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Ronan’s hands feel electrified.
Not quite electric, but electrified; buzzy and fidgety and like everything they touch feels like an echo of whatever bolt of lightning must have first zapped them. He tries holding them still on his lap and they move without him noticing. He tries biting his cuticles and his hands burn his tongue when they get wet. He tries sitting on them but they fizz anyways, energetic underneath him.
He resorts to letting them wander onto the abnormally warm Gansey or the abnormally wild Adam in front of him and they crackle whenever they make contact, but it’s a good crackle, almost, and since when did Ronan Lynch let a little pain get under his skin. Which is what it feels like, to put his electrified hands on their already-electric bodies, but it feels better than anything else, so he finds any excuse to touch them, pokes and prods and pinky-promises even though he hates promising things.
For once, he’s studying. Or, trying to, at least, because it’s Latin and Latin’s important and if Parrish beats him again (it’s not a contest, Ronan, Gansey’s perfectly measured voice says in his head), he’ll never hear the end of it. And he really is trying to study. But it’s hard to when his hands keep being electric.
Mostly, they seem to keep wanting to touch Adam and Gansey. Which is hard when he’s across from both of them, slouched into a blue plastic bean bag while they lean against the wall in a corner of the Aglionby library, unusually busy because of the upcoming spring finals.
When his hands spark so hard that the pages feel like they’ll burn a hole through them, he gives up. “Fuck this,” he hears himself say. “Can we take a break and do some leyline shit? My brain’s going haywire.” It’s really his hands, but he’s not going to tell them that.
Adam sighs, closing his book and his eyes at once. “Thought you’d never ask, Lynch.”
Ronan grins, trying to infuse it with enough wickedness to get Parrish to smile a little wider, maybe even laugh. Gansey catches his wickedness instead, though, and Ronan’s hands spark again, along with the rest of his body.
“Are you sure, Ronan? We’ve only been at this for —“
“Gansey, for once Parrish is agreeing to take a fucking break. Can you let him?”
Gansey sighs, mirroring Adam’s earlier gesture, and then smiles despite himself, eyes still closed. “Fine. Leyline shit it is then,” he says, and the nerves in Ronan’s hands jump so quickly that he has to stand up and use pulling both of them up by their wrists as an excuse to touch them, heart racing and brain three miles ahead of where he wants it.
As they walk out towards the Pig, Ronan decides, unusually, that it’s for the best that Gansey’s driving. His hands would probably burn a hole through the steering wheel anyways.
***
Adam’s stomach feels hungry.
To be fair, Adam almost always feels hungry. He feels it in his legs when he hasn’t eaten in a while, and his skin when he hasn’t been touched in a while, and his eyes when he hasn’t slept in a while. He feels it in his hands when he’s been working too hard and his mouth when he hasn’t drunk enough water and his heart when he hasn’t seen his friends’ smiles in a while. And he’s been feeling something approaching this type of hunger before, this twisting and bubbling in the stomach that reached its clutch up and up and up the more he thought about things like Ronan’s approving smirk and Gansey’s habit of touching his hands to his cheeks when he needed grounding.
But it had never been like this before.
It’s past sunset, and the three of them are driving much faster than Gansey normally goes down the highway, coming home from another leyline search that hasn’t really felt like a normal search. Something about some unturned rocks, literally, and a path that had appeared from nowhere. Nothing had really been found, but Ronan had kept on skittering his hands around their belt loops and Gansey had kept on opening and closing his mouth and so it felt a little bit like something had been found.
Gansey’s driving fast, too, which just confirms his suspicions.
And Adam is starving.
He tells them this, sort of, although he means to add but not like that and never really does, and Ronan suggests Nino’s and so they go somewhat in that direction, taking their time and driving fast at the same time somehow.
There’s music on, something low and inviting and loud and irrevocably sexy, and it’s dark out, and Ronan keeps pressing his hands into Adam’s seat back, and Gansey’s driving fast, and Adam is hungry, hungry, hungry.
