Archive of Our Own ^beta

A door slamming hard enough to shake walls didn’t alarm Adam Parrish. Neither did the muffled crash of pots and pans inside a cardboard box as it met the floor. The silence that followed alarmed him though, enough he needed to address it before something louder and potentially more serious occurred. He had too much firsthand experience with his new roommate’s actions and behaviors, and a sudden and complete lack of sound never preceded something good.

“Lynch?” Adam called through the open bathroom door, arms still raised as he took a break from hanging up a brand new shower curtain. When they’d first started looking for apartments, he’d hoped for one with a more modern bathroom — glass shower doors, a low flush toilet, maybe a rain shower head — but he’d survive this one. With white tile everywhere and good ventilation, it would be easy to clean, and unlike a few of the apartments they’d toured, warped wooden floorboards didn’t stop the door from closing.

It also beat the communal bathroom of Adam’s last dorm at Duke by a mile.

Heavy footsteps replaced the silence, first stalking through the living room and then down the short hall leading to the bathroom. Then Adam’s new roommate swung into the open doorway, one hand holding onto the top of the door frame so a tattooed arm supported Ronan Lynch’s weight as — with a little bite — he asked Adam, “What?”

“Are you breaking stuff before we’re done moving in?”

“Like shit I’m breaking stuff. And we are moved in. That was the last box.”

“It was?” Adam hung the shower curtain on its last two hooks and tugged it straight before he turned all the way toward Ronan. He couldn’t classify either of them as a hoarder — Adam considered it one of the benefits of leading a transient life and changing colleges three times until one stuck — but their boxes, beds, and meager furniture had filled the better part of their small rented Uhaul truck that had taken a circuitous route from the Shenandoah Valley to Durham before chugging back north to Washington, DC. Leaving North Carolina as soon as the sun came up meant Adam parked the moving truck in front of their new apartment building around lunchtime, and — by his watch — it hadn’t even struck three o’clock.

“It’s like you doubt my efficiency,” Ronan said as he used his hand on the door frame to tilt himself back onto his feet, bicep flexing beneath the deep green snakelike scales covering his entire left arm.

“Or I anticipate your inefficiency,” Adam told him, and Ronan’s icy blue eyes narrowed. “But that was it? We’re really done?”

“Yes, Parrish. We’re really done.” And like he hadn’t been irritated with Adam just seconds before, Ronan’s face split into a grin so sharp it should have splintered the wooden bathroom door. “Feel like a grown up yet?”

“No,” Adam admitted. At almost twenty-three, he should feel like an adult. After supporting himself since seventeen, he now had a college degree, his name on the lease for an apartment in a not inexpensive neighborhood, and an entry-level position that came with a signing bonus large enough to cover three months’ rent. All signs that pointed to supposed maturity, though Adam still felt suspended someplace that wasn’t childhood and wasn’t adulthood, but a liminal space in-between. Too young to be taken seriously even with a well-stacked resume. Too old to blame mistakes and bad decisions on inexperience.

It probably didn’t help that he’d just strengthened his ties to childhood by moving in with a best friend he’d had since high school, but, after years of saying he’d never, Ronan had finally decided to leave home. Moving to Washington from the Barns, the Lynch family’s farm in western Virginia, put him closer to his brothers, and — according to Ronan — would get Declan, his older brother, off his ass about getting more human interaction while Ronan made an attempt at writing a book. That decision happened to coincide with Adam looking for a roommate, creating a fortuitous combination too good for Adam to pass up.

And even after a rotating cast of dorm mates — many of them, like Adam, job hunting in and around DC — Adam hadn’t met anyone other than Ronan who he’d be willing to live with for an extended period of time. He didn’t know which of them that reflected better on: Adam, for being tolerant of Ronan’s shitbaggery, or Ronan, for being Adam’s most tolerable friend despite his shitbaggery.

Either way, Adam was sure their new living arrangement didn’t make Ronan feel like an adult any more than it made Adam feel like one. Not when — other than his bed — Ronan’s only furniture was a shelving unit for his complex and expensive sound system. Still, Adam asked, “Do you?”

“The hell do you think?” Ronan replied. The sharpness of his grin blunted slightly as he drummed his fingertips on the door frame, then he jerked his chin at the shower curtain and told Adam, “You missed a hook.”

By the time Adam wheeled around to check his work, confirmed he hadn’t missed anything at all, and turned back toward the doorway, Ronan had disappeared, his boot-heavy footsteps retreating down the hall. Sighing and preparing to follow him, Adam reached to turn off the light but hesitated when he caught his reflection in the mirror above the sink.

On the outside, he did look like an adult. Like a grown up. He’d allowed himself a trip to the barber before graduation and his dusty hair fell evenly across his forehead and had been trimmed neatly around his ears. Though he remained tall, lean, and gaunt-cheeked, he’d replaced clothes he’d once bought out of necessity with a wardrobe he liked, and the t-shirt he wore fit well, not hanging off his shoulders and large enough for him to hide in, the way he’d worn his t-shirts not all that long ago. Even the bruise-like circles beneath his blue eyes had faded since he turned in his last final, easily cured by a few good nights of sleep before Ronan picked him up in the Uhaul.

But looks deceived, and Adam hadn’t lied to Ronan. He might put on a good act, dress in nice clothes, behave with a semblance of maturity, have a real job, but he didn’t feel qualified or truly prepared for any of it despite years of being on his own. If anything, he felt younger than ever. After almost a decade of being an exceptional student, of dean’s lists and academic achievements, he’d thrust himself into a world where grades no longer mattered. He hadn’t quite figured out how to deal with that and, unfortunately, adulthood didn’t come with a syllabus.

When he finally flicked off the light and headed out of the bathroom, Adam stopped at the end of the hall to survey their box-filled living room. Once they put everything away, only an old leather couch, a television, and a single end table would remain, and they’d need to get more furniture eventually — soon — but they had to start somewhere. And their sparse furnishings already made the apartment better than any place Adam had lived before — his parents’ double-wide, a small musty apartment above the Catholic church in his hometown, a series of sterile white dorm rooms at four different colleges in four different states.

Looking up from a box labelled BEDROOM SHIT in Ronan’s jagged, caps locked handwriting, Adam found Ronan watching him from across the room, a chilly observation Adam had grown used to over the six years since they’d been introduced at the beginning of their junior year at Aglionby Academy, the all-boys private high school they’d attended. A four-year reprieve while Adam completed college hadn’t made the look less weighted — it could have even succeeded in making Ronan’s stare heavier — and for the first time, Adam thought living with Ronan might have been a bad idea. Ronan had always made Adam a little reckless, and signing a two-year lease with him was probably the most reckless thing Adam had ever done because — for almost six years — Adam had liked the weight of Ronan’s gaze, and now he’d put himself somewhere that gaze would be unavoidable.

At least that — unlike some of the activities they got up to in high school — didn’t put Adam in physical danger. Not yet anyway. Their new place had both a balcony and rooftop access, so he might have been getting ahead of himself.

But reckless or not, they had a lot to unpack. A lot being relative, considering they were twenty-two-year-old guys — barely more than boys — who had four pots and pans between them and both thought an old jelly jar made an acceptable drinking glass. They also had a moving truck to return, and Adam didn’t want to get hit with another day of rental fees because they didn’t bring it back on time. So, replying to Ronan’s stare, Adam said, “Want to drop off the Uhaul, grab pizza, and unpack?”

Another grin split Ronan’s face faster than a lightning strike. “Parrish,” he said, “I thought you’d never ask.”

They gassed up the truck and returned it before driving back home — the first place Adam thought could potentially live up to the title — in Ronan’s BMW, its wheels itching for the road after being towed on a trailer for almost five hundred miles. Adam phoned in a pizza order from the passenger seat, and by the time they picked it up, grabbed a pack of beer from the liquor store beside the pizzaria, parked near their building, and walked back through their front door, the sun had shifted and left the apartment not dark, but dim enough shadows pooled in corners, around boxes, near the couch, and under Ronan’s sharp cheekbones. Adam reached for the light switch as soon as he stepped into the apartment, but nothing happened when he flicked it. He flicked it again to rule out operator error, and moments before he commented that light bulbs should come with the apartment considering the cost of their rent, he realized why the light switch hadn’t worked.

The apartment had no overhead lighting in the living room.

When they’d taken a tour in March, when Adam had met Ronan in DC over Duke’s spring break, the model apartment had been staged to look lived-in. The kind of art you found in hotel lobbies hung on the walls, and a couch and chairs covered in throw pillows occupied the living room. The furniture had been flanked with tables — one on either end of the couch along with a coffee table in front of it — and Adam distinctly remembered the most basic, utilitarian table lamps he’d ever encountered sitting atop the two end tables. It had been early afternoon when they’d gone on their tour, but everything had been lit up and turned on in an unnecessary waste of energy.

“I’m assuming you didn’t pack a lamp,” Adam said as Ronan followed him inside, preparing himself for the inevitability Ronan hadn’t thought to bring one either. The 6-pack he held suddenly felt like it weighed a ton.

Just inside their front door, they stood side by side and surveyed their dim apartment. Everything that needed to be unpacked. Put away. Rearranged. Not confirming nor denying, meaning that he hadn’t, Ronan replied, “Did you?”

Adam shook his head. He’d been living on his own for so long, and he’d apparently taken overhead lighting for granted that whole time. “No.”

Shrugging, Ronan jabbed the pizza box held in his hands to one of the only places in the apartment where a lamp wouldn’t be needed, then he started slinking through the shadows as he told Adam, “Guess we’re starting in the kitchen.”

Bread. Lunch meat. Sliced cheese.

Peanut butter and jelly.

Outside of dining hall food, Adam’s food consumption had always been basic. On every trip to the grocery store, he found the least expensive items he could — even better if they had accompanying coupons in the weekly town circular — and subsisted on mostly sandwiches. He’d never had a real kitchen — not one he felt comfortable using — and while he could throw together pasta with jarred sauce if he needed to, he couldn’t do much else. Lack of time, lack of money — those contributed to his subpar cooking skills, and he’d never needed to improve. He’d never needed to change his grocery buying habits either.

Until he went grocery shopping with Ronan in DC for the first time.

“That’s all?” Ronan asked, jerking his chin toward the red plastic basket dangling in Adam’s hand. They’d coordinated on the things they’d both use — condiments, milk, eggs, basic spices — and those littered the bottom of the cart Ronan pushed up and down the aisles. The whole time they’d been in the store, Ronan had hunched over the cart’s handle, looking moments away from stealing someone’s wallet or dropping their baby, and more than once, other shoppers had left aisles upon seeing Ronan and Adam approach. Were Ronan a perfect stranger, Adam’s first instinct would have been to walk away too. Ronan’s dark buzz cut, frigid gaze, and the massive tattoos that covered a whole arm, most of his back, and crept up his neck all dripped venom, but upon closer inspection, it wouldn’t take much to look past them and notice Ronan’s general physical appeal.

Most people never got past them, and if they did, Ronan’s temperament usually turned them off, but that hadn’t happened yet for Adam, who hadn’t wanted to go grocery shopping any more than Ronan. He at least, however, had enough sense to look decently civil while they sucked it up and got it over with.

“What?” Adam replied, looking down at his basket. He’d picked up a loaf of bread — not store brand white sandwich bread, but a decent whole wheat at a slightly higher price point — and jars of real Jif and Smucker’s. They hadn’t navigated through the fluorescent lit Safeway to the deli yet, but Adam planned on adding ham and cheese to his small haul. “Sandwiches are fine.”

“You can’t survive on sandwiches.”

“You can’t survive on frozen chicken patties and cereal either.”

“At least it’s variety.” Ronan took a corner fast enough the cart almost tipped onto two wheels. “The spice of life.”

Adam frowned at Ronan’s back, his black t-shirt stretched across his shoulder blades, but he followed Ronan around the corner into the snack aisle. Wire bins stretched down one side crammed full of Cool Ranch Doritos and sour cream and onion potato chips, the printed foil bags reflecting light off every wrinkle. Boxes of crackers and cookies filled shelves on the other side of the aisle, Keebler elves and miniature goldfish smiling at Adam as he meandered by. As a kid, he and his mother had never walked down the snack aisle when she’d taken him with her to the store. There’d never been money for Chips Ahoy or Wheat Thins, real ones or not. A tube of toothpaste and a few cans off off-brand Spaghetti-O’s usually totaled more than the Parrish household’s bank balance, and even after he’d moved out of his parents’ trailer, Adam had pinched pennies too hard to allow himself the small luxury of a bag of chocolate covered pretzels. He couldn’t remember the last time he’d looked at one of those fancy plaid boxes of shortbread.

“I don’t need a lot,” Adam told Ronan as they walked, pace slowing as Ronan poked through bags of potato chips to find the kind he wanted. “And it’s better than ramen.”

“Yeah,” Ronan said, finally flinging a bag of jalapeño flavored chips into the cart, “by about one level of the food pyramid.”

“It’s at least two.” Adam picked up a pack of Oreos and turned it over to read facts about cocoa sourcing on the back as Ronan went back to hunting for chips.

“Bullshit. It’s one. One and a half if I want to be generous about it.” Ronan grabbed another bag of chips, wrapper crinkling in his grip. “Just add water barely ranks below throw shit between two slices of bread.”

