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“Don’t you ever, like, get nightmares or sh—stuff?”
Opal blinks, fingers ceasing their fidgeting at the half-broken watch adorning her wrist. Ronan is hardly looking at her, eyes dropped low; his hands are tugging at the leather on his own wrist. It’s a forced kind of casualness. A play at indifference. In response, Opal only sinks farther into the bed, farther beneath her three blankets. There’s a motion that’s possibly her shrugging. She blinks again, slowly. “It’s not scary here.” And then she rolls over and closes her eyes.
It feels like a long time that Ronan sits there on the edge of her bed, hands folded in his lap. It’s hardly past nine, but time is already more sluggish, itself already settling in for the long night.
“Please turn off the light,” she says, her voice muffled, lump of blankets unmoving.
“Yeah, yeah,” he mumbles. More feigned disinterested. He stands heavily and crosses the room towards the door. As his fingers hesitate over the light switch, he glances back over his shoulder one last time. Just before he’s made up his mind to hit the lights, Opal peeks over the comforter. “Goodnight, Opal,” he says, and the room goes dark.
“Sleep tight,” she whispers.
He shuts the door.
The Barns are huge. It isn’t like that’s new information. But with everyone gone, they’re now uncharacteristically empty. Empty and fucking enormous. And at night they get swallowed by a darkness that is too big for dream candles and lightning bugs—a darkness that is too big for Ronan Lynch.
And it’s only September.
Jesus fuck, it’s only September.
It feels like he should have known this feeling was coming, feels like he should have been ready for it. But he’d let himself get used to having Adam here; he’d grown accustomed to his friends’ laughter filling the corners of his home that hadn’t been touched in years; he’d lost touch with the vastness of the property. Vivid dreams and close company meant the darkness that was much bigger than the nighttime had been slowly dissipating over the past few months, painstakingly transforming his home back into the place of weightlessness it once was.
At night, though—at night, when Opal was asleep and Ronan was left with nothing but his cellphone—
It was easy to forget the way that had felt.
The living room is dark, spare the feeble, yellow glow of a sconce in the corner. Ronan resents the way it glints off the dull metallic of his phone sitting on the coffee table. It’s been lying there since the last time he used it—about this time yesterday—and so it’s probably about time to move it again. He scoops it up and takes it back to his room, the idea that he has no real reason for doing so unconvincing even to him. And if it’s not convincing him then there’s certainly no one else around to fool. The Barns are empty, after all.
So he lets himself open the messaging app. Lets himself read over his call history.
He could call Adam. The kid has a phone now and he’s much better about using it than Ronan is.
But Adam has things to do at night. Studying. Hanging out with people, probably. Ronan may not know much about real-life college, but he’s pretty sure things don’t slow down on campus the way they do around here. He wouldn’t want to get in the way of that. College was Adam’s dream as much as Chainsaw was one of Ronan’s.
He puts the phone on his nightstand. He walks back out to the kitchen.
He walks back to his room.
Stupid, he thinks.
And then he calls Adam.
“Ronan,” he says, voice light enough to make Ronan close his eyes. Of course he wasn’t bothering him, hadn’t they gotten over that months ago? Stupid, he thinks again.
“Parrish, hey.”
He laughs. “I don’t think you’re allowed to sound so surprised when you’re the one who called me.”
“Whatever. Are you busy?” When did Ronan get so good at faking nonchalance? When did he get to the point where he felt like he needed to? Shoving those questions away for another date, he lies back on his bed, curling an arm under his head.
“Not really. I’m just—hold on.” Various shuffling noises come over the line; there’s a rustling that sounds like bed linens, a scuffling that must be shoes on linoleum, an indistinct mumbling that is probably Adam addressing his roommate. With his eyes closed, Ronan can almost see it. Then there’s a sound that is definitely a door opening, and then—quiet. “Sorry, the roommate was in. I wanted to get out of there.”
“You planning on talking sexy to me?”
“Shut up,” but his smile is an audible thing. “But no, not busy. Thinking about homework but not really doing it. That kind of thing.”
“Mm. Glad that’s not part of my life anymore.”
“I’m glad for you.”
“Thanks. Classes and shit still, like, good, though?”
