18. Chapter 18

Now that Marinette and Adrien knew each other's secret identities, Plagg saw absolutely no reason to be remotely subtle with his pranks, much to Adrien's exasperation. His only comfort was that Plagg did at least refrain from constant references to "your wife" and any crush that he thought Adrien might have on Marinette... at least for the most part. For now, at least.

"Adrien, why do you have this tucked under one of the couch pillows?" Marinette called, and Adrien frowned as he set his laptop back down on his bed and headed back into the living room. What on Earth could Marinette possibly be talking about? He didn't keep anything besides a few pillows and a spare blanket on the couch. He was pretty positive that he hadn't accidentally left anything else there.

In the living room, Adrien found Marinette holding up a printed photo of the "wedding" kiss and was looking very, very perplexed. Adrien groaned loudly.

"Plagg, get your ass out here!"

There was a grumble, and after a pause Plagg came floating very slowly into view. "Whaddya want?"

Adrien narrowed his eyes at the kwami. "I thought I told you to quit it with the hiding pictures all over the place."

There was a quiet 'Aha!' from Marinette. Plagg just snickered.

"That stopped being funny months ago, Plagg," Adrien scolded, still irritated. "If anyone else had found that, I wouldn't be able to explain it."

Plagg shrugged. "But they didn't."

"So are you gonna stop doing that, then?" Adrien demanded. "You're going to make my printer run out of ink again. And that stuff isn't exactly cheap, you know. Especially the colored stuff."

Thankfully, it was Tikki that spoke up next. "Plagg, you really shouldn't do that. It might have been a little funny this time, but you know how often Adrien has people over."

Unsurprisingly, Plagg scoffed, completely unrepentant. "How often he has people over? He doesn't! If he studies with other people, he does it at school, not here. Marinette has people visit more often, and they mostly pop into her apartment and only for a short while to talk about work. No one was gonna find it except her."

"Which would have been awkward if she hadn't found out about you!" Tikki argued. "And don't try to tell me that you only started after Marinette found out, because it's obvious that you didn't!"

"He was doing that back in the fall," Adrien said with a sigh, plucking the picture out of Marinette's fingers and tossing it in the recycling. "I swear I found at least two or three a day, and I was terrified that Mari might find one and think I was a giant weirdo."

Marinette giggled. "You are a giant weirdo," she told him fondly. "A giant punny weirdo. But yeah, I would have thought it was really weird. I did think it was really weird."

Adrien had the sudden urge to murder Plagg for that. If Marinette had found those photos before, when he couldn't tell her about Plagg being the one to blame...

(He just really, really didn't like the idea of Ladybug thinking that he was actually weird. He could deal with goofy-weird, just not creepy-weird.)

"You know, I think I liked it better before the reveal," Adrien announced loudly, giving Plagg a stink-eye. "Then Plagg actually hid and didn't annoy me when Marinette was over. It was nice and quiet then."

Marinette sniggered. Plagg only shrugged, unaffected.

"Yeah, but then you wasted your time going out to run around with Ladybug after you had seen her all day instead of, oh, I don't know, sleeping."

"Plagg, you don't actually care about how much sleep I get. You just don't want to work," Adrien pointed out dryly. "And it wasn't a waste of time. I liked getting out and running around."

"But he does have a point," Marinette said, making Adrien pout at her. Was she really taking Plagg's side over his? "You have all sorts of papers and projects due soon, and if we hadn't figured out each other's identities, you can't tell me that you wouldn't have not gone out until your finals were over, even if it meant sacrificing some of your sleep."

Adrien opened his mouth, ready to argue that. He would have done the responsible thing- he would have gone to bed, he would have done his homework- after all, he had done it before- but then he paused.

Could he honestly say that he wouldn't have pushed himself to the limit to see Ladybug, when he hadn't yet known that Ladybug would be staying in London for another year? There was no way of knowing how soon she would have remembered to bring it up, and if she only mentioned it after the school year was over, he totally would have lost time going out to meet up with her. Maybe he would have tried to schedule get-togethers for nights that would work better for him, but he would definitely have tried to go see Ladybug. That was just what he did.

"Yeah, he can't even deny it," Plagg scoffed. "He would go out of his way to see yommmph."

