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Ronan knew he should have said no to Nino’s as soon as Gansey suggested it.
Problem was, by the time he’d bothered to look at the group chat, the conversation had moved past deciding to meet up, glossed over a quick vote on where, and landed squarely on the when. Trying to veto would have led to a whole side conversation with Gansey that Ronan didn’t feel like letting bleed into what, up until that point, had been a perfectly good day at the Barns.
Hence: his steeping in pizza stench. Mingling with beer stench. Mingling with the banter of boys definitely too young to be drinking but clinking beer glasses together anyway. Ronan was crammed between a window and Adam, his shoulders and triceps already sticking to and peeling off the blue pleather of the booth every time he shifted his weight. Blue and Gansey were posted up across the table chattering about vegan pizza and lab grown pepperoni or some bullshit.
Ronan hadn’t been to Nino’s since high school. Dropping out of high school. Whatever. Nothing had changed, and it irked him, revving up a bad mood like pulling the ripcord of a lawn mower. Ronan hadn’t bothered to do the math on how many revs it would take to get it started, but if he kept pulling, it eventually would, and then everything in his path better move or get mown the fuck over.
A spike of boyish laughter from behind their booth made him twitch. Maybe it was that the people before him had all changed while Nino’s remained steadfastly the same. The last time they’d squeezed into a booth like this together, Adam had been stressing about Latin homework, Blue had been riding the high of quitting her waitressing job, and Gansey was mulling over the best method to woo the curator of some hoity toity upstate museum.
The last time they’d been here, Adam had sat next to Ronan, exactly like this. Chuckled knowingly at Gansey’s jokes, just like this.
Caught Ronan looking, just like this.
“A pint,” Ronan growled at the skinny waiter, and jerked his head in the direction of the pre-pubescent assclowns. “Whatever they’re having.”
He meant to say it conversationally. But judging by the way the waiter skittered off like a fart in a thunderstorm and Gansey’s disapproving look that snapped the two syllables of Ronan like thumb and forefinger, he’d poured too much gasoline on the waiter. For a single, glimmering moment, reality felt achingly like four years ago. Like when they were 17. Like when Gansey had held Ronan’s leash with expert care and Ronan was still learning how to not bite passerbys.
It was a lesson he wasn’t in the mood to re-learn.
“What?” He scrubbed the back of his head with his free hand. The other was draped across the table, exactly six inches away from Adam’s. This, too, was like four years ago. This feeling: warning lights flashing a proximity alert on the dash. His foot, hovering over the gas and brake, unable to choose.
The beer arrived like liquid mercy. Ronan downed half of it in one gulp as everyone else put in their pizza order. He wasn’t hungry, so he ordered more beer, because of course Nino’s didn’t serve anything stronger.
Of course he’d told his friends about his second secret. Thing was, they all thought Ronan was finally telling them the truth. And maybe he was–just not all of it.
He thought he’d had so much time.
But then, one day after many days of thinking that, he’d had none at all.
“So,” Blue said in a way that meant an entire conversation had carried on in the background while Ronan had been glowering at his own hand. He’d gotten better at recognizing these things, if not at fully addressing them. Story of his fucking life. “Adam. Ronan.”
“Blue Sargent,” Adam echoed into a sip of water.
“We’ve covered your calendars and work lives and all the adult stuff we have to pretend to care about, but what the crowd would really like to know is: is there anyone special around? Keeping in mind, obviously, that monogamy is a heteronormative, patriarchal construct.”
Gansey raised his water at this in a here here , and kissed Blue on the cheek, and for some reason, the question or the response drawn naturally from it like elixir from a goddamn magic potion, made Ronan want to finish the rest of his goddamn beer.
Ronan Lynch was a creature of habit. He finished the rest of his goddamn beer.
“Er, you know I’ve been busy,” Adam deflected, but sloppily. His long, crooked fingers toyed with the laminated edges of the menus that had yet to be collected. “Graduate program applications and letters of recommendation and the internship–”
“Adam. It’s okay.” As always, Gansey’s voice was like honey over a blister. How could you leave? Ronan thought suddenly, ardently, scathingly. How could you ever leave and think we’d be okay? “Blue was just teasing.”
“Half-teasing. I do want to know.”
As if they’d rehearsed it, all eyes slid to Ronan. He did not angle away into his seat to make his body a smaller target as Adam might have done, or deflect with a politician’s smile, as was Gansey’s habit, or launch a scattershot counteroffensive of the Blue variety.
The bad-mood ripcord shredded against its casing as it was tugged yet again.
