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Ronan slowed to a stop halfway up the drive, gravel crunching under the BMW's tires. Adam didn't have to ask why he did it. He did it every time. It didn't hurt anything; Adam had started factoring it in, time-wise, when he knew Ronan was going to be the one taking him home.
Ronan didn't say anything, just sat there with his wrists balanced over the top of the steering wheel, picking at a scab on his knuckle. Staring blankly at the little house looming, inevitable, up ahead.
He was giving Adam a chance to tell him to turn around.
They had never officially Talked About It, not in the way he and Gansey had Talked About It. Gansey was all principle and frustrated tears and lines cribbed from the motivational speeches rich people heard all their lives to make them feel better about being rich. Ronan was just—this. His silent presence next to Adam was a statement as loud as if he'd said it. Here, Adam could say something. He could tell Ronan he'd changed his mind, ask if he could stay at Monmouth for the night. Or he could say "come on, man," or "well, goodnight," and Ronan would drive him up to the door, wait until he got out, and then take off without a backward glance.
Gansey made it feel like a life sentence. Like every time he trudged up the front porch stairs, he was walking to his grave. Fine, Adam. Just—fine. You know what? I won't ask anymore. Ronan made it all feel temporary, without even saying anything. He didn't even heave that put-upon sigh like Gansey always did. It's cool, Parrish. Maybe next time.
It didn't matter that Adam always went inside. Ronan always stopped, halfway up the drive, and waited.
Adam caught a flicker of movement in the illuminated living room window. His mother appeared in a gap in the curtains.
He sighed. "I really don't want to go in."
It took him a second to realize he'd said it out loud, and it surprised him. He'd said it before, but never to Ronan. Why would he? They didn't Talk About It.
After a measured pause, Ronan said evenly, "So don't, man."
Adam glanced sideways at him. Ronan's face betrayed nothing; he just tugged at the knots on his leather bracelets in an uncomfortable sort of way. "And go where instead, exactly?"
Ronan shrugged and said to the steering wheel, "I dunno. Night's young. You wanna get something to eat?"
Adam huffed a dry laugh into the space between them. "That's all?"
He had expected, he realized, the Gansey speech. An offer to stay at Monmouth, or pay for an apartment. The words you don't deserve, repeated at varied volumes.
Ronan's eyebrows drew sharply down. "You wanted something more exciting?"
"No, that's—that's not what I meant." He waited until Ronan's forehead smoothed out again and said again, deliberately, "I don't want to go in."
Ronan rolled his neck and fixed Adam with a stare almost entirely un-Ronanlike in its tame seriousness. It freaked him out, that look.
"And I don’t want to talk about it," Adam added. His mouth was dry.
Ronan scoffed, and Adam internally breathed a sigh of relief. "Please," he said, throwing the BMW into reverse and bracing his arm on the back of Adam's seat. "I'm not Dick."
***
It had already been pouring for an hour by the time Niall Lynch's car pulled up next to the bus stop, and truthfully Adam almost didn't want to get in. The last thing he needed right now was another fight with Ronan about the mud on his shoes and the wet dog smell that wouldn't come out of the upholstery for a week.
He got up from his spot on the bench next to the pay phone, sorely wishing Gansey had answered his cell, and climbed into the BMW. His foot hit something and he knocked it aside without looking to see what it was. Ronan wordlessly handed him a towel.
"Thanks," he mumbled. He gingerly wiped his face, trying to avoid the bloodier spots; the towel, like everything Ronan owned, looked expensive.
Ronan leaned over and reached down into Adam's leg space—"look, I'll clean the mud out myself, don't be a dick"—and held up the box he had kicked. It was dented white aluminum, with a red cross on the front.
"Oh," he said guiltily. "Thanks."
He pulled down the visor and used the two-inch mirror to assess the damage while Ronan waited for a space to clear in the traffic. Black eye. Goose egg swelling over his cheekbone. Split eyebrow over the same eye. Bloody nose, split lip. He opened the box and found it stocked with Band-Aids and cotton, ointment and alcohol. Useless tears sprang to his eyes.
"I don't want to talk about it," he said.
"No one's making you," Ronan said simply, and pulled back onto the road.
***
One ring. Two rings.
