Archive of Our Own

Ronan stripped the wrapper from the brand-new pack of Marlboro Reds he bought from the dingy gas station on 29 an hour earlier and tossed the clear plastic into the bag in the passenger seat that also contained a fifth of Jack and a black lighter. His fake ID, also brand-new and not yet scratched, was a gift from Kavinsky. He liked to imagine it was a birthday present, because Kavinsky flicked it through his car window on the afternoon of his 18th, but Kavinsky probably didn't know his birthday, let alone remember it. They weren't that kind of friends.

The night began in a fight with Gansey, whose primary transgression was that he asked too many questions. This time of year, the sun set over the rolling foothills of the Blue Ridge at five, and the evenings ached on. Ronan didn't like the winter; he was far too well acquainted with the monsters in the shadows for short days and long nights. He preferred the long summer days of June, when the tops of his shoulders turned pink and the sun assaulted his eyes from early in the morning to late at night, the offense of the sun's set softened by the cotton-candy hues of the sky. This time of year, there was nothing to do after the sun went down but to go to Nino's, which Gansey suggested like it was a novel idea, rather than what they had done every single Friday night for months.

Gansey worried. Adam concealed his concern more deftly, but twice Ronan caught him staring with knowing eyes, like he could see his thoughts. Undoubtedly, Gansey and Adam talked about him on the drive to Nino's. He considered offering to pick Adam up from work himself, but he already did too many things for Adam that he refused to do for anyone else, and if he kept it up, Adam would sooner or later evaluate it all in some, putting all those little details into play with one another. He was whip-smart; if he took the time to seriously consider the strangeness of Ronan's uncharacteristic affection for him, he would stumble upon the one truth Ronan would never himself admit.

Ronan thus spent the meal needling Gansey and mocking Adam.

Gansey asked about Ronan's after-dinner plans in a tone he probably believed to be casual. Ronan changed the subject to Adam's terrible haircut. Gansey disapproved, because they all knew Adam cut it himself because he couldn't afford a barber. But Ronan cut his own hair too, and if Adam was going to give himself haircuts, the least he could do was go after his hair like he graduated kindergarten and knew how to cut in a straight line. Unfortunately, his clumsily cropped hair only contributed to his handsomely rough exterior. His chapped lips, calloused hands, and skin he probably washed with a bar of soap contrasted unexpectedly with his delicate features. The cupid’s bow of his hips and the arch of his cheekbones made Ronan’s stomach turn. It made him angry for reasons he cared not to reconsider, which he concentrated into making fun of Adam’s haircut.

When Adam fought back, he didn’t stop until he saw blood. When Ronan called him poor, he shot back with thinly-veiled remarks about his worsening alcohol problem or the coke Gansey didn't know about that he sometimes did on the weekends at parties Gansey also didn't know about. Adam wasn't supposed to know about any of those things either, but he was perceptive in a way that tended to make people incredibly uneasy, Ronan included. Tonight, Adam didn't fight back. He was too tired to give it back as good as he got it and instead just scoffed and rolled his eyes, like he found it rather pathetic that Ronan had to stoop to such lows. Adam Parrish was too self-aware for his own good. By the time the drinks came, Ronan felt like a Spanish matador trying to provoke a bull that wouldn't attack, trying to convince the crowd he had a right to start a fight in the first place.

He needed Adam's help in biology before he failed out, but he didn't know how to say that, so instead he eyed his thick brows and asked if he was taking inspiration from Frida Kahlo. He had been making fun of his eyebrows for over a year now—even though he didn't hate them at all and would probably be disappointed if Adam did change them—so Adam was a fool if he was still willing to actually help him with anything. Matadors never asked the bulls they gouged with swords to help them plow their fields afterward.

Often, Ronan dug his own graves.

Despite the heavy navy-colored circles under Adam's eyes and the slowness in his reactions, he still managed something like self-satisfaction at Ronan's eventual willingness to back down without the whole table having to hear Gansey's fussing. Gansey spent a lot of time shielding the world from Ronan's offensive personality and not nearly enough protecting it from Adam's, whose meanness ran a whole lot deeper. He supposed the difference was that when Adam was mean he was also right, whereas when Ronan was mean he was usually wrong.

The tension thickening the dinner table originated from the fact that Gansey didn’t like it when Ronan went missing at night without telling him where he was going. When he blew out of Monmouth with his keys in one hand and his wallet in the other after the sun went down, Gansey always suspected that Ronan intended to go places that he wouldn’t approve of. Ronan never told him where he was going because he was going places that he wouldn’t approve of, and he intended to go through with his initial plan whether Gansey thought it was a good idea or not. But Gansey wasn’t his father, and Ronan had the autonomy to wreck his own life if he wanted to.

Ronan didn’t know where Gansey assumed he went, but the reality was probably worse than whatever he thought. He found it both endearing and infuriating that Gansey always assumed better of him. Endearing, because he was the only one. Infuriating, because he always looked like a kicked puppy upon being reminded that Ronan Lynch was a piece of shit.

At least Ronan’s terrible quality of character never surprised Adam.

The only thing worse than going out when he couldn’t sleep was staying in, where he had to be subjected to the effects of Gansey’s own insomnia. Though he rarely slept, Gansey belonged firmly to the daytime. Rather like Dr. Jekyll’s Mr. Hyde, Gansey’s daytime eccentricities grew unsettling in the shadows. Adam and Ronan shared a number of off-putting qualities that set them alike in a way Gansey initially seemed unalike. They were antisocial, irritable, poor-tempered, unfriendly, and sometimes directly hostile. Though they were each friends with Gansey before each other, these qualities made them a believable pair, and Gansey’s apparent difference set him as their wrangler. But all those terrible qualities they shared crawled under Gansey’s skin too, and at night, it all came out to play. Scholarly prowess became nonsensical obsession. The scientist capable of solving the nuclear problem became the scientist who wanted answers so badly, he was willing to risk nuclear fallout to get them. His friendliness grew puppet-like, like a clown crying through its painted-on smile. Gansey was no different from Adam nor Ronan, and his keen ability to hide it under a friendly expression was unspeakably disturbing. In short, he kind of creeped Ronan out sometimes, especially at night.

