Archive of Our Own ^beta

          Blue Sargent felt a lot of things for a lot of people, but she had never felt for anyone the type of things she felt for Gansey. Which was all kinds of ridiculous, because who had feelings for anyone named something as ridiculous as Richard Campbell Gansey III? She could barely think it with a straight face, but she knew—something about the way she felt for him was indefinably, inalienably different than anything she’d ever felt before.

          She didn’t love him yet, but she certainly liked him, and wanted desperately to be with him. She couldn’t, however—firstly, because of the curse, and secondly, because of Adam. She couldn’t do that to him—and neither could Gansey, especially when he told her, one night when they drove outside of town together and parked illegally on the grass, what Adam had said to him a month or so before.

          She had lain on the hood of his car, her ankles crossed and her arms tucked behind her head to prop her up against the hard metal of the hood. Gansey had sprawled out next to her, his foot nudging hers, his eyes darting between her face and the stars above—she could feel it, nearly see it in her peripheries while she had pretended to focus her attentions on the sky.

          Gansey had reached to fruitlessly tuck her hair behind her ear. He had been very close when he turned towards her, his breath fanning across her cheek. Blue had shivered and tried harder to watch the constellations. She had played a mental game with herself, trying to name star clusters and hoping it would take the away the heated focus of where Gansey’s skin touched hers—on her calf, on her elbow, on her shoulder. His lips had nearly grazed her jaw, then her ear.

          “I want this,” Gansey had whispered. Blue had closed her eyes. The words had been fine, but the way he had said it wasn’t the way someone generally asked out a girl. Sure enough, after a beat she had heard him inhale and say, “Adam told me that I was right.”

          She had shuffled slightly to the side so that when she too turned her head, their lips wouldn’t been in danger of touching. “Adam said that?”

          Gansey had quirked a smile, one of his soft, private Gansey smiles. The kind he wore when he was sleep-mussed and lying beside her beneath the stars at two in morning, not the one he wore when he was being President Cell Phone. “Yeah,” he had muttered, running his thumb over his bottom lip. An anxious gesture. “I know. He thinks it would have been…bad…to date you, now that you’re one of us.”

          Blue had chewed her lip, gaze unfaltering on him now that she had allowed herself the precious mistake of looking at him. Her voice had come out lower than anticipated when she’d asked, “And what do you think about that?”

          Gansey’s smile had stretched minutely. He had leaned forward until his forehead laid against hers, and she could feel his breathing, shallow and warm against her lips. She had been sure he could feel the same; they had been just the two of them, Blue and Gansey, sharing breaths underneath the velvet sky. The stars had been very bright, the moon very absent. Noah liked to joke that the full moon made him extra ghostly, and Blue extra mirror-y, and Adam extra magic, and Ronan extra powerful in his dreams. Blue wondered if new moons were the opposite; just for that night, could she be just Blue, and he just Gansey? Two people who wanted to be together, with the curse suppressed by the receding tides, sharing more than breaths on the hood of his car?

          Then Gansey had sighed, “I think I’d like to kiss you, Jane,” and Blue had said, “I think I’d like you to live a little longer, chief,” and they had laughed and shoved each other and pretended that they weren’t wondering if that meant the other knew just as clearly as dawn that that meant they could both feel it, this true love blooming between them.

          Blue sighed thinking about that night now. Then she flipped her covers off herself, climbed out of bed, and snuck downstairs and out the front door. Maura was still recovering from her long stint in Cabeswater, Calla had been told to restrict her aggressive grief over Persephone to the destruction of her own property and so had been locked in her room almost nonstop for a week now, and Gwenllian, though she never slept, had taken to spending the nights wandering town. Blue thought she had worked her way nearly to the other side of Henrietta by now and that, if she took mainly backroads and rode fast, she probably wouldn’t be caught biking to Monmouth at this hour of the night.

          Despite a close call with a loose dog, which delayed her ride by fifteen minutes as she rounded him up and carried him back to his yard and properly latched the fence, she made it undetected to Monmouth Manufacturing. She leaned her bike up against the side of the building and, instead of knocking, walked right in and up to the second floor. Ronan’s door was closed, as usual, and a quick peek into Gansey’s bedroom showed that he was finally sleeping at night for once. Sighing a little, although she hadn’t come specifically to see Gansey, she shut his door as softly as possible and turned around to see if Noah was back in his room now that Malory had gone, or if he was manifested at all.

          Her heart leapt into her throat when she turned around to discover Noah a few inches from her, watching her with his eyebrows raised. Blue put a hand to her chest, and Noah put a finger to his lips and gestured her back down the stairs and outside, so they could talk without disturbing their habitually insomniac friends.

          They leaned together on the wall outside the building, on the other side of the door from where she had stashed her bike. Without looking at Noah, Blue leaned her head back against the building and exhaled loudly, closing her eyes.

          “You’re very sigh-y tonight,” Noah observed.        

          Blue cracked a smile, and peered at him with one eye. She jabbed at his side, delighting in the laugh that it drew from him as he jumped away, and she folded her hands behind her back and leaned against them back on the wall as she turned to look at him more fully.

          “I didn’t come here to be insulted,” she declared, although she sort of had, because all her friends ever seemed to do was lightheartedly insult each other—well, Ronan more so than anyone else—and she had signed up for slander just by virtue of setting foot on the property.

          Noah knocked his elbow into her and grinned like he knew what she was thinking. “Liar,” he accused softly.

          Blue rolled his eyes and looked away from him, back up at the sky. She thought she could see Ursa Major from here, but then she thought it was just a cluster of stars that looked like a rocket ship with three legs. Despite popular myth, seers had very little to do with astronomy—or astrology, for that matter—and Blue had never been particularly good with any of that business despite her fascination with the night sky. Hers was an open curiosity, not an academic one.

          “Why did you come here?” Noah’s voice, when it came, was quiet and gentle. It was the tone Blue associated with distinctive nonjudgement, which was to say he knew she had a purpose worth judging.

          “Can’t I come see my friends at half past midnight?” Blue asked.

          Noah just looked at her. Blue gazed back at him with measured vacuity.

          “Blue,” he said then.

          The simple breath of her name jolted through her, and she peered more closely at him. Her mouth twisting to the side as she considered him with her head tilted as though to study him more closely. He stared back as nonjudgmentally as before, and Blue felt more exposed than ever. Something flickered between them then, and Blue gasped and grabbed his arm, jerking him around to face her as she turned.

          “How did you know?” she whispered harshly, leaning closely enough that she could count his eyelashes as he blinked slowly at her in response.

          After a second, he said, resigned now, “Gansey.”

          Amazing how a simple name could ignite such fury and such longing inside her at the same time.

          She let go of Noah with a disgusted hiss, crossing her arms instead as she leaned back on the wall again. “Traitor,” she muttered.

          Noah let out a sound like an aborted giggle, and she turned to glare at him, betrayed. “He didn’t tell me,” Noah said, smiling in a quietly teasing manner. “I heard you two talking on the phone one night. He asked me not to say anything to the others.”

          Blue snorted. “We’re not doing anything wrong,” she insisted, unsure how one sentence could be both truth and lie, “we’re just talking.”

          Noah raised an eyebrow at her, evidently unimpressed with her insistence. She had to admit it felt weak to her as well. “Just talking,” he repeated. She lifted her chin, adamant. Noah’s eyebrow climbed higher. “Whatever you say, Lily Blue.”

          Altogether, the serious conversation broke. Blue stuck out her tongue, and Noah danced away from her flailing slapping hands.

          “That’s not catching on!” she snapped. “Don’t call me that!”

          Noah’s ensuing laugh was gentle and soothing as a night breeze, and when he wrapped his arms around her and reeled her in to press a firm kiss to the top of her head, she resignedly melted against him, huffing an irritated laugh and squeezing him around the middle in response. Despite him being cold, dead, and only half corporeal, there was nothing in the world like a Noah hug.

