Chapter Text
Blue Sargent had been kissed exactly one proper time in her seventeen years of life, and it was not by Richard Campbell Gansey the Third.
This had not been nearly as ethically distressing before herself and the aforementioned student of Aglionby Academy – the sort of boy she’d sworn once upon a time to stay away from, a fact which she now reflected upon with a twinge of embarrassment – had officially cemented their ‘dating’ status. It had been even less distressing back when she hadn’t known what she was missing, back when she still thought she’d perhaps never kiss a boy in her entire life. (Funnily enough, the boy she’d broken that rule with was also an Aglionby student, though she wasn’t sure if that quite counted when he hadn’t technically attended school since being murdered seven years ago.)
Unfortunately, “before” and “back when” were roughly the equivalent to “not now;” meaning, in short, that at current time and place, Blue was in a tentative, terrifying, and completely tormenting relationship with the illustrious Richard Gansey.
And that the one kiss she’d been allowed in her lifetime had not been with him.
Blue didn’t like the feeling of guilt. Logically, there was no reason to feel guilty for having kissed Noah. She hadn’t been with Gansey then; it had been Adam she couldn’t kiss. And both of them had agreed that it was just to see. (How badly she wanted to regret it! How horrible it was knowing, and how desperately she would never give it up.) But still, the niggling feeling of hiding something from him, and for a few days now the anxiety had been growing like a tangle of worms behind her sternum, wondering what would happen if Noah brought it up, if Ronan suspected she was hiding something and told Gansey, if Cabeswater or Gansey’s mattress or the pool table suddenly sprang to life and implicated her crime?
It was after four or so days of trepidation, the worrying growing each hour and taken out mercilessly on her poor skeins of yarn (no scarf in the world had any business being this long, but fiercely gripping metal knitting needles is, she thought, a slightly safer stress fidget than chewing her lower lip to shreds – besides, the latter just made her think more about kissing), that Orla apparently grew sick of her “bad vibes” and stomped into the bathroom without knocking to declare:
“Just freakin’ talk to your Richie Rich boyfriend already, little emo! Mary Magdalena you are so fixated.”
Flushed and furious and promptly yelling at Orla to not invade her private moments with the only proper mirror in the house, Blue later reeled in embarrassed shame.
All things reluctantly admitted, though, Orla was right. Even if it was ridiculous, or even if it would ruin things and make them awkward, it was eating at her, and it wouldn’t stop until she talked to Gansey.
Which was how she ended up on the second-floor landing of Monmouth Manufacturing in rolled-up dungarees, a sunhat, and a shirt made out of repurposed tablecloth, hands wringing and absolutely determined that she would not back out of this conversation, no matter how terrible it was. In her head, she hoped very very loudly that Noah would find someplace else to be for this. Please get the message, she prayed.
To her unspeakable relief, it was Gansey who answered the door. He was still in his school uniform and looked politely surprised, and Blue realized that it was quite possible he had only arrived back at Monmouth shortly before she. She did her best to suppress a rising heat in her cheeks, having neglected to consider that.
“Well, hello, Jane,” said Gansey pleasantly.
Blue took a breath.
“Ihavetotellyousomething.”
She could see the bulge of his throat pressing thickly from behind his collar. A faint recognition that maybe she shouldn’t have phrased it like that tugged at her like a light pull, and she had to again forcefully strengthen her resolve.
Carefully, ever-gracious: “Please, come in.”
She did.
Gansey wandered over to the kitchen-bathroom-laundry and fetched himself a bottle of apple juice, then offered her any beverage she’d like. She snorted, but at his strained expression, acquiesced.
After taking a long draught from his own juice, eyebrows knotted like yachting rope, Gansey gestured to offer Blue the couch. She went and perched on it, wishing she weren’t wearing boots so she could lace her toes together like Maura did when she was anxious. They were itching for some sort of distracting sensation. Talking to people was hard. Talking to boyfriends were hard. She should have listened to past Blue and stayed away from boys.
“So,” said Gansey, tight as a topsail and upsettingly Abercombie-esque. “What can I do for you, Jane?”
She thumbed the cap of her Snapple, chewing the inside of her cheek, then abruptly pushed herself up back to standing. Being seated felt unnatural, especially wound as tensely as she was right now. Upright, she faced him, stern and stubborn.
“... IkissedNoah.”