What was Ronan supposed to say? That he hadn’t been looking for a guy? It would only lead to questions that Ronan didn’t feel like giving away the answers to. He could lie, but he was not in the habit of lying, especially not during the first time he’d seen Gansey in months. Not to mention that Adam would see right through it the way Adam saw through everything. He was probably picking Ronan apart in his head even now, studying him like an insect under a heat lamp–
“My good people! What is up!”
For the first time in 22 years of living, Ronan was overjoyed to see Henry Cheng. Grinning from too-big ear to ear, Henry fistbumped a half-standing Gansey and nodded at Adam and winked at Blue. Ronan muttered a “sup”, which he thought was being generous, and Henry at least had the grace to act like it was a royal fucking pardon while he dumped himself down into the booth beside Adam.
Which would have been fine and dandy–except the architects of Nino’s had not planned their booths for three adult men to sit shoulder to shoulder. Which meant Adam had to scoot over to accommodate Henry’s biceps, which had somehow gotten even bigger than the last time Ronan had seen him, which meant not only Adam’s hand but also his thighs (mercifully covered under jeans), hips, and ribcage zipped up the six-inch gap to a zero-inch touching.
Don’t think about it , Ronan told his adrenal glands. It’s fucking normal. He has no choice.
Henry derailed Blue’s inquiries by ordering a round of IPA’s for all of them and merrily recapping his jaunt through college and a number of study abroad trips higher than the alcohol percentage of Ronan’s beer. Despite the fact that IPA’s were horseshit, Ronan silently nursed it throughout storytime, then ordered a darker kind like the shitnugget freshman behind him were drinking when the pizza came, and chased it with mouthful after mouthful of grease and cheese and crust.
He sees you. The harder you try, the more obvious you make it, idiot.
Ronan wallowed in the bottom of the lager, watching Henry showing off his girlfriend’s Instagram. This soured his mood considerably. Actually, this sent his mood straight past IPA and into those fruity shitshakes that passed for beers in breweries named after folk bands and geological features.
And why couldn’t he just be normal? Wearing a smile looked so easy for Blue and Gansey and Adam, Dear Lord, Adam Parrish. Adam’s smile was a shy revelation beside Ronan, coaxed out of its cavern by the loving forest of hands that was the group of them. Ronan was no longer used to Adam’s smile and was unprepared for its full wattage, the crinkles around Adam’s eyes creasing like livewires, the freckles dusting his nose and upper cheekbones peppering mortars. Each burst in Ronan’s head in single-word epiphanies:
You.
Should.
Have.
Told.
Him.
Because now Adam was complimenting Henry on the soon-to-maybe-be-girlfriend, and Henry was asking Adam if he’d found a lady friend of his own. And goddamn, if there was one thing Ronan did not want to listen to tonight—
“Lynchster, anything to add?”
Henry had thrust his head across Adam like an inquisitive, black-haired bird. Ronan had forgotten how many beers were jostling for room in his stomach; the one in front of him was nearly full. He set to work on fixing it.
“Ronan,” Blue said, picking through her words carefully, “is not taking calls about that right now.”
Ronan thumped his fist on Blue’s county of the table in silent thanks-slash-admiration. His beer didn’t even taste alcoholic anymore, which was how he knew he was edging past social drinking and into drinking for a purpose. Drinking not as an activity, but as a means to a destination; a particular sport he had not participated in for a very long time. This, too, was like high school. And like high school, Ronan still hadn't told Adam, had fallen into the habit of not telling Adam--because he was nothing if not a creature of habit, pacing perennially around the perimeter of his comfort zone like a snarling dog.
Gansey’s eyes flicked to him. Ronan ignored him in a way he knew Gansey would know was intentional, refusing to come when he was called. But fuck it. Tonight, Ronan didn’t feel like heeling. Tonight, for some reason, he was incendiary, and defying orders felt like the perfect things for stoking those flames. Tonight felt fragile and impermanent and carefully constructed; all the perfect attributes for the objects Ronan Lynch enjoyed hurling to pavement.
“C’mon, buddy, pal of mine. No old flames since the big H-S? No fellow keeping your bed warm at night? No chap writing tender sonnets from the frontline trenches?”
Ronan saw Blue see it on him just a beat after Gansey; she knew him that well. The ribbing edge to her face and voice fell away when she laughed. Adam had probably seen it minutes ago, but was just better at playing his cards.
“Nope,” Ronan grunted into his glass. The syllable echoed against the empty chamber. Every pore of his forearm and neck and ears were belching heat from whatever was roaring to life inside of him.