          Blue hated Ronan’s BMW. She supposed there was nothing intrinsically wrong with the car itself,     but she loathed everything that came with it: Ronan, insistently and unironically blasting horrible Irish folk music from the shoddy, beat-up stereo; Noah, singing off-key and flickering in and out of existence so the two living teenagers in the backseat alternated between having a comfortable excess of legroom and squishing to the side to make space for Noah to spread out in the hump seat; Adam insisting that being in the back made it harder for him to connect to Cabeswater since there were too many warm bodies pressed against him and distracting him, and Ronan allowing a smug Adam to occupy the passenger seat most trips, even when they weren’t on a journey that required a working magician and despite the fact that he usually sat in the back in Gansey’s equally small car; or Gansey, complaining every few minutes that the radio was working too well and the engine didn’t stutter like it was supposed to, suggesting frequently that they would all be better off in the Pig, and complaining lowly in Blue’s ear beside him that he preferred driving because he disliked the lack of control that came with a backseat, and that he really didn’t trust Ronan not to accidentally-on-purpose crash the car with all of them in it.

          So, quite reasonably in her opinion, Blue hated the BMW.

          Nevertheless, she found herself squashed between Noah and Gansey in the backseat of it a few weeks after she had biked to Monmouth in the night only to have a brief, borderline-judgmental conversation with Noah and then bike straight back home again two hours later. Ronan had allowed Adam to change the radio to something actually bearable, Noah was sticking around for much longer than usual, and the entire length of her side was pressed up against the entire length of Gansey’s, so she wasn’t having as bad a time as she usually did when forced into Ronan’s hellish car.

          As they passed the general convenience store and sped off through town, Blue felt a finger digging into her thigh. She turned to look sharply at Gansey. He obligingly withdrew the digit, then leaned in closer to whisper in her ear and look out the front window at the same time.

          “Hey,” he hissed. His gaze flicked to her face and back at the road. “Don’t you think we should be using this time to look for Glendower?”

          Blue knew why he was whispering this like a secret; Gansey had become incessant in their quest now that they had come even closer than before, and he was determined to keep combing the mountains for any other caves he might have missed. As he had oft repeated the past few weeks, he was sure that they were close, and since they had found both the false tomb—they had all agreed with varying degrees of hesitance that Gwenllian, for all her eternal wakefulness and the unclear nature of her hundreds of years of possibly being conscious, was probably the “middle sleeper” that they had heard so much about. In fact, her curious maybe-sleeping, maybe-not state was probably why all the psychics they had spoken (and with Fox Way at their disposal, they had quite a lot of psychics readily available) of waking one, not waking another, and had left the middle quite ambiguous—and the tomb of the sleeper they were not to wake, Gansey’s excitement had increased tenfold with his confidence that they were getting closer to Glendower. Unfortunately, with his conviction came a serious upswing in bossiness, as well as an increase in prickly irritation when none of the others seemed to share quite as much urgency.

          Blue sighed as she looked at his open, desperate face. In it she could clearly see all of his desire and hope, marred by the pain of sitting idle for several long weeks. She swept her hair out of her eyes, a pointless effort as it fell immediately back into place. When she put her hand, placating, on Gansey’s arm, the heat seemed to sizzle from his skin to her entire body. She looked down at her hand on him, and then back up at his face.

          “We can’t yet, you know that.” She tried to keep the exasperation out of her tone, though he had asked this question many times before—almost every time they had a spare moment. “Ronan’s still trying to make more of those dream word things and Adam’s…”

          His jaw stiffened, and infinitesimal change that nevertheless catapulted him from the adventurous, passionate boy on a search for sleeping kings back to the immaculate rich son from a long line of immaculate rich children.

          “He’s just working through some things,” Gansey whispered fiercely, instantly defensive despite being met with no resistance.

          “I know,” Blue said heatedly.

          She saw Ronan glance back at them in the rearview mirror and quickly withdrew her hand from Gansey’s arm. She hadn’t realized that it was still there until Ronan’s gaze had suddenly sent it scorching again. She waited until Ronan returned his attention to the road before turning back to Gansey. She lowered her voice.

          “I know,” she repeated, more calmly. “And rightfully so—his dad just got sentenced to prison and his mom’s still not talking to him. He’s got a thousand things on his mind that are more relevant than some sleeping king.”

          Gansey started to protest, “I’m not saying—” but Blue held up her hand to silence him. Surprisingly, he simmered, though he looked disgruntled at the interruption.

          “More relevant as in more realistic,” Blue amended. “We need our magician at his peak for this, it won’t work if he’s all bothered by mortal stuff. Scrying and everything, it won’t be as effective if he’s distracted.”

          Gansey’s mouth twisted unhappily, and he leaned back into his seat, into his own space, looking momentarily thwarted. Blue, trying not to miss the proximity too desperately already, settled back as well.

          Her mind had started to wander back to what she had seen in the vision tree, of the two of them kissing—and then to the night of their almost-kiss, all heat and desperation in his car, moonlight casting him in beautiful shadows—but she was interrupted shortly thereafter by Noah eagerly nudging her with his elbow.

          “Look!” he said when she turned to him. He was pointing out the window, and she leaned around him to see out as well. “A dog!”

          Adam and Gansey immediately craned to see the dog as well, and Blue found herself getting shunted over as Gansey climbed halfway into her lap to see it. She was struck by a brief initial stun of having him on top of her, searing through her and setting all her senses on fire. In the rearview mirror she saw Adam glance at them, at the frozen expression on her face, and she looked back into his stiff one. Then the moment was gone; Gansey’s knee pressed hard into her thigh, his hand was slipping painfully on her skin, and then she laughed and shoved him off, and they engaged in a brief play fight that ended when the car came level with the woman and her dog, and they promptly turned to watch them pass instead. Noah waved at it out the window. The dog barked. From the front seat, Adam laughed delightedly.

          They sped on until they reached the opposite side of town; Ronan had to slow the car when traffic picked up as the area around them grew more and more densely populated. A few people waved through the car windows at Gansey, who gave them a pleasant wave back. Sometimes Blue thought that that was all Public Gansey had—vague, detached pleasantness. She liked him better when he settled back a second later and whispered in her ear about each person that greeted him, sometimes a short description—“We used to take piano lessons together” or “he dated Helen” or “her mom’s a politician, too”—and sometimes something like, “He looks ridiculous in that hat” and “I think I hacked up bile from that one gesture!” and Blue had to stifle a laugh against her hand, because the car was moving too slowly for her to be sure they were out of earshot from the sidewalk.

          Ronan sped up and slid into a parking space, skidding his tires along the asphalt. Blue peered out the window, and up front, so did Adam.

          “Here?” Adam asked, turning back to Ronan with an eyebrow raised.

          “What, you don’t like fro-yo, Parrish?” Ronan threw back, like the very idea was an affront to everything he stood for.

          They kept bickering as everyone climbed out of the car, but Blue didn’t mind what she recognized as affectionate teasing, and it faded into background noise as she skipped up first to the door and led the group inside the frozen yogurt shop.

          The woman behind the counter smiled at them as they piled in—Noah had finally flickered out of existence again, and frankly, Blue was hopeful but unsurprised, because he seemed to not exist more than exist these days—and she laughed joyfully when Ronan entered, a reaction that Blue had certainly never witnessed or experienced upon Ronan Lynch entering a room.

          Ronan flashed her one of his razor-sharp smiles, but Blue thought it looked fonder than usual, more like it looked when he looked at Adam than the one he wore around strangers or self-destruction.

          He finished ordering his strawberry and chocolate swirl as Blue came up behind him. She put on her most pleasant smile, the kind she used for customers and customer service, and sweetly asked for caramel and peanut butter. She ignored Ronan’s snickering at her demeanor until the women beamed back at her and turned to Adam, and as he was ordering his chocolate-and-sprinkles cone and Gansey his mint, Blue shoved an elbow into Ronan’s ribs and hissed, “There’s no need to be so rude all the time.”

          Ronan pushed her arm away, his smile like steel. “Oh yes there is,” he retorted smoothly.

          Blue rolled her eyes and looked away, knowing there was little use arguing behavior with him. Adam grinned in their direction before turning to Gansey to cough up for his frozen yogurt so Gansey could pay with his credit card; Blue, remembering herself, forced him to take a few bills for herself as well. Ronan watched the display of polite yet adamant exchange with a passive expression. He made no move to pay Gansey; Gansey didn’t seem to expect him to. He swiped his card and they found a table near the window to crowd around while the woman started on their orders.

