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i.
Many years later, Adam would look back and realize that if Ronan hadn’t taught him how to love when he did, no one else ever could have. He would imagine alternate lives, in which he never met Ronan, or in which they were never more than friends. In a lot of those possible worlds he just ended up dead. In the rest, he went off to college a solitary being, unknowable. He would go on dates with boys or girls, getting them to open up while keeping his own secrets, unable to trust or let down his guard, eyes keen for any hint of pressure or rejection, any excuse to shut them out before they could hurt him. He would graduate and go on to his lucrative career in an anonymous city, bring more dates back to his sleek glass and chrome apartment, even more jaded and walled off. He would have everything he’d thought he’d wanted and none of it would seem worth all the effort he’d put into getting there. None of it would even seem worth surviving for. Maybe someday he would get a therapist and talk about his childhood trauma and fear of intimacy, and that paid confessional an hour a week would be the closest thing to a human connection he ever achieved. He would see his isolation as a kind of superiority, even, a triumph over the common human need for fellowship, and not recognize the link between that and the emptiness he felt when he swallowed a sleeping pill every night before retiring to his empty, luxurious bed.
That was always the most likely outcome, the way his life should have played out, rationally speaking.
Except it didn’t. Not that it had been easy to change course.
There was one night, after it all ended, after Gansey was dead and not, Ronan unmade and not, Adam possessed and not, when relief outweighed everything else and they slept in a tangle on the floor of Fox Way’s living room, afraid not to hear each other breathe.
In the morning, Ronan was gone. He had taken Orphan Girl and left a note addressed to no one specific saying he was going to DC to see his brothers. Adam read the note, with all it did and did not say, and felt something settle heavily inside him, the presence of a knowledge or the absence of a hope.
Gansey and Blue were promptly swallowed up by their anxious families and by one another (see: Blue’s sudden kissability). Henry returned to his Vancouver crowd and his own inimitable mother.
Adam went back to school as if nothing had happened, as if the world had not ended and, to some, possibly lesser extent, begun again. He went back to work as well, of course - he’d only missed one shift but he signed up for extra hours at all his jobs. This made it easy to start his retreat. He could not meet up with the others after school; he was working. He still sat with Gansey and Henry at lunch, but with his textbooks out, doing reading he wouldn’t have time for between his jobs later.
There had, he thought, been some moment in the middle of the end of everything when he’d been jealous of Henry in the same way he imagined Ronan must once have been jealous of him. Now, he was grateful: Henry could fill the gaps Adam’s withdrawal left in conversations, could make connections and find solutions and lie when it was needed. Gansey’s court could proceed onto its next adventure without lack or interruption.
So the days passed, and Adam worked, and sometimes he ate and the food was ash in his mouth, and sometimes he slept and saw his hands wrapped around Ronan Lynch’s throat, and no one pulled him away. He thought, sometimes, of that brief period of peace after he had cast the demon out, between understanding that he owned himself, and understanding just how poor a thing he had turned out to be. It seemed very far away.
Ronan returned to Henrietta a week later. Gansey had informed him of this at school, so it was not too much of a surprise when he heard the purr of the BMW’s engine as he worked beneath a car at Boyd’s garage. He was in the middle of tightening a nut, and the process was somehow taking longer than it ought to. He turned the wrench as Ronan’s door opened and shut and the heavy tread of his boots approached.
Adam allowed himself a moment to close his eyes, disappointed that in this, unlike so many other things, Ronan was apparently not content to let his silence and absence speak for him. He probably viewed it as a point of honor, Adam thought, to end things in person.
Slowly, he rolled out from under the car and dragged himself onto his feet, but he couldn’t bring himself to look at Ronan head-on.
“What’re you doin’ here?” he asked when Ronan seemed willing to let the silence spool out indefinitely.
“Came to see you, asshole.”
Adam cut his eyes toward him and then away, taking in no more than black jeans, black jacket, a look maybe like uncertainty on his face. “No need,” he said. “I already know how things are now.”
“And how’s that?” Ronan asked, a familiar note of stubbornness in his voice that made Adam want to fall to his knees.
“Over,” he said flatly, allowing himself no indulgences.
“The fuck they are,” Ronan said, and the flash of his blue eyes caught Adam for a second before his gaze snagged instead on the bruises ringing his neck, faded now from red and purple to green and yellow.
Adam let the sight of them harden his resolve. “If you’re too much of an idiot to figure this out for yourself, let me tell you what I wish someone had told my mother back before I was born: when someone lays his hands on you like that, get the fuck away from him while you still can.”
“It wasn’t your fault,” Ronan spit, and as always he cut straight through Adam’s control, his determination to do things the smart way.
Or maybe he was just too tired and in too much pain to stick to his own plan of drifting away from them slowly, without giving any cause for alarm.
Instead, the words poured from him without his permission in his fury that Ronan of all people should not see what had been so plainly revealed about him: “Do you not get it,” he demanded, “do you not understand what I am? You made Cabeswater out of magic and beauty and mystery and I took its power like a thief, I swore to serve it and I led it to its end. I’m a broken vessel, I took your light into me and turned it into ruin. I knew I wasn’t good like the rest of you, but I thought - I thought I could still be useful, and that might be enough, but I failed at everything. Blood will out, in the end. The apple doesn’t fall far from the goddamn tree. Your mother is dead because I didn’t see how the rot in Cabeswater threatened her. Gansey died because I couldn’t get him to Cabeswater in time and Cabeswater died because I couldn’t think of any other way to bring him back and Blue will have a scar on her face for the rest of her life because of me and I would have killed you if they hadn’t stopped me and don’t you dare tell me it wasn’t my fault, because if the demon had been in you, or in Gansey, or in Blue, you wouldn’t have let it do those things, no matter what it cost you. But its filth was in me, and I was already filth inside so I couldn’t see what was happening or fight it off until it was too late to matter, until you were being unmade and Gansey was laying down his life for you and I could just stand there and watch. So there’s no need to pretend we don’t know how things are anymore. I’m not for someone like you. I’m just for this,” he concluded, gesturing widely at the garage, the grease on his skin, the Henrietta night.
Adam glared at Ronan, waiting for him to yell or scoff or just storm away, but he did none of those things. He just rubbed at the stubbled back of his head and said, “Okay,” and then looked around as if seeing their surroundings for the first time, and added, “get this place closed up so we can go home.”