Adrien laughed at the disgruntled look on Plagg's face. Clearly the kwami didn't appreciate having his taunting cut off with a chunk of cheese shoved in his mouth. Still, he couldn't help but wish that Marinette had maybe done that a little sooner, considering that Plagg seemed intent on revealing information about Adrien that would make him seem like a lovesick kitten.

He was a lovesick kitten, but Marinette didn't need to know that.

"Well, it's good that you don't have to waste time right now, at least," Marinette pointed out as Plagg floated grumpily down the hall and away into Adrien's bedroom to sulk- or, more likely, take a nap. "Don't you have a few projects due next week?"

"Yeah, I do," Adrien admitted. "As much as I wish I had more time, it's good to get it over with before I really have to dive in with studying for finals. I'll probably be pulling some late nights later in the week to get everything done."

Marinette let out a quiet, playful hum. "Funny thing, I remember you saying something last semester about irresponsible classmates having to scramble last-minute to get things done and how you were never going to do that."

"I'm not pulling all-nighters. There's a difference," Adrien called over his shoulder as he headed back into his bedroom to grab his laptop again. "I just had a little more homework than planned last week, and then there was the concert that we went to that I hadn't taken into account. I'll be a little rushed, but I have everything under control, I promise."

By Thursday evening, Adrien was wishing that he hadn't been so confident earlier in the week. Everything that could go wrong with his projects did go wrong- or, well, almost everything. Thankfully the files hadn't been lost and he hadn't forgotten any of his numerous projects, but books had been misplaced, his notes had fallen off of the table and had gotten into complete disarray, and several of the papers and articles online that he had marked on his computer had somehow vanished completely from his bookmarks and it took several hours of sifting through his site history before he found them all again. That meant that Adrien had pulled more late-night study sessions than he had anticipated, and he wasn't even able to see Marinette as much since she was going back to her own apartment after they finished cleaning up from dinner so that Adrien could focus better.

While being alone definitely forced Adrien to actually work instead of talking with his best friend, having no one to talk to (Plagg had been strongly suggested into going to bed early, meaning that Adrien wouldn't get distracted by him, either) meant that his mind sometimes drifted off a little more than it should.

A light knock at the door followed by the sound of it opening shook Adrien out of the light doze he had accidentally slipped into. He jolted upright, grabbed onto his computer to steady it, and glanced up from the screen to see Marinette slipping in through the door, wrapped in a bathrobe. She was probably wearing pajamas underneath, but the robe was tied shut securely to ward off the eyes of any too-nosy neighbors. She raised an eyebrow as she caught sight of Adrien in front of his computer. "Adrien? I thought you were going to bed early tonight."

"I was," Adrien admitted, even as he glanced down at his computer. "But I have a couple finishing touches to put on the project that I have due tomorrow. It's not much, just proofreading and then sticking in a few details that I remembered today during class. But I hope to be in bed by one. Go on ahead- that's what you came over for, right?"

Marinette's cheeks turned pink and she looked a little sheepish. "I- I mean, yes, but if you're going to be busy, I don't want to hog your bed, I can sleep in my own-"

Adrien snickered. "You're too small to hog my bed, My Lady. And go on ahead, I'll be there soon enough." He had to admit, seeing Marinette flustered about sharing his bed- even though they did it regularly, and there was nothing remotely inappropriate about it- was adorable. "Go on and warm up the sheets for me."

"You don't want company while you finish that up?"

"As much as I love your company, I think you'd be more of a distraction than anything," Adrien assured her. "And you need to sleep. Shoo, little bug."

Marinette shooed. Adrien smiled to himself as he listened to the rustle of fabric as Marinette took her bathrobe off and hung it up on his closet door, then the click of a light switch and more rustling as she crawled into his bed. He let the sound distract him for a few minutes, and then he refocused on his paper. Right. Editing. The sooner he got done with this, the sooner he could go join Marinette for a well-deserved night's sleep. The thought spurred him on, and it didn't take long at all for Adrien to make the last change, save the document, and send the finished paper to his professor. He was about to congratulate himself with a hard-earned chocolate-chip cookie (baked fresh only hours earlier) when a note in his planner made him freeze. Because right there, written under the assignment that he had just completed, was another note.

Data sheet marking- due at noon! Summary + write-up.

Adrien knew exactly what assignment that was. He knew what class it was for, he knew what he had to do for it...

...and to the best of his recollection, he hadn't finished it. Not even close.

