Chapter Text
Because Ronan had set off his own kind of detonator at the Barns, hooked together the pieces and watched Gansey go off in the aftermath, he could not bring himself to take Adam there now.
The Barns was a miracle, sacrosanct. It would always be home. Ronan would not give it up or see it taken again. But he felt that he'd changed it, exposed it to time and consequences. It was not a place untouched by horror. It would have to be a truer place than that.
So he drove the BMW to a back road, a road hidden behind a corner of Henrietta like a secret. He decided that he wanted this road for tonight. It was still moonlit, but morning mist was creeping over the cracked asphalt. Personable trees drooped low above both the BMW and the Hondayota trailing just behind. The road seemed as mundane as it was magical. It felt like the right place.
Still, Ronan's hands trembled when he stopped the car.
Noah, too, was a timeless thing he'd subjected to time and change. This was even worse than changing the Barns. Ronan's mind edged around the topic, but Noah still lingered uncomfortably around the edges.
Ronan gathered up the coverlet and went to let himself into the Hondayota.
In the drivers' seat, Adam wore silence as absolutely as he wore his own skin. His gaze was still remote.
"Think I'll get another tattoo," Ronan said into the silence, settling into the ratty, ancient passenger seat. He picked at his wristbands. After weeks of feeling too big for his skin, it should have felt good to feel like he'd finally exploded, ripped apart, made a wreck.
It didn't. And a part of him had known it wouldn't.
Next to him, Adam shifted, like he was having difficulty hearing him. He nodded in response to Ronan's comment. The nod came a few seconds delayed.
Ronan tried again. "It's good that you didn't wash this," he said, hitting the coverlet lightly.
Again, Adam responded mechanically. He looked down at his hands from somewhere very far away. He said, after a minute, "Didn't know if it was machine-washable."
"What do you think I am, Parrish?" Ronan snapped.
He was more irritated by the assumption that he wouldn't know what to dream for Adam than he was by Adam's blank non-responsiveness. He said, "It's a fucking blanket. I'm not going to make it dry-clean only."
Adam's dusty lashes flickered in annoyance. He seemed to come alive in response to Ronan's anger, his own ire rising to the surface. Ronan's heart always had space for anger in it, so this seemed appropriate. It did not worry Ronan.
"You didn't give me a care manual for your dream blanket," Adam said coldly. "I couldn't know if it--"
He broke off. Sat up straight. For one instant, Ronan saw not the boy Adam was now but the thin, worn-down creature he'd first met in the checkout line.
"My clothes are all back there," Adam said, with sudden and certain dread. "And my sheets."
Adam's coveralls and camo pants had probably been well-worn and ready to be trashed at the time Adam had picked them up at the Goodwill. And next to all of their current problems -- Blue betrayed, and Noah gone, and wild Gansey awakened -- this was so ordinary that to be upset about it was laughable. Ronan had no frame of reference for this problem. If it were him, he'd buy new clothes. Or dream them. So it should have pissed him off again to find Adam so concerned with something so stupid. It should have nettled him, this further proof that Adam was sometimes too caught up in dust to care about provocation and magic and dreams.
It didn't. After Matthew, after Niall-and-Aurora, after hearing Adam's take on Noah, Ronan felt relief.
He said, trying to be helpful about the situation, "Your clothes made you look like a loser. You looked like a fucking farmer in those coveralls."
Adam stared at him.
"You own a farm," he said.
Ronan frowned. "Yeah, and I still don't look like shit," he pointed out.
For a second, Adam looked marvelously enraged. Contempt lit up his whole face, his feathery brows, his deep blue eyes. He looked close to the Adam of Ronan's dreams. Ronan had seen this disdainful creature so many times now, and still could not decide what was more powerful: his love for this Adam, or how scared he felt to think that he might be beneath Adam's notice.
Ronan was not good with words. He still tried to make himself known. He said, more carefully than even he thought he was capable of, "I'm trying to be helpful."
Adam said nothing. He exhaled hard, thin shoulders rising and falling. Then he turned away and leaned back, pressing his dusty head into the Hondayota's ancient headrest. His eyes tracked something on the roof of the car. His mind was not on Ronan now. It could be on any of a million things -- his clothing, his parents, his schoolwork, his regular work. Gansey-Noah-Blue. To see Adam reviewing problems in his head was an intensely private thing. He was usually blank and wary. He was Gansey's watchful advisor, a complement to Ronan's heedless outbursts. Ronan offered ignition. Adam offered solutions.