"Pick up, you smug Irish bastard," Adam hissed through his teeth, drumming his fingers impatiently on Gansey's desk. His throat still felt scraped raw from the ride over, his neck stretched too far from whipping to look behind him. He couldn't believe he'd watched Ronan die only a few hours ago—the whole thing had already taken on the surreal, visceral quality of a particularly punchy nightmare. He'd showered for an eternity and then he was Cabeswater and then he'd slept for an eternity, and when he woke he was plain old Adam Parrish again and his father knew where he was.
The emptiness of Monmouth, and the feeling of hovering like a spider in a delicate web above the miles of ancient, toothy machinery below, was smothering him like a physical pressure. He thought of Ronan dying somewhere among the hungry clockwork. Cabeswater was vibrating behind his eyes, thrumming in his skull. It didn't seem to be trying to tell him anything. It seemed to be sympathizing, in its way.
His fingernails were getting to be too long; they made intrusive echoing clacking noises. He stopped drumming.
After ten rings he hung up and dialed again.
And again.
He won't answer, he's still mad, you ruined everything and now you need him and he won't answer—
On the fourth ring of the fourth call Ronan finally picked up, sounding lazily annoyed, like he couldn't be bothered to put any real effort into it. "What the fuck is your damage, Dick—"
"Lynch. It's me. Where are you?"
Ronan instantly sounded more alert. "Parrish? What's wrong?" Another voice mumbled in the background, and Ronan pulled his mouth away from the phone to say, "Man, shut up."
Adam's stomach flopped over and he felt a small spike of something at the back of his throat.
"My dad," Adam said, "he showed up at St. Agnes. I need—"
"Say that—man, I said shut the fuck up—Parrish, say that again."
"My dad," Adam said emphatically. He felt his voice break and hoped Ronan couldn't hear it through the phone. He swallowed. "My dad came to St. Agnes. He was in my apartment, Ronan."
There was a heavy silence on the other end. Then Ronan said, "Lock the door. I'll be there in fifteen."
-
Ronan was there in twenty-six minutes and twelve seconds. Adam counted all of them on Gansey's atomic clock from his place in the glossy leather armchair, knees tugged up to his chest and the knuckles of his left hand pushed in against his teeth.
He jumped when he heard the car door slam, and again when the doorknob started to rattle—for a second he thought maybe his father did follow him after all, and got to his feet—but then there was the unmistakable sound of a key clicking into place, and Ronan pushed open the door.
Adam's first thought was that he'd been in a fight. His face was flushed, his eyes keenly bright, and his hands and knees were dirty and the neck of his tank was ripped, exposing a line of brilliantly dark purple bruises over his throat and shoulders—
Oh. Adam looked away, embarrassed.
Three plastic bags were wound around one of Ronan's sharp hands. "Sorry," he said, locking the door behind him and not sounding sorry at all. "Would've been sooner, but—"
"You stopped to go shopping," Adam said disdainfully, but with no real force behind it. Ronan shot him the sort of look that could curdle dairy.
"Here," he snapped. He threw Adam a bag, not terribly gently. "That's for you, cockbite. We're changing your locks."
"He didn't break in." This seemed like a moot point, though. The problem was that his father knew where to find him to begin with.
"Don’t fucking argue with me. I'm gonna talk to those nuns, too, get locks put on the outside door. Big solid ones. And this"—he detached another bag from his arm and handed it to Adam uncharacteristically gingerly—"is for you, too."
Adam looked inside and felt cold shame wash over him, followed by hot indignation. "I'm not taking this."
Ronan squared his jaw. "Yes, you fucking are."
"I've told you and Gansey a hundred fucking times, you are not giving me a goddamn cell phone—"
"This isn't principle, Parrish!" Ronan shouted, clenching his fists. "This is a fucking lifeline, this is so I know you're not dead in a fucking ditch somewhere or—or brain mash on your dad's fucking hands—"
Adam felt this like a punch, like a flash of lightning. He understood, suddenly, that if it had really been Ronan dying on the church floor with his spine bent in half and blood bubbling out of his hands, somehow, it would have been worse not to be there. Not to know.
But the part of his brain that controlled his mouth was still stuck on the fact that against all his principles and after countless hours of fighting, Ronan had bought him a fucking cell phone. "I can take care of myself."
"Goddamnit, Parrish, I know you can, just—" Ronan broke off suddenly and closed his eyes. He took a step backward, took a deep, rattling breath. His shoulders lowered themselves from up around his ears. When he spoke again, his voice was quieter, but trembled with something barely contained. "Please," he said. "Please just take it. You don't have to use it, just—just have it." He opened his eyes and Adam felt the full weight of that hard gaze leveled on him. "It's not even—it's the cheapest model I could find, and it's pay-as-you-go, you're not on my plan or anything. . . "
Adam looked down at the bag in his hands. It didn't feel as much like giving up as he thought it would (or as it would if it were Gansey), but it still felt like shit. His voice was subdued as he said, "Okay."