Gansey, more than anyone else, should have understood the itch that drove Ronan from Monmouth more nights than not.

Ronan threw a wad of cash onto the table when he grew sick of ignoring Gansey’s worried glances and took off into the night, Adam’s gaze burning a hole in his back and his fake ID burning a hole in his pocket. He solved one hurt with the other and pulled into the grimiest gas station in town, where the cashier hardly looked at his ID before taking his credit card.

Now, flying down the empty highway and pushing 90, he opened the cigarettes with one hand and fished one out. He reached for the lighter and rolled the windows down. The first inhale did nothing for the itch but the second made a dent. He smoked his very first cigarette in Joseph Kavinsky’s bed. He gained two vices that night, and the cigarettes were the least dangerous of the set. The smoking bothered Gansey more than the drinking, and if he found the wrapper, he would know exactly what it came from, because Gansey had a sixth sense when it came to Ronan’s pharmaceutical vices. He was less perceptive when it came to Kavinsky. He could throw the wrapper away if he wanted to appease Gansey, or he could leave it crumpled in the footwell if he felt like punishing him.

Kavinsky was even more difficult to pin down than Ronan was, and the easiest way to find him was driving around Henrietta, drifting from one stoplight to the next. Kavinsky had a talent for smelling trouble. He always ended up in the wrong place at the wrong time. He sent Ronan a text while he was still at Nino’s: You down?

Ronan didn’t answer. Kavinsky wasn’t his friend, and he certainly wasn’t his boyfriend. It wasn’t a genuine question but a taunt. He knew Ronan was down because he always was. There wasn’t a word out there that could entirely encompass what they were to each other, but Ronan came when Kavinsky called. That summed it up pretty neatly.

Before long, Kavinsky rumbled up to the line in the left lane, his passenger-side window rolled down and his hand draped arrogantly behind the headrest. Ronan acknowledged him only for a moment, then he looked back to the road.

In the beginning, they only raced, but not even Ronan could delude himself into thinking it was about racing. The racing was only a substitute for the only thing they dared not poke at. Kavinsky looked at him like he wanted to eat him alive, and that was enough at first, like rubbing cocaine on the inside of his lip. He fought with Gansey and stared at Adam when he was certain he wouldn’t get caught, and then at night, when he couldn’t sleep, he went off to find Kavinsky and let him want him until the itch went away.

Sometimes, after they had each won a satisfactory number of times, they drove through the mountains side-by-side, neither car nosing ahead of the other. Ronan was a good driver because he took risks; Kavinsky was a better driver because he had a certifiable death wish. Flying up the sides of mountains, Kavinsky drove with one narrow wrist propped carelessly atop the wheel, racing toward a tight hairpin turn, his head turned to look Ronan in the eye through their twin open windows and his mouth curled into a vicious smirk. It was a race to see who would turn their wheel first, and Ronan always lost, even if only because Gansey would never understand if he finally did send his car flying through the guardrail. Sometimes Kavinsky waited so long to turn his wheel that Ronan was certain he was going over, but he always made it out of the turn with a wild look in his eyes and his car in one piece. Ronan was sad enough to find it romantic.

The nature of their relationship changed one night in May, when Ronan called his number drunkenly in the middle of the night with the revelation that if he went on as he had been, he would lose his mind within the month. Perhaps it was better to ruin his life than to abandon it entirely, so he let Kavinsky pick him up from Monmouth. They drove up the mountainside in one car rather than two, and when Kavinsky snapped his car around dizzying turns, Ronan closed his eyes against the coming cliffsides. It wasn’t that he trusted Kavinsky to keep them safe but rather that he accepted placing his fate in the hands of chance.

Before long, Kavinsky rumbled up to the line in the left lane, his passenger-side window rolled down and his hand draped arrogantly behind the headrest. Ronan acknowledged him only for a moment, then he looked back to the road.

They drove down the dark, empty Henrietta roads for almost an hour, Kavinsky watching him more than he watched the road. Ronan took a long drag that hurt his throat but eased the ache in his chest, soothing him in the way only worsening a situation could do.

Near the county line, Kavinsky put his foot to the floor and slipped ahead, cutting Ronan off in the right lane and breaking hard. Ronan laughed wildly in answer, swerving into the left land to keep from rear-ending the Evo. Ronan pulled after him into an empty church parking lot.

Kavinsky ripped out of his car before Ronan could get the BMW in park. He grabbed the Jack Daniels from the passenger seat and followed after him into the abandoned Presbyterian church. He unscrewed the cap off the fifth and drank halfway to the top of the black label. Inside the church, vacant except for the pews that survived its gutting, Kavinsky no longer wore his trademark sunglasses, which had been discarded in the narthex.

“What?” he demanded when Ronan glanced around cautiously. “No sex in God’s house?”

“I’m Catholic,” he smirked, “and this is a Presbyterian church. This isn’t my God’s house.”

Kavinsky twisted his fingers into the front of Ronan’s tank with a grin that would cut him if he wasn’t careful. Sometimes he left trysts with Kavinsky with split lips or bruises that looked more like they came from fistfights than from sex. Fist-fighting Kavinsky and fucking him scratched the same itch. He was certainly left no less sore from one than the other.

“I’ll be the priest, you be the altar boy.”

