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Everyone knows that Ronan Lynch has secrets.
He is too dark, too notorious, too Ronan for anyone to not know that he has secrets like stalks of dry wheat in an endless field hidden beneath his wildfire eyes; and there is no ignoring how desperately he wants to burn through them. But Ronan’s mind is a also a fortress, surrounded by a ring of fire, a hell in its own making. There are dark things there that fight for the image behind his eyes, locking every secret down and drilling them into the fixed spread of his skull. Ronan Lynch is good at keeping his secrets; he’d been hiding them for a very long time.
Adam Parrish’s secrets were forced out of him, hitched in like fingertips under his skin, flat as the business end of a crowbar, prying free every potential secret he might have wanted to keep to himself. The wrinkles in his clothes told of a countdown lifestyle, moving from one point to the next as quickly as possible to get as many necessities accomplished before the sun rises again and resets the clock. The lines on his face echo the same tale and add a twist: exhaustion.
(Alternatively: lack of free time, lack of the capability of free time)
His thick Henrietta accent is a crowbar itself, lending prying eyes a private showing to his roots, letting them see the tears and the tenor of the cord that had tied him down; it’s the same as he once had been. Unnoticeable and low in the dirt, a broken thing.
That is changed, now. He is changed.
No longer are his secrets hung out to dry like damp clothes on a line dripping intimate details into the homegrown dirt around his feet; no longer is he unnoticeable—in fact he is quite noticeable, now, after Cabeswater, after everything; and no longer is he a broken thing trying to mend itself alone.
He glances up from his kneeling position in the soft dirt of Cabeswater, fingertips sunk into the cool soil around the stone he’s shifting; his eyes slide over the long, lean lines of Ronan Lynch’s body lying several feet away, one arm crooked by his side, the curve of his head held delicately in the palm of his own hand. His eyes are closed, Adam thinks, and the sunshine peering through the whispering trees presses kisses to the backs of his eyelids like a lover’s morning greeting. The quiet breeze of Cabeswater stirs again but he barely feels it on his own skin; instead, he watches, irritatingly captivated, as the air smoothes over Ronan’s skin like the faintest of touches.
Ronan forgets himself and his audience; his lips quirk up in the corner and Adam sees a flash of teeth.
Adam Parrish has a secret all his own.
“Playing with rocks again, Parrish?”
Adam doesn’t turn to greet Ronan, doesn’t even really startle at the sound of his voice. He ignores completely the rushing warmth that seeps through him, coming from somewhere deep and heavily rooted inside of him, a mysterious forest of his own creation.
He hums in response, focusing on the way his hands mold to the stone beneath his fingertips, how the dirt caked under his fingernails feels so different than the oil and grease he’s used to. He wonders what Ronan thinks about it, if he thinks anything at all, and glances over his shoulder to find him already lying on his back with both hands cupped beneath his head, elbows bowed. His eyes are closed but his lips are the same unsmiling slash Adam’s used to, except this time there’s a peculiar curl to them that Adam is also used to, though far less pleased to see.
“You wanna talk about it?” he asks, and ignores the way that his heavy accent, thick and sweet, slipped through his control to cast a slight twinge to the words.
“’You wanna talk about it,’” Ronan mocks, voice pitched slightly higher in an attempt to capture the soothing cadence of Adam’s tone. “No I don’t want to fucking talk about it.”
“Whatever,” Adam’s voice is careless, but the lines of his shoulders are strained. He can feel Ronan’s eyes on them, on him, and he tries to loosen up and slip back into the peaceful state that doing light manual labor (or, as Gansey was like to say, “gardening”) in Cabeswater usually allows him. He thinks of the near-silent babbling of the pool of water just a skip away, feels the magnetic pulse of the soil against his fingertips when he pushes the stone deep enough to be almost entirely submerged within it, and his heart settles in his chest.
