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Chapter Text

Didn’t Adam Parrish deserve nice things? Didn’t Adam Parrish deserve to be pushed against the back wall of Boyd’s and be kissed like he was addictive by a boy who had the cheekbones of a model? Didn’t he deserve hands grasping at his waist with an eagerness to be held close that Adam had never known? Adam Parrish didn’t have many nice things in his life, and he wasn’t going to question this one that had happened unanticipated this one random, Saturday afternoon.

Adam tilted his head back, and lips found their way to his chin, his jaw, his neck.

“I have to get back,” Adam said, a husked out whisper. “Breaks over.”

The boy nipped his ear. “Fuck that,” he hissed.

Adam knew from the beemer, from the leather jacket, the fancy jeans, that this was a rich kid, an Aglionby boy out of uniform, a type of person who never had to work a day for anything, a type Adam envied and hated in opposing but equal measure. Still, the whisper of his voice on the shell of Adam’s ear, the suggestion of it, was tempting, but temptation wasn’t enough for Adam was a realist. He was an expert in survival, and to survive he went to work.

With a groan, he pushed with the heels of his hands against the boy’s hips. The boy stepped back without resistance.

The boy’s lips were redder than before, and Adam wondered if his looked the same, sensitive from heavy-pressed kissing and the sandpaper rub of stubble. The boy’s dangerously blue eyes were half-lidded, staring down still at Adam’s mouth like he was thinking about making himself home there.

It was this look that got Adam saying, in a hopeful outreach, “I get off at seven.”

The guy nodded, then stalked off kind of stiffly around the building to out front where his car was parked. Adam leaned his dome of his head against the wall, to try and calm his pumping blood, hot and thrumming.

#

He had showed up at Boyd’s a week ago with a “It’s making this fucking noise.” Adam had been bent over the guts of another car catching only glimpses of a slick black BMW paired with boy dressed slickly in all black himself.

One of the other guys, Dan, had dealt with him mostly. He turned on the engine and could recognize the sound for a belt just from years of commensurate experience. It was a quick fix, and then the boy in the black was gone.

Today he showed up when Adam was the only one working in the garage, because Boyd was on a phone class in his office, Dan was on lunch break, Jackson was off because his wife just had a baby, and no one else was on the schedule. Adam recognized the car, recognized the boy. Both were memorable.

“Making the noise again?” Adam asked.

“Hit my three thousand miles.”

“Oil change then.”

The boy tossed his keys to Adam in a casual arch; Adam caught them against his chest, unimpressed by the dismissive act. He waved the boy off in the direction of the waiting area, not sparing complete sentences on him. What was the boy going to do? Complain to his manager? Not like Boyd would care what one bratty Aglionby had to say about one of his hardest workers. Boyd was talking about taking Adam on the road with him this summer, a promotion that other full timers were hoping for.

Adam popped open the hood, and when he turned around to a grab a rag he’d left on the bench, saw the boy hadn’t gone to the waiting area, but instead of leaned against the garage wall, watching, arms crossed. If this guy thought Adam was easily intimidated, he didn’t know the life Adam lived.

Whatever. Even if he could feel the boy’s eyes, oil changes were routine as riding a bike. The fact that could have an expensive car like this one and not know how to do the simple maintenance of an oil change was just another example about how the world wasn’t fair.  

He was there, no matter what Adam did, lingering in his same spot, glowering and unmoving. A black smudge at the corner of his vision, a haunting ghost. Although not intimidating, it certainly was frustrating to have him staked out where he didn’t belong, scrutinizing like he didn’t trust Adam with his car.

“Why don’t you just --” Adam started, ready to tell the boy to get to the waiting area because of insurance safety reasons or some bullshit, and banged his head exactly into the car’s hood.

He hissed, pressing the heel of his hand to his scalp.

“Fuck. You alright?”

When Adam squinted his eyes back open, the boy in black had peeled himself off of the wall. He wasn’t close, but he was closer, just a little beyond an arm’s reach.

His gaze glanced down Adam and back up, and it hit Adam, an understanding. This boy hadn’t been looking all this while with distaste or disgrace. He had been looking for the exact opposite reason. Because he liked what he was seeing, that he was searching for it.

Something strange and unfamiliar curled low in Adam’s stomach, but it wasn’t unpleasant. It was warm and satisfied.

Adam lowered his hand. The boy stepped closer, lifted his own. It was slow and fast and silent. Motion with no words, watching for rejection, for Adam to shy away. He didn’t.

The boy’s fingers pressed his care along the sensitive spot on Adam’s scalp.

“Just a bump.”

The boy’s hand dropped away, slowly, slower than…

This was all a conversation of actions and looks and implications, a dance of stuttering steps, a game of chicken. Adam understood, but now it was his step to take.

Did he want this? The answer wasn’t no, but the questions were more complicated than that. Was it safe to want this? Could he fit this into his life of school and work and survival? Did he dare?

The boy before him blinked, and up close it was all dark lashes. Damn.

Adam bit his lip. “Meet me out back in ten.”

#

“Do you have a name?” the boy asked, after Adam settled himself into the passenger seat of his boy’s BMW. It two minutes past seven.

“Adam,” he said. “Do you? Other than Lynch.” He had glanced that on the paperwork.  

“Ronan,” he said. He drummed his fingers on the steering wheel. There was some obnoxious techno-metal song playing over the speakers, but it turned down lowered that a pulsebeat, just another hum along with the engine.

“Where are we going?” Adam asked.

“I don’t know,” Ronan said. “Sometimes I just like to fucking drive, forget anything else exists.”

“That’s nice, but I need to be home by ten,” Adam said.

“Fucking curfew? Lame.”

Adam eyed Ronan’s profile, pale against the night and the tinted windows. Adam said, “Find somewhere to park.”

Ronan’s jaw shifted, his Adam’s apple, the tight of his mouth.

“Sure,” he said. “I know somewhere.”

Ronan turned out on a dirt road, took them up a ridge, to a look off point. He parked, and before Adam could unbuckle, was out the car.

Adam, unsure, followed.

Outside, Ronan hopped up onto the BMW’s hood. Adam followed. The metal was warm where he planted his palms.

Through the trees, over the edge of the ridge, was the town, a spattering of twinkle lights spread out like a spiderweb over the darkness.

“Wow,” Adam said. “That view.” He had lived Henrietta his whole life and had never been up here. Why would he have ever expanded the time and energy to bike himself up the side of a mountain? Why would his parents ever spent the gas money or time for a family trip?  

“Fuck the view,” Ronan said.

Adam tipped back his head and laughed, pure instinct. He didn’t laugh freely often, had little to laugh about, but Ronan’s transparent eagerness was like inhaling helium.

And Ronan looked at him, all the while. All there is in the forest-musky night air: the view and Ronan looking at him. From there, it was easy to descend into each other.

In the hours between break and quitting time, Adam thought hard about what this was. Here was his theory: this was some Aglionby  boy who liked other boys, but didn’t want anyone important to know. Not his family, definitely not his classmates. So he found some townie to direct him affections toward. So they would make out in hidden corners of town, in his BMW, and Adam could live with that. He was a seventeen year old boy with an interest in kissing and touching and all that stuff. Adam Parrish could absorb some misplaced affection while it lasted. It might be a nice distraction.

Ronan’s hand grasped his jaw, and their mouths crushed harder together. What a way to be touched.

And what a way for time to pass with lips and tongue and teeth, with hot panted breaths, with hands on clothes and hands on hair and hands on skin. It didn’t matter that the car hood became a hard, uncomfortable seat after a while, or the strain in his calves and hamstrings to keep himself from sliding away.

Always responsible, even in this moment of indulgence, Adam checked the plastic-band watch on his wrist.

“I have to get home,” he said into Ronan’s mouth, pressing in then away for a final kiss.

Ronan linked his fingers around Adam’s arm, just past the watch’s band, and lifted Adam’s hand to his mouth. He pressed a kiss to the tender inside of his wrist where veins and soft skin were exposed, and another to center of his palm. It was such a soft thing, an action Adam couldn’t quite rationalize. Experimental and eager make outs with a boy you just met sounded like a plausible thing other teenagers might do, that this rich and dark-fringed boy might do. But careful kisses to uncommon places? That was inspiration.

Ronan let go. He slide off the hood of the BMW with ease. “Let’s go.”

Inside the car, Adam gave Ronan a few short directions and then an eventual “Stop here.”

Ronan stomped on the break and the car jerked to a stop. Adam swore. Ronan smirked like a devil.

“There’s nothing here,” he said. “It’s a fucking field.”

“It’s up there,” Adam said, pointing up at dirt path hard to see in the dark. After a lifetime of being ashamed and now being determined not to be, and because if Ronan had an issue with it then fuck him, Adam said, “It’s a trailer park.”

Ronan turned up the music volume. “Whatever.”

Reaching for the door latch, Adam said, “Unlock the trunk. I need my bike.” If this was the end, Adam wasn’t forgetting his bike out of it.

He got his bike and rolled it up past the driver’s side, to the mouth of dirt path leading up to not-exactly-home. Because he was tempted, Adam lingered right there, beside Ronan’s rolled down window, waiting for last words.

“Do you want to… fucking hang out again or what the fuck --?”
“Sure,” Adam said, cutting off what looked like Ronan about to have an aneurysm. And, a touch coyly, “You know where I work.”

Ronan didn’t quite grin, but it wasn’t the concentrated scowl when he was trying to put vulnerable words into the air just moments ago. “I don’t know when you work,” he said.

“Tomorrow,” Adam said. “I have a lunch break at two.”

Ronan stared out the windshield, raising his arm up from his face to chew on the leather bands wringing his wrist. “Yeah, I can make two,” he said.

He lowered his leather-band arm back to the steering wheel, banged it twice in beat with the song playing clear over his speakers.

Adam raised his eyebrows, waiting. “Good night,” he said. Which meant, drive off now. I want to see you good and gone before walking up to the double wide. I don’t know what awaits me there, but the temptation down here was making it sure hard to walk away.

Ronan left, tires screeching as he pressed on the gas too hard, too fast. Adam rolled his eyes and pushed his bike up the dirt road, lingering in every step closer to home. Home would suck all fantasy from tonight, from this dream world that had been today.

#

A pizza box balanced on the dashboard, quivering as Adam shut the BMW’s door behind him.

“What’s that?” he asked.

“It’s lunch,” Ronan said with the flatness of a pancake.

Adam Parrish who had a plastic-bagged sandwich waiting for him, and also pride, didn’t need anyone buying him lunch. This, afterall, wasn’t a date.

He didn’t say that. But he did need to clarify what this was.

He said, “No one can know about this.” But it really wasn’t everybody in the world or even everybody in Henrietta Adam was worried about. Just one, and all the possible conduits back that just one. “My father --” it was like speaking through an asthma clogged throat. “My father can’t find out about this.”

Ronan stopped at a redlight. Adam had thirty-six minutes of his lunch break left.

“I don’t lie,” Ronan said, eyes straight forward. He raised the shoulder nearest Adam in a self conscious shrug. “But I’m good at keeping secrets.”

Adam squinted at him. “Are you a sphinx or something? What kind of riddle is that?”

Ronan scoffed and looked right back over at Adam. God, his eyes were blue, as dangerous and thrilling as walking across a frozen over lake.

And that’s how fragile it was, a skin of ice over depths of freezing water. This was the third tryst in two days, and while maybe they could be smart enough not to get caught, eventually someone would notice Adam Parrish hanging out with some kid in a sleek BMW. That would pique curiosity, cause questions.  

The light changed. Ronan pressed on the gas, the BMW jerked to speeding life on the long open stretch they had found themselves. As they climbed a hill, reached a new speed, Ronan changed gears, seamless. It was impressive, really. Adam didn’t drive stick, but he could appreciate the art of it, and even more Ronan at the wheels, the BMW an extension of him, two parts of the same soul.

Adam knew what he was doing with the guts of a car, just as he knew what he was doing when was writing an essay for school.There was definitely satisfaction being good at something and being recognized for being good at something, but it wasn’t the same as whatever this was, an artist and his artform.

With a turn that was both smooth and sudden and had Adam plastered to the interior of the car door from the centripetal force of it, Ronan had driven them onto a dirt path that cut through a cornfield. When he got far enough in that the road proper behind them was gone from the rearview mirror, he stopped.

“What’s this place?” Adam asked.

With a shitty-coy grin, Ronan replied, “Secret.”

He then leaned across the drive shaft, closer to Adam, then pulled the pizza box from the dash to his lap.

“I’m starving,” Ronan said. “I haven’t eaten since eight.”

“This morning?”

Ronan grunted.

“What were you doing up at seven on a Sunday.” Adam Parrish might be up at seven on a Sunday, but Adam Parrish also knew he wasn’t normal.

“Mass.”

Adam waited for a joke to follow, but it didn’t. Instead, Ronan curled a slice of pizza between his fingers and took a large bit out of the point.

Mouth full, Ronan made a series of noises that Adam translated as ‘Want some?’

“I brought my own lunch,” Adam said defensively, although the smell of the pizza -- yeasty, greasy, cheesy -- compared to what Adam knew was waiting for him in his bag: a limp white bread and single slice of baloney sandwich.

Ronan swallowed the obscene amount of his bite, said, “I can see you brought your fucking own, but I’m not going to be finish this before it gets cold, and cold pizza sucks.”

“Cold pizza’s good.” All pizza was good.

“That’s a lie we tell ourselves so that we’ll eat cold pizza.”

It all makes sense; it’s all incidental. This wasn’t date pizza, or pity pizza, or pay me for half pizza. It was just pizza that was there, leftovers from Ronan’s loose budget where he could buy more pizza than he could eat. But Adam can’t quite get himself to reach over and take a slice, nor can he get himself to open up his pathetic bagged lunch. Which left Adam ashamed and hungry and not getting made out with in the passenger’s seat. What a waste of a lunch break.

After taking a second slice, Ronan shoved the box back on the dashboard,one flap tucked in, two flaps sticking out.

In the night between yesterday and today, Adam had laid awake in bed, thumb pressed to his bottom lip where he could still feel the burn of stubble, and thought a lot about hunger. He had been hungry his entire life. In the real, physical, grumbling and ache in your sides type way, and also in the metaphysical varieties. They were some things -- many things -- he couldn’t do about his circumstances yet. But -- what a precious contribution this was -- he had learned yesterday that some hungers could be sated if you let yourself take advantage of the circumstances instead of overthinking the consequences and implications.  

Adam reached for the box and tore out a slice. If he caught something satisfied and smirky on Ronan’s face, he let it slide. He didn’t know Adam well enough to know what parts of hims were conquerable and which weren’t.

After Adam had scarfed away the slice and a second, he wiped his mouth along the back of his hand and said, “You know, my lunch break isn’t that long.”

It was all the suggestion that was needed for mouth to find mouth, Ronan’s hand wrapped around the back of his neck.

The positioning was an awkward strain, the two of them in opposing seats, the gear shift between them, the spacious backseat available behind them. There wasn’t time for that today. Adam was logical even in his reckless ventures.

Despite this, kissing was easy. Adam didn’t know Ronan’s history, but for Adam dating had been sparse, and wanting boys had been a quiet voice. Known, but drowned out by issues more pressing and preferences more convenient.

If kissing was easy, post-kissing wasn’t. The last two times, silence and the perfunctory exchange of words was all they needed afterwards. This was the third meet up in two days, and it wasn’t a date. It wasn’t. Even though Ronan picked him at a predetermined time and took him to a destination and they ate food together before engaging in physical intimacy. Still, it wasn’t a date. They didn’t need to talk. They understood what they wanted from each other.

But Ronan hadn’t turned up the radio loud enough to drown out conversation, so Adam said, “You’re the first guy I’ve kissed.”

Ronan said nothing.

“I’ve kissed girls before.”

Ronan made a nose-wrinkled-up face. Although it was like someone had just stuffed a can of garbage under his nose, it still managed to be attractive. When you had a nicely proportioned face with high cheekbones and strong brows, you had the advantage of twisting your face into any expression you wanted and still looking good.

“I  like both.”

“You’re not having a goddamn crisis, are you?” Ronan said.

“No…” Adam said, lingering over the ‘o’ sound. “So you only like guys?”

Ronan made another face, eyes held on the road. This face said, ‘you know where my mouth’s just been.’

“Look,” Ronan said, after blowing through a stop sign. “I really don’t do... this.”

“Talk?” Adam suggested.

“Yeah.”

Adam leaned back in his seat. Well, he had said this wasn’t a date. Actually, he hadn’t said it, but he had thought it a lot.

Nearing Boyd’s, the car slowed, and Ronan took it over to the shoulder about a block away. Was Adam getting dumped off here, literally and figuratively?

Ronan said, “It’s the first time I’ve done this too, or fucking whatever.” He lifted his wrist to his mouth, biting the leather bracelets he had wrapped around there.

Had Adam… had Adam made him nervous?

“I wouldn’t have guessed,” he said. He shrugged. “You’re good at it.”

Ronan chewed on the leather bands a little more, then dropped his arm to the steering wheel. He could make every action look enigmatic.

When Ronan dropped him off properly, just a block further along, Adam said, “Don’t ask me for a phone number. I don’t have a phone.”

Ronan replied, “Great. I hate using my phone.”

Hopping down on the asphalt, Adam held the car door open a wedge. “I don’t work again til Tuesday, but it’s to closing, so I have to head straight home.”

“What’s closing?”

“Ten.”

“Cool.”

#

“What’re you doing here?” Adam said, Tuesday, at 10:07 pm, in the parking lot, leaning into the BMW’s open window. “I told you I had to go straight home.”

Ronan, lounged in the driver’s seat like he was some sort of king on a throne, said, “Take how long it takes you to get home by bike and subtract how long it takes to get home by car, and now suddenly you don’t have to get straight home. That’s how fucking math works.”

“I know how fucking math works.” Adam tugged opened the door, happy to find it unlocked and not making himself look like a fool, and got in. “And also that’s the longest I’ve ever heard you talk in one go.”

“Fuck off,” Ronan said with no heat.

“Too late,” said Adam. “I’m already buckled. Now tell me more about subtraction.”

“Is that what gets you going?”

“You found it out. Mathematics, my secret kink.”

“Boys, girls, and the worst school subject. Is there a name for that?”

“I don’t know. Why don’t you stop wasting my minutes.”

Ronan grinned. There was a trend to his rare grins Adam had noticed. They were never just happy. There was also something sharp to them. Although alluring, although something Adam could keep staring at and trying to parse, it was also a touch sad that someone couldn’t smile without a condition attached.

The time gleaned from Ronan’s mathematics wasn’t a great sum, instead precious and few. So much of Adam’s life came in bits precious and few. Too soon were they idling at the bottom of the path that lead up to his family’s trailer.

Ronan reached out and rubbed a thumb across the purple splotch under Adam’s eye, something he hoped the other boy would overlook all this time. It wasn’t that bad. It was negligible, really, versus all ways it could be worse.

“You get a fucking fight or something?” Ronan asked.

“Not exactly,” Adam said, and gave no answer beyond that.

Ronan didn’t need to know. Adam would prefer, in fact, that Ronan didn’t know.

The walk between the bottom of the dirt road to the trailer stretched longer than Adam remembered. With each marching step came a thought.

Left foot. Would he ever receive more than his spare moments with Ronan? Right foot. Is that what he wanted? Left foot. Did he deserve it? Right foot. It wasn’t a matter of deserving. Left foot. It was a matter of something else, complicated and strange. Right foot. It was also a matter convenience, two people in the same place who wanted the same thing. Left foot.

Adam reached the bottom of the rickety steps that lead up to his front door. Inside that door there was no doubt who he was. Adam Parrish, trailer trash, survivalist, thinned out around the edges and weary. In the passenger’s seat of Ronan’s car, as misplaced as he was, Adam was something else entirely. He was wanted. Such an unfamiliar experience for someone who wasn’t even wanted within the walls of the only place he had known as home.

It was risky and it probably was going to crash and burn, but Adam was going to hold onto it while he could.

Chapter Text

Here was the thing that Ronan didn’t tell Adam: when he brought in his BMW for making a noise, it wasn’t the first time he had seen him.

Henrietta was a town so small it wasn’t odd to run into the same person at disparate places, but Ronan usually didn’t care enough to know people and didn’t care enough to pay attention. If you weren’t one of the few people he counted as friends (one, Gansey, two, Noah), not family, and not one of the several people looking to fight or drag race on the irregular, Ronan didn’t have space for them in life or in his desperately warring mind.

He had first seen Adam, although he didn’t know his name, at the grocery store. Ronan had been drug along by Gansey, because, “I don’t want to hear a word out of you when we run out of cereal.”

It was an arduous trip, for although Ronan prefered a chaotic ‘throw random things in the cart -- just whatever makes you feel good -- and go home’ method of shopping, Gansey preferred to trail his cart down every aisle, contemplating this or that when the answer could easily be both, and getting lost in philosophical tangents in regards to the ethics of GMOs and the mythological inaccuracies of certain leprechaun mascot. He didn’t even let Ronan handle the cart, because Ronan would ram it into the shelves to pass time, so he was left trailing around behind him, resentful in the freezer aisle, resentful by the produce, so forth and so on.   

Ronan first spotted him when they had turned down the canned goods aisle. A boy, their age, squatted down to examine the price tags on the lowest shelves, where the cheapest, generic brands were displayed. He was just a boy, until he stood up, and then he was a miracle of moving pieces contained in a too small, too thin t-shirt. Shoulder blades a unique angle against the stretched fabric, a contrast between sleeves and skin, sun-browned in a way Ronan’s all-Irish pale could never hope to achieve.   

Gansey plucked up a can of french cut green beans and said, “Wow, look at the sodium in this thing” like he was about four decades older than he actually was.

Ronan blinked. The boy placed the can in the basket he had crooked in elbow, and turned away down the aisle. That had been it, the entire non-interaction. Ronan, consumed by boredom, had found something interesting. Ronan, mind wandering from whatever Gansey had been yapping about, had been unguarded enough to perceive and admit and admire without any of his usual self-doubts, confusions, or hangups.

Ronan Lynch had found the boy attractive, because Ronan Lynch was a boy who found other boys attractive.

When Ronan saw him again when he brought his BMW to the nearest auto shop because of a rather ominous noise it was making, seeing the boy again their was a coincidence. Henrietta was too sparsely populated for it to be fate. So it was coincidence and, also, reaffirmation. Because the boy in a too small t-shirt and the boy in coveralls were completely different, but equally compelling images.

So when it came time for an oil change, and because he loved his car enough to treat it right by getting timely oil changes, he went to the same shop again, hopeful and unsure. Everything that happened after wasn’t planned or contrived or schemed, it just happened.

Except it didn’t just happened. It happened because the boy and him made it happen in equal parts. The boy, Adam, like the first man. Adam, a townie, with mechanic-rough hands, prickly and beautiful and wanting.

Adam, over top of him. The two of laid out on the backseat of Ronan’s car, with the comfortable press of Adam’s weight long the length of him, mouths clashing together. Ronan’s leg going that tingling it went before it went numb where Adam’s knee dug into his thigh. He didn’t care.

All he cared about was rucking up Adam’s shirt in his fisted grip. Not with any destination in mind, just because he could. Because it left a path for him to slide his palm up the warm length of Adam’s back, over the skin and knobs of his spine. Adam hissing into his mouth as he dragged his palm back down, biting Ronan’s bottom lip. Then his chin, then the axis of his jaw. Ronan craned up beneath him.

Adam tucked his head to the side, pressed a firm palm to Adam’s shoulder, said in a quiet huff, “Hold up.”

It wasn’t a rejection; it was just that he was probably as turned on as Ronan was. It was all too fast and unfamiliar and leading to a territory neither were quite ready to explore, and could turn out embarrassing rather soon if they didn’t cool it down.

Ronan sunk back into the seat, languid, and raised a hand up from Adam’s shirt to the back of Adam’s neck, where wavy hair was wispy against his hand.
He should’ve probably said something, as they were regaining breath. It was weird, to be quiet so long, right? Ronan wasn’t very wordy, and even less so in the places it counted.

“You’re really…”

How was he going to finish this sentence. Hot? That sounded like some fucking Aglionby boy, pretentious shit. Cute? Fucking stupid. Attractive? Good-looking? Those sounded like things Gansey would say, and thus, not something Ronan would say.

“Yeah?” Adam muttered into Ronan’s shoulder. Now Ronan was stuck with coming up with an ending to his aborted phrase.

“I like your… face.”

