Chapter Text
In the beginning, when everyone first left, Ronan Lynch couldn’t shake the thought it it wasn’t meant to be this way. It felt so fundamentally wrong that so much could happen to them, only for them to part ways and live separate lives. Maybe someday they would reminisce on the frenzied summers they spent galavanting around Henrietta like Gansey’s knights, but even that felt wrong.
Their leaving exposed the fundamental point of difference that set Ronan apart from the rest of them, that he always felt but couldn’t trace to its source until after they were gone. Adam and Gansey and Blue and even Henry could all be normal, if they liked. They could go to college and travel and get married and take corporate jobs and move to the suburbs and become real live people, and to them, the magic of their shared childhood would just be a strange folktale in the story of their lives. Ronan’s name would start to sound like the name of a fallen friend, and they’d raise a toast when they thought of him. But this story wasn’t one Ronan could escape from. There was no life for him away from this land. There was no world where he could find peace in a night’s sleep. It didn’t matter that he was getting a handle on his night creatures, that he was learning to stay the night at Declan’s apartment in DC, that dreaming was becoming a thing he did rather than a thing that happened to him. What happened to them was their story, but it was his life, and it was always going to be that way.
He tried to make peace with it. It wasn’t like he had much choice in the matter.
The first time he saw all of them again was more than a year and a half after they left.
Adam hadn’t visited, not once in all that time. Ronan thought he might, but he didn’t blame him that he didn’t. Everything was such a mess when he left for school. Maybe it was for the best. Gansey, Blue, and Henry returned from their travels in November. They flew into San Fransisco from Santiago, because Gansey had a contact there who promise she could help him track down some old books he was looking to acquire. They spent a few weeks there in the city, staying in someone’s guest room, then they bought a van for cheap and spent the first half of December driving from the west coast to the east coast, to New York, to deliver Henry to the one-bedroom he’d just rented in the West Village.
Gansey wanted Ronan to come see them in the city, said they could drive up to see Adam too. Ronan didn’t take it as an honest invitation. He knew Ronan hadn’t seen Adam in a long time, and he knew Ronan didn’t trust himself to stray so far from home. He didn’t answer the voicemail.
Blue and Gansey spent a few days before Christmas at Gansey’s parents’ place in Northern Virginia. Apparently they even took Declan and Matthew to lunch, then they drove the junky old van down to Henrietta, where they parked her in the drive at 300 Fox Way. Gansey’s parents made them park the unsightly thing down the street from the house, but the women at Fox Way cheered when they pulled up and demanded a tour.
Ronan told them he’d stop by to see them when he had the time, but the moment he heard that they’d made Henrietta, he got in his car and drove into town. That was the tricky thing. As complicated as it had all become, they lived in his bones.
He was more of a stranger to Blue Sargent than he was to Fox Way, these days. He brought Maura eggs and milk from the farm every other week after the Sunday service. She was more charmed by him in his Sunday best, if she was ever charmed by him at all. She always asked after Adam, even though she knew he didn’t know any better than she did.
“I’m sure he’s good,” he always answered, and he did believe it.
He laid down on the horn to announce his arrive, then hit it a couple extra times just for the sake of disrupting the rest of the neighborhood. Within a matter of seconds, before he could even get all the way out of the car, the screen door smacked open, and Blue came tumbling down the steps, colliding into Ronan like a head-on collision, her arms flying around his neck and the rest of her hooking around him like a mean spider monkey. Gravity might have taken them both to the ground, had Gansey’s collision not followed just a moment after, a pileup of Blue’s kisses all over his head and Gansey’s tears and Ronan just hanging on for dear life. A lump formed in his throat.
He had the idea that there were a few things that ought to have gone into the Bible but didn’t, and the holiness of a hard hug was one of those things.
“Oh my god, you smell exactly the same,” Gansey’s said, snapping the camel’s back.
Ronan threw them both off. “Get off, you freaks. What a weird fucking thing to say.”
Blue grinned up at him, hands on her hips. She looked tanned and happy and older, all the things you’d want to see after time apart. If he was feeling especially mushy, he’d say she looked fulfilled, but Gansey sniffing him had snuffed out all his mushy feelings.
“We brought you presents,” she said.
“Oh good, I was hoping you’d bring me back a bunch of weird shit from Kazakhstan you’ve been carrying around in a bag with your dirty socks for 18 months.”
“Kazakhstan is in Asia, not South America, and we washed our socks,” Gansey said excitedly, because sweet, beautiful Gansey always missed the joke by a mile, and Ronan had missed him more than anybody could ever imagine. “Listen,” Gansey said, squeezing his shoulder, “you should probably know—”
But before Gansey could finish his warning, the screen door opened again, more gently this time, and Adam Parrish closed it behind him, stepping out onto the porch. Ronan stared. Gansey and Blue had changed, but it didn’t bother him nearly as much as it did to learn that Adam looked different too.
Everything about him was different. When he thought of Adam, he remembered his old, worn-in blue jeans and his white t-shirts with the stretched-out necks and the frayed stitching on the chucks he wore until the treads went thin and yellow. Now he wore a nicely fitted sweater and slacks, boots sticking out from his ankles. He held himself differently, his shoulders square and his back straight. His skin was golden like it used to be, but delicate in its shade, presumably a side effect from no longer working out in the sun every day.
The last time he saw him, he had a sunburn from a long day out in the fields at the Barns.
“Adam’s here,” Gansey finished softly, losing some of his steam.
Adam looked saintly jogging down the steps, wearing his cautious smile.
“Hey Lynch,” he said. Ronan swallowed. He even sounded different.
“What are you doing here?”
“It’s Christmas,” he answered simply, every long, drawing syllable gone from his voice.
Ronan swallowed against the pain in his throat and nodded. “I just didn’t know you were coming.”
Adam offered a small smile, a peace offering, reserved and untelling. Not disingenuous, but impossible to read. “We can talk about it later.”
Ronan didn’t want to talk about it, but he’d brought it up. And it had been so long since they last spoke, that he was willing to rehash every awful thing they’d ever done if it meant they could talk like they used to.
“Alright.” He jammed his hands in his pockets. “You look good, Parrish.”
“Meal plan and a free gym goes a long way.”
Adam tilted his head and offered his hand gentlemanly and impersonal. Ronan was momentarily so transfixed by that simple gesture — by his surety, by the complete absence of familiar timidity, by the quiet confidence in the way he moved now — that he stood frozen. Blue bumped his shoulder. He tossed Adam’s hands out of the way and hugged him.
