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He opened his eyes—reluctantly—but Adam was still far too sleepy to register more than the glowing 3:26 on the alarm clock. That, and the fact that it was cold as a fucking witch’s tit, which is probably why he’d woken up in the first place. Still, the idea of getting out of bed to dig through his drawers for another sweater was not an attractive one. The inertia of the newly-woken left him huddled under his thin blanket, hoping it would spontaneously begin providing more warmth than a bag of frozen peas, and he would be able to get back to sleep.
The blanket failed to deliver on that account, and after a few minutes of the cold air biting at his feet and lower back where his T-shirt had ridden up, Adam sat up. Blearily, he managed to grab a miscellaneous garment from off the floor without actually getting out of bed or even properly opening his eyes. He shrugged the thing—some sort of jacket—on, and in two shivers he warmed up enough to fall back asleep.
Adam registered one more thing before he sunk into sleep; the jacket smelled really good.
“Parrish wake up, it’s fucking snowed!” Ronan banged on the door to the little attic apartment, waiting impatiently for Adam to come unlock it. He wondered if he should bribe the secretary downstairs to give him a key, or if he could dream one.
The door opened, revealing Adam in an obviously-just-rolled-out-of-bed state, complete with messy hair and half-closed eyes. Ronan briefly regretted not brining a snowball inside to throw at such an unsuspecting victim, but he was soon distracted by the pajama pants that were riding almost unbearably low on Adam’s hips and—
“Is that my jacket, Parrish?”
Adam visibly started, and looked from the jacket he wore to Ronan with wide eyes, ast though Ronan would be able to explain why a garment that was very clearly Ronan’s fucking jacket was on his body.
Ronan could not in fact explain this, nor could he explain anything else, having been struck entirely speechless. He simply gaped at Adam, Adam in his jacket, his jacket that was a little too big, with sleeves that were slipping down over his hands, leaving only long and delicate fingers exposed— his shoulders are narrower than mine, Jesus fucking Christ—did he have God to thank for this, or the devil?
“Sorry,” Adam said after a beat, the freckles on his nose disappearing in a slow blush. “It was freezing last night— I guess I didn’t wake up enough to realize what I was putting on…”
“Right,” Ronan said in a strangled voice, before shaking his head suddenly, like Chainsaw did after a bath. It didn’t do that much to clear his mind, but at least it got his eyes off Adam for a few seconds—God knows how long he’d been staring. “Anyway. There’s snow.”
“So I heard you shouting,” Adam said dryly, relaxing into their familiar pattern of banter.
“Come out so we can go throw snowballs at Gansey. Or his car.”
Adam rolled his eyes, but a grin broke through the wry façade. It made his face light up; made him look like maybe he was just another teenage boy waiting to go mess with his friends.
Ronan couldn’t help but grin back. He probably looked like a complete fuckwit, but he figured Parrish hadn’t had any coffee yet, so the odds were low of him actually remembering the conversation in detail.
“Just let me get changed,” Adam said. He made as if to shrug off the jacket to hand it back to Ronan. A noise of protest escaped Ronan, to his mortification, and Adam paused.
“Everything alright, Lynch?” he asked with a strange look on his face.
“Keep it,” Ronan muttered.
“What?” Adam still sounded confused, but now there was an edge to his voice that said he wasn’t sure what was going on now, but he was pretty confident he wasn’t going to like it.
“I said, keep it,” Ronan made his voice hard enough to deflect any sort of emotion that might attempt to betray him. “You could use some clothing that’s not an actual piece of shit.”
Adam’s eyes narrowed. “Seriously? Damnit, Ronan I—“ he broke off, ran a hand angrily through his barely-curly hair, and momentarily stopped Ronan’s heart before continuing. “You know what? Just fuck off, okay. I don’t need your goddamn favors.”
His eyes screamed I’m not putting up with your shit today, and Ronan glared back because he didn’t come here to fucking fight, and now they were arguing yet again. Because Ronan was prickly, a goddamn plant with thorns and brambles that cut anyone that tried to come close.
And Adam, he was a weed, stubborn and humble, determined to survive under any circumstances.
The morning sunlight caught briefly in his hair and Ronan amended his comparison: Adam was a nice looking weed. A wildflower. An obstinate bastard, sure, but he was fucking pretty.
“You’d be doing me a favor,” Ronan choked out, wondering for the second time in the past fifteen minutes why he ever let himself say anything. It wasn’t a lie, though. Ronan did not lie. If he could have nothing else for the rest of his life, he’d take Adam Parrish in his jacket and thank Mary, God, Jesus, and the devil for it.
“I’d—what?” Adam clearly had not expected this response.
“Just fucking keep it,” Ronan muttered before stomping back down the stairs and out to his car, leaving Adam no time to retort.
Adam glowered at the stairwell that had just swallowed Ronan. It was far too early to put up with this, and by this, he meant Ronan and all his contradictions—those that were self-contained, and those that he seemed to bring out in Adam himself. He sighed. He hadn’t even had coffee yet, and here he was glaring at some stairs and wallowing in introspection. Couldn’t Ronan have at least waited until a decent hour? It’s a damn Saturday and I don’t have to be at work ‘til three.
There were few rules Ronan obeyed, however, and common courtesy was miles from making the cut. He was like a train, an explosion, a god—something large and loud and powerful. Something that made its own rules.
Exasperated and annoyed and still sleepy and something-else-Adam-couldn’t-quite-name (he was reminded suddenly, strangely, of the hand lotion on his bedside table that never seemed to run out), Adam trudged back into the apartment to brew the generic brand coffee he kept on the tiny shelf above his desk.
He was two cups and thirty pages of history textbook in before he realized he never had taken off the jacket. It still sat on his shoulders, warm and leathery, its weight somehow comforting.
He nearly took it off for the sake of his pride, but, well. No one was here. No one would know. It’s not weird, he tried to convince himself. It’s not pathetic; Noah steals our clothes all the time, and so does Blue, sometimes. His subconscious was not entirely satisfied with this line of reasoning, but Adam ignored its protests, deciding with a particularly deep inhale to allow himself this one thing.
The jacket just smelled good.