Adam snorted, confused. “What?”

“And, like, your hands...”

“Is this your attempt at flirting?”  

Ronan felt his face grow warm. He was glad Adam couldn’t see him from how they were laid together. Except Adam ruined it by pushing up on his arms, examining Ronan straight down.

“I like your face too,” Adam said, pseudo-serious.

Ronan nudged one of Adam’s arms out from under him, causing him to half-collapse back down. It was almost like a wrestling match, making out, except with very different objectives.

“Don’t be a loser,” he said. “Don’t -- Don’t steal my compliments.”

Adam snorted. “Such poetry.”

Ronan let out a torrent of swear words, not really directed at anything or to a combination of any sense, but probably at himself, because he was embarrassed and flustered. Being embarrassed and flustered made him angry, because it wasn’t something he controlled.

There was so little Ronan controlled. He couldn’t control his sadness and pain, ever since his life broke at the center when his father died. He couldn’t control his sleep, haunted by nightmares and influxes of insomnia. He couldn’t control the pathways of his life, forced to go everyday to a school he hated, forced to stay away from the home he loved. There were a few highlights, breathing room. Being able to live at Monmouth with Gansey instead of the dorms with Declan. Street racing, driving fast, the car and him on being, a monster on the road, free.

And this. With Adam. Adam giggling into his shoulder, and all the anger diffused away like air out of popped balloon, his crusade of curses trailing off mid-phrase. Adam, who didn’t know everything -- who knew barely anything -- about him, but knew one thing no one else did.

Ronan watched as Adam shifted his wrist to gain a clear view of the cheap plastic watch latched there.

“You have to go?” Ronan asked. Adam always had to go, was on an eternally tight schedule.

“Not yet,” Adam said, then easing his weight back onto Ronan, the two of them lying together, breathing together, just there together.

“This okay?” Adam asked. Because this wasn’t hunger, this wasn’t mouths or tongues or racing hearts.

“It’s fine,” Ronan said. Although it was more than fine.

It wasn’t the thrill of racing or a fistfight. It the rarely found peace in his life. It was sitting in with Gansey, wordless but in camaraderie, late into the night as he worked on his miniature Henrietta and Ronan blared music through headphones to drown all else out. It was falling to sleep easy and dreamless for just one night. It was seeing Matthew laughing and know for the span of an instant that the entire world was not, in fact, wrecked beyond all reason or redemption.

It was feeling Adam’s heat, heartbeat, breaths as they laid crunched together in the backseat, just because they could.

#

A week later, engaged in another secret rendezvous, Ronan pressed a hand to Adam’s ribs. Adam gasped and shied away.

 They were in a park, which was much more exposed location than usual, but it had rained earlier, and the overcast skies were still releasing the end of their sprinkles, so the park was empty. The whole place smelled like damp earth, which to Ronan smelled like home.

They had been goofing off, out in the outside, because even Ronan Lynch needed get out from behind the wheel of his car every so often. They had taken advantage of the playground empty of children. Adam perched himself on top of the monkey bars while Ronan did a balancing act along a seesaw and tripped over the handle at the end. Adam snort-laughed. Ronan came over to the monkey bars and did a pull up.

Adam muttered, “Show off.”

Ronan dropped the ground and tugged at Adam’s ankle, forcing him to slide down off the bars and onto the ground with Ronan. Somehow from there it turned into some unannounced games of tag or chase, until they ended up within a scattering of trees that could not even be favorably been called a woods, but blocked them far enough off the road from view.

That was when Ronan touched him; that’s when Adam reacted. Ronan knew pain when he saw it.

“What’s wrong?”

“Nothing,” Adam said, head down. “It’s…”

But it wasn’t nothing. Ronan had groan up rough and tumble with two brothers, had collected his fair share of accidental and reckless injuries, and als accumulated the basics of first aid thusly. It was in his childhood DNA to learn further.

He tugged up the side of Adam’s shirt before he could be stopped, revealing the left of Adam’s ribs covered with purple and yellowing bruise.

“Fuck. What happened?”

Adam tugged his shirt free from Ronan’s grip, pulling it overstretched back down.

“Just,” he said between tight teeth, “An accident at the factory.”

Ronan squinted. The factory. One of Adam’s jobs that Ronan was always negotiating their time together around.

“You gonna sue them?”

“Forget it,” Adam said, shaking his head and brushing by Ronan’s shoulder as she started away.

Ronan followed after. “I asked you how work was, and you said fine,” Ronan called out at the back of Adam’s head, in his shittiest tone.

Adam whirled around, yelled back, “I didn’t think ‘how was your stupid fucking job’ was a question that wanted a real answer” in a shittier tone, pissed off.

Was this a fight? Were they fighting?

With decidedly longer strides, Ronan caught up, grabbed Adam by the shoulder to stop him. Adam wrenched his shoulder out of Ronan’s grip with vigor that left him wincing over his wounded side.

“Don’t touch me,” he said, in a tone so chilly that Ronan froze through.

He left Adam walk off without him, knowing very well the the shape of the desperate need to be left alone. Adam, walking, hunched over, in the direction Ronan thought was towards the car, until he veered off to the right.

“What the hell?” he said to himself, as he watched Adam reach the edge of the road and start walking down it like some despondent hitchhiker. Ronan jogged across the stretch of the grassy park to his car.

When he rolled past Adam a few minutes later, he rolled down the passenger’s window and yelled out, “Get in car.”

Adam kept walking, not even reacting a flinch.

Ronan leaned on the horn. Nothing. He eased the car onto the shoulder behind where Adam kept walking on.

He popped open the door and took a stand on the gravel. “Are you going to fucking walk the five miles back into town?” he yelled at Adam’s back. “That’s doesn’t fit in your schedule!”

This final thing cracked through. Adam stopped. He peaked an eye over his shoulder in Ronan’s direction. It was a compromise between two unmovable mountains.

Ronan drove his car up the road and stops by Adam, through the still open window, said, “Get in the car, you stubborn ass.”

As if to prove his stubbornness, Adam delayed, shifting weight behind feet on the roadside, like he was reconsidering this all out of spit. Then, logic overcame all. Adam had a night shift later, and he needed to get back by the correct hour, something that couldn’t be achieved by walking. The street was too dead to hope for some other ride.

Adam got in. Ronan stomped on the gas before he could buckle. He swore as he was jerked against the seat.

Ronan head tornadoed with thoughts: what the hell, what the hell was that, what the hell is wrong with you, what the hell is wrong with me…

“Fuck!” he said, loud and quick and violent. Adam cut him with a look from the corner of his eyes.

They drove on a minute, two, more, under an oppressive silent. They had silent before in the car. They had been silent a lot, but this was an infected silent, worse and crushing.

“Where do you want me to take you?” Ronan muttered, because they were an hour and a half early from dropping Adam off for his shift, as had been the plan.

“My house,” he said. “My bike’s there.”

Ronan blinked. Alright, then.

“Do you need me to pick you up from work later?” This was his try at an olive branch. He wasn’t good at it.

“I don’t need anything from you,” Adam replied, a much sharper answer than Ronan’s question had required.

“Motherf--” He snapped his own teeth shut. “What the fuck is wrong with you?”

“Nothing’s wrong with me. This is who I am. If you don’t like it…” This was where Ronan would say ‘then you can fuck off’ but instead Adam shrugged with an aggressive motion.

“Take me to my house,” Adam said again when Ronan didn’t answer.

“You don’t have a house,” Ronan said, just to be cruel, just because he could. Keeping a careful eye on Adam as he drove -- out of corner of his gaze, with fleeting glances between the road and the boy sitting rigidly next to him but an unfathomable distance away -- he saw the way Adam’s face heated up under his tan.

Ronan remembered being younger, being little, being stuffed into the backseat of the car with his two brothers, being taken on some journey. Some short -- to church. Some long -- off to another town for Irish music competition or festival. He remembered the squabbles that would take place there between three brothers in a squashed space for a prolonged time and how discontent it was to sit their like a chain-ganged prisoner with someone who was temporarily serving as your worst enemy.

There was a certain lack of control in those situations, knowing you wouldn’t be free of the car or of your own space until Dad decided to stop the car at a pitstop or at the destination. Today, Ronan was at the wheel. He had the control, but he had no idea how to wield it. So he drove to where Adam told him to, his forearms tense where he gripped the wheel, mind whirring around different half-formed plans of action.

No solution came -- no words, no actions -- by the time he was braking in front of the trailer park. His body worked itself there purely on muscle memory. And as he often did, Ronan sat there, behind the wheel, not moving, as Adam got out of the car and tromped up the path to his trailer.

He sat their, minutes ticking by, the engine idling, as a rawness scratched down his throat and a itchiness overcame every inch of his skin.  

#

“Ronan is that --? Really?” came the parental overture of Gansey’s voice, his image a upside down silhouette framed by a doorway.

Ronan had made it about one third up the stairs to the livable level of Monmouth Manufacturing, before tripping and giving up, instead finding a semi-comfortable way to sprawl on the staircase, elbows propped, neck craned back so his head rested on one of the stairs.

He blinked, and the shadowy Gansey had drawn closer, was now leaning down to grab him by the arm, haul him up.

“How drunk are you?” Gansey asked, as Ronan got to his feet in an uneasy balance.

Ronan tipped his head back, and it seemed like the whole world tipped with it. Gansey’s hold tightened and Ronan was jerked forward. Had he been ready to keel backwards down the stairs?

“Really,” Ronan answered.

“Really?” Gansey repeated that ‘I’m so disappointed and proper right now’ way. He smelled like mint.

“Really drunk,” Ronan explained. He had answered. He was being cooperative. He was so drunk he was past belligerent drunk. He was compliant drunk. He was slug who was to lie on the steps drunk. He was so drunk he was beyond the touch of emotions and reality. It was exactly the type of drunk Ronan had set out to be.

Gansey pulled Ronan up the steps like he was a piece of luggage, for he was mostly dead weight and little coordination. Once up the staircase, Gansey dropped Ronan on the first soft thing available, Gansey’s own bed.

“Please tell me you didn’t drive like that?”

Ronan muttered something that was supposed to be, “No, Dick” or “no, dick” which came out really muffled because his face was half in the pillow. He rolled on his back and threw his arm over his eyes to protect them from the light.

He hadn’t driven. It was a testament to whatever study coma Gansey had been sunk into that he hadn’t heard Ronan’s BMW pull up in the lot hours ago, after Ronan had procured his illicit goods. He had walked around drinking and cussing and kicking trash, not wanting to go inside under Gansey’s discerning gaze or inside his car where it still smelled like Adam. Gasoline, axel grease, grass, and cheap soap.

That’s why he was drinking away, instead of racing away, his issues. Adam and his car were now linked. He couldn’t drive around without thinking of Adam in the passenger seat, or him and Adam crushed longways in the backseat, or sitting together on the hood that first night.

“You haven’t been like this in a while,” Gansey said, maybe in the direction of his desk, a diagonal way off to the side. “I thought you were… Nevermind.”

Getting better, Ronan supposed Gansey was going to say. But Ronan wasn’t better. He wasn’t going to get better. Something inside of him was twisted, like a piece of metal melted and deformed. There was no getting him back to his original shape.

Ronan hadn’t been like this -- sloppy drunk -- in a while because he had something else to distract and fill his after school hours. Now he didn’t. Now he just had another thing that hurt.

#

“Turn right,” Ronan said, from the passenger seat of the Pig, Gansey’s atrociously orange and atrociously running Camaro, which was at this very moment vibrating with the strength that convinced Ronan that the bolts were about to shake loose.

Gansey, who had been monologuing about the differences between the French and English King Arthur myths, stuttered halfway through his sentence about the addition of Sir Galahad, to ask, “Why? We’re going to the store, right?”

But going to the store from this direction meant driving past Boyd’s. It was hard work, in a small town, to avoid driving past all the places that inflicted memories of Adam’s mouth, smell, touch, taste, pulsebeat.

The week that had passed since his fight with Adam had been dreadful. During the night, Ronan couldn’t sleep, and when he could, he had night terrors. During the day, he felt rusty. Going through the motions of school and dealing with people were harder than normal, and they were usually difficult enough for Ronan who felt like feral beast caged into normal life.  

Ronan, who didn’t lie on principle, just didn’t answer Gansey’s question. Instead, he squared up his shoulders and held his breath as the drove past the autobody shop, like he was a suspicious kid getting driven past a graveyard.

But, apparently, he had cursed himself instead of preserved his luck, for in the grocery store, the target of his avoidance showed up in the frozen goods’ aisle.  

Gansey had sent Ronan out on a mission for egos, which was a perilous mission, because he was never sure what Ronan would come back with, and if he would come back at all.

Adam, holding a canister of orange juice concentrate in one hand, caught Ronan’s gaze front across the length of the aisle. It would’ve been so easy for either of them to turn away, walk out the end of the aisle nearest them, and not interact. Ronan should turn away. He was pissed and miserable, but turning away was a rather lame passive-aggressive reflection of his internal storm, and Ronan was usually much more direct than that.

Then Adam nodded. A slight invitation. Ronan walked forward, stopping a few feet away from him.  

“Nice outfit,” Adam said.

Ronan who was itchy and uncomfortable in his school uniform replied, “Fuck off” but he has said it the same way he said everything, and the corner of Adam’s mouth twitched up.

It was too hard to look at it directly, the hint of his smile, so he ducked his head, scuffed a mark onto the tile floor. On Adam’s arm there was ringing bruise, like he had been grabbed hard. It’s existence was discordant, after the bruise on his cheek and on his side. As angry as Ronan has seen Adam now, he has never seen him take a swing. Where was getting these bruises?

Because Ronan doesn’t how to say anything nice, he said, “I see your fucking alive.”

“Yeah, I’ve managed it somehow.”

“It’s an accomplishment,” Ronan said, “When you’re actively trying to work yourself to death.”

“Well, some of us aren’t born rich,” Adam said, with a spark.

Now Ronan grinned. That was the Adam he knew, as prickly as him.

Thinking of Adam and his work made a realization dawn in Ronan’s slow head. The only way that they had ever connected was by Ronan showing up at his work, Adam revealing his schedule in day or two chunks at a time. If Adam hadn’t been avoiding Ronan in the week past like Ronan had been avoiding him. Adam had probably just been living his life. Sure, he had said he wanted nothing from Ronan anymore, but Ronan knew all about saying hateful things in hateful moments. If Adam had wanted to contact Ronan, to see him again, he hadn’t a way to.

“So... what’re you doing here?” Adam asked in the lull.

Ronan wrapped his hand around the nearest freezer door and tugged it open. Condescending flashed up inside the glass, creating a translucent barrier between them.

“Food,” Ronan said, like a jackass. This door had lead to hash browns and tater tots and other potato-based breakfast foods. He grabbed a bag of tater tots. He and Gansey could presumably eat this. “You?”

“Food,” Adam answered back.

Ronan let the freezer door go, let it slam shut. He drew a finger in the frost, leaving a line behind. He drew another, another, another.

Adam watched. At the end of it, he said, “I thought you hated your phone.”

“I do,” Ronan said, stuffing his now numbed fingers into his pants pocket. But he had written out his phone number in the frosted glass.

“What am I supposed to do with that? Memorize it?”

“You can do whatever the hell you want with it,” Ronan said, taking that moment to leave with a bag of tater tots that ended up offending Gansey to amusing effect and with a single glance back over his shoulder to see Adam started at the freezer door like a puzzle.

#

Ronan didn’t answer his phone. He didn’t answer it when he knew the person calling and he definitely didn’t answer random numbers. So when his phone buzzed on the table and he checked the screen to see whether he was ignoring Gansey passively or Declan aggressively and saw an unfamiliar combination of numbers with a local area code, he had no reason and no reputation to answer.

But there was something unsettled in the air. A night of bad dreams, a date ending with anxiety, a prolonged dip in communication, a series of subconscious signals and maybe some sort of magic. He answered, sliding his thumb across the screen and holding it to his ear like it was something foreign and distasteful.

“What?” he said, a blunted edge.

“Ronan?” asked a quiet voice, familiar and desperate.

“Adam?”

“Can you come get me?”

Chapter Text

Adam hung up the payphone outside the gas station nearest the trailer park. He had biked here, but it was slow going and painful with only one hand to use on the handlebars.

He hadn’t wanted to call Ronan. He didn’t want Ronan to see this: Adam broken. He cradled his left arm to his chest. This had been too bad for him to hide out in the trailer away from the world until it healed up on its own. He needed medical attention. He needed a ride. He had exactly one phone number memorized that wasn’t home or work.

The BMW pulled to a screeching stop in the gas station parking lot. Adam blinked. Had so much time passed already? Or had Ronan sped the whole way here? Possibly both.

Ronan clambered out of the car before Adam could move forward. He stopped a few feet away, eyes carefully calculating over all of the evidence: split lip, torn collar, arm blossomed with bruises held close.

“What the fuck?”

“I think it’s broken.”

Ronan blinked. Adam didn’t quite see the transformation, but his expression went entirely dark.

“Get in. I’ll get your bike.”

Getting in and getting buckled were such trials with one damaged arm. Ronan busy at the trunk protected Adam from his scrutiny.

When Ronan climbed into the driver’s seat, neither of them said a word for a near minute.

“Was it your father?” Ronan asked, glaring out at the parking lot.  

Adam had given Ronan all the pieces, bit by bit, and now he was laid bare. What was he to do now? Deny it?

He said, “Just drive.”

Ronan took him to the hospital emergency room. Adam was practiced at lying about how he had received his injuries by now, so he said the lies and filled out the paperwork and was sent to an x-ray (wrist fractured) and to a exam room to receive a cast. All alone, because Ronan wasn’t family and had to be left behind in the waiting room.

When he came back out, near hour and a half later, he half expected Ronan to be gone, scared off or disgusted. Yet his form -- shaved head, dressed in all black, tattoo peeking up the back of his neck -- slouched in the waiting room chair.

“Hey,” Adam said in a scratch of a voice, all he had right now. Ronan was here.

Ronan twisted around in his chair. He casted an eyebrow. “Cast?” he said. “Lame.”

Adam scoffed, mostly because this hadn’t been what he’d expected. He had expected, of course, Ronan not there at all.

Ronan shuffled to his feet. His hands were stuffed in his pockets, his shoulders hunched over. On another person this posture would’ve seemed diminishing, the image of a person making themselves smaller, curling themselves in. Adam was sure he has struck that posture before when he wanted to not be seen. Ronan, however, looked like a coiled snake.

“Let’s go,” he said. “This place smells like hand sanitizer. I’m gonna hurl.”

#

“Where to?” Ronan asked once they had they had reached town and all the possibilities of the very limited Henrietta just within their reach.

Without any consideration of the reaction it would bring, only considering it, as it always was, the inevitable, Adam said, “Back home, I guess.”

Ronan swerved off the road. Adam flailed for, then grabbed, the door handle to keep upright. On the shoulder, Ronan shifted the car into park in one righteous movement.

“What the fuck, Adam,” he said in a way that wasn’t a question.

Adam slunk in his seat. Yelling was not something he was going to react well to right now. “He’ll have calmed down by now,” Adam said, and it sounded so achingly pathetic to even his own ears. He had never had to say it before. No one ever confronted his reality directly. They did it through side glances and sitting him down for vague chats about ‘are you having any trouble at home?’ But what Adam had just said was the truth. His father was probably calmer down. That was the pattern of his anger: explosion and then diffusement.

“He’ll have calmed down by now,” Ronan repeated somewhat mocking, mostly confused tone. “He shouldn’t done it the first place.”

“Oh, right,” Adam snapped. “Because I’m so stupid I didn’t realize that.”

Ronan banged a first on the steering wheel; Adam clenched his teeth against flinching.

“You’re the one who wants to go back,” Ronan said.

“I don’t want,” Adam said, “To go back. I just…” He was desperately unable to explain. If Ronan didn’t understand what it was to be young, and friendless, and penniless, and powerless, with no where to go, then Adam couldn’t explain it to him. Couldn’t explain that desperation was like a heavy humidity that never broke, that he had to move through each day. Couldn’t explain that that his father hurting him wasn’t some countable amount of bad things, that it was a lifestyle of pain and recovery and survival that Adam had to outlast. Indignation -- righteous or irreverent -- did nothing for him.      

“You’re a fucking idiot if you go back,” Ronan said, his anger quiet this time.

It was too much. Being the one in control tired Adam out.

“You don’t know anything about my life!”

Ronan scoffed. “I sure as hell know more about yours than you know about mine.”

“I’m sorry, but last time I tried having a conversation with you, you said you didn’t talk.”

“I don’t!” Ronan shouted. He gripped the steering wheel, and banged his forehead down on the top. “Goddammit,” he hissed as Adam watched. He had to wait through it. It was the most frustrating this of all, being at Ronan’s mercy in the car. Ronan had never betrayed his trust yet. Never forced him out on the roadside, never abandoned him when he promised to pick him up, never kidnapped him to some destination Adam didn’t want to go. So here, Adam believed he would get his way eventually, but not without all this first, the fighting and the negotiation of Ronan’s volatility.

“You wanna fucking know who I am?” Ronan said, sitting up and shoving his leather bracelets up his arm. He twisted in his seat, grabbed Adam’s good wrist, and pressed Adam’s fingers to the inside skin of his wrist. “Here. This is who I am.”

It took a moment for Adam to realize what he was feeling, eyes locked into Ronan’s intense gaze. Everything about Ronan was intense. The way he swore, the way he kissed, the way he drove, and now this too: the way he confessed. For under Adam’s fingers he felt thin raised lines on Ronan’s wrist. Scars.

He glanced down as he drew his fingers back, seeing the silvery healed skin, a series of criss-crossed marks.  

“Why did you --” Adam started, but didn’t finish.

“My dad died,” Ronan said. “He was… murdered.”

Adam held carefully still, even as his insides turned to liquid fire. He hadn’t known.

Ronan blinked, looked away for a second. “I found him,” he said. “I can’t sleep anymore. Insomnia. Nightmares. Everything hurt. I just really wanted to sleep.”

Adam sucked in a breath,

“Now you can wipe that pitying look off your face,” Ronan said, yanking his arm away, shaking the leather bracelets back down his wrist. “I’m not going to try it again. I promised some important people that.”

“I don’t pity you,” Adam said. “Pity’s worthless.”

“How many people have pitied you?”

Adam looked away. “Take me home,” he said.

They both sat on this, with no words.

Then, he felt the car start to move, Ronan guiding back onto the road. Slowly. Really slowly for the way Ronan usually drove. He was driving with reluctance.

“This whole thing is fucked up.”

“It’s my life,” Adam said.

“To fuck up?”

Adam didn’t reply.

“Let me teach you how to fight, at least,” Ronan said. “How to throw a punch instead of just take ‘em.”

“No,” Adam said. “That’ll make it worse.”

Ronan made an over-wide right turn. A maroon sedan honked at him. He rolled down his window and extended a middle finger.

“You’re just going to lay down and take it for the rest of your life?”

“Not the rest of my life,” Adam said. “Just until I graduate high school.”

“What happens then?” Ronan asked.

“College,” Adam said, like he was saying ‘heaven’ or ‘paradise’ or ‘el dorado.’

This was another thing Adam wasn’t used to saying out loud, his secretly harbored plans. His guidance counselor at Mountain View knew what he was aiming for, and she was actually hopeful for him. Adam was at the top of his class. But she only knew what he was aiming for; she didn’t know from what he was running.

“Where?” Ronan asked, because Henrietta didn’t exactly house any auspicious institutions.

“Anywhere,” Adam said. “Anywhere but here.” He didn’t said Harvard, or Standford, or Penn State. Those were dreams he had been forced to retire, but there were other good enough schools and other good enough dreams.

#

Adam was right. Back in the doublewide his father was so calmed down he was asleep in his easy chair, the TV static-crackling out a football game as a lullaby. His mother was anxiety tidying in the kitchenette, a twitchy practice that ended with dishes and pots picked up and put in different places, with the end result being nothing getting any more organized.

They caught eyes as Adam walked in the door. She didn’t say anything, and neither did he. The more he grew up and more independent he came, the less and less they talked. The less and less he needed a mother.

No, he needed a mother. Or regular teenagers needed a mother. Or at least a parental figure of some type. Adam Parrish just didn’t need his mother. It was a sour thought, displeasing to the gut but true. There was little she could do for him now. He could cook his own food and wash his own laundry. He had outgrown her petting his hair or reading him bedtime stories, the rare, short time those were a thing. He had long ago stopped expecting her to stand up to his father, or make a runaway plan, or tell him sorry. Sometimes he’d like to imagine there were paragraphs being communicated in these looks, but it was probably a flight of fancy. She was probably warning him to keep quiet. She was probably just observing him as another hollowed out survivor.