Ronan’s eyes are a sharp and dangerous pair, however, and Adam cannot escape them. The hairs on the back of his neck stand on end, a chill dragging down his spine.
“Dickbag Declan dropped by Monmouth,” Ronan suddenly says, and Adam pretends like his quiet exhale is not one of relief. He doesn’t say anything about Ronan’s earlier mocking, because he knows they both recognize it for what it was, and that is enough. “Wanted a little chat.”
Adam glances over his shoulder, sees Ronan with eyes closed once again, facing the canopy of the trees surrounding them and the facets of sunlight that peer through. He’s in familiar shades of black—shoes, jeans, tank, jacket—and a blossoming bruise, purple enough to join the rest of his shadowy ensemble. Even from this distance, Adam can see the yellowing at the edges, the swelling over the hinge of Ronan’s jaw. He thinks, it could’ve been worse.
He thinks, it’s still not good.
He says, “Should I see the other guy?”
“Yeah,” Ronan laughs, actually laughs, “You should definitely fucking see the other guy.”
Adam smiles, more because of the laugh he’d won from the trap of Ronan’s throat, a two-toned burst of air more than a wholehearted laugh, but Adam still counts it as a victory. As a prize.
There’s silence again as Adam shifts on his knees, uncaring of the soil staining the knees of his jeans. He presses his fingertips to the soil around the pile of stones he’d meticulously designed, following the pulsing electric yearning of Cabeswater throughout the entire process. He presses the dirt down around his last stone and wonders about the silence around them, wonders at how it no longer feels quite as heavy as before—as if by allowing Ronan one step above Declan, even here, even in the expression of words, the mood had been transformed into something brighter. As if Ronan had needed to return to the quiet lull of Cabeswater to lie beneath its calming atmosphere in order to feel at home again.
It does not occur to Adam that Ronan had come looking for him; that Cabeswater is only completely home when Adam is there for Ronan to find.
He sits up and smiles down at his completed work, a six-stone design that is enough to make Cabeswater sigh in relief upon its completion. He runs a single fingertip over the hard curves of the closest stone, tracing its features, feeling for secrets.
He feels Ronan’s eyes trace over the curve of his neck, bared in the sunlight, and wonders if he, too, is looking for secrets.
He wonders if he’ll find them.
✧
It becomes a sort of routine, Ronan finding Adam rearranging stone patterns and then sticking around to joke and mock him until they both fall into a reputable silence. Adam has the time to wonder how Ronan always knows when he’s in Cabeswater—if he can feel him there—but he doesn’t ask. He never asks. Even if he had asked, Ronan would never tell him that particular truth.
Ronan does not lie. But telling Adam that he comes to Cabeswater several times every day but only stays when he finally finds Adam is a truth he’s not yet willing to voice. Not yet. Hell, maybe not ever.
It’s just another secret added to his arsenal, one that’s lighter and better and beautiful in comparison to the secrets it’s housed with. Ronan keeps it far away from him, as far away as he can, and welcomes the fury and the frustration that come from his more visceral secrets, the ones he’s had for years, the ones that continue to rub him raw. He doesn’t let himself hold the secret of Adam close, even if it’s beautiful, especially because it’s beautiful.
When Ronan finds Adam this time, he’s not rearranging stone patterns or carefully lifting a flower from the soil to replant it elsewhere. He’s crouching in front of a pool of water, clearer than anything Ronan’s ever seen before, and he’s staring at his reflection with screaming shoulders.
Ronan stops, doesn’t move, just studies the line of those shoulders, hears the way they demand for him to back off. He wonders if Adam knows they’re doing that, wonders if Adam knows that even if it’s the tense lines of a friend’s shoulders warning Ronan off, it’s still a fight he won’t walk away from.
“Need a push, Parrish?”
Ronan watches, curious, as Adam’s shoulders tense even more and then, all at once like a storm blown through town, relax under Ronan’s gaze. His hair, dusty and in slight disarray, shifts when he turns to glance over his shoulder at Ronan.
