Work Text:
Ronan Lynch was perched tensely on the edge of his bed, tinkering with the buttons on his phone — screen on, screen off, screen on, screen off — and decidedly not thinking about Adam Parrish. He was not thinking about Adam's ragged thumbnails, or the vaguely sunburnt tips of his ears, or the fresh scab on his right elbow. He didn't even notice any of those things, in fact, so how could he be thinking about them? He threw his phone across the room, blinked, watched it sink into the quicksand of pungent clothes he hadn't washed in too many weeks.
Adam was in class. Ronan was not in class, because going to class wasn't a thing he did anymore. He mostly hung out at the Barns, trying to wake the cows up or, when he got too angry about not being able to wake the cows up, indiscriminately hammering nails into fences and pretending like he was accomplishing something. Or, like today, he sat in his old room that was still kind of his room at Monmouth Manufacturing and didn't think about Adam and tried his best not to bang his skull against the wall.
Ronan sighed, a deep thing that brought his shoulders to the very brink of his earlobes. Then he scurried off the bed and dug his phone back out of the laundry pile.
He backed up until his knees hit mattress and texted Gansey: r u at school
Gansey replied a few minutes later: It's 2 PM on a Friday. Then: Yes, Ronan, I'm at school.
is parrish with u
Yes.
tell him im picking him up when hes done with class
A moment. He wants to know why?
why not
The phone was ringing. The screen flashed DICK THE THIRD over an unflattering photo of Gansey that made Ronan laugh every time he looked at it. Ronan stared at it for a second, then accepted the call.
It was Adam on the other end. "What do you want, Lynch?"
Ronan flopped backwards on the bed. Adam's voice in his ear — the slight twang of it, quiet but not soft, perpetually a little annoyed if it wasn't too busy being tired — made his stomach do something embarrassing. "You're the one who called me, Parrish."
Adam made an unamused sound. "I've got class in three and a half minutes," he said, a warning. Ronan could hear the slam of a locker in the background.
"I'm bored," Ronan said. It was the truth, if only part of it.
After a beat of silence that made Ronan wonder if Adam had learned to read minds on top of all the other bizarre, magical shit he could already do, Adam said, "If you want to hang out with me, you can just say so." Then: "I'm not working today."
Ronan said, "I know." It wasn't quite I want to hang out with you, but it was close.
"I'll see you in an hour."
The Aglionby parking lot pissed Ronan off, irrationally, like even when he just had to sit there with his music blasting and the pads of his fingers drumming against the steering wheel his blood pressure still wanted to rise to a frightening level. Too many teenage boys in impeccably pressed chinos loosening their ties and lounging against expensive cars as though they weren't all bootlickers, deep down, like their asses didn't lift off their seats every time they threw their hands in the air and groveled for the chance to show off how much they knew about differential equations.
It was a gloomy ass day, UV index in the negatives, but Ronan still kept his sunglasses on so he didn't have to acknowledge any of the former classmates who tried to catch his eye. Either they wanted to talk to him because he was the village screw up and the fact of it gave them some sick sense of superiority, which Ronan was not about to entertain, or because they were self-proclaimed tortured rich boys who thought they could relate to him even though they actually knew fuck all about what it was like to be Ronan Lynch. Both options gave him acid reflux, so he just cranked the music up louder and tossed his head back against the headrest.
"You look constipated as hell." Adam had appeared, suddenly, curling his fingers around the open passenger side window and peering inside. The collar of his shirt looked freshly starched, and he probably knew more about differential equations than any of the bozos milling around them, but the difference was that he really, truly needed to and Ronan was very aware of that. His inexpertly chopped hair fluttered a little, in the wind.
Ronan's blood pressure was at a critical high. He slid his sunglasses down to the tip of his nose and said, dryly, "I don't give a shit."
That got a brief grin out of Adam, who straightened and tapped on the rear window until Ronan rolled it down. Then he tossed his bag onto the backseat, carefully, and swung himself into the car, carefully. He instinctively twisted the volume knob all the way to the left as he clicked his seatbelt into place. He was the only person besides Ronan who could touch the stereo without losing a finger, but, still, Ronan half-heartedly swatted Adam's hand away before turning the music off entirely.
"Where are we going?" Adam asked. There was a translucent eyelash stuck on the deep wrinkle beneath his left eye.
Ronan's agitated fingers tapped the steering wheel more quickly, even though there was no beat to tap along to. He shrugged.
Adam angled his body towards Ronan, a kneecap pressed into the glovebox. The whole car smelled like Irish Spring. "Monmouth?"
