Chapter 35
When Charlie opened her eyes, it took her a few seconds to understand why her body felt heavier than usual. Then she heard the snoring, and it definitely wasn’t coming from only one direction.
Someone was snoring in the hallway, somebody else through the wall, and another person so close by that at first she thought the sound was coming from inside the room.
Reeze was still asleep beside her, though, and for once he wasn’t actually the one responsible for the noise. And he really was asleep.
Charlie remained on her side and watched him for a while.
For the first time since she had come to Wallhalla, he seemed to have let go of the world completely.
His face was softer in sleep, his jaw no longer quite so tense, and his phone lay abandoned on the bedside table without him appearing to care about it in the slightest. The meeting the day before hadn’t solved anything.
Sunkholes were still out there and Dennis hadn’t disappeared simply because they had managed to steal a few hours of peace, but right now Reeze was sleeping so deeply that Charlie suspected somebody could demolish half the clubhouse without waking him.
Considering the past few days, it was probably a minor miracle, and she wasn’t going to be the one to ruin it.
She carefully slipped out of bed, pulled on her clothes and crept into the hallway, where she almost stepped on a prospect who had fallen asleep on the floor with a folded hoodie beneath his head.
Farther along, a pair of boots stuck out from beneath a bench, and a sound coming from one of the guest rooms made her quicken her pace before she could work out exactly what was happening in there.
Apparently, Wallhalla recovered from the previous night in much the same way they did everything else.
With minimal planning and maximum chaos.
Things didn’t improve when she reached the bottom of the stairs.
Empty beer cans covered almost every table, a half-eaten burger had somehow ended up on the pool table, and in one corner a hangaround was sleeping so deeply on the sofa that he didn’t even react when two other men tried to move the entire thing with him still lying on it.
Charlie was halfway across the room when Amanda emerged from the kitchen with a mug of coffee in one hand and an expression that made her opinion of mornings perfectly clear.
“A word of advice.”
Charlie stopped. “What?”
“Don’t speak to Mia before she’s had coffee.”
As if summoned by the warning, the door behind the bar opened and Mia appeared with her hair twisted into a messy bun and the expression of a woman approximately three minutes away from committing a serious crime. “If anyone says good morning, you can bury the body yourself.”
Amanda gave Charlie a satisfied nod. “See?”
Charlie burst out laughing, and somehow, before she really knew how it had happened, all three of them were standing there with rubbish bags, clearing away the remains of the previous evening.
Nobody had asked Charlie to help and Mia hadn’t given her any orders.
It had simply happened, and while they worked, the rest of the clubhouse slowly began coming back to life around them.
One man staggered towards the coffee machine with the expression of someone questioning every decision he had made in his adult life. Another was wandering around looking for his shoes, and from the sofa came a long, miserable groan. “Where the fuck am I?”
Someone looked up from his coffee. “Wallhalla.”
Silence followed for a few seconds. “Oh, fuck.”
Amanda snorted so hard she nearly dropped the beer cans she had just picked up, and Charlie was still laughing when the office door opened and Billy emerged.
She caught a glimpse of the woman behind him before she saw his expression and immediately had to bite her lip. The patchbunny looked as though she was already planning their future together.
Billy looked as though he was planning an escape route.
“See you later?” the woman asked, wrapping her arms around him.
“Absolutely.”
“You’ll call me?”
“Yep.”
“Do you have my number?”
Billy hesitated. Not for long. But long enough.
Amanda quickly turned away and became intensely interested in the rubbish bag she was holding.
“You are terrible people,” Billy muttered.
“We learnt from the best,” Mia replied without even looking up.
That finished Charlie off. She started laughing again as Billy managed to disentangle himself from the woman and headed straight for the coffee machine with the determination of a man whose continued survival depended entirely upon caffeine.
“Not a word,” he warned as he passed them.
“I haven’t said anything,” Charlie pointed out.
