Chapter Text
He wasn’t wearing a ring, but that didn’t mean anything. He had a baby, and Ronan filled in the rest: there would be a long-term girlfriend, a modern woman who didn’t want to get married. A Fox Way sort of girlfriend, or maybe a fiancée, at home with a little diamond on her left hand.
For some reason, Ronan imagined that the baby was a happy accident. He pictured the man and his girlfriend hugging on the edge of the tub, a little teary, shocked and joyful. The man had probably been wearing his green button-down; he wore it a lot, and Ronan thought it must be his favorite. In Ronan’s mind, the girlfriend was a vague, generic sort of female shape. Just a stand-in where Ronan couldn’t be.
Still, Ronan liked the baby, or he liked that this man had a baby. If you’d asked him before today, Ronan wouldn’t have said that parenthood was specifically attractive, but here he was, morosely enthralled as he watched the man tool around carefully on his bike. Once, twice, the man slowed to a stop and turned around to peek into the little three-wheeled trailer behind his beat-up Schwinn. He half-smiled, the second time, reassured that the baby was sleeping, and then started up again, pedaling gently along the side of the path so that faster cyclists could pass.
Ronan was in his usual spot eating lunch near a wild-feeling copse of trees. He liked the parts of the park that felt untouched and quiet, and he’d thought for a few months now that the man on the bike did, too. Most weekdays, the man would take a few laps on the main loop before detouring off the pavement and across the meadow, to the edge of the trees where Ronan sat now. There was a narrow path worn into the grass from years of people cutting across the field.
Today, the man stayed on the paved loop, biking slowly with his trailer. Ronan felt hot at the rush of new fantasies: this man holding a little infant to his chest, swaying and rocking them to sleep; the man cooking one-handed, wrestling the baby into tiny clothes, waking up early to give the baby a bottle—a thousand domestic moments, soft and sleep-deprived. And all the while, this man had been coming to the park on weekdays at two, biking by Ronan and giving him a smile so wry and perfect that it felt like a tangible thing in Ronan’s pocket: hope, light.
*
Adam biked down the worn grass path toward the bench by the trees. Tall oaks dwarfed the man sitting there, but as Adam approached him he straightened up, brushing his hands off and putting down his sandwich. To be so obviously anticipated gave Adam a thrill of satisfaction as he slowed to a stop.
“Hi,” he said. He gave what he thought was maybe a normal-looking smile.
“Hi,” the man replied. He made the word more like a mocking repetition than a greeting. Still, Adam’s pulse quickened at his voice, how low and full it sounded. Up close, he was as handsome as Adam had hoped: light blue eyes, broad-chested and tall, with a mouth that was playful and appealing. On his chest, embroidery indicated the name of the park. Adam winced; he hated to bother anyone on the clock.
“I come here a lot,” Adam said, after a moment.
“You bike on the pavement,” the man agreed. His eyes narrowed slightly, assessing. “Mostly. But then you come down here,” he reached up, pointing, “all the way down that hill through the grass.” His finger traced the long path that Adam had followed. “Do you have any idea how hard it is to get grass to grow where you run it over every day?”
Adam felt a wave of mortification, blurring into the beginning of anger, blurring into—
“I’m fucking with you,” the man said, and a cocky smile spread across his face. “I don’t even do the grass here, it’s not my problem." His arms were crossed nonchalantly but when he looked Adam right in the eye it was intense, too long to be casual. Adam was instantly distracted from his flare of defensiveness. “We’ll probably pave it eventually.”
Adam swung a leg over his bike, setting it on the kickstand. “I’m Adam,” he said. “You don’t do grass?”
“I don't do grass. I do trees.”
“From the bench?”
“I go all the way up,” the man argued, pointing up to the oaks overhead. “Tree surgery and shit. You just happen to bike during my lunch break.”
“Or you eat lunch during my ride.”
The man scoffed but didn’t say more. Adam wanted to laugh at him, wanted to sit down next to him, wanted to ask his name, at least, since they were bantering a little. But he thought that might be too much—since he’d been the one to park his bike and start the whole thing—and Adam didn’t like to be that way. He pushed up the kickstand.
“You know, there are paths like that one all over the world,” the man said. “From animals, usually, they always find the best ways to go.”
“Desire paths,” Adam said, looking up. “I know.”
Looking felt active and overt, like holding the man’s gaze was a physical touch. A breeze moved between them, and Adam imagined that he caught a scent on it, a masculine sweat smell, something that told his blood about sex and skin. His body was warming.
When the man leaned back and rested his arms along the back of the bench, letting his chest stretch wide, Adam looked all over him shamelessly, drinking in all the places where fabric pulled over curving muscle. He saw a bead of sweat form on the man's neck and finally forced his eyes up, then, for fear of getting caught and never biking away. The cocky smile was back.