Behind Ronan, their friends laughed with relief, and over Adam’s shoulder, Maura appeared on the porch laughing too. Everything had changed, but there were some things that would feel the same in every life.
Adam could talk different and walk different and never call, but this would always be the same. Adam stilled, then after a heartbeat, his hands twisted into the loose fabric of Ronan’s sweatshirt like they used to, and he held onto him for a moment too long also like he used to.
Oral made some kind of casserole, which they ate on paper plates scattered around the messy kitchen. There were new women at Fox Way who Blue recognized but Ronan didn’t, women who kissed cheeks and gathered in doorways to see all the strange boys who had descended upon their house of women, watching them like zoo animals. He’d found this place deeply unsettling the first dozen times he came inside, but it had grown warm in that same strange way in which a traveler could find comfort in any fire anywhere. All of the women of the Fox Way were transients in their own way, except for Blue, who was made of this place in the same way Ronan was made up of the red clay of Singer’s Falls.
They were short on kitchen chairs — a perpetual problem around here — so Ronan hopped up onto the edge of an unneeded countertop and set into his dinner. Orla pulled a pitcher of red Sangria from the fridge and pour with a liberal hand into plastic cups that she passed around. Adam collected two cups and his own plate. He passed one cup over to Ronan and moved to house himself up onto the counter next to him, unthinking. It made Ronan remember the way it used to be. Back when they were still in school, they were a matched set, the unspoken pair. The seat next to Ronan was always Adam’s, and so was the passenger seat of his car and the grass next to where he stood.
Ronan caught the back of his sweater, wiggled over to make room, and nudged Adam to the other side, so he could hear him.
Maura made him practice meditation. She didn’t know any more about meditation than he did, but she knew the reachings of uncommon minds, and she thought it would be good for him to learn to get his thoughts under control. His emotional whims maneuvered his dreams like puppet strings; she thought controlling his mind was the key to controlling his dreams. He didn’t know if the meditation really worked, but in that moment, he could pack away all that had happened in the past couple years, put it in a little box, and set it aside. He could imagine that it was summer, that Adam still had a course catalog tucked in his backpack, that they weren’t friends but brothers. It felt just the same when Adam reached over the sink, tore two paper towels off the roll, and handed one to Ronan to use as a napkin. He didn’t want to reminisce. He wanted to have the same thing back again.
Ronan drank half of his drink then poured the rest into Adam’s cup, who drank half of that and poured the rest into Blue’s cup. Orla’s drinks were lethal. She didn’t have all the right ingredients on hand, so rather than a traditional Sangria, they had a dangerous concoction of red wine, plain sugar, brandy, and all the fruit they had in the bottom drawer of the refrigerator. It was gross, and anyway, he had to drive home.
Sometime after Maura went to bed — and sometime after Orla poured a second cup for everybody but Ronan and Adam — Gansey’s fingers tugged through Blue’s hair, and Blue told a couple women Ronan didn’t know or recognize about their time in Peru. It was as easy as anything to slip back into that little world he once inhabited with Adam while their friends lived their incomprehensible lives.
“Were they always this gross, or have they gotten worse?” Ronan lamented.
Adam snorted. He never got drunk — at least never with Ronan — but when he had a couple drinks, he loosened up considerably, saying things he’d probably bite back otherwise. Ronan liked him a little tipsy. It was like peeking in through a tiny window. “I guess we’re lucky Cheng didn’t ride all the way down with them.”
Ronan raised a brow. “What does that mean?”
“Come on, Lynch. The three of them just spent the last eighteen months living under each other’s skin. You really don’t think they never—”
He recoiled. “Fucking ew, man. The fuck’s wrong with you?”
“I’m just saying.”
“You know, it’s creepy as hell the you say shit like that now that you look all buttoned up.”
“Ask them, then.”
“I’d rather take a bleach bath than know the answer to that question.”
“Whatever. Just know, if I find out, I’ll tell you whether you like it or not.”
“Sadist.”
“And masochist,” he added helpfully.
“Speaking of sadism,” Ronan said, “how’s school?”
“It’s really good.” He dropped his head back against the cabinets. “It’s really, really good.”
“All you dreamed?” he asked. It sounded like sarcasm leaving his mouth, but it was an honest question. He hated that it sounded so cold and nihilistic out loud. He wished he was more like Gansey and knew how to say it in the right way, in the way that would tell Adam that he prayed every Sunday the it was all he ever hoped — more than he dreamed.
“It’s not like I thought. Just as good, but not the same. There’s hard shit, like anywhere else. It’s just that the hard shit is mostly all-nighters and pretentious shithead professors,” he said. A warm feeling rushed through his chest. Adam Parrish deserved a world that was good to him. “What about you, huh? I heard you’ve got a real job and everything.”
“That might be pushing it.”
It was Declan’s idea, so he resisted it for months. But it was good for him to get out of the house sometimes, and he needed an outlet for all the shit in his head. He got a few more tattoos in the fall after Adam left, designs he sketched out on kitchen napkins in Sharpie after smoking too much of the weed Orla set with him for meditation purposes. They were half-dreams, half-hands. Ideas he brought back with him in the morning light and reworked over and over until he liked them. Weeds and bramble that are unruly from his wrists to his elbows. The oak tree that grew from his ankle. The hawks that flew across his ribs. His artist in town thought they were pretty good and asked if he’d thought about an apprenticeship. He thought it was a stupid idea. Maura thought it was a good one.
He gave in after a while.
They weren’t letting him work on real people yet, and all he got paid for was sweeping up the place after it closed, but it felt good to do. His dreaming had hardly done any real good for anybody before, but the ideas he brought back from his sleep made people happy. He’d let his mentor use some of them, and he had clients waiting for him to finish his studies to sit for the real thing.
It was a nice feeling.
“I might quit,” he said.
“Yeah, or you might not.”
“You wanted me to go to college.”
Adam laughed. It was such an old argument. “Don’t be difficult. I just wanted you to have something you liked.”
“I do like it,” he said softly, because it was the kind of thing he’d only admit to Adam, even after so long. He didn’t mind telling Adam things. There was a deep, strange satisfaction in knowing that only he knew. He wished he could pack up all of his secrets into a box, wrap it with a bow, and give it to him for Christmas, just to watch him open it.
Adam smiled, for real this time. “I’m glad.”