Ronan shoved his shoulder. “Fuck you.”

Under their jokes laid a real violence, something that undercut any weak attempts they made at something that looked like friendship.

Kavinsky didn't like Ronan in his bed. He didn't touch him gently or tell him he loved him or ask what he liked. He fucked him hard and fast in inappropriate—and often illegal—places and told him he was so horny he thought he might die. Kavinsky yanked Ronan's fly open and shoved his jeans down his thighs, not bothering with his shirt more than to push it up his stomach.

"Fuck, K."

He separated raw lips from raw lips. Sometimes when Kavinsky kissed him, it felt like he was placating him; sometimes when he let Kavinsky touch his body, that felt like a placation too. They needed this like air. They also needed air. Kavinsky's hedonism bled through Ronan's skin until he couldn't think of anything other than what he wanted from him. Abstract concepts of lust and attraction fractured into craving the touch of hands on hips, mouths on skin.

He was too rough and said things that made Ronan a little nauseous afterward, but in the moment, Kavinsky breathed heavily against the line of his spine, fucking him against the creaking pews.

“Fuck,” he groaned, ragged. “You feel so fucking good, Lynch.”

Sometimes it was the nicest thing anyone said to him all week. Certainly it was the only time anyone touched him, though that was probably his own fault, given the way he glared when even his friends stood too close.

“Do you think we’re the saddest people on earth?” Ronan asked later, laying across the pew, his head cushioned only the wooden arm. His whole body ached.

Kavinsky looked more sober than Ronan felt, but that was impossible. He chased multi-colored pills with long slugs of Jack, then when he felt like having another go at Ronan, he drew lines of white powder across the wooden pew to wake himself back up. Ronan couldn’t get it up again—too much liquor, probably—but he supposed that was hardly the point. Now they laid opposite one another on pews on either side of the aisle. Ronan closed his eyes so the rafters would stop swinging.

“Speak for yourself,” Kavinsky said.

Ronan took another swig from the bottle. He looked across the aisle and saw the lie. Kavinsky talked a convincing game, but sometimes Ronan looked him in the eyes and saw nothing behind them but hurt. Misery loves company, and Kavinsky was the greatest miser of them all.

Kavinsky was long gone by the time Ronan woke the next morning on the cold wooden pew, like he was no more than a glass bottle left out in the grass after a party. Kavinsky never wanted anything to do with Ronan in the morning. Kavinsky’s hands in the dark were like a shot of tequila, but his hands in the morning were more like waking up still drunk—dizzy and nauseated and far too self-aware. Kavinsky was best when Ronan wouldn’t remember all the details.

Last night’s bottle of Jack laid tipped over on the floor in a depressing puddle of whiskey that was far smaller than it should have been. His head spun, his stomach turned, and the sun that shined through the church windows took a mallet to his temple. Worst of all, Adam Parrish stood over him like an angel at the gates of heaven, looking down at him with his hands on his hips and a frown on his face. A halo of light encircled his messy hair.

Ronan squinted hard against the morning sun.

“The fuck are you doing here?”

“Mother Gansey’s having a cow, Lynch.”

“Yeah.” His voice came out rough. He couldn’t be sure if the cigarettes or Kavinsky’s hand around his throat was to blame. “He does that.”

“You’re lucky I found you first.”

He swung his legs off the pew and pulled himself into a sitting position. “ Fuck .”

“No chance you’re good to drive.”

He was perfectly resigned to sleep it off in the pews until he was sober enough to get himself back to Monmouth, but Adam hauled him to his feet and ushered him out into the parking lot, where the shitbox sat parked next to Ronan’s car at the edge of the treeline behind the building. When he moved too quickly, the blood drained from his face and sweat collected on his upper lip.

“Shit. Hold on.”

Adam turned the keys over in his hands while Ronan threw up into the bushes. Ronan wiped his mouth on the back of his hand and climbed into Adam’s car, where he immediately rolled the windows down and leaned out to maintain his intake of fresh oxygen.

“I cannot express to you,” Adam said, sounding rather like Gansey, “how furious I will be with you if you throw up in my car.”

Ronan waved his hand. “Just drive.”

Adam didn’t say much else. He didn’t chatter incessantly like Gansey did, even when he was in a good mood, but he did talk usually. Because he was kind of a weird guy, he was more apt to mention something he learned in physics than the weather, but it served the same purpose. Ronan even humored him most of the time, proposing absurd hypotheticals in answer to his sober observations. This morning, in place of their usual banter came an aching silence.

According to the time on the dash, it was only eight, and the church was far from town. He wondered how long he and Gansey had been scouring Henrietta looking for him. He wondered if Adam, like Gansey, had imagined him dead in a ditch somewhere, gouged through the chest by one of his own nightmares. He didn't dream, but as it turned out, he didn’t need nightmares to engage in self-destructive behaviors.

His leg bounced. Adam didn't fidget, because Adam never fidgeted. Ronan turned on the radio, then turned it off again.

Adam's composure never failed to astound. He clearly had an opinion—he always had an opinion—but he appeared intent not to offer it. Ronan lacked that same self-control. It was rare that he kept his thoughts to himself, even when sometimes it would be better if he did.

" Alright ," Ronan said finally, driven to insanity by the silence. "Alright, have at it."

Rather than angry, he only looked resigned. "Have at what?"

"Aren't you mad?"

Usually Gansey found him in the mornings. Usually he spent these horrible drives back to Monmouth getting an earful about healthy lifestyle choices and telling someone where he's going, for the love of god .

Adam shrugged.

"Don't you want to yell at me?" Ronan taunted bitterly.

