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In about five hours, the best thing and the worst thing were going to happen.
The best thing was that Adam was leaving for Harvard. The worst thing was that he was also leaving Ronan.
It hadn’t taken him very long to pack up all of his belongings in a single duffel bag, and even less time to place that duffel bag in the trunk of the car. In theory, he was totally ready. Get in the car, turn on the car, go. Gone. In theory was the only way he was ready, though, because there wasn’t a single part of him that was prepared to be eight hours away from Ronan at all times.
It wasn’t just the thought of not having Ronan there, though that was bad enough. Against his better judgment, against everything he’d spent years teaching himself, he’d allowed himself to grow roots in Ronan. Ronan was the release of tension in Adam’s neck after long hours at Boyd’s. He was the solution to the very last problem in one of Adam’s absurdly long calculus assignments. He was Adam’s freedom to grow towards the sky knowing that his feet were still planted safely on the ground. He was a word Adam hadn’t known how to use before he’d realized he was spending more nights at the Barns than at St. Agnes. Home.
No, the hardest part wasn’t that he was going to drive away from the one person who made everything easier. It was that he knew he was that person for Ronan, too, and that Ronan was going to have a harder time with it. It was the knowledge that he, Adam, would have Harvard, classes, distractions. Homework, definitely, work-work, definitely, new friends, maybe. Ronan, on the other hand, would be entirely alone. No school, no job, his only friends God knows where and his only family four hours away.
The thought of him waking up in the Barns, alone, going to sleep in the Barns, alone, eating all of his meals in the Barns, alone - it was more than Adam could bear. It appeared to be more than Ronan could bear, too, because, all day, they hadn’t talked about it.
They’d had a great day, really, once Adam had finished packing and Ronan had finished acting like the packing wasn’t happening, but they hadn’t talked about it. Not once.
They’d taken one last dip in their rustic, makeshift, perfect pool, Ronan’s dreamt wings holding him in the air for longer than they ever had before. Once he’d crashed into the water, Adam had also held him for longer than he ever had before. They hadn’t talked about it then.
Adam had convinced Ronan to video chat with Gansey and Blue on the phone Ronan had convinced Adam to accept. Gansey and Blue, whose faces Adam had been delighted to see, had talked about it a lot, and very excitedly. Ronan, at that point in the conversation, hadn’t said a word. They hadn’t talked about it after.
They hadn’t talked about it during the dinner Ronan had cooked for Adam, during the movie they had pretended to watch, or during the hours they had spent tangled up in Ronan’s bed, so Adam, lying awake, was beginning to believe they wouldn’t talk about it at all, not even in the morning. He was dreading the emotionless goodbye, fearing that Ronan wouldn’t acknowledge what was happening. That Adam would have to play along, make-believe that he was only going to the store and of course he would be right back.
Then Ronan, who had been curled up against his back and supposedly sleeping, silently and suddenly turned away to face the wall.
Adam waited a moment. Collected himself. Then, he turned over, too.
Ronan was still silent, but his shoulders were shaking in a way that made every inch of Adam hurt. There was a fire in Adam’s throat, burning around a lump that had appeared about three days earlier and was still stubbornly growing. Ronan’s shoulders had made it instantly double in size.
“Ronan,” Adam said softly. He placed a gentle hand on the back of Ronan’s trembling arm.
Ronan jerked away. He didn’t say anything.
“Lynch,” Adam tried again. “Come here.”
Nothing.
A little sharpness, perhaps, would help. “If you don’t let me hold you right now, you’re going to regret it for a long time, and you know I’m right.”
Still, silence. Maybe Ronan’s shoulders heaved a little harder.
The fire raged. Adam was desperate. “Let me hold you, for fuck’s sake.” His voice cracked when he added, “Please.”
As suddenly as he’d unglued himself from Adam, Ronan glued himself right back. He whipped around and buried his face in Adam’s chest. Adam wrapped his arms around him. He felt the magnitude of Ronan’s sobs under his fingertips, their wetness on his skin. This was too much, for Adam and for his throat. He couldn’t have stopped himself from crying if he wanted to.