“One step versus multiple. Assembly required.”

Ronan’s barking laugh scared a mother and small child out of the aisle, and after throwing his second bag of chips into the cart, he hunched over the handle again. “Just get the Oreos. Four bucks isn’t going to break the bank for you. Or did you forget we filled out a lease application together?”

Adam glanced up from the pack of cookies to look at Ronan. It figured he’d taken note of Adam’s income on all the paperwork they’d had to complete for the apartment. Ronan noticed just as much as Adam. But the use of his income against him still prickled, no matter how far it deviated from the ways Ronan had brought it up in the past when he’d called Adam and their friend Blue Poverty Twins and worse. Now, Adam would have almost six figures flowing into his bank account on an annual basis, but he wanted to get so much further. He needed to get so much further to prove all the years of late nights studying after work and catching just enough sleep to barely survive had been worth it.

He’d never celebrated his small victories though. Getting out of his parents’ double-wide. Surviving on his own. Being named valedictorian at Aglionby. Earning scholarships that covered most of his college tuition and finding grants to cover the rest. Landing a cushy job at a top-tier think tank right after graduation.

Sure, Adam still had a long way to go, but he’d already come so, so far.

Without thinking any harder about it, he put the pack of Oreos in his shopping basket. Then he added a box of Triscuits.

“Happy?” he asked Ronan.

“Yep,” Ronan replied and started pushing the cart again. “Never thought I’d see the day Adam Parrish became a big spender.”

Falling into step beside Ronan, Adam elbowed him as they walked toward the end of the aisle. “Wait until my first paycheck.”

“Jesus, what are you gonna buy then? Fresh fruit? Gelato? Fancy cheese?”

Adam laughed until they turned into the next aisle — paper goods and plastics — and as he kept walking next to Ronan so they took up the entire width of the aisle, Adam said, “Maybe I’ll get all three.”

The Saturday after his first full week at his new job, when he finally had the chance to sleep in, Adam couldn’t. Years of waking up for early weekend shifts had hardwired him to get out of bed not long after the sun rose, but now he had the luxury of a nine-to-five — which turned out to be closer to an eight-to-six — he didn’t need to fit in hours at a garage or factory or warehouse around classes, homework, and group projects. He could sleep until noon if he wanted.

Part of Adam wanted. To stay in bed all morning and only get up when he’d wasted half his day. To get tangled up in the new linen sheets he’d bought and fall back asleep without setting an alarm. He tried when he first woke up in his hazy bedroom, lit only by the thin lines of sun peeking through his closed blinds. The time on his phone — 7:12 — allowed at least a few more hours in bed before he couldn’t stand it anymore, but Adam’s body and brain wouldn’t shut back down. He closed his eyes and hugged his pillow around his head to mute the weekend morning DC sounds outside his window. He counted backward from one hundred, then two hundred, then five hundred. He threw his arm over his face like he used to in high school, hoping near-suffocation would send him back to sleep.

Nothing worked. Even with all the tactics he tried, his body wouldn’t return to slumber and, eventually, Adam gave up the ghost minutes before eight o’clock, climbing out of bed and shuffling out of his room in boxers and a t-shirt to go make himself a cup of coffee.

In the living room, every single light — they’d overcompensated for their lack of lighting upon moving in and ordered two floor lamps and a table lamp online — blazed, adding to the brightness of the sunlight streaming into the whitewashed apartment through the floor-to-ceiling balcony windows. Adam squinted as he moved to turn off the lamps, then paused when he realized why the living room had been lit up like a Christmas tree.

Ronan laid asleep on their brown leather couch despite being several inches too tall to sleep on it comfortably. His neck bent distressfully to one side with the way he’d propped his head on the couch’s arm, and he’d draped one leg over the edge of the cushions so his bare foot rested on the gray area rug — another new acquisition — spread over the hardwood floor. Evidently, he’d been writing before he passed out because, on his thighs, his laptop tilted precariously toward his hip, one deep breath away from crashing to the floor, and Adam stepped around the coffee table — another new acquisition — to rescue it.

Once it rested among the notebooks and scraps of paper covering the coffee table, Adam looked down at Ronan and figured he should rescue him too. But not immediately. Adam studied him for a long moment first, at how the slackness of sleep softened Ronan — his dark eyelashes resting heavy on his cheeks, his breath long and slow through slightly parted lips — and Adam wanted to reach down and put his fingertips to Ronan’s jaw, usually so sharp Adam could cut himself on it, now softer and lacking its usual defiant grit.

He settled for Ronan’s shoulder instead, bared by Ronan’s black muscle tank, and Adam shook Ronan as he said, “Lynch, you’re gonna regret this.”

Ronan’s eyelids fluttered before he grunted, chesty and ragged, and opened his eyes, and he blinked at Adam a few times before he looked at Adam’s hand where it still rested on Ronan’s shoulders. Even with Adam’s faint tan, it stood out stark against the deep green of Ronan’s tattoo, a completely unpleasant contrast.

Slowly, like he was backing away from an animal baring its teeth, Adam peeled his hand off Ronan and retreated from the couch, Ronan’s warmth still radiating through his palm. It never felt intrusive — wrong — to touch Ronan. Since day one, they’d jostled and brushed and bumped, invading one another’s space more often than not if they were near each other. But somewhere along the way, that casualness turned hesitant, at least on Adam’s side. After high school but before he left for Harvard — the first of his four colleges — he’d pulled back, thinking it would make leaving Henrietta easier. It worked. For a time. Then Ronan would come to visit him in Cambridge or New Haven or Pittsburgh or Durham and they’d fall back into old habits. Now they were living together, it would be futile to try and break those habits again, no matter the signals they’d send.

Still looking up at Adam, in his usually gravelly voice — further roughened by whatever sleep he’d gotten on the couch — Ronan asked, “What, Parrish?”

“You’re neck’s gonna hate you,” Adam replied, waving a hand at Ronan’s position. “Go to bed.”

“Fuck that.” Ronan stretched out and some joint cracked before he sat up and scraped his hands over his face and buzz cut. Once he dropped them into his lap, he dropped his eyes to the coffee table for a while before he looked at Adam again. “What time is it?”

“Eight.”

“The hell are you doing up then?”

“Couldn’t sleep anymore.”

“You? Couldn’t sleep anymore?”

Laughing, Adam shrugged before he reached to turn off the lamp nearest him. “I know. You should though. In a real bed.”

“Fuck that,” Ronan repeated. “I slept enough.” Leaning forward, he started piling up all his notes and journals. Adam recognized some of them — beat up Moleskines Ronan had carted around for years to scribble ideas in — and it made Adam wonder when Ronan would be done. When he’d finally be happy with the book he’d written. Adam also doubted Ronan had slept enough — he’d been an insomniac forever — but he wasn’t going to fight Ronan on it. Finally dumping his notes on top of his closed laptop, Ronan shoved himself to his feet and asked, “It’s really only eight?”

“Yeah.”

“Shit.”

It was the first time in a very long time Adam had a whole Saturday stretching in front of him with absolutely nothing to do. No obligations. No school work. No oil changes. Ronan was no stranger to the concept of an open schedule — his parents’ untimely deaths left all three of the Lynch brothers financially secure for life and Ronan would never need to work if he didn’t want to — but Adam wanted to make the best of it. They’d moved to DC, a city with plenty of sites to see, museums to visit, and restaurants to try, and even if it met the bare minimum of doing something, Adam offered up something that could occupy them for a few hours. “Want to grab breakfast?”

“What? No. No.” Ronan shook his head with grave conviction. “I’m not turning into one of those brunch people.”

“It’s not —” Adam looked at Ronan flatly. He would need a cup of coffee before he started a fight on the differences between breakfast and brunch, and he hadn’t stepped into the kitchen yet. “Want me to make breakfast?”

“You? Make breakfast?”

“Oh, go to hell. Do you want breakfast or not?”

“Depends. What are you making?”

And what was Adam making?

In high school, he’d skipped breakfast most days. If he ate anything at all before an Aglionby-provided lunch — not entirely free because the school bundled on-campus food costs into administrative and activity fees — he considered himself lucky. Once he’d moved on to college, access to dining halls meant all-you-could-eat at all hours of the day and skipping breakfast became less frequent, but it meant Adam hadn’t needed to learn how to cook — breakfast or any other meal. The times he had to fend for himself because of school breaks or a schedule that didn’t align with operating hours, he relied on his usual staple of sandwiches and, sometimes, canned soup, but his experience in a kitchen didn’t extend far past that.

Simple meals — pasta, grilled cheese, something boxed that only required he add a can of tuna — Adam could competently handle, and yes, he could Google how to fry an egg, but Adam had offered to make breakfast. He’d set the expectation that he knew what he was doing. Not that Ronan would have high expectations, but he’d lived alone at the Barns for four years and gained useful knowledge of working a stove top and oven. The handful of times Adam visited over school breaks or long weekends, Ronan had cooked for them. It might only have been pork shoulder and barbecue sauce dumped into a crock pot for a few hours before being shredded and scooped onto buns, but it wasn’t nothing.

It wasn’t ham and cheese put between pieces of bread.

There had never been a need to impress Ronan. Not much did, and on a good day, it was an impossible task. But Adam kind of wanted to, as far as breakfast could impress Ronan. He had a steep hill to climb considering his less-than-basic understanding of cooking, but he could put in some effort. Figure out how to make something edible from the things they’d picked up at Safeway.

“Eggs,” Adam replied finally after what felt like far too long a pause. “Bacon. Toast.”

If Ronan had a problem with food generally considered breakfast staples, Adam had no problem cutting him out of his breakfast plans.

“Alright,” Ronan said, nodding like he’d been the one to accept a challenge, not Adam. “Let’s see what you can do.”

What Adam did was passable. He would not win a Michelin star anytime soon — or ever — but his eggs weren’t runny, his bacon not burnt, his toast not too brown. He found success in not setting off the smoke detector, a piercing wail they’d already heard more than once from their neighbors’ apartment, though Adam and Ronan agreed the root cause wasn’t something left in the oven too long.

When they sat down on the stools they’d bought for the aptly named breakfast bar that separated the kitchen from the living room, Adam waited for Ronan to take the first bite, like an ancient king waiting to see if his taste tester keeled over from poison. Except Adam didn’t want Ronan to convulse and fall off his stool. Adam didn’t know exactly what he wanted. But after Ronan used a piece of toast to shovel up ketchupy hunks of scrambled egg, took a too-big bite, chewed, and swallowed, Adam watched his face carefully, eyes vigilantly ready to catch a wrinkling nose, furrowing brow, or curling lip that might reveal some wrongness in the breakfast Adam had made.

Part of Adam always expected wrongness.

But Ronan’s nose didn’t move. His brow didn’t crease. The corner of his mouth didn’t twitch. He simply chased his bite of egg and toast with a long chug of orange juice, and after he swiped the back of his hand across his lips despite the paper towels Adam had tucked under their plates, Ronan looked at Adam and said, “Not bad, Parrish. Not bad at all.”

Adam would take that any day.

“I can hear you out there, Ronan. You might as well come in.”

It took a very long time for Adam’s bedroom door knob to turn, long enough he almost thought he’d mistaken footsteps in the apartment upstairs to footsteps in their own. But finally — barely visible in the gray shadows of Adam’s room — the knob turned with purposeful slowness before the door opened just enough for Ronan to peer at Adam through the dark.

“You came in here a year and a half ago,” Ronan said. “Why aren’t you asleep?”

“It’s too hot.”

“It wouldn’t be if someone — not naming names, but there’s only two of us in this apartment last time I checked — let me set the A/C lower than seventy-five.”

Adam pressed his lips together as he looked at Ronan. The first few weeks of summer, the first few weeks after they’d moved in, they’d pumped the apartment full of brisk air to combat the perpetual swampiness of the DC summer. Then they’d received their first bill from the electric company and Adam demanded more moderate temperatures going forward. He regretted that now — mid-July, after almost a week of highs near one hundred degrees and humidity that left his shirts sweat-soaked by the time he reached the nearest Metro station, had turned the city scorchingly brutal — but economy and frugality had clutched Adam in their claws for so long he had a hard time wrenching himself free. Reversing his decision would also prove he’d been wrong, and he’d do almost anything to avoid that with Ronan. Even lying awake, suffering and a little sweaty, after he’d said goodnight to Ronan an hour ago when the movie they’d watched that evening had ended.

Pushing himself up on his elbows, sheet slipping down his bare chest, Adam asked, “What do you want, Lynch?”

“Nothing. A guy can’t pace in his own damn apartment?”

“Now when it’s right outside my room.”

Stretching one arm up Adam’s doorway, Ronan pushed the door open further so he could lean into the room, one hand braced on the door knob, one holding the door frame. His muscle tank slid aside to reveal one pec as he swung back and forth a few times, the door’s hinges creaking, and he seemed to avoid looking at Adam at all until he finally said, “It’s book shit.”

“What kind of book shit? And can you stop? It’d be nice to actually get our security deposit back.”