Ronan stared at him for a moment longer while the tension bled out of his face. Then he nodded. "Okay."
Adam jutted his chin in the direction of the last bag Ronan still held. "What's that?"
"Huh? Oh," Ronan said, looking down. "We’re changing Monmouth's locks, too." He dropped the bag on the floor. "Find me some tools. I gotta feed Chainsaw."
He pushed past Adam, who spun around to watch him stalk into his room. "You wanna do it now?"
Ronan tugged off his ruined shirt and looked back at him sourly. "There a better time for you?"
"No, I mean—you don't want to wait, I dunno, till Gansey's home?"
Adam heard the grin in Ronan's voice as he shut the door. "Where's the fun in that?"
-
An hour later Adam sat with his back against the now much securer door, watching Chainsaw hop around Gansey's knee-high cardboard-and-plastic model of Henrietta. Ronan directed her from cereal box house to cereal box house with a finger and a series of little clicking noises and whistles.
He was gentler with her, Adam noticed, since the cave. More attentive. Ronan Lynch protected the things he loved.
"You should dream up some brothers and sisters for her," Adam said fondly. "Start a dream bird circus."
Ronan snorted. "Maybe that's what I'll do when I leave Aglionby. I'll travel around the world with my creepy bird circus." He made a twirling motion with his index finger and Chainsaw performed a complicated little flip in the air before landing on Henrietta Paint and Tile.
In his other hand Ronan held a beer bottle. Every time he lifted it to take a drink, his chin lifted too, and the long column of his throat was exposed. Adam's eyes kept flicking to it involuntarily. Ronan was all stark contrast, a study in sharp lines and features. He looked like he was chiseled by someone with an affinity for deadly weapons, rather than born. Adam wondered how someone who looked so knifelike could move so fluidly at the same time; how he could seem rigid and sharp as flint and yet somehow as lazily boneless as a cat.
He also briefly wondered how much force one would have to apply to achieve that deep a purple. He thought about the logistics of it, of fastening his mouth to Ronan's neck and claiming his own place there for the world to see. Look. Adam Parrish's. Mine. All mine.
He could never imagine Ronan letting him, even with That Other Thing They Didn't Talk About. Ronan would never let Adam own him. A lot of days, Ronan didn't even seem to like him.
But he'd let someone else do it, someone that wasn't Kavinsky or any of them. Someone that didn't matter.
"So hey," he said, feeling slightly reckless and not at all jealous and knowing he was approaching dangerous territory, "who was that on the phone earlier?"
"Chainsaw! Tsst!" Ronan snapped his fingers sharply in her direction; she abruptly stopped picking at the window of the bait shop. "What now?"
"When I called. Who was with you?"
Ronan's face darkened and the tops of his ears went red. Adam had always thought Ronan's ears ought to be pointed, to better fit the rest of him.
"You know, that," he said quietly, lifting the bottle to his lips, "is really none of your fucking business."
In the hazy late afternoon light slanting in through the thick glass windows, with his chin tipped up at that angle, half-turned toward Adam the way he was, Adam could see a line of four distinct smaller bruises, elongated like smudges of charcoal, under the edge of his jaw. Three of them together and one slightly in.
Fingers. On his neck.
He felt something worn and tired in him stretch itself and snap, like a rubber band.
"Must've been pretty special," Adam said with over-exaggerated nonchalance, "to let them mark you up like that."
Ronan drained his beer and looked down at Adam with disdain layered over contempt layered over something else. "Why do you care, Parrish?"
"I don't," Adam lied. He shouldn't, there was no reason to, but he did, and it was putting him in a shit-starting mood. "I just thought you hated being obvious."
Adam saw this strike Ronan like an arrow right in the middle of his forehead. His whole face contorted around it all at once—eyebrows down, nostrils flared, one corner of his mouth drawn up to expose a wolfish cross-section of teeth. His free hand curled into a fist. The other gripped the brown glass bottle so tightly Adam was amazed it didn’t burst.
"I get that you have a thousand-year-old mystical forest fucking around in your brain," Ronan snarled, "and that you have had—several—bad fucking scares today, so I'm gonna let that slide."
