Chapter Text
Adam wakes up in Ronan Lynch’s bed. Panics. Calls his editor. There’s a sticky note on the side table:
stay the weekend
Feeding animals
Ronan made a hideous little stick drawing of an animal on four legs.
Adam meant to call Monday, but in the golden light of morning, his nerves are chaos. Adam Parrish can compartmentalize completely and on command, a survival tactic he honed in childhood, but he can also identify the biggest threat in any given situation. If he waits another two days to drop the bomb on his editor, things will only get worse.
“What happened,” Calla demands immediately when she picks up. “Why are you calling me on a Saturday morning, what did he do?”
The “he” here is Ronan Lynch, obviously, because who else could be responsible for a disaster? Adam palms his face with the hand not holding his phone.
“I—there’s a conflict of interest,” he says. Best to rip off the bandaid. “I’m so sorry. I’ll cover the travel costs. I can’t do the interview.”
Calla doesn’t respond for a long time and Adam waits, unnerved by the silence. He hears some kind of animal making animal noises outside and winces, squeezing his eyes shut. Prays that Calla can’t somehow sense that he’s sitting on the edge of a bed he should never have been in.
“Do you want to say more?” she asks, finally.
“No. I spoke with him. He’ll do a make-up.” He winces again. “He offered to come to New York.”
Calla is silent, again, for a sharp, horrible moment. “Ronan Lynch offered?” she asks slowly. “...To come to New York?”
Adam hears the ten or twelve questions in her voice and pauses, considering his answer. He’s worked with Calla for years and they trust each other; they know each other. His thoughts are interrupted by the sound of footsteps approaching as Ronan climbs the creaking stairs. Adam turns, phone at his ear, as Ronan arrives in the doorway. He's wearing his black jeans and a white shirt and in each hand he holds a mug of what is obviously fresh hot coffee. The whole of the scene makes Adam’s mouth water.
“Adam,” Calla says in his ear. “Would you like to say more about the emergence of this previously unknown conflict of interest?”
“Calla, I sincerely apologize for the inconvenience,” Adam says. Ronan holds his gaze.
“You’re off the Symone Sanders story,” she says. It stings Adam’s pride, but he manages not to argue. “And I think we should have a conversation on Monday.”
“I’m sorry,” he says again. “It was unexpected.” Ronan leans against the doorframe and gives him the slightest hint of a smile. “Circumstances changed.”
They get off the phone and Adam feels calmer, slightly, having gotten it over with. A rush of breath leaves his lungs as Ronan stalks over to the bed.
“Circumstances changed,” he echoes. “What changed? What is that?”
The smell of coffee is making Adam salivate, a little, and the headache prickling at his temples seems to shimmer with the anticipation of caffeine. He reaches a hand out as he answers: “I meant that yesterday morning I was a journalist planning to have a professional exchange with a musician, and that is no longer the circumstance.”
“What is it now?” Ronan presses. “What are you today?”
“Ronan,” Adam says, hand still in the air. “Give me the coffee.”
“What made it change for you?”
Adam frowns and grabs at one of the mugs, which Ronan gives up easily. “I don't exactly know," he admits. "I don’t lose control like that,” he says. “Usually. That was—”
“Unusual,” Ronan suggests. Adam can’t quite understand his tone.
He nods. “Unusual.”
“But good?”
Adam nods again. “It was good,” he says, and he means it. He holds the warm mug in his hand and looks up at Ronan’s handsome face. “It was good, and it’s good to be here. And it’s also—I feel embarrassed and unprofessional,” he admits. “I feel bad at my job. Like, every second I’m in your bed, it gets worse and worse.”
He takes a sip of coffee to slow himself down, but as soon as he swallows the words keep flowing, the adrenaline rush from his phone call cresting.“My Media Ethics prof was such a dick, and I feel like he can see me,” he says. “Like he’s watching me right now. He knows. He knows I fucked my subject and he’s going to flunk me, except this isn’t a class and I’m going to get fired.”
