Chapter Text
Feeling kind of sick tonight
All ive had is coffee and leftover pie
It’s no wonder why
Still you take up all my mind.
Let me break my heart // Laufrey
Adam woke up in his own bed. A fact that in itself wasn’t particularly strange, ever since he’d acquired his own 500 square feet of ferny plants and second-hand furniture. It was nothing like the trailer’s sickly emptiness, or his Harvard dorm’s standardised musty carpeting. Instead it felt homely, with windows that opened to views of bustling streets and water pressure that made him long to extend his strict four-minute shower regime to a luxurious six.
So it wasn’t strange for Adam to awaken to sunlight slashing lines across his face, or the steady hum of his radiator keeping him from dying a very cold death. The unusual thing about this particular morning in early January, was the 6ft 3 man sporting dangerous black ink laying crumpled and docile in his sheets. A man who he knew instantly, because only Ronan Lynch had the ability to look both gentle and simultaneously pissed off even in his sleep.
Shit. Adam thought as he peeled back his duvet to slowly slink out of bed. Ronan shifted a bit at the disturbance, unconsciously reaching his arm out as if to capture Adam’s retreating form and pull him back in. Fingertips lazily brushed freckled skin, grabbing at the boy where he sat perched on the edge of the bed before giving up and landing, splayed, across the empty pillow. Ronan’s face was littered with the spindly imprints of Dollar General linens, patterns that carved up his jaw and made Adam’s chest do weird and inexplicable things.
This wasn’t the first time he’d awoken to this sight and—if Adam was honest with himself—it was not going to be the last. They had the tendency to act magnetic, toying with fundamental concepts of physics as if they could only obey them; shaping to their wills. If anyone could force gravity, it was the immovable object that was Ronan Lynch.
Each time that they fell into one another’s orbits, he promised himself that it wouldn’t happen again. A lie that they both knew but continued under some strangely negotiated treatise that neither deigned to acknowledge.
He told himself he’d stop. He promised himself that he’d stop with Ronan on his knees. He promised himself in the passenger seat of an obnoxious BMW’s leather interior. He promised in the dirty stall of a dive bar. In the back alley of a closed auto repair shop. In Ronan’s bed. In his own. And once, notability and perhaps stupidly, in Blue and Gansey’s spare bedroom. He promised himself so often that the words were no longer meaningful to him. Instead, he used them as a buffer to separate himself from whatever the hell his heart was starting to feel about Ronan’s heavy voice, his guilt-less persuasion, his careful understanding. It was easier to pretend that you hated something than acknowledge that it meant a little too much.
“Jesus,” he mumbled aloud, reaching around his floor blindly for a shirt. The first one he picked up was almost definitely not his, considering it was missing sleeves and had a skull spitting flames emblazoned across it. He vaguely remembered ripping the article of clothing from a chest the night previous, half-drunken with giddiness and half with vodka sodas. The leftover acidity of liquor on his tongue made him angsty, eager to scrub himself clean of his half-aware mistakes and inebriated thoughts. As if sobriety would have ever kept him away from the alluring pull of rough hands and teasing conversation.
His apartment was small, even for New York standards, but he had a bedroom separated from his living spaces. A small mercy that allowed him to close a door between him and his latest indiscretion as quietly as he possibly could, taking care to avoid the floorboards he knew were particularly creaky as he shifted further into his tiny kitchen.
Locating his phone took longer than he cared to admit, but after ripping apart his entire couch he found it in the pocket of last night’s discarded pants. It was dead, because of course it was, so he plugged it in to charge and knocked his head heavily against the stone of his countertop.
His kitchen had what Blue affectionally referred to as a ‘kitsch charm’. That was to say, it was old and dated looking. His apartment block had somehow managed to escape New York’s incessant need to modernise, and his frugal soul was endlessly grateful. Sure, his sink was no longer technically ‘stainless’, and his fridge swung so violently from lukewarm to freezing cold that he’d once cracked an egg over a pan just for frozen slush to ooze out, but of all those things were just quirks. He’d prefer old appliances and creaky pipes to scrounging for coins even more than he already was. He could barely afford the place as it was.
Besides, the cold stone on his head was fending off whatever tail-end reaction he was having to last night’s events.
He’d never had a hangover until he’d gotten to college. Scrawny and almost definitely emaciated, his first-year roommate had gotten him smashed on two and a half pints of beer. It had been deeply embracing at the time, but Fletcher had just said he mumbled a lot and passed out shortly after. So he was hardly a flight risk, but losing chunks of his memory was much less fun than social convention had made it out to be.