Adam opened his mouth and shut it. “Have you experienced a recent blow to the head?” he asked. “Do you need me to say all that again, but more slowly and in smaller words?”
“No,” Ronan said shortly. “Seriously, put that shit away and get your keys to lock up. I’m shutting the lights off as soon as I find the switch.”
This made no sense, but Adam by this point knew to take Ronan at his word, and it was later than he’d meant to work anyhow, so he put away his tools and grabbed his things.
He’d driven the Hondayota to work, but Ronan somehow steered him into the passenger seat of the BMW, and then there was the comforting blare of electronica and Adam leaned against the window and closed his eyes and when he opened them again they were at the Barns.
Ronan herded him into the kitchen and sat him down on a stool at the counter and slapped a piece of paper and a pencil down in front of him. “Put down your schedule for the next week,” he demanded, and went to bang pots around at the stove.
Numb with exhaustion, Adam marked down school and his regular work schedule and then some homework for good measure.
Ronan reappeared, scrutinized his work, and said, “What about your other work shifts?”
Adam scoured his memory for all the extra hours he’d agreed to, and noted them down. Something in the kitchen was starting to smell good and his stomach gurgled embarrassingly.
“When was even the last time you had a meal or a halfway decent night’s sleep?” Ronan asked. Adam just stared at him, and he swore under his breath and grabbed his piece of paper. “That’s not how much studying you do,” he said. “Put down the rest.”
When Ronan came back again, he slammed a bowl of pasta in hearty sauce down in front of Adam and picked up his schedule, nodding to himself.
“Do you know what this is?” Ronan growled, waving it in front of him.
“My life?” Adam asked between bites. He hadn’t realized how hungry he was until he’d started eating.
“This is how those Korean kids end up dead after playing video games for five days straight, except more efficient.” Ronan got a red marker from a drawer and began applying it liberally to the piece of paper. “You need to fucking sleep,” he announced. “You’re canceling these shifts. You can call it in or I will.”
Adam blinked at him. This was not how he believed break-ups were supposed to go.
***
That night Adam woke gasping for breath in Declan’s bedroom. It was long before dawn and he was shivering in a cold sweat, hands balled into fists so tight he couldn’t get them open. He half-climbed, half-fell out of bed and stumbled to the bathroom down the hall, still choking for air as he splashed cold water on his face and tried to believe he was awake, in the Barns, with Ronan and Orphan Girl safe and sound. But every time he blinked he saw Ronan’s corpse, blood and black ichor on his own hands. How was he supposed to be sure it wasn’t still in him? He scrubbed at his face under the water from the faucet, but the icy water made his hands feel numb, alien, untrustworthy.
He slid down to the floor, hands tucked underneath him where they couldn’t do any damage, and that was how Ronan found him, blinking with sleep in sweatpants and no shirt. He reached out for Adam, but Adam flinched away.
“My hands - it’s not safe,” he said, and Ronan sat down carefully on the floor, facing him but not touching.
“Did something happen?”
Adam shrugged. “I dreamed and - my hands don’t feel right, sometimes. I don’t - I don’t know how to tell if it’s still in me.”
“The demon is dead,” Ronan told him.
“All they need to grow is violence and magic,” Adam said, “so it wouldn’t need anything but me, it could be just a seed still. Maybe people like me are what demons start out as, before they turn into weird tar insects.”
“For fuck’s sake, you’re not a demonspawn, Parrish. You’re just you.”
“What makes you think that those are different things?” Adam choked out.
Ronan huffed indignantly. “Give me your hands, shitbag.” Adam hesitated. “Fucking now.”
Warily and somewhat unwillingly, Adam pulled them out from under his thighs and held them up between him and Ronan, watching them for any indication that they were about to betray him.
Ronan grabbed his hands, gently, and pulled them toward him. He pressed a kiss onto the back of each hand, and then onto each palm, and then fitted Adam’s hands against his own cheeks, holding them in place, and stared into Adam’s eyes. “There’s nothing here but you and me. You’re not going to hurt me. We’re safe.”
Staring back at Ronan, Adam could not bring himself to doubt him. The moment stretched out, liquid, endless, and something inside Adam crumbled, a weight that had been pressing on him for so long he’d forgotten it was even separate from himself.
Then a fresh whip of shame flailed at him, and he pulled away. “I’m sorry,” he said, “I shouldn’t - your mom died, and I, I -” his eyes flickered back to his hands, and then Ronan’s neck - “you shouldn’t have to take care of me, that’s not…”
“Look, Parrish -” Ronan scrubbed at his head, exhaled hard, “I have - I’m fucked up right now, yeah, but - I need to do something with all the shit going on in my head, and I don’t want to do the shit I used to do, after Dad died, so… Let me do something fucking good with it instead, all right? Let me - let me be here for you.”
Adam closed his eyes, too exhausted and too caught up in Ronan to muster his defenses of pride and resentment, and nodded once, then let his forehead fall onto Ronan’s shoulder.
Ronan’s breath hitched, and he slowly reached up to cup the back of Adam’s neck with his hand.
They sat there together, on the bathroom floor, and breathed.
At breakfast the next morning, Ronan lobbed something hard and black at Adam as he ate his Cheerios. “You need a phone, asshole. I dreamed it extra shitty so it would go with the rest of your stuff.”
He glared at Adam, waiting for his response.
Adam just flipped him off without raising his gaze from his food, and stuck the phone in his pocket.
ii.
Two weeks later, Ronan slouched into Monmouth Manufacturing, his shoulders hunched defensively. He found Gansey chewing a mint leaf and reading an enormous tome, alone as he knew he would be because Adam was at the factory and Blue and Henry had gone on a shopping trip on which Richardman’s fashion sense is not invited.
Ronan retrieved a beer from the fridge and flopped heavily onto the opposite end of the couch. “I think I broke Parrish,” he said, opening the can.
“What happened?” Gansey asked immediately, looking up from his book and nudging his glasses up his nose.
Ronan shrugged. “I don’t fucking know.”
“Well, why do you think something is wrong?”
“For like weeks he’s been on autopilot or something, he just fucking works and does his homework and goes to school and in between he’s just checked out, the shithead doesn’t even fight me about paying for fucking groceries anymore.”
