Chapter Text
It was one in the morning on a Friday in December when Adam barged into Ronan’s Back Bay brownstone, which would have woken him from sleep if he was the kind of person who went to sleep before the sun rose. Adam was skittish about using the key Ronan gave him at first, but it had been six months now since the last time Adam stepped cautiously through the door, politely announcing his presence and taking his shoes off in the foyer. These days he just came inside, manners forgotten and ultimately unimportant. Ronan still made Gansey and Blue take their shoes off when they came inside, but not very many of his usual rules applied to Adam.
“Lynch,” his voice echoed down the front hall, rough and melodic, “you home?”
Ronan was home.
He sat on his kitchen table in his underwear, trying to wrestle the wall clock that hung over the stove into working again. It was the same clock that hung over the stove at the Barns when he was a kid, one of the few things he packed into his boxes and brought to Boston three and a half years ago. He packed his car in a daze; he couldn’t remember why he wanted it.
“Yeah? What do you want?”
Adam wore an old Harvard sweatshirt that belonged to Gansey, originally. Gansey purposefully spilled gray paint down the front and threatened to drop it off at Goodwill if Adam wouldn’t take it. Ronan held honesty over most virtues, but even a bald-faced lie could be overlooked if it meant Adam wouldn’t shiver through another Boston winter just to save money. His closet was full of Gansey’s stained clothes. Ronan wondered if he ever noticed that Gansey only seemed to ruin his warm winter things. This was one of the many games they played to avoid stepping on Adam’s ego. His sandy hair peaked out from under the hood, and dark circles dragged below his eyes. The keys swinging from his finger and the sagging backpack slung over his shoulder told Ronan he had been at the library and drove into the city as soon as he was done.
His hands danced restlessly through the air, and he shifted from one foot to the other. He looked wild. He looked tired. He looked like he wanted something. Adam Parrish was both a man on fire and a man about to burn out at all hours. Ronan thought it was the stuff of real art that he could be both of these things at the same time. Ronan was only ever one thing.
“What are you doing?” Adam asked, as if he hadn’t barged into his home in the middle of the night.
He shrugged. He set the clock down. “Fucking around. Why are you in my house?”
“I just left the library,” he said, like an answer. “Submitted my last paper of the semester.”
“Fuckin’-A, man,” he grinned. “Thank fuck, really. You look like you haven’t slept in a week. Not hot, at all.”
He smiled wryly. “I haven’t.”
“ Parrish —”
“I slept twice,” he amended quickly, before Ronan went off the deep end.
“Seriously?”
“I know.” He rolled his shoulders. “I know, I know, but I’m still wired.”
Ronan hopped down from the table. “Alright.”
“I need to sleep, but I’m just— I can’t—” His gaze caught on Ronan’s chest. He scoffed and shook his head. “Are you gonna make me beg?”
Ronan smirked. “You want to beg, Parrish?”
Adam didn’t blush, and Ronan didn’t expect him to. He wasn’t really the type.
He didn’t wait for his answer, because he knew what it would be. He curled both of his hands around the hard edges of his jaw, prickly from too many mornings in the row without a shave, and hauled him in for a bruising kiss. It was the kind of kiss that Ronan could feel in his toes and his fingers and everything in between, the kind that made his head spin, the kind that made their teeth clash, the kind that made him pant against his mouth. Adam walked him back into the kitchen counter.
“I’m sorry,” Adam gasped in between kisses. “I know it’s late—” He shoved Ronan’s underwear down his thighs. “—but I just—” He wrapped his hand around him, touching him like he knew him perfectly, like he could draw him in the dark. “—couldn’t get to sleep, because I was thinking about y—”
Ronan dropped his head back against the kitchen cabinets. “Holy fuck,” he laughed breathlessly, eyes squeezed shut against the onslaught of perfect, unobscured pleasure. “Shut the fuck up, asshole.”
“What were you—” Adam started to ask, one knee on the floor, then two, “—doing when I—”
“For the love of God, Adam Parrish,” Ronan snapped, “if you say another word, I’ll—”
His lip lifted cruelly. Self-satisfied. “You’ll what ?”