They stayed like that for a while, neither knowing how to break the terrible silence they’d both let grow. Adam just stroked Ronan’s back and tried not to think about Ronan crying with no one to hold him. He tried not to think about whether or not he himself would be able to cry quietly enough so that his roommate wouldn’t notice. He tried not to think about whatever Ronan was thinking about.
When Ronan finally lifted his head, his bloodshot eyes were momentarily out of focus. He watched Adam’s tears fall, and, for a second, he didn’t seem to understand. Only for a second, though. Then, his already broken face crumpled. “Fuck. See, this is why-”
He didn’t finish his sentence. He didn’t have to.
“I’m not just crying because you’re crying,” Adam said. “I’m sad, too. Asshole.”
“You should be happy,” Ronan argued. “Harvard, Parrish. Your dream.”
That word. To most people, it meant something uncontrollable, something yearned for that either happens or it doesn’t and there’s nothing more to be done. Adam knew what it meant to Ronan. Something yearned for, but it happens if you make it happen. If you want it badly enough. In one way or another, it meant the same thing to Adam.
“Ronan.” Adam cupped Ronan’s face in his hands, watched as Ronan closed his eyes and leaned into his touch. He counted the teardrops on Ronan’s eyelashes. He waited until Ronan’s eyes were open again before he continued, “It is my dream. But so are you.”
Ronan didn’t seem to know what to say to this, or else he was waiting to hear if there was more. It wasn't often that either one of them said these kinds of things, but right now these words were the only ones that could soothe the burn in Adam’s throat.
Adam kept talking. “I am happy. I am. But I also feel like I’m ripping my goddamn heart out of my chest and leaving it behind.”
Ronan leaned his forehead against Adam’s. Adam could feel Ronan’s shaky breaths on his face. He knew his breaths were shaky, too. The fire was making a ruin of his lungs.
He pushed his lips against the corner of Ronan’s mouth and whispered his next words there. “I’m coming back to you. I’m always going to come back to you.”
Ronan didn’t move, and his voice was barely more than a breath on Adam’s cheek. “Tamquam?”
Adam didn’t think Ronan had meant for it to come out as a question, but he made sure it sounded like an answer when he said, “Alter idem, Ronan.”
At some point during all of this, they had both stopped crying. Now, Adam pressed his own tearstained, salty lips onto Ronan’s tearstained, salty lips. Then he did it again, and again and again and again. He swore he could feel his pulse in the hand that cupped the back of Ronan’s head. He swore he could feel Ronan’s pulse in the thumbs that softly stroked Adam’s collarbone.
They didn’t say it very frequently, not because they didn’t feel it but because both of them thought it so very obvious that they did. Tonight, though, Adam felt that Ronan needed to be reminded, so he punctuated each kiss with an “I love you.” Half of his “I love you”s somehow turned into “I miss you”s, so that it sounded like “I love you I miss you I love you I miss you.” This was ridiculous, to miss him when Adam hadn’t even left yet, when Ronan was right there in his arms, but he did. Adam missed him. Ronan didn’t comment on it, so maybe he missed Adam already, too.
When Adam stopped, Ronan whispered into his good ear, voice raw, “I love you so much, you asshole,” and everything felt more okay than it had in days. Then he pulled back and said, “I don’t fucking want to sleep. I don’t even know that I could.”
Adam understood completely. What a waste of these last few precious hours. “Me neither.”
“Do you want to test out one of my new dream things?”
Today was the first day of the rest of his life. Did he want to spend part of it experiencing one of the many bizarre things that made Ronan so wonderfully Ronan?
“Yes.”
It was almost three in the morning, when even late August was cold, but they made time only for sweatpants and t-shirts before they headed out, barefoot, into the dewy grass. Ronan led Adam to the top of a hill and sat him down. The seat of Adam’s pants quickly grew damp from the wet ground and goosebumps sprung up on his bare arms, but he didn’t care. He felt so alive.
“Wait here,” Ronan said, and he marched off towards his dreaming barn.
He returned minutes later and settled himself down in front of Adam. He was holding a bottle that said only “BUG SPRAY” in large block letters.
“Bug spray?” Adam asked.
“Yeah, but I don’t think…” Ronan trailed off. “Well. We’ll find out.”