“Maybe he’s just exhausted from everything that’s been happening lately,” Gansey suggested. “It’s not as if he was exactly well rested to begin with, it might have been harder on him than the rest of us.”
Ronan made a noise of frustration. “When in his goddamn life has Adam Parrish been too tired to fight with someone about money?” he demanded, and took a pull of beer. “He was about to fucking collapse when I got back from DC,” he said, shooting Gansey a look that partly accused Gansey of not taking proper care of him and partly acknowledged that so soon after rising from the dead it was not fair to demand Gansey also look after Adam and mostly admitted his own guilt for having been gone so long himself, “but he’s been sleeping since then, I - I made him cut back on work.” He fiddled with the tab on his can, uncertain how much he should reveal. “He’s had a lot of nightmares, though. Not about the demon. About, um, his life before.” Repeatedly, he’d woken to Adam’s sobbing and been treated, in broken, halting fragments, to more details about life in the Parrish trailer than he’d honestly thought Adam would ever share. Inevitably they made him wish he’d done more damage to Robert Parrish when he’d had the chance.
“So why do you think whatever’s wrong with him, if anything even is, is your fault?”
Ronan slouched lower on the couch, feet drumming against the floor. “For a while he was really beating himself about what happened, you know, the fucking idiot was all, like, guilty about what happened when the demon possessed him, about, you know,” he shrugged, unwilling to rehash Adam’s hands crushing his neck, “and I was I guess worried or whatever the fuck, and I asked him to let me take care of him.”
Gansey blinked at him. “I’m afraid… I don’t yet see the problem.”
Ronan drained the last of the beer and pushed himself off the couch, pacing like a caged animal, though in fact talking to Gansey was, disgustingly, useful for finally letting him put his finger on what was going on. “So I fucking guilted him into taking better care of himself and letting me do shit for him and now he’s like a sad fucking compliant zombie-Adam and he’s having flashbacks about his piece of shit father because I’m controlling him the way he never wanted anyone to do again but he’s letting me because he fucking hates himself for something that wasn’t remotely his fault and I don’t know how the fuck to fix it!”
Gansey rubbed contemplatively at his lower lip.
“Fucking say something!” Ronan demanded.
“I think… you may be misinterpreting the situation.”
“What the shit does that mean?”
Gansey looked at him sadly enough that Ronan doubted whatever he was going to say would be an improvement over his own suspicions.
“I’ve seen the two of you together lately, and Adam might have been, as you say, a bit distracted, but he certainly didn’t seem… coerced, or even uncomfortable,” Gansey began. “In fact, I think he appears, perhaps, more comfortable, say, sitting next to you at Nino’s, than I’ve ever seen him around anyone before.”
“Right, because I gave him fucking Stockholm Syndrome or some shit,” Ronan said impatiently.
“Ronan,” Gansey said with a trace of humor, “people do not get Stockholm Syndrome when someone else expresses concern for their wellbeing.”
“Then what the hell is going on with him?”
The sad look came back, and suddenly Gansey was looking down at his book. “When a person,” he said, “is in a severely abusive situation, all their energy goes into survival. No matter how smart they are, they don’t have the cognitive capacity to fully process what’s happening to them. Often, such a person will function at a very high level during the abuse, to such an extent that the damage it causes is invisible even to themselves, only to experience a kind of collapse once they’ve escaped the dangerous situation and finally have the luxury of actually understanding what’s been done to them. I think nightmares and flashbacks and a kind of withdrawal from his current surroundings would be very typical of someone going through that.”
“But Adam wasn’t like that when he moved out of the trailer,” Ronan objected.
Gansey fixed him with a hard look. “Do you honestly believe,” he said, “that there has been a single hour until extremely recently when Adam didn’t have very concrete and rational concerns about his day-to-day survival?”
Ronan sat back down on the couch. “So I didn’t break him?”
“Quite the contrary. I think… you have perhaps given him a chance to un-break himself. And he is using it.”
“Fuck,” Ronan said expressively.
“It… might take a while,” he cautioned.
Ronan raised his eyebrows in question.
“I just want to make sure you know,” Gansey said determinedly but uncomfortably, “that it might cause, um, quite a setback for Adam if something were to rupture this newfound sense of safety.” He drew in a long breath. “So just… bear with him, all right? Even if he keeps being… off for quite a while.”
“What the fuck do you fucking take me for, you fucking prick,” Ronan spat at him, and stormed out.
***
The time that followed was both easy and difficult for Ronan. Easy, because he had Adam in ways had not imagined were possible, had not conceived of even in his guilty-hopeful fantasies of maybe maybe maybe he’d let me touch him. He had been able to imagine Adam’s hands on him but not Adam relying on him. But now, Adam did just that, though without mentioning or possibly even noticing it. He asked Ronan for nothing, of course, but accepted rides and food and shelter and demands that he get some fucking rest, asshole and the occasional dream-present without argument. He let Ronan drop him off at work and drive him back to the Barns afterward, not every day but a lot of days. He let Ronan wrap himself around Adam after he woke up from a nightmare and breathe together with him until his heart was no longer trying to batter its way out of his chest. And he offered Ronan, freely, an abundance of casual affection: holding his hand, leaning against his shoulder, occupying his space on the couch, pressing a kiss to his cheek. These touches had begun with a kind of twitchy hesitance, as if he had not meant to allow them and did not trust their effect, but over time there was more reaching out and less jerking back, and eventually they became routine, as unthinking as most of Adam’s other actions during this period.
But it was also difficult, because this time was so clearly a transition, and Ronan had no idea what would happen when it ended. It made him think, though he would not admit it to Adam on pain of death, of when Chainsaw had been a featherless chick tucked into his pocket or his backpack: being responsible for something precious and fragile that would, if he did his job right, grow strong enough to fly away from him forever.
There had been Adam from before - prickly, shut off, clinging desperately to the unyielding scaffolding of his bitter pride because he believed he had nothing, was nothing without it - and then Adam unfolding himself a bit, discovering there was more inside him than dirt and rage and bloody-mindedness, Adam on the cusp of becoming something new with Ronan (boyfriends? Was that the word? It seemed too small for Ronan’s feelings or intentions, but he would have been fucking delighted to hear Adam say it to him), and now there was Adam cracked apart and piecing himself back together, and once that was done, what would Adam be? Would there be a place for Ronan in his life, or would he be shed along with the other detritus of Adam’s misery-wracked past to make way for the Ivy League Adam of the future? Would he one day wake up and shroud himself again in his dignity and independence and hate Ronan for having been the witness to this unprecedented and possibly involuntary vulnerability?