          Adam pushed in beside Blue, shoving her deeper into the booth until she was by the wall, in the seat across from Gansey’s. Gansey turned to raise his eyebrow at Ronan.

          “Come here a lot then, do you?” he asked, nodding his chin towards the woman behind the counter.

          Ronan shrugged. He seemed unaffected, but most of the time he affected the deportment of being unaffected, and Blue could only tell which was which about half the time. This was not one of those times.

          “Matthew likes the milkshakes,” he said tonelessly. He promptly propped his head in his hand and turned to look across Gansey out the window instead, a clear dismissal of their company.

          Blue rolled her eyes and turned to Adam instead. “So, have you had—”

          Her sentence only made it halfway out of her mouth before she felt someone’s toes nudging the edge of her foot. The angle was wrong for it to have been Adam, since he was beside her and the intrusive foot was most definitely incoming from the front, so unless Noah had materialized beneath the table and was prodding her pseudo cowboy boots (high fashion, no matter what Orla said), either Ronan or Gansey was prodding her foot with his own.

          She doubted it was Ronan, but just in case, she nudged the questionable foot back. Ronan continued to stare morosely and unresponsively out the window, but Gansey’s eyes snapped to hers. A gentle pressure met hers beneath the table.

          “Have I had what?” Adam prompted, drawing Blue’s eyes back to him from where she had been staring, lips parted, across the table.

          Blue forgot what she had been going to ask; to cover for the moment, she quickly invented, “Have you had a chance to come to my house recently? I think Mom wanted to talk to you, after…Persephone…”

          While it was true that her mother had been asking to do a reading, maybe with Adam instead of for him, and also true that Adam hadn’t been past the front walk since that night in the caves—and only then to pick up Blue—she hadn’t meant to bring the mood down quite so much.

          Beneath the table, Gansey’s foot slid in between her own.

          Adam picked at a fray in his sleeve, both hands on the table, his eyes straying from hers. She watched his profile carefully, and finally he gave a jerky little shrug and said, “Yeah. I mean, no, I haven’t.” He paused, then looked up at her, his nails still worrying the fray, and he added reluctantly, “Tell her I’ll try to stop in this weekend.”

          Blue nodded, small and concerned, but before she could decide whether or not pressing would be a good idea, the proprietor of the shop bustled out from behind the counter, cups and cones in hand. Ronan perked up when she came out, and he seemed to come back to himself a little as he accepted his snack with a quiet thank you. The woman handed Blue her cone as well and then hurried back to get the others’. Blue licked at her fro-yo, laughing and batting away Adam as he tried to snatch some of the nuts sprinkled on top of her cone. He jabbed her in the side; she almost flipped the whole thing upside down trying to hold it out of his reach as he tickled her for a taste. Gansey’s foot pressed up against one of hers, and she squeezed his between hers, short and reassuring.

          She managed to keep Adam away from her dessert until the woman came back with his and Gansey’s, and she traded a few cashews and pecans for some of his mini gummi bears. After a minute of trading and tasting, Ronan snorted rudely, and Blue and Adam both stopped in their bartering to look at him.

          Blue wasn’t offended; Ronan did most things rudely.

          He was looking between them with his eyebrows raised in a manner that, on anyone but him, would seem like amusement. Blue propped her elbows on the table and intertwined her fingers to make a net for her to rest her chin, as she speared him with a look that sarcastically declared her preparation to listen to his snide comment.

          He settled his gaze on her when he said, “Are we going to have to listen to you and Parrish fight over fro-yo all day or can we talk about something important?”

          Across from her, Gansey perked up—“something important” only meant one thing to him, one interest that he pursued with single-mindedly intensity—but Blue just stared back at him passively. Nevertheless it was Adam who asked, more curiously than Blue would have,

          “Like what?”

          “Like Cabeswater!” Ronan said loudly. “Aren’t you guys wondering how to get to Glendower from there? There has to be a way in from the forest—”

          “We’re looking—” Blue said crossly, because she got this enough from Gansey without worrying about it from Ronan as well.

          Adam, however, interrupted her. “Ronan, you only care because I care—”

          And Ronan, in turn, cut off Adam: “I’m not your puppy, Parrish, I think I have a little more brainpower than that—”

          They started to interrupt and protest over each other, each getting louder and afforded less and less words every time the other interrupted, and after a minute of this Blue turned to Gansey with her eyebrows raised. Gansey spread his hands, resigned to this, and Blue stifled a giggle behind her hand.

          They went back to their frozen yogurt, ignoring the boys beside them. Beneath the table, Gansey’s foot rubbed slow and steady against hers.

          Blue fell asleep at Monmouth one evening, when they had all been laying around chatting and laughing and she hadn’t been running on enough hours of sleep. She awoke a few hours later on the floor of Gansey’s room, the circle of boys beside her gone, the door shut, the windows dark. She rubbed her eyes as she sat up and looked around, momentarily disoriented by her surroundings, unfamiliar with waking up to this view.

          She sat up more fully. The beer they had been drinking was gone, but their empty cups were strewn about the floor around her. She hadn’t been drunk, but she had thought she was entirely sober and it wasn’t until the startling difference between falling asleep and waking up now, with the world less fuzzy, that she realized she had been a few drinks deep.

          Gansey was asleep in his bed, as she saw when she pulled herself to her feet by his bedframe. She looked down at him for a second, head cocked—Gansey slept on his back, but turned like he was going to shift over to his side at any second. He had the blankets curled around him, his head pushed deep into the pillow. He looked messier, less stately, in sleep—he looked like her Gansey, the mussed one that came out the most when they were alone in his car together, driving hand in hand down the interstate.

          She smiled softly and precisely then realized that she was staring. Blushing lightly, she silently thanked the other boys for no longer being present and then turned and headed out of the room as quietly as she could.

          She kept her hand on the doorknob as she pulled it shut, hoping to be silent, and managed to close the doors with a relatively soft click. She thought she had been triumphant, but then she heard a door open behind her, and she whirled around to find Ronan padding out of his room in a loose tank top and pajama bottoms, squinting in the dim hall light and scratching sleepily at the side of his face.

          “Blue?” he asked, sounding rough with sleep. She stepped closer in response. He shuffled towards her a little more as well and croaked, “Everything okay?”

          Blue nodded, stepping until she met him just in front of his bedroom door. She laid a hand on his arm, placating.

          “I’m fine,” she whispered. “Just woke up. Go back to bed, okay?”

          Ronan nodded, loosely and dazedly, and she very much doubted he had been up for longer than he had been asleep. She felt bad for waking him; she knew how he and Gansey struggled with sleep in the first place without her making things more difficult.

          Ronan pulled away from her with a small smile and shuffled back towards his room. Right before he cleared the threshold, he turned back to her and jerked his thumb towards the other bedroom.

          “Noah’s up,” he said simply, voice sounding just the least bit less cracked than before. Because Noah was always up, Blue assumed he meant that he was around and corporeal. Instead of correcting him, though, she just nodded hastily in acknowledgement, hoping he would go back to bed before he was too awake to get back to sleep quickly. After a second he nodded back at her and retreated to his bedroom, and shut the door firmly behind him.

          Despite knowing she should get home, Blue headed for the third bedroom. She knocked softly so as not to disturb the insomniacs in the apartment, and after a few seconds’ wait, the door creaked open and Noah’s face appeared in the gap.

          “Hey,” he whispered, splitting into a grin when he saw her. He stepped back to let her in and shut the door behind her. “What’s up?” His eyes roamed over her, and he seemed to consider before asking, “Did you just wake up?”

          Blue nodded, still a little bleary from sleep. Noah led her over to the bed pushed against the back wall—well, really he went over to the bed, and she followed him mindlessly and sat crosslegged down the other end of it from where he was leaning against the pillows. She gripped her ankles, and rocked back a little, considering him. The moonlight was striking a line across his face, illuminating brightly onto his pillow. If he slept, she thought, he would be very uncomfortable with the intrusive light always in his eyes.

          “Does Gansey…ever talk about me?” she whispered in a rush. She felt very silly, and very young.

          Noah looked across at her with a small smile on his lips, in his eyes, like he was thinking the same thought but with fondness instead of self-consciousness.