Inside him: a sword, sheathed in its scabbard, and Ronan trying very, very hard to keep it that way.
You should have told him.
The sword edged out.
You know you can’t.
He forced it back in.
“But Ronan, my darling, you are far too handsome to be without a gentleman caller. To my knowledge of Ronanology, you’ve never even dated anyone, yes? What about crushes? Ever had even one of those little zingers?”
“Not everyone gets crushes,” Gansey said, and Ronan didn’t miss how Blue appraised him like a star pupil.
“True. But our dear Ronan has already shared with us for whose team he plays, and it is not nobody’s.
Ronan tightened his fist around the beer glass. “Listen, Cheng. I said–”
“And I don’t believe you.”
Henry Cheng leaned further over the table. The thing about him, Ronan realized, was that his bravado was not all bluster. There was a reason Gansey was fascinated with the guy. Some hidden weapon Cheng had on his person that made him the stripe of dangerous and interesting that intrigued Gansey enough to trigger his friendship instinct.
Ronan met Henry’s eyes. One of those perfectly-bladed black eyebrows quirked up. Ronan felt, viscerally, Adam’s intake of breath, and its release. Intake, release.
And just like that, the ripcord pulled and stuck and the combustion engine obeyed.
Now the night not only felt breakable but destined to shatter. Of course it had to. The group of them hadn’t been together like this for almost a year and in this spot for five; of course it was always going to collapse under its own weight. Ronan’s weight.
Fine. Fuck it.
Ronan reached across the table and finished Gansey’s panseyass Pabst for him. Adam’s breath was so, so loud; how was it not overpowering for anyone else?
Because Ronan could not stand and fling the table back from him in a booth like he wanted to, he had to settle for slamming the glass on the cheap formica and throwing his head back and breathing in through his nostrils and out through his nostrils, a smoker’s breath, a dragon incensed.
Who cared anymore? Maybe some nights were for breaking.
“You know what? Yeah. Yeah, you’re right, man.”
Henry looked like a cat who had caught its laser-pointer. Ronan pressed the advantage.
“There is someone.”
“Aw, buddy, you really don’t have to confess to how much you love m–”
“It’s not you. Sit down.” And now Henry was off balance, thrown by the sincerity of Ronan’s assault, and he could feel, practically sense Gansey tensing up, throwing a sidelong glance at Blue as if they were sharing pizza not with a man, but with some kind of cracked reactor about to melt the face off everyone in the facility.
But once Ronan had made the decision to break it, there was a delicious joy in hurling the night and watching it explode in slow motion. Because the thing that was encased in it, that had been encased in every night during and since high school, was a sword in its scabbard. It had been kept in for far too long and now it wanted out no matter who was in the blast radius. No matter all the reasons Ronan had for keeping it in; tonight, his mouth tasted like overpriced beer and bitter unfairness, and he was sick to hell of it.
“But if you wanna know, Cheng, there is someone. Always was.” Ronan would have normally wished for more beer, but this moment required no external stimulants other than the one rubbing elbows with him. “Never told anybody ‘cuz I figured–doesn’t matter what I figured, actually. But yeah, there is somebody.”
Gansey’s face was a portrait of a civilization about to watch itself collapse. Henry’s smile was wobbly, uncertain. “Well, don’t keep us waiting.”
“You don’t know anything about waiting.”
Nino’s swam in a green-red haze around Ronan. Beer didn’t get him this drunk. Nothing got him this drunk, melted reality like wax like this, poured it on his skin and watched him bite his lip as his life ran in rivulets down his chest, like the boy sitting right next to him did. Goddamn Adam Parrish had always held that candle. Goddamn Adam Parrish always would be. Goddamn–
“Adam Parrish,” Ronan heard himself say.
The glass orb of night struck asphalt.
Ronan expected to feel–what? Euphoria? At the very least, relief? Even just for a second, he wanted it worse than he wanted the future the name held.
But of course he couldn't have it. Reality solidified back around him as the four syllables found their marks. Gansey’s face paled, and Blue’s eyes went wide, and Adam, beside him, was silent, too silent, and was not saying anything, and even Henry was not saying anything, which was saying a lot. And everyone kept on not saying anything, choosing not to say anything over and over and over again as the seconds stretched like miles and Ronan sank and crashed and what the hell were you thinking there was a reason you never told him there was a good fucking reason–
To her credit, Blue didn’t try to salvage the mood or pretend it was something it wasn’t. She reached across the table and touched Ronan’s wrist–a gesture that would have meant brutal and swift pain for anyone else.
“Ronan,” she said. And in that one word, despite how much she tried to keep it out, Ronan heard it: pity.