Adam tugged himself up to his feet slowly, pushing himself back and up against the door. He felt drunk, probably. This is what people usually described being drunk as feeling like—limbs too loose, too hot, and an electric sort of indiscriminate recklessness pressing invasive fingers into the base of his brain. He didn't want Ronan to let it slide. Not after the church, not after his father. He thought, maybe, he wanted Ronan to hit him. And then. . . and then.
"Come on, man, tell me who it was." He felt it in his voice now, insistence that bordered on petulant, a push that stepped its toes decidedly over the line of mean. "Tell me who you ran to. Tell me who you let hold you down and brand you like fucking cattle. I want to shake his hand. And then I want to kick his ass."
One of Ronan's eyebrows flicked up at the word his and his teeth ground together. "We," he said, and there was a grating undercurrent there that thrilled Adam because it told him Ronan was losing his grip, "are not—talking—about this."
"Good," Adam snapped. "I don't want to talk."
Ronan dropped his bottle with a heavy thunk and in two long strides had Adam's shoulders gripped in his hands and pinned against the door, jaw clenched, breathing hard through his nose. He hissed, "What do you want from me, Parrish?"
Adam cocked his head, narrowing his eyes at Ronan, and reached his hand up between them. He pressed his palm flat over Ronan's Adam's apple.
"Oh," Ronan said.
Not What the hell, Parrish. Not Get your goddamn hands off me. Just, Oh.
Adam slowly wrapped his hand around Ronan's throat, pressing callused fingers under his ears. Ronan's breath hitched as Adam pushed his jaw up but he didn't say anything else, just stared down at Adam with his teeth gritted together and a look in his eyes like he was being flayed alive.
Adam flexed his thumb, tilting Ronan's head to the right. Ronan watched him. He swallowed, and Adam felt it under his palm. It was dizzying, looking at Ronan like this, up close, pulse in his grip. He could see the burst blood vessels at the edges of the bruises on his collarbones, tiny pinpricks of red. It came very close to being too much.
There was a clear swath of skin where Ronan's neck met his shoulders, an almost perfect circle situated between hooks of black ink. Adam stared at it for a moment, mesmerized (I could do it, right there, right there where it would be seen and I'd know it was mine), before bending—or falling—forward and fixing his mouth to it. Ronan's knees buckled a little. His mouth opened wider. His throat jumped beneath Adam's hand.
Adam bit down, hard.
Ronan made a bitten-off strangled sound and his hands scrabbled at Adam's collar. Adam tightened his hold just ever so slightly. Ronan tasted like blood and salt and heat, the muscle under his mouth taut and twitching. His other hand curved over Ronan's hip. He imagined he could feel Ronan's tattoo, radiating warmth through his shirt. He was aware, vaguely, in some far-off part of his brain that didn't matter when he had Ronan Lynch under his mouth and held in his hand, that he was making small noises he'd never heard himself make before.
And then, suddenly, Ronan's hands were pulling away from his shirt, and one of them wrapped itself around Adam's wrist while the long fingers of the other tented themselves against his chest. Ronan tugged his hand away at the same time as he gave a firm, but gentle, push. Adam pulled off of his shoulder with a wet noise that bordered on obscene.
Ronan was breathing hard. When he opened his eyes, they were fuzzy, disoriented. He looked down at Adam and said hoarsely, "No."
Adam's mouth felt swollen. He ran his tongue over his lips. "No?"
"You're not doing this," Ronan said. His voice lacked its trademark heat, and it was jarring.
The mark Adam had sucked into his neck was darkening to a deep purple. In it Adam could see a clearly defined ring of teeth; he'd broken the skin. It exhilarated him. Almost (but not quite) instantly, he felt guilty about it.
"Whatever you're using me for," Ronan said, shaking his head, "I can't—I don't want it." He dropped Adam's wrist and took a step back. Then another step. Then he spun on his heel and stalked back toward his room.
"Ronan?" Adam said hesitantly. All his Adam Parrish was flooding back and he felt nervous and itchy and wrong in his skin again, and he didn't know what to do with this Ronan and the wholly unfamiliar set of his shoulders, and for half a second he wished Ronan would whirl on him and start shouting so he'd have at least some idea of how he was supposed to be acting.
Instead Ronan sighed, a deep and shuddering thing that seemed to live, and said softly, "Go home, Parrish." One of his long hands came up to rest on his doorframe. He tapped it absently. Chainsaw flitted over from her perch to land on his shoulder. "I'll help you with your locks tomorrow."