Ronan narrowly avoids spitting out his coffee. “You’re going to get fucking fired?”
“No,” Adam sighs. He thinks about Calla taking him off the other story. “Reprimanded. Maybe put on probation.”
“You didn’t fuck your subject,” Ronan argues, sitting down on the rug at the side of the bed. He sits with his knees bent, feet flat on the floor, and looks up at Adam. “Not if I’m not your subject anymore.”
“When did you stop being my subject,” Adam wonders.
“Probably when you put your finger in my ass.”
Adam laughs. “Before that, I hope.”
“Probably when you asked me how I masturbate.”
“Before, God, before that.”
“Probably when we met.”
They look at each other. Adam sips his coffee and breathes and feels his heart beat. “Guess so.”
“Stop feeling guilty.” Ronan nudges Adam’s foot with his own.
“I can’t help it.”
“I’m Catholic, I’ve got you covered. Get over it.” Ronan stands. “Let’s go.”
*
Adam helps with chores and watches Ronan carry buckets of feed and water. “You look like a medieval farm boy,” he observes.
Ronan grins and flexes, lifting the buckets up like he’s doing bicep curls. “You can write about this part,” he says proudly.
"I actually can't," Adam says glumly. "Do you really want me to stay the weekend?"
Ronan doesn't bother to stop his work. "Yeah," he says simply. "I do."
Around midday, they walk alongside the same fence as the day before, a long looping route that takes them up a hill.
“You talk like you write, you know,” Ronan tells him as they climb. “I think your shit is fucking hilarious, no one ever talks about that on Twitter.”
Adam considers him. “You really thought I was seventy?”
Ronan scoffs, petulant. “No,” he admits.
“Did you know who I was the whole time? It’s OK if you googled me,” Adam says, knocking their shoulders together. “I basically cyberstalked you when I was a repressed teenager.” Ronan doesn’t say more, and Adam figures that’s as good as a confession.
They stand at the top of the hill for a while and look out; Adam likes the view, and he also thinks that there isn’t much else to do at the Barns. He misses the bustling street outside his apartment and it makes him feel strange, remembering how much he hated New York when he first arrived there, fresh from Tennessee.
“Doesn’t every writer have a half-written novel in a drawer somewhere?” Ronan asks, at his side.
Adam smiles. “Some of us,” he admits. “Fiction’s a fickle game. Things tend to stay half-written if you’re not getting paid.”
“You could do it,” Ronan says firmly. “You’d make a living at it.” Adam likes how he sounds like he’s ready to fight about it.
“I probably could,” he says, agreeing. He’s surprised to find that he’s not inclined to lie or feign self-doubt. “I’ve gotten some stories published. Fiction doesn’t intimidate me.” He turns to look at Ronan. “I like my job, though. I love our reader base. I’m lucky.”
Ronan narrows his eyes. “What’s in your secret drawer, then,” he presses. “Because I don’t believe for a second that someone like you doesn’t have a secret drawer.”
The idea that Ronan has a well-defined concept of him, a confident sense of what it is to be someone like Adam Parrish, gives him a swell of buzzing pleasure. It startles him into honesty. “I had a shitty childhood,” he says with a sigh. It’s a relief, the sting of saying it out loud, and he thinks again about that college freshman from Tennessee. “People don’t know that. That’s probably in my secret drawer.”
Ronan nods, unfazed. He probably has about fifty secret drawers. He probably thinks he had a shitty childhood in the same way that Adam did.
“What would you write if you weren’t hiding?” Ronan asks.
Adam thinks about it for a moment before he speaks. With anyone else, with someone who knows him better– Blue, or a teacher, or a colleague– he’d probably get defensive. The implicates of “hiding” would offend him. Is he hiding? Maybe, probably. He wants the secret drawer to stay a secret. But it’s Ronan Lynch, and the whole weekend is so surreal already that Adam just muses out loud.
