*This chapter contains multimedia relevant to the plot*

Carter felt high on something new as he got home, after his date with Johnny.

He just couldn't shake the dumb smile off his face, nor did he really want to. As he stepped into the living room, he found his mom lying on the couch, with Tony's arm loosely draped around her shoulders while they watched TV.

"Hi, honey," she greeted him, reaching for the remote on Tony's lap to pause their show.

Carter stopped on his way to look at her. "Hey."

"Hey," Tony returned.

"Seth came over today," Carter's mom said.

"What did he want?"

"He's still here, actually," Abby told her son. "I said you were out, but he said he'd wait."

Carter frowned. "He's upstairs?" He asked. His mother nodded. "I didn't see his car outside."

"I think he walked," Abby said.

That was strange.

Carter walked around the couch to reach the stairs and hopped up the steps to the first floor. He heard animated talk from inside Luca and Frankie's room as he walked to his own. Upon opening the door, his eyebrows furrowed further in confusion. It was empty.

The bathroom door was open and the lights were out when he passed it, so Seth couldn't have gone there. Taking a step back into the hallway Carter looked over his shoulder to the door across from his. Bella's bedroom door.

He heard voices—plural—from the other side. Something in his chest sunk unpleasantly when he heard a female giggle followed by a male chuckle. He knew that second voice.

Without thinking, Carter stepped toward Bella's room and twisted his hand on the doorknob. As the door swung open, everything appeared to play out in three distinct stages.

First, Carter took in the scene before him like it was something happening on a screen, not real at all. Bella was lying on her own bed, on her back, and a second body was sprawled over her. Their lips were connected and it was nearly impossible to define where one body ended and the other began. Seth's leather jacket was discarded by the floor, next to both their shoes, and his hand was hidden beneath Bella's top. It was all intimately familiar.

Second, probably immediately after Carter opened the door, their heads turned to see him standing there. Confusion, shock and horror followed one after the other, before stage three erupted.

Carter let go of Bella's door, like he had been burned. He felt like he'd been burned, for some reason. At the same time, Seth jumped away from Bella, as though lightening had struck him.

"What the fuck," Carter spoke evenly. It was like his voice hadn't had time to catch up to the tornado inside his head.

Seth picked his jacket up from the floor with one hand, extending the other one in front of himself like one would to show a growling dog they were harmless.

"I can explain this."

"What the actual fuck?" Carter repeated, louder this time. "How?" He demanded. "When? Why? With her?"

"Carter, just let me talk."

"I'm pretty sure this is all very self-explanatory," Bella mused from the bed, where she had sat up with her legs folded over the mattress. Her brown hair was messy at the back still.

Carter felt white hot rage bubble up in his chest. Some of it felt like it had been there for a while, waiting to be ignited. 

"Shut up," he hissed. Bella raised her eyebrows.

"Seriously, just shut up for once in your life," Carter said.

He turned to look at Seth, whose face was no longer the usual neutral mask. Carter still couldn't read his expression, though. His best friend spent so much time trying not to convey any emotion that it was now nearly impossible for Carter to read him.

"Of all the girls you could've chosen," he started, pointing at Seth. "You could literally get with any girl in Florida, and you go with her? What the fuck?!"

Some time along the way, Carter had started shouting without noticing. He pursed his lips, turning around to step out of Bella's room. He heard Seth follow him out to the hallway.

"Look, you weren't supposed to find out this way," Seth urged. "I wanted to see you, but you weren't home—"

"So you thought you'd look for comfort or whatever with her?" Carter spat, cutting him off. "Because I'm pretty sure what I saw is not the kind of relationship we've had so far."

Seth recoiled a bit at that. Carter was still shouting. To his left, he heard Luca and Frankie's bedroom door open and assumed they'd come out to see what was happening. He didn't look though. His eyes were trained on Seth, his best friend of a lifetime, who was still to offer a response.

Behind Seth, Bella came out to stand on her own bedroom's doorway. To their right, the trapdoor to the attic opened and the retractable stairs dropped. Mike climbed down.

"Just get out," Carter told Seth.

Seth's lips parted as he gripped his jacket tighter. He exchanged a look with Bella, whose face was contorted in sympathy...and worry, maybe? It made Carter angrier somehow.

"I—"

"It honestly doesn't matter," Carter cut Seth off again. "Sleep in your car, for all I care. Or better yet, go home to your mother, for a change."

That was enough to tuck Seth's features back into a more familiar stoic expression. His Adam's apple bobbed in his throat and Carter watched him glance at Bella one last time, before walking away toward the stairs.

Bella's burning gaze caught Carter's. She looked pissed. It only made Carter's temper boil hotter. What right did she have to be fucking pissed?

His stepsister took one step toward him, crossing her arms over her chest. "I know I can be a dick sometimes," she started quietly, "but you could've seriously gotten over yourself for this one time."

Carter watched through a frown as she took off after Seth.

He was fully aware of his stepbrothers' eyes on him, but he didn't care. For once, he let go of his wish that this fucking house wasn't so damn full all the time and just ignored the scrutiny. Without a word, he walked back into his room and shut the door behind himself.

He woke up the next morning without an alarm.

He put on a pair of sweatpants and a t-shirt over his underwear, and left his room. As soon as he opened his bedroom door, the scent of homemade pancakes reached his nostrils from downstairs and he followed it into the kitchen.

He found Luca stirring a bowl of creamy dough at the kitchen table, while Frankie flipped a half-cooked pancake with a spatula at the oven. Mike stood to their side, behind Charlie, setting a big plate of still-warm pancakes at the center of the table. Bella sat across from them, with a smaller plate in front of her. She looked at Carter from the corner of her eye when he walked in and her expression immediately soured.