"Gansey said he was bringing Cheng and the pipsqueak over after school." Ronan frowned. He didn't have to explain to Adam that sometimes his best friend's girlfriend and their boyfriend unintentionally found themselves playing a game called Who can talk the loudest? and sometimes (most of the time, nowadays) it gave him the kind of headache that he could feel in the back of his neck.
Adam snorted. "You shouldn't call her that," he said, but he didn't really mean it. "We could just hang out at mine?"
Ronan thought about it, tucking his limbs into that cramped space, accidentally touching Adam every six seconds because there was hardly anywhere else to go, the scent of Adam's boyish soap and church incense everywhere. Heat rushed to his cheeks. It had been weeks since he had last slept on that floor, inches from that mattress that was barely a mattress, and his mind wouldn't let him linger on the fact that Adam was kind of disappointed about it even though he clearly was. He shook his head.
"Want to take me to the Barns?"
"Fuck, no," Ronan responded too quickly, and Adam cocked an eyebrow at him, so he clenched the steering wheel tighter and said, "I can't— I keep trying to— I just need to not be there right now, okay?"
The lot was starting to clear out around them, the seniors growing bored of the spectacle that was High School Drop Out Ronan Lynch and filing out to prepare for their thrilling Friday night plans of drinking Mad Dogs and tossing ping-pong balls into plastic cups. Ronan's knee bounced. Adam looked at Ronan's fingers, his knuckles now a ghostly shade of white, and hummed. Before he could say anything, though, Ronan bared his teeth and said, voice low, "Don't you start psychoanalyzing me right now."
Adam put his hands up defensively. "Wasn't gonna."
They sat there, then, quiet, and it wasn't awkward because it never was, but Ronan still wanted to die, a little bit. He wished he could smoothly invite Adam into his car and smoothly whisk him away somewhere without even having to think about it, not because Adam needed him to be that person but because Ronan just needed something to go right, for once. He'd been sleeping like shit and dreaming worse and now he was bleeding anxieties in the driver's seat while the boy he— while Adam waited for him to do something, anything at all. He wanted to offer up something easy, to ask Hey, why don't we go for ice cream? or something, but going for ice cream felt monumentally stupid after everything, like they couldn't just lick samples on tiny wooden spoons after Ronan had been so openly willing to sacrifice himself with Adam's possessed hands around his throat.
"Here." Ronan dug something out of the center console, before he could overthink it, and haphazardly tossed the object in Adam's direction. He pulled his sunglasses back up over his eyes while Adam's hands fumbled with the container.
Adam examined it from every angle. Ronan's brain had covered the thing with some sort of nonsensical characters and, embarrassingly, what maybe could have been Adam's face if Adam's face had been sloppily etched into a rubber stamp and stamped with a very watery, green ink. "What is it?"
"It's like, a first aid ointment or something," Ronan said nonchalantly. He picked at a loose thread in the distressed knee of his jeans, unraveling until it wrapped all the way around his finger. He watched, with interest, as his fingertip turned faintly blue. "That scab on your elbow's been looking nasty."
It was silly, it was so silly, and Adam probably should have cracked a joke about how his whole medicine cabinet was full of Ronan originals, at this point, about how Ronan could have started his own pharmacy, but he just leaned over the back of his seat to tuck the ointment into the front pocket of his backpack and said, quietly, "Thanks." Then he looked at his hands, clasped together on his lap, and asked, "You know how Persephone left me that address book before she— you know?"
Ronan knew. There had been no explanation, just a tiny spiral notepad in an offensive shade of purple with a sticky note on it labeled ADAM. It was full of handwritten addresses with no names attached to them, and neither Maura nor Calla had had a clue what any of them were, so Adam had just decided to meticulously go down the list and visit each one. Usually he went alone, but sometimes he brought Ronan with him, or, if he was in a particularly amicable mood, Gansey or Blue or Henry or some combination of the three. He'd even gone to Dollar General and bought a tiny spiral notepad of his own, so he could take notes on what he found. He refused to write in the address book itself.
Most of the places on the list were in need of ley line restoration, a task which Adam always dutifully completed because even though he always vibrated a little bit, afterwards, he also glowed, seeping magic from his skin in a way that even Ronan could feel in his chest. A few of the addresses led Adam to the homes of people who had met Persephone — in their doctoral program, at the grocery store, in line for a gas station bathroom in the middle-of-nowhere Georgia — and inevitably been struck by her. They would offer him cups of tea or coffee or juice and tell him stories that would have sounded made up if they had been about anyone other than Persephone, or sometimes they just sat on the opposite end of a table and thought about her and didn't say a word. The shitty part was that some of the addresses seemed to lead him nowhere at all, but there was no way to know that beforehand, so Adam still tried them all. Ronan, when he joined, would wait in the car unless Adam explicitly asked him not to. Even if he did wait, he could always tell — by whether or not Adam talked on the drive home, by how tensely he held his shoulders — which type of place it had been.
