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“What the hell are you doing here?” They both asked at the same time.
Ronan froze in the doorway to the apartment above St. Agnes, keys dangling from one hand, the other still on the knob. Adam glowered back at him, clutching a secondhand alarm clock in one hand like he meant to throw it. In his haste to get up, he’d overturned a plastic bin that once held his economics textbook and a plastic mug of tea. Both were on the floor now, the cheap Lipton bag sadly weeping across the old floorboards.
“Put the fuckin’ clock down, Parrish. What would you have done if I was the secretary?” Ronan tried not to think too hard on the reality of Adam in his church, a legitimate object of worship, and instead wandered deeper into the apartment to a cabinet that should have some extra paper towels in it.
“The secretary wouldn’t have picked the lock and walked in like she owned the place,” Adam said, but he did put the clock down.
“Lock’s shit, just like Monmouth. I can jack it with the Beemer key.”
Adam stood right where he was, watching Ronan crouch down to clean up the spill that was, ultimately, his fault.
“I think the point here is that you just broke into someone’s apartment.”
“No one’s actually lived in this apartment the entire time I’ve been at Aglionby. It was an honest mistake.”
“They actually call that a misdemeanor.”
Ronan let out an annoyed groan. “Fine, I broke in. I’m sorry. I interrupted what I’m sure is a breathtaking homework assignment I’m not bothering to do.”
He tossed the soggy towels into the trash, and when he turned back around, Adam was much closer than he’d been a moment ago. It took Ronan right back to the reason he’d come here in the first place. Adam crowding in on him, occupying his mind the way he now let himself into Ronan’s physical space. It was like being in Cabeswater, except — ironically enough — he felt like he had more control in Cabeswater. But for all that St. Agnes was his church, and it was the house of his God, Ronan felt fantastically unmoored within arms reach of Adam Parrish. For all his late-night driving, running away from whatever feelings had their jaws sunken into him, he couldn’t escape this. Even more alarming was that he didn’t want to.
Ronan Lynch held his breath.
Adam looked at him as if he were on the same hurtling course into Ronan’s orbit. Nothing showed outright on his face, but when Ronan met his gaze, they shared an equivalent turbulence. He would have sworn the ley lines were trembling with the proximity. Adam touched the inside of his wrist, no doubt felt the way his pulse raced. Ronan bit back a helpless sound as Adam’s hips slotted in with his. Instead, Ronan kissed him; it was self-defense. He didn’t know any of the rules beyond this point. Adam fit himself to Ronan’s body, to the moment, not pulling away but leaning into it more. Honestly, Ronan hadn’t expected it, and yet he hadn’t allowed himself to consider that he could break everything by wordlessly asking something of Adam he wasn’t willing to give. Adam’s persistent chapped lips and his other hand pressed to the back of Ronan’s head told a different story.
Everything tipped into the surreal for Ronan, as heightened and dizzying as one of his most vivid dreams, but experienced in the waking world with Adam Parrish. The edge of the old laminate counter top bit into the small of his back, Adam’s thigh found its way between Ronan’s. He broke away with a sharp inhale and Adam didn’t let go of the moment; he leaned in even closer, brushing his lips along the stubble of Ronan’s jaw. Ronan’s mouth ghosted over Adam’s left ear.
“It’s always been you,” he whispered.
Adam froze.
Ronan felt a boulder sink to the pit of his stomach, all the heat bubbling up in him from Adam’s mouth, his hands, his existence suddenly turning cold. Fuck .
Pulling his head back slowly, but leaving everything else where it was, he peered at Ronan with the same intensity he had before the kiss, trying to decipher a mystery only he could see. Ronan had messed up. If he could have just kept his mouth shut and let Adam do whatever he wanted without making it more complicated than it already was—
“I didn’t hear you,” Adam said, completely level and without inflection. He only let a moment fit between that and, “I can’t hear in that ear anymore.”