“You’re thinking out loud.”
“That sounds like a personal problem.”
Billy stopped and looked at her. “Reeze has ruined you.”
“That happened quickly,” Mia observed.
“She was probably damaged from the start.”
“Good morning, Billy,” Charlie said sweetly.
He gave her the finger and continued towards the coffee.
That was roughly when somebody on the sofa began to stir.
Tony opened his eyes first and stared around in confusion before Sissi woke up half sprawled across him, one arm still around his waist and apparently just as confused about why the rest of the world had chosen to exist this early.
Billy stopped halfway through a sip of coffee. Charlie saw the look.
“No,” Tony said immediately.
“I haven’t said anything.”
“You’re thinking out loud.”
“That sounds like a personal problem,” Charlie repeated.
Billy stared at her for a second before bursting out laughing. “I like her.”
“You’ve been saying that for days,” Amanda muttered.
Charlie carried on clearing up while the verbal abuse continued around the room.
Mia shouted at people with the same efficiency with which she handed out coffee, Amanda complained about the amount of rubbish despite the fact that nobody had asked her to help, and Tony attempted to escape from the sofa without waking Sissi enough for her to decide she wanted to follow him.
Only a few days earlier, Charlie would probably have seen nothing but the chaos. The beer cans, the noise, the half-naked people and the complete absence of anything resembling normal order.
Now she saw something else as well. Someone automatically brought coffee to the man who was still searching for his shoes.
One of the Assholes men started carrying empty bottles away without anyone asking him to, and when the hangaround on the sofa finally woke up, the same two men who had just tried to move the entire sofa with him on it helped him to his feet before immediately resuming their mockery over the fact that he hadn’t known where he was.
Around here, insults and consideration seemed to exist side by side in a way Charlie had never encountered before.
The same people who would fight for one another without hesitation could stand here the following morning arguing over who had knocked over a table, who had finished the coffee and why somebody’s shoe had ended up in the fridge.
It was still chaos.
Wallhalla would probably always be chaos. But it didn’t feel strange any more.
Somewhere beneath all the noise, the swearing and the completely insane people, Charlie had begun to see the family that had been there all along. And, much to her own surprise, she felt comfortable right in the middle of it.
Something was wrong. Reeze knew it before he even opened his eyes.
He lay somewhere between sleep and wakefulness while the feeling slowly crept closer, but there was no noise to explain it and no phone vibrating on the bedside table.
Just that vague awareness that something wasn’t right.
Then his hand moved across the mattress.
His fingers met cold fabric. His eyes snapped open.
The other side of the bed was empty, and the last remnants of sleep vanished so quickly it almost hurt.
Reason should have got there first. Charlie was an adult and they were inside a clubhouse full of people.
She could have gone to the bathroom, got herself some coffee, taken a shower or been caught downstairs by Mia.
There were a hundred perfectly reasonable explanations for why she wasn’t still in bed.
None of them was the first thing that hit him.
She’d left. Reeze was already sitting upright before he had time to get angry with himself. His gaze swept across the room even though he knew perfectly well she wasn’t hiding behind the chair or underneath the fucking table. Her clothes were gone. That shouldn’t have mattered.
It did. His chest tightened. “Fuck.”He dragged a hand over his face and tried to get his brain working properly.
This was ridiculous. Charlie had told him she was staying.
Not once, but several times. She had seen him bloody, furious and halfway out of his fucking mind, and she had still chosen to stay.
But old reflexes rarely gave a shit about logic.
People left. Eventually, they had enough.
Sooner or later they realised that life around him cost more than it gave back, and then they disappeared.
Then Billy’s voice came through the wall.
Reeze didn’t catch the words at first, only that loud, overly confident tone he could have recognised from a hundred metres away.
A second later, somebody laughed.Charlie.
Reeze closed his eyes. The relief came so quickly and completely that he sat there for a few seconds feeling like a fucking idiot.
