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DC couldn't have gotten hit with worse fucking weather the day of the city's largest beer festival.
Despite the decent temperature, overhead, gray clouds lumbered low, a dense ceiling that occasionally spat rain at DC’s lovely concrete and brutalist architecture, and most Snallygaster attendees donned raincoats or held umbrellas above themselves and above the crowd to fight off Mother Nature's onslaught from the heavens. Ronan Lynch and Adam Parrish, on the other hand, had not entirely prepared for the weather. Ronan hadn't anyway; he just wore his standard black leather jacket, which he guessed was waterproof enough. Adam at least wore a raincoat, one of the cheap plasticky kinds that would make him sweat his ass off but would keep him dry enough as rain pummeled the hundreds—possibly thousands—of attendees as they wandered a barricaded Pennsylvania Avenue.
Piss poor weather or not, more than three hundred beers lay in wait for them, and the two young men—barely old enough to partake in the event—didn't know where to begin.
Or even possibly want to begin.
"Why did I agree to this?" Adam asked as they stopped at a folding table just inside the event's entrance to pick up the slightly-smaller-than-normal stemless wine glasses they'd use for tastings all afternoon. "I don't even like beer."
"You said yes when I asked if you wanted a ticket," Ronan replied. He held the tasting glass up, surprised it was actually glass, not plastic, and resisted the urge to smash it on the street. Between the festivities and the weather, enough of that would probably happen naturally. Whoever had to clean up the road before it reopened to vehicular traffic was going to have a hell of a time making sure there’d be no flat tires in the future. "You didn't have to come."
Apparently having the same thought process about what material they’d used for the tasting glass, Adam grimaced a little as he held his up. "I wasn't doing anything else," he said. "And when I said yes, I didn't know the weather was going to be so—wet."
"Nothing's keeping you here, Parrish. You can go home." Ronan used his glass to point back in the direction they'd walked from. "Metro's that way."
Not that he wanted Adam to leave, but Ronan sure as shit wouldn't make him stay. Not that he could make Adam stay—if Adam didn't want to be there, he'd leave on his own. Probably steal a page out of Ronan's book and Irish goodbye while Ronan used a porta potty. Or he'd silently have a horrible time until Ronan felt so bad about it he made them both leave.
But, thank Mary and Jesus and all twelve disciples, Adam said, "No." Which he followed shortly with, "I paid sixty dollars for this and I can't get it back."
Because Adam would put up with being miserable if it meant not wasting money. And Ronan paying for Adam’s ticket had never been an option, even though he'd desperately wanted to. For one, Adam had always needed to pay his own way for everything—as soon as he'd agreed to the festival, he'd asked Ronan how much it had cost with fees and the exact amount showed up in Ronan’s Venmo thirty seconds later. For two, paying for Adam’s ticket would have made the afternoon feel distinctly like a date—another thing Ronan desperately wanted—but pushing their friendship into uncharted waters didn't hold much appeal, not when he couldn't tell if Adam would even entertain the idea.
"Then let's do this," Ronan replied, holding his tiny glass up toward Adam until Adam reluctantly tapped his glass against Ronan's in the most lackluster toast Ronan had ever heard. Then the two of them made their way toward the crowds, Adam deftly skirting puddles to keep his sneakers as dry as he could while Ronan sloshed right through them, his combat boots impervious to the aquatic onslaught.
A shit ton of breweries populated the navy tents lining both sides of Pennsylvania Avenue and the other two streets that met to make not a traffic circle, but a traffic triangle in front of the National Gallery of Art. From the list Ronan looked at online, some of the brewers had come all the way from California, and some had come from Europe, long ass trips to pour some beer for an afternoon, but he wasn't about to start complaining. All those breweries meant a lot of beer to taste, and he'd be damned if he didn't at least make a dent in the hundreds of beers on tap around him.
"Where do you want to start?" he asked as they neared the first row of tents. The brewery at the end had already accumulated a hefty line, which gave Ronan the urge to avoid it, no matter how good their beers might have been.
"This is your show, Ronan."
"Yeah, yeah. I don't even like beer. You just haven't had the right one." Ronan scanned the closest tents until he found the shortest line and pointed. "There. That one."
Adam used his glass to make an after you gesture, and Ronan led the way.