Of all the things Ronan had been braced to come out of Adam, that certainly hadn’t been it. But somehow, it landed like a physical blow, telling a story out of context and leaving Ronan to piece together the clues. It shouldn’t have been that easy to do, but Ronan had been driving away from the insidious inevitability since the day Gansey had brought Adam into the fold. Suddenly, it all made sense - Adam refusing rides home, suspiciously bereft of new bruises, which made Ronan wary of the shoe finally falling. When they went to Nino’s, Adam sat on whichever side put his right ear to the person on the same side as him. He hadn’t told any of them, he hadn’t asked for help. Ronan shouldn’t have been surprised after all this time, and instead felt that shock to his system turning into anger.
“You fucking asshole,” he huffed. “I could’ve—” Ronan freed a hand to wave it frantically at the tiny apartment.
“Lynch, don’t.”
Ronan shifted tracks immediately. “I’ll smash his face in.”
He tried to push away from the counter, from the press of Adam’s hips, but Adam grabbed his shoulders in a strong grip, keeping him pinned. Ice turned to flame, and tumbled over one more time. Ronan’s eyes were wide, wild. Vengeful, hungry, wanting.
“No,” Adam said sternly, and Ronan knew he couldn’t fight it, “you won’t.”
“What the fuck?” Ronan huffed. “Tell me—”
Adam pressed a finger to his mouth. “Later.”
Once more, he leaned in so that it was impossible for Ronan to tell where he ended and Adam began. In retaliation, Ronan bit at his fingertip, his eyes locked on Adam’s face to make sure he wasn’t stepping over a line he didn’t know was there. If Adam would hide his deaf ear, what else would he hold Ronan back from knowing? How would he know he wasn’t fucking up? Adam ran his thumb along Ronan’s lower lip and a shudder raced through him.
“Later,” he said again, replacing his touch with another kiss. “Okay?”
“Okay,” Ronan’s reluctant agreement was dampened by Adam’s reignited persistence to take his breath away.
They kissed and kissed until Ronan felt light-headed and he was grateful for the counter holding him up, because his knees wanted to give. It was that weightless feeling in the pew right before Ronan slid to the kneeler to ask forgiveness. So too did he offer up whatever it was he had of himself that Adam could worship with. He dared to grasp at Adam’s threadbare shirt with one hand, the other on a narrow hip, all of him on fire. He panted when Adam released his mouth, letting his head fall back while a string of curses fell out of him.
Adam reached up and took hold of his chin, looking at him. Unlike before, he was completely unguarded, and there was a matching feral depth to his blown out eyes. It was almost enough to make Ronan look away, but it was a car crash now, impossible to look away from. Impossible to avoid without impact. He waited; breathless for what could come next. Adam kissed along his jaw now, only this time Ronan’s mouth was by his hearing ear. Adam bit down over his pulse and Ronan gasped. He apparently didn’t care if Ronan went to class with bruises above his collar. In all honesty, neither did Ronan.
“Say it again,” Adam commanded against his skin, no doubt feeling the flutter of Ronan’s heartbeat under his teeth.
“Fuck you, Parrish.”
Adam laughed, a sharp bark of a sound that he didn’t bother to quiet, and it sent a thrill straight to Ronan’s core.
“You’re such a bastard.”
“It’s always been you,” Ronan replied before he could lose his nerve; as if it were part of the joke.
He was always a bastard. He’d always loved Adam Parrish.
“Mm.”
For Adam, it was an affirmation, and Ronan chose to hear it as such. No doubt he would take those words later, when it was safe, and analyze them like he did everything. Like the dreaming, like Cabeswater, like the way they’d blindly raced to this moment with their eyes closed and their arms open wide. It was the sound a magician would make when he felt potential. If Adam explored this truth of Ronan’s and gave that same truth back, it threw open all the doors of possibility. There would be nothing they couldn’t do, nothing and no one could touch them.