Chapter 3
Chapter three
“Uncle Sergio! Wake up!” Henry shouts, kneeing Sergio in the balls and jolting him awake.
Sergio shoots up, confused and wincing as he grabs his aforementioned balls.
Gus hisses and runs out from underneath the bed and bolts out the door.
This is not the knock-down tackle he was bracing himself for.
Though given the pointiness of Henry’s knee, it does perhaps hurt more than getting laid out by four hulking security guards.
That said, they must have hit him pretty hard for him to wake up in his own bed and not remember anything that happened after midnight.
“Henry, my boy,” he manages to say through gritted teeth. “Good rule of thumb. Let adults sleep in on New Year’s Day.”
“That’s tomorrow, silly!” Henry laughs.
“No. That’s definitely today,” Sergio says, still wincing.
I should know, I had a rough night last night.
Which, now that he thinks about it, if he was drunk enough to black out and forget the rest of the evening, shouldn’t he be feeling worse than he does right now?
Well, worse than he does outside of getting kicked in the balls for the second day in a row by a five-year-old’s knobby knee.
He really is going to need to talk to Henry about that if this is going to be his standard wake-up call for the week.
Or maybe the solution is to lock his door.
Too bad he hadn’t done that the night before.
“Come on, Uncle Sergio,” Henry pleads, pulling at Sergio’s arm. “Dad said to come get you. Breakfast is almost ready.”
“Is it another big spread like yesterday?”
Henry stops pulling and looks at Sergio, his face scrunched up in bewilderment. “You weren’t here for breakfast yesterday.”
“Yes, Henry, I was,” Sergio says impatiently.
He’s in no mood for whatever little game Henry is playing.
It would have been nice to be able to sleep in today before he goes on his apology tour for last night’s foibles.
His focus is on Jeremy, but second, he needs to talk to Holden, who likely had to bail him out of jail if Chadwick decided to be an asshole and press charges.
Oh, shit. Maybe it’s not Henry that’s confused.
He pulls the kid in close to his chest. “How mad is your dad at me this morning?”
“Daddy’s not mad at you.”
“No? What about Mommy?”
“Mommy’s always mad at you.” Henry giggles.
“Okay, that’s true,” Sergio says, lightly laughing along with him. “Did you wake up your Uncle Adrien yet?”
“No.” Henry continues to giggle as Sergio tickles his side.
“Good. Go wake him up like you did me again, please,” he says, then remembering his brother quit on him the day before, adds, “Maybe put a little extra kick into him for me, would ya?”
“Okay!” Henry yells as he jumps out of Sergio’s arms and off the bed, throwing his thumbs into the air as he then goes thundering down the hall.
Sergio waits until he hears the telltale oof of Adrien being woken up in Henry’s special manner before he rises and exits the room.
He smiles and snickers to himself, trying to figure out how he even got to bed last night clad in his sweatpants and T-shirt.
It’s not the first time he’s woken up somewhere, unsure of how he got there.
But he is sure Holden and Adrien will be more than happy to tease him about it as they retell the drama of the evening over coffee and breakfast before hitting the slopes again for another day of skiing.
Once downstairs, the reception Sergio gets from Rose is as chilly as it was the day before.
Clearly, Henry hadn’t picked up on his parents being upset with Sergio’s antics last night.
That’s fair, he reasons. They were likely hiding it from Henry.
No use telling a five-year-old his favorite uncle is a complete degenerate who punches Olympic gold medalists—no matter how much they deserved it—in the face.
“Good morning, shithead!” Holden says, loud and bright, as Sergio trips once again over Gus underfoot.
“Goddamn it, Gus!” he yells.
“Hey! Don’t yell at my cat,” Rose scolds, picking Gus up and kissing the space between his ears before she places him on the nearby couch and then moves back into the kitchen.
“Sorry,” he says to her, but doesn’t mean it. He turns back to Holden, “And, sorry about last night as well. I hope I didn’t cause too much damage. I’ll pay you back whatever I owe you if you had to bail me out or something?”
“Bail you out?” Holden questions.
“Money isn’t going to fix this,” Rose says, taking plates from the cabinet.
Sergio, attempting to move the Gus incident behind them, turns on the charm. He grabs the plates from her and hopes it doesn’t fail him today like it did yesterday. Maybe this time she’ll let him drink his coffee. “Lemme get that.”
“Thanks,” she says, avoiding his eye contact before she spins around and whips him across the chin with her full, red ponytail.
