Archive of Our Own ^beta

Adam gets a week off for Thanksgiving.

Given that exams are in less than a month, he's inclined to spend the entire week studying.

Ronan has other ideas. "Come stay with me."

Adam manages not to sigh into the phone. He's twenty pages into one of the most deliberately obtuse academic articles he's ever read -- which is saying something -- and he doesn't have the brainpower to deal with this.

He wouldn't have picked up, but it's still a novelty, Ronan Lynch making a phone call.

"I can't make it back to Virginia," Adam says, automatically. He has said this many times. He's tired of saying it, tired of doing the math, but it's not worth it for a visit as short as one week. The drive eats up most of a day, and more than most of Adam's gasoline budget for the entire month, especially if it comes on top of giving up half a dozen shifts at work.

He's counting the days until exams end and winter break begins, and Ronan knows that, which makes it infuriating that he would ask.

But Ronan surprises him. "I'm not in Virginia."

"Where are you?" D.C. is the obvious candidate, and while it's technically closer than Henrietta, that doesn't make it feasible.

"The Cape."

Adam taps the heel of his hand against his forehead. He misses Blue. If she were here, he could tell her Ronan invited me to out to 'The Cape' and he'd see the exact same mix of horror and resigned amusement on her face that he's feeling. Or she'd tell him that Ronan's not half as bad as Gansey when it comes to obnoxious wealth so Adam should suck it up and deal, which might also help.

But Blue's not here, and his own issues with class aside: Cape Cod is possible.

"I didn't think the Lynches were aristocratic enough to have a house in Cape Cod." Adam highlights the last sentence he remembers reading and drops the article on his desk. "Don't you run more toward eccentric little hermitages?"

"Yeah, 'cause I have such a fucking blast living by myself."

Adam feels immediately, profoundly guilty. His instincts tear him in two: snarl back, or apologize.

But he doesn't want a fight, he really doesn't. And I'm sorry has never been their style.

"What about Opal?" Adam asks. Ronan's strange little child, part-self part-sister part-daughter. Adam loves her beyond words; appreciates her for keeping Ronan company; resents her for keeping Ronan in Virginia. He mostly represses that last part. "Is she prancing around the Cape eating seashells?"

"No, she's going through a mood," Ronan says, disgusted, and Adam smiles at this performative hypocrisy. "All pissy and avoiding me lately. I don't know what crap she thinks she's pulling."

"Maybe she's hitting adolescence." Opal has shown no signs of growing or aging since her appearance in the material world, but it could still happen. Probably at the least convenient time possible. "Or, I don't know, teething or something. What age do children turn into little monsters?"

"All children are little monsters," Ronan says. "I dropped her off at Fox Way. She can drive the psychics crazy for a week."

"I guess Blue turned out all right," Adam says. "And it would be good for her to have more female role models -- oh, fuck, Gwenllian."

Ronan snorts. "Six hundred year old crazy chicks aren't my type."

"Because you get to call people crazy." Adam runs his thumb over his fingers. "I think Gwenllian might be a bad influence on Opal. That's probably a weird thing to worry about. Is that weird?"

"Totally psycho." Well, he asked. "She'll be fine. They can talk nonsense at each other and stick random shit in their hair."

When he puts it like that, it sounds like a fun little sleepover. Opal can handle herself. She's handled worse.

But it's hard, not to look at her and see a lost child who needs protecting.

Adam's about to say something sappy, about Opal or Ronan or how much he misses both of them, but the door to his room opens.

"Hey, my roommate just came back," he tells Ronan.

"Tell him you're having phone sex and he needs to fuck off."

"No," Adam says. "Look, send me the address where you're at and I'll drive out Friday night, okay? I’ll get there pretty late."

Ronan hangs up. He never says goodbye.

Adam is used to that. Completely, totally used to that.

It doesn't bother him at all.

-

There had been a night at the Barns, the second night -- and Adam was still greedy for that, still counted every night, as though he had to keep track of them to stop them from being snatched away.

Adam and Ronan had stayed up past dawn, dealing in secrets and skin and solace, and Ronan had confessed the fear that the demon had whispered to him, that Adam was going to leave.

It was news and not news. Adam had known that the demon had borrowed his voice to say something to Ronan. If he'd thought about it consciously, he would have realized what it must have been.

He probably had thought about it, unconsciously, because he wasn't surprised.

He couldn't refute it. Because Adam was going to leave. He’d redirected most of the energy that had been spent on Glendower to college applications.

Adam was going to leave Henrietta, and Ronan was only getting more settled there.

Adam couldn't tell Ronan he wouldn't leave, because Ronan only wanted the truth.

"I'll come back, though," he said, and for once he must have found the perfect words for the moment, because Ronan's face split open with joy and relief.

It seemed -- not easy, when he said it. But simple. Straightforward.

Things usually do, when you're just talking about them.

-

Adam comes back from his Friday morning class to find Ronan stretched out on his bed, tapping away at the laptop that had been a graduation gift from the Ganseys. Chainsaw is perching on his desk lamp like something out of Edgar Allan Poe.

Adam's duffle bag is zipped and sitting neatly on the foot of his bed.

Everything else in the room is a complete mess.

"What did you do, break in?" Adam asks.

"Your roommate let me in," Ronan answers, without looking up. "He's a tool."

"I'm not crazy about his housekeeping skills," Adam says, deadpan. "But it looks like I can't judge." There are no less than four pairs of Adam's boxers on the floor, and that's just what he can see. Since most of his wardrobe is also on the floor, it's hard to tell if there are more that he's missing.

"Oh, yeah, I packed for you," Ronan says. "So we can go whenever." He looks at Adam then, finally, smirking and so pleased with himself. Exactly like the cat that puts a dead mouse in your slipper as a present.

"I have class at two." Adam sits down and wrestles his shoes off. "I was going to drive out after traffic died down."

Ronan shifts, his attention once more on the laptop. He's playing some game that Adam has never seen before, and Adam makes a note to check the browser history and downloads for the last day. He suspects he’ll find a lot of porn.

Ronan also manages to put his head in Adam's lap.

"I got bored."

Adam can keep fighting this: the way that Ronan dominates his life whenever he shows up in it.

Or he can just admit what a relief it is, that Ronan shows up at all.

He runs his fingers along the short bristle of Ronan's hair.

"I can entertain you until two," Adam says. "And then I am going to class." Ronan snorts softly, like he doesn't believe this statement. Adam scrapes Ronan's scalp lightly with his nails, to emphasize his point. "Want to get lunch?"

Adam can swing that. He has two meals left in his plan for the week. He'd meant for the second one to be dinner, but then, Ronan always does upset whatever plans he has.

"What, dorm food?" Ronan wrinkles his nose and looks up at Adam in disgust, but whatever he sees on Adam's face changes his mind. "Yeah, okay."

Ronan can take the joy out of victory, somehow. All Adam can think now is that he has to put his shoes back on, and he'd only just taken them off.

"You're an asshole, you know," Ronan says, conversational. The way a real person would say how are you or nice weather we're having.

"I know," Adam says. "Why in particular?"

"You never said hello. Aren't you happy to see me?"

"You trashed my room. When exactly was I supposed to be happy about that?"

"As soon as you saw me."

Adam hoists himself off the bed. "Get up, would you? They're going to run out of chicken wings."

They're halfway to the dining hall, cutting through a shortcut between two ivy-covered buildings, before Adam gives into the urge to push Ronan up against a wall.

"Hello," he says, lips close enough to Ronan's that they brush against each other as he speaks.

"Happy to see me?" Ronan makes it sound filthy and divine at the same time.

"Very," Adam answers, and kisses him thoroughly.

The dining hall is out of chicken wings by the time they get there. Adam doesn't mind.

-

Adam made a decision early on, without ever saying as much, that he would never call Ronan.

It was one thing to send a text. If Ronan ignored a text, it made him no different from any of the dozens of students Adam had given his number to at dorm mixers, discussion groups, the first day of his work-study program.

There were a thousand reasons not to answer a text, and even if Adam's brain would only accept the terrible ones, he could at least repeat the innocuous ones, over and over, until he almost believed them.

But there was a terror inside him that he would call Ronan and Ronan wouldn't pick up, and he didn't know how to get around that.

So he waited for Ronan to call him.

He thought he knew now how all those martyrs painted on the walls of St. Agnes must have felt, waiting for the Kingdom of Heaven, or more likely, waiting for someone to come let them down from their crosses and take them home already.

But miracles do happen. His third full day of classes, his phone rang, and there on the screen was the grainy, low light photo that he designated as Ronan's contact photo.

Funny, but he'd never realized how few pictures he had of Ronan until he'd gone away. And grainy as it was...

Ronan was smiling in this one.

"Do not be alarmed," Adam said. "I am not in the room with you. The device in your hand is transmitting sounds -- "

"Screw you, Alexander Graham Bell, I know how phones work."

"Congratulations on joining the rest of us in the twenty-first century." Adam's eyes flicked over to his roommate's bunk; it was one in the afternoon, and his roommate was still sleeping. Reason dictated that no one could be annoyed at being woken up at one in the afternoon, but Adam remembered what it was like to live in close quarters, better than he'd like to.

He stepped out to the hallway and eased the door shut behind him. There was a lounge at the end of the hall, but it was occupied, so Adam headed the other way and sat down on the floor across from the fire escape.

"Don't pretend phones are so great, they just make it harder to get away from people you hate," Ronan said. "Name one good thing about phones."

"The ability to summon medical services in an emergency is pretty good."

"911 versus the fact that Declan called me twice the last week," Ronan said. "I know which one I'd pick."

"What does Declan want?" Adam asked, and it was soothing, listening to the ensuing rant about older brothers who were nothing but sellout politicians in overpriced suits.

God. He missed the Lynch sibling rivalry.

He had it so bad.

He had it so bad that he didn't realize that he hadn't said anything for several minutes, just listened and grinned maniacally at the fire exit, until Ronan demanded, "Fuck, Parrish, did you die over there?"