He thinks, absentmindedly, that sticking his head out the window might help, and so he does; rolls down the window and leans his head out to meet the wind along with the song in a perfect music video moment. Ronan shouts from the backseat jubilantly and goes to join him, and Gansey laughs and doesn’t join them quite but the wind sticks in his hair a little and ruffles it, and Adam’s stomach pulses hotly in time with his heart as he thinks about ruffling Gansey’s hair himself.
He turns around to make eye contact with Ronan’s leaned-out head and electricity spins between them.
And Adam is so, so hungry. But he feels like maybe it’s a kind of hungry that won’t need to last much longer, and the thought of it makes him close his eyes and allow himself to unravel into the night.
***
Gansey’s mouth feels hot.
Which is odd, he thinks. Mouths shouldn’t be hot. Or rather, they always are, but most people don’t notice that they’re hot. Are mouths hot, he wonders? Absentmindedly, he looks at Adam in front of him, watches as his tongue worries the tip of his top lip, right at the center of his cupid’s bow.
His tongue feels hot now, too.
Ronan’s fingers are dug into Gansey’s knee a little, and his left side is pressed against Gansey’s right side. They’re still sitting in a booth at Nino’s, and it’s mostly midnight, and for some reason they’re on the same side of the booth and Adam’s on the other side facing them, which is unusual because normally Gansey likes to sit by himself and have Adam and Ronan in front of him so he can keep an eye on both of them at once. Except right now Ronan is next to him, very next to him, and his foot is wrapped around Gansey’s ankle and his fingers are grasping into Gansey’s knee because he’s frustrated at something Adam’s just said and Adam is frowning at them from across the table and for some reason Gansey’s mouth is hot.
And his tongue. His tongue is hot, too.
Adam’s face changes, suddenly, morphs into something that’s very nearly a laugh, and Gansey hasn’t been paying attention to things other than mouth hotness to notice why, what absurd thing Ronan’s said this time to change Adam’s face this drastically. His eyes are wrinkled just so and his knee bumps against Gansey’s left one in the hullabaloo and Ronan moves his fingers from Gansey’s knee to his thigh and Gansey’s tongue now feels heavy, too. I must be going insane, he thinks, and then stands up, knocking his elbow against the table and wincing as the pain rings around his body a little, replacing the sensation of Adam’s knee against his and Ronan’s arm on his leg.
“If you’ll excuse me, I have to — that is, I — um — I should be —“
“Go take your piss,” Ronan says, and Gansey shuffles our of the booth as fast as he can and practically runs to the bathroom.
When he sits down on the toilet of the slightly smaller of the two stalls in the Nino’s men’s restroom (he likes to make sure that the people who need to use the handicap bathroom can), fully clothed, his mouth still feels hot. And his tongue. And his whole face, really. And his knee. And his thigh. And his ankle.
He closes his eyes, wraps his hands around each other and then holds them against his face, breaths in and out like he’s learned to do from years of that pinching anxious feeling spiraling in from nowhere. Once he starts to focus on something other than the heat in his mouth — the slight callous on his middle finger from writing, the tickly bits of hair on his neck, something in his topsiders stabbing his big toe — he breaths out an extra big sigh and takes his hands off his face.
Well. This is.
He finishes shoving down his intruding thoughts and figures that while he’s here, he might as well actually relieve himself. But when he goes to stand up and take off his pants, he realizes he’s a little hard.
Odd, he thinks, definitely odd, and pinches his arm a little to keep from thinking about it more.
He takes another second to compose himself, decides on avoiding the whole situation altogether, and pulls his pants back up. He washes his hands, just in case someone might care enough to check, and then presses his now-cold hands against his face. Then his lips. Then slips his thumb into his still-hot mouth, to cool it down a little. Then swirls it around a little, distracted by the feeling, licking and sucking it inside his mouth. This sends a jerk all the way to his legs, and Gansey yanks his hand out of his mouth and wipes it on his pants, then decides to wash it again for good measure.