But generally no one got to see him arrive at them. Ronan felt cracked open by it somehow.
Because Adam was no longer even thinking of him, he settled blackly into his corner of the car and picked at the coverlet. He wondered if he should rip it apart and make a clean one that came with a clear tag:
M A C H I N E W A S H A B L E, ASSHOLE.
He didn't.
After a few minutes of quiet, he said, "Just because you're poor doesn't mean you have to look poor, Parrish. You can look like whatever you want to. Blue's poor and you don't even notice some days, since she dresses like a hippie dwarf fucked Maleficent."
Adam turned to look at him, and for a second his mouth opened and closed soundlessly.
"You know," Adam said. "The rest of us were told at some point in our lives that we should only talk if what we had to say was more beautiful than silence."
"Yeah, but I think we all know who told you that, Parrish," Ronan said.
Robert Parrish and his wife had never thought that what Adam had to say was better than silence. Gansey would have pressed this point, but Ronan didn't need to and didn't want to. Adam Parrish was more than that. Adam had changed since Cabeswater, but it was more accurate to say that Adam had changed since leaving the trailer park.
Adam had not changed to meet what Ronan wanted. Adam had changed to become what Adam deserved to become. So the real fear was not that Adam was turning into something that Ronan liked too much. The real fear was that Adam might remain something Adam didn't like. That thought made something course through Ronan that he could scarcely identify. It was close to anger, but not quite. He thought it might be sadness. He had rarely felt it undiluted by rage. He didn't like it. His nails shredded faint red lines into the skin between his wristbands.
"I can dream you new clothes," he said roughly. "Even if you just want the same shit. I did this. I changed Gansey. I changed Noah. You lost all your stuff because of it. I'm going to fix that."
It was not a request. What he gave to Adam, he gave freely. If Adam could not see what Ronan gained from that, and how Ronan needed to give, then Adam was not so much principled as he was deluded.
But Adam only said, "Forget the clothes."
Ronan stared at him. He was looking down at his fair, careful hands. He said, "I get it. You can dream them or buy them and it's nothing to you. I get it."
"It's not nothing," Ronan snarled. He felt alive in a way he hadn't a second before. He felt like he was starting to know not just Adam, but himself. It was something. It was something. It was:
How do you know you have it in you to be more than a piece of shit?
This was how. This.
But Adam's voice was becoming loud and ruthless. He said, "Yeah, but obviously it's not what it is to me. So just tell me. Why me, then? Why me, if I need this much help all the time? Why me, if I look like shit, if I come from shit?"
"You don't always look like shit," Ronan snapped. "And you're not what you come from. It's not nothing when I do things for you. I know that. It's not nothing to me. Maybe I don't have to care about all the same things you have to care about. But I need to care about you."
He realized too late that this felt like the largest thing he had ever said. Maybe it wasn't the largest. Life isn't all just sex and drugs and cars -- that had been a good one. That had been the first time Ronan had felt like he could be something more than a walking explosion.
But this put words to the something more. This felt bigger. This hung in the air, rattled by the Hondayota's creaky, barely-there heating. Ronan felt like he could see it swell in the space between them. He pressed himself against the door and window without realizing he was doing it, trying to give this more space. Ronan was not a small person, but this seemed bigger than the dimensions of his body.
Adam, in the drivers' seat, seemed to think so too. He leaned back again and closed his eyes. He looked delicate, his fine bones stark and fragile-seeming. Ronan thought of how deceptive this was. Ronan thought he could speak a single word and kill it, the truest thing Ronan had ever said.
Magician.
But Adam looked still and tired. An older Adam. An old, old Adam. Maybe the side of himself Adam was most used to, the way Ronan was most used to explosive anger.
"Why?" Adam said again. His voice was ugly and even. It was the voice he used to read aloud in class. He spoke like he was assembling all the evidence, or presenting an obvious solution. He said, making every word very clear, "I'm not like you. I can't rework time, or make whole people. I don't dream miracles. I'm warped. Everything is so big for me, even when it's small. You don't have time for that. You were born big."
For so long, Ronan had kept almost nothing beyond anger in his heart. Now he felt like it threatened to burst with something far, far worse.