It was hard to have heart in this place.

Adam went to space that was considered his bedroom and laid on the mattress, making sure to keep weight off his left arm as he lowered himself down. One good thing, the cast was on his left arm, and he was right-handed. A very small good thing. He didn’t know if he could work while he had the cast.

How many weeks until it came off? How many shifts would he miss? How many dollars would be left unearned? How much of his saving would be depleted to cover the difference?

That was how he fell asleep, thinking of calculations and calculations.

#

In the world of you win some, you lose some, Adam Parrish was often the loser. He was born the loser. He was net negative at birth. The factory let  him go. He couldn’t do what he needed to do, and as a part-time, at-will employee they could do without him. It was probably against some workers’ protection law somewhere, but how was Adam going to sue? He had been skirting legality working their anyway. A lose.

A win, rare in Adam Parrish’s handbook: Boyd’s had not let him go. He had been set to gophering and paperwork, but it was shifts and dollars. Another win: a familiar BMW sitting on the lot one afternoon.

Adam slipped outside during a lull between tasks. The beemer is reverberating with pound of music thinly contained by metal and glass. Adam knocked on the glass of the driver’s window. It rolled down, letting the terrible techno pour out, followed by Ronan’s arm, bare skin up to the loop of the tank top sleeve, resting on the edge.

“I still have an hour and forty minutes left in my shift.”

“I was taking my chances.” Sitting there, leaned back in the driver’s seat, arm hanging out the window, careless and covetable, he was devilish and handsome all in one. Adam’s heart clenched.

“Yeah, you’re a real risk taker,” Adam said dryly, because he was good at keeping his real emotions tapped down.

“What’re you doing in an hour and forty minutes?” Ronan asked.

“Check back and see,” he said. This was good as plans.

Ronan was already shifting gears, when Adam pressed in to say, “But I’m not talking about it.”

Ronan raised an eyebrow. “I don’t talk.”

#

“Why are we parked outside an abandoned building?” Adam asked.

“It’s not abandoned,” Ronan said.

Adam peered up out of the windshield with suspicion. He had lived in Henrietta and he knew an old, abandoned industrial building when he saw one. This one was no different, blocks walls with peeling paint and a lawn of overgrown grass sticking up between old lumber.

“You sure?” Adam said.

“I live here,” Ronan said.

“You live in an abandoned building?”
“It’s not abandoned building if someone lives in it,” Ronan said. “Get a fucking dictionary, Parrish.”

Adam popped open the passenger’s door. “Show me.”

“What?” Ronan snapped.

“That’s why you brought me here, right?” Adam said. He had gotten better, over the passing weeks, at interrupting Ronan. “To show me?”

Ronan clambered out of the BMW, slamming the door behind him. Not because he was angry, not because he didn’t like to concede, but because that’s how Ronan reacted when he was embarrassed or nervous: banging, stomping, swearing.

Inside and up the steps, and Adam was introduced to the living space. Not by Ronan saying anything. No, his shoulders were hooked up high in a defensive posture as he had lead the way in. Adam was in a mammoth space, high ceilings, a large window glaring with afternoon light. It must’ve been ridiculously expensive to heat in the winter, because Adam Parrish was the type of teenager to think about heating because he was the type of teenager who had paid heating bills out of his own paychecks.

“That’s my roommate’s bed,” Ronan said with a nod toward the piece of furniture. “And his model of Henriette… He’s eccentric.”

“And where is said roommate?”

“Out of town for the weekend.”

“Ah.”

“And my other roommate just… disappears every so often. He’s also eccentric.”

“So this is just an abandoned building full of well adjusted people then?”

Ronna scuffed his foot -- he was wearing doc martin boots -- against the floor.

“Bathroom-kitchen’s over there. My room’s there… It’s not much.”

Except it was a lot, Adam thought. His home, the doublewide, wasn’t much. Not much space filled with not much things of not much value. This building was an impractical thing, but everything about his relationship with Ronan so far had been impractical, and yet Adam had liked it anyway.

“The door’s closed,” Adam commented.

“Killer observation skills there.”

“Does that mean I can’t go in?”

“You can do whatever the hell you want,” Ronan replied. His shoulders were still up.

“Well, then…” Adam navigated a few steps around town model dominating the center of the floor to reach the door, rest his hand on the doorknob. “Then I’m going in.” He glanced over his shoulder at Ronan, who through the slicing sunlight illuminating dust motes dancing in the air, looked like a figure standing in the midst of a dream.

Ronan replied with an unblinking stare, “Go ahead.”

Adam went ahead.

Maybe he dreaming up significance, but Ronan who didn’t talk was allowing Adam into his space. It was a realization how little he knew about Ronan’s life. It wasn’t normal for seventeen year old boys to live in abandoned factories with roommates. Adam knew about Ronan’s father, but his mother? A brother had been mentioned in passing? And it might’ve been more than one brother? What about before his father’s death? Where had he lived then? Ronan seemed to know the nooks and crannies of Henrietta and the surrounding nature like a native and not like one of the dormitory Raven Boys shipped in from states and countries elsewheres.

But this Adam was allowed to know: he could see Ronan’s room. It had to be important. Adam sure wasn’t keen on showing Ronan’s his own.

“You’re a slob,” Adam said in first reaction.

“You expect something else?”

“The BMW’s not messy.”

“That’s the BMW,” Ronan said, voice suddenly closer than it had been. “Not my room.”

Adam turned. They were both in the close proximity space of the doorway. Still, Ronan made the space smaller, stepped closer, hands magneting to Adam’s sides, eyes dropping to Adam’s mouth.

“Adam,” he said in a whisper, like he was praying on the name of a saint.

Mouths hovering close, but not yet touching, Adam hummed and said in a soft tone, “Did you just bring me here so you get fresh?”

“We were going to get fresh no matter where we went,” Ronan replied, just as soft. “You’re a cheap date.”

Adam shoved his shoulder, but not hard. He didn’t actually want Ronan to go far.

He laid his hand on Ronan’s jaw and pulled him in the rest of the way. The rough of stubble made itself known against the skin of his palm, against his lips.

“The bed will be more comfortable than the doorframe,” Adam said in slips of breath, between slips of kisses.

“Now who’s getting fresh,” Ronan hissed back.

Ronan lead a step back, not letting go of Adam’s shirt. Adam followed with a step forward, not pausing in concentrated attention on Ronan’s bottom lip. Another step, and another, in a bizarre, uncoordinated dance. Mostly there, Adam’s foot snagged on a throw rug or a discarded pair of jeans or his own shoelaces. He didn’t know except the end result of them toppling onto the bed and cracking up in laughter. Then kissing again, then cracking up again promptly after.  

In a new sort of unknown privacy, spacious and uninterrupted, it was easy to lose track of time. Until a crack of thunder interrupted.

“It’s storming?” Adam said, pushing up from the mattress to get a view out the window. “I didn’t know it was supposed to storm.”

Ronan, who had been paying languid attention to the space under Adam’s jaw, made a grunt of dissatisfaction. Across the room, buried in some unknowable place, his phone blared out a series of bleating horns: a flash flood warning signal.

“You’re not going anywhere soon,” Ronan said, sitting up too. His fingers fisted in the side of Adam’s shirt, a handhold.

Adam raked his fingers with aggregation through his already messy hair. “What time is it?”

“Fuck if I know.”

Adam’s own watch had died three weeks ago and he had yet to replace it. With a swear under his breath, he got up from the bed and started digging through a pile of Ronan’s clothes where the alarm had sounded, until he found it tucked away in a jacket pocket.

He swore again.

“I’ll drive you home if you want me to, fucking flash floods or not,” Ronan said, voice distant with him still on the bed. “Or… you could stay here. Stay the night.”

Adam turned to look over his shoulder. “I can’t do that,” he said. “My parents…”

“Call them,” Ronan said.

“And say what?”

“Lie.”

The phone weighed in Adam’s hand. Then he dialed the long memorized number connected to the trailer, and thankfully the storm hadn’t upset the phone lines yet. Adam hated going home, but was afraid of the consequences of not.

Overwhelming either of those conflicts was this: He wanted to stay.

“Hey, Mom. I was working overtime at the garage when the storm hit. The TV in the break room said it’s flooding. I can’t bike home in this. I called Boyd, he said I could sleep in the office. He has a couch in there… Yeah… Tomorrow… Bye.”

He hung up; his hands were trembling.

“You fucking liar,” Ronan said proudly.

Adam dropped the phone back from the pile of clothes from whence it came. “I’ve been saving that one,” he admitted.   

It was a foreign freedom to be released from time for the night. No curfew, no schedule, no to do list, or mental calculations. Just Adam in this place where he wasn’t familiar but where he as welcome. What a strange evening.
It was watching Ronan’s back as he scrounged leftover pizza and canned sodas from the refrigerator for their dinner. It was Adam finding a copy of Treasure Island amongst Ronan’s roommate’s book pile, and Ronan kicking up his feet on Adam’s lap and telling him to read aloud. It was Ronan’s head thrown back, eyes shuts, but breathing paced like awake, listening. It was Adam stuttering over some words when he got too distracted, looking. It was Ronan’s eyes fluttering open and him commenting, “You’re accent’s hot.” It was Adam going redfaced and saying, “Shut up.” It was Ronan saying, “Make me.” It was Adam, taking him up on the challenge.

Chapter Text

Morning rose. Ronan, who only ever slept thin as steam, rose with it.

Having grown up with two brothers, this wasn’t the first he shared a bed with someone, but it was the first he had shared with someone in this capacity. The capacity of touch and longing.

Outside his bedroom, the telltale scream of rusty hinges and the heavy bang of a door disregarded echoed. Someone was back.

With reluctance, Ronan crawled out of bed, opened his bedroom door just enough to slip out, and leaned himself against frame. He crossed his arms over his chest.

“You’re home early,” he said to Gansey.

“The luncheon I was supposed to attend with my mother was cancelled because the restaurant had a breakout of ecoli,” Gansey said, removing a satchel from over his shoulder and looping it over the back of his desk chair.  “As soon as I heard I was out of there. There’s only so many hours of campaigning I can do straight.”

“Fuck, Gansey,” Ronan said with a crick of his neck. “Do you realize how many pretentious words you just said?”

“Pretentious?”
“Luncheon is the most pretentious fucking word I’ve ever heard. It’s lunch.”

Gansey straightened up and eyed Ronan. “What about you? Can I hope you did anything productive with your weekend? The Lit homework, maybe?... Don’t give me that dead-eyed look! A man can hope.”

“Hope away. Just don’t start getting expectations.” Behind him, his mattress creaked with the weight of a shifting person. Ronan glanced over his shoulder and glanced back to find Gansey with a scrunched up, discerning expression, one common when he hovered over his ghost maps.

“Do you… do you have someone in there?” Gansey asked.

Ronan couldn’t stop the grin that slid on his face. A drunken grin. No, that wasn’t exactly right. The type of grin he got when he drove too fast when it was dark outside with the windows were open and the air was crisply smacking his face, and for those spare moments he felt like he was flying. That grin.

“Yeah,” he said.

Although Gansey had come to the right conclusion, nothing in his expression or coiled posture suggested that he had solved the mystery. Ronan, after all, as far as Gansey knew, could stand no human beings in the world other than his roommates and his little brother. As far as Gansey knew, Ronan didn’t date or hookup. The last one, as Adam was not a hookup, was still true.

Here was the moment. Ronan said, “Do you want to meet him?”

The pronoun landed, a confession. It was never going to be a big moment, a speech and tears. Ronan, a man of action, did by doing. He watched as a subtle movement of understanding pass over Gansey’s face.

Many things Ronan doubted. Gansey wasn’t one of them.

“Yes,” Gansey. “I would like to meet him.”

“Alright,” Ronan said, with a chin up nod. “Give me a few minutes.”

He slipped back in his room, door closed again except for a crack. Adam blinked up at his from the pillow and Ronan had to take a moment to keep his feet under him.

“Did you hear all that?” he asked, whisper-like, although it wasn’t a whisper needed situation. A whisper just seemed right, between the two of them, in the proximity of the  dawn-lighted bedroom.

“Some of it,” Adam said.

Ronan wondered if he should lay down again on the bed, or sit on the edge, or kneel beside it, because him standing and Adam laying felt like the wrong type of disconnect. But not knowing, he stayed standing, spreading wide his feet into a more solid stance.

“My roommate got back early. Do you want to meet him, or…” He remember Adam, from weeks ago, announcing in no uncertainty that their interactions must be kept from his father. Ronan, now, had no uncertainty about it too. Gansey could be cautioned with secrecy, but it was still Adam’s call, to reveal his face and name.

“Or I can tell him to leave, or cover his eyes, or something, and you can sneak out.”

“No, I’ll…” Adam pushed up on his elbow, the blanket sliding down, his askew and stretched wide collar revealing a stark collarbone. “He’s your friend?”

“Best friend,” Ronan admitted, which is something he might not have admitted to Gansey out loud, but he probably understood it anyway.

A few minutes passed of Adam getting up and then changing into one of Ronan’s spare t-shirts because Ronan caught Adam staring forlornly down at his own, at the oil stain and the hole in the side seam.

When Ronan had bought Adam to Monmouth, it was the first step of clashing these disparate parts of his life together. When he asked Adam to stay, when he let him sleep in, it was possible this was the consequence he had been desiring without conscious effort.

It didn’t make him less nervous.

When they exited the bedroom, Gansey stood up -- too fast, too eager, too nervous -- from his desk chair, stumbling over one of the chair legs, anxious to make a good first impression.

Ronan squared away abrupt introductions -- “This is Adam. Adam, this is Dick.” -- which inspired Gansey into a fit of sputtering to explain he certainly when by “Gansey” all while shaking Adam’s hands, two pumps too many.

“Nice to meet you,” Adam said with a precision that had Ronan side eyeing him. Adam had definitely just tampered down his accent. Perhaps that was the effect of Gansey and his whole old man slash proper southern gentleman vibe. He inspired people to want to match up to that, to gain approval.

Gansey plunged into a series of embarrassing sentences like ‘welcome to our rustic abode’ amongst others, and ended it all off with a “How long have you two been dating?”

It was a question that drew them both quiet. Another memory, distinctly drawn up: Adam saying that what they were doing wasn’t a date. But that had been back at the beginning, and by now they had shared secrets, and Adam had stayed the night. They were definitely something, even if it was unlabeled and precious.

Adam answered smoothly, “We’ve been seeing each other on and off for about three months.” An answer extremely accurate in its broad sweeping vagueness. ‘Seeing each other’ could mean many things, and in this case the literal act of seeing other included. On and off covered all the rough patched in one swoop. Three months. Had it been that long and short already?

To Ronan, Gansey started, “Is that why you been less --”

“What?”

“Nevermind,” Gansey said, which really meant ‘later,’ and ‘later’ which really meant when Adam wasn’t here.

“You can say it now,” Ronan said, which meant he wasn’t hiding things.

Gansey scratched at the back of his head, bae-ful. “I was going to say less self-destructive.”

“That’s exactly it, Gansey. I’ve had somewhere else to focus my destructive energy.”

Adam snorted. “Not that less self-destructive. I’ve seen you drive.”

Together, they found clean bowls, enough cereal, and barely enough milk for the three of them, and they sat on the floor eating breakfast in a circle. Gansey didn’t ask a stupid question about how Adam got his cast, but did act a stupid question about how they met. Adam explained the garage which Gansey found immensely interesting. It wasn’t the supernatural, but Gansey had a ‘for the aesthetic’ car that broke down a lot, so it was tangentially related to his realm of his interest.

It was a strange blend Ronan’s two lives: his world with Gansey and his secret one with Adam. Watching Gansey make casual conversation as worked on his model of  Henrietta’s singular post office, while Adam nodded and passed him the paintbrush Gansey pointed to from the desk made Ronan squeeze his eyes shut several times, as if trying to clear a mirage from his vision. It was always still there when he opened them.

“You should come with us,” Gansey said, as he squirted a perfect line of elmer's glue down what was becoming a roof.  “Next Saturday. We’re going to hike a haunted train track about fifteen miles south from here.”

“You’re hiking a what?” Adam asked.

Throwing his head back with scoffy-sigh, the perfect volume and timber to interrupt, Ronan said, “Gasney, don’t pull him into your weirdness.”

“I thought he might be interested!”

“Adam, don’t let him pressure you into his weirdness.”

Adam said, “I’m not doing anything next Saturday.”

Gansey grinned, widely and winningly.

“It’s like feeding a stray cat,” Ronan said. “Now Gansey’s never going to leave you alone again.”

As morning started to stretch toward noontime, Adam leaned into Ronan to whisper, “I think I need to go now.”

Ronan nodded once and got to his feet, making a sharp announcement that they were leaving now that left Gansey no room to question. Although he hated it even worse than dragging himself to school every day, Ronan drove Adam back to the mouth of the trailer park. They lingered there, in the BMW, although every second was a chance at revealing themselves. Adam won’t kiss him here. His expression had already tightened up into a mask. The stretch of a wonderful night may have made Adam’s arm-in-cast irrelevant, it was still there, white wrappings turned gray.

 “I wish there could be more nights like last night,” Adam said. He reached, and the seat belt loosened from across his chest. “But I used up my one excuse.” Door opened, Adam out, door closed.

If only ever Ronan could have the right thing to say in the right slice of time, and the strength to say it.

#

Once Ronan returned to Monmouth Manufacturing, Gansey was a nightmare.

“He seems nice,” Gansey said.

Ronan pulled off a doc martin boot and tossed it against the floorboard. “Stop it.”

“I’m just glad that you’re happy.”

“You’re a fucking embarrassment, Gansey.”

#

“I have to admit… as old and obviously abandoned as it is, I don’t think this train track is haunted.”

Adam, lean and tan, standing in field of overgrown grass the sun-dried color of hay, on a gloriously sunny day, distracted Ronan from giving any answer.

“We don’t know that yet,” Gansey said, hand clutched around an electromagnetic meter about the size of a cassette tape walkman. Said meter was giving off a constant buzz of being on, but no beeps of detection. “Just because it doesn’t look like a horror movie set, doesn’t mean it can’t be haunted.”

Adam walked down the track like it was a balance beam, then hopped off right in front of Ronan. “Do you go ghost hunting every weekend?”

Hands tucked in jeans’ pockets, Ronan shrugged. “Gansey obsessed with ghosts.”

“I’m not obsessed!” Gansey called back from where he had wandered down the track. “I have an academic interest.”

“He’s using the word ‘academic’ loosely,” Ronan said.  

Gansey squatted down, meter extended, as if the world would be more haunted down low. “When I was a kid, I had a near death experience. Well, not exactly near death… I was legally dead for eight minutes.”

Adam glanced at Ronan. His nearly invisible eyebrows twitching. It was a question: was this for real, or was his leg being pulled.

“I told you my roommates were eccentric,” Ronan said.

“I think we’re on the wrong part of the track,” Gansey said, standing again. He pointed before him. “We need to go that way.”

“Please tell me you didn’t just point in a random fucking direction?” Ronan said, but following anyway, Adam keeping in pace with him.

They walked for several minutes. The track, the yellow grass, the bright sun all stay the same. Gansey’s meter stayed buzzing.

Ronan nudged Adam with his elbow. “I’m sorry this is kind of lame.”

“I don’t think it’s lame,” Adam said. He ran the back of his hand across his forehead to swip away sweat. Ronan bit his tongue.

“It’s nice to… just hang out.”

“You’re easily impressed, Parrish.”

“I would have to be to be dating you, Lynch.”

If Gansey hadn’t been walking just a few yards away, Ronan would’ve grabbed Adam and kissed him with the vigor of a old time, black-and-white movie kiss. (The kind of movies that had been his mom’s favorites.) But Gansey was just standing a few yards away, and Ronan was very private about some things. Instead, this heat between them was left to sizzle under the heat of the autumn sun.

#

Several weeks later, Ronan took Adam to get his cast off.

“How does it feel?” Ronan asked. He struggled to keep his eyes on the road with Adam in his passenger seat, manipulating his arm in forgotten angels, looking lighter as if just some ounces of plaster had weighed him down.

Adam touched the skin of his forearm. “Free,” he said. He bent and stretched his fingers. “I can get my old job back.”

Ronan attempted and failed to repress a scoff.

Adam’s eyes cut sideways to him as if daring him to elaborate.

Ronan didn’t. Instead he ran a red light, and said, “I broke my leg when I was ten.”

“...Oh?” Adam said. Ronan wasn’t stupid. He heard Adam’s care, his hesitation. Ronan didn’t talk about his childhood, because his childhood was a venomous pit of dangerous memories. Great memories -- dangerous because they were no longer real.

“Yeah,” Ronan said. “I had to wear a cast all summer. It sucked.”

“I can imagine,” Adam said. “Especially for you.”  

“Watching my brothers run around outside, and I couldn’t keep up. Pretty sure that was the summer I really started to appreciate swearing…” Ronan laughed, a barely there laugh, but a laugh for sure. He could feel Adam’s gaze burning into the side of his head, but for this moment he couldn’t turn to meet eyes. It was just him and the road in front, the steering wheels between his hands, and the pedal beneath his foot. It was the only way he could keep talking, even though he had already plowed on so deep.

“My mom,” he said. “She’d --” But Ronan couldn’t. Not with his vision narrowed straight ahead, with the seat belt like a metal band pressing against his chest.

“Ronan,” said Adam’s voice, distant but there. “You don’t have to tell me anything you don’t want to.”

Ronan sucked in a breath. The world softened a little -- not completely -- around the edges. He had wanted to tell Adam. He had wanted to try. It wasn’t about want at all, but ability.

He kept driving, until he saw the sign for the gelato stand and crossed a lane of traffic in a rushed turn to get into the lot.

“We should… celebrate,” he said, the words stilted mush out of his mouth.

“Okay…” Adam said in a not celebratory tone.

There was no line, because it was in the mid-sixties outside, not exactly the weather that demanded gelato. When Ronan slide his wallet out of his back pocket, just outside the car, Adam was quick to interject: “I can pay for myself.”

“I know you can pay for yourself, but I’m paying right now.”

Adam was already tugging a vinyl fabric and duct tape wallet out of his worn denim pocket.

“I’m paying for myself,” Adam said.  

“Jesus Christ.” Ronan’s eyes turned to the heavens as if he was actually entreating it.

“I’m going to let you pity me.”

“Fuck, I’m not pitying you,” Ronan said. “Can’t I just do something nice for my fucking boyfriend?”

There was no curse word, no insult, no cruel jab, which could’ve brought the conversation to such a break screeching halt as the word ‘boyfriend’ uttered freely but shockingly from Ronan Lynch’s own mouth.

Adam blinked. “Boyfriend?” he repeated. His tone shifted, but remained tense tense.

“I didn’t -- I mean -- It’s whatever.”

“Did you mean it or did you not?” Adam said.

“I said it,” Ronan said. “I don’t lie.”

After a pause where two cars passed in doppler effect succession, Adam said, “Okay” so plainly, like he had figured out every problem in the world and the ones beyond. He slide his scrappy wallet back into his jeans pocket. “You can pay this time, but I’m paying next time, and I don’t want to hear any bitching about it then.”

Which was a statement that slapped Ronan harder than a wet towel and grossly more unexpected. He expected this to be the end, somehow. Adam remembering those first days, promising this wasn’t dating, that Ronan’s freudian slip had knocked him back to his senses, to remember that he couldn’t or shouldn’t or didn’t want to be a boy who had a boyfriend. But it hadn’t. It had just moved them along.

Later, when they finally get to eat the gelato, Ronan dug his spoon into the heart of the purple-red black raspberry flavor, and said, “We’re just a fucking mess.”

“So?” Adam said. His lips were tinged red from food dye and it really wasn’t fair.

Ronan jabbed up a sharp shoulder in a shrug.

“I didn’t say it was a bad thing.”

Chapter Text

“Alright, now just ease on the clutch and --”

Adam stalled the BMW.

“People pay you to fix cars,” Ronan said. With Adam in the driver’s seat and Ronan in the passenger’s, they were sitting in Ronan’s car in the middle of Monmouth dirt lot. “How can you be so fucking bad at this?”

Adam ducked his head toward the steering wheel and shrugged. “Why do I need to know how to drive stick when I have you to chauffeur me around?”