Before Adam could protest, or even decide if he should or wanted to protest, Ronan grabbed Adam’s wrist and held his arm up. He coated it, all the way up to the hem of Adam’s too-short sleeve, with the spray, then did the same to the other arm. Satisfied, he sat back and looked at Adam expectantly.
For a moment, Adam felt silly. He simply held his arms up in front of him like a mummy from a black-and-white movie, feeling his skin tighten where the spray dried and clung to him, a clear film that gleamed slightly in the moonlight. Nothing happened, until it did.
He heard the wings first, a whoosh in his right ear. Then he saw them: dozens and dozens of fireflies, drawn towards this bug spray that apparently did the exact opposite of its job. They covered every bit of his arms until there was nothing left to cover, the latecomers crawling over the ones that were already there. He couldn’t move, or didn’t want to, in fear of scaring them away.
Ronan began to laugh. It was one of his realest laughs, unguarded, the kind that said he was genuinely and deeply pleased. That was another thing that made Ronan so wonderfully Ronan: no matter how many impossible things he took out of his head, he never ceased to be amazed by himself.
Growing up, Adam had shared his room with enough unwelcome creatures to not be bothered by them anymore. If he were Gansey, he knew, he’d be shitting himself, but he actually kind of enjoyed the sensation. The fireflies twinkled in a dizzying display of unsynchronized lights, and, inexplicably, his skin felt warm underneath them. He liked watching the staccato of the flies’ performance. He really liked hearing Ronan’s joy.
And then, though the mathematical odds of it were infinitesimal, the lights stopped being unsynchronized. They dimmed, simultaneously, and there was a brief moment of darkness before each firefly, communicating with its brothers in some silent language, emitted its radiant gleam at the exact same time. Adam watched this happen with awe, his heart expanding the way it only ever did when he looked at things like Ronan’s smile. Things that held the kind of beauty only Ronan could create. It felt like magic, because that’s exactly what it was, and he hadn’t ceased to be amazed by it, either.
Ronan stopped laughing. He just stared at Adam with something like reverence, his face awash in the glow of Adam’s shimmering arms. Adam supposed he should have continued looking at the miraculous phenomenon happening on his own body, too, but, instead, he stared back at Ronan and forgot how to breathe.
He just sat there, on the ground, sticky with a spray Ronan had pulled from his dreams, coated in fireflies Ronan had probably also pulled from his dreams, looking at a beautiful boy he often thought he would have pulled from his own dreams, if he were capable of such a thing. In mere hours, he’d be on his way. He’d be a Harvard student, if he didn’t fall asleep and crash the car on the way there, and Ronan, this person who knew him and adored him and looked at him like that, would still be here. He felt something break. It was a something that had barely been holding itself together in the first place, and now it was fully broken.
He simultaneously sounded nothing like himself and the most like himself he had ever sounded when he asked, “Is there any version of you that could come with me to Cambridge?”
Something complicated passed over Ronan’s features. He opened and closed his mouth a couple of times, ran a hand over the back of his head, plucked at the leather bands around his wrist. Finally, in a voice that was uncharacteristically small, he said, “I want that more than anything, but I don’t know.”
Ronan didn’t lie. Another wonderful thing, but maybe not as wonderful in this moment. Adam usually loved who they were and everything remarkable that came with it, but, right now, he wished he lived the kind of life in which his boyfriend could move to a different state with him without risking literal death. He was going to have such a hard time getting in the car.
“I’ll work on it,” Ronan added, wearing a brave face that Adam could see right through. “While you’re off doing your nerdy shit, I’ll be working on it.”
Images of dark, terrifying, implausible black dripping from Ronan’s eyes immediately danced across Adam’s vision, and he hated himself for asking. He would much rather have a sad, lonely Ronan miles and miles away than no Ronan at all, but he was worried Ronan didn’t always believe that and the last thing he’d wanted to do was instill more doubt. “Please don’t hurt yourself trying.”
Ronan’s mouth twisted, and he inched closer. The fireflies, perhaps sensing the severity of the situation, took off, and Ronan grabbed hold of Adam as his dream-bugs swirled around them. The air itself seemed to shimmer, a reminder, as if Adam could have possibly forgotten, that this was his life. Magic, despite what the fairy tales had tried to tell him, never made anything easy. Adam sighed, closed his eyes, and put his head on Ronan’s shoulder.