So Ronan said, "Yeah."
"There's this one address that I've been avoiding because it's kind of far." Adam shuffled in his seat. "If you want, we could go."
Ronan pushed his sunglasses on top of his head and grinned. Chasing down a mysterious address left behind by a dead psychic was much more attainable than getting ice cream, which was all sorts of messed up but also the truest thought Ronan had had all day, so he shifted into reverse and peeled out of the two spots the BMW had been taking up without even bothering to glance at his mirrors. He was already burning rubber, practically drifting around the corner of the parking lot exit, when he asked, "Where to?"
Adam clung to the grab handle. Fat drops of rain were starting to splatter against Ronan's left bicep. Adam said, "I used a library computer and looked up the way. I'll tell you where to turn."
Ronan huffed air out of his nose. "Sure, Marco Polo. And if we get lost in a field somewhere? Miles from civilization, and it's pitch fucking black and we're hungry and my phone is dead and the car is out of gas and there are wolves howling in the distance—"
"They extirpated all the wolves in Virginia," Adam interrupted helpfully, "and, if I starve to death first, I give you permission to eat me. If that makes you feel better."
"First of all, I have no idea what extirpated means," Ronan snarked, even though he didn't actually care and was capable of using context clues, "and second of all, you're literally all bone. I would provide a lot more sustenance, I think."
"Maybe, but I don't think you would die out there," Adam said thoughtfully, watching the rusted metal barriers at the side of the road as they whizzed past. Once, he'd told Ronan that, ever since he was a little kid, he'd imagined a spindly, faceless man sprinting alongside the car, leaping impossibly from barrier to barrier. "I think you'd stay alive out of sheer spite."
"I didn't say I had to be dead first."
Adam turned to look at Ronan, then, brows raised. He blinked. His lips twitched upwards when he said, awestruck, "That's so fucked up."
Ronan beamed. He turned his windshield wipers on, Adam started talking about prion diseases, and they barreled happily down the road.
Forty-five minutes later, after Adam had almost made them miss two exits and Ronan had sworn colorfully and accused Adam of being the world's worst navigator, there was a lull in the rain, so Ronan got off the highway and pulled into a Sunoco. He filled up the car — stupid cheap because they were in the capital of Bumblefuck, Nowhere — and edged into a gravelly excuse for a parking spot. He cracked his back before gesturing towards the tiny convenience mart and asking, "What do you want?"
"Nothing. I'm good," Adam responded, predictable. He shrugged. "I've got a granola bar in my bag."
Ronan stared for a few seconds longer — though he knew it wouldn't make a difference, glaring was to Ronan as stubbornness was to Adam — before he rolled his eyes, just as predictable, and stomped off. Inside the store, while the middle-aged woman behind the counter watched him warily with one hand wavering suspiciously close to something behind the counter that Ronan couldn't see, Ronan perused the aisles, clutching his wallet in his fist very visibly so the lady wouldn't decide to go all patriotic on him. He snagged the first bag of candy that caught his eye, one of those mixed varieties like the ones his mom would buy before Halloween even though only like, four kids would ever show up at their door with costumes on. Then he tossed a few bills at the cashier and booked it back outside.
Adam had gotten out of the car in the meantime, now sitting on a damp curb and stretching his legs out in front of him. The metallic edges of an empty granola bar wrapper peeked out from between his fingers, and there was a tiny speck of peanut above his lip. He stared out at the empty road, barely flinching when Ronan's feet crunched towards him.
"Trick or treat," Ronan said. He dropped the bag on Adam's lap.
At first, Adam just stared at it with what looked like either curiosity or disdain — it was hard to distinguish between the two, sometimes, when it came to Adam's face — but then he wordlessly dug his hand inside and pulled out a Tootsie Pop. His long, bony fingers painstakingly peeled the edges of the wrapper away from the small paper stick, and he seemed so preoccupied by this task that Ronan felt okay about sitting down next to him and unabashedly watching. His stomach swooped a little when Adam placed the lollipop between his lips and held it there, a hard lump on the inside of his cheek.
