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Tony is back. The knowledge whispers through him sweetly, skitters across his brain like dry leaves over cement, sings into his fingertips and out of his scalp. Tony is back. He’s back. He's back.
He had memorized the date of Tony's release the very second it came floating out of the courthouse on the shirt tails of an intrepid, easily-bribed reporter; in his free time he had also memorized the bus schedule from Sing Sing to Manhattan. Tony has ruined it by being released too late in the day to catch the last bus and staying upstate a night; Riff waited at the bus terminal until two AM before finally concluding Tony had either a) died in prison, b) died on the bus, or c) would be arriving tomorrow. He had gone home because the bus terminal smells like piss and isn't, like, the safest place to be skinny and alone after the bars close—thus he misses the bus that Tony actually does arrive in, which pulls into the terminal at the godawful hour of seven AM.
Anybodys is the one who meets him, which Riff will never quite forgive her for—he isn't there to see it but he bets the reunion is heart-warming or tear-jerking or some other insufferable compound adjective. By ten the news has spread: Tony is back in town, staying briefly with his ma; he'll attend his pa's funeral on Tuesday and then help his ma move in with her brother. After that, Anybodys doesn't know, because neither does Tony. Riff absorbs all this in the thirty seconds it takes Anybodys to say it, then slaps her on the back and runs off down the street.
(He only pauses once to think: 'Where is Anybodys sleeping?' He knows she's been in some trouble at home—her parents not understanding the whole thing with the boys’ clothing and the boys’ haircut and the, well, boyness of her. What Anybodys was doing at the bus terminal at seven AM is a question he doesn’t necessarily want answered, primarily because that would usher in no small amount of extra guilt and he’s had enough of that lately, thank you very much.)
Tony is outside his ma’s building, already looking down the street like he expected Riff to come running, and maybe Riff should be a little offended by that but he isn’t. More like he’s got the sense of some old groove being fallen back into, like a record got scratched and he’s been bouncing on the same note for a year, and now the tune has started up again, ba-da-bum ba-da-bum. Same tune his heart has beating for years. Something sweet, something wild. Something a little like a hymn sung up past the church’s rafters.
When he’s close enough he shouts: “Where the fuck have you been, Wyzek?” and Tony grins wide and beautiful. He shouts back: “Screwing your ma, Lorton,” and then they’re right up on top of each other and Riff can’t hear anything else or see or even really breathe because his face is mashed into Tony’s shoulder and neck and his arms are wrapped tight, so goddamn tight, around the one piece of good news he’s had all year.
“Riff,” Tony says, into Riff’s shoulder. “Fuck. Fuck, I missed you.”
Riff can’t say anything back, he’s got something in his chest that feels too big for his ribcage and his throat is tight around his own saliva, plus he can’t remember how his mouth works and all that makes speaking near impossible. Anyway it doesn’t matter because Tony hasn’t said anything else, so Riff focuses on what he can, what he finally has back: the smell of Tony in his nose and the warmth of him under his palms and the pounding of Tony’s pulse at his neck. Ba-da-bum.
Their hearts always did beat the same.
Riff breathes in, breathes out. He knows he can’t stay here forever but it’s hard not to want it. Somehow Tony smells exactly the same as he did before he got picked up and he’d forgotten that sometimes a scent in your nose is like a needle full of something regulated by the federal government, like having a waking dream—memories flood back to him as surely as if they were playing on a silver screen suspended on the insides of his eyelids. A strange one comes back: Tony wearing Riff’s jacket, hanging upside down from a tree. Grabbing for Riff’s hand and saying “I want you up here with me.” He doesn’t even know when that was.
“If it isn’t little Riff,” somebody says, close by. Riff tears himself away from Tony, startled and annoyed, before he realizes who it is. Agnes, Tony’s mother: wearing a winter coat pulled over a dress that looks too big, and earrings a little too sparkly for the occasion. The smell of peaches in the air.
“‘Lo, Mrs. Wyzek,” he says. “Uh—how are you.” Agnes, still strikingly beautiful despite a bottle-a-day habit and a marriage composed almost entirely of black eyes and regret, looks back at him coolly. She ignores his question. “Nice of you to come,” she says, in a voice like an ice floe. “Glad you could clear your busy schedule.”
Riff nudges Tony with an elbow. “Ain’t every day your buddy gets out of the clink.”
“No,” Agnes agrees. “It isn’t. Although I imagine this isn’t your first time welcoming a friend home from upstate.”
“Ma,” Tony says, with a warning note, but Riff just shows his teeth in what could passably be called a smile. “Tony’s the first one of us got picked up, Mrs. Wyzek. A trailblazer.”
A flash of anger goes through Agnes’s eyes. “Your influence, I’m sure.”
Agnes might not have realized how deep this would cut. She probably doesn’t understand that this wound was already there, a year old, but still open and seeping. Riff knows full well that between the two of them, Riff should’ve gone upstate right alongside Tony, or maybe instead of. Just because he was passed out and bloody, being hauled bodily away by somebody who didn’t want him found by the police—he never knew who to be angry at for this—didn’t mean he deserved it any less. That sentence was as good as his, only nobody had ever said it or written it down so he never had to serve it, and Tony did. It had eaten at him for twelve months, and it was eating at him now.
“How’s church, Mrs. Wyzek?” he asks in retaliation, sweetly as he can. He knows full well she hasn’t gone back since she got caught sneaking money out of the collection, about nine months ago, three months after Tony had stopped donating his income to her liquor fund, on account of not having any income to donate.
Agnes’s face goes pink and mottled, and her eyes cut sideways. She’s still gorgeous as all hell, is the annoying thing. Even embarrassed and blotchy, she’s the prettiest mom on the block. Riff used to wish she was his ma, just for the way everyone had looked at her: like she had hung all the stars in the sky, one at a time, all by her lonesome.