When he comes back out from the bathroom, Ronan has traded sides and is now pressed up against Adam instead, a snicker on his face and hands gesticulating wildly. Adam is laughing, wonderously unraveled, and Ronan is laughing back, and Gansey’s heart slips sideways a bit at the sight of them.
By the time he sits back in front of them, he manages to regain his composure. Well, most of it, anyways, and it’s enough, because now the check has come and the mood has been shoved elsewhere now and it’s up to him to fix it. Or maybe he’s the cause of it, he’s never sure. Either way, he forgets all about his and Ronan’s and Adam’s mouths for all of ten minutes until they’re all safely back in the car, separated in such a way that he can’t touch them or look at them too much.
He drives almost all the way to Monmouth before he realizes that he’s got Adam in the car as well, and does the dance of oh-well-i-can-drive-you-back-if-you’d-like-but-also-if-you-want-to-stay-overnight-you-can and tries not to push the last bit and ignore the brightness in his chest when Adam says actually, if you’re offering, that way we can talk a little more about this new development in the leyline. Ronan grins from the back seat and says thank God Parrish I thought you were gonna say— at the same time that Gansey says excellent, we can make up the— and they both don’t really finish their sentences because the laughter in the car fills up just a little too much space and also because neither are really sure what they’ll say. Gansey thinks he might have said something about making up the couch if given the opportunity, but they don’t really have a couch, exactly, and Adam hasn’t ever really slept over before, because before moving to his apartment he couldn’t and since then he hasn’t needed to, and so he doesn’t know where Adam will sleep aside from in his bed and the thought of this makes his mouth hot again and so he lets the subject change to laughter and figures they’ll cross that bridge when they come to it.
When they get to Monmouth, Ronan gets out while Gansey’s still fumbling for his wallet and keys and notebook and making a mental note to buy something that would carry all of them but isn’t a backpack and isn’t a purse, slamming the door as he does so. When Gansey looks back up, he catches Adam looking at him. No, Adam is looking at him; Gansey hasn’t caught him at anything. Half a dozen unformed thoughts pass through his head rapid fire, most of them concerning the words please and more and can ibut what he ends up saying is, “What’s not a purse that I can put all my things in?”
He realizes his heart is racing when Adam responds, “What, because a purse is too gay, Gansey?”
Gansey swallows. “What? No. What?”
Adam starts to get out of the car, and Gansey belatedly follows suit. “Purse seems fully handy for what you might need to put in it.”
Too gay, Gansey?. “I can’t,” he gets out of his mouth.
“I know,” Adam says, throwing him a sympathetic look as they walk through the front door. “Maybe a briefcase?” Gay, Gansey?
Ronan hears this, unfortunately, and guffaws delightedly. “As if he needs a way to look even more Dick-ish.”
Gansey sighs. “I’m not afraid of being— of looking gay,” he says, before he can think.
Adam shoots him a look as he settles on Gansey’s bed next to Ronan. “I didn’t think you would be.”
“Because I’m an ally,” he says, and his stomach twists.
“I know,” says Adam, and glances at Ronan.
“I’d wear a purse if it was — if I could — without —“
“Gansey, I understand. You’re fine, don’t worry about it.”
“Okay.” He lets our a breath, and then claps his hands, cracking open a smile. “So! Glendower?”
Ronan stands up, grinning wildly. “Glendower.”
***
They don’t talk about Glendower.
Or rather, they talk about Glendower, and also a new boy at school, and Latin, and briefcases, and immortality, and Matthew’s new girlfriend, and bees, and church, and the leyline, and ravens, and electricity, and dreams, and everything in between. Suddenly, without any of them realizing it, it’s four in the morning, and they are all lying in Gansey’s bed, pressed up against one another. Gansey’s in the middle, with Adam taking up not enough space on one side and Ronan taking up too much on the other, one leg spread over Adam and Gansey and the other folded up at the knee and spread the other way so that the zipper of his jeans glints in the artificial lighting. Gansey keeps getting distracted by it and having to start over sentences, which isn’t helped by the small amount of wine (a gift from Helen) he and Ronan and Adam had split earlier in the night.
