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Richie knows all too well how sick and fucking twisted it — he — is.
Because Carmen is like a decade younger than him. Because he and Mikey were smoking spliffs in the attic while Carmy, unsupervised, melted together two action figures in the microwave and burned himself so bad that his tiny hands blistered into balloons. Because in high school they would wake up, sick as dogs from the night before, to Carmy asleep on the foot of Mikey’s bed, tear-streaked from nightmares with his thumb in his mouth. Because, when their father left, Richie was the one who held Carmy in his footy pajamas while Mikey shattered a stack of glassware into the kitchen sink.
Because Carmen isn’t Michael, and never will be. Because every time Richie sees him there’s a part of his brain that is convinced his best friend will reappear if he squints hard enough, drinks hard enough.
Because once, during a screaming match in the walk-in, Richie looked at Carmy’s face and said it should’ve been you.
Because when Carmy didn’t show at the funeral Richie wanted to hurt him. To kill him. To grab his neck and watch the blood leave his face until it was irreversible.
Because Richie blames himself more than he could ever blame Carmen, or their parents, or the drugs, or this life-sucking shithole of a place.
Richie knows he’s sick because he once called Carm by Michael’s name while coming inside of him. Neither of them said a thing afterwards.
He knows he’s sick but he can’t stop it. Doesn’t think he even wants to.
—
Maybe Richie was too hard on Carmy when he came home. Maybe it was a shock to the system to see him, after all the years, still so fucking short but so muscular, tattooed fingers, teenage acne given way to stubble, hardened by Michelin-starred abuse and New York drugs. Maybe Richie wanted to join Mikey up on the bridge when he learned the restaurant wasn’t left to him. Maybe when Carmy hired Syd to come in and do everything Richie couldn’t it felt the same way. Maybe nothing anyone did would have been enough to fill the space left behind.
The first time they fucked Richie came in, like, seconds. Hadn’t stuck his dick in anything since before the divorce, definitely not anything as wet and tight and fucking hot as Carmy’s stretched, red asshole.
It’s easy to chalk it up to, well, anything. To the stress and grief and loss and to Carmy’s body slick with sweat under the kitchen fluorescents and to the familiarity of his voice saying cousin, corner but also right there, don’t stop, Richie, keep going, please, cousin and to the echoed memory of Mikey’s hands. Richie tries not to think about anything other than how good it feels. Tries not to think about what it means, what it says about him. That he’s fucking his dead lover’s (that isn’t the right word, Richie knows it but doesn’t have a replacement because there’s no word for it, for Mikey) little baby brother over the arm of his couch and the desk in the office.
And he does think about it. How good it is. He thinks about it constantly.
—
Carmy calls on Tuesday morning while Richie is lighting up in the alley. It’s blistering hot against the brick wall, steam and stink rising from the busted-up concrete, making his eyes shimmer and swim.
“Cousin. What the fuck is up.” Richie is surprised to hear from him on his day off. Surprised and irritated by the tiny nauseous lurch his stomach does when he sees the name on the screen.
“Cousin,” Carmy says in a sleepy, affable voice. Richie wonders idly what he does at home when he isn’t being fucked into the countertop or trying to burn the place to the ground. “I need a favor.”
“A sexual favor?” Richie laughs gruffly, like it’s a joke, which it is. Yeah.
“No, no, fuck you.” Richie doesn’t say okay, sure even though it’s right there. “I have an appointment. Eye doctor. They say I need someone to drive me home.”
“Hm.” Richie muses, stamping out the butt of his cigarette under crusty work shoes. “Why don’t you ask Sydney.” There’s vitriol in his voice, intentional or not, because he sees the way Carmy looks at her on the line, face shining when she speaks like she’s fucking Jesus offering him a miracle. It doesn’t make Richie jealous or anything. But it’s annoying.
“Because, cousin, unlike you, Syd is necessary in the kitchen.”
“Oh, fuck you.” Richie’s head hurts. His balls hurt. “Does that usually work for you? Insulting somebody until they do what you need?” Of course it does. Anything would work for Carmy.