She hadn’t left. She was downstairs in the clubhouse.And judging by the sound of it, she was making Billy’s morning considerably worse.
“...I’m just saying, some women can’t handle this,” he heard Billy say.
“No,” Charlie replied dryly. “I think the problem is that you think you’re much more impressive than you actually are.
” Laughter erupted.“What the fuck is that supposed to mean?”Charlie answered something Reeze didn’t catch because he was already out of bed and reaching for his jeans.
As he pulled them over his hips, he heard furniture scraping across the floor downstairs, followed by a curse and Mia announcing that the next person who entered her kitchen without permission would be personally introduced to her frying pan.
A normal morning at Wallhalla.And Charlie was right in the middle of it.
By the time Reeze came out into the hallway and headed downstairs, the smell of coffee reached him almost immediately.
The clubhouse looked like absolute shit after the previous night, which wasn’t exactly surprising, but he barely noticed any of it.
He only saw her. Charlie was standing by the bar with Mia and Amanda, a mug of coffee in one hand and a smile on her face, while Billy stood a few metres away trying to defend himself against accusations from just about everyone within hearing distance.She didn’t look like somebody planning to disappear.
She looked like she had been there for years.Charlie spotted him when he was almost across the room and her smile widened.
That was all it took. Reeze crossed the remaining distance, wrapped one arm around her waist and pulled her straight against him.
She made a startled little sound before both of his arms closed around her and he held her considerably tighter than the situation called for.
“Well, good morning to you too,” she laughed against his shoulder.Reeze didn’t answer.
Not immediately. He simply buried his face in her hair and breathed in her scent while his heart slowly stopped trying to beat its way out of his chest. After a few seconds, Charlie went still.
Her arms slid around him. Apparently, she didn’t need to know exactly what had happened.
It was enough that she understood something had.
“You’re weird,” she murmured.“Mm.”She pulled back just enough to look at him.
“Did you wake up and think I’d run away?
”Behind her, Amanda started laughing. Billy made a noise that sounded far too fucking triumphant.
Reeze lifted his head and gave them both the finger.
“That’s not a no,” Billy pointed out.“That,” Mia said as she reached for her coffee, “is exactly why men shouldn’t be allowed to make important decisions before their morning coffee.
”“I didn’t make a decision.”“No,” Charlie said.
“You panicked.”“I didn’t panic.”Billy laughed even harder.
“Brother, you came downstairs half-naked and threw yourself at her like she’d been missing for three fucking years.
”Reeze looked down at himself and realised he was, in fact, wearing nothing but jeans.
“Shut up.”“No.”Charlie laughed against his chest and Reeze decided he probably deserved every fucking word of it.
He still didn’t let her go.All around them, the clubhouse continued waking up.
Tony had finally managed to get off the sofa only to discover that Sissi wasn’t going to make his escape quite that easy.
Amanda continued gathering up the remains of the previous night while commenting on everybody’s life choices, and Mia attempted to keep both the kitchen and the people around it under control with varying degrees of success.
Reeze barely noticed any of it. Charlie was still in his arms. That was apparently the only thing his body gave a shit about right now.
She had said she would stay, and she had.Still, a few seconds beside an empty bed had been enough to drag something out of him that he hadn’t even wanted to admit to himself.
He was afraid of losing her. Not because Dennis might win.
Not because the club might become too much.
Not even because somebody might force her away from him.
He was afraid that one morning she would look at everything surrounding him and decide that none of it was worth the price.Charlie tilted her head back and looked at him.
“I’m here.”Two words. That was all. Reeze ran his hand slowly over her back and nodded.
“I know.”And this time, he actually tried to believe it.
Sunkholes could wait a few minutes. So could Dennis.
Everything outside the gates would still be there once the coffee was finished and the clubhouse was properly awake.
Right now, Reeze was going to stand there with Charlie in his arms and let Billy be a fucking arsehole in the background. For once, that was enough.