None of that changed anything for the time being, of course. But it haunted Ronan nonetheless, while he drove through the hills with reckless abandon on nights Adam spent at St. Agnes, while he gave Orphan Girl lessons in English and surviving the waking word, while he fidgeted through his last days at Aglionby, working up the nerve to officially drop out.
He tried to content himself with what he had in the present and soak in as much of Adam as possible while it was still allowed.
iii.
For Adam, this period was one of dislocation, of feeling radically unmoored in time and space in a way even scrying had not induced before. For as long as he could remember, he’d shoved his parents and the trailer and everything that happened in it into a box in his head and kept it walled off from the rest of his life, not to be spoken of or (to the extent possible) thought about when he was at school or at work or with his friends. Now the box had collapsed, and its contents spilled out unpredictably, a single jagged memory cutting through his thoughts for an entire afternoon no matter what else he was doing.
He would see Ronan slam a bowl of cereal down on the counter in front of Orphan Girl and suddenly be immersed in himself at age seven, making a kind of pitiful game out of trying to eat his offbrand Frosted Flakes at the perfect moment of milk saturation between crunchy enough that the sound of his eating might draw his father’s ire and soggy enough that they became unpleasant. And then he would be down the rabbit hole of what else he’d done to make himself unnoticeably small, and what stories he’d told himself to make that seem normal and proper, and then somehow hours would have passed and he’d be sitting in A.P. Chemistry with a page of careful notes in front of him that he didn’t remember taking.
Even as his mind wandered, the demands of his body became more insistent. Where once he’d gotten through a school day and six hours of manual labor on a thin bologna sandwich, now skipping a single meal led to irritable distraction. He felt increasingly embedded in the animal state he thought he’d left behind in childhood via the miracle of mind-over-matter that was Adam Parrish building a path out of Henrietta from sweat and exhaustion and relentless will.
And what the animal inside Adam wanted was food and sleep and the physical presence of Ronan Lynch.
Adam had never taken uncomplicated comfort from another person’s touch before. Even as a small child, his mother’s caresses and hugs had been muddled with her sharp-tongued weariness with him: with his dependence on her, his needs, the way he occasioned (caused, she would say, another thing that had occupied his thoughts lately) his father’s violent fits of temper. Then he had gotten older and Robert Parrish had decreed that a mother’s cuddles were only for sissy boys, and they had stopped entirely, and no one had touched him in kindness at all, except for awkward end-of-year hugs with teachers, events that he both longed for and hated for how they opened a hole inside him, or perhaps only shined a light on the hole that was there all the time. Even his fleeting, dizzying points of contact with Blue had been as freighted with anxiety as with pleasure.
He had not, in fact, known that touch could effect him this way. He had watched other families, or the couples in the hallways of his old school, and wondered what their touches felt like, if the apparent warmth of it was genuine, or just for show the way so many things about his own family, when out in public, were.
But now.
At first, after the demon, he’d assumed Ronan would not and should not want to be touched by Adam again, but this had proved to be incorrect. Adam retained his own reservations about the prospect, but his body in this regard disobeyed him, reaching out for Ronan on base instinct, without his awareness or conscious intent. He would flinch away again, at first, lest holding Ronan’s hand or bumping his shoulder lead inexorably to harm, to a violence he did not want but no longer believed he could prevent.
But his body betrayed him again and again, reaching for Ronan almost as soon as he came near, and time and again nothing awful did happen, time and again Ronan seemed pleased and Adam’s hands remained his own, and eventually he accepted this new order of things, in which he could have upon demand the primal comfort of another body close to his own.
When the inside of his mind seemed like a twisted kaleidoscope of past and present, when hours slipped away from him like water, Ronan was a fixed point, too vivid and too singular to be anything but real. And Adam, who had never excelled at understanding either others or himself, could rely on the fact that Ronan was entirely driven by his own desires: if he suffered Adam’s touch or cooked Adam dinner or listened to his secrets, it was not out of pity or noblesse oblige, but because he wanted to. And Adam, therefore, could accept it.
The implications of all this did not become clear to him until the end of this period some months later. For a while Adam had been feeling more present again, less drowned in the past, more likely to snap back at his friends with a sharp comment. When he kissed Ronan it was more hungry and less chaste, though for all that they shared a bed most nights by this point they’d still not been naked together. Adam had been preoccupied with other things and Ronan had left the pace of their relationship entirely to him.
Then came the day when he received his first college acceptance letter, which sparked first a feeling of purer happiness than he could remember experiencing, and then the question of what it would mean for him and Ronan. This was immediately followed by shock at that reaction, and then surprise at his own surprise.
He leaned back in his chair and stared at the words excited to welcome you to the class of and thought not about arriving on campus or choosing his major or even all the work he’d done to make this a reality, but about the demon trying to kill Ronan with his hands. For the first time, he could remember the scene and not think of his own shame and horror, but of Ronan. Ronan, who never backed down from a fight, who didn’t pull punches thrown at his own brother, prepared to let Adam choke the life out of him rather than raise a hand to hurt him.
It was an act born from a love that could never be earned or deserved. This spared Adam from having to worry about whether he had in fact earned it, and let him simply accept what it was: a gift of pure grace that he could only hold with utmost care, that he not break it.
Adam had not gotten as far as he had without knowing what he wanted and using any means available to him to get and keep it. Now he’d gained something he’d never anticipated - that he for a long time hadn’t even believed existed - and he was damned if he was going to throw it away by taking it for granted or through inadequate planning.
This was, amid the confusion of Adam’s moment of epiphany, reassuring. Adam did not know how to love or be loved, but he knew how to plan. He knew how to assess variables and consider contingencies and maximize resources. He could make this work.
***
Ronan greeted the news of Adam’s acceptance letter with a fierce smile and a scoffed, “What, did you think they’d be stupid enough to turn you down?” but Adam noted the caged wariness hiding at the corners of his eyes. It had been there a lot lately, because Adam in his self-preoccupation and self-doubt had not understood how to fix it.
