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Adam was not usually in the business of needing.
He was most certainly in the business of wanting. He generally considered himself to be very greedy, really, what with the constant climbing and climbing and the clamoring for more, more, more.
Before this, Adam had never experienced needing so much as merely a more localized sense of want; he was hungry, but he didn’t need food. It might be nice to have it. It would help to quell the hunger pangs. It served, ostensibly, a practical purpose.
Now, with the patchwork of the quilt against his cheek and his good ear pressed into the fabric so the room existed in clouded, fuzzy silence, Adam finds himself, alarmingly, in need. Or, at least, he’s afraid that this may be the case.
As a young man in possession of a scientific mind, Adam takes the logistical approach.
He resolutely ignores the burning tingle (the need) in his fingers urging him to reach out and trace the straight-cut line of Ronan’s nose, and instead opts for merely staring at him as he sleeps, like a strange, generally mildly concerning stalker. It’s fine. It’s mitigating. Whatever.
He stares some more and shuts his eyes against it when the feeling crops up again over the soft slack of Ronan’s mouth.
Adam was starting to think that there was something seriously wrong with him.
It’s an interesting sensation, to watch the hands of the analog clock tick and to see the rise and fall of Ronan’s ribs and yet hear nothing but the sort of soft buzz of his outside ear pressed to the bed. It makes the dreaded needing worse, see, because instead of the distraction invited by the smally beehiving sounds of the western world at large, Adam’s five-fingered senses are narrowed to the feel of the quilt and the image of this boy asleep on this bed.
Adam buries his head in his arms. He risks a peek outside of the cocoon, eventually, because he is only so strong, and gives into it all for the split second it takes to lightly run his pointer finger down the line of Ronan’s strong nose.
It only snowballs from there.
Ronan Lynch is a devout Catholic; this had been a fact of him that Adam had always known, objectively, and yet had never quite understood until it had been lain in front of him in unignorable ways throughout the unfolding of each coming Sunday.
Ronan had been confirmed under Saint Christopher, and for all his poor driving habits, refused to drive if the silver Saint Christopher pin fell from its place nestled along the rearview mirror. Ronan had blushed scarlet the first time they’d done something further than kiss, apparently vaguely mortified (yet obviously not too much so) at the notion of premarital anything. Ronan Lynch knew how to fold palm leaves into crosses, looping the tails of them in and folding them under themselves.
Adam hadn’t expected it, but then he supposed it made sense. Ronan was unexpectedly traditional, covetously loyal, and therefore it would reason that he should not stray from the practices and prayers he had grown obeying and, by turn, believing. His belief, however, did not seem to extend to teetotalism.
“I think he’s somewhere outside,” Gansey laughs, a weekend in June made sticky with heated rainfall. Adam mourns the whites of his shoes, preparing for the task of scrubbing them back to their lost glory with no small amount of elbow grease.
“Where’s your babysitter?” asks Adam, slightly concerned for the way Gansey can’t seem to find where his glasses are (they are situated neatly upon his nose, where they belong), and how his hair has solidified into some Clark Kent adjacent swoop that appears to be attempting to defy gravity. Adam rights him with a hand on his ankle when he valiantly tries to fall off the couch.
“Blue’s left me for another, at long last. I always knew this day would come. I can’t blame her. Henry is quite the catch.”
Adam rolls his eyes. “Woe is you. Pardon me, lover boy.” He pats Gansey on the shin with all the understanding that he would no doubt experience the mother of all hangovers come morning, and makes his way out back.
The Barns is uniquely suited to summer in the way that all nostalgia creatures are. The air remains reliably at the slow-heat temperature of youth, cooking the sunset colors into tie-dye like cracked eggs sizzling on the skillet. Opal is off messing around in Ronan’s bedroom, waving back at Adam from her spot in the big window.
Adam finds them collapsed in laughter, slightly too close to the roaring bonfire to be entirely comforting. Sober, Adam sighs.
“I’m decently sure that your skirt is a fire hazard,” Adam warns Blue, although he knows when he hears it that it’s far too soft to really count as scolding. She grins like she knows it, too.
“Nice of you to join us!” Henry shouts, too loud, “any word on our Gansey boy?”
The smoke blows into Adam’s eyes with the wind, soaking into his t-shirt and fogging up his eyes into a vintage filter.
“In his cups.”
“Yeah,” chimes Ronan, and Adam tilts his head at where he’s sprawled across the dirt on his back, “you’d better go and check on him.”