Tip of his tongue stuck between his teeth, Ronan’s expression held, some churning thoughts were being developed.

A second later, he was in motion again. He popped open the glove box and took something out. “Here,” he said.

Ronan pressed a piece of something slim, cold, and metal into Adam’s palm.

Adam stared down at it. “What’s this?” he asked.

“I thought you were smart enough to know what a key is,” Ronan said.

“To…?”

“Monmouth, yeah.” Ronan shrugged. This wasn’t a shrugging moment.

“Your roommates are okay with this?” Adam asked.

“You’re there enough anyway,” Ronan said.

Since bringing Adam to Monmouth the first time, since meeting Gansey and the even more eccentric Noah, since being further introduced to Ronan’s strange and eccentric life and his strange and eccentric friends, Adam had allowed himself to get comfortable in it.

Monmouth was a easy place to go to, to hang out. For the privacy of a bedroom. For the comfort of a bed under them as the explored each other in touches done in bits and pieces.

“So you have a place to do your fucking homework,” Ronan said.

Adam barked a laugh. “You won’t let that go.”

“I feel so used,” Ronan said, distress affected.

“I had a paper due,” Adam said. “The library was closed.” What he didn’t say and didn’t have to say: he couldn’t concentrate at home.

Adam leaned in, voice lowered, “Didn’t I say thank you after?”

Ronan face twisted in memory. “Not enough.”

Adam rolled his eyes. He fiddled with the key in his fingers. Most teenagers didn’t give their significant others keys to their homes. Most teenagers didn’t have their own homes to give keys for. Adam had no grounds to parse out what this gesture meant.

“You won’t even need it,” Ronan said. “Because Noah forgets to lock the fucking door, and if you kick it in and lift it up at the same time it doesn’t matter if it’s locked or not.”

Adam held out the key at full arm’s length, daring. “You can have it back then.”

“No,” Ronan said, too quick, revealing himself and all his cards. He twisted his fingers over Adam’s, guiding Adam’s hand closed around the key.

“For when Noah remembers to lock the door?” Adam suggested. Because sometimes it was hard give things, and it was similarly hard to accept them. Sometimes you needed to make excuses, to make it easier.

“Yeah,” Ronan said, understanding the game. “That motherfucker is so flaky.”

#

Adam had met the elusive third roommate of Monmouth Manufacturing a few days after he had gotten his cast off. They had been sitting on the floor, watching some explosion-filled action movie of Ronan’s choice when a pallid, blonde-haired young man drifted out of a bedroom and across the many living a space towards the kitchen-bathroom.

Ronan kicked at his ankle as he passed, and said, “Shit, Noah, I didn’t know you were here.”

The young man -- Noah -- blinked, “Here as in Monmouth? Or here as in this plane of existence?”

“The first one, you jackass.”

Noah blinked, then his gaze -- kindof unnerving -- settled on Adam.

“Are you Adam?” he asked.

“Yes”

And that’s all Noah had to say, and he drifted on to the kitchen-bathroom.

“Have have you been talking about me?” Adam asked Ronan in a not-so-clandestine whisper.

“No,” Ronan said, fast enough to suggest it was actually a ‘yes.’

The toilet flushed. The fridge door snicked open then shut. Noah reemerged with a can of soda in hand and then plopped done on the floor beside Ronan. His soda canned fizzed as he opened it.

“In case you hadn’t fucking noticed,” Ronan said. “We having a moment here.”

Noah sipped loudly. “If you having a moment, you’d be in your bedroom.”

Adam leaned forward to see past Ronan, who now sat in the middle. The mysterious third roommate of Monmouth was more interesting than the movie. “Are you an Aglionby student too, Noah?”

“I’m a student of life,” he said. A car exploded on screen.

“Oh my god,” Ronan said. “He graduated two years ago. He’s living through some extended gap year, quarter life crisis.”

“Ah,” Adam said, but that answer seemed to provoke more answers that it resolved.

But all other possible questions were diverted when Ronan nudged Adam on the arm, pointed at the screen, and said, “This is a good part.”

The good part involved a car crash, several swear words, and a corny joke that left Ronan and Noah howling with laughter. But the laughter casually ended with Ronan roping an arm around Adam’s shoulders, and the gravitational weight of it pulling Adam closer.

Adam couldn’t help it -- Ronan’s casual, affection touch just did him in every time. It districted, it lingered, it made him stop and want to memorize it.

All he had known before of touch was it was pain at its worst and perfunctory, like a doctor, when it wasn’t pain. But now he knew the truth. It was warmth and weight, shifting muscle and skin contact. It was so much, all at once, and as a scholar he had to examine it, memorize it, and -- when he wasn’t paying attention -- drown in it.

#

Adam and Gansey officially meeting changed things. It turned Monmouth into a place Ronan could now bring Adam without it being over thought or schemed. A place to make out. A place to hang out. A place to meet after they each of them got of their respective schools.

And most strangely, a place that ended up with Adam having two more friends.

One after school afternoon, the rare four of them were all in Monmouth’s main room, all possessed with different tasks. Gansey at his desk, scouring over an antique map of the area he had just acquired. Noah and Ronan busy and swearing at some shooting video game that Noah had brought out of his bedroom and set up out there. Adam, stretched out on the floor, doing his pre-calc homework. While Adam was used to doing his homework while the household ignored him, it was different here than at the trailer. At the trailer it was always a carefully held, always fragile peace. Here, it was instead a peaceful companionship, people happily doing different things in the same room.  

As the afternoon passed on into early evening, Gansey popped up suddenly. “Let’s go to Nino’s. My treat.”

It was agreed, and they were all cascading down the stairs out of Monmouth, when Adam injected, “I can pay for himself.”

“Oh, we make Gansey pay when we go to Nino’s,” Noah said lightly.  “As an apology.”

“An apology?” Adam questioned, as he stepped into the descending sunlight.

“More like penance,” Ronan said.

Noah hummed. “Very Catholic of you.”

Ronan shoved Noah sideways. Noah nearly stumbled into a bush, laughing the entire way.

Standing outside the driver’s door of his glaringly orange camero, Gansey tilted his head upward, looking distant in thought. “I always thought it was more of a bribe.”

“What the hell are you all on?” Adam asked, which turned Noah’s laughs into cackles.

Ronan yanked open the car door and summoned for Adam to get in. “You’ll know when you see it.”

What it turned out to be was a very short and irritable waitress with a name tag that read Blue, but whom -- when she approached their corner booth -- Gansey sat up straight and called, “Jane!’

“Richard,” she replied back, dryly. She tapped her pen against an order pad. Then, softer, and more fondly, “Noah.” He waved. Then, as hard as flint, “Lynch.” Her eyes dropped to Adam. “You’re new… You roped another Raven Boy into your crew?”

“I’m not a Raven Boy,” Adam said.

Her eyes dropped to him again. “You go to my school,” she said, in recognition. “You’re in all the… smart kid classes.”

He shrugged a shoulder, not knowing what to do with that observation.

“So what are doing hanging out with these losers?” Blue or Jane asked, hand to her hip.

“Hey!” Noah said, offended.

“I ask myself the same question every day,” Adam said.

Blue or Jane gave an approving nod. “I like him,” she said. “He might just be the level head this group needs. Alright, so what type of gross pizza will you be ordering today?”

Order taken and Blue drifted away into the kitchens, Adam asked, “What did I just witness?”

“Dick has a crush and is bad at it,” Ronan said.

“The first time they met, Gansey tried to pay Blue to spend time with him, and she went into a feminist rage,” Noah said gleefully.

Red-faced, Gansey said, “That’s not exactly -- It was a misunderstanding!”

Ronan shook his head with gravitas. “Fucking pathetic.”

“So this is why you make Gansey pay?” Adam asked. “Because he flirts badly?”

“Because he makes us come here so he can flirt badly,” Ronan said, although Adam knew this pizza parlor was a known Aglionby hangout.

“And because the waitress spits in our drinks,” Noah said, easily. When everyone looked at him, he added, “Probably.”

A moment later, Blue came back with a round of sweet teas, as Gansey had ordered.

Before she slipped away, Adam asked in an overheard undertone, “Townie to townie, did you spit in the drinks.”

Without missing a beat, Blue said, “Yes.”

#

“I get it,” Adam said to Gansey once they had left the dinner. Ronan and Adam crowded into the backseat of the camero, where they pretended there was less room than there actually was. “She’s cute.”

Ronan kicked Adam’s shin -- lightly -- with his heel.

Adam turned to him, and said, “Eyes.” By which he meant, he had them.

“Too bad she hates me,” Gansey said, then twisted his key in the ignition. The engine gurgled to noisy, roaring life. Load enough for the backseaters conversation to be private if they pitched in the right tones.

“But you don’t have to say it in front of me,” Ronan said.

“You were talking about how hot you thought Paul Walker was just last week,” Adam said.

“Yeah, but that’s something we could both appreciate.”

“What do you know about what I appreciate?” Adam challenged.

Ronan leaned back, tucked his hands behind his head, and raised his heavy brows in lewd suggestion. “I fucking know that real well, Parrish.”

#

Adam creeped up the internal steps of Monmouth until he could peek a view onto the second level. There sat a lone figure sitting cross-legged on the floor, hunched over squares of cardboard.

The figure looked up at the sound of a creaking step.

“Hey,” Adam said. “Is Ronan here?”

“He’s not with you?” Gansey asked. “He ran off at the end of school.”

Adam shrugged. He didn’t know. The two of them didn’t have plans, and Adam still had free hours because he had yet to get his factory gig back -- they had filled spot while he was away -- and had biked here in hopes to do some homework in good company.  

“You can come on up,” Gansey said. He pushed wire-rimmed glasses up his nose. “He’ll show up eventually.”

Adam trotted up the last few steps. “I thought I’d just do some…” He hefted the strap of his bookbag.

“Sure,” Gansey said. “Use my desk.”

Adam set himself up there, and rustled through his ten year out-of-date history textbook, eyes not settling on a single paragraph. He had never hung out with Gansey without Ronan there, scoffing and making side-comments throughout. Sure, Gansey was affable enough, and Adam found himself actually rather liking him with his quirks: the town model, the ghost obsession, his equally shitty and wonderful car. But then there were other moments in which Adam couldn’t separate Gansey from the fact that he was obscenely and passively rich.

Ronan was too, but Ronan was barbed wire and grit. He had grown up on a farm. One not far outside Henrietta’s limits. Gansey -- from his accent to his loafers -- was old money and class. The foreign and untouchable to Adam. Lusted after and resented.

Without Ronan as a connection between them, Adam couldn’t get over the fact that a person like him and a person like Gansey shouldn’t really be hanging out.

Still, he was a wealth of forbidden knowledge.

Adam settled his textbook halfway through a chapter on the Civil War, where he had left off reading in study hall, and asked, “How long have you known Ronan?”

“Since…” Gansey squinted at his work. “Sophomore year.”

“So you knew him before…” Adam had pieced together a timeline from the scraps of knowledge Ronan had let spill and from the newspaper article he had looked up at the library.

“Yes,” Gansey said, his hands at work stilling. Neither of them were putting words to the haunting thing. “He was… different then. You wouldn’t recognize him.”

Adam clenched his jaw, thinking. Was this betrayal, asking behind Ronan’s back? But what other ways were Adam going to know even just these simple things?

“Since he’s met you,” Gansey went on, un-prodded, “He’s been more… calm.”

“This is him calm?”

“Well… calmer,” Gansey said with chagrin. “I guess it’s just one less thing off his shoulders, being… being out.” He seemed unsure of his words.

“Maybe,” Adam agreed. Or maybe it was having someone else to help carry what you had on your shoulders.

The door downstairs echoed with a slam. Stomps pounded by the stairs, once by ascending one. The upper floor door -- that Adam had closed behind himself -- flew open.

“That motherfucker!” Ronan said. He threw a punch that collided with the wall. Only after did he notice Adam sitting at Gansey’s desk.

“Shit,” he swore, as vicious as the first, and stormed into his bedroom, the speed ticket-covered door shuddering in its frame.

Gansey let out an exhausted sounding sigh, like the entire display didn’t have his muscles coiled in tension, like Adam’s were.

“It must’ve been his brother,” Gansey said.

“The older one,” Adam said, a presumption, another piece.

Gansey nodded, but it was curt.

When the tension loosened enough across his shoulders, Adam stood and walked right over to Ronan’s door.

“He doesn’t like it when people go in his room,” Gansey said, a bit knowing, a bit automatic.

Adam gave Gansey a look. “He likes it when I’m in his room,” he said.

Gansey flushed. “Oh. Right. Go on.”

Adam felt a little warmth of pride in his gut for unsettling the always settled Richard Gansey.

When Adam crept into Ronan’s room, Ronan was sitting on the floor, leaned back against his bed, and wearing both a pair of bulky headphone drumming out base and a screwed up expression of discontent.

Adam sat beside him and, with Ronan watching with an unblinking concentration, removed the headphones from Ronan’s ears to hanging around his neck.

“What’re you doing here?” Ronan asked, a grumble.

“You gave me a key,” Adam said.

Ronan’s headphones changed from one song to the next, the only distinction a little pause in between and shift in the tempo of screeching.

“You listen to horrible music,” Adam said.

“What do you listen to?” Ronan said. “Country?”

“I don’t listen to two racoons fighting in a garbage can,” Adam said.

The corner of Ronan’s mouth twitched. “It helps me not to think,” he said.

Adam didn’t know what else to say. He hated when people asked him inane questions of concern, because they were rarely matched with any real intention to help. So Adam sat there. The best you could be for someone was there.

Ronan dropped his head. “My brother’s such an asshole,” he said.

“And a motherfucker too, apparently,” Adam added.

Ronan snorted. He dug the heels of his hands into his eye sockets. “Shit.”

Ronan had been there, so much, for Adam already. At the very least Adam could do it in return. But he wasn’t used to relationships, or friends, or helping other people deal with their shit.

Adam knocked the heel of his sneaker against the heel of Ronan’s boot -- consolidation.

“Who the fuck does he think he is,” Ronan muttered, head still down, “Telling me what shit would disappoint Dad.”

“That… That sucks.” Adam didn’t have stronger words.

Ronan lifted his head. “Midterm reports came out. I have straights D’s.” He said that last part a little proudly. “And I’m a great, big disappointment. Squandered fucking potential.”

“Stop,” Adam said.

Adam had been called worse things in his life, by his own family, but he knew the knife could be twisted in many different ways.
Ronan looked at him. “Were you scared of me when I punched the wall?”

“I’m not scared of you,” Adam said firmly. But he couldn’t deny the instant reflex reaction to anger, yelling, and punches thrown. In the world of fight or flight, Adam froze -- breath and muscle tight.

Ronan dragged his knuckles down the length of Adam’s forearm, the newly freed femur and wrist. Goosebumps raised at the touch. Knuckles were so often the tools of destruction and here they were the instrument of skimming, intimate contact. Knuckles, Adam saw,  that were bruised, one split.

Adam grabbed Ronan’s hand and twisted it for a better look. “You really did punch that wall.”

“It wasn’t the first one I punched on the way home,” Ronan mumbled.

Adam raised Ronan’s knuckles to his mouth. Kiss and make it better, right?

Ronan pulled their interlocked hands back towards him. He kissed Adam’s knuckles. The back of his hand. Then, without breaking eye contact, turned their hands over to kiss the inside of Adam’s exposed wrist. The goosebumps returned.

When he was done, their hands fell apart as gently as drifting sand.

“Here,” Ronan said. He fiddled with his ipod, then lifted his headphones from his neck. He held them out towards Adam. “You’ll like this one.”

“I doubt it,” Adam said, but let Ronan settled the headphones onto his ears anyway.

When the song started, it wasn’t anything Adam had expected. It was melodic, with something like strings and something like a flute, and then words that were in a language that wasn’t English.

“What is this?” he asked, lifting one side of the headphones from his ear to hear.

“Celtic music,” Ronan said. “I can’t listen to it anymore. It makes me think too much.” He lifted his wrist, began to chew on the leather bands.

“But you want me to hear it?” Adam said.

“Sure,” Ronan said, eyes skating to the side.

Adam left the headphones settled back on his ears, drowning out all else. He understood. This was another piece, another moment of Ronan saying: Here, this is who I am too.

#

A week later, Blue the waitress stood across from Adam in the Mountain View High cafeteria, and asked, “Mind if I sit here?” of the empty across him. All the seats down the row beside him were empty too.

“Sure,” he said, blinking up at her.

She set her tray on the table with an unrefined clatter. She nodded her head at the AP  Chemistry textbook he had open beside own own tray. “Homework?”

“Studying,” Adam answered. He had a test at the end of the week and worked after school every day between then and now.

“I guess that’s why you’re not sitting with anyone,” Blue said, plucking up a limp fry from her tray. Adam didn’t take offense, as he would’ve probably, except that after they had left Nino’s last weekend, it had clicked. He recognized Blue. The girl who lived with the house with the psychics. A loner too.

Adam said, “That amongst other reasons.”

“Everyone here’s an asshole?” she said.

Adam snorted, despite himself.

“I’m too busy to make friends,” Adam said. It was a nice excuse, and maybe true for high school, when he had set his eyes to the holy ground of higher education, but not before, when he couldn’t make friends because he was too shy, or he was made fun of for shabby clothes, or parents didn’t want their children hanging out with him because of Adam’s father, and because neither of Adam’s parents made an effort in his youth to arrange playdates or take him to birthday parties back when the whole class would be invited.

“It’s your ticket out of town, right?” Blue asked. “School?”

Adam’s eyes flicked between her and the page, feeling incredibly see through. Sure, the guidance counselor knew that, but the rest of the students just seemed to pass him over as boring.

“It’s like half the kids on the sports teams here, who think that just because they’re a big fish in a small pound their going to get a sports scholarship. At least you’re actually smart.”

“I put a lot of effort in.”

“That too.”

The conservation died. Blue ripped open a little package of ketchup with the help of her teeth and Adam noted her fingernails were painted a mismatched three different colors. He turned the page of his textbook even though he hadn’t finished reading the one he was on. Blue drummed mismatched fingers on the table top, and again, and Adam cracked.

“What do you want to ask me?” he said. She had to want to ask him something she wasn’t.

“Is that why you hang out with them?” Blue asked -- the them needing so specification. “Networking or something?”

“No,” Adam said, the ridiculousness of it embedded in his tone. Nevermind that there were kids in their town with that very same idea. Maybe not networking, but some girls who swooned over the Aglionby boys, hoped to be swept away from their crummy lives by one of them. Adam himself didn’t want to be reduced to asskissing. In his desperate need to earn what he received, receiving via asskissery was something receiving via pity.

“Believe it or not, they’re actually kind of decent,” Adam said.

“Even Gansey?”

Adam looked up. There was a hint of a flush in Blue’s face.

“Especially Gansey,” Adam said.

“It’s just… I have a moral opposition to supporting the idea that if a girl says no that the guy should just pester her until she says yes. And that’s not exactly what’s he’s done, but… I guess it’s hard to admit that I might’ve had the wrong first impression about him.”

“Rich people have the luxury of being idiots,” Adam said.

“Yeah,” Blue said. “But I don’t.”

“My opinion,” Adam said, “From some personal experience … sometimes it’s worth taking a chance.”

Chapter Text

One late night, Ronan came out of his room to the unsurprising image of Gansey sitting cross-legged on the floor, gluing a length of cereal box cardboard into a wall of a miniature courthouse.

“I’m going to get Adam,” Ronan said. “When I get back just… don’t ask any questions.”

“Huh?”

“Just don’t ask,” Ronan snapped, punctuating it by slamming the door on the way out. There had been more than anger in his voice. Ronan was angered easily, and his anger had variations. This was the type when he found out, maybe, Matthew was in trouble. It was anger with worry.

An hour later, Ronan came back with a bruised-face Adam.

Ronan made eye contact with Gansey -- wide-eyed and shocked -- and didn’t even have to say a word. Gansey was silent. Adam didn’t even seem to notice him as Ronan guided Adam to his room. He had Adam sit down on his bed, left the room and came back, with Adam staring at nothing but space.

“Catch,” Ronan said, and underhand tossed him something.

Adam blinked down at the bag of frozen peas that had been tossed into his hands. His eyebrows drew into straight lines. “These are expired.”

“You think we brought them to eat them? Here.” He sat down beside Adam. He lifted the bagged peas to Adam’s face. Instinctively, maybe. from the cold, from the sensitive bruised skin being touched, from something unexpected coming into his vision, Adam flinched away. The room itself held its breath.

Ronan shoved the bagged peas in Adam’s lax hand so forceful Adam had to grip them. Ronan slide his under Adam’s and guided it up, so that in result, Adam was the one moving it, holding it to his eye, but he didn’t have to do it alone.

This time, Adam’s only reaction to the cold was the sucking in of air. They sat like together for several minutes, as the bag of peas did it’s work of soothing the throb, of reducing the swelling. Ronan’s hot hand clasped over Adam’s cold ones. Ronan’s mother always said that he ran hot. There wasn’t once that Ronan’s hadn’t found Adam’s fingers to be cold.

“Do you want to… do you want to sleep?” Ronan asked. Adam had been zoned out, barely responsive, since Ronan had found him, but Ronan knew from personal experience that zoned out was a very different state than sleep.

A moment passed. Adam lowered the bag of peas from his face.

“I’ll lay down,” Adam said.

“Do you want me to…” Ronan started, but he’d be lying if he said it this way. It was as much about Adam as it was about him. “Can I stay with you?”

Adam blinked once, twice. Like the thoughts were moving through his head but slower.

“Stay,” he said.

Ronan took the bag of peas when Adam held it out for him and tossed it absently into the clutter on the floor. He reached past Adam’s shoulder to reach the lightswitch with his long arm as Adam leaned down to tug off his shoes.

“Come on,” Ronan muttered, and the laying down in the narrow space of the twin mattress, slotting together, happened without a lot of fuss. Maybe Adam just too tired too overthink it. Maybe Ronan’s pillow was downey cushion, and the heat of Ronan’s body lying pressed behind him, the am anchored over his waist, was all the blanket he needed.

#

“What the hell?” Gansey asked the next morning, words whispered for Ronan’s ears only. Ronan was the one who had slipped out of his bedroom alone.

Ronan ran a hand over his face. His entire head felt heavy. He hadn’t been able to sleep.

It was a counterintuitive logic. With Adam safe in his home, in his bed, under his arm, Ronan should’ve been able to sleep better than the nights Adam stayed at the trailer park, with all the chaotic risk that came with it. But Ronan was angry. He was scared. His head was running over and back with the possibilities of what he could have done and what he could do now.

“His dad…” Ronan said, and that was all that needed to be said.

Gansey swore.

Ronan crossed into the kitchen. He poured out the last dredges of orange juice into a glass. If it had been for him, he would’ve just drank it straight from the carton. He found a packet of unopened pop-tarts in the back of a cabinet. He ripped open the foil wrapping and stuffed one into his mouth.

From behind him, in the living room, Gansey asked, “What’re we going to do?”

Ronan turned. Mouth still full, he managed to say, “You’re not going to do fucking anything.”

“Ronan --”

“Don’t!” It was as burning as acid. He fizzled out a second later. “Last time I made a big deal about it he stopped talking to me. I’m not going to fucking push him away again.”

“But…” Gansey sighed and ran his hand through his sleep messy hair. “Maybe you’re right, but there has to be something.”

“If you come up with some perfect plan, Dick, then let me know.” Ronan stormed back to his room with his supplies, shutting the door behind him with his foot, louder than he probably should’ve. Adam startled awake, but setting slowly-focusing eyes on Ronan, settled back into his pillows.

“Here,” Ronan said, setting the glass of juice and the other pop-tart on the set of crates he used as a bed stand because he never bothered getting better furniture when he moved in here.

Ronan watched as Adam sat up, reached for the glass and downed in it one long go then consume the -- frankly, stale -- pop-tart with equal dispassionate vigor.

“Hungry much?” Ronan asked.  

“Huh?”

Ronan shook his head.

He sat down on the edge of the bed, eyes scanning over Adam’s face in the dim light of the morning. Bruises had a way of looking worse the second day, Ronan knew. He had carried his fair share of bruises, but that had been born from his own recklessness, from fights he had picked.

“They feeling any better?” he asked. He didn’t touch.

Adam raised a hand to his cheek, a sour expression twisting on his mouth.

Ronan turned away, to pretend to reach for the lightswitch, but really really he just didn’t want to look.

