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Tony S.

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  1. Tony S.
    Kitt didn’t remember walking home. One moment he was in the restaurant restroom, knuckles pressed to his eyes, breath unraveling in sharp, uneven bursts— and the next he was letting himself into his apartment with hands that barely worked, the faded light of late afternoon smearing across the narrow hallway. He closed the door quietly behind him, as if making noise might shatter the fragile shell barely holding him together. The room smelled faintly of detergent from the laundry load T
  2. Tony S.
    The days in Riverbend had been warming and cooling in strange, uneven waves — warm afternoons followed by crisp evenings, the kind of seasonal in-between weather that made jackets feel unnecessary one hour and essential the next. Kitt adjusted to it because he adjusted to everything now. That was how survival worked. He worked the breakfast shifts at Javier’s restaurant, taking the early morning rush of dishwashing, mopping, wiping down counters, whatever Javier needed. And in the afternoon
  3. Tony S.
    Mid-October in Riverbend didn’t come with frost or breath-clouded mornings yet. Instead, it arrived in quiet, creeping shifts: the air a little sharper at dawn, the sun setting earlier each day, the river moving with a slow, thoughtful murmur as if the season itself were deciding how quickly to turn cold. The afternoons were still warm enough for kids to run outside in short sleeves, and the evenings still held a trace of leftover summer heat trapped in the pavement. But under it all, there was
  4. Tony S.
    I'm aware the pace is kinda slow but it's getting there soon. Thank you all for your support and patience. I hope you have enjoyed the story so far. 😉
  5. Tony S.
    Stephen Wellington had not meant to drink that night. He told himself he simply needed something to warm the hollow ache that had taken root beneath his ribs, something to quiet the echo of a front door slamming and the memory of his son’s eyes—blue and wounded and furious—as he disappeared into the snow. One glass of bourbon became two, then three, then something he stopped counting because acknowledging the number felt too much like admitting the truth: he was spiraling and didn’t know how to
  6. Tony S.
    Time did not stop for boys whose lives had cracked open in winter. It moved the way it always did—steady, indifferent—dragging everything with it. Snow melted off the roofs in Lakehurst and Riverbend, mud replaced ice, and then suddenly there were leaves and heat and the endless, humming stretch of summer. People went on buying groceries and paying bills and arguing on sidewalks. Buses kept running. The sun kept rising. None of it cared that one boy had run into the snow with nowhere to go and a
  7. Tony S.
    The winter in Riverbend was beginning to soften, just slightly, the kind of change that wasn’t obvious on the streets but made itself known in the way the air smelled—less like frozen metal, more like damp earth waking from sleep. Kitt adjusted the collar of his jacket as he stepped out of the youth center late one afternoon, the sky a soft lavender, the streetlights flickering to life one by one. His hands still smelled faintly of washable paint and cheap cafeteria pizza, the “official meal” th
  8. Tony S.
    Kitt’s days slowly grew into a rhythm—a demanding one, unsteady in places, but more structured than the chaos he had fled. Every morning, long before the streets thawed from the winter cold, he walked to the small Mexican restaurant tucked between a pawn shop and a barber. Javier had given him more hours—“You work hard, kid. I like that”—which meant Kitt spent most mornings in the steaming back kitchen, scrubbing metal pans still thick with last night’s oil, lifting stacks of plates fresh from t
  9. Tony S.
    Riverbend woke under a pale, washed-out sky, the kind of morning where even the snow seemed too tired to fall. Kitt felt better than he had the day before—better enough to stand without wobbling, better enough to shower, better enough to pull on the sweater Tom washed for him and tie his shoes without pausing to catch his breath. He was still exhausted, but he’d grown used to carrying exhaustion the way some people carried backpacks. He stepped out into the stairwell, ready to walk the two
  10. Tony S.
    Riverbend settled into evening the way it always did—slowly, quietly, like a town trying to disappear into its own shadows. Kitt walked home from his shift with his hands tucked deep in his borrowed sweater, breath clouding in the cold. His hair was damp from dishwater, his fingers sore from scrubbing, and his stomach aching with the weight of everything he couldn’t fix yet. The snow had thinned to a soft dusting, carried gently by the wind. Apartment windows glowed softly as he passed them
  11. Tony S.
    Morning in Riverbend always came with a certain heaviness—like the air itself hadn’t warmed in years. Kitt woke in the dim gray of early light, the cold biting at his nose even under the thin blanket. For a moment he lay still, staring at the cracked ceiling, letting reality settle around him in slow, unwelcome pieces. Another day here. Another morning alone. Another reminder that there was no going back. He changed into Tom’s sweater—soft, slightly oversized, smelling faintly of detergent
  12. Tony S.
    Riverbend mornings had a stillness to them, a kind of pale quiet that seeped through the thin apartment walls and settled over everything like a second layer of cold. Kitt woke one morning with that cold pressed against his spine, the mattress beneath him stiff, its springs biting faintly into his hip. He pulled the borrowed sweater closer around his shoulders and exhaled slowly, watching his breath bloom white in the dim room before fading into nothing. The radiator had clicked twice during the
  13. Tony S.
    Riverbend’s winter had a particular silence to it, Kitt noticed. Not the peaceful kind he’d known back in Lakehurst, where the snow softened the whole world and made neighborhoods hum with warmth. Riverbend’s silence was different—thin, stretched, almost tense, like a held breath. It seeped into the cracks of the sidewalks and the alleyways, the flickering lamps and crumbling apartment balconies. Even the river that split the town seemed quieter than water should be, moving slowly under the smal