"Hey, C-dog," Frankie saluted with a look over his shoulder.

"Good morning," Mike greeted.

"Hope you woke up hungry." Luca grinned.

Charlie shot him a buttered smile, with a mouth full of chewed up pancake. "Hi."

Carter smiled softly. "Good morning."

Bella forked two pancakes from the plate Mike had put down, with a shrieking clicking sound of metal on ceramic, and dropped them on her plate. She got up, letting her stool slide against the floor noisily and picked up her plate, after grabbing two cubes of butter from the table.

"I'm gonna eat in my room," she mumbled, leaving the kitchen.

Carter sat down on his usual place for breakfast, wordlessly. He looked down at the table.

"I know you're usually a milk and cereal type of guy, but you should really try these," Luca spoke up and Carter lifted his gaze to look at him.

Behind Luca, Frankie twisted his neck again to look at Carter. "They're the old man's special recipe, which he got from our maternal grandma," Frankie told him. "Only recipe we got from our mom's side of the family."

Carter nodded faintly. "Sure."

Mike smiled at him across the table, pushing a plate toward him. "You won't regret it," he said, before noticing the mess Charlie was making next to him. "No, no—That's enough jam."

"I want more jam," Charlie whined, as his older brother dragged the jar away from him on the table.

Mike grabbed the spoon the youngest Santoro had been using to lay down industrial amounts of blueberry jam on his pancakes, just as the kid shoved it into his mouth.

"I said it's enough jam," he repeated gently but surely, discarding the spoon on the sink behind him.

Frankie squeezed in between Luca and Mike then, to drop the pancakes he'd been cooking on the plate at the center of the table.

"Fresh off the pan," he declared.

Carter swallowed down on a dry throat as he helped himself to one.

"Where's everyone else?" He asked in a tight voice.

"Your mom's downstairs with our old man," Luca answered. "Came to get their pancakes earlier and went back to bed. We didn't ask for details."

Mike shot him a disapproving stare at the innuendo and Luca smiled impishly.

"I drove Richie to the airport earlier this morning," Mike told Carter. "Jack's still sleeping. He's driving back to Gainsville after lunch."

Carter nodded silently and lowered his gaze once more. He tore off a piece of his pancake with his fork and shoved it into his mouth, without a word.

"Might be better with some jam," Luca told him lightly. "We have apple and blueberry. Or just butter, if you're like Bella. Frank likes sugar and cinnamon, like a churro, but that's just disgusting."

"Don't hate before you try it," Frankie shot back.

"Your mom and the old man took the whipped cream down with them, if you feel brave enough to go knock and ask for it," Luca added.

Carter looked up at them, eyes dancing between his four stepbrothers. Luca had a splash of raw pancake dough on his t-shirt and Frankie was wearing Tony's apron over his pajamas. Mike was standing by, behind Charlie, with a napkin in his hand, ready to wipe his little brother's jam-covered face as soon as he finished chewing.

It was a perfectly normal scene, within the Santoro household. No visible indication whatsoever of any tension or animosity. Neither even seemed to have noticed the hostility with Bella when he came down.

Somehow, so much naturalness made Carter feel worse.

He cleared his throat. "Butter is fine," he said.

There were no objections to that.

Charlie swallowed down the last of his first pancake and Carter watched as Mike cleaned his sticky mouth with the napkin. Charlie let him, before digging into the second.

"I'm sorry for making a scene yesterday."

He spoke quietly, but Mike, Frankie and Luca still looked at him.

"We all have bad days," Mike said with his characteristic understanding, reasonable tone.

"Yeah, it comes with living in a full house," Frankie agreed with a shrug as he dropped the last of the pancakes he'd been making on the table. "Sometimes we have to deal with each other's bad days, but we don't have to mention it afterwards," he concluded as he walked around the table to take a seat.

Luca nodded along to that, moving to stand by the oven himself with his bowl of raw dough. "Like when Mike had a mental breakdown in his freshman year after having his first B-minus, and went on a rampart telling everyone we were a family of half-assers and lazy idiots, and our genes were ruining his life," he said.

Mike glared at his little brother, as Luca poured some dough on the pan, after spraying it with butter.

"It happened once," he said, somewhat exasperatedly. "I was on way too much caffeine at the time and it has never happened since."

"Yeah," Frankie shot back. "And we totally don't mention it." He grinned deviously. Behind him, Luca shot Carter a mischievous wink.

Without any of them noticing, Charlie reached across the table to grab the jar of blueberry jam and was preparing to dive in with his hand when Mike pulled it away from him.

"No more jam, Charlie!"

They all laughed again, even Mike. Frankie slipped a cube of butter towards Carter and he caught it, unraveling the foil to spread it over his pancake.

Turned out, his stepbrothers were right. Their pancake recipe was indeed worth trying, and Carter helped himself to a second and a third, which he ate with the sound of easy morning conversation in the background. When he went upstairs after, Mike's words were still fresh in his head.

We all have bad days.

Except Carter hadn't had a bad day. A bad moment, granted, but his day as a whole had been going exceedingly well.

He laid down on his bed contentedly and allowed himself to remember his date with Johnny. It was all amazing, down to the very last moment, when Carter had promised he would text, before leaving the car.

Shit.

He grabbed his phone from the nightstand.

Carter bit down on his lip as his fingers hovered over the keyboard. He considered the question for a second.

***

Okay. How predictable was the Seth and Bella thing? From a scale of nauseating cliche to I had absolutely no idea.