“I’d write about how much I love your fucking album,” he starts. “I’d write about what it’s like to grow up poor and abused, like I said. I’d write about my friends. I’d write about hope. I’d write something that would have helped me.” He kicks at the dirt with a frustrated laugh. “I used to think that the only thing that could save me was hard work, self-denial. Getting farther away from who I was, or who I was scared to be. Now, I’d write about hope,” he says, looking up at the rich blue sky. “I’m not good at it yet. But someday I will be.”
Standing in silence next to Ronan feels like a balm that works its way slowly, slowly, over the hurt of thinking about his past. Adam wants to ask Ronan to share, too, wants to ask about a hundred different things. What comes out first is a question that’s been bothering him since he showed up:
“Do you like your job?”
Ronan rocks back on his heels, like he’s mimicking the sensation of getting punched. They stand in silence for longer than would typically be comfortable in a conversation between new acquaintances.
“It’s like: sometimes I look out at the crowd, right?” he starts, finally. “I see their faces, but they don’t see me. They think they do, they think they relate, but they don’t get me. At all. And I look in their eyes and they think there’s something there between us, but I’m still alone. And it makes me hate myself, for not… doing it better.” Ronan shakes his head, frustrated. “For letting them down, for being bad at my job. I’m trying to communicate something and when I don’t get it right…” He lets out an angry huff. “It’s bullshit, is all. Like, I write something about missing my mom and someone thinks it’s about their high school girlfriend. It makes me want to live in a goddamn cave.”
“What would you write if you weren’t dealing with the fame? Would it be different?” Adam asks.
“I’d write what I write now, just more.” Ronan looks out across the field, and Adam admires his profile, unabashed, too curious to look away. Eventually he adds: “I’d write about how you touch me. I’d write about how lonely I’ve been. I’d write about how I want to eat you out.”
It breaks the somber moment perfectly, and Ronan’s smile is pleased when Adam laughs out loud. Ronan’s humor—it’s a gift. Wryer and stranger than Adam could have hoped for.
“I’d write about love,” Ronan continues, and Adam loves to hear him talk like this. “I’d write, God, so much more about my family. I’m terrified that they’ll take that,” he says with a broad gesture. Adam assumes he means the ‘they’ of fans and critics and Twitter trolls and Instagram stalkers. Ronan shakes his head. “I could make a hundred albums about how it felt to lose them.”
Adam doesn’t know what to say to that, and they step apart in silence. They walk down the hill and Adam showers while Ronan disappears somewhere, looking thoughtful. Adam wonders if he’s thinking about his young self, too.
*
Ronan kicks Adam’s leg under the table after dinner. “You wanna go out to the studio?”
“Is that a euphemism?”
“You wish.” He uncrosses his arms. “Come on.”
Adam grabs his laptop bag on instinct, with his computer and a notebook. Ronan pulls on a jacket and they trudge out through the fields in silence. When they get to the door of the studio barn, they pause, and before he opens the door, Ronan cups Adam’s cheek with one hand and kisses him.
Inside he pulls on headphones and plugs into an electric keyboard, pointing Adam towards a chair in the corner. Adam just watches for a while, listening to the tuneless tap of plastic keys, watching Ronan frown as he plays chords that only he can hear.
After a while, Adam opens his computer. He looks at the notes he prepared for this interview, and laughs at himself in a sort of miserable way. Watches Ronan for a while. Lets himself replay that first afternoon for a few indulgent minutes. Then he turns back to the screen and opens a new document.
He writes about his trip. Like a diary entry, almost, which he hasn’t done in years. He writes about listening to the EP, and meeting Ronan, and kissing Ronan, and making him come, and touching his body, and seeing the studio, and staying at the Barns. He writes about how Ronan’s music made him feel: at 17, at 22, at 25. He writes a little about the things he told Ronan today, about hope and fear.
He writes about the shows in Boston and how he closed his eyes and let the music hit his chest like a lightning strike. How it was redemption. It was a balm. It was forgiveness. It was the opposite of every time that Adam felt alone.