“Come on.” Carmy’s voice is needling, not begging like it is when Richie has him on his knees. Richie feels irritation rise bilious in his throat.
“Yo, take the L.”
“I’ll be blind, fucko. Blinded and robbed and stabbed and it’ll be your fault.”
“Oh my god, Carmy. You’re such a whiny fucking bitch.”
“Whatever. You’d do it for Mikey.” It’s pointed, and mean, and shuts Richie up. Which he supposes was the point. There’s a heavy beat of silence. Carmy breathes loudly into the phone. “Sorry. I’m… sorry.”
“What time?” Richie concedes, because he always does. To his kid when she begs for ice cream and late bedtime, to his wife (ex) when she stood in the bedroom and told him they were getting a divorce, to Mikey when he would say one more, Rich, this is the last time, I’m fine, promise, relax. Fuck.
“Two thirty.” Carmy’s voice is quiet.
“I’ll pick you up. Cousin.”
—
Richie doesn’t like leaving the neighborhood with his suspended license. It makes him jittery. So do doctor’s offices. So does Carmy, lately, though it used to be the easiest thing in the world.
Carm appears in the waiting room wearing flimsy plastic sunglasses and very clean sneakers. Richie gets to his feet arduously, like flipping through magazines for an hour in the blasting AC was a task he barely made it through.
“Come on.”
In the car, Carmy pulls off his sunglasses to show Richie his massive pupils that block out the creepy glacier blue of his eyes. (Richie doesn’t know where those came from. Mikey’s eyes are brown. Were brown.) Their faces are close, too close. Richie can feel Carmy’s warm breath.
“Thanks for the ride.” Carmy doesn’t back up. His blown eyes are unnerving and Richie's back is sweating and he doesn’t realize until minutes later it’s because of all the times he saw Mikey’s eyes looking just like that.
“Sure.”
“I’m sorry for what I said.”
“Sure.” Richie sounds petulant even to himself, like a child. He turns away, shifts the car out of park.
It’s a quarter to four when Richie pulls up in front of Carmy’s apartment complex. Enough time to get back to the restaurant for the dinner rush. Except why go, why even go, since he doesn’t do anything there. Or whatever. Richie is bristling as he lights a cigarette.
“Okay, cousin.” Carm says, opening the passenger door.
“Okay.”
Richie is making a point of not looking at him as he walks away, a point of focusing only on his smoke and not on the churning in his stomach or the ache in his dick. So he hears Carmy shout instead of seeing him fall, bolts out of the car with the cigarette hanging half-smoked from his mouth.
“What the fuck?” Carmy is sitting on the concrete steps, wincing and holding his right ankle.
“I told you I couldn’t fucking see.” Richie pulls him to his feet, trying not to laugh at how forlorn he looks brushing dirt off his stupid vintage jeans.
“Jesus, cousin, you’re a mess.”
“I’m fine.” Carmy tests the ankle, gingerly, hobbling until he’s satisfied it can hold his weight. “See?”
“You’re so stupid, bear,” Richie says, but it sounds fond. Carmy hears it, smirks. So fucking annoying. “I’ll walk you up.”
“Not necessary, cousin.”
“Shut up.”
Richie guides him up the dimly lit, carpeted stairwell, hand on the small of his back, partly because he knows it’s making Carmy bristle with annoyance, partly because it’s been, like, kind of a while and Richie feels a familiar dull need lodged somewhere between his stomach and sternum. Carm’s skin feels warm warm warm to the touch.
Carmy lives on the seventh floor, and the elevators never seem to fucking work. Richie is sweating and out of breath by the time they make it to his door, heart thrumming in his ears in a way that might be concerning if Richie worried about those kinds of things. If he didn’t smoke a pack and a half a day and eat primarily things dripping with grease and sodium.
“Fuck,” Carmy sighs, under his breath, fiddling with the key in the lock. Richie can see that he’s holding himself unevenly, favoring one leg, and a pang of sympathy — saccharine and irritating — goes through him.