“Since yesterday? Yeah, still good. There’s going to be a visiting professor in one of my classes next week, he’s coming to give a lecture about the death penalty.” The way he says death penalty, hushed and dryly dramatic, Ronan imagines him raising his eyebrows. Smiling. “I’m looking forward to that, though. Not looking forward to the paper we have to write about it afterwards, but we move on.” He gives an airy sigh, almost inaudible.
“If you call me, I’ll be sure to distract you from that, no problem.”
“I’ll bear that in mind, thank you.”
This feels too much like all their conversations: Questions they already know the answers to, sighs that aren’t meant to be heard.
“How’s Opal?”
“A fucking angel, as usual. She built a birdhouse today, but from the looks of it, only spiders will be moving in, it looks like it was made for trolls or… miniature swamp demons. It’s okay, I hung it on the porch anyway.” He pauses, unwilling to talk over Adam’s soft laughter. “She painted it black, Adam.”
“I miss it,” he says softly, whispering in a way that sounds almost like he hadn’t meant to say it. “I mean, it’s not like I—” he stops. In the silence that follows, they can almost hear each other thinking, determining how to navigate everything that has to be said. Everything that’s somehow gone unsaid up until this point. It’s just verging on uncomfortable. Adam manages to break it first, “Things are good, you know? Things are really good, but…”
The dip in his voice tugs at something. Ronan presses his fingers to his eyes, that final conjunction ringing in his ears.
“You know?”
“Yeah,” Ronan answers quite truthfully. “Yeah, I know.”
“It’s not that it isn’t everything I hoped for, it’s just that—I’m happy here. But, I—” He takes a deep breath, like he’s about to confess, “I don’t know anyone. I really don’t know anyone. I thought I would be friends with my roommate, but I’m not. We don’t not get along, but it’s weird. It’s weird living with someone who isn’t my friend, and—and have you ever noticed the way people don’t look at you? When you don’t know them? You’re walking along to class, and no one—no one notices you? And attending 100-level intro courses, it’s…”
Ronan longs to be able to see him—is he sitting or pacing? Are his hands steady? His eyes open? He takes too long to answer.
Adam goes on, voice dropping. “It’s everything I wanted, but I don’t like pretending like that’s all it is. There’s—it’s not all easy. And I feel like I can’t talk about it because then I’ll be complaining, and you guys will think I’m not happy, and I don’t want that, but it’s…” He finishes again with a defeated, “You know?”
“I know. God, I know. I…” Ronan can’t get a grip on his words. Even though this was more the conversation he’d had in mind, even though this was what they needed to say. Nothing comes to him, and he curls his hands into fists in the frustration of it all.
“I’m sorry,” Adam says at last. “I didn’t mean to—I’m okay.”
“No, no, Adam, fuck. No, I’m sorry, you can tell me, fuckin’, whatever—”
“Now I’ve upset you, though.”
“I was upset before, Adam.” He puts his wrist to his mouth. The fingers around his phone feel disconnected, distant. Sighing, Ronan sits up, elbows to his knees, free hand sliding back to his forehead. “I’m sorry it’s disenchanting. And fuck, after everything we’ve—how could it not be?”
There’s the sound of the phone being repositioned on Adam’s end.
“Like, yeah, I’m upset for you, I’ll come up there right now and fuck up every person who isn’t begging to be your lab partner if you want? Like, fuck your roommate for not being totally obsessed with you? What the fuck? Rude and inconsiderate. So yeah, that upsets me. But only because I—because I… wanna know what’s up with you. I… care about what’s happening. With you.” He bites his lip. “Don’t feel like you can’t tell me shit, okay? Enough of that.”
Adam’s end is quiet; there’s the noises of cars passing. “Okay,” he says at last. “Well in that case, I… My English professor is a piece of shit. The worst man I’ve ever met, every single Tuesday-Thursday at ten a.m. is a nightmare.”
“Go off. Tell me.”
“I don’t know how he even got a job here. He talks to use like we’re in the ninth grade, and he gave me a C on an essay I worked ridiculously, embarrassingly hard on. It was such a dumbass prompt, it took me ages to even think of how to dignify such an assignment with a good paper, and when I finally did? A C?”