"What do you want from me, Ronan?" Adam sighed, his first name like a knife sliding across his skin. "You want me to tell you that you fucked up? That I think it's really fucking stupid what you're doing? The dangers of drinking like you do, taking Kavinsky's drugs?" Adam glanced briefly at Ronan for the first time in more than ten minutes. "Or do you want me to ask you if it actually makes you feel good to have sex with Kavinsky, or if you're just pissed off at yourself and using this as a method of self-harm that Gansey can't cry about?"

Ronan froze.

He stared at a smudge of bird shit on Adam's window, his heart slamming in his chest.

"I could ask any of those things, but you don't need me to, because you already know all of that. I'm not going to waste my breath because you never listen to me anyway," he said sterilely, still going the speed limit. Those were both lies, because Adam had already wasted his breath, and Ronan listened to every word he ever said. He was too shaken that Adam knew what he really did with Kavinsky to point that out. "Gansey seems to think he can yell until you make better choices, but he's not your parent and neither am I. It's your own business if you want to ruin your life."

He was disappointed in him, Ronan finally realized. Not angry or annoyed, but disappointed. He could hardly look him in the eye. Adam pulled up to the first red light in town.

"How do you know about Kavinsky?" he demanded.

He felt like he might throw up again, this time for an entirely different reason.

"I pay attention," he snapped. "And—" He looked over from the driver's seat, finally meeting Ronan's eyes. They stared for a long few seconds, longer than necessary. Adam blushed, and he looked away. "And Kavinsky told me."

Ronan rubbed his eyes. His head spun.

"Gansey doesn't know.”

He would take Gansey knowing over Adam any day.

"When?"

"A couple months ago. I think he was trying to make me mad."

Ronan looked up. He lacked Adam’s regimented self-control, so he asked, “Did it work?”

Adam thought about it. His grip tightened on the wheel. “He talks about you like he owns you, and for the life of me, I can’t figure out why you let him get away with it.”

The truth was that sometimes, when the night got too dark, Ronan felt utterly worthless, and the only thing he wanted was validating that he was right. Kavinsky was brilliant at making him feel worthless. He couldn’t tell Adam that, because Adam had the opposite problem. Adam walked through life with a steadfast belief that he was worth more than anyone knew, that he had been jipped by his circumstances, that it was his environment that tied him down rather than his character. Ronan, by contrast, had everything going for him, yet he still managed to fuck it up every time. You could only fuck up so many times before you became a fuck-up.

They made the rest of the drive in silence.

He wondered what lewd details Kavinsky threw at Adam like knives. Certainly Adam thought less of him, if he knew even a fraction of what he did with Kavinsky. And Kavinsky was never one for cliffhangers. Ronan didn’t doubt that he picked the worst of the worst to share.

“Hold on,” Adam said quietly, pulling into Monmouth. He put the car in park and turned to look at Ronan, his gaze both shy and firm. “I know you, man. I know you, and you’re killing me. You used to treat yourself like shit because you felt like shit, but now you’ve got him to do it for you. You’ve convinced yourself you like him because you both dream monsters and like drugging yourselves into oblivion, but you still care about things. You have feelings, which I know, because Kavinsky bailed on you, and now he’s probably nursing his hangover with a handful of pills. If you didn’t care, you would be doing that too, but you’re not. You’re here, scared to go inside because you hate that you’ve disappointed Gansey again, and you don’t know how to face him.”

Ronan knew Adam was smart, but sometimes it really knocked him on his ass.

“You’re better than this, Lynch.” He unlocked the car door pointedly. “Go get some fucking sleep. I have to work.”

“Adam,” Ronan said, after getting out of the car, his keys caught between his fingers on the top of the car door, “for the record, I do listen to you.”

Adam offered a small, tired smile, the first of the morning from either of them. He nodded smally. “Okay.”

He didn’t pull out of the gravel lot until Ronan made it up the stairs. Adam was often unimaginably thoughtful in all the ways you might miss if you blinked. He considered knocking, even though he had his key. Sometimes when he went missing, he came back halfway expecting to see all of his shit in piles outside. He could only do this so many times before Gansey gave up on him. Gansey was the most patient and understanding friend he ever had; when Gansey finally walked away for good, he wasn’t sure there would be anyone left.

Ronan found Gansey less angry than he usually was, and his shouting was cut short when Ronan’s turning stomach sent him running to the bathroom to throw up. He had certainly still been drunk in Adam’s car. When he got home, Gansey force-fed him toast and water until he regained his color, but now he had something new to throw up. He felt far too sober, clutching the toilet bowl and emptying his stomach for the second time that morning. Involuntary tears ran down his cheeks.

After washing his mouth out in the sink, he met his own gaze in the mirror and saw, just for a fraction of a moment, not himself but his father looking back at him.

He startled back. “Jesus.”

He shook the thought out of mind and pulled off his clothes to inspect the damage. Twisting in the mirror, he found purple marks from where Kavinsky’s fingers dug into his hipbones, the remains of a hand-shaped welt on the back of his thigh, and bruising from where his chest dug into the back of the pew. Worst of all, he found angry red marks littering his throat from Kavinsky’s mouth that he hadn’t known were there.

He knew Kavinsky well enough to know he left them neither for Ronan’s pleasure nor for his own. He left them because he knew they would be impossible to hide when he inevitably came home to Monmouth. They were proof that Kavinsky owned him. He cursed under his breath. That was why Adam finally confessed to knowing about Kavinsky, and it was probably also why Gansey’s lecturing lacked its usual vigor. It wasn’t just that Kavinsky didn’t care if Gansey saw; for the same reason he told Adam in the first place, he wanted Gansey to see.

He was struck for the first time by the unevenness of their arrangement. Kavinsky went home without a scratch, and Ronan just felt gross and used. In the beginning, Kavinsky’s roughness scratched an itch of its own. Or maybe it appealed to his self-loathing in just the right way. Maybe Adam was right. His dream monsters weren’t punishing him anymore, so he employed Kavinsky to do it instead.