"I was revived by paramedics," Adam told him. "One point for modern cell phone technology."

"I'm glad we have this technology that lets you talk to people who are far away so you can not say anything. Shouldn't you be all excited about college and shit?"

"Oh, God, I don't even know." Adam was not smiling anymore. "I should be, shouldn't I."

"Four more years of school, who would be excited by that?”

"Gansey," Adam answered. "Gansey is absolutely going to have the time of his life when he goes to college. And he's going to be good at it, too."

"Whatever. Gansey's not a real person, he doesn't count." Ronan added, grudgingly, "You're good at stuff."

"Some stuff," Adam admitted. "It turns out it's hard to make small talk with your classmates when your main hobbies in high school were magic and survival. It's not any worse than anything that came before, but..."

He trailed off. The shape of the fear in his head was something he recognized but did not want to name.

But Ronan had never stood for cowardice.

"Seriously, Parrish, you need to use words."

"What if it's like Aglionby?" Adam asked. "God, I'll get through it if it is, but the whole point of suffering through Aglionby was to get to something better. What if it's not? What if the whole world is just Aglionby over and over again?"

"Then we make our own world," Ronan said. "Duh." It was possible that Ronan meant this literally.

Adam shut his eyes and pictured that, Cabeswater and the Barns on a massive scale, whole continents and oceans plucked from Ronan's brain for them to hide away in.

He wasn't sure he could do it. Getting through Aglionby was about getting to something better, but he also thought, maybe, it was about getting to make something better out of what existed already. Adam had a streak of philanthropy hiding deep in him that wouldn't let him shut himself away from the world completely.

But God, it was good to imagine.

"Okay," Adam said. "In the new world, there is no small talk."

"No responsibility," Ronan said, and Adam let the lie pass. Ronan was shockingly responsible, when it counted.

"No ties," Adam said, thinking of every grudge match Ronan had ever had against his uniform.

"Why stop there? No clothes."

Adam laughed. This was the worst game of all time, and he couldn't stop playing. It was possible he was a masochist.

"No bugs, then. No sunburns."

"No phones."

"Obviously." You didn't need phones when everyone you loved was in arm's reach. "No cars," because killing demons and waking nightmares had not prepared Adam for the horror of Boston traffic.

"Bullshit. Yes, cars. Cars that never break down. They can be fucking fuel efficient to keep Sargent happy."

"Fine. Cars for you. We can throw in some endangered species for Blue. Mysteries for Gansey."

"Ugh, we have to find something for Cheng, don't we?"

"Blue and Gansey," Adam answered promptly. "What else does he need."

Ronan made a disgusted noise.

Adam shut his eyes and wanted.

"What about you?"

All of it, he didn't say. Anything. I don't care.

"I haven't decided yet."

-

"Hey, Adam!"

One of Adam's seminar classmates waves at him from a large and crowded table in the dining hall. A very large table; they've shoved three together to fit a dozen people.

Adam nods, returning the greeting, but Joshua waves again, summoning him, and after a quick look at Ronan, Adam heads over.

"You finish the reading yet?" Joshua asks.

"Yeah." He finished it days ago, but doesn't see the need to mention that.

"Dude, lifesaver. I need someone to talk me through it. You going to the review session tomorrow?"

"Oh." Adam hadn't forgotten about it, but it had slipped low on his priority list, buried under begging and bribing people to cover his shifts at work for the next week. "No, I'm driving out of town tonight."

Joshua's girlfriend Liz wrinkles her brow at him and at Ronan in turn. "That's nice! I thought you were staying on campus for break."

"Change of plans."

"Hey, sit, tell us about it." Joshua gestures for the group to make room.

"Maybe next time." Adam doesn't want to explain Ronan, for reasons he can't articulate. Worry that he'll come off like he's bragging, maybe, or petty desire to keep Ronan to himself; or just the knowledge that no introduction he could give would be sufficient. Ronan Lynch is impossible.

But Liz is about a half a second from introducing herself, and not explaining Ronan is turning out to be its own kind of awkward, so Adam adds, "My boyfriend Ronan's visiting, we're going to grab a table."

Ronan nods at the group, silent and only glaring a little, which is pretty good as far as Ronan first impressions go. Adam is glad that Chainsaw consented to be left in a tree outside.

Liz waves, dorky. "Nice to meet you, Ronan. Adam, have a good break, Josh can figure out the reading on his own for once."

Adam is sincerely grateful to Liz for managing a normal reaction, because no one else at the table has. They're either doing shitty jobs of hiding surprise, or openly appraising Ronan. Liz's roommate Christina, who drunk-cried on Adam's shoulder at a Halloween party he wishes he could forget, looks particularly distressed by the word boyfriend, and there's no possible good explanation for that.

Adam makes his farewells and leaves, trying not to look like he's fleeing. It's not the first time he's come out, but practice has so far failed to make perfect. It doesn't help that he can hear Christina whisper, not nearly quiet enough, "Did you know he was gay?" as they leave, the beginning of a conversation he desperately does not want to be a part of.

He expects Ronan to comment on the scene, or make fun of the way that his cheeks are burning, but Ronan is silent as they grab food and find a table for two near the back of the hall.

When he does talk, it's just, "Ditching a study session? Delinquent."

Adam laughs, weak in relief. "Well, this madman showed up to abduct me."

Ronan's foot reaches out under the table, coming to rest behind Adam's so that their ankles touch. Adam presses his leg against Ronan's, grounding himself.

"This pizza's disgusting," Ronan says. "The school's fucking loaded and they can't make pizza that doesn't taste like ass?"

"They throw all the money away on scholarships," Adam says.

Ronan looks at him, serious, for several long seconds.

Adam looks away.

"You know you deserve it, right?"

Adam smiles at his truly subpar pizza. "Most of the time."

Ronan shakes his head. "Idiot."

"God, you're terrible at pep talks," Adam says.

"So don't go fishing for one," Ronan snaps, but his fingers twitch, just enough that the tips brush against Adam's.

Adam thinks the blush is back on his face. He also thinks he doesn't care.

-

By the time they're done with lunch, Adam has to dash to get his bag and head to class.

He offers to let Ronan into the room to kill time, but Ronan shakes his head. "I'm going to wander."

God forbid he go somewhere he's invited. Ronan Lynch: reverse vampire.

Latin is usually one of the better classes in Adam’s week. Today, it drags. He keeps sneaking looks at his phone and keeps being rewarded with nothing.

His eyes drift around the room. It's the Friday afternoon before a break; class is sparsely attended. Hell, even on a regular week, Friday means low attendance.

Everyone else ditches sometimes. Anyone here, surprised by their out-of-town boyfriend coming to whisk them away for a vacation, wouldn't give Cicero a second thought. They'd be gone already.

But not Adam. Adam, the perfect student, is in the same wobbly desk, taking the same thorough notes, though the words are going from his ear to his hand without being processed by his brain. He's too busy wondering if he couldn't ditch, or if he wouldn't, or if it matters anyway since he didn't.

He thinks it matters, but he can't figure out which it is.

When class finally ends, he has one text message from Ronan: at the fugly statue.

Adam sends a text for clarification but doesn't wait for a reply, just starts for the nearest piece of stonework that could have offended Ronan's aesthetic sensibilities.

It takes him five statues before he finds Ronan, who of course never texted back.

"That's the school founder," Adam informs Ronan. He sounds a lot pissier than he'd have liked.

"He was fugly." Ronan is scratching at the statue's bronze base with a pocketknife. "All academics are fugly."

Ronan looks up.

Adam wants to say something to him, but he can't for the life of him think what. Which means he's about to say something without thinking about it, and given the tight anxious knot that built up in his chest during class --

The pocketknife snaps shut.

"Come on, I want to show you something."

Ronan has derailed whatever Adam was about to say. "What?"

Ronan starts walking, though, and Adam has to catch up. "I found something cool."

"Are you giving me a tour of my own campus?"

Ronan shrugs. "I could."

Adam makes a dismissive noise.

"On the left," Ronan says, voice dripping with condescension, "is Fuckberg Hall, where in 1827 the dean of the college screwed a donkey in front of the incoming freshman class. On the right is the largest library in the US dedicated entirely to necrophiliac erotica -- "

There are people walking by, and Ronan is not exactly being quiet.

Adam wraps an arm around Ronan's neck. They grapple briefly before Adam emerges victorious, Ronan's neck in the crook of his arm. He thinks Ronan let him win.

"You," he tells the top of Ronan's head, "are not fit for polite society. But that's the point, isn't it?"

"You're the one who made it violent."

Adam lets go of Ronan and steps aside. Puts his hands in his pockets, visibly keeping them to himself. "Were we going somewhere?"

Ronan appears to think about this for a few moments before he points his thumb over his shoulder. "C'mon."

He takes Adam to a small building that's mostly classrooms and offices for -- astronomy. Geology. Something like that. Adam's never been inside, but he is positive that the door Ronan leads them to is not for student use.

There's a lock on the door that's broken. Adam does not ask Ronan if it was broken when he found it.

There's a narrow, workman's staircase that takes them up to the roof.

There's...a hell of a view.

Adam turns in a slow circle. It shouldn't be that nice up here; they're still on campus, still in the middle of a forest made as much from telephone wires and distant high rises as it is trees and old bricks. But Ronan has found a spot with enough foliage and history to hide the fact that they are smack in the middle of one of the largest cities in America.

There's a smile on Adam's face, and he's not sure how it got there.

When he turns around, Ronan has walked right up to the edge of the roof. He looks like he might sprout wings and fly away.

"You're going to break your neck."

Ronan peers down at the ground. Adam doesn't breathe as Ronan's center of gravity moves closer and closer to the edge of the roof.

"It's three stories," Ronan says dismissively. "I'd be fine."

"Can we not test that theory?"

For a split second, Adam thinks Ronan might fall off the roof just to spite him.

But Ronan steps away from the edge, and the moment passes.

