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Blue thinks Adam must have Buddhist monk levels of patience to tolerate the way Ronan is always stepping on the backs of his shoes, pinching the inside of his forearm, moving Adam's tea around at the table, yanking on the hem of his shirt, nudging him off balance with a hip.
"My God, I want to smack him and he's not even tormenting me. How do you stand it?" she asks one night when Ronan has left for the bathroom, having tugged firmly on Adam's hair twice before he got up.
"Hmm?" Adam asks, genuinely bewildered, half his attention on the cold empty spot he's waiting for Ronan to come back and fill.
"It seriously doesn't bother you?" she says, incredulous. "The poking and pinching and whatever else he constantly does?"
Adam's smile is small and oddly contented and it takes him a bit to answer. "Does it bother you when Gansey holds your hand?"
"No - but hand holding is a normal, caring gesture, not an endless assault and battery."
Adam shrugs. "It's Ronan's version of the same thing."
"My version of what?" Ronan asks sharply, pressing himself right back up against Adam, even though there's room at the end of the booth to leave a good 6 inches of space between them.
"Wanna hold hands, darlin'?" Adam drawls, deeply sarcastic, offering a hand.
"Fuck off, Parrish," Ronan replies, smacking at the proffered hand. Blue rolls her eyes, Adam smirks, and Ronan squeezes Adam's knee twice, under the table. Adam hooks two fingers into the pocket of Ronan's jeans, also unobserved.
She does not entirely understand how this mellow tolerance dissolves into the competitive passion they constantly seem to fall to when left alone together for more than five minutes. Blue has interrupted enough public/private moments (outside the back door of Nino's, under the beech tree in her yard, around the corner of a hallway at Litchfield house) to know that Adam, unexpectedly, is usually the aggressor. It's a mystery. If Gansey perpetrated anything like Ronan's behavior, he could expect to feel the business end of her switchblade. Maybe it's some kind of incomprehensible mating ritual, perpetrated by the only two members of whatever species Adam and Ronan belong to.
***
Even as he gets to know them better, Henry cannot quell his perception of them both as magical creatures. There's an invisible frequency of communication between them he keeps trying and failing to tune into.
They always sit next to each other. Even if there isn't really room. It's not like they're holding hands or making moony faces or even looking at each other more than they ever did. But when Adam leans over to reach for something, Ronan has already moved exactly the necessary distance to accommodate it. When Ronan finally decides to spit the damn straw wrapper he's been chewing on into Henry's hair, Adam's already a little behind him, completely out of the line of fire. It's like they're each listening to something no one else can hear.
When Ronan gets hectic and angry, gearing up to fight, Adam will stand close beside and slightly behind Ronan, slip his hand just under the hem of Ronan's shirt, and press three fingertips to the skin next to Ronan's spine. It's not just that it happens, but that Ronan deflates a little the instant it has happened. Like Adam pressed a valve open just enough to depressurize the atmosphere. Henry doesn't dare bring it up in front of Ronan and Adam though. He is certain this magic trick has kept Ronan's fist out of his own face more than once. Of course, Adam can be as harsh and vengeful a creature as Ronan. Adam will only perform his transformative miniature miracle if the potential victim merits his mercy. Henry is grateful to be on Adam Parrish's good side, given that Ronan Lynch doesn’t seem to have a good side.
***
Gansey finds plenty of evidence to support his theory that true love makes something inside a person go quiet.
It's Adam sitting at the desk at Monmouth, entirely focused on his homework. Gansey would expect Ronan to be all over the warehouse -clacking balls around the pool table, starting a shrieking game of hide and seek with Opal on the first floor, banging doors open and closed for no discernible reason. But if Adam sticks out a foot far enough to cross ankles with Ronan as he lies on his stomach on the floor, Ronan will stay put, playing card games with Opal for far longer than Gansey would have thought possible.
Sometimes, if Gansey happens to look out the window into the parking lot at exactly the right moment, he'll glimpse Adam hanging sort of boneless inside the circle of Ronan's arms, head on his shoulder, hands tucked in Ronan's back pockets, Ronan's chin on Adam's temple, both of them leaning against a car, not talking or bickering or teasing. Seeing it sort of feels more intrusive than walking in on them making out (frequent and uncomfortable) or hearing the thumps and groans and curses from behind a closed door (frequent and mortifying). It's each of them stripped barer than they could be in their own skins. But Gansey always looks a little longer than a glance because it's reassurance that they seem to have found in each other what he was afraid neither of them could allow themselves to have.
***
For Declan, it's all in the way the Barns have metamorphosed from the jumbled, dream-saturated world entirely belonging to his father - exclusive and bizarre - to something no less dreamlike but also accessible, even to ordinary people like him. There are still fairy lights and dream flowers and strange creatures, but all of these things now seem to have proper places - there is an underlying structure absent from his memories. It takes him almost a year to figure it out, because he's not around all that much.