“Carmy, I—“ Richie stops, because what is he going to say? Now? Carmy, I want to come inside and fuck you until your ass hurts more than your foot. Carmy, I wanted to throw up in the car when I saw Mikey in your eyes. Carmy, I wish you’d never look at Sydney again, just at me. Carmy, I’m not gay, you know that. Carmy, I loved your brother more than I ever loved anyone, maybe, except my kid, I loved him like a brother and more than a brother, more than anything I can say.
Carmy gets the door open while Richie is stumbling over his words and breath and stands in the frame looking up at him with those huge black eyes.
“What?”
Richie shrugs, paws at his eyes with the heels of his hands. He feels suddenly very fragile, like unstable, like a bomb. Like he could start crying or puking or throwing punches. He remembers this feeling from childhood, like a dam somewhere inside him has broken and if he stands very still that maybe, maybe he can keep the churning contained.
Since Mikey left it’s been worse. The pit in his stomach gnawing and expanding and spreading like sour poison into his mouth and fingertips. Mouth and hands that he puts on, in Carmy. Infecting him too.
“Cousin,” Carmy says it very softly. Richie can’t look at him. “You want- you wanna come in for a beer?”
—
Carmy’s living room is very bare apart from the striped couch they dragged up off the street where it lay, abandoned, and scrubbed for several long hours with vinegar and baking soda because Carm has a thing about germs and is just kind of anal in general.
There are cookbooks scattered and piled high across the floor. Mikey and Richie used to make fun of the way he read, voracious, desperate for information. Skinny, lonely, fatherless kid, only 5’2 his freshman year of high school, all the girls towering over him, made worse by the drawing and the dog-eared biographies of fucking Jacques Pepin spilling out of his hand-me-down backpack.
Carmy is in the bathroom. The walls are so thin that Richie can hear him pissing. Richie is so gross that it turns him on.
Richie’s head feels like a clogged garbage disposal. Full of swampy water and detritus. It’s hot in the apartment, hot enough that Richie wonders, idly, if he should stand up and open a window. His limbs feel too heavy to move. Carm’s phone is ringing somewhere in the room, probably Sydney on the other end with her face screwed up ready to scream at them to get the fuck back here. Richie closes his eyes.
Carmy sneaks up on him, somehow, even with his gimp leg, and when Richie feels the couch shift next to him he startles, fingers jerking against his knees.
“Whoa,” Carmy chuckles, leaning back against the tattered cushions, “jumpy.”
“Yo, can you even see?” Richie spits, annoyed with himself and with twinkletoes here and with the prospect of the restaurant grinding on without him.
“Yeah. Sort of. It’s dark in here.”
“I should get back.” Richie imagines Tina or Marcus or fucking Fak at the register, pissing off regulars and messing with Richie’s delicate fucking system. None of them know how bad they need him there. Mikey knew.
“Like this?” Carmy asks. Richie still doesn’t have a fucking beer in his hand. Useless.
“Like what.”
“You seem… tense.”
“Shut up,” Richie says. “Cocksucker”. Carmy raises both hands, palms out, like a concession. Don’t shoot the messenger.
“We don’t have to talk about it.” If it’s a pass, Richie is too fogged-up to notice.
Carmy puts his right hand on Richie’s cock.
Okay. Yeah.
“You aren’t slick, cousin,” Carm says, not moving. He’s blinking rapidly against the thin light that slats in from behind the dusty blinds. “Your hand on my back.”
Richie feels shy, suddenly, like he didn’t do it on purpose.
“Whatever.” Richie swallows, throat stale and thick. He could really use that beer. “You’re the one petting my cock.” Carmy winces like a schoolgirl. Richie knows he doesn’t like the word, which is why he uses it.
(Richie knows no one had fucked Carmy, actually fucked, before he did. Richie knew Carmy was lying when he said yeah, no, I’ve done it before, voice too casual, hands clenching and unclenching. Richie knows how to be gentle, like he is (was) with girls after the second or third date. And he was gentle, even with every nerve in his body screaming at him to pound Carmy until he cried.)