Because Adam was nothing if not completely thorough, he’d re-tested his tolerance on multiple occasions. Headaches, nausea, fatigue, irritability, thirst, an unquenchable need to touch another human being that never seemed to abate. Though maybe that last one was unrelated to hard liquor.
One of the fundamental rules of Adam Parrish was that he liked control. This rule, unfortunately, interfered with another one of his carefully curated commandments. A rule so long set in stone that it pre-dated practically everything else: he’d do almost anything for Richard Campbell Gansey III.
This rule came with a lot of perks. Namely because Gansey was the kind of person whose natural disposition was laced with empathy and an inexplicable affinity for careful concern. His default setting was to believe that people didn’t need him, even when the exact opposite was the case, and so he spent most of his time repaying whatever scraps of kindness people did show him sevenfold.
They’d met at Harvard. Adam, simultaneously terrified and excited at the prospect of a fresh start, had introduced himself to Gansey with an extended hand and a carefully manufactured accent. He’d practised it so thoroughly during the entire 8 hour drive to Cambridge that he practically sounded like a native. Carefully inserting constants back in their rightful places, clipping vowels and rigidly shaping each letter with his tongue. Every time he accidentally dropped a syllable, he’d repeat the word over and over until it sounded proper again and he was sure that he’d go insane with the repetition of it all.
Gansey did not have to practice such things. He was everything that Adam wasn’t; effortlessly intelligent, personable no matter the time or place, and compassionate to a fault. He radiated old money and white-collar manners. Ancient Roman pillars and fresh fountain ink. Untouchable, yet touching others just the same; an extended hand reaching towards a startled freshman Adam. He’d thought touching the sun would hurt, but it had felt almost cold. Like shaking hands with a statue of King Augustus, rather than the man himself.
They had many of the same classes, and Adam observed him from a distance like a spectre, angrily scribbling into a notebook like he could manifest the transference of himself into the body and place of the utterly perfect politician's son. Perhaps sensing Adam’s aversion to him, it seemed that Gansey had made it his mission to win Adam over by any means possible.
“You’re quite smart, you know,” he’d told Adam in a shittily lit lecture theatre, leaning over his shoulder from the row behind. “I never know what Professor Ditley’s saying. What’s you’re secret?”
Adam had started at him blankly. In his head, there was no way that the interaction was anything but a lead-on for something else. What did he want from him? A tutor? A person to cheat off? Though that didn’t seem much like his style.
“Anyway,” Gansey continued at Adam’s prolonged silence. “You should come and have lunch with me and my roommate. He only bites a bit.”
That last quip had not settled the nerves in his stomach, but he’d gone to the dining hall anyway. Gansey’s roommate had turned out to be a testy boy with a buzzcut and an affinity for swearing on Mary more than any person ought to. They’d tolerated one another but Adam and Ronan’s sparse conversations were stilted and harsh at the best of times. Luckily Gansey was like a natural buffer between the two, more than willing to console Adam as often as he was his life-long friend.
Richard Gansey, collector of things and arbiter of very few real friends, seemed to find Adam worthy of investment. Apparently, Ronan did too.
Eventually, Adam’s phone buzzed to tell him it was charged enough to use, and he lazily typed in his password with his head still smushed against the cold stone of the counter.
Adam couldn’t help but feel overwhelming and penetrating guilt. He was supposed to be celebrating Gansey’s birthday, not hooking up with his childhood best friend. No matter how unfairly god-like said childhood friend had looked in ripped jeans and a wife beater; sweating and smoking and smirking effortlessly. Adam had been making a lot of excuses lately.
He couldn’t even recall when he’d ended up leaving last night, but it was presumably with Ronan on his arm and a blood alcohol level far surpassing legality. There was an Uber at some point, desperate lips at another. He could vaguely picture phantom hands on his wrists, a hot breath on his neck, rough syllables pushed out between hurried pants, Adam Adam Adam.
When his phone finally decided to join the living, it brought along with it an onslaught of notifications.
Ever the professional, and half-dreading what the hell he’d find on his camera roll, he checked his emails first. There wasn’t much, just a message from his line manager regarding meeting KPI’s and about twenty-two pokes from Tad Carruthers asking about updates on their latest project. Adam sometimes wished he could poke Tad Carruthers in the eyes twenty-two times and be done with him.
