AN: Sheesh, to the guest reviewer who seems to be seeing misogyny, in everything little thing. I don't actually care if you feel sorry for Charlie or not, honestly I don't care. But the two chapters from Charlie talking to Quinn and Max happened within the space of twenty-four hours. Like if you're searching for everything little thing that someone does wrong and not correct. I stated simply that trust isn't something that you can force, what would make you happy? Seriously Santana to beat up on him till she felt better? I just find it slightly amusing that you're ignoring that Santana cheated too, in fact no one really commented on it not that I thought anyone would. Shit happens, the world is messy, not everything is black and white so take a breath and continue to read and review.


Santana shook her head as she looked at her phone and made her way towards Charlie's apartment. She was trying not to worry about the text from Bela, which, judging by the capital letters and various emoji's, suggested that Charlie had lost his mind. It was enough to get her up and make her drive all the way to Charlie's apartment to check on her babies, and maybe apologize for being petty a few days ago.

If there was one thing she didn't want to do, it was ruin Max's relationship with this father. It was finally getting to a place where Max was back to his old self. It was probably for the best that they hadn't donated all of the things that Charlie had given him. Whether or not she trusted Charlie to keep it in his pants was a separate issue and she wasn't going to pass her distrust onto her son.

She finally makes her way to his door and knocks on it once before she hears a thud and a groan. "Charlie—"

The door swings open and Bela grins at her mother while practically falling on her, "Mom! Take us home!"

Santana blinked hugging her daughter and frowning, usually Max and CJ would be right behind her but they were nowhere to be found. "Where are your—"

"Bela! Is it straight? This thing is heavy, why the hell didn't I just pay them to put it up for me?" Charlie barks grunting as he attempts to balance the large picture. "Come on! Pictures don't hang themselves."

Santana raises a brow and pokes her head into the apartment and quickly spots both of her sons passed out on the couch, and now that she had gotten a good look at Bela, her daughter looked absolutely exhausted. She bites her lip and turns to Charlie, her jaw dropping at the rather large photo that he was attempting to hang on his wall. "What the hell is that?"

Charlie turns and flashes his ex-wife a smile, "It came today! The picture that we took, doesn't it look amazing? I think it does. We don't have any family photos or at least I don't have any recent ones so I took it and had this done with it."

Santana stared at the family photo for a moment, it was the one that they had chosen for the cover, and it still looked like they were a family. "Has anyone told you how weird you are? Also, you're going to hurt yourself," she said after a moment.

"My body is insured for fifty million dollars, I'm okay."

"Which is less than the ninety million that is on the rest of your contract," Santana reminded him. She rolls her eyes, it's not her job to remind him to be careful anymore, and she turns to Bela. "This can't be why you called me? Your dad does silly things like this all the time."

"Hey, at least I don't play with fireworks."

"That's a flat-out lie." Santana snorts. Charlie loves fireworks just as much as a regular nine-year-old boy. "Care to tell me why our kids say you're torturing them?"

Charlie blinks and turns to Santana before looking at Bela, "You made me run laps. And then run soccer drills, and now my leg hurts. Max had to do push-ups if he didn't box-out and get the rebound. CJ—well he just ran around after all of us." She reminds him.

Santana turned to look at Charlie who didn't look ashamed at all, "Well?"

"I don't know what you want me to say, CJ woke me up this morning so I strapped him in his stroller, you know the one that I can run in and we went for a 10 mile run, got back, gave CJ a bath, made breakfast, something healthy, no bacon, and then told the kids that I needed to work out today. Max thought it would be a good idea to use the practice facilities, so we did. I had Bela running drills, and Max getting rebounds while I worked out watching them of course. Then afterwards, I got them ice cream and took them to the zoo, then we came home I made something healthy for dinner and here we are." As far as he was concerned he had done his duty as their father.

"Do you see what we've had to put up with?" Bela flops against the couch. It wasn't fair that all of her friends had normal dads who sat around and watched TV all day.