“So are you gonna go?” Carmy asks, a taunt coloring his slow, sleepy voice. Richie swings his weight around, pins Carm down by the shoulders into the cushions.
“No.”
—
Carmy grew up so much somewhere between culinary school and when Mikey blew out his brains. Grew into his nose and his heavy, perpetually worried eyelids. Let his hair grow from its awkward kiddie buzz into brown-gold curls down his neck. Filled out everywhere except those delicate, pink lips that are curving taut around Richie’s cock.
“Fucking Jesus Christ.” Richie lets his head fall back. He can feel the veins in his neck popping with the effort it takes not to come down Carm’s wet little throat right this second, because Richie doesn’t give a shit about being emasculated or whatever but he gives a shit about how good Carmy is making him feel and he can’t let it stop. “Bear, you fucking take it so good.”
Richie digs his dirty, chewed nails into Carmy’s greasy mop of hair, pulls him down further. Carmy chokes, the sound so dirty-wet-satisfying that Richie’s whole body twitches. Carm looks up at him, pupils still huge, spit running down that weak, dimpled chin of his.
Then Richie really is gonna come, so he grabs the collar of Carmy’s stupid pretentious white t-shirt, same one he wears every day, and hauls him up off his knees.
Carm is drooling, face slack, forehead slick with sweat. He looks ruined, which Richie likes. Sometimes Richie sees him across the kitchen and pictures him just like this and gets a semi in his trackies in front of everybody.
“Do you want me to put it inside you? Put my cock inside you, bear?” Sometimes when they fuck Richie gets into this space, rambling, vomiting it all up, all the dirty unnecessary details that he and Mikey always sped right past. Carmy doesn’t seem to mind, not really. “Do you wanna ride me, you wanna ride my dick, want me to open you up? You want it here?” Richie presses his thumb over thick denim into the cleft of Carmy’s ass, right below his balls, and Carm moans, shaky, nods.
Richie unbuttons Carmy’s jeans, thumbs the head of his dick through the wet spot of his worn boxers. Sometimes Richie thinks Carm likes not having to speak, to think. For once. Something about the way his eyes glaze and his body responds to Richie’s touch. So Richie guides him along, lets him go loose and inside-outside-above himself.
Richie holds Carmy by the ribs, tight enough to bruise, probably, as he fucks up into him. Carmy has one hand on the back of the couch and the other digging half-moons into Richie’s shoulder. His dick is angry-red and leaking, caught between their stomachs. Something inside Richie wants to kiss the tip. He doesn’t.
There’s not enough lube, not quite, and Richie can feel the drag of it as he fucks in and out. It can’t be comfortable for Carm, but he doesn’t complain and Richie doesn’t stop.
Richie comes before Carmy does, which is just in poor taste, alright, Richie is a gentleman and that’s how he bagged his wife. Ex. Carmy’s too tight for his own fucking good. His asshole and everything else.
They both groan when Richie pulls out and Carmy’s knees give, collapsing into a sweating pile on top of him. Richie spits in his right palm and gets his fist between their sticky bodies and jerks Carm off without much skill or precision. It doesn’t seem to matter. Richie pops him one finger and it’s over in about five seconds.
Afterwards, when they’re smoking on the couch to Barefoot Contessa reruns (so gay, so fucking unsexy) Richie looks over at Carmy and asks did I hurt you?
Carmen smiles, impassive.
“You never cared about hurting me before.”
—
When Carmy was still in high school he walked in on them. Richie and Mike. Together. Afterwards, after the stunned moment of sheer silent panic where Carmy slammed the door and Mikey stared, face white and slack, Richie fled into the hallway and hit Carmen so hard that his nose gushed like a lawn sprinkler.
Carmy wouldn’t have said a thing. He wouldn’t have.
