by Rhys Ford
Mason tagged him a second later, a hard slap to the middle of Rey’s back, firm and quick enough to shove out what little air Rey’d sucked up and sending him into a violent coughing fit. His friend continued a few paces, catching at the chain link span separating the side alley from the nearby dew-damp tennis courts. It rattled when he grabbed at it, using the barrier to stop, and Mace clung to it for a moment, letting his body go slack.
“God, you suck,” Rey gasped, wondering if he was going to be sick on his own shoes. “Hands on the front.” He sucked in more air, his back tingling where Mace hit him. “Can’t tag… if touching… asshole.”
“Sure I can. Just because you got to home base doesn’t mean I can’t hit you. If you had any brothers, you’d know that,” Mason huffed, walking back from the fence, white plumes in front of his face, the hot breath from his overworked lungs hitting the frosty morning air. “Come on, winner buys breakfast, and I’m hungry.”
“Screw you, Crawford.” Rey finally caught his breath, stretching out his aching legs. “Loser buys, and this time I hope you brought your wallet, because there’s no way in hell I’m washing dishes again.”
MACE GREETED the elderly hostess with a slight bow of his head and a smile, then uttered, “Ni hao ma, a yí.”
“Wow. Stick to English. Your Chinese is horrible. Worse than you smell, and man, you stink,” Yī lián groaned, wrinkling her button nose, then scraped her tongue against her teeth. “You go into the back. People don’t want to smell you when they eat breakfast. Go. I’ll be right there.”
Yī lián was a fixture at the tea house, a short, slightly bent over Chinese woman with an impossibly pitch-black pixie haircut and more sass than a pot of hot peppers. Rey couldn’t figure out if she owned the dim sum shop or had been there since it first opened in 1920, but she was always there from four to eleven in the morning, handling the breakfast rush and managing the front of the house with an iron fist. Usually dressed in a track suit—bubble-gum pink that morning—and a pair of black tennis shoes, she sorted out seating and waitstaff with a ruthless cunning meant to turn over tables quickly and ensure a steady profit. Linger too long at a table and she would shuffle by, offering you takeout cups for the rest of the tea in the pot, then tapping the back of the bill before asking if it would be cash or charge.
Being put in the back was problematic. Service would be spottier—out of sight meant sometimes out of mind—but it also meant they could stay as long as they liked, a courtesy Yī lián only extended to people she liked. Or so Rey hoped. Since they normally used the tea house as the end of their street tag run, he and Mason were usually sweaty and a little disgusting when they came in, and Yī lián always slotted them into one of the private cubbies, poking her head in once in a while to make sure they’d been fed.
The restaurant’s newly painted florid walls were a mint green, about two shades dimmer than the neon lime they’d been a few years ago, but the columns remained a blinding tangerine, their hue fighting with the old-fashioned brick-red vinyl chairs set around the dim sum house’s square brown tables. The carpet was the same color as the tables, a mottled coffee industrial-grade pile covering the entire span of the space. Rey couldn’t tell if the speckled chocolate was the carpet’s original tint or if it had merely soaked up decades of spilled shoyu. Either way it looked clean enough or as good as a place could look when packed tight with people nearly every minute of the day, with little down time to do much more than wipe the tables between seatings and run a quick carpet sweeper over any mess larger than a torn napkin.
“Here, this one.” Mason slid into one of the smaller rooms at the back of the restaurant, its wooden swinging doors pinned back with a pair of old bungee cords. The space was barely large enough to hold a long table and four chairs, but it was clean, and the small lazy Susan condiment pots were bulging with sauces and peppers. Sliding into one of the chairs, Mason reached out to grab the end of the table when his knees struck its legs. “Shit, I’m starving. Might as well fill up now. Murphy’s got kitchen duty this shift. We’re going to be burping canned chili for days.”
“Yang switched dinner duty with him, so only… what?” Rey counted up the meals Murphy would be slinging out his doctored slurry. “We’ll have it for lunch today, then chili dogs for late-evening snack, then his chili and scrambled egg casserole for breakfast. Yeah, maybe we should get some bao to go.”
