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Adam never drove out to the Barns; Ronan always drove him there.
It was something he’d just realized, looking across the car to see Ronan’s fingers tapping on the steering wheel. He’d chosen something howling for the music – which, for Irish rock and for Ronan, was positively cheerful. Whatever the reason, Ronan was less irritable than normal and it made Adam nervous. But Ronan kept driving him out here – kept not just allowing Adam into his world but asking him without words – and that was something Adam couldn’t take for granted.
It never felt like the Barns changed much. Even on days when it was sunny and bright, there was mist in the back fields. There was something about that sameness that bothered him precisely because he found himself wanting it. He had started to dream about going there and sleeping – he had a lot of dreams about sleeping, which he found annoying but a little funny – in a bed in front of the fireplace, warm, happier than he knew how to be when he was awake. And, of course, Ronan was always there. The impossibility of it ever happening made him tired and angry when he woke up.
In the old barn the same animals slept, the same junk littered the tables and the floors and the walls. There was the same blanket with the same impression of a body in it, and Adam suddenly shivered all over at a strangely soft feeling of affection, thinking of Ronan asleep here with a blanket around him. Sleeping beside him would be dangerous, Adam supposed, but no more dangerous than anything else in his life. His skin felt like it knew already what it would be like to be warm with Ronan, against him. Ronan might grow spikes in his sleep…but then again he might be soft underneath. Adam was starting to suspect the latter.
“There’s some stuff I need to get before we start, so I need to sleep,” Ronan said once they were in the office. “You can fuck around with whatever’s here if you’re bored. Maybe Noah will show up.”
“Where are Gansey and Blue?” he asked when he was sure it would seem off-hand. Like he didn’t notice that it was always just the two of them here, like he didn’t hope it would just be Ronan in the BMW every time they went to the Barns.
“Off doing Glendower shit somewhere,” Ronan said with a wave of his hand, leaning against one of the work tables.
“They've been doing that a lot lately,” Adam said. He wasn’t going to say it bothered him, but it did, although he wasn’t sure what upset him because he wasn’t sure how much of him liked Blue that way anymore. A part of him had let it go and enjoyed her friendship, a part of him was sometimes still caught up in how pretty she was, and a part of him still resented being rejected, and resented even more the idea that she might choose Gansey because Gansey always got everything Adam wanted. He thought – hoped, really – that part was getting smaller. Being resentful and then guilty about being resentful was exhausting, and he didn’t have any more room for exhausting things.
“Yeah, well, he trusts her more than he trusts us,” Ronan said. He said it so calmly Adam knew it must have been eating at him for a long time.
The cat wandered over and patted at Adam’s knee. Lonely, Adam thought, being the only creature at the Barns who wasn’t sleeping. “I thought Gansey and I were good,” he said. “And you and Gansey are always good.”
“We’re as good as we can be for people who betrayed him,” Ronan said. “I don’t think he’ll ever completely trust either of us again. He’ll try to, but I don’t think he can.”
“You think he hasn’t forgiven you?” Adam asked. He didn’t ask You don’t think he’s forgiven me? He didn’t really want to know.
Ronan shrugged. “I haven’t given him any reason to. And you – I think it might be worse because he didn’t expect it from you.”
If Ronan said another word, Adam realized abruptly, anything at all, he was going to cry. He buried his face in the cat’s fur to hide it, but Ronan backed off for what was likely the first time in his entire life and eventually the cat squirmed and ran away. He wondered what Ronan would do if he did cry. Growl at him to cut it out and then dream up some kind of glue for his tear ducts so he’d never cry again, probably. The thought made him smile, and when he looked up Ronan was watching him carefully. Careful, the way he was with so few things, not because Adam was something that needed a caretaker but because he was something Ronan wanted to treat with care.
Finally Ronan walked past him to the chair he was leaning against, the one with the blanket in it. He sat in it and put his foot on Adam’s thigh, pushing to propel the chair. When he had swung all the way around his legs bumped into Adam, and he used Adam to twirl the chair in the other direction.
“I’m going to sleep,” he said finally. “You can do whatever. There’s food.”
“Hm,” Adam said, and when Ronan curled up in the chair Adam leaned against it again. The cat had returned, and regarded Adam warily until it seemed satisfied Adam wasn’t going to mash his face in its fur. He stretched his legs out and the cat settled in his lap like a fat gray loaf, and then the only sounds in the room were sporadic purring and Ronan’s breath evening out. It was actually pretty pleasant, he thought drowsily, resting his head on the nearest surface, which was Ronan’s knee. He watched the dust motes floating through the light from the window and felt, for the moment, that he didn’t have to hold himself together quite so tightly to prevent everything from flying apart. Sometimes there was no one he felt both more and less comfortable with than Ronan.
The cat purred louder. Ronan, now completely asleep, made the tiniest of not-quite-snoring noises. The pendulum on the clock that never ticked swung back and forth and Adam’s hand slowed and then stilled on the cat until he too was asleep.
*
He opened his eyes in Cabeswater. Or – not Cabeswater. Something like it. He was standing in a field next to a forest, and there was a grassy path into the forest, overhung with vines. He looked wildly around him and saw Ronan’s familiar black jeans and gray muscle shirt near the edge of the forest. Ronan jogged over, smiling.
“Hey,” he said, like there was no one in the world he wanted to see more than Adam.
“H…ey,” Adam replied, more than a little disturbed by the affection in Ronan’s voice and the way he was grinning at him, sweet and as uncomplicated as Ronan could ever be. “How did we get here?”
