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They were on Ronan’s bed when Gansey said it.
They’d spent the afternoon tromping through the woods, following Gansey’s compass and dowsing rod and pausing so that he could make notes in his not-so-little notebook, and when Gansey had gone to drop Ronan off at the Barns, Aurora had asked him to stay for dinner. Ever a gracious guest, Gansey had stayed, listening as a delighted Niall remembered that he was a new audience for Irish folk tales that Ronan and his brothers had heard a thousand times before. After a peach cobbler (“Ronan, have you taken him out to see the trees? Fruits as big as your head, I tell you!”) the two of them went upstairs.
Neither of them were good at sitting still. They started on the floor, legs crossed, looking through Gansey’s journal and Ronan’s comic books. When their knees got sore, they sat on the bed, passing Ronan’s laptop back and forth, taking turns at minesweeper. When that got uncomfortable, they lay side by side, gazing up at the glow-in-the-dark stars on Ronan’s ceiling. The sun was fully down when Gansey rolled over, facing Ronan, head pillowed against one arm.
“A girl from Mathison asked me out.”
Ronan schooled his face to look neutral as he turned his head toward Gansey. “What’d you tell her?”
“I said yes.” To his credit, Gansey looked remorseful, his eyebrows drawn together, but Ronan’s heart had already sunk. “I panicked—all her friends were there and I didn’t want to embarrass her, so I just—” He sighed, rubbing a hand over his face and going silent.
Breathing in slowly through his nose, then exhaling through his mouth, Ronan looked back to the ceiling. “So are you gonna do it?”
There was a long pause before Gansey replied. “I think I’ll go, make it clear at the start that I’m not looking to date, and tell her that she’s free to tell her friends that I was the worst, most boring person she’s ever gone out with so that it looks like it was her decision.” He sighed miserably. “Is that awful of me?”
Ronan shook his head with a snort. “I would’ve just told her no in front of everyone, so you’re already a better man than me.”
“Oh, stop it.” Swatting Ronan’s arm, Gansey rolled his eyes. When he put his hand back down on the bed, his pinky was just a few inches from Ronan’s; if he spread his fingers, they’d be touching. “You’re a fine man, considering you were raised in a barn.”
There was a moment where Ronan couldn’t tell if his heart stopped or if it was beating so fast he couldn’t feel each individual contraction, right between Gansey calling him a ‘fine man’ and cracking a joke. He’d never get used to the way Gansey talked, so unlike the other boys he knew—who else would say something like that?—and the moments where Gansey talked about Ronan like that were almost too much to bear. “What can I say? Cows never ask me on dates, so I’ve got no experience turning someone down.”
Gansey laughed. “I’m sure they’d be excellent kissers, although perhaps a bit enthusiastic with the tongue.”
“Gross, Gans.”
There was a pause, stretching out forever, where Gansey looked right in Ronan’s eyes as if they’d just been talking about something deep and philosophical instead of what it might be like to swap saliva with a bovine animal.
“Ronan.” Gansey’s voice was soft, hesitant in a way that was uncharacteristic of him. “Have you ever kissed anyone?”
Somehow, Ronan hadn’t seen this coming. Maybe he should have.
He shook his head. “Have you?”
With a tiny, almost apologetic smile, Gansey shook his head as well. “No.”
“You’re not gonna kiss Mathison girl right before you tell her you’re not interested, right? Because that’s definitely a dick move.”
“Heavens, no. It just got me thinking.”
“About kissing?”
“What if—I mean, I imagine that I’ll want to, with the right person and all that—but what if I go to kiss someone and it’s obvious that I haven’t done it before?” Gansey looked truly distressed, the crease between his eyebrows back again. “Do people tell their friends if someone’s bad at kissing? Do you end up on a blacklist?”
Ronan smirked, shifting positions so that he, too, was on his side, head on his bent arm. “So what if you do? It’s not like you’ve got time to go chasing girls.”
What Ronan had expected Gansey to say was that he’d have more time for the hunt for Glendower if all the Mathison girls steered clear of him. Or that his mother wouldn’t be happy to hear he’d gone around breaking the hearts of other legislators’ daughters. Or that he’d be moving on to some other spot on the ley line in a year, so there wasn’t much point in dating.
What actually said was, “I suppose you’re right. I’d rather be spending time with you, anyway.”
Something warm landed in Ronan’s chest, his pulse carrying a blush up to his cheeks; he looked away from Gansey and his small, fond smile.