—
Richie sits outside the restaurant and smokes and thinks about what a miracle it is that only one of the Berzatto children committed suicide because their mom was so fucking crazy that being raised in, like, the Manson cult probably would have turned out better. It was horrible. It was so fucking horrible, that house, and still Richie spent all his waking hours there because he loved Michael so much, loved him so much and maybe felt like he needed to protect him too. Like Aunt Dee couldn’t have slit his throat with those horrible press on nails she wore. Like if Richie was there, there was a buffer. He loved her, too, though. He loved her more than his own mom.
When Carmen was five and Natalie was brand new Donna fell asleep while breastfeeding and smoking and — fuck. Later that night, Mikey, who hadn’t put Sugar down since, who wouldn’t and couldn’t, told Richie about the gun upstairs in the bedroom. Said sometimes I think I should kill her before she kills them.
So Richie gets it. Why Sugar went and married Pete, breaking her neck for some semblance of stability. Why Carmy makes himself throw up, sometimes, why he can’t catch his breath or say I love you. Why Mikey went and did what he did.
Jesus fuck. Richie still has nightmares about it all and he didn’t come out of the woman.
—
Friday is his day with Eva. She looks so much like Tiff that it makes Richie sick to his stomach. They’re sitting on a bench at the playground, eating popsicles. Strawberry for her and grape for him. Her face and hands are covered in sticky red goo, so he’ll have to give her a bath or Tiff will look at him with those wide eyes like seriously? and Richie will want to kill himself.
Mike was their first visitor after she was born. Tiff in the hospital bed, looking wan and sweaty but still so, so beautiful, Richie holding Eva swaddled in his hands with hot tears falling down his face like hey, you, I made you, we made you and we will never let anything hurt you, your daddy will never let anything hurt you.
Mikey had kissed Tiffany’s head, held both her hands in his, murmuring. He’s the one who introduced them. And then Mikey and Richie stopped sleeping together and they never talked about it and it didn’t matter then because Richie was so stupid in love and Mikey was so stupid high.
Hi, you Mikey had said, talking to the baby but to Richie too, taking her in his arms and staring with this expression on his face that Richie understood, like how could something so beautiful and so perfect and so pure come from the place they all came from too. And then Tiff had taken her and Mikey held on to Richie, a giant bear hug, while Richie fell apart with the joy and fear and newness of it all.
“Daddy,” Eva says, her voice and face real serious.
“Yes, baby?” Richie hopes to god she’s too young for this, for him and Tiff, to scar her. He hopes to god he’s not doing it wrong. Richie bad news.
“Will you push me on the tire swing?” Richie grins at her. His chest aches.
He pushes her high, her blonde hair haloing against the blue sky, and they both laugh and laugh until they’re out of breath.
—
They’re both very, very drunk. The kitchen floors are unmopped and there’s garlic under Richie’s nails and Carmy’s breath smells like cigarette smoke and Pepto-Bismol and Malört. Disgusting.
When Carmy mentioned AA to Richie, Richie had laughed. Because he’s a horrible person.
Carmy is still wearing his apron. Richie is hard. He’s felt old all day.
“Did you ever, uh, sleep with Sydney?” He asks, suddenly, because. Some reason. Carmy is drunk enough that he doesn’t tell Richie to go fuck himself. He’s chewing on his lip, worried and thoughtful and so fucking annoyingly intense all the time.
“No.” Richie tells himself not to feel relieved, does anyway.
“Would you?” You’re just hurting your own feelings Tiff had said when Richie begged her to explain why she was leaving.
Carmy laughs, shortly. Richie can’t tell if he’s annoyed.
“Yeah,” he says, “I mean, fuck it. I would.” Ugh. There it is. She’s beautiful and she worships Carmy and Richie might as well crawl in a hole and die. “Would you, cousin?”
Maybe if you were out of the picture, Richie thinks. If Carmy was out of the picture, Richie likes to think he already would have. He likes mean women, they get him hot, and they can’t stand him but they always fuck him.
If Richie was smart, if he was thinking, he would say already have and she’s a better fuck than you, dickwipe. But he isn’t. So he’s honest.