In line for that first brewery, tables turned. Adam collected skills and knowledge like everyone else collected groceries, and Ronan usually turned to him with questions of the fact-finding or hypothetical variety. With wide-ranging realms of expertise—or at least expertise enough to know what he talked about—Adam might as well have been a walking dictionary, and if Ronan asked something Adam didn’t know, Adam found out and then filled Ronan in with more information than he’d ever needed.
For a question he’d probably already forgotten asking.
Beer, however, happened to be one of Ronan’s few areas of expertise. Because he contained multitudes, his others were street racing and Latin, and two of those paired better than the others. But, for once, Ronan got to flex his knowledge of all things hops when they neared the front of the line and Adam asked him, “Which one should I get?”
Peering over the shoulder of the woman in front of him—incredibly easy considering she was short and he was tall—Ronan looked at the sign of the brewery’s offerings: two IPAs—a Hazy and a West Coast Style—and a festbier. Ronan had known Adam for over five years, but he wouldn’t have had to know him that long to realize Adam drank copious amounts of black coffee, so much so that if he didn’t have a cup in hand, he’d have one soon. “Go with the West Coast,” Ronan said, betting Adam wouldn’t mind the bitterness.
The bet paid off. After the guy from the brewery filled both their tasting glasses with the West Coast IPA—completely ignoring the line marking three ounces etched into the glasses—they moved a little away from the tent and Adam held the hood of his navy blue raincoat down over his dusty hair as he tipped his head back and took a tentative sip of his beer. Ronan watched his jaw move back and forth for a moment before Adam held his glass up in front of him, raising his fair eyebrows in something like surprise as he said, “Oh. That’s—okay.”
“Jesus, just say it’s good.”
Adam pressed his lips together in a thin line as he looked at Ronan, unimpressed. “Fine. It’s good.”
“See?” Ronan grinned, taking a less tentative sip from his own glass. The IPA had the bitterness and chewiness and hoppiness that made Ronan salivate, and he mentally gave the brewer props for making a damn fine IPA. “I told you. You just haven’t had the right beers. Put your brain on the back burner today, Parrish. I’m going to be your sherpa up the Mount Everest of good—no, great—beers”
Rolling his eyes, Adam didn't stop himself from laughing before he took another sip of his beer and said, "Alright. Okay. Not the back burner thing, but alright. Be my sherpa."
After he took another swig to finish off the contents of his glass, Ronan clapped Adam on the shoulder, and if he left his hand there for a few seconds longer than necessary, neither of them commented on it. Ronan just waved his empty glass toward another brewery with a short line and told Adam, "Then you better keep up."
The second tent they stopped at had another West Coast IPA, and so did the third, and Adam tried both of them while Ronan opted for a Hazy Double IPA at one tent and a Wet Hop Pale Ale at the other. No one pouring beer had any respect for the fill line on their glasses, so by the time they got in line for a fourth brewery, they’d both probably had the equivalent of a full beer. No stranger to drinking, Ronan didn’t feel anything—yet—but when they went out or had a night in with their other friends Blue and Gansey, Adam drank sparingly. He was a competitive little shit though, and Ronan didn’t want him to bite off more than he could chew by really trying to keep up with Ronan, and as they waited in line for their next beers, Ronan asked, “You good?”
“Why wouldn’t I be good?” Adam replied, angling himself toward Ronan. Three tastings in, Adam Parrish remained the picture of sobriety. No pink tinted his cheeks—or the tips of his ears where Ronan could see them beneath Adam’s hood, because the few times he’d witnessed Adam get tipsy, those had gotten pink too—and Adam’s deep-set blue eyes hadn’t gone glassy. His eyelashes had started sticking together, but Ronan thought that had more to do with the damp afternoon than the beer.
Lifting his free hand to scrape raindrops off his buzz cut, Ronan shrugged a shoulder. “Just trying to make sure I won’t have to carry your ass home.”
“For all you know, I could be carrying your ass home.”
Ronan snorted as he pictured Adam trying to physically pick him up. He had lean, ropy muscle from years of working manual jobs to pay for the private high school where they’d met as teenagers, then kept up so he had expendable income while he went to Georgetown on a full-ride scholarship. Still, Ronan had had twenty pounds on him thanks to an additional three inches of height and almost three years of singlehandedly reviving his family’s farm while his friends had fucked off to college. Adam probably could pick him up, if only out of sheer spite and to prove that he could, and the thought of that made Ronan laugh again. “Yeah, I don’t think so, Parrish.”