He can only write for about an hour before he burns out. Once he’s closed his laptop and stretched, he looks over to find Ronan watching him with a contented expression. Ronan pulls off his headphones.
“Done?” he asks.
Adam is, and so is Ronan. They walk back to the house.
In bed, much later, they talk again. After a night of silence and then sounds, but no words.
“How often do you write?” Adam asks.
“It comes and goes.” Ronan scratches his cheek. “I take time off. Sometimes it's constant.” Adam frowns, and Ronan shrugs. “This is why journalists hate me,” he adds, defensive.
“How often do you want to write?”
He thinks about it for a long time. “It doesn’t work like that, for me,” he says finally. His voice is sad, and Adam leans into the places where their bodies are touching. “When I love it, I want to write all the time. But I don’t always love it. It doesn’t always feel good. Sometimes I write just because I want the feeling to end.”
“Does that work?”
“No,” he says. “Not really.”
*
Adam wakes up in the middle of the night and finds Ronan gone. There’s no note, but the bed is warm.
He lies in bed alone and thinks about arriving at the Barns, stepping up onto the porch, looking at the flush on Ronan’s neck. The moment when Ronan took off his clothes and begged Adam to touch him, looking Adam in the eye and telling him over and over that no one had ever touched him before…
Adam could swear it was a dream. But then: his notes from that day, on his laptop. The mud on his shoes downstairs. Waking up in Ronan’s dark blue bedding. The memory, so perfectly vivid, too crisp and persistent to be anything but real. Adam realizes abruptly why Ronan’s eyes were such a surprise: all of his old press photos were black and white.
He closes his eyes and falls back asleep within minutes. Blue sky, blue sheets, blue eyes in his dreams.
*
Sunday morning is a sudden rush of touching, humping, biting, straight from dreams into reality. Before he understands that he’s awake, Adam is pulling and panting, savoring Ronan against him.
“I think I really want to suck your cock,” is the first thing Ronan says, breathless. “I do,” he decides, and he rubs Adam, gripping him through fabric. “I want that in my mouth again.”
“Say please.” Adam can’t help it. They smile at each other: Adam smug, Ronan hungry and satisfied.
Ronan tugs at the waistband of Adam’s sweatpants. “Take these off,” he replies.
They both laugh at that, Adam nervously, because his heart is swelling with something euphoric that scares him. Ronan is earnest and pliant underneath him, sweet and sincere. Panting, begging. Ronan sucked Adam’s cock the night before, just hours ago, but he looks at Adam’s body like he couldn’t ever get enough of it.
Their clothes come totally off, finally. Adam kisses Ronan’s neck for a long time, making him moan and shake, alternately pinching his nipples and pinning his hands. Then he separates and swings his legs off the bed, beckoning to Ronan. “Come sit in front of me,” he says.
Ronan stands up fully to do it, rising to stand in front of Adam. Adam feels dwarfed by his height and the width of his shoulders but then he bends down to kiss Adam, holding his face between his hands. It’s a serious kiss, a trusting kiss, and Adam feels words unsaid pass between their lips and tongues. He’s going to make Ronan feel safe and taken care of. He’s going to make him feel taken. He has to.
Ronan knows it, too: he shows Adam with his body when he steps back and looks at Adam, staring into his eyes as he drops to his knees. “Here?” He says quietly. Adam touches his face, nodding. Ronan’s cheeks are pink and happy. “Show me what it’s like to be good,” he whispers.
It almost knocks Adam out; his body takes over from that primal, animal place, moving his hands to Ronan’s cheek and his neck. He plays with the swell of Ronan’s lip. “You make me so fucking hard,” he murmurs. “This is what it’s like.”
He feeds Ronan the head of his cock, just the head, holding his hard cock down in front of him so Ronan can lean forward and put his mouth on it, moaning as he sucks gently. Adam settles into it like he did earlier when they were kissing, relaxing even as the pleasure starts to build. Ronan’s eyes are closed and he makes noises, quiet and desperate. Under Adam’s palms, his throat works. Adam is never, ever going to forget what Ronan looks like right now.