Gansey was sad, Adam was late to work, and Kavinsky was probably launching himself into the clouds with the pills he kept in every drawer in his house, but the only person really punished by Ronan’s decisions was Ronan. He sure as shit didn’t like the way he felt.

He pulled his hood over his head before leaving the bathroom. He made for his bedroom but stopped and looked back. Gansey watched him from the couch, his eyes big and sad.

“I’m sorry if you were worried.”

Gansey looked like he had just seen a unicorn, and Ronan momentarily felt incredibly guilty that his best friend was shocked to hear him apologize.

“Thank you,” Gansey said softly.

Ronan shrugged, went into his room, and didn’t come back out for the rest of the day, even when Adam came over after work. He figured his friends deserved to not worry about him for once.

The morning Adam spent looking for Ronan, he drove around Henrietta for over two hours, lost almost an entire tank of gas, and was ten minutes late to work, where he was berated by his cranky boss, who threatened to fire him if he did it again. Going to class was the only way Ronan knew how to apologize, so he sat behind him in Latin on Monday morning, drawing lewd diagrams on scraps of paper that he folded up and flicked over Adam’s shoulder onto his desk.

Adam didn’t acknowledge them, so Ronan kept making them until Adam’s shoulders shook subtly with silent laughter. He liked to act all high and mighty, but he was a degenerate just like Ronan, and he thought Ronan was funny, even if he rarely let it show. On their way out of class, Adam made a show of throwing the notes away, but Ronan had been paying enough attention to know he had ten more in his left pocket that Adam didn’t think he knew about.

The thing was, in the light of day, Ronan knew that Kavinsky wasn’t good for him, but that wasn’t always enough. An alcoholic could swear they wouldn’t drink that night and mean it when they said they didn’t want to, but they would still put on a coat at nine and go walking shamefully to the grocery for a bottle of wine. Ronan didn’t grow immediately immune to Kavinsky’s lure just because he understood it wasn’t good for him. When he hurt—when he wanted to keep hurting—it was as easy as anything to go running back to him.

He stayed away from Kavinsky for three weeks, longer than he had gone in ages, and he tried not to drink so much. Harder substances were a vice he only engaged with around Kavinsky, so keeping away from Kavinsky kept him clean in more ways than one. One night, when he experienced a restlessness that would have before sent him onto the streets of Henrietta in search of an outlet, he instead put on a horror movie in the living room and scared the shit out of Gansey to blow off steam.

And then Declan stuck his nose where it didn’t belong.

Now that Ronan was eighteen, he got to make his own choices. The first and easiest of those choices was telling his brother that he wasn’t going back to Aglionby. Declan, expectedly, was enraged. He was so enraged that he made a scene at lunch after church, despite regularly chastising Ronan for the exact same thing. They argued the whole way through lunch, breaking only to shovel food into their mouths and thank the waitress, then they argued the whole way back to Monmouth. Declan made Matthew wait in the car and followed Ronan into the building.

It ended the way these arguments used to. They were doing better these days, partly because Declan was in DC and not right under Ronan’s feet all the time. The longer Ronan went without a nightmare incident, the less Declan bothered him. This time, they resorted to old patterns. Ronan taunted him too far, and Declan came back swinging.

Ronan’s nose had already poured blood onto the carpet by the time Gansey managed to order them apart. Before Declan’s Volvo had even made it all the way back out onto the main road, Ronan had grabbed his keys from the kitchen counter, stormed out of Monmouth, and ripped out of the lot in the BMW.

He didn’t know where he was going until he was already halfway there, flying down the highway pushing 90. Gansey didn’t like when he drove like this, and Adam hated it. He tried to slow down during the day at least, but if he got pulled over, it would be neither the first time nor the last.

Kavinsky bounded down the front steps, arms thrown wide. He wore only a pair of white sweatpants and a gold chain hanging between the stark cliffs of his collarbones. When the winter crept upon Henrietta, every sensible person within town limits and quite a few of the unsensible ones too bundled in knits and wool to fight off the cold winds that whipped through the valley, but not even the biological threat of hypothermia could make Joseph Kavinsky care.

“Where the fuck have you been, Lynch? I’ve been calling.”

That wasn’t true. He had been texting rather incessantly, though at least half of his messages were lewd images. There were a few videos too, but Ronan had enough pride not to watch them.

“You fucking told Parrish, asswipe,” he snapped, with twice the vitriol he normally worked up for Kavinsky.

“Relax, princess.” His thin mouth twisted into a cruel grin, revealing rows of perfectly white, chemically brightened teeth. “Just had to make sure your little girlfriend wasn’t getting any ideas. Theory—” He pointed up, like a lightbulb might appear over his head. “If you’re Gansey’s little bitch, and Trailer Park’s your little bitch, then what the fuck does that make Trailer Park to Gansey? Dogshit under his shoe? Or is it more of an infinite-stairs situation? I bet Dick would bend over for—”

“Watch your fucking mouth,” Ronan spit.

“I’m good, thanks,” Kavinsky shrugged. “Get off my lawn if you don’t like it.”

“Maybe I will.”

Kavinsky blinked pointedly. “Great. What are you waiting for?”

Ronan stared for a long moment.

Niall Lynch taught his sons to throw a punch that would land, but he also taught them how to a spot a man who would swing. Kavinsky stood like a boxer in the corner of a ring. Maybe, Ronan realized for the first time in his life, if he didn’t want to end up facedown on the canvas, all he had to do was step out of the ring. Even more profoundly, he realized maybe he didn’t want to throw punches at all.

He turned around and went back to his car.

