Bass walked through the door to his friend's apartment and stepped through. He was more than used to the maze that was Miles' apartment and was able to travel through it easily, without thinking, to get to the light switch.
That was, he was usually able to get through it.
"Dammit." He muttered to himself as he stubbed his toe on something in the dark.
What the hell had Miles left on the floor for him to trip over?
Bass carefully stepped over the obstacle, whatever it was, and then continued walking, only to accidentally step on another mystery object on his way.
He fell forward, and dropped the bag holding the breakfast that he had brought for him and Miles as the coffees he had been carrying spilled onto him, burning his chest.
He barely managed to catch himself as he reached an arm out to the couch… Only that wasn't couch that he was feeling.
Charlie woke up with a start as she felt a hand grab her.
She turned and could just barely make out a set of eyes in the darkness as she felt the hand leave her body.
She heard a distinctly male voice mutter out, "Shit."
"Who the hell are you?" Charlie demanded in a panicked tone as she bolted into an upright position.
"Who the hell am I?" Bass asked incredulously as he set the coffee tray down on the table where it wouldn't be able to do any more damage to him. "Who the hell are you?"
He moved to get around the couch, going to go head for the light switch so that he could figure out who the hell this girl was.
Charlie saw him heading towards her and quickly reached for the nearest object that she could use as a weapon. Unfortunately for her, when she reached out all that she could find was a remote.
Still, it was better than nothing and she wasn't about to go down without a fight.
Bass didn't make it two steps before he was being hit roughly over and over.
As he brought his arm up to guard where he had already been hit in the face, he complained, "Ow! What the hell? …Who the hell are you even?"
The hits just kept coming and so he decided to raise his voice a little.
"Just stop!" Bass insisted. "Calm the hell down for a second."
When that didn't work, he decided on a different approach.
"Miles!" He shouted out loudly. "There's a crazy person in your home!"
"I'm the crazy person?" Charlie demanded as she stopped attacking for a moment, but kept the remote in hand, ready to defend herself. "You're the weirdo who broke in here and started groping me while I was asleep!"
The lights flickered on then as a gruff voice questioned, "What the hell is going on in here?"
Charlie turned her head to see Miles standing by the light switch in the entrance of the room, barely half-dressed, and looking incredibly unimpressed. But then again, she hadn't seen him look anything but unimpressed since she had arrived.
"What's going on?" Bass echoed in disbelief. "What's going on is that I practically burnt a nipple off spilling coffee all over myself while I tripped over all the shit you left everywhere on the floor-" He paused for a moment to gesture dramatically at where the backpack that he had stubbed his toes on and the extra pillow from the couch that he had tripped over. "And then this crazy person you've got sleeping on your couch tried to beat me to death with… A TV remote? …Oh, that's just perfect, Miles."
He let out a dry laugh as he looked between the half-dressed mystery girl, who was still clutching the remote as if she was ready to strike again at any moment, and his friend.
Charlie couldn't believe what she was hearing as she turned to stare at Miles. He couldn't be buying this, could he?
"You have got to be kidding me," she insisted before turning her attention back to the over-dramatic intruder. "You can't seriously be trying to play the victim right now."
"You're the one who attacked me," he retorted. "So, yeah, I'm pretty sure that does make me the victim. The victim of your insanity!"
"You're the one who was trying to grope me in my sleep!" Charlie argued. "Excuse me for defending myself."
"Wait, what?" Miles asked as he turned his gaze back to his friend.
Bass couldn't believe that Miles actually seemed to be wondering if this girl was telling the truth.
"What? Really Miles?" He asked. "Do you really think that I just went, oh look, a girl and decided to grope some random sleeping girl on your couch? …Come on, you've got to give me a little more credit than that. I tripped over these damn pillows and put a hand out to catch myself. How the hell was I supposed to know that there was some random girl sleeping on your couch? Who even is she?"
"Alright, just calm down, Bass," Miles told him in an exasperated tone. "This is Charlie."
"Charlie?" Bass asked a little hesitantly. "As in Charlotte..? As in..?"
He trailed his words off, figuring that things could end disastrously if he ended up accidentally letting it slip that Miles was her dad if she didn't already know… If this even was the same Charlie.
"As in my daughter-niece?" Miles filled in the blanks for him. "Yeah, that'd be the one."
Bass turned his attention back to the girl and looked her up and down once again, this time taking her in a little more since he knew now that she was apparently Miles' daughter.
Charlie felt more than a little uncomfortable as Miles' weird friend looked her over. In what world did finding out that a girl was your friend's daughter mean that you should check her out?
She didn't want to be in the same room with him while she was only half-dressed for any longer. So she bent down and grabbed her backpack before heading out of the room in the direction of the washroom that she had found during her snooping the night before.