“Don’t stay out too late, Tony,” she says now, pointedly ignoring Riff. “We’ve got things to do before tomorrow.” She sweeps inside, the faintest whiff of peach schnapps in the air the only indication that she’d come out at all.
“You didn’t change any,” Tony says, when she’s gone. He’s looking Riff up and down, slowly, drinking him in almost. Riff would do the same but he’s worried he’ll be too obvious about it, too nakedly hungry. He’s resorting to quick glances at Tony’s arms and waist and shoulders, catching flashes of the skin at Tony’s wrists and the calluses on his palms. He wishes time would stop, just for two seconds—or, well—whatever you measure when time has stopped—so he can look at Tony properly, turn him around and re-measure him, get a handle on the Tony that came back from prison, same but different. Broader, stronger, harder. Same bowstring mouth; different jaw to hold it.
“I got taller,” Riff says. He’s also lost weight, but he doesn’t mention it.
Tony shakes his head anyway. “I didn’t mean how you look. I mean you’re still wise-cracking my folk—” He cuts himself off. “My ma.”
“Yeah, well.” Riff is still trying to resist the urge to grab one of Tony’s biceps. “Leopard, spots.”
“You’re fucking skinny, man. String bean.” Tony pokes his arm. “Guess you didn’t learn how to cook anything, huh?”
“I can make a sandwich.”
“Two pieces of bread around a third ain’t a sandwich.”
Riff laughs: he’d had a bread sandwich for breakfast. “Sometimes there’s margarine on it.” He claps his hands together, takes a few steps backwards down the street with his eyebrows raised: an invitation. “C’mon, let’s go see the Jets.”
Tony looks suddenly, strangely nervous. He coughs, glances behind him at his ma’s apartment building. “What?” Riff asks. “You got shit to do?”
“No,” Tony says. “Not ‘til later.”
“So let’s go.”
“Not yet,” Tony says. “Okay?” He’s got a funny pleading look on his face, the look he used to get before he asked a favor. “Let’s just—come on, I gotta catch up some. I been away too long, I ain’t even got my feet under me yet.”
And, well, Riff isn’t going to complain too much about getting more of Tony on his own.
They walk to Doc’s first; Riff steals four Milky Ways while Tony buys two fair and square, and has a long conversation with Valentina about God knows what. When he finally comes back outside he’s smiling quiet, sort of proudly. Riff’s about to ask him why when Tony hands him the second Milky Way, and Riff feels a pebble drop into his gut about the four in his jacket pocket. “Thanks,” is all he says.
“No problem,” Tony says, like it really isn’t, even though Riff knows he can’t have much money seeing as he hasn’t exactly been in gainful employment recently. “Okay,” he says, and drops an arm over Riff’s shoulders as they walk down the street slowly, towards the park. “Catch me up.”
— —
Tony is in town a month before Riff finally gets his head out of his ass and realizes that all of Tony’s hemming and hawing regarding the Jets isn’t, like, code or anything. Tony isn’t worried he’s out of touch or lost any respect or that he’s going to be stepping on any toes coming back, and he’s not trying to build suspense or feel out the hierarchy or any of that shit; Riff should’ve realized immediately that Tony doesn’t play games like that but, okay, he didn’t, so sue him—Tony’s been away a year, Riff’s forgotten how his brain works.
Tony’s hemming and hawing is for real, as in, he’s not sure he wants to come back to the Jets.
“All they do is fight,” he says to Riff one day, and Riff corrects him: “We.”
“I just feel like we got better shit to do.”
They’re folding laundry. Well, Tony’s folding laundry, and Riff’s watching him do it. He’s never folded a shirt in his life and he isn’t going to start now. He’s fine watching Tony do it, anyway—he likes watching Tony shake out a shirt with a hard fast Snap! and after that, the small careful actions of edge alignments and collars turned down. For his part he’s happy on the bed, jack-knifed on the pillow, boots still on until Tony had given him enough dirty looks to kick them off, as dramatic as he could make it. Not that his old, half-hole socks are any better; he watches Tony realize his mistake and give up the fight immediately.
“We don’t got better shit to do,” Riff says. “Actually.” He takes out the crumpled pack of cigarettes in his shirt pocket, remembers that it’s empty, and puts it back. “Only three of us got jobs.”
“Three?” Tony looks up with interest. “A-Rab and Diesel—who else? Anybodys working for his ma again?”
Riff stares at him. It takes him a few seconds to figure out how he wants to respond. “Valentina ain’t paying you?”
“Oh.” Tony looks back down at the shirts he’s folding. “Yeah,” he says finally. “No, she is.”
There’s a beat of silence, while they both ignore the first couple of things Riff could say after that, and doesn’t. Then he says: “We need you, Tony. The Sharks got Bernardo, and some of the rest fight real fuckin’ nasty. Plus Chago’s got, like, five inches on all of us. And the Jets lost too much territory over the winter to be losing any more in the spring—”
“They ain’t losing it because Bernardo knows how to box—”
“We," Riff says, through gritted teeth, "And we sure as hell ain’t losing it because he knows how to make good scrambled eggs.”
Tony glances up. “How do you know he makes good scrambled eggs?” He’s got a look on his face, like What do you know that I don’t, which is unfair because that came out of Riff before he even realized what he was saying—sometimes his mouth is three steps ahead of his brain, like it’s running the same race but with better shoes.
“Fuckin’—that ain’t the point. Jesus, everyone knows how to make scrambled eggs. It was just an example.” Riff hops up off the bed, walks in his barely-socked feet over to Tony’s dresser and starts rifling around for cigarettes. Without looking up he continues: “If you don’t fight, we lose our next rumble.”
“So don’t arrange a rumble,” Tony says. “Gee, I solved that riddle for you. Isn’t every day I get there first.”