He presses forward slowly, so slow, controlling the movement as Ronan swallows him deeper. With one hand, Ronan steadies himself, and he touches his cock with the other. Adam can see how quickly he’s moving, jerking himself off like he can’t help it. A bead of sweat trickles down Adam’s chest. “That’s good,” he tells Ronan. “Touch yourself, that’s good for me.” Ronan moans, clumsy, and Adam can hear the slick sound of him getting himself off. He follows an instinct and lets his voice be stern: “I know you can’t help it,” he says, and Ronan shudders, body jerking. “You can come right there on the floor,” he says. “I know you can’t help it. You can come, Ronan.”
It’s the first time Adam’s watched someone come while his cock is still in their mouth. He feels it, the groan that Ronan makes from deep in his chest; Ronan’s body trembles and he comes all over himself. It spurts onto the wood floor and coats his hand. Some of it gets on Adam’s shin, and the whole time Ronan is swallowing around Adam’s cock, his wet mouth keeping Adam thick and hard. There’s drool running down his chin.
“You’re so good,” Adam murmurs. He wants to soothe Ronan as he shakes and stutters, choking slightly, breathing hard through his nose. “Do you feel good?” Ronan nods. “Do you want to swallow it?”
Ronan doesn’t nod but he moans, loud, wrapping his arm tight around Adam’s thigh, and Adam watches Ronan swallow as he finds a deep, shuddering orgasm.
“Did you like that?” he asks after.
“I liked it,” Ronan says. “The way you talk makes me crazy.” He kisses Adam’s stomach and the top of his thigh.
*
Ronan rushes through his chores then comes back to bed. Adam sends a few emails and makes vague gestures at exploring the house but then finds himself back in the sheets, naked, undone with laziness. It’s like the heavy moment after orgasm, that perfect exhaustion, never ended. They lounge and drink cold coffee and talk.
“You make a lot of sexually themed music for someone who hasn’t had sex with anyone else,” he muses.
“You’re a someone else.”
“As of Friday, sure.”
Ronan looks up from where his head is resting on Adam’s stomach. His hands move slowly over Adam’s hipbones and thighs and ribs, covering his body with a kind of possessive spell.
It’s joyful, humbling, the way Ronan takes without asking or assuming. How he steps into the shower where Adam is, how he pulls him close at night. Kissing the back of Adam’s neck while he’s leaning on one of the fences, looking out at the fields.
Adam tries to make sense of it as they lie there together. How did it happen, how, why, why. He thinks about that first afternoon and tries to understand what happened. How it all came to pass.
Was he in some sort of self-denial? Was he hoping for this the whole time? Adam feels far from himself and bewildered, and also,
Comfortable. Seen. Cherished.
Ronan is effusive and earnest in a way that couldn’t exist in New York City. He’s an asshole, he’s stubborn, he makes everything difficult. He also begs Adam to fuck him, tells him about his dreams, lets him listen to unreleased tracks. Tries to teach him to play the bass. He makes Adam extra coffee, gives him shirts and extra socks, tries to give him the wi-fi password three separate times, a fidgeting, forgetful host. If Adam was still writing the feature, he’d mention—
Well. He isn’t, anymore.
Adam has tried to make sense of it over and over, all weekend, but his body moves automatically. He looks at Ronan and thinks how? Why? When? But his hands move without permission, touching, taking, caressing. His feet carry him over to wherever Ronan is, to sit on his lap or stand at his side. It’s been two days.
The truest thing is: Adam likes Ronan. And Ronan Lynch likes Adam. It’s mind-altering.
He says it in a million ways, over and over, absentminded, effortless: call me baby, I liked that interview you did, I read that book because you reviewed it, you made that guy sound smart but he’s sort of a moron. You feel so good when you touch me, do that thing, bite my shoulder, god yes, you feel so good.
