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On the way to pick up Adam, Gansey squeezes the steering wheel and says, “Hey, could you two not piss each other off this time?”
Ronan, his feet resting defiantly on the Camaro’s dash and his hands turning over a dirty tennis ball he’d found in a parking lot, frowns. “What?”
Gansey pretends to be distracted by birds dotting a telephone wire. “I just had kind of a long night and- could you guys not fight, or anything? I’m not saying you have to like each other, but could you just-?”
Ronan scoffs. It doesn’t quite get his point across, so he blows out a long breath through his nose for good measure. Gansey closes his eyes for just a second and nods, his passive-aggressive acceptance that whatever Ronan does, Ronan does.
They don’t talk for the rest of the drive because Gansey is annoyed and Ronan is even more annoyed. He tosses the tennis ball back and forth between his hands, hard enough to make the sound of rubber hitting bone. He doesn’t mind Gansey’s sweet attempts to make him more bearable, he can shrug those off. What he does fucking mind is Gansey acting like a beleaguered middle-class mother taking him to a hellish playdate. He can cut that shit right out.
Besides, the problem isn’t that he doesn’t like Parrish. He likes Parrish a lot.
Ronan likes things that are familiar, and there’s something under Adam’s skin that Ronan recognizes. It’s that violent itch that makes you want to watch buildings burn to the ground, duck under ropes of caution tape, rush into a hurricane with your eyes closed.
He doesn’t think Gansey can see it, but Ronan can. He saw it the second he met Parrish, the second that uptight asshole had offered a handshake. There were pistons firing at his temples, a buzzing current in his fingertips. Ronan had offered him a terrible smile, and Adam had smiled back with delightful energy, quick as a punch.
The problem is that Parrish never does anything with it. Whenever it starts to surface, he pulls it back in, deep under, as deep as he can. Ronan, by comparison, scratches at it until he bleeds. And he knows that’s fucked up. He knows that Parrish looks down his nose at Ronan’s recklessness and selfishness, his lack of self-control. He even knows, sometimes, that Parrish has a point, that he should reign it in. There’s this one little sigh Adam will give when Ronan speeds, exhausted and forlorn, that will convince him to slow down faster than any of Gansey’s good-natured cajoling. It impresses him, watching Adam store his anger in a black hole.
But one of these days Adam’s insides are going to be too crowded and itching to hold anything else, and he’ll fucking explode. Not in the fun way, not the fender bender way. It’ll be obliteration. It’ll be the way that doesn’t let you go back.
If Ronan didn’t like him, he’d let it happen. He doesn’t like that that’s the case, but he knows he would; he’s too chicken to let it happen to himself, even though the catharsis is always beckoning.
So what he does is controlled demolition. Nothing cruel, nothing harsh. Just enough to piss him off. If he keeps it up, he thinks he might really be able to stave of the inevitable.
When they pull up to Adam’s mailbox, there he is, slowly rubbing his eyelids with his right hand while his left is shoved into his pocket. He looks up as the car gets closer and smiles a little, his lips pressed together. There’s a dark smear of engine grease right near the right side of his forehead, but it looks like he’s changed into a clean shirt. It looks like it’s even been ironed.
As they get closer, Ronan starts cranking down the window. He thinks he hears Gansey asking him what he’s doing, but he’s too busy taking careful aim. “Think fast!” he shouts, and his tennis ball skims just past Adam’s right temple, barely missing him and landing off in a ditch.
Adam’s hand goes reflexively to his face; he absently rubs his forehead as he turns to see where the tennis ball landed. He turns back with a what the fuck? frown. His face is clean.
Gansey smiles apologetically as Adam climbs into the backseat. “Hi, Adam.”
“Hi,” says Adam, still touching his forehead the way you touch an injury-that-might-have-been.
Ronan tips his head against the headrest until he can just barely see Adam. He grins. “Good to see you.”
Adam looks back, tired and still. “I’m sure.”