“Almost makes me want to find a religion where I have to eat bacon with every meal,” Mason grumbled, pulling the dim sum menu out from behind a napkin holder. “Let’s figure out what’s for breakfast. I’m kind of hoping we don’t have a lot going on today. Gus came downstairs when I got into the house last night, so I didn’t get a lot of sleep.”
Rey opened one of the condiment pots, taking a whiff of the peppers inside. “These smell good.”
“Yeah, watch those. They’re damned hot.” Mason shook his head. “You’re going to regret eating them later. We’re down to one bathroom at the station, remember? They’re doing a refurb on the other one.”
“Pretty sure that’s a myth. The outward burn. Not the bathroom refurb.”
“Yeah, down there’s lined with cells similar to what we’ve got in our mouths. So yeah, peppers can burn out as much as they do in.” Mason chuckled when Rey grimaced. “Damn truth. Promise.”
“I don’t even want to know how you know that.”
“Live around Ivo for more than two days and you learn all kinds of shit you never even thought about looking up,” his friend replied. “Want me to write down what we want? Then you can tell me about the look you got on your face when I mentioned Gus. Oh, and while we’re talking about Gus, I might have told him you have a boyfriend.”
“I do not have a boyfriend,” Rey reproached across a table brimming with steamed dumplings and a plate of garlic gai lan, then smiling at the departing waitress when Mason thanked her.
“You like that Brian guy.” Mason gestured with his chopsticks. Mixing pepper oil and shoyu in a shallow bowl, he continued, “You’ve gone out with him four… five times? One of us needs to get laid, and it looks like you’re a hell of a lot closer than I am.”
“Not a boyfriend. And we’re not….” Rey was torn between dealing with hunger or hammering at the discomfort in his chest from talking about Gus. So he went with hunger, taking a deep breath while Mason poured half of the oil-shoyu mixture into another bowl, then slid it across the table for Rey to use. “I just got transferred into Station Two a few months ago, remember?”
“Took you long enough,” he retorted. “Hell of a lot easier to torture you with my spaghetti if you’re in the same house.”
“Mace, the last thing I need right now is a relationship. Brian’s… a great guy. And it’s nice to do things with him, but I’m not looking to move in and get a dog.” Lifting a har gow out of its container to let the dumpling cool down, Rey waited for most of the steam to roll off its wrapper, then dipped it into Mace’s concoction. “I don’t have a problem with Gus. It didn’t work out. I want different things in life than he does—”
“Like a steady job and a home,” Mason interjected.
Rey gave his friend a baleful glance. “You want to tell Bear being a tattoo artist isn’t a steady job?”
“For Bear and Ivo it is.” He shook his head, selecting a char siu bao and hissing when the hot bread steamed his fingers. “For Gus it’s a way to get away with doing as little as possible and still make enough money to survive.”
“You’re too hard on him. He’s good at what he does.” Rey winced a bit. “When he’s focused on what he’s doing, but he doesn’t do shitty ink. Uninspired sometimes but not shitty. He’s just not… Ivo.”
“Look, I love Gus. He’s my kid brother,” Mason clarified, breaking the bao in two. “But that doesn’t mean I don’t know who he is. He’ll be thirty next year, and he’s still living with Bear—”
“So is Ivo,” Rey pointed out. “Yeah, that’s different, but Gus… that’s his life,
Mace. That’s for him to decide. His life to figure out how to live. Thing is, what he wants? It didn’t work for me. We didn’t work for me. Hardest thing I had to do was walk away from him, and yeah, it’s been three years, but it still sucks. He’s your brother, and I’m going to see him once in a while. I can at least make that work, but no telling him I have a boyfriend. At least not until I actually have one.”
“Dude, I’ve seen how Brian looks at you.” Mace grinned at him from across the table, chewing around a cheek full of Chinese barbequed pork and puffs of white bread. “All you’ve got to do is crook your finger and he’d be right there.”