          “Gansey talks about a lot of things,” Noah said, smile turning teasing. “Did you have something specific in mind?”

          Blue rolled her eyes, leaning back on her hands instead and shaking her head so that her hair fell behind her shoulders. “About me,” she repeated, looking at the ceiling and then pinning her gaze hard on Noah. “About…”

          She waved her hand around, in the air beside her, then in front of her face, gesturing inadvertently at her lips. That, she supposed, was the real question anyhow.

          Noah scooted over so that he could lean back on the wall, shifting closer to her in the process. Blue copied him, resting her back against the wall and turning her head to look at him. Their shoulders were only inches apart, but she didn’t feel any of the pull she did with Gansey, the need to be closer, to be pressed together in every way she could get. She wondered if it was something intrinsic about him, or something unique to them, unshared by the rest of the world.

          Noah leaned his head onto her shoulder like he was tired, and she reached up automatically to brush her hand through his hair lightly, soothing whatever anxiousness plagued him. It calmed her too, being close to him like this, sitting in relative silence but for their out-of-sync breathing.

          “Gansey likes you,” Noah said quietly, just as Blue was beginning to suspect that the conversation had been dropped. “It’s just tough…”

          “Because of the death thing, I know,” she sighed. Then, a little louder: “F—Screw this curse!”

          Noah snorted, his body shaking beside hers as he laughed. “Did you just chicken out of cursing?” he asked.

          Blue smacked his thigh, but Noah giggled exactly as long as he wanted before he stopped, and Blue could do nothing about it but pray her light blush went away soon. She waited until he calmed before resuming her slow stroke through his hair, maybe as a reward for sobering. After a few moments in comfortable silence, Blue’s thoughts grew louder, and she bit her lip, wondering if she should voice them.

          Finally, she asked, “Could I kiss you again, Noah?”

          Noah sat up, his eyes wide, but nonjudgmental, she thought, just open and curious and searching the way that Noah often was. He assessed her mood and finally asked flatly, “This isn’t about the same thing as last time, is it?”

          Blue looked away from her, exhaling her held breath. Her fingers picked absently on a thread in her mustard-colored shorts. “No,” she admitted. “This isn’t about kissing for the sake of kissing. I just…”

          She sighed again and looked away, but a second later she felt Noah’s hand lay over her leg, and she looked over at him with her eyebrows drawn. He still looked calm, broadminded as ever.

          “You can kiss me all you like,” he assured her, but then added, “But I’ll never be him.”

          Blue laid her hand on his cheek, aching to reassure him, aching for herself, but she had no words for either of them. After a second she broke eye contact and looked down. “Sorry,” she muttered.

          Noah nudged her chin up, and he was smiling as softly as ever. “It’s okay,” he promised. “We can kiss again if you want. I just want to make sure you’ll be okay with it when we’re done.”

          Blue hesitated, considering. Finally, she nodded.

          She watched him carefully as he leaned towards her, just in case anything flickered in his steady composure, but he remained controlled and sure. Blue sighed a little when their lips met, but she didn’t think it was from the kiss.

          Noah’s lips were soft and pliant beneath hers, his kiss gentle and reassuring. For just a moment, she imagined that she could have this with Gansey too. She pressed towards him, keeping him anchored to her for a few precious seconds before she pulled away, breathing soft against his arm when she rested her forehead on his shoulder.

          They didn’t speak for a long time. Too long; she peeked upward to glance at his expression, but he looked unfazed and sure, purely calm as he wrapped an arm around her.

          “Thank you,” she whispered.

          Noah squeezed her shoulder. “Any time,” he whispered back.

          On Thursday, she walked out of school in the direction of her bike, only to find a beaten-up old Camaro parked directly in front of the bike racks. She blinked at the car for a confused second, wondering about the probability of this collision of worlds—Aglionby and her school did not come from similar spheres, and she was starkly aware that Aglionby boys, those bastard Aglionby boys, did not share spheres with the different kind of bastards that attended her high school, either—before she blinked her way to sanity and yanked open the passenger door.

          “I’ve finally ranked a ride home?” she asked, peering into the driver’s seat.

          Gansey grinned back at her, all pomp and rich-boy confidence. “Put your bike in the back, Jane. We’re taking a drive.”

          Blue stared dubiously at him for a second before he shooed at her and she went to wrangle her bike into the backseat, which required a lot of maneuvering and twisting and resulted in a few cuts on her arms and a lot of grease on her hands. She wiped them unceremoniously on her bare thighs and climbed into the Pig’s passenger seat, slamming the door shut and smiling sunnily at Gansey.

          “Where to?” she asked pleasantly.

          Gansey seemed to be struggling for something; he didn’t immediately respond, and when he shot a seemingly irrepressible glance at her thighs, she assumed he was in some way perturbed by her method of cleanup. Ignoring his reaction entirely—trying hard not to attempt to parse it, really—Blue threw a glance out the windshield at the big brick building of her school and then back at Gansey.

          He seemed to come to himself, the easy smile back on his face, the discontent gone in that quick way only Gansey seemed able to achieve—like it had never been there at all. He threw a smirk at Blue and shifted the car into drive.

          “It’s a surprise,” he said, winking briefly as he turned out the school’s parking lot.

          Blue tried not to let her smile get too fond when she glanced at him. “You’d better have tried really hard if you want to surprise a psychic’s daughter,” she said smugly.

          The look Gansey shot her in return seemed equal parts self-pleased and teasing. Blue rolled her eyes.

          “Do your worst, then,” she said, gesturing grandly out the window in acquiescence.

          Gansey drove in a different direction that they normally did when they went on their night drives together. They never had a true destination in mind, but they often went out to the stretch of road where Blue could drive the car at whatever speeds she wanted, or out to the patch of grass where they stargazed and held hands and pretended not to want to kiss each other.

          He took a different route, but Blue quickly caught on to where they were going anyway.

          “Cabeswater?” she asked dubiously. “You’re taking me to Cabeswater?” She huffed,  more than a little put out despite her best attempts not to assume anything about their little roadtrip, but she had imagined something a little more private and romantic and a little less…Cabeswater.

          He looked across at her crossed arms and shook his head, although he kept to the road that they always took out to the magic forest. “No,” he promised. “Well, yes, but this isn’t a Glendower thing.” At her steadfastly dubious expression, he said, “It’s not! I…”

          Here, curiously, he blushed, a remarkably unGanseylike gesture. It was enough to have Blue drop her guarded, accusatory look and peer at him with more question than judgment.

          “I found this place out there,” he clarified, and she caught him glancing at her in the side mirror. “It’s…it’s really beautiful. You’re gonna love it, trust me.”

          Blue settled back into her seat better. She didn’t look at him when she said, “I do trust you.”

          A brief silence reigned. She didn’t look at him again until they turned down one lane in a fork in the road and he pointed out a deer to her on the side of the road. She laughed, feeling free and wild with the wind blowing through her hair and Gansey warm in the driver’s seat beside her, and when she stretched her arm out the window, palm flat to buffet the streaming breeze, she thought she could feel the magic of Cabeswater reaching out to her even here, seeping through her fingertips. She felt invincible.

          Gansey took a turn at an unnecessary speed, and she let out a surprised, wild laugh as natural momentum swayed her, dragging her back to her seat with a low, swooping feeling in her stomach.

          “That’s dangerous!” she tried to chastise, but she was grinning ridiculously and she could feel her cheeks tinged happily pink.

          Gansey laughed loudly back at her, and as he did, the car sped up faster. Blue glanced, wide-eyed, out the front window, but the long stretch of road in front of them was empty.

          “Don’t be a killjoy, Jane!” he yelled over the wind whipping through the car as he urged them still faster.

          “Who’s complaining?” she shouted back. She stretched her arm further out the window, stretching her seatbelt as she leaned half out of her seat.

          Gansey quirked a brow at her and pushed the car past any point she had ever seen it reach. Her heart was hammering as he leveled the speed out, but still too fast, too dangerous, too insane. A helpless shriek escaped her, and she turned just in time to see another car speeding out of a turn up ahead, from a road hidden from view by the trees lining the road. Gansey, his eyes on her from her shout, followed the line of her finger and she saw the moment realization struck him, his eyebrows jumping up, his mouth falling open. He let out a strangled, “Shit!” and slammed, hard, on the brakes.