Adam tugged down at the loose collar of Ronan’s tank, at the back of his neck.

“What is it?” he said, and he could only mean Ronan’s tattoo.

Ronan reached over his head and shucked the shirt off. This was a good of a divergence as any.

Adam dragged a cold finger over one of the lines of his tattoos. Ronan couldn’t be sure which part. He shivered when Adam’s touch crossed the line of his spine.

Adam’s touch drew away and then came back, planting full-palmed on his lower back.

“Every second I look at it I see something different,” Adam said. “It’s not just one thing.”

Ronan knew that. It was celtic knots, trees with branches and roots, birds and hooks, shadows and nightmares and hopes.

Ronan hung his head. “After my dad died,” he said, a whisper, but that was all that was needed, “I couldn’t talk. I couldn’t think. I couldn’t…” He couldn’t breath. All feeling had been consumed with anger and pain and despair. “So I drew that. And paid a tattoo artists nine hundred dollars to ink it on me.”  

“Nine hundred dollars,” Adam repeated, in a dazed way. It was the type of money that pissed Ronan’s brother off with him spending, but not the type of money that was life changing.

“I just needed…” Ronan started. He felt a desperate need to explain how he had needed it, how he had needed to mark himself, to show that he had irreparably changed.  

“You don’t need to put words to it,” Adam said. He leaned in close, pressed a dry kiss to the top knob of Ronan’s spine before retreating again. True proof Adam understood him, understood that words were the most difficult part for him, that he could think and feel and do way before he could assemble the right words and assemble the nerve to say them.

“Turn around,” Adam said, and Ronan did.

Adam pressed his mouth against Ronan’s. It was familiar now: his chapped lips, the warmth of them, the smell of him this close -- gasoline and cheap soap. Ronan held carefully still.

Adam drew back from an inch.

“Kiss me,” he demanded. “I’m not broken.”

Ronan raised a hand to cup Adam’s jaw, just barely, a ghosting touch. “I don’t want to hurt you,” he said.

“This…” Adam said, with a hiss. He pressed his mouth briefly against Ronan’s again. “This won’t hurt me.”

So Ronan kissed him, lips and tongue and careful hands.

After a while, Adam drew back just enough space to work at getting his own shirt off over his head, wincing when he lifted right arm at the wrong angle. Ronan assisted with careful guiding hands, the t-shirt over his head, catching his fingers in the flat waves of Adam’s hair.

He remembered the time Adam had shied away, hide, when Ronan had uncovered the bruising under his shirt. And here he was, weeks later, revealing himself.

“Lay back,” Adam said, and Ronan did, back onto the mattress and pillows.

Adam situated himself over Ronan, held up by the distance of his arms only -- a distance not very far in reality, but very far in relativity.

As the moment grew, Ronan had to wonder what was going through Adam’s head. I’m not broken , he had just said.

It was the worse Ronan had seen it, last night. The bruised side and the fractured wrist had been awful to witness, but by the time Ronan had seen Adam with them, Adam had his sensible senses about him. Last night, when Ronan had got to Adam at the gas station, Adam had been trembling, distant, silent, and Ronan had sat beside him on the curb for near twenty minutes before Adam seemed to realize he was there.

Adam lowered himself slowly, with care to his aching bones, until they were chest to chest, and he kissed Ronan again.

Ronan ran his hands up Adam’s back, to the jutting shapes of his shoulder blades, holding him close.

There wasn’t heat in this. It wasn’t about that. It was desire of a different breed, of languid comfort, of flesh-to-flesh touch, of being in the careful company of someone of someone you felt safe with.

It descended into them lying together, Adam half on top of Ronan, not asleep.

Adam raised his wrist to check the time on his still broken watch, a habit.

It triggered Ronan to speak aloud hidden thought.

“Don’t do back,” Ronan said.

“And go where?” Adam said, a voice by his ear. “I don’t have anywhere else to go.”

To Ronan, this answer was easy: “You can stay here.”

“I can’t stay here,” Adam said, like it was a fucking joke of a suggestion and Ronan felt his internal hackles raise. “I can’t be seventeen and move in with my boyfriend.” He ran a hand over his face then retracted with a wince when it came in contact with a tender spot. “It would…” He shook his head against the pillow. “It would mess everything up.”

Ronan scoffed despite himself. “Like everything isn’t messed up now.”

“I’ve lived with this kind of messed my entire life,” Adam said. “I can take another year of it.”

“I can’t,” Ronan said. “Live with it.”

“What’re you saying?” Adam said, his tone sharp and worried. But Ronan was only saying what he was saying. He couldn’t live with it, live like this, knowing the risk every time Adam returned to the dreaded place that was called his home.

“I don’t fucking know,” Ronan said. He tucked his head against Adam’s bare shoulder.

He felt the released breath from Adam’s nostrils skate across his jaw.

“Why was it worse this time?” Ronan asked, with barely enough air to make sound.

Adam eased some space between them.

“My dad’s always more careful after I have to go to the hospital,” Adam said. “And I always think… No matter how many times it’s happened, some part of me always thinks…” He released a slow breath. “Maybe it’s getting better. Maybe the peace is going to stick this time. Then it doesn’t. And it always just….”

“You don’t have --”

“It just always makes it worse,” Adam said definitely. “When I’m not expecting it.”

No one should expect to get hurt. But Adam probably already knew that. Ronan hoped Adam believed it. There was no use saying it, Ronan thought, when such adages were little when thrown up against the reality of what you had to endure to survive each day.

“It’s  stupid,” Adam said. He was really saying, I'm stupid .

Ronan wrapped his hand around Adam’s neck and pulled him close enough to plant a kiss on his temple, like a blessing, an anointment. Not stupid. Strong. Hopeful. Calloused from the world, but not yet calcified.

“My mom,” Ronan said, words he hadn’t been able to say before. “She’s in a mental institution. They don't call it that, but it's what it fucking is. After my dad died, she broke down. I guess she just wasn't anyone without him.”

Ronan had to wonder if him and his brothers weren't enough for her. If any of them were  enough for each other. Growing up, his family had seemed so solid, an institution, the immutable Word of God. The death of his father had been a vicious hit, but he hadn’t expected them to be so fragile. Now Mom had lost it, Declan had turned cold, and Ronan had turned the opposite. Only Matthew had seemed to recover enough to go through each day like a mostly operational human being, perhaps due to the mercy of having two older brothers willing to shelter him from the worst -- of the world, of the truth, of their pain.

“You miss her,” Adam said.

Ronan pressed his head back into the pillow. Above him, a piece of peeling paint clung to the ceiling.

“She was a good mom,” he said.

#

The day wore on. Eventually they got up and got dressed and discovered needs to leave Ronan’s bedroom, like hunger and time.

Stretching his shirt down over his stomach, Adam asked, “Does Gansey know?”

Ronan stared at Adam, unblinkingly.

Adam ducked his head. “Oh.”

“It was obvious,” Ronan said.

“Great,” Adam intoned darkly.

“Come on,” Ronan said, extending a hand. “He’s an idiot about some things, but he won’t be an idiot about this.”

Adam interlocked his fingers with Ronan and let him lead him out into the living room. Gansey, who was hunched over his desk, sat up straight rather suddenly.

“Hey, Adam,” he said, cheery.

Adam raised a hand. “Doing homework?” he asked.

Gansey glanced down at the textbook spread open before him. “Yeah. Like Ronan should be…” Ronan rolled his eyes. “After seeing how much you study, I thought you would’ve turned out to be a better influence on him.”

“He’s stubborn,” Adam said.

“I know it.”

“Hey, Mom and Dad, stop fucking talking about me like I’m not here,” Ronan said, but his rage was manufactured. He knew enough to know that Adam and Gansey were going around in circles to avoid talking about the bruises on Adam’s face and the person who put them there.

“Is Noah here?” Adam said.

“Who knows where he is,” Gansey said.

“The real question,” Ronan said. “Do we have any fucking food that will pass for lunch in this place?”

“Your guess is as good as mine,” Gansey said.

“Christ.”

Ronan stomped off toward the kitchen, giving Adam a playful shove toward the couch, a recent street corner thing they had decided to rescue. Either Ronan or Gansey had enough disposable money to buy one new, but that required the forethought of a trip to a furniture store.

He tugged open a cabinet, and just behind him heard Adam speak up.

“I’m top of my class at Mountain View.”

Ronan turned. “You never told me that.”

Adam shrugged. “It’s nothing to be bragging about.”

“That’s plenty to brag about,” Gansey said, twisted around in his desk chair. “You obviously worked hard for it.” Gansey had seen enough of Adam’s studying to see the proof of it.

“I wanted to go to Aglionby,” Adam said. He hadn’t told Ronan that either, hadn’t even hinted at it. Adam never asked him about his school.

Adam bit his bottom lip, an indecisive gesture, words held back temporarily. “I applied.” He cleared his throat, eyes averted down, but he didn’t need to get their attention, he had it. “I studied. I filled out every scrap of paperwork. Got letters of recommendation. The day of the placement test I, um… The night before, my dad found out and… I couldn’t make it.”
The room was silent with their collective breathing.

“Aglionby is very serious about people showing up on time for the test,” Adam said. “Held one day a year, no exceptions.”

Ronan blinked. His very veins burned. He, as well as Gansey, knew that there were plenty of exceptions but those were for people with parents with enough money to buy the school a new wing, or other such bribes. But that outrage was minor compared to what Ronan felt towards Adam’s father. He never even laid eyes on the man and yet Ronan was filled with a boiling, righteous and indignant fury, far stronger than anything else he had yet felt.

It would only be later that he was realize that in that moment, the rage had superseded the anger he felt towards the distant and mysterious force that had taken his father -- and in result his family -- away from him.

“That’s not fair,” Gansey said.

Adam’s eyebrows raised although he hadn’t yet looked up. “Life’s not fair.”

“I know, but…” Gansey sighed, heavily. Ronan could sense him itching to set things straight.

“You never told me anything of this before,” Ronan said.

Adam lifted his head, caught eyes with Ronan across the space of Monmouth now seeming too immense, too much for just three boys.

“What’s there to tell,” Adam said. “It’s just a thing that didn’t happen.”

Ronan shut his eyes and imagined for a moment. Adam in an Aglionby uniform. Meeting Adam in a different way. Sitting behind him in class, staring at the shape of his ears, the busyness of his hands scribbling notes over a page. Ronan just might’ve found school an inch less of a burden if it involved seeing Adam Parrish there.

#

“You never told me,” Ronan said again, about Aglionby, when they are left to their privacy when Gansey went out on a grocery run. The run was arguably less about groceries than the unspoken tension that had risen in the main room of Monmouth.

Leaning against the arm of the couch, tucked comfortably in the corner of the sagging cushion, Adam said, “You don’t know everything about me.”

“I know you want to go to college,” Ronan said. Sitting on the middle couch cushion, but not touching Adam seemed like a weird compromise.

“A lot of people want to go to college.”

Ronan tilted his head. “Not me.”

“Well, you’re not like a lot of people,” Adam said.

“Compliment or insult?” Ronan asked.

“Both.”

Ronan snorted, pleased.

Adam shook his head. “Aglionby offers partial scholarships. I figured I could I save enough money from my jobs to pay for the rest.”

“Amibtious.”

Adam turned his neck and looked Ronan in the eye. “And now I’m going to use that money to get out of town as soon as I graduate, and I’m never coming back.”

Ronan clenched his jaw, and watched Adam watching him, seeing the tension flex at his neck.

They hadn’t been dating long enough to talk about the future, beyond the stretch of a week, the plans for an upcoming weekend. They were teenagers and the future was everything -- the horizon and beyond.

“And where does never coming back land you?” Ronan asked.

“I don’t know yet,” Adam said. “A city somewhere?”

“Ugh, a city?”

“What wrong with cities?”

“Too many people.”

Adam scoffed. “Of course that be your answer.”

“City people are so fucking pretentious.” And Ronan knew about pretentious. He was surrounded by it every day in Aglionby. A lot of the student population came from cities, or the affluent suburbs just outside of cities, or New England, or California. Ronan could never decide which of those was the worst.

“You’ve been to a lot of cities?” Adam asked.

“One or two.” When Ronan had a family; that family used to travel.

“So a thorough survey then,” Adam said, tone teasing. Ronan picked at a loose thread at the seam of the cushion.

“And what do you want to do with your bright and shining future, Lynch?’

Ronan wrapped the thread around his finger and gave it a sharp tug, snapping it off. “Why do you do that?” he said.

“Do what?” Adam tilted up his chin.

Ronan smirked. “Call me by my last fucking name when you’re trying to have attitude?”

“Maybe I like getting a rise out of you,” Adam said.

Ronan raised his eyebrows. “Oh, I know that.”

With that kind of heated banter, it was easy to get distracted by what types of things naturally followed. Longitudinal things along the new-old couch. That was, until Adam turned his chin away with a deliberate misdirection.

“You never answered my question,” he said.

Ronan dropped his forehead to Adam’s shoulder and let out a heaving breath. “Right fucking now? Really?”

“Yes,” Adam answered, like he wasn’t as hot and bothered as Ronan.

In a move of revenge, Ronan got up from couch, from laying half atop his boyfriend. He was satisfied at the shocked little drop of Adam’s mouth. He hadn’t expected Ronan to play him back like that.

“Get up,” Ronan said. “We’re going on a motherfucking field trip.”

Chapter Text

They drove out of town. Ronan was silent on where they were going, so Adam waited, patient, in the passenger’s seat. Eventually, they turned off a main, paved road onto a winding dirt one. Then, just in the middle of the path, under the swooping branch of a large oak tree, Ronan pressed on the brake and then shifted the car into park.

“Legally,” he said. “I can’t go any farther than here.”

“What are you talking about?” Adam said.

Wrist rested atop the steering wheel, Ronan pointed through the windshield, down the road. “Follow this, and you’ll get to where I grew up. The Barns. That’s what we called it.”

Adam had piecemealed together Ronan’s childhood from what he had let slip. He had grown up outside of Henrietta, on a large plot of land, with barns and woods and cows, one of three brothers, and once the beloved middle son of rose-tinted parents.  

“My dad…” Ronan said. Then the words choked up in him. Ronan pounded a fist on the steering wheel. “In his will, he banned us -- my brothers and me -- from going on the property.”

“What? That’s --” But Adam didn’t have to say how awful that was, or ridiculous. Ronan probably knew and also probably wouldn’t appreciate it coming from him.

“The thing about me is, though, that I don’t exactly follow the fucking rules.” Ronan got out of the car and slammed the door shut behind him.

Adam followed Ronan out of the BMW, and they marched down the road side by side. Overhead, birds darted from branch to branch, tweeting and cawing as if announcing the coming of the boys beneath them. Being a little shorter than Ronan meant Adam had to walk fast to keep up with the other boy’s brisk, direct, unwavering pace.

“Have you been back --?” Adam started to ask, the welling over of curiosity of if this was Ronan’s first sneak back on the property that was once his home. It was cut off as they emerged in a clearing.

Stretched was before them not a lawn -- neat, tidy, or uniformly green -- but the great mass of a yard, patchy-grassed, filled with weeds and wildflowers, all leading up to a large farm house, the wooden siding a sun-bleached forest green, three stories tall, with a wrap around porch.

Ronan sucked in a breath. “That’s it,” he said. “Home.”

#

“Which window was yours?” Adam asked, because he vaguely recalled seeing something like this question in a movie once. Adam didn’t have a bedroom window. Adam didn’t have a proper bedroom.

“Second floor, left corner,” Ronan said, extending his arm to point, but not moving any closer to the house.

“We had a chicken coop around the back of the house,” Ronan said, tucking his hands safely back into his jeans pockets. “And through the woods over there,” He jerked his head in a direction,  “A creek and a treehouse. We kept the cows in there.” He nodded at one of the barns, painted an ash blue on the outside. “And pastured them behind it… They were sold, after…”

It may have been the longest Adam heard Ronan speak without dropping a swear word.

It was nothing like the home Adam had dreamed about growing up in -- the mansion-like suburban homes so common on television. It was not like he wanted now -- a sleek, stainless steel-filled penthouse with wide windows looking over a sleek, stainless steel city. But with Ronan standing there, his longing and nostalgia evident, the beauty of nature tucked up against homey buildings, Adam could feel that longing too. This would’ve been a dreamland to grow up in compared to where he came from. Even more for the family Adam knew Ronan missed.

He laid a hand on Ronan’s shoulder.   

“This is it,” Ronan said. “This is what I want to with my future, Parrish. This. Fix it up. Get the animals back. Get the farm running again....”

“Here,” Adam said. Here was a very different place than where Adam wanted to end up. But they were juniors in high school. Those disparate futures they both longed for were a long way off.

Ronan turned on the spot a perfect one hundred and eighty degrees around. “Let’s go,” he said.

“You don’t want to…?” Adam started, but Ronan was already walking away.

No, Ronan didn’t want to go inside. He didn’t want to get too close to the something he couldn’t keep. Adam knew that feeling, that danger, knew it every day with his relationship with Ronan Lynch.

#

It was a thought that carried with him, that afternoon into the night, when he decided to return to the trailer. His father was drunk asleep in the armchair in front of the television, a welcome relief. Drunk asleep was dead asleep. Entering his house when Dad was still livewire awake was dangerous. It was softer this way, as much as just seeing him made Adam suck in a sharp breath in reaction.

The next day, after school, Adam biked about a third of the way towards Boyd’s until Ronan’s BMW pulled off on the shoulder behind him. Then he stopped and got in. It wasn’t a destined meeting place, but instead a type of race, a dance, how soon Ronan could reach him as he got out of school.

Adam was never going to wait for Ronan to pick him up at Mountain View where everyone could see.

The travel to Boyd’s was short while in Ronan’s passenger’s seat, although he often added in a few curves and turns that were off path. “The fucking scenic route,” he had called it before.

Then, Adam was at work, jumping out of the BMW in the front lot, not even bothering to get his bike out of the back with their after work plans already agreed on. They were own of those obnoxious types of couples that spent all their free time together.

Adam wasn’t the only one that noticed.

Zipping up his coveralls as he stepped into the garage, Boyd, hovering over an opened up engine, said, “You sure been seeing a lot of that boy.”

Adam’s heart picked up a pace, but he replied like he didn’t know what Boyd meant, eyes concentrating down on the workbench at the opposite wall. “Who?”

“BMW,” Boyd said, because he referred to most people by the makes of their car.

“Oh, yeah.” Adam fiddled with a wrench, head ducked down over it like it was taking most of his attention.

“He go to that rich school?” Boyd asked next, because even though he had lived in Henrietta all his life, he didn’t dane to put the school’s name to memory. No one in Henrietta would be confused by what he meant.

“Yes,” Adam said. This was followed by no judgement but the question itself had been a judgement. Most of the townies didn’t have a favorable view of the Aglionby students, only softened by the business they brought to the local businesses.

“He’s local, though,” Adam said, as if it would soften the blow. Being rich wasn’t so bad as being an outsider.

Boyd hummed, a consideration that Adam couldn’t interpret. “On dock one you can get started with replacing the brake pads.”

“Okay.”

“And just because he’s your friend, don’t start fixing his car for free.”

Adam laughed, a jagged surprise. “I won’t.”

Working on something routine as changing brake pads, a practice of muscle memory, left Adam’s mind to wander to the matter at hand: If Boyd had noticed Adam hanging out with Ronan, who else had? The other hands at the shop, probably. Maybe people about town. Enough for anyone to suspect it was more than friendship? Friendship with rich kids like Ronan and Gansey would be bad enough to Adam’s father, if he ever saw, if rumors ever floated their way back to him.

Adam had gotten sloppy. It had been easy at the beginning, the secret-keeping, when it had still been a secret. When Adam had just considered it all a passing fad for both Ronan and him.

This is why Adam never had real friends before, because it always resulted in complications.

#  

Adam had a smear of grease on his cheek that couldn’t be completely rubbed away with the back of his hand. His finger throbbed from jamming it earlier in an act of distraction. To top it all off, he had ripped his jeans on the work bench’s ragged corner.

The shift at Boyd’s had stretched long with his thoughts. He was glad he didn’t have to bike home tonight. He’d probably run himself right off the roadside.

Ronan pulled off the road in front of the a large, Gothic stone building.

“Is this your church?” Adam asked, because when Ronan had first mentioned Mass, Adam had thought he was joking, but every Sunday since any plans had to fit around that schedule and Adam learned he wasn’t.

“Yup,” Ronan said as he turned off the engine. “I’m a good Catholic boy.”

Adam raised his eyebrows.

“Well, I’m fucking Catholic at least.”

“Are you trying to convert me?”

“I want to show you something,” Ronan said. “Come on.”

Outside, Ronan didn’t lead Adam up the front steps to the intimidating red doors that all those spiring stone churches seemed to have, but to a regular sized door off to the side. Inside, they immediately went up a towering set of stone steps. Once on the landing, Ronan stopped at the first door.

“The Sister said she’d leave it unlocked for us,” Ronan said, which was just a tossed log onto the fire of confusion. He twisted the knob and pushed open the door. Adam stepped in first; Ronan followed a step behind.

It was an unimpressive room, empty and of the aesthetic and age of the old church itself. There was an empty bed frame in one corner and in the other a small kitchenette set up of a small stove probably dating back to the eighties and wooden cabinets with doors that didn’t hang closed properly.

“There’s a bathroom through there,” Ronan said, motioning at one adjourning door. “The rent is $400 dollar s a month,” Ronan said. “I figured you might be able to swing, with all your jobs, and what you’ve saved.”’

Adam turned around on the spot. “You want me to live here?”

“You said you had nowhere else to go,” Ronan said. “Here’s somewhere else.”

“I --,” Adam started. This was a lot at once. Ronan reached up and touched the side of Adam’s face, where there was still the yellow-ish tint of a healing bruise. It settled him.

“I can’t,” he said.

Ronan’s hand dropped. “Why the fuck not?”

“Because a lot of reasons.”

Because leaving won’t be that easy, or clear cut. Because when Adam planned to walk out the trailer for the last time, head held high, he intended a clear cut, a slice of the umbilical cord, with him leaving this town, this state, this entire geographic regional for all and good, not to move a couple streets away.

Because he couldn’t just accept another thing, with the seeming hundred things Ronan had given to him already.

“Christ,” Ronan said. “If I had let you find this place on yourself, would you have liked the idea, you stubborn ass.” Ronan stomped off, creating a series of banging steps down the stairs that somehow didn’t manage to get softer with distance.

Adam was left alone in the cold room. Stone walls didn’t have much color and the sloped ceiling would most definitely end with him hitting his head. It would need to be furnished, which would be a big bill even when done in the most budget friendly way. But the place had its own bathroom. And a window. He didn’t have a window in the trailer.

A few minutes later, Adam descending the stairs himself. Ronan was waiting for him in his car, the engine growling, and his fists wrapped tight around the steering wheel. That was Ronan, always waiting.

#

Ronan stopped the BMW at the bottom of the trailer park path. What an echo this was, to their first days, to so many days after it. Again, Adam would be leaving unsure how Ronan was feeling.

“Do you really believe in God,” Adam said, “After everything bad that’s happened to you?”

“Yes,” Ronan said.

Adam pressed the back of his hand to the cool window beside him.

“How?” he asked. Not why. How.

“I tried to kill myself,” Ronan said, staring straight forward through the windshield. “And I’m alive right now.... Did you know that Noah was the one who found me?”

Adam shook his head.

“He did. By some fucking miracle. I didn’t leave any note, or any hint. No one knew where I was going. And he found me... So, yeah, I do believe someone’s looking out me.”

Adam garnered no strong opinions about religion. He hadn’t raised with one, his parents never taking him to church although he knew his mother had a Bible in her bedside drawer where she kept the scant few of her precious ‘before Robert Parrish’ possessions. They never went because Adam thought his father didn’t want them to, maybe because he didn’t like the preaching or maybe because he didn’t like the judgement of the people there. Adam can’t recall a singular memory of him saying this, but it felt something like that was true. Robert Parrish was a dictator in both his son’s and wife’s life.

“I wish I could do that,” Adam said. “I wish I could believe that some cosmic force had my back. But… I just can’t.” It wasn’t a scientific choice, logic, or calculated. It was just like looking at a window and knowing it was closed for you. How nice it would for someone ever to be looking out for Adam Parrish. He had learned a long time ago that the only one looking out for him was him.

Adam glanced sideways at Ronan. But maybe, it didn’t have to be such a lonely job anymore.