“I don’t know, it’s a dream,” Ronan said. “Come on.”
Ronan’s hand slid into his, gently stroking his thumb. He shivered and let Ronan lead him for a few steps through the grass before he stopped again.
“I'm," he began. “I don’t think this is a dream. Not my dream, anyway.”
Ronan let go of his hand, no longer smiling, and he regretted saying anything. Maybe he was wrong and he was dreaming, or he’d fallen asleep and landed somewhere in Cabeswater. Either way, he had a feeling that this happy Ronan who wanted to hold his hand was someone he was never going to see again.
“You think I pulled you into my dream?” Ronan asked.
“Could be.” Adam looked around. “It’s happened before, sort of.”
Ronan reached over and pinched his arm, hard.
“Jesus, Lynch.” He slapped at Ronan’s hand. “I don’t think it works that way.”
“Well, I’ve got shit to do, so you’re just going to have to deal with it until I’m done,” Ronan said. He had closed down, pulled in on himself with his tattoo and his hunched shoulders doing the work of spiky armor.
“I don’t want to be in your dreams,” Adam said without thinking.
“I didn’t do it on purpose,” Ronan said, sounding baffled before he apparently realized he was supposed to be angry and stalked off.
“Wait, I didn’t mean – ” Adam started off after him. “I just meant I don’t want to be attacked by nightmare monsters.”
“It’s not always like that,” Ronan said. He still seemed off-kilter, unable to attain quite the appropriate level of fury. His face, when he turned back to Adam, wasn’t angry at all. “Usually it’s just – like this.”
“This” was something like the misty hills around the Barns, gray and green and surrounded by wet, dark woods. It was so calm and eerily lovely Adam could only stop and look for several minutes, sorting out what was lifelike and what was created by Ronan’s imagination. Most of it seemed normal, although he kept catching movement out of the corner of his eye – small flickering images that he could just barely see.
He took a deep breath. “What’s in the forest?” he asked.
“I never know until I get there,” Ronan said. “I ask Cabeswater to help me and then something appears.”
“So,” Adam said. “Let’s go see.”
The light that fell onto the path into the woods was like the light during an eclipse. Adam kept stumbling and had the urge several times to grab Ronan’s arm because he walked through it with a sure step, but he had a feeling Ronan would shake him off. After a mile or so the trees became slightly less dense and the clear gray light shone through.
“There,” Ronan said, pointing above them. Hanging from one of the higher branches in a birch tree was a red ribbon. “That’s one of them.”
Before Adam could process it Ronan was hauling himself into the tree. He watched the muscles in Ronan’s back and shoulders working under his shirt for several moments, his mind completely blank, until he realized Ronan was looking down at him over his shoulder.
“You got it?” Adam asked, hoping that his dream-face wouldn’t blush and knowing he wouldn’t be that lucky.
“Stop looking up my skirt, Parrish,” Ronan said, climbing back down. He landed in front of Adam and flung the ribbon at him.
Flustered, Adam said, “This is only slightly better than the last time I was in your head.”
“No one’s trying to kill us at the moment.” Ronan had found another ribbon, this one growing from the ground like the grass.
“And Kavinsky’s not here,” Adam agreed. “He’s the only other person who’s ever been in your head, right?”
“I wish you were the only one,” Ronan said.
He glanced sidelong at Ronan, who was staring resolutely ahead, his face flushed. The admission seemed to have startled him as much as it had Adam. It was unlike Ronan to be so candid, and Adam wondered if being inside his own head made it harder for him to hide what he was thinking. He decided to test the idea out a little.
“Why Kavinsky, though?” He moved further into the woods, seeing another ribbon.
Ronan shrugged. “Why not?”
Out of the corner of his eye, Adam saw a flash of Kavinsky. It was gone before the next blink. “He was like the worst parts of everyone I’ve ever met.”
The ribbon was just out of their reach, and Ronan grabbed onto a branch, braced himself, and climbed up to get it. He held it aloft and dropped it onto Adam’s upturned face, then hopped down again, wiping his hands on Adam’s sweatshirt. “He knew me,” he said at last.
“In a biblical way?” Adam asked, and Ronan snorted and moved ahead. “You have people who know you. Gansey knows you.”
“Not like that,” Ronan said. “If Gansey went inside my head, he’d be so Gansey about it. Imagine.”
Adam imagined. Gansey, Ganseying everywhere. God, what a nightmare. “Point,” he said.
“But Kavinsky – in the end I didn’t want him to know me,” Ronan said. “And I didn’t want to know him.”
You want me to know you, Adam thought. Was that why he was here? Cabeswater knew what the Greywaren needed. He shivered at the thought. He could ask – could say Ronan, do you want me to know you? Do you want me? But he knew the answer already, and he didn’t want to hear it until Ronan actually wanted to tell him.
There were seven more ribbons and then, finally, a gold ribbon, which was higher and harder to reach than any of the others.
“Am I allowed to get them? Does it have to be you?” Adam asked, squinting up at it.
“Why not? You’re the magician.”
“All right, give me a boost then,” Adam said. Ronan held out his linked hands for Adam to step into and lifted him almost all the way up to the first branch. His other leg flailed for a moment until Ronan grabbed the back of his knee to support him. The air rushed out of him as he pulled himself up properly and Ronan’s hand fell away. He was unbearably sensitive there – ticklish, on a normal day, although he’d never admit that to anyone – and he realized as he climbed the tree that he was imagining Ronan’s hands on his thighs and his heartbeat was pulsing fast and heavy between his legs. This is ridiculous, he thought crossly, and ignored it. It took him a few minutes to reach the top of the tree, and once the gold ribbon was in his hands he looked down. Ronan was standing with his arms crossed, smiling up at him.
