peaches | fillie

twenty-three

***

Millie jumped as the door to her bedroom swung open and shut with force. "What's wrong, Finn-" she began, propping herself up on her elbows.

She was confused, to begin with. The person standing with their arms crossed on her carpeted floor was definitely not Finn. Unless he had shrunken several inches and had a complete wardrobe change while he was downstairs, that is.

Noah, not Finn, was standing in her bedroom with a stone look on his face. They stared at each other for what felt like an eternity before he began to pace back and forth.

He ranted on about how Millie was so unreliable lately and that whenever he needed her, she was nowhere to be seen. Noah lifted her phone from her nightstand, showing her at least twenty missed call notifications.

On top of her confusion, Millie was now surprised. How had she missed so many of his calls? She always made sure to have her ringer on in case he needed her. She tried to argue that she must have silenced her phone earlier on accident, but Noah cut her off.

"I have been repeatedly trying to Facetime and call you this entire week. You always either decline or ignore the notification. Do you know how shit that feels, Millie?"

"Noah, I promise you, I haven't been trying to ignore you. If anything, you have been ignoring me." She jabbed at her chest to emphasize her point but to no avail.

"You know how fucking important promises are to me. Don't promise me something that you can't promise your fucking self."

His words stung like a slap to the face. It was an icy pain at first, but then overwhelmingly hot. Like someone had put her into a bath of ice and then lit it on fire.

It took her a moment to realize that he had actually slapped her. She cried out, her delayed reaction surely making her look foolish.

Noah glanced at his hand, and then at Millie's reddening cheek. As much as he wanted to feel bad for hitting her, he didn't.

She deserved that slap, and every slap coming to her.

"Let's go, I'll explain on the way to Gaten's." He said, grasping her wrist gently and pulling her out the window behind him.

***

"So, " Millie began, running through everything that Noah described to her while they rushed down the street. "Gaten's parents are out of town and he threw a small party. Like, really small. He invited ten or eleven kids, but over a hundred kids started showing up. Now he has an ankle that got run over by his sister's moped because some random sophomore wanted to try it out, and a bunch of drunk, horny high school kids that won't leave his house."

Noah nodded sadly. "Yes to everything you just said."

It had begun with inviting Caleb and Sadie over to get to know them better. Caleb convinced the two that it would be more fun to add more people, so they did.

"The more the merrier, right?" Gaten had said as the people poured into his house.

But, as they started to show up, more and more and more people came with them. The original people invited had come in groups or with plus-ones and it had already left the realm of "out of hand" by the time someone had found the basement liquor cabinet. Noah had been panicking from the beginning, but Caleb and Sadie made them sit through the discomfort and try to have a so-called "good time."