Adam’s mouth was hot, and his tongue was sharp in more ways than one, and within minutes, Ronan was at risk of slipping down from where he stood and cracking his head open on the tile. His knees shook and his hands shook and Adam held onto him hard enough to leave marks along his hip bones. He was good at giving head. He was good enough that sometimes a creeping masculine instinct flooded through Ronan’s veins. He wanted to know who taught him to flick his tongue like that, and he wanted to knock him out. He wanted to send him flowers. He wanted to thread his fingers through Adam’s hair, so he did.
Ronan knew Adam was through with that when he traced a line along the inside of his thigh with his mouth. He never finished him off like this; it wasn’t satisfying enough. Considering Adam’s sensibility, one might be fooled into thinking he wasn’t also an egomaniac, but that was hardly true. When he pushed Ronan headfirst into his finish, he preferred him underneath him. Ronan liked Adam however he could have him, and most often, that was underneath him. He didn’t mind. He really didn’t mind. He really didn’t mind because Adam always made it worth his while, stripping him down and stripping layer after layer off of him and pulling him apart the same as a chef takes an onion down to its layers.
He hadn’t seen Adam naked in six weeks. Four of those weeks were due to a girlfriend named Julia, who had long brown hair and thought Ronan was a shithead. Adam didn’t refrain from fucking Ronan because Julia thought he was a shithead, but rather because he didn’t fuck Ronan when he had a girlfriend because he wasn’t a shithead. The effect was all the same. The other two weeks were due to finals season, when he tucked himself into the library and didn’t emerge again until all of his final essays and exams had been submitted. He couldn’t blame him, but he was also so horny that he nearly had a breakdown. Ronan took it out on him by pushing him down into his bed and stripping his clothes away with a needy touch. Adam always folded his clothes when he took them off, but tonight, they hit the wall and fell to the floor with a thud.
“Fucking missed you,” Adam gasped against his throat as he pushed inside, his hands everywhere and still not touching enough. He held him down against the sheets and held him together. “God, you feel so fucking good. You’re killing me, Lynch.”
Adam held his wrists over his head in one hand and settled between his thighs. He didn’t know why he needed this like he did, but he did, and he wouldn’t be made to feel sorry for it. He read once in a book in high school that a constant itch was worse than any stabbing pain; he didn’t know if it was true, but he did know that those six weeks felt very, very long. He knew Adam could make his entire body buzz with perfect, uninterrupted, impossible pleasure.
Adam fucked him like he had wanted him since he was nothing more than a thought in his mother’s brain, and Ronan came harder than he did the day he discovered jerking off. They were both desperate for different things, in different ways. Ronan thought so, at least.
“I can’t breathe,” Ronan gasped into Adam’s mouth. “I can’t fucking think.”
Ronan Lynch liked sex and had a lot of it for that reason, which should have made him more immune to its cruel effects, but even so, he fell apart so entirely in Adam’s hands. He felt better than he had felt in weeks. He’d never tried heroin but he couldn’t imagine it was any better than this.
“You shower first,” he ordered afterward, laying back in the sheets and trying to catch his breath. He was sore in the glorious way that only sex could induce. He also doubted his ability to stand on the first try. “Soap’s in the cabinet.”
“I know,” Adam said sharply, smacking his shoulder with the corner of the passenger-seat pillow, the one that sometimes belonged to him but usually didn’t.
When he first moved into the brownstone, he bought a bed set from IKEA that included a fitted sheet, a flat sheet, a comforter, a duvet, and one pillowcase. He thus had one pillow, which he slept with folded between his arms. He thought it was good enough, but Blue didn’t agree. She gasped the first time she saw it and carried it all out to the dumpster within the hour. That evening, she returned with the backseat of her pale green Nissan Cube full and carried large bags into the townhouse. Soon enough, his bed was clothed in thick, warm blankets, and he had more pillows than he knew what to do with. He thought would have to host an orgy to have a need for that many pillows, except he slept better that night than he could ever remember.
Blue hung obscure art pieces about the house, things that couldn’t have come from an IKEA. There recognized a few pieces from the apartment she now shared with Gansey. The nude silhouette of a woman haunted the third guest room on the right on the second floor.
“The fuck is this, Sargent?” he demanded while she hung it.