“That’s the problem I have with Gus,” Rey said softly, staving off a flood of memories he couldn’t ever seem to pull himself out of. “Except I wasn’t the one doing the crooking.”
IT WAS too early in the morning to do anything but sleep and perhaps stumble into the kitchen to get coffee and then go back to sleep, but there Gus was, finding a parking space in front of what sounded like a zombie apocalypse going on behind a half-block-wide high fence.
He was on the wrong end of Mission, near Chavez, and the neighborhood was already tepid and faintly muggy, its odd microclimate shoving back the city’s legendary fog. The streets were already filling up, the city’s bones rising up to support its existence for another day. A pocket of service-uniformed women huddled around a bus stop, their chatter of Spanish slang drifting across the street with Gus catching every other word, hot slang tinged with a bit of bitterness and envy around a woman who’d been promoted to the front desk.
It wasn’t a bad neighborhood. Actually, it was one Gus knew fairly well. Of the ten foster homes he’d been placed in, four were in the Mission District, and one—the one he hated the most—wasn’t too far from where Lucas eventually set up shop. The place was a bit sketchy, more run-down than dangerous, but there were still areas on some streets where walking quickly through was best. It was a district of iron grates on the windows and doors, with buzzers used to let clients into a furniture rental store, but was also home to Gus’s favorite Chinese food and donut shop.
Bright colors did battle on most of the buildings, and the graffiti on the walls were mostly tags, lacking any artistic value and nothing like the murals staged by local communities to brighten up a dismal corner. Taquerias and pizza-by-the-slice joints were on every street, and cramped apartments were stacked above weather-bleached storefronts, a crazy quilt of tenements stretching and winding in between the blocks, creating a maze of dead ends and shadowy, narrow walks.
Gentrification nibbled at the edges of these streets but hadn’t quite taken a bite. Most of the district’s meat was still too toxic, too hard to manage and without the resources to provide protection for wide-eyed naïve innocents looking for cheap housing in a city known for its galactic price tags. A couple of streets over and the world was a brighter, happier place, but that sunshine hadn’t quite reached that end of Mission, and Gus wasn’t sure if it ever would.
A frutas vendor was setting up shop outside of a closed tattoo shop Bear disliked mostly on principle, its single focus on New School guaranteed to stir up his older brother’s ire if poked at. Lucas sharing a block with the place probably tweaked Bear’s nose, but they were both pragmatic. Sometimes living next door to the enemy was the best hope to survive, and if there was one thing Lucas knew, it was how to survive.
The mango looked good, and his mouth watered, tasting the bite of chili on the sweet fruit in the back of his throat. It would sting, and he’d be a little bit sick after eating too much, but Gus was tempted to stop. His brother’s husky, playful laugh coming over the wooden fence was enough to keep him moving.
He woke up needing a bit of peace, especially after tangling with Mason. The oldest of Bear’s strays, Mace pushed, harder than Bear ever had, driven to be better and more righteous than anyone around him. It was what led Mace into the fire to pull Rey out, why he hounded Gus and the others to do more than what they were already struggling to attain. Where Bear for the most part gently guided, Mace shoved when he thought he could get away with it, apologizing only if Bear offered up an opinion.
“Fuck, he pisses me off,” Gus muttered, then caught himself before he pushed open the building’s front door. “No swearing. Don’t want to tarnish Luke’s halo.”
If Mason was the pitchfork stabbing Gus into a lava pit of good intentions, Luke was a saint waiting for beatification. When Gus was bounced out of the hospital and into yet another foster home, Luke Muñoz was there waiting for him, a steady rock for an eight-year-old Gus to huddle against, sheltering himself from the storm of confusion and loss he was caught in. He’d been alone—frighteningly alone—and in the chaos of a ten-kid foster home, Gus clung to the only bit of brightness he could find in the dark surrounding him and cried every night when that light held him and told him things were going to be okay.
Even when they both knew things were never going to be okay ever again.
