Archive of Our Own ^beta

“Hey, fucker!” The voice was accompanied by the all-too-familiar rumble of the speaker’s car, sleek and demanding. It vibrated the road beneath it possessively.

Adam Parrish tightened his hands around the handles of his bike. He kept his feet moving steadily, sneakers crunching against stray pebbles on the asphalt. He didn’t let himself look over his shoulder towards the call, but it didn’t matter. The boy who had called after him rumbled his car up beside Adam until the passenger window was in line with him, and called at him again.

“Didn’t expect to see Gansey’s bitch this far from the trailer park.”

Adam bristled, but didn’t rise to the bait. “Leave me alone, Kavinsky,” he said, mostly succeeding at keeping his voice level. He would have succeeded, if it hadn’t been for Blue breaking up with him only hours earlier. If his feet didn’t hurt from walking up and down all those hills after his bike had stopped working. If he hadn’t been running on empty already, mind grating against itself.

He wanted to sleep. He wanted to sleep and wake up feeling something other than tired and numb.

Anger crept its wanting tendrils up towards his chest, reminding him that it was always inside of him, waiting. He willed it away. Numbness was unbearable; anger was worse. And then there was Kavinsky.

A car honked from behind Kavinsky’s, then sped around him to continue down the road. Kavinsky’s white Mitsubishi Evo continued to crawl along at Adam’s pace, engine complaining, road shaking. How Adam hated the attention — how he was astounded by it. Blue had made it very clear that he was nothing to her. It’s not gonna be you. Adam Parrish: unwantable. But here was Kavinsky, Aglionby legend, puttering beside Adam, giving him attention. Adam's back straightened and his chin lifted without his asking them to as he felt Kavinsky's eyes slide over him.

With his left hand looped lightly and effortlessly around his steering wheel, Kavinsky leaned towards Adam, reaching his right hand for the side of the car. To Adam’s surprise, he opened the passenger side door.

“Get the fuck in.” Kavinsky’s sunglasses peered directly into Adam, his mouth curved upward in a venomous smile not so different from Ronan’s. The expression had nothing to do with anything pleasant.

Probably, Kavinsky only wanted to talk to Adam as some way to get to Gansey or to Ronan. Probably, any decision that wasn’t to turn and retreat quickly in the opposite direction would only come back to bite Adam in the ass. Probably, he would have already turned around if it had been any other day. But today, unwantable, angry Adam Parrish didn’t have it in himself to turn away from this attention. He let his pathetic, broken bike fall onto its side and opened the passenger-side door the rest of the way. He sat himself inside Kavinsky's infamous Mitsubishi Evo, and closed the door behind him.

Adam Parrish was a sensible, watchful creature, and so he knew that Kavinsky was destruction personified. Today, Adam could bear to be destroyed. He imagined Ronan having sat in this same seat — he knew that Ronan snuck away from Monmouth late at night, and more often than not ended up street racing, more often than not ended up in proximity to Kavinsky’s band of criminals and thieves. Adam’s brain was wired for jealousy, and he had imagined Ronan going so far as sitting in this seat. Going farther: his hand on Kavinsky's knee, thigh, lips… Farther…

The thought was thick and gnawing inside of Adam’s rib cage for reasons he wouldn’t let himself get close enough to understand. He only had Ronan and Gansey and Blue — they were his late-night adventures and his crushes and his idols. Ronan and Gansey and Blue did not need Adam. They had late-night adventures and crushes and idols outside of him. They were more than him. Infinitely more.

And yet, here was Kavinsky, with Adam as his passenger. Now that he’d lured Adam inside and therefore had accomplished all he needed with the speed limit, he pressed his foot into the gas pedal. Adam watched the muscles of his thigh tense through his dark skinny jeans. The car sped forwards, eating the road with an appetite that Adam felt in his soul. He allowed himself to close his eyes, holding his head back against the headrest, one hand gripped on the sill of the wide-open passenger window.

Wind rushed through Adam’s hair, cascading over his face and moving through his nose, his mouth, down into his lungs. The air tasted of smoke and sunbaked roads. It was a cool shock to his adrenaline-hot body. The car shook and worked underneath him. He felt unattached from his responsibilities, his reality. He understood, now more than ever before, Ronan’s obsession with fast cars. He never wanted to leave this moment.

Kavinsky had different ideas. He spun the steering wheel, sliding recklessly to a side-ways stop, everything screeching. Adam immediately missed the motion of the world around him. Or, rather, of the car speeding forwards as the world stayed still. He opened his eyes, wincing slightly out of anticipation. He had no idea where Kavinsky would have brought them. For once, Adam hadn’t thought that far ahead.

Adam blinked his eyes open, then blinked them again, not trusting what he saw. They had stopped at what appeared to be a car lot, except that Adam knew all of the car lots in Henrietta and they had not been driving towards any of them. And all of the cars in this dusty, brown parking lot were the same: white Mitsubishi Evos, identical to the car they’d arrived in.

“What—” Adam started, but didn’t finish the question. The “what” or “how” of the situation was not important. What was important was that Blue had seen right through him and found the terrible, dirt-born boy he was at his core. Unwantable, undesirable Adam Parrish. What was important was that Kavinsky’s sunglasses-covered eyes were tracking his movements, and maybe Adam Parrish was not undesirable after all.

“Have you been here with Lynch?” Adam asked, because that was the most important thing of all.

“Mommy and Daddy both,” Kavinsky said, shifting the car into park and quieting the engine. “Dick was terribly uncomfortable, though. He doesn’t like to get his Burberry dirty. He has a conscience, or whatever.” Kavinsky paired “conscience” with the gesture of two fingers sliding across his throat, fake-slitting it. He finished by thumping his hand twice on the dashboard. “Whoop whoop Gansey boy!” He yelled obscenely, then threw himself out of the car.