“Still,” Gansey said, a matching flush spreading over his face, “I don’t want to be caught off-guard if the moment comes, you know?” His voice continued to get softer, almost breathy.
Ronan was not brave in the way Gansey was, but he was reckless in the way teenage boys often are.
If he was misreading the situation, all he would have to do was howl in laughter and that’s all this would have been—a joke.
“You wanna practice?”
Gansey’s tongue darted out and ran over his bottom lip as he nodded. “Only if you want to.”
Ronan very much wanted to. He inched forward and lifted Gansey’s hand from the mattress, laying it on his own neck and curling the other boy’s fingers toward the back of his head. “I think girls like it when you do this.”
“You do?” There was a sly smile on Gansey’s lips, bemusement laced with something else. “Do they like it when you just kiss them right away, or do they prefer some suspense?”
“Suspense can be nice.” Ronan wriggled a little closer; he could feel Gansey’s breath on his cheek. “Makes them want it more, I think.”
This time, when Gansey licked his lip, he bit it as well, just for a second, leaving that area slightly darker. Ronan couldn’t take his eyes away, even as Gansey spoke. “Like this?”
He gripped Ronan’s head with a little more pressure, drawing him in so that his lower lip grazed Ronan’s cheek, right near the corner of his mouth. Every bit of Ronan felt electric and tingly, like he’d held his breath for too long. “Yeah,” he said, swallowing. Gansey tilted his head, and his lips brushed against Ronan’s own.
“What now?”
“Then you kiss her.” Ronan’s voice wavered.
Gansey’s didn’t. “You go first—you’re the expert, after all.”
Ronan licked his lips, swallowed hard, and kissed Gansey.
His first thought was that Gansey’s lips were smooth. Ronan knew that he didn’t feel like that, now well beyond a five o’clock shadow. He was scratching his stubble over Gansey’s soft skin; he couldn’t imagine that it felt good. Were there guys who were into that? He’d never felt self-conscious about it before.
Once that had passed, though, his second reaction was that he was kissing Gansey . The ‘kissing a boy’ thing wasn’t a surprise—new, yes, but not a surprise—but the fact that it was his best friend was. It was thrilling, but frightening just the same. This could change everything. It didn’t have to, but it could , and the unknowing that came with that was almost enough to make Ronan stop.
It wasn’t, though, and Ronan leaned deeper into the kiss.
Gansey was the one who stopped, a giddy smile on his face as he pulled back. “How was I?”
Their lips were still touching when he asked, and Ronan laughed, softly. “Good. You were good.”
“Should I have used tongue? Do people like that?”
Ronan didn’t miss how Gansey asked about ‘people’ instead of ‘girls’ this time. “I think so. Not too much.”
“Show me?”
This time, when they kissed, Ronan brushed his tongue over the inside of Gansey’s upper lip, then pushed past his teeth. Their tongues touched; it felt strange, and not necessarily good. Ronan pulled away. “That might have been too much.”
Gansey’s eyes, only inches from Ronan’s, were alight. “Teeth?”
“You have to be gentle.” Practically speaking the words into Gansey’s mouth, Ronan added, “Like this.”
He didn’t bite, obviously—just took Gansey’s lower lip between his teeth and tugged, gently, sucking it between his own. Gansey made a sound between a moan and a sigh, then laughed when Ronan released his lip. “That was embarrassing.”
“Why?” Ronan brushed his thumb over Gansey’s cheek, his blush burning under Ronan’s touch. “Lets me know that you like it.”
Gansey pressed his lips between his teeth, almost as if hiding a smile. “I do. Like it, I mean.” Lifting his hand, which until then had been resting on Ronan’s bicep, he let it hover above them for a moment before settling it on Ronan’s hip. “Can I try?”
“Go ahead.” The hesitancy in Gansey’s kiss was so unlike his usual self—he barely nipped at Ronan’s lip before pulling back, and Ronan interrupted after a moment, “You can do more.”
“I don’t want to hurt you.”
“You won’t.”
For the first few seconds of the kiss, Ronan stayed quiet, but when Gansey’s hand tightened on his hip, pulling him in, something low and rough rose in Ronan’s throat.
“Do that again,” he said, surprised by the sound of his own voice. Almost frantically, he reached down and yanked his shirt up, pressing Gansey’s hand back down onto his bare skin. Gansey nodded, still kissing him, and slid his hand onto Ronan’s low back; he kept Ronan close, callused fingers warm on his skin. Without thinking, Ronan rolled his hips against Gansey’s. Gansey gasped, pulling back from the kiss. Ronan looked down, toward the pillow, heart pounding.