"When we used to get these at school as kids"—Adam slurred around the stick—"like, if the teacher brought them for us on Valentine's Day or whatever"—he took the wrapper and carefully laid it out on his knee, smoothing out the wrinkles—"we would all check the wrapper for a star, 'cause it was supposed to be good luck or something. It was probably bullshit, but—"
He trailed off. Ronan looked at the pointer finger of Adam's right hand, at where it hovered by a tiny, five-pointed star on the corner of the wrapper, and asked, "But?"
Adam took the lollipop out of his mouth and said quietly, "But I always had one."
Ronan hummed, then took the bag back and pulled out a Tootsie Pop of his own. Like Adam, he plopped the red lollipop in his mouth, spread the wrapper out on his knee, and dipped his head to look closer. He could feel Adam lean in closer, too. There was a tiny drawing of a horse, one of a bicycle and one of a boat, but no star.
"Coincidence," Adam whispered, probably because it was what Gansey would have said if he were there. His breath was warm and cherry-scented on Ronan's cheek.
Wordlessly, Ronan offered him the bag again. Adam only blinked at him for a moment, face unreasonably close, before he reached in, rummaged around, and chose another lollipop. When he unfolded the wrapper on his other knee, Ronan thought, for one disappointing second, that there wasn't a star there, either. But then Adam moved his thumb and it was there. A second tiny, five-pointed star.
Ronan's heart was doing something stupid. He shook the bag at Adam.
"You're pushing it," Adam said.
"One more," Ronan insisted.
Adam sighed, and he delicately wrapped the second lollipop back up and tucked it into the pocket of his khakis first, but he obliged. He reached into the bag, unwrapped yet another lollipop, spread the wrapper on his knee, and—
Star.
Adam made a small, pleased noise. Ronan laughed out loud. He couldn't help it.
"You're goddamn magic," were the next words out of Ronan's mouth, breathless and emotional and immensely more vulnerable than he had intended. It was the same as calling Adam Magician, like he normally did, but it was also completely different, and there was something very raw about the way Adam looked at Ronan after he had said it. Adam clutched the bag of candy to his chest, and the tip of his nose was a little pink, and maybe he was about to say something just as real, but then his gaze caught on something over Ronan's shoulder. He scowled instead, brows quickly knitting together. Ronan turned his head and saw the cashier standing ominously on the other side of the glass, eyes narrowed like she suspected they would set fire to the whole establishment if she dared to look away.
"It's like one of those scenes in a horror movie where the protagonist looks up and the killer suddenly appears in the window." Adam rose to his feet, still holding the candy protectively. His accent was thick around the word horror. "We should go before she calls the cops or something."
Ronan couldn't tell which part of this whole thing upset the woman most, his shaved head or his shiny car or two boys sitting on a curb together, a little bit too close. "I think she'd go vigilante before she called the cops," he muttered, but, still, he gave her a sarcastic two-finger wave as he got back in the BMW. Adam called him an idiot, and they both laughed, and then they hurried away, leaving behind a litter of lollipop wrappers and the shared feeling that something important had almost happened.
Ronan's stomach, full of nothing but his own flavored spit and a little bit of chocolate taffy, started rumbling menacingly, eventually, so another hour later he stopped at a diner on the outskirts of what looked like a decently-sized suburb and corralled Adam through the drumming rain and into a vinyl booth. This time, he didn't bother to ask Adam if he wanted anything — he just ordered two burger meals, extra fries, that's all, thanks before the waitress could even so much as look at Adam.
"You didn't have to get me anything," Adam said when she was gone, because he was Adam, but Ronan just scoffed, crossing his arms over his chest and leaning back against the sticky, cracked plastic of his seat.
"Who said one of those was for you? I'm hungry as shit," he countered, but, when the food came, he slid one of the little baskets over to Adam anyway. Adam ate it without complaining, because if Adam was the only person who could touch the radio in Ronan's car, Ronan was the only person who could spend money on Adam and get away with it.
Every few seconds, the ceiling fan cut across the fluorescents that dangled from the ceiling. Adam's eyes blankly followed the flickering shadows it made on the lacquered surface of the table as he absentmindedly shoveled his burger into his mouth, and Ronan desperately wanted to know what he was thinking about but was worried the answer might be You're goddamn magic and they couldn't talk about that. Adam never talked about the fact that he knew Ronan was in love with him, and Ronan never talked about the fact that he knew Adam knew, and that was just the way it was. Ronan also never talked about the fact that sometimes Adam slipped up and looked at him with such sheer hunger it made his palms sweat, because Adam was leaving and he wasn't and the idea of capital-T Them made more sense than most things in their life but that didn't make it logical. Logical was Adam going to some big-shot school and starting a big-shot career in some big-city high rise while Ronan rotted at the barns for the rest of his life.
