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The knock comes on the door and Declan sits for a full minute, letting it die away and resume again. It’s not that he wants to be rude, and it’s not that he’s trying to play games, not the way the Dupont Circle girls play games, not the sharky will-they-won’t-they of the Hill.
(Declan wanted DC to be his natural habitat so badly once; he’s beginning to think he’s evolved beyond it, but this fact will take him awhile longer to internalize.)
No, he waits to answer the door now because he can’t quite believe it’s happening. And sue him, he’s never underestimated the pleasure of anticipation. Indeed, he’s built his life around it, the endless stoking of a greater and greater fires. This one, though—this one he barely knew how to contain at the time, and unlike every other goal Declan’s laid eyes on, it’s always seemed utterly out of his control.
The knock starts up again, a little more tentative, as if its owner has begun to wonder if perhaps he’s at the wrong apartment. Declan decides it’s all gone on too long, not just the knocking but all of it, and that he’d better throw the door open and meet the conflagration at last.
When he opens the door, Gansey’s still got his fist up in the air, and the look on his face is utterly unguarded. Declan always thought Gansey must school himself into a calculating, genteel sort of calm even in his private moments, and he thought that only because he himself did the same thing. But as he sees Gansey see him, the tension at the edges of his features beginning to rise again, he has the sudden realization that it’s been exhausting, doing that all these years. And that he feels bad for Gansey, doing it too. He hopes he hasn’t.
“Hey,” says Declan. “You came.”
Gansey nods, inclines his head as if to say, of course, why not. Declan can think of several very good reasons why not, and at least one of them is death, but he decides against saying that out loud. Instead, he gestures to the interior of the apartment. Gansey steps in, and Declan sees approval register on his face. It’s a nice place, it’s got character, and Gansey knows nice and Gansey knows character.
“Great view,” says Gansey, going over to the window. The sun is beginning to think about setting, the sky fading to peaches and lavenders. It’s fall. Gansey should be at some homecoming somewhere, drunk on a blanket, apple-cheeked coeds under each arm. There’s always been something midcentury about him, Declan thinks. He should have gone to war and come back and written earnestly about it. In a way, maybe he did.
“Yeah, I like it,” says Declan. “You want a beer?”
Their choices are Miller (the champagne of beers) or a couple potent cans of IPA. Gansey picks the latter, and Declan lets this minor choice impress him, decides to read more into it than is probably indicated. That’s what happens, he thinks. He doesn’t know Gansey anymore, not really, but Gansey came anyway and that has to count for something. His palms are sweaty where they grip his beer, but the bottle is sweaty too so no harm no foul. He took a Miller in case Gansey wants the other microbrew.
“Drive okay?”
“Great,” says Gansey. “Pretty. The foliage, you know?”
“Right,” says Declan. “Leaf-peepers,” he adds, and Gansey rolls his eyes.
Then “You talk to Ronan lately?” Declan says, at the same time Gansey says “Have you seen Ronan much?”
Nervous laugh; both of them shake their heads. By rights, Ronan should probably be here. He should probably knock on the door right now, or—knowing Ronan—pick the lock and enter.
“Last week,” says Gansey. “He’s good, I think. Building his empire, probably.”
“Probably, right?” They text, Declan and Ronan. It’s a start. Declan will take it, oh god he’ll take it. Matthew, on the other hand, is talking about moving in next year; Declan will grouse about it to his friends, but privately he imagines a convivial future in which Matthew takes up residence on his couch as on their pew at church and he wonders what kinds of strings he can pull at Georgetown, at American.
“Can you believe,” says Gansey, “everything that’s happened?”
Declan sighs. It feels as if he’s been sighing for the better part of a decade. “No,” he says.
It figured that the small talk would only last so long. Declan’s always thought of Gansey as the sort of person for whom there is no intermediate place between cursory politesse and a bloody, guts-and-glory sort of intimacy involving hero’s quests and fisticuffs and the highest of stakes. He’s always counted himself in the second group, though maybe…maybe that’s just wishful thinking. The way Gansey’s looking at him now, though—he somehow doesn’t think it is.
Gansey sets his mostly-full beer can down on the coffee table (on the coaster on the coffee table). He sets his hands in his lap and all of a sudden Declan’s back in Gansey’s car, sticky black vinyl seats, redolent of diesel and of the sort of boy Declan had so badly wanted to know.
“It wasn’t fair,” Declan says.
“Declan—“
And it’s telling, Declan thinks, that Gansey doesn’t bother asking What wasn’t?
“It wasn’t.” Declan huffs a laugh. “You know that’s all I kept thinking back then? Maybe it was some kind of, like, coping mechanism, some way of not thinking about Dad, people would say it was. But the thing is, I really don’t think it was. I just—I remember sitting out on the grass and you coming over and just—it sucked, you know? But Ronan—"
“It was good of you,” says Gansey.
Declan smiles tightly. When he speaks it’s with the same politic surety he’s been cultivating half his life. “I know it was,” he says.
Gansey looks troubled. He also looks a little tired, a little too thin, though Declan guesses dying does that to a person. He wonders if you come back entire or if you leave some part of you out there in the ether. He’d ask, but it seems a little personal. Sometimes he wonders at how close he’s come to finding out just what passes between a man and Death, at the end. Not close enough, not yet, and there are days he feels shockingly ambivalent about that fact.
“It was too good,” Gansey says suddenly. “All of it was too good of you. I don’t know how you did it half the time, and I forgot, Declan. Everything just happened, and—and I barely missed you at all.” He tugs his sweater sleeves down over his wrists. Oversized, knock-around cashmere. There’s a moth hole at one cuff and Gansey’s got his thumb hooked through it.
“Don’t you think,” says Declan slowly, “that that was the point?”
“But—"
“You were a kid,” says Declan.
Gansey sniffs. “So were you.” He looks up. There’s something in his face, Declan thinks. Something about Gansey has always been ancient. “Not anymore, though,” Gansey adds unnecessarily.
Declan takes a breath. Then he reaches out and takes Gansey’s hand, the one with the cashmere thumb. There’s a split second where he thinks he’s miscalculated, that everything is wrong, that far too much time has passed. But Gansey’s always had a soft spot for history, and that’s what Declan’s banking on. Gansey’s hand feels at once solid and birdlike, thick with calluses built up to save fine bone. He’s bitten one nail almost to the quick, exposing its soft pink bed. Declan thinks of Gansey nervous in traffic, bored on the Beltway. Sometimes it takes a little hurt to keep you focused.
“I’m glad you came,” Declan says.
Gansey shifts then toward him then, like a breeze-bent tree. They’re face to face, and Gansey’s looking at his mouth.
“You could use some Chapstick,” Gansey says, and kisses him.