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Two and a half hours into the drive, Ronan pulls the BMW up onto a shoulder. It’s the crunch of gravel that wakes Adam, who squints reluctantly through the windshield to see why they’ve stopped. Parked right ahead, the orange of the Camaro is offensively bright. “Looks like a mutiny,” Ronan tells him, before hauling himself out of the car with too much energy. Adam tries to stretch, and feels his shoulder pop warningly; on the other side, his neck creaks. Ronan likes to tell him he has too many bones.
Outside, the revolt is swift and bloodless. Gansey is ejected from the Camaro, as Blue clambers over the hood. She ignores his protests completely as she climbs into the driver’s seat and slams the door definitively shut. Through the rear window, Adam can see the Henry trying to move from the back into the passenger seat, legs hooked gracelessly around a headrest. His arms flail for Blue’s support, but she ignores him; a second later and the Camaro’s engine drowns Gansey out, traitorous beast kicking up stones and leaving its master behind.
Ronan slings a consoling arm over Gansey’s shoulder. Adam winds down his window. The hot air stings his cheeks, and his cramped body complains as he shifts to hang out the side. “What did you do?” he demands.
“There was a disagreement,” Gansey replies, suspiciously straight-faced. “Over the music.”
Adam laughs, harshly, because he has absolutely warned Gansey how offensive Henry would find his taste, and that Blue would inevitability take Henry’s side. “And now you think we’ll let you in with us?”
Ronan tugs Gansey closer into his side, and jabs a finger hard into his chest. “My car, my music,” he says warmly. “And now Parrish is finally awake, we can move on to the second disc of my special road trip mix.”
“Nope,” Adam says immediately, pulling himself back into the car. His shirt catches on the window frame, and he yanks it back down with one hand, scooping up the nest of his things with the other. When he lurches out of the car, it’s with his jacket and water bottle clutched to his chest and his bag hitting the back of his shins.
“You see?” Gansey says to Ronan. “Adam would rather brave the wilderness than put up with your soundwaves.”
“Parrish knows what he signed up for,” Ronan replies, with the kind of smirk that on anyone else would look unpleasantly smug, but on Ronan looks unbearably smug. Gansey’s answering expression says that he tolerates Ronan, but barely, and it’s a wonder no one’s ever given him an award for it. Adam has simply developed a sixth sense, and knows when not to look.
He drops his things on the backseat, and drops himself in after them; Gansey catches the door before it closes, saying with obligatory contrition, “You don’t have to move on my account.”
“This is further from the speakers,” Adam replies. “And I’m just going to keep sleeping.”
Ronan settles himself back behind the wheel, and leans around to regard Adam fondly. “You know this baby has surround sound.”
The threat is mostly idle; Ronan treats Gansey to a teaser of his mix, lovingly burned to an actual CD and labelled in overconfident marker as ‘BANGERS PART DEUX’. Yesterday, Adam had looked Ronan in the eye and snapped disc one in half, after they’d been through the whole thing once and Ronan had suggested a replay. But after ten minutes, Gansey’s loud objections become quiet groans, real pleas for mercy, and Adam kicks Ronan from the backseat until the music is silenced.
Overhead, the sky is patchy, a mix of overcast with spots of sunlight and a malignant heat. The weather doesn’t know what it wants to be. Occasionally, Adam hears an indignant scoff, likely the Pig dropping back into view while Blue and Henry flaunt their vehicular larceny. Mostly, it’s just Gansey and Ronan talking, weaving around the topics of where they’re going and where they’ve been and that time most of them almost died and Gansey actually did. Despite Blue and Ronan gifting him countless novelty t-shirts, it is clearly a hole Gansey is still feeling the edges of.
Adam naps, legs stretched out, shoulder crammed into a corner, head tucked in the arch of the window frame. The sun is burning him through the glass, awarding him more freckles, more spackled skin, but he doesn’t care. Possibly he should have stayed up front, beside Ronan in Gansey’s place, but that kind of thought started to exhaust him a long time ago. It’s Ronan’s car, anyway, Gansey’s a passenger, even if his hand gestures probably rise to the level of a dangerous distraction. They’ve all shifted, just a little, their alignment stretched slowly out of shape, and none of them are who they were anymore.