It comes to light when he and Matthew are at the Barns for dinner. Declan chats with Adam in the kitchen while Ronan cooks. Without any inattention to the conversation, Adam follows an irregular orbit around Ronan, capping bottles and returning them to the fridge or cabinet, depositing soiled measuring spoons in the sink, plucking the chili flakes out of Ronan's hand before the food crosses over to unpalatable. When Ronan sticks out an impatient palm, Adam knows exactly what to place in it. They function in a non-verbal harmony.
Declan plants himself in the kitchen again after dinner ("I need coffee before that fucking drive,"), to further study the phenomenon. He observes Ronan washing dishes while Adam dries them and puts them away, all while they playfully knock into and kick at each other. Adam throws the dish towel in Ronan's face before he can flick the water from his hands all over the floor. Ronan tosses the towel back before he stomps into the living room after Matthew and Opal. Declan, sipping quietly at his coffee, notes Adam wiping down the sink, pushing a drawer closed the last inch, righting tiny notes of disarray with the casual proprietary air of a man in his own domain.
Declan strolls through the house, alone, as if taking a nostalgic tour. Everywhere, Ronan's whimsy is balanced in understated, tidy ways, gently coaxed into welcoming order. This house, this property, is the center of Ronan's heart, and Adam is subtly threaded through every bit of it.
The image of Adam and Ronan engaged in cooperative domestic mundanity returns to him. Declan knows his mother was created and designed to be his father's perfect counterpart. He recalls her doing all those household regularities alone, whether his father was present or not. He recalls the way the property was always irrationally cluttered with Niall's excessive dream detritus, that Niall was indisputably the sole nexus of the Lynch solar system. Had anyone asked Declan a year ago, he would have predicted Ronan would be exactly the same. Declan certainly ensures he is the center of his own little universe. And yet, there is something comfortable, something warming, about this binary system. Perhaps Ronan, king of a land of dreams, knows something about real life that Declan has yet to understand.
***
Inside a classroom or the library, even walking through the campus, Adam Parrish is unremarkable to the other inhabitants of Princeton. He's an eager, committed student, dresses like most people do, is pleasant and helpful in the bookstore and library where he does his work-study. His college friends know him to be witty if you like cutting sarcasm, unperturbed even in stressful situations, mechanically inclined, and strangely knowledgeable about things before they happen. No one can pinpoint why, but Adam comes across as literally untouchable. Even a clap on the back or shoulder nudge seems like it might be a violation of the rarified space he casually occupies. Everyone knows he has a boyfriend back home, but no one is remotely prepared for the reality of Ronan Lynch. Ronan is also untouchable, but not in the undefinable Adam way. Ronan is untouchable in the same way as a porcupine - anyone getting too close should expect to be peppered with foot-long quills.
And yet, seeing Adam with Ronan is like peeling a banana only to find it entirely composed of pomegranate arils. Where something soft and bland belongs, there is something wholly unexpected, bright, tart, infinitely appealing. They are constantly touching each other: a finger in a belt loop, knee against knee when seated, arm around shoulder or around waist, palm on nape of neck. This touchable Adam is a fluid mix of unguarded laughter, shoves and curse words, and hungry looks so heated it seems indecent to witness. It's Adam's entire body gravitating toward Ronan's as he whispers something in Ronan's ear, lips brushing skin, fingertips on forearm. Whatever he's saying is shocking enough for someone as spiky as Ronan to blush.
After Ronan's departure, the opaque shield falls back over Adam, only now, everyone has had a glimpse of what's underneath it. It becomes a point of competition for Adam's friends to catch hints of the real Adam Parrish outside of Ronan's presence.
***
For Adam, it's the flood of possessive desire that washes over him the first second he sees Ronan in a day, and knowing, without doubt, it is reciprocated. It's the tender care Ronan takes with Chainsaw, Opal, the Barns, so incongruous with his projected image. It's the heat of Ronan's skin on his shutting down all the analytical machinery of his mind. He likes all the little ways Ronan touches him wherever they are - a million "I love you's" giving his whole life color and dimension.
For Ronan, it's Adam fixing a fence beside him at the Barns, scrying himself into the places no one else can ever go with Ronan, never backing down when they fight because he trusts Ronan implicitly to never hurt him. It's waking from a nightmare to something so safe and real he doesn't want to run away from his own bed. It's someone who wants to stay with him, unquestionably, no matter how much of a shit he is. It's the impossibility of a dream thing that even Ronan could not have imagined well enough to create.
Ultimately, it's nothing nearly as strange as bringing dreams to life or bending time or communicating with a mystical energy source. It's just love.