“Hurry the fuck up,” he shouted.
“I’m enjoying the scenery in your weird brain,” Adam said. “There’s a Celine Dion concert happening on the other side of the forest.”
“Now you know what we’re listening to the entire way home,” Ronan replied.
Once he had climbed out of the tree, Adam held the ends of the ribbons and Ronan braided them together with the gold one in the middle. When it was done Adam pressed the long cord into Ronan’s hand and curled his fingers around it, remembering the way those fingers had slid into his own and how happy Ronan had looked to see him.
“Hopefully you won’t just leave me here when you wake up,” he said.
“There’s plenty in here for you to play with,” Ronan said, but he yanked his hand away fast, looking unhappy.
*
They were silent on the drive back to St. Agnes. The braided ribbon had done nothing except frighten the one wakeful cat, who hissed at it and then ran off balefully like Adam had betrayed its trust. Adam leaned his head against the window and found himself drifting to sleep again, his breath fogging the glass around his head. It took him a few minutes to realize what was different with the car and when he did he smiled. The engine was quieter. Ronan was driving slower, more carefully. It wouldn’t have mattered if he whipped around corners and pushed each gear until it protested and stopped on a dime as usual; Adam could sleep through anything. But he appreciated the gesture. Maybe, he thought sleepily, Ronan had forgiven him for that strange moment of vulnerability.
“I think you’re getting closer,” Noah said.
"Jesus Christ," Adam said.
“Oh my fucking god,” Ronan bellowed, swerving the car.
“You have to stop being so creepy,” Adam said, clutching his chest and trying to breathe, when Ronan was in the right lane again.
“Please, this is one of my few earthly pleasures,” Noah replied, and Adam wasn’t sure why but it made him laugh, loud and wild and maybe a little hysterical. Ronan looked at him sharply for a moment and then grinned.
“You should never stop being creepy,” he said, but Noah was already gone.
*
That night, just as Adam pulled on his pajama pants, Ronan pounded on the door and flew through it before Adam had it all the way unlocked. Chainsaw followed him with a squawk that sounded annoyed to Adam. It must be difficult keeping up with Ronan, he thought. She settled on the back of Adam’s chair and puffed up briefly before shaking herself out.
“It’s working,” Ronan said. “Noah was right, we’re getting closer.”
“What happened?” he asked. “Did you go back to the Barns?”
“Yeah,” Ronan said, stalking around the room restlessly. “Yeah. I wanted to be alone for a while. And when I got there one of the cows was shaking its head back and forth. She wasn’t awake, but she was moving.”
“So we did something right.” Adam pulled a shirt out from the small stack in his makeshift bureau and pulled it over his head.
“It’s because it’s the two of us,” Ronan said. “I want to try it again. Do you think you can?”
He shrugged, then remembered Ronan’s hand on the back of his leg and flushed so hotly he thought he must be glowing in the dark. With some alarm he realized he was getting hard just thinking about it. “Yeah,” he said, clearing his throat and turning his back to Ronan. “I mean, what else do I have to do tonight?”
“Exactly, you have no life,” Ronan said, already shrugging off his jacket, kicking off his shoes and wriggling out of his jeans.
“What, now?”
“Yeah, now.” Ronan grabbed one of Adam’s blankets and stretched out beside the bed where he usually slept if he stayed over.
Adam made a face and stepped over Ronan to flop onto his bed, sighing dramatically.
“I think,” Ronan said, “you have to be touching me.”
Adam scooted to the edge of the bed and looked down at him. Ronan was staring at the ceiling very casually. “Fine,” he said, flattening his entire palm over Ronan’s face.
“I will eat your skinny fingers,” Ronan said, his voice muffled but calm.
“Go to sleep, asshole,” Adam said, and grabbed Ronan’s hand before he could say anything else.
It took him a little while longer to fall asleep this time, but when he did he woke up by the forest again. Ronan was sitting on the edge of it, waiting for him.
*
Over the next three weeks Ronan slept at St. Agnes every night. From Ronan’s dreams, they pulled out: a blank piece of paper, an antenna, something that seemed like a finger trap but wasn’t flexible, knitting needles and thick woolen yarn that wouldn’t cooperate even when Ronan learned how to knit and taught Adam as well, and piles and piles of flowers.
“We’re almost getting it,” Ronan said, frustrated when the animals would only move a little bit at a time. Chainsaw hopped from cow to cow, landing and pecking them encouragingly. “There’s something I’m missing still. It’s like we’re not asking deeply enough, or something.”
“I think I’m distracting you,” Adam said, running his finger around the rim of the glass bubbles they had found. “You talk to me when you should be concentrating on the objects.”
Ronan blew out a hard breath. “I’m going to try it on my own tonight.”
Adam, alone in St. Agnes that night, stared at the wall for hours before he finally turned on the light and decided to drive over to Monmouth Manufacturing. Ronan wouldn’t be there, he knew, but odds were Gansey would be up. Gansey was always up.
“Can’t sleep,” he said shortly when Gansey opened the door.
“You’ve caught the disease,” Gansey said, handing him a book from the stack beside his bed. Adam read on the couch until dawn, when Ronan burst into the building like it had done something terrible to him. Gansey, who had finally fallen asleep facedown on a thick book of Welsh genealogy, groaned.