His voicemail was empty, but his messages were full to the brim. Mainly with photos from a group chat aptly titled gansey gang. Blue had sent an odd assortment of pictures of them before they’d gone out, most of which Adam still had the clarity to remember. Henry and Noah sitting on top of each other on their shitty couch, smiling like fiends. A half-blurry snapshot of Adam wincing down a shot of hennessy while Blue cackled in the background. Gansey, adorned with a gold Party City crown, smiling down at a cake that Noah had laboured over for hours that morning. Ronan, with a razor-sharp smile and a five o’clock shadow, staring at the person behind the camera as if they were a personal offence to him.
He smiled, flicking through these snapshots of his friends. Adam loved these people with a passion he didn’t think he’d ever felt before. Strong and burnished in shared memories.
His idle browsing led him to a string of texts asking for his whereabouts, which were promptly answered with mildly (very) incriminating evidence. Found him, Henry had sent at around 2 in the morning, attached to a blurry photo of Adam and Ronan hanging off one another. Ronan’s eyes were piercing the top of Adam’s head with such intensity that he quickly flicked past the image. He’s with Lynch, Henry has added.
It really created more questions than it answered.
When he’d finally reached the end of their seemingly never-ending text threat, Adam found the strength within himself to remove his head from cold granite and put water into his malfunctioning kettle. Malfunctioning, because it was $7 from an op shop and had a tendency to sporadically stop working. Or, much to his landlord's annoyance, spontaneously flip his breaker. Adam decided to throw the dice and hope the odds were in his favour for some steaming earl grey. He needed it.
It was when he’d wrestled with the kettle enough for it to finally start boiling (placed a book on the switch so it’d stay on) that Ronan decided to emerge from his bedroom, confusedly and as irrevocably attractive as usual.
“Sup,” he greeted easily, running rough fingers through his hair before settling himself on a stool and with a hand under his chin. It was almost like they’d never seen each other naked before. “You look like shit.”
“How charming,” Adam jested, taking a sip of his tea. He felt slightly awkward, if only for a moment, at the prospect of having a conversation with a person who had seen him so vulnerable less than a few hours ago. It was a problem he was having alarmingly often these days. “You treat all of your conquests so sweetly?”
Ronan’s grin was like barbed wire. “Just the poor ones.”
“I’m taking $100 out of your wallet,” Adam warned with absolutely no intention to follow through. “Reparations.”
“Wow! You’re one cheap prostitute,” Ronan mocked. His and Ronan’s relationship was a carefully tumultuous one. Careful in some ways because Gansey acted as a mediator between the two of them. Tumultuous because the second Gansey left the room they bickered non-stop until one of them said something irreparable and the other stormed out. “What’s for breakfast?”
“Get it yourself.”
Ronan, like the child he was, threw himself off the chair and onto the couch with a whine. “I’m the guest. You should be making me breakfast after you deflowered me.”
Adam hoped his disdain was visible from the kitchen. “Deflowered? I think that train passed a while ago.”
“Ha,” Lynch huffed, humourlessly and threw himself onto Adam’s handed-down couch. As much as the two liked to complain about one another his chest got warm whenever Ronan displayed such cavalier familiarity.
Adam didn’t know what he’d expected to happen when Ronan had woken up, but it wasn’t the scene before him. Ronan’s spine curved along Adam’s deflated pillows, one arm over his eyes and the other hanging off to brush the hideous green rug his landlord had forced him to keep. It almost felt like they were together. Like this was what every morning was like.
Adam contemplated arguing with him some more but decided against it. He cooked eggs while Ronan unearthed the most vulgar record he could find from the bottom of his semi-substantial collection. Persephone had handed him down her old turntable and an attic full of vinyl when she’d passed. Multiple variations of Fleetwood Mac, Retrofile, and ABBA. Some of them were unmarked and almost unlistenable: obscure Scottish yodelling, floating requiems filled with periodic silences, and an entire bi-fold worth of white noise.
Ronan had somehow managed to find something that sounded like a goat screaming. A fact he seemed immensely happy about.
“This is hardcore,” Ronan said, hunched over the needle to reposition it. Adam was struck by the blueness of his eyes, their simultaneous vulnerability and sharpness. “I’m almost impressed.”
“Don’t be,” he said, semi-violently buttering a slice of toast. “They’re Persephone’s.”