Ronan combed his fingers through Adam’s curls, but he didn’t say anything. He didn’t promise not to hurt himself trying, even though he had to know that was what Adam needed to hear. He didn’t lie, after all.
Adam was the kind of person who liked to come up with reasons for everything, so he had spent a lot of time thinking about why he wanted to go to Harvard. Status. Connections. A piece of paper that would lead to a proper job that would lead to money. Things that were considered superficial by people who never had to worry about not having them. But the list of things Adam had spent his life worrying about never having was longer than that, and some of the things on it couldn’t be considered superficial by anybody.
Ronan had already given him all of those things.
“If I ever have to choose,” he said quietly into the folds of Ronan’s shirt, “if this, us, isn’t working because I’m too far away, I’m going to choose you.”
“Parrish.” Ronan’s hand stilled.
Adam looked up. “I mean it. If it comes down to it, I will choose you.”
Ronan looked back at him. His eyes said a million different things at once. “You shouldn’t have to make that choice.”
“No, I shouldn’t, but I will if I have to,” Adam said fiercely, “so I need you to not kill yourself because you’re worried I’d choose Harvard instead.”
Ronan grew quiet again, and Adam felt a surge of frustration, partially at the cruelty of this unfair world but mostly at himself. He’d meant every word, but the first thing he’d said was that he wanted Ronan to come with him, and so that was the thing Ronan would remember most clearly.
“You can work on it,” he told Ronan, because he knew Ronan was going to, anyway, “but promise me you’ll stop if it gets too dangerous.”
“Okay,” Ronan whispered, and Adam’s heart started beating a little faster.
He pushed his luck. “Say it.”
“Jesus. I promise.”
Adam was momentarily stunned. Even all this time later, those words, coming out of Ronan’s mouth, were like a winning lottery ticket. He was still going to be afraid for Ronan, but this was the best compromise he could have hoped for, especially because he knew what the promise meant. It told him that, right now, Ronan was thinking to himself, Adam wants me safe because he loves me. He hoped Ronan would hold onto that thought and wrap it tightly around himself the first time he went to sleep alone, and every time after that, too.
He wanted to thank Ronan for the promise out loud, but Ronan’s fingers were still curled tightly in his hair and pulling him closer, so he thanked him with his lips instead.
They stayed outside until their toes were painfully numb, then went inside and lounged on the couch, intertwined the same way they had been the night of their first kiss. They were exhausted but sleepless, delirious with heartache and adoration and other feelings they didn’t have the words to describe. Adam refused to look at his watch, as if that could somehow stop its hands from moving.
But not even a magician and a dreamer were a match for time. Sunlight began to trickle through the window even when they willed it away. There was coffee that Adam gulped greedily and eggs he couldn’t stomach and one last walk through the halls of his home that ended at the door to his car, and then there was nothing left to do but say goodbye.
He’d said so much throughout the course of the night, but now it appeared that his voice was no longer working. He looked at Ronan helplessly. Ronan, in response, wrapped him in a hug. It was a tight, bone-crushing thing, and Adam hoped it would never end.
“Go kick some ass, okay?” Ronan said. “I want to be able to say ‘Fuck you, my boyfriend’s a Harvard graduate’ to people when they piss me off.”
Adam laughed, even though it stung his throat, and nodded against Ronan’s neck. They kissed, and, then, somehow he was behind the wheel and the car was on and it was happening.
“I’ll see you soon,” he said to Ronan, who was leaning through the open window.
“Count on it, sweetheart.” Ronan grinned sharply, but his soft voice and softer eyes ruined the effect.
Adam pressed the backs of his fingers against Ronan’s lips, because he knew Ronan wanted them there. The gentle way Ronan kissed them almost made him get out of the car, but then Ronan, as if reading his mind, took hold of his hand and placed it back on the steering wheel. Adam curled his fingers around the wheel and held on for dear life.
“Tamquam,” he choked out.
Ronan stepped away. “Alter idem.”
It was a wonder Adam didn’t run over anything, because he didn’t take his eyes off of the rearview mirror until Ronan was out of sight.
He had no choice, now, but to look forward. To Cambridge. It was the best thing twice over. It was the best thing, because he was going to Harvard. And it was the best thing, because he had someone to come back for.