"Pretty cool, huh?" Ronan says, taking a seat by the door and stretching out to lie on his back.

Adam's heart starts beating again. He's able to notice the actual focus of Ronan's attention: not the quietly beautiful view, not the potential for disaster, not Adam.

Ronan is running a finger along foot-high letters gouged into the door that read ACT UP.

Now that Adam's looking, there's quite a lot of graffiti on the roof, much of it faded with age. Initials in hearts are dropped carelessly between dated political invectives and names of old rock bands, but all of it shouts: I lived, I cared, I was here.

"Trust you to find the hotspot for vandals," Adam says.

"This is a museum," Ronan says. "For real history."

Adam sits down carefully next to Ronan. "Real as opposed to fake, or real as opposed to unimportant?"

"Unimportant is fake," Ronan says unhelpfully. "Here." He pulls a Sharpie from his pocket.

"Really?" Adam asks.

"You gotta write something."

"Why, did you?" Adam asks.

Ronan looks at him. There are words, on the tip of his tongue, and Adam hasn't the slightest idea what they are.

But then Ronan looks away, flicks off the cap of the Sharpie. "You're the one that goes here," he says.

Adam takes the Sharpie from Ronan's hand, brushing his fingers against Ronan's as he does so.

He has an urge to scrawl AP RL on the ground beside him but it feels...obvious.

Childish.

He turns on his side, half propped up. His back is to Ronan, and the hairs on his neck are standing up from the feeling of being watched.

He finds a relatively open space and declares, in his jagged handwriting, odi et amo.

Then he busies himself with collecting the cap and putting it back on the marker, sticking the marker back in Ronan's pocket, all without meeting Ronan's eyes.

"Happy?"

It's such a small question, when you ask it like that.

He feels Ronan shrug, more than he sees it. "I guess your school doesn't totally suck."

"Great, yeah, they're going to put that one in the college brochure."

It's cold, up on the roof. Adam lies down, out of the breeze, putting his body against Ronan.

-

Adam insists on waiting for traffic to thin before they head for the Cape, and then they lose track of time, and then Ronan insists on getting dinner even though he's loaded up the backseat of his car up with a vending machine's worth of junk food, so it's late before they're on the road.

"Where are we staying again?" Adam asks, staring down at his phone screen. Ronan had given him an address, and he'd expected the directions to lead to a hotel; overpriced, anonymous, someone else's problem to clean up.

Instead, the little red pin on the map looks like a house. Mansion, really, but something that belongs to someone. And Adam still doesn't think that the Lynches go in for that sort of property.

"Friend of Dad's," Ronan says tersely.

Adam shifts his gaze to Ronan in the driver's seat. Ronan is staunchly looking out the windshield.

Getting Ronan to talk about Niall is a dicey proposition even when circumstances are good. Adam doesn't usually push it. But he has a right to know if this is the sort of vacation that's going to end with someone getting kidnapped.

"Business associate?" Adam asks.

"No. Travel buddies or some shit, I haven't seen him since I was ten. He's never home, he said I could drop by if I needed a place to stay."

Strange. Adam had never quite pictured Niall Lynch as having friends. Rivals, victims, family, and combinations thereof; but not someone that he would play a game of cards with, take a road trip with.

It bothers Adam, having gaps in his knowledge about Niall, and by extension about Ronan. But Ronan has clearly said all he is going to say on the subject, and Adam lets it drop. Gansey might be the person to ask. Or Declan.

Adam tries to imagine asking Declan to talk about his father. The ashes of Pompeii come to mind.

It's going on ten o'clock when they pull up into a garage that is a home for cars with inflated insurance policies and nothing else -- no tools, no oil stains on the concrete, no out-of-season patio furniture or half-repaired lawnmowers.

Ronan moves faster than Adam, turning the engine off and grabbing Adam's bag out of the trunk before Adam's fully out of the car.

Adam gives Ronan a look -- I can carry my own things, you know -- but Ronan doesn't falter, so Adam lets him have it.

Ronan leads the way into the house, down a hallway, up a flight of stairs, making vague comments like "kitchen," "bathroom," "clown room, creepy ass shit in there."

It's a little creepy just walking through the hallways, honestly. There's religious iconography in every room they pass, crucifixes and haloed martyrs staring at them from all sides. Adam feels judged, like some saint is going to jump down off the wall and condemn him for...hell. They could take their pick: witchcraft, sodomy, coveting his neighbor. Taking your dad to court must be a sin, some sub-clause of honor thy father and mother.

They end up in what is clearly the master bedroom; there's a bed the size of Adam's entire dorm room, a balcony with a Jacuzzi on it, a cavernous bathroom of marble countertops.

Ronan drops Adam's bag by the foot of the bed. His own suitcase, Adam notices, is open against the dresser, its contents spewed across half the floor.

Adam steps into the bathroom, splashing his face with water. A painting of Renaissance angels hangs over the toilet. He feels grubby.

When he emerges from the bathroom, Ronan has already moved on. Adam can hear him from somewhere downstairs, but Adam takes his time, poking his head into rooms, looking for something that didn't come straight out of a home decorator's magazine or the Vatican gift shop.

The clown room is more tacky than creepy, but it's the kind of tacky that only rich people go in for, so Adam doesn't think it counts.

He catches up with Ronan again in the room off the kitchen, the sort of thing that would be called a breakfast nook in Gansey's circle. There's an entire dining room next door to it, set up for a banquet that no one is attending.

Ronan is sitting on the bench of a window seat with his bare feet on top of the table. Adam experiences an enormous surge of fondness for this disrespectful act.

He's holding a Ziploc bag, and Adam sits on the bench next to him.

"If I wanted to spend the week with stoners I could have stayed on campus.” Adam lifts the bag out of his hands. ”Where did you get this?"

Ronan snags it back. "Weed's legal in this state."

"Not when you're nineteen."

"Neither's alcohol if you're going to be like that."

Adam can't argue with that kind of logic.

There's a bong on the table, which Adam highly doubts was purchased by the same person who covered the master bathroom in cherubs, but Ronan shakes his head when Adam picks it up.

"That's a souvenir," he says. "For Declan."

"He's going to throw it away," Adam says.

"I'm reaching out. It's not my fault if he can't appreciate a nice gesture."

Adam wonders how much money Ronan has spent on his most recent effort to spit in his brother's face. They get along better, these days, but Ronan still pushes Declan's buttons at every opportunity, and Declan still thinks Ronan is going to change his mind about college and the workforce and respectability.

It isn't as though if Ronan were to change his mind, Declan couldn't make a few phone calls and write a check and get him into school somewhere. Which would have made Adam angry enough to put his fist through a wall, back at Aglionby, that someone could just show up and throw some money around and get the thing that Adam had been killing himself over for years. But he's working on his anger, and, well...

It's Ronan. Adam wants him to have everything he wants.

And right this second what he wants, apparently, is to roll joints under the disappointed eyes of Pope Somebody-or-other.

Adam rests his chin on Ronan's shoulder. Feels Ronan tense for a split second before he relaxes into the contact.

So Adam’s note the only one who still has his defense up.

Ronan offers him the joint, and Adam puts it to his lips. Notices how closely Ronan watches, as he holds up a lighter.

Adam takes the first hit, coughs, and passes it to Ronan.

Time dilates, stretching out, so Adam does the same. He sprawls along the length of the window seat, half lying down, and can't quite remember how he ended up there.

He's trying to explain how screwed up the honors system at the college is, but he keeps losing track of where he is and forgetting details, so he thinks mostly his gestures have to get the point across for him. He doesn't know how he got on the subject, how long he's been talking, how to move on from here.

Ronan hands Adam a new joint -- Adam has lost count of how many this brings them up to -- and he's smiling at Adam in a way that's out of synch with the conversation Adam is trying to have.

There's something strange about Ronan like this. He's soft, his harsh edges smoothed over, a look on his face that's almost dopey.

Adam can't decide how he feels about it. If it's cute, like a kitten falling asleep. Or if it's wrong, stunted, like a lion with its teeth pulled out.

That thought bugs him so much he sits back upright.

"Hey, Ronan, let me see your teeth."

"Hm?" Ronan blinks. It's an entire event.

Adam puts the joint down on the table. "I need to see your teeth."

Ronan cackles. "Parrish, you are stoned out of your fucking mind."

He catches a glimpse of incisor when Ronan speaks, but that isn't enough to satisfy the need he has.

"Hey!" Thought and action are out of order; Adam registers Ronan's objection before he realizes what's caused it, before he realizes that he's crawled on top of Ronan to pry his mouth open.

"Hold still," Adam says, sticking a finger in Ronan's mouth.

Ronan sucks on Adam's finger and makes an obscene noise.

"Would you knock it off? This is important." Adam is trying to focus. "You -- How many teeth do you have?"

Ronan's answer is garbled. Adam removes his hand, leaves it resting on the corner of Ronan's mouth.

"Twenty-six," Ronan repeats.

"Why do you have twenty-six teeth?"

"I got two pulled."

"What?" Absolutely nothing makes sense. Ronan is perfect. It defies reason that he could ever have needed his teeth pulled. "When?"

"You want to talk about this right now?" Ronan asks, and shifts under Adam. Adam realizes that he's straddling Ronan. Realizes how much he enjoys that fact, the feel of Ronan trapped under him. "Because if you want to put something in my mouth, I can think of a few better options."

Adam's hand drifts down to trace the line of Ronan's jaw, and Ronan turns his face upwards. Like Adam is the sun.

Adam bends down to kiss Ronan, sliding his tongue into Ronan's mouth. Hey, he asked for it.

Ronan has some pretty good ideas, sometimes.

-

Adam wakes up the next morning, naked and alone, in the master bedroom.

He rolls over, burying his face in the pillows to smother his headache, but his eyes are too dry to stay closed.

And it's a bummer, the waking up alone thing.

He scrounges up his underwear and pants and emerges from the bedroom half-dressed.