“You want the Jets to lose everything we got left?” Riff gives up on the dresser and picks up Tony’s jacket, starts going through the pockets. “Everything we fought for, for years—that don’t mean anything? And what about family, huh? Birth to earth, sperm to worm? The Jets didn’t disappear just ‘cause you did.” He tosses the jacket aside, feeling the skin crawl at the base of his neck. “Jesus, man, you stop smoking or something?”
“Oh, yeah.” Tony looks up. “Yeah, I did. Valentina doesn’t like it.”
Riff stares at Tony until Tony goes red and turns away again, goes back to the shirt he’s folding. “Christ,” Riff says. He strides back to the bed, sits down to pull his boots on. “I dunno what’s happening to you, kid.”
“There's nothing happening to me. It all fuckin’ happened already.”
Riff can’t interpret that. Tony is making it sound like his life is already half over, like he’s settling in to whatever he’s doing now and planning to do it forever—which, folding laundry? He might as well die, as far as Riff is concerned. “Well, I need some fuckin’ smokes,” Riff says, pulling on his jacket. “You need anything?”
Instead of answering that question, Tony answers a different one. “‘Course the Jets mean something to me, Riff. Never won't. But they got a lot left without having to go to the mat for it.”
“We got a lot left, and we could keep it a lot longer if you were going to the mat. Doing what you're best at, right?”
This is the wrong thing to say. Tony’s shoulders stiffen, and he snaps the shirt he's holding hard, like it did him wrong. “Yeah,” he says, bitterly. “Only ever got good at one thing, didn't I?”
Which is a patently ridiculous statement, like, hilariously so—so stupid that Riff almost starts laughing. Because Tony is a natural leader and a good cook and a poker whiz and a pretty okay dancer; he's never met a sum he couldn't figure given a few minutes and he can always find north. He can walk on his hands for a whole block, probably more if they ever let him go past his face turning tomato, and once he held his breath for four minutes, which Riff thinks is a world record. He's a good friend and good company and a good kisser, Riff is pretty sure, on account of hearing a lot about it from various girls on the Upper West Side and remembering—unfortunately—all of it. Because that’s another thing Tony is good at: getting real fucking comfortable in Riff’s head.
And that isn't even most of the things he's good at. Tony is good at a lot of things, is the point.
That's bullshit, is what Riff opens his mouth to say, but Tony is already talking. “Don't come back here after you get smokes,” he says, not looking around, focused instead on the socks he's rolling up into pairs. “I gotta make a pick-up after I do this.”
Riff, stung, closes his mouth. Then he says mulishly, “Wasn't planning on it anyway. Say hi to the witch for me, yeah?” He hops up the stairs two at a time, then calls back down to Tony as he’s yanking open the door. “We’re meeting at Ice’s tonight. Come by, why don’t you. If you can spare the time.”
“I’ll come,” Tony is shouting after him, and as the door is closing with a rusty squeak, he’s adding: “As long as they ain’t fightin’, I’m there.”
The door slams closed. Riff closes his eyes, taking a deep breath in of the undusty store air, Valentina nowhere to be seen and the street outside empty. “We,” he answers, so quiet it’s like he didn’t say it at all.
— —
Not too long after that Riff has to move, for the same reason that everyone in the neighborhood has had to at least once, it seems like: the bulldozers arrive. He’d known it was coming, he couldn’t not—he had eyes, didn’t he, plus a functioning brain, functioning enough to spot a pattern anyway. Some of his neighbors move neighborhoods entirely. Ice—who’d been Riff’s next-door neighbor since they were still in diapers—moves into the apartment Diesel’s family is still hanging on to by the skin of their teeth, which doesn’t exactly have a spare room but it does have a closet big enough for a cot, and Ice doesn’t take up too much space anyway. Balkan moves in with A-Rab; they're sharing a room, which neither of them seem too happy about.
As for Riff, he figures there’s enough condemned buildings lying around the place that he can find one with an apartment that’s empty, relatively rat-free, and maybe with the water still working. Which is more or less correct, it turns out. He knows a guy who knows a guy who knows about an apartment that had squatters until recently, where the water still works and the landlord’s biding his time until the building can be sold for a premium, and not too concerned with who’s sleeping there in the meantime. Riff moves in, and although it’s exactly what he needed and maybe not even as bad as he expected, he hates it more than anything else he’s ever hated within forty-eight hours.
The main thing is the drip drip drip of the tap in the bathroom, so loud it echoes off the tiles and sounds through the whole apartment, irregular and maddening and unmufflable, but really it’s the whole place and the entire situation, the unfairness of it, the unjustness. He hadn't wanted to be there from minute one, from minute t-minus twenty-one really, even before he'd seen the front door he'd known it would be a moldy unmatched sock of a place, disgusting and unloved and forgotten. He isn't surprised to be proven correct but he's surprised by how much he hates it: the bare walls and the cracked plaster and the stupid fucking tap, drip drip drip all night like a very small hammer to the inside of his skull, somewhere on the brittle bone plates behind his occipital lobe.
He moves in four understuffed boxes and leaves them all packed because he can't bear to make it permanent, and on the third night at two AM he pulls on his jeans and his boots and his ratty jacket and sloughs over to Doc's. He rings the bell three times in quick succession, hopping in place to keep warm. There's nothing for it, he tells himself. Nothing for it but to do it. It can't be all that bad, can it?
Oh but can it.
When Tony comes to the door he's not wearing anything but loose pajama pants and he looks sleepy and mussed in a way that makes Riff go gulp, like with the goddamn noise and everything, like he's in a cartoon involving overambitious villains and plucky little animated heroes. He feels himself do it: a little hiccuping gulp like his throat decided to spasm and hadn't told him it was about to. Tony doesn't notice because he's still half-asleep and struggling with the security gate besides—it sticks—and when he's finally got the thing open most of the way, all he says is "What're you doing here?"
Riff's forgotten. It takes him a beat to remember, and half a beat more to say: "Can I stay here a night?"
Tony's starting to look a little more awake, probably because it's so cold his chest is already bright red from it, but it still takes him a second to respond. "Sure," he says, finally. "You locked yourself out or something?"