It would do no good to tell Ronan he would come home to him, no more than Adam would have believed in Ronan’s love from hearing the words spoken (they had not been said, and Adam did not expect it would matter if they never were).
So instead Adam pulled him into a kiss, trying to communicate his desire and determination to Ronan with his lips and tongue.
Later, when they were tangled together flushed and languid on Ronan’s bed, Adam toyed idly with the leather bands on Ronan’s wrist. “I really only stay at St. Agnes now after a late shift at the factory,” he began, cautious but not uncertain. Ronan grunted an assent. “But the rent there is more than I make on those shifts anyway, so if I moved out I wouldn’t need to take them anymore. I could maybe pick up a few more hours at Boyd's instead, to cover the extra gas cost of driving back here every day.” He could feel the laser focus of Ronan’s gaze on his face. Ronan’s wrist had tensed against his fingers. “What would you think about that?” he asked as neutrally as he could manage, staring up at the shadows on the ceiling.
“The fuck kind of question is that?” Ronan demanded.
“The kind that I believe it’s commonly considered polite to ask before moving into another person’s house,” Adam responded dryly.
“Fuck polite,” Ronan swore, “fucking - obviously -” he gave a strangled noise of frustration. Adam, finally, turned his head to look at him and saw an intensity on Ronan’s face that he found frankly humbling. Once he was sure Adam was paying full attention, he said, “This is your home for as long as you want it.”
Adam wanted to kiss him but nodded instead, because it was important to show he understood what he was being given.
Ronan nodded back and then rolled over, curling in on himself a bit, and Adam pressed a kiss to the back of his neck and wrapped an arm around him, trying to convey his presence without invading whatever space Ronan needed to process this development.
***
“How do you imagine your life five or ten years from now?” Adam asked Ronan a few weeks later, looking up from the course catalog he was studying. He was trying to weigh too many possibilities based on too little data, and he knew it, and it frustrated him.
“Is this a fucking job interview?” Ronan asked, once he was done staring at Adam in mute disbelief.
Opal, as she now liked to be called, looked up at them from where she was doing something inscrutable with a pile of rocks underneath the dining table.
“Don’t be a shithead,” Adam snapped. “I’m trying to get some kind of handle on all this,” he gestured at the panoply of college documents spread out across the table, “and it would be helpful to have some parameters to work with.”
“Then ask yourself the damn question!”
“That’s what I’m trying to do! Or do you not anticipate being part of my life five years from now?”
Ronan snarled. “All this,” he said, pushing the stack of brochures back toward Adam, “is not about me.”
“Well what about what comes after? Is the Barns it for you? Have you been hiding some lifelong dream of moving to Croatia? Becoming a Nascar driver? Setting up a cheese factory in Vermont?”
“Don’t get me involved in this.” Ronan bared his teeth. “Just choose what the fuck you want.”
“That’s what I’m doing, you stupid asshole.” Adam flicked a financial aid sheet at him. “I’m the most selfish person either of us know and I’m afraid that isn’t going to change anytime soon. But what I damn well want involves ending up in the same place as your fucking uncooperative ass, without you being utterly miserable there or Opal getting turned into a lab experiment, so possibly you can see where it would be useful for me to know if you’re planning to stay the fuck put or go buy a tract of land in Oregon and start raising dream elk or whatever the hell. I mean maybe you think I’m just flipping through these brochures trying to pick where they have the best a capella group, but they have different academic strengths that are going to matter when I’m applying to grad school. Computer science or engineering might make sense if you want to live near Seattle but it’s fucking useless here. If we’re staying at the Barns, medicine or law probably make the most sense, or something I can mostly telecommute for. Then there’s distance - would you rather see me more often for four years of undergrad if I study somewhere closer, or have me somewhere further away where I might be able to graduate in three years but couldn’t come home as often? What about getting hitched and having children? A lot of medical fields demand hours that aren’t very compatible with picking someone up from kindergarten. Not that we could get married until after I graduate, obviously, your money would ruin my whole financial aid package, but-”
Adam’s rant was cut off by Ronan’s laughter. “Planning our wedding already, Parrish?” he asked with a predatory grin. “If that was a proposal, I have to say it’s the shittiest one I’ve ever heard.”
“It was not,” Adam said with what dignity he could muster, “a proposal. No one’s engaged until someone gives someone a ring.”
“Sure, Parrish,” he replied, tipping his chair back with dangerous indolence. “Whatever you have to tell yourself to justify being total ass at romance.”
Opal took this opportunity to crawl out from under the table and scamper outside, and Adam decided to follow her rather than remain in the presence of Ronan’s self-congratulatory smirk.
The first ring appeared the next day.
iv.
Ronan had spent so long preparing himself to lose Adam that he was radically unprepared when things began to go in the opposite direction. When Adam asked to move into the Barns, he told himself it wasn’t about them, not the romantic them anyhow. It was practical and it demonstrated both that Adam was finally beginning to let himself have nice things and that Adam trusted Ronan’s friendship and the lack of strings attached to it, which were both excellent developments, but it wasn’t a commitment: not to Ronan, and not to come back ever again after he left for college.
When Blue found out Adam had moved in, she’d smiled and said, “Congratulations, that’s a really big step in your relationship,” at which Ronan had flushed and scowled furiously, prompting Blue to continue with increasingly shrill and fascinated horror, “Oh my god, did you not talk about what this means for your relationship? Like do you even know if Adam is moving in as your boyfriend or your roommate? Do you even know if Adam is your boyfriend? Have you seriously not had the Define the Relationship talk yet? Do the two of you ever actually use words to communicate at all or do you just grunt and throw things?” Ronan had grunted and thrown something at her and left the room with extreme prejudice, more convinced than ever that Adam moving in with him didn’t really mean anything.
So when Adam started talking about five year plans and basing his fucking career choice on Ronan’s geographic preferences and holy shit getting married, Ronan had no idea how to react beyond trying to extricate himself from the conversation before either of them said something that couldn’t be walked back when Adam returned to his senses.
He grabbed his car keys and once speed and the EDM pounding through the BMW’s stereo had soothed the white noise of his mind enough to permit thought, he tried to figure out what the hell was wrong with Adam.