"See you around," Adam said.
"See you around,” the man agreed. "I'm Ronan."
Adam stopped. It wasn’t the rarest name, but—“Not Ronan Lynch,” he said.
Ronan’s eyes narrowed. “Who’s asking?”
“Blue,” Adam said. “Or, Richard Gansey. Gansey. You know them?”
Ronan smiled but it was different than before. His face was cautious, but it gave something up. “Who the fuck are you, then?”
“I’m Adam, I told you. I went to high school with Blue.”
“Adam from high school,” Ronan said thoughtfully. “Who was the quarterback and who was the cheerleader?”
“Oh, we were both outcasts, thanks,” Adam said with a laugh; Ronan laughed back, which Adam liked. “Blue worked the concession stand at football games, and then I’d bike her home on my handlebars.” He let himself remember those sweltering Friday nights, Blue chattering and cursing the whole way home. “No one was on varsity, believe me.”
"Romantic,” Ronan mused. “Was she even shorter then? You could put her in a basket.”
“She looked the same. She’s been that height since I’ve known her.”
“And you?”
Adam wondered what he was trying to ask. “I’ve been this height since I’ve known her, too.”
“Adam from high school,” Ronan said again. He frowned, like he was trying to work something out. “Had a growth spurt early, but never even tried for first string.”
*
That night, Adam hardly remembered how the conversation ended. He had thought he was trying to make an introduction, at best; he’d even prepared himself for totally bombing and then avoiding that part of the park for the rest of his life.
But he’d gotten so much more than he’d known to hope for: flirting, a name, a backstory, friends in common, an embarrassment of riches. He remembered the sweat on Ronan’s skin and the smell on the air. The heat from the sun; the heat from their looking.
*
Ronan remembered the baby.
He’d fantasized about talking to Adam, of course, had imagined it happening in a dozen different ways. The best he could come up with was usually somewhat violent—Adam crashed his bike, Ronan fell out of a tree, some other crisis forced them together—but it always ended with some crumbs of knowing: a name, a smile. Maybe an acquaintance that would build over time, encounters layering on top of each other, rapport deepening as seasons passed.
He had wanted so little.
And now, Ronan remembered the baby. Adam had brought the trailer a few more times recently, so he knew it was real, it wasn’t a fluke, Ronan hadn’t hallucinated. Adam had a baby and yet somehow he was also the man who had rode down to the bench, gotten off his bike, looked all over Ronan’s body and said, “desire paths.”
And then he’d said, “I know.”
Ronan wanted to see him again. More, again, outside of the park, at his home, in Ronan’s home, for hours, however it could be, yes, that.
*
“I met Ronan Lynch yesterday.”
Gansey and Blue turned to look at Adam as he closed the front door to Gansey’s apartment, placing Helly gently on the floor and letting his school bag drop next to her. Gansey’s ancient terrier thumped her tail against Adam’s leg until Blue came to scoop her up. “He asked me if I was short in high school and whether or not I was on the football team.”
“Ah.” Gansey pressed his thumb to his lip and frowned. “He—” he started, and then he stopped, tucked his hands into his pockets and looked sheepish. “Ronan comes off a bit rough, sometimes.”
“He’s a big asshole,” Blue interjected, swaying with Helly in her arms. “I mean, he’s fine, but no one likes him at first.”
“I do,” Adam said. He saw the way that Blue and Gansey looked at him with strange expressions: one confused, one hopeful. “I like him at first.”
Gansey’s face warmed like a sunrise. “I think Ronan would be happy to know that,” he said. Then he turned to look at the scruffy dog in Blue’s arms. “How’d she do?
“Fine,” Adam said. “She just sleeps in the trailer, you know. Today we rode around the neighborhood.”
“Well, we’re back to the vet on Friday, hopefully the cast will come off.” Gansey rubbed the dog’s snout gently and then looked back at Adam. “Thank you for taking her with you,” he said sincerely. “I know it might seem silly to you, but I know the fresh air does her good.”
“I don’t mind,” Adam said, and it was only a half-lie. He didn't mind doing a favor for Gansey, Blue's new boyfriend who was strange and lovely and had ordered a bike trailer, he'd explained, for his friend Ronan Lynch's niece. And Adam didn't mind Helly, who reminded him of the neighborhood dogs where he'd grown up, those little scoundrels who licked the tips of Adam's fingers.
But he did mind the days when the dog and the trailer kept him to the path, off the grass and away from the sprawling, thick roots of oak trees, where Ronan was waiting. Now, he thought, he'd mind it if he couldn't ride down the hill and set his bike on the kickstand and talk a while, or sit on the bench, or press his body into Ronan's, tight up next to him, shoulder to shoulder and thigh to thigh.