"I'm supposed to hear about Harvard next week," Adam said suddenly, appropriately, swirling a fry through twin globs of ketchup and mayonnaise. It turned a medicinal shade of pink that made Ronan's insides churn.
The idea of Adam being all the way in Boston made Ronan want to claw everything out of his chest cavity with his own hands, but, still, he said, "You'll get in."
Adam frowned. "I wish people would stop saying that."
Ronan glowered right back. "Fuck all of us for having faith in you, I guess."
"No, that's not—" Adam made a frustrated noise, popped a fry into his mouth, chewed angrily, swallowed. "I just mean, everyone keeps telling me I'll get in, and that's nice and all, but no one, not one single person, has said anything about what happens if I don't. Because maybe I won't get in, and then what? I don't know what else there is. I try to picture it and I just see this, this— black hole. It's just a black hole."
Ronan, who was much closer to that black hole than Adam probably knew, threw a fry at him. Then he asked, "You ever heard of a Procrustean bed?"
Something glinted in Adam's eye. He sounded wary when he said, "No."
"So there was this asshole named Procrustes in Greek mythology, right? A robber or something. He would invite travelers to stay at his place, offered them a bed. And they were all like, shit, thanks, dude! But if they were too big for the bed, you know what Procrustes did?"
Adam's lip curled. "Do I want to know?"
"He would cut their limbs off so they fit perfectly on the mattress," Ronan continued anyway, holding up his palm and pretending to saw away at his own forearm. "And if they were too small for the bed, he'd stretch them."
He reached across the table, grabbed the limp fry he had thrown at Adam, and pulled at it until it split in two. Adam watched him do this, chin in hand, and said, "Thanks for the demonstration." Then: "Why are you telling me this?"
"The story's a warning about conforming to arbitrary standards, dude. Procrustes just like, decided this bed was the size everyone should be, and the result of that was that people fucking died. And someone else, once upon a time, decided that you "—he pointed the half-fry in his right hand at Adam, whose tense expression was softening into something much less guarded—"are supposed to finish high school, then go straight to a four-year college, then go straight into a nine-to-five desk job and live happily ever after with your little briefcase and your little stapler."
Adam, face downturned, blinked up at him through the fringe of his barely-there eyelashes. He said, quietly, "No one's going to get their limbs ripped off if I choose to conform to this particular standard."
Debatable, Ronan wanted to say, already aching, but he just leaned forward and said, instead, "The point, dingus, is that your whole life won't be over forever if you have to do something else for one more year. Or two. There's no real rule that says the only alternative to getting in on the first try is to curl up and die."
Ronan watched Adam's teeth sink into the pink of his lower lip. He stared at Ronan for a long, loaded moment, and when he finally said, "You couldn't have picked a more disturbing way to say that to me," there was such a visceral warmth in his voice that it sounded like Thank you anyway.
Ronan just grunted in response, picking up the too-long menu and flipping through it under the guise of looking at desserts. His finger trailed over bread pudding and lemon meringue pie, but all he really wanted to do was ask the waitress to bring a juicer to the table and stick his stupid heart in it.
Thinking about Adam with a desk job and a briefcase made Ronan think about Adam with a wife to come home to, or maybe even a husband, two point five adorable towheaded children with Adam's white-blonde eyebrows and a fluffy dog, one of those breeds that always seems to have something crusted in the corner of its eyes and looks ancient even when it's a puppy. Adam probably wouldn't want a dog like that, but his wife-or-husband would come home with the thing bundled in his-or-her arms to surprise the kids and Adam wouldn't have the heart to send it back and, regardless, he'd probably fall in love with the thing within hours.
Once, when they were little, Matthew had knocked a cup of orange juice over and spilled the whole thing on Ronan's Playstation. There was a sizzle, and Matthew's quiet, terrified oops, and then the graphics had collapsed into themselves, leaving behind nothing but Ronan's own shocked face, staring back at himself from a dark, blank screen. Trying to imagine Adam with a man who wasn't Ronan made Ronan's brain short-circuit, just like that. The best he could come up with was a six-foot something mannequin, a perfect head of curls but a face made of smooth, clear plastic. Always, eventually, that face that wasn't a face would morph into Ronan's own, and that just made Ronan want to kick something.