“That,” she answered, gesturing to the entire room, “is my room. Merry fucking Hanukkah, shitstain.”
She fell asleep in her bedroom that night, buried in blankets she bought. He might have minded the invasion, except for the fact that he never minded having Blue around, and she made bacon in the morning. She made the best bacon of anyone he knew, so after she left, he went out and bought a can of the brightest blue paint they sold at the hardware store.
Ronan watched the slow rise and fall of Adam’s chest. He slept at the edge of the bed like he always did, curled in on himself. Ronan hardly ever knew what to do with himself, but he knew what to do with Adam most of the time. He took him by the waist and hauled him onto the second pillow. He grumbled but didn’t entirely wake. Ronan, on the other hand, suffered through another handful of hours of consciousness before finally slipping into a fitful sleep, the same as a boxer blacked out after a hard hit to the head. He wanted to fit himself neatly around Adam’s sleeping shape, but he didn’t, because that wasn’t what this was. The moment they did something like that after sex was off the table, then this was something more than casual. Suggesting anything more than this would end in one of two horrific ways. Either Adam would agree, and Ronan would join the everlong list of abandoned, overlooked lovers behind him—people who thought they were different from the others, people who thought they could get more from him and found that they were very wrong—or else Adam might reject him. He wasn’t sure which outcome would hurt worse, but he knew for a fact that either one would ruin what they did have going for them.
But that night, just before drifting off, he let his forearm fall beside Adam’s, their wrists pressed together between them. It could be enough, for a time.
This was how it happened.
The attraction between them laid underneath all of their interactions from the very start, not directly pressing but there all the same. Adam didn’t act on it, so neither did Ronan. Before they were friends, their relationship could have taken a far different shape, but it didn’t, and a precarious friendship formed. The longer they pretended the attraction wasn’t there, the more obvious it was that it shouldn’t be there. They were friends, something that neither of them were good at making. Not only were they friends, but Adam occupied a very specific role, one not even Gansey could touch. Gansey was Ronan’s oldest friend and probably his best too, but he had the constitution of somebody’s conservative grandpa. Ronan didn’t watch his mouth in front of him by any means—despite the way Gansey unapologetically was, years of exposure raised his tolerance for Ronan’s particular brand of humor—but Adam was almost impossible to faze. Adam did watch his mouth in front of Gansey, because some of the jokes he made when they were alone were fucked up enough to make Ronan raise his brows. It was brilliant.
Gansey was extraordinary because he didn’t always understand Ronan and the way he was and the choices he made, but he loved him anyway, despite the fact that they were nothing alike. He was extraordinary for the way his eyes bulged out of his head at Ronan’s dirty jokes but at the same time how he didn’t flinch at all the realer things—his brother’s horribleness, his father’s deadness, his mother’s invisibleness, his own self-disgust. Adam was extraordinary for a different set of reasons. He didn’t just accept these things about Ronan, he understood . Most days, Ronan was certain he had, either by design or by divine luck, stumbled upon the single person on this eight-billion-person rock capable of understanding all of the mangled, bloodied bullshit in his head.
He actually didn’t really like Adam at first. Gansey said that was because he was hard-wired to hate everyone. This was true. The levels of rage he could conjure for a stranger on the bus he didn’t even know, even if they weren’t doing anything offensive at all, was impressive. He was loosely aware that Gansey and Blue had a three-week protocol in place to be used any time they needed to introduce him to someone new. It involved showing him a picture, listing the person’s redeemable qualities, warning him of their more offensive traits, threatening him into behaving, and, in a serious bind, bribing him into playing nice. Just the fact that he was a stranger would have usually been reason enough not to like him, but that wasn’t the problem.
The real reason he didn’t like Adam at first was because Gansey talked about him like he was the second coming of Jesus Christ himself, and Ronan was pretty sure his Lord and Savior would not come in the form of a pretentious, sweater-wearing Harvard douchebag from Gansey’s introductory Latin class. His only warning was that Adam was very private, and he shouldn’t push. He said this as if Ronan had any interest at all in where this kid summered or attended boarding school. And then he met him, and he was just some guy. He was handsome in a modest, understated way, and he made small talk, and he laughed at Gansey’s jokes, and he didn’t visibly bristle at Ronan’s general Ronan-ness, and Blue liked him. He was bland and he was fine, and Ronan didn’t understand what the big deal about Adam Parrish was and why neither of his friends could stop talking about how great he was.