"Nah," says Riff, and doesn't elaborate. He pushes inside and heads down the stairs, leaving Tony to struggle with the gate again. By the time Tony's made it back to the basement floor, Riff's taking his boots off on the cot.
"Get me a blanket or something," Riff says, without looking up.
"Don't got any," Tony says through a yawn.
"Fuck off."
"I don't," Tony says. "I only had two and A-Rab took one of 'em. He's got family in from out of town."
Riff pauses on that. "Valentina ain't got any?"
"A-Rab took hers too. He cleared us out—I'm lucky he left me a pillow. By the looks of things he's got a whole circus comin' to town. Bet they all piled out of a clown car."
"Shit." Riff feels unbalanced, unprepared, stupid. He's going to have to put his boots on again, and walk back to his new apartment. It's only a ten minute walk, and he'd just done it the other direction, and he's not even that tired: but the prospect weighs him down as surely as if somebody'd stuffed lead weights in his jacket pockets. "You should have told me."
Tony, with an irritated roll of his eyes, says: "How was I supposed to know you'd show up here at the goddamn witching hour?" Riff doesn't respond to that and then Tony says: "Bunk with me, if you want."
"No, thanks," Riff says, but doesn't move.
"Then go home," Tony says, after a short, sharp pause.
"Yeah," Riff says, and still doesn't move.
"Buddy," says Tony, after a very silent silence. "You may not have to sleep more than ten minutes a night but I gotta. Shit or get off the pot."
Riff gets up, then sits back down. "We can't fit two of us."
Tony shrugs, looks away. "We used to."
Well, Riff wants to say. That was when nobody minded where a wandering hand landed, late at night. He gets back up. “I’ll go.”
“Don’t,” Tony says. It comes out brusque and exasperated. “C’mon, man. We can’t keep being odd around each other. It’s driving me crazy. Just 'cause I—" He stops, flounders. "I’m the same fuckin’ guy, Riff. You’re jumpy as a jack-rabbit.”
“I ain’t,” Riff says, offended.
“You fuckin’ are. Calm down, will ya? Just get in the goddamn bed.”
Riff swings his feet up on instinct, because at the end of the day he never learned how to say no to Tony, especially when Tony uses his Jets voice, the one that’s got all the conviction of a switchblade and a gang of boys behind it. The funny thing about the Jets voice is, Tony had the Jets voice before he had the Jets. He just didn’t know what he could do with it until he was leading kids around by the nose.
“Finally,” Tony grumbles, and flops onto the bed next to him. "What did you think was going to happen, huh? I'm so tired I can't see straight." The mattress sags deep; Riff can feel the springs. Tony shoves him and Riff moves over, until he’s as close to the wall as he can get his shoulder. “Thought we were gonna be awake all night while you made your goddamn mind up.”
“Never met anybody who needs as much beauty sleep as you do.”
“It’s ‘cause I’m so pretty,” Tony jokes, in a sleep-softened voice, like he’s already halfway back to whatever dream he was in before Riff showed up. Riff grunts something noncommittal—he’s not going to touch that minefield with a twenty-foot pole. He closes his eyes, letting the warmth of Tony’s back against his arm seep through him.
Two minutes of silence, and the anxious patter of Riff's pulse begins to slow. Until it relaxes, he hadn't realized his throat had been as tight as it was—he takes his first full breath of the night. Dusty as it is, the air smells of Tony, fresh and green, under the cardboardy and yeasty smells of a stockroom. Riff feels very tired suddenly, some weight landing with a soft languid whomp on his chest, and he’s about to roll over to face the wall when Tony speaks.
“You don’t like your place?” It comes out more statement than question, barely inflected and practically whispered, he says it so low, like it’s come out with an exhale.
“What’s there to like.” Riff keeps his eyes tight shut, imagines himself closed off, fenced off, a barrier erected high and impenetrable. “I ain’t there ‘cause I chose it. And it’s temporary.” Tony doesn’t answer for a moment: neither of them can see the future, but they both know that it’s true, regardless of whether Riff has a place to go next. Buildings are coming down too quickly for it to be anything else. Riff’s building is right in the path of the bulldozers, just one of ten or so bowling pins and the ball coming fast.
“You can stay here whenever you want.” Tony’s half asleep, the words coming out slurred and indistinct. “Just give me some warnin’ next time. I’ll make sure you got a blanket.”
I don’t need one, Riff wants to say. This is all I wanted.
Because he’s already asleep, almost. Tony next to him and the room warm and silent, and his head finally slow and peaceful. If he had been worried about giving himself away, he doesn’t now: he’s too tired to. Sleep has crept into his chest and turned around three times, curled up purring around his lungs.
As Tony’s breathing slows and deepens next to him, Riff feels like a kid again, cloistered between Tony and the brick wall of the basement, safer than he’s felt for months. Sex is strangely far from his mind, farther than he’d thought possible when Tony is this close. He knows he’ll fall asleep as soon as he rolls over, despite the press of Tony’s back against his own. Maybe this is all he needs to be cured: to remember that Tony means comfort, means home, means family. Maybe some wires got crossed in his head a long time ago, and he turned that into something else entirely. Maybe he could go back to when those wires weren't crossed. Maybe sex doesn’t even have to come into it.
If he could only remember all that, all the time, then nights like this could be easy—easy as they ever were, before Riff started seeing Tony behind his closed and fluttering eyelids every time he jerked off. These three or four fucked-up years, the slow slide into something that feels like insanity, the horror and fear and deceit of it, maybe it was all just a trial he can get through with nothing more than a few psychological scars, a few dents in the body of his metaphysical make-up. He can do this—sleep next to Tony, without touching him more than the bed requires—for as long as Tony lets him. It could be normal. Tony wouldn't ever have to know Riff felt different. Half-asleep, already dreaming, Riff even believes that.