Then he disappeared into his room, snapping his door neatly shut behind him.
Adam stood there for another long moment, trying to pull his head back on straight. After a minute he heard noises from Ronan's room that sounded like something much larger than Chainsaw was knocking things over.
He thought about Ronan's hungry eyes hours and days before and wondered if maybe he had miscalculated. Shame hooked its claws into his abdomen and started to pull down, down.
Ronan didn't come back out.
Adam stepped into his work boots, picked up his two bags, and left.
-
Adam was awake early the next morning, or maybe it was late. Either way, he hadn't gotten a lot of sleep. Sometime just before it got light out he pulled the plastic shopping bag with the brand new phone in it out from under his bed, and got it set up. Ronan had clearly been honest about the phone—it was just a plain slider phone with a keyboard, nice but not pretentious, and definitely not a smart phone like he and Gansey had. It fit nicely in his hand, and he hated that he liked it, that he was grateful to have it.
He got another sick pang when he saw the $100 phone card shoved awkwardly into the phone's packaging, but decided not to say anything about it. You already took the phone, he could hear Ronan's voice saying. What's the point if you can't use it?
Ronan showed up soon after sunrise with a toolbox and Chainsaw on his shoulder, broody and dark in one of those quietly affluent black fitted sweaters with the neck zipped all the way up. Adam was honestly surprised to see him; he'd said he would show up, but Adam didn’t really think he would. He'd already resigned himself to figuring out the lock situation on his own.
They got the locks installed in relative silence while Chainsaw flitted in and out of the open window and tapped around tugging on all of Adam's papers with her beak in a self-satisfactory sort of way. Ronan rolled up his sleeves, but kept the zipper where it was. It stung, a little.
Let me see it, he thought desperately as he watched Ronan head down the stairs to go talk to Mrs. Ramirez. At the same time another voice in the back of his head whispered, He's ashamed.
He showered and got into fresh clothes. When he came out of the little bathroom Ronan was lying on his bed with his eyes closed.
"You work today?" he asked. Chainsaw was tucked into a vaguely bird-shaped ball on his chest. He rubbed her head with a finger.
"No," Adam replied, rubbing his damp towel over his damp hair. "Why?"
"Dick called."
So they got in Adam's shitty car and drove to meet Gansey and Blue and Malory and the Dog, and they talked about the cave and the curse. And Blue wouldn't look at Gansey and they all pretended not to notice, and he kept bumping her on accident and she pretended not to notice. And Ronan kept his eyes down and the neck of his sweater up and was even less talkative than usual and Adam pretended not to notice. And at the end of the night Adam drove Ronan back to St. Agnes, and Ronan followed him up the stairs, and crashed on his floor.
He was gone before Adam woke the next morning.
They didn't talk about it.
***
Adam's butt hitting the seat was like an alarm clock pulling him out of a deep sleep. As soon as his door was shut he collapsed forward with his head suspended in his hands.
"Holy shit," Ronan said, sliding in next to him. "Holy shit, Parrish."
"That was too much," Adam groaned. "I was—I was too much."
"No, no, man, you were great. I thought I was gonna have to do the heavy lifting."
Adam shook his head. "What if it wasn't enough? What if—"
"Stop it." Ronan put the key in the ignition and the BMW grumbled to life. "It was airtight. We had everything. Gray took care of everything. We've been through this."
Adam couldn't stop picturing Greenmantle in his house now, on the phone, ordering hit men in quiet gray suits to descend on Monmouth, on 300 Fox Way, on his childhood home. And of Greenmantle's mouth forming his address and the name of his mother.
"He saw right through me," Adam said to the floor.
"Would you fuckin' stop it? Christ. Stop worrying. You were incredible."
The word spiked through Adam's chest like lightning. Incredible. Ronan thought he was incredible.
Then he wondered if Greenmantle thought he was the second kind of incredible and he couldn't breathe again.
He didn't breathe all the way back to St. Agnes, and when they got there—he'd been so sure there was going to be an ambulance, and paramedics wheeling Mrs. Ramirez out in a black bag (or maybe an unassuming and utterly forgettable sedan with an unassuming and utterly forgettable man waiting inside it with a very real gun) that when he saw the lot was empty except for his trashy little Hondayota relief flooded his brain like icy water—he let it all out in a single gasping exhale.
Ronan's head snapped over to the side, brows knitted in concern. He closed his eyes when he saw Adam wasn't dying. "Jesus, Parrish, don't make noises like that."