But the person you saw when you looked at Adam Parrish, Ronan came to know, was just a trick of the light. He kept all the good stuff out of sight.
He didn’t experience Adam in any large capacity until he followed Gansey up to Massachusetts when he was 19. A year prior, he thought dropping out of his stuffy boarding school and buying a flock of chickens constituted having a life plan. It worked perfectly well for exactly six months, then Gansey left for Harvard and he entered what he later remembered as the loneliest year of his life. Ronan didn’t like most people, but that didn’t mean he liked to be alone either. Sometimes he went weeks at a time without seeing or speaking to another human soul. He could have dropped dead, and no one would have noticed for months because he never went out or picked up his phone, and he told his brothers not to stop by without warning, and sometimes he was too empty to drag himself to church, and often he dug his own graves. In May, he took a long drive up the winding, cliffside mountain roads on the southern tip of the county and wondered what would happen if he put the pedal to the floor and went over the side. In the light of day, he emptied the contents of his medicine cabinet into a cardboard box and set it on fire out back so he wouldn’t make a stupid choice after the sun was gone. He promised Gansey back when they were kids that this sort of thing wouldn’t happen again, so he called him when it seemed like it could. He liked to think he could have pulled himself out of the darkness on his own, but when things got bad, it was always Gansey yanking him out of his solitude and giving him a sense of purpose until things felt okay again. Within hours of that call, Gansey made the long drive back to Virginia and told him that he would not be living another year like this, so Ronan packed a couple boxes, and they found a two-bedroom near campus.
“I’m not your fucking housewife,” Ronan warned him while they unpacked, except, that year, he kind of was. And he kind of didn’t mind.
He cooked and cleaned and asked about Gansey’s day when he came home from class, and in a way, it kept him walking the line. He picked up a few odd jobs to occupy his time. He worked at a bakery for a couple months, then filled in as a secretary at the Catholic church down the road when their last secretary had a baby and they needed someone in the interim. He never sought out jobs, but he didn’t turn them away either when they fell into his lap. He never stayed long but had a job more often than not. It was all part-time. He didn’t need the money so much as he needed to pass the time and behave like a functioning member of society, rather than the fucked-up housewife of some insomniac Harvard kid with a trust fund and horrific dietary habits. It wasn’t what he imagined for himself, but he already tried doing the thing he imagined, and as it turned out, he was a hell of a lot happier keeping the books in a church office than he ever was alone on that fucking farm.
Adam came over to study with Gansey a few times a week. Sometime by winter, he started coming around to study even when Gansey wasn’t around.
“You just like my fucking cooking, Parrish,” Ronan accused at least once a week.
He’d just shrug. “Caught me.”
Adam Parrish had a way of sneaking up on you. He wasn’t quite what you thought. It occurred to Ronan for the first time that spring, sitting in a vinyl booth in a cheap-ass all-you-can-eat pizzeria with cardboard crust and flat cokes, that they were real friends. Not only were they friends independent of Gansey, but anymore, he seemed to see more of Adam than anyone else. Ronan bet Adam that he could eat more and lost twenty bucks. Adam was smaller than Ronan by a bit—not much shorter but a good bit skinnier—but the kid could eat when he set his mind to it. That was also the day that Adam told him on the drive home, both of them so full that they had to put the windows down and drive slowly so they wouldn’t puke, that they didn’t always have food in the fridge when he was growing up.