A beat passed between them before Ronan dropped the needle on the record, and the screaming once again resumed. He was expecting the classic words that came with the territory of death. Condolences and pity: two of the things that Adam hated the most in the world.
He moved towards the counter with a kind of pace that suggested to Adam that he was scared of startling him. Like a wolf approaching a startled deer.
Adam had never said anything to Ronan about it, but didn’t know what Gansey had let slip over the past few months. Adam had attended Persephone’s funeral in a sort of trance that no one had been able to break. It was filled with church pews and mourning blacks, empty reassurances from people he did not know and unbearable weights pushing him down past the earth’s crust into nothingness. Blue’s family had touched his shoulders with the gentleness of a family grieving, and he’d eaten pumpkin pie on the back step of Fox Way. He hadn’t cried, though everyone else did. It made him feel a little broken.
As Ronan dropped heavily onto a stool, Adam was expecting the apology, a crescendo of pitying eye contact ending in an I’m sorry for your loss. He readied a bullet on his tongue, but he didn’t have to use it.
Instead Ronan looked at him, maybe just a bit sadly, and said: “At least you got some good music out of it.”
Adam choked on his reply, already talking himself down from some kind of edge he wasn’t even really fully aware he was standing on. Sometimes he forgot that Ronan had been through a far worse grief. He slid a plate of eggs in front of Ronan. “Don’t choke.”
Ronan’s grin was shaped crudely around the jagged metal of his fork. “I bet you’d like that.”
“Shut up,” Adam huffed, but he was blushing and busying himself by wiping down the countertop as Ronan spilt crumbs all across it. At least it’s an excuse to not look at him. He felt a little off-kilter like he was standing on one leg rather than two.
When Ronan finished eating he shoved the plate into the sink with a dangerous clatter before nodding at Adam’s mug. “Coffee?”
Adam shook his head. “Tea.”
He was expecting to be teased for it. He wasn’t expecting a twitch in Ronan’s jaw, or for him to reach across the counter and take a sip of the lukewarm drink, humming. “I’ll take one.”
“Okay,” Adam answered slowly, still feeling like the butt of the joke. Ronan’s eyes were expectant, but Adam didn’t think he fully understood what was happening. The goat screaming abruptly cut off as the track changed to something that sounded more like a racoon being stepped on.
Ronan slinked himself over the counter like a cat. “I’ll take it neat.”
Adam snorted in response and rearranged his kettle again so it would actually work. He steeped a new cup for Ronan and topped up his own. Knowing that Lynch’s tolerance for bitterness was surprisingly low, he dissolved a tablespoon of honey in his. “Voila.”
“Thanks,” Ronan huffs in reply and Adam’s glad he’s facing away from him, rinsing out the spoon he’d just used at the sink. The single word makes him baulk. Ronan doesn’t say thank you. Not when you open a door for him, or inconvenience yourself to make life slightly easier for the guy, or even when you’re on your knees and have just given him the orgasm of his life. It didn’t happen.
Adam swallowed, turning back around. “You’re welcome.”
It feels overly polite but Ronan’s got his face buried in his cup, like maybe the simple word had been involuntary and he was questioning why the hell he’d said it.
Its hours after they finish eating, while they’re playing video games on Adam’s tiny, pixelated TV that the topic of the night previous gets re-dredged. Ronan’s shirtless again, somehow, and Adam’s legs are flung haphazardly over Ronan’s own when the whole image suddenly comes into stark relief.
“We really should talk about this,” he tried, faux casual and blowing up zombies with a semi-automatic weapon. A curious glance at Ronan revealed a path of dark marks trailing down his neck and disappearing into the knots and twists of his tattoo. It’s oddly pleasing to him. Like he’s staked a claim to something he has not the slightest business owning.
“About what?” he grunted. Adam couldn’t tell if he was being serious or trying to avoid talking about it, like they usually did. He’s leaning towards the latter.
“I don’t know, Ronan,” he hissed, suddenly sick of dancing around it. “What do you think?”
There’s a pause that’s only interrupted by the occasional sound of a zombie’s head being blown off. The likelihood of Ronan taking any of this seriously was slim to none. Flashes of white and red illuminated Ronan’s face, filling in the dips of his eyes and reflecting off the high points of his cheekbones. Gansey had told him stories of Ronan as a teenager, a soft-spoken kid morphed into an attack dog by grief and loneliness. But Adam didn’t think he saw rage in those eyes, when he looked. Energy, maybe.
