Author's Note: I've gone to see Spielberg's West Side Story three times now, and I'm grateful for how inspired it's been making me to write again. This is just something that came to me randomly and that I put together in the span of an hour or so. It's the first piece I've tried to write based on the new film. To me, Mike and Paloma's Riff & Graziella had a very different dynamic than Russ and Gina's Riff & Graz in the 1961 film. I've tried to capture that here, but apologies if anything seems off. All my other Riff/Graz stories are based on the '61 movie.
Mike Faist really is my favorite part of the new WSS, and his Riff just really shatters my heart. I based Riff's family history and the background about his bracelet on interviews with Mike that I've read, and some of the information that's included in West Side Story: The Making of the Steven Spielberg Film by Laurent Bouzereau.
Regret, Graziella realizes, is a cruel thing. It's like a window that shows you all the things that could be, but only after they've been snatched away.
She'd never been one for regret. From the time she was a kid, she'd decided that it was better to just take each day as it came, without looking backward or forward. When her old man left them, she hadn't spent months moping on the couch like her ma. When her cousin got killed in a street brawl, she didn't get all weepy about all the things he could have been. When Tony got sent upstate for beating on that Egyptian King, she didn't make any false promises about waiting for him. Wishing things could be different than they were was pointless, and Graziella wasn't one for wasting time.
Riff had understood her in that way. He'd been the same. He never looked back and he sure as hell never thought about the future. She'd always loved that about him. Even when she'd been with Tony, there had always been something about Riff that she'd been drawn to. He understood her in a way Tony had never been able to. That's why she hadn't felt an ounce of regret when she'd started going with Riff after Tony got locked up. She never felt regret about anything when it came to Riff.
Until now.
Now Riff is gone and regret is the only thing Graziella knows how to feel. It punches her in the chest every time she remembers his smile, the feel of his arms around her just the night before at the dance. It slaps her in the face when she thinks about the nights they would lay in each other's arms until the sun came up, her fingers tracing the scar beneath his eye that he'd earned from a rumble with the Emeralds. It was always then, in that suspended bit of time between darkness and dawn, when it was just the two of them, that he would whisper the sweetest things in her ear, things that were only for her to know.
He had loved her. She knows he did. People might have thought Riff cruel and selfish and incapable of love, but she knows better. She knows that he loved her, that he loved the Jets, their family. He died because he loved them.
He had loved her. And she had loved him.
But she'd never told him. And that was the most painful regret of all.
He'd come to see her before the rumble with the Sharks. He'd been nervous. She could tell from the way his hands shook, and the way he messed with the bracelet he always wore. It had been his mother's bracelet. He'd told her that once, when she'd been playing with it after they'd made love. Over time, she'd come to realize that whenever he was really nervous, he'd twist the bracelet back and forth, sometimes clasping and unclasping it, sometimes just tugging on it absentmindedly. She had always wondered if he thought of his mother when he did that, the mother who'd died when he was six year old, leaving him on his own when he was just a kid.
He'd been twisting that bracelet before the rumble, until she'd grabbed his hands and kissed him, intent on making him forget about all his worries. Afterwards, she'd snatched up the shirt he'd left at her place the night before when he'd been getting ready for the dance. Knotting it at the waist, she'd smirked and winked at him. "Do I look like a Jet?" she'd teased.
He'd grinned then, the first smile she'd seen from him all night. "Too pretty ta be a Jet," he'd told her, pressing another kiss to her lips and slipping a finger through one of her blonde curls. "I'll see ya later, Grazi," he'd added, running his fingers through her hair one more time.
It was then that he'd paused, looking down at her with those eyes that seemed to see everything all at once. He hesitated slightly, looking torn between wanting to say something and wanting to hear her say something. She'd known in that instant what he wanted her to say. What he needed to hear. She'd hesitated, too, her lips parting but nothing coming out of her mouth as she looked up at him.
Chuckling sadly, he'd moved away from her, twisting his mom's bracelet once more. "See ya, Grazi."
She has to close her eyes as the pain of regret pierces her at that memory. Maybe if she closes her eyes, she won't have to see Riff looking at her. Maybe she won't have to hear him silently begging her to tell him she loves him.
Why didn't she tell him?
For all his talk and all his bravado, all Riff had really wanted was for somebody to love him. His old man had dipped when he was a baby, his mom had died when he was a kid, his best friend went to prison for a year and then was a different guy when he got out. All he'd had was the Jets. And her. And she had let him down.
Burying her face in the collar of his shirt, the shirt that still smells like him, Graziella weeps. For the first time in her life, she weeps for all that could have been and all that would never be. She weeps for the broken little kid who just wanted someone to love him. She weeps for the angry boy who just wanted a place in this world. She weeps for the man he will never get to be.
She weeps with the pain of a regret too overwhelming to bear.
She weeps for Riff. Her Riff.
"I love ya, Riff," she whispers, pressing her lips against the collar of his shirt. "I'm sorry I never told ya."