Adam was the most private person Ronan had ever met. He was open about his thoughts, but the only biographical information Ronan knew came from the time he went through his wallet. Based on what little Ronan knew about him before that, as well as context clues, he assumed that Adam’s childhood was decorated with wealthy parents, car keys on his sixteenth, private school, and a golden retriever, or something. An all-American upbringing, even if not as shiny as Gansey’s. Once Ronan saw the first crack, it was impossible not to notice all the other incongruities—all the other ways he was unlike Gansey. His apartment was inexpensive but well-maintained, and he had three roommates. He patched his clothes rather than replacing them, and he ate a plain ham-and-cheese sandwich every day for lunch. He ordered the cheapest thing on the menu and always asked for water. Just water. He rarely drank, and when he did, he took a draft beer. What Ronan assumed was characteristic sensibility was probably a symptom of something else, some bigger thing that loomed in his shadows. Maybe his privacy was another symptom. Ronan didn’t ask, because he liked Adam, and he got the distinct sense that poking too hard at his privacy would push him away.
What he intended to be a year in Massachusetts to get himself back on track turned into two, then three, and then before he knew it, Blue was selling her art in a shop she just opened downtown, Gansey had a fancy consulting job in Boston, and Adam was starting his MBA at Harvard, and Ronan was still in Massachusetts. The whole world was in this dumb, cold state. His whole world, at least. He hated it, but he hated it less than everywhere else, so he stuck around.
It didn’t matter that he was attracted to Adam Parrish in the beginning. It was just another thing. His attraction persevered through the start of their friendship and probably intensified with time, as Adam’s lanky frame broadened and he grew into his features and especially that one summer, when he kept a beard to compete with Gansey’s. He wondered if it was possible that his attraction was reciprocated when Adam mentioned in passing, back during his third year of undergrad, sometime in the fall, a past hookup. A he . He knew for a fact that it was reciprocated that winter, when they went out to one of the usual Harvard haunts to celebrate the New Year and Adam kissed him hard at midnight, his hands on his waist and his fingertips just barely brushing bare skin.
That kiss made his vision go dark at the edges.
He drank more often than Adam or Gansey—he could handle his champagne—but he spent the rest of that night in a daze.
He didn’t know what the fuck that was, but that definitely wasn’t the way you kissed your entirely platonic friend at midnight on New Years if it was just because there was no one else. He knew because now he knew what Adam Parrish’s tongue tasted like. Knowing what someone’s tongue tasted like fundamentally changed how you looked at them; it cut a notch in the timeline of their friendship.
Their friends brought it up constantly to tease them—to tease Ronan, in particular.
“Remember that time Adam planted one on Ronan,” Blue might say, then they would all dissolve into matching fits of giggles.
“Stop it,” Gansey might say, when Ronan picked on Adam, “or he might kiss you again.”
Henry was furious he didn’t see it.
“You should’ve seen—” Noah gasped for breath trying to relay the story for Henry, unable to contain his laughter, “—the look on his face.”
It was probably just a joke, except that Ronan knew Adam Parrish down to his bones. He knew the filthy, horrifying kinds of jokes he made. It was his best quality. And that wasn’t one of Adam’s jokes. It was playful and unserious, but it wasn't a joke.
Their mutual attraction, which had before lingered in the background, slid closer to the forefront, something they didn’t dismiss but didn’t act on either. Sometimes he caught Adam staring, unashamed. He took it as permission to stare back, when Adam drove the BMW to the store on the weekends or closed his hand around a beer bottle or stripped his shirt over his head at the beach. Ronan knew they absolutely could not, under any circumstances, take it farther than kissing, even though he knew it would be so fucking good , because they were them and they were friends . So it lived on in the background. Sometimes he convinced himself that this tension was a necessary facet of their friendship, like they had to picture each other naked sometimes if they wanted things to stay the way they were. The deep reverence with which they held their friendship partly depended on a mutual fascination vaguely beyond the platonic. He rationalized that it was a good thing. Except, when Adam kissed him, he couldn’t think straight for three days, and Adam just went on like he always did. He didn’t know what to think about that.
It took exactly three months before they fucked it up. Gansey was staying at Blue’s for the third night in a row, so Ronan picked up Chinese takeout and drove over to Adam’s. It was unseasonably warm for March, and Adam’s roommate was gone, probably holed up in the library like usual. They opened the balcony doors and sat on the living room floor, watching the sun set over campus in a wash of reds from the kitchen. After they finished eating, Adam washed their dishes. Ronan sat up on the counter with a rag to dry.