#

“More homework?’ Ronan asked, as Adam pounded down a pile of books and papers onto the Nino’s table top. None of the rest of their usual gang had arrived yet.

“No, actually,” Adam said. “It’s all my research into becoming an emancipated minor in Virginia.”

For a moment, Ronan just stared at him, one of those intense, unblinking, unflinching stares of his, where you weren’t sure if he were in his own head or yours.

Then he moved, quick as a striking snake, wrapping his arms around Adam, pulling him into a sturdy embrace. Adam was enveloped in it. Not just physically, as he ducked his face into Ronan’s shoulder, into the soft-worn fabric of his zipper hoodie, into his smell of sweat and spicy aftershave that was too often oversprayed in school hallways. He was held up and consumed all at once.   

The moment was wrecked as bad as car crash by a single word, called out from a group of boys, cackling on their way out the door. It was a word that Adam had heard uttered frequently enough, from kids at school who bantered it around as casual as any other insult, from his father about rival sports teams, or the wrong person around town, or Adam himself.

So it wasn’t the first time Adam had heard. Nor was it the first time that Adam had it directed at himself. But it was the first time it had been said that had left feeling exposed.

“Faggots.”

They let go of each other. Stepped back, apart. It was survival instinct.

So eyes -- the waiter behind the cash register, the twenty-something couple in the nearest booth -- flicked between them and the slamming door, where the perpetrator had left.

“Who was that?” Adam pushed his hand up his forehead, over his bangs.

“Just some Aglionby asshole. He wouldn’t’ve said it if he saw it was me and knew it would get him punched in the fucking face,” Ronan said. “I still might.”

Adam heaved in a breath into his tight chest. “Did anyone …”

He felt Ronan’s hand on his arm, pushing him toward the booth. He pulled his arm away and sat. Ronan slide in across from him.

“It was just bullshit,” Ronan said, voice low. “No one knows anything.”

Adam rested his head in his hands, pressed his thumbs into his temples. “My dad --”

“I know,” Ronan said. “But you’re getting out of there.”

Adam wasn’t sure that just leaving home, if he managed to do that unscathed, would be enough distance to prevent his father taking visceral offense to his son being… well, whatever Adam was. A boy who liked kissing boys, amongst other things, and he was sure the nuance of it would be lost along the way.

Adam shut his eyes. It never ends, he thought, every high note ends with a blow.

Chapter Text

Gansey’s orange camaro curved into Monmouth’s lot. Ronan had been waiting for him, sprawled on the front steps, leather jacket scrounged from his closet because the autumn weather had finally turned autumn from prolonged summer.

He had considered bringing a can of beer down here to drink as he waited -- Gansey was fucking late -- but Adam didn’t like the smell or taste of it on him, so Ronan had decided to make that trade off.

The passenger door of the camaro swung open. Ronan squinted. That wasn’t right. They were going to pick up Adam after this still, and Noah had flaked off somewhere. Who…?

“The fuck are you doing here?” Ronan shouted when a short figure appeared.

Blue raised her arms as in a challenge. “Ruining your male bonding time, or whatever.”

Gansey’s head popped up from the other side of the car. “I invited her,” he said.

Approaching, Ronan said, “No shit. I thought she carjacked you. Jesus Christ.”

Ronan clambered into the backseat, then leaned forward to slap the leather seat of the front. “Hurry up. Adam’s got off work ten minutes ago.”

“I didn’t take you as the kind of guy who worried punctuality,” Blue said.  

Ronan’s mother had once told him if he didn’t have anything nice to say, he should say nothing at all. Ronan Lynch was very bad at this rule. He, in fact, found it much easier to say something mean than ever say something nice. Biting his tongue was not in his nature, nor was self control. And yet, for this singular moment, he reined it in. His best friend had been pining after this strange girl for months now. He probably shouldn’t screw it up for im right away.

“Dick,” he said instead. “Get driving.

#

Adam was just as surprised to see Blue, but welcomed her much nicer than Ronan had managed to.

“How did this happen?” he asked.

“Remember how I planning to get a psychic reading?” Gansey said.

Adam said yes. Ronan said fuck no.

“I told you three different -- nevermind. Anyway, Jane lived there. Of course, at first she thought I was stalking her…”

“But then my aunt convinced me he wasn’t,” Blue said.

“How did she do that?” Adam asked.

“She’s psychic,” Blue said, like ‘duh.’

Ronan clunked his head back on the headrest.

“I told her about our plans, and she asked to come along,” Gansey finished.

“Taking chances?” Adam said.

Blue twisted in the front seat and made a certain, knowing eye contact with Adam; Ronan didn’t miss it for a second.

He tilted his head toward Adam’s ear with a shift all he was doing was shifting and bumping along with the car.

“What was that about?”

Adam didn’t answer with words, but he did push his knuckles against the outside of Ronan’s thigh.

#

The night Ronan had taken Adam to the apartment above St. Agnes, and Adam had rebuked it -- had rebuked Ronan --  Ronan had gone driving like he hadn’t in a long time. Speeding, zooming, cutting around corners at weaving angles. Trying outrace his own negative feelings.

With Adam, most days, he didn’t need to outrace anything. He didn’t need to drink himself into a certain state to feel okay about just passing the hours. Adam -- touching him, kissing him, thinking of him -- was all the adrenaline rush he needed.

Most times, that was. Not moments like this, when Adam was part of that problem.

It had been a church announcement that the apartment was available for rent. Hearing it, Ronan had thought another miracle had descended on him. Here was an option. Here was somewhere else for Adam to go.

Then Adam had to go and be Adam about. Stone stubborn about doing things his own way.

A traffic light turned from yellow to red, and Ronan didn’t see it. Or he saw it, and it didn’t register. Or he saw it, and his foot was lead-heavy on the acceleration and he didn’t want to stop and it didn’t matter if he did because it was too late now. He plowed through the intersection. Headlines glared through his right-hand windows and a car horn blared while brakes screeched. Ronan swerved, riding the BMW onto the dirt shoulder, the uneven ground thumping beneath him, until he dragged to a stop, heart pounding. Collision avoided.

The other car laid on his horn as it continued on its way. Ronan pressed the heel of his hand to the center of his chest, over his heart, beating rabbit fast. He ducked his head on the steering wheel, the curve digging into his skull the more he pressed.

Driving like this used to be half a death wish, but Ronan Lynch didn’t want to die anymore.

#

Blue was behind the cash register when Ronan entered Nino’s the next afternoon, the bells hung on the door jungling and she looking up to spot him.

“Booth for four?” she asked.

“Nah, just me,” Ronan said. He stuck his hands in his jeans pockets. Such a gesture always gave him leaned over posture, shrinking him in height but not necessarily in intimidation. He was still a creature, reactionary to attack, sharp-angled, with everything from his haircut to his stomping big boots declaring, ‘Back the fuck up.’

“Eating alone?” Blue said.

“Not eating at all,” he said. “I just wanted to talk to you.”

“Okay…?” she said, dragging out the word for all its worth and confusion.

Glancing at a couple eating at the table not two yards from where he stood, Ronan added, “Not here.”

Blue held up a finger cautioning him to wait, then leaned back to yell into the kitchen, “I’m taking my fifteen.” To Ronan, she added, “There’s a gross alley out back no one’s ever in. Meet you there.”

Ronan turned around and stalked back out the front door. He arrived in the alley first, Blue slipping out from a door connected to the kitchen a moment later.

“What’s up?” she said. “Are you going to give me one of those, ‘If you hurt my friend you’re dating, I hurt you’ speeches. Because, one, I’d like to see you try. And, two, I do slightly appreciate that gender flip of the situation.”

Ronan said, “No.”

Blue tugged on the strings of her apron. Ronan, hands still tucked, scuffed his boot against the asphalt.

“I only have fifteen minutes,” Blue said.

“Motherfucker,” Ronan whispered to himself. “He’s what it is,” he said to Blue. “What you saw with me and Adam the other day… Can you keep it to yourself?”
Yesterday, off on their Gansey-led adventure, hiking through the woods to find a colonial-era graveyard which sounded like the beginning of a horror movie that had you questioning the intelligence of the characters, Ronan and Adam had found themselves walking in matched pace, side by side. Even though it meant easing up his longer pace for Adam (and also even more for Gansey, no matter how eagerly he marched onward).

“The woods here is beautiful,” Blue said, up by Gansey’s side, where they had paired off. What leaves still clung to the trees were painted a variety of colors.

Adam’s knuckles brushed the back of Ronan’s hand, and it was enough to spend tingles up Ronan’s entire arms.

Under his breath, he said, “If you wanted to hold my fucking hand you just had to ask.”

Adam raised an eyebrow, a neat curve of nearly invisible pale hair, and then ignored him. It was a game they played, back and forth. Ronan trying to act tough and Adam, unimpressed, throwing it back to him.

Ronan flexed his fingers, and when Adam’s swinging hand came past, grabbed it in his own.

Without a glance to him, Adam said, “You just had to ask,” but squeezed Ronan’s hand tighter all the same.    

“Keep an eye out for headstones, everybody,” Gansey said. “They could be hidden in underbrush, or fallen over, okay?” He glanced over his shoulder when no response came. “Okay?”

“Okay, Dick,” Ronan said. “We heard you.”

In a softer tone, Adam aid, “We’ll keep an eye out.”

Blue had glanced back too. Ronan was aware of her because she was still new. Untested. An outsider. He caged up as her eyes dropped to their conjoined hands. Her gaze slide over them as easy as vaseline, only the surprised pinch of eyebrows any tell.

Adam hadn’t seemed to notice, but Ronan did.

Back in the present, Blue said. “I’m not jerk and I’m not an idiot. Of course I won’t say anything. I’m not going to out you guys.”

Ronan raised a hand and ran it over his skull. His hair was getting long -- for him -- he’d have to shave it again soon.

“Was that it?” Blue asked.

“Yeah,” he said. “I mean… it’s a big deal to me, but it’s even bigger deal to Adam, and you two go to the same fucking school so…”

“I get it,” Blue said. “I know how shitty people are. But I’m not one. Most days.” She grinned.

“Maybe you’re not so bad, Sargent.”

“Was that almost you saying something nice to me?” she said.

“Don’t get used to it,” he grumbled.

#

Ronan skimmed his teeth against the juncture between Adam’s neck and shoulder, a tease, and then bite. Not hard, but the perfect pressure that he knew would cause Adam’s breath to hitch. It hitched.

But Adam wouldn’t let that play go by un-retaliated. As much as Ronan knew Adam’s weak spots, Adam knew his. He ran his hand over the dome of Ronan’s head, ending with his fingertips stoking where his hairline faded away at the nape of his neck. Ronan shivered.

“You cut your hair,” Adam said, breathy.

“Yeah,” Ronan replied, and then moved his mouth a few inches up to a new spot on the side of Adam’s neck.

When Ronan had picked Adam up a rough half an hour ago, Adam had clicked his seat belt closed across his chest and then said, “Drive us to somewhere secluded.”

Ronan ran his hand over the curve of the steering wheel. “Why?” he asked.

“As much as I like your roommates,” Adam said. “We really don’t get enough alone time anymore.”

Ronan shifted into drive.

Now, they were relocated in the backseat, still upright, but generally enjoying undisturbed exploration of each other’s company.

Ronan pulled himself back from a favorable part of Adam’s neck before he left evidence of a hickey Adam would have to explain.

Ronan found Adam’s mouth, briefly, with his own, then the hollow of his throat.

Adam hummed, and Ronan felt the vibration of this under his lips.

Then, apropos nothing, except the obvious current ongoing, Adam said, “Do you think about sex?” in a way that was truly quizzical.

Ronan huffed breath, but took about half a minute to get out his reply: “Of course I do.”

“Do you think about it with me?”

Ronan brushed his lips over Adam’s collar bone. “Yes. I think about you.”

Ronan was fairly sure this wasn’t foreplay, not in the immediate sense. Adam was an academic, a scholar, and everything in his life had to be research, discussed, and analyzed before decisions were made.

“I can’t afford to make mistakes,” Adam had said when Ronan had called him out on it once before. What Adam seemed to miss, in Ronan Lynch’s fucking humble opinion, is that no matter how rich you were there were some mistakes no one could afford to make, and on the other side, some mistakes were worth it.

Ronan sat back. It wasn’t so far, with one of Adam’s legs thrown over Ronan’s thigh, with the automatic way Adam reached out and tangled their fingers together.

“You’ve kissed girls before,” Ronan said. “Have you ever done anything else with girls?”

Adam’s eyes skated to the side, not avoidant, but thinking. “There was one girl. We didn’t… not all the way… but we did some stuff that was… sexual.”

“More than we’ve done?” Ronan asked.

“Yes.”

Adam tugged Ronan closer by the hand, leaned in to press his tongue into Ronan’s mouth. That distracted until breathing needed to happen.

“What happened,” Ronan said, still within an inch’s proximity. “To the girl?”
“She dumped me,” Adam said. “I wasn’t a very good boyfriend.”

“Fucking bullshit.”

“Couldn’t afford to take her out on dates, was too busy working, wouldn’t take her to my house…”

All reasonable, if you knew the circumstances. Not so great from the outside.   

“Does it bother you? My experience?” Adam asked.

“No,” Ronan said. Except, yes, a little. “You’re my first anything,” he said.

“We’re at the age a lot of people are doing their first anythings,” Adam said.

Ronan leaned in for the attention of Adam’s mouth again. He didn’t want to be thinking about this, about having to catch up, or having to forge through. All he did was forge through.

There had been a return question, lingering, unasked. “Do you think about it with me?”

“Yeah,” Adam said, no hesitation. “Have you ever thought about it with someone other than me?” Adam asked, and his tone suggested he knew exactly how loaded this was and wanted to push forward regardless.

Ronan said nothing. He didn’t lie, but he let lying by omission be a loophole.

“Paul Walker?” Adam suggested.

Ronan ducked his head to Adam’s shoulder to hide his embarrassed flush. “Shut up.”

“Gansey?”
“Really shut up.”

Adam laughed, lightly, and his fingers found that sensitive spot at the back of his neck again.

“What do you think about doing with me?” Adam whispered, right into Ronan’s ear.

Ronan sucked in a breath.

“I think about seeing all of you,” Ronan said, glad his face was still hidden down on Adam’s shoulder. “I think about touching all of you. About making you feel good.”

Adam hummed again. Ronan felt the whole rush of it up his chest.

“For someone who uses ‘fuck’ every other word, that was actually a little romantic.”

Ronan liked the word ‘fuck.’ He like the precise hammer-slam of it when said. He like its many conjugations and ways into could be inserted creatively into words and sentences. He liked how it so easily unsettled polite people. But that was the word itself, for Ronan Lynch never thought of sex as fucking. At least not for himself.

Watching his older brother trade off on girlfriends with blaize distraction, date more than one at a time, cheat and break up both confused and angered Ronan. Maybe this was at the core of Ronan’s nature, why he had exactly two friends. Because he didn’t care for artificial relationships or face-level cordiality. People weren’t worth the effort if they weren’t willing to put in the effort. All that obviously leached over into his feelings, even when they were still abstractions of the future, of what he wanted from a romantic relationship.

For a second, Ronan thought Adam had, after all this time they’d known each other, missed this essential part of him. Then, Adam course corrected, saying, “Now that I think of it, you are a little romantic, aren’t you?”  

“I don't know what you're talking about,” Ronan muttered.

“Lie,”Adam said, calling out every inch of him.

“Why the fuck are you asking me all this stuff?”

Adam’s fingers trailed down Ronan’s neck and across his clothed shoulder. “Because it could happen sometime.”

“Sometime?” Ronan repeated.

“In the future…,” Adam said. Then, pointed, “Not in your car.”

Ronan snorted. They had gotten into the area of jokes. “That be hot.”

“I have more class than that.”

#

How was Ronan supposed to sleep after a conversation like that?

Ronan rolled over his bed. The pillow was mush under him. It was too warm with the blankets on and too cold with them off.

Nevermind that conversation -- real, honest conversation-- wore him out. Adam was insistent to drag it out of him, and Ronan gave in. If Ronan let him in on this secret, Gansey would probably say it was good for him. Ronan was willing to do a lot of things for Adam. Not because Adam demanded them. Ronan Lynch had instinctive defenses against demands made of him. No, because he was learning, piecemeal, that give and take, that compromise, where little steps to closeness.

Ronan threw his arm lengthways over his eyes. Through the window blinds sliced in the glow of the streetlamp outside and tonight it seemed punishingly bright. Too bright to go to sleep with.

How could he sleep when all he saw when he shut his eyes were abstract shapes that formed the curious angles of Adam’s face, the length of his fingers, the knobs of his spine? How could he sleep when Adam’s voice echoed in his skull with all his suggestions spoken earlier? How could Ronan sleep with Adam Parrish burning under his skin like fire?

Chapter Text

When Adam Parrish stepped inside the trailer, the door slapping shut behind him, the tension he stepped into was worse than the slap in the face of Virginia’s summertime humidity.

His mother was kneading her bottom lip with her teeth in the crook of the kitchen, eyes set as magnets on him. She was silent. If she wanted something from him, she would say it. Otherwise, she’d ignore him as Adam was accustomed to being ignored. It was bad news when she stared at him like she could see the curse upon his head. It meant he was in trouble, and she knew it, and she waiting for the reckoning.

Adam set his eyes on his bedroom door and started forward, practicing everything he had ever learned about the shortest distance between two points being a line. So he walked with the quickest and quietest footsteps he could manage, wishing himself to be a ghost.

He didn’t make it halfway when the recliner creaked -- springs and joints -- mixed with the low grunt: the sounds of  his father standing.

Adam froze a second before the command came.

“Come here, boy.”

It was calm. Robert Parrish’s calculated rage was a different beast than his unbridled rage, but not any less dangerous.

Adam turned. He stepped forward, following the strictest definition of his father’s orders because in this home he was an tyrant who could not be defied. Adam stopped just outside his father’s immediate arm reach, because he wasn’t stupid.

With his nose scrunched up in a slight sneer, Robert looked Adam up and down like he didn’t find a single inch of him that he approved of. It was always an contradictory list of faults and flaws. On one hand, Adam was getting too big, eating too much, taking up too much space, and on the other too skinny, too delicate, not manly enough. He was an embarrassment to his parents with his worn, ill-fitting clothes and home- cut hair, or he was getting fucking uppity when he too much care with his appearance. He needed to be working more, making more money for the family, or least out of the trailer and out from under their feet, or he needed to be home, taking care of chores, helping his mother.

When Adam was much younger, he thought he could shape himself and his behaviors into something that earned his father’s approval and contentment. Adam knew better now. This was a series of contradictions he was never meant to win.    

“Care to explain to me about a rumor I heard?” Robert said.

Adam gulped, his mouth incredibly dry. His heart felt like desperate little bird, beating his wings against his ribcage as it tried to escape. This was a trap, this question, as affable as his father asked it. Adam had to admit wrongdoing or be caught in lie.

“What rumor?” Adam said.

What rumor, Adam thought. Had someone else noticed Adam’s time spent with Ronan the BMW boy like Boyd had? Like the boys at Nino’s who had yelled that slur at them?

“That my son’s been hanging around with those Aglionby nancy boys.”

Adam sucked in a breath. Bad. Not not as bad as it could be. What a strange irony to be standing before his father, being interrogated, and having a sense of relief.

“I --” Adam glanced past his father’s shoulder to his mother, who was still watching, still silent. Some little, boyish part of him was always looking for her to become his surprise hero although all evidence counteracted it.

“Speak up!” Robert snapped.

Adam’s shoulders seized tight.

“Yes. I have,” Adam said.

With the lack of immediate response from his father, it was clear the man hadn’t expected Adam to tell the truth here. But Adam would sacrifice this rather than the truth that lay a little deeper. This could be explained. Here Adam could control the narrative.

“One of them,” he said, quickly, while he still had this spare seconds to make an excuse, “Came to Boyd’s. We’ve hung out a few times. We talk about cars.” They did talk about cars, a topic that Ronan, Adam, and Gansey had in common in strange, differentiating ways.

Robert ran hand over over his grizzled chin. This was almost a civil conversation. It would be, until it exploded.

“I don’t like it, ya hear. I don’t want you hanging around them boys anymore.”

“But --” Adam said, a misstep. Out of the corner of his vision, he swore he saw his mother flinch.

“You back talking?”

His father stomped forward; Adam cringed back.

Robert Parrish descended into a rant about Aglionby and rich people and Adam knowing his place. Words could be fists, but they weren’t as bad as actually blows, Adam thought, so he stood there and took it. No matter that the ‘But--’ still reverberated under his tongue. But they were Adam’s friends. But he wanted to keep hanging out with them. But he was still going to keep hanging out with him, just more carefully.

Whatever point Robert Parrish worked himself up to ended with a damning question:

“Do you think your better than us?”

Adam, head bowed and silently receiving chastisement, didn’t answer quickly enough.

Robert grabbed Adam by the collar of his shirt and yanked him forward. His stale beer breath was right in Adam’s face as he slurred, “I asked you a question, boy!”

Adam lowered his eyes. There was only one answer to mitigate the danger of this situation. There was no room for explanation. How his friends were different than other rich kids. How Adam felt just as envious and just as little in their presence that perhaps Robert Parrish felt right now with the very same thoughts.

And the defiant spark in him, small but present -- that Adam did think he was better than his father, but that had nothing to do with the friends he had recently acquired. It had to do with Adam being smarter, and not a drunk, and that he was going to get out of here if it was the last thing he did.

But saying that wasn’t the last thing Adam wanted to do, so he said the sensible thing, the survivable thing.

“No, sir.”

#

“Can I use the phone in your office?” Adam asked the next morning when he arrived at Boyd’s Autobody Shop ten minutes before his shift started. It was a request he had made a few times before, but he tried to only ask sparingly. He didn’t want to overdraw on favors.

Boyd, who knew Adam didn’t have a cell phone and suspected at least something about Adam’s home life, told him to go ahead. Adam slipped inside the office and closed the door behind himself. He dialed a long ago memorized number. He had never dared write it down.

The phone rang and rang -- so it was at least on -- until it was picked up by voicemail. Adam hung up and dialed again.

“Pick up, pick up, pick up,” Adam mouthed in a little, praying chant. Voicemail again. He hung up and dialed a third time, jabbing at the number buttons.

He ducked his head, phone received pressed tight to his ear. Come on , he thought.  

The ringing cut off. A voice mottled with static said, “Adam?”

Adam let out a rush of breath. Adam had never called Ronan from this number before, but the desperation of call after call must’ve been calling card enough.

“Hey,” he breathed. The door was closed but he still felt the pressing need to be quiet.

“What’s wrong?” Ronan said.

“Nothing,” Adam said. He ran his hand over his bed-matted then bike-ride messy hair. “Just… Don’t pick me up from work today.”

“The fuck going on?”

“I’ll meet you at Monmouth afterwards, okay?” Adam said, and his voice had pitched upward despite all his intentions to keep it steady. “I’ll explain then.”

“Adam --”

“Please.”

He heard Ronan swear quietly.

Adam had done a lot of things, revealed a lot of weaknesses, but he had never begged Ronan for something before.

“Alright,” Ronan said, although it was clear he wasn’t alright with it at all.

#

Adam peddled to Monmouth after his shift ending, a path he had never had to bike before. It was lonely.

He had never found a bike ride lonely before although it was an activity decidedly alone. Adam was usually so focused on the destination, on the time spent traveling, on all his mental calculations to ever feel alone. That before, of course, he had almost constant rides and almost constant company squashed into his spare minutes.

Adam knew the shape of ‘alone’ like his own spine. Could a few months really be enough to reshape him?

Arriving at Monmouth, Adam leaned his bike against the wall outside the door, tucked beside a scraggly bush. A Saturday with only one shift left him with plenty of time free, and it had been an enjoyable prospect before his father had added a burden on him last night.

When he made it up the steps of Monmouth, Ronan was there waiting for him.

Ronan cupped Adam’s face in his hands, eyes scanning down him, then up.

“They somewhere I can’t see?” he said.

Adam curled his fingers over one of Ronan’s wrists. “Huh?”

“The bruises,” he said.

“Shit.” Adam ducked his face away from Ronan’s hands, turned half away. “No. That’s not…” He shook his head.

“The fuck is it then?” Ronan said. “Because I’ve been sitting around here like a fucking idiot all morning.” Worrying about Adam, he didn’t say.

“I’m fine,” Adam said. The truth, when it came to physical injuries.