A noise of glorious disdain left Ronan before he bumped the door all the way open and sauntered into Adam’s room, shutting the door behind him soundlessly, which somehow irritated Adam more. In three steps, Ronan reached Adam’s mattress, and when he thrust a hand out, Ronan said simply, “Pillow.”

“Why do you —” Adam narrowed his eyes before he reached over and switched on the lamp on his bedside table. Turning back toward Ronan, he shook his head. “No. You’re not lying on my floor. This isn’t St. Agnes. You’re not seventeen.”

“So what do you want me to do?” Ronan retorted. “Stand here like an asshole?”

Adam didn’t dignify that with an answer. Standing, sitting, lying down, whatever position he assumed, Ronan would be classified as an asshole. Adam didn’t need to confirm that. Instead, he pointed to the vacant side of his queen size mattress. Without a doubt, it would be more comfortable than the splintering floor of the apartment Adam lived in his senior year of high school — or one of the common room couches Ronan slept on when he visited Adam at college — and, yes, it inched them closer to an edge they’d been skating along for years, but they weren’t kids anymore. They could survive sharing a mattress — one with room for both of them to lie down without even touching — for half an hour while Ronan bitched and moaned about revising his manuscript for the third time.

A second noise of glorious disdain left Ronan and he sneered for a moment before he stalked around the other side of Adam’s bed and flung himself down on top of the covers the same way he’d always thrown himself onto Adam’s floor: with reckless abandon. To further accentuate his contempt, he pounded a fist into Adam’s spare pillow a few times before he finally laid down and dropped his head heavily into the abused pillow as he crossed his arms over his plain black shirt.

Unimpressed with the entire display, Adam — feeling a little too bare despite taking his t-shirt off to combat the warmth of the room — pulled his sheet back up over his chest and asked, “What kind of book shit?”

Succinct, sharp, Ronan replied only, “It sucks.”

“It does not suck.”

Late in Adam’s freshman year, when he’d been preparing to transfer from Harvard to what would end up being a single semester at Yale, Ronan had texted Adam he’d given up on the thing he’d dropped out of high school for — rejuvenating his family’s derelict farm — and had decided to write a novel. Never once did Adam doubt Ronan’s ability to write, just his ability to finish something, considering the only thing Ronan had ever stuck with was going to Sunday mass with his brothers. But by the time Adam got on a bus to Pittsburgh for what would end up being a single semester at Carnegie Mellon, Ronan had a first draft completed and Adam offered to read it in his downtime over winter break. Then, after Ronan revised his first draft and finished his second, Adam offered to read that too. He tried helping Ronan whenever he could — help and intangibles like it were the only things Adam could typically contribute to a friendship — but he wouldn’t have read through four hundred pages twice if those four hundred pages had sucked. He didn’t have time for that. So if Ronan’s second iteration of his novel hadn’t sucked, Adam figured the revision he was working on didn’t either.

“It sure as shit sucks.” Ronan threw his hands into the air and flicked his fingers around a few times before he scraped his hands over his face and then scraped his fingernails through his buzz cut. “The writing’s fucking flat. Don’t get me going on the plot. It’s making Jesus weep. You know how many times it’s been done? More times than Declan’s fucked a girl named Ashley. I want to go stab my eyes out with the chick on top of the Capitol, it’s so boring. And —”

“Freedom,” Adam interrupted, because as much as he was trying to be a good friend, the clock on his nightstand glared a red 12:07 and he kind of wanted at least a few hours of sleep.

“What,” Ronan said, “the hell.”

“Freedom. The chick on top of the Capitol. That’s Freedom.”

“You stopped me so you could be a pedantic shitbag.”

“Only partially.” Adam turned on his side to face Ronan where he sprawled on the other half of the mattress. Digging his elbow into the bed and propping his cheek in his hand, Adam pulled sageness he’d heard from a professor from the recesses of his mind because it worked just as well for writing as it had for data analysis. “I think you’re too close to it.”

“To a pedantic shitbag? Yeah, I am.”

“Your book.” Adam kicked Ronan’s shin near the hem of his charcoal gym shorts, though it lost some of its effectiveness through layers of sheets and the comforter Adam had pushed off him in an effort to cool down. Resigning himself to not falling asleep anytime soon, he pressed the back of his free hand to the bed so it rested palm up between them as he started to explain. “You’ve been working on it for over two years. You look at it every day. You’re in it up to your neck. It’s boring because you see it all the time.”

The soft yellow light of Adam’s bedside lamp took away some of the effect of Ronan’s sneer and when he grunted, it didn’t pack the same disdain as the sounds he’d made before climbing into Adam’s bed. “Whatever,” Ronan replied, the same thing he always said when he didn’t want to admit Adam had made a good point. “Distance isn’t going to stop the plot from sucking.”

“But it’s not going to hurt,” Adam told him. “And look. I have enough distance to know if it sucks or not, and I don’t think it sucks.”

“Bullshit. You have — inherent bias or some other fancy pop psych concept you drop twenty times a day at work.”

“I don’t,” Adam lied, because when it came to Ronan, he did. With all of his friends he did, but particularly with Ronan, and Ronan’s cocked eyebrow said he didn’t believe Adam for a second. Adam soldiered on, “Go get your laptop.”

“What? Why? No, it’s midnight. You have to get up in six hours and put on your monkey suit and get back to the daily grind and all that other corporate speak shit I’m embarrassed I know. Go the hell to sleep, Parrish. I’ll cover the A/C.”

“That’s not going to help anymore. We could turn this place into a refrigerator, but my mind’s going a mile a minute.”

“Like it isn’t always,” Ronan replied, and for a long moment, he stared at Adam. Adam stared back until, finally, Ronan rolled off the mattress, retreated to the living room, and returned with his computer. He resumed his place on Adam’s bed and cranked his laptop open, looking at Adam expectantly over the top of the screen. “Are you happy? What now?”

What now was Adam taking Ronan’s laptop from him and scrolling through Ronan’s manuscript to the scenes he remembered liking in previous drafts, explaining what he’d liked about them, what they’d made him feel. The world tearing in two and one of the main characters getting ripped into a parallel universe. Both characters turning morally gray and rising to power in their respective worlds as they tried to get back to one another. The disfigurement of the other main character, rendering him scarred but still frighteningly lovely to the other character.

Adam might not have been well-versed in science fiction, but he’d never read anything like it.

He didn’t know if this approach worked the way he intended. If he’d gotten through to Ronan about how much his book didn’t suck. Adam knew a lot about many things, but he knew nothing about writing novels and revising them. But multiple times, Ronan snatched back his computer to make minor edits, only to shove the laptop back at Adam for Adam to continue, and it was only sometime after two o’clock — when Ronan had reclaimed his computer to tighten up a few sentences — that Adam finally fell asleep despite the heat and despite wanting to keep on going.

With his face smothered in his pillow, Adam uncharacteristically slept through the alarm he set on his bedside clock, but his fallback alarm — his phone perched at the edge of the bed and set to vibrate while it rang at top volume — woke him. On the other side of Adam’s bed, Ronan slept with his tattooed arm smashed into the side of his face, one hand still on his laptop’s keyboard where it sat between them, beeping and blinking warnings about a low battery.

By some miracle, none of the sounds or vibrations woke Ronan, and he didn’t wake up when Adam climbed out of bed and started getting ready. And he didn’t wake up when Adam pulled his laptop from under his hand so Adam could plug it into its charger. And he didn’t wake up when, right before leaving for work, Adam returned to his bedroom, folded his comforter in half, and used it to tuck Ronan in before he turned lowered the temperature of the air conditioner.

For someone who’d once said he didn’t want to become a brunch person, Ronan did not complain any more than usual when their friend Richard Campbell Gansey III suggested they meet up with him and Blue Sargent at a Georgetown restaurant known for its bottomless mimosas. Ronan also didn’t complain that he needed to wake up far earlier than he regularly got out of bed — or off the couch — to meet Gansey and Blue at noon, and he didn’t disagree when Adam suggested he wear sunblock because they were probably going to sit outside.

The only thing he ended up complaining about were the entitled shitstains on M Street who turned a half mile drive into one of the more erratic and interesting experiences Adam had ever had in the BMW’s passenger seat.

“I told you the train made more sense,” he said after Ronan had to jam his foot on the brake again when someone else walked into the street from between two parked cars without looking both ways first. The sidewalks teemed with tourists lining up for cupcakes or macarons or undersized scoops of ice cream, and no one seemed aware of crosswalks, traffic signals, or general mobility on two feet. “You’re gonna stall.”

“I’m not going to stall,” Ronan spat as he pressed the clutch and switched gears, steering the wheel with one hand. His other arm hung out the open driver’s side window, and he’d flipped off multiple elderly women in chambray shirts, white pants, tan loafers, and sunglasses half the size of their faces who thought they had the right of way. “But if these fuckfaces think they’d win a game of chicken with this car, they’re gonna… Oh, for the love of Christ.”

Adam unfortunately didn’t get to hear what a fuckface was going to get, because as yet another pedestrian stepped in front of the BMW, Ronan laid on his horn louder and longer than ever before while magnificently stalling his car right in the middle of the busiest street in Georgetown. It gave Adam a not insignificant amount of satisfaction — he cared about the BMW’s well-being but Ronan almost never stalled, and watching him make that kind of mistake negligibly boosted Adam’s confidence with a stick shift — but he kept his mouth shut until Ronan had wrestled the car into neutral, restarted the engine, and pointed across the front seat at Adam as he said, “Don’t say a word.”

“I wasn’t going to say anything,” Adam replied, but he bit his lip and grinned as he turned to look out the passenger window.

Once the hell of M Street ended and Ronan found a parking spot, they walked to the restaurant, where Gansey and Blue had already been seated at a table on the patio. After fist bumps and hugs were exchanged, and appetizers and bottomless mimosas were ordered, they all huddled around the table, and even though they would have heard about it if the summer-long dig had been successful, Ronan took off his sunglasses so he could look right at Gansey as he asked, “Did you find him?”

A slow shake of his head probably didn’t capture all of Gansey’s remorse, and he didn’t stop himself from looking wistful as he looked at Ronan then at Adam before replying, “No. But we found something.”

For as long as Adam had known Gansey, Gansey had been hunting for the grave of a long-dead Welsh king, Owen Glendower. Why a man who’d led an uprising in the fourteenth century would have been transported to a then-uncolonized Virginia, Adam still wasn’t clear, but Gansey and Ronan, then Adam, then Blue had spent most of their free time during high school combing the mountains around Blue and Adam’s hometown of Henrietta, looking for Glendower’s final resting place. They found a lot of stuff along the way, things that had no right belonging in the foothills of the Blue Ridge: medieval shield bosses covered in ravens, pre-Columbian soapstone bowls, rocks with holes bored through them by seawater despite being found well into the mountains.

But they’d never found Glendower.

That hadn’t stopped the high school obsession from carrying Gansey, after a gap year, to Columbia University in New York City so he could pursue archaeological and anthropological studies, and Blue had enrolled fifty blocks downtown at Hunter College because she liked their ecology and conservation program. The bulk of their summer had taken them to Wales — Blue for a farmland restoration project and Gansey for the excavation and opening of a tomb — and now they were back in Washington and Virginia, prodigal children for a week before they needed to return to school.

Gansey produced his phone from the pocket of his cargo shorts and they crowded impossibly closer as he unlocked it and began swiping through photos of his dig. In most, rolling green hills covered the screen from corner to corner, but here, there’d be a toppled henge surrounded by stakes and orange flags, and there, there’d be the beam of a flashlight illuminating a rough-hewn effigy on top of a tomb. It hadn’t contained Glendower, Gansey told them. They weren’t sure whose bones had been in the bottom of the coffin. The markings on it had been inconclusive.

“Likely no one of importance,” he said.

“Doesn’t stop it from being a great find,” Adam told him, trying to keep his voice from sounding tight. Each time Gansey swiped to another photo, Adam’s stomach had hardened a little more, and he hadn’t been able to stop himself from wishing he’d been in Wales instead of Gansey, or that they’d been there together. But Gansey — privileged enough he could pursue things he loved — had chosen one path and Adam had chosen another, and while Gansey searched and explored and uncovered, Adam would fill his days with desks and data and desert-dry eyes.

“It’s undoubtedly great for Anglesey,” Gansey replied, not surprisingly diminishing his own contributions toward the dig and the excitement he’d surely felt over the find. Clicking his phone to sleep and returning it to his pocket, he looked at Adam and Ronan across the table and said, “But you two. In DC. Together. What have you been up to?”

Adam glanced over at Ronan and found Ronan glancing at him. They’d both known this question would come, and now Adam almost wanted to cower under its scrutiny. Because while Gansey had been digging up ancient tombs and Blue had been improving soil health and biodiversity, what Adam and Ronan had been up to paled in comparison.

With a flick of a wrist, Ronan deferred to Adam, and Adam set his shoulders before he said, “Working.”

“Writing,” Ronan followed quickly, like piling on top of Adam would get all this over with more quickly, and Adam gave him props for the attempt.

Blue blinked at them through her rose-tinted sunglasses. “Oh, no. You didn’t move here and become boring, did you? You’re really just working and writing?”