He made a crack about the hole in the shoulder of Adam’s old, worn-in t-shirt, and Adam flicked his wrist to shoot water in his direction from the sink faucet. In retaliation, Ronan grabbed the wet sponge and shook it at him, covering his clothes in suds. When Adam tried to splash him again, Ronan hauled him back away from the sink by the collar of his shirt. Adam, laughing and shouting wildly, tried to wiggle his way out, but Ronan worked his arm around his middle and held on tight, even when Adam pinched his arms to get away. He reached to grab the faucet and yanked, aiming it over Adam’s head and drenching him all the way through.
Within seconds, they both looked like they had showered with their clothes on.
“Fuck,” Adam shouted, giggling and shoving him away. “Fuck, Lynch.”
“Sorry,” he tossed back remorselessly, dripping onto the linoleum.
Adam sloughed water from his face with both hands. His wet lashes clumped together, and a rivulet ran from the tip of his nose. “Not fucking likely.”
Ronan grinned. Fluidly—thoughtlessly—Adam tugged him back in by the hand and kissed him affectionately. He tasted like the Coronas they abandoned on the living room floor, as likely to be kicked over as finished. Unlike that first, bruising kiss, this one was slow and easy. Ronan’s hands shook, and Adam’s pressed into his ribs.
Then they parted, and Adam wasn’t smiling anymore. He wore a panicked expression, like he hadn’t actually meant to do that.
In that single moment, they broke their primary unspoken rule. They broke a rule—and maybe a lot more than just a rule—but Adam’s hands didn’t immediately leave his chest and his eyes were incredibly blue. Ronan should have known better, but he had always been greedy, and he had never had any respect at all for rules, and they were both soaked from head-to-toe, and he couldn’t breathe. Suddenly, he missed the shirt he stripped over his head earlier in the evening and slung over the back of the couch and the layer of protection it provided; without it, he felt as though Adam might see his pounding heart through his skin. He might see him falling apart.
His head was a mess. He had too many thoughts racing to pluck any single one out of the bunch. Adam slipped closer, pushing his thigh between Ronan’s. He could feel the line of him against every pulse point. Certainly Adam knew how his heart raced. Certainly he could feel how much he wanted him.
“Adam,” he warned.
He was out of breath and it wasn’t getting any better, not with Adam standing so close. Maybe their boundaries were bizarre, but they usually held them firm, and without those boundaries, what was this? Without their precious boundaries, how could they preserve this perfect world they existed in? Would this not devolve into disaster?
“It wouldn’t be out of nowhere,” Adam said slowly, and his gaze slipped down to his mouth. “If we… If we did .”
If they did.
That night wasn’t the first time they hooked up. Adam sent him home with orders to think about it, like they were deciding where to go on vacation, not whether or not to rip their friendship to shreds in exchange for a couple good orgasms. The first time they hooked up came two weeks later, when Adam showed up at his door in the middle of the night and asked if he had made a decision yet. In the interim, they went to lunch with Gansey and Blue, grocery shopped together on the weekend like they always did, and helped Blue install her new bookshelf. Everything was exactly the same as it always was, except Ronan knew that he could take Adam’s clothes off later if he wanted to, which sent a thrill down his spine like nothing he could have imagined. The suspense was intoxicating, and yet he hadn’t truly made up his mind until Adam stood there on his front steps, breathing rapidly like he had been running.
He pulled him inside.
In the first months, Ronan kept count of how many times it happened, but he lost track sometime around when Adam graduated. It fluctuated in frequency. Sometimes they were at each other constantly, unable to keep their hands off each other and fucking fifteen times in a week. Sometimes they went months without.
The thing about Adam was that, while he had almost certainly been with men in some capacity in the past, he always had girlfriends. He had so many girlfriends that Gansey once observed to Ronan, in private, that Adam probably liked having a girlfriend more than he actually liked any of his girlfriends. That wasn’t to say that he wasn’t a perfect gentleman with them, because he was. He did all the right things. He brought flowers and held the door and listened to their feelings and presumably slept with them, but inevitably, usually about a month into each relationship, his girlfriends wanted to take the next steps and quickly discovered that Adam Parrish was about as penetrable as a concrete wall. They wanted to know about his past and his feelings and why he flinched when people moved too fast, but he didn’t talk about those things. He contained multitudes but owned them entirely; his depths weren’t for other people to see. His relationships tended to sour around then, which he accepted with indifference. The sheer number of times he got dumped in a year might have been pathetic if it wasn’t own apathy that caused it. Girls thought they could change him, but Adam was uncrackable. Ronan found this fascinating but never commented. It wasn't his place to have an opinion.