Gansey’s expression, which had been braced, suddenly fell slack, eyes widening and the corners of his mouth dropping tension. His lips parted, ever-so-slightly, in surprise. A horrid trepidation was twisting inside Blue’s chest, but so far, the pieces she could observe just added up to… something unrecognisable.
“I –” she blurted, at the same time as Gansey breathed out a single, relieved,
“Oh.”
They both blinked at each other, then stumbled over their clashing words, each seeking to acquiesce to the other. Gansey won out for speaking privileges.
“I just – I’m sorry. That wasn’t what I was expecting to hear at all. I had to process, so sorry, Jane.”
“No! I mean, no, god, it’s totally fine, seriously, process all you need.” Blue suddenly wanted to sit again, but plopping back on the couch seemed like it would make having stood at all pointless, so she found Gansey’s desk with her back and leaned against it. Don’t chew your fingernails. It’s gross, scolded Orla’s voice in her head, and she tried to resist blanching at the idea that Gansey might think a bad habit like that might make her Undignified or Base.
Gansey, in the meantime, seemed altogether unconcerned with Blue’s fingernails, instead exhaling a thoughtful breath. He seemed entirely too calm.
“Well, then. You kissed… Noah? That’s, what you wanted to tell me?”
Heat fought to her cheeks. “Yes.”
“I see.” His thumb was rubbing over his bottom lip infuriatingly. “I… did this happen while we… Or, well. Rather, after we started being together?”
Blue blinked at him. Once. Twice. Then she remembered to speak. “No! It was – I mean, no, before that. We were just… talking. And he was being very sympathetic. And we were just, talking.” She’d said that already. She winced, and clarified, “About… how I couldn’t really, you know. Kiss. Anyone. With my curse.”
She eyed Gansey carefully for reactions. He no longer seemed either strained or embarrassed, just interested, leaning forward with that tilt of the head he always did when he was on the phone with Mallory. With a rush of tentative relief, she continued.
“It kind of just happened. I mean – well. It was Noah’s idea. He can’t die because he’s dead, and, I dunno. You know. I said yes.” She did not want to think about what that prickling warmth indicated about the color of her cheeks right now, instead bravely plowing on. “It was an experiment. It only happened once. It won’t happen again – I mean, obviously. It was just… I just… wanted to see.”
By the end of that sentence, Blue found that she felt very, very small. Not because she was embarrassed, or ashamed; oddly enough, that had begun to pass, and seemed on its way to being completely gone. Instead, it was the feeling of having to once again acknowledge, this time out loud, the fact that a kiss, a simple kiss, was not on the list of things Blue Sargent could have in any foreseeable stretch of future. It felt like a fairy tale; it felt like a prison probation. She would only ever get the one time, the kiss of the dead. She unwrapped her grip from the cranberry Snapple in her hands and twisted off the cap, bringing it to her lips to swallow in some kind of rebellion.
There had been silence from Gansey during her reflection, but now, glancing up at her with befuddling innocence, he said, “Noah can kiss?”
A tendril of resentment sneaked up and wrapped around Blue’s introspection. Miniscule microseconds of recovery from the question hardened it into fury: That. That. THAT was his reaction?? Hoping furiously for Gansey’s sake that he was suffering from shock and not simply too divinely self-assured to be at all ruffled by the fact that his girlfriend had kissed his roommate before him (something which she had been avidly defending as not unethical previously to herself, but right now it seemed like some sort of horrific slight that he was unbothered), Blue puffed an uncertain but certainly displeased breath through her nose.
“Yes, Gansey!” She had no idea what she was about to rail, but she could positively feel the volcano powering up its eruption. “Noah can kiss. It’s completely shocking, I know, except that it’s not, because he was a normal human boy for his entire life up until seven years ago, and he can KISS and I KISSED HIM and it was very nice! In fact, it was marvelous! It was something I’d altogether long to do again except that I can’t!”
That was it, she thought. That was why she was mad. It was nice to have figured it out. “I can’t ever kiss the person I want to kiss, and it’s super grand, by which I mean it royally sucks, MISTER Richard Gansey. And gosh, you know, I would have thought that meant anything? But I guess it doesn’t matter all that much to you, Mister I-Could-Kiss-Whoever-I-Wanted-To. Well, guess what? You can’t kiss me, so ha ha to you. And to me. Are you satisfied?”