Ronan never really thought that he would never see Adam again; they knew each other in a way that couldn’t be undone or abandoned. They all did. What they all shared was closer to covenant than friendship, a severe and deeply serious sort of brotherhood that transcended the bounds of normal connection. Blue looked at the bounds of his life and tore it right open, forcing him to look in the eye all the things about himself he’d dodged so deftly. She made his burdens mean something. He would have died for Gansey like a knight with his fist to his chest. He would have let Adam fill him. They’d found one another precisely when each of them felt most alone in the world, in their own awful way. Knowing each other made them whole again. Even when he was apart from them, he could feel their pull. Gansey called it friendship. Blue called it soul. Adam called it the ley line. Ronan called it God. He figured they were all talking about the same thing, even if they had different name for it.
He knew he would see Adam again, but for all the ways he’d imagined it going, he never thought it might be like this. Neither of them had ever made anything easy once in their lives, and with the way Adam left, he imagined he might feel anger or grief or some sadness, but when he snuck glances that night, trying to drink in every last moment he could spend looking at him again, all he felt was relief.
It was an exhale. He didn’t know he’d been holding his breath.
He missed that he was meant to be paying attention to Gansey until Blue threw a sock at his head and Gansey said, “I asked what you thought.”
He felt his ears go hot. “About?”
Blue smirked, like she knew right where his head was at, like she knew he was still reeling.
“Hiking tomorrow,” she supplied.
“Oh. Why?”
“For old times’ sake.”
“It’s cold, Gans,” Adam said, but he didn’t say it like he really wanted to put his foot down. When he put his foot down, Gansey listened, and he knew it.
“It’ll be in the fifties tomorrow,” Gansey answered excitedly, “and a friend sent coordinates for this waterfall that—”
“Fine, I’ll bite,” Ronan snickered. Adam chewed on a smile, looking away. “What friend?”
“Henry,” Blue clarified, her hand hooked around the back of Gansey’s neck, smiling fondly.
Adam looked at Ronan pointedly, which he ignored.
Sometime around midnight, after Gansey had had enough to drink that he nearly teared up every time he looked at Adam and Ronan, Ronan stood up and announced that it was time for him to get home and time for the rest of them to get to bed. As it turned out, that was a bit of a fiasco all of its own. The number of residents at 300 Fox Way fluctuated from week to week, and this week, they were at capacity. Gansey and Blue were sharing a twin bed, and they offered Adam a pile of blankets on the floor of Blue’s room, because someone was already occupying the couch. Gansey and Blue debated the matter. Blue thought Gansey and Adam should just share the bed, to which Gansey said they wouldn’t both fit. Ronan held back his jokes. Gansey thought they should just let Adam have the bed and sleep on the floor together.
Before they could spiral down that line of thinking, Adam grabbed his backpack off the floor and hoisted it over his shoulder. Ronan didn’t know what to do with this easy-going version of Adam except stare. “Relax. I’ll just crash at Lynch’s. It’s no big deal.”
Their friends’ silence shocked Ronan back to life. “Sorry, did I offer?”
“Oh, I’m sorry,” Adam mocked, “do you mind, your highness?”
Ronan scoffed. “Maybe I do.”
“Well I’m not sleeping on the floor, and I’m definitely not listening to Gansey snore and drool in my ear all night.”
“I don’t snore,” Gansey contributed helpfully.
They said their goodbyes, and Adam tossed his backpack into the back of the BMW. Adam settled into the passenger seat and rolled the windows down.
As Ronan pulled out of the driveway and down the street toward Singer’s Falls, Adam asked, “You’re sure you don’t mind?”
“Well, we’re already in the car.”
Adam snorted. “You’re lucky you didn’t have to sit through seven hours of Blue veering off the road going five under while Gansey showed me his entire camera roll.”
Ronan cracked the windows, because Adam liked the fresh air, even in the winter.
“You still got the shitbox?”
Adam leaned back in his seat, closing his eyes like he’d been waiting all night for the quiet. “Yeah, but I’m hoping to get a few more years out of her, so I try not to push my luck with long drives.”
“Might as well take her straight to the junkyard when she’s done. I think they’d charge YOU if you tried to take that thing to trade in.”
The quiet between them was simple. Adam turned on the radio, then switched the station a few times before settling on a 90s station. He didn’t know a lot of music, which people tended to find endearing, because everybody ached to be the first one to show someone Nirvana or Def Leppard or the Stones. Adam’s father used to put on country radio, so he didn’t like any of that, but he liked Ronan’s mother old Johnny Cash records, and he liked Loretta Lynn and Patsy Cline. He liked Martina McBride. He liked Independence Day.
He wondered if Adam still had that stupid mixtape he gave him back in high school. He wondered if he ever put it on and thought of him.
Adam rolled his window the rest of the way down when they got close to the house and took a deep breath in.
“Home sweet home,” Ronan murmured when he pulled in the driveway. He intended for sarcasm but it didn’t sound that way, probably because he didn’t really mean it that way.
“You know,” Adam said, as Ronan shut off the car, “I thought it would look different.”
Ronan wanted to know what he meant by that, but Adam was out of the car before he could ask.
The house was in its usual state, which was to say messy. He tried to keep things tidy, but the Orphan Girl left her things everywhere, and he hadn’t been expecting guests.
Adam didn’t appear to mind. He followed him in front out the cold, backpack over his shoulder like a traveler in his own right. The normal thing probably would have been to offer him something to drink, maybe something to eat. But Adam set his bag down quietly — maybe reverently — by the door and began his slow procession around the house, looking at everything. Ronan followed after.
They stopped in front of Opal’s room. Adam pressed his palm to the door.
“Quiet. Kid’s hopefully sleeping,” Ronan said softly, reaching around him to turn her doorknob and open the door slowly, so as not to wake her.
He’d bought an old broken computer from a garage sale for her to demolish, to take up her time and keep her occupied. It laid in ruins, shredded parts tossed about her bedroom floor. They had to have a long conversation about what was and wasn’t safe to chew on before he let her take it into her room. He’d rather she didn’t chew on any of it, but they came to an agreement that she could chew on the plastic bits, as long as she stopped if anything zapped her. Declan called that bad parenting. Ronan called that realistic expectation management for the feral psychopomp camping in his house. She laid fast asleep in one of Ronan’s old t-shirts in her bundle of blankets on the floor. Ronan tried to convince her to sleep in a bed, but when he poked his head in to check on her in the middle of the night after an entire afternoon spending setting up an IKEA bed frame, he found her with her blankets on the floor anyway and gave up on that particular endeavor.