"Sorry, I just—" Adam rubbed his hands down over his face. "I thought for sure something was gonna happen."
Ronan turned off the car. "Well, it didn't, okay? You can unclench your asshole now."
He didn't unclench. He followed Ronan inside the (newly deadbolted) doors and up the stairs to his little apartment with his asshole still firmly clenched. When they were inside Adam paced around the small room, taking his phone out and typing out half a message to Gansey, then putting it back in his pocket, then taking it out again and pulling up the number for 300 Fox Way, then putting it back in his pocket, then taking it out again and typing half a message to Gansey. . .
"Hey," Ronan said, after watching six or seven cycles of this. "Parrish. Hey."
He reached out and caught Adam's wrist as Adam was passing him again. Adam jumped and looked down at him, embarrassed.
Ronan sat on his mattress, and his face was weirdly open. His blue eyes were sincere. "We thought of everything. Okay? We got everything right. It was airtight." He tugged at Adam's wrist. "Gray said he'd call if anything went wrong. He hasn't called, has he?
"No. But—"
"Then it's all right. Nobody's dead, nobody's being maimed anywhere. Okay?"
Adam exhaled, one long breath that slumped his shoulders downward, and nodded.
Ronan chewed at his lower lip and tugged at him again, more insistently this time. "Sit down, would you, please? You're making me nervous."
"I make you nervous," Adam said reflexively. He sank down onto the floor in front of his bed, where Ronan's mattress pad was still laid out. "Ha."
Ronan was curled forward over the edge of Adam's mattress. He grinned. "Exactly. I'm supposed to be the unsettling one. Role reversal freaks me out."
The unbuttoned collar of his school shirt stretched open as he leaned, and Adam saw it peeking out from underneath the fabric—half of the circle he'd made with his teeth, faded to a thin red line over a patch of yellow bruise. The sight of it dropped into his stomach in a solid block of acid, and started to sizzle.
Ronan followed the line of his eyes. The smile melted off his face. He made no move to close his collar.
"Clearly," Adam said.
Ronan's eyes narrowed..
"What, not hiding it anymore?" Adam needled him.
"This gonna be a regular thing with you?" Ronan asked in a low voice. "You gonna get shitty and try to pick a fight with me any time you have a scare?"
"Why not? It's what you do."
"Not about things that matter," Ronan hissed.
"You were ashamed," Adam said, and suddenly there it was, this thing that had been gnawing at his intestines for two weeks and growling up into his pancreas every time Ronan wouldn't look at him was out in the world, ugly and raw and pulsing. "Am I not supposed to be offended by that?"
Ronan was shaking his head. "No. You don't get to do that. You don't get to use me like that and then make it my fault."
"Use you? I didn't—"
"Yes, Adam, you used me," Ronan snarled, in that patented way the Lynch brothers had where they kept their teeth gritted together and their lips did all the work. Adam tried not to think about his teeth. "You used me for whatever was going on between you and Blue, and—and I let you do it."
Understanding washed over Adam in a cold wave. "No," he said desperately, his mouth cottony and dry, "no, Ronan, that's not what I—that's not—"
"You couldn't just go out and fuck somebody we didn't know? You had to—" Ronan broke off. His fists were clenched, the knuckles white. Adam knew he was digging his fingernails into his palms. "You're goddamn right I was ashamed. I've been looking at this thing in the mirror every day."
"Ronan, I didn't, I promise. I thought" Adam swallowed hard. "I thought—you wanted me to—"
"You thought I wanted you to pick a fight and then choke me?"
"No!"
"Then what?!"
Adam pressed his palms into his eyes. He could feel himself panicking. This was big, he could feel it, not just another dumb for-the-sake-of-it fight, and he still wanted to have Ronan at the end of it. God, don't think like that. If he could just explain himself. Somehow.
"I thought," he started, weighing each word individually, "that you. . . wanted me."
And then there this was, this other Thing They Didn't Talk About. Even Gansey didn't say it outright.
"So what," Ronan said, his voice dangerously quiet, "you were doing me a favor?"
Adam threw up his hands. "God! No."
"Because let me tell you, Parrish, I am not that pathetic."
"Jesus Christ, Ronan, I know, just—I wanted to, okay? I saw what you liked and I wanted to do it, I wanted to—to have you and I thought you wanted me and I just—I didn't use you, not like that. I would never."