Blue snorts. “Real slick, jackass. Come, come, Henry. We’ve been kicked out of the grown-up’s table.”
Ronan laughs at them from the ground, waving them away. They watch Henry and Blue stumble their way back inside, cheers going up from Gansey once he manages to spot them, and with the wind pushing against their backs the sounds and smells of country summer, Adam moves to stand over Ronan. The entire back of his white shirt, his nice jeans that Declan had bought him for his birthday last year, behind his ears would be entirely caked in mud and grass stains. It is ridiculously charming, which is a ridiculous thought to have, Adam Parrish.
“Comfortable?” he asks, pushing down the needing called by the particular contour of the dimple in Ronan’s left cheek, and pulling himself to stand against it with a string tied to his spine.
Ronan grins his shark grin. “Could be better.”
Adam lets himself be pulled down by the hand against his better judgement, because Ronan is impossible and doesn’t yet know that Adam will make him do the volumes of laundry they’ll have amounted by the time the sun rises again. And so, Ronan merely laughs when Adam refuses to lie prone, protecting what little dignity remains in the clean back of his shirt.
For a second, Ronan stays like that, holding Adam’s arm against his stomach with a shark-wide painting of delight on his face, before he remembers that he is drunk and therefore altogether absurd.
“You’re spinning, Parrish,” he says, spreading the webs of Adam’s fingers out so that he can nip at them with his canine teeth.
“I’ll bet. Do you think it might be the Malibu?”
Ronan shakes his head, sh sh shuffling against the grass beneath him. “No chance.” He heaves a grievous sigh, and Adam loses the battle of remaining upright to the impressive strength of a teenage boy who knows what he wants. What he wants, apparently, includes maneuvering Adam until he’s sitting astride Ronan’s thighs, leaning down with arms braced on either side of his head.
“Hey, stud.” Ronan snickers, tugging at Adam’s belt loops. “My head hurts.”
Adam reaches before he can catch himself, and digs his thumb in a circular motion into Ronan’s temple. He closes his eyes and pushes into the touch like a preening cat.
The logistical approach, in science, is mostly foolproof; that is to say, when presented with a problem and then following a verified solution, one can generally count on the absolution that the problem will be solved. The Problem, Adam’s problem, is devastatingly handsome and terribly trusting and Adam, horror of horrors, is confronted once again with that pestering, decidedly unsolved need.
“You’ll stay tonight,” Ronan says, and it’s less of a question or confirmation than a certainty.
“Yeah, Ronan.”
Adam is attempting to solve it. Really, he is. But he finds himself far less inclined to work towards a methodical, guaranteed solution when faced with his greatest weaknesses laid out, in full, six days out of the week.
Chiefly, he finds, he is weak-willed against the prospect of Ronan’s bedroom.
Frankly, he can’t quite remember the last time he’s spent more than three nights in a row in his tiny cardboard box of a bed at St. Agnes’. Whenever he considers it, whenever he takes in the shining independence of eggshell walls and plain blue blankets overlaid neatly across the mattress, some convenient, very convincing excuse of a too-tall hellion brings him, unconcerned, back to his wicked lair.
It's just that Ronan’s room is so. Ronan. Jesus. Although he probably wouldn’t subscribe to Adam’s blasphemy over the fact.
It’s an ambiguously framed photograph; a page from an unnamed storybook.
The required quilt, of course, dark green and gray diamonds stitched with care into sprawling patches. Shelves lining the walls stacked with books that Ronan had probably never read, including several that had clearly been relegated to their current places by Gansey (Early History of Swordplay: A Comprehensive Guide), Declan (The Business of Propriety), and what Adam figured was probably Opal (the title had been chewed away). Although Ronan didn’t tend to use it much, too tied up with the tedious mechanics it entailed, an old record player shoved into the corner with the same Queen album that had graced it for months waiting to be spun. Adam liked to dig through Ronan’s records and play whichever he thought would annoy him most at any given moment.
Of course, Adam’s affinity for the picture frames lined along Ronan’s walls was almost certainly due to the accompanying Pavlov response of the room’s inhabitant; usually, when Adam laid against the spread-out quilt, Ronan was within a yardstick’s reach.