It coursed like cyanide through him. Drove him like a dying animal to spasm and jitter and run for his life. Ronan Lynch had always had one ear on the ground, listening for the instincts bred into him by Irish blood and a trickster god in his family tree, and he heard them now, long and clear:
Fight. Fly.
Ronan could not fight anyone here. Not in a way that would satisfy him.
So he chose the latter.
Except–Adam and Henry were between Ronan and freedom. He tried to hurl himself sideways and only succeeded in colliding with Adam. The hot, burning urge to run drove him to spasm awkwardly against Adam’s body until finally Cheng had the sense to get up, and Adam slid over, and Ronan was uncorked and stumbling away from the table and pushing past the skinny waiter bringing another beer he didn’t remember ordering. Fuck. Fuck. Shards of the evening they could have all had together splintered into his feet, and Ronan wished for the blackness that was his room at the Barns at midnight, or the comforting embrace of his forest, or even Chainsaw’s talons to dig into his shoulders and tell him he was wounded but alive.
He had none of those things.
Ronan shoved open the front door of Nino’s and loosed himself onto the Henrietta night. Once this sword had been drawn, it couldn’t be sheathed; he had always known that. It was practically transcribed on the fucking blade.
He had drawn it anyway.
Ronan was drunk enough that he could wander without thinking, but not so drunk he would be able to lose himself in a place so familiar as this. He couldn’t claim it was the beer’s fault–not that he would try. The only thing worse than admitting what he’d admitted would be to shy away from it and pretend he hadn’t and give that biting shame an even cozier place to burrow in his ribcage.
So instead, Ronan was here: in the garbage-strewn alleyway behind Nino’s, punching the side of a Dumpster. Boom. Boom. His hands were aloft and level with his cheekbones like his father had taught him. Bits of his skin were strewn all over the green chipped metal. His rawed knuckles pulsed with every heartbeat, blood brought close to the surface.
He could have kept it in. The knowledge drove first one fist forward, then the other, sending the sheet metal of the Dumpster ringing like a trash gong. Boom. Boom. Ronan had kept it during the last half of Agliongby without incident. Boom . He kept it while driving Adam up to Harvard and unpacking his dorm room, all the while knowing every single box he untapped was another nail in the ship Adam was building to sail further away from Henrietta. Boom . From their gang. Boom . From Ronan. Boom.
He had sat on it because he’d had to. What other choice was there? Adam was sprayed over every cell in Ronan’s brain in neon aerosolized paint. But every time Ronan had run the situation in his head, or every time he’d meticulously constructed it in a dreamscape, it always went sour without his consent. Confessing to Adam on top of a mountain wreathed in mist and stars ended no differently than doing it on the backs of shadow-and-smoke dragons, or while hiking together through a canyon on an alien planet, and now, no differently than in Nino’s of all places: it ended badly.
Boom. Boom. Boom.
Ronan became aware he was being watched the way he regained consciousness after losing it to a fifth of tequila or a balled-up fist. One smattering of moments, his one-sided boxing match did not have an audience, and the next, it did. Getting out of Nino’s would invite someone to follow him. He’d known this, too, had dreamt this, too, and had done it anyway. Idiot . Shitbird idiot.
“Go away, Gansey,” Ronan growled, and struck the Dumpster in the center of the slowly-forming crater he was working on. He was kind of proud of it, actually. “I don’t want to hear it. You can’t fix this.”
Gansey didn’t respond. Ronan didn’t look at him.
But suddenly, punching felt performative, and as soon as it did, Ronan didn’t want to do it anymore. Leave it to Gansey to take away the one thing that could make him feel better in this total asswipe of a night. Leave it to Gansey to do it without even lifting a finger. In fact, what would Gansey know about any of this? What was he possibly hoping to say to Ronan in mutual bro empathy? Richard Dick Campbell III was a model straight out of God’s factory, shipped in bubblewrap and spit-shined until he shone. Gansey had been through his share of shit, sure, but never shit like this. He and Blue had wanted each other since before either of them knew it. For them, it was as easy as driving up a mountain and necking in the Pig.
It would never be that easy for Ronan.
BOOM .
He staggered back from the Dumpster, breathing heavily, sweat staining the collar of his MCR hoodie he was just realizing was the one Adam had gotten for him years ago. And just like that, Ronan was furious with Gansey. Or maybe with them all. Or maybe just with himself. He badly wanted to break something more important than the Dumpster. The jagged consequences of it would be the perfect distraction from what he was feeling now. Ronan Lynch knew how to get out of a hole not by climbing out, but by digging himself deeper in order to avoid the spot he’d landed in. Wallowing in his own pain and frustration was a terrible cure, but it was the only cure he had.