He finds Ronan shirtless on the couch, and a pan of scrambled eggs and a pot of coffee in the kitchen. It's a toss up, which of those three things is the most attractive. Adam settles on the coffee.

"How long have you been up?" he asks Ronan, after he's managed most of a cup.

"Hours," Ronan says. "Since when do you sleep in?"

Adam winces. That wasn't enough coffee. "Since I have a hangover."

Ronan rolls his eyes. "There's no such thing as a weed hangover."

Adam pours another cup of coffee and waves a hand at him. "Shut your mouth. Now."

"You liked my mouth last night."

Adam groans and collapses onto the couch next to Ronan. His head is pounding, and for lack of anything better to do, he nuzzles his forehead against Ronan's shoulder. The warmth of Ronan's skin feels amazing against his own clammy, useless flesh.

"Just, be nice," Adam mumbles. "For ten minutes. Okay?"

There's a long moment of peace where Adam feels slightly less like he wants to die, and then -- oh, then -- Ronan's hand comes to rest on his head, fingers brushing through his hair.

Adam whimpers. It's pathetic, but right in the moment, he can't bring himself to mind.

"Can't hold your weed at all," Ronan mutters, pressing his lips against the top of Adam's head. "You're such a wimp."

"You're the worst," Adam complains, and curls into Ronan.

-

He wakes up again sometime later to find that Ronan has maneuvered them so they're both lying on their sides. It's a tight fit getting them both on the couch, but Ronan has his hand on Adam's hip to keep them tucked together, Adam's back to his chest.

Ronan's thumb is drawing soft, slow circles on Adam's hipbone, and it feels so amazing that he never wants to move.

Except --

Adam frowns.

"What the hell are you watching?"

He cracks his eyes open and, sure enough, Ronan has the television on one of those crackpot shows about how aliens built the pyramids.

"It's educational," Ronan says, running his hand up Adam's side.

"It really isn't."

"You shouldn't be so narrow-minded." Ronan's hand brushes back down Adam's side. It drives Adam completely insane sometimes, these two sides of Ronan, harsh and sweet, mocking and tender, overlapping and co-existing and never contradicting each other, when by all logic they should. "We found Glendower, why not E.T.?"

"E.T. was a puppet." Adam doesn't see the remote anywhere, so he moves to stand up.

Ronan's arm wraps around him, tight. Adam could probably get up if he tried, but not without some force.

"I'm watching that," Ronan complains, and kisses the back of Adam's neck.

It's a cheap shot. Ronan knows how sensitive Adam is there. How much it winds him up.

Adam tries not to react, but pressed up against Ronan like this there's no way to hide how his breath catches.

Ronan kisses his neck again, slower, and a third time, just barely scraping his teeth against Adam's skin.

His right hand, meanwhile, drifts down to Adam's fly.

"I'm not having sex with you while Ancient Aliens is on," Adam snaps. "Or ever again, if you don't turn that TV off."

Ronan stops for a moment, and Adam wonders if he's going to try to call Adam's bluff -- the first part is not a bluff in the least, but Adam could never make good on the second half of his threat.

Then he shifts, doing something out of Adam's view that nearly drops Adam off the couch.

The TV goes mute, but stays on.

"You're such an asshole," Adam grumbles, though it's as much of a concession as he expected.

"Kind of perfect for each other that way," Ronan says, and bites down hard on Adam's neck.

"Fuck," Adam gasps, and again a second later, "fuck," when Ronan gets his hand in Adam's pants.

It doesn't take Adam very long, between Ronan's mouth and his hand, to get off. He lingers for a second in the afterglow, wondering if anyone has ever marketed sex as a cure for hangovers. Probably.

He opens his eyes in time to see Ronan wipe his hand on the upholstery.

"That's going to stain," Adam says, more amused than anything.

"Whatever. It's an ugly couch."

There's a chance that Ronan inviting him over to have copious amounts of sex under the watchful eyes of Jesus is a heretofore-unknown kink of his, or some kind of arcane revenge against the owner of this house.

Adam wouldn't mind that, exactly, but he wants to know why he's here. Wants to know what exactly Ronan needs from him.

Or maybe Ronan's just horny.

Adam rolls off the couch and gets to his knees. It's gratifying, how Ronan's eyes go wide and dark, how he scrambles out of his jeans, his face not arrogant or guarded but just eager.

Adam takes Ronan in his mouth, swallows when he's done.

He figures it's the polite thing to do, as a houseguest.

-

Adam was reluctant to get in the car with Ronan, the day after graduation. Ronan picked him up with a shit-eating grin, and on top of the mysterious and dire hints he'd been dropping about Blue's graduation present, Adam felt like something was afoot that was -- if not dangerous, then profoundly annoying.

But Ronan got out of the car, told Adam to drive, and Adam rationalized that if Ronan steered him somewhere unmanageable he could turn around and leave.

Except the directions Ronan gave him were the same he'd have followed a year earlier to get to Cabeswater.

Without quite deciding to, Adam drove faster.

Ronan grinned at him then from the passenger seat, pure joy, either because Adam was figuring it out, or because Ronan generally liked to encourage recklessness in others.

Adam nearly wrecked the BMW, in the end. He hardly noticed, even when Ronan had to grab the wheel, even when slamming on the brake made his body rock forward and back. His mind was abuzz with thoughts and feelings he thought he'd lost months ago.

"How...?"

"Same as last time." If the dismissal was supposed to sound flippant, Ronan missed the mark by a mile. "Come on."

Adam scrambled out of the car, leaving the key in the ignition and the door wide open.

He had few possessions growing up, fewer of which could have been called cherished, but there had been a blanket he had wrapped around himself every cold night for as far back into his childhood as he could remember, a brown and white plaid number that was worn thin by the time it had come into Adam's life. This once, something being past its prime had been a bonus: the worn blanket was soft, cozy, safe. Adam had drawn courage and comfort from it, until his father had decided that security blankets were for babies and sissies. The blanket had been taken away; his mother had cut it into rags to clean with, and the sight of brown and white plaid drying dishes and wiping down counters had made Adam nauseous for a year.

Stepping out of the car felt like wrapping himself back in that blanket again.

It felt like coming home.

"It remembers me," he said, wondering, grateful, stunned. Images pour through his mind: lunch with the Ganseys, Helen laughing at an astute observation of his; Blue dancing to some of Ronan's terrible music; the first time Ronan kissed him.

Cabeswater was happy to see him, too.

"How?" he asked again, laughed not because anything was funny but just from sheer, overflowing joy. "When?"

"Yesterday."

"A whole day!" There was no space in Adam to contain irritation. He grinned madly at Ronan and saw the same look reflected at him. "I can't believe I couldn't tell -- " But as he said it, he believed. Felt, improbably, that Cabeswater hadn't wanted to ruin the surprise. "It's like -- "

Like it was never gone, he stopped himself from saying. Cabeswater did feel different from before, in a way that as hard to pin down. Matured, maybe. Sadder but wiser, except not sadder and not wiser, because it was an immortal magical forest, and didn't really get sad and didn't really learn.

"Like it remembers," he said again. His words and his wit had gone on strike; it was the best he could manage. "Like it knows me."

"I'd remember the weirdo who sacrificed himself to me, too." Ronan's words had no bite. "Don't go making a deal with this one."

"Jackass."

"I like your hands how they are."

Adam groaned, "You and my hands, seriously," but stepped close enough for Ronan to take one of his hands, kiss each of the fingers and rest his thumb over the pulse in Adam's wrist.

Adam felt a nudge from Cabeswater. "Oh," he said, "over here, this way --"

Cabeswater pulled him, and he laced his fingers between Ronan's and pulled him along too, until they were breathless from laughing and running and climbing.

They ended up sitting on a bluff, twenty feet over a slow-moving creek. This was not a part of Cabeswater that Adam had ever seen before; this was not Cabeswater as they had known it, but a new Cabeswater, for a new Adam, a new Ronan.

Adam wouldn't have wanted to be steered to the rose glen, or the oak grove, or any of the old haunts.

They were tangled up, Adam and Ronan and Cabeswater, for longer than Adam could guess at, when Ronan spoke up.

"It's not because of the deal."

"Hm?" Adam felt like he was dreaming. It was hard to tell cause and effect, here, harder to tell if it mattered.

"What you're feeling. It's not 'cause you're the magician."

Adam couldn't imagine what else he could have done to deserved such a euphoric reception. "Then what is it?"

Ronan ran his thumb over the knuckles of Adam's hand. "Cabeswater loves you. That's what you're feeling."

Adam stopped breathing for a second. But it was okay. The entire world was breathing for him, all of the trees in Cabeswater acting as his lungs. "Yeah?"

Ronan shrugged, a lousy pretense of indifference. "I made it, so."

-

The beach on the Cape is freezing, between the strong November breeze and the frigid spray of waves hitting rocks.

Adam would say I told you so, but Ronan is immune to that brand of shame, and anyway he hadn't argued when Adam had pointed out it would be fuck-off cold down at the beach. He'd just said that they would have the beach to themselves.

At least Ronan had done a good job of packing for him. Adam tucks his gloved hands into the pockets of his warmest coat and tries to ignore the slap of the cold against his cheeks. There had even been a thick wool scarf in his luggage, one he'd never seen before, and he discovers the purpose behind that underhanded gift when Ronan tugs on it to pull Adam close enough for a kiss.

They are the only people on the beach. The solitude, the stark beauty of the landscape, makes everything feel unreal, too good to be true.

Or maybe it's Ronan that has that effect.

Adam doesn't know how long they walk along the beach, only that the sun is setting and he's all chapped skin and hunger by the time they return to the mansion.

It turns out that there's not a lot to do at the Cape, off-season, for bored young outsiders. Their host had left a note on the fridge that Ronan and his guest "are, of course, more than welcome at the club," and Ronan and Adam take turns repeating the phrase the club to each other in horrified tones, which makes Adam feel better about being in a mansion in Cape Cod in the first place.