Adam didn’t think there was anything shameful about him settling into his job or Ronan putting most of his time into his novel, but next to Blue and Gansey and their adventures, things did feel unbalanced. Adam felt inadequate. He’d never thought himself interesting the way his friends were, but he’d never considered himself dull. Unremarkable. Blue’s reaction made him think he might be wrong.

“Slow your roll, Sargent,” Ronan cut in. “We’ve only been here, like, two months.”

It’d been nearly three, but Adam didn’t correct him.

“Summer’s bad anyway,” Gansey said, forever the diplomat. “Too hot to do anything worthwhile. But you should make the best of it now the weather's improving. It’s a wonderful city.”

“Yeah,” Ronan agreed, though no one predicted how he was going to continue, “if you like suits with sticks up their asses and fuckfaces who don’t know how to walk.”

It dropped them right back into their usual banter whenever the four of them got together, and through two rounds of mimosas and a waffle the size of his head, Adam began feeling something closer to normal. Gansey caught them up on his mother’s political career, Blue caught them up on happenings back in Henrietta and with her family of psychics at 300 Fox Way, and just as she finished telling them about how her cousin Orla recently sank money into starting a website with a live chat, Blue perked up like she’d remembered something and plunged her hand into the crocheted tote hung over the back of her chair.

“Persephone sent these, Adam,” she said when she set a small, black velvet bag on their table. From the way the fabric draped around the contents, it didn’t take long for Adam to figure out what was inside: a deck of tarot cards. Why one of the psychics at 300 Fox Way had gifted him a tarot deck, he had no clue. His interest in them in high school had been passing, if he could call it that. But no one who lived in Blue’s childhood home — particularly Persephone, the psychic Adam always liked best — did anything without a reason. He just hadn’t worked that reason out yet. “She said they’ll be good for you.”

Few emails requiring devoted attention made it into Adam’s work inbox, but he’d yet to turn off Outlook notifications, so they got his attention anyway. Every few minutes, a pop-up in the corner of one of his dual monitors drew his eyes away from setting the parameters for a statistical model or combing through a spreadsheet of raw data, and each time, Adam crossed his fingers the message would be about something other than leftover food from an on-site client meeting or an early warning HR would be assigning all employees a new mandatory training next month.

Usually, it wasn’t.

Top-tier internships and letters of recommendation had only yielded offers for entry-level roles, and Adam understood he had to start somewhere. But on the bottom rung of a very tall ladder, he’d been deemed too new to be important, and fresh out of college, he didn’t yet have good enough rapport with his colleagues for his opinions or ideas to be trusted. After years of being told he held promise, that any company would be better off for hiring him, in barely four months of work, Adam Parrish had determined precisely what he was good for: finishing assignments ahead of schedule and then reenacting Oliver Twist and asking for more.

Which left him opening most emails and reading them halfheartedly before deleting them or filing them away, until a random September Wednesday found him hovering his mouse over an Outlook notification so it didn’t disappear from his screen. Not because the email seemed like it needed to be read with urgency, but because Adam didn’t recall providing his work email address to the message’s sender.

Opening the email and ignoring its lack of content — no subject line, no signature, simply a hyperlink that made it past security and phishing filters — Adam replied, How’d you get my email?

Faster than Adam expected, Ronan replied, people shouldn’t blast their shit all over linkedin. first initial dot last name at company dot com. didn’t take a 4 yr degree to figure that out.

Or a high school diploma apparently.

ha. ha. ha. you wanna go or what? dick told us to get out more.

As he prepared a lecture about how shit and dick — no matter the context — were words that would get Adam flagged by IT, he finally paid attention to the link Ronan had sent him, a URL that would take Adam to one of the Smithsonian’s websites. He wouldn’t put it past Ronan to try and infect Adam’s work computer with a virus, but he didn’t think Ronan would take the time to spoof a Smithsonian link to accomplish it. So Adam clicked it, and a page he never expected from Ronan opened: an event that evening at the National Postal Museum celebrating the USPS launching a set of Dungeons & Dragons stamps.

An event that started well before Adam typically left work.

His gut told him no. Adam had never played D & D. He had very little interest in tabletop roleplaying at all, and he doubted Ronan did either. Ronan’s game-based entertainment leaned toward video games where he used high-powered automatic weapons to shoot at zombies, enemies, or both. Based on what little Adam knew about Dungeons & Dragons, Ronan certainly had the creativity to be a dungeon master but probably lacked the patience, though if Adam knew Ronan at all, Ronan would probably love torturing any adventurers playing with him in hilariously violent ways.

But —

On their way home from hanging out with Gansey and Blue, Adam had agreed with Gansey’s point about Ronan and Adam not making the best of living in DC, and he’d mentioned the first summer of his post-college life had slipped away while he’d been tied to his desk. When Ronan asked him what he was going to do about that, Adam had been unable to provide an answer. Now here Ronan was, giving Adam one. While Adam had been exhausting himself with another ten-hour day at the office, Ronan had looked for things they could do so Adam could say he’d done something in the final weeks before summer truly ended. The event was even at a price point Adam couldn’t argue about: free.

Which left the only remaining argument one he’d need to have with himself about unchaining himself from his desk before 6:30. An argument Adam would have as five o’clock approached, because before he could stop himself, he replied to Ronan’s last email.

Okay.

Ronan went radio silent after that, leaving Adam assuming they’d meet up in front of the museum around 5:30, the event’s posted start time. A surreptitious search revealed the National Postal Museum — a place he’d never visited or even heard of — stood across the street from Union Station, two Metro stops from the office, and if he planned to leave at five, he would make it to the museum with time to spare. A plan didn’t stop Adam’s stomach from rioting as five o’clock approached though. The mental gymnastics of coming up with justification for leaving quote-unquote early took his focus away from what he’d wanted to finish before clocking out, an analysis for a project he wasn’t assigned to but had been given after he’d finished all the reporting he’d been tasked with.

That had become a recurring problem the past few months, rewards of more work after he displayed his efficiency.

But, rioting stomach or not, as soon as Adam’s watch ticked five o’clock, he saved his files, shut down his computer, and ignored the dour glances sent his way as he started packing up his things. His boss — her office unavoidably along the path he had to take toward the stairs — proved less ignorable, particularly when she called out to him through her open office door. “Oh, Adam. How’s the broadband survey data shaping up?”

The overachiever in Adam, the promising young man, wanted to pull his laptop from his messenger bag, open it back up, and review everything he’d done so far. He just managed to stop himself, but only because he caught a glimpse of a digital clock stuffed alongside binders on his boss’s bookshelf. 5:04. “Good,” he said instead, curling his fist around the strap of his messenger bag where it cut across the front of his blue plaid button down shirt. “I should be done tomorrow.”

Though she’d given him no deadline, a brief look of chilly disappointment crossed his boss’s face before she replied, “I’m glad to hear it. Any problems?”

“No.” A Ronan-like reply. Something Adam didn’t usually lean on in general and never with a manager, but he leaned on it then. Short and no more than needed. Not leaving anything open for further questioning. Ronan would be proud of him. “Everything looks good.”

His boss nodded, still cool. “Good. Well, it looks like you’re leaving so I won’t keep you.”

“Have a good night.” Adam waved a quick, stiff goodbye before beelining toward the stairs, not giving himself the chance to regret not dropping a thank you when his boss dismissed him, and not giving himself the chance to second guess his decision to leave early. Because it wasn’t early. For anyone working anywhere else, five o’clock was a completely normal end of the workday, evidenced by the streams of people leaving the office buildings around Adam’s as he joined them walking in the direction of the Metro station at the end of the block.

“The hell is that face for?” Ronan asked, the first thing out of his mouth when he spotted Adam crossing the street toward the Postal Museum’s recessed entrance where Ronan loitered.

Adam’s default wariness must have looked warier than normal if Ronan had noticed and said something, and Adam sighed. “It’s not for anything,” he said, stepping past Ronan when he reached him and moving toward the museum’s brass and glass door. When Ronan didn’t follow, Adam turned to face him. “Ronan, come on.”

“No. Not until this —” Ronan stuck his index finger out and waved it in circles around Adam’s face “— is explained. I’m not hanging out with that all night.”

“It’s my face. You hang out with it all the time,” Adam replied, knocking Ronan’s hand away.

“Unfortunately. So what is it? Girl problems? Boy problems? Not enough fiber? Too much fiber?”

Adam pressed his lips into a thin line as he looked at Ronan, who very well knew the reason for the look on Adam’s face was not a single thing he’d listed. There’d been no women or men to speak of — not that Ronan would ask or Adam would tell. Following a fair amount of success at the colleges he’d attended, the dating scene in DC had posed so much of a challenge for Adam as to be almost impossible. Too many conversations on the dating apps he’d downloaded — the only thing Ronan knew about Adam’s dating life at all, and one he’d laughed about mirthfully for at least fifteen minutes — started with what line do you live on? or who do you work for?, driving Adam to the brink of giving up. And considering they often went grocery shopping together and cooked together and ate together, Ronan knew exactly the kinds of food Adam bought and ate, leaving him free of all the internal issues Ronan accused his brother Declan of suffering from.

All of that added up to Adam not feeling the need to respond to Ronan directly, and instead, he said, “The people I work with are going to hate me for leaving before six.”

“Seems like a them problem.” Ronan shrugged and then wagged his thick, dark eyebrows. “Did you get all your fun number crunching done?”

“Most of it.”

“And is the stuff you didn’t gonna kill anything?”

“Only my reputation.”

“Oh, no,” Ronan deadpanned. “How will you survive?” His face cracked into a dark grin when Adam groaned and rolled his eyes, which must have improved Adam’s face because Ronan jerked his thumb over his shoulder at the museum doors and asked, “Are we doing this thing or what?”

They did this thing, and after spending ten minutes in line to pass through metal detectors and then wandering the event for another ten, they glanced at one another, Adam shook his head, and they left through the same doors they’d entered. Apparently, they’d both missed the costumes encouraged note on the event page, and there’d been too many cloaks and corsets, elf ears and flower crowns, horns and fake leather armor for comfort. Adam’s business casual and Ronan’s muscle tank and ripped jeans clashed with the ethereal ambiance the Postal Museum had tried to create for the evening, and the sooner they reentered the real world outside, the better. Years of hiking through Virginian woods looking for the grave of a long-dead Welsh king with Gansey, Blue, and Ronan had not prepared Adam for the particular brand of people that showed up for a Dungeons & Dragons stamp party. Even an ad hoc bar and air conditioning couldn’t have convinced him to stay.

“Jesus shit,” Ronan said once their feet were firmly planted on the sidewalk outside the museum’s doors. “That was —”

“Nerdy?” Given the nature and venue of the event, Adam thought this fact had been implied, but forward thinking had always been more of his forte than Ronan’s.

“The nerdiest,” Ronan agreed. “God, I need to snort deodorant to get this smell out of my sinuses. Run my nose through an olfactory car wash. Fumigate my face with Febreze.”

As if exhaust and warm concrete were much of an improvement, he took a long, exaggerated sniff, and Adam shook his head and laughed. He shouldn’t have because — encouraged — Ronan could go all night, but Adam kind of wanted to let him. To linger there outside the Postal Museum until Ronan had run through every deep cleaning method he knew. It had turned into a nice evening, and while they weren’t in the most picturesque part of the city, it wasn’t bad. A small but lush park stretched out on one side of the street and the glass-and-stone bulk of Union Station looming above them on the other. The sun had dipped west in the sky, tinting all the white granite buildings populating DC a little golden, and a few hours remained before dark, when artificial lighting would take over the sun’s job to illuminate buildings and monuments alike.

Any other day, Adam would have still been at work for at least another hour, and he would have been lucky to catch thirty minutes of daylight before night fell. So today, he needed to take advantage of his freedom. He knew — fundamentally — nothing he’d signed provided him with strict working hours. As a salaried employee, all he needed was to get his work done. He only spent ten hours a day in the office because of his boss’s expectations.

His colleagues’.

His own.

Not knowing when he’d be able to shake those again — and wanting to hear more about how Ronan planned on getting any lingering body odor out of his nasal cavity — Adam said, “You could do all that, or we could get a beer instead.”

Most of the suggestion came from not being ready to go home, but a not small part of it was because the sun hadn’t just gilded the city around them. It had gilded Ronan too, catching the tips of his thick eyelashes on fire, pooling faint shadows in his collar bones, washing out the dark tattooed hooks that crept up the back of his neck. That was just enough enticement for Adam to stretch his toe toward the knife-thin edge they delicately balanced themselves on, a balance slowly becoming more difficult the longer they lived with one another and the more time they spent together.

It was entirely possible Adam was giving himself too much freedom that evening. And it was entirely possible the whole evening felt a little bit too much like a date.

Whether he caught Adam’s motivation or not — the steely, searching way he looked at Adam said it hadn’t gone entirely unmissed — Ronan didn’t mention it. He simply met Adam’s gaze again the moment a slow, slick grin began curling one corner of his lips, and it almost set Adam alight when Ronan replied, “You know what? I like the way you think, Parrish.”

Adam remembered the first time he'd networked, when Gansey's mom ran for an open Congressional seat.

She'd kicked off her campaign with a weekend-long schedule of events the summer before their senior year at Aglionby, and Gansey had invited Adam to go with him. There might be an internship in there, he'd said, if you're good at it.