Once her vision stopped flashing red, she calmed down enough to notice Gansey properly. He seemed to have aged thirty years since she’d been paying attention; not with worry or shame or even weariness at being yelled at. He looked old with sorrow. Her heart dropped suddenly; having risen with seizing and frustration it now floated downwards, deflated of energy.
Gansey did not look satisfied. He did not look satisfied at all, he did not look like it didn’t matter to him. He did not look amused or superior (how was that always her fear, still, despite how she had grown to know him?), nor did he look bitter or scolded. He just looked sad.
He smiled at her, and looked no happier as he did so. “I’m rather envious of Noah right now. I don’t think I ever really imagined a world in which his life would be so appealing to me.”
As her heart had deflated, the rest of Blue sank in on herself now too. Her nose tickled, and she ignored it.
“I’m not… mad, Blue,” said Gansey next. “Aside from the fact that you did nothing wrong – like you said, it was before we were even together – I just can’t think of anything I’d hate worse in the world than to think that because of me, you would never be kissed.”
His eyes, the hazel of thousand-dollar brandy, swam in hers. “You deserve to be kissed, Jane.”
A thrill entirely incongruent with the mess of emotions she’d cycled through for the past several minutes surged from her stomach up to her ears and down to her toes.
“... Yes, well.” The thrill couldn’t quite reconcile with the stubborn stone in her stomach. “I can’t. So, I had my one time.”
She tucked a lock of hair behind her ears that she knew would float back the moment she released it. “Now I can die not a lip-virgin, I guess.” Then the recollection that this was Gansey compelled her to correct. “Or. Live. You know what I mean. I’ve had my first kiss. Now it’s done.”
Sometime halfway through her sentence, Blue’s gaze had floated up to the distant ceiling. She puffed out her cheeks, then released the air held inside them. A few seconds of letting her gaze blur out and fade back in experimentally soon revealed a Gansey standing over her. He had walked over to the desk, and was gazing at her curiously, as if waiting for her to come back down to earth.
Flushes were traitorous things.
“Jane Sargent, if I could be Noah Czerny right now, I would kiss you one hundred million thousand times until no inch of you was left remaining that hadn’t been cherished exactly as much as it deserves to.”
Her throat trembled.
“One hundred million thousand isn’t a real number.”
And then all at once, he was Gansey-Boy again; confident and golden and just brimming with a welcoming smile, his very gaze a handshake to all in his presence, offensively handsome and every tanned inch of him doing something quite awful to Blue’s horrid teenage hormones.
“Quite so, Jane,” he said cheerily. “Also quite so: the fact of the time, which very regretfully informs me that I’m late for picking up Adam.”
Stuttering, Blue forced out a, “You – are so dramatic.” This had all happened so fast, somehow. Hadn’t it? She wasn’t quite sure. “Fine. That’s it. That’s all I needed to tell you. I’m glad you’re not upset. You’re late for Adam, I’m late for a date with homework. We should all be quite glad we’re sensible enough not to turn this into an episode of Degrassi.”
That pleasantly tilted head indicated that Gansey had probably never watched a teen-targeted TV show in his life, and it made her desperately want to roll her eyes and propose to him all at once.
“Don’t forget your Snapple,” he reminded, starting a leisurely stride towards the door. Then, a little more hesitant, a little more real: “I’m glad you told me. Really. It means something that you wanted me to know.”
Small and expansive and dizzy and altogether uninterested in the barely-touched bottle of Snapple (which she took along anyway to allow Gansey to feel more like a gracious host), Blue nodded and followed him out to the landing.
“Yes, well,” she said. “It seemed like the sort of day for telling ghost stories.”
He laughed, unrestrained and gentle, and side by side, they made way down the stairs – Gansey finding her hand to squeeze at the bottom of the landing, her palm cupped in both of his, the closest imitation of a parting kiss that felt safe enough to share. Outside the door, she retrieved her bike while he drew around to the Camaro.
“I don’t suppose you’d accept a ride back home, Jane?” he offered, smile saying he already knew the answer.
“No, I don’t suppose I would,” she said, kicking out her bike stand and hopping on it to find the pedals. “Tell Adam I’m sorry you were late.”
“I will,” he promised, and, pushing her legs to start the bicycle rolling, Blue Sargent blew Richard Gansey a cheeky air kiss of the sort she would never make solid.
It had been, so far, a day.