His first thought was that it was just another iteration of guilt and obligation: that Adam had let himself eat Ronan’s food and live in Ronan’s house and stick his hand down Ronan’s pants (not to mention the small matter of demon-based strangulation that Adam seemed to have a hard time letting go of), and now that he was emerging from the haze of trauma enough to fully appreciate all that, he’d decided to repay this debt by fucking sacrificing his entire future to Ronan’s whims.
His second thought was that this was a new phase of Adam’s recovery, one in which he did the opposite of everything he’d done before out of a kind of giddy contrarianism: once he’d relied on no one for anything, so now he’d organize his whole life around another person. Once, he’d valued his independence more than life itself, now he could throw it away for nothing.
Both of these scenarios seemed plausible, and both required the same response: that Ronan tell Adam not to be an idiot and then just wait and let it be.
But Ronan was utter shit at leaving things alone, especially when there was a third possibility that he couldn’t quite dismiss: that Adam was a motherfucking go-getter, and if he’d actually just decided Ronan was what he wanted, this was also exactly how he’d behave.
Ronan hated having unrealistic hopes more than he hated almost anything else. If the world was going to disappoint him, which it usually was, he would rather know as soon and as unambiguously as possible. And the hope that Adam might actually mean it was equally impossible to reject and to accept, so Ronan did what he always did - he pushed and pushed until something broke and spat out the answer he was waiting for.
The first ring was umistakeably a dream thing: a blue-gray metal that didn’t exist in nature with an inscription in the dream language that, if translated with the puzzle box, would be found to say This is real, asshole. Ronan hid it in the folder with Adam’s chemistry homework.
The next few were more traditional, gold, platinum, silver. Then they took a turn for the odd: petrified wood, a ring pop where the candy jewel never ran out or got sticky. The biggest challenge was hiding them in places Adam would find them before Opal, who had a keen eye and a magpie’s love of shiny things.
It only took a week for Adam to break.
“This isn’t funny, Lynch,” he said, pouring a handful of rings onto the farming magazine Ronan was perusing (Declan had bought him a subscription as a Fuck You gift when he dropped out of Aglionby, but the joke was on him because Ronan liked reading it).
“Wasn’t meant to be,” he replied, glancing up at Adam. He couldn’t tell much besides that he was genuinely pissed off.
“So you’re telling me this isn’t your way of saying ha ha remember the time Parrish said the word ‘married,’ what a fucking loser?”
Ronan flashed a shark-like smile. “That sounds like an awful lot of effort to go to just to fuck with you. Besides, you know I have to really want something to bring it back.”
Adam shot him a flat, unimpressed look. “So you really wanted to fuck with me, fantastic.”
“Wasn’t a joke,” Ronan insisted, leaning back in his chair and stretching, hands on the back of his head.
“So what is it?”
“You said it wasn’t a proposal without a ring,” he reminded Adam, and gestured to the pile of rings. “Take your pick.”
Adam’s gaze flickered between the rings and Ronan’s face several times. “What. The. Fuck,” he said.
Ronan tipped his chair back down. He was beginning to re-evaluate the whole plan. He’d succeeded in getting a rise out of Adam, but so far it was disappointingly uninformative. With a mental curse he remembered Blue laughing at him, because fucking fuck her for having a point. “What you said last week -” he exhaled hard, frustrated as ever with the blunt instrument of words “- I don’t know where the hell that came from, man, I know things have been weird in your head or whatever lately, and that’s fine, alright, but don’t say shit about us like hypothetically to try it on for size or because you think you owe me something or whatever the fuck, because it’s fucking real to me. I just - I thought maybe this would make it into more than a thought experiment.”
Adam looked him in the eye. “What if it’s real to me too?” he asked.
Ronan jerked his head at the rings. “Take your pick. Figured you might want a bit of choice about something you’ll be wearing for the rest of your life.”
“Fair enough,” Adam said. He gathered the rings up again and tucked them into his pocket.
“Adam,” he said, a warning. “I’m not playing chicken.”
Adam blinked, looking surprised for the first time in the whole exchange. “I know that,” he said.
***
Ronan didn’t dream more rings after that, and Adam didn’t bring it up again. Ronan went for more drives by himself, trying to settle the uneasiness that gathered along his spine like an itch, like a change in the weather. He had spent the entirety of his relationship with Adam perfecting a complex system of arbitrage between what Adam thought he wanted and what he obviously needed, but Ronan now found himself not knowing what either of those things were anymore. And so he began to think, glancingly, almost angrily, about what he himself might want instead.
One night he looked through a half-open bedroom door and saw Adam with the dream-metal ring on his finger, staring down at it with an expression that was not wishful or starry-eyed but serious, a frown line between his eyebrows.
Two nights later, as they lay in bed together before sleep, blankets piled over them and lights out, Ronan closed his eyes and then threw his arm across them as if the darkness of the room were not privacy enough, and he said, “It doesn’t always have to be the Barns for me.” Adam made a soft noise to demonstrate that he was listening, and Ronan continued, “I’d stay here forever and be happy, it’ll always be my home and I couldn’t give it up, but I could live somewhere else as long as I could come back here when I needed to. Not a city though, I need fucking trees and fields and empty roads and - just - space without other shitty people it.”
“Okay,” Adam said. “I can work with that.” Adam sucked in a long breath and Ronan felt it like an anvil settling onto his chest, the prelude to a but.
“When I go away to school…” Adam began, “…I just want to make sure you know that it probably won’t just be the four years for undergrad. Most of the jobs I’m interested in require a graduate degree too. And there will probably be internships and research projects during breaks - not all of them, not the whole time, but I probably won’t be able to come home home as often or for as long as you might think.”
This was something Ronan had known but tried not to think about. “I could probably live in a city for a little while,” he offered. “Like as long as an internship. If that would be something you wanted.”
“I could take a year off before grad school,” Adam replied, “if it would help to have a break from the long distance thing.”
Ronan swallowed, his throat thick with something he couldn’t even name - Adam leaving or Adam coming back. He could feel a kind of tense hesitation radiating off Adam in the darkness, and he might have lost some of his Adam-related bearings but he could still read this: Adam unsure if Ronan really did want or ought to want what being with him would mean, the long absences, the competing priorities, the possibility of ending up far from the Barns. Adam trying, for once, to compromise a little but not believing it would be enough, that he wasn’t too selfish and ambitious to be a viable partner. It made Ronan want to punch something or kiss the doubt out of him, but instead he rolled over toward Adam and said, “Whatever, get three PhDs if you want, we’ll manage,” because no matter what, he would not be the thing that clipped Adam Parrish’s wings.
v.