He slips out early the next morning anyway, before Tony wakes up. No use tempting fate.
— —
Tony continues his hemming and hawing, never quite saying no outright, never quite saying "I'm not one of you anymore," but coming pretty damn close. He hangs with the Jets, sometimes, but he leaves the second somebody mentions going looking for the Sharks, or stealing something from San Juan Hill, or anything resembling vandalism. Which it turns out happens a lot, more than Riff had ever bothered to count. Riff gets used to seeing the back of Tony's jacket as he slips away down a side street.
So Riff keeps coming to Doc's, sometimes at night and sometimes during Tony's workday. His days are empty and his head is full, and he's missed Tony too much not to follow him back to the basement, like a pigeon with its magnetic beak pointed homewards.
One day Riff is walking over, rubbing soap scum out of his ears and scripting arguments in his head, when he slows down at the sight of Tony outside the drugstore, a crate held awkwardly to one side and his eyebrows knit in concentration as he talks to—somebody Riff recognizes. Not a Jet, not Valentina, not a neighbor. It takes Riff a second for it to click: it’s one of Bernardo’s friends, not a Shark but Shark-adjacent. Riff doesn’t know his name. He wears thick glasses and his hair parted severely; he’s always dressed a smudge too formally, like he’s on his way to class.
Riff stops walking, ducks into a doorway to watch. Tony, concentrating, is nodding along to whatever the other guy is talking about. The guy is gesturing with undisguised enthusiasm; he’s got the face that people always get around Tony, the faces of people turned up to the sun after a long winter. Tony nods, smiles, says a few words, and then—Riff’s jealousy, always barely contained anyway, twists free—laughs, throwing his head back. He pats the guy on the arm, once, and there’s another short exchange before Tony taps his forehead in a salute and turns to the cellar door as the other guy disappears down the street.
Riff waits until he can’t see either of the two men, then follows Tony into the basement of Doc’s, letting the doors slam behind him with a bang. The light is dim and it takes Riff’s eyes a second to adjust; when they do Tony is looking up at him, smiling. “Hiya, buddy,” he says. “Thought you’d be with the Jets all day.”
“Left ‘em to fend for themselves,” Riff says, and saunters over to Tony’s bed. “So if you hear sirens, you’re my alibi. Who was that?”
“Who?” Tony asks, and then, “Outside? Chino. He lives around here, I guess.”
“You know him?”
“No. I mean, not before today. He’s cool, though. Smart.” He laughs, finishes stacking cans and moves on to the next box. “Poindexter for sure. Betchya he’s running a company in twenty years.”
“Yeah, a brothel,” Riff mutters.
Tony doesn’t hear him. “Right now he’s repairing adding machines. I didn’t even know that was a job. There’s so many jobs out there I never even knew existed.”
“What’s the point? They wouldn’t let you do them anyway.”
Tony rolls his eyes. “Did you come by for something? I gotta finish restocking.”
“I’ll help.”
Tony raises a skeptical eyebrow at him, and Riff raises it back. “What,” he deadpans. “You don’t think I can handle a few minutes’ work?”
“Just haven’t seen you do it,” Tony jokes. “But sure. If you want to.” He nods at a box by Riff’s feet. “Just unpack that box and throw ‘em to me so I can take stock.”
“This one?” Riff swipes dust off the top and sides of the box, then pries off the lid. He takes out a can, peers at the label. ““Beans, huh. Why am I not surprised.”
“Real funny,” Tony says. “Throw it here.” Riff does, tossing it underhand, and Tony puts it in the open crate before holding his hand for another one. Riff frowns at him. “This is what ‘restocking’ means? Movin’ cans from one box to another? You ever hear of Sisyphus?”
“I only need to take twelve upstairs, I’m not gonna haul the whole box up.”
Riff throws him a second one, and then broaches the topic he came to discuss. “You hear about the dance tonight?”
“Sure,” Tony says. “At the school. Church thing.”
“Nah, it’s not a church thing. Some community center is puttin’ it on.”
Tony nods, holds up his hand again. “That guy—Chino—he told me he’s going. With Bernardo and his sister.”
Riff pauses, midway through reaching for a fifth can. He hadn’t anticipated Tony already knowing the Sharks were going to be there. “Yeah,” he says. “Sure. I guess everyone’s goin’, Jets included.”
“All the Jets?” Tony asks. “Not really their scene, I thought.”
“Our scene, and maybe I talked it up a bit.”
Tony catches the fifth can but doesn’t put it in the crate, only looks at Riff like he knows exactly what’s coming out of his mouth next. “You’re going to fight. Jesus, Riff, you know some people actually like those corny dances—”
“We ain’t gonna fight at the dance.” Riff leans down for another can but when he straightens up, Tony hasn’t put the other one away yet. “We ain’t,” he says, more forcefully.
“You’re gonna arrange a rumble.” Riff doesn't miss the accusation in Tony's voice.
“Maybe,” Riff says, and forces a grin. “But we’re gonna dance a bit, first. Mingle. You know. Have ourselves a grand old time.”
Tony finally puts down the can he’s holding. He does it slowly, in a measured movement like it’s an effort to control his limbs. He’s got a strange expression on: tired, somehow. Weary, is the word Riff might have used. Like the world’s gotten a little too big for him to carry around. “Have fun,” is all he says.
“You should come,” Riff says, trying for casual. He fucks it up by throwing the next can to Tony a little too hard, overhand, too much like a baseball or a rock. Tony catches it with a flinch, says, “Easy.” Riff grunts an apology and picks up the next one.
“It’ll be good. Usual thing. Get your spats on. Comb your hair.”
“Nah,” Tony says. “I can’t go out tonight.”
“Don’t want to, you mean.” Riff tosses him a can but doesn’t lean down for the next one. “It’ll be fun, Tony. We’ll make a night of it. Grab dinner first, have a few beers, the whole nine yards. I got my jacket laid out all nice.”