“Where the fuck are you going?”

Ronan got back into his car. His hands shook. He would have gone along with anything Kavinsky liked if he had stayed, he realized. Kavinsky asked him to go, so he went. God. What did he want? What the fuck did he want? The problem was, he only wanted Adam. That was all. To want only one thing might have made him a simple man, had Adam not been the most all-encompassing, cosmically complex being on the planet. Ronan was in fact the greediest fucker who ever lived, and sometimes he didn’t know how to breathe. If you put all your eggs in one basket but the basket didn’t belong in your hands, it didn’t really matter what happened after that, because you were shit out of eggs.

He slammed the heels of his hands against the steering wheel, and when he looked back up again, Kavinsky was gone, disappeared into the gaping front doors. Of course he was gone. To Kavinsky, if Ronan wasn’t bending over or breaking his nose, it didn’t matter what else he had to say. In a way, Ronan was to Kavinsky the same as Kavinsky was to Ronan. The difference was that Ronan wished things were different.

If he couldn’t let Kavinsky take him apart to pieces, maybe a good, old-fashioned speeding ticket would give him the rush he was looking for. Maybe he would wait an extra second to pull over. Maybe he would speed pass the first turnaround and only stop at the second, just so the officer might yell.

He had just rounded 110 when his phone vibrated on the seat and didn’t stop. He let the call go to voicemail, but it rang again, which wasn’t like Declan, who liked leaving angry voicemails. He looked over and saw Adam’s name.

He picked up the call. “What?”

“Ronan?” Adam said, like he was surprised he picked up at all.

Somehow, in recent months, Adam had joined that shortlist, that excluded even Gansey, of people whose calls he answered. In theory. This was the first time he actually did it.

“Obviously,” he answered, irritated for a vast number of reasons, only a few of them being Adam.

“Look, I’m really sorry to do this, but I just— Well, okay so—”

“What?”

“Can you come pick me up?”

“Yeah,” Ronan answered immediately. “Where are you?”

“Work,” he answered. Ronan knew which job he was working today, because he always knew. “At the—”

“Yeah, I know, at the factory.”

He hung up without saying goodbye.

He slowed down when it started to rain, because Adam was waiting on him, and he couldn’t pick him up if he wrapped the BMW around a tree. The rain picked up, and within three miles, it was coming down so hard that Ronan actually drove the speed limit. Impossibly, conditions only worsened from there.

He pulled into the parking lot at the factory to find it empty except for Adam, sitting on the curb in the rain. He was soaked straight through, shivering with his arms around himself. He jumped to his feet when he saw Ronan pull into the lot. As little as Ronan wanted to leave his dry, warm car in the rain, he jumped out of the car, almost involuntarily. Thunder rumbled distantly.

“Parrish, what the hell? Get in the car.”

He cranked up the heat all the way and dug around in the backseat until he found his old sweatshirt that read Aglionby Tennis across the front in block letters to hand to Adam, who looked at it like a foreign thing in his hands. When he looked back up, it struck Ronan that his eyes were the exact same color as the darkening blue sky overhead.

Ronan didn’t have anything to say that could justify his staring, so he glued his eyes forward and pulled the car out of the lot. Rather than just pulling the sweatshirt over his wet clothes, Adam stripped his soaked t-shirt over his head to replace. Ronan resolved not to look but did anyway. Adam was usually shy to undress. Gansey was Ronan’s best friend but Adam was his favorite, which he supposed was a childish distinction to make, but it was true nonetheless. And even so, the most he had ever seen of him was a flash of stomach when he pulled a sweater over his head or a pale inner thigh when he sat. His ever-slouched posture and ill-fitting clothes concealed broad shoulders and definition not even Dream-Adams had. Ronan looked away, his face hot.

“I usually catch a ride back into town with a guy I work with, but he didn’t show up today,” Adam said quietly, holding his hands up to the vents to warm them.

It was easy to convince him to come dry off at Monmouth, where they had central heating, hot water, and a dryer. He took a long shower and redressed in clothes he borrowed from Ronan, his own thumping around in the dryer. They had the place to themselves. Gansey was out with Blue. Ronan didn’t know if Adam knew about that, but if he knew about Kavinsky, then surely he could also deduce what the looks their friends shared meant. Ronan pulled Gansey’s blanket off the end of his bed to throw over Adam’s shoulders on the couch, where he still hadn’t entirely stopped shaking from the cold.

Ronan perched on the opposite end of the couch.

“Where were you?”

“Huh?”

“Before you came to get me.”

“What’s that supposed to mean?”

“It took you thirty minutes, but the factory’s only ten from Monmouth.”

Ronan huffed. “Took me a while to get out of bed.”

Adam blinked, unimpressed. He looked at him like he knew the truth, which was that he would have bolted out the door the second he knew Adam needed something from him. “Ronan.”

“I was out at Kavinsky’s,” he confessed, picking at his thumbnail.

Adam nodded slowly. “Oh.”

“Not like that,” he said, his face hot. “I’m trying not to do that anymore.”

After his shower, Adam pushed his wet hair back away from his face, but now as it dried, dusty locks fell over his forehead. His cheeks were still pink, and his hands rested in his lap, folded around a mug of hot tea. Ronan had never wanted Kavinsky half so bad as he wanted Adam just then, with the masculine set of his shoulders and the way his chest rose and fell under borrowed clothes. Ronan had never been jealous of a sweatshirt before that exact moment.

Adam tilted his head. “Why not?”

“I think maybe you were right,” he answered, fidgeting where he sat. “It’s not something I should be doing.”

Adam met Ronan’s eyes, assessing him with nearly academic precision. Ronan hated himself a little for letting the conversation drift in this direction. He didn’t want Adam thinking about his poisonous, self-destructive sexual arrangement with Joseph Kavinsky, and he certainly didn’t want him talking about it.