  14. Tony S.
    The kitchen at Javier’s restaurant roared with a kind of organized chaos that Kitt had never experienced before. Even on his first day, he could tell this was the heart of the building—loud, warm, frantic, and strangely alive. Steam rose in pale ribbons around the stoves, the music pulsed from a speaker tucked on a shelf, and spatters of oil jumped in the air like sparks. Every metal surface glinted under the overhead lights, every order shouted from the front was met with a flurry of movement b
  15. Tony S.
    The pale light of dawn crept slowly across Riverbend, brushing the tops of the buildings in a muted lavender glow before spilling into the narrow alley where Kitt had curled himself through the night. The cold had seeped so deeply into his body that waking felt like dragging himself up from beneath a sheet of ice. His joints were stiff, fingers numb and swollen, the pads of his fingertips tinged with an alarming shade of red-blue that throbbed when he tried to flex them. For a long moment, he di
  16. Tony S.
    Kitt eased the bedroom window open with trembling hands, the cold night air spilling in like something from another world. The gust hit his face sharply, shocking him out of the numb, stunned panic that had taken root in his chest. He lifted his backpack through the opening, the strap catching briefly on the frame before sliding free. Then he swung his leg over the sill and dropped onto the narrow strip of frozen earth behind the house. The moment his feet hit the ground, a jolt of cold sho
  17. Tony S.
    December moved into Lakehurst without asking if anyone was ready. One week the sky was just a dull, ordinary gray. The next, the clouds sank low and heavy, promising snow that hadn’t fallen yet but already made people walk faster, hunch deeper into their jackets. Christmas lights appeared slowly, strand by strand, as if the neighborhood were trying to convince itself that the cold meant something cheerful. School didn’t care. The hallways smelled like wet wool and cafeteria cocoa.
  18. Tony S.
    The week after Riverbend felt like walking around with sunlight zipped under your jacket. Nothing huge changed. School was still loud and crowded and smelled faintly of disinfectant and fries. Practices were still brutal. Homework still multiplied on every flat surface. But there was a new hum under everything. A good one. Matt rode it hardest. He leaned back in his chair more, tipping onto the back two legs like he wanted gravity to argue with him. He tapped his pencil
  19. Tony S.
    The first real cool morning of the year slid quietly over Lakehurst, brushing the air with a hint of autumn. Not enough to make anyone shiver, just enough to remind them that summer was inching farther away. Kitt woke before his alarm, eyes open in the gray light, nerves humming low in his stomach—half excitement, half the tight kind of tension that always came before a big race. The Riverbend Invitational. Coach Vega had been talking about it for weeks. “Good competition. Hi
  20. Tony S.
    Junior year didn’t slam into them the way everyone older had promised it would. It slid in on cool mornings and warm afternoons, with dew on the grass and the scent of leftover summer still clinging to the metal of the lockers. The hallways at Lakehurst High buzzed with voices Kitt and Matt already knew—same kids, same teachers, same bulletin boards—but everything felt just a little… sharper. Like someone had turned up the contrast on their lives without asking. They fell back into step as
  21. Tony S.
    Summer didn’t explode into brightness the way people romanticized it. It seeped in slowly—warm mornings that arrived earlier each day, long evenings that stretched soft and golden, the air thick with the smell of cut grass and heavy leaves. School ended in the usual blur of slamming lockers, crumpled worksheets, and yearbook signatures that promised keep in touch and never did, but for Matt and Kitt the transition felt quieter, steadier, like stepping from one room into another without shutting
  22. Tony S.
    Summer settled over Lakehurst slowly, like a warm blanket being pulled higher inch by inch. The lake lost its last trace of spring chill and grew dark and inviting, the trees along the shore thickened into lush green, and the air hummed with heat and the lazy rhythm of long afternoons. For Matt and Kitt, the season came with a strange tangle of closeness and distance—so tightly woven together that neither of them could tell where one ended and the other began. Matt and Lindsay were dating n
  23. Tony S.
    Spring didn’t arrive all at once in Lakehurst. It crept in slowly, almost shyly—thin patches of grass appearing under retreating snowbanks, the smell of wet soil rising after the first warm rain, birds returning and singing over bare branches long before the trees remembered how to grow leaves again. By mid-March, the cold had loosened its grip enough that coats unzipped, hats disappeared, and the boys looked up one afternoon and realized the sky had softened without either of them noticing exac
  24. Tony S.
    Fall slid into Lakehurst in small, patient shifts. The air turned sharp in the mornings, the grass glittered with thin frost, and somewhere in the neighborhood, someone started burning wood in their fireplace. Leaves crunched under tires on the way to school, and the sky lost the heavy blue of summer, trading it for something paler, quieter. Matt and Kitt fell into a rhythm they never bothered naming. They met at their lockers most mornings. Sometimes they talked the whole walk to class—abo
  25. Tony S.
    By the time a month had passed, the strange spotlight of being the “new kid” had finally dimmed around Kitt Wellington. Lakehurst no longer felt like a foreign place he had been dropped into; it became a place he was slowly learning the edges of, helped—whether he admitted it or not—by the one boy who insisted on walking beside him every day. Matt Everest didn’t have to try; he simply had a way of folding people into his orbit effortlessly, as though gravity itself shifted around him. Most after
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