“Yeah, if you were there.” Carmy’s face drops a little, in surprise or revulsion or something else. Richie’s heart thrums a pulsing, drunken rhythm against his ribs.
“Oh, that’s disgusting.” Carmy laughs but his voice is low and thick and when Richie glances down he sees the erection in those gay-as-shit chef pants Carm wears. “You’re, like, so fucking disgusting.”
“Oh my fucking god!” Richie guffaws. “You’ve thought about it!”
Carmy says shut up but he’s staring at the ground and his face is beet red and Richie feels a weird hot wave of affection wash over him.
“Who’s disgusting now, cousin.”
“Stop. Fucking-” Carmy is so red and quiet that for a moment Richie thinks he’s fucked it, fucked it all up. But then: “Can we go to your place?”
Because Carmy, stupid uptight sanitary Carmy would never fuck in the kitchen, never in a million years. And, yeah, he makes Richie wait until he mops to leave.
—
On Richie’s bed, shirtless and facedown in the mattress, Carmy turns his head to the side, eyes bleary, and says real quietyo, you ever gonna let me fuck you?
Richie laughs and hooks three fingers into Carmy’s mouth to shut him up, so he doesn’t have to say that the first and last and only person to do that to him was Mikey and he can’t stomach the thought of not having something only touched by him.
Carmy drools on Richie’s fingers, closes his eyes and says fuck, fuck, fucking fuck as Richie eases inside him.
It’s a little messy after a twelve hour shift, no shower, but Richie, who is a disgusting pervert, apparently, doesn’t give a fuck. Not when it comes to Carmy. (No way in hell Richie would ever tell him though; Carm would probably kill himself.)
Carmy is rutting his hips into Richie’s threadbare Walmart sheets, biting down too hard on Richie’s fingers and it hurts and Richie’s stomach pools with the heat of his impending orgasm. He’s not coming first this time, not twice in a row, so he looks away from Carmy’s fucking glistening Greek god manlet body and stares at the ceiling instead. Starts listing the Chicago Bears season stats in his head until he no longer feels like a desperate high schooler about to bust on his girlfriend’s thigh.
When Carmy comes, he moans Richie real high, like a girl and, well, that’s that.
—
Later, in the kitchen, Richie stirs a sizzling pan of corned beef hash, the kind from the can, under the bare fluorescent overhead. Carmy comes out with a towel slung low around his hips, pubes visible, same hay-colored curls as the ones on his head. Richie idly wonders what it would be like to pull them between his teeth.
He’s still dripping wet, leaving little puddles on Richie’s tiles.
“This is fucking,” Richie snaps him with the kitchen towel, “original flooring, you dumb fuck.”
“You’re so full of it, cousin,” Carmy swats back. “This place was built in the fucking eighties.”
“I was fucking your mom in the fucking eighties.” It’s probably a bad joke, Richie realizes at it leaves his mouth, all things considered, but Carmy laughs.
“Yeah, when you were seven? Have you talked to someone about that?”
“Go fuck yourself.” Richie turns off the burner. “Hash?”
“Man,” Carmy drags a hand across his stubbly face, stares into the pan, “haven’t had that since…”
“Yeah. Me and Mikey’s place.” When they were at their brokest, water turned off, rent overdue every time, this shit was all they ate. Corned beef and cigarettes for dinner, listening to gunshots ring in the alley.
“D’ya miss him?” The way Carmy says it, the way he’s standing there barefoot — he looks like a child all of a sudden. Richie wants to gather him up and put him to bed. Fuck.
“Of course I miss him, cousin.”
“I think I should — I think I’m supposed to miss him more.” Carmy’s face crumples minutely. Richie doesn’t know what to do, feeling stupid and useless with the spatula in his hands and Carmy’s taste on his molars.
“Hey,” Richie murmurs. He think Carmy is about to cry. “Hey.”
“I’m drunk,” Carmy mutters by way of explanation, of excuse. His eyes are bloodshot and damp. He’s swaying minutely.
“Yeah,” Richie says, suddenly exhausted. “It’s okay.”