There is no actual discussion of going to the club. It just turns into making out, and then Adam remembers he brought his textbooks with him, and then Ronan tries to distract Adam from his textbooks and partially succeeds.

But it does trick Adam into thinking that they have no appointments at all, so he's unpleasantly surprised when Ronan's alarm wakes him up at eight o'clock the next morning.

Adam grabs the offending phone and silences the alarm, throws it across the room, but the damage is done. Years of getting up early for school, for work, have rendered him incapable of falling back asleep once he's awake.

And Ronan is already up out of bed and turning on the shower in the master bathroom.

Adam rests his head on the heels of his hands before getting out of bed too.

"Am I missing something?" he asks. Ronan is sniffing at a bottle of shampoo, which gives Adam a moment of cognitive dissonance. He puts the bottle back down and grabs a bar of soap before he and his shaved head can tax Adam's brain too much.

Ronan shrugs, which is a hell of a sight when he's in the shower. "No."

"Why are we awake?"

"Eighty-thirty service at Our Lady of Hope," Ronan says.

Adam manages not to groan. He'd forgotten it was Sunday morning. Of-fucking-course Ronan is going to church.

"Am I supposed to go to that?" he asks, which is more charitable than it could have been.

Ronan frowns, confused by the question. "Do you want to?"

"No?"

"Then don't," Ronan says, and turns off the shower.

Adam had been about to join him, but he supposes that wouldn't have been the best idea, under the circumstances. I was making out with my boyfriend is probably not a valid excuse for being late to Catholic mass.

Ronan dresses and gets out the door in record time -- he's punctual, when he gives a damn and doesn't want to make a scene. Which really only covers going to church, now that Adam thinks about it.

That leaves Adam, alone and wide awake on a weekend on his vacation.

He gets through three pages of his statistics textbook before shutting it in annoyance. If Ronan can take the morning for his spiritual wellbeing, so can Adam.

He shuts the blinds in the breakfast nook and starts poking around the kitchen.

There are a couple of taper candles in a drawer, purple and clearly intended for some special purpose. In his particular mood, it suits him just fine to dig out a few candlesticks and light them.

Weirdly, he has no trouble finding the perfect dish. There are about twenty different wide, shallow serving bowls, any one of which would work.

What he has more trouble with is a liquid. The only ingredients in the kitchen are the kind of shelf stable essentials that everyone keeps on hand -- flour, salt, rice -- and things that Ronan purchased before Adam arrived. Which includes a lot of booze, potato chips, and bacon, but is rather short on any of the dark liquids he'd normally have chosen.

He settles for Coca Cola, pours out half the bottle and shakes the rest of it to make it go flat more quickly. Waits until there's no more bubbles floating on the surface of the bowl, only the slightest reflection of candlelight.

Then he breathes and lets his eyes lose focus.

Scrying isn't quite the same as it used to be. The ley line in Boston isn't awake like the one in Henrietta, and it doesn't recognize his right or obligation to it.

In a way, it's disappointing, being shut out of something that had once been handed to him so completely.

But in another way, it's a relief, like getting to know someone before being forced into marriage.

The ley line in Boston still speaks to him on occasion, sends him out on errands. It asks him to go crack a cobblestone in the middle of an alley, or bend a downtown street sign at a twenty-degree angle, or drive hours out of the city to dig up a sapling and replant it ten feet to the north.

He's amassed a variety of weird local knowledge about the city that way, finding corner bodegas and all-night eateries and places of historical non-significance, and earned himself a reputation among his social circle as the guy who can find cool shit to do in Boston.

But he's not on a ley line now. Scrying presents him no errands. There is no choking thing struggling to come back to life. There is just Adam and his own mind, and a strange kind of clarity.

He can feel himself, and not himself, and everything, and nothing, and no neediness dragging at him.

It's...mesmerizing.

It's...several times that Ronan says his name, before Adam realizes he's being called.

The first thing he notices, when he opens his eyes, is that the candles have burned half way down.

It should have taken hours for that to happen.

The second thing he notices is that Ronan is furious.

"So, you're not dead."

"Are you disappointed?"

Adam regrets the words almost as soon as he speaks them.

But he's ravenous, completely starving -- how long has it been since he's eaten something? -- and Ronan is clearly overreacting, and --

And Adam is tired of walking on eggshells.

"If you're going to kill yourself," Ronan says. "Do it where I don't have to find you."

He's gone before Adam can think of a response.

It might be for the best, since all Adam ends up doing is burying his face in his arms and swallowing a scream.

He'd felt so close. To understanding. To peace. To making sense out of something, anything.

Now he's as blind, as frustrated, as human as ever.

Adam wishes he were more.

He wishes he could chase after Ronan and apologize. Wishes he could throw the scrying bowl across the room and shatter it into a thousand pieces. Wishes he could watch the reflection of the flames dance across the surface of the Coca Cola and lose himself outside his own mind again.

He sighs, breathes in again to blow out the candles, and goes to find something to eat.

There's a cold, soggy fast food burger sitting on the counter, and Adam scarfs it down in four bites without letting himself think about Ronan buying him breakfast and finding him -- gone.

He goes outside, underdressed, and walks around the neighborhood until he's out of breath and worn out from exertion. Backs away at every turn in the road that would take him to the ocean.

Thinks, suddenly and vividly, that he hates it here. Every lawn he passes is too perfectly trimmed, every house too freshly painted, every road sign gleaming. He wishes he could break something. He wishes he weren't so cold.

He wishes he were home.

He jogs back to the mansion, sweating and freezing at the same time, and finds Ronan sitting out on the massive screened porch.

There's a chair opposite him, but instead Adam sits in Ronan's chair, half beside and half on top of him. The chair is not meant for two; the wicker creaks alarmingly.

He hasn't actually planned what he's going to say or do from this point. But it's Ronan, so the solution is both easy and impossible.

He reaches for the truest thing he can say, and ends up with "I don't want to be angry anymore."

"How's that working for you?"

"Not great," Adam admits.

Ronan has a beer in one hand, but he sets it down on the floor next to Adam's foot.

"You smell gross," he tells Adam.

"I'm going to take a shower," Adam says, but he gives it another minute before he stands. A minute for Ronan to explain himself, to demand an apology, to offer to join him.

Ronan does none of those things, so Adam gets up and leaves.

-

There's a phone ringing when he gets out of the shower. He tracks it down as he towels his hair dry.

The screen identifies the caller as SARGENT, so Adam picks up, even though it's Ronan's phone.

"Hello?"

"Hey! Adam? Can you hear me?" Blue sounds distant but cheerful, which is consistent with most of his conversations with the Gansey-Blue-Cheng trio in the last few months.

"Yes," Adam says.

"Oh, good. The reception here is shitty -- I think I missed a call from Ronan, earlier."

Adam's stomach does a little flip. He has a pretty good idea why Ronan called Blue that morning.

"Let me see if he wants to talk." Adam tells himself that it's prudent, not cowardly, to spare Blue any unnecessary explanations.

Ronan is still out on the porch, trying to tempt Chainsaw into eating cold French fries.

Adam offers him the phone. "It's Blue."

Ronan sticks out his middle finger at the phone. Or maybe at Adam.

"Ronan sends his love," Adam tells Blue, and once he's out of earshot, "he's sort of pissed off at the moment."

"News at eleven," Blue intones. "Need an intervention?"

"No." Blue would probably be on Ronan's side. Blue and Ronan are on the same side more often than either of them willingly admit. "Just sympathy."

"You knew what you were getting into," Blue says, utterly unsympathetic.

Which is not true. It's true that Ronan doesn't hide his anger. He goes out of his way to hit you in the face with it as soon as he meets you. So Adam knew how difficult Ronan could be, but that isn't the same as saying he had a choice.

Or, no. He had a choice. But Ronan is so completely the right choice -- even when he's pissed off, even when he's impossible, even when he's hundreds of miles away -- that he feels inevitable.

It's the kind of thing that Adam thinks everyone knows, but that he'd never say to any of them. So he tells Blue, "Not everyone can read the future."

"Rub it in my face, why don't you," Blue snaps, mock-angry. "I was going to offer you my switchblade if you need it, but now I don't think I will."

Adam winces. "Please keep that thing to yourself."

"You know," Blue muses, "it's funny. If I was only going to stab one raven boy, you'd think it would have been Ronan."

"Funny's not the word I'd use," Adam tells her. He has a scar on the back of his hand.

They all have a lot of scars, these days.

-

By Monday morning they've moved on, without anybody saying I'm sorry or I forgive you or what are we even fighting about.

They drive to a shitty run-down mini-golf course -- Adam would have bet money, all five dollars in his discretionary fund, that there was nothing shitty or run-down in Cape Cod, but Ronan, God bless him, has somehow found the lone holdout. They take increasingly terrible putts while Ronan sneaks sips from a flask, and get kicked out at the ninth hole when they give up any pretense of playing mini-golf and start bouncing pebbles off the giant windmill.

Ronan drives back to the mansion at twenty miles over the speed limit, all the windows down. Adam tries to watch the scenery going by, but keeps getting distracted by the ferocious smile on Ronan's face. Ronan, he thinks, should always be behind the wheel of a vehicle going twenty miles over the speed limit.

Tuesday and Wednesday both devolve into long drives to nowhere in particular. They end up at a historic old pie shop on Tuesday, an antiques dealer on Wednesday. Adam wouldn't have cared if they'd driven to a MacDonald's and back. The real virtue is getting Ronan out of the house. Ronan is falling into fits of boredom, and the best thing Adam can think to do is throw the car keys at his head and let him work off some of his energy.

Adam is more worried than he would like to admit, of what Ronan will do when he's bored. Destructive is a real possibility. So is introspective.

Someday, Ronan is going to realize that Adam isn't worth the level of worship that Ronan has for him, and as selfish and cowardly as that makes him, Adam wants to put off that day for as long as possible.

-

"The club" is having some fancy dinner on Thursday. An invitation arrives in the mail for Ronan Lynch & Guest.

