we can put stabbing a homeless man to death on the same level as butt stuff. -Look, you can do whatever you want but my point was that you could get away with murder because you’re famous as fuck, and if The-Motherfucking-Adrien-Agreste was legally declared missing three weeks ago then you’re shit out of luck in the cause célèbre department. Here,” Claudia added, throwing something at his lap. “Put a damn shirt on.”

The smell of Claudia Guadalupe Perreault was so potent in the fabric of that KMFDM shirt that it almost distracted Adrien from the fact that she’d just lied outright. 

“That wasn’t your point at all,” he responded.

The pause spoke volumes. She might’ve flushed; It was too dark to say for certain.