A strange noise, kind of like yelp, kind of like a wail, kind of like a screech, definitely animalistic, emanated from Ronan’s room, where the door hung open.

Ronan’s head swung towards it. Adam squinted.

“Do you have a dying kitten in there?” he asked.

“Not a kitten,” Ronan said, and vanished into the depth. He re-emerged with something small and slightly hideous and definitely the source of the noise cupped in his hands. “I need to feed her,” he stated, like all the surrounding conclusions were obvious.

“Is that a… bird?”

“A raven,” Ronan said, crossing to the kitchen.

“Why do you have a baby raven?”

“Because I found one.”

When Adam was nine, he had taken upon himself to feed a stray cat that wandered around the trailer park. After three months of sneaked scraps of food, getting a black eye for getting caught, giving the creature a name, the creature trusting him enough to let Adam pet him, he found the cat’s body, run over by a car. He remembered having to hide his tears, holding the back until the privacy of bedtime let him stuff his face in his pillow after dark.

Since then, Adam didn’t have much room for such compassion.

“And how does one feed a baby bird?” Adam called after him. “Don’t tell me your reguitating worms into his mouth.”

“Why don’t you come over and smell my breath to check.”

If Ronan hadn’t been carrying something so delicate, Adam would’ve shoved him.

Ronan took a seat on the new-old couch, raven in one hand, a weird syringe-like thing in the other. Still developing and without its feathers, the raven was a strange and somewhat hideous little creature, not like the the elegant and ominous bird of prey it would grow into. The slash of Ronan’s grin, unmitigated and unconscious, made it clear he thought of this as a precious thing.

Adam took a seat in Gansey’s desk chair and watch as the creature opened its gaping beak, stretching its neck upward, hungry. Adam didn’t question that what Ronan was doing was the right way or how he even knew it, as he feed the bird.

He recalled their trip to Ronan’s childhood home and the confidences shared there. Ronan wanted to start up his family’s farm again and here Adam saw it in fruition, Ronan nursing a baby animal, careful and caring.

“Her name’s Chainsaw,” Ronan mumbled.

Adam snorted. He pressed his knuckles to his forehead. “Thanks for that,” he said. “I needed it.” Laughing didn’t loosen the knot in his chest, though.

“I’m serious,” Ronan said.

“I know you are.”

That was exactly the type of person Ronan Lynch was on the outside. Chainsaw, fast cars, swerve words, tattoos, and bruised knuckles. On the inside, or really, what he made himself known to be through his actions was a guy who raised a baby bird, and touched gently, and was there when you needed him even when you didn’t realize you needed him.

A few minutes later, the feeding was done. Ronan got up and disappeared back into his room, and came out again empty-handed.

He didn’t sit down again on the couch, but came over to lean against the edge of Gansey’s desk, arms crossed.

Adam stood. He didn’t care to be loomed over right now, enough though Ronan had perched himself an arms length away and wasn’t at all looming. Instead, he walked over to the wall where Gansey had pinned an expansive map of the area, completely with color--coded push pins and post-it note addendums.

“Adam…”

Ronan had come to stand behind him.

“My dad,” Adam said. “He found that I had been hanging out with kids with Aglionby. That’s all he found out. But he wants me to stop. Obviously, I’m not going to. But I can’t have people seeing you pick me up from work. Or at Nino’s. I can can come here still. And any weird out of town roadtrips Gansey drags us on should be fine…” He tilted his head, hearing nothing but Ronan’s breathing. “Say something.”

He half- turned. “Ronan. Say something.”

“Just until you move out, right? All this not being seen bullshit. Just until you move out.”

Adam blinked.

“You’re still planning to move out.”

“It’s complicated,” Adam said.

“No,” Ronan said. “It’s not.”

Adam’s hands balled into fists at his side.

Yes, it was. But he wasn’t going to have this argument with Ronan again. Sure, now there was a place to go. And sure, Adam didn’t feel too much shame about taking it. But what about fear? Moving out and taking his paychecks with him? That was a lot of defiance to wield against Robert Parrish.

“This is bullshit,” Ronan said.

It was, Adam thought, as magma formed in his chest. All these demands put on him when he was barely holding it together. That his father, who had given him nothing but resentful life, who had already taken and torn away what scraps were left, was trying to take away these few good things Adam had found for himself. Like snatching his spare cash for booze money. It was bullshit that Ronan, his ally, was even turned against him.

He needed to break something or break down in tears. Neither was acceptable.

Adam pressed his knuckled against the wall until they hurt and pressed some more. He dared not give into the urge he really had, to pull back and punch. Maybe for Ronan that could be a casual enough to punch a wall in anger and be over it a few minutes later. But for Adam Parrish, if he punched the wall in anger, maybe split the drywall, maybe broke something else, maybe hit a someone instead of a something, that would be the first step down the road to hell.

Adam turned grabbed Ronan by the shoulders and shoved his mouth against his. It was an ugly kiss, teeth clashing, and unreciprocated.

“Kiss me,” Adam said, between teeth.

Ronan wrapped his hands around the space of Adam’s forearms -- holding him there, and holding him away.

“Doing angry shit for angry reasons is half my fucking personality,” Ronan said. “But not this.”
Nothing to break, nothing to distract, all he had left was to breakdown.

He dropped his head onto Ronan’s shoulder. He drew in a breath that shuddered.

“I wish it was easy,” he said. Adam Parrish wished anything in his life had ever been easy.

“Hey…” Ronan’s voice ghosted over Adam’s ear. He tucked his nose against the fluff of Adam’s hair.

Adam took some care to even out his breathing with careful inhales and exhales. He leaned again Ronan’s weight -- his muscle, sinew, and skeleton -- relying on that to hold him up as he recomposed himself.

He lifted his head. “Sorry for acting awful.”

“Acting awful is the other half of my personality,” Ronan said. “It was only fair that you take a spin at it for once.”. He swiped his thumb over the line of Adam’s cheekbone, like it was something he had been thinking about doing for a while and now gave into temptation.

Adam let his eyelids shut, sinking in the phantom aftermath of the touch. And the little understanding that came with it: Ronan touched him gently not because he thought Adam was delicate, but because he thought Adam deserved it

Ronan leaned in the little space between them and pressed a careful kiss to Adam’s mouth, the antithesis of Adam’s attempted kiss from earlier.

Consumed with each other, neither heard nor heeded things like footsteps and doors signaling they were soon not to be alone.

“Oh!” Gansey, really loud. When they turned to look, instinctively, it was more than Gansey standing there. There was also a young man Adam had never seen before, but he looked enough like Ronan for him to make an educated guess.

“I -- I’ve got to go,” said the young man that was probably Ronan’s brother and he turned around and fled back down the steps as soon as he said it.

After he was gone, after the beat of silence that followed, Gansey poured into an apology: “I’m sorry. I didn’t realize Adam was here. I never would’ve --”

“Why the fuck did you bring him here at all?” Ronan shot back.

“I didn’t! He was pacing in the parking lot when I pulled in. He said he had been calling you but weren’t picking up.”

“Because it was Declan calling.” Ronan ran a hand over his head. “Fuck.”

From one fire to the next. Adam squeezed Ronan’s elbow. He didn’t know what to say. It was Adam’s worse nightmare that his family find out his sexuality. It was Ronan’s every right to feel the same.

“Is he not going to be okay with it?” Adam asked.

“We’re Catholic,” Ronan said.

“I can talk to him…” Gansey started to say.

Ronan interrupted. “You’ve fucking done enough.”

Gansey sunk like a plant under weedkiller. It wasn’t Gansey fault, really, Adam knew. At worst, just carelessness. Ronan probably knew it to. It didn’t take away the sting.

Ronan reached out for Adam’s hand, tugging him in the direction of his room. Adam didn’t miss this detail. The last time Ronan had stormed off to him room due to his brother, he had left Adam outside.  

Inside the bedroom, Adam dared to ask, “What’s he gonna do?”

“Be an asshole,” Ronan said. He kicked a loose shoe, and it tumbled across the floor. “Tell Matthew before I can. Remind me in another way how I’m disappointing my dad.”

“Would he’ve been --”

“I don’t know,” Ronan said, the words slurred together he spoke them so fast. “Sometimes I think… Shit.” Ronan craned his head to stare up at the ceiling. “I guess now I’ll never know.”

Adam stepped up behind Ronan and slide his arms around his middle. They were just two boys living under the weighty shadows of their fathers.  

Chapter Text

“You’re going?” Gansey said, surprised when Ronan emerged from his bedroom early on Sunday morning. Gansey looked worse for wear, hair sticking in all directions, bruise-like circles of tiredness under his eyes -- evidence of another all nighter. Ronan’s night had been the same, but he had tucked on his headphones and stayed holed up in his room, not ready to share in misery with Gansey again with the wounds so new.

Ronan tugged at hem of his button-down, wrinkled from a week laid over the back of a chair, but still presentable.

“God himself would have to come down from heaven to tell me not to go,” Ronan said.

Gansey hmmed. “That’s sounds exactly like the sacrilegious thing to say before you go to Mass.”

“Your Christmas and Easter only ass wouldn’t understand,” Ronan said, the last thing he said before he left.

When he arrived in the cathedral of St. Agnes, Declan and Matthew were already there, seated in their same pew, ninth back from the pulpit on the left side. There had been days when all five of the Lynches were sit there side-by-side, any Sunday Dad was home between all his business travels. So it was usually, more likely, four of them.

Ronan slide in on the side that put Matthew between him and Declan, and gave his younger brother’s curls a quick ruffle. Matthew shot him a wiry grin. Ronan hadn’t been seeing enough the kid lately, his own fault.

The church service commenced, with its kneeling and standing, praying and moments of silence, hymns played on the great pipe organ and priest sermonizing from the pulpit. It was all a very good reasons for neither Ronan nor Declan to speak or even look at each other.

An hour and a half later, exiting down the stone steps outside the front of the cathedral, Declan said, “Why don’t we go out for lunch, all three of us? My treat.”

On a regular Sunday, this would be a hard no. On today, it was a fuck no. But Declan, the manipulative bastard, had an ace up his sleeve. An ace that was standing right there with a sunny grin on on his face.

“Let’s!” Matthew said. “What about that dinner on Mountain Terrace?”

“I’m not hungry,” Ronan said, although the only thing he had eaten today was a communion wafer.

“Come on, Ronan,” Matthew said. “We never do anything together anymore.”
Ronan, who was already sweltering in Catholic guilt over lack of quality time with his younger brother, didn’t have the heart to deny him.

“Great,” Declan said once Ronan acquiesced. “I’ll drive.”

This was another trap.

“I’ll follow,” Ronan said.

“That’s a waste of gas,” Declan said. “I’ll drop you off here to pick up your car when we’re done.”

#

“Go straight inside, okay?” Declan said, as Matthew climbed out of the backseat of the car. They were parked outside the Aglionby dorms, now with their stomachs full and an hour and a half past the end of Mass. “No getting distracted.”

“Okay, okay,” Matthew said, right before he slammed the car door shut. Engine running, Declan sat in the parking lot, waiting until Matthew was through the front doors, and the doors shut behind him, before changing gear from park to drive.

Declan pulled out of the parking lot and onto the road. Ronan contemplated the velocity of jumping out of the moving car.

“I had something important to talk to you about yesterday,” Declan said. “I guess now we have two things.”

“Or we can make it fucking nothing,” Ronan said. He leaned the corner of his forehead against the window. Declan drove over a pothole and Ronan’s skull thunked against the glass. Good. For this conversation, the less brain cells the better.

“I don’t know exactly what you think of me --” Declan started.

Ronan snorted.

“Okay. I know a good fucking deal what you think of me, Ronan, but I’m not idiot. I’m not unobservant. I know a lot more about a lot of things than you can imagine.”

“Get to the goddamn point,” Ronan said, teeth gritted.

“I mean, I figured this might be the case,” Declan said as he turned right onto Elm Street. “You never showed any interest in girls. And you would rewind that scene in The Outsiders a lot. You know, the one where Rob Lowe is coming out of the shower with just a towel --”

“Fucking stop.”

“I hoped you would grow out of your ‘girls have cooties’ stage, but I guess not,” Declan said, every word like the precise speech of a politician. “Now things are going to be harder.”

“Now things are going to be harder,” Ronan repeated, with acid.

“For you,” Declan said. “It’s just how the world works. Especially around here.”

Ronan scrunched up his eyebrows. That hadn’t exactly been what he had been expecting.

“So you’re saying you knew I was --” He hadn’t put lyrics to this yet.  

“I suspected,” Declan said. “To be honest, I thought I’d be walking in on you and Gansey one day.”

“Jesus Christ.”

Declan flicked on his blinker and took another right turn.

“St. Agnes is the other fucking way,” Ronan said.

“I’m not done talking yet.”

They drove on a little longer, and on a nice clear spot of highway, Declan pulled his car over onto the shoulder. He jerked the gear into break.

“The hell are you --?”

“How much did you ever think about what Dad did as a job?” Declan said. “Why he was always traveling? How he made his money?”

Ronan raised his leather bracelets to his mouth. He was sure thinking about it now.

“All you need to know that he pissed some people off. Dangerous people,” Declan said. He drummed his finger along the steering wheel, not like in the beat of song, like Ronan would do, but in a nervous twitch. All dissonant with the image he was creating, sitting behind the seat of his fancy car in his fancy suit with his hair slicked back and designer sunglasses pushed up the bridge of his nose.  

“Some of those people,” Declan continued, “Are snooping around. Looking for answers. Things he promised them.”

“How do you know this?” Ronan said.

Declan turned to him. “You might’ve been Dad’s favorite,” he said. “But I’m the oldest.”

Ronan opened his mouth to protest, then clicked it shut, deciding not.

“I was given responsibilities,” Declan said. “One of which is you.”

This was usually something Ronan would protest against, something that would sound more condescending to his ear, something that Declan usually said more condescending for Ronan to hear. That Ronan was his responsibility, weighted with two connotations, of Ronan’s burdensome nature and of Declan’s somehow superiority.

Today, Ronan heard something else. Responsibility was, in fact, Declan’s burden.

Declan lowered his sunglasses, and Ronan noticed something he hadn’t in church, hadn’t when he had been decidedly not acknowledging Declan: a bruise under his left eye.
“Just promise me that you won’t go… drinking in abandoned fields at night. Keep a normal schedule so people will know if you’re missing. Answer your goddamn phone once in awhile. If not for me, for someone.”

“That’s asking a lot,” Ronan said.

“From you, yeah. Not from a normal person.”

“Sorry to disappoint.” No he wasn’t.

Declan sighed. He put his sunglasses back on and shifted his car back into drive. He swerved it onto the highway after a passing minivan, their route now back to the church.

“Are you just making this all the fuck up?” Ronan said. “To make me behave. Like some boogey man for grown ups?”

“Would I lie?” Declan asked. St. Agnes peaked into sight down the road.

“Yes,” Ronan said.

“Would I lie about this?” Declan said. This. Their father. And his legacy.

Ronan was silent.
Declan pulled into St. Agnes’ lot. Ronan’s BMW, which had once been his father’s BMW, was one of the few cars to remain.

“What about Matthew?” Ronan asked.

“I’ll watch out for him,” Declan said. “God knows you won’t let me watch out for you.”

#

When Ronan arrived back at Monmouth, late afternoon, both Adam and Gansey were there. No plans had been set in place, but it wasn’t shocking to find them both gathered. And Ronan hadn’t set out to his afternoon self-destructions with any forethought of keeping them secret.

“Are you bleeding?” Gansey asked, aghast and resigned at once.

Ronan pressed his tongue to the split in his lip. “Not anymore,” he said.

“You couldn’t even go to Mass without getting into a fight with Declan?” Gansey said, scolded.

“Not Declan,” Ronan said, then plopped down on the couch. His muscles ached in a glorious way he sought out after being dropped off back at his car. His instant reaction to being told to be cautious was to act out, sure, but it had been more than that.

“So you got into a fight with someone else because Declan pissed you off,” Gansey said.

It wasn’t a far reach. It had happened before. But it wasn’t the case this time, because, astonishingly, Declan hadn’t pissed Ronan off. Instead, he had baffled him.

“Who?” Gansey asked.

“Someone who deserved it,” Ronan said. He knew a few. He knew one in particular. Ronan might’ve only been nice to a select very few, and only in his specific way, but he also didn’t find any fun in bullying.

“I’m sure I’ll see in school on Monday,” Gansey said, then with a huff went off to the kitchen for a beverage. The entire impression being, I’m not angry, I’m just disappointed.

Adam, who had never seen Ronan on the tale end of a fight before, carried more concern -- compared to Gansey’s annoyance -- in the furrow of his brow as he sat down beside Ronan.

“What happened?” he asked in a low voice.

Ronan cricked his neck then cringed when it cricked a little too much. “Declan kidnapped me. He talked. He… wasn’t the fuck I was expecting. He said some stuff about Dad…”

That was the hard part out of all of it. Having an idea of someone, and then having that idea tainted.

“I needed to do something to make me feel better.”
“You’re insane,” Adam said. “How could you enjoy getting beat up?”

“It wasn’t just me getting beat up,” Ronan said. It wasn’t about getting beat up at all, at least not in totality. That was only part of it. It was the adrenaline. It was the physical assertion of both giving a punch and taking it. It was something ephemerally beyond that. When Ronan Lynch didn’t have control of the other pieces of his life, he could at least wrestle out control and victory in a fist fight.

It wasn’t something Gansey understood and it was definitely not something Adam would understand either, when he had never been equal grounds for a fight with anyone.

Gansey came out of the kitchen and tossed a bag to Ronan. Ronan placed it over his most painful bruise, one across his ribs, hidden by his shirt.

Adam shifted beside him. “Is that the same bag of peas…?”

“Yeah,” Ronan said. “We didn’t buy them to eat them. Best ice pack their is.”

Adam shook his head.

If Ronan was worried about his bruises, his propensity to fight as a coping mechanism, would be off-putting to Adam, it dissipated quick. Adam sat beside him, not looking disgusted. Confused, if anything. Two seperate people, living separate lives, and coping with them in separate ways. Yet still able to sit side by side.   

#

Ronan slide his headphones off his ears.

“What do you do,” he asked. “If your hero turns out to be the bad guy?”
Adam, who was using Ronan’s abdomen as a pillow as he read a some paperback for his lit class, tilted his head up the ceiling. Maybe he was staring at the same piece of peeling paint Ronan was.

“Is this a riddle?” Adam asked.

In the few days that passed since Declan had insinuated certain things about their father, Ronan had kept quiet about it, both to Gansey and Adam. His mind hadn’t kept silent about it though, raging on and over itself, messing with his sleep. Declan hadn’t laid out any proof and the childish part of Ronan wanted to live in ignorant denial, but it all sort of made sense.

“It’s a question,” Ronan said.

Was it a fair question to ask of Adam, though? A boy who probably never had any heroes.

“It’s about my dad,” Ronan said.

Adam laid his open book down on his chest. This wasn’t a conversation only half-listened to.

“Yeah?” Adam said, prompting.

“Declan said some shit,” Ronan said. “And that shit implied some other shit about my dad and… how he made his money.”

Adam hmmed, a noise that implied active listening, but gave no assessment yet.

“It might’ve not been safe,” Ronan said.

“Safe?” There were plenty a noble and hardworking professions that weren’t exactly safe.

“Legal,” Ronan added. How new information could twist all memories. The long “business trips” his dad took. The phone calls that would interrupt dinner and games of catch and board game night. Some stranger calling out Niall’s name when the family was out somewhere, and stone-like look on his face when he would order the rest of them into the car or inside wherever. How easy it was to overlook it as the world of adults that Ronan as a child didn’t yet understand. Now, with a little more but not all the facts, he could only loom up the worst conclusions.

“Do you still believe he loved you?” Adam asked.

“Yes,” Ronan said.

“I think if it were me,” Adam said. “That would be enough.”

Ronan shut his eyes. That wasn’t advice without merit, but it didn’t quell the tornado ongoing in his head or in his chest.

Ronan Lynch had already lost his father in the most brutal of ways; He felt like he was losing him again.  

Ronan reopened his eyes: “Up for another fucking field trip?”

The comment was flippant, but the sentiment was buried underneath was the ache of it. The anxiety. But Adam seemed to hear it all and found no need to comment. Instead, he joined Ronan in his car and then in his homeland. Ronan parked right next to the house, at the end of the driveway, this time.

“You okay?” Adam asked as Ronan lingered in the driver’s seat.

“It’s just a big moment,” Ronan said. “Bringing my fucking boyfriend home.”

There was no one in that home. That was the strange, brutal truth that everyone had to learn eventually, just some in more cruel circumstances than others -- the childhood you thought would go on forever would end.

There was a whisper of a grin on Adam’s face, but it failed to reach his eyes. Here was the burdensome truth: neither of them had a proper home to bring the other back to.

“Come on,” he said. He climbed out on the car, and stalked toward the house. He heard Adam’s door open and shut, and his following footsteps on the grass behind him.

Up the porch steps. No running away this time. It was never exactly just legality that kept Ronan away.

The keys weighed in palm. He kicked off his shoes at the baseboard beside the the front door. It was an old habit. One he fell back into without thinking. One did not just walk in dirt into his mother’s house.

From behind him, Adam laid a hand on Ronan’s shoulder. He was here, but he was letting Ronan lead the way.

He unlocked the door and stepped inside the familiar entrance hall. It was with less gravitas that he had thought. He touched the table that lay along the wall just inside the door, holding a lopsided ceramic bowl of his mother’s own creation still filled with loose change and keys that belonged to nothing and rubber bands and an unopened piece of mail. His fingertips came away dusty.

“So this is fucking it,” Ronan said. “Home.” His voice felt rusty.

He lead Adam up the stairs and to his bedroom. He remembered how tentative he felt when he had introduced Adam to Monmouth and allowed him that first time in his bedroom, and even introduced him to Gansey. That had all been exposures to little snippets of his soul, of the things that mattered, of the things he hid. But exposures of his present. This bedroom was an exposure of a past him that no longer existed except somewhere buried in his foundations. Ronan feared he wouldn’t even see himself in it himself anymore.

“It’s nice,” he heard Adam said, like an echo behind him. What did Adam really see in the sizable room, larger than the one at Monmouth, with the closet door that won't close due all the stuff packed in, the heaped over basket of clothes left their to be folded from over a year ago, the clutter of toys and games built up from a childhood filled of interests. The trapping of filled, wealthy, even spoiled childhood?  

Adam picked up an old model car from the dresser, ran his thumb over its crooked back wheel, giving it was whirl.

“Did you always like cars?” Adam said.

“I think every little boy does,” Ronan said. It was the standard toy given to little boys after all.

“I figured with the way you drive…”

Ronan took the model car from Adam’s hands, smoothed his fingers over the die cut metal.

“I didn’t care about driving,” Ronan said. “Until my dad died.” Saying it out loud was the first time it really pieced together in his head. With his thumb, he spun the car’s tire like Adam had. “The BMW… it was my dad’s. The first time I drove it… I had stolen it. I crashed. It was… two days after…”

Ronan set the model car back on the dresser, and then stepped back so it was out of reach.

Adam cleared his throat. “My dad taught me how to fix cars. He did it as a side job. I think it’s the only thing he’s ever been proud of me about.”

“He’s missing out,” Ronan said.

Adam betrayed a twitch of smile, but it faded away quickly. “Did you want anything from here?”

Ronan wanted a lot of things from this place: peace, absolution, to return, and to return to what it had once been. Not just a fullying functioning farm, but a place for the Lynch boys to be safe and happy.

“Get the car,” Ronan said of the model. He had no specific memories attached to it, none of power. But it was a piece of home. Like a seashell snatched off the beach as a proof of being there, he wanted this.

As they were leaving, almost to the front door, Adam said, “Hey, what’s this?” He reached into his mother’s ceramic bowl and plucked a envelope from its depths. On the front, in his father’s wiry script, it read, “Ronan.”

#

Ronan ran his fingers around the shape of the envelope over the narrow edges and the corners and over the long flat plane of the front and the line where the flapped was sealed down.

What could be in here? A lost birthday card. Some evidence to incriminate Niall’s murderer. A few bills for allowance money. A note explaining everything.

From her cage, Chainsaw cawled, or her yelping little version of one. Ronan pushed up from his bed. He tapped the envelope against his palm as he came to stand over her cage.

It could be the world or could be the most disappointing bit of nothing. He set the envelope aside on the messy dresser top.  

But for certain Ronan couldn’t open it, because it was the last thing his dad would ever give him. And then, what would he have left?