“You can’t fix this,” Ronan repeated to his knuckles, and leaned his forehead against the brick. “Don’t even fucking try. It’s not going to change anything.”
“You’re wrong,” Adam said.
Ronan jerked away from the slimy brick so fast he almost sent himself wheeling into the trash heap slouched on the other side of the alley.
Every sinew and muscle went snap , taut, pulled to attention by the lanky figure haloed by a streetlight.
A shadow Ronan would know anywhere stretched out and brushing against his, in negative light if not in physicality.
Should he bolt? But no–as soon as he thought it, he rejected that, too. Ronan was a lot of things, but he wasn’t ashamed of who he was. What he wanted.
Then why was he so angry?
Even with Adam right in front of him, Ronan couldn’t stop seeing the playful bump of Blue’s shoulder against Gansey’s. Couldn’t stop hearing Cheng go on and on and on about the girls he’d been meeting at graduate school.
Ronan sneered out of habit, and then lost whatever he wanted to say next. Grasped for it. Fell only on the heat and serrated metal churning in his abdomen.
But Adam was used to it. Undeterred. Ronan had seen Adam Parrish fight demons and strike bargains with dreams; he was tempered glass of a kind Ronan wouldn’t dare crack, even if he could.
Adam taking a step drove Ronan back. It drove him forward. It drove him absolutely fucking nuts.
“I want the truth.” Adam’s steps were one thing. His voice was completely another.
So Ronan sneered again. And then, because he wouldn’t lie, he fucking refused to lie, and he was not ashamed , said, “You already heard it.”
“Not that. We’ll get to that.”
“You– fuck , Parrish, did you know?”
“That’s not what we’re talking about. I want the truth, Ronan. Why?”
Because he was Adam, and because Ronan was Ronan, Adam didn’t have to finish it. Ronan knew by process of familiarizing himself utterly and completely with this person the way priests poured over the bible late at night, every night, by candlelight, that Adam Parrish wouldn’t ask him any other why but this one:
“Because I couldn’t carry it anymore. It was fucking heavy.”
“Stop avoiding it, Ronan. Why didn’t you tell me?”
But Ronan was not a priest, or a scholar. He was Adam’s friend–at least, he thought he was, or had been, once. Had always wanted to be more.
“It’s complicated. It’s stupid.”
Adam crossed his arms. Shook his head. They were mere feet apart now, and though the alleyway stank of garbage and rain, Adam’s deodorant was making Ronan heady. His skin rippled with goosebumps. Anger flared out of habit, but he didn’t want to direct it at Adam. The desire to do something dumb coiled seductively in his inner ear.
Ronan dipped his head ever so slightly, but he wouldn’t allow himself to drop Adam’s eyes. He’d rather go back to punching the Dumpster.
He found himself talking instead.
“You remember what it was like in high school? When we were looking for Glendower? Every single day was real life but with better graphics. More RAM.” Ronan laughed, bitterly. “Like, this one time, Ganseyman took us up the mountain to a spot that was just this patch of clearing off the trail, but we brought all this high-tech James Bond gear, and we marched down through this awful, steep little fucker of a trail?”
Somehow he was still talking, and Adam was still there.
“Of course I remember. It was sonar, not James Bond.”
“Then you remember what that afternoon was like,” Ronan said. “It felt like it was gonna last forever. We holed up in Monmouth after while Gansey waited for his shit to print out, and I was teaching Blue how to do donuts and Noah kept throwing himself out the fuckin’ BMW window while we were doing it, and you were–”
“Recording it,” Adam finished. His arms dropped from his sides. Just a few inches, but enough that his entire posture changed. “On your phone.”
“ That’s why.” Ronan kicked a trash bag for emphasis and maybe for fun. “It felt like it would last forever, but I always felt how fragile it was. Like a baby goddamn bird. Especially after you and Blue almost blew it wide open, and then Gansey fought with you, and Noah peaced out…we didn’t feel like we could take any more."
Ronan had never articulated any of this, or even gone so far as to put it into conscious thought. It had all existed in a matted, tight wad in his gut, collecting like bubblegum scraped off the underside of a desk. How was he ever supposed to remove that from himself? The answer was that he couldn’t. Exercising it would be to make it known, and to make it known would be to put the entire summer, all of them , in peril.
And that, like lying about it, was something Ronan Lynch refused to do.
So he’d kept it in.