“Don’t,” he says, and then, “Don’t.”
Ronan smiles, shows his teeth.
A moment later, Adam is in the water and Ronan’s smile is smug enough to resemble the expression he gets when Gansey sides with him over Adam—ever rare, ever sweet.
“Asshole,” Adam hisses and suddenly the trees around them hiss, too. Before he can do much else—and pretend he isn’t smiling—there’s a gust of wind, sudden enough to be surprising, and then a smattering of leaves blow right into Ronan’s face, forceful enough to knock him down. Adam, for his part, absolutely loses it. He does, however, lift a hand to cover his mouth as he laughs, trying to stifle the sounds when they just continue to grow as Ronan tries to talk the leaves out of harassing him—in Latin.
The leaves settle after a brief moment, falling around him and on him. Ronan glances over to Adam standing waist deep in water, soaked to the bone, with his face flushed with mirth, and curses.
Fuck, he thinks.
“Fuck,” he says. Adam’s eyes are doing that thing they do, gleaming and narrowing and shining all at once, when he’s feeling particularly smug himself. Ronan hears the trees whisper to him, reprimanding yet still loving, and he knows that Adam hears it too. He flushes, still cursing, and lets his head fall back to the dirt, eyes sliding shut. He can hear Adam crawling out of the water, muttering under his breath and wringing different parts of his clothes out. Ronan lets his head fall to the side, lets his eyes open to watch Adam fuss over his wet clothing.
“You’re lucky I don’t have a phone, Lynch.”
“Oh yeah,” Ronan sneers, “Because that would’ve been so hard to replace.”
Adam glares, responding with a sneer of his own. “I wouldn’t accept shit from you.”
“You accept shit from me all the time,” Ronan says. “You take a lot of shit, too.”
“Yeah,” Adam agrees, all the fire in him suddenly burnt out as he tries to figure out what to do with his clothes. “You’re right about that.”
“Come to think of it,” Ronan says, “You’re kind of full of shit, aren’t you Parrish?”
Adam doesn’t give rise to that remark, merely rolls his eyes with an exasperated sigh. He peels both layers of his shirts up and over his head, shaking them out and heading over to a tree with low-hanging branches. He mumbles something to the tree before hanging his wet shirts over it to dry. Ronan, for his part, tries not to stare.
It’s not the first time that he’s seen Adam shirtless. Not nearly. And it’s not as though Ronan has never seen someone beautiful and shirtless before. Ronan has seen a lot of beautiful bodies.
The difference here is that they’re in Cabeswater and they’re alone and Adam’s beautiful in a way that hurts, physically hurts Ronan. Some part of him, acerbic and bent on constant retaliation, thinks it’s unfair for Adam to be so fucking beautiful from so far away, to hurt him with how good he looks without even touching Ronan. If he’s going to hurt, he wants to feel it.
He doesn’t say anything, not a goddamn thing, but he doesn’t look away, either. Not this time. Not even when Adam turns back to him and notices the stare, not even when Adam heads back over towards him, the lean lines of his body shifting with every step. He has thin shoulders but they’re strong, somehow, sturdy enough for the world and all of its baggage. His neck is an elegant column, his jaw a finely crafted piece of art. Ronan looks away.
Adam toes out of his shoes and peels his socks from his feet, wriggling his toes after tossing his socks over in the vicinity of the tree with his shirts on it. And then he lies down beside Ronan with enough space for three people to lie between them, mimicking his usual position with hands beneath his head. Adam closes his eyes and Ronan exhales silently, his chest tight.
They don’t say a word to each other, after that. They just lie there, side-by-side in the midst of their whispering forest, and they listen, and they rest.
And they dream.
✧
The next time that Ronan shows up in Cabeswater and finds Adam wrist-deep in the soil and surrounded by lilies the color of the distant ocean, there are bags under his eyes. Ronan doesn’t say much other than, “Parrish.”