“Who the fuck gives Adam Parrish a C?”
“I know!” he cries, but he’s laughing. Probably shaking his head. “He’s really just mean, though. Besides that. Unprofessional.”
“I’ll fight him.”
“Please.”
“What else?”
“I don’t know…”
“Come on,” Ronan insists.
“Well, my dorm neighbors are pretty obnoxious. I can hear them through the walls. Just talking really loudly. Not even shouting, just talking like they’ve got their fingers in their ears.”
“Eliminate them.”
“Wish I could.” For a moment it’s quiet, simply quiet, and then Adam says, “But hey. What about you?”
“Me?”
“Yeah, you. Tell me about your woes.”
“It’s empty here.”
“Empty?”
“Yeah.”
“How so?”
There’s a sliver of window visible through his curtains, a stretch of darkness that catches his eyes, an expanse punctuated by the shadows of trees and old buildings. Ronan shrugs a shoulder. “There’s a lot of space. Not a lot of me.”
Adam considers. “And Opal?”
“She’s so fucking independent now. I mean, you saw her not two months ago, she doesn’t—like, she’s a kid, but she doesn’t need me. She just… goes on about her day and at night, she just goes to bed, and—”
“She does need you.”
Adam interrupts so rarely that it almost startles Ronan.
He scrambles to justify himself, “Like you said, she’s a kid. She’s… growing up.”
Ronan runs a hand over the back of his neck. Distantly he knows that it’s selfish to want her to always be clinging to him, to always be nervous when he’s not around, to begrudge her growing self-confidence. Of course it is. “Yeah, I know. It just still feels kind of bad.”
“I know. I didn’t mean to say that it didn’t. She loves you a lot. But she does need you, I promise.”
“Thanks. I—” But he stops himself when his phone buzzes, different from his text alert. He pulls the phone back from his ear; the screen stays on long enough for him to see that his battery is exhausted. Then it goes black. “Fucking hell.”
Even with the pace Ronan searches the house, it takes him way too long to find his charger. Apparently, he was unable to keep it in any normal place like beside his bed or the couch in the living room, no, he’d left it in a corner in the kitchen for whatever reason. He snatches it up and plugs it in beside his bed with a vengeance that would suggest it was the plug’s own fault for being in a random-ass place. And once his phone finally blinks back to life, a message comes in.
Adam, 10:08. Hey, I’m guessing your phone died. I was planning on going to bed soon anyway, I’m heading inside, but seriously call me back if you need to keep talking.
As he’s staring at it, debating, another message comes in.
Adam, 10:23. I mean it
Ronan replies, that’s ok. Goodnight
Adam, 10:24. Talk to you tomorrow?
yeah
It should have been easier to sleep that night. It was always easier after having spoken to Adam.
And yet.
He doesn’t remember the dream—it’s so hard to remember normal dreams now, so hard to keep details when they aren’t related to something physical in his hands. But he remembers waking up from it. His chest had seized, his hands had flown out as if in defense against some unseen enemy. His knuckles had collided with something solid, and then there’d been a clatter that had been quite deafening in his sleep-hazed ears.
“Shit,” he gasps, rolling over and pressing his face to the pillow.
He’d been worrying about Opal getting nightmares, and yet here he was—
It’s undignified, really. When was the last time an ordinary dream had made his chest tight like this? But the dream had felt like loss, like oceans without ships and mountains too big to be scaled. The dream had been walls upon walls, words shouted into nothingness, and promises so empty they might as well have been lies.
No, Ronan couldn’t remember what had happened while he slept. But he could remember the feeling that had gone with it.
His heart is pounding.
He rolls onto his side, eyes catching on the faint light beyond his curtains. Early morning, then. On the floor lies his phone, the apparent culprit of the offending noise. Really he doesn’t want to retrieve it, but he doesn’t think he should let it lie there, either.
He’s distracted, however, by a familiar noise. A soft clacking down the hall.
Ronan listens, letting himself appreciate the presence of someone else in his home. The sound of life beyond his door. Opal’s tiny feet click along, growing ever so slightly in volume, and just as he’s expecting them to grow distant again, to fade as she passes his door and goes into the kitchen or out the front door, they stop. His doorknob turns, and she peeks in.
