37 days

Steph's office

POV
Millie

I make it to Steph's office only getting lost twice.

The third-floor hallway is gorgeous, with beautiful light fixtures throughout the halls with cool beige walls, and all the doors, which belong to some of the big shots here are just as nice as X's, all black with gold touches.

Steph's office is towards the end of the east hallway with a gold metal plaque on the side of the door that reads 321 Stephanie Taylor.

A few other doors are reading other people's names too. I knock on the door and hear her say come in. When I walk in she's sitting behind a mahogany desk with a comfortable-looking white chair behind it. The walls are a light slate blue and with beautiful landscape photos of sceneries from other countries.

On her desk sits a laptop, phone, notebooks, pens, and small green plants, it's so cute in here. She stands up and hugs me.

"Give me one sec Mills, I'll get you a chair," Steph says leaving me for a minute and coming back with a folded white plastic chair.

"Thanks," I say to her.

"I'm almost done with Tank's travel plan, then we can talk," she says looking at her laptop.

"Where is he going?" I ask.

She keeps her head straight looking at the screen of the laptop "Colombia, in two days" she says focused on whatever she's doing.

"Is anyone else going?" I ask curiously, maybe a little more curious about X.

She catches on immediately, side-eyes me, and then puts her eyes back on the screen, "There's no current plans of travel right now." she says and types away at her laptop.

"But when it comes to X, things can come up at a moment's notice and be gone hours later," she says matter of fact.

After a couple of minutes, Steph closes her laptop and turns to me "Tell me everything" she demands full of curiosity.

I shift in my seat to look at her, I tell her every detail about what happened at Chase's house yesterday and then hesitate to tell her about this morning, but I eventually do.

She has her jaw wide open in disbelief "Oh my god Millie, I don't even know what to say. This is so unlike X, he chases after no one." she says.

"And here you have the upper hand right now." she continues.

I'm not entirely sure how I feel about it all, this isn't a game to me, I don't care who is above who right now. In my mind, X isn't some trophy to be had, I just see him as a person and that's, that.
...

Steph orders some lunch from the kitchen and we eat in her office while she continues to work and we chat. It's 5:30 now and I get a text from X

I'm done

I text him back

ok I'll be up soon

no response

I hope he isn't mad at me from this morning, his text seemed a little dry but maybe I'm just reading into it too much.

I tell Steph that I'm heading out and she tells me to update her on everything, which I will. I leave Steph's office and head to the elevator making my way back up to the 4th floor. The door is locked so I knock on it. I'm expecting x to open it but instead, it's Julian.

"Oh..hi," I say awkwardly.

He opens the door more to let me in and says "What's up milliie?"

I walk a couple of steps in and say "I was just hanging out with Steph."

He raises an eyebrow and says "Cool, is she at her place or office?"

"She's in her office," I reply and he nods his head.

"You guys have a good night, I'm going to go see Stephanie for a bit." he winks and walks out the door closing it behind him.

I have no idea where X is so I go to the bedroom and find some different clothes to wear. I pull on some black yoga pants for comfort and put on a tight black t-shirt. I rummage around for a zip-up hoodie because I can't keep taking X's, which reminds me I need to return the two others I borrowed. I pull out my curling iron and makeup from my backpack and go into the bathroom to doing some loose curls and touch up my makeup from earlier.

When I'm done, I sit on the bed and pull out my phone scrolling through nothingness to pass the time until X is done doing whatever he's doing.