He looked back to find Adam’s real smile, the big one, his eyes crinkled at the corners.
He closed the door softly.
“She’ll be excited to see you,” he said.
Adam’s smile faltered a little, almost imperceptibly, then faded very quickly to a frown. “Do you think that would be good for her?”
Ronan could easily fill in the blanks. Would it hurt her when he left again? Would she understand why he was here, why he couldn’t stay?
Adam didn’t really understand Opal like Ronan did. It wasn’t his fault — he tried his best — but Ronan made her. He’d known her since he was a child himself. She was closer to a child than an adult, but closer to wild creature than child. She was like a fractured piece of himself, frozen in time. She, at baseline, knew what he knew when he first dreamed her, but she was capable of learning. It was a complicated thing.
She missed Adam because Ronan missed Adam, but she saw him often enough in his dreams to placate her.
“She doesn’t understand things the way other kids do,” he reminded him gently. “She knows what I know, in her own way.”
“The question stands,” he whispered, and Ronan knew how to decipher this too.
Adam pointed at the elephant in the corner of the room and wanted to know if this would do more harm than good for them. For Ronan. Maybe for himself.
Ronan answered his question with one of his own, as he crossed the hall to find blankets for the couch. He thought, unexpectedly, of those early days after they kissed for the first time, after Gansey died, after Ronan left school, after all the complicated rest of it. When they laid on the couch touching until they couldn’t bare it anymore and slept separately, Ronan aching and staring at the living room ceiling. “Why didn’t you stay at Fox Way?”
Adam didn’t answer that question, but Ronan didn’t need him to. He didn’t really want him to. Adam would blame the key line, Ronan would blame God, and it wouldn’t do them any good. Not tonight. Tonight, neither of them had the right words. Ronan was trying to be more patient these days, and sometimes he did alright.
Adam reached for the pile of pillows in his arms.
Ronan shook his head. “I’ll sleep on the couch.”
“I crashed in on you. I don’t mind.”
“I know. You know where the bathroom is.”
“Yeah.”
“There’s water in the kitchen. You know, snacks and shit. Help yourself.”
“Okay.”
In the morning, Ronan woke to chatter in the kitchen. Adam stood over the stove, scraping nearly-burnt blueberry pancakes from a pan he clearly forgot to grease while Opal chattered in his ear, largely in English, though she slipped back to Latin when she got excited, which was to say, every time she looked at Adam.
Ronan leaned against the doorway. “Should I just go ahead and take the batteries out of the smoke detector?”
Adam looked up sheepishly. “I couldn’t find the butter.”
“There’s olive oil.”
“Couldn’t find that either.”
Ronan smiled and ruffled Opal’s bedhead. “Sleep good, kid?”
They went up into the mountains for the day. It wasn’t like before. There were no stakes. They weren’t looking for anything or running from anything. If anything, it was simpler then. They had meaning. Now they had all been set loose on the world, like all children were in time, left to find their own things to look for or run from. There was a good reason most adventures were undertaken by children in the stories; adults couldn’t be trusted to care about the right things. Meaning was simpler at seventeen years old.
Adam dressed more like himself in old beat-up clothes he wouldn’t be upset to get muddy, and Maura packed them sandwiches for the day. Blue wore something awful, and Gansey drove the van. It was one of those odd warm days in Virginia, nearly in the sixties, and on the long drive into the mountains, Adam laughed like he used to, in the backseat with Ronan.
Adam didn’t like him much when they first met. Ronan felt strongly about Adam, a conviction that manifested both as love and hatred, in equal measure. They were a pair before they were a couple. As life drew Gansey toward Blue, they watched together from the sidelines, and they came to know one another. They were alike. It felt right in a way that nothing every felt right then, to have Adam standing by his side. Ronan always — then and now — stood a half step behind Adam, chest bumping his shoulder. Kavinsky thought he was an attack dog, and he might have been right in the end, but he was never Gansey’s attack dog.
Gansey bundled them all in sweatshirts from the back of the van. It was warm for the season. Ronan figured they’d all rather be sitting around a fire, but they hiked out three miles down a poorly marked path, Ronan and Adam lagging behind, making fun when Gansey put his hands on his hips, looking for the right way to go.
When they reached the waterfall, rushing down a sheer rock face tucked into the forest, Ronan pointed up a the high boulder peak above and bet that Adam couldn’t make it to the top and jump off.
Adam scoffed, shaking his head. He stood close enough that their arms brushed with even such a small movement. It had the power to kill him, Adam’s earnestness.
“Come on, kid,” Ronan teased, shaking his shoulders when he felt brave. “Bet I can beat you to the top.”
“Bet you can,” Adam answered, grinning, uninterested.
“Don’t you wanna jump?”
“It looks a little shallow.”
Ronan laughed. “What? You want me to check?”
Adam’s brows raised, probably without his express permission. But knew how to push his luck, so he stripped his shirt over his head.
“Lynch,” Adam laughed, “it’s cold!”
He found the rocky edge of the river, stepping out of his jeans. He stripped his shirt over his head. It was cold, but not that cold.
“Ronan,” Gansey called after him from the other side of the river. “What are you doing?”
He watched, annoyed, like he knew exactly what he was doing. It was the oldest story, doing something stupid to make a boy like you. It was the only story ever told. He walked into the freezing cold water until it covered his waist.
“See?” he shouted back to shore. “It’s safe.”
Adam sighed and stripped his own shirt over his head. “You’re nuts. Fine.”
Ronan waded out, and by the time he made it onto the embankment, dripping cold water over the sand, Adam had already scaled halfway up the boulder, his knee hooked into a crevice and his shirt and jeans in a pile down below. He scrambled up after him, just in time to catch his hip when he slipped and push him back up toward the top.
Despite that he’d just nearly fallen off, Adam jostled Ronan’s shoulder to get to the top first. He could hear Gansey worrying from the ground.
Blue came back from the woods, where she refused to admit she’d gone to piss. She chose weird moments to act like a girl. She put her hands on her hips. “What the fuck are you doing?”
Ronan looked down at Blue. “Jumping. What does it look like?”
She wrinkled her face in disgust. “Why are you wet?”
“Cause Adam’s a wuss!”
“Why are you naked?”
“Cause I’m wet!”
Adam snickered. “Turn around, Sargent.”
“What? Why?”