"I want you," he snapped. "If you don't want me back, Parrish, then say it. Don't feel like you can't say it because it's not more beautiful than silence, or because you think I only make miracles, or some horseshit like that."
Feeling wild and brutal, he considered another detonation. Unleash the secret. Tell Adam everything. The belief he'd had, for so long, that this was nothing and could be nothing, because he was a walking wreck and Adam Parrish was Adam Parrish. The sense that Cabeswater had done this, that it was not something natural and right in Ronan. That all this was was some imperceptible magic molding Adam, nothing more than the dream forest delivering to Ronan an Aurora.
Adam made careful connections. Ronan made reckless leaps.
They could both be spectacularly wrong, though, wrong enough to torch themselves and the people they loved. So if Adam was going to let this go up in flames, then Ronan could more than match him.
But he didn't. He put the coverlet down between the seats, where Adam would find it when he was ready. He opened the passenger-side door with a clunk. It was too heavy for the car. Ronan regarded it with disgust and stepped out.
Before he started back to the BMW, he said, "If you don't want me back, it won't change anything. I'm still here. It's if you want me back that things change."
Ronan would not pretend that he was a gift. Adam could pretend, but Ronan wouldn't. Ronan Lynch was a walking war. He was every hidden truth and secret just waiting to go off.
He was climbing into the BMW when Adam darted out of his own car. In the rearview mirror, Ronan saw his long limbs jerking wildly, his elegance giving way to some momentary frenzy. Adam stopped before the open door of the BMW, motionless, careful-seeming. But there was an unpredictability there too, a mutinous element. He was covered in dust and sweat, his eyes red, his thin mouth set. He was not especially beautiful. He was a challenge.
"Okay. If that's what you think. Let's change things," he said quickly. He sounded reckless and thoroughly Henrietta. He looked down at Ronan expectantly. Half-terrified.
Ronan stood.
He put his hands on Adam very carefully, the touch he had until now reserved for his dreams. He slipped a hand under Adam's dusty t-shirt. The skin there was hot and hard and alive. He seemed like a part of the land itself, an obstinate part that could not let itself be buried or destroyed.
"Ronan," Adam said again, bringing his hands around to Ronan's back and tracing the brambles there. His voice shook. Ronan understood that this was Adam's way of detonating. He said, "Ronan, let's change things."
-
There was one recurring dream that never seemed to become reality. It never needed to. It came often in the years before Niall died. It came whenever Niall was away, and so Ronan assumed it was sent to him by Niall, like a calling card or a letter in the mail. If Niall could dream the world, then surely Niall could dream Ronan's dreams.
In the dream, Ronan was in his bed in his room in his home. The Barns was golden and drowsy. On the floor, there was the rug Aurora had made. On the sill, there was a collection of things that Declan had pinned to cardboard just for Ronan, though Declan always said he did not like to do that. Ronan was in the bed. He had all his things around him like a protective hedge. He had the living teddy bear, and the pink weasels. He had the wooden duck that clucked, that the peg-legged carpenter had made for him. He had many glittering beetles that crawled around him, but only sometimes on him. He felt safe.
Niall sat in the chair by the window, holding something. He was huge. His hair and brows were frightening in their blackness. But Ronan was not frightened. Ronan never had to be frightened of Niall. He flicked beetles at Niall and Niall flinched, and that was how Ronan knew this could not be the real Niall anyway. He was only another improbable dream, sitting there like an explosive on a leash. He simmered, and Ronan did not care.
When Niall spoke, he sounded slow and frustrated, like he was trying to learn a whole new language. His heavy accent clouded up the words so much that Ronan felt confident ignoring him entirely. He said, "You have to tell me how you did this, Ronan. And why."
Ronan fed the bear some glittering beetles and watched them light up its insides. The bear smacked its lips. This was more absorbing than watching Niall sitting darkly by the window.
But when Niall shook the bundle he was holding, it cooed. Ronan looked up. Maybe the bundle would do something interesting. It didn't. It kept cooing. Ronan was more interesting than that. When people shook Ronan, he screamed and screamed. He said, "Jesus Christ!" This was a thing he'd learned to say from Niall. Sometimes he would say it in church and the real Niall would say it back and carry him outside, with many frightening looks at the priest. In the courtyard he would bounce Ronan on his knee and call him a wild thing. Ronan enjoyed this.
"We don't need her anymore," Niall said now. "Do you understand? I can make you a better one. I've always tried to make sure you had the best one. the best of everything. I'm doing it for you."