He’d kept it in because he’d be fucked if he was the one who made things change, and instead, all he’d seen tonight was how much everyone had gone and changed without him anyway.
Everyone besides him. Ronan had been so busy holding it, he hadn’t had time to grow into anyone else.
Adam was staring at him. The light of the streetlamp was curling around his cheekbones in fluorescent eddies, catching on his irises and fringes of flyaway hairs. This, Ronan thought, was the part where Adam left. Where they all pretended like nothing had happened but knew it had. Where the sword he’d kept sheathed for years and years had buried itself into the core of them, not badly enough to kill, but badly enough to wound, and then to become infected, and then to fester and rot. None of them would ever be able to even breathe without thinking of that sword in their side; how could they?
Ronan had suspected it couldn’t last forever. But he’d assumed the end was graduating high school, splitting up, scattering across the country.
He’d been wrong.
This was the end. Right here. Right now. This was the night they all began to fall apart. Even if it didn’t happen right away, the moments before they’d stepped into Nino’s were the last untainted ones he’d ever have with the four of them.
Ronan dragged a sleeved hand across his eyes, and was surprised to find Adam was still there when he was done.
In fact, Adam was taking another step forward, and another. He put a slender-boned hand on Ronan’s shoulder and looked at him. “Ronan,” Adam said.
His name was a bullet in the chamber of Adam’s mouth.
It always had been.
“You’re assuming the worst. That telling me would be another test we all had to survive.”
His name a bullet, Adam’s mouth a chamber, Adam’s hand on Ronan’s arm an order to fire.
Adam’s hand moved lower.
“You’re assuming I would take it badly,” Adam said.
Found the bare skin of where Ronan’s thumb met his palm.
Ronan didn’t trust himself to breathe.
Ronan Lynch had dreamt a million versions of confessing to Adam Parrish. Sailing on a skyship of beaten diamonds. Under siege by a legion of clockwork devils who had crawled out of some godforsaken pit. Jetskiing on the aurora borealis, skimming the upper atmosphere with his hand like it was a lake. He had said the words to Adam in every scenario possible, every life he could ever live, every iteration of himself that might ever exist.
He had never let himself dream of this moment.
This moment: Adam’s finger brushing Ronan’s thumb, and then the arc of his bone slotting into his hand. Adam’s breath misting over Ronan’s face. His shoe ever so slightly bumping against Ronan’s shoe.
“You knew?” Ronan repeated, because he didn’t trust himself to make up his own words, or his own dreams.
Anyone else would have dropped Ronan’s eyes. But Adam was Adam, so he held them.
“I don’t know if I knew, or if I felt like I might. It was like having half a hope, and hoping it would turn out okay, but only if I didn’t let myself acknowledge it. Like it needed to grow in the shade instead of full sun.”
Still, still they hadn’t said it, and suddenly Ronan could bear it no longer. The night had blown up with the concussive force of a grenade, and he’d been left to shuffle around in its smoking carcass, but now he felt a different want. Or maybe the same want. Repeated. Amplified. Pulsing under his throat always.
And yet it was so fragile. Adam knew and maybe he was okay with it, but that didn’t mean he returned the favor. Maybe a little pressure had been relieved, but–
“Ronan,” Adam said. “I can see you thinking.”
“You can’t see shit.”
“I can. You know I can. You’re assuming I would take it badly.”
“Try a new line, Parrish.” A hole. A sword. A wad of gum. A nuclear apocalypse. Standing this close to Adam was all of these things at once, mixing like convoluted dreamstuff in Ronan’s head and nose and ears, and he couldn’t bear it–couldn’t bear the not knowing. He realized, all at once, that the not knowing was twofold: he hadn’t let the others know. He couldn’t have. Ronan had kept the sword sheathed, the secret buried, the warhead defused for everyone else’s safety.
“You’re not listening to me. Let me finish.”
The faintest flutter of hope stirred amidst the ashes of the bombed-out evening. Because now that Ronan had let his secret out, that crack in his head had opened up, and there was room for another thought, another hope, the faintest glimmer of light he had never let himself bask in.
He had worked as hard as he could to keep the blade in his heart dulled. But there were consequences for that work. No room to be anything else for himself, infinite room for everyone else to find out who they’d become.
The thing that Ronan had felt was so fragile and worked so hard to keep between all of them wasn’t a shield. It was a net, and it had been strangling him for years.
Adam’s other hand trembled over the hem of Ronan’s sweater where it met his hip.
“I wanted to tell you, but you bolted, so–this is what you get. You’re a self-involved bullheaded prick, Ronan. You drive me up the wall. And for some reason, you always, always, always assume the worst.”