Adam could cry for what a relief it is. How the affection and attraction soften him and melts the tension in his shoulders. How coming inside Ronan feels like the biggest physical release he’s had in months. When he fucked Ronan Saturday night, slowly, carefully, he came so hard his ears popped.
Getting fucked hurt Ronan more than either of them expected. He liked it at first, and then he didn’t. Got frustrated. After a break and a shower, he nursed on Adam’s cock for long minutes, like he was soothing himself, receiving the way his body needed. It was so sexy that Adam thought he was going to pass out. Finally they tried again, moving carefully, until Ronan was flushed and moaning. Adam came just after Ronan and slept like a rock, dreamless, until ten Sunday morning.
Adam can hardly understand how he lived without this, before. He feels stupid, almost, for not knowing it could be like this. For not knowing that he could just show up on Ronan Lynch’s porch and have this, this feeling of happiness. He cannot understand, at all, how Ronan has survived without sex, at the least. So he asks.
“I couldn’t feel my body,” is what Ronan says.
Adam sits up in bed while Ronan stays lying down, propped up lazily on one elbow.
“The press found police reports,” he continues. “They knew there was a minor in the car when my parents died. They thought it was my brother, but it was me. I’m still scared that someone’s going to find out. Another someone,” he adds, gesturing at Adam.
“After, I couldn’t feel my body. It was just this numb thing for so long. For years. I just couldn’t be in it, I didn’t even want sex. I felt guilty masturbating because I didn’t think I deserved it, to be alive and like, jerking off. Literally.”
Adam smiles, but he knows his face is heartbroken. “Do you have scars?” he asks. He wonders if he could have missed some trace of the accident on Ronan’s skin, but Ronan shakes his head.
“Broken ribs.” He gives Adam a sad half-smile in return. “All on the inside.”
Adam thinks for a moment. “My body,” he starts. “I wanted to use it. Growing up, I always hurt: bruises. Hunger. I got hit. I did a lot of manual labor and I didn’t get enough to eat. When I was a teenager I was always hungry, and my boss at this auto body shop used to buy me foot-long subs.” Adam looks at where Ronan’s thumb is gently touching his thigh, like he could ease some years-gone pain. “He’d give me two at the start of a shift, and I’d be done with them both an hour later.”
Ronan’s expression is patient and curious. He doesn’t quite understand yet, Adam thinks, but he wants to.
“I wanted to feel better,” Adam explains. “I wanted to not hurt. It’s like the opposite of what you said, I wanted my body to be for something good, something that felt good. Pleasure. Making other people satisfied.”
"Are you trying to tell me you had sex before marriage?" Ronan deadpans.
“Yeah,” Adam laughs. “Wanna do it again?”
They talk until Adam offers to make breakfast for dinner.
*
“Hey, don’t you work for a magazine or something?”
It’s Monday and Adam’s weekend in paradise is over. He kicks Ronan in the leg. “Thanks for having me.”
“Fuck off with that,” Ronan retorts, annoyed. “Don’t go. Quit your job. Come back.”
“If I quit my job, then I couldn’t write your favorite features, could I?”
Ronan narrows his eyes. “I mean you’re good but not irreplaceable, how hard can–”
“I can’t,” Adam interrupts. Ronan looks chastened. “I’m sorry, I just, I have to go back. I have a houseplant that was already on its last leg.”
“I want you,” Ronan says. “I’ll come to you.”
“Come to New York.”
“I will.”
“Soon.”
“I will.”
“I mean it.”
“I wouldn’t lie to you, Parrish.” And after everything, after confessions and sex, Adam figures he can trust that it’s true.
*
Songs appear on Ronan Lynch’s website. And social media accounts. Adam gets back to New York on Monday night, and survives another evasive phone call with Calla; on Thursday night, she calls again.
“Were you aware that Ronan Lynch is going to put out an EP this week?”
Adam pauses. “Not in November?”