Adam, the real, present-day Adam, was waggling his fingers in front of Ronan's face now. When Ronan just blinked at him, he curled his hand into a fist and lightly tapped on the center of Ronan's forehead. His callused knuckles were rough and cool. "Hello. Just pointing out that your physical body is sitting in this booth right now, but your brain has left the building."
"Oh, is it feelings-circle time now?" Ronan, embarrassed, wrapped his own hand around Adam's fist and gently pushed it back towards Adam, and if his fingers lingered for a second too long that was his own business. "Are we having a heart-to-heart in"—he flipped to the front cover of the menu, which looked like it had been designed by someone's thirteen-year-old kid who had just gotten really into Photoshop—"Gus's Diner?"
Adam shrugged and flicked a folded-up straw wrapper. He said, calmly, "I didn't even ask you anything. I was literally just making an observation."
There were a lot of things rattling around Ronan's head that he could share with Adam. He could say, There's a part of me that goes to mass every Sunday and begs God to help you leave and there's a part of me that would do just about anything to make you stay and I hate myself for not being able to tell which part is bigger. He could say, I haven't for a second regretted leaving school, but, when it's just me and the sleeping fucking cows in that hour right after sunset, I think to myself that everyone would just be better off if I wasn't here at all and sometimes I really, truly believe it. He could say, I resent my best friend for spending so much time with his boyfriend and girlfriend because they still get to have him next year and I don't, but I can't say anything to him because that isn't fair and, either way, I can't find the words to remind him that he promised to love me for life.
He could say, No one else can pull things out of their goddamn dreams and I'm so fucking lonely, but, instead, he just said, "Yeah, but, see, the thing about you making observations is that it's not really fair considering you're an actual psychic." Then: "Speaking of psychics, we should probably get the bill and split. Places to be. What do you think this one's going to be? Pile of rocks? Someone who sat three seats down from Persephone at the 1990 premiere of Ghost and had their life forever changed by her presence?"
Adam's eyes went glassy, for a moment, before he said, "Don't be a dick." His lips twitched. "I can't believe you know the exact year that Ghost came out."
"My mom had a thing for Patrick Swayze."
Adam didn't guess that Ronan also had a thing for Patrick Swayze, even though he probably knew. "Can it be my turn to tell you a story?"
Ronan spread his hands out, in a be my guest sort of way, then crossed his arms over his chest. The rain outside the window was slowing down, making the Friday-evening chatter and the hum of the soda machine, running sink water and the clink of porcelain plates, seem a little louder. There was a small kid on his hands and knees in the aisle, running a toy truck across the laminate tiles and making race car noises under his breath.
The volume was probably making Adam a little dizzy, it always did, but he didn't show it. He said, "There was this sultan who caught his wife sleeping with a servant and decided to seek revenge on all women, forever. So he would take a new virgin bride, every night, and then he would behead her in the morning. This one woman, though, Scheherazade, she volunteers to become the next bride, and, that night, she starts telling the sultan a story. And her story is so captivating to the sultan that he lets her live, so she can keep telling it the next night, and the one after that, and on and on for years until he decides he's not going to kill her, or anyone else, at all."
Ronan nodded along, keeping his face impassive. He didn't tell Adam that Niall Lynch, a walking storybook, adored the tales of One Thousand and One Nights, that Ronan had already heard this story when he was probably too young to hear it and that he had guessed Adam's point by the time Adam had said the word sultan. He asked, "Am I the sultan or am I Scheherazade?" even though he knew the answer.
"You know which one you are, asshole. You are so good at talking and talking and talking, for the sake of delaying the terrible thing from happening to you," Adam said. "Except, for you, the terrible thing isn't being beheaded. It's just having to tell anyone anything about how you really feel."
"Maybe I'd rather be beheaded," Ronan said, and he pretended not to notice the flicker of disappointment across Adam's face. Then he gestured for the waitress to bring them their bill, and neither of them said anything more.
It was getting dark by the time they silently got back in the car. Adam spoke only when telling Ronan where to turn, and Ronan could tell that he had fucked something up, but that was the point, wasn't it? Neither of them let this thing go too far because that was the best option, in the long run.
Adam's directions led them to a sleepy subdivision, one that had clearly been around a long time because the trees in the front yards towered and curled overhead, dripping seeds onto sticky windshields. They buzzed with ancient life, imposing in the way that only creatures who had been drinking sunlight way before any breathing human had been born could be. Ronan hated new-construction neighborhoods where the only trees were tiny things planted in fresh mounds of mulch, so fragile they had to be wrapped in plastic bags. Neighborhoods like that freaked him out.