Adam doesn’t say much other than, “Lynch.”
But then Ronan’s crouching beside him, breaking their routine, encroaching upon Adam’s personal space. The surprising aspect of this is not that Ronan has invaded Adam’s space, he’s so peculiarly good at breaking things down, the barriers between their bodies seem to pale in comparison to Ronan’s sheer force of existence. The surprising part is that Ronan would let Adam into his personal space, by breaking Adam’s barrier first.
Adam glances over at him with a narrowed gaze, lips touching his own shoulder. Ronan doesn’t look at him, pointedly; he presses fingers stained crimson into the upturned soil Adam had just removed his hands from, and he exhales. Adam traces the bruises along the mountain range of Ronan’s apocalyptic knuckles, up and down and up and down, certain peaks blown open from disaster, tattered and torn. Adam clicks his tongue, a purposeful gesture, but Ronan doesn’t respond to it, not even to retort.
Ronan’s blood drops hot and heavy into the soil, and Cabeswater weeps.
The trees, they flutter and pull toward him, the breeze bringing the vines of a willow close enough to graze over Ronan’s sharp shoulders, the arrow of his bicep. Adam’s summer becomes Ronan’s spring and the showers come slow at first, hesitant yet insistent, until the blood is almost completely washed away from Ronan’s knuckles. The trees whisper to Ronan even though Adam can hear them, even though he understands.
He watches the rain glide over Ronan’s skin like a healing embrace, the trees whispering comforts and pacifications. He watches Ronan’s eyes shut, his head bow.
He wonders, then, with a suddenness that he can only remember striking him when he’d first seen Gansey walk into his classroom, when he’d made his way to Adam and known his name before introducing himself, if Ronan has ever allowed anyone to see him this raw.
It’s almost easy, then, for Adam to lift his hands—hands covered in a mixture of grease and soil and longing, of Adam and Cabeswater and the unknowable in-between—and place them on top of Ronan’s in the soil. Cabeswater is an amalgamation of thoughts, of wishes, of dreams, of longing.
Adam thinks, wishes, dreams, longs for: warmth, comfort, the right thing to say.
As it turns out, there’s nothing to say at all.
There’s only this: Ronan’s eyes opening to Adam’s face, his hands turning over to twine their fingers together, the soil the grease and the blood cradled gently between their steady hands.
Adam does not look away, and this time, neither does Ronan. His eyes, turbulent and dangerous and everything Adam knows he should probably be running from, trace over his features with honed interest. It goes like this; left eye, right eye, the sweep of his nose, the bow of his lips. The subtle jut of his chin, the line of his jaw, the fluttering pulse in his throat.
It is both surprising and not surprising at all when Ronan leans in, lets his forehead rest against Adam’s, breathes his name across the space between their lips. It’s quiet and rough enough to leave expressive inflection in the pit of his swallowing throat, but Adam still hears the question in it, the nervous hesitance.
He answers it with a breath of his own, curled around a tiny word, just three letters; he presses it against Ronan’s lips and tastes alcohol, tastes blood.
Ronan kisses far more gently than Adam does. He lets himself be led, follows every twist and retreat of Adam’s lips, a despairing creature gasping silently at air. His nose presses against Adam’s skin and Adam’s hands tighten around his, feeling the grit and the slide between their fingers.
Cabeswater shifts through spring until the showers disappear and the sun pushes through the canopy of trees to speckle them in glowing light, warm and comforting on their skin. Even still, even still, Adam shivers and Ronan comes alive around him. The trees still whisper, quieter and less worriedly, almost encouraging as Ronan straightens up, pulls his hand from Adam’s and brings it up to cup the side of his face. He pushes where before he had only been pushed, pulls where before he had been pulled.