Very badly, Adam had wanted to be good at it, and it hadn't taken much pressure for him to agree to go along.

Gansey's older sister Helen had whisked Adam and Gansey away from Henrietta in her helicopter and that thirty-minute flight — a needless extravagance when the distance could have been covered by car in less than two hours — kickstarted Adam's weekend-long nausea. The first night, there'd been a cocktail party at the Ganseys' palatial northern Virginia mansion, guests crowded wall-to-wall while servers wound between them with trays of hors d'oeuvres drifting overhead. Music from a string quartet filled every nook and cranny bodies didn't, and no matter how hard the house's air conditioning worked, everything and everyone radiated heat. Adam could hardly breathe, let alone think, and it took a sensational amount of effort to not step outside into the garden and leave the contents of his stomach under a rose bush.

In the span of four hours, Adam shook more hands than he ever had before, collected enough business cards to fill the pockets of his suit jacket, drank far too much champagne, and — several times — Gansey had put his hand on Adam's shoulder and told someone This is Adam Parrish. One day we'll be throwing one of these shindigs for him.

Adam didn't know whether to be pleased by or terrified of the prospect.

It had been his first real taste of networking, of being introduced to the right kind of people, the kind who could help him get ahead. Even at seventeen, he understood how important it was, especially for someone like him: a poor kid from rural Virginia who only had his own merit to build a life upon. But that hadn't stopped him from hating it so much he sequestered himself in Gansey's childhood bedroom to avoid a tea party and book club the Ganseys hosted the next day. If the family pitied him, or if they found his behavior childish and uncouth, they never showed it. Their breeding was too good for that, while Adam's breeding left him hiding behind a closed door.

Time and exposure had improved his relationship with shaking hands and swapping email addresses or business cards. Adam still didn't like it — how false it felt, how the whole concept of networking was using and being used — but let's catch up over coffee or could you pass on my resume no longer nauseated him. So he could grin and bear it for an evening. Be an emerging young professional. Interact with people other than his colleagues and Ronan.

That still didn't make stepping into happy hour at a swanky bar in DuPont Circle easy. The low, pink velvet chairs, gold-and-marble tables, and Edison bulb pendant lamps he could see through the windows were far from Adam's comfort zone, and they hadn't been what he expected when he saw the flyer for the event posted on a bulletin board at work, but he took a deep breath and walked through the door anyway, plunging into the crowded sea of other emerging young professionals.

And, immediately, a guy he recognized from the strategic communications team at work attached himself to Adam — a problem he'd had at Harvard — and launched them into a conversation about how their teams could better synergize until Adam finally excused himself to go to the bathroom, only to hit the bar instead.

As he waited for the bartender, people around him did network. To his left, someone who worked for some senator talked to someone who worked for some super PAC. To his right, two people from — what he gathered — two different non-profits discussed potential collaborations. What he knew, what he did, wasn't relevant enough for him to politely cut in and ask questions or offer his opinion, so he simply ordered his IPA once the bartender came around, and as he waited for it, someone squeezed between Adam and the senate staffer and said, "I've seen you before."

"Beg pardon?" Adam replied, turning away from watching where he'd started tapping his debit card on the bar.

A young woman now filled the space beside him, her elbow resting on the bar as she angled herself toward Adam, and she echoed his tapping with a fingernail manicured a shiny pastel pink. "I've seen you before," she repeated, narrowing her hazel eyes slightly as she looked up at him, and her chestnut bangs swept across her forehead as she tipped her chin. "Choate. No. Actual Yale."

Laughing dryly, Adam nodded — pausing to accept his beer and give the bartender his card — before he replied, "I went. For a semester." He tried to place her but he couldn't. Most of his classes at Yale had been introductory seminars in lecture halls large enough to fit a hundred students, so if they'd shared a class at some point, chances were he'd never noticed her. She was cute in a New England kind of way, like she should always wear white Oxford shirts and have a cardigan tied around her shoulders, but she looked a little like Gansey's sister, which meant she looked a little like Gansey, and Adam didn't know how to feel about that. "Fall, about three years ago."

"I knew it!" She grinned — all straight white teeth and lightly glossed lips — and stabbed her fingertip into the bar. "I'm great with faces." Extending her hand to Adam, she finally introduced herself, "Morgan Williams."

Adam took her hand, shook it gently, and said, "Adam Parrish. Nice to see you again."

Maybe things would have turned out differently if Morgan's next question hadn't been who do you work for? And, honestly, Adam should have known that was coming considering the event they'd both chosen to attend, but that didn't stop the question from being tedious. They still had a nice — if somewhat flirty — conversation, and Adam bought Morgan a drink despite not having further intentions. She was nice enough. Attractive enough. Smart enough. But like everyone else in the bar, including Adam, she seemed a little fake. Too polished and ready to smile or laugh, anything to make other people see she was enjoying herself, as if Adam hadn’t done the exact same things over the course of their conversation.

He gave Morgan credit though. She had a kind of gumption he hadn’t seen in other girls he’d talked to in DC, even ones who’d messaged him first on Hinge or Bumble. Because after Adam finished his beer and prepared to leave — done with his subpar attempt at networking, if sitting on a plush pink barstool and talking to a moderately interesting woman could be called networking — she asked for his number, and for the first time all day, Adam was genuine.

"Thanks," he said, "but I'm taking a break."

And he was.

From networking. From dating. From being as fake as every other person who’d walked into that bar that night.

Every other person in DC, except for one.

On the Metro, he deleted the dating apps from his phone, and then he stopped in the grocery store along his walk home from the station and picked up a 6-pack. But when he let himself into their apartment, Ronan wasn’t around. Signs pointed to recent occupancy. The television displayed a first-person shooter and its buzzing electronica soundtrack filtered from the speakers, but the game hadn’t been paused. Ronan’s avatar simply crouched in a corner behind a stack of crates, occasionally stretching, checking his weapon, or sighing about his inactivity. Ronan’s phone and keys had been thrown on the coffee table too, meaning he hadn’t gone anywhere, but Adam couldn’t hear movement from Ronan’s bedroom, and the bathroom door wasn’t closed, though that hadn’t prevented Ronan from using it before.

The only sign that pointed to Ronan not vanishing into thin air was the open roll of aluminum foil on the breakfast bar, and after he stashed four of the six beers he’d bought in the fridge, Adam headed up to the top floor of the building and pushed open the black-painted door reading Rooftop Access.

“What are you doing out here?” Adam asked as he stepped onto what had been billed in the apartment listing as a terrace. Property management hadn’t done much to make it less roof-like, but they’d put some patio furniture in one corner, surrounded it with planters full of bamboo shoots, and set up an umbrella to create a semblance of shade. Nothing that qualified as a terrace in Adam’s opinion, but he wouldn’t decline additional outdoor space.

Ronan stood nowhere near the furniture, but near the edge of the roof and the waist-high wall that ran around its perimeter. Balls of tinfoil in various sizes lined the top of the wall just in front of where Ronan stood, and he still held a few in his hands when he turned around toward Adam. As if it were perfectly logical, he told Adam, “The crows are back.”

It took a long moment for what Ronan said to make sense, but when it did, Adam laughed, and then he noticed the nearby caws of a not small number of crows, probably the same murder Ronan had told him about the week before when he’d watched them converge on the roof of the building across the street.

“And what,” Adam said as he started walking toward Ronan, “you’re trying to lure them?”

“No,” Ronan replied, indignant. He threw one of the foil balls at Adam, who dodged out of its way, unable to catch it because he was trying to multitask and twist the caps off the beers before he reached Ronan. “I’m not trying to lure them. I’m trying to befriend them.”

Caps successfully removed, Adam offered one of the beers to Ronan when he stopped beside him. “Good,” Adam said as Ronan took it, and just before he lifted his bottle to his lips to take his first sip, Adam offered Ronan the two golden bottle caps in his palm. “We need more friends.”

Tan chinos. A white collared shirt. A navy blazer. An optional red tie.

Seven other men in Adam’s train car wore the exact same outfit he’d chosen that morning. Possibly eight, but he couldn’t confirm if the guy a few window seats away wore khakis or if his pants were a darker shade of brown. On his walk to the office from the Metro station, a scant block, he passed two more men — and one woman — in the same white-khaki-navy combination, and once he reached the office, three of his colleagues had gotten the memo too.

Fashion had never been something Adam cared about. He cared that he looked put-together, presentable, but whether his clothes were in style or not had never been a factor in how he dressed. He’d even appreciated the Aglionby uniform in high school — white collared shirt, navy sweater, khaki pants. It took the guesswork out of getting dressed every morning, leaving one less thing for him to think about. It also helped homogenize the student body, meaning Adam mostly fit in unless someone got close enough to notice the frays on the shoulders of his secondhand sweaters and how his dress shoes had been polished back to life.

But now, when he no longer needed the armor of a uniform, he’d put himself back in one along with half the male population of DC under forty, and Adam didn’t appreciate that nearly as much as he had at Aglionby. He’d had grades to distinguish him then. Favoritism from teachers. College — even without the uniform — had been more of the same. He’d set the curve in most of his classes. Graduated summa cum laude.

In Washington, disregarding his style — or maybe lack thereof, because Adam was not unfamiliar with men’s fashion magazines and did not recall advice on dressing exactly like everyone else — he had nothing that made him stand out. Nothing that set him apart. Adam Parrish was just like the guy across the train car and just like his colleague three cubicles away. A ladder-climber in a city of ladder-climbers, the rungs above Adam packed so full he couldn’t see the top.

He’d grown so used to being great at everything, focused so much of his attention on getting on the ladder in the first place, that he’d blinded himself to the truth: his ambition had thrown him head-first into a sea of people exactly like him. People who’d been patted on the back like Adam. Congratulated like Adam. Gotten straight A’s like Adam. Told good work, nice job, keep it up like Adam. And he’d be fighting each and every one of them for that same stale recognition for the rest of his career.

All it had taken for him to comprehend that had been seeing thirteen other people wearing his same navy jacket.

That evening, he walked home, not wanting to encounter another dozen guys wearing the same outfit again, though his plan was far from perfect. He still passed one more person wearing a white shirt, khaki chinos, and a navy blazer, and in typical DC behavior, a day that started cool and autumnal in the morning and turned into mid-July by afternoon. Halfway to the apartment, Adam lost his jacket — so sweaty beneath it his undershirt and button down stuck to his back between his shoulder blades — and rolled up his sleeves, but the nail in his coffin ended up not being his clothes at all. It ended up being his leather-soled brogues, and he hated himself for ever thinking they’d make sufficient walking shoes.

Thankfully, Ronan wasn’t home when Adam limped through their front door. He hung up his blazer — already mentally scheduling a trip to the dry cleaner to rid it of wrinkles from spending a slow two miles draped over Adam’s arm — and when he sat down on the couch and peeled off his shoes, he saw precisely what his poor planning had wrought on his feet. Thin, raw, red lines curved across his bony ankles, and the jut of one big toe shined pink with an oncoming blister. While his other big toe remained fine, the skin over both Achilles tendons had lost layers, and Adam looked at his feet for a long, long moment before he mustered the willpower to retrieve the first aid kit from beneath the bathroom sink.

The sting of alcohol wipes over split skin had just faded when Ronan barged through their door shoulder-first, stuttering to a stop when he noticed Adam — barefoot with bandages at the ready — and asking, “What the hell happened to you?”

“I don’t want to talk about it,” Adam replied, focusing on twisting the cap off a tube of antibacterial cream instead of Ronan shoving the door shut. If he said anything at all about beginning to regret every single decision he’d made that led him to sitting on their couch with wrecked feet, history told him he’d get one of two reactions from Ronan: rapid acceptance or rapid humiliation. Adam wasn’t prepared for either, but his shoulders loosened a little when he got something close to the first.

“The fuck would I talk about?” Ronan stalked into the living room after kicking off his boots into the growing pile of his shoes beside the door. Once he reached the couch, he threw his backpack — probably holding his laptop, considering the weighty thump it made against the cushion — onto the end opposite Adam, and Adam could feel Ronan’s eyes burning into the side of his head before Adam turned on his socked heel and stalked out of the living room again.

In his absence, Adam smeared cream and smoothed bandages over one foot and he’d started working on the other when Ronan returned with a bottle of whiskey and two glasses, putting them down with a clink hard enough to chip something before he tossed himself down beside Adam.

“What’s that for?” Adam asked flatly as he tore open the wrapper of another bandage.

“What does it look like?” Ronan said. “We’re drinking.”

“I don’t need —”

“No. You do, man.” Ronan pulled the cork out of the bottle with a hollow pop. “You really do.”

Adam raised no more protests, only finished sticking bandages to his ankles before he packed up the first aid kit, gathered his trash, and gingerly walked it all back to the bathroom. By the time he returned, Ronan had filled the glasses with healthy pours of whiskey and held his own glass in his hand. Sitting back down, Adam picked up the second glass from its place on the coffee table, and watching the amber alcohol sway as he tipped the glass back and forth, he asked, “Is this the shot kind or the sip kind?”

“It’s whatever fucking kind you want,” Ronan told him before he took a small, slow sip, so Adam started with a slow, small sip.