“No, not that EP. Not Noah. Another one. His agent emailed me and we have the scoop, there’s another totally new EP dropping tomorrow.”
Adam freezes and tries to kickstart his brain, pointlessly. He reminds himself to breathe. He—
“It’s called ‘New York,’” Calla adds. “Apparently very raw, very new.” Her voice is sharp and purposeful. “Do you know anything about this?”
He does not. He wriggles his way off the call and then clicks on the link she emailed him, to a password-protected page on Ronan’s website. There’s a track list:
- I-95
- Dinner
- My parents used to be dancers
‘I-95’ is a minute and a half, no lyrics, a droning march. ‘Dinner’ sounds like Noah—crunchy, fast, with lyrics about sex and longing and a mouth that Adam thinks, shivering with a sort of dreadful hope, may be his own.
'My parents used to be dancers' is a love song so pure and pained that it makes Adam nauseous. He slams his laptop shut halfway through it the first time he tries to listen. Then he calls Ronan.
“Did you write another EP in the last week?” He demands. “Did you? Is this about me?”
There’s a staticky silence on the phone. Ronan is outside, Adam can tell by the sound of the wind. “It’s only three songs.”
“Is it about me?” Adam demands again. “Is it about us?”
“What if it is?” Ronan counters. “Would that be so bad?”
“Maybe!” Adam’s breath is loud and it clogs the line with static. “Maybe it would be. My boss is upset, I’ve never fucked up an interview like that, I would never normally—”
“You don’t have to cover your ass with me,” Ronan says, cutting him off. He sounds impatient. “I was there, I let you fuck me in the ass. You don’t have to go on and on about how much you regret it.”
“I don’t, Ronan, I don’t regret it at all,” Adam says more quietly. “But I should. I really should. It’s different for you, your job isn’t impacted. God, your job probably benefits. You’re a musician, you’re supposed to live and fuck and fuck around and fuck up and fall for people and have experiences."
“You’re supposed to live,” he says, squeezing his eyes shut. He pictures Ronan, handsome Ronan, so hard that he half expects him to teleport. “You’re supposed to be living, Ronan, you know that, right? You’re supposed to be in the world, feeling, breathing. Getting fucked in the ass. Knowing people, letting people know you.”
“And what are you supposed to do?” Ronan asks. “You’re worrying about me because you think I’m this sheltered virgin, I know you are. But what are you supposed to do while I’m tearing it up like you think I’m supposed to?”
“I’m supposed to write about it,” Adam says quietly. “It’s different for me.”
“Don’t you think you deserve love?”
Adam’s breath catches and he can hear Ronan let out an exasperated sigh. Adam half expects him to take it back, to apologize, but he says, “I’m not—I’m just saying. In theory. Maybe, maybe I could. Feel that way for you, with you.” His voice fills with affection and hurt. “Don’t you deserve that, too? Aren’t you supposed to be living? Why aren’t you allowed to be part of the story?
“I care about your work and I don’t mean to be a dick, but Parrish—fuck your professional reputation,” he says. “Be a person, be here with me. Be real. Remember? You said, ‘be real with me.’ This is real, Adam. Be real. With me.”
*
Four months later.
Ronan looks strange in Adam’s apartment. In the city, really. On the subway, at the bodega on the corner, Adam does double-takes. Is that really him? Is he really here, mud-crusted boots, with a beanie pulled down over his ears?
January is a slushy slog of gray and freezing rain. The weather is worse in Virginia, and Ronan spends half of his time pestering the people looking after the farm, bugging them about the animals and the radiators and keeping the pipes from bursting.
They write. Side-by-side, sometimes, in bed and in the living room. Apart, when Ronan disappears to his sister-in-law’s, or when Adam goes into the office.
It’s a few months of back and forth, with Ronan doing short tours and promotional events. Adam likes it when they get back to the Barns and sleep in the bed with the dark blue sheets.
For his birthday, Ronan makes him a bedside table with a big drawer in it.