“That was a fucking disaster,” Ronan hissed at Adam, like it was his fault. “I didn’t find anything at all and the trees started shedding all over me. I woke up covered in leaves.”
“We’ll go together tonight,” Adam said softly, not wanting to explain to Gansey.
“You’re damn right we will,” Ronan said, stomping past Adam to his bedroom and slamming the door. He came out again an hour later and made coffee before Adam had to go to work.
“God,” Adam murmured, “this is the best coffee I’ve ever had. This is the best coffee anyone’s ever had.”
“Magic beans,” Ronan said, leaning against the counter and looking pleased despite the shadows under his eyes.
“You’re Jack,” Adam said, delighted. “Going up the bean stalk and stealing everything before the giant gets you.”
“I was going to bring you a golden harp,” Ronan said. “But now you’re getting goose shit.”
Gansey shuffled into the room, grabbing a mostly clean coffee mug. “Why is he getting goose shit?”
“He knows why,” Ronan said darkly.
*
They slept in Cabeswater one afternoon, to see what would happen. Ronan went to see his mother first, and when he came back he looked more relaxed, a little younger. They stretched out in one of the fields, head to foot, Adam touching Ronan’s ankle. This time when they went into the forest they found a stack of small, clear cubes.
“I think these might be for the chickens,” Ronan said, which made Adam laugh until he couldn’t breathe.
“I don’t know,” he gasped when Ronan raised his eyebrows. “I have no idea why it’s funny.”
“Fucking weird, Parrish,” Ronan said, but he kept smiling and trying not to and then smiling again.
When they woke up they stared at the sky instead of getting up to go home. Something was different, Adam thought. Not just Ronan himself, although he seemed different too, in a way Adam was starting to love. It took him a while to realize he could hear something, very faintly, in his left ear.
He pushed himself up and shifted around so his head rested on Ronan’s stomach, just beside his sharp hipbone, closing his eyes so he could concentrate on hearing the wind in the trees more clearly. It was so low in his deaf ear, maddening, like white noise. He almost wanted to lift his head to get rid of it, but Ronan was quiet and comfortable the way he never was outside his own mind. After a little while Ronan’s knuckles brushed the side of Adam’s head and for a second, he could hear perfectly. He jumped and Ronan jerked away, tensing, but Adam grabbed his wrist.
“No,” he said, bringing Ronan’s hand close enough that his fingers touched his ear. “I can hear everything when you do that. You’re like a radio tuner.”
Ronan made a rough noise of amusement, but didn’t pull away. Instead he settled down again, relaxing under Adam’s head. After a while his thumb started to sweep over the shell of Adam’s ear, slowly, back and forth. Adam listened to Cabeswater, to the wind in the leaves and the grass and the water, the rhythm of Ronan breathing, the noise of a tractor far away, the angry buzzing of a cicada. They stayed there for so long it began to get dark, but Ronan didn’t stop. Occasionally his fingers stroked through the hair at Adam’s temple. When they both shivered in the cool evening air, he finally stilled Ronan’s hand and, on impulse, turned his face into it so his cheek was against Ronan’s palm.
“Thank you,” he murmured.
Ronan pulled away and the noise of the world was half-gone again. He flicked Adam’s nose hard and said, “I could eat.”
“So let’s eat,” Adam said, rubbing his nose. He sat up, drowsy and still tingling with the pleasure of being touched.
*
They went back to Cabeswater to sleep several times. The things Ronan pulled from his dreams there weren’t any more or less effective than they were anywhere else, but he seemed to like it best and Adam realized after a while that it was probably because he liked it when Adam could hear. They spent an entire day there, having found so many silvery daisies that Adam started to thread them into chains while Ronan stroked his ear. The late afternoon light was just starting to stretch across the field, turning everything sepia.
“You should sing,” Adam said. “Since I can hear you completely.”
Ronan pulled in a deep breath.
“Not the Murder Squash song,” he said.
“You get my Murder Squash or you get nothing at all,” Ronan said, but after a while he started to hum. Adam had no idea what the tune was but he enjoyed it all the same, listening intently as he dug his thumbnail into the stem of a daisy to make a hole and then slid another daisy through it.
When Ronan fell silent, Adam said, “It’s no Irish jig, but I guess it’ll do.”
“Asshole,” Ronan said, and that was all the warning Adam got before Ronan jumped up, laughing.
His head hit the ground and he gave a strangled shout before he rolled over and jumped to his feet as well. Ronan was already running back toward the road. “Lynch!” Adam shouted, gathering up the daisies as fast as he could. “You’d better dream up something to protect your balls before I get to you.”
Ronan turned around, dangling the keys. “Like you can catch me before I drive off without you.”
Adam sped up, his thighs and calves burning. He was just behind Ronan by the time they reached the car and he threw the daisies aside fast before he caught Ronan and pushed him against the passenger door. Ronan was panting and still laughing like crazy, his eyes bright.
“What are you going to do to my balls, huh?” he gasped, chest heaving.
“Fire ant torture,” Adam said.
And it happened then, just as Ronan closed his eyes, his lashes thick and dark and his smile curling wickedly: Adam loved him. Or rather, he loved him already and it all suddenly fell on him, like he’d been waiting impatiently for a door to open only to find that he’d been inside the room all along. He was overtaken by it for a moment, an absolute wave of brilliant happiness that made him hold onto Ronan tighter, his fingers twisting in Ronan’s shirt at the pleasure of it.