Adam followed along, moving slower only because he was not as familiar with the Evo. His feet landed on the dirt, stirring up clouds of dust. He didn’t bother to close the door behind himself. His heart was pounding in his throat. Gansey and Ronan both had been here without him, without telling him: jealousy ate Adam like acid inside his chest. Now, Adam was here alone. Not alone--with Kavinsky. Something wild and hungry overpowered the jealousy, then continued on to cloud Adam’s mind. He stalked towards where Kavinsky had laid himself across the hood of one of the many, many white cars in the lot.

The car’s hood was hot and alive beneath the tips of Adam’s fingers, which was impossible, but that didn’t seem to matter. Kavinsky had taken his sunglasses off — they were sprawled on the dusty ground a few feet from the car, as if he’d tossed them without caring much about distance. His dark, hooded eyes were locked on Adam, and not on his face. Kavinsky’s white teeth bit at his bottom lip.

“You know,” he said, low and rough as his car’s engine, “I’ve always blamed Ronan’s flightiness on Dick, that motherfucker. I should have— ” he kicked one heel against the front of the car, “damn it, I knew Gansey boy wasn’t dishing out! Pathetic! Of course!” At that, Kavinsky pitched forwards, landing with a thump onto his feet. He was looking at Adam like he expected an answer.

“I—” Adam said dumbly. He wanted to do something with his hands, like punch Kavinsky in the face or touch the jut of his hip bone where it peeked out above his low-slung jeans. Adam pushed his hands into his own pockets. Ronan had been here. What had Kavinsky done when he’d been with Ronan?

“Fucking Parrish! You bitch!” Kavinsky took him by the shoulder and spun him half way around until the back of his legs hit roughly against the mouth of the car. “I didn’t even consider, because, well,” Kavinsky motioned up and down Adam “trailer trash. You know. Who would have thought?”

Adam didn’t have time to feel insulted. Kavinsky continued on mercilessly.

“Lynch, oh, Lynch, he would, wouldn’t he. He noticed you, oh. He noticed you GOOD! And he wants you. He wants to fuck you, Parrish, and now that I’m looking at you through his eyes, I can see why.”

Adam’s heart stopped beating, and his blood turned white. He watched Kavinsky’s lips move, but didn’t hear any more of what he was saying. He’d caught at "He wants to fuck you, Parrish," "He" meaning "Ronan," and couldn’t get past it. Kavinsky was a liar and a cheat: he could not be trusted. He would say whatever he needed to get what he wanted. And yet, Adam wanted to believe him. Adam Parrish, unlovable, undesirable, desired. Desired by someone like Ronan, who could have anyone he wanted.

What did Adam want? He wanted to be touched and held and kissed and wanted and loved. Loved. Loved. He wanted to be desirable. He wanted to be wanted. He’d never been loved in his life. He craved it like a starving animal. He had been starving forever.

“Parrish, pay attention,” Kavinsky said through tight lips. He lifted one hand towards Adam’s face, brushed a finger along the line of his cheekbone, then grasped his jaw. His grip was tight, and Adam could feel his nails digging in. Adam wanted it and more. More.

He let his hand move to grip over Kavinsky’s hip, feeling the sharpness of the bone underneath his fingers as he’d wanted to do before. He had to remind himself to breathe. He imagined Ronan here, Ronan in Kavinsky’s place. He pulled the other boy’s body closer to his own, pressing their hips together, hungry.

Kavinsky breathed against Adam’s cheek, his breath hot. He slid his tongue lightly along Adam’s jaw, and closed his mouth close enough to Adam’s face that his teeth brushed the skin. Adam moved to catch Kavinsky’s mouth with his own, but Kavinsky pulled away.

“What do you want, Adam?” He whispered the question into Adam’s ear.

“This. Fuck, this.”

“With me?”

Adam paused despite himself, then rushed to make up for it, “it doesn’t matter. Yes. Yes, it doesn’t matter.”

Kavinsky tightened his grasp around Adam’s jaw, and brought their eyes to focus on each other. He breathed, “I’m not going to fuck you, Parrish. You disgust me.” He sighed. “It’s not even worth it to break Lynch’s Goddamn heart. There are better ways to do that. You’re not worth the hassle.” He stepped back from Adam, and suddenly he was Kavinsky, that sketchy bastard Adam purposefully kept his distance from around school.

Adam tried to move away, but bashed his hip on the car. He side-stepped, took a shaky breath into his lungs, then turned and sprinted through the car lot. He ran past the rows and rows of white Mitsubishis, feet kicking up dust underneath him. He ran back to the road, and tried not to focus on his muscles jarring each time his feet hit against the hard concrete. His lungs began to burn, and his eyes stung with tears that he wouldn’t let fall.

He was terrible and he was unwantable. He had always known that, and he’d made peace with that, but then Blue had made him second-guess it and he’d begun to unlock the hundreds and hundreds of walls he’d hid himself behind. He’d wanted too much from her, and he’d been left vulnerable and breakable when she hadn’t wanted the same from him.

And then, in his grief, he’d given himself up to Kavinsky. Stupid, stupid. He didn't know if it was possible to hate himself more than he did in that moment, sprinting down the highway, running from Kavinsky, from Kavinsky’s hands on his face, breath on his cheek. Mostly, mostly, running from his desire. What do you want, Adam? Not that. God. Surely not Kavinsky. But some part of him had wanted it, or at least something like it.

He hated everything about this day. He wanted to run until he dropped out of hunger or fatigue, and then he wanted to sink into the ground and cease existing. That was what he wanted: to never want anything ever again.