It wasn't as though the assignment was particularly difficult, Adrien reflected as he reopened his computer. It was just using a computer program to mark a bunch of old scanned datasheets into categories based on the amount of time it had taken each datasheet to run, and then it would take maybe a minute after everything was marked to run the data through a program that would summarize everything nicely. The process was so easy that anyone could do it, and Adrien hadn't had any trouble with the program when he did the first few pages. It was just that it would take a whole lot of time to go through everything.

Except he didn't have a whole lot of time anymore, because he had been a complete freaking idiot and forgotten about the assignment until last minute. Unless his memory was seriously failing him, the project was due in less than thirteen hours.

In short, he was screwed.

"I'm an idiot, I'm an idiot, I'm an idiot," Adrien groaned as he opened the program and confirmed that yes, he had in fact forgotten to go through most of the data. He had done a handful of the pages- maybe a couple dozen, tops- but that left hundreds of pages to go. He was going to have to stay up most of the night, and he had already had a short night of sleep the previous night after he stayed up late studying a concept that he was having a bit of trouble with and then had to wake up early for an eight o'clock class. This was the worst possible night to find out that he had an assignment he hadn't done due the next day.

Stupid, stupid, stupid. How on earth had it managed to slip through the cracks? Adrien knew that he had had a crazy number of projects to do that semester, plus he had gotten that crash course in applying to and interviewing for jobs partway through the semester and that had definitely added to his workload, especially since he had had to look into whether or not he needed a work visa and especially especially because he had never applied to a job before. He had had to keep calling Marinette over to help explain things to him. Still, even with all he was trying to juggle, he shouldn't have forgotten a project entirely. That was just plain irresponsible.

With a growl, Adrien buckled down to plow through the pages. He could do it, he could do it, he could do it...

He couldn't do it. Several hours later, Adrien was bored out of his mind from staring at one nearly-identical page after another. He had perked up a little an hour in after inhaling nearly half a dozen cookies, but the sugar high had long since worn off and left him plodding miserably through his assignment.

Adrien yawned again before forcing himself to focus on his screen. He was really starting to drag now, he could tell, but he couldn't go to bed yet. He still had a solid hour of data left, at the least, and more if he kept slowing down like he was now.

He really had to stop thinking about how much his bed was calling him, soft and already warm with Marinette sleeping there already...

Adrien shook himself yet again and refocused on the screen. If he weren't worried about waking Marinette up, he'd make himself some coffee to jolt himself awake. Maybe he should invest in some green tea in case this happened in the future.

Of course, he'd have to either worry about the teapot whistling or he would have to make it in the microwave like a heathen. Maybe he should ask Marinette if he could borrow the extra key to her flat so he could make his coffee in her place when she stayed over...

A noise down the hallway made Adrien jump. He glanced down towards the bedroom and saw Marinette exiting his bedroom, hair messy and eyes bleary. She blinked at him before meandering down the hall towards him.

"I didn't wake you up, did I?" Adrien asked, reaching out an arm to pull Marinette down onto the couch next to him. She plopped down and snuggled up against his side without missing a beat. "I've been trying not to make any noise, but-" he yawned and clapped a hand over his mouth. He glanced sheepishly over at her. "I'm sorry, I really did want to go to bed earlier."

"I thought you were going to come to bed by one?" Marinette glanced down at the time on Adrien's computer screen. "Adrien, it's already past three."

Adrien cringed at the reminder. It was really getting ridiculously late. He was fairly certain that he had never stayed up so late before, with the only possible exception of him having to get up in the middle of the night to fight an akuma. "Yeah, I know. But I remembered that I had this thing due tomorrow at noon, and since I have class until eleven, I need to get this done. I forgot about it with all of the other projects-" he yawned again, long and loud "-all the other projects that I had. It's not hard, just really time-consuming."

Marinette leaned over to watch as Adrien did a couple pages. "So what are you doing?"

"These are the results from this experiment people have done over the last few years. We're summarizing the data by tagging each of these sheets with what time category they fall in- you know, like how long it took for the experiment to run."

Marinette curled into his side a bit more and peered at the screen. "There's several times, though?"

"Yeah, each page has several runs on it. I'm supposed to tag all of them, because not everyone did the same number of runs in different years and so the averages would be not as accurate...or something." Adrien yawned again. He was so tired that it was questionable if he could even get a decent write-up done later. If he went to bed now he could probably get just enough sleep to function decently well until after all of his classes were finished, but that wasn't going to happen.