“Hey,” he said, because there was no one else he wanted to see more than Ronan. He leaned in and kissed Ronan’s smiling mouth. Ronan stiffened but responded instantly, tentative and sweet. Perhaps Adam wouldn’t have been surprised at the sweetness if it weren’t Ronan he was kissing, but since it was he let himself be taken by the way Ronan's breath stuttered, the way his hands didn’t push or pull but rested shakily on Adam’s hips like he didn’t know if he was allowed. Adam pulled away and watched him lick his lips like there was something delicious on them. It was the least guarded he’d ever seen Ronan outside his own mind; there was no posture, no anger, nothing but uncertainty warring with what he wanted. Me, Adam thought, he wants me to kiss him again. Somehow the knowledge that he wanted to be kissed was overwhelming – it was hard to imagine Ronan, of all people, wanting love or touch or any other human thing, even after all Adam had seen in his mind. You don’t have a monopoly on longing, he told himself.
“Fuck,” Ronan said, squirming out of Adam’s grasp and hurtling himself away, rounding the car until he was at the driver’s side door and trying, without success, to unlock it with the key rather than the clicker.
“What –” Adam said, touching his elbow. “What the hell is wrong with you?”
“Don’t,” Ronan said, yanking away from him. “Don’t touch me.”
“I thought you wanted me to kiss you,” Adam said.
“Fuck you,” Ronan spat out, his chest heaving, and pushed at Adam’s shoulders until he staggered back. His face was a study of furious pain before he turned and ran into the field.
There was a time when Adam wouldn’t have followed him, either because of wounded pride or because he thought Ronan, spoiled angry little boy, was simply looking for an outlet and didn’t need anything from him. But that time was long past, and he was – well, he was still proud, but he knew by now that he’d follow Ronan anywhere. He ran, trying not to fall in the waist-high wheat and weeds. Ronan had stopped somewhere deep in the middle of the field and was hunched over with his hands on his knees, panting again.
“Why does it make you so angry to want me?” Adam asked, gulping to catch his breath. As he had suspected, it was exhausting trying to keep up with Ronan Lynch. He knew he was opening himself up to hearing a truth about himself he’d hoped Ronan didn’t see, but he thought it was time to face it, finally. He was ready.
“I’m not like my father,” Ronan said in a dull voice.
“I – you are, though,” Adam said, wiping the sweat from his face. Ronan, as far as he could tell, was nearly a clone of Niall Lynch, and even if he hadn’t been, he’d have made himself into one by dint of sheer determination.
“I can’t love someone who doesn’t care about me of…of their own free will.” Ronan straightened, and Adam understood in an instant what the problem was.
“You didn’t dream me up,” he said. “I’m older than you are. And I don’t think you had much to do with my sunny disposition.”
Ronan wouldn’t look at him, staring down at the wheat instead and pulling at the stalks angrily until the hulls spilled all over his hands. “Cabeswater likes to give me what I want.”
“You think Cabeswater made me want you.” He turned it over in his head. “That’s a reasonable thing to wonder.”
Ronan snorted. “Thank you, Dick the Third.”
He rolled his eyes. “I know what’s me and what’s Cabeswater. It’s never made me want anything.”
“But it makes you do things,” Ronan said. “It shows you what it wants. Cabeswater is in you. It’s changed you.”
“It doesn’t control me.” But it did make him understand, sometimes. It did make him know and see and hear. “Maybe – maybe it wouldn’t have happened so fast. Maybe I wouldn’t have noticed it or been so open to it, before. But Cabeswater couldn’t make me love you just because it does.”
Ronan shook his head. “It could. And I won’t, I could never.”
“What I feel – about you,” he said, picking his way through it, “it’s both part of Cabeswater and not part of it at all.”
He couldn’t explain the enormous presence of Cabeswater in him that was separate from the pull of Ronan’s power, which grew more unbearably, catastrophically attractive the more he saw of what was inside Ronan Lynch’s mind.
Ronan’s mind, he thought, and lit up. “I can be inside your dreams,” he said. “Could you be inside mine?”
Ronan looked at him, finally. “No,” he said. Then, “Maybe.”
“Cabeswater likes to give you what you want,” he said, sliding his fingers into Ronan’s. “I’ll show you. You can see that it’s all me.”
*
They drove back to St. Agnes. Ronan had asked him if he wanted to try it at Cabeswater and he said no without explaining. I want you in my bed seemed a little too straightforward, although he suspected Ronan knew.
“I don’t know how to do this,” Ronan said. “I guess you should fall asleep first. I’ll concentrate and see what Cabeswater will let me get away with.”
Adam lay down on the far side of his bed and gestured at the other side awkwardly. “Well. Have at it, Greywaren.”
Ronan stretched out beside him and grinned. “See you on the other side, Magician.”
*
He was alone for a little while before Ronan appeared. Long enough to take a look around and know that he didn’t want Ronan to see what was inside his head after all. If he’d been thinking straight he’d have realized what a terrible idea it was, but he was too overwhelmed by the thought of Ronan not believing him to remember his brain was an ugly mess.
Quite literally. He was standing in front of a pigsty. There was a familiar trailer on the far end of it, dusty and falling apart, and a rickety wire fence around the sty. There were no live pigs in it, no hay, just a foot-deep layer of mud and pig shit and flies around the few dead pigs. Adam couldn’t tear his eyes away. This – the entire smelly, dead, wretched thing – was him. He could walk up the steps into that trailer and into his father’s fists and it would be like coming home.