“Stop screwing with me and get to your point, Parrish.” Ronan wanted to growl it. It came out more as a moan instead. A breathy white flag.
“See? That’s what I–I’m not screwing with you, Ronan.”
Adam’s hand on Ronan’s hip found its way into Ronan’s other hand. Which meant they were now holding hands. Both of their hands. And now Adam’s eyes were pleading, as if they wanted Ronan to figure them out. Which didn’t make sense. What would Adam–
Oh.
A single bubble slipped through the crack in Ronan’s skull, and floated up toward the sunshine.
Oh. Oh.
Rain pattered in the puddles of Nino’s alleyway. Ronan was going to get soaked if he stayed. He didn’t care.
Because what if–
Ronan had stoppered up Adam so perfectly, so tightly, that he had never let himself dream what might happen if Adam loved him, too. He’d never even let himself imagine it was a possibility. Doing so would be to invite danger, to weaken his own defenses, to indulge where there was no point in indulging.
To make himself vulnerable to Adam Parrish.
Adam, whose voice was a bullet, his heart a powderkeg.
“You didn’t use past tense inside.” Adam’s finger rubbed a small circle on the inside of Ronan’s palm, tracing electricity like a ring of lightning, and that was all it took to set Ronan off.
The keg exploded.
The bullet found its mark.
The inevitable flinted to fire as Adam said, “Was that on purpose?”
Half of Ronan’s brain was in the alleyway. The other half was rearing up, casting off the burning net, clawing its way out of the hole, catching the bomb, grasping the sword, roaring with a fierce and delirious something he before would have only known how to word as fury, but now, now–
–now, he knew the answer, this answer, right here, would change everything. It was the apocalypse; it would be the end of everything they, Gansey-Blue-Adam-Ronan-Cheng, had been before. They would never, ever be the same as they had been depending on what words Ronan chose next. Maybe that was already true, but if he played it right, at least he could still have the slow decline and pretend it was fate.
But maybe he didn’t want that.
Maybe Ronan was ready for it all to end.
Maybe endings weren’t always bad.
He squeezed Adam’s hand back. Stepped on his foot, just a little, to let him know he was there.
“It was on purpose,” he breathed. “Fuck, Parrish, of course it was on purpose. It’s present-tense. There was never anyone else. There–there won’t ever be. You’re in my head all day, every day. That’s not ever gonna change.”
Ronan realized Adam had been holding tension in his shoulders only by virtue of them sagging. His face softening. His whole lanky body slanting back not to the rigid man Ronan had come to know in the last few years, but the boy he remembered from when they had spent every waking minute together in infinite summer.
In all of Ronan’s dreams, he had conquered galaxies and commanded deities, but he had never kissed Adam Parrish.
In his dreams, he could bring back anything he wanted except for the the only thing he ever had:
Adam, squeezing Ronan’s hand back. Nodding so slightly it would have been invisible to anyone else. Leaning forward to meet Ronan in the middle.
Being a Greywaren, a dreamer, a god of some other plane; all Ronan’s power was nothing compared to Adam’s lower lip brushing Ronan’s upper, and his mouth opening ever so slightly, and them pulling back and then surging together because Ronan couldn’t bear the air that pulling back created between them.
His hands left Adam’s, but only to grasp the small of Adam’s back. Ronan had never let himself want it. But paradoxically, feeling Adam’s hips completely under Ronan’s grasp, like a palmed basketball, was what his body had craved. Each moment that pulsed by was every single desire Ronan had never let himself feel coming to the forefront of his mind and being met by reality like a chain reaction of chemicals. He never wanted it to stop. Ronan Lynch would happily, cheerfully, goddamn fucking lovingly grind the universe to a halt and make this handful of seconds the only seconds that would ever happen for the rest of time, if only he had that power too.
But if letting time soldier onward meant getting to do this, and having Adam Parrish, then maybe that wasn’t so bad either.
“Ronan? Ronan! Reagan’s corpse in hell–do you think he’s driving?”
“Jane, there are minors around.”
“Oh, please. Those minors are all drinking beer on fake ID’s and they probably don’t even know who Reagan was.”
“Thou fair lady has a point.”
“Thank you, Henry. That is no help at all.”
The familiar sounds of bickering pinged off the concrete like the first drops of an approaching shower. The sounds of it brought back, for the briefest flash of instinctual fear jolted Ronan a breath’s span apart from Adam.
Because it was right here. If Blue and Henry and Gansey, holy Mother Mary if Gansey saw, then–
–then what? Things would change?
