“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 telltaleoofof 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 outhow 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 wasyou, 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 allowedon 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.”