Luke stepped into the gaping void left by Puck, and then when Bear finally found Gus, the older boy vowed Luke would come with them. Somewhere safe. Somewhere the five of them could call their own. True to his word, the moment Bear was able to, he’d gathered Mace, Gus, Luke, and Ivo up and brought them home.
There was no sign on the building. Nothing to lead someone to its front doors looking for a dentist or any other kind of professional. Nondescript and beige, the sprawling two-story brick building once housed a church and its school, but God hadn’t seen fit to bless its flock. Instead its pastor had an affair with several members of the congregation, and when things got too hot for him, he fled the country, taking most of the church’s assets with him… leaving the building behind as a place for Lucas and a few others to help people learn how to build their lives back up.
Gus reached the center’s front doors and grabbed at the right side’s handle, yanking it open. Or at least he tried to. It held firm, glass rattling in the steel frame. An older Caucasian woman he didn’t recognize looked up from her place behind the reception desk, the morning light coming through the chicken-wire-infused glass panels throwing the shadows from her face. Frowning at him, she pointed downward, and Gus glanced to his right, spotting what looked like a newly installed intercom set into the building’s tumbled-rock façade.
“Can I help you?” Her voice was pitched high, strung tight by the crackling speaker.
“I’m here to see Luke… um…. Doctor Muñoz.” It was silly, but Gus leaned toward the intercom, keeping his eyes on her as he spoke. “I’m his brother, Gus.”
Gus could practically hear her thoughts through the glass. Her face said it all, and when she let her gaze catch on his blond hair, sharp bone structure, and pale skin—a far cry from Luke’s honey tan and beautiful Latin features—he didn’t need to be a mind reader to know she not only doubted every single word coming out of his mouth, but she was also about to reach for the panic button to call in the cops, since showing up in a pair of torn jeans, an old leather jacket, and a faded 415 Ink T-shirt probably didn’t help matters.
“I’m August Scott.” After digging his driver’s license out of his wallet, Gus plastered it to the glass door, knowing she wouldn’t be able to make anything out, but it was the only thing he could think of to get her attention. “I’m on the approved visitors’ list. Just… go look.” She didn’t so much as blink, but her arm drifted to the right where Gus knew the block plate was for the alarm. “For fuck’s sake, lady, will you either call Luke or look my damned name up? I’m one of the volunteer art guys. Just… call Luke, okay?”
Judging by the sour look on her face and the shift in her shoulders, the woman decided against calling the cops. The intercom went dead, or at least he couldn’t hear anything else come out of it, and Gus shoved his license back into his wallet, muttering to himself about red tape and petty dictators. He didn’t hear the door open, but he felt the whoosh of air on his face when Luke swung it open, his face bright with a wide smile.
Sh
orter than Gus by a few inches, Luke packed a lot of personality and charisma into his slightly stockier frame. His hair was a bit longer on the top than it’d been the last time Gus was around, a messy ruffle of dark brown he’d probably run his hands through after he’d gotten up, then hadn’t touched it since. His cinnamon gaze was soulful, carrying the weight of things he’d lived through and now battled every day. There was a Star Wars Band-Aid on his little finger, emblazoned with characters too small for Gus to make out, but the logo was a dead giveaway. He’d gone very casual that morning, with red Converses, black jeans, and a white T-shirt with fabric too thin to hide the faded, stretched-out phoenix inked on his right shoulder. When he turned to make sure the door was closed, Luke’s back tattoo coyly flashed into a view, a set of wings and a sword, the feather tips curling up to encircle the five-point star they all shared.
Gus hadn’t taken another breath before he was wrapped up into one of Luke’s rib-breaking hugs. His faux-twin’s arms were still long, and they wrapped around him, broad hands patting his back, and it took a moment before Gus could find how to control his body again to return the embrace. Luke was solid—so damned solid—and when his arms tightened even more, Gus finally let himself go, loosening the tension in his muscles and resting his weight against Luke’s strong body.
“Fuck, it’s good to feel you,” Gus whispered, resting his chin against his shorter brother’s hair. “I didn’t know how much I missed you until… right now. I’m glad I came home.”