“Why do you like Kavinsky?”

He shrugged and offered a smile he hoped might come off as wry and charming but, based on the look that crossed Adam’s face, was rather pathetic. “Because he’s there.”

Adam frowned. “And today?”

“Today I told Declan I’m not going back to Aglionby.” If the news surprised him, it didn’t show on his face. “Shockingly, he’s not thrilled that I’m dropping out of school.”

Adam snorted. “I would imagine not.”

Recently, Ronan found himself occasionally caught between a new, unfamiliar urge to tell Adam things and a debilitating dread that he might drive him away if he was too honest. “I drove out to Kavinsky’s, realized it was dumb as hell, and turned back.”

“Good,” Adam said firmly. “He’s a piece of shit.”

Ronan used curse words like punctuation, but when Adam said them, he really meant them. It was wildly alluring in a way that any therapist would probably find concerning.

“Yeah.”

“You know, you could always just date someone who actually likes you.”

Ronan stared, but Adam didn’t back down like he used to. Maybe he finally figured out that he, like Gansey, was one of the few people who could get away with disregarding his boundaries. Or maybe he had only realized that, despite Ronan’s temper, there was nothing he could do to permanently offend him.

“I never dated Kavinsky.”

Adam blushed but still didn’t falter. “You know what I meant.”

Ronan did, this time, falter. “I’m good, Parrish. And if I change my mind, there’s always farmersonly.com.”

Adam choked on a laugh. He had a hideous laugh, like he wasn’t well-practiced in using it, like it surprised every time. It sounded less like an expression of joy and more like a cough poorly concealed. When Adam laughed, it sounded involuntary.

Ronan pushed up from the couch and wandered toward the kitchen, where he popped open a Corona from the fridge.

He tried to imagine how someone like him might go about getting a date and came up empty. He didn’t want a date. Sometimes he lost himself in daydreams of what it might be like if he wasn’t alone, but that was because he wanted Adam, not because he wanted someone . People liked him better before his dad died. He was never senselessly popular in that way that Gansey was, but he had friends. He made positive first impressions with people who had the right sense of humor. He got asked on dates, and sometimes he went on them. Even the people who didn’t like him didn’t find it entirely inconceivable that he could have friends. If Adam had met him back then, he wouldn’t have had to warm up to him. He would have liked him straightaway. Maybe the person he used to be was someone Adam might have wanted to date.

Adam pulled the blanket tighter around his shoulders, and neither of them said any more on the matter.

Adam’s clothes finished drying in the first of the three hours they spent playing Mario Kart on the couch at Monmouth, but he didn’t rush to change back into them, so Ronan opened a second beer. When six rolled around, he had his third in his hand, maintaining a careful buzz rather than throwing himself into the abyss like he would have done had Adam not been around. Adam redressed in Ronan’s room. He returned to the main part of Monmouth in a white t-shirt and his old blue jeans, where he sat to pull on an old pair of white Chuck Taylors to suggest Nino’s. Ronan didn’t invite Gansey, and Adam didn’t tell him to, so they got in the BMW together, Adam behind the wheel.

In many of the dreams Ronan had about Adam—the kind that had him waking up sweating and embarrassed—Adam sat in the driver’s seat of the BMW, his skilled hand working the clutch with ease. He drove the speed limit, but after almost a year of practicing, he shifted naturally enough that Ronan wondered if he could beat him in a street race. At the same time, he despised the thought of Adam going over 80 miles an hour, whether it be in his own car or in Ronan’s. Accidents became fatal at those speeds, and he couldn’t stomach even the thought of him taking a turn too fast and flying through the guardrail. He wondered, fleetingly, if that was what Gansey felt when his face turned ghost-white in the passenger seat and he ordered Ronan to slow down.

At Nino’s, they settled into their usual booth, visually thrown off-balance by Gansey’s absence. They spent time alone without him often enough; in fact, Adam seemed to spend more time alone with Ronan than with Gansey.  But where Gansey had once been the mediating force between them, he had recently become a grounding one, tying Ronan to reality, and without him, he didn’t entirely know what to do.

Ronan pretended he wanted to change their usual order and try a Hawaiian, and Adam kicked his ankle under the table in retaliation. But then their ankles just barely rested together under the table. Ronan painted a bored expression across his face, just in case Adam checked for a reaction. Blue circled around to their table, first eyeing them from afar and pointedly taking her time before coming to take their drink orders.

“Adam,” she greeted pleasantly. She jostled Ronan’s shoulder. “Snake.”

“Maggot,” he returned.

Adam ordered a Coke, and Ronan ordered a Corona.

“You mean a water?” she said. “Sure.”

Adam snorted amusedly.

“No Gansey today?” she asked when she brought their drinks around, like she had expected him to materialize in the past ten minutes.

“No,” Ronan answered, “but don’t worry, we left a bone in his crate in case he gets bored.”

She rolled her eyes. “Funny.”

“Thanks,” he grinned, satisfied.

Neither Ronan nor Adam had addressed the fact that they were having dinner alone, which wouldn’t have been weird except they had never done it before. They split a pizza, and without Gansey’s constant chattering, they fell into an easy, companionable silence. With Adam, Ronan could make mean jokes and tear his napkin to shreds and talk about his bird, and in turn, Adam complained and let his accent drawl over long vowels and made complex, layered quips, often in Latin.

Sometimes, in moments like these, when Ronan was happiest, he suddenly became very, very sad for reasons he couldn’t entirely put into words. It struck him out of nowhere, like Sunday nights when he was a kid, watching movies with his brothers and suddenly remembering that he had school in the morning. He looked at Adam, and reality flooded back.