          The car jerked to a quick stop, throwing them towards the dash. Gansey’s grip on the steering wheel saved him from falling too far, and Blue’s hands jumped to stop her forehead from colliding where it froze, inches from danger. She whipped around to make sure no cars were behind them where they sat, suspended and gasping, in the middle of the road. The car in front of them pulled around and away, speeding off in the opposite direction.

          Blue turned her eyes on Gansey. He stared back at her with the same shocked look, pulled apart by fear and adrenaline and proximity to each other, making them crazy.

          And then, ridiculously, Gansey threw her a smile, as free and bright as she was right in that moment. It looked stretched to the point of painful, his cheeks red, and all his teeth showing. After a second Blue grew aware that she, surely, looked just as strange, just as jumped up on the adrenaline still pulsing through her, as she watched him and he looked right back, gazes locked, hearts hammering in time with each other.

          After a beat, simultaneously and nonsensically, they began to laugh—loud, unrestricted, chest-deep laughs. Their eyes caught again, and they laughed harder.

          Just the pair of them, laughing their pumping hearts to bursting. They were untouchable.

          They needed another several minutes to get going again, this time at a much more reasonable speed until they pulled up to Cabeswater fifteen minutes later. Gansey cut the engine and they climbed out, and Blue bounced on the balls of her feet as she waited for Gansey to lead the way. He tipped a hand towards the forest, down a footpath she hadn’t been down before as it led in the opposite direction from the dreaming tree and the cave.

          “What were you doing down this way?” she asked, setting a hand on a tree branch so that she could duck underneath and start into the forest beside him.

          He shrugged, and she thought he didn’t look nearly as brazen as he usually did when he admitted, “Looking for a nice place to take you today.”

          Blue stopped short. He was several steps ahead of her when he looked back.

          “What?”

          After a second of staring at each other, Blue bit down on a smile and started walking again, falling back into step with him.

          “You planned this?” she finally answered. “You planned me a…?”

          The word was on the tip of her tongue; she wasn’t sure whether or not it would be dangerous to say. Instead of answering, and before she could properly decide whether or not to even ask, Gansey smiled mischievously at her and grabbed for her hand, entwining their fingers together to pull her along as they wended deeper into the woods. Electricity shot up her fingers, and she gripped at him a little tighter. She admittedly had to perform a light jog to catch up to him, but he slowed down when she was beside him, matching his long stride to her shorter legs. He looked down at her as they helped each other over a fallen branch, a small smile still gracing his lips, and as the terrain evened out somewhat afterwards, she worried he might drop her hand, his excuse lost. He, however, seemed just as content as she to keep them linked, and she squeezed his fingers, that shockwave ripping through her again when he squeezed back.

          They walked another ten minutes until they reached a clearing that seemed to be Gansey’s intended destination, as he stopped at the edge of it and released her hand. She folded her arms behind her back, flexing her fingers and watching as he headed for the middle of the little grassy knoll. When it became apparent that he really was stopping here, she joined him in the middle, where the grass was lushest and a bottle and crate were lying beside a blanket.

          Gansey, sitting on the edge of it, looked up at her and waited.

          Blue studied everything before her a few times to make sure she was not misperceiving anything. When she was sure that there was no other possible, reasonable conclusion, she said, “Did you…make me a picnic?”

          Gansey thumbed at his lip. “No, not really,” he admitted. “I bought the sandwiches and salad and sparkling cider. But I carried it here by myself, if that counts for anything.”

          Blue smiled and folded herself onto the blanket next to him. “That counts,” she assured him, because it did, really. Whether or not he had made all of it himself was irrelevant to the fact that he had done this for her.

          She leaned over him to grab the crate and drag it between them, not at all lost on how his breath caught when her elbow brushed his jeans or her hand fell beside his knee for balance. She smiled cheekily at him when she pulled back, then turned to face him and crossed her legs as she began to dig through the crate. She selected the sandwich marked B, presumably for her, and handed the G-marked one to him without looking up as she continued to rifle through everything. He hadn’t even bothered to peel the price sticker off the salad container, and she tossed the lid aside without looking at it, shoving the crate over to put the salad between them.

          She looked up to find him watching her, expression gentle and half-unreadable. Not thinking too much about it, she looked down and murmured, “Are you waiting for permission to pop that?” as she jerked her thumb at the cider.

          He let out a breathless chuckle and grabbed the bottle, twisting the cap off easily. Only when he looked around after did she look up again.

          “What’s wrong?”

          “Nothing’s wrong,” he said airily. “I forgot glasses, so we have to share this.”

          He shoved the bottle at her. She rolled her eyes and clucked her tongue at him.

          “Typical Gansey,” she sighed dramatically, swiping the bottle and taking a hearty swig. She wiped the back of her mouth off on her hand and passed it back to him.

          He licked his lips a little before wrapping them around the bottle, and she tried not to look too obviously at him or away from him while he drank. Instead, she found herself focusing on the line of his throat, lost in the way it moved and bobbed while he swallowed, how his chest constricted and relaxed when he breathed. When she remembered to look back up at his face, she saw he was already watching her.

          “See something you like?” he teased.

          Blue shook her head, bashful. “Nothing new,” she said.

          They made it through their sandwiches and half the salad without her accidentally complimenting him again, and then they shoved the food and containers to the side so they could lay back together. Her hair fanned out behind her, her arm brushed his, and she was acutely aware of how he shifted closer when he rolled slightly to point out a bird over there, or a noise over there. Before long he was whispering right beside her, his lips by her ear as he breathed out some fact or question.

          She barely noticed that she had closed her eyes until she felt his fingers on the inside of her wrist, tracing something slowly and reverently; she thought it might be a vein, this funny little one that stuck out extra prominently on her right arm. She wanted to open her eyes, to turn her head and face him, but she was afraid of what she would want to do once she had.

          “I wish…”

          The words were a breath, soft and wistful by her ear, and her heart jumped helplessly at the sound.

          “What?” she prompted in a whisper, afraid to disturb the magic around them, between them.

          He laid so close to her that she could feel the shakiness of his inhale before he murmured, “I wish this could be easy.”

          She sighed, and after a long moment, accepted that she would have to break the spell; she opened her eyes. When she turned to him, their foreheads were almost pressed together, but she didn’t feel the same pull she always did. She felt the way he sounded: longing, and lost, and a little sad.

          “What would you do?” she asked. “If this were easy?”

          Gansey blinked, watching her carefully. She stared steadily back. After a minute, she felt his fingers curling around her wrist, securing her arm with him.

          “I would do what we’ve been doing,” he said simply—as though anything between them could be done simply. “I would hold your hand—” As he spoke, he released her to trail his fingers down over her palm, and then weaved his through hers, clasping their hands together on the blanket. “And take you somewhere serene and beautiful,” he added, smiling slightly at the trees around them before locking his gaze back on hers. Then he lifted up onto his elbow, his free hand sweeping her hair off her opposite cheek, and he leaned slightly over her. Her breath caught, but he didn’t move closer, didn’t shift down the way she wished he could. “I’d kiss you,” he breathed out.

          His hand secured itself on the side of her neck, thumb sweeping up over her jaw, and she tilted her chin up like she would if they could close the short distance between them.

          “Is that why you chose this place?” she asked, gazed locked dangerously on his lips. “So we could pretend again?”

          Gansey smiled, and he let her go so he could collapse beside her on his back. She breathed out shakily, willing her heart to slow as he distanced himself. Before she could help herself, she laced their nudging hands back together.

          “No,” Gansey admitted. “This isn’t the only beautiful, serene place I know.”

          “I figured,” Blue laughed. And then, teasing: “I didn’t really think this was the only romantic social setting in your arsenal.”

          Gansey smirked, jabbing lightly with his elbow so she giggled and rolled away, right before he tugged her back close by her hand. She sobered, twisting to face him on her side.

          “It’s not,” he agreed, “but it’s the only place I could do this.”

          She turned her attention to where he swept his hand along the grass beside him, and despite the grove being free of anything but grass and tiny, pretty weeds, he nevertheless brought his hand up with a pretty blue lily flower between his fingers.