The presence of Ronan – full of mist and magic and the green and gray woods – made it all the uglier.
“Christ, this is terrible,” Ronan said when he sidled up beside Adam. “How did you ever stand it?”
“I told you I wasn’t like you,” Adam said, trying not to choke on it. His eyes prickled hotly. He wasn’t sure why he was so upset; he had expected Ronan to see him for what he was. But it hurt to know once and for all.
“Do you think this is you?” Ronan asked, waving a hand at the filth before them.
“This is what I am,” he said.
“You’re a fucking idiot, is what you are,” Ronan said, eyebrows drawing together in fury. He put one hand on Adam’s shoulder and the other on his chin and forced his head to the side. “Look.”
And suddenly the picture widened – impossibly wide now, shrinking the muddy sty down to a much smaller portion of a larger scene that was…himself, he supposed. Adam Parrish as he would like to be, if he’d ever had the ability to be something besides the sty. It was the country, no doubt about that, but the Virginia countryside that was wild and strange and dark and big, too big for anyone to control it. It was so green he couldn't accept it. There were strawberry vines growing around his feet, a wall of currant bushes behind him that surrounded a strange, elegant, old-fashioned house. It was a private house, and it needed a little care but was solid. This house could survive anything.
In front of the pigsty there was another Adam, standing with both feet in the green grass but pulled so heavily toward the pigsty that he couldn’t move. It was as if the sty had its own gravity and this other Adam was a satellite unable to remove himself from its orbit.
“Because you think you can’t escape,” Ronan hissed beside him.
Adam shook his head. The image blurred, trebled before him. “It’s part of me,” he said, crossing his arms over his chest and trying to calm down. Here in his head control was difficult. Little wisps of memories of his parents danced around them, there and then gone.
“Yeah, but it’s not all of you,” Ronan said. “You’re too smart to be this fucking stupid, Parrish.”
“You don’t understand,” he said, “because what’s inside of you is so beautiful. At the core. This is what I am at the core. If you don’t know that –”
“That’s you,” Ronan said, turning him and pointing at the house. “That’s your core.”
He guided Adam to the house with a hand on his back and the instant they stepped through the glass-paneled door Adam knew Ronan was right. A couple of the rooms were torn apart, as if someone had burst through in a rage, but not – he thought this tentatively and as he did some of the mess righted itself, pictures straightening and holes filling out – not irreparably damaged. The wallpaper was peeling in the living room and the furniture was old and well-worn, but it was comfortable rather than slovenly. It reminded him of the Barns, where everything was meant to be used and worn and loved rather than admired.
His kitchen, which was what he thought of when he thought of family, was messy and crowded and a lot like the one at 300 Fox Way. It reminded him of one of the games he had played when he was little, where his bed was a boat and everything else was the water, and he had to fit everyone he loved in the boat with him. There were dozens of Ganseys and Blues and Noahs, with Persephone and Maura and Calla and even Mr. Gray roaming around. A version of Adam and Blue sat on the counter and kicked the cupboards below while Gansey leaned against the island opposite them and rubbed his lip, and another version of Blue decorated sugar cookies while her mother and Calla argued. They overflowed into the hall and the living room, upstairs and in the yard he could see outside the kitchen windows.
Most of all there was Ronan. He was everywhere. In the bedroom there were so many Ronans that Adam shut the door hastily.
“I believe you now,” Ronan said, watching a version of himself, asleep in the chair from his father’s workshop, with a version of Adam wrapped around him.
“Do you have a place like this?” Adam asked.
Ronan shrugged, not looking away from the chair. “Sort of.”
“Am I there?” He wished he didn’t want to know, but suddenly he needed to know that they were on equal footing with an irrepressible intensity.
Ronan turned his gaze on Adam and the look in his eyes, like Adam was unbelievably stupid but he loved him anyway, was answer enough. He reached out and pinched Adam’s arm.
Adam woke with a cry in his bed, turning instantly toward Ronan, who caught him and kissed him. He was overcome by an ecstatic shiver at the heat of Ronan’s hands on him, the delicious almost-pain of teeth on his lower lip, the feeling of sinking into pleasure. He’d enjoyed it the first time but this was amazing – Ronan kissing him without hesitation, drawing him in until they relaxed deeper and deeper into each other. Their mouths were warm and slow and Ronan, with his arms around Adam, slid his hands into Adam’s hair and stroked and kissed until Adam felt as if he had melted into a pool of sunlight.
After a long stretch of time – or maybe it was short, he wasn’t sure and was amazed to realize he, who had planned every moment of every day for years because there was never enough time, didn’t care – he ran his fingers over the side of Ronan’s neck and Ronan gasped raggedly into his mouth, and he realized he’d touched edges of the tattoo.
“I want to see it,” he said. He realized suddenly that he could demand things like that and Ronan might obey. The thought sent his stomach swooping, and it swooped again when Ronan pushed himself up and tugged his shirt off with one hand, then rolled over onto his stomach. Adam traced one finger over it, light on the raised skin.
“I had a dream like this,” Ronan said shakily.
Adam felt so flushed, lips already sore in a way he knew he’d be thinking about for the next week because they’d remind him of this moment. “Yeah?” he asked. “How did it end?”
“Let’s just say it’s a good thing I didn’t bring anything back with me.”
“Have you ever brought anything back from a sex dream?” he asked.
