Chapter Text
One Year Later
The papers were spread out like a fan on the floor, Adam sitting cross-legged at its center, when Ronan stepped into the small room about St. Agnes. He took care to stop an inch short from standing on even a single stray corner.
“More college applications?” he said.
Adam tucked a pen behind his ear. “I just have to finish up these ones for my safety schools and I’ll be done.”
“What the fuck is a safety school?”
Pushing up on his knee, Adam got to his feet. He held a palm flat at the height of his forehead almost like a salute. “Reach school.” He moved his hand to nose level. “Match school.” He lowered his hand to his chest. “Safety school.”
Ronan scoffed. “You don’t need safety schools. You’re a fucking genius.”
“Well, that’s flattering,” Adam said. “Let’s hope the admissions departments think the same.”
“If they don’t, they’re idiots,” Ronan said. “And I’ll go beat them up for you.”
“How romantic,” Adam said, dryly. He rolled his neck on his shoulders, creating a series of little pops. “If you can make your way to my bed without stepping on anything, I’ll meet you there.”
Ronan tiptoed his way in a strange, zag-footed way to the bed and Adam did the same in his own discovered pathway. They both sat on the edge of it, side by side. Adam cupped Ronan’s chin to pull in close enough to press a hello kiss to the corner of his mouth.
“How’s the lawyer stuff going?” he asked.
Ronan ran a hand over his face. “Like fucking hell,” he said. “But it’s going.”
A month ago, near the bitter dawn of his senior year of high school, Ronan had gurnied up the emotional balls to open the letter ascribed to him in his father’s handwriting that Adam had found in the Barns. It was an updated Last Will and Testament, dated more recent than the one on file that barred the Lynch sons from their home. The process to authenticate it was a labor.
Ronan began to play with a loose thread along the inside seam of Adam’s cargo pants, right above the knee. Adam laid a hand over Ronan’s to settle it.
“As much as I love anything that involves you and me on the same bed,” Ronan said. “We’ve got to get fucking going.”
“Right,” Adam said, checking the watch on his wrist, finally replaced. “Noah.”
#
“I can’t believe you’re making me go out to eat at the place I work,” Blue said, shutting the camaro’s passenger door behind herself. Gansey had pulled into Nino’s lot just before Ronan, coming from the opposite direction. Ronan had taken the opportunity to flip Gansey off through the windshield.
(“With affection,” Ronan had said when Adam had scolded him about it.)
“It was Noah’s pick,” Gansey said with a chagrined shrug. Apparently he liked eating At Nino’s even when Blue wasn’t going to be his waitress to harass.
Noah was already seated in his favorite corner booth when they amassed through the door, which they could’ve guess from his mustang parked diagonally in a spot in the parking lot.
(“He just seems like the type of person I’d hate, but I don’t,” Blue commented casually on their way inside. Then to Gansy, “Kind of the same with you.”)
They all stuffed into the booth, Ronan sitting pressed flush up against Adam on the end so he could stick his long legs into the aisle.
Ronan’s phone rang. “Goddammit.” He pulled it out of his pocket like it was a detestable rodent. He stared at the caller id. “God fucking dammit.” He brushed out of the booth.
Gansey pointed over his shoulder in the direction Ronan had stalked away. “Did he just answer the phone?” he said. “But Adam’s sitting right here.”
Adam shrugged, and stared after Ronan too. Ronan jerked open the front door, bells clashing, and went outside.
Gansey picked up the menu. “Oh, they have avocado as a topping now.”
Blue laid a hand over his wrist. “Gansey, no.”
“Screw Ronan, I’m hungry,” Noah said cheerfully, lifting up the menu. While they were all in different stages of denial, they all knew they’d been succumbing to whatever weird concoction Noah decided to order.
A few minutes later, when Blue was trying to convince Noah out of a combination of blue cheese and double black olives (“No one here wants to eat that!” “I know, isn’t it gross!”), Ronan returned. Hands stuffed in his pockets, he slide back into the booth beside Adam.
Adam tapped his knuckles against Ronan’s knee under the table. “Everything okay?” he asked in an undertone.
Ronan pressed the back of his knuckles against Adam’s, a slice of an answer.
Dinner went on, full of banter and one pizza with Noah’s inglorious concoction of toppings and the rest with toppings to be shared by people who actually wanted to enjoy the food they were consuming.
When they left over an hour later, Adam slotted his hand into Ronan’s in the darkness of the parking lot. Without as many people to desperately keep secrets from they didn’t have to be completely secretive, but still found no need to invite trouble.
“I can’t believe Noah’s leaving,” Adam said. Tonight had been Noah’s going away dinner. He was half-packed up in Monmouth. In January he would finally be starting college, but had decided to spend a few months back in his hometown first.
“It’s about fucking time,” Ronan said, although Adam knew he didn’t mean it, knew he was suffering under that the pressing weight of losing a friend, even if he wasn’t really lost.