Bass pressed a cold ice-pack to the side of his face as he leaned back against Miles' kitchen counter.
"Look, man, your daughter is hot. I mean, she's significantly more attractive than you, so congratulations on making that. But she's not that hot, okay? And no offence, but the joy of your company was not worth getting pummelled by a remote-wielding lunatic over."
"Come on, Bass," Miles insisted. "She thought you were groping her in her sleep. You probably scared her half to death."
"I scared her?" Bass asked as he shook his head in disbelief. "...Why didn't you tell me that she was coming?"
"I didn't know," Miles told him. "I didn't even know that she knew about me. She just showed up at the bar last night, all over-enthusiastic and pushy."
Bass didn't get the chance to respond before he heard footsteps approaching and looked up to the doorway.
Seconds later, Charlie walked through the door and Bass suddenly changed his mind about his earlier comment about her not being that hot.
Now that she'd had time to get herself ready and was dressed in a simple pair of blue jeans and a tight grey tank top that rode up an inch or two above the waist of her jeans, all Bass could do was stare at her helplessly as she strode into the room.
That is until she sat down and reached for the bag of food that was sitting in the middle of the kitchen table. Bass's opinion of her very quickly changed back as she pulled his breakfast sandwich out of the bag.
"Oh come on, now she's eating my breakfast?" Bass complained in a tone that came off admittedly whiny as he turned to look helplessly over at his friend. "Miles."
Charlie froze with the food halfway to her lips before setting it back down on the table and pushing it a ways away from herself.
She'd had a little time for her thoughts to catch up to her as she had gotten ready and, now that she was fully clothed, she had managed to calm down over the Bass thing. In fact she had even reached a point where she was willing to admit, only to herself of course, that she had overreacted a little.
Miles looked between his food and the other two with a torn expression for a moment before he ripped the muffin that Bass has brought him in half and reluctantly handed part of it to Charlie.
A few seconds passed in silence before Bass decided to give up on the ice and moved to join them at the table.
As he picked up his sandwich, Charlie commented, "Sorry... About your face."
Bass wasn't convinced that she sounded all that sorry, but he gave her a small nod of his head anyways.
Charlie was just about to finish off her half of Miles' muffin when her cell phone began to ring loudly.
She groaned a little to herself, already suspecting who was calling, as she pulled the phone out of the pocket of her jeans. She looked down at the screen and was disappointed to find that she had been right about who was calling as 'Home' flashed across the screen.
Charlie hit the ignore button and then set her phone back down on the table before resuming eating.
"Shouldn't you be answering that?" Miles questioned, presumably having seen who was calling.
"I'm not really in the mood to talk to my mom right now," Charlie informed him. "I'll call her later."
Miles didn't seem thrilled by her answer.
A couple of brief minutes passed before Charlie's phone began to ring again.
She was just about to hit the ignore button when she saw her brother's name on the screen. Even though she knew he must be with their mom, she couldn't make herself hit the ignore button. She didn't want Danny to worry about her, so she was willing to bite the bullet.
"Hello?" She asked nervously as she brought the phone to her ear after hitting the answer button.
"Where are you, Charlie?" Her brother asked, skipping right over the formalities.
"You have to promise not to freak out first," she insisted.
"Fine," he agreed, sounding a little reluctant to her ears.
"...I'm in Chicago," she admitted before biting down on her lip as she awaited her brother's reaction.
"Look, Mom's hovering over my shoulder expecting me to tell her where you are and I'm pretty sure that she knows I know, so if you don't want her to find out then you'd better tell me now before she rips the phone out of my hand," Danny responded.
Charlie ran a hand through her hair, attempting to untangle an imaginary knot, before frowning as she told her brother, "I don't want to get you in trouble, so I guess just put her on the phone."
"Are you sure?" He questioned.
"Yeah," she responded nervously, nodding her head a little despite the fact that she was talking through a phone.
"Charlie?" Her mother's voice came through the phone a moment later. "Where are you? Why aren't you answering my calls?"
Charlie took a deep breath before admitting, "I'm in Chicago... With Miles."
Miles waited a moment, wondering what Rachel could possibly be saying about him, before Charlie hesitated for a moment and glanced up at him as she brought the phone away from her ear.
"She wants to talk to you," she informed him.
"No." Miles responded bluntly.
He hadn't spoken to Rachel in over twenty years and they really had not left things in good standing. There was no way that he was going to let Charlie just stroll in and change that.
She needed to get out of here. It was morning. She had agreed that, if she spent the night, she'd leave in the morning. So what the hell was she still doing here, holding out her phone to him, refusing to take no for an answer?