Ronan's silence radiated off him like heat, making the air feel thick and heavy. Adam felt like looking directly at him might burn his eyes out of his head. How do you explain yourself to a house fire you started?
He tugged at the fraying edge of the sheet Ronan had slept tangled up in the night before, and spoke to it instead.
"I put a lot of things together wrong," he said. "I read you wrong. And what I thought I saw, I didn't know what to do with. It's not easy, being the object of a Ronan Lynch crush. Or thinking you are, I guess. It's terrifying." His voice shook. "I fucked up. I'm sorry."
The ceiling fan whirled overhead. Adam wished it would come free of its attachments and kill him. Or at least cause him some grievous serious injury that would postpone this conversation indefinitely.
His mattress creaked, and he looked up in alarm. Ronan was getting up.
Adam's heart jumped into his throat. No. "Wait."
"Relax," Ronan said, holding up his hands. "I'm just going to open a window."
"Oh," Adam said, feeling stupid.
Ronan pushed the little window over his desk open with a grunt, then came back over and nudged Adam with his toe. "Get off the floor."
Adam scrambled to his feet. Ronan's face was inscrutable.
"First of all," he said, and the calculating way he fixed his eyes on Adam forcibly reminded Adam of the Terminator, "I hate the word 'crush'."
Confused, Adam said, "Okay. Then I'm. . . sorry about that too, then."
"Second. . . " He dropped his gaze to Adam's collar. "The idea of me—feeling that way—terrifies you."
Adam squeezed his eyes shut. "Not that."
"Then what?"
It wasn't as sharp as a few minutes ago, but it still dug right under Adam's ribs. "The idea of. . . Not knowing what I'm doing. I guess."
Ronan made an mm noise, like he understood. It wasn't exactly a secret that most of Adam's life up to now was him not knowing what the fuck he was doing. And Ronan. . . he flew through life by the absolute seat of his pants, and somehow, made it look exactly like he knew exactly what he was doing, all the time. Even his mistakes and fuck-ups, all his problems at school—they seemed like part of the Great Fucking Ronan Lynch Plan.
"Did you know what you were doing? A couple of weeks ago?"
Adam shook his head. "Not really, no."
"But. . . you wanted to."
Adam sucked his lower lip into his mouth and nodded.
"What would've happened, if I hadn't stopped you?"
Not entirely truthfully, he said, "I don't know." He did know: he would have chickened out. He'd been going over it in his head for weeks, and there wasn't a single scenario that didn't end with him chickening out. But he couldn't very well say that.
He felt Ronan take a step forward, into his space.
"You said. . . " Ronan swallowed. His voice was very quiet, barely more than a whisper over the new outside sounds and the suddenly loud fan. "You wanted. . . to have me. Was that—do you still—"
"Yes," Adam breathed out.
He opened his eyes. Ronan was still not-quite-looking at him, staring at Adam's throat with his teeth pressed together and his chin jutted forward. Looking like he was holding himself back by a thread.
"Tell me I'm not a—not a substitute," he said throatily.
There was a jagged edge to his voice that bit into Adam's chest. He reached out, tentatively, experimentally, and pressed fingers to Ronan's face, along his jaw. He put his hands on Ronan's collarbones and pulled his rumpled white school shirt into fists.
Ronan was rigid, immovable. It hurt.
"Fuck, Ronan," he said, and he let a little bit of that same desperation bleed into it, all rough edges carving out of his throat, "of course you're not."
An animal sound escaped Ronan and he melted, suddenly shifting and moving and alive in Adam's hands, and Adam pulled Ronan into him.
Ronan kissed fiercely and deliberately, like he did all things. He attacked Adam's mouth with a bruising intensity that left Adam gasping, sucking in Ronan's air. He felt full to bursting, too big for his skin. Ronan clutched him like he was a life preserver.
Sometime, somehow, over the last two weeks, Adam had forgotten, to some degree, what Ronan tasted like. He decided that he wasn't going to this time, no matter what happened after. He licked into Ronan's mouth, sucked at his tongue, scraped teeth along his lower lip. He filed away every spark on his tongue. He flattened his hands and spread fingers over Ronan's ribs, feeling the forceful thump of Ronan's impossible heart, thumping Ad-am, Ad-am. Imagining he could cage it in his hands and keep it with him.
Oh, he thought, and it was loud and clear and colored with want, let me keep it. And if I can't keep it, please, let me write my name on it, let it be mine.