Adam spent a lot of time considering Gansey's injunction that he not break Ronan. He had, both on that first night before he kissed Ronan on the porch of the Barns and over the subsequent months of their relationship, tried to work through all its various implications and requirements. He kept a running list of them in his head:
Do not break him through lust, by using Ronan to slake your own desire without reciprocating his feelings.
Do not break him through indifference, accepting his affection to bolster your vanity but offering only the blank, impermeable surface of your armor in return.
Do not break him through absence, by leaving and never coming back.
Do not break him through pride, treating his gifts as unwanted charity and his caring as a bid for control.
Do not break him through fear, by retreating or lashing out in the face of an unfamiliar situation.
Do not break him through carelessness, by taking his facade of strength and anger for truth and forgetting the bottomless well of emotion underneath.
Do not break him through selfishness, taking advantage of his generosity but treating his wants and needs as unimportant.
Do not break him through inattention, by failing to notice the things he shows but cannot say.
Do not break him through anger, by using words the way your father taught you to, inflicting wounds that can't be healed.
Adam attempted to obey these commandments, with varying degrees of success. He was still selfish and angry, careless and proud and afraid, but he mitigated it to the extent he was able, and thus far that had seemed to be enough. But it had not until quite recently occurred to Adam that it might be possible to break Ronan through poorly executed good intentions as well.
Every time Adam made an effort to be a considerate boyfriend or partner or whatever they were, it seemed to make things worse. Just now, it had started innocently enough: Adam had,after careful scrutiny of his budget and work schedule, suggested that the two of them go on a road trip for a few days during Aglionby’s spring break.
Ronan raised his eyebrows. “Ready to elope already? I hear you can get hitched by a pirate in Myrtle Beach.”
Adam could see, in retrospect, that he shouldn’t have taken the bait. He already had plenty of evidence that Ronan responded to any significant overture on Adam’s part with skepticism, boundary pushing, and defensive jibes, and he should have recognized this and let the snark roll off of him. But he was still touchy about the marriage topic and it pissed him off that Ronan couldn’t once respond like a normal human being when Adam was so obviously making an effort, so he rolled his eyes and drawled, “But sugar pie, we haven’t even figured out the prenup yet.”
This had triggered a profanity-laced tirade about you bring that kind of garbage paper near me and I’ll light it the fuck on fire. Adam could, again, see in retrospect that this was not a fight worth having, but in the heat of the moment he’d snapped back, and things had escalated, and yes, clearly invoking Declan’s likely opinion on the matter had been an error in judgment, but still. Ronan had stormed off and Adam had wandered outside to walk through the late-winter fields, still shell-shocked by how quickly things had gone wrong.
It was unsurprising, of course, that being with Ronan Lynch would involve arguments, even vicious arguments about stupid things. Adam didn’t mind that, he liked that he wasn’t afraid of Ronan’s anger and Ronan wasn’t afraid of his. But this made him feel like a failure. He hadn’t expected to be good at having a functional relationship, he’d anticipated missteps and misunderstandings and reacting the wrong way in the most commonplace moments. But he hadn’t prepared for doing the worst exactly when he tried the hardest. The side of him that was still braced for rejection wanted to read it as ambivalence on Ronan’s part - that sure, Adam was good enough for a kind of roommates-with-benefits arrangement but not anything more serious, not future plans or even weekend getaways.
But Adam knew that wasn’t the problem. Ronan didn’t do casual and those rings he dreamed might have been a test but they weren’t a lie. So the problem was Adam not knowing how to do this: how to offer a loving gesture, how to express his own desires, how to give back the assurance of affection that Ronan provided so effortlessly. Adam couldn’t say he was surprised that such words came out of his mouth pinched and unconvincing. He tried to tell himself that this was no different from starting out unable to read Latin or fix the ley line and having to learn slowly and painfully what others had a natural gift for. But it didn’t feel like he was learning, and he didn’t know how to get better, and each time he got it wrong he hurt the person (and how damning was it that he could barely admit this even inside his own mind) he cared about most.
Adam clenched his fists as his mental alarm clock told him it was time to head in and get ready for his afternoon shift at Boyd’s. He didn’t want to see Ronan in the house and he didn’t want to leave without making up. But Adam was used to doing things he didn’t want to do.
When he got back to the house, Ronan and his BMW were long gone.
vi.
Ronan sat on the hood of his car on the hill overlooking the field of imperfect Mitsubishis, now almost entirely subsumed by kudzu, like the ruins of an ancient civilization that had worshipped exclusively white cars. It was where Ronan came to contemplate his sins.
He ground his fists against his stinging eyes and considered going to one of his friends for advice, mainly as a form of self-flagellation, but he already knew what they would tell him. He was fucking everything up because it hurt too much to actually believe he could have what he wanted. Adam, with the same courage that had allowed him to walk into Aglionby as a townie in second-hand clothes, was making an honest attempt at building a relationship with him, something that could last, and he was turning it to shit. And Adam might be a stubborn asshole, but he was certainly smart enough to take a hint, and if Ronan kept shooting him down, eventually he would stop trying.
Adam had been fine - safe - as a remote object of worship. He had saved Ronan without doing anything or even knowing it, just by existing. Ronan had been drowning in darkness at the bottom of a well, and the light of Adam Parrish had appeared, dim and flickering at first, a sporadic glimpse of beauty and strength in the form of callused hands and dappled freckles, but it had been enough to begin guiding him upward. And so, slowly, his world went from nightmares and loneliness to nightmares and loneliness and Adam Parrish, and the light got brighter and his path clearer, and he began to struggle forward in earnest. He had not really been prepared to break the surface, much less for Adam to be there waiting for him when he did.
A kiss on the eve of his possible death had been permissible; a tentative, half-way sort of arrangement with a likely expiration date when Adam left for college skated on the edges of what he could stand, but Adam had needed him and that had made it all right. But, this, now? It felt like being cut to pieces.