"Park here," Adam said, and Ronan coasted to a stop at the side of the narrow road, the rubber of his tires almost touching the curb. A tree branch practically scratched the passenger side window, and Adam could only open his door wide enough to barely squeeze through.
"Parrish," Ronan called before Adam shut the door behind him. "Do you want me to wait?"
"No," Adam said quietly. Then he stood in the center of the street, arms loose at his side, and, for a moment, he looked as magic as he was. Puddles covered the asphalt, pooling in cracks and potholes, and the trees covered the moon but the unnatural light of several sporadically placed streetlamps was trapped in the standing water at Adam's feet. His eyes, though, sepia-brown, reflected nothing at all, frighteningly dark as he stared straight ahead. Ronan watched, short of breath, leaning on the hood of his car and trying to cement the image on the backs of his eyelids. Adam, like this, was beautiful the way that the iridescent scales on the underbelly of a snake were beautiful right before it sank its fangs into your neck.
"Is it one of these houses, here?" Ronan asked when he couldn't stand it anymore, fingers twitching at his sides. He tilted his chin towards the quiet bungalows that lined the road, warm light filtering through drawn curtains.
Adam turned his head, eyes wide, now beautiful in the way of a deer standing shell-shocked at the edge of a cornfield. Ronan thought about how male deers shed their velvet antlers every winter, calmly walking around with a gnarly mess of blood and tissue spilling out of the tops of their heads. "No, um— It's over here."
He splashed down the road, then, Ronan close behind, until they came to a dead-end. There was a bike path, or a walking trail, a thin, rubbery stretch of something that led to nothing but pitch black. Trees were packed tightly on either side. Adam, without hesitating, stepped over a low, dangling chain, an aluminum sign zip-tied to it that said PARK CLOSED AFTER SUNSET.
"You're being so weird," Ronan said, but he hopped over the chain, too. He swore he could feel his blood rushing frantically through his veins. "Are you taking me out here to axe-murder me?"
"Yeah," Adam deadpanned. He kept walking, rounding a corner until they were standing under a small, rusted lamp with a small, fading blue lightbulb. Dead moths littered the metal tray at the lantern's base. He wore an odd expression, something hidden and maybe a little timid lurking behind his eyes.
"Do you— Does the ley line need you to do something here?" Ronan glanced around them. There was nothing to look at except the silhouettes of brooding trees and one lone, dented bottle cap resting on a clump of weeds.
Adam chewed his lip. "No, I don't think so."
Ronan kicked the bottle cap with the toe of his boot, sending it soaring into the thick of the woods. "So it's another useless address? There was never anything here?"
A shrug. "I guess not."
"Okay. So, uh, let's make like a tree and get the fuck out of here?" Ronan stuck a thumb over his shoulder and took a single step backwards. It was too early in the year for crickets, so all he could hear was his own breathing, a singular, persistent bullfrog, and the very faint roar of the interstate, somewhere in the distance. "Parrish?"
But Adam didn't move. "What if there wasn't supposed to be anything here?" he asked quietly, but quickly, like maybe he wanted to squeeze the words out before he changed his mind. Ronan stared. Adam had that open, wanting look on his face now, the one that terrified Ronan and made him want to tumble headfirst into him at the same time. Dull, blue light splattered across the curve of his cheek. "What would you say if I told you this wasn't even one of the addresses and I just made it all up?"
Ronan's heart sank, first, then shot back up into the base of his throat before settling somewhere in his chest, drumming wildly and painfully against his ribcage. He was suddenly, incredibly thirsty. He said, "Did you know your right eye sometimes does this weird, fucked up squinty thing when you ask me questions? It looks like you're winking at me all creepy like."
Adam blinked, once, twice, then turned on his heel and stalked away.
Ronan chased after him. He was taller, so he caught up with Adam's long, angry strides with a fair amount of ease, but, still, they were moving quickly enough that Ronan had to swallow down the wheeze of it. His forearm crinkled, staticky, against the back of Adam's shoulder. "Are you planning on walking all the way back to Henrietta? That's probably going to give you shin splints."
Adam came to a stop so abruptly that the rubber soles of his sneakers squeaked menacingly against the blacktop. Ronan circled his arms to keep his balance, cartoonish. The shutters had come back down over Adam's face, but his cheeks were a bright, frightening red when he said, "Can you be serious for one second? I'm trying to tell you something."
"Okay, fine." Ronan conceded. He stuck his hands in his pockets, mostly so Adam couldn't see his fingers shake. "Did you, then? Did you make it up?"
"What would you say if I did?" Adam repeated, defiant.