Adam turned away from him so they could shuffle up in line, but then he bumped his shoulder into Ronan’s a little firmly. When he backed away, he didn’t step as far from Ronan as he’d been. “Guess we’ll see, Lynch.”
By the time they’d hit a dozen tents, Ronan did start to see the effect of the tastings they’d had so far. The euphoric, floaty quality of the early stages of drunkenness had settled into his head after an astoundingly strong Hazy Quadruple IPA—15% and Ronan had hardly tasted the alcohol in it at all—but his eyesight sharpened a little, at least on the things he could focus on: the blue rooster on the roof of the art museum, the green dragon costumes some people wore, the few freckles left over from summer scattered across the bridge of Adam’s nose and his gaunt cheeks. Adam had opted out of the 15% beer, but a random assortment of other IPAs and a few Hefeweizens had succeeded in pinking his cheeks and loosening his tongue a little, enough that while they waited in another line he started complaining about school, something Ronan almost never heard from him.
“Wait a second,” Ronan said, putting his palm up like a traffic cop would hold up a stop sign, only his hand was slightly too close to Adam’s face. “Is this you admitting higher education is a farce?”
“It’s not a farce.” Adam batted Ronan’s hand away, then he held his palm up to the sky and felt for raindrops before pulling the hood of his raincoat down when he didn’t feel any. Ruffling his hand through his hair, Adam sighed, though Ronan couldn’t tell if his sigh had something to do with college or with the sound of a glass shattering on pavement a few feet away. “It’s just—not what I expected.”
“What did you expect when you chose political economy for your major?”
“Something more interesting, I guess? I have to finish a paper for my behavioral economics class by Monday and every time I look at my laptop to work on it, I feel like my eyes are bleeding.”
“I know you want to be some big shot DC politics bro,” Ronan said as they made it to the front of the line, pausing their conversation so he could ask for a Dry-Hopped Witbier and Adam could request a Belgian Blonde Ale, and as soon as they’d gotten their beers, he continued, “but what the hell about political economy ever sounded interesting? You’re barking up the wrong tree, man. Kind of the least interesting field ever.”
Adam smiled a little—so small Ronan wouldn’t have seen it if he hadn’t been looking—and took a sip of his new beer before he said, “Yeah. If I wanted interesting, I should have studied art history or something.”
Gagging at the reference to his older brother Declan’s major, Ronan took a long sip of his Witbier to get the disgusting taste out of his mouth that was always brought on by the mere thought of his older brother. Swiping the back of his hand over his mouth to get foam off his upper lip, Ronan wiped it off on his jeans as he said, “So change your major.”
“I’m a junior,” Adam replied. “It’s a little late for that.”
“When has that ever stopped you before? Georgetown would be ass over tits to keep the great Adam Parrish enrolled for another year.”
Before Adam ducked his head to look down at his glass, Ronan swore his cheeks turned a deeper shade of pink, one that even reached the tips of his ears as he shrugged and took another sip of his beer. Any additional color had left his cheeks by the time he looked back up at Ronan though, a grimace on his lips as he said, “I don’t like this one.”
Taking Adam’s glass from him, Ronan downed the Belgian Blonde Ale and grimaced too as he handed Adam back his empty glass. Reluctantly, Adam took it, but not until after he’d grimaced at Ronan and raised one of his fair eyebrows like Ronan was going to give him cooties, which Ronan thought was ridiculous. They’d spent high school picking scabs off of one another after stupid stunts like using Ronan’s BMW to drag one another around on a moving dolly, which provided a better opportunity to infect Adam with something than drinking from the same glass.
“Yeah, that’s gross. Come on,” Ronan said, all thoughts of poking and prodding Adam further about school leaving his head as he flung his arm around Adam’s shoulder and directed them toward another row of tents, “let’s find you something better.”
They found Adam something better—a Hazy Double IPA with orange blossom honey—then they found Ronan something better—a Black IPA with four different kinds of hops—and then they both found something better, and something better, and something better until Adam wrapped his hand around Ronan’s bicep as he asked, “Is that one from Wales?”
“Where?” Ronan replied, reeling his head around to look at the tents around them. Each had the name of the brewery displayed on the front, with the brewery’s location right beneath it. So far they’d had beers from multiple states, Germany, and Belgium, but nothing from the United Kingdom. Ronan hadn’t even seen any breweries from England, Scotland, Northern Ireland, or Wales—the country their friend Gansey was focusing his history degree on—and he still didn’t, though that might have been because his vision had become significantly less sharp and things were starting to go a little blurry.