“Hey. Ronan.” Adam hadn’t moved at all. Instead, he let Ronan buck and waited for him to calm, and laid a hand on the hollow of Ronan’s shoulder once he had. “I know what you’re thinking.”
“You don’t know shit,” Ronan said, also instinctually. There was no more heat in it, only the last embers of an old fear he’d watched over for a winter he never thought would end. How could he let the thing that had saved him go out just like that?
“You don’t need it. We don’t have to tell them–all of this can go at your pace. We can go at your pace. But everything you’ve been doing…they’ll understand.”
Would they? Would Gansey? Ronan had never lied to Gansey, not ever. Even when it was for Gansey’s own good, Ronan had always dealt the old man the straight and unequivitable truth; an old lesson from Niall. You can’t hit your hardest if you’re holding back. You can’t fight like you’re supposed to.
But had he been lying? It hadn’t occurred to Ronan before now, when he was about to reveal the blade he’d kept hidden from Gansey and Adam and Blue, if it had felt like lying or not. He’d just done it, the same way he’d protected his magic, his Greywarenness.
Had Gansey thought of that as lying? Or his liking boys?
If the rest of the gang saw the two of them, things would change. But as Adam’s fingers traced Ronan’s neck up to his stubble, and as Ronan sunk into the gesture, he could only think that just possibly, that was a good thing. Who they were together would end, but in order for him to have this, the boy in front of him and all the futures that promised, it had to.
He looked at Adam. Placed his hand over Adam’s bonier one.
Maybe not all of it. Just some. Just enough to make room to grow.
“Okay,” Ronan said. Together, he and Adam turned toward the mouth of the alleyway. Adam’s palm in Ronan’s own was still an alien sensation. The promise that someday, maybe someday soon, it would be a familiar one instead, was what drove Ronan to take the first step. “Okay. You ready, Parrish?”
Adam’s hint of a smile, sideways and lean on his mouth, was all the nitros Ronan thought his system could handle.
ONE YEAR LATER
Ronan knew he should have said no to Nino’s as soon as Blue suggested it.
He was a creature of habit, and liked spending his afternoons doing one of two things: dreaming with or on or of Adam, and chores. Problem was, by time he’d bothered to tear himself away from Adam to look at the group chat, the conversation had moved past deciding to meet up, glossed over a quick vote on where, and landed squarely on the when. Trying to veto Nino’s would have led to a whole side conversation with Gansey that Ronan didn’t feel like bleeding into, up to that point, had been a perfectly good day at the Barns.
At the Barns with his boyfriend.
Hence: the pizza stench. Mingling with beer stench, mingling with the banter of the people Ronan still couldn’t believe were old enough to drink with him, but clinking beer glasses together anyway. Ronan was crammed between a window and Adam, his shoulders and triceps already sticking to and peeling off the blue pleather of the booth every time he shifted, and Blue and Gansey were posted up across the table, chattering about some oil pipeline protest. He hadn’t been to Nino’s since this time last year. Since he and Adam had gotten together. Became a thing. Boyfriends. Whatever.
It was hard to believe it was only a year ago. So much had changed, and sometimes it changed so fast Ronan felt a headrush from the speed.
But it was the headrush of pressing down on the BMW’s pedal and feeling its engines purr to life, of the road whipping out like a black ribbon before him and the beast in his grip ready to devour it, and the boyfriend in his passenger seat ready to see where it took them. It was the best kind of vertigo. The one he lived for.
“So,” Blue said in a way that meant an entire conversation had carried on in the background while Ronan had been lost in Adam’s hand tracing lines on his thigh. “Adam. Ronan.” Her eyebrows waggled in a way that reminded Ronan so much of Maura it was almost creepy.
“Blue Sargent,” Adam echoed, his head leaned on Ronan’s shoulder.
“We’ve covered all the adult stuff we have to pretend to care about, but what the crowd would really like to know is: how are you guys? We never get photos online and you have, like, half a phone between the two of you.”
Gansey raised his water at this in a here here , and kissed Blue on the cheek, and Adam imitated the gesture on Ronan; a magic mirror that made Ronan want to do indecent things to Adam right then and there. But he’d have to settle for kissing Adam. His boyfriend. Whatever.
Ronan didn’t know how many miles he’d have with Adam, or what their friendship with everyone else would look like if he kept ripping down this road. But he was going somewhere. No longer idling, no longer spending all his energy on resisting inertia. He was going somewhere. He was going somewhere. And he wasn’t going there alone.
Ronan Lynch was a creature of habit.
So he kissed his goddamn boyfriend.