Adam keeps his eyes open. He watches the way Ronan’s brows carve a certain kind of fury into his expression, as though by kissing Adam back he’s engaging in a war inside his mind, one where the victor will either be Ronan or the lying mask he wears. With the way his lips move, firm and hungry, Adam thinks with a surprising measure of delight that the former is winning.
Cabeswater brightens around them, opens up and expands, brings back the soft sounds of life and joy. The branches overhead shiver, flicker, flutter; Adam doesn’t know if it’s his heartbeat or Ronan’s that they’re falling in line with. He doesn’t think there’s much of a difference.
Ronan pulls back just enough to run his thumb over Adam’s lower lip, opening his eyes and watching the gesture as if to make sure he’s not dreaming, and then he’s dipping forward again, just as hungry, even more insistent. Adam makes a tiny noise, quiet and low in the base of his throat, and it makes the pulse in his veins—in Ronan’s—in the vines of Cabeswater flutter anew.
Adam doesn’t mind the soil now smeared over his face—it’s not the first time he’s had a cheek covered in muck. His mind flashes back to the cave that had almost swallowed Gansey whole, to looking up from the mud to see Ronan with his arms wrapped tightly around Blue’s waist, and he remembers the sting of envy he’d felt—not for Ronan, pressed so close to Blue, but for Blue, pressed so close to Ronan.
Had he even really known, then? How much he felt for Ronan Lynch? How much he loved him?
Adam feels that slight sting, a steadily growing burn of envy, and he presses it and Ronan both down underneath him. There’s a moment of surprise that flashes quick and hot over Ronan’s features before he breathes out a curse, and then a string of them, gracefully crafted together to somehow become a symphony unique to Ronan Lynch.
Adam is the first to pull away, a smooth gesture that leaves Ronan on his back, staring up into Adam’s magnificent eyes, the wisps of hair falling over his forehead, the sunshine-bright canopy of Cabeswater overhead. He doesn’t move, doesn’t smile. The shadows of the monsters that had led him to bloody knuckles and eyes too willing to slide shut still played around the edges of his skull, shrill and enduringly present.
“You ever kissed a guy before?” Ronan asks, derisive. “Weak technique, Parrish.”
Neither of them mentions how Ronan is out of breath, or the way his lips are swollen, or how his eyes look as bright as Cabeswater is magical. Adam just rolls his eyes and moves away, coming to sit with his legs crossed at Ronan’s side. Ronan stays on the ground, unsmiling and quiet.
Adam says, “Your knuckles need attention.”
“Fuck my knuckles.”
“Don’t be an asshole.”
“Gansey has a first-aid kit. I’ll make use of it.”
Ronan’s words are careless, but they suit Adam just fine, because he knows he’ll follow through. Silence settles between them comfortably, sudden like a downpour, soft as snow. Ronan breaks it open with a mallet the size of his words and sneers at the pieces.
“There’s shit on your face,” he says, gesturing halfheartedly at his own cheek. “You just gonna leave it there?”
“Does it bother you?”
“No bother.” Ronan’s smile is a weapon he purposely misses Adam with. “But it ruins your pretty-boy face.”
Adam laughs, which he knows wasn’t actually Ronan’s intention, but he can’t help it. He wipes halfheartedly at his cheek, comes away with a bit of the soil. He’s still smiling when he says, “You think I’m pretty, Lynch?”
Ronan comes incredibly close to sputtering, expression darkening. “Pretty fuckin’ lame.”
“Good one,” Adam retorts, shaking his head. His smile is still a ghost hanging over his lips, a sort-of shadow of the familiar amusement he hasn’t felt in so long. “Loser.”
For once, Ronan doesn’t offer an insult in return. He has one, but he keeps it locked behind his teeth. He just grins, sharp as a cliff’s edge and near as daunting; he closes his eyes to the sunlight streaming through the whispering trees of Cabeswater, presses his tattered knuckles into the grass, and holds his hands open to the magic of thoughts, wishes, dreams, and longing.
And to the magic of Adam Parrish.