For the better, Adam thinks, cracking one eye open. Ronan’s grin is fierce, Gansey’s laugh comes easy, and they’ve arrived in that honey-vague dream place that seemed so impossible a year ago and that feels no more real for living in it.
“Alright back there, Parrish?” Ronan asks, catching him awake in less than a minute. “We’re trying to figure out how to describe Cheng and Sargent to the cops, when we file the report.”
“I like ‘hooligans’,” Gansey adds. “‘Rascals’ is too soft.”
“They’re scamps at best,” Adam tells him.
Gansey sighs. “I just hope the judge goes easy on them.”
“Is it their first offense?”
“No way,” Ronan says, “Sargent is a public menace. She’s gonna do time. Cheng’s best hope is saying she made him go along with it and making puppy-eyes at the jury.”
“Stealing the Pig is barely a crime at this point,” Adam says, a tentative press on an old wound, but the stare Gansey fixes him with is long-suffering and forgiving. Scar tissue now; who among Gansey’s friends hasn’t stolen his car? Gansey’s only recourse is to sullenly chew on a mint leaf, as Ronan snickers and moves them onward.
They catch up to the Camaro on the outskirts of a service station, the neon paintjob a beacon, a hazard, looking like it has always been marooned in the dirt. The cartoon character on the sign beside it has had its face worn off; Henry is taking a selfie with it, while Blue perches on the Pig’s hood, trying very hard not to look pleased with herself.
“Brigands,” Gansey shouts to them joyfully, bursting from the BMW to rejoin them. “That was an act of high treason! I want my keys returned directly.”
Blue drops them into his outstretched hand, and presses a kiss to his forehead, looking sun warmed and triumphant before she finally drops back to the ground. Regalia restored, Gansey leads the charge into the service station. The place looks air-conditioned and overpriced and a little too proud of the small selection of fruit they’ve got stacked up front.
Adam lingers out at the edge of the lot, rolling scrub grass under his foot to the ticking of the Camaro’s engine. There is not enough shade. The sun only arrived twenty minutes ago, but now that it’s here it is here, searing the cracks in the concrete and the top of Adam’s head. He could follow the others in and buy something for himself, but if he waits outside then Ronan will just bring him something he likes. Even if he lobs it at his head.
“Am I back in with you two?” Gansey asks Blue when they’re done.
Ronan says, “You’d better be.”
Henry says, “You’d better learn to love the Spice World OST.”
Ronan fails to repress a full body shudder, and Adam laughs from a corner of his mouth. “I’m so happy for you.”
“Don’t be fucking cruel, Parrish,” Ronan tells him. When they turn back to the BMW, he knocks his shoulder against Adam’s in a warm and pointy kind of way.
The Camaro falls away behind them; Ronan is far more willing than Gansey to explore his car’s engine when they’re on an empty enough stretch of road. Back up front, Adam stays awake to listen to Ronan’s running commentary about why everyone else is a worse driver than he is, which ranges from funny to patently untrue. It feels normal, and easy, and familiar, and like something he might have been robbed of for years. Hours slide past, the fickle sun dips, and Adam points out to Ronan the turnoff to the quiet little nowhere town the five of them are spending the night.
The town has about six streets, and the bus station is signposted on every major corner. The motel is the only one, undersize, and Adam chooses to let Ronan explain to the receptionist that yes, there will be five of them, and yes, they only want two rooms and two beds between them. Adam leans up against the car and examines the town; he’s not quite sure, these days, if he likes this much quiet.
Across the road is a combination tattoo parlor and sewing supply store. It’s impossible for Adam not to study it; the sign is still lit, possibly for someone on an evening cross-stitch supply run, possibly for more traditional reasons. Impulse prickles Adam’s skin, the thought that he’s here, out of Henrietta, that he can afford it, that no one can stop him. He could make his body a little more his own. Ronan would love it.