The thing about Adam Parrish was that Ronan had to goad him into doing stupid shit, and he said no often enough that it lured him into the false sense that he was a little boring, a little uptight, a little prudish. But he was none of those things, and when he did agree to Ronan’s schemes, he always took it just one step further than even Ronan. He was mostly stoic but told jokes that made Ronan wince. He drove the speed limit or fifty over. He kept out of trouble or framed his teacher for felonies. He was more reckless than Ronan had ever been but only released it in small, controlled increments. It was a fascinating psychology, and Ronan forced himself to continue thinking about that because now Adam was stripping off his underwear and throwing them off the side of the boulder, aiming loosely for his pile of clothes.
“Jesus!” Blue shouted, spinning around, hands clapped over her eyes.
“Why the fuck are you naked?”
“You think I’m gonna hike three miles back with a soggy ass?” Ronan blinked, looking up at the sky. He hadn’t thought about that, and Adam knew it, judging by the way he laughed.
“Please be careful,” Gansey pled.
“Cool it, grandpa!” Ronan shouted, then Adam was pushing him out of the way and flying through the air, arms flailing, letting out a magnificent shout that echoed through the mountain valley. He hit the water with a great splash.
Ronan peered over the edge. Adam surfaced, sputtering and laughing. He was a decent swimmer but not a natural one; he treaded against the current like he had a bone to pick with the water flowing around him.
In the end, Adam was right. It wasn’t fun walking three miles back with a soggy ass, but when Adam forgot was that it wasn’t fun walking back three miles with a wet head of hair either. They had to pretend they weren’t miserable when Gansey made them stop for the thirteenth time to take a picture of a lame flower he could find at the Barns if he liked. Blue dug spare sweatshirts out of Gansey’s backpack, snapping that she’d like to see less of the both of them.
They went to Nino’s for dinner, where Ronan had to sit in his wet jeans for another hour while Adam laughed at him. Blue protested; she said she’d rather see Ronan’s bare ass too than go eat shitty cardboard pizza at the place she waitressed for years, but Gansey let Ronan use his dreamed ID to buy her a beer, and she got over it fast.
They made the long drive back to Singer’s Falls, and Gansey got behind the wheel to make the shorter drive to 300 Fox Way.
When they got home, Ronan caught Adam by the back of his sweatshirt hood and yanked him back. He grinned. “I call first shower.”
Adam shoved him in retaliation. “Good, you smell like mold.”
After he showered and dried off, Adam slipped into the bathroom with a spare towel he’d dug out of the linen cabinet. Ronan liked that he still remembered where everything was. He liked that he knew he could go searching without asking. Looking for towels without asking was the most casual kind of familiarity — intimacy, maybe — he could think of. Come to my home and take what you like. Come and live here. Come and know my possessions as a surrogate for knowing me.
He went out to feed his animals, and by the time he made it back, Opal was already asleep in her room. Adam said he’d reminded her to brush her teeth. He remembered, then, what a fight that was.
Ronan got two beers out of the fridge and cracked the tops, carrying them into the living room. They put on a movie that neither of them watched. Adam tucked his knees up and nursed his beer. He wore an old sweatshirt and a pair of sweatpants Ronan remembered from before. Walking into the room felt like seeing a ghost sitting there on his couch.
It was quiet. They let it be quiet.
“Why didn’t you call?” he asked finally, because he couldn’t help himself, because he needed to know. Whatever the answer, he needed to know why he spent months watching a phone that never rang. He thought maybe the answer might help him understand why he kept believing it might.
“I didn’t know you wanted me to,” Adam said softly, mouth pulled into a reserved line. He didn’t meet Ronan’s eyes. “Why didn’t you call?”
“It didn’t seem like the fair thing to do.”
“I wanted to call, if that’s worth anything,” he whispered. “But I left. We were— Well. You remember what we were like. You and me.” He sucked in a breath. “Opal. And the I left. If I called, you’d pick up, because you’re you. It didn’t feel like the right thing to do.”
“You were my best friend.”
“Was I?”
Ronan set his drink on the table and leaned his elbows down on his knees. He looked at the floor. “Still are, you know.”
He felt Adam’s eyes on him, searching for eye contact he didn’t know how to meet. “Even still.”
“Even still,” he murmured, like it was a shameful thing, though he knew it wasn’t supposed to be.
Adam set his drink down too. Neither of them had more than a few sips, but the alcohol gave them a certain plausible deniability that allowed honesty. Adam exhaled, elongated and tired in a way that he hadn’t seemed all weekend. He leaned against Ronan’s shoulder. “You think we could be friends?”
“We were today.”
“You think we could forget?”
Ronan couldn’t read him as well as he could before, but he still new what he meant. Adam, ever cautious, never said the incriminating thing aloud. He said half of it and left the rest of it to dangle between them like food before the starving.
Could they really just be friends after they used to kiss each other’s skin and make promises they couldn’t keep and sleep like twin vines, born from separate roots but wound together all the same?
Ronan didn’t have an answer.
“What else is there?”
There was a world where they were friends, and there was a world where they were nothing. There was a third world too, but that wasn’t something he could speak about. They’d had it for a short while, then they burned it down. It was gone now, but he hadn’t forgotten. Effectively, he had two choices, and he knew which one was his. He wanted to have Adam, but he needed to know him. It wasn’t such a complicated decision in the end.
Then Ronan shook his head. He didn’t like that answer. He didn’t like that they HAD to be anything. This thing between them had always been as complicated as an atom bomb. There was no word for what they were before, and there was no word now.
His hands shook. “Maybe we should just be whatever we want to be.”
Adam reached out, all the same as the first time, like he was unsure if he was allowed. It seemed ridiculous to Ronan, that he wouldn’t know. His fingers grazed along his jaw, eyes following their path.
“I know you have to go,” Ronan whispered, eyes closed. “It’s okay that you have to go.”
Adam, warm and easy in his arms, said, “I still dream about you. Almost every night. I dream that you walk right in the door and put your arms around me and tell me it’s been too long.”
“It has been too long.”
Adam’s hand fell to his cheek. “I can’t stay.”
“I know.”
“I don’t know how to promise you anything.”
“It’s okay.”
Adam’s eyes bore into his, serious as he had ever seen them. “I don’t want to make it hurt all over again.”
Ronan’s hand fell over his, over his cheek. “Do we have to think about it?”
He expected Adam to shut this down, because Adam was the smart one. Adam was the rational one. He expected him to remind him of all the reasons this would kill them in the end. But just when Ronan thought he could predict him, Adam went left instead of right and proved him wrong again.