Santana smirks, "Well, you're the one that wants to join the soccer team, which means you need to be fit enough to play, and you want to be one of the better players don't you? That requires sacrifice—CJ on the other hand is two Charlie. What the hell did he do all day?"

"He ran around the practice facility till one of the guys brought over one of those like small nets, then he did what Max did until he got tired and decided to crawl on me while I was doing some yoga."

"You were doing Yoga?"

"I'm getting old, so I started Yoga and Pilates, I need to keep limber and this helps," Charlie grunts and slides the photo to the ground, he'd have to make sure that CJ didn't accidentally knock it over or something. "I got my shoulder fixed, I don't want to be repairing parts of my body during my time off."

"Please take us home." Bela begs.

"And undermine the fact that your father is feeding you all something other than jelly beans and bacon. Think again." She chuckles softly at her daughter's look of betrayal. "Why don't you go get cleaned up for bed, I'll help your father put CJ and Max down."

Bela groans but follows Santana's instruction with a glower that would almost be intimidating if Santana hadn't perfected the look herself.

Santana rolls her eyes and looks at Charlie for a moment but he had seemingly given up and had headed to the fridge. It figured, at least now she'd be able to talk to him, and get things back to what their definition of normal was. She picks up CJ in one swoop, grunting as her not-so-much-of-a-baby-anymore-baby flops against her like dead weight. She makes her way up to his room and settles him into bed without so much as a whimper. She shakes her head, glad that he now seems to be able to sleep like the dead before making her way back to the front room where Max is still curled up on the couch. "Come on, Max. Let's go to bed."

"I'm not tired." He mumbles, but rises to his feet anyway. She's pretty sure he doesn't even open his eyes and she leads him up to his own room where he settles back into a restful slumber. Poking her head into Bela's room quickly she smiles when she notices her daughter asleep on her bed, it hadn't taken long for that to happen and she smiles.

It paints a decent picture and it just reminds her of how good Charlie is with them, she would need to apologize to him so that they could get back to their normal behavior. The kids were the most important thing between them and as much as she wanted to be mad at him, they were his children and even when they were being terrible little shits, they still brought her so much joy. She closes the door to Bela's room and heads back to the kitchen pausing when she notices that Charlie's gone and heads to his room, knocking on the door once and opening it. "Charlie?" She blinks and stares at him from where he's got an ice-pack on his shoulder and winces for him. "You overdid it again didn't you? This is why the doctors probably told you to keep up with the exercises that they gave you."

Charlie flashes her a small smile, "I'll be fine, Max wanted to dunk on the adult nets so I picked him up and tweaked it. I'll have the team doctor stop by tomorrow so they can check it out," he said with a wave of his hand.

"Don't be ridiculous. Lay down and let me help."

He eyed her skeptically. "You want to give me a massage?"

"Want to? No. But you're in pain and we both know that fixing it now is going to be better than you rolling around in pain all night long."

"This isn't some trick where you say one thing and then you'll call the kids and they'll jump on top of me, right?"

Santana snorts at that. "Are you kidding? All three of our kids are dead to the world, thanks for that by the way."

Charlie studies her for a moment, these things generally ended up with sex, but he had made up his mind that he wasn't going to try Santana back through sex, he just had no idea how to do it. He had always had her, and now that she was gone he didn't know what he had done in the beginning to get past her defenses. So instead he flashes her a small smile, "Well, if they're asleep they can't complain that they're bored." He winces as he decides to lay down on his bed, this wasn't the proper protocol but he lived in an apartment, sure it had plenty of bedrooms for the kids, but that didn't mean that he could fill it with a bunch of stuff that he didn't need.

She straddles his back and gets to work. Years of being married to him has made her a practical professional at soothing the sore muscles in his back, but as she kneads and digs at the tight spaces in his back she sighs. "I am sorry about what I said the other day. I shouldn't have said that—especially in front of Max."

Charlie tenses and Santana mentally prepares herself to be berated. It is what she deserves. They are supposed to be the adults here, and snide remarks don't help any of the kids feel like they have a stable family relationship. After a beat, he blows out a breath. "It's fine. I probably deserved it."