“Kerah.”
“Yeah?” he asks, voice strained as he props himself up with an elbow. “Something wrong?”
Opal gives him a look that he knows well. It’s all squinted eyes, slightly cocked head, pursed lips. It’s the one she wears when she’s trying to figure something out, when a situation doesn’t quite run the way she’d expect it to. Then she blinks quickly and steps inside, closing the door softly behind her. She scrambles up onto his bed, not offering any further words.
With a motion that’s just a little too aggressive for her tiny hand, she yanks back a side of the blanket and draws herself underneath. Then she curls against his side and reaches upwards, resting her palm on his chest, fingers spread wide over his still-racing heart.
Slowly, Ronan drops back, head falling once again to his pillow. He moves the arm he’d been supporting himself with to wrap around her shoulders.
“There’s nothing scary here,” she whispers after a while.
Sleep is pulling on him once again, his heartbeat steadying beneath Opal’s tiny hands and her even tinier voice.
He presses a kiss to her forehead, and he hears a mumbled, “Ew,” but she only scoots even closer.
Idly Ronan wonders if Opal needing him wasn’t really the issue, after all. Had there ever been any genuine doubt? But lying in bed with long shadows being pulled from the windows, tucked beneath soft blankets with no rush to get up, it feels a little too early in the morning to be considering the implications of the fact that perhaps the issue was that it was the other way around.
Adam hears her before he sees her.
“Adam!” It’s an unholy shrieking, a distortion of his name that would sound horrifying coming from anywhere but Opal. He’s hardly even out of the car before she’s colliding with his legs, arms wrapping tight like it’s been six months instead of one and a half. But he just laughs, a little breathless, a little disbelieving of her existence still.
“Opal,” he greets, taking a step backwards (as much as he can), to catch her under the arms and settle her on his hip.
She immediately claps her hands over his cheeks, staring intently, as if to make sure nothing’s changed. And when she’s content that nothing has, she drops one hand to his shoulder, and raises the other wrist to her lips in an all-too-familiar fashion and gnaws on the watch-face.
“We need to get you a new one of those, don’t we?” he asks, eyeing the mess that used to be his watch with a twitch of a smile.
Her mouth stills. “No,” she replies seriously, and then she returns to biting.
“Fair enough.” Adam gives a half-shrug and starts up the drive towards the house.
From nowhere—a hidden pocket, up her sleeve, or beneath her clothing—she pulls out a delicate-looking yellow flower. For a second, Adam’s pace slows as he looks at her fist closed around the stem, assessing where her eyes are focused. Then she reaches up towards his ear, and Adam mumbles, “Opal,” giving a half-hearted attempt at maneuvering out of her reach.
She gives him a pointed look, eyebrows furrowing.
He complies.
She tucks the flower into the hair behind his ear, a smug look on her face that she never would have been able to pull off when she was first pulled from Ronan’s dreams. Learned behavior, and who the teacher had been is fairly obvious.
Adam’s almost just reached the front door when she says, “Kerah didn’t say you were coming.”
He grins. “Because he doesn’t know.”
“Ooh,” she draws. And then she starts swinging her legs and lightly pounding an open palm to his chest. He lets her down, and she runs the rest of the way to the door, not waiting up for him. She leaves the door cracked, though the moment he’s inside, she’s tearing back down the hall towards him. She almost crashes into his legs again. With a jerky motion, she gestures for him to come to her level, and so he does. She whispers, “He’s sleeping.”
“Is he now?”
They walk together to the living room, Opal’s hand tight on the hem of his shirt.
And there’s Ronan, passed out on the couch, one arm hanging off the side of the couch, knuckles against the floor, the other draped over his eyes. Opal is looking between the two of them, some kind of question, some kind of light in her eyes. Adam allows himself a long look, but finally he shakes his head at her and taps her on the shoulder blade. He points to the back door. She dashes that direction, and for a second Adam hesitates, wondering if the noise of her hooves will wake him. It doesn’t. Adam follows her onto the porch.