Ronan threw more beetles at him. Some of them caught on the bundle and Niall, looking horrified, batted them away. When they fell to the ground they burrowed into the wood of the floorboards and Niall cursed. Ronan watched them eat their way downstairs, leaving small holes to mark their tracks. They were many-colored and they shone, but they had millions of ugly legs and clacking pincer parts. Ronan realized that Niall was scared of them. This was further proof that it was a dream. It made no sense for large Niall to be scared of something so small. And there were so many of them -- what would be the point? Ronan tried to step on them sometimes, and it only meant that he squished them into more and more beetles. Every attempt to kill them only made them smaller and more numerous, like they weren't beetles at all.
"Come away from those horrors," Niall said, voice thick and heavy.
Again: a dream. It had to be. The real Niall did not sound like this. Mountains did not cry.
"Ronan," Niall said again. "Come away."
Ronan shook his head stubbornly. Jesus Christ, Jesus Christ. What a stupid request. Jesus Christ. If he came away, he'd only encounter the beetles somewhere else.
Niall's horror beetles coated every inch of the Barns. There was no escaping them.
"I can bring her back, do you understand?" Niall said. He sounded tricky now. He was a bargain-maker now. This was closer to the real Niall. He shook the bundle again and the bundle took it soundlessly, without complaint.
Niall said, "Is that what this is, Ronan? Is that what you want? Maybe you should try to show me what happened, and I'll try to give you what you want. Wouldn't that be nice, Ronan? Why don't you show me what happened? If it hurts, you have to show me."
"Jesus Christ," Ronan informed him calmly.
Niall stood and towered, blocking out the light. He came close and with one hand he picked Ronan up and lifted him out of the bed, shaking him so that the beetles fell off. Ronan decided that this time he liked the shaking. He helped by waving his limbs and his head, squirming all over, shaking and shaking and shaking.
Niall cursed again, a giant thwarted by a child. He could only truly lift Ronan when Ronan stilled. He hefted Ronan over one shoulder. Ronan beat his fists against Niall's back because he could. Niall said, "Fucking Christ. A hurricane. I made a hurricane. I should have dreamt myself all my sons."
The bundle in his other arm cooed. Niall took both Ronan and the bundle out into the hall and up the stairs, retreating into his room. There were no beetles here. It was dark and cool and smelled like rain and living things. Like Niall. Ronan appreciated this. He grabbed handfuls of Niall's shirt. He put the shirt in his mouth and bit down and growled to show his appreciation.
The baby Niall dropped into a bassinet by the window, as though he were unsure what else to do with it. Ronan he tried to swing onto the bed, but his shirt was still in Ronan's teeth. It rode up and tangled Niall together with Ronan.
"Jesus Christ!" Niall said in earnest.
"Jesus Christ!" Ronan sang happily. "Jesus Christ!"
Niall ceded the shirt to him entirely as he dumped Ronan on the bed. Ronan fell happily into the warm blankets and pillows, where he squirmed and moved like he was a beetle himself, a terrible creature with thousands of legs. No, a bird. He had thousands of beaks. He made cawing sounds and piled all the pieces of the bed around himself like he was making a nest, a home. He thought he was a bird without a mother and would have to make his own nests now. It was very sad. His caws became mournful.
Niall towered above him for a moment, stripped to his undershirt, his face in shadow. He said quietly, "You didn't get it quite right, little hurricane. You made a brother, not a mother. You're going to have to get better at theft, don't you think?"
Ronan balled his hands into fists and stuck them against his cheeks.
"No," he insisted. "No."
He hadn't stolen anything. He was a bird that had wanted its mother. He had gone into the forest and asked for her -- a pretty golden bird, the same general shape as him, a little bigger, just as new, except that Ronan was black and not golden. But he loved her very much. And the forest had given him exactly a golden thing to love, which was what he had wanted.
This dream Niall was so stupid.
"No," Ronan said again, this time very firmly.
Niall stared at him. He did not speak so much as bark.
"You stole it," he said. Then he looked briefly annoyed and amended this. "Not it. Him. It's a him. You stole him, Ronan, you must have."
"No!" Ronan said. "I didn't!"
Niall was so large and glowering that he covered the whole room with it. He said, "You stole it, and there'll be scars from that. You have to let me see what they are. I can show you how to do this, Ronan. For Christ's sake."