The slight burn across his tongue and down the back of throat didn’t distract from the pain in his feet, dully throbbing where they rested on the gray area rug they’d spread out beneath the coffee table and couch. Adam had dealt with blisters plenty of times before. He’d worked so many night-long shifts in too-tight boots. But this time, he’d turned his poor feet into martyrs for his bad mood and he’d be facing the consequences for days. God, he was an idiot. On so many fronts. Nothing he could do or drink would distract from that. Not grinding his fingertips into his eye sockets or taking a second, longer sip of whiskey, though after a few of those, his feet began feeling better.

When they finished their first pours, Ronan refilled their glasses, and a few sips into their second round, Adam finally broke the silence that had filled the space between them while they drank. “I saw fourteen people dressed exactly like me today.”

“Thought you said you didn’t want to talk about it.”

“I don’t.”

“Yet here we are.” Ronan spread out his hands — one still holding his whiskey — and he grinned when Adam stared at him. “So you saw fourteen doppelgangers today and decided to fuck your feet up.”

“I walked home, yes.”

“Jesus, Parrish. Why?”

Shaking his head and taking a long sip of his drink, Adam swallowed down both the whiskery and his dread about this conversation before he replied, “You wouldn’t get it.”

Not because Ronan wouldn’t understand the words coming out of Adam’s mouth, but because he wouldn’t understand Adam’s situation. He’d never wanted a nine-to-five, an office job with a desk and dual monitors. He’d never wanted to get on a ladder unless he could use it to climb onto a roof and jump off. The only time Adam ever saw Ronan wear a tie was to church, and Adam had no doubt that if Ronan miraculously found himself in corporate America, he’d use a tie as a noose and find the nearest ceiling fan.

Ronan gave Adam a withering look he’d probably learned from Adam himself. “Like you get my writing stuff.”

“I try.”

“And, what? You have a monopoly on trying?”

“Sometimes it feels like I do.”

Ronan reeled his foot back, preparing to kick Adam’s foot the way he’d done hundreds of times before, and Adam braced himself for an impact that never came. Because, like he’d changed his mind at the last moment, Ronan stomped his foot down into the area rug and punched Adam in the arm instead.

“Shithead,” Ronan said. “No — shitfoot.”

The change was accurate, and Ronan said it so purposefully and with such conviction, Adam couldn’t stop himself from laughing once, dryly. It succeeded in releasing more of the tension that had his shoulders inching toward his ears, letting him finally slump into the couch cushions behind him and close his eyes for a moment. Sightless, he brought his glass to his lips and took a gulp — not a sip — of his whiskey, then he opened his eyes again as he held the glass in both hands and pressed the bottom edge of it into the middle of his chest.

Putting words in order should have been easy. Adam strung them together into cohesive sentences every single day. But he’d never talked about something not meeting his expectations. He’d never had to admit that — for years — he’d been entirely wrong about the path he’d set for himself. That now he’d made it past a significant milemarker, he thought maybe he should have taken a different fork in the road. That it was possible he’d spend four years of his life at four different colleges setting himself up for a life he was gradually going to grow to hate.

But he could start simple. Ronan had never needed eloquence. He’d never really needed Adam to explain anything at all.

“I don’t like it,” Adam finally said, clasping his hands so tightly around his glass he thought it might shatter in his hands, forcing him to add being a shithand to his resume. “I thought I would. I wanted to. I thought after I got over the learning curve and stopped being the new guy that it would get better, but it’s been four months now and it hasn’t. And I don’t think it’s going to. It’s not the work. The work is fine. I’m good at the work. It’s just — everything else.”

He stopped, because if he went into the everything else — the hours, office politics, being lauded as a top performer only to be rewarded with more work — he’d be holding bloody shards of glass in his hands and his shirt would have been soaked with not just sweat that day, but whiskey too.

After a lengthy silence during which both of them took long sips of their drinks, Ronan replied, “Well that’s fucking bleak.”

“At least it’s not you.”

“Wouldn’t want it to be. Did my whole existential what am I doing with my life mindfuckery already. Twice. Not doing that again anytime soon. Maybe next decade.” Ronan made a noise of glorious disdain and knocked back another swig of his whiskey, nose wrinkling as he asked, “So what are you going to do about it? Other than not dressing like every other political monkey in this goddamn city.”

“I don’t think I have a lot of options.”

“I mean, yeah. It looks like a Banana Republic Factory Store puked in your closet, so —”

“I don’t mean that,” Adam laughed, then sighed. Clothes were the least of his worries, but he could dig out some of what he’d worn in college. Tweed vests and thrifted sweaters and vintage slacks. That would at least put him in something different than what half the men in DC wore. “I signed a contract and a bunch of other stuff that’s not going to be easy to get out of. It’s not as simple as… I can’t just leave.”

“Who are you?” Ronan asked once Adam had finished being pitiful.

“Is that a trick question?”

“You know what, I was going to try to help you figure out your shit ass work situation, but if you’re going to be a dick about it, maybe I won’t.”

“No. No. I’ll stop. I’d —” Adam sighed again and finished off his whiskey, leaning forward to put his empty glass down on the coffee table before he looked at Ronan beside him. Plaintive, he said something he’d said very, very few times before. “Help me.”

“Now we’re talking. I thought you’d never ask.” Finishing his own drink, Ronan filled their glasses again, and after he thrust Adam’s whiskey back into his hand, Ronan slapped Adam’s knee, leaving his hand there — warm, heavy, and solid. Soothing in a way only Ronan could be. “It seems like,” he said, his fingertips curling into Adam’s inseam just above his knee, increasing Adam’s heart rate a few beats per minute, “you might be shit out of options.” Meeting Adam’s gaze, Ronan smiled, small but real and slow. “But you’re Adam Parrish. You can always make some more.”

“Dick and Sargent want to do — what the hell is this — Friendsgiving?”

“I saw.”

“And you didn’t say it’s stupid?”

Adam looked up from the tarot deck he’d laid out on the coffee table, four perfectly straight lines of dark and wispy cards covering nearly every inch of the tabletop. Before Ronan appeared — wearing black boxer briefs and nothing else, his phone held far away from his body — in the mouth of the hallway leading to their bedrooms, Adam had been leaning over the table with his elbows resting on the edge of it. Slowly, methodically, he’d shuffled himself down one line, then the next, studying everything from The Fool in the top left corner to the King of Pentacles in the bottom right, not exactly sure why he’d chosen to spend his Saturday morning on the esoteric, but somehow knowing he needed it. Now he stared at Ronan, seeing both his friend and the last card he’d looked at — the smoky figure on skeletal horseback of the Knight of Wands — and blinked until he saw only Ronan before he said, “I wasn’t going to say anything.”

“Wow,” Ronan replied, cocking his head as one corner of his mouth tilted down. “That’s real nice.”

“Are you going to reply?”

Rapping the edge of his phone against the wall, Ronan shrugged before he padded into the living room, tossing his phone and then himself onto the couch. “What do you think?”

Which meant Ronan had no intention of replying either.

“That’s real nice,” Adam echoed.

With Ronan awake and present, Adam figured it had become futile continuing his examination of the deck of tarot cards Persephone had gifted him through Blue. In order, he began stacking them back together so he could pick up where he’d left off later, and he’d gathered about half the deck before Ronan asked, “What’s all this anyway? Please do not tell me you’re finally buying into Blue’s woo woo bullshit. Come on. You’re college educated, Parrish.”

“I’m not buying into it.” Adam stopped his stacking and looked at Ronan, keeping his eyes above the bare, broad expanse of Ronan’s chest. “I just didn’t have anything better to do.”

In hindsight, knowing Ronan would inevitably wake up and that, once he did, this exact outcome had the highest probability, Adam should have left the tarot deck where he’d found it: in the top drawer of his desk, where he’d been putting away the collection of program pamphlets and course catalogs he’d been looking at over breakfast. But, short of seeking professional guidance or abusing Ronan’s offer of help, Adam needed something other than his own ideas to get him out of the mess he’d found himself in, and turning to a deck of cards seemed like a far better option than talking to someone about it.

“Whatever you want to pick up as a hobby, man. God knows you need some. Or one.” Ronan held up his hands, palms out, like this would absolve him from his accurate blast about Adam needing to get a life outside of work. “Don’t let me stop you from trying to tell your future.”

The two feet of space between them already held a fair amount of annoyance flooding in from both sides, but Adam managed to pack more into it as he frowned at Ronan. Years of hanging out with Blue, of spending time around her family at 300 Fox Way back in Henrietta, had solidified everyone’s understanding of psychics and their talents — smudging, scrying, tarot readings — and if Ronan still didn’t did know the cards half-stacked in front of Adam guided rather than predicted, they had bigger problems than jokes about the how Adam had dedicated most of his morning.

Adam didn’t have to worry about potential problems for long though, because — always a shitbag — Ronan flashed him a grin and said, “Ask them if we should host Friendsgiving.”

“I thought you said it was stupid.”

“Then do you want to make the call whether we’re doing it?”

“Not particularly.”

“So pick a card, any card, and we’ll blame that when we tell Gansey the bad news.”

Out of all of the questionable and often unsafe ideas Ronan had had over the years — taking turns dragging each other around on a moving dolly behind the BMW, racing a shopping cart across a parking lot while Adam sat inside it, using an old backhoe to dig a pool-sized pond at the Barns — leaving decision making to a deck of tarot cards fell at the not horrible end of the idea spectrum. Adam could easily go along with it. Not that he hadn’t easily gone along with Ronan’s ideas before. He’d probably gone along with too many, too easily.

But this one — more or less, if he looked at it sideways — took away the responsibility of choosing whether or not to have Gansey and Blue over for a small party the night before Thanksgiving, and Adam couldn’t argue with that.

Shoulders sagging as he shook his head, he finished gathering up his tarot cards before squaring off the deck, tapping each of its four sides against the coffee table. Then he shuffled — not the high speed flick of a casino, but a slow cutting of the deck before letting the two halves fall lazily together — over and over again until it felt like he’d done it enough, finally fanning the cards out in a dark arc across the coffee table, one end near him and one end near Ronan.

“You pick,” Adam said, nodding his chin toward the cards.

Ronan scoffed. “So you can blame me?”

“I thought we were blaming the cards.”

“So we are, Parrish. So we are.” Hunching forward, Ronan dug his elbows into his thighs and his gaze followed the arc one way and then back before he looked at Adam and asked, “How do I do this?”

“You never pulled one at Fox Way?”

“Are you really asking me that?”

Considering Ronan avoided the reading room in Blue’s family home at all costs, Adam probably shouldn’t have. The fact Ronan had suggested consulting the tarot deck at all kind of astounded Adam. Him actually agreeing to pull a card was nothing short of monumental.

“You pick the one that feels right,” Adam replied after poking at memories of all the crash courses about psychics Blue had ever given him. “Like — your fingers will buzz, or your gut will tell you which one to choose.”

Ronan nodded, almost sagely, before reaching toward the curve of cards. For a minute, he didn’t move his hand an inch, just hovered it above the spread deck. Then, in a burst of movement, he lunged for a card like an Olympic-level fencer in a gold medal bout, plucking one from the table and holding it out to Adam without turning it over.

“That’s one way to do it,” Adam remarked, taking the card from Ronan, flipping it over, and setting it down on the table.

Despite his earlier study of the deck, Adam hadn’t been able to uncloud his memories about what all the tarot suits and numbers and symbols meant. It’d been years since he’d seen the cards regularly, and the dark, smudgy figures in the deck Persephone had passed on to him didn’t look anything like other, more classic tarot decks. He didn’t need a deep understanding of tarot to understand the card Ronan had picked though. On this Three of Cups, three wraiths gathered together in a circle, raising three chalices in a toast to the white and wavy sun above them.

Even Ronan — who had always despised everything arcane and mystical — picked up the meaning, because after they’d both looked at the card for a long moment, he said, “Looks like we’re throwing a fucking party.”

What they really threw fell quite short of a party, but preparation for it did force Adam to look at the apartment through a guest’s eyes. He and Ronan had furnished it, but they hadn’t done much else, and Adam realized how bachelorish it looked when he spent two minutes thinking about what Blue would see upon her arrival. They’d hung nothing on the stark white walls. They’d bought no pillows or blankets to throw on the couch. They hadn’t even gotten hangers for the closet near the front door, leaving them using the chairs in the living room as a coat rack.

So Adam took it upon himself to decorate. A Sunday trip to a flea market provided framed prints of vintage cars he hung up while Ronan supervised and critiqued everything from how Adam stood on a step ladder to how he leveled the frames. On a rare-but-becoming-more-frequent lunch break at work, he stopped in an overpriced home goods store and bought a gray hand knit blanket he carefully folded over the back of the couch so he didn’t snag any stitches. Then, one evening, Adam came home and found hip-high snake plants in green-glazed pots standing on either side of the balcony door, and matching green throw pillows had been artfully tossed on the couch, complementing the blanket he’d bought. It took Adam a while before he hung up his jacket — he and Ronan had simultaneously ordered hangers online and now had too many — and stepped out of his shoes, because it struck him that their few small changes had made their apartment finally look like a home.

The day before Thanksgiving arrived and a messy, combined effort left the kitchen — and Adam and Ronan — covered in a fine dusting of flour and red splatters of homemade tomato sauce because store bought dough and marinara didn’t meet Ronan’s standards for pizza night.