“I haven’t been able to get you out of my head,” he said, like it had been two weeks and not almost two years. “You promise we can be friends?”
Ronan held onto him like a lifeline, like he was the last rope that could drag him ashore. “I promise.”
Adam’s thumb brushed over Ronan’s lip, leaving a nerve-deep burn in his wake. “You’re my favorite dream.”
Adam kissed him.
It was fitting, that Ronan kissed him first, that now Adam kissed him back.
Adam was an earthquake, rumbling low then bringing the town down in the rumble.
He imagined this ought to feel like a sin, but it didn’t. It felt just like it used to, and maybe that was the sin.
“Adam,” he murmured when they parted.
Adam shifted to lay him out across the couch, to slide overtop him, to consume him. He affixed his knees on either side of his hips, pressing him down into the cushions.
Adam ran his hand all the way down his should, along the sensitive inside of his elbow, along the newly inked skin of his forearm. Adam took hold of his wrist and lifted it over his head to press back against the couch cushions, laying him back, slipping between his hips. He was a dream.
Ronan wondered fleetingly who taught him to do that.
Then their mouths met again and every thought left his head.
His skin burned everywhere Adam touched him, and it seemed Adam worked to touch him everywhere he could reach. His hands slipped under his clothes like he remembered where to go.
He shuddered when Adam brought their hips together, and he hoped he couldn’t tell there hadn’t been anyone else. It seemed like an embarrassing thing, that he hadn’t wanted anyone since the last time he wanted him.
If Adam could tell, he didn’t let it show. If he could tell, maybe he even liked it, by the way he pulled his other wrist over his head and bent to whisper that he’d been thinking about this since he first saw him yesterday.
“Your shirt,” Ronan breathed. “Come on, Parrish.”
Adam pulled his shirt over his head. “Yeah.”
What Adam had called his dining hall and free gym combo was really doing some unbelievable work. He’d always had a lean sort of muscle, the result of genetic inclination and the heavy lifting from his job at the mechanic’s, but he hadn’t been eating well then and he never slept. It wasn’t the time to comment on how good it was to not see his ribs anymore. He looked good. He seemed happy.
It was an unspeakably nice thing, and he couldn’t think up any good words in any good order that would tell him just how nice it was to see him like this. There was a twinge of sadness in it too, in knowing that he needed to go in order to become this. He had to go far away and get rid of his accent and throw away his shitty old Goodwill clothes and never call, but it let him be this.
It wouldn’t be kind to mention it, so he just said. “You’re a real looker, dickhead, you know that?”
He hoped he could read between the lines.
Adam laughed, inexplicably. His head tipped back a bit, and his eyes crinkled in the corners. He’d have wrinkles there someday, deep lines from laughing. It was a good thing.
Ronan forced a breath. “What?”
“You’re like the whole world in one person.”
“I don’t know what that means.”
“You could go all the way to Peru, and you’d still never find anybody like you.”
“Well, you’ve never been to Peru.”
“Sorry,” he laughed, shaking his head, like Ronan wasn’t really getting what he was trying to said. Ronan wasn’t really getting what he was trying to say, but he didn’t think it really mattered. “I just forgot what you were like.”
“Opal’s a light sleeper,” he said. “We should get off the couch.”
Adam slipped away from him but never entirely parted from him, tugging him by the ankle then pulling him to his feet then touching the middle of his back down the hall then kissing his shoulder blade then shutting the door softly behind them.
He took off his shirt and dropped it onto the floor. Adam used to pick up his clothes and fold them, his silent chastisement, but he didn’t today. There wasn’t really a place for chastisement anymore, not when it felt like they’d stolen this moment anyway. Adam liked the new tattoos on his arms.
“You saw them earlier,” Ronan said.
“I didn’t know if I was allowed to mention it.”
Ronan hummed. “I took them out of my dreams. Sort of.”
He ran his fingers over the dark ink that emerged from the bone of his wrist and brambled along his forearm. It was no elegant vine; it was vegetation that had seen no human soul, a mess of greenery that grew toward the light and never saw pruning shears. He saw visions in the night — not quiet dreams but not quiet thoughts either — of turning himself into a forest. It felt holy, like a nun accepting the habit for her Savior. It was the sort of thing that would make him sound nuts to say out loud.
“They make you look more like yourself.”
They undressed, Adam watching him, his eyes dark. The curtains were still cast open, but that sort of thing didn’t matter out here. The woods could watch if they liked. Moonlight cast a hazy underlight across the floor, more fog than beam. It was enough to see the way to the bed, enough to see what he needed to see.
He was the same as Ronan remembered. As far as he had gone, as diligently as he had worked to eradicate his accent, as hard as he worked to look like someone different, he fell into Ronan’s bed the same. He wrapped around him the same. He pulled his mouth across his skin like every atom in his body remembered the right way to do it, and he still smelled like a grassy night in the forest, a woodfire burning close by.
The more Ronan dreamed, the less he felt the weight of it. He marveled less at the beautiful things he could bring from his dreams than he did when he was younger, but he feared the nightmares less too. There was this one moment though, whether dream or nightmare, that had not changed in its force. For just a fraction of a second, just before he woke, he felt an amazement so massive, so consuming that it nearly felt like fear. It wrapped around him nearly too tight, pulling at his every nerve. Wonder was the closest word. He never felt it once outside of his dreams until the first time he slept with Adam.
He felt it now too.
In the morning, on Christmas Eve, Adam made coffee, and they didn’t talk about it.
They didn’t need to. They both knew what they needed to know, and they both felt what they felt. Adam never put milk and cream in his coffee, because you didn’t need the sweetness to get the kick of caffeine in the morning. The trick to understanding Adam was knowing that he would never ask for what he wanted. If he did seem to outwardly want something, then the truth was that he had needed it for a very long time. He liked milk and a touch of cream. Ronan put it out on the table, and when he didn’t bite, he poured it in himself.
“I don’t need it,” Adam said, taking a sip anyway.
“I know.” He poured the milk liberally into his own mug. “What are you studying?”
Adam looked up, surprised. “At Harvard?”
“No, at Julliard.”
Adam scoffed. “Fuck off. Finance.”
Ronan raised a brow. “Exciting.”
“It doesn’t have to be exciting. It’s a means to an end.”
“What’s the end?”
Adam leaned back in his chair at the kitchen table. “Job security.”
“Admirable.”