He had Kavinsky but didn’t want him. He wanted Adam but didn’t have him. The worst part was that he had Adam so close, in so many ways. Perhaps the two least companionable people on the planet somehow found one another easy to be around, which was probably a miracle of some kind, but those last inches between them, countable on one hand, were the hardest to close. Maybe impossible.

The complication was that sometimes, it almost seemed like it was possible. Most of the time, Adam was a fortress, his true feelings delicately concealed. His careful distance made it easy for Ronan to convince himself that he would never have a real chance with him, but just when he started to move on—just when it got a little easier to be around him and breathe normally—he caught Adam looking for just a moment too long. Sometimes Adam touched him in ways that were entirely platonic in nature but unusual for him. Adam’s ankle, resting alongside Ronan’s under the table, for instance. He wouldn’t touch Gansey like that, casually but intentionally. And in moments like that, Ronan was flooded with terrible, cruel hope.

One moment he understood Adam Parrish perfectly, then in the next moment, he didn’t understand him at all.

Ronan was fine to drive by the time they finished their pizza and paid their tab. He was probably fine to drive to Nino’s in the first place, but he had two drinks before they left, and that wasn’t the kind of shit he was willing to risk with Adam in the car.

In the parking lot, Ronan flipped his keys into the air and caught them again. Adam stepped in stride with him, his hands in his pockets and their shoulders bumping, still laughing about something Blue said when a white car ripped through the parking lot, swinging maniacally behind the BMW, effectively boxing him in.

“Are you kidding me?” Ronan hissed.

Kavinsky tore out of his car, leaving the door gaping open.

“Where the fuck have you been, Lynch?” he demanded cruelly, the dark circles under his eyes visible even under his sunglasses. “Let me guess. Letting Trailer Trash get it in? Question. Do you let Dick Gansey watch, or does—”

“Shut your fucking mouth, K. Get in your car and leave me the fuck alone.”

Kavinsky ripped his sunglasses from his face and threw them to the ground. It didn’t matter that the lenses were probably scratched beyond reasonable use; he could just dream a replica. He probably had another pair in his car, for that matter. Ronan looked him in the eyes and found them blown, both from the drugs and from an anger he hadn’t seen him wear before. This wasn’t his usual mocking. There was something dangerous in his words tonight, like a razor baked into coffee cake.

He turned on Adam. “Do you make him beg for it? He’d do it, you know? He fucking loves to beg for it.”

Ronan’s stomach plummeted. He knew anger like an old, familiar friend, but for the first time in a long time, the feeling Kavinsky evoked in him was not anger but shame. Adam stepped forward, effectively placing himself between Ronan and Kavinsky.

“Go home,” Adam said lowly, his expression unchanged and his drawl creeping into his words.

Kavinsky scoffed. “Whatever, man.” He shoved Ronan’s chest. “Come back to my place when you get bored of the trailer park, Lynch.”

“We’re done, K.”

“On second thought,” he continued, like he hadn’t heard him, “maybe you’ll come back when the trailer park gets sick of you.” He shrugged. “Either way. It’s you and me, princess. You fucking know it as well as I do.”

Kavinsky ducked into his car and sped off, crunching his sunglasses under the tire.

Sickened by the silence that followed, Ronan threw himself into the driver’s seat of his car and pressed the heels of his hands to his eyes. His hands shook, which shouldn’t have surprised him like it did, because the rest of his body shook too.

“Sorry,” Ronan mumbled when Adam got in the car. “Sorry, man. You shouldn’t have to hear—”

Adam’s fingers closed around his forearm, pulling it away from his face, and Ronan lost his train of thought. His thumb pressed into the inside of his wrist.

He looked more serious than Ronan had ever seen him, which meant something, because Adam Parrish always looked serious.

“Don’t talk to him anymore, Ronan,” he said, eyes bluer than they had ever been. “Please.”

“Okay,” Ronan agreed, taken aback. He nodded. “Okay. I promise.”

Ronan drove him back to St. Agnes in silence.

“Go home, Ronan,” he pleaded, like he knew where the restlessness always took him.

He nodded. “I will.”

Adam looked relieved, and the silver lining to this horrible, fucked-up night was that at least Adam seemed to still trust that he wouldn’t lie to him. Just as Adam shut the passenger-side door and turned toward the church, Ronan threw open his own door and stood, meeting his eyes over the roof.

“Hey,” he said quietly, like the wind might carry his secrets out of Henrietta if it caught them.

Adam’s blond, boyish brows pulled together. “What is it?”

Ronan felt like he was going to cry for one million different reasons, most of which had been compounding long before he knew that a person like Adam Parrish was even possible, let alone living within county limits.

“You would’ve liked me before my dad died.”

Adam’s jaw firmed stubbornly. “I like you now.”

“You like me despite the fact that I’m an asshole, and probably against your better judgment. Back then, you just would have liked me.” He didn’t know why it mattered that Adam knew, but it did. He swallowed around a lump in his throat. “Before my dad was dead, before I started drinking, before Kavinsky.”

Adam stared at him for a long time, the cold wind biting their cheeks.

“Ronan, I’m not sure you would have liked me back then.”

But that wasn’t true. That wasn’t true at all. There was no version of Ronan, innocent or ruined, that wouldn’t like Adam. Liking Kavinsky was a turbulent thing, deeply depending on his circumstances, but his opinion of Adam was nestled into the marrow of his bones. Ronan liked the version of himself who liked Adam. He trusted himself when he trusted Adam.

He only kept Corona at Monmouth anymore because he was trying to do better, but he felt the kind of restless that made him want Kavinsky to fuck him over the hood of the Evo in an abandoned parking lot, so he chose one vice over the other and stopped at the ABC