“We’re better than that,” he’d said. Adam didn’t necessarily agree — they’d found a perfectly good pizza place within walking distance and could have bought at least a large pie for what they’d spent on ingredients — but he did appreciate Blue’s and Gansey’s surprise that he and Ronan had managed to cook something from scratch without burning down the building.

Three different pizzas were baked, wine Gansey’s parents sent with him was drunk, awful science fiction B movies were watched, and while Ronan showed Blue a contraption he’d mounted to the balcony railing where he’d been leaving shiny objects in an effort to attract crows from the roof right to their doorstep, Gansey leaned against the breakfast bar with Adam and asked, “Is work still going well?”

“No,” Adam replied honestly, and so he didn’t alarm Gansey, he added, “But I’m looking into other things.”

Slowly, Gansey rubbed the side of his thumb over his bottom lip — an old, thoughtful gesture — a few times before he nodded once as if approving. “I’m glad to hear it,” he said. “And I’m glad to see you and Lynch are both still alive.”

“Yeah,” Adam agreed, looking out at Ronan and Blue on the balcony. “I thought I would, but I haven't really wanted to kill him.”

Later, after locking the apartment door behind Gansey and Blue when their Uber arrived, Adam headed back into the kitchen to clean up from the party. They hadn’t left much behind, but wine glasses streaked red with Merlot needed to be hand washed, pizza crusts needed to be thrown away before plates could be loaded in the dishwasher, and the half-eaten pecan pie Blue’s family sent with her needed to be covered and stuck in the fridge. Except when Adam stepped into the kitchen, Ronan’s legs blocked his path. Instead of starting to clean up, he’d sat down on the floor and leaned back against the glass door of the oven, both legs splayed across the tile in front of him.

Adam’s first instinct was to say something like come on, Ronan, or really, Lynch? And maybe if Blue hadn’t poured him a fourth glass of wine — it’s not like you’re driving anywhere and you look like you need it — his instincts wouldn’t have been blunted, but sitting on the kitchen floor seemed like the proper place to be when one needed to process the relative success of the night. So Adam joined Ronan, sitting a little bit closer than he would have if he hadn’t had that fourth glass of wine, and as he stretched his legs out in front of him to mirror Ronan’s position, Adam said, “We lived. We had our first party.”

“First and last,” Ronan said, rocking his feet from side to side so his calf grazed Adam’s and their feet knocked together. “Next time, I’m jumping off the roof into traffic. You can come if you want.”

If it weren’t for four glasses of Merlot, if it weren’t for earlier admitting to Gansey he liked living with Ronan, if it weren’t for the inevitability they’d been spiraling toward since the moment they moved in together — since they’d been in high school, really — maybe Adam wouldn’t have laughed so hard. But once the first snicker escaped him, he couldn’t stop what followed, little wails of helpless laughter that tipped his head back against the oven door and leaned him sideways against Ronan. Neither of them flinched, and when Ronan started laughing, he leaned against Adam too, tilting toward him in the same way he’d been tilting toward Adam for a long time.

The same way Adam had been tilting toward Ronan no matter how hard he'd been fighting to stay upright, afraid of falling into something they couldn't return from.

Adam didn’t doubt their neighbors could hear them through the walls and through the floor. Ronan’s cackles and Adam’s wails blended into a cacophony that competed with every Michael Bay movie their downstairs neighbor had ever watched at maximum volume. Centuries passed before they calmed down — any time Adam started flagging, Ronan laughed harder, making Adam laugh long, loud, and breathless again — and their shoulders heaved against the oven and each other when, some indeterminable time later, they stopped long enough to catch their breaths.

Then finally, in a silent kitchen — no laughter, no panting, just two twenty-three year olds propping each other up — Ronan extended a closed fist toward Adam, and without missing a single beat, Adam bumped his fist against it, leaving his knuckles pressed against Ronan's, neither one of them pulling their hands away.

In a year punctuated with bad decisions, allowing Ronan into his bedroom over the summer shaped up to be one of the worst Adam had made. Finally with a room of his own, a working but rarely-used lock on the door, he expected a measure of privacy he hadn’t been afforded in college dorms. Except Ronan’s understanding of personal space had always been blurry. Adam assumed it stemmed from growing up with Declan and Matthew — two brothers close to his age — and toys and clothes and books floated around the Barns without true, designated owners, but since that July night, Ronan had taken Adam letting him into his room as an open invitation.

And, for whatever reason, Adam let it continue unchecked.

While Adam was out, Ronan stole — borrowed, because they were always eventually put back — Post-It notes and highlighters from Adam’s desk, and a few pairs of Adam’s socks grew legs and walked away, only to return a few weeks later, balled up and smelling like Ronan’s detergent. If his things never reappeared, it would have become a problem, but they always showed up exactly where Ronan had taken them from. Sometimes better than they’d been: plastic-wrapped stacks of Post-Its, fresh four-packs of highlighters, a worn-thin heel darned back to like-new.

Yet despite complete awareness of Ronan’s inner-apartmental wanderings, Adam still took a few backward mental steps when his very nice suit — usually hung in its garment bag in Adam’s bedroom closet — collided with his chest the moment he walked through their front door on a wet December evening, Ronan seemingly lying in wait for Adam to get home.

Ronan, who was already dressed in his own three-piece suit without a tie, savagely handsome in his black on black on black.

“What’s this for?” Adam asked, grabbing hold of his suit’s hanger before Ronan let go so Adam’s very nice suit didn’t end up in a pile of gray worsted wool on the entryway floor.

“We’re going to a thing,” Ronan replied. “Chop chop, Parrish. It starts in forty minutes.”

“Who said I was going to a thing?” A useless and rhetorical question. Spontaneity had never been one of Adam’s assets, but Ronan’s had been rubbing off on him since they’d arrived in DC. It didn’t usually present itself as a thing requiring a suit though, more like last-minute weekend hikes at Great Falls or ducking into a bar they walked past. But whether Ronan had asked him ahead of time or not, Adam would more than likely agree to go with him. And Ronan knew it, because he simply looked at Adam with raised eyebrows until Adam asked, “What kind of thing?”

“Declan’s girlfriend has a show opening at a gallery in Georgetown tonight.”

“Declan has a girlfriend?”

“I know. Shocking. Who would want to go out with him? I wasn’t even supposed to know about her, but Matthew is allergic to keeping secrets. They make him break out in hives. Her name’s not even Ashley. It’s Jordan. Jordan Hennessy. She’s apparently hot shit in the DC art scene. I googled her.”

“Which is how you found out about the thing.”

Ronan nodded, grinning fiercely. “Yep. Now come on. Let’s crash it.”

Forty minutes and a long walk from the Foggy Bottom Metro station later, Adam followed Ronan up a pair of slate steps into an art gallery whose floor-to-ceiling windows spilled expensively pale white light onto the damp pavement outside, sparkling where rain collected in its cracks. Inside, that same expensively pale white light illuminated the paintings that lined the gallery’s exposed brick walls, frames suspended from the ceiling by wires so thin as to be nearly invisible.

Everything — and everyone — inside the gallery sang with money, and the back of Adam’s neck itched beneath the collars of his shirt, blazer, and wool winter coat. On the surface, he fit in. All the men had neat, civilized facial hair and wore dark suits appropriate for the weather and the season, cufflinks gleaming occasionally when they peeked from beneath a sleeve. The women — with the exception of one — donned dark colors too, accessorized with exotic shawls or necklaces that would probably make Adam’s bank balance hurt. But there was still something unseen Adam would never be able to imitate. A bone-deep behavior guided by generational affluence he’d never be able to perfect. Small benign smiles, gently assertive touches, even the way they held their champagne glasses aloft with one elbow cupped in a hand. Since high school, since before Aglionby, that had been the kind of life Adam wanted to lead, but looking at the crowd mingling in the gallery — the surface-level sincerity of hands on shoulders, polite tittering laughter after tasteful jokes — maybe he ought to stop trying. Maybe this wasn’t the tier of people he wanted to be a part of.

Inside the entrance, he used his coat as collateral for a small, numbered ticket, and Adam tucked it into his wallet as he followed Ronan deeper into the gallery, where Ronan swiped two glasses of sparkling wine — no, real champagne — from a tray floating in a passing waiter’s hands. He handed one to Adam and then they both played inconspicuous well, sipping their drinks while wandering the gallery’s perimeter, lingering in front of artwork for a reasonable amount of time before moving on to the next piece.

Most of the paintings were portraits — so hyper-realistic they looked like they took more skill than artwork he and Ronan had seen at the Renwick or the National Gallery when they’d wandered into them out of Saturday afternoon boredom. And, like those museums, it was only a matter of time before they began mocking the art and the pretentiousness of the people admiring it. In front of one painting, Adam stood straighter and narrowed his eyes, losing his gaze in the middle distance as the fingers of his free hand stroked his chin. In front of another, Ronan mirrored the woman rendered in oils, shrugging his arms from the sleeves of his blazer and hunching beneath it as it draped languidly over his shoulders.

Frame by frame, their game continued, only ending when they turned a corner into another room and found themselves face-to-face with Declan.

Not flesh and bone Declan, but a painting of him sitting in a posh armchair with a jacket draped over one knee, a bright white edge drawing the viewer’s eye to his square Lynch jawline. The exact same jawline Ronan set before he sneered, “Jesus shit. What the hell is that?”

“It looks like Declan to me,” Adam replied, if only to be an asshole.

Ronan elbowed Adam, hard. “Who would want to paint him?”

Gaze drifting back to the painting, the tiniest realization snuck out of the back of Adam's mind, and he asked, “How long have they been going out exactly?”

“What kind of question is that? What does it matter?”

“I don’t think,” Adam replied, measured, “you paint a portrait like this of someone you just started dating.”

Which meant Declan had been keeping Jordan a secret for quite some time, something Ronan would take as a personal affront. He never had a problem keeping his own secrets, but he — hypocritically, Adam thought, but weren't they both — didn’t like being kept from.

As predicted, Ronan curled his lip at the painting again and grabbed Adam’s wrist to pull him away. “I don’t want to look at his face anymore. Come on.”

And though Ronan didn’t want to look at his older brother any longer, he was forced to when he and Adam turned around to Declan in real life, not still life, standing directly behind them.

“Ronan,” Declan said flatly, folding his arms over his chest. Over — what appeared to be — the same blazer draped over his knee in the painting now hanging at Adam’s and Ronan’s backs. “How are you here?”

Adam really wished Declan had asked a different question, or that Gansey was there. He’d always been far better at running Lynch brother interference than Adam, and though Declan wouldn’t create a scene, one could never be so sure about Ronan.

“There’s this thing called the Metro, and then Parrish and I have legs, so —” Ronan began and Adam started looking for an easy exit.

“Cut the bullshit,” Declan replied through his teeth before Adam could find one, his voice low so he didn’t draw the attention of the people standing around them. Grabbing onto Ronan’s biceps, he started propelling him toward a door leading to either a closet or an alley beside the gallery. But before Declan got too far, he looked at Adam, letting go of Ronan long enough to jab a finger at him so hard Adam could almost feel it stabbing into the middle of his chest through the air. “I expect this from him —” Declan jerked his chin toward Ronan “— but I expect better from you, Parrish.”

“You shouldn’t,” Adam and Ronan replied as one, and Ronan smirked at Adam before Declan shoved him through the door into the drizzly evening, not a room full of supplies.

“Crumbs,” a Black woman said near Adam’s elbow. Jordan, Adam realized when he looked at her. Ronan had shown him posts from her Instagram on the train, and she was the one woman Adam had noticed earlier who hadn’t dressed in black or gray or navy, her orange bodice bright against her skin and the black leather bomber jacket she wore over it. “Looks like your boyfriend’s in a bit of trouble, mate. That was Ronan, right?”

“Yeah,” Adam replied, and though he should have denied the boyfriend part, he didn’t. He didn't know exactly what he and Ronan were anymore, but it was slowly slipping out of the realm of just friends. Just friends didn't swallow and look away the way Ronan had when Adam stepped out of his bedroom in a suit. Just friends didn't leave someone they'd never met with the impression they were partners. “Yeah, that was Ronan.”

Whether because he didn’t want to, or because Declan wouldn’t let him, Ronan didn’t reenter the gallery after his altercation with Declan ended. Not long after Adam watched Declan smoothly return to the party as if he’d never left, Adam’s phone buzzed in his pocket, and the message preview told him all he needed to know about what course the rest of his evening would take: out front. get my shit.

Curiously, Adam didn’t need to coerce the guy at the coat check to return Ronan’s overcoat along with Adam’s, and when Adam stepped outside, he found Ronan shivering on the sidewalk, his shoulders shrugged up to his ears and his hands shoved deep in the pockets of his slacks. Though he looked like he was going to snatch his coat from Adam when he offered it, Ronan took it gingerly, and as he wrestled it on, he said, “Declan can go to hell.”

“Tell me something I don’t know,” Adam replied. “But you wanted him to catch us.”

“Yeah.” Ronan jerked at his collar until it laid flat, then he grinned at Adam, his straight, white teeth glinting red and blue from the Open sign hanging in the window of the bubble tea shop next to the gallery. “So did you.”