“I think it is,” he said, not argumentatively exactly, but like he didn’t want to hear Ronan’s thoughts on the matter. “Picking a career isn’t about finding some meaning in life, it’s about finding something you can put up with, finding something that gives you the life you want.”
“And what do you want?”
“I want options.”
Ronan didn’t have a response. There was a painful kind of irony in that Ronan had all the freedom in the world but only one life he could live, while Adam was born with such a limited lot in life, only to use every bit of it to grant himself choice. As cruel as fate could be, the consolation was that it wasn’t always cruel — not for everybody.
They spent the day at 300 Fox Way. Blue gave them looks, like she maybe knew how much they had complicated things the night before. She didn’t say anything about it, but she watched them carefully. Ronan tried his best to ignore it.
She’d had her own thoughts when they broke up. They left on their travels before it happened, and when she found out, she didn’t write for months. Gansey dutifully reported that she was doing well, that she was enjoying her time abroad, and that she was so angry with them she couldn’t bear to spare a stamp to write letters of her own. She came around to speaking them again by that first Christmas they were away, but she didn’t hold back her opinions about the whole thing. She said in a letter that Ronan still had, tucked away somewhere, that she was impressed by how good they were at drowning everything that mattered. He wondered if she still believed that about them.
Gansey didn’t seem to notice, which was probably for the best.
Blue caught him outside late in the evening. Gansey and Adam were playing cards inside, and Ronan promised he would get up on the ladder and clear out the gutters before he left. After Blue left 300 Fox Way and everyone left Ronan, Maura gave him these chores to do, things she didn’t want to pay anybody to come to do when she had a nice boys around — as she put it — to her out. He didn’t mind it, though he always put up a fuss. Blue held him hostage from the bottom of the ladder, sitting on the bottom rung so it wouldn’t tip. He’d actually looked forward to doing it this time; he needed a minute alone with his thoughts. But Blue had no intentions of allowing him that.
“Are you aware that he’s different when you’re not around? Like, are you aware of that, or do you just think he’s always like this?”
“Are you aware that I’m less annoyed when you’re not driving me nuts?”
“Ronan.”
“Butt out. You read half the Bible and wrote nine sermons.”
“What?”
“What?” he mimicked, pulling at a stuck twig. “It’s complicated. And more importantly, it’s none of your business.”
“Since when aren’t you my business?”
He frowned. “You know what I meant.”
“No,” she shot back, just to be contrary. “Explain that to me.”
He reached to scrape the last pile of leaves within his reach into the bag he’d tied to his belt loop, then he climbed down to move the ladder down a few feet. He flicked the side of her head. He didn’t have any sisters, but having Sargent around made him think he’d probably be pretty good at it. “He looks better don’t you think?”
“Well yeah, but—”
“He eats three square meals a day. He goes to his bullshit dickwad classes and gets enlightened, or whatever they do up there. He has hobbies and shit. He lived in a dumpster fire for eighteen years, and now he gets to do whatever the fuck he wants. I think he’s allowed.”
“I didn’t say he’s not allowed,” she snapped, standing between him and the ladder, forcing him to talk to her. “I just think you’re a coward.”
“Great. Move.”
“Ronan.”
“I’m not Beetlejuice. Saying my name a bunch of times doesn’t do shit.”
“You know I’m right.”
“No. Actually, I know you’re wrong. Adam’s good. He’s happy. He wanted Harvard, and he got Harvard. Do you know that he goes to the gym now? Like, do you know how fucking incredible that is? Adam Parrish, who used to prop his books up on the steering wheel while he drove to work so he didn’t waste a moment he could spend studying, blocks off an hour every day so he can go to the gym, just because he wants to. That’s a fucking miracle, and we’re all acting like it’s not.”
She watched him for a long, painfully silent moment. “I know it’s a miracle.”
“God gives what God wants to give.”
“I don’t believe in God.”
“And He still gives what He wants to give.”
She shook her head, turning away from him.
She went back inside.
Ronan finished cleaning the gutters, then he helped Maura make dinner. When he helped around the house, she paid him with her best recipes, looking over his shoulder and correcting him. She told him once that she intended to make a good husband out of him. He just laughed and rolled his eyes, but he always made her best pot pie on cold nights.
He thought Adam might stay at Blue’s place, because it was Christmas Eve, and he planned to spend the holiday with them, but he got in Ronan’s car when he left, and he was glad for it. As happy as he was to have Gansey and Blue around, having Adam to himself made his soul settle. It was their last night. Adam had a train bound for Boston late Christmas afternoon, and he wasn’t ready to say goodbye tonight.
They made it home early in the evening, and Ronan took down a good bottle of bourbon to pour. They sat together on the couch, and they didn’t say much, but Adam leaned into his shoulder, cheek pressed to his arm. That was better than any words he could imagine. Opal was still awake, and she tucked herself between them to watch the movie, sprawled out with her elbow jammed into Ronan’s side and her knee poking into Adam’s leg. They watched Revenge of the Sith because it was her favorite movie. Adam watched with his hand on Ronan’s shoulder, sneaking glances over her shoulder.
Ronan sent Opal off to bed after the movie ended, and Adam took Ronan to bed too.
He left Adam behind at the Barns a couple hours before midnight to drive into town for the midnight mass, to meet his brothers. Declan and Matthew drove back with him to stay at the house for the night, so they could be together on Christmas morning.
If Declan wondered why Adam was there, he didn’t ask, though he did take note of it. He didn’t ask why Ronan didn’t sleep on the couch. Ronan didn’t bring it up either, but he knew the conversation was coming.
Adam promised Gansey he would be at Fox Way in the morning. Ronan wished they all would have just come out to the Barns, but Blue wanted to be with her family for Christmas morning, and Gansey wanted to be with Blue, and Adam had already spent enough of his trip leaving Gansey and Blue to be at the Barns. Ronan let him take the BMW. Declan shot him a brutal side-eye after Adam left, keys in hand.
“Be careful,” Declan said.
“I know.” He bristled at Declan’s implication that Adam was someone he needed to watch out for. Like Adam was some danger to him. “He’s a good person, you know, even if you don’t like him.”
He knew it sounded derisive, but he kept his temper in check because they were trying to be better. In the start, it was for Matthew, but now it was for them too, in their complicated way. The story of Cain and Abel was one of the simplest in the Bible. In short, they were trying.
“I like him fine,” Declan said warily. “You’re just not like everyone else.”
Ronan eyed him. “I’m aware.”