“One stop needle shop,” Ronan observes, falling back into place beside him. His eyes have that irreverent gleam in them, and he starts to smirk – unbearably – at Adam’s interest in the place. “You should fucking go for it, Adam.”
“I’ve always wanted to learn embroidery,” Adam replies. He thinks his pulse might be ticking up, just a little, with the sudden possibility. He doesn’t need Gansey to tell him not to, but he would be able to balance out actual shoulder devil Ronan Lynch.
“If you get it somewhere it won’t show, no one ever needs to know,” Ronan says, clearly ready to start hissing do it. It would take a very high collar to hide the inky barbs on Ronan’s neck, and for Adam, opting out of the workforce is not a solution to that problem. But something on his shoulder, his ribs, not even Gansey would ever need to know about it. The thought of a secret flutters in him. He had enjoyed being unknowable.
Casting a look down the still-empty road, Adam asks, “They can’t be that far away. I wouldn’t want to make you all wait for me.”
“They’ll just want dinner, I’ll go with them, bring something back for you.”
“I haven’t even thought about it.”
“Do you know what you’d get?” Ronan asks. He has a dream between his shoulder blades, and no one ever believed it was just to piss Declan off, or he would have chosen something cruder. The claws, the eyes, the barbs, the shifting underbrush between them, it’s still him. And Adam has had a much better view of the piece than anyone else; he’s run his hands over every twisting curve, and wondered what would suit him best.
“Yeah,” Adam says. “I think I do.”
Ronan knocks him with his shoulder. If he waits much longer, the Camaro will arrive, or the shop will close, or this second will pass and the impulse will die and it won’t happen, and that would be fine.
In this second, he wants it.
He goes in alone, Ronan sending him off with a hard slap on the back. When he comes out, it’s properly dark, and country dark too, streetlights along the main road and absolutely no further. Behind him, the shop light illuminates a variety of flower patterns in the window, with no indication if they’re for stitching or ink. Ahead, the Camaro and the BMW both sit in the motel’s lot, lights on in two curtained windows.
Ronan has sent him the room number in a text, and Adam crosses the empty street, knocks on the door softly, hears a spill of laughter from the next room over and smiles. Ronan yanks the door open like it’s a challenge to the hinges, and doesn’t let Adam in until he’s given him a once-over and failed to find anything new. “So where is it?”
“I’ll show you,” Adam replies, pressing past him. The motel room is small and likely only surface-clean, but that’s the kind of thing Gansey considers adventurous, and it’s fine. With the curtains shut and just him and Ronan inside, it’s better. There’s a tinfoil parcel waiting for him on the counter, and his stuff from the car is piled up on top of their luggage.
Aware of Ronan’s eyes on him, Adam lifts the hem of his shirt. A fern unfurls along the side of his ribcage, gaps left between the leaves to make it look like it’s woven through his bones. Still wrapped in plastic, still red and sore and healing, still miles less expensive than Ronan’s black-ink bracken, but he likes it.
Ronan looks like he likes it too. Adam pulls his shirt back down, and no one ever has to know; he feels happily bright, sharply awake. Another burst of laughter from the other room makes it through the wall, and Ronan tells him, “We should head over. They’ll want to see you; I told them you were on an angry bushwalk.”
Adam snorts. He’ll show them the tattoo another day, when it’s not fresh, when it’s a piece of him that he’s used to. “Alright. Not as late as last night, though.”
“How much more driving do we have tomorrow?”
Adam shrugs in pre-emptive apology. “Enough.”
“I vote we all leave without Cheng.”
“Gansey will never agree to that.”
“Sargent might, though,” Ronan says, and he’s grinning just for Adam, and Adam’s ribs are hurting with a healing kind of ache, and he already knows they’re going to talk too late and he’ll sleep through tomorrow, and that’s all good.