This lagging afternoon, late with the July sun, Adam ruminating upon the never-ending merits of Ronan’s bedside lamp, is not especially remarkable. Ronan’s grown tired of pretending to fill out required tax paperwork and by doing so essentially admitted that he’s planning on simply dreaming some up. For all that this should annoy Adam, mostly it warms him, as it frees Ronan’s hands up to do some better preferred things. Familiar things. (Needed things, his useless brain supplies).
Ronan kisses him like he is something particularly valuable.
His hands are rough against Adam’s skin from his work out on the farm, overheated like the sunshine has soaked right into the marrow. Adam feels the rope of his muscle where he runs his hands over Ronan’s shoulders, and sighs out a breath he hopes isn’t too revealing, although he suspects from Ronan’s answering smirk that it might be.
Julia, sleeping sand
Silent cloud, touch me…
“Turn this shit off,” Ronan grumbles, barely pulling away to say so. His voice tickles where it rumbles against Adam’s skin. He tugs on Ronan’s ear just to see the way his nose scrunches up at the feeling.
“Why do you even own the album if you hate it so much?”
It’s a few moments before Ronan decides he’s ready to break from Adam’s mouth again for long enough to answer. “They’re all Declan’s, and they’re all ass.”
Adam puts a hand on his chest to keep him from leaning all the way back down, to Ronan’s obvious irritation. “Juuuuuuliaaa,” Adam sings off-key, laughing, perhaps a little deranged as Ronan tries to smother him with a hand.
“I swear-ew, don’t lick me, freak,” Ronan says, until he finally manages to wrestle Adams wrists onto the bed with his sunshine-rough palms pinning them (too gently to count) against the bedsheets, “This song fucking sucks.”
Adam feels alive, convicted. “It’s romantic,” he teases, out of breath and smiling so wide he feels his cheeks might split. Luckily, Ronan glues them back together with another heated kiss in the next moment.
“It’s Lennon,” he says against Adam, like the notion personally offends him, and it’s so uniquely hilarious that Adam just has to yank him, incredibly ungently, back down so that the entire length of him is covering every spare inch of skin belonging to the skeleton of one Adam Parrish.
“Touch me,” Adam begs, (needneedneed), and bless him, but Ronan does.
The truly horrifying thing is that it rears its head most in the most unsuspecting of moments.
Adam is in a bad mood. He is covered in grease and motor oil. He had fought with Ronan that morning, something about a particularly immature reaction Ronan had decided to have to something Declan had attempted to do for him, and he had biked to work in silent protest. Trust his luck for it to start raining.
Adam glances at the evening sky, notes the sound of the rolling thunder and thinks, pointedly, screw this. “Boyd,” he calls, “I’m headed out.”
And because the universe cares not for the whims and wishes of Adam’s moods, a screaming crackle of thunder breaks through the smoker’s clouds and artfully hands Adam the proverbial middle finger. Boyd laughs from across the shop.
All Adam wants is to pedal until he feels his legs might conceivably fall off, until he can make it to the most scalding version of a shower possible without incurring third degree burns, and a bed with a decent pillow. He ignores the deeper, more truthful want for a more specific bed than his too-short excuse above the church, and reminds himself that Ronan is a no-good bastard son of a bitch who deserves nothing better than the silent treatment he is receiving. The reminder takes some pushing to seem quite important enough to heed.
He isn’t shocked when the BMW sidles up in front of the garage. His shoulders lower before he can remind them that it is, in fact, not welcome.
“Ought to keep your bike here overnight,” Boyd’s gruff voice says, and Adam swings his unimpressed gaze to where he’s now leaning against the wall to Adam’s right. Under Adam’s scrutiny, he holds up his hands. “Hey, if you get pneumonia, we’ll have to have James handle the engines. Have mercy on an old man, and get in that damn boy’s car.”
Adam sighs, heavily, and is literarily pleased that Boyd seems to wither the appropriate amount at the sound. “Make sure it doesn’t rust,” he says, short, and as a second thought, “Please.”
“Yeah, yeah.”
Adam pulls open the door of the car with more force than the expensive handles probably deserved, and ducks under the frame to settle roughly in the seat. He opens his mouth, unsure of the tirade that might leave it but sure that whatever it is, it will be suitably scathing, when a brown paper bag is dropped unceremoniously into his lap, covering the oil and grease on his too-old and too-big jeans with its own splotchy stains. The smell of fried food wafts up at him and pulls at the demanding pang beneath his ribs. Bastard.
He stares over at Ronan, then, leaning back against his side of the car like an alligator handler wary of being death-rolled, at the unmatching raise of his eyebrows, his chin resting on a fist, and sighs significantly.