          “That’s not funny,” she snarled, while Gansey laughed. She softened and warmed when he leaned to tuck the flower behind her hair, and barely glared when he added, “You look beautiful with that blue lily, Lily Blue.”

          “Is that all you had to show me?” she deadpanned, trying for unimpressed when he laid back down. “A bad pun and a flower I could find at any old florist?”

          He seemed not to believe her acidity, because he was smiling, pleased and smug, when he rolled his head to look at her.

          “No,” he said easily. “Lay back and look up.”

          She watched him for another long moment before complying. She shifted over onto her back, keeping his hand clasped tightly with her. A short squeeze of her hand was the only warning she got before Gansey raised his free hand, pointed at something in the tops of the trees, and started to twirl his index finger around in the air. As it moved, a line of tiny black birds flew out of the leaves and began to swirl and dive and dance with Gansey’s finger as their conductive baton.

          Her eyes traced their path through the air as they twisted and moved gracefully where Gansey sent them; she began to suspect, as his flourishes grew more theatric, that his finger conduction was hardly as necessary as he pretended, but for just the moment she decided to let it go; he had gone through all this trouble, and it really was beautiful. Besides, this wouldn’t be the first time they had left crucial things unsaid.

          Gansey kept the show going for another ten minutes at least, never ceasing in his theatrics, but the display didn’t decline in beauty or awe, and she watched raptly. She caught sight of his expression a few times, determined and set on his little performance, and she smiled to herself before turning back to the birds.

          Finally, he finished off with a spin and sent the birds streaming gracefully back into the trees, and then dropped his arm and turned a lazy grin in her direction.

          “Good?” he stated more than asked.

          She shifted a little closer to him, her shoulder brushing his on the blanket, their hands still twisted together. “It was beautiful,” she assured him.

          Gansey’s answering smile was blinding. After a long moment, he reached over to brush a few strands of hair away from her forehead and pressed his lips firmly to her temple. She closed her eyes; he leaned his forehead against the side of hers, and by her ear, he murmured,

          “One day I’ll learn how to kiss you, Jane.”

          Yes, you will. “I hope not,” she whispered.

          Unsurprisingly, Gansey always lost the quickest at Never Have I Ever. The part that did shock her was that she was only slimly in fifth place with Ronan of all people threatening to take her spot as least experienced—or least adventurous, depending on what questions were being asked.

          Blue was tipsy with beer in her hand and her brain as she looked to her left at Gansey, leaning back on his hands and smiling serenely at all of them huddled together in Monmouth, a severe storm raging on outside. It had come on suddenly and fiercely, trapping them all inside. Ronan had beer, and Noah had a game in mind, so they had all congregated in the main area between their bedrooms and circled up in the middle of the floor.

          Gansey, Blue thought, looked pretty far gone; more so than she was certainly, considering how he’d had to drink for nearly every turn so far. She flicked her gaze back to Noah, who was considering something to say, stroking languidly at an imaginary beard. Beside him, Adam snickered.

          Noah looked at him, and then his eyes landed past him to Ronan, and he suddenly grinned. “Never have I ever,” Noah began, with the air of someone about to lay down what he considered a very mastermind trap, “hooked up with Kavinsky.”

          Everyone turned immediately to Ronan, whose expression closed off fiercely.

          “I’m not answering that,” he snapped.

          “You have to!” Blue and Adam protested at the same time.

          “Ronan,” Noah complained.

          “Have a dare instead,” Gansey suggested.

          They all raised their eyebrows at this new twist to their game, Ronan’s more antagonistic than the rest’s, but even Blue could see the curiosity beneath his irritation.

          After looking around at everyone’s expectant faces, Ronan sighed, a short, incensed exhale. “Fine,” he said. “What’ll it be?”

          Gansey arched an eyebrow at him, looking stately and dangerous, and Blue felt a thrill of anticipation shoot down her spine right before he nodded with his chin and said, “Kiss Noah.”

          As Ronan’s expression turned deadly—while Blue and Adam started falling in on themselves laughing at the prospect—Gansey sat up so he could spread his hands.

          “It’s his question you won’t answer,” he said. Then he looked at Noah and asked, “Noah?”

          Noah was also grinning, no doubt finding Ronan’s discomfort privately hilarious. He made an exaggerated kissing face at Ronan and teased, “What? Don’t you wanna kiss me, lover?”

          “Shut up,” Ronan snarled, kicking out with his foot at the dead boy, but even if his legs had been long or flexible enough to kick him with Adam in the way, Blue was relatively sure that Noah wasn’t corporeal enough to make contact. She wasn’t sure how far gone he had to be until he couldn’t be touched. Ronan had missed him anyway.

          “Come on,” Noah said, now with a mocking pout, apparently unbothered by the sight of Ronan getting up onto his knees to gain the advantage of height intimidation. “Don’t you wanna—”

          The rest of his sentence was cut off by Ronan grabbing the sides of his face and ramming their mouths together. The kiss was aggressive and angry, just like Ronan; Adam was laughing again, now with Gansey joining in, and Blue catcalled enthusiastically until they broke apart a few seconds later.

           “There you go, assholes,” Ronan spat while he settled back into his spot.

          Blue giggled at the look on Noah’s face, shell-shocked and awkward, until he wiped the back of his hand across his mouth and started chuckling too.

          “Good kisser,” Noah said, mostly to Adam.

          “Go fuck yourself,” said Ronan. “I’ll leave right now.”

          “No, come on,” Blue complained, while Gansey said, “We’re just teasing, relax. Blue, your turn.”

          She tapped her chin dramatically in thought, and the game went on. They made it another two rounds around before Adam starting hiccupping from all the beer he had drunk, and Gansey dropped his head to Blue’s shoulder with a lazy smile and Ronan said, “Never have I ever had a crush on Blue.”

          All four of the others blushed immediately. Adam groped around on the floor behind him until he found a crumpled up tissue to throw at Ronan’s head, and once he had, Ronan poked him in the thigh until he took his drink. Blue, busy watching this spectacle, did not immediately notice that Noah was looking pointedly at Gansey. When she did, though, she raised her eyebrows and flushed again as she turned to look down at him.

          Gansey sat up. He closed his eyes and muttered what Blue thought was a curse to himself before picking up his cup. The movement alerted Adam and Ronan to other debacles besides themselves, and they turned as one. Adam let out an audible breath, and Blue sucked her bottom lip between her teeth when he let out an even more audible, “Shit.”

          Gansey set his cup down carefully and raised his eyes to Adam’s. He looked haughty, determined, and unruffled, and that’s how Blue knew he was incredibly anxious.

          “Adam—” Gansey started, when nobody spoke.

          Adam cut him off. “It’s fine,” he said tersely. He glanced at Blue, and she knew that he was remembering what she had told him about the death list, and that he was putting together even more pieces that he hadn’t known existed in the same puzzle before. “It’s fine,” he repeated, a little more levelly.

          Ronan glanced at Adam. Adam glanced back, and he softened. The third time, when he said, “I’m fine,” he really sounded like he meant it.

          Noah glanced around the circle once before clearing his throat and saying, “Uhm, my turn?” and Blue jumped at the chance to pass the awkward moment, nodding vigorously at him in wordless encouragement. They had skipped over Adam but he didn’t seem eager to press the point. Noah smiled a little at her, and when the others had settled—Blue noticed Gansey had shifted infinitesimally away from her but didn’t mention it, despite the way the bottom of her stomach dropped out uncomfortably—he set about thinking up a new never for their game.

          Gansey elbowed her in the side while Noah was thinking, and after a brief glance at the others confirming that Adam and Ronan were talking amongst themselves, Blue turned so Gansey could whisper in her ear.

          “Sorry,” he murmured, and she shivered when she felt his hand trail down her side. “I didn’t want him to find out like this…I should have told him sooner.”

          She smiled sadly at him. “There’s nothing to tell him,” she whispered back. She looked down at her lap, and then, summoning both her breath and her courage, she tentatively laid her hand on Gansey’s thigh. He stiffened, but she took heart from how he relaxed back towards her a second later.

          “Isn’t there?” Gansey asked.