“The fact that I stayed over last night?” Ronan questioned without looking away from the screen.
“Yeah,” Adam responded, annoyed by the phrasing. It was not direct at all. A cop-out. “All that.”
Suddenly, the screen flashed black and his legs were being tugged away from himself and towards Ronan’s own. Hands curved over the gangly knobs of Adam’s ankles, warm on his eternally cold skin, and his face looked dark in a strangely alluring way, no longer lit by a tv screen but by the last remaining dregs of sunlight that managed to escape through his moth-bitten curtains. “We’re good at it, I think.”
“Well,” Adam started, trying to course correct the conversation and getting flustered for a reason that was not currently discernible to him. “I guess yeah, we are. But I—”
“So that’s that.” Ronan insisted, annunciating, like Adam’s hesitancy was unwarranted.
“I think we really need to talk about it,” Adam croaked even as Ronan’s lips attached themselves to the junction of his shoulder and his neck. Calloused fingers brushed away the collar of his sweater to reveal more of his clavicle, and Adam’s brain lapsed for a second, like his entire consciousness has decided to reboot. “We never talk about it.”
“Do we need too?” Ronan asked against his skin. “I don’t like talking.”
Adam groaned. In frustration or desire, he did not know.
Ronan’s lips disconnected from his skin and his eyes looked up at him through dark, splattering lashes, still firmly gripping Adam’s thighs. “You always say we need to talk, and then we always end up on some kind of surface doing some kind of thing that would make Gansey blush. I think you may be lying to yourself, Parrish.”
“Don’t talk about Gansey when you’ve got your mouth on me,” he hissed. Adam’s almost entirely pulled into his lap now, a hair’s breadth away from Ronan’s face. He could feel desire pooling in his gut like gold cord, curving through his intestines and choking his lungs. He was breathless when he caved and answered, “Fine.”
How they end up back in his room is a miracle. They kiss like their fighting one another, lips against lips and teeth against teeth. Ronan’s got both of his arms wrapped around his waist, heaving him up off the couch and stepping over loose books and record sleeves. His nails dug deep into the flesh and muscle of Ronan’s arms, straining against Adam’s weight and the unfortunate principle of gravity. Not that gravity had ever stopped them before.
Abruptly, Ronan’s lips left his and attached themselves back to his neck, a warm trail that ended with him dropping Adam back to his feet to pull off his sweater and throw it against a wall, before heaving him back up to kiss along his collarbones. They knew each other too well.
“Hurry up,” Adam panted, pulling him closer to push his tongue back into his mouth, filthy and warm and heavy. Ronan finally got the message and moved his hands from Adam’s waist to his thighs, lifting him further up against him and pushing them through the bedroom door. The strength of it sent spindly pleasure down his spine. “Fuck.”
Momentum carried him back against the unmade covers of his bed, and it sent the breath from out of him. Ronan’s stood above him, eyes dark but so, so blue and there’s no need to take his shirt off because he’d never put it on. A fortuitous fact for Adam, who gets to watch him skip that step and go straight to slipping out of his borrowed sweats.
“You’re staring,” Ronan grunted as he knelt down over him, a leg on either side of Adam’s own, his grip on his clothed thighs possessive. He reached up to take Ronan by the neck and pull him into another kiss, just to shut him up. He hated Ronan’s sudden smugness. He was always up in arms about people telling the truth, but Adam had a feeling that whatever faux-confidence he smeared on his face daily was anything but truthful. Not when Adam could remember his breathy voice through the cloud of liquor of the night previous, begging and pleading with him.
He decided a few minutes into making out that he liked having Ronan underneath him better, and so he makes his fantasy happen. Their dynamic had been solidified a long time ago anyway. The little huff Lynch made as he did so tugged a devious smile onto Adam’s face.
“Hurry up,” Ronan mocked, repeating Adam’s own words back to him, but he could tell that Ronan was seconds away from breaking his rough exterior. Adam shifted until most of his weight was on Ronan’s upper thighs, and slowly leant down. Ronan’s face was no longer smug but loose in the same way it had been the night before, with eyes half-lidded and lips parted. “God, touch me.”
Adam knew where he wanted to be touched, could feel its firm presence against his lower stomach, but he wanted to tease him. Drag it out. His fingertips trailed feather-light across the seam of Ronan’s lips, tracing their curves and sensing their softness. He could feel Ronan’s breath speeding up, fast pants pushing air against Adam’s fingers like a contact-less kiss.