“Wait to be a martyr, Lynch.” Says Adam, aiming for sarcastic and falling flat somewhere on the way. Ronan hums.
Adam slides the greasy fast-food sandwich out of the bag and bites into it (no mayo, side of ketchup), huffing out through his nose as Ronan, damn him, coasts out of the gravel drive and takes the left out of Boyd’s instead of the right turn necessary to lead them back to St. Agnes’. Adam reaches for the anger, comes up with sand rushing through his fingers, and latches onto fresh anger over the fact that there really hadn’t been any real anger there to begin with. Huffily, Adam shoves a fry out across the center console without turning his head.
It's a fuck you, because it’s a damn short fry, and it’s a sorry, because despite popular belief, Ronan was at least always trying, and it’s a thank you rolled up in something more multifaceted, because Ronan knew that Adam didn’t like the burnt ends off his fries, and so tore the end off with his teeth before shoving the rest of the fry back at him in silence.
Adam’s chest is tight when he reaches to run a hand up the back of Ronan’s head, turning to stare out the window at the familiar road to The Barns.
And because, disastrously for Adam’s logical case, Ronan keeps making it worse.
He holds doors like some suit and tie gentleman from Regency England, and he puts his hand firm on the small of Adam’s back when he reaches up to grab something from a top cupboard, and he is cuttingly handsome like only Bryonesque poets should be.
He gets fevers now and then, cold and achy and something that was apparently genetic and that he’d never quite managed to grow out of. He never asks for anything, when he’s flushed and light eyes glassy, not soup or solitude or even extra blankets, nothing at all except for Adam.
He inspires gentle, sweeping feelings of care that leave Adam needing to pull him under blankets and never let him leave, so that no outward atom, nucleus, molecule, could ever give him reason to hurt again.
Adam is scared for him when he wakes up beside him in bed, bleeding from an unkind dream and breathing heavily because he was worried, of all things, that he might have brought back something that could hurt Adam. He hadn’t even seemed to notice the deep, nightwashed scratches all along his own back and down one side of his neck. Adam had pressed the washcloth to his skin and rested his lips against his shoulder, in sleepless vigil until morning.
Adam is tender, watching Opal clinging to Ronan’s legs as he tries to pry her off for bed, or when he brings up an unassuming story about the kindness of his mother, the cleverness of his father, remembered indigo from childhood.
Adam is overwhelmed by the many giving wonders that encompass Ronan Lynch, when Adam refuses to show his face and Ronan lets him lean against his chest and shake on the rare, dreaded occasions in which his mother calls, and he cannot bring himself to answer, and worse, he cannot bring himself to block her number. Ronan is protective, he is needlingly humorous, he is incredibly soft and irreplaceably gentle and Adam needs him, all the time, unceasingly, with a strength that is as mortifying as it has become commonplace.
It comes to a head on a Thursday evening, Adam’s limbs tired from a long shift at Boyd’s and Ronan freshly sunburned under his eyes from too-hot late summer sun.
They’re just lying there. The record player spinning. Opal asleep in the next room with Chainsaw on guard. And Adam’s hearing ear is pinned to Ronan’s chest where his heart lies underneath muscle and sinew, the warm skin ambrosia against Adam’s cheek. Adam is grateful, then, for his selfishness, here, that needing has sidled up right alongside them before they quite realized it, and has landed them in this planetary shift of inevitability, of safety. Scientifically, Adam examines the notion that with the lights turned off, unable to see, with his cheek smashed to skin, unable to hear, he feels Ronan as though he’s crawled into his bloodstream and taken his left atrium into his hands.
“I love you,” he says, unsure of if he’s loud or coherent enough for Ronan to hear, unsure if Ronan’s even awake, but needing (needing) him to know it, laid plain. As if they hadn’t been making it clear for longer than Adam could remember, now.
Ronan’s palm sweeps up his bare back, coming to rest against the back of his neck, and Adam knows like he knows nothing else that his own heart is beating, in need, dead center in the palm of this one miraculous boy’s sunshine palm.
Adam breathes in Ronan’s pinegrove soap, and exhales his heavy need into the diamond-star pattern of a dreamer's quilt.
Ronan's chest rumbles under Adam's cheek, and although he can't hear him, he knows somewhere bone-deep and secretive, tucked safely between his ribs and his breath, what it is he's saying.