Ronan shook his head, but said, “Your t-shirt.” Adam watched his ears go red and smiled.
“Do you wear it?” He began to trace the tattoo again and Ronan shuddered.
“To bed, sometimes. It smells like you,” Ronan mumbled, his face hidden in the pillow, and Adam’s breath caught. The confession, half-embarrassed and utterly foreign to Adam’s idea of him, struck him as if Ronan had reached into his pants and touched him. He felt liquid-hot and a little savage, like he wanted to suck bruises into Ronan’s skin or bite him or both. Ronan would like that, he thought. Ronan loved it when they did something crazy and came away scratched and bruised. But something made him want to be gentle, or as gentle as he knew how to be.
Instead he pressed his lips to the black lines curling on his neck. Ronan rolled his hips, his fingers clenching in the bed sheets. It was such a brilliant thing to watch that Adam did it again, and again, giving himself over entirely to the pleasure of making Ronan Lynch writhe and twist against the bed. He could see Ronan’s mouth open in a silent moan against the pillow and, still wanting to bite a little, pressed his teeth against Ronan’s neck before sucking the skin between his teeth. The noises that followed when he spread kisses over his shoulder and then down his spine were unpracticed, as far from his everyday nonchalance as could be. I know you, Adam thought, learning him with his lips. I know you, you beautiful impossibility. Ronan moaned as if in agony as Adam moved closer to the center of the tattoo, and when he got there Ronan said “Adam,” like he’d never said it before, like he was pulling it from a dream.
He rolled over before Adam could go any further and propped himself up on one elbow, wiping his face with a shaking hand. For the first time it occurred to Adam that the layer of barbed wire and thorns Ronan wrapped around himself hurt him as much as it hurt anyone else, and now that he had temporarily thrown it off he was as unprepared for the lack of pain as Adam was. He was flushed all the way down his chest, betrayed by his fair skin. There was something brightly real about him, as if the contrast had been turned up on the black of his hair and tattoo and the blue of his eyes and the pink of his mouth and nipples. His lashes fluttered and he tilted his head back for a moment, still panting, before he straightened and reached for Adam. Adam caught his hand and turned it palm up, kissing it. He continued down Ronan’s arm and then up to his neck again. Ronan’s hands moved restlessly over his back but didn’t slip under his shirt, and he realized finally that Ronan would never ask for what he wanted until he was shown that it was wanted from him.
“You can –” He paused, sitting up and tugging his shirt over his head. Ronan’s fingers rested tentatively on his ribs and he flattened his palms over Ronan’s to show him he could touch. “Go ahead.”
“I want it too much,” Ronan whispered, shivering and feverishly hot.
“No such thing,” Adam said, settling between his legs and pressing him down again, so he could kiss his trembling mouth. His cock was throbbing so hard he could barely think about anything else, and he slid against Ronan to relieve the ache a little bit before he realized he was doing it. Ronan moaned against his lips. “Sorry – I didn’t mean –”
“Please,” Ronan said, pulling him closer, breath shuddering in and out quick when Adam slid against him again. He did it a third time, slow so he could feel Ronan rock his hips up, and then neither of them could stop, thrusting desperately and panting into each other’s mouths while they tried to kiss.
Ronan’s hands slid down his back and paused at his jeans. “You can touch – all over, god, Ronan,” Adam gasped, and Ronan’s fingers slipped under the elastic of his boxers and dug into the muscle of his ass. Something about Ronan’s hands there made him shudder all over in pleasure, his nipples tightening and his dick pulsing, and when Ronan rubbed his thumb over the spot where the base of his spine met his ass, he froze, right on the verge of orgasm. He buried his face in Ronan’s neck, breath sobbing against his warm skin, until it backed off a little.
“All right?” Ronan whispered. He had stopped moving.
“I was about to come,” he admitted, embarrassed.
“Yeah, god forbid that should happen,” Ronan said, but his voice was low and breathless, and Adam knew the idea was turning him on even further.
“I want you to go first,” he said. “I want to watch you.”
Ronan gave him a tremulous half-smile, so sweetly genuine that Adam felt himself going a little crazy over him and wondered if he would keep falling again and again like this for Ronan. He hoped so. “You’d barely have to touch me,” he said.
“Yeah?” Adam grinned, leaning in again to kiss him, putting a hand on his chest and running it downward.
As Adam’s hand slid over his stomach, running a gentle finger along the hair under his navel, Ronan began to gasp with increasing urgency, chest rising and falling fast and uneven like he was coming undone just at the prospect of Adam touching him. Adam had wondered what it would feel like even before he knew for sure Ronan liked him, his face hot at the thought of Ronan jerking off to fantasies about him, and later he’d had his own fantasies where they did a hell of a lot more than that. So it wasn’t like he was going to be surprised, but it was still a brilliant new shock when he closed his fingers around the thickness of Ronan’s cock through the denim. He was so hard, Adam thought dizzily, wondering what – god, what would it taste like? He licked his lips, leaning down to press a kiss to the damp fabric, and Ronan cried out like it was ripped from him, arching his back. A single stroke and he came hot and wet through his jeans and all over Adam’s fingers. He was so sharply beautiful and wild, losing control, that Adam felt like he had when he saw the green inside his own mind, unable to comprehend its totality. That Ronan would let anyone see him unguarded like this was amazing enough; that it was Adam who had made him that way was too much to believe.
When Ronan settled back against the bed Adam bent down and kissed his stomach, where the muscles still jumped, then rested his head there while Ronan stroked his hair. Eventually Ronan tugged on his shoulder and he moved, curling up along his side with a stifled moan as his dick pressed against Ronan’s hip.