Adam and Ronan stay in bed until noon and only emerge for bacon and Pop Tarts.

Declan calls at one o'clock sharp, like he had an alarm set to remind him to call Ronan at one o'clock.

Ronan suffers through the call, though Adam overhears the words genocide and consumerism and fake-ass holiday from out on the porch, so it’s not like there’s a Thanksgiving miracle of brotherly love occurring in the next room.

Adam stares at his parents' number for a long time, knowing he won't call but not able to look away. It's a relief when the phone rings and Gansey's photo pops up on screen.

Adam talks to Gansey, and Blue, and even says hi to Cheng before going to save Ronan from his brother on the pretense of making him say hi as well.

Adam leaves his phone with Ronan and breaks out his Latin reading. He's engrossed enough in Catullus that he doesn't realize how long it's been, not until he gets up to grab a soda.

Ronan has been out on the porch for a long time.

Half-wary, Adam cracks the door open, one finger marking his page in the book.

"Whatever." Ronan is sprawled out on a hammock, one hand holding the phone up, the other feeding Chainsaw a piece of Pop Tart. She drops it in favor of biting at his fingers. "I made you, I can unmake you."

So he's either talking to Opal, or he's taking a fairly gratuitous amount of credit for Gansey's life.

Adam hangs in the doorway, eavesdropping on Ronan not talking for the next few minutes, and decides it has to be Opal. This is their thing, the kinship that extends beyond communication, and Adam loves it as much as he envies it.

Adam listens to Ronan listen to Opal listen to Ronan, and he almost doesn't feel like an outsider.

Ronan must have noticed Adam when he opened the door, but he lets him hover for a few minutes before he does anything about it. "Parrish wants to talk to you, you can drive him crazy for a while."

Adam takes the phone from Ronan. "Hello, Opal." He sits down in the seat across from the hammock, nudges Ronan with his foot and watches him swing back and forth. Chainsaw takes to the air with a squawk of protest.

"Hello." Opal always sounds like she's just been running, short on breath and high on adrenaline.

"How do you like it at Fox Way?"

"It's nice." There's one of those lengthy pauses, and maybe Adam can't divine any meaning from it, but he likes that she feels comfortable enough with him to take her time. "I made a pie. Maura says I'm better at eating pie than at making it."

Adam laughs and kicks Ronan's hammock again. Ronan shoots him a dirty look, so he does it a third time.

"Most people are." He remembers Persephone's pie, life changing and a little too sweet. It's a big legacy to follow, for a girl who mostly eats twigs.

"Gwenllian was going to show me how to do a magic trick, but Calla said that Gwenllian should quit before she burned the house down."

At least Adam's not the only one who's looking out for whatever degree of innocence Opal has left. "I think I'm with Calla on this one."

Ronan mutters, "That witch is a fucking tyrant."

Adam's next kick nearly upends the hammock. Ronan scrambles to maintain his balance with an uncharacteristic lack of grace.

"Gwenllian's nice." This may very well be the first time in history anyone has spoken those words. "She's helping me draw my own tarot cards."

"Are you getting into tarot?"

"She's going to turn out crazy," Ronan mutters.

Adam waves a hand at him to shut up, mouths you left her with psychics, what did you expect.

Opal doesn't speak right away, as though she knows that Adam's attention is divided. "I like the pictures."

He hadn't known she was interested in art, or drawing at all. But he likes the thought of her having something where she can sit and get her thoughts out.

"You should tell Ronan to take photos," Adam says. "I'd like to see them, if that's okay."

Opal chews this over for a long time. "When they're done."

"When they're done," Adam agrees.

"Maura says they're interesting. I think she means I draw too many ravens."

Adam eyes Chainsaw, and the edges of Ronan's tattoo peeking out of his shirt, and the intense watchful look in Ronan's eyes.

"No such thing," Adam says, "as too many ravens."

Opals thinks this over, too. "I'm going to go. I want to watch them mash the potatoes."

"Okay. Love you."

Opal hangs up.

Adam lowers the phone to be sure; the call has ended. He feels a tired sort of pain, too old and familiar to be worth fighting.

Opal is Ronan's creature, after all.

But the phone rings as he's passing it to Ronan, and Ronan hands it back to him. His usual antipathy for answering his phone, or a reaction to the caller: FOX WAY.

Adam swipes to answer. "Hello?"

"Adam?" Opal says, and before he can answer, whispers, "love you," and hangs up again.

Ronan makes a noise that sounds more like Chainsaw than anything human.

Adam refuses to look at him. He's aware that his face is doing something ridiculous; he doesn't need Ronan to tell him that.

"Here." Adam tosses Catullus at Ronan. He'll find his page again later. "Educate yourself."

He takes his time grabbing his stats book out of the master bedroom, doesn't emerge back on the porch until he feels less foolish.

Ronan has abandoned the hammock, moving to the sofa to encourage Adam to sit next to him. Or possibly out of self-defense. Adam sits with his back to the arm of the couch, feet up on the sofa and pressed against Ronan's thigh.

He's good at making himself focus on his work, so he doesn't lose much time -- just moments here and there -- to watching Ronan read.

Latin is something of a fringe interest, even among Ivy Leaguers. The students who take it usually do so because it's useful for pre-med, pre-law, primary sources -- a means to an end -- and Adam agrees with them when he has to.

But in his heart of hearts, he's studying Latin for this exact moment, for the absorbed expression on Ronan's face, for his hand running down the side of the page before it comes to rest on Adam's ankle. Even for the twisted smile on Ronan's face, the comment that "this is the kind of shit they should have made us read at Aglionby, Latin would have been the best attended class in history."

"I think they try to discourage the natural perversion of teenage boys."

"Yeah, 'cause that works." Ronan slides his hand up Adam's leg, and Adam tries very hard to focus on his reading.

Or not that hard.

He can review the chapter later, anyway.

-

Ronan is having a nightmare.

It's been months since Adam was awoken by the sounds of Ronan in distress. But as soon as his eyes open, everything comes rushing back to him, a helpless moonlit haze.

Adam stays exactly where he is, lying on his side, only his eyes moving. He wants to help; he'll settle for not making anything worse.

He could die, Adam thinks, and pushes the thought away. Ronan's dreams are less dangerous than they used to be. There's no reason to think tonight is any special threat. No reason to worry at all.

Adam counts his breathing, in and out, and watches Ronan's face twitch.

He'd woken Ronan from a nightmare once, shook his shoulder and called his name, and Ronan had woken up with half a not-quite-human body bleeding out on top of him.

They're getting the hang of burying corpses, but Adam would be happier not to have any more practice.

Ronan snaps awake, one hand flailing out, a useless defensive maneuver that nonetheless tells them he brought nothing back with him.

"Hey," Adam says. "It's just me."

Ronan sits up with a grunt and swings his legs out of the bed. His back is to Adam. In the low light, the ink of his tattoo almost looks like it's moving.

"Need anything?" Adam needs an answer, needs to be useful, needs to hear Ronan speak, but he keeps his voice casual.

"No." Ronan stands up.

Adam forces his eyes closed. If Ronan wants space, or wants to take care of himself, or whatever, then Adam isn't going to press him.

Even if Adam's heart is beating a thousand times a minute.

He hears water running in the bathroom, followed by a long, uneasy silence.

Ronan returns to the room, but not to bed. There's rummaging, and a thunk, and Ronan swearing, quiet but heated.

Adam opens his eyes again.

Ronan is getting dressed.

"Going somewhere?"

Ronan spits the word. "Out."

It's -- Adam takes a second to remember where the clock is in this room -- 3:18 in the morning.

Ronan is the least muggable person Adam can imagine, in a fancy rich neighborhood no less, but anything could happen.

Adam's pulse is racing so hard it hurts. "I could come with."

Ronan tugs a shirt down over his head. "No."

He leaves.

Adam rolls onto his back and sighs. There's an uneven line of paint on the ceiling where it joins the wall, incongruous in a house this expensive, and Adam stares at it for want of something benign to fix his mind upon.

Ronan reappears in the doorway.

He watches Adam, and Adam watches him, and then he steps close enough to the bed to lean down and rest his forehead against Adam's.

Then he's gone again, without another word.

Adam grabs his phone off the bedside table. It's 1:22 for Gansey and Blue. Or maybe 12:22; he's fuzzy on the specifics. Too late to call.

He doesn't want to talk to anyone right now, anyway. He just wants to not feel so damn alone.

He keeps a hold of the phone out of some vague idea that Ronan might get into trouble, might call for help. The weight of that responsibility, or the brightness of the screen every time Adam checks the time, or the exaggerated reality of the late-night-early-morning world, keeps Adam from falling all the way back asleep.

He dozes.

At some point, Ronan lifts the phone out of his hand, runs a finger along the lines of his palm like a fortuneteller.

"You okay?" Adam mutters into the pillow.

"Go back to sleep."

"I worry about you," Adam admits. "A lot."

Ronan doesn't say anything. Adam thinks he might have dozed off again.

"Go back to sleep," Ronan says, and Adam can't quite remember obeying him, but he must have, because he wakes up to morning light and terrible music streaming through the windows.

-

The weather turns to shit that afternoon, rain and sleet pounding against the roof.

Even Ronan doesn't suggest walking down to the beach, or driving reckless and too fast down the highway.

They stay in.

He shouldn’t feel trapped. But the pounding on the roof sinks into Adam's brain, a rat-a-tat countdown, reminding him several times a second that he and Ronan are running out of time.

He rewrites the same sentence over and over, the lines scratching out his words becoming increasingly violent and erratic, until Ronan walks past the breakfast nook and snatches the pen out of his hand.

Adam jumps in his seat. Ronan had come up on his deaf side, and he doesn't know which is worse, if that was carelessness or if Ronan meant to sneak up on him.

There's a warm ugly anger building inside of Adam, and it doesn't need logic. It feeds on both possibilities at once.

"What are you doing." His words come out clipped and stilted, because that's what it takes to keep his voice down.