It had been so much easier to accept that he would be alone forever. Of course, in fact, he had never been alone at all, he’d always had Gansey, and then Noah, and eventually Adam, but it hadn’t felt like it. And if he had someone, then he could lose him, brutally, at any moment, with no warning.
Before Ronan found out about the Gray Man and Colin Greenmantle, he had spent a long time wondering if a dream had wielded the tire iron that killed his father, and if so whether it was one of Niall’s dreams or his own. He had seen the night horrors using tools. He sometimes brought something back from a dream without knowing it in the morning. He knew being close to him wasn’t safe. It was easy to put those pieces together into the worst possible pattern.
The truth had not turned out to be tremendously more comforting.
Ronan desperately wanted Adam to love him back, but he was terrified of having that much to lose again, and he was pretty sure that Adam’s life expectancy would be significantly increased by leaving Henrietta and everyone within it behind forever.
Ronan allowed himself to realize these things, and allowed himself to feel the surge of helpless panic they entailed, and then Ronan said to himself, fuck it.
Fuck if Colin fucking Greenmantle was going to fuck up his love life.
Fuck if he was going to back down from a challenge and let Adam be the only brave one.
Fuck if he ended up the sad sack loser who let his beloved walk away because he was too chickenshit to take what was offered to him.
With much the same spirit that led him to inadvisable escapades involving shopping carts and furniture dollies, Ronan Lynch climbed off the hood of the BMW and into its driver’s seat, and set off to be a proper fucking boyfriend.
vii.
Adam returned home that evening to find a light on in the empty dining room. On the table was a printed photo of a peddler’s cart in front of some old buildings. Two stick figures had been added, one pushing the cart at apparently high speed and the other balancing on top of it like a surfer. The caption, in Ronan’s familiar scrawl, read Want to fuck some shit up in Colonial Willamsburg? The paper was held in place by the toy car he’d picked up the first time he entered Ronan’s bedroom.
Smiling, he tucked the car into his pocket and padded through the silent house. Opal was in bed. Ronan he eventually found on the roof over the kitchen, wrapped up in a blanket. He climbed out the window and dropped down onto the shingles beside Ronan, who immediately wrapped an arm around him, engulfing him in the warmth of the blanket.
Without speaking, he leaned in, meeting Ronan in a kiss. Their bodies as always responded easily to each other, as free and uncomplicated as their words were tangled and difficult. Here, everything was eagerly given and hungrily received. For Adam, the comfort and relief that they still had this warred with frustration that he was so bad at the rest of it.
“Are you ever tempted,” he said when they pulled apart, “to do what your dad did and dream yourself someone to be with instead?” He hadn’t known he was going to say it before the words came out, but the half-formed thought had been there forever: that he could be replaced at any time not just by someone Ronan did meet, but by anyone he could imagine. It was hard, sometimes, to understand why it hadn’t already happened.
“Fuck no,” Ronan replied immediately, rearing back to scowl at him. “Never.”
“Why not,” Adam pressed. “You could have anything you want.”
“I already have what I want,” Ronan said curtly.
“He could be almost exactly like me though, just better - a me who didn’t want to go away to school, who knew how to be a good boyfriend.”
“You’re a fucking person,” Ronan spat, “not a machine with parts to be swapped out.” He studied Adam. “Would you do that with me, if you could?” he asked. “Would you trade me for a dreamed Ronan?”
Adam took some time to consider it: a Ronan who was maybe a little easier, better at taking yes for an answer, maybe even one who’d go to college, live in a city, not frighten the neighbors. One who would never leave him, because he was designed to love Adam no matter what. He was surprised by how little the prospect appealed.
“No,” he said. “I would not. But…” His eyes clouded. Replacing Ronan with an impostor would be like painting over a masterpiece; replacing Adam might be more like exchanging a defective appliance for one that worked as intended, one that hadn’t been broken even while it was being put together.
“It’s the same thing,” Ronan insisted. Their eyes met, Adam’s doubting, Ronan’s burning. “I’m sorry,” Ronan said at last, dropping his gaze. “I know I fucked up, but that’s on me, not on you, all right?” He dragged Adam in against his chest.
Adam rested his head against Ronan’s warmth and closed his eyes.
“And you’re a fucking fantastic boyfriend,” Ronan said, gruff bravado covering the cracks underneath.
Adam huffed with laughter.
“You are,” Ronan insisted, softer.
Adam butted his head against Ronan’s shoulder, unable to repress a smile. “The answer is yes, by the way,” he said, pulling back as far as the confines of the blanket allowed.
Ronan scowled inquisitively at him.
“I would love,” Adam said, “to badly misuse the props of Colonial Williamsburg with you.”
Ronan’s answering grin could have powered Henrietta for a week.
***
When Adam was in his late twenties, he began attending his college friends’ weddings. He learned after the first few that there was a pattern to both the events and the relationships they celebrated: the stories of first dates, first kisses, first I-love-yous. The optional meet cute, the obligatory embarrassing mishap. Each time he encountered this litany of romance, in champagne toasts and three paragraph overviews on wedding websites alongside links to gift registries and directions to the reception site, he felt like a space alien visiting an unfamiliar planet.
This domesticated coupling was not love as he experienced it: a pit trap that you fell into unexpectedly and could not get out of, a magnet pulling you implacably back toward the last place you thought you’d want to be, an animal instinct embedded in the wordless, ancient part of your mind that sought food and heat and shelter.
The love Adam had learned from Ronan was not a noun, an object to be given and received, but a verb, a way of being, the soil from which all other actions grew and took their meaning.
Ronan confessed his love explicitly for the first time as a subordinate clause midway through an invective-laden rant when Adam was a sophomore in college. Adam was too distracted to register it properly until after the phone call was over, at which point it seemed too late to respond in kind. Ronan didn’t seem to notice or mind the lack of reciprocation.
It stayed with Adam though, and on their next call a few days later he’d awkwardly inserted it into their conversation: Um, you know I love you too, right?
Ronan had laughed at him and said, “No shit, dickhead,” and launched into a story about Opal trying to chew through a tree with her teeth after watching a documentary on beavers, and after that it was something they could say, sometimes, but usually didn’t.
Adam found that comforting. He could never have believed in a love that was communicated primarily by words, especially not words as elastic and common as those. But ultimately, he didn’t really have to believe in love at all.
He just had to believe in Ronan. And that had always come easy.