#

Ronan Lynch had seen a lot of Adam Parrish. He had seen him angry and in despair. Seen him closed off and vulnerable. Lying and honest. Afraid and so, so brave.

All of that, and he had never seen Adam Parrish cry.

Ronan had come to open the door after being annoyed with a minute of someone fumbling useless with keys and the lock outside. He had assumed it was Noah. Instead...

Adam wiped his hand under one of his red-rimmed eye, sucked in a jumpy breath, and said, “They found out.”

Chapter Text

Adam had just escaped the guillotine and his hands were still shaking.

“My mom was the only one there when I got home,” he said. Home. What a strange word. One he only used because there was nothing else concise enough for ‘the place that I live.’ It was hardly home in all the romantic notions of the word. It wasn’t his home at all, anymore.

Ronan, sitting cross-legged across from him on the floor, watched Adam with that intense expression of his. Like he had forgotten how to blink. Adam looked aside.

“She grabbed my arm and…” He touched the place on his bicep where he could still feel her phantom touch. She was feeble, mostly. But with her urgency and the crescents of her fingernails, it had felt like a claw. “‘Is it true?’” he said, echoing her words exactly.

He had known then, like being dunked underwater, unpleasant and sudden.  

“‘Is it true you’ve been kissing boys?’”

Only one boy, but Adam knew that wouldn’t matter.

He must’ve gone white. He must’ve gone something. He didn’t answer with words, but just as he had known, she knew.

“She told me I had to pack my things and leave. Leave before my father got home.” Adam blinked, and felt a wetness in his eyes that he hated. He was stronger than this. He had gotten used to this kind of rejection a long time ago.

“The thing is… I’m not sure if she just kicked me out, or if she saved me.”

Ronan lifted a hand. One that might’ve been intended to brush away a tear that Adam was pretending hadn’t fallen. Adam shied away from it. He couldn’t deal with touch right now. Even from Ronan. Ronan’s hand dropped like a brick back into his lap.

“You know what really sucks?” Adam said, then sniffled.

“This isn’t enough for you?” Ronan said.

Adam ran the back of his hand over his eyes, wiping away the tears. He was done with those.

“I was so close,” he said. “To walking out of there on my own. I really wanted to do that.”

The door cracked open behind them. Both Adam and Ronan turned to look. In entered the ever elusive Noah.

“Hey,” he said, casually, but a moment later seemed to take in the scene, and said more softly, “Hey.”

“Hey,” Adam replied, with a bare husk of a voice. Ronan said nothing at all.

“We having an overnight guest?” Noah said.

“Looks like it,” Ronan mumbled.

Noah held up the bag he was carrying, that would later reveal itself to be full of Chinese food. “Good thing I got extra.”

“I didn’t know Henrietta had a Chinese restaurant,” Adam said.

“We don’t,” Noah said, admitting that he had drive to the next town over to get it. “But sometimes I feel the need. The need for lo mein.”

A fleeting smile passed over Adam’s face, but he didn’t really feel it. Like he didn’t really taste the food as he ate, but it was better than growing weak and dizzy from hunger. Like he didn’t really understand the passage of time, right now, as he sat through it.

A little later, Noah put on a movie. A little later after that, Adam was blinking at the credits rolling by, realizing he couldn’t recall a single thing that had happened on screen.

Noah yawned, loudly. “It’s late. I’m tired. I’m going to bed.” Without any more ceremony, he got up and disappeared into his room.

Ronan got up next, and turned off the television. “I’m tired too,” he said, probably so Adam didn’t have to come up with the words himself.

Adam nodded, stood, picked up his backpack from the floor. Stuff to capacity, but still a measly collection of possessions. He made a thoughtful noise.

“What?” Ronan asked.

“I guess I don’t have to worry about emancipation anymore.”

Ronan blinked, his expression stoney. He could be thinking in so many directions that Adam didn’t have the emotional capacity to track at the moment.

“Can I touch you?” he asked.   

Adam hung undecided for a moment. Then, he nodded.

Ronan stepped forward. First, a hand found his shoulder. Then, Ronan shifted closer, tucking Adam into a hug. Adam couldn’t bring himself -- exhausted in all variables -- to raise his arms and embrace Ronan back, but he leaned in all the same.

#

Adam slept on the couch. He had taken one step beyond the bedroom doorway, laid his eyes on that narrow twin bed that he already spent nights and glorious days pressed together with Ronan on, and he just couldn’t stomach it. With Gansey away for a family thing, the entire main room of Monmouth was left for Adam.

“I just really need my space right now,” Adam had told Ronan, excusing himself away.

So he was left alone, in a space that loomed large around him, leaving him exposed and sleepless and like a foreign object.

A door creaked, but it wasn’t the almost soundless main door, or the familiar whine of Ronan’s bedroom. Out in the darkness stepped a figure, pale enough to be a phantom in the darkness.

“Are you sleeping?” Noah whispered.

“No,” Adam said.

Noah crossed to the kitchen. The sink ran. He came back out with a glass of water. But instead of returning to his room, he perked himself on the edge of the couch by Adam’s feet. Adam curled in his toes.

“Water?” Noah asked, holding out the glass.

Adam shook his head.

Noah took a tiny sip from the rim, then lowered it to rest on his bent knee. He sat there in profile, staring straight ahead, his eyelids dipped with tiredness.

“When people hurt you,” Noah said. “It’s not your fault…It takes a really long time to start believing that.” He ducked his head, blonde bangs skirting down over his eyes. “The first step, I think, is just pretending to believe it.”

With nothing else said or done, Noah stood up and vanished back into his room.

#

Morning came, the sun glowing bright through Monmouth’s large windows, rising Adam from his fitful sleep as soon as it rose.

Adam leaned up against the couch’s arm, and thought. Last night was for despair. Today was for making plans.

The door to Ronan’s room swinging open was a welcome punctuation.

“Hey,” Adam said, seeing him.

Ronan looked like he had slept as poorly as Adam. He crossed his arms. “Feeling better?”

Adam held out his arm, an entreatment for him to approach.

Ronan came close, and when close enough, Adam slipped his hand around his wrist and tugged him into taking a seat flush beside him.

He picked at the leather bands on Ronan’s wrist, an adoption of Ronan’s nervous habit.

“What happened to Noah?” he asked. Not what happened to him last night, but what happened to him , the nineteen year old who couldn’t move on.

“What matters is that he survived,” Ronan said. “Who cares if we’re all fucking broken, as long as we keep fucking going.”

Adam thought of Gansey, who’s near death in childhood kept him searching for some signs of the afterlife. He thought of Noah, and whatever trauma that was still haunting him. He thought of Ronan who wore the signs of his destruction on his body in scars and tattoos. He thought of himself, with his years of faded bruises and bumps of healed bones, who was sitting here today, one more day, always one more after the other.

Adam leaned his head against Ronan’s shoulder.

“Is the place in St. Agnes still available?”

“I think so, yeah,” Ronan said.

“Take me?” he asked.

And they went. Agreements were made and papers were signed. A trip to the thrift store was next, picking up the essentials of living.

Ronan helped him carry the new-used purchases up into the room. The small room was only made less impressive by the scant and weary possessions that barely filled it.

Adam sucked in a breath. It wasn’t much, but it was his.

Ronan leaned against the doorframe, observing Adam with his careful eyes. “I’m fucking glad you’re out of there,” he said.

Adam nodded once, tight.  

“I don’t lie,” Ronan said. “So I’ll just fucking say it. You getting out of there was more important to me than how it happened. But, for you, I’m sorry that it didn’t happen the way you wanted.”

#

Church bells rung. It was a more pleasant wake up call than the his father’s shout, his loud stomps out the door, or even Adam’s five dollar alarm clock. He blinked his eyes open, but remained in his bed, a thin mattress on an old frame. With nowhere to go this Sunday morning he laid appreciating these spare precious minutes he had to rest with no worries, timetables, or threats over his head.

Is this was freedom felt like?
If he listened, just listened, he could hear cars pulling into the lot below, car doors opening and slamming shut, and feet on the gravel. Voices. The organ was a strange but not unpleasant hum. Adam drifted back off to sleep.

He got up to his alarm an hour later, got dressed and got downstairs in time for the end of Mass, the congregation scattering out the main door, one peeling off and heading in Adam’s direction.

“Nice suit,” Adam said, as Ronan approached.

Ronan thumbed at the corner of his mouth. “Yeah. Don’t get any ideas.”

He was probably referring to ideas of having Ronan dress up on the regular. He probably would have no objection to the other ideas the slim cut, well-fitting suit on Ronan Lynch’s tall and broad-shouldered body was inspiring in Adam.

A boy with moppy curls, sun-bleached at the ends, caming trotting over to them.

“Hey, Ronan! Do you want to go out for lunch again?” he said.

The way Ronan’s expression softened, this only could’ve been Matthew.

Where Declan was hard but in a different way than Ronan, every inch of Matthew as a softer version of Ronan, with his light hair and his wide eyes, with the hint of baby fat still clinging around his face. He was Lynch handsome, but completely lacking the flint of it.

Matthew’s eyes darted between Adam and his brother. “Your friend can come too.” He pronounced friend like it was an odd word to associate with Ronan.

“Actually…” Ronan said to his brother, but made eye contact with Adam. He tilted his head in Matthew’s direction, and Adam understood the exact question he was trying to ask. Adam nodded.

“Matthew, this is Adam. My boyfriend.”

Matthew blinked twice as he processed this information. Then, in a mixed tone of mild offense and excitement, said, “I didn’t know you were dating anyone!”

Ronan gave him a soft shove to the shoulder. “I’m telling you now.”
“You really can come too,” Matthew said to Adam, with more enthusiasm than before.

A car honked. Declan waiting for Matthew.

“Maybe next time,” Ronan said.

Matthew’s mouth twisted, disappointed. “Alright… Nice to meet you, Adam.”

“You too.”

Before Matthew ran off, Ronan reached out to mock-cuff he back of his head. “Don’t go spreading it around town.”

Matthew trotted over to Declan’s car. Declan, through the driver’s window, raised a hand in a stoic wave. Adam thought it was meant for him, for Ronan had his hands stuck stubbornly in his pockets. Adam raised a hand in return.

“I’ve been accepted into the Lynch family,” he said.

Ronan snorted. “God help you.”

The other Lynch brothers drove off. The parking lot was emptying as people finished their conversations and drifted into their cars and away, leaving the lingering and stuffily quiet Ronan behind.

“Do you want to go for a drive?” he asked. It was a very Ronan Lynch thing.

“To where?”

Ronan shrugged, all shoulders. “Just drive.”

They loaded into the BMW, and just drive they did. Ronan was silent at the wheel, his awful electronic music playing at a volume Adam found tolerable if not pleasant. Every so often, Ronan would lift one hand from the wheel to pick at his leather bracelets on the other.

Whatever was he trying to think or not think about?

If Ronan hadn’t just introduced Adam to his brother as his boyfriend, he might have half a mind to believe Ronan was gunning up to break up with him.

Adam knew enough of the town and its surrounding roads to know that the paths Ronan was taking them on was ultimately directionless. They had back-tracked and u-turned enough. At the last moment, Ronan decided to take a turn, and made a quick swerve onto a mountain road, and then then were going up, up, up.

He parked them at an overlook -- the town sprawled out below.

“We’ve been here before,” Adam said. “That first night.”

“Yeah,” Ronan said, then was quiet as a closed drawbridge.

“I know something's bothering you,” Adam said. “You haven’t even taken off your tie.”

Ties, to Ronan, were detestable things. A part of his school uniform that was never worn neatly and striped away at the earliest possibility.

He reached his hands up to the knot, but Adam moved quicker, snatching up the end in his fingers. He pulled Ronan towards him.

“You should dress in a suit and tie more often.”

“What did I tell you about getting ideas?” Ronan said from between his teeth.

“Yeah, but these are kinky ideas.”

Ronan made a choking noise akin to an animal and a hairball. It was hardly a turn on, but Adam found his heart swelling with affection all the same.  

Adam filled up the space between them with a kiss.

He let his fingers linger on the side of Ronan’s face, were the stubble was blunt from two days out of school.

“What’re you thinking about?” he asked.

Ronan said, “Let’s keep driving.”

#

They ended up back in the lot of St. Agnes in about triple the time the trip, in its purest form, should’ve taken.  

“Do you want me to go?” Adam said.

Ronan had been quiet again for this later drive. Not uncharacteristically quiet for an often quiet person, but quiet in a way that carried weight, like a rain soaked jacket.

“No,” Ronan said. “Do you need to do anything today?”

“Homework,” Adam said. With all the moving drama, it had been pushed off.

Adam sighed. He couldn’t stop the pinch of irritation that seeped into his voice as he asked again, “What’s bothering you?”

“It’s not a fucking bother,” Ronan said, almost snapped.

“Alright then,” Adam challenged. “What is it?”  

Ronan took a big, sucking breath through his nose, mouth cemented closed. He released it a second later.

“I love you.”

Adam stilled.

His brain spun as it tried make sense of the sounds his ears had just absorbed. Surely Ronan had said something like ‘fuck you’ or ‘I love food’ not that exact combination of those three little words. Certainly Adam had just misheard.

But Adam looked and Ronan was looking right back over at him.

Ronan, who didn’t talk, had just scrounged up the most vulnerable words inside him, and gave them to Adam Parrish.

“You don’t have to say anything. I just…” Ronan pounded once on the steering wheel. “I wanted you to know.”

Adam couldn’t say anything. How could he when he couldn’t even draw breath?

“Ronan…” But what could he say when he couldn’t think?

He reached out a touched Ronan’s face again, that stubble. Ronan ducked his head into it, pressed a chaste kiss to Adam’s palm. “Go do your homework,” he said.

The steps up to his new room grew steeper with each step taken, more effort, more muscle strain, more aching time.

It wasn’t all that long ago that Adam had been living in fear, contemplating what he did and didn’t deserve, and finding a weird, comfortable place notched beside Ronan -- in his car, in his hands, against his lips. And here else -- in his heart, in his soul, in his life.

Adam gripped the banister as he reached the landing. Here he was, not long after in the scope of his so-far-lived life. Adam Parrish -- self-sufficient, with friends, freed. Adam Parrish -- loved and in love.

Oh.

Adam ran back down the stairs. It wasn’t about deserving at all, he thought, as he kept careful, speedy balance.

The BMW was at the mouth of the parking lot, but Ronan hadn’t driven away yet. Had he been as lost in his head as Adam had been these last few moments? Of course he had. Ronan Lynch might hide it, but his mind and his soul were busy, with turmoil and with care.

Seeing Adam, Ronan backed up the car and rolled down the window. He propped his elbow on the edge. “Yeah?”

Adam leaned onto the open edge of the window as he tried to catch his breath. Useless. Love -- of any kind -- wasn’t about what you deserved at all. It was about what was accepted and freely given.

With half the air but all the conviction needed, Adam said, “I love you too.”

Ronan released a huff of breath, like it was an explosion he had been holding in tight in his chest for hours. He seemed looser when he said back, “Are you sure that’s a fucking good idea?”

“Shut up,” Adam said, and leaned in the window to make him.

Chapter Text

One Year Later

The papers were spread out like a fan on the floor, Adam sitting cross-legged at its center, when Ronan stepped into the small room about St. Agnes. He took care to stop an inch short from standing on even a single stray corner.

“More college applications?” he said.

Adam tucked a pen behind his ear. “I just have to finish up these ones for my safety schools and I’ll be done.”

“What the fuck is a safety school?”

Pushing up on his knee, Adam got to his feet. He held a palm flat at the height of his forehead almost like a salute. “Reach school.” He moved his hand to nose level. “Match school.” He lowered his hand to his chest. “Safety school.”

Ronan scoffed. “You don’t need safety schools. You’re a fucking genius.”

“Well, that’s flattering,” Adam said. “Let’s hope the admissions departments think the same.”

“If they don’t, they’re idiots,” Ronan said. “And I’ll go beat them up for you.”

“How romantic,” Adam said, dryly. He rolled his neck on his shoulders, creating a series of little pops. “If you can make your way to my bed without stepping on anything, I’ll meet you there.”

Ronan tiptoed his way in a strange, zag-footed way to the bed and Adam did the same in his own discovered pathway. They both sat on the edge of it, side by side. Adam cupped Ronan’s chin to pull in close enough to press a hello kiss to the corner of his mouth.  

“How’s the lawyer stuff going?” he asked.

Ronan ran a hand over his face. “Like fucking hell,” he said. “But it’s going.”

A month ago, near the bitter dawn of his senior year of high school, Ronan had gurnied up the emotional balls to open the letter ascribed to him in his father’s handwriting that Adam had found in the Barns. It was an updated Last Will and Testament, dated more recent than the one on file that barred the Lynch sons from their home. The process to authenticate it was a labor.

Ronan began to play with a loose thread along the inside seam of Adam’s cargo pants, right above the knee. Adam laid a hand over Ronan’s to settle it.

“As much as I love anything that involves you and me on the same bed,” Ronan said. “We’ve got to get fucking going.”

“Right,” Adam said, checking the watch on his wrist, finally replaced. “Noah.”

#

“I can’t believe you’re making me go out to eat at the place I work,” Blue said, shutting the camaro’s passenger door behind herself. Gansey had pulled into Nino’s lot just before Ronan, coming from the opposite direction. Ronan had taken the opportunity to flip Gansey off through the windshield.

(“With affection,” Ronan had said when Adam had scolded him about it.)

“It was Noah’s pick,” Gansey said with a chagrined shrug. Apparently he liked eating At Nino’s even when Blue wasn’t going to be his waitress to harass.

Noah was already seated in his favorite corner booth when they amassed through the door, which they could’ve guess from his mustang parked diagonally in a spot in the parking lot.

(“He just seems like the type of person I’d hate, but I don’t,” Blue commented casually on their way inside. Then to Gansy, “Kind of the same with you.”)

They all stuffed into the booth, Ronan sitting pressed flush up against Adam on the end so he could stick his long legs into the aisle.

Ronan’s phone rang. “Goddammit.”  He pulled it out of his pocket like it was a detestable rodent. He stared at the caller id. “God fucking dammit.” He brushed out of the booth.

Gansey pointed over his shoulder in the direction Ronan had stalked away. “Did he just answer the phone?” he said. “But Adam’s sitting right here.”

Adam shrugged, and stared after Ronan too. Ronan jerked open the front door, bells clashing, and went outside.  

Gansey picked up the menu. “Oh, they have avocado as a topping now.”

Blue laid a hand over his wrist. “Gansey, no.”

“Screw Ronan, I’m hungry,” Noah said cheerfully, lifting up the menu. While they were all in different stages of denial, they all knew they’d been succumbing to whatever weird concoction Noah decided to order.

A few minutes later, when Blue was trying to convince Noah out of a combination of blue cheese and double black olives (“No one here wants to eat that!” “I know, isn’t it gross!”), Ronan returned. Hands stuffed in his pockets, he slide back into the booth beside Adam.

Adam tapped his knuckles against Ronan’s knee under the table. “Everything okay?” he asked in an undertone.

Ronan pressed the back of his knuckles against Adam’s, a slice of an answer.

Dinner went on, full of banter and one pizza with Noah’s inglorious concoction of toppings and the rest with toppings to be shared by people who actually wanted to enjoy the food they were consuming.

When they left over an hour later, Adam slotted his hand into Ronan’s in the darkness of the parking lot. Without as many people to desperately keep secrets from they didn’t have to be completely secretive, but still found no need to invite trouble.

“I can’t believe Noah’s leaving,” Adam said. Tonight had been Noah’s going away dinner. He was half-packed up in Monmouth. In January he would finally be starting college, but had decided to spend a few months back in his hometown first.

“It’s about fucking time,” Ronan said, although Adam knew he didn’t mean it, knew he was suffering under that the pressing weight of losing a friend, even if he wasn’t really lost.

It was also an echo of what was to come, at the end of this school year, at the end of the summer following it. Ronan was barely scraping by in school and had his dreams set elsewhere than higher education, but Adam and Gansey had other ambitions. Ambitions that took them far out of town, out of Virginia, away from Ronan. He had to be thinking about it now. Adam was.

“Do you have time to go somewhere tonight?” Ronan asked as he got in the car.

“Sure,” Adam said. “The applications will be there when I get back.”

He hoped it as a joke, but Ronan didn’t react. It didn’t take many turns for Adam to realize where they were going, so it was no surprise when they turned down the dirt road that lead to the Barns.

When they climbed out of the BMW, parked near the farmhouse, Ronan took a long, stabilizing breath. It was like very air here was different; the correct climate for Ronan Lynch to be living in.

“Earlier… that was Declan that called. It’s official.”

Adam blinked. The updated will. Which gave the Barns back to the Lynch brothers.

“This is great!”

“Yeah,” Ronan said, his voice a puff of breath. Above, the clouds shifted, clearing the moon to pour out its light on them. Adam could see the softness of what was subtly there on Ronan’s face -- the barely there smile that wasn’t conscious, just contentment, and the lack of any tension around his eyes or jaw. A relaxed Ronan that Adam had rarely seen, not even in sleep.

“You’re happy,” Adam said.

“I am?” Ronan said, turning to him, hands sliced into his pockets. A moment’s compilation crossed over him. “I am.”

Adam just waited with him.

“I want to show you something.” Instead of leading Adam to the house, Ronan led him to one of the barns. Inside smelled like hay and mildew. Ronan went up a ladder to a hayloft; Adam followed.

“It’s not really anything fucking special,” Ronan said, sitting down and wrapping his arms around his knees. “I would hang out up here as a kid. Hide.”

Adam settled down beside him, more careful in the unfamiliar dark. “Hide from what?”

Ronan shrugged. “If I got upset or something. When you have two brothers, you piss each other off a lot, even when you all fucking get along.”

“Bring any boys up here?” Adam said, although he knew Ronan hadn’t. He had already admitted to Adam being his first everything. First kiss, first date, first boyfriend, and over the summer they had shared their first time.

It was fun to tease him still.

“Finally,” Ronan replied. He reached over and found Adam’s hand without even looking. He always seemed able to know where Adam’s hands were and how to locate them the fastest.

He kissed along the shape of Adam’s knuckles, telling Adam in between about the animals they used to keep here and the ones he planned to get to fill it up again.

“It sounds amazing,” Adam said, and honestly. Although he never imagined a farm as a dreamland before, the picture Ronan painted sounded like one.

Ronan sighed. He sunk his weight against Adam’s side, and ran his thumb across the sensitive part of hand, as if palm reading.

“What’s going to happen…” he said. “When you leave?”

“That’s a long way away,” Adam said.

“Not that long.”

“No, not that long.”

Ronan suck in a breath that Adam heard if didn’t see.

“You said you were never coming back,” he said.  

Adam opened his mouth to say when, then remembered. “That was a long time ago.”

“Not that fucking long.”

Adam shook his head. “No.” Not that long ago. They had been dating long enough that it been something hurtful to say even if Adam hadn’t intended it. They hadn’t been dating long enough for Adam, in his stunted mind, to understand all the consequences.  

“Ronan…” he said. “I said that before I knew I loved you. I thought the only things in this town were the things to hate.”

Ronan scoffed. “Even all those times we were sneaking around?”

Adam ducked in his chin. “At first, I thought… I thought you’d get tired of me. That I was… an experiment. I didn’t know you then.”

Ronan was brusque. He was sharp-edged. He could even be cruel. But he didn’t play games with other people’s emotions.

“Before… before I ever came to Boyd’s,” Ronan said. “I saw you in the grocery store. You were wearing this tight little t-shirt and it gave me a fucking sexuality crisis right there in a canned goods aisle.”

“Are you saying you were my secret admirer?”

Ronan tucked his face into Adam’s neck. “Fucking something.”

“You never told me that.”

“I am fucking now.”

Adam dragged his finger around the shell of Ronan’s ear; his breath puffed against Adam’s skin.

“When I go away to college,” Adam said. “I don’t want to break up… I’ll make it work.”

Ronan pressed a kiss the spot on Adam’s neck that made him shiver.   

Making a long distance relationship last seemed accomplishable in comparison to everything else that had played out in Adam Parrish’s life. His life had been configuring pennies into enough to eat dinner and surviving his father. He had taken himself from trailer park and now he was applying to colleges with confidence. And he had done it all on his own. That is, except for this last year.

Sometimes Adam still had to remind himself. He wasn’t alone anymore. He didn’t have to soldier on solo.

Adam amended: “We will.”