"Going insane." Ronan glares at him. "You keep tapping this damn thing, it's like a fucking metronome."

"Go listen to your shitty music," Adam says. "I'm trying to work."

"You're always working."

"Not right now I'm not. Give me my pen back."

Ronan snaps the pen in half.

Adam's on his feet before he thinks about it.

Just walk out of the room just get another pen just walk away --

But louder than the voice of reason is his own heart pounding in his ears, wordless staccato rage.

"What the fuck, Ronan."

Ronan does that thing he always does when Adam is truly mad: shuts down, goes cold, impossible to rattle. There's an appraising look in his eyes, and his hands are perfectly steady as he spreads them out to show Adam the ink that's bleeding across his fingers.

"Oops." His voice is completely flat and completely fake.

Adam is up in Ronan's face before he can think about that, either.

"What is your problem?"

"I don't have a problem," Ronan says. "You're the one who's getting mad about nothing." And then he reaches out and smears ink across Adam's face.

Adam smacks his hand away.

He hates himself for it immediately. He hates Ronan a second later, for driving him to it, and then hates himself more for thinking that.

Adam shoves his hands into his pockets. The ink on his cheek feels wet, as though he's been crying.

If he were smarter he would walk away.

If he were smarter everything would work out on its own and this wouldn’t be happening.

"What. Is. Wrong with you."

"Nothing's wrong with me. Sorry I'm not a super genius like you."

"Are you really mad that I'm studying? That I'm trying to keep my scholarship? Just because your life is so goddamn easy," Adam says, as nasty as he can manage, which is extremely. "You get to live at home with everyone -- "

"Right, because it's not like everyone scattered to the four fucking winds."

"Blue and Gansey left me, too," Adam snarls. "You don't have a monopoly on being abandoned. You have Opal, and Matthew, and meanwhile I'm at school alone and working my ass off and fucking miserable -- "

"If you hate it that much why don't you -- "

"Don't. Say it. Don't."

Adam, already too close to Ronan for safety, takes another step forward.

Ronan refuses to back down.

"This is what I have to do. Just because you never have to do a goddamn thing in your life -- "

"Okay, Declan." Ronan finally sounds angry, finally sounds like Adam is getting to him, and it's the opposite of a victory. "Why don't you piss off back to Boston if I'm such a waste of space."

"That isn't what I meant."

Adam shuts his eyes. He feels like there's a bright light shining directly into his eyes, piercing his brain.

Ronan doesn't say anything, so Adam takes a few minutes, forcing his hands to uncurl from fists, forcing his heartbeat to slow itself, forcing himself to breathe.

He feels Ronan stepping away from him.

When he opens his eyes, Ronan is sitting on the window seat, head hanging down, staring his hands.

"We suck at this, don't we," he asks Adam, but it isn't really a question.

Something strange and foreign tries to claw its way out of Adam's gut.

This would be a very bad time to start laughing.

He shuts his eyes again, presses the heels of his hands against his eyelids. Bites on the inside of his cheek until he can feel edge of hysteria receding.

"We're awful," Adam says. "Just -- shit, the worst."

He could leave, he supposes. Not outside, maybe, not in this weather, but he could go submit himself to the stares of the bathroom cherubs or the creepy clowns or any of the five different crucifixes he's counted in the mansion. He doesn't have to stay here with Ronan when he's so mad.

Except he doesn't want to leave, when it comes down to it.

He'd rather be mad with Ronan than be on his own.

He sits down on the window seat next to Ronan. It's awkward. But at least they don't have to look at each other that way.

Even if he does want to look at Ronan.

He doesn't know what to say, and then he thinks, what the hell, it's Ronan, and he opens his mouth for the first piece of truth he can find.

"I didn't want to fight with you this week."

"Congrats on that," Ronan mutters. "You should have just gone for it."

Adam gives in and looks over.

Ronan is beautiful in profile, all sharp angles and harsh lines. He is not looking at Adam.

"What do you mean?"

"I'm not stupid," Ronan says. As though Adam could think that, as though anyone could think that. "I can tell when you're pissed at me. I'd rather you said it and got it over with instead of us having to pretend you're not for a whole goddamn week."

Adam blinks. Ronan is still there when he opens his eyes, which is something to be grateful for.

"I wasn't mad at you," Adam says, and he can feel the shape of the lie in his words. "Until right now."

Ronan looks at him then, a glare sharp enough to break the skin, and looks away quickly. As though Adam were the dangerous one.

"Sure, whatever."

It’s so dismissive that Adam feels himself crumbling. He'd do a lot to not have Ronan talk to him like that.

"Fuck, I missed you, okay? I just wanted to see you, I didn't want to fight about it."

"Too bad. We got in a fight anyway."

"What, that's what's going to happen now? Every time I see you, we're going to have a fight about it?"

"I don't know," Ronan admits. "Maybe that's our thing."

"That's exhausting," Adam says. "Why does being angry have to be our thing?"

"Why are you angry at me?"

Adam leans back with a sigh. The back of his head makes contact with the window behind him.

The rain smacking against the window is suddenly soothing, if only because it's filling the silence that his own words are creating.

He is angry with Ronan, he realizes. He has been all along.

There's an ugly snarl of feelings somewhere inside his chest, wrapped around the absence of Ronan and the inadequacy of his college friendships and his own endless, all-consuming fears about not being worthy.

But none of that is actually Ronan's fault. Even if he has been blaming Ronan for all of it, on some level, since he went to college.

"I hate that you never say goodbye," Adam says.

"What?" Either Ronan wasn't expecting an answer at all, or he wasn't expecting this answer, because he sounds honestly confused.

"When you hang up the phone," Adam explains. "You never say goodbye."

There's a long silence before Ronan speaks again.

"I hate hanging up the phone."

Adam doesn't recognize the noise that escapes him, then. It's pathetic enough that Ronan reaches across the space between them and rests a hand on the small of Adam's back.

Words spill out of Adam, a damning, unstoppable torrent, "I worry -- fuck -- all the time, that you aren't going to want to talk to me -- "

"Why wouldn't I want to talk to you?"

"I don't know!" Adam's anger is circling around to its source, what is always its ultimate source: himself. "I don't know, but I worry about it, okay? And then you hang up like you can't get away from me fast enough -- "

"I hate the phone," Ronan says, heated. "I don't hate you, shit, I hate the phone, I hate -- "

Adam leans into Ronan's touch, to get himself through that hitch in Ronan's voice.

"I hate that none of your college friends know about me," he finishes.

Whatever Adam had thought Ronan was going to say, it wasn't that. There's no sign of subterfuge, of exaggeration; Ronan is staring intently across the room into the banquet-dining-room, and he looks as serious as the grave.

Adam has to rack his brains to figure out what Ronan is talking about, and that makes it worse, that this thing he hadn't noticed has been hurting Ronan all along.

"I don't know how to talk about you," Adam says. "It's easier not to get into it with people I don't trust, because if I talk about you than I'm going to end up saying I miss you and once I say I miss you I just -- I'm not going to be able to stop saying it."

"Right, you just love me too much."

Quietly, Adam asks, "Is that so hard to believe?"

Ronan doesn't answer.

When Ronan had first had a crush on him, Adam had known that he was in the rare -- for Adam Parrish -- position of having all the power in a situation. Hell, Gansey had known that. It had been exhilarating and terrifying, holding that kind of power, and he'd been as careful as humanly possible to make sure he didn't abuse it.

But it had been a long time since he'd thought of their relationship as unbalanced.

It breaks his heart a little, that Ronan still thinks of it that way. That Ronan thinks Adam would give up on him.

It breaks his heart more, to think that he might have earned it.

"I thought you knew."

Ronan swallows, hard. "Guess I'm not that smart."

"I think we’re both being pretty stupid." Adam presses his shoulder against Ronan's. "I love that you call me even though you hate talking on the phone. I love that you hold me up to your insanely high standards. I love that you take such good care of Opal."

Ronan slides his hand across Adam's back, wraps his arm around Adam's waist.

"Keep going," he says, his voice still rough around the edges. "I want to hear more about how great I am."

"I love that you can ruin any serious moment anyone tries to have around you."

"I love that you take everything so damn serious."

"Yeah, I do." Adam leans closer to Ronan. "I'm not here because I'm messing around. You're important to me. Even if I forget to tell you. Even -- even if I can't come home and see you as much as I want to."

Hesitant, like he thinks he's got the answer but doesn't trust it, Ronan says, "But you want to."

"All the time." Adam swallows. "And every time I have to say, no, I can't come down this weekend, I feel like shit. Like I'm picking school over you. Like I should be going home, and I want to, so why the hell don't I?"

Ronan huffs at him. "Don't act like it's news that you're a stubborn pain in the ass."

"It's news that I'll work myself to death out of spite and not just out of need.”

"You’re independent. I know that." Ronan breathes deeply. "Most of the time that's pretty cool."

"Most of the time?"

"Sometimes it's fucking stupid," and Ronan sounds so much like himself again, annoyed and judgmental, that Adam nearly laughs.

Ronan glares at him from the corner of his eye, and that makes Adam laugh, small but real.

Ronan adds, "I'll stop asking you to come home."

"I'll start bragging about you," Adam says. "Next time you come by campus everyone's going to be very impressed with you."

"What, you're going to lie to them?"

"You are impressive."

Ronan rolls his eyes. "Pull a few magical forests out of your dreams and everyone's amazed."

"I don't mean the Greywaren stuff. I mean you." Adam gives in to the urge to rest his head against Ronan's shoulder. "I keep waiting for you to realize that I'm not as great as you think I am."

"Have you not noticed I’m a fuck up?”

"So we're both too good for each other."

"As long as we're clear on that."

Adam turns his face in toward Ronan, nuzzling his shoulder.

He feels completely ridiculous for a split second until Ronan kisses the top of his head. Then -- well, he still feels ridiculous, but he doesn't mind.

He's a little ridiculous about Ronan Lynch. He can live with that.