He’d done this enough times to know how he wanted it.
“What do you say?” Adam asked, looking intensely into Ronan’s blown-out pupils. “How do you ask?”
“Please,” he panted, and Adam could feel the syllables against his fingertips. “Please.”
His favourite part of doing this wasn’t getting off, or the comforting ache of his muscles afterwards. It was this: Ronan splayed beneath him and desperately trying to pretend he wasn’t putty under Adam’s hands, that he wasn’t aching for touch and to be teased and brought to the edge. He didn’t even need to get it out of him anymore, Ronan caved as if he was merely balancing on shifting sand and not the solidity of Adam’s metal bed frame.
Adam pushed his fingers into the wet heat of his mouth, running them along the inside of his lip and Ronan’s tongue curled along them. He groaned, moving his hand back and forth, slowly and teasingly. It felt so oddly and overwhelmingly intimate, that he was using his hands like this, still mostly clothed and viewing him from above.
Ronan huffed in frustration, words forming around Adam’s intruding fingers. “Why do you always tease me?”
“Are you telling me you don’t deserve it?” Adam quipped, but he knew he was going to give in soon. Because if he had a soft spot for anyone, it was the boy underneath him.
“Okay,” Adam said, releasing the hand that was holding Ronan’s hip against the bed and using it to pull back the elastic of Ronan’s boxers and wrap his hand around him, hard and heavy in his palm. “You gonna be good?”
The contact arched Ronan’s back, moaning muffled around Adam’s fingers. His hands pushed and pulled and tugged at Ronan, his mouth and his dick at the mercy of Adam’s calloused fingertips and gangly knuckles. The boy beneath him clung to Adam like he was scared he’d leave him there, panting and desirable. As if Adam had the strength to do that.
“Are you?” Adam demanded of him. At Ronan’s confused look he continued. “Are you gonna be good for me?”
Ronan’s chest rose and fell at an alarming rate. Adam pulled his hand back from his mouth, giving him room to talk. “I didn’t think you were fucking serious—”
“Are you?” Adam asked again, more firmly than the first few times. “Yes or no.”
“I—” Ronan swallowed thickly. “Yeah.”
Adam smiled down at him, feeling a little breathless himself. They hadn’t really done anything this intense in a while. He teased his thumb over the head of Ronan’s dick, pressing down as he spoke. “Yeah? Gonna listen to me for once?”
Ronan’s hips jerked upward in a way that seemed involuntary. “Yeah. I—yeah.”
“Say it,” Adam demanded into Ronan’s ear. “Say that you’ll be good.”
“I’ll,” he choked. He could feel Ronan’s ragged heartbeat straining against his chest, his face contorted, as if he wasn’t sure how to say the words. “I’ll be good.”
Adam slid his hand to the base of Ronan’s cock, dragging even more sounds out of him. He cut off whatever uncompromisable thing was trying to escape Ronan’s lips with a bruising kiss.
When it got too much, when Adam was uncomfortable and aching against his pants and Ronan was close to finishing, he pulled his hand back, knocking back Ronan’s protesting arms playfully. When he leant back in, he had lube in his possession and a set of hazy eyes following his every gesture. Carefully, he slicked up two of his fingers after he’d messily rid both of them of the remainder of his clothes.
When Adam’s first finger entered him, Ronan’s instinct was to tug Adam towards him by the neck. Anticipating this, he dodged flailing arms and adjusted himself so that he was still firmly towering over him. “How about you help me out, baby?”
It was a testament to how far gone he was that Ronan had no objection to the term of endearment, only a grutal huff and the willing presentation of his splayed hand. Adam wrapped his mouth around one of his fingers, partly wetting it and partly because he knew that Ronan found anything to do with hands unbearably hot. When he released the slickened finger he grabbed it and brought it to Ronan’s hole, sliding it in beside his own finger as it worked him open.
He groaned, grabbing at Adam’s back with his free hand. He didn’t run his nails down the skin, or grip him too tightly, aware of Adam’s past protests to such things. Instead, he ran spindly fingers down his spine, creating a strange dichotomy in Adam’s head between the crudeness of one hand and the gentleness of the other.
He added a second finger and told Ronan to do the same. “Add another for me. C’mon.”
