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“Long, long ago, before I was a tormented artist, afflicted with longing yet incapable of forming durable attachments, long before this, I was a glorious ruler uniting all of a divided country—so I was told by the fortune-teller who examined my palm. Great things, she said, are ahead of you, or perhaps behind you; it is difficult to be sure. And yet, she added, what is the difference? Right now you are a child holding hands with a fortune-teller. All the rest is hypothesis and dream.” - “Theory of Memory” by Louise Glück, from Faithful and Virtuous Night .
Fox Way reminds Ronan a little of the Barns. He can’t place it, at first - Fox Way, tall and blue and dusty, in the middle of the poor side of Henrietta, which is most of Henrietta, while the Barns had been - still is, though Ronan can no longer see it - squat and dirty white and surrounded on all sides by verdant green.
He figures it out, watching Adam tinker with the back of Blue’s washing machine: Fox Way is lived in. People sleep and dream here, cook meals and eat them, read books and raise children. It holds lives. Monmouth watches over a pale imitation of a family in him and Gansey and Noah, however much Gansey likes to pretend he’s playing house. It’s an overgrown dormitory, an equivalent to living on campus that doesn’t make Ronan suicidal. But it isn’t the Barns. Sometimes, Ronan is convinced that his life isn’t a life.
“Pass me that ring, would you?” Adam says, gesturing with a free hand. He seemed overly enthusiastic to be doing fucking chores for some women he barely knew. He’d spent three days last fall pissed at Gansey for asking him to help unclog one of Monmouth’s drains - and rightfully, too. Ronan is always on the side of the pissed-off. But he hates a hypocrite.
He passes Adam the rubber ring, and watches his long fingers push it and twist it into place. Ronan could’ve done this, if they’d asked him. Which they hadn’t, thank God. There had been a time when he’d watched over his father’s shoulder while he fixed a dryer, replaced the oil in his own car. His life had been one of pleasurable hardships, rather than just hardships. He’d unblocked the drain at Monmouth, when he’d gotten around to feeling like it.
Adam doesn’t ask any commentary of him, doesn’t ask why he’s lurking here instead of in the reading room with Gansey and Blue. He just lets Ronan stare out of the screen door into the backyard, at the huge white birch tree which grasps longingly at the sky. Ronan sometimes dreams that he’s a tree, or a cloud, or the dirt. Better and more peaceful than the dreams in which he plays himself.
“Has Blue said anything about me to you?” Adam asks, suddenly, voice very low. He looks at Ronan when he turns around, deliberately unshy. “Like, does she talk about me, when I’m not around?”
“I don’t fucking talk to Blue when you’re not around,” Ronan says, and it’s almost the truth. He wishes he was racing, or running. Or dreaming. Crossing to the door, he says, sharp and practiced, “You know it’s not gonna be you and her, right?”
He stops only to see the look Adam is giving him from under his fair brows, a look like Ronan is Adam’s own personal raincloud, sent to spoil the mood.
Ronan loves and despises Adam’s little apartment, hidden above the church registry office, smelling of sawdust and the old Christmas decorations they’d once stored there. Now it’s full - but not very - of the plastic bins Adam had bought for pennies to store his crap in, and a brand new mattress that might as well be the floor, as far as Ronan is concerned.
While Adam is at work one night, and Ronan sleepless, he disassembles the Ikea bookshelf in his own room at Monmouth, takes it to St. Agnes’, and reassembles it on the floor of Adam’s apartment. He feels keenly alone, but not guilty. Adam wouldn’t accept shit, not even harmless, easy shit, like a bookshelf that had only held a bong and Ronan’s old Avenged Sevenfold CDs up until tonight, and he owns more books than clothes. Mostly bought for school, some borrowed from libraries and quietly never returned, some Gansey’s; one, Ronan finds, while flicking through it, inscribed to Blue, for her thirteenth birthday, clearly recently borrowed. Seeing it makes his stomach squirm unpleasantly. He puts it down under the mug on Adam’s nightstand.
There were a half dozen places Ronan could’ve found for Adam to stay. Declan knew everyone, and people liked money. Any of the student houses with a free room downtown, or in an apartment Ronan’s father had left for him, or a suddenly unoccupied dorm on campus. A thousand lies. This had been the most honest way, the kindest way, because he couldn’t stand lying to Adam. Though he did, constantly. He knows this. The nuns had always told him it was impossible to lie to God, knowledge that should have terrified Ronan and instead comforted him.
The next thing he needed to pilfer for Adam was a lamp; the light from the bare bulb in the middle of the rafters is giving Ronan a migraine. He’s slept on the floor next to Adam’s mattress twice now, once out of pure exhaustion, the night he’d finished helping Adam move his stuff in, and once because Adam had asked him to. More or less asked him to. Ronan liked to imagine it had been an invitation.
He leaves before Adam gets back, and an hour later, parked up in a field of long grass outside of town, watching the sky, gets a call from a number he knows is the phone in the office under Adam’s apartment. He lets it ring out, and Adam doesn’t call back.
The week after his mother’s funeral, Ronan had reupholstered one of the armchairs in the living room at the Barns. Opal had tried to eat his staples and ran outside he’d yelled at her for it; he’d felt guilty, but glad of the peace, he remembers.
It had taken every ounce of his strength just to get up and do anything, every day. Sleep and Adam had been the only things to stem the physical pain of grief, even for a moment. At twenty-three, Ronan stands in the living room at the Barns with a hand on the shoddily fixed-up chair, thumbing a loose thread. It’s work badly done; he could manage it better now. But he’d done it. Done it at all, when doing anything had felt like pulling his own fucking teeth out of his head. He was just a kid, he thinks. Eighteen and suffering like that. He runs into dreamers in similar positions fairly frequently now, babies with the weight of the world on their shoulders, all their own personal worlds. By nature, he is not a patient man, nor a comforting one; he just does what Adam and Gansey and Blue had done, and is there.