He was definitely going to have to be more careful about keeping track of his projects after this, even if that meant programming every single last one into his calendar so that he would get a dozen reminders a month about each and every one.

"And then I run them through a program that compiles all the tags and gives me a summary of the data, and then I do a short write-up about it and turn it in with the summary sheet." Adrien let his head drop onto Marinette's, relaxing for a long moment. "I completely forgot about it. It wouldn't be a problem normally."

"Is that it? Just tagging?"

"Yeah. It's just that there's so much to do." Adrien yawned again. He was about to fall asleep right here, right now, with his head resting against Marinette's. He really needed to sit up and get back to work before he conked out just like that. "I probably have at least another hour just with the tagging, and then running the summary sheet will only take a couple minutes after that. I was planning on doing the write-up after my last morning class and before lunch, just so I can get some sleep."

"I can tag things, Adrien. You go to sleep." Marinette nudged Adrien's side, then nudged harder when he didn't respond. "Seriously. I'm more awake than you are right now. Go get some sleep. It'll only be, like, four hours, but it's better than nothing. You can run the summary in the morning or before lunch. Shoo."

Adrien straightened up and blinked at her, startled. "Mari, this is my homework, I can't ask you to do it for me-"

"You aren't asking. I'm telling you I'll help." Marinette wrapped an arm around his waist and gave Adrien a hug. "And you helped out when we were in a pinch at Fashion Week. Let me help you now."

Adrien blinked blearily at his computer. Marinette was right, she definitely wouldn't have any trouble with the tagging. She was smart, she could figure out the tagging pretty fast. He'd get to sleep- well, not a decent amount, but a passable amount- and actually would be able to function the next day. He'd have to take a nap in the afternoon before he could get any productive studying done, but at least he could do that and didn't have classes all day, just in the morning-

Wait.

"You have to work tomorrow," Adrien protested, even as Marinette slid his laptop from his lap to her own. "I can nap in the afternoon, you can't-"

"Adrien, I've been sleeping since ten. I've already gotten five hours of sleep. You said that this will take an hour, so I'll be back in bed a little past four. I can go into work a little late if I really need to, so I'll get another two or three hours of sleep. I'll be fine." Marinette pushed at his back. "I've got this, I promise. Shoo."

Adrien shooed.

He was asleep the minute his head hit the pillow. Adrien woke up briefly around four when Marinette crawled into bed next to him, and then he was sleeping again until his alarm went off at seven. He groaned his way out of bed and out of the bedroom, rubbing sleep out of his eyes as he got ready as fast as he could. Adrien could smell breakfast cooking in the kitchen- Marinette must have decided to just cook at his place so both of them could eat, she was an actual lifesaver- so he hurried out to the kitchen as fast as he could.

"You are amazing, have I told you that yet?" Adrien said as he hung over the short dividing wall to the kitchen. Marinette was piling toast onto a plate and had jam and butter already on the table with a small bowl of chopped fruit. The smell of coffee filled the morning air, along with the smell of cooking bacon. "Wow, you really went all out."

Marinette turned and grinned at him. "Hardly! The fruit is from last night, the toast was easy, and the bacon and coffee were both quick. I figured you might need it this morning."

"Yeah, I really do. I slept in as much as I could. I don't even have time for a shower this morning." Adrien ran one hand through his hair, wincing. It wasn't as though his hair was greasy or anything, but he could feel the traces of product left over from the previous day. It wasn't a particularly pleasant feeling.

Marinette laughed at that as she came to the table with the plate of bacon. "You'll survive. Besides, you can wash your pretty-boy hair this afternoon once you've finished class." She reached over and ruffled his hair, ignoring his laughing protests as he tried to bat her away.

"Plagg, the mean woman is making fun of me," Adrien managed to mock-whine between his snickers, batting Marinette's hands away. "Make her stooooop."

Plagg, who had been lounging on top of the refrigerator with a chunk of cheese, peered down at them and made a face. "Ugh. You're so gross together."

Adrien made a face at Plagg in response as he rearranged his hair into something that would less resemble a bird's nest. He and Marinette weren't gross. They were just friends having fun.

"Any problems with the data tagging last night?" Adrien asked Marinette as she started to spread jam on her toast.

Marinette shook her head. "Not at all. It was easy."