He dropped onto the bed, loose-limbed and massive, the largest thing in the world. He lifted Ronan into his lap and began to check him all over, checked his hands and his feet and his legs and his chest. Ronan squirmed and yelled, yelled not from upset but anger. Niall was sitting on his nest.
"My God," Niall kept saying. "My God, my God."
Ronan did not know why Niall was checking him. There was nothing wrong with him.
Niall came to this conclusion a few moments later.
"There's nothing the matter," he said. He said it like something was the matter. He said it like he held a big truth in his mouth, and it was scalding him.
"You're not hurt. You're not burned down by it. You didn't even feel it, did you? It didn't make you sneak in and scrape yourself raw."
"Caw," Ronan said. "Jesus Christ, Niall."
Niall was undeterred. He picked Ronan up so that they were at eye level, so that Ronan's blue eyes were looking into his blue eyes.
"If I were to go there now, it would be whole, wouldn't it?" Niall said. "The line and the forest would be whole."
There was dream shock in his dream tone. Ronan, who was a dream bird, flapped his arms.
"It gave itself to you," Niall said.
His eyes were wet. This was the natural illogic of the dream.
He said, sounding broken, "Ronan. Ronan, do you know what you are?"
"I'm a bird," Ronan informed him.
Dream Niall tucked Ronan into his chest then, and helped him build the nest so they could fall asleep.
They went to the forest together. This was a thing Ronan had never done with the real Niall. Ronan wanted to show dream Niall the trees, the cave, the hollow tree, the bones in the leaves, the writing on the rocks. Orphan Girl. The boy whose hands were the forest. The boy who dreamed of kings. Mirrors.
Because in the dream, for an instant, Ronan's mind flashed with all the pieces of the forest and he knew instinctively that they were there and would be there for him to find someday. In the dream, he wanted to flap his wings over every corner like a bird, to pick out every inch with his beak and bring it back to show Niall.
But dream Niall was very cagey, as though he thought they had to be secretive. Ronan did not agree. The forest liked him. It kept no secrets from him.
It did not like Niall, but then this was not the real Niall.
Dream Niall said he had to take just one thing, and then he and Ronan would have to leave right away.
When they returned to Niall's nest in his bed in his room, Aurora was there. She surged up like something newly-born, like she only just realized what the world was like. She stretched out her legs like they were curious and wonderful to her, and Ronan laughed because it was like she, too, was a baby bird in the bird game.
When she found the bassinet she gave a little scream of delight and lifted the baby up. She held it close. Ronan hoped that she would feed it and that it would want worms. They could find Declan and the three of them could cluster around her and Niall. They could open their mouths and caw to ask for food. Niall could dream them worms that were chocolate or popcorn or raw hope. Niall could dream anything.
But when he looked to Niall, Niall had pulled away from the bed, away from Ronan. His eyes were red-rimmed. There was blood all along his arms. He picked splinters and twigs out of the wounds. He looked like he had been attacked by the forest. This time, when Ronan began to cry, it was not from anger. To see Niall bleeding like this made his heart feel too full. Ronan hated it.
"Ronan," Niall pleaded. He raised his bloody arms to Ronan, but stopped just before touching him. "Ronan, look, it was to bring her back."
It was a dream, not the real Niall. The real Niall never seemed to carry even a drop of shame. This Niall brimmed with it.
"Please, Ronan," he said. "Don't cry. Do you understand? I thought we were the same. I wanted us to be. I was wrong. I'm sorry, Ronan. Please. I love you. Never doubt that I love you. I love you. That has to count for something, Ronan."
He sounded like he was pleading. He said it again, and again and again and again. I love you. I love you. Like this was the dream he wanted most of all, and could not quite perfect.
-
Under the blanket, where time slowed to a crawl, Ronan had the dream again. It was the first time he had had it since Niall died. It was the first time he had felt ready for it.
It was not a message from Niall, but a message from himself.
Even before he opened his eyes, he stretched out a hand. He found Adam's hand and took it. He marveled at the way Adam's fingers were long and bony. When he tried to cup them they flexed in irritation, marvelously defiant. Ronan lifted them up to his lips and kissed them.
Adam shifted, faced him. He looked as though he hadn't expected the kiss. Ronan felt godlike. He bit along each knuckle lightly. He felt every part of his body align itself into a pleasant pool. He felt the rightness of this. For a moment he considered the ways he could touch Adam. Adam felt like Cabeswater had the first time Ronan had seen it in his dreams: a landscape brimming with possibility, all the magic that might condescend to be his if only he offered it the best of himself.