Ronan felt his temper flare, a little bit, but the anger was gushing in the way it only did when it was trying to wash away something much more wounded. "I would say that you must feel really clever," he bit out, "sending pathetic little Ronan on a wild goose chase just so he can feel important for one night."
Adam glared at him, clenched his hands and unclenched them again. "Maybe that was part of it, a little bit, maybe it was clear you needed to get out of there for awhile and I thought, okay, sure, I can do that. But do you really think that's all? This is my first night off in three weeks. Three weeks, Ronan. Do you think I would spend four hours in the car just to make you feel better?" He laughed, self-deprecating and humorless, and added, "I'm not that selfless."
Ronan knew what he wasn't supposed to ask, and he asked it anyway, scared shitless in the middle of some private neighborhood park like a community service officer wasn't about to show up any second and write them both a ticket. "What did you get out of it?"
And then Adam said it, he said something that neither of them ever said and he made it sound easy even though Ronan could see the way his lips quivered before he spoke. He said, "I got you. All to myself, for hours."
Ronan exhaled, and he barely recognized his own voice when he whispered, "Adam—"
"I know we've both been pretending, and I know you don't want to talk about it, you don't even sleep over anymore, I know, but I'm tired, Ronan. I'm sick of pretending." Adam pulled at his own earlobe, transparently nervous, and there was something so tender and intimate about that stupid little ear tug that Ronan had to close his eyes. "I do a lot of pretending about a lot of shit in my life, but you're— I think you're goddamn magic, too."
Ronan opened his eyes and tried again. "Adam."
"Look," Adam butted in, again, reaching towards Ronan with one hand and then dropping it. "Even if things go my way, I won't be leaving for almost five months. That's over a third of the year, okay? And even then, there will be breaks. And summers. There's something like, a hundred forty days I could see you, and that's not even counting weekends. I could come back on weekends, sometimes, especially long weekends, you know? Like President's Day, maybe."
Ronan and his brothers had once taken turns crossing their arms and sitting on each other's diaphragms, squeezing all of the air out until a horrible, wheezing noise like something from a zombie movie came out of their throats. His lungs felt like that now, empty and constricted. "You counted?"
Adam lifted his chin, stubborn and silent, like he was daring Ronan to make fun of him for it.
"You're not going to want that," Ronan said, then, a little desperate. He was gripped with the worst, most petrifying hope, the kind that would suck the soul out of him if he lost it. "You've been trying to make it out your whole entire life. You're not going to want to come back."
"Says who? Listen, Lynch. If you don't want me, you don't want me." Adam stepped forward, pushed a resolute finger into Ronan's breastbone. "But you don't get to decide what I want."
"I do want you," Ronan whispered, so, so softly. It was the most obvious thing in the world, and also came nowhere close to describing the actual extent of Ronan's feelings, but he still had to say it. It was so much easier than saying, I thought we could never, ever have this.
Adam's palm flattened against Ronan's chest. He said, "Okay, then," and then he rocked the entire goddamn planet and kissed Ronan.
It was clumsy, and a little toothier than Ronan had expected, but they had almost five months and then a hundred and forty days and then a lifetime, maybe, to figure it out, so Ronan thought it was perfect. They broke apart, and laughed, breathless and almost silent, and then they tried again and it was already better. It occurred to Ronan that he should wonder if he was dreaming, but then he felt Adam’s very-real pulse under his skin and he thought, Fuck that. Adam's hand cupped the back of Ronan's neck, and Ronan's hand gripped the loose fabric of Adam's sweater at his lower back, drawing him closer, and all Ronan wanted to do was take Adam somewhere safe and tell all the parts of him everything he had left unsaid for years. Ronan hopelessly cherished every stupid inch of Adam Parrish.
But they were two hours from Henrietta, in a town that apparently meant nothing at all to either of them except for the very important fact that it was now the town where Ronan had kissed Adam for the very first time. They would have to drive all the way back first, and Ronan would have to keep his hand on the gear shift and try not to crawl out of his skin. He pulled back, gently pressed his thumb into the hollow next to Adam's eyebrow, and said, lovingly, "Bringing me out here into these creepy-as-shit woods just to kiss me was very serial killer of you. What's next? Sacrificing my virgin ass to the devil?"
Adam grinned, wickedly. He said, "There are so many jokes I want to make about that," and Ronan, mortifyingly, blushed in places he didn't think people were capable of blushing in. Then Adam's face melted into that expression that was supposed to be a secret but was no longer a secret, and he took Ronan's hand in his own. "Come on, Scheherazade," he said. "Take me home."