“Listen,” Sergio continues as he goes about setting the table. “I am really sorry about last night. I was drunk.”
“You weren’t that drunk,” Rose says.
“I obviously was if I punched someone,” Sergio says with a laugh, trying to lighten the mood.
“Punched someone?” Holden flips a pancake, then looks over his shoulder at Sergio. His eyebrows rise, and his lips quirk up at the corners. “Maybe you were drunk.”
“Yeah, I punched Chadwick Levinson last night. Did you all not see that?”
“Sergio, what are you talking about?” Rose asks him.
Confused, he takes a seat, dropping his task of setting the table. “Last night,” he says, holding his hands out in front of him, palms up. “I punched Chadwick Levinson for insulting Jeremy.”
“Umm … that was you, mate,” Holden says slowly, placing a pot of coffee on the table that Sergio begins to pour a cup from.
“What?”
“Yeah,” Rose says, taking the full mug of coffee he poured out of his hand. He frowns and starts pouring another. “You were the asshole who insulted Jeremy last night.”
“Okay, I may have been thoughtless—”
“You’re always thoughtless,” Adrien says as he enters the kitchen with Henry dangling upside down from his shoulders, laughing in delight.
“That’s for sure,” Rose says and steals the second cup of coffee as well, then holds it out to Adrien as he places Henry back down on the ground.
Sergio, frustrated, pours yet another cup. All of this is feeling way too familiar for him, and he’s starting to think everyone is fucking with him, which he supposes he deserves. “But I punched the guy!”
“Sergio, dude, you didn’t punch anybody last night.
And definitely not Chadwick Levinson. That man isn’t even allowed on our property,” Holden says, delivering plates of pancakes, bacon, and sliced fresh fruit.
Rose points at Holden, as if punctuating his statement about Chadwick’s ban from their haven in the Adirondacks.
She then takes Sergio’s latest mug of coffee and places it in front of where Holden takes a seat.
“I did!” Sergio practically shouts. “At the New Year’s Eve party!”
“Sergio, the party’s not until tonight,” Holden says solemnly.
“What? How? It was last night.” He pulls his phone from his sweatpants pocket, ready to show them that they’re all wrong. When he looks at it, he gets the shock of his life. There, right beneath the time, eight-thirty am, is the date, December thirty-first.
“Alright, quit fucking around, Sergio.” Holden laughs and mercifully hands Sergio back his cup of coffee. “Here, it looks like you need this more than I do.” He then claps him on the back. “Eat up! We’re gonna need all the calories we can get for the slopes today.”
Once on the slopes, Sergio starts to wonder if yesterday was all a dream.
No one has any recollection of the events of yesterday as he seems to.
But he does remember taking pictures, documenting the whole day.
Most notably, he had snapped a few shots of himself and Adrien from the chairlift he finds himself perched on beside his brother again right now.
He pulls his GoPro out of his pocket, sure that he’ll find photographic evidence of the existence of yesterday in the camera’s memory bank.
“What the fuck,” he mutters as he flips through the photos, finding no trace of the previous day’s activities. Did someone erase them?
“What the fuck, what?” Adrien asks, sounding exhausted. “You’ve been weird all day.”
Sergio starts shaking his camera as if, like a magic eight ball, the photos will appear to tell him his fate. “The photos I took yesterday! Where the fuck are they?”
“They’re on your work camera, the EOS. Not your GoPro. Why would you even think you could find them there?”
“Not the fashion shoot from two days ago!” Sergio says, frustrated. “The ones I took of you yesterday from this lift while we were skiing.”
“Sergio, what are you talking about? We didn’t go skiing yesterday.”
“Yes, we did!”
“No, we didn’t!”
“We did!” Sergio shouts, his voice escalating louder and louder the longer this conversation goes on. The two teenagers in the chairlift in front of them turn and look at Sergio like he has two heads. He flips them off, but they continue to stare and watch the show, whispering to each other.
“Sergio,” Adrien says gently, and grabs the camera from Sergio’s shaking hands, then places it in his coat pocket for safekeeping.
Which is a smart call, considering Sergio is two seconds away from throwing it into the trees.
“We didn’t go skiing yesterday. We woke up, we did the Dior photoshoot, we hopped on a plane, and we came here.
Holden and Henry picked us up, we had dinner, you insulted Jeremy, and we all went to bed.
Are you having some kind of mental mind snap I need to know about? ”
“Pfft. As if you’d care even if I did. You quit on me yesterday.”
Adrien shifts in his seat uncomfortably. “I didn’t quit on you yesterday.”