It wasn’t like Ronan just waited around, sitting on his hands, for Adam to come around and kiss him again. The thought was always there and the dreams kept coming, but he kept moving. There were other men. Sometime after his twentieth birthday, before Adam, he started sleeping around. He didn’t want to be weird about sex, but an entire childhood in the pews of a catholic church made him weird about sex. He always didn’t want to be weird about his virginity, but he didn’t get around to losing it until after he had officially entered his twenties. It didn’t seem to him like an atrociously long time to wait, but once you entered your twenties, your virginity became a thing . It was all stupid and embarrassing, and Gansey gave terrible, doe-eyed advice about sex, so he just took care of it on a random Tuesday in February and didn’t tell anyone about it. He always intended to wait for it to be special, but nobody felt special at all, so he hooked up with a bartender from a bar in town who didn’t know he was drinking with a fake ID and definitely didn’t know he was a virgin. Afterward, the bartender—who had a bizarre number of cats in his apartment and said he liked guys with tattoos—stared at him like he was waiting for him to leave. It wasn’t that bad. He went home and cried about it, but at least it was done. Sometimes when he drank too much to control his thoughts, he wished it would have been Adam instead, because then it wouldn’t have been so weird, except then Adam would know he was a virgin (because Adam always knew things) and then it couldn’t be casual (because Adam was Adam), so maybe it was for the best.
Adam had lots of girlfriends and Ronan had lots of hookups, and sometimes they went on sex benders when they both happened to be untethered at the same time. By his 23rd birthday, Ronan had managed to convince himself that this was a normal and healthy way to live. And even if it wasn’t, he didn’t know that he cared. Normal wasn’t half as good as having Adam Parrish sleeping under his blankets, arm resting against Ronan’s. Even if it wasn’t normal, it was enough.
The next day, Adam drove them both to lunch with Blue and Gansey. Given that his own car was still parked out in front of the brownstone, he inferred that Adam intended to go home with him after lunch, which would probably end with fucking in the kitchen. It usually did. He resolved not to think about it. Adam naked wasn’t something he could think about, if he was supposed to sit across from Blue Sargent, because he knew it would read all over his face, and Blue liked making fun of Ronan more than most people liked winning the lottery. They told Gansey that Adam picked him up on the way, because no one knew about this thing between them, and it was better off that way.
“How were finals?” Blue asked, leaning over Gansey’s lap.
“Good,” Adam shrugged. “Finished last night.”
Gansey, who knew Adam well, raised a brow. “And you’re not sleeping right now?”
Adam knocked his ankle against Ronan’s. “Slept like a rock.”
Gansey suggested they go see a movie that night.
He brushed him off sheepishly. “I’ve got a date.”
Gansey groaned. “Here we go again.”
“Ooh,” Blue mocked, leaning against Ronan, “who’s the next victim?”
“I don’t think it’s my fault that I’ve got the highest dump rate on the east coast. They break up with me, if you didn’t remember.”
She scoffed. “Considering I contributed to your impressive dump rate, I think I’m more than qualified to say it’s your fault.”
Sometimes Ronan forgot they used to have a thing, before she was with Gansey. It was jarring to remember.
“I was 18,” Adam rationalized.
“Yes,” she drawled, the smirk lingering just underneath her arching brow, “because you’ve really matured since then.”
He scoffed. “You wouldn’t know.”
“Yeah,” Ronan smirked. “Parrish’s emotionally mature as fuck .”
“It’s just a date,” Adam redirected.
“It always is,” she shrugged.
Gansey made a vague allusion to finding someone for Ronan, which made Adam’s brows shoot into his hairline and made Blue scoff. Ronan couldn’t remember what exactly it was that he said, even moments after he said it, because this particular line of conversation had a way of making him irrationally irritable. Always had. Gansey always talked about finding him ‘someone’ because they never actually had the conversation about Ronan’s sexuality, even though Gansey endured awkwardly greeting an entire host of Ronan’s one night stands while they lived together. Ronan never handed Gansey a label to use for him, so Gansey maintained this overly politically correct act of never assuming that it would be a man, and Ronan wanted to strangle him every time he did it.