          Blue sighed. “What would you have said?” she challenged more than asked. “That sometimes I call you at night and we pretend to argue but we both wonder if I’ll call back again tomorrow? That sometimes I drive your car on the interstate and we maybe hold hands for a few seconds? How we have picnics in the forest and don’t kiss?”

          Gansey looked troubled at that. “That’s not all there is,” he insisted.

          “No,” she agreed, which at least made some of the tension evaporate off his shoulders. She wondered if he was as concerned with that ever-present question—what are we?—as she was. “But that’s what we do. And the rest of it…is just us.”

          She knew she wasn’t making any sense. Gansey seemed unbothered, maybe because he was much more muddled by drink than she was, and he pressed his forehead to her shoulder and nodded slightly.

          “Just us,” he breathed. His head rocked gently from side to side against her shirt, and then he looked up at her, frowning. He opened his mouth to say something else but then Noah finally spoke, interrupting all other conversation.

          “Never have I ever had a pet.”

          “Fuck you, Czerny.”

          “Hey, don’t complain. Blue, your turn.”

          “Never have I ever had shoes more expensive than my bike.”

          “Never have I ever had a dad disappear mysteriously.”

          “I hate you,” said Blue.

          “Just know that I know where you live,” said Ronan. “Never have I ever...died.”

          “That’s not fair!” Noah complained.

          “It is what it is,” said Ronan. “Adam, go.”

          “Never have I ever cried while watching Titanic.”

          “Are we all just ganging up on me now?” Noah shouted over Blue and Ronan laughing. “Stop it!”

          “Never have I ever said I love you to a flower garden,” Blue piped up.

          “It’s my turn!” Noah protested. “And yes you have!”

          “So you both drink,” Gansey reasoned. “Never have I ever literally ghosted out on a check.”

          “You guys,” Noah said desperately, to no avail.

          “Never have I ever tried to steal a dog from a pet store.”

          “Never have I ever had people take drunk videos of me doing karaoke!”

          “My turn!” Noah shouted before they could skip him again.

          He looked around the circle at each of them, and Blue followed his gaze, delighting in the laughing faces of her friends. For the moment they were all light and happy and carefree, and she didn’t care that they had the drink to blame for it. For just a moment, everything was amazing—at least until Noah snapped his fingers triumphantly and crowed,

          “Never have I ever kissed Noah!”

          All eyes snapped to him, and three mouths dropped open for a split second before the barrage of protests came, overflowing the room with indignation.

          “That was one time—”

          “That’s not fucking fair—”

          “That was a secret!”

          Noah rocked back laughing, his arms wrapping around his stomach as he collapsed into hysterics, evidently thrilled with himself for that bit of cunning. When the shouting had died down a little, and Noah had composed himself, the fifth voice spoke up—

          “When the hell did you guys all kiss Noah?” Adam demanded, looking, of all things, offended.

          “One time,” Blue explained, beseeching understanding from the rest. “One time! You know I can’t kiss anyone—”

          “Wait,” Ronan said, “what?”

          Blue ignored him. “—and since Noah’s already dead, it seemed the only chance I’d get to have a real kiss! I mean, unless Ronan or something wanted to kiss me, because we all know he’s not my soulmate—”

          “No thanks,” Ronan interrupted again, scrunching his face up in distaste at the thought. “No offense, but I’m more into—”

          He waved his hands around in what Blue assumed was a gesture for boys and then shot a subtle glance to the side, but Blue was the only one who noticed; everyone else was looking at her.

          “Right,” she said, still determinedly not looking at Gansey. “So, yes. I kissed Noah. The end.”

          “Actually, not the end,” Noah piped up cheerfully. “A few weeks ago she kissed me again.”

          “Noah!”

          “You could always kiss me one more time if you wanted,” he teased, while the others stared between them in shock. He made an exaggerated kissy face at her, and she groped around for one of Gansey’s empty beers to chuck at his head. “Oh come on, Blue! I know you’re secretly in love with me!”

          Her cheeks were hot, so she tried to infuse her voice with enough venom to offset it. “Come on! I was really upset about not being able to kiss—anyone,” she stumbled briefly, and then picked back up with vigor, “so I kissed him again. Look, it’s no big deal. Obviously it’s never going to happen again!”

          “Never say never,” Ronan snickered.

          “Shut up right now or I’ll kiss you too,” she shot back at him.

          “Alright, enough!” Adam had to raise his voice to be heard. “What about you two?”

          Ronan held up his hands. “You just saw mine,” he said. His expression abruptly shifted to sly as he raised an eyebrow across the circle, jerking his chin a little. “What about you, Gansey? When’d you foray into my neck of the woods?”

          Blue, having momentarily forgotten Gansey’s confession, forgot about not looking at him as she twisted her entire body in his direction, gripping onto her crossed ankles as she leaned forward.

          “Yeah, Gansey,” she teased. “What happened to your crush on me? I’ll admit, I’m nowhere near as handsome as Noah, and he’s definitely got me beat in height—but I didn’t take you as a superficial kind of guy.”

          “Stop it.” He tipped his head back and groaned loudly. “Okay, listen. Stop it. It’s no big deal. It was back, way back—Ronan had just moved in here…Noah kept talking about how he hadn’t been kissed in seven years. I know, I know, I thought he was exaggerating, okay? And we were holed up in my bed because of the storm outside, the power had gone out—Ronan had already gone back to his room—

          “Alright, alright!” he shouted, tripping over his own recount as everyone’s laughter escalated to a volume that made storytelling difficult. “Relax over there, Parrish. I kissed him and we agreed never to talk about it again!” This, he threw at Noah, along with a glare. “I didn’t know what else to do! And then we drank hot chocolate and went to bed.”

          “The same bed,” added Noah, causing Blue to choke a bit trying to get all of her giggles out at once.

          Gansey’s cheeks were bright red. “Like none of you have ever fallen asleep in a pile—”

          “We cuddled,” cut in Noah in a stage-whisper to Blue. Then he turned to Adam and Ronan, and with raised eyebrows, added, “He was the big spoon.”

          The pair of them turned to Gansey.

          “Aww,” Ronan threw at him, while Adam jutted out his bottom lip in silent agreement.

          “Screw all of you,” Gansey muttered. He picked up his beer and chugged down a generous amount.

          Blue slipped her arms through the one he had planted on the floor between them and squeezed. “It’s sweet,” she said to the others, right before she turned a wide, teasing smile on Gansey.

          Gansey scoffed, the sound rough like it started in the very back of his throat.

          “Like none of you have ever kissed each other,” he grumbled.

          This sobered them, and the four of them looked between each other with mingled curiosity and challenge. Blue glanced at Noah and knew he was wondering the same thing as she; Noah’s eyes were questioning, Ronan’s guarded. Noah seemed downright delighted; his kisses, after all, had all been already divulged.

          Gansey, seeming satisfied with his success at diverting their attentions, smiled smugly and stood up clumsily to swagger his way towards the bathroom. Blue watched him go for a moment before standing abruptly as well.

          “I need to—check on something,” she said lamely, then threw Noah a significant glance and headed in the same direction as Gansey.

          She knocked on the bathroom door, raps light and fast. Gansey shouted something from inside, and she knocked again, impatient this time.

          More indistinct yelling greeted her, and then the sound of a toilet flushing, a faucet running, and his voice, more intelligible than before: “What?”

          “It’s me,” she called softly.

          “I’m a little—”

          “Let me in,” she demanded. No malice, just a command.

          After a brief pause, the door creaked open. She pushed it the rest of the way open and stepped inside, shutting the door again behind her and enclosing them in the small space. Monmouth’s bathroom wasn’t particularly large, at least as not as much as she thought it should be relative to the rest of the building; it was longer than it was wide. She set her eyes on Gansey and said nothing.

          After a beat of silence, he broke.

          “I had to pee, Blue.” He sounded nonplussed as he gestured pointlessly at the toilet behind him. And then, “Why did you come in here?”

          She bit her lip and looked at him through the soft layer that the beer had constructed between her and the rest of the world, turning everything warm and lovely. When he continued to just look at her, she crossed the distance between them and stood to wind her arms around his neck.

          Despite his small sound of surprise, he hugged her back immediately, squeezing her when she pressed her face into his shirt.