“Sorry,” he said, keeping his eyes averted. He couldn’t bear to see Gansey’s expression. “I just—I didn’t mean to—”
Graciously, mercifully, Gansey kissed Ronan again, on the cheek this time. “Hush,” he breathed. Gently, he tugged Ronan’s shirt back into place, then tucked Ronan’s hair out of his face. “Let’s focus on perfecting kissing for now, shall we?”
‘For now.’
Gansey, fixing his curls with such care.
‘Perfecting.’
Breathless, Ronan nodded.
Gansey kissed him again.
Ronan kissed back.
It was somewhere around midnight when they stopped, sapped of energy by their twin butterfly hearts. Ronan pressed his hand to Gansey’s chest and felt the flutter beneath his fingers; Gansey did the same to Ronan.
“I should go home.”
“Stay.” Ronan swallowed. “It’s late. You’ll fall asleep at the wheel. They’ll find you dead in a ditch in the morning.”
“Okay.”
Ronan thought that was it, that Gansey would get out of bed and lie on the floor like he usually did when he spent the night. He would get the sleeping bag out of Ronan’s closet that was kept there specifically for the purpose of Gansey staying over and he would put it next to Ronan’s bed and they would sleep separately. In the morning, they would eat breakfast with Ronan’s brothers and Gansey would go back to Monmouth and they would see each other at school on Monday.
But Gansey didn’t get out of bed.
He took Ronan’s hand off his chest and rolled over, wrapping Ronan’s arm around him in one smooth movement. “This okay?”
It took a few seconds for Ronan to be able to reply, and even when he could, his voice was a tight whisper. “Yeah.” Relaxing just a bit, he shifted his arm to fit more comfortably around Gansey. A moment later, he tucked his knees against the back of Gansey’s, scooting forward so that his chest was pressed to the other boy’s back. “Is this?”
“It is.” Gansey paused. “Sleep well, Ronan.”
Even as Gansey’s breathing evened and deepened, his body relaxing into Ronan’s, Ronan couldn’t sleep. At first it was because his mind was racing, but as time went on, it was simply because he was cold. Gansey warmed his front, but Ronan was still in shorts and a t-shirt; the skin at the back of his neck, usually safely snuggled under the covers, felt unsettlingly bare, especially with the ghosts of Gansey’s fingers brushing over it. His back, the shirt scrunched up near his ribs, prickled with the memory of a hand holding him close. Everything was goosebumps and electricity and Ronan’s hand sandwiched between Gansey’s hand and heartbeat.
There was a tap at the door a split second before it creaked open. Ronan’s head shot up as he pulled his arm away from Gansey. Aurora, illuminated by the moon, put a finger to her lips. Silently, she crossed the room and closed the curtains. With the light gone, Ronan could barely make out her shape as she bent over near the foot of the bed; when she stood, she held the quilt that had gotten kicked onto the floor at some point earlier in the night. Delicately, she laid the quilt over Ronan and Gansey, adjusting it so that Ronan was covered all the way from his ears to his toes, just the way he liked it. She slipped from the room, the door clicking shut behind her.
When morning came, Ronan woke to Gansey rolling over in his arms. Gansey proceeded to tuck his head under Ronan’s chin, completely burying himself under the quilt.
“Hey,” Ronan said quietly, clearing his throat when his voice came out scratchy. “You’re gonna suffocate under there.”
Gansey pawed at the quilt, pulling it off Ronan’s shoulder and down below his own chin. “Better?”
“Much.”
There was still the possibility that Gansey wouldn’t acknowledge what happened the night before, or that he’d play it off as a joke—it wouldn’t be unkind, of course, Gansey would never be unkind to Ronan about something as private as this. He didn’t expect Gansey to ignore what they’d done, but it wasn’t out of the realm of possibility.
What he hadn’t expected, though, was for Gansey to kiss his way up Ronan’s neck, over his racing pulse, his jaw, his mouth. “I was thinking after breakfast,” he murmured, lips brushing against Ronan’s cheek as he spoke, “we could go back to Monmouth and practice some more.”
“Gotta make sure you can show your date a good time.”
Gansey wove his fingers into Ronan’s hair, holding it out of his face and cradling his skull. “I think,” he said, speaking the words into Ronan’s mouth, “we both know that I’m not going on that date.”