How was it that the kid had been there for less than a day and had spent most of that time sleeping and was already a major pain in his ass? She needed to leave. She needed to go as soon as he could get her out the door.
Miles stared disapprovingly at the phone for a few more seconds before he realized that Charlie wasn't planning on giving up.
He cursed under his breath before snatching the cell out of her hand and bringing it up to his ear.
"What?" He questioned.
"What the hell is she doing there?" Rachel demanded, getting straight to the point.
"How am I supposed to know?" He asked. "You're the one who knows her. You should have seen this coming before you told her the truth about me."
"So what? She just ran away to you?" Rachel questioned.
"I don't know," he responded. "I guess. She just showed up at the bar last night with a backpack, expecting some kind of welcome home party. What was I supposed to do? Throw her out on her ass? She doesn't exactly seem street-smart to me."
"I don't know what you should have done," Rachel admitted. "Look, Miles. Just please don't hurt her."
There was a brief silence before Rachel spoke again.
"Can you give the phone back to her?"
Charlie took her phone from Miles and then told her mother, "I'm back."
"How long are you staying with him?" Rachel asked.
"I don't know," Charlie told her. "But I'm not coming home anytime soon."
"Yes you are," Miles interrupted. "You said, if I let you stay over last night, that you'd leave in the morning. It's morning. You're going home."
Charlie ignored that comment as she told her mother, "I don't know how Danny can stand to live there anymore."
"That's not fair and you know it, Charlie," Rachel insisted. "Look, if you want to stay with Miles for a while, then I can't stop you. But don't make this about trying to run away from the family you already have."
"Don't make it sound like I'm running away from Dad," Charlie insisted. "He's not the problem. You are."
She didn't wait for her mother's response before hanging up on her.
"You're going home," Miles insisted as he watched Charlie set her phone back down on the table.
He wasn't going to let her just barge into his life and start calling all the shots. He was already annoyed enough that she'd made him talk with Rachel after all of his years of carefully avoiding her. The last thing that he needed was to get dragged into the middle of a fight between the kid and her parents.
"You don't know what it's like at home right now," Charlie argued.
"You're right. I don't," he agreed. "Because that's not my problem. My problem is that you've been here for less than a day and you're already creating problems for me."
"Already?" Charlie asked hopefully.
Dammit. Of course that was what she got out of that. Where had this kid gotten her eagerness from? It certainly wasn't from him and he doubted that Rachel had anything to do with it. It must have been Ben's optimism wearing off on her.
"That's not what I meant," he told her frustratedly. "And I'm pretty sure you know that."
"Don't you care at all that I'm your kid?" She demanded with damn tears in her eyes. "Or that I'm your brother's kid? Or whatever the hell it is that you tell yourself? …What? You're just going to send me home to go be miserable while you go back to pretending that I don't exist?"
Miles was about three seconds away from getting up and slamming his head against the nearest wall in frustration. He bet that the kid didn't even realize how dirty she was fighting as she stared at him with those tear-filled eyes that reminded him so much of Rachel. All of her reminded him so much of Rachel, now that he got a look at her and it was bringing up a lot of memories that he had been struggling to supress for years.
After a long pause as they each stared the other down, Miles realized that she wasn't planning on giving in any time soon. Dammit. He was really going to have to get a better solution than just giving in for the sake of not having to deal with her getting too emotional.
"Fine," he told her angrily. "If it'll shut you up, then you can stay for a few nights."
The wide grin that immediately formed on her lips told him that she had probably just taken that as a full invitation to permanently move in and officially change her address.
"But that's it," he added. "Don't get too comfortable because you're not staying here long. I mean it this time."
Charlie was ecstatic. Even if he said that it was just for a few nights, he was still letting her stay.
That was a few nights away from the drama of her home life... A few nights in Chicago, where she had wanted to travel for years even before finding out about Miles... That was a few nights to try and change Miles' mind.
She couldn't hold back a huge grin as she rose from her chair and loudly told him, "You won't regret this, I swear! Thank you!"
Miles thought that he already was regretting it as the kid bounded at him and babbled excitedly.
"I'm not a hugging person," he insisted in a futile attempt to stop her.
It was already too late though. She didn't seem to care about his argument, or the fact that he was still sitting down with his arms crossed over his chest, as she wrapped her arms tightly around his neck.
"And yet you're hugging me anyways," Miles muttered to himself in complaint.
He looked up to see that Bass was smirking over at him and quickly shot his friend a stern glare.
A/N: Please read and review! A huge thanks goes out to Sexy Meat Pies, RevolutionReader, decadenceofmysoul, LemonSupreme, emmacv, and ToTheSkyAndBack for reviewing the first chapter! :)