          “I’m not sorry I kissed Noah,” she said.

          Gansey stilled in her arms, and she pulled back, stepping out of his hold to better look at him. He blinked confusedly at her, and finally managed, “What?”

          Blue groaned. She dragged her fingers through her hair a few times, rough and quick, knowing that she would only expedite its frizzing and not caring enough to stop. She spun away from him, pacing between him and the door a few times as she struggled to collect her thoughts. Finally, she paused, spinning back to look at him.

          “I’m…not sorry,” she said again, weighing her words carefully. “I would do it again. But I don’t…I don’t want to kiss Noah.”

          Gansey just stared at her, clearly unsure where this was going. “Okay? Me neither?”

          She huffed, pushing past him and hopping on the counter beside the sink. They were slightly closer to eye-level this way, though when he stepped nearer to her, she still had to tip her head back to keep his gaze.

          “I don’t want to kiss Noah,” she said, miserably. “I only did it because…because I can’t kiss anyone, and…it was easier. To kiss him and wish it was someone else than to kiss nobody and wonder what it’s like.”

          She knew she wasn’t making any sense. Gansey paused, looking like he was thinking over her words, and she fought the urge to bury her face in her hands and forget this conversation ever started. Blue grimaced at him.

          “So…” he began, then stopped. He licked his lips and tried again. “So, there’s someone that you do want to kiss?”

          If Blue had known she would be blushing her way through this, she never would have followed him into the bathroom. As it was, she nervously (and unsuccessfully, as it fell right back along her cheeks) tucked her hair behind one ear and avoided looking at him for a long time.

          Finally, she looked him in the eye and said, “Yes.”

          Gansey’s nod, when it came, was slow and almost sleepy. He came even closer, and Blue’s heartrate skyrocketed.

          “Is he in this room?” Gansey asked.

          Blue swallowed. “Yes.”

          Gansey’s brow furrowed. Without thinking, Blue reached to smooth the wrinkles out with her index finger, and Gansey laughed, his entire body unwinding on the exhale.

          “I think he wants to kiss you too,” he said ruefully.

          “You think?”

          “I know,” he amended. “I know he wants to kiss you.”

          Blue sighed then, looking down at her feet where they began swinging back and forth, her heels occasionally knocking into the handle on the cabinet under the sink. “So, he wants to kiss me, and I want to kiss him, but I can’t kiss anybody. What do you think we should do?”

          Gansey’s touch surprised her into looking back up, and he brushed a hand over her temple, thumb rubbing softly across her cheekbone when he moved to cradle her jaw, his fingers gripping her chin.

          “I think you should stick to non-kisses out on the highway,” he said. She frowned. He added, “Maybe some non-kisses at his house too. Or outside yours. In front of his friends. You two could not-kiss anywhere you’d like.”

          “What about Adam?”

          “What about Adam?” he returned passively. “I love him, he’s my brother. But…”

          Blue smiled a little, weak but present as she gazed the miles and miles up at him. “Are you asking me to not-kiss you in public?” she asked. “Hold your hand and not-kiss you at dinner?”

          Gansey laughed. “You could not-kiss me in my car, too, when I pick you up from school. Oh, and I could start picking you up from school. We could even not-kiss right now, if you want.”

          Blue smiled and lifted her hands from where they were curled around the edge of the countertop, and she spread them across his face and neck as she pulled him down to her level. He leaned down, closing around her, and Blue only stopped when their lips were close enough to be dangerous. After a few seconds of suspended breathing, Blue let him go.

          “There,” she said, like she wasn’t breathing a little heavier than she had been before. “I just not-kissed you right here.”

          Gansey scrubbed a hand through his already messy hair and looked away, out the window at the night sky before turning back to her.

          “Do you want to be my girlfriend, Blue?”

          She only froze for a microsecond. “Did you just ask me out while we’re in your bathroom?”

          He laughed at that. “Alright, fine. Do you want to go to my room so I can ask you there?”

          Blue grinned, nodding and stretching her hands out. Gansey took them, helping her hop down from the counter, but he kept one of her hands wrapped in his as he led her back out into the main room. Blue twined their fingers together and followed.

          The room was empty when they came out, and they started towards Gansey’s room, and everything was almost kept a secret from everyone, if it hadn’t been for Blue. Her mistake was being cold. She shivered, and Gansey asked if she wanted a blanket, and she said yes, so he led her (still by the hand) over to the closet where they kept spare towels and sheets and the like.

          For a moment, when Gansey pulled open the door, Blue wasn’t sure what she was looking at. Then the pieces came together, and she let out a delighted shriek, and Adam and Ronan, who had previously been kissing ferociously, startled and jumped apart.

          Ronan said, “Shit!” and Gansey said, “What the hell?” and Blue said, “Oh my god!” and Adam turned beet red in one of his special blushes that fanned all the way to his ears.

          “Why the hell are you two in the closet?” Gansey shouted.

          Blue snorted. “I don’t think anybody’s in the closet anymore,” she pointed out.

          Ronan aimed a punch at her arm, which she dodged. She stuck her tongue out at him.

          “Ronan has a room!” Gansey protested.

          Adam shrugged, though he was still bright red. “Closet was closer?” he suggested, and it sounded like a question.

          Gansey shook his head. Blue, on the other hand, was still thrilled.

          “Well, this works out really well! Because me and Gansey were just on our way to his room so he could ask me out without a toilet nearby, so this all works out! Nobody’s feelings are hurt! Adam, could you get me a blanket?”

          Ronan rolled his eyes, and Gansey was making a face, but when Blue met Adam’s eyes, they were both smiling. Not the type she had been before, not alight with teasing or false joy, and his was devoid of the offence that had overtaken him earlier, when Gansey had admitted his crush in the circle. They were both genuinely happy for each other.

          Adam stretched up to fish one of the thicker blankets off the top shelf, and she smiled sunnily at him and Ronan as she bundled it in her arms and pulled Gansey away, shutting the closet door cheekily behind them.

          She heard them go into Ronan’s room as soon as she shut the door on Gansey’s, and she was still laughing a little as she wrapped her blanket around her shoulders and joined him on the bed. She bounced a little as she threw herself down, meeting him over by the wall.

          “So, go on,” she said, like they hadn’t been briefly detoured by their friends’ romantic endeavors. “You had something to ask me?”

          Gansey rolled his eyes, but he seemed cleared of the surprise he’d had upon stumbling in on his friends kissing. He turned to face her, and she watched him expectantly.

          “Blue, do you wanna be my girlfriend?”

          She gripped her heart in feigned shock, her mouth falling open accordingly. “Oh my, wow!” she said. “This is so unexpected!”

          Gansey shook his head while she collapsed in giggles.

          “Blue?” he reminded her patiently after awhile.

          “Right, right. Sorry,” she said blithely.

          She sat up, cleared her throat, and calmed as she took his hands in hers and squeezed. He squeezed back, and something warm and fluttery erupted in her chest.

          “Yeah, I do.”

          For a second they did nothing. And then he was laughing, and so was she, and he lifted an arm to accommodate her when she pressed up against his side. He wrapped his arm around her shoulder.

          They didn’t say much, and went to bed shortly afterwards, still wrapped around each other as much as was comfortable. Gansey laid on his back, his arm out, and she used his bicep as a pillow while she curled against his side. He wasn’t asleep yet—she doubted he would be for awhile—but she was warm and contented and felt very at ease, very at home, right here with him, in this place with all her friends. His hand trailed slowly up and down her arm, and she traced her hand across his stomach, spiraling her finger aimlessly against his t-shirt. Beneath it, his skin was warm, his scent comforting as it wrapped around her.

          She never thought she would get to be here, with him, in his bed and feeling their breathing even out in tandem. She splayed her hand across his chest, his heartbeat strong and steady against her palm.

          “Gansey?” she whispered.

          He turned his face towards her. His eyes were closed, and he nosed sleepily at her hair. “Hm?”

          “One day I’ll figure out how to kiss you, too.”

          She shut her eyes after that. When she fell asleep, she didn’t dream of magic forests or raven kings or tragic prophecies. With Gansey warm at her side, her friends thriving and alive and nearby, Blue dreamt peacefully and easily, her senses all filled up with home.