“There.” Adam kept his grip on Ronan’s arm, getting closer to Ronan so his chest almost touched Ronan’s back as Adam held his empty glass up, one finger pointing to a tent fifteen yards away. Sure enough, beneath the brewery’s name, in bold white letters, the location read WALES. “We should try what they have. Make Gansey jealous.”
When Ronan looked over at Adam, he liked the bit of glint caught in Adam’s eye, and the looseness of the smile playing at one corner of Adam’s lips. “We should get a picture,” Ronan said, even though they hardly ever took pictures together, or of one another. “Send it to him.”
“Yeah.” Adam laughed before propelling Ronan forward through the crowd toward the Welsh brewery. Ronan went willingly, and Adam didn’t really need to push him, but Ronan didn’t say anything about it. He’d have gone anywhere for Adam. Plus, he really liked the way Adam’s hand felt around his arm.
After they each got pours of beers from Wales—a barrel-aged Farmhouse Ale for Adam and an unfiltered dry cider for Ronan—Adam fumbled his phone from his pocket and asked a passerby to take their photo with the Welsh brewery’s tent in the background. The idiotic way Ronan smiled as he held up his glass for the picture had absolutely nothing to do with Adam putting his arm around Ronan’s waist.
“Oh God, this is disgusting,” Ronan said after forcing himself to swallow the mouthful of cider he drank after Adam got his phone back and texted their photo to Gansey. “Give me yours. I need this taste out of my mouth.”
“No.” Adam scowled and took a healthy sip of his beer, and from the way he squeezed his eyes shut as he swallowed, it kind of made Ronan glad he’d refused. “Ugh,” Adam choked out, looking like he wanted lick his sleeve to get the taste of the Farmhouse Ale off his tongue. “You don’t want this.” He took Ronan’s glass and dumped both their drinks on the ground in a crude move that kind of impressed Ronan. “We won’t tell Gansey they were terrible.”
Ronan pinched his fingers near his mouth and gestured zipping his lips shut, and when Adam laughed, it wasn’t only the copious amounts of beer he’d drunk that made Ronan’s head feel light.
They continued on after the horrible stuff from Wales, returning to the United States and hitting breweries from Oregon, Maine, and Georgia, but a brewery far closer to home—from right outside the city in Maryland—sent them both reeling when Adam got a beer from them and, upon his first sip, said, “Shit. Shit, Ronan. This tastes just like apple pie.”
And then he thrust his glass in Ronan’s face.
Ronan could have very well gotten his own glass of the apple pie beer, but he took Adam’s first and took a sip, and damn, if the beer didn’t taste just like a goddamn dessert. Vanilla and cinnamon and nutmeg and apple hit his taste buds one after another, and Ronan wondered if he’d get the same flavor palette if he kissed Adam right then.
He didn’t—he just gave Adam back his glass and got his own pour of the apple pie stuff—but he wanted to. If the two of them hadn’t been as hazy as some of the IPAs Ronan had tried, he might have made an attempt, but Ronan only had to look at Adam to know they were both well past the point of intoxication. They both still stood upright, but now, a glassy sheen covered Adam’s eyes, and pink flushed everything from his cheeks to the tips of his ears, and the flush didn’t look like it would be going anywhere anytime soon. Somehow, being drunk made Adam look five years younger, like he wasn’t a guy who kind of hated his college major and had a dumbass paper to write before class on Monday.
“Lynch?” Adam asked, and only then did Ronan realize he’d been staring, but, in his defense, Adam Parrish was a very nice thing to stare at.
Ronan muttered something, not an apology, but not not an apology, before he tipped his head back and swallowed the rest of his apple pie beer in one swift chug. “I don’t think it can get better than that,” he said once he’d emptied his glass. “That was…” The beer had tasted great, and a single word would definitely cover that, but Ronan couldn’t quite remember what that word was.
“Delicious?” Adam laughed and when Ronan gave him the finger, he smiled, elastic and amiable. “I thought you said I wouldn’t be carrying your ass home.”
“I’m still on my feet, aren’t I?”