Adrien let out a sigh of relief. "Fantastic. Thank you so much for doing that, by the way. I probably would have taken forever and then had to run on an hour of sleep."

"It's not a problem. You do still have to run the summary sheet, though. I didn't want to do that and mess everything up somehow."

"Oh, that's fine," Adrien reassured her hastily. "I've done that before in class- with smaller data sets, of course- so it'll only take a couple minutes for me to do. I'll try to get it done before I leave, and then I can think about what I want to write during class." He chanced a glance at the clock and winced. He'd be cutting it close with the bus, probably, but he could always run to the station.

Marinette caught his glance and followed his gaze. She looked a little concerned. "Maybe you should do that now and then eat your breakfast while you're walking. You won't be cutting it as close that way."

"Right, right, of course. Mari, have I ever told you how much of a lifesaver you are?"

Predictably, Plagg didn't stay quiet for long after they left the flat.

"So your wife helped you out with your homework last night, hmm? How domestic!"

Adrien groaned quietly as he hurried down the street, toast in hand. "Plagg."

"What? It's true!"

Adrien really couldn't debate that. Marinette had made him breakfast, after all, and they had slept in the same bed together like it was normal- which it was for them, he reminded himself- and then she had made sure that he had everything before he left for school. The kiss that she had pressed to his cheek as he raced out the door only added fuel to Plagg's arsenal.

"So domestic," Plagg sighed. Then he made a small retching noise. "It makes me sick."

"You could stop thinking about it all the time," Adrien suggested. For someone who claimed to hate romance, Plagg sure seemed to be incredibly interested in his own love life. Adrien guessed that he might never figure that little mystery out.

Plagg blew a raspberry at Adrien.

The morning flew by, and soon Adrien was handing in his project. The summary sheet wasn't quite up to his normal standard, but it was good enough to get his a pretty good grade. There were more than a few other people in the class that looked a little bleary-eyed, which made Adrien suspect that he wasn't the only one who had forgotten the project until last minute. He just happened to be incredibly lucky that he had Marinette willing to sacrifice her own precious sleep to help him.

He had the best friend in the world, honestly. Adrien was pretty positive that most people would have given him a coffee and a few encouraging words before going right back to bed.

Class dragged on, and Adrien did his best to pay attention when his eyelids felt like lead and every blink was an effort to force his eyes back open. Finally class was over and he was done for the day, and Adrien hopped on the bus back to his neighborhood. The ride woke him up a bit- well, the ride and the small iced coffee drink he had picked up on campus so he wouldn't do anything stupid like falling asleep on the bus- so he decided that before he went back to his apartment to sleep, he should do something nice for Marinette. After all, she still had several hours of work left before she could get back to the apartment and take a nap herself.

What to do...what to do...

Just when Adrien was just about to give up for the moment and go home to sleep on it and figure out a solution later, he caught a whiff of something delicious. It smelled warm and welcoming, like baking bread and sugar.

Of course! Their favorite bakery (at least, favorite in London; Marinette's parent's bakery and the pastry stall from the festival up north ranked a bit higher) was nearby. Marinette would no doubt welcome something warm and sugary, since it was still a bit cool outside and really, when wouldn't something warm and sugary be welcome?

Six minutes later, Adrien headed down the sidewalk, pastry bag in one hand and carrier of hot chocolates in the other. He hoped he wouldn't be interrupting anything- he hadn't texted Marinette to let her know he was coming, and maybe he should have- but his luck had held out so far. And if she were busy- well, Adrien didn't have to stay for long. He could just drop off one chocolate-filled croissant and Marinette's hot chocolate at her desk, or have another worker bring them to her.

Luckily for him, Marinette was busy at her desk. A sketch of what looked like a lovely summer dress filled her computer screen, and she was busy making notes in a small notebook. Adrien tried to crane his head to get a peek- was she coming up with a list of fabric she would need? Was she making notes about current fashion trends?- but before he could see anything, Marinette noticed the movement behind her and spun around.

"Hey, Adrien! I didn't know that you were coming in to visit today!"

"It was a bit spur-of-the-moment," Adrien admitted, setting the hot chocolates and pastry bag down on a clear spot on her desk. "I wanted to thank you for helping me last night- well, early this morning. And I figured that you might start to drag sometime soon, so I got some sugar to help."

"Sugar is always appreciated," Marinette said, peering into the bag and sniffing appreciatively. "This looks fabulous."

