One sided benefits

Progress

"I have already been worried, as you haven't been here for quite some time, Adrien", his therapist exclaimed. Then he looked at the young woman at his side and placed a hand on top of hers, asking kindly, "hello Marinette, how are you feeling? You look a lot better than last time, we met!"

"I actually am a lot better, thank you. But we're not here for 'my' mental well being, right?"

"I kinda see this as a couple's therapy by now! Adrien has been talking about the two of you so often in his last sessions, that it almost felt, as if you were here!", he told her calmly.

Marinette looked at her boyfriend and questioned him, a slight anger audible in her voice:

"You told me, you were making progress and that you were slowly getting over the things, your mum did to you. Why have you been lying?"

"I haven't been lying. My wish and my desire, to be there for you, to eventually get over the things that happened to myself, made everything that happened back then become unimportant. We've both lost something, we have both suffered under that loss, but for you it had been even worse, because well, this baby was a part of you and was growing inside of you, so I tried to see all of that in relation and somehow, it brought me forward quite a bit", he told her about his recent appointments, to which she hadn't accompanied him. 

Mike confirmed the things he told her and instead he kept asking about her own mental state and how she had managed to get past those last couple of weeks and also, what had kept them both from coming to the scheduled appointments for so long.

"First of all", Adrien explained, my little sister has been born three weeks ago and not in a regular way, but at home, because it was already too late to get my stepmother to the hospital. After that, we wanted to spend some time with each other, just the family, especially Marinette was supposed to take some time to rest after that night!"

"Why's that?", the psychologist questioned further with beginning concern, "have you been there with her?"

He watched them both nod and smile.

"So, it doesn't look as if it was a bad experience, though it most certainly reminded you of your loss again, right?"

"Uhm, it was more because my doctor told me, that I should be taking it a bit slower after all the excitement, to not endanger the pregnancy!"

Marinette's eyes were sparkling as she told that and she beamed at him widely, while one of her hands rested on her belly and the other was intertwined with Adrien's.

"Oh", Mike exclaimed, "so you are pregnant again? And I figure, it's on purpose this time?"

"We just let nature take its course!", Adrien informed him quickly, "we neither did really try for, nor did we try to avoid a pregnancy, we simply enjoyed being intimate!"

The girl beside him couldn't hide her smirk, when he told about being intimate and the therapist quickly understood. But he wasn't done with his interrogation and posed another question:

"So, how far along are you now? And how are you feeling? Mentally and physically? I mean, it certainly comes with a lot of anxiety and insecurities, right?"

With a tender smile, the young man leaned in and kissed his girlfriend's belly, while he let her speak, as she could remember all of the details much better, without having to check any notes. He had made a whole diary for all the things on his phone, but felt pathetic, when he needed to look anything up, while Marinette just knew those things.

"Well, we have been to the doctor two days after Belle's birth and the gynaecologist told us, that I was already ten weeks along, so we obviously created this baby during the first few times, we even started to be intimate again. So by now, I am in my fourteenth week and that's why I feel rather calm, as the first risky trimester is over and we both can't wait for the next examination in about two and a half weeks, because then, we maybe will find out the gender already. Physically I struggle with the weight, I have already gain, not only since being pregnant, but also before, when I was just lying around, but I guess, that's just a part of having a baby, right? I didn't even need to throw up very much, though I have some trouble with it lately. I don't care about it though, because, I've been reading about that and the article said, that..."