He pulls back, to look at Ronan, to say something sappy, he doesn’t know, and then he gets a look at Ronan's shoulder.

He had forgotten about the ink on his face.

"Uh."

Ronan grimaces, like he'd forgotten, too. He places a hand on Adam's chin and runs his thumb along his jawline.

"Here," Ronan says, "come on."

Adam follows Ronan to the bathroom. Ronan runs some water, wets a washcloth and takes it to Adam's cheek. His hands are gentle against Adam's skin.

"Fuck, ink is hard to wash off," Ronan mutters.

"That's the point," Adam says. "Your shirt's going to stain."

"Ask me if I care."

"I care." Adam slides his hands up under the hem of Ronan's shirt, pushing it up.

Ronan sighs and pulls his shirt off. "I'm on to you, Parrish. You just want to get me naked."

Adam leans forward to rest his forehead against Ronan's bare chest. That's how he ought to feel. They had a fight, now they -- make up. But.

"I'm exhausted," he admits. "Can we just -- sit together?"

"Christ, you're acting like I don't like cuddling. Idiot."

Adam smiles against Ronan's chest. "Yeah, yeah. Wash your shirt already."

Ronan puts his shirt in the sink to soak and takes a few more swipes at Adam's face with the washcloth. Adam can see in the mirror that his face is mostly clean; he suspects that this is just for Ronan's amusement, a suspicion that is confirmed when Ronan wipes the washcloth over Adam's nose.

"Knock it off, Lynch," Adam says. "I'll let you watch your shitty TV."

"Nah," Ronan says. "You should read me what you were writing."

Adam blinks at him. "Really?"

Ronan doesn't make eye contact with him when he mutters, "I like when you read me your assignments."

"Really?" That had started on the phone one night as cheerfully deliberate Lynch torture. Ronan had moaned the entire time that his brain was leaking out of his ears from boredom, which had been Adam's original intent. But he'd found it was helpful, too, so he'd kept doing it whenever Ronan would let him get away with it, which wasn't often. Or so he'd thought. Apparently he'd been mistaken about that.

"I like seeing how your brain works."

Adam thinks about saying something self-deprecating -- it doesn't, most of the time -- or mocking -- I didn't know you were such a nerd. But he doesn't want to tear either of them down. He doesn't have to, even if sometimes it feels like his only options are hurt yourself or hurt Ronan.

He'll probably screw that up again. Maybe soon.

But for now he kisses Ronan gently on the ear and says, "We can do that."

-

Adam had left Henrietta on his own, when he'd moved to Boston at the beginning of the school year.

Ronan had offered to drive up with him, couched it in the most casual terms possible – "You still suck with a stick shift, I could drive so you don't stall out" – and Adam had dismissed this with no more thought than it took to roll his eyes.

In retrospect, Ronan hadn't been casual about wanting to come with Adam to say goodbye. In retrospect, Adam had known that all along. But he had wanted goodbye behind him, over and done with. He hadn't wanted to drag it out for ten hours. He hadn't wanted to watch Ronan unpack his things, to know what Ronan looked like in his dorm room, to spend the next ten months looking at his possessions and remembering Ronan sitting on his desk, placing his books on shelves, lying in his bed.

And Adam still doesn't think he'd been wrong, the first time. Because doing it this way, Ronan sharing the drive back to Boston with him, the conversation failing and stumbling over its impending demise, is every bit as awful as that first solitary drive had been.

But one more hour with Ronan is one more hour with Ronan. And if it hurts – and it does – then it hurts like Blue's little pink switchblade slicing him open. Pain that saves his soul.

"You're going to get a ticket," Adam says. It's the first words either of them has spoken since Ronan pulled off the freeway.

Ronan slams the car into park and turns the engine off in what is definitely not a parking spot. "No one can tell me where I park."

"Yeah, no, that's exactly what parking enforcement does. It's their job." Adam looks out the window. Students are walking by; life is happening outside this car. It's only him that's falling apart. "Not that a ticket would be that much more expensive than an hour of parking in Boston."

"Exactly," Ronan says, and he's out of the car before Adam realizes he's leaving. The slam of the driver side door makes him jump.

"Is there some reason you keep carrying my stuff for me?" Adam asks as he catches up to Ronan at the trunk of the car.

Ronan doesn't answer for so long that Adam assumes he isn't going to answer at all.

They're all the way at the door of his building when Ronan says, matter of fact, "I like doing things for you."

Adam can't speak, for a moment.

"I know you can do it yourself. But. I like it." Ronan's voice is rough.

"Okay.” Adam reaches out to brush his fingers along Ronan's hand. "Thanks."

Ronan looks at him in surprise. Then he switches the bag over to his right hand, twining the fingers of his left hand with Adam's.

They make it up to Adam's dorm like that, hand in hand, and Adam works his room key out of his pocket with his left hand.

He feels a flash of annoyance at seeing that his roommate is home when they open the door, sitting on his bed in gym shorts and playing an obnoxiously loud video game.

Before his emotions can settle on disappointment, Ronan turns the television off.

"Whoa, bro."

Ronan just stares at him, drops Adam's bag on the ground for a loud thunk of punctuation.

"Out," Ronan growls.

Adam's roommate looks at him for confirmation.

Part of Adam wants to apologize, or laugh, or grind his teeth -- but he defaults to backup Ronan, without question; raises his eyebrow and jerks his head toward the door.

His roommate clears out.

"You know," Adam says, conversational. "I have to live with him. I'd like it if he didn't hate me."

"Don't care," Ronan says. "I want him to tell everyone you have a big fuck-off angry boyfriend."

"But I was going to tell everyone that," Adam says. "Don't spoil my fun, Lynch."

Ronan inhales sharply, like Adam's word hurt, and the next thing Adam knows Ronan has his hands on Adam's hips, gripping hard enough to bruise.

Adam can picture that moment, as clear a memory as though it has happened already: looking in the mirrors of the bathroom dorm, finding black-and-blue marks on his skin, feeling torn apart between satisfaction and longing.

He gasps against Ronan's mouth, "Ronan," and then Ronan bites his lower lip and Adam abruptly loses any interest in conversation.

Adam slides his hands under the hem of Ronan's shirt, pushing it up his chest until Ronan breaks away from him with a growl, just long enough to pull the shirt over his head.

Then he's on Adam again, kissing him too hard, working open the buckle of Adam's belt.

Adam runs his hands along Ronan's back, traces the pattern of his tattoo from memory.

Ronan gets Adam's pants open, and Adam steps out of them while Ronan clumsily tries to gets his own pants off without letting go of Adam.

Good enough, Adam thinks, and wraps his arms around Ronan's shoulders, tugs him toward the bed.

"Fuck, Parrish, your bed is tiny," Ronan complains, their knees colliding everywhere.

There isn't enough room for two side by side on the dorm bed, not really, so Adam pulls Ronan on top of him.

He thinks, when Ronan whispers fuck in his ear, hot and desperate, that it isn't a complaint this time.

"God, Ronan." Adam jerks his hips up, and Ronan bites a line down his neck in a way that is going to leave an enormous hickey. Adam isn't sure who is happier with that, his stupid possessive boyfriend, or his stupid subconscious desire to be possessed.

"Adam," Ronan groans. He's holding Adam's hips again, pressing him down on the mattress, and Adam's head rolls back in pleasure.

"Fuck, yes, yes, yes," Adam gasps. He can feel Ronan's lips, forming inaudible words against his skin; can feel Ronan's cock, thrusting against his; can feel the sweat beading along his skin, or Ronan's skin, or both their skins, pooling together. "Oh, fuck, I -- "

He doesn't even know, what he was going to say in the moment; but he thinks, shaking and stroking and coaxing Ronan through, that Ronan knows, and that's the important thing.

-

There's a ticket on the windshield of Ronan's car. Ronan snatches it up and crumples it into a ball.

Adam says, "At least it didn't get towed," and Ronan scowls.

"Since when are you an optimist?"

Adam shrugs. "I thought I'd try it out."

"It's disgusting."

"So that's a 'no' on personal growth."

"No one goes to college for personal growth," Ronan says. "Don't fucking learn any life lessons, don't improve yourself or any of that bullshit. Just get your piece of paper and get out."

“Okay," Adam says. "I'll follow your example and stay screwed up and anti-social for my whole life."

"Good," Ronan says, and pulls Adam into an embrace.

Adam shuts his eyes, turns his face in toward Ronan's neck. He can feel Ronan's heartbeat.

He's going to be haunted by this moment for the rest of the year, the rest of his college career, the rest of his life maybe: holding Ronan Lynch and knowing he has to let go.

But he can't complain. Not when that's what he's asked Ronan to do for him all along.

Ronan steps away.

"It's gonna be the middle of the night when I pick up Opal," he mutters. "The psychics are going to eat me alive."

"Right," Adam says. Tries to keep his expression even as he watches Ronan get in the car.

Ronan rolls the windows down, despite the cold, and Adam ducks down to speak to him through the driver's window.

"Tell Opal hi for me. Try not to crash into anything on the way home."

But he means take care of yourself.

Ronan sneers, "Try not to die of boredom."

But it sounds like you too.

Adam reaches out with one hand, brushes his thumb over Ronan's cheekbone. Ronan turns, follows the gesture, and presses his lips against Adam's knuckles. Then Adam steps away from the window, and Ronan starts the car, and it isn't the end of anything.

Adam stares after Ronan's car as it drives away, and he can see all the things that will happen next:

He'll take a shower, make peace with his roommate, finish the studying he didn't get to in the last week.

Ronan will text him some profanity to let him know he's arrived back at the Barns.

Adam will badger Ronan for pictures of Opal, for news of Matthew and Declan, for every scrap of his life he can get.

Ronan will irritate him and drive him crazy and make him laugh, will be undeniably Ronan.

Ronan isn't going anywhere, and neither is Adam. They are, he thinks, two fixed points in space, connected by a thread as strong as any ley line.

Adam smiles at his own foolishness, and goes about the rest of his day.