Adam laughed again and after he nudged the sleeve of his raincoat up to check his watch he looked at Ronan and said, “Come on. There’s five minutes until last call and I want to try one more beer.”
He turned and started walking in the direction they’d need to head to get back to the Metro, but Ronan didn’t move as he watched Adam walk away. Sometime over the course of the afternoon, Ronan had stopped guiding Adam from brewery to brewery and Adam had started guiding him. Adam had even started choosing his own beers, and he’d gone to a few tents on his own that Ronan had no interest in. All from someone who, earlier in the day, had seemed like he was ready to leave before the whole thing had even begun.
When Adam finally realized Ronan hadn’t followed him, he turned around and retraced his steps to get closer to Ronan, his fair eyebrows furrowing as he asked again, “Lynch?”
For a moment, Ronan looked down at his boots, their toes dry since it had stopped raining and puddles started dwindling. When he looked up, he met Adam’s gaze, and keeping his voice low but loud enough for Adam to hear him over the chatter of everyone around them, Ronan asked, “If you don’t—didn’t—like beer, why’d you agree to come?”
Adam didn’t answer right away. He looked at Ronan for a long minute before he closed the rest of the space between them, and when he stopped directly in front of Ronan, he asked, “Why didn’t you invite Blue and Gansey?”
That had a simple answer—because Ronan had wanted to spend time alone with Adam, he always wanted to spend time alone with Adam—but even after God knew how many beers he’d had, he still couldn’t make himself say that out loud. Instead, Ronan said, “Don’t ask stupid questions.”
“Then you shouldn’t either.”
They looked at one another—probably the same way they’d been looking at one another for years, but had been too chickenshit to do anything about until they’d both gotten drunk enough their inhibitions had gone straight to hell. Ronan hadn’t planned some grand reveal for how he felt about Adam Parrish, but he never thought it would go down like this: literally standing in the middle of the street in Washington, DC, after they’d both spent the afternoon tasting dozens of beers and spiraling just a little bit closer with each and every sip. And maybe it wasn’t ideal, but fuck ideals. He’d look back on this in five years, ten years, twenty years, and his memory would make the moment perfect.
Mouth dry despite everything he’d drunk that afternoon, Ronan asked, “Adam?”
And then Adam closed what space remained between them and kissed Ronan.
Ronan’s tasting glass slipped from his fingers, but he didn’t register the sound of it smashing to bits on the street. He didn’t register someone behind Adam yelling party foul. All he registered was the feel of Adam’s lips on his, and the way Adam moved a hand to cradle the back of Ronan’s skull as Ronan’s now-free hands slid beneath Adam’s raincoat to take hold of Adam’s hips. He registered the feel of Adam’s stubble against his, and the ghost of Adam’s breath across his upper lip, and how warm Adam felt under his hands, and Ronan didn’t need his tasting glass anymore anyway, because the only thing he wanted to taste for the rest of his life was Adam Parrish.
They stayed close when Ronan finally pulled back to catch his breath—it might not have been some groundbreaking, earth shattering kiss, but it sure as hell stole all the air out of his lungs—and he fought valiantly to stop himself from breaking into the most shit-eating grin he’d ever wear as he asked Adam, “Do you—You wanna get out of here?”
Adam smiled, uncontained, before he grabbed Ronan’s hand and said, “Yeah.”
Ronan’s brain didn’t really pick up on how they got back to Adam’s basement apartment in Georgetown. There’d been some unspoken agreement to not take the Metro, and Ronan thought he pulled out his phone and got an Uber, but that could have been Adam, or it could have been Adam using Ronan’s phone. No matter how they’d gotten a ride, they’d gotten one, and then they’d wound up in Adam’s bed, making out until they fell asleep—less because they were actually tired than because of their blood’s high ABV.
When Ronan woke up from their nap—or possibly their full night’s sleep—he found his cheek pillowed on Adam’s thigh and Adam’s hand spread over his buzz cut. A few inches away, Adam’s fingers clattered over the keyboard of his laptop—slow as he typed one-handed—and Ronan groaned, “Don’t tell me you’re working on your boring ass paper while I’m right here.”
“No.” Adam’s leg shook a little as he laughed, and when Ronan tipped his head back to look up at Adam, Adam smiled down at him. He moved his hand to Ronan’s cheek and his thumb to Ronan’s lips, and after Ronan kissed the pad of Adam’s thumb, Adam said, “I’m figuring out how to change my major.”