It was also an echo of what was to come, at the end of this school year, at the end of the summer following it. Ronan was barely scraping by in school and had his dreams set elsewhere than higher education, but Adam and Gansey had other ambitions. Ambitions that took them far out of town, out of Virginia, away from Ronan. He had to be thinking about it now. Adam was.
“Do you have time to go somewhere tonight?” Ronan asked as he got in the car.
“Sure,” Adam said. “The applications will be there when I get back.”
He hoped it as a joke, but Ronan didn’t react. It didn’t take many turns for Adam to realize where they were going, so it was no surprise when they turned down the dirt road that lead to the Barns.
When they climbed out of the BMW, parked near the farmhouse, Ronan took a long, stabilizing breath. It was like very air here was different; the correct climate for Ronan Lynch to be living in.
“Earlier… that was Declan that called. It’s official.”
Adam blinked. The updated will. Which gave the Barns back to the Lynch brothers.
“This is great!”
“Yeah,” Ronan said, his voice a puff of breath. Above, the clouds shifted, clearing the moon to pour out its light on them. Adam could see the softness of what was subtly there on Ronan’s face -- the barely there smile that wasn’t conscious, just contentment, and the lack of any tension around his eyes or jaw. A relaxed Ronan that Adam had rarely seen, not even in sleep.
“You’re happy,” Adam said.
“I am?” Ronan said, turning to him, hands sliced into his pockets. A moment’s compilation crossed over him. “I am.”
Adam just waited with him.
“I want to show you something.” Instead of leading Adam to the house, Ronan led him to one of the barns. Inside smelled like hay and mildew. Ronan went up a ladder to a hayloft; Adam followed.
“It’s not really anything fucking special,” Ronan said, sitting down and wrapping his arms around his knees. “I would hang out up here as a kid. Hide.”
Adam settled down beside him, more careful in the unfamiliar dark. “Hide from what?”
Ronan shrugged. “If I got upset or something. When you have two brothers, you piss each other off a lot, even when you all fucking get along.”
“Bring any boys up here?” Adam said, although he knew Ronan hadn’t. He had already admitted to Adam being his first everything. First kiss, first date, first boyfriend, and over the summer they had shared their first time.
It was fun to tease him still.
“Finally,” Ronan replied. He reached over and found Adam’s hand without even looking. He always seemed able to know where Adam’s hands were and how to locate them the fastest.
He kissed along the shape of Adam’s knuckles, telling Adam in between about the animals they used to keep here and the ones he planned to get to fill it up again.
“It sounds amazing,” Adam said, and honestly. Although he never imagined a farm as a dreamland before, the picture Ronan painted sounded like one.
Ronan sighed. He sunk his weight against Adam’s side, and ran his thumb across the sensitive part of hand, as if palm reading.
“What’s going to happen…” he said. “When you leave?”
“That’s a long way away,” Adam said.
“Not that long.”
“No, not that long.”
Ronan suck in a breath that Adam heard if didn’t see.
“You said you were never coming back,” he said.
Adam opened his mouth to say when, then remembered. “That was a long time ago.”
“Not that fucking long.”
Adam shook his head. “No.” Not that long ago. They had been dating long enough that it been something hurtful to say even if Adam hadn’t intended it. They hadn’t been dating long enough for Adam, in his stunted mind, to understand all the consequences.
“Ronan…” he said. “I said that before I knew I loved you. I thought the only things in this town were the things to hate.”
Ronan scoffed. “Even all those times we were sneaking around?”
Adam ducked in his chin. “At first, I thought… I thought you’d get tired of me. That I was… an experiment. I didn’t know you then.”
Ronan was brusque. He was sharp-edged. He could even be cruel. But he didn’t play games with other people’s emotions.
“Before… before I ever came to Boyd’s,” Ronan said. “I saw you in the grocery store. You were wearing this tight little t-shirt and it gave me a fucking sexuality crisis right there in a canned goods aisle.”
“Are you saying you were my secret admirer?”
Ronan tucked his face into Adam’s neck. “Fucking something.”
“You never told me that.”
“I am fucking now.”
Adam dragged his finger around the shell of Ronan’s ear; his breath puffed against Adam’s skin.
“When I go away to college,” Adam said. “I don’t want to break up… I’ll make it work.”
Ronan pressed a kiss the spot on Adam’s neck that made him shiver.
Making a long distance relationship last seemed accomplishable in comparison to everything else that had played out in Adam Parrish’s life. His life had been configuring pennies into enough to eat dinner and surviving his father. He had taken himself from trailer park and now he was applying to colleges with confidence. And he had done it all on his own. That is, except for this last year.
Sometimes Adam still had to remind himself. He wasn’t alone anymore. He didn’t have to soldier on solo.
Adam amended: “We will.”