She cocks a brow and slowly but firmly rubs out a particularly tight knot. "It's not like you just to roll over whenever I piss you off."

"Yeah? Well after all of this, let's just say that I get that you still hate me sometimes."

"There's a difference between me being hurt and angry with you and me hating you. I—we need to do better so we don't show that anger in front of the kids. They'll think we hate each other and with our luck it'll end up on the Enquirer. "

Charlie laughed at this, and grunts when Santana hits a particularly tight spot. "It would help if you trusted me."

Santana pauses at that statement, and frowns debating on how to handle the situation. She didn't want to start a yelling match between them, things had been semi-decent between them lately. "I—"

"So tell me what I have to do to earn your trust back?" Charlie says after a moment. "I screwed up, I know I did, and I—I want to earn your trust back. You might not want to be with me again—but I need you to trust me. I want you to trust me."

Santana sighed and slid off his back, watching as he rolls over so he could look her in the eye. It hurt, he was picking at a wound that hadn't really begun to heal. He had always been sort of a dick like that, but there was an earnestness in his eyes that she had never been able to resist. "I'll always want to be with you." She admits with another sigh, "that's the problem."

He looks confused and she feels her cheeks burn whether with embarrassment or something else, she isn't sure. "Even after—everything?"

"I wish I could just get over you." She shakes her head, suddenly unable to meet his eyes. She shifts on the bed so she can lie next to him on the large king sized bed.

Charlie feels his own heart surge and follows Santana's lead, avoiding looking at her to hopefully get her to open up. He had never thought that he even had a shot, not after everything that had happened. But lying next to Santana, staring up at the ceiling almost felt natural. "I'm never going to get over you." He blurts out, laying his cards on the table. It's a fool's hope that she could ever feel the same, but he's never been accused of being bright.

"We're quite a pair, aren't we?"

He waits for a minute, wondering if she's going to say anything else. "What can I do?"

It's a little too serious for Santana, and she laughs to diffuse the tension. "Well maybe shaving those pubes off your face would help." It's a joke and something she doesn't expect him to actually follow through with.

But Charlie isn't about to make the same mistake twice. Santana had given him an ultimatum before and he had tried to call her bluff. He stands up and makes his way to the bathroom, ignoring the indignant grunt of surprise that Santana gives him at the movement.

"What are you doing?"

"Shaving." He says like it's the most obvious thing in the world. To him, it is. He disappears into the bathroom, rummaging around for the electric razor that his mom had given him for Christmas a few years ago.

Santana's jaw drops, but she shakes her head. "Well you can wait to go see a professional. You're awful when it comes to shaving off your face-pubes."

He steps back out into the bedroom, razor in hand and points it at Santana. "No. I didn't listen to you once and I'm not going to let it happen again."

"Charlie—"

He starts the razor and despite the fact that he's not looking at a mirror, puts the buzzing blade against the base of his neck, swiping upward slowly and allowing the device to trim the thick swatch of hair.

Santana watched him he had never been any good at shaving, a skill that Russell should have taught him. She half expected him to have a bunch of nicks along his face soon enough, and the razor burn that usually came with his attempts to shave. "Sue's going to murder you." When he doesn't listen to her she gets off the bed to stop him. It was close enough to the season and he had interviews and things to do and there would be pictures. "Charlie, stop. Go see a professional." She bites her lip; he looks absolutely ridiculous with a huge portion of his beard shaved off. "Preferably before the children see you and Bela decides to humiliate you and put it on Instagram."

"We should ground her, she's far too young for Instagram." Charlie grumbles looking at himself. He did look funny. He makes a note to text Dave if he knew a barber who could make house calls. There was no way he could go out looking like this. "I'm serious Santana, I want to earn your trust back anything I need to do. I'll do it."

"Get someone to help you shave your beard, and maybe then we can talk."

"You promise?" He puts down the razor, checking just to be sure.

"I—" she sighs and looks at him reaching out to touch his arm. "I promise."