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Carmy had always thought the best cigarette a person could smoke was the one you had first thing in the morning. After sleeping for hours, the craving was strong, and that first dose of nicotine back into the body after it had all filtered out during the night was a headrush in the best way.
If burning the first one after six hours was a luxury, the first after sixty-two felt like a fucking godsend. The irritable, restless feeling digging around inside his bones was finally settled into submission as he stood on Sugar’s back porch and took a drag, almost down to the filter. When the door opened, Carmy turned to see Richie stepping out, his own bad habit already held between his teeth. The blinds of the kitchen window were kept open while he was outside now, for understandable if embarrassing reasons, and he spied Pete shooing Sugar into a chair with a mug of tea as he took over stirring the soup.
“Hey,” Carmy said, tapping the ash off the end of his smoke before taking the final drag. He stubbed it out and reached into his pocket for another, not yet satiated, and it took him until it was lit to realize Richie hadn’t responded.
Richie’s smoke was hanging unburnt from his mouth, lighter in hand and thumb poised on the spark wheel. He was looking at Carmy in a strange way from ankle to collar, brow furrowed.
“You good?” Carmy asked.
“Shit. Yeah. I’m good.” Richie cleared his throat and tore his eyes away like the question had startled him. He fumbled the first couple of strikes before his lighter sparked.
Carmy looked down at himself and understood. He was wearing the same navy T-shirt and light-wash jeans he’d been wearing on the bridge that night, the outfit they’d taken from him at the hospital and given back ninety minutes ago. It wouldn’t surprise him if the sight of himself in these clothes - hair mussed by the wind, eyes and cheeks red from crying, hands on the railing, all hope and life drained from his being - had been burned into Richie’s retinas forever. He started to imagine how he’d feel if it had been Richie or Sugar or Sydney, and immediately had to shut down the thought. Even the imagination of it was too much. He would never forget the way they’d looked in that moment, if it had been one of them.
“So fucking good to be home,” Carmy said, by which he meant it’s good to be alive, I’m still all fucked up and sad and everything hurts but I’m alive, thank you for keeping me alive. He trusted Richie to catch the undercurrent.
“Food sucked?”
“Food fucking sucked.” He almost added, ‘that place was a nightmare,’ then thought better of it, because to everyone but him it had been the best case scenario. They’d only narrowly avoided their own nightmare. “I think I am…actually, genuinely surprised they didn’t give me food poisoning. Don’t laugh at me, I’m serious. It was so bad.”
Richie, chuckling, took a drag. “Fuck off. Eleven Madison dickhead.”
“No, those eggs tasted rotten.” They hadn’t. They’d merely been overboiled and sulfury. But Carmy was grinning now, too. “Rotten. That’s a fucking hazard, Rich. Not good. I’m sorry, though, I shouldn’t have expected you to know that. Now you know. Rotten food is bad, by the way.”
“Well, I’m sorry they didn’t have any, like, reduced plum wine -”
“- yeah, alright, go fuck yourself -”
“- fuckin’ fancy ass - what was it, four sets? Four sets of -”
“- four sets of plum, yeah, to shove up your -”
“- should sue their asses, how dare they not serve you gelée? How fucking dare they…”
They both broke off into quiet laughter, smoke curling into the tepid afternoon air around them. Carmy felt warmed from the inside out.
“We gotta get you a new phone,” Richie said after a moment. “Whole fucking restaurant started blowing up mine when Sugar told ‘em we were jailbreaking you. Fucking vultures. If vultures, like, ate broccoli cheddar and hugged the shit out of you. They’re flooding the goddamn group chat asking when they can come see your sorry ass.”
“They are?” Carmy stared at Richie. That took him by surprise - though maybe it shouldn’t have - and with his guard down, it hit soft and firm in the center of his chest. The collateral damage of the strike: guilt. It wasn’t just Rich, Sug, and Pete. He’d terrified everyone, hadn’t he? He wondered if Mom knew, and decided very quickly that he wasn’t ready to go down that mental path just yet. “They’re, like…trying to see me?”
Richie gave him a bewildered look. “The fuck you sound surprised for? Fucking ‘course they’re trying to see you. Syd closed the fucking kitchen early that night, and they all hauled ass to the hospital. Got there a few minutes too late, you’d already been moved upstairs.”
Tears pricked at the corners of his eyes. Carmy swiped roughly at his face with the outside of his wrist. He was sick of crying. “How would I have known that?”
“They stayed. Like, for a fucking while, Cuz. Couple hours, at least. They only left the ER finally because some asshat doctor got sick of them asking to break the no-visitor thing, and threatened to have their asses hauled out by security.”
“Oh. That’s…” Terrifying. Awe-inspiring. A level of commitment to his life that he was scared he couldn’t live up to. Extremely, irrationally kind. “That’s. Wow.”
“People fucking love you, dipshit.” Richie cuffed him on the head. “So do I, God fucking help me.”
Carmy made a strange sound that started as a laugh but ended as something sadder. The tears began to flow against his will. He dropped the cigarette butt, folded his arms across the porch railing, and lowered his face into them. “Shit. Sorry.”
Richie bumped his side lightly and asked, quiet, “You good?”
“Will be. Yeah. Gimme a minute.”
A hand came up to rub circles against his back, slow and soothing, and Carmy didn’t try to fight the tears. He let them run their course, dripping down his face and onto the wooden porch in silence, save for the occasional sniffle or hitch. When he lifted his head back up a few minutes later, Richie gestured vaguely toward his jaw. Carmy hadn’t looked in a mirror yet, but he could feel as he shifted the muscles that it had bruised.
“Sorry I punched you in the face,” Richie said flatly, not sounding very sorry at all.
Carmy shrugged, sniffled a little, and rolled his jaw. “Sorry I made you have to punch me in the face.”
“I’ll do it again.”
“Yeah, I know.”
“Like, for five bucks, really, not just if I have to.” Richie watched Carmy’s face for a smile, grinned when he saw the beginnings of one emerge. “Or, fuck it, I’d do it for free. Smug motherfucker.”
Carmy cleared his throat. “Did you know you can appeal to a court to keep somebody in an involuntary hold? For longer than three days?”
“Yep.”
“You guys didn’t do it.”
“Nope.”
“Why?”
Richie seemed to think about it for a minute, like he wasn’t sure of the answer himself. Surely it would have been, from their perspective, a plausible option.
Finally, he said, “I think we’d just fuckin’ miss you too much, Carm.”