The place is a wreck. They’d left it a wreck at New Year’s, and Ronan hasn’t been back since then - neither have Adam and Declan and Jordan, as far as he knows. If he finds out Declan has been around and left the place like this, he’ll go homicidal.
He scrubs out old charcoal from the fireplace, washes out mugs and wine glasses. The one thing he and Adam had time to do when they’d left was wash their sheets, thank God. He’s putting fresh ones on his bare mattress when he hears Chainsaw squawking outside, Atom Atom Atom, her pure delight a mirror of his own.
Adam is always a vision when Ronan is seeing him for the first time in a while. He’s a miracle to look at all the time, but that moment when Ronan sees him, and it clicks into place again - that Adam isn’t just a voice on a phone, not an affectionate text message or a plan made, but a person, and here, it makes Ronan feel like earth being warmed by the sun.
They lie down on top of the clean sheets, Adam wriggling and pleased and naked. Ronan traces a vein on the inside of Adam’s thigh, dark and blue and vital.
“I’m out for the rest of the week,” Adam says, yawning. He isn’t hard, but he presses up into Ronan’s hand, enjoying the attention. “I told Tate —” his boss, “— I swear I was working like twenty-hour days, sleeping in my damn car. Way more than his assistant should be doing. So I said, you know, either pay me more or give me the rest of the month out. He said, take the week, and we can talk pay on Monday.”
“He’s a dick,” Ronan says, almost on instinct. As far as he knows, Tate is a totally fine boss. Ronan just isn’t a fan of authority. “He should’ve paid you more
and
given you the month. You do way more than anyone expects you to.”
“I’m gonna ask for a promotion,” Adam says, suddenly very awake. He turns onto his side, trapping Ronan’s hand pleasantly between his thighs. “I’m already doing the work. It’ll only be a title thing and a pay thing. And I’ll control my own schedule, mostly. I think he’ll go for it.”
Ronan wants to say, Fuck your job, come driving with me . But this stuff is important to Adam, proof that he’s done it, finally, broken the ceiling or whatever. And he does like his job, for all he complains about the hours. Selfishly - or extremely unselfishly, whichever - Ronan knows it’s valuable to have someone on the other side of a .gov address. Adam has already warned him ahead of time when things are looking bad for a dreamer, when he’s been able to - a lot of what Adam deals with, or what his boss deals with, can be traced back to dreamers. Not all, but a lot. And if it came down to it - his job or a dreamer, his job or an innocent - Ronan knows what Adam would choose.
Between Adam’s thighs, Ronan flexes his hand, fingernail catching lightly on a mole. Adam hums next to him, pressing a kiss to his bicep, lips dry and warm. He splays a hand on Ronan’s stomach, inching towards his chest. Ronan likes it when Adam rides him and presses down on his chest, heavy, a little suffocating. Already half-hard, his cock twitches.
He jerks when Adam scratches at a nipple, then feels Adam smiling against his arm.
“You wanna use my thighs?” Adam asks, quiet. Tired, Ronan thinks, but nothing would stand in the way of Adam Parrish and getting his rocks off, not even his own body.
“I wanna reupholster that chair in the living room,” Ronan says, taking hold of Adam’s hand and pressing a kiss to the protruding middle knuckle there, most beloved.
“God,” Adam answers, with a patient sigh. “Didn’t you just finish doing that?”
These last few years seem to have gone quicker for Adam than Ronan. He thinks it’s college, that struggle just to get past freshman year, then sophomore, then junior. Things must merge into one. Ronan, in turn, feels keenly every passing second. Even traveling with Hennessy, finding dreamers, dreaming, even being happy, time has it out for Ronan Lynch. He’d said to Hennessy, once,
It just keeps going. It just keeps going.
“It’s dogshit,” he says, now. “We can drive out and get fabric tomorrow. You can pick the colour.”
With another yawn, Adam says, “Fine. Make me come and we’ll do whatever you want tomorrow, we’ll drive to the moon.”
“Just the Home Depot,” Ronan says, putting Adam’s hand on his dick. “But, thanks. We should do that sometime.”
Adam squeezes, gentle, two fingers tracing the thick vein on the underside of Ronan’s cock. He bites at Ronan’s shoulder, probably to stop himself from saying something bitchy. Ronan works Adam’s thighs open with his trapped hand, cupping his balls, rubbing at Adam’s perineum.
“You want my cock there?” Ronan asks, voice low. “You like feeling my cock fucking up against your balls, don’t you?”
Adam makes a strangled, harsh moan, sitting up and dipping down again to take the head of Ronan’s cock in his mouth, sucking gently for a moment, making Ronan groan, an airy, unthinking noise from his own lips. His face feels hot, flushed.
He runs a hand through Adam’s hair, encourages him away and onto his side again, fumbles in the drawer for lube. When he’s fucking the tight heat between Adam’s legs, feeling the muscles in Adam’s thighs shake from exertion, he takes Adam’s cock in his hand and strokes it hard, unrelenting, until Adam finishes. Then he presses a messy hand to Adam’s knee, keeping his tired frame together so Ronan can fuck him until he comes, too, lightning hot and loud, feeling it in his stomach.
They lie, afterward, sweaty and half-sleeping, in a bed that has been and will for a long time be theirs, in sheets they will need to wash, over and over again.