“Oh, now you want to come?” Ronan asked, amused.
He pressed his face against Ronan’s hot skin and nodded, too close to respond to any teasing. He reached down and unbuttoned his jeans, ready to jerk himself off.
“Jesus, hold on,” Ronan muttered, turning so they were facing each other with his arm still around Adam. He pushed Adam’s fingers out of the way and opened up his jeans, helped him push them and his boxers down. Adam touched Ronan’s chest, bracing himself, and felt Ronan’s heart speed up as he touched him for the first time. His grip was firm but dry, and Adam pulled his hand up by the wrist.
“Like this,” he murmured, licking Ronan’s palm.
“That’s how you like it?” Ronan asked, his voice low and breathless again.
Adam nodded and Ronan licked his own palm and started to stroke him at a pace slightly slower than he did it himself, although the feeling of someone else touching him made up for it immeasurably. The fact that it was Ronan touching him turned it into something else altogether. He’d never felt anything like this – he wasn’t someone who sought out gratification or let himself enjoy it much, but he wanted nothing else as much as he wanted Ronan Lynch turning him absolutely inside out with pleasure. Part of him bristled at the idea of being overtaken by anyone or anything, but there was another part, a newer part, that suspected the wonder of doing this was in opening himself up to that pleasure, that beautiful hot wave that made his toes curl when Ronan rubbed a thumb over the head of his cock and stroked down just right. I allow this, he thought, I’m not going to push it away, and then Ronan did it again and he thought nothing.
“Ronan, oh my god,” he said mindlessly, shivering from head to toe. His voice shook, but he didn’t have time to be surprised by that because the third stroke drove him right up to the edge. He was getting wetter and the slide of Ronan’s hand was perfectly slick and he was so close – he was right there and he turned even further into the warmth of Ronan’s arms.
“Come on, Adam,” Ronan whispered, and at the sound of his name he broke and came with his moans muffled against Ronan’s neck, trembling.
It was – not too much, but almost. He clung to Ronan, who held him as fiercely as if he were warding off an enemy. If anyone had asked him how he thought Ronan Lynch would be in bed he’d have said difficult, because Ronan was Ronan whether he was naked or clothed. He should have known Ronan wouldn’t be that predictable – should have known, at least, that whatever else he was, he’d be as intense as a sweeping fire. Adam was beyond familiar by now with the lie of studied casualness that masked the truth of how very terribly not casual Ronan was. He’d never be able to be like this with anyone he didn’t love in that all-consuming way of his. The tenderness Adam had felt at the Barns when he thought of Ronan sleeping there alone returned to him with force, like it had been growing exponentially in the time between without him realizing it. He kissed Ronan’s throat, hoping it would convey exactly what he felt.
He thought maybe it did, because Ronan relaxed his hold.
“I’m covered in jizz,” he said, grinning like he did when they’d just done something wonderful and stupid. Adam wondered if this would take place of shopping cart races and hoped not; he hoped Ronan would always make him do strangely exhilarating things.
“That’s your own fault,” Adam said. “You’re the one who had to do everything yourself.”
“I’m taking a shower.” Ronan rolled out of bed and headed for the bathroom. “If you want to save water, you should come with me.”
Logic, Adam thought, he really couldn’t find any fault with.
*
That night they slept with the windows open and it was just cold enough for the breeze to make the room comfortably chilly and the space under the blankets comfortably warm. That need again – comfort, gratification. Who would have thought he could find it with Ronan?
“Gonna get some nicer sheets tonight,” Ronan said sleepily, tracing out Latin words on Adam’s back.
“Your poor tender skin,” Adam said. “I’m surprised you haven’t broken out in hives touching less than 3000-thread count Egyptian cotton.”
“This is zero thread count, Parrish,” Ronan said. “You sleep on notebook paper.”
“Nobody’s forcing you to slum it,” Adam said, but he scooted back a little so Ronan would continue writing. Paying close attention to Ronan’s fingers revealed part of a Catellus poem. Adam caught something about his ass being finer than a saltcellar and started to laugh.
“This is beautiful shit, pay attention,” Ronan said. He was quiet for a while, writing Adam’s name over and over again in between kisses to the nape of his neck. Try as he might, Adam couldn’t keep his eyes open, and when Ronan wrote go to fucking sleep, he smiled and obeyed.
He opened his eyes in Ronan’s dream again. The dark wood on the edge of the forest was covered in red roses. From afar, through the mist, it looked like it had been spattered with red paint, and when they crossed the hill he moved closer and found that there was a lacy network of thin vines curled around the trees. The flowers exploded joyfully out of the vines, red as poppies and thornier than any rose bushes Adam had ever seen in real life. By the path they always took into the woods, the roses turned gold. Adam shivered looking at them and knew they were important, if he and Ronan could pick them.
Beside him, Ronan stood looking up at the gray sky. He looked more than a little pleased with himself. Just under the collar of his shirt there was a deep pink mark from the second time, or possibly the third or fourth, when neither of them were feeling particularly gentle. He’d have to wear a different shirt to cover it up, but he probably wouldn’t. Adam bit his lip and felt hot all over and wondered, not for the first time, what would happen if they had sex here in Ronan’s dreams.
“What are you smirking about?” Adam asked.
“Fuck off,” Ronan said, but he was smiling and slid his hand into Adam’s, leading him into the forest.