“Yeah,” Adam admitted, grinning back, and without exchanging a word, they simultaneously began walking back toward the Metro station.

If Adam had to choose spending his night with Ronan Lynch or with a gallery filled with every layer of DC’s upper crust, Adam would pick Ronan each and every time.

A week before the holidays, Adam submitted a time off request — his first — for the few days between Christmas and New Year’s. When he checked it, the company PTO calendar remained surprisingly barren — just a few employees on the administrative team scheduled out of the office — and it led Adam to believe he’d missed some unwritten rule about taking time off at the end of the year. He put the request through the HR portal anyway, and his chest didn’t tighten at all when he hit send. For the better part of two months, he’d been dialing down his devotion to his job, and he couldn’t bring himself to care if his boss denied his request or not.

But not ten minutes later, an email approval came through, his name populated on the calendar, and the day after Christmas — a day spent watching bad holiday movies with Ronan after Ronan got home from church with his brothers — Adam slept in for the first time all year. It was only after he wandered out of his room around ten o’clock and startled Ronan in the middle of doing something colorful and novel-related on the living room wall that Adam realized he probably should have at least mentioned his time off. He hadn’t thought he needed to because no one had cared before. It hadn’t mattered, and not only because Ronan had never been awake before Adam.

“The fuck are you doing home?” Ronan asked, staring at Adam as he hunched over himself with a half-used stack of Post-It notes in one hand and a black permanent marker in the other.

“I’m using vacation time until next year,” Adam replied. When Ronan continued staring, Adam swiped his hand over his face in case he had dried drool crusted on his chin, but when his hand came away clean, he asked, “What?”

Shaking his head to snap himself out of his staring, Ronan finished scribbling whatever he’d stopped writing when Adam appeared, and after he pulled the Post-It off the stack and slapped it onto the wall between two of their vintage car prints, he looked at Adam again. “Adam Parrish using the benefits from his grown up job? I didn’t think I’d live to see the day.”

Adam crossed his arms over the cracking white YALE printed on the blue t-shirt he’d worn to bed as he looked at Ronan. True, he hadn’t taken days off work other than the handful of holidays there’d been since he started, but he’d used other benefits despite feeling guilty about it. When he let it overwhelm him, his general malaise toward his chosen career turned into something that stole Adam’s appetite and kept him in bed every morning until the precise moment he needed to get up or risk being late. Using benefits he’d earned but no longer felt entitled to because of his diminishing effort — despite still being enough to get a respectable yearly performance review — didn’t help in the general malaise department, though Adam had cobbled together some plans for improving morale.

Not that Adam had said anything about any of this to the doctor he’d seen for his first physical in years, the only time he’d used his health insurance. And Ronan knew Adam had used it because he’d been hanging around while Adam searched for a primary care provider that let him schedule appointments online instead of calling during office hours.

When he’d looked at Ronan long and even enough to telegraph his precise level of indifference, Adam nodded to the Post-It-covered wall and asked, “What’s this?”

“I’m wallpapering.”

“Ha.”

Ronan curled one corner of his lips before dropping his attention back to the stack of sticky notes in his hand. As if under duress, he said, “It’s every scene in my book in order.”

“Okay.” Adam moved toward the kitchen because he’d need coffee to fully process whatever idea had Ronan covering the living room in small, colorful squares. “Why?”

“To make sure it makes sense,” Ronan replied after writing on another note and slapping it onto the wall. “To make sure shit’s logical. One thing leads to another and blah blah blah.”

It clicked as Adam shook grounds into the coffee maker. “And you can move those around if it doesn’t.”

Ronan pointed his marker at Adam before he started writing again. “Yep.”

“Where’d you come up with this?”

“Is this twenty questions? I’m a little busy.” Ronan flapped his Post-Its in Adam’s direction. But being a little busy didn’t stop him from answering, “I heard about it at a writing seminar.”

Finger poised on the button to start the coffee maker brewing, Adam looked across the breakfast bar and living room at Ronan. “You went to a writing seminar?”

“Parrish.”

“What? Don’t blame me for being surprised. Since when have you been the seminar type?”

“Whatever. People who’ve written books go to writing seminars and join writing groups and get critique partners, and believe it or not, I’ve written a book.”

Now Adam paused as he reached for the cabinet where they kept coffee mugs. “You’re done?”

The past few weeks, he’d been so wrapped up in dismantling his own self-caused problems that he hadn’t bothered to really ask how Ronan’s novel was coming along. If he’d stopped thinking his writing sucked. All signs pointed to Ronan working feverishly to the point of hyperfixation. Late nights left him asleep on the couch when Adam got up for work, and his horde of journals and loose pages of notes had seemingly doubled in size. But other than a passing question about how it was going — often answered with a grunt or string of curses that sounded like black-painted poetry — Adam hadn’t asked in earnest despite almost unlimited opportunities. He hadn’t offered to read Ronan’s work in progress or to help him with anything he’d gotten stuck on. He hadn’t even bothered to fully understand that things like writing seminars and groups and finding geographically close, like-minded people for advice might have been some of Ronan’s motivations for moving to DC, and that maybe that explained why Ronan had been getting out of the apartment more than when they’d first moved in.

Since almost the beginning, when he’d first told Ronan he was moving to DC and was looking for a roommate, Adam had taken Ronan’s I’ll do it for granted, and it made Adam hate himself a little that he’d been such an asshole and hadn’t seen that before.

“I sure as hell hope so,” Ronan replied. “This shit’s been revised five times. I can't look at it anymore.”

“Can I read it?” Adam asked. Probably too little, too late, but he could try. Put balance back into things after Ronan had helped him pull his own head out of his ass with three glasses of whiskey.

Ronan didn’t deem a verbal answer necessary. He simply gestured aggressively at the wall, and once he got the point, Adam added, “When you’re done making it make sense.”

For a few long breaths, Ronan drew air in through his nose and let it out through his teeth, but it was slower than usual. More levelling or calming than angry or frustrated, like he needed to work himself up toward something. Finally, through gritted teeth, his eyes laser-focused on the wall, he said, “Fine.”

Adam thought it was wise to not press further. He thanked Ronan and left it at that, making himself toast while his coffee brewed, then he took his breakfast to the couch and watched Ronan work. And he kept watching Ronan work over the next few days, every rearrangement of the sticky notes on the wall accompanied by a flurry of typing after Ronan threw himself down in one of the chairs or on the other end of the couch.

Between sometimes acting as Ronan’s sounding board and sometimes doing chores — when he finished those, the apartment ended up cleaner than when they’d moved in — Adam allowed himself to luxuriate in doing nothing for probably the first time in his life. He went to bed late and slept in. He napped on the couch. He watched all the YouTube videos Gansey had sent him that he’d never gotten around to watching. He flipped through his tarot deck and built his own understanding of the cards.

He also emailed old professors for letters of recommendations, registered to take the GRE, began drafting academic statements of purpose, and refreshed his still-new resume.

Work never crossed his mind except for planning his getaway by setting himself up for something better.

Without experience in anything as creatively intensive as writing a novel, Adam couldn’t predict how long it would take Ronan to work on his final pass of his book. It ended up taking him all the way through the afternoon of New Year’s Eve, when — vaguely napping on the couch — Adam heard Ronan leave the apartment, come back, and then leave a second time. When he returned for good, he woke Adam — then truly napping — by dropping a thick, black binder right in the middle of Adam’s red-sweatered chest.

“What the hell, Ronan?” Adam groaned, reeling his arms back in after startling awake so he could rescue the binder — as heavy as a whole ream of paper — before it toppled to the floor.

Ronan waved an open-palmed hand at the binder as if he were presenting prizes on a game show, handsome enough for the role but too intimidating by far. “You asked if you could read it. There you go.”

Using the heels of his hands to scrape his afternoon nap from eyes, Adam sat up and set the five-pound binder in his lap. Wherever Ronan had gone to print it, it must have cost him a fortune, and Adam would need to hide the binder the next time Blue visited or Ronan wouldn’t hear the end of her thoughts on his contributions toward killing trees. “I could have read it on my laptop.”

Shrugging, Ronan peeled his leather jacket off, and though he’d taken it out of the closet when he left, he tossed it onto one of the armchairs instead of putting it back. “I wanted to see it,” he replied, a reasonable thing to want after the amount of time he’d spent writing. Slumping into the corner at the opposite end of the couch, he pulled a throw pillow into his lap before he waved at the binder again and said, “What are you waiting for? Get reading.”

To be contrary — he shouldn’t have been, but he disliked the order to get reading enough he did it anyway — Adam didn’t begin reading immediately. He showered first, then washed dishes, then drank a glass of water. He only returned to the living room when Ronan’s glare became more unnerving than usual, and Adam ignored Ronan entirely as he sat back down on the couch, pulled the binder into his lap, and started reading.

The first draft Adam had read was still there. And the second. And the third. But they weren’t the whole story anymore. They were the skeleton — the bones — of something Ronan had spent the last few months giving heart and guts and blood and breath. From the very first page, Adam no longer sat in their living room. Right alongside the novel’s characters, he strode through alternate versions of cities, countries, the world as it split and merged and split again, pulling the main characters apart and pushing them back together over and over and over until awareness spread through Adam he wasn’t reading about fantasy worlds and fantastic characters, about kingdoms and battles and power and wars.

He was reading about himself, and he was reading about Ronan.

He was reading about himself and Ronan.

Together.

It was Jordan painting Declan, not with a brush and oils, but in black ink on white paper, and as soon as he noticed, Adam almost couldn’t breathe.

He had to force his lungs to work as he read, telling them to move, slow and measured, like he didn’t have a love letter laid out in his lap. Like he didn’t have six years of bone-deep wanting scrawled out across four hundred pages.

Like he hadn't had that same bone-deep wanting too.

At the end of every chapter, Adam glanced down the couch at Ronan, still surprisingly seated like his jeans and hoodie had fused with the worn brown leather beneath him. But, like always, Ronan couldn’t remain still. He fidgeted and bounced his knees. He chewed on the bands around his wrists. He almost tore the pillow in his lap apart. At some point, he finally extracted himself and paced the living room, kitchen, and hallway, including a few trips onto the balcony. Slowly, midnight approached, a few preemptive fireworks crackling outside, and as Adam neared the end of Ronan’s manuscript, only a handful of pages left, Ronan said absolutely nothing as he stalked out of the apartment all together, leaving his jacket, his wallet, his keys — Adam — behind.

But he’d also left Adam alone — in silence, without distraction — to finish. To come to his own conclusions. And though he wanted to let his eyes race over the pages to get to the end, Adam paced himself. He took his time with every word, every paragraph, every page, and slowly closed the binder after he’d read the final sentence. Then he took his time again, hands splayed over the hard vinyl binder cover, until he finally set it down on the coffee table and climbed from the couch, putting on his own coat before grabbing Ronan’s jacket and following him to the only logical place he could have gone.

On the roof, Ronan leaned against the waist-high wall facing the National Mall, the Capitol and monuments shrouded in a hazy white glow through the thin fog blanketing the city. Adam watched him for a moment, the rise and fall of his shoulders against the city lights beyond him and the pale halo they made around his buzz cut. Finally, Adam crossed the roof and silently took his place beside Ronan, offering him his jacket, and after Ronan put it on, they stood next to one another in the waning moments of the year until Adam said, quiet, “It’s really good, Ronan.”

“I know,” Ronan replied, matching Adam’s timbre, and he shifted incrementally closer to Adam as he put his elbows on the top of the wall and folded his hands together.

“What are you going to do?”

“I think,” Ronan paused and rolled his lips together a few times before continuing, “I’m going to look for an agent. And if that doesn’t work…” He trailed off and shrugged.

Adam nodded. He knew nothing of the literary world, what publishers were looking for or bought. And though he hadn’t read much for pleasure, and probably had biases because of his closeness to the author and the book’s themes, he didn’t think Ronan would have a hard time finding someone who wanted to help him get his novel out into the world. Even if he didn’t, even if Adam ended up being the only person who ever read the finished product, that wouldn’t be an awful outcome.

“What are you going to do?” Ronan echoed Adam’s question back at him as the muffled boom of another premature firework rolled through the city’s streets. .

It was the same thing Adam had asked himself over and over since early in the fall, and he’d finally found himself some adequate answers.

“I think,” Adam replied, “I’m going to go back to school. For anthropology.”

“Like Gansey.”

“Yeah. Like Gansey.”

“Copycat,” Ronan muttered, but he nodded like it was about time Adam made a decision. Like he’d made the right one. Like Ronan approved.

Somewhere beneath them, in an overcrowded apartment with its windows open, a drunken, shouted countdown to midnight began. Across the street, a little out of sync, another party joined in. As the new year ticked closer and closer, Adam had one more decision to make, and with a mere few seconds left until midnight, he said, “And I think I’m going to do this.”

Drifting up towards them where they stood on the roof, the countdown dropped to four, then three, then two. Only a single second remained as Adam brought his palm to Ronan’s cheek, and as cheers erupted below and more timely fireworks sparked and fizzled at the edges of the city, Adam Parrish started the new year the best possible way he could and he kissed Ronan Lynch.