“No, it fucking isn’t.” Carmy sits on one of the cheap, hard stools Richie has pulled up to the sauce-stained island. He’s looking at the floor. “You were right, you know, cousin.”
“About what?” He’s starting to make Richie nervous. The smell of pasteurized meat and grease hangs acrid in the air.
“What you said. How it should’ve been me.”
“Oh,” Richie brings a hand to his forehead, feels the deep wrinkles and sheen of sweat under his palm, “bear.”
“Don’t.”
“Bear. I didn’t fucking mean that, okay.” Carm won’t look at him. Richie wants to throw up. “I was just — just angry. You’re not…”
“I’m not him.”
“That’s not what I was gonna fucking say.” Richie feels a sick sense of desperation, his voice rising.
“You’re right.”
“Cousin. You’re not listening to me.”
“He fucked my life up.” Carmy gesticulates wildly, hand jabbing the air like a tough batch of dough. “He died and he made me come back here and fucked up my whole life and I don’t even miss him.”
“Yo, you weren’t even happy in New York.” Richie says, feeling the strange urge to defend Mikey, to protect him even now.
“I was wanted in New York,” Carmy spits, and it stings, even though Richie knows that isn’t how he meant it. Because what does that make Richie? Fucking chopped liver. Standing here wanting him so bad. Always wanting him. “Mike hated me so much I couldn’t come into his restaurant until he fucking died.
“He didn’t hate you, Carm.” Richie doesn’t actually know if that’s true. He understood everything about Mikey except this, this seemingly inexplicable rift. But Mikey had that drawing Carmy made hung in his office from the day they put the down on the piece of shit. “He was just… jealous.”
“Jealous? I’m the one who was fucking jealous.”
“Cousin…”
“He had everything I fucking wanted. His own place, all his fucking friends, Sugar, mom. You.”
Richie head snaps up. Carmen won’t meet his eyes.
“Carmen. I’m. You know. I’m here.” The sentiment falls flat, empty and lame.
“Let me ask you something.” Carmy doesn’t sound like himself. He sounds choked and angry.
“What is it?”
“Why don’t you love me as much as you loved Mikey?”
Oh, god. Richie rubs his eyes. The hash is going cold. He wishes he could disappear.
“I do love you, bear. Stop it.” Please.
“You fucking… you know what I mean.”
Then Carmen does start to cry, earnest and drunk and crumpled in the face in a way that makes Richie want to kill himself.
“Bear,” Richie says real quiet. His eyes and sinuses burn. “Come here.”
“I’m just. So fucking tired.”
“I know. Let’s go to bed.”
Carmy sleeps, finally, tumultuously. Richie stares at the ceiling and listens to Carm’s breathing change and lays awake for a long, long time after that.
—
After the dinner rush, rain pouring and sizzling on the sidewalk like an egg in a pan, everything smelling thick and wet like mud and sex, Richie takes the cigarette Carmy passes to him. Lighting flashes in the distance.
“We got killed tonight,” Carmy muses.
“We did alright.” Richie inhales, holds it too long just to feel the quiet burn in his lungs. He never could quit it, even when Tiff was pregnant. He’d go outside, change his clothes and chug mouthwash so the smell wouldn’t make her sick. He felt like an asshole. He is an asshole. Don’t you want to live to walk your daughter down the aisle?
Richie tilts his face up into the rain that spits from the lip of the frayed awning. It feels good. Clean.
“Thanks,” Carmy says.
“For what?”
“For saying that. Reminding me.” Carmy looks exhausted as he takes the cigarette back, but his eyes are clear and still.
“Give yourself some fuckin’ credit, cousin,” Richie says. Carmy smiles at him.
“You too, yeah?” Carmy takes the final drag, grinds the cherry under his work shoes. “We — I — couldn’t run this place without you. And you’re a good dad.”
“I dunno,” Richie snorts, but his chest and face feel warm. “Thanks, bear.”
They sit in silence for a long time, listening to the high whistle of the train and the loud laughter from the kitchen behind them.