It had felt decadent to drink the wine, and wild, and off-kilter, and against the rules, but that was how the whole night had felt so far, so it was okay, somehow, also.
Adam’s shirt had ridden up, so now, when Gansey looks down a little, there’s a bit of skin showing, just enough so he can see the bottom Adam’s stomach and the two freckles underneath his belly button. Belly, Gansey thinks, reverently, and then, gay, gansey? and then he has to close his eyes because his mouth’s too hot again.
“Need water,” he mumbles, just to do something with his body and warm mouth other than shiver at how the two of them are pressing into him, and eventually follows through and gets up to go pour himself some water.
It’s the wine, Gansey carefully thinks as he walks to the kitchenbathroom, but it’s not quite. It’s the time, Gansey thinks, but it’s not really. It’s the proximity, Gansey thinks wildly, and this feels a little closer to the truth but also so far away from what Gansey is allowed to think and so he stops himself from thinking it anyways.
He swishes the cool water around his mouth and tries to soothe the dizziness around him by putting his hand on his face again, but this feels like a slippery slope to putting his thumb in his mouth again and so he leans his cheek against the fridge instead. Fuck, he thinks, to nobody, about nothing in particular other than vague concepts like something more and gay, gansey? and Ronan’s glinting zipper.
He finishes the water and resolves himself to go back out now that his mouth no longer is quite as warm, but when he walks out he finds it and the rest of his body even hotter than before because Ronan and Adam are kissing.
Kissing. On his bed. In his sheets. Mouths open and hands pressing and stomachs rolling and hips moving and legs tangled up in legs and Adam on all fours on top of Ronan’s open thighs and Ronan tugging at Adam’s hair with one hand and his ass with the other and their eyes closed and backs coiled and faces wild and they’re kissing in Gansey’s bed in Gansey’s bed in Gansey’s bed. Kissing. In Gansey’s bed.
And Gansey is burning all over.
He tries to think of what to do, whether to clear his throat or scream or walk back into the kitchen or walk back into the bathroom and jerk off or walk back into the bathroom and spray himself with cold water. He tries to think of what it is he’s feeling beyond hot, whether this is something that he should be feeling, like surprise or shame or anger that they’re kissing in his bed with him right there, or something he shouldn’t be feeling, like turned on as all hell or jealous beyond belief or dizzy with excitement.
Instead, he makes a small noise, something between a moan and a question. It doesn’t even register to Gansey that he’s made it at first, but apparently it must be enough of a noise to alert Adam and Ronan because they stop kissing and look up at him in the doorway.
If Gansey’s as red as they are, which he must be, he’s gone past normal skin tone and into traffic light territory. Which is objectively embarrassing, he thinks, even though he’s the one that’s just stumbled onto his two best friends kissing. On his bed.
On his bed.
Why can he not stop thinking about that fact?
There’s silence for three, four, five rapid beats of Gansey’s heart, and then —
“Jesus fuck Gansey, you can’t just—“
“My apologies, I see you two are—“
“Gansey, we didn’t see that you—“
“Again, apologies, I — didn’t know that you were — that you two —“ Gansey can hardly hear what he’s saying over the pounding of his heart and the heat in his whole body. He knows he should walk back out, let them do whatever it is they’re doing, and maybe they’ll talk about it in the morning and maybe they won’t, and either way it’s none of his business. But somehow, he finds himself walking closer to them, because he doesn’t know how to control his body or words or thoughts anymore and also they’re in his bed. Where he sleeps. On his pillow.
Adam clambers off of Ronan, halfway sitting on his legs. “Gansey, it’s — I know you’re probably surprised, and, honestly, we are too, but —“
“No,” says Gansey. “I mean. Yes, but — I just — my mouth is hot, and — I just was out for a second, and — don’t worry about me, it’s just — it’s my bed,” and his voice cracks ungainly at bed and nothing is coming out how he wants and somehow he’s even closer than before.