Blue shoved Ronan. “Who the fuck would date Lynch?”
He grinned proudly.
“Jane,” Gansey reasoned, “Ronan is a perfectly nice fellow once you get to know him, and he has plenty of wonderful qualities that would make him a very good choice of partner, and—”
“Yeah,” she interrupted, “he can set anything on fire with a toothpick and he’s got enough traffic tickets to cover his fridge, which is cool as fuck, but that doesn’t mean I’d put myself through the horrifying ordeal of dating him.”
“Yeah, and I’m too fucking hot for you, maggot,” Ronan added. “People would stare. It would be humiliating.”
She yanked his hood hard enough to make him choke.
“There’s someone for everyone,” Adam said levelly. “I’ve heard Satan walks among us. Think he’s on Tinder?”
Ronan kicked his leg hard under the table in retaliation. He dug his cross out from under the neckline of his sweatshirt and flashed it across the table. “I think I’m safe.”
Adam raised an unimpressed brow. “From vampires, maybe.”
If they were alone, he would remind him about the state of his chest, about the marks Adam had left all over him the night before, but they weren't alone, so he just barked a laugh. Blue folded her legs up on the cracked vinyl booth, one knee lopping over Ronan’s thigh. It was proof that he had matured since high school that he didn’t immediately shove her off. Instead, he waited until she had her drink in her hand.
“You’re gonna get yourself knocked out one of these days with that sacrilegious talk,” she mocked.
Adam grinned shyly. Ronan looked away.
He slipped off to find a bathroom and returned to find Adam and Gansey hunched over their phone calendars.
“Can you do the weekend of the 21st?” he asked Adam, tapping through his schedule.
‘You’ was a term Gansey had been using for the past year or so to refer to both Adam and Ronan. Ronan wasn’t sure when they became a package deal. Worse, he wasn’t sure when Gansey noticed. This sort of thing was exactly why Gansey could never know what they were doing, because no words in the English dictionary would possibly make him understand that the sex was only casual, that they weren't planning on having a summer wedding and seven blue-eyed kids and a white picket fence.
“I have class on the 20th,” Adam answered, “and Ronan works late.” If he was still working at the bar, that is, which was up for debate. His manager was pissing him off lately. “But we could drive down the next morning, if that’s—”
Gansey was proposing to Blue soon. It was so near, it felt like a tangible thing that they carried around with them and dropped onto the table every time they were all together, for them to look at but not talk about. Blue knew he was going to propose, and Gansey had already asked Adam to be his best man. Blue didn’t ask Ronan to be hers because their friendship didn’t work like that, but he knew he would be. Probably even the pope knew Gansey was going to propose to Blue, but he hadn’t done it yet because he was waiting for the perfect moment . Gansey told Adam and Ronan repeatedly that it wouldn’t be perfect if they weren’t there too, but since he didn’t know when exactly he was going to do it, this was the third weekend away in as many months they had to attend, just in case he might deign to put them all out of their misery and finally ask the fucking question.
Ronan didn’t like the beach, and he really didn’t like Martha’s Vineyard. He didn’t tan so much as get third-degree burns all over his body, no matter how much sunscreen he lathered on, and he didn’t like daiquiris. He even hated the sand, but he didn’t complain, because Adam wouldn’t go if he didn’t, and Adam deserved the breaks.
Later that afternoon, after Adam left, Blue dropped by for their regularly-scheduled movie night, with her short arms wrapped around more bags of chips than most people could consume in a week. Most people . This wasn’t fucking amateur hour. While Ronan pulled their bean dip out of the fridge, she admitted passingly that she had driven by Adam’s place late the night before to drop off groceries—he was notorious for forgetting to eat during finals.
“I asked him about it earlier, and he said he must have been asleep. But his car was gone.” She frowned. “Kind of weird that he would lie about that.”
Ronan shrugged. “Parrish needs his secrets.”