Adam broke the moment. He was altogether more physical than Cabeswater, more physical than Ronan had expected. His hands cupped the back of Ronan's head, stronger than they looked, pulling Ronan in. It was heady and powerful, magic manipulating Ronan for once. Ronan let himself be pulled and was rewarded with kisses along his neck, Adam's breath on his ear. Adam was frantic and present everywhere, hard sparse muscle lined up along Ronan's body, legs kicking apart Ronan's legs. Some knobbly, skinny, Henrietta-bred part of him brushed exactly where it needed to, and Ronan was lit up, breathing hard and unable to think beyond the urge in him. Adam did not seem to realize he had done this; he only dropped his hands down Ronan's back and pulled the rest of him in closer.
He was not a magician, but a wild, touch-starved boy. Ronan had not anticipated this. He had not anticipated that he would like it. Adam handled him with such a mix of care and ferocity that Ronan felt undone. It was precise and furious, everything he wanted. It was kissing a war.
Still, their teeth knocked together. They needed more practice. Lots of practice. Ronan breathed hard and tried again and it was a little better, if still imperfect.
"Sorry," Adam breathed out softly. "Sorry, sorry."
Even overcome, Ronan had to roll his eyes. "Don't fucking apologize," he instructed. He snaked an arm around Adam and tried to get them closer yet, kissed along the fine, fragile collarbones. "I'm not apologizing," he added.
"When do you ever?" Adam said.
Ronan shifted them so that he was lying above Adam. He looked down with satisfaction at this mix of elegance and plain want.
"Don't be fucking pert, Parrish," he said, and kissed him again.
But somehow the moment was lost. Adam's urgency gave way to Adam's essential Adam-ness, his depressing tendency to prefer almost anything to freely-given affection.
"Ronan," he said, pushing Ronan back. "Ronan, Ronan, Ronan."
Ronan obeyed and looked down at him. He was thankfully not a removed Adam or a distant and pitiless Adam. He was an Adam who was ready to begin, an Adam who had used the extra time afforded by the blanket not to sleep but to work at his problems. He was the too-disciplined, too-careful Adam, the Adam who did not understand that this was worth stopping time for.
Ronan dropped back and rested on his elbows. He would show Adam. He would make time to show him.
"Ronan," Adam said again, sounding determined. "Listen. We have to fix things."
Ronan made a fist with one hand and then let the fingers splay like a sudden explosion, made a satisfied booming sound effect like lies falling to shreds.
"I blow things up," he said. Then he pointed a finger at Adam. "You fix things."
Adam looked annoyed. He looked angry and free in the way he often was with Ronan, in a way that Ronan didn't care if he apologized for. Ronan wanted to kiss him again. Instead he traced his fingers down Adam's chest. Adam did not tell him to stop.
He did say, "Grow up, Lynch. You have to fix things, too."
Ronan grinned. He shrugged lightly, even though he knew that Ronan Lynch was not supposed to be light. He was supposed to be a bomb, a boy who could go off at any moment. He faced his problems by blowing them up.
He knew there were problems out there, beyond this moment. He did not feel like blowing anything up.
"For you, anything," he told Adam easily.
He moved back in, but Adam held him off and said, sounding pained, sounding guilty, "Not for me. We're trying to change the outcome for Gansey. And Blue. And Noah, if we can do something for him."
Adam seemed to line their friends up in the small space between himself and Ronan. He scanned this space. Looking for connections. Trying to see a way out. Ronan loved him fiercely. He had to touch a hand to Adam's shoulder and back to make sure that this was real and Adam was here.
"All of you," he agreed, tracing Adam's skin. "For all of you, everything."
He would give all he had for these people, and for Matthew, and for his mother. He would give all his powers of making and all his powers of unmaking. He burst with the giving, but it wasn't a painful burst. He could handle it. He no longer needed to dream his love into a separate body. He could carry it in himself.
"Only you get me this way, though," he informed Adam. "Because love is a fucking sacrament. Which reminds me. For now, the pants stay on. I'm not easy."
"Easy isn't what I would call you, no," Adam said.
"Like calls to fucking like." Ronan agreed, and kissed him again.
He was easier than he thought.