Because it’s always been them. Suns, and magnets, and lights, and whatever other cliches people say when they mean that all they want to do is be next to someone. And the realization of it is about to turn Gansey inside out with longing.
“Gansey, we —“ Adam starts, sitting up a little, and Gansey is still moving closer to then, and Ronan is grabbing his hands and moving him closer and putting one hand on the back of his neck and pulling him in and kissing him and the feeling of it sends shockwaves or electricity from his lips all the way down his body and back up again. It’s rough, and somehow it doesn’t fit with what Gansey expected of Ronan’s kissing, and then it makes him wonder when started thinking things about Ronan’s kissing, and then his thoughts are knocked out of his head when Adam goes to kiss his neck.
“Oh,” he has just enough time to think, before he feels so entrenched in emotion and want that he tumbles onto the bed in between them. He arranges himself so that he’s lying on the bed, grabbing onto Ronan still (when had he grabbed onto Ronan?) and leaning up into his kisses. Adam moves to kiss Ronan’s neck, then, which makes Ronan arch his back away from Gansey, and it gives Gansey just enough of a moment to asses his situation. And when he looks up to see Ronan on top of him, eyes closed with tenderness and heat, and Adam next to him, one hand on Ronan’s neck and one hand on Gansey’s stomach, he feels so filled up that he almost starts to cry.
He hears himself murmur thank you to both of them, or to himself, he’s not quite sure.
“What for?” laughs Adam lightly, moving himself so he can kiss a trail down Gansey’s wrist.
“For being my best friends,” he says, half-gasping, and it’s not quite right, but he knows they understand.
They always do.
Ronan smiles into his mouth. And Gansey feels hungry, and electric, and hot, and he never wants it to stop.
***
Ronan feels like he’s been stilled. Like someone’s reached in and turned him off — well, turned parts of him off, at least. Like he doesn’t need to do anything with his hands, because he has the two most beautiful boys in front of him to do it for him — one to cool him down, one to fill him up. One to hold his wrists down as he lays back on the bed, surrendering, and another to press his thumbs onto his lips and watch as they are surrounded. One to curl his hands around his thighs, and the other to press kisses up his legs. One to lay on each side of him as they fall back into bed, exhausted by tenderness and heartstrings plucked raw.
“I don’t do casual,” he whispers into the dark, heart pounding.
“We know,” he hears from both sides, and feels two hands reach to meet his.
They are each serious and they are each sweet and they are each each smart and they are each unique and they are each their own and they are each his.
***
Adam feels full.
Full of kisses, up and down his back and chest and legs and neck and arms. Full of praise — Ronan’s whispered fucks when Adam takes his shirt off, Gansey’s wet eyes when Adam smiles up at him, both of their grasps on his shoulders when he does something to them that’s just right. Full of love. Full of movement, like a current inside him. Full of warmth.
So, so full.
He sleeps well for the first time in forever, even though Gansey drools a little on him. Even though Ronan wakes up too often in the night, always pressing a smiling kiss to him whenever he does. Even though — or maybe because — the bed is so crowded. Even though there’s still so much to talk about and smooth out like strange maps in front of them.
When they wake up — Ronan first, then Gansey, then Adam — Ronan starts their mornings by kissing each of them in turn, varying soft and hard and wild and tender. He stops for a second in the middle to go to the bathroom, smirking just enough to let them know that the real reason he’s leaving them is to tease them, just a little, and also because he can and he knows they’ll still be there and is exceedingly happy about that fact.
When he comes back, Gansey, uncharacteristically eager and out of breath, says, “Well. Shall we get intimate again?”
Adam and Ronan explode into laughter and groans, and Gansey presses his hands to his face, and they take a second like that to just enjoy the moments in between. Because they can.
And Adam, for the first time in his life, savors.