Straightaway, he almost laughs. Hanging from a beam is the bird/spider house, a composition of impossibly warped wood and starkly black paint, swaying in the evening breeze. Opal is already tearing off into the field, arms wide, fingers spread, the low sun catching in her hair. And when she turns to look over her shoulder, black eyes unbelievably bright, he takes off after her.
Adam imagines it’s probably her incessant screeching that finally wakes Ronan up, but maybe it’s just the setting sun tugging their side of the world into darkness.
Whatever the reason, when Adam rolls over, blowing a blade of grass from his cheek, and sees Ronan pulling the back door open, he doesn’t look too miffed about it.
“What the fuck are you doing here?” Ronan calls, doing a shitty job at biting down a smile.
Adam just raises a hand in a wave, propping himself up with his other arm. It only takes Ronan a moment to make his way over and pull Adam into a kiss, and it takes Opal an even shorter moment to dash off in the other direction with a disinterested noise. Adam smiles into it, partly because of the grass tickling his ear, partly because this feels way more like home than he’d ever counted on.
He wraps an arm around the back of Ronan’s neck and pulls himself more upright, only to end up dropping his forehead to his shoulder.
“Okay, but seriously, what are you doing?”
“I came to visit,” Adam answers, as though the six-hour drive were as easy to explain away as that.
“For the weekend?”
Though his voice is trained, the hopeful twinge is impossible to miss. “Of course. I came to take up some space out here.”
He says it like it’s a silly thing, but Ronan can already feel the night closing in, already feel how different it is with his boyfriend sitting before him covered in grass and—Ronan’s hand drifts towards Adam’s ear, dry smile on his lips. “Cool.” He hesitates. “You look pretty,” he says flatly, clearly eyeing the flower nestled in Adam’s hair.
Adam scoffs, but Ronan presses a kiss to his jaw beneath his ear nevertheless.
Ronan’s eyes drift Opal’s way just long enough to see her stick her tongue out at them.
Ronan kisses him again.
The hours don’t feel like hours for once. The evening happens, the night falls, and it feels more like a simple progression of time and less like a curse that is personally out to get him. And Ronan doesn’t even have to think about picking up his phone. Not until the alarm starts going off, anyway.
“No,” says Opal immediately from her spot nestled against Adam’s side. She clenches her fingers into his shirt as though that will be enough to keep her there.
“Afraid so,” Ronan returns, pushing himself to his feet.
“No.”
“What’s going on?” Adam asks, looking up.
“Bedtime.”
“Nooo.”
Adam sound unduly incredulous. “Bedtime?”
“Of course. What kind of parent do you take me for, Parrish?”
Adam grins in reply.
Ronan taps her on the back a few times, and eventually Adam nudges her up—once he realizes Ronan really isn’t joking around. Ronan pulls her into his arms, acutely ignoring the animal-like moans of protest. She wraps one arm around his neck, even so; the other she holds out towards Adam, who takes it with a little squeeze. Opal gives a begrudging smile. And then it flicks into a dark frown pointed at Ronan, who merely brushes it off.
“Yeah, yeah. You’ll see him tomorrow.”
Adam wants to interject that Wait, this isn’t about me. He wants to say, I think she just wants to stay up and finish the movie. His absolute first response is to scoff. But then he notices the way her eyes are on him, the whiteness of her knuckles gripped around his fingers. To be missed by Ronan was one thing; to be missed by a child was another. Even if she was a strange dream-child, Adam was an adult, male presence in her life and yet somehow—
Ronan’s words from the night before come rushing back. She doesn’t need me. Adam had been so quick to refute it, so quick to assure him that Yes, yes, she did. Whether or not that applied to Adam hadn’t even crossed his mind.
Opal whines incoherently.
Adam says, “I’m not going anywhere just yet.”
He says it as an experiment, a testing of the waters, unsure of what would happen. He’d been ready for her to stick her tongue out some more, pout or kick, confirm that it wasn’t him she was interested in, but instead she cracks a smile.
Adam is embarrassingly speechless.
And later that night, caught under a tangle of sheets beneath a darkness that feels a lot more like warmth than vacancy, Ronan wraps an arm around Adam’s torso, drawing him against him. “You know,” he whispers, half-mumbled into Adam’s shoulder, “I thought it was obvious, but crazy as it may sound, I’m not the only one she loves.”