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It is late summer in Henrietta, but Cabeswater has settled into an early autumn--golden light filtering through leaves of deep, fiery reds and oranges, air sharp and crisp in Ronan’s lungs as he draws in hungry breaths. Sprawled out on his back, fingers spread wide in the mossy earth, he can almost imagine the forest is a real, tangible creature, not a tangled web of dreams and ideas and promises of memories.
Aurora is mirroring him; laid out on the forest floor, eyes closed, soaking in the dull sunlight and cold snaps of wind.
He feels guilty sometimes, coming here without Matthew. No, worse than that--coming here without telling Matthew. Stealing a few quiet moments alone with his mother shouldn’t feel like depriving his brother of anything, but the look on Matthew’s face when he sees her, when she hugs him, when they get to chatting and leave Ronan to wander through Cabeswater alone with Chainsaw at his heels….
Anyway. He doesn’t tell Matthew.
Usually he stuffs his time with her full of chatter; she asks him questions and he sits and tells her about Gansey’s latest discovery, about how useless and boring school had gotten lately, about something Blue said that he thinks she might laugh at. It reminds him of coming home from school back before it was unbearable, throwing himself into a barstool in the kitchen and rattling off what he’d done that day while she made him and Declan and Matthew something full of cinnamon and sugar in the kitchen.
Today he’s silent, and Aurora waits patiently for almost half an hour before she turns her head towards him. He stares resolutely at the sky.
“Ronan, dear,” she says, gentle. “What is it you wanted to talk to me about?”
He had not said anything about wanting to talk to her. He had actually been considering getting up off the floor and making up an excuse for leaving early and heading back to the Barns to lay silently in some other dream.
But he forces himself to turn his head towards her. She’s looking at him with an open expression. Patient and gentle. Teasing and kind. His throat feels full.
He says, barely above a whisper, “I think I want to be with Adam.”
When he says Adam, his mother’s expression softens, like butter melting out on a hot stove.
When he says Adam, his heart skips a beat, like his chest is trying to squeeze the words back into his lungs, like he can take it back somehow.
When he says Adam, Cabeswater rustles, echoes back to him magi, magi, magi. He wishes it’d shut the hell up for once.
“Oh, darling,” Aurora whispers. She reaches out a hand to touch his cheek. He doesn’t think he’s crying, but he can’t really tell past the buzzing in his ears. “You love very fiercely, don’t you?”
Love is a word that rattles around in his chest. Love is something he cannot imagine saying out loud.
But it sounds so real, coming from his mother’s mouth.
“What if he doesn’t want me?” he hears himself saying, hoarse. He feels like a child. “I don’t even know if he wants….”
Even here, under the lingering watch of his mother and Cabeswater, he can’t say it. What a fucking cruel joke that would be, wouldn’t it? It isn’t you, Ronan; it’s just everything about you.
Aurora runs her hand over his head, the same way she used to when it was long and curled down to his chin. He closes his eyes. It hurts now to keep them open.
“He can see people’s hearts, that boy,” Aurora tells him. “I think he’ll find yours plenty fitting for his.”
His face burns hot. This is too much. He shouldn’t have said anything. Secrets, one-two-three, much easier than this.
Cabeswater rustles around him. Everything is growing impossibly bright behind his eyelids; he can taste sickly sweet air on his tongue and the damp earth growing drier beneath him. His chest aches.
Ronan opens his eyes.
It’s summer in Cabeswater now.
“And if he doesn’t,” Aurora says, “you’ll survive that, dear.”
If he doesn’t. If he doesn’t. Ronan reaching out; Adam pulling back. Ronan saying please and Adam saying no. Ronan saying yes, okay, maybe love and Adam saying you? You thought you could be enough for me?
His worst dreams go like that. He never brings anything back from them.
“I don’t know how I will,” he admits. It sounds horribly dramatic, coming out of his mouth. It also sounds like a razor-sharp truth.
“Oh, dear,” Aurora laughs, and stands up to brush leaves and moss and dirt from her skirts. “You are your father’s son.”