"I can just drop it and leave you to eat if you're busy," Adrien said, glancing at Marinette's computer screen again. It definitely looked like an in-progress sketch, which meant that if she was on a roll, he was just in the way. "I'll just snitch a croissant-"

"You can stay!" Marinette said hastily. "I'm not really in the middle of much anything. I've been trying to get into a groove with the dress, but I'm having a little trouble," she said when she caught Adrien's glance towards the computer. "I'm having a bit of a creative block right now. I might have to go do something else for a bit and come back to it later."

"The lack of sleep probably isn't helping much, huh?" Adrien asked, feeling a bit guilty. As much as he appreciated Marinette's help (a ton), he couldn't just ignore that her having to be up in the middle of the night and then getting up early to get breakfast for him cut into her sleep time, which probably was affecting her productivity. "I'm really sorry about that, honestly-"

Marinette snorted. "I didn't miss out on that much sleep. You're making it sound like I was running on three hours of sleep instead of, like, seven. This design has been giving me trouble for days."

"Really?" Adrien had always rather thought that designs gushed out of Marinette freely. She certainly had been drawing new things easily enough when he saw her at home, but maybe that was because she was drawing things that she wanted to wear, not things that were new and fresh enough to be carried by a fashion house. He supposed that there were probably a lot of designs that got scrapped or cast aside without ever making it to production. And when he took that level of pressure into account...yeah, it made a little more sense that Marinette might be struggling a bit from time to time. Besides, he vaguely remembered a few discussion about the creating process that they had had before, and yeah, Marinette had definitely mentioned occasionally having designer's block then. He just was too tired to remember those full conversations.

"I'm just not quite happy with it. I can't quite put my finger on what's wrong, but there's just something..." She glanced at the computer screen again. "It doesn't quite have the oomph factor to it, you know?"

"Maybe it could be made with a fabric with some sort of pattern?" Adrien suggested as Marinette pulled her pastry out of the bag and passed it back to him. "You could use some of those patterns that you thought up earlier in the year, they're all gorgeous."

Marinette froze, pain au chocolate caught between her lips, and then she lunged for her drawing tablet, sitting on her desk behind her computer. Still mid-bite, she pressed a button and frantically started searching through the drafted fabric patterns she had saved on it. Adrien watched, torn between amusement and concern as she flipped through one design after another, finally settling on one with a happy noise. Seconds later, the pattern showed up on her computer screen. Marinette made a satisfied noise at that, then grabbed her sketchpad, flipping to the page with the dress design on it before flinging open a desk drawer and yanking out some colored pencils. It was only once she had started coloring the design that she froze, put the pencil down, and sheepishly turned to Adrien, pulling her pain au chocolate out of her mouth as she did.

"Sudden burst of inspiration?" Adrien suggested, amused. "I can go. Don't feel bad about kicking me out," he added when Marinette looked like she might protest. "I need a nap anyway. My plans for this afternoon were eat, sleep, shower, in that order, and I wasn't planning on bothering you for long anyway."

"I don't want to seem ungrateful," Marinette said, finally taking a bite of her pastry. Her eyes closed in momentary enjoyment before she focused on him again. "Really, I love the food, and the hot chocolate, and thanks so much for getting me back on track with the design, I really needed that suggestion-"

"But now you need to get that idea all sketched out before you forget it," Adrien finished, getting up and immediately bending down to press a quick kiss to Marinette's forehead before gathering up his pain au chocolate and hot chocolate. "I get it, I promise. I'll see you at home."

"See you later," Marinette responded absently, attention already back on her design as she picked up a colored pencil and started filling in the design with a rough representation of the fabric pattern, pastry forgotten on a napkin on her desk. Adrien smiled at her back for a moment, just watching her draw. It was admirable how focused she got when she was hit by a burst of inspiration for a design. She forgot about the rest of the world for however long it took for her to get her design sketched out. Strands of hair were falling out of her bun and into her face, but Marinette was so far into the zone that she didn't even bother to brush them aside.

When he heard a giggle, Adrien quickly turned and glanced around. Several of Marinette's coworkers were watching him watch her, and they looked rather amused. Trying not to blush, Adrien nodded a greeting to the giggling duo before making a hasty exit.

Yeah, he definitely needed a nap if he was openly staring at Marinette like that.

As always, reviews are much appreciated! :)