“I worry he needs you to be like everyone else, and I worry you’ll try if he asks.”
“If that was true, I wouldn’t have let him leave,” Ronan said. He wished Declan hadn’t brought it up, even if there was truth in it. Could there be no grace given, on Christmas of all days? “He asked before. He won’t ask again, Believe me.”
Declan looked away, his first real expression of regret for bringing it up. Ronan wasn’t stupid. He knew that his dreaming wasn’t a piece of him that he could forget about or tuck away when it got inconvenient for him. It wasn’t a trait like right-handed night or good eyesight. He was a dream before he was anything else, and he didn’t know why in the great scheme of all of it, he was burdened with this state of being, but he understood better than anyone — better, certainly, than Declan — that he was stuck with it forever. What Declan failed to understand was that Adam, like his dreaming, was in his bone marrow. He could let him leave, he could let him go live a life away from this, he could let him slowly forget him, but none of that would change the fact that Adam was just as much a part of him as his dreams, and that wasn’t something that could be reasoned away. His existence was an isolatingly singular one, a chronic disease to which Adam was the only relief.
To leave his land would be akin to ripping his spine from his body and trying to go on living without. There was no world he could see in which he could date Adam Parrish like a normal person could, but that didn’t mean he wouldn’t always open his door for him.
Declan leaned back against the kitchen counter. “Are you happy.”
Ronan scoffed, shaking his head in disbelief. Declan always missed the fucking point. “Sure.”
“Ronan, please. Will you just have a real conversation with me?”
“I am. I am. I just know that it’ll start a bunch of shit if I tell you that you don’t understand. But you don’t. It’s not your fault that you don’t understand. Nobody on the fucking planet understands.”
Declan took a deep breath, because they were trying. Their main method of getting along was practicing painful honesty, then not punching each other. It worked well enough, most of the time. They pissed each other off to a degree no one else on the planet could manage, but when the initial anger wore off, they had a better understanding, and it sort of made them closer. Kind of. It also meant he had to spend a lot of time listening to his brother say annoying, stupid shit.
“Then help me understand.”
“That’s my whole fucking point. I know that you care, or whatever, and I know that you sympathize, but you could get on a plane and fly to Milan and meet some Italian girl with huge—”
“Ronan.”
“You could meet a lovely woman with good values and marry her and have fifty kids and save for retirement, and that’s not an option for me. I don’t have a lot of choices, but when Adam shows up, I can choose to let him in. I can choose to do the thing I want to do, even though I know it’ll fucking suck ass when he leaves.” He looked Declan in the eye, trying to summon as much of Maura’s mindfulness shit as he could manage. He visualized not punching his brother in the face and took deep breaths. “I can choose to love him, and I can choose to let him go, and I just think you’d do the same thing if you were me. I really do.”
“Maybe I would,” Declan said, and that was just about the closest thing he would get to an apology. He almost appreciated it.
Ronan drove Adam to the train station that afternoon. Gansey said he didn’t mind driving him, but Adam had his car at 300 Fox Way anyway, so he caught a ride into town with Declan, who was on his way back to DC, then they went to the train station.
He carried Adam’s backpack over his shoulder, up onto the train platform. The Henrietta station hardly qualified as a station. There were just the two rickety platforms, one bound north and one bound south. It was down at the very far end of Main Street, away from all the shops and around the corner from the shady parking lot where the high school kids went to buy their weed.
Adam stood fidgeting while they waited for the train. It was supposed to come in three minutes, but the trains were always running a few minutes behind on this stretch of the line. He looked like he had something to say. Ronan gave him the moment to decide if he would. The thing with Adam was he didn’t compulsively blurt things out like Ronan did. He thought things through, but he always said what he needed to say, in his own time.
Ronan also knew that the longer you gave him to think about it, the kinder it usually came out. He, like Ronan, had a temper, but he, unlike Ronan, knew how to cool it off.
He squinted against the winter sun, looking out over the tracks. “The way I left—”
Ronan shook his head. “We don’t have to talk about it.”
“I think we do.”
“We had all weekend to talk about it,” he murmured, his hands shaking.
Adam could have said this any time this weekend, but he waited until now because he knew that he could say it and go — say it and walk away from the fallout. He didn’t really want to reopen that wound. For all the things Adam was good at that Ronan was still trying to figure out, there was one critical thing that Ronan understood better. Honesty was only a virtue if you knew when to keep your mouth shut.
“It was so—” He smiled sadly, shaking his head. “Well. You know. You remember how it was.”
“I remember.”
He remembered pretty viscerally, actually. He could still taste Adam’s mouth from the night before, from the morning too, when they snuck off to fool around in the shower while Ronan’s brothers still slept. But that wasn’t what Adam meant. Ronan knew he was talking about the rest of it. The best parts. Adam living at the Barns that summer, Adam with Opal, Adam tucking himself neatly into every facet of Ronan’s life and making each one better just by brushing up against it. Ronan knew how it was.
“I wasn’t— I wasn’t planning on leaving all along. I didn’t realize that you might think that until after I was gone, and I don’t want you to—” He sucked in a breath. “I meant everything I said.”
Ronan sort of knew that. Sometimes.
“What’s done is done.”
“Yeah,” he nodded. “I thought I was doing the kind thing, by cutting it off at the root.”
He obviously didn’t think so anymore, if he was back here. Or maybe they had just given up on doing to merciful thing. Maybe it was fine if they tortured each other with this. Ronan didn’t mind, at least. But talking to Adam now felt infinitely different from talking to him six hours ago. It felt stiff. Guarded. If Adam had been HIS this weekend, even momentarily, that moment had passed. This Adam categorically was not HIS.
The Adam who was his didn’t apologize. The Adam who was his didn’t need to apologize and knew he didn’t need to apologize. The Adam who was his didn’t look away from him and watch his words and carefully control his movements.
“I’m sorry,” Adam said finally. “If I was wrong about that, I mean. I should have called. I wanted to call.”
“I would’ve picked up,” Ronan said.
It wasn’t a monumental admission, but Adam seemed to think it was. “Really?”
“You know that,” he chided lightly — chiding him for his self-deprecation more than anything.
“I know now, then.”
The new time flashed on the departures screen overhead, and they heard the train horn blaring as it entered town. Ronan lifted the backpack off his shoulder and handed it over by the top handle. “Don’t be a stranger anymore, alright? I’m sick of that bullshit.”
Adam nodded, hugged him briefly, squeezing his wrist. “Okay. Promise.”