Tony ignores him, just holds out his hand for the next can. When Riff doesn’t throw it, he prompts: “Can.”
“C’mon. Just for an hour. Only a little hour. You used to like dancing. No monkeyshines.”
“C’mon, Riff, can.”
Riff picks up another one. He suddenly realizes how dirty his hands are: grimy with dust and grit under his nails. “Christ almighty.” Instead of tossing it to Tony, he walks it over, already annoyed with the tedium of the activity and with the feeling of digging himself into an argument he hadn’t wanted to have. “You know, there’s dust on everything, and ever since—” Tony reaches for the can; Riff grabs Tony’s wrist. “I swear on what’s holy, it’s just girls sippin’ punch—” He chucks Tony under the chin. “And music—”
Tony goes for the can, misses. “And the Sharks, and the rumble.”
“Which all you gotta do—”
“You’re on your own, pal-o-mine.”
“—is help me haggle over the terms of the rumble.”
Tony taps him on the chest. “You don’t need me if you don’t screw up.”
“You know how I get,” Riff says. “I will start runnin’ my mouth. You—” Tony goes for the can again and Riff snatches it away. “You got command! You’re West Side legendary! And Tony, the Jets—” Riff waits until Tony looks him in the eye again; he knows he’s got at least one trump card in his hand and he isn’t planning on wasting it. “I gave ‘em my word you’d show.”
The weariness in Tony’s face looks a lot more like disappointment, this time around. Or maybe it’s exasperation. “Why would you do that?”
“Because—” Riff can’t understand why it isn’t self-evident. “Because it’s a rumble. We need you if we’re goin’ to war. You can’t refuse us now. And because I know you.” Tony isn’t listening anymore; he’s counting cans. “Or I thought I did, before you got all unlike yourself, before you went upstate.”
The way Tony looks at him now, it really is disappointment. Like Riff’s missed a point Tony made a while back, or broken some rule they’d agreed on. Like Riff was still a little kid, and he’d spilled something sticky and filled with food dye on one of Tony’s best shirts. What did I do? Riff wants to ask. What happened while you were away?
“Tony!” Valentina calls something down the stairs, and Tony yells back: “I’m comin’!”
It smarts: the way he leaps to answer Valentina, the way his voice changes when he talks to her, even when he’s just yelling up the stairs. Valentina has a power over Tony that Riff doesn’t understand, some kind of magic thrown around his wrists and over his eyes. Riff had stopped liking Valentina around the time she’d started following him around the store whenever he came in unaccompanied. Now they regarded each other with slit-eyed suspicion, two pack animals from different sides of the forest.
“It’s like you’re still in prison, and the old witch is the warden,” Riff says. He means it to be snide, but it comes out bitter.
Tony returns with another box, this one full of cardboard packages—oatmeal, or maybe rice. “She gave me a job, and a place to stay,” he says. There’s a warning in his voice that hadn’t been there before, a note of something sharp. “She’s always been there for me—” He shoves the crate into Riff’s chest, pinning him back against the wall. “Like nobody else.”
The shove wasn’t hard, but it comes as a surprise—Riff thumps hard against the wall and it knocks his head back. His skull hits the wood and one of the sharp corners of the crate digs into his ribs. Another day, and he might have shoved back. Another day, and he might not have thought about what Tony has just said, or maybe the words wouldn’t have sunk in as deep as they do.
Riff experiences a strange sensation: that of being ripped very gently in two, separated down some spiritual planar middle, the papery netting of his soul folded over and again onto itself and then torn down the fold. A halving, somehow a doubling, a deep-seated and internal mitotic rupture.
He wants to be angry. A part of him is angry: half of him has been waiting months for Tony to say something like this, to prove to himself that Tony really has forgotten all about him, or at least forgotten the tangled webbing of heartache and nostalgia that kept them in lockstep for years.
But the other half of him is so damn tired of himself. The other half of him is only hurt, not angry, can't bring himself to respond with a quip or a lash. And this half of him wins. It's a near thing.
“I’ve always been there,” he says, quietly.
Tony’s face goes still, and then it goes sad. He pulls himself back, keeps looking at him. “I didn't mean you,” he says. “You’ve always been there.”
“You and me,” Riff says, trying to keep his voice even, “We’ve been together since day one. We are the Jets.”
Tony shakes his head slowly. He turns around, puts the box of cans down, then faces Riff again, something unreadable and soft in his expression. “We aren't, though,” he says, and steps closer.
“Shut up,” Riff says, sharp. “Stop pretending they never happened.”
“I'm not,” Tony says, taken aback. “I wouldn't, ever. I'm just saying—” He scrubs a hand through his hair, looking lost and young. “Riff—we ain't the Jets. We ain't only the Jets anyway. We're so much fuckin’ more. The Jets—they're family like I never had, and you neither. That came out of us.” He puts a hand on Riff’s shoulder, leans even closer. “We built something. We built something so nice, everyone wanted a piece of it.”
Riff doesn't understand, and Tony is too close. He should've known all that shit about uncrossing his wires, about being able to leave sex out of the picture when it came to Tony, was a big fat lie he'd told himself. “If it's so nice," he says, "Why don't you want it anymore?” He feels how his voice is going raspy at the edges, fraying like a shirt washed one too many times.
Tony's eyes are fixed, intense. “Because we started tearing other things down,” he says. “And I don't wanna do that anymore.”
“So, what?” Riff chokes out. He needs two more inches than Tony is giving him. He needs just that much more oxygen. He needs Tony to stop looking at him like this, like he can see every thought inside of Riff’s head and then some, like he can read Riff’s mind, because what Riff is thinking at this exact second isn't exactly fit for public consumption and is one hundred and twenty percent not intended for Tony’s consumption, specifically, even if he does happen to co-star in it. “What do you want, then?”
