If I Stay {Fillie}

Happy-ish

The next week was a tedious one.

The morning after Millie learned more about Finn than she ever thought she would in just a short time, she woke up in his bed around eleven to find him gone.

When she'd gone downstairs, she saw him in the kitchen talking to Maddie. It looked important, so she'd turned around and left before he saw her.

The day after, Millie went to see Dr. Owens with her parents. He told her she kept going unconscious because she was trying to do too much at once. The night of the concert, she had just performed on a stage in front of thousands of people and it proved to be too much on her body. The day she had argued with Finn in the garage took all the energy she had out of her. And then the charity event, of course, had given her anxiety attacks, not to mention the horrible questions asked of her at the panel.

That made sense to Millie, and it made sense to her parents. And so Dr. Owens was happy. He suggested she try not to overexert herself or be too hard on her body.

She had told him she could do that. She only hoped she'd been telling the truth.

The day after that, Millie stayed in her room all day. She hoped Finn would come to see her. He did not.

Then on Thursday she hid in her bedroom again. She wrote a tiny journal entry to pass the time.

May 7

Dear Journal,
I think Finn is avoiding me for some reason. He hasn't spoken to me in four days. I've hardly even seen him around the house. Maybe he's just busy with celebrity things, but I don't know. It just seems different this time.

On Friday, Lilia came to visit her. She brought sandwiches. They conversed comfortably for a while, but when Millie asked about her fight with Maddie, the blond quickly looked away and announced that she'd better go.

And now it was Saturday, three in the morning. Millie sat on her bed, holding her check in her hands, staring down at the numbers. Her eyes moved to Finn's name, then over to hers. She thought she saw something a little off.

Upon closer inspection, Millie could see that Finn had written Millie "Mars" Bobby Brown in the space for her name. She laughed out loud and ran her thumb over the dried ink. She had never hated that nickname, despite all the times she told Finn she despised it. From the first second he called her by it, she loved it more than anything.

Maybe I should tell him that, she thought sadly. But this was the sixth day he hadn't spoken a word to her. And it seemed strange that she had barely seen him in that time. She wondered vaguely if he was alright.

Normally he was a ball of energy, everywhere at once. Sure, he was grumpy and a douchebag sometimes, but he wasn't the type to just hole himself up in his room and not show himself to the world for almost a full week.

Then a horrible thought struck Millie: what if they'd gone back to the way things used to be? The charity event was over; Finn didn't need her help with kids anymore. What if everything they'd built was gone?

No. We're friends now. And he shared his deepest secrets with me. He wouldn't just throw it all away.

A sudden urge to see him slammed into her chest like a thirty ton brick wall. If he wasn't man enough to face his fears or whatever the hell was going on and speak to her, she would have to do it herself.

Millie tossed her blankets off her legs and marched out of the room. She turned down the hallway, meaning to go to Finn's bedroom and demand that he open the door, but with just a few yards left to go, the door to his room opened a crack and Maddie slipped out, closing it softly again behind her. Millie stopped; so did Maddie.