Ronan stepped forward then, guiding Adam back with pressured hands on his hips. Adam felt his calves hit the low mattress and half a second later he was on his back, awkwardly shoved into the wall with Ronan curved over him like a gargoyle. His shirt rucked up on his waist, exposing a sliver of tanned and tattooed skin—Adam pressed his fingers to it.
Ronan's skin was incredibly, impossibly hot. How does he stand it?
Ronan's mouth smeared onto his jaw, down into the crook of his neck where he fixed his lips, and his harsh breath was suddenly added to Adam's rushing pulse.
Adam needed more—he twisted the bottom button on Ronan's shirt carefully through its hole, then the next—then Ronan got impatient, and reared up to yank the whole thing over his head. Adam watched him, marveling as more of his lovely inked body was revealed. The gesture felt intimate and close, despite how many times Adam had seen him do it.
It wasn't Ronan, taking off his shirt to work on the BMW so Adam would spare him the lecture. It was Ronan, taking off his clothes so Adam could touch him.
It was definitely too much.
Ronan saw it was too much and his thick eyebrows dipped in concern. He opened his mouth to speak.
In what could only be described as an out-of-body experience, Adam reached up and clapped a hand over it. Ronan made a strangled sound, warm and wet against his palm.
He circled his other hand round the back of Ronan's head, into his too-short hair, and pulled Ronan down toward him.
Then he dropped his hand down to Ronan's throat.
"Oh," Ronan said, like the first time, but the cadence of it was different, and he was here, in Adam's bed, hunched over him with his face an inch away, losing clothes and kissing him like he needed it, and this time Adam had said stupid shit but it hadn't been mean, it had just been wrong, and Ronan wouldn't kick him out this time—
He needed to know.
He pulled back, just barely. Enough that he could see Ronan's whole face. "Who was it?"
Ronan's eyes were unfocused and glassy. He was breathing hard. "No one, man."
Adam's face said he knew Ronan didn't think he was that stupid.
"Adam," Ronan said hoarsely, and it thrilled Adam to the core of his bones to hear his name spoken in that new and secretive voice, "it was nobody you know, and he doesn't matter, so he's no one."
"Ronan."
"Adam." Ronan gripped his shirt, pulling him forward. He craned his head to press teeth at the edge of Adam's jaw, just under his earlobe, and hissed, "You really want to talk about this now?"
His sharp hips ground into Adam's, and Adam could feel the hardening length of him shoved against his thigh. He swallowed hard. "I don't want to talk about anything right now."
Ronan's face split into a wicked smile that was all teeth and promise. "That's more like it."
-
When Adam woke, the trees outside his window were painted a dusky blue, and his tiny room was filled with bleeding cherry blossoms and hushed voices.
"Not now," he whispered, but he knew even before he said it that it would be no good; the blossoms shook as if in a gusting wind. A single bright, fat drop of blood dripped down next to him on the mattress.
"Fine," he sighed, "fine."
He gently disentangled Ronan's legs from his own, and climbed over him, muscles protesting. His whole lower body ached.
He would bet good money (if he had it, and were able to spend it on things like bets) that Ronan probably had it worse, but then again, Ronan wasn't new to this.
He stretched until he felt something pop, then turned around and took a minute to just look at Ronan. He was soundly asleep, and still boldly, defiantly naked on Adam's cheap jersey sheets, all stark lines and sharp curves. One arm stretched up behind his head; his other hand rested on his stomach. He looked like a modern take on a classical painting.
Adam smiled to himself, and bent to pull on a rumpled pair of jeans and a dirty t-shirt. He sat at the edge of the bed to put on socks.
"Hey," Ronan said.
Adam twisted his neck to look at Ronan, gazing at him through one cracked eye.
"Everybody's still fine," he said softly. "Gansey's been sending me updates."
"It's not that," Adam whispered, and pointed up. Ronan followed the trajectory of his finger and frowned in a resigned sort of way.
"I don't know how long it will take," he said truthfully, regretfully. He wanted Ronan to know he wasn't just freaked out and running.
Ronan rubbed his eyes with the heel of his palm. "You want company?"
Adam thought about it. "If you're offering."
Ronan pulled himself into a sitting position with what looked like a lot of effort. His face was still thick with sleep, his brow deeply furrowed. "Yeah, just let me. . . find my clothes."
Ronan locked up behind them, with the key Adam hadn't known he had. And he let Adam drive, and fell asleep again for the forty minute drive to the national park system Cabeswater seemed to be leading Adam to.
In the end, they didn't have to talk about it.