“I want,” Tony starts, and then pauses. The pause goes long, too long, turns into silence. Riff’s skin is tingling. “I don't know,” Tony finally says, but doesn't move away. His gaze flicks, once, quickly, to Riff’s mouth. Riff watches him do it, and something flares hot and solar-flare bright in his belly.
“Tell me,” he says, quietly.
“I don't know. I still don't. I’m figuring it out.” Tony’s hand has drifted down Riff’s shoulder, like he’s forgotten he’s holding on.
Then he lets go, and turns away. “I want to be building things again,” he says, quietly. He’s looking into the crate of cans but not moving to pick them up. “I'm just not sure what.”
Something is hanging in the air with the dust motes and the light from upstairs, an unspoken sentence, an unanswered question. Riff’s question, really, but not the one Tony thinks he’s left unanswered. The one that sounds like What do you want, and is really, What do you want from me?
“Buddy, if you want to be building things, I’ll get you a damn train set,” Riff says. “Don’t mean you have to leave us behind.” He follows Tony as Tony turns, walks deeper into the stacks of the basement supply area. His pulse is pounding in his ears, a tidal swish of blood thick in the gummed up cavities of his aching skull. He’s got a sense that Tony is trying to cut the conversation short and he’s not interested in that, like, intensely not interested, some animal instinct of his has kicked in, sunk its teeth: there’s an anvil hanging over their heads and for once, Riff didn’t hang it. This is Tony's fault, through and through. And he might not want to talk anymore but Riff sure does, Riff wants the other shoe to drop and he wants it to drop now. “Christ—give us instructions. Be the fuckin’ leader you used to be. You don’t want us to tear things down, you gotta come back and tell us different.”
“That’s not—” Tony glares around at him, then turns back to the shelves, finger skimming the boxes, looking for something in particular. “That’s not what I mean.”
Riff already knows this, but he leans on the point hard. He’s trying to get Tony to break. “So we’ve been tearing things down. But if you don’t want the Jets to be doing what I say, somebody’s gotta step up, right? You got a gang of kids at your beck and call, if you want it—you just gotta tell us where to be and when. You say jump and we’ll ask who. You’re actin’ like we wouldn’t follow you wherever you want to go.”
“I’m not talking about the Jets,” Tony shouts. He’s turned to face Riff, has gone red at the collar, and he’s glaring again. He’s let Riff get very close, right up on top of him, so close Riff can feel his breath when he shouts. His voice goes low for the next part, low enough that Riff would’ve had to lean in, if he wasn’t already doing it. “I’m talking about us, Riff. I want to build something with you.”
Riff kisses him. He doesn't know what he’s thinking between one moment and the next. Maybe he isn't thinking anything. Maybe he's thinking that if he doesn't do it now, he never will, and although that wouldn't have felt like the worst-case scenario yesterday, he suddenly understands that it is.
It's not exactly what anybody would call passionate but it is unmistakable for anything else, seeing as how Riff’s hand has also gone up to cup Tony’s jaw and he's pressed himself flush to fit, plus honestly you can't exactly press your mouth up to somebody else’s and not have it be called a kiss, not unless the other person is drowning or choking or turning blue, which probably isn’t happening to Tony right at this exact second, or not that Riff has noticed anyway.
But, okay, Tony’s mouth has just opened, which makes it a real kiss, and fire shoots up Riff’s whole goddamn body because Tony’s hand has wrapped hard into Riff’s shirt, and maybe Riff has read one too many of Grazi’s pulpy paperback romances because the word he would have used is “clutched,” and if thinking that doesn’t make every single hair down the length of his body stand right to attention, then it must be the actual sensation of Tony’s other hand on his shoulder, fingers digging deep.
Riff has pressed himself tight up against Tony, pushing him back towards the wall, so he almost doesn’t notice when Tony starts pushing back. They were moving backwards and now they’re not; Tony’s hand has gone from—Riff declines to think the word ‘clutching’—from gripping to pushing, and when Riff wakes his brain up to this fact he wrenches himself away. If Tony is pushing, Riff is in trouble. His stomach pitches as he pulls himself back.
Tony’s hand stays on Riff’s arm. His eyes are wide, shocked. His mouth is partly open, bright red, and there’s a white half-moon pressed just in front of his ear, where the nail of Riff’s index finger had been a moment earlier. He lifts a hand to the mark, slowly. His eyes don’t leave Riff’s.
"Sorry," Riff says, compulsively. He takes a step backwards, then another. Fear has come up as acid in his belly, a lurching nauseous heave of his own guts against the flimsy walls of his body, the whole skinny salt-mouthed blade of him saying run run run. The moment, a fragile and precious soap bubble of exhilarated joy, has popped. Tony's shock like a hot needle poked into its center. Riff already on his heels, looking for the exit. Run run run.
"Sorry," he says again. "Didn't mean to—" He can't finish the sentence. How do you finish that sentence? His stomach feels like an empty pit, like the rotten core of an apple. And still his lips are tingling. And still his fingers tremble. And still he thinks: again. Let me do it again.
The guilt gnaws gently at his ribcage, a teething animal. His lungs feel constrained, half-full even when he tries to take in a deep breath, and his heart is beating fast and hard. “I’m sorry,” he says, again, and turns on his heel for the door, halfway across the basement in a split second.
Tony falls over his own two feet running after him. That is not an exaggeration; Riff hears the clatter of a pile of boxes crescendoing down from neatly stacked to unneatly scattered, and turns to see Tony already picking himself up off the ground, panic-struck face and his breathing a rasp against the basement walls. “Wait,” he says, urgently. “Riff, wait. Don’t fuckin’—don’t run. Don’t do that to me.”
Riff takes two more steps back. “It was stupid,” he says. “Don't—Christ. Don't say anything. I'll go. Just—I’ve been feelin’ antsy, is all.”
Tony nods, quickly, twice. “Yeah,” he says, straightening up. “Yeah, okay. Only—” He takes a step forward and Riff matches it by stepping back. "Riff. Stop."