When Ronan was sufficiently open and overwhelmingly willing, Adam pulled his fingers out to line the head of his cock up to Ronan’s hole. Clearly sensing the direction they were about to go, Ronan tried to pull his fingers out of himself but Adam held his wrist steady and slipped inside of him, pushing in alongside the digits. They were still for a very long time, Ronan adjusting to taking slightly more than you usually had to.
“Fuck,” Ronan swore, when he was finally relaxed and languid. Adam pulled almost all of the way out and slowly rocked back into him. One of the first things he’d noticed about Ronan was that all of his cogency seemed to slip out of him the second he was even remotely turned on. He huffed and panted and moaned garbled nonsense. “That’s. I want, you have to—"
They swayed and gasped and fucked until he almost forgot that they weren’t together, actually. That Ronan lived 8 hours away in an inherited farmhouse, fucking around and doing stupid shit because he didn’t need a job. That Ronan could be this with anyone, really. That Adam wasn’t his and he wasn’t Adams.
They managed to get another one of Ronan’s fingers in alongside his dick, the stretch of it showing in the crease of his brows, the periodic tensing of his shoulders. He didn’t last long, spilling out all over both his own and Adam’s chests, grunting and swearing like a sailor. He went to pull out, but Ronan hissed something that was mostly incoherent but conveyed enough for Adam to know he wanted to continue to be fucked.
He came inside of him just as he could tell that Ronan was about to be overcome with the sensitivity of it all, and Adam guided Ronan’s fingers out of himself and into his awaiting mouth, watching him lick off Adam’s come with newly discovered enthusiasm.
“Good,” he breathed, leaning in to taste himself on Ronan’s tongue. Their kissing never had the same kind of urgency after they’d both finished. He supposed that kissing without an objective in mind was reserved for people who could actually stand one another.
He pressed a final kiss to the outer corner of his mouth before he pulled out and collapsed on Ronan’s chest, exhausted. He lay there for a little while, feeling as the harsh rise and fall of his ribs calmed down, gentle and slow. He watched Ronan as he slept for a little while, before he succumbed to his own sleepiness.
When Adam had finally awoken, it was too thick silence, rather than the usual bouts of bickering they shared. Adam had fallen off his chest at some point, and they laid side by side, Ronan on his stomach with his hand thrown messily over Adam’s torso. He always took up so much space. Adam was almost jealous.
He tried to concentrate on his breathing, inhaling and exhaling to a pattern. Every time they did this he felt slightly different about it. Sometimes baseless guilt, sometimes an all-encompassing kind of satisfaction. Today his emotions were so mangled and messy he couldn’t decipher them. Ronan, on the other hand, seemed unfazed. Adam didn’t know if he was ever going to have the guts to tell Gansey what had been going on between the two of them for months now, or the fact that they’d seemingly started to extend their quick fucks into drawn-out, overnight affairs.
Everything felt manageable until it didn’t, and he peeled himself out of bed to sit in the shower. Sometimes his heart beat so fast and for so long that he convinced himself he was dying. It was stupid and irrational and he hated that his brain could trick him, deceive him in that way.
He ran his fingers over the messy lines of grout, over the old tiling; illustrative pomegranates and peaches in a single strip up and around the length of his bathroom. It was irrational and frustrating, his tendency to work himself up.
He had a project proposal due in two days. His power bill was overdue. His landlord was increasing his rent by $200 in two weeks. He’d run out of his sleeping pills months ago and was unwilling to find another doctor to get a refill. It felt like cheating to him, to regulate his mood like that when he should be able to do it for himself.
More than anything, Adam was so fucking lonely. He’d just spent a whole day with a guy who wasn’t even interested in him beyond aforementioned activities, just so he could pretend that he wasn’t drowning in his own self-inflicted isolation. He hadn’t responded to any of his work emails. He’d left his friends on read. He’d been in the shower for three times the amount he should have been. He’d skipped his last three ASL classes. He couldn’t sleep at night. He was spiralling, falling, failing, ripping and splitting apart at the seams.
When his heartrate had finally decided to regulate itself, he slipped back into his room, shivering and dripping water from his hair.
“What took you so long?” Ronan huffed sleepily, one crooked arm covering his eyes loosely.
They weren’t actually together, they were barely friends. Ronan didn’t actually want to hear the truth from him. Like when a stranger asks you how you’re doing, it's obligation rather than concern.
“Nothing,” he lied. And that was that.