Riff stops. "It was stupid," he repeats.
Tony brushes dirt off his hands, then moves forward a step. Riff has to stop himself from recoiling. Tony keeps coming, bit by bit, hands open and still, like he’s approaching a wild animal. “It wasn’t stupid. It was—” He swallows. “It was good.”
Riff can’t breathe. He watches Tony step closer.
“And you ain’t sorry, huh.”
Riff feels like a mouse that’s met the house cat, and the house cat is suggesting summit diplomacy. He doesn’t say anything.
“I don’t want you to be sorry,” Tony says. “I don’t think I could handle that.”
“Okay,” Riff says. “Okay, I’m not sorry.” He stays still, and lets Tony come to him. “Are you?”
“No,” Tony says, and laughs, once, a disbelieving Ha! like he can’t help it. “Are you kidding?” He reaches forward, tentatively, puts a careful two fingers on Riff’s elbow. “I was just surprised, is all. You just—” His eyes are boring into Riff’s, wide and questioning and keen. “You surprised me. I don’t think you’ve surprised me in ten goddamn years.” He swallows, moves his hand to Riff’s neck. “Are you gonna let me do it again?”
Riff lets him do it again.
— —
Hours later—Tony finishes his work in a wordless whirlwind of ruthless efficiency while Riff waits downstairs, shaking with what feels like fever except that it’s the best fever he’s ever had—they’re sitting on Tony’s bed, facing each other. Tony has grabbed Riff’s hand at some point and they’re trying to figure out how to talk to each other, but not in a way that feels awkward—they’re both smiling too hard for it to be awkward—just in a “the world’s flipped us over” kind of way, in a “what do we say first” kind of way. In a “what happens next” kind of way.
Tony is the first to talk. “Why now?” he asks.
Riff blinks at him. “What do you mean?”
“I mean—” Tony starts, and blinks back. “What changed?”
“Nothing,” Riff says. “Nothing changed.”
Tony looks down, to where they're connected by their interleaved fingers. “Something did.”
Riff shakes his head forcefully, tapping his brain into place. “Nothing has changed. You think I woke up this morning and decided—” He stops, peers at Tony's bemused face. “Tony, I've been—Jesus, man, you gonna make me say it?”
Tony looks nonplussed. “Say what?”
The basement is cold, and Riff isn't wearing anything but a thin t-shirt. He shivers, and the hair on his arms stands up.
“Tony,” he says, and laughs. “I’ve wanted to do that since we were sixteen.”
Tony’s expression is complicated for long enough that Riff regrets saying that, and is very very glad he hadn’t said the truth, which is that he’s actually wanted to do it since they were thirteen. But then Tony says, “Why didn’t you say?” which is a ridiculous statement, on par with saying the only thing he ever got good at was fighting.
“Fuck off,” Riff says.
“I’m serious,” Tony says, seriously. “You think I would have said anything but ‘okay, let’s do it’?”
It’s Riff’s turn to blink in astounded confusion. “What?” he asks, which isn’t the most intelligent thing he’s ever said but it’s better than “blarghjkl?” which was his other option.
“Riff, I’ve been crazy about you since—I dunno how long. Forever.” He’s searching Riff’s face for its reaction; Riff couldn’t even begin to say what his face was doing. “I thought you knew. You got all... weird.”
“I didn’t,” Riff says, numbly. “I didn't know. But—Grazi? The other girls?”
Tony shrugs. “I always told them I didn’t want anything serious. They were all up for it. I think Grazi knew I was—” Tony coughs, uncomfortably. “Well, anyway—they weren’t anything serious. And I always thought if I met the right girl, and just committed to it, I’d get over…” He waves a vague hand between the two of them. “You know. This.”
Riff reels. He feels like he’s been tossed headlong into a tempest, lost to the winds and rain and beating waves. “Oh,” is all he manages to say.
Tony leans forward far enough to tip their heads together. “I didn’t,” he says, conversationally, as if that isn’t exactly what Riff wants to hear, as if it’s not the answer to every prayer he’s had for months.
When they kiss, slowly this time, like they’re testing it out, Riff sinks his hand into Tony’s hair and holds on tight. He needs an anchor in the tempest, a port in the storm. He’s needed it for a long, long time—now it’s his for the taking. For the clutching.
He’s pushing gently, trying to tip Tony onto his back, when Tony pulls back, holds him at arms’ length. “Wait,” he says. “I want to talk about the dance.”
“The dance,” Riff says, and laughs. “We don’t gotta talk about that.”
“We do,” Tony says. “Because—listen to me, Riff, I ain’t playing—I don’t care if you go. Hell, I’ll go. I dunno if I want to be anywhere you aren’t, tonight. But I can’t help you with the Sharks. That’s still true. I’m not gonna—”
“Don't worry about it,” Riff interrupts.
“But—”
“No,” Riff says, cutting him off decisively. “Don't. It's stupid. We ain't gonna fight. It's not their fault your building came down.” As soon as he says it, he knows it's true. How could it be Bernardo's fault? How could any of the Sharks be to blame? They weren't writing the eviction notices. They didn’t know who the landlords were kicking out to make room for them. They were looking for cheap rent just like anyone else. They were moving in where their friends were, just like Ice had done, and so many others, Tony even.
He has that feeling again: the ripped-in-half feeling, a second Riff moving off sideways into a different world, a different outcome. He reorients along a new axis; his compass wobbles, settles, steadies.
“We should go,” Riff says. He puts his thumb to the corner of Tony's mouth, then drags it sideways, pulling it across Tony's bottom lip. “To the dance. I promised Grazi.”
"Yeah?"
"Sure. I'll hold the Jets back. Say—I dunno. Say that the rumble's off. We'll just dance."
“Okay,” Tony says, and smiles. “Who do I dance with?”
“You’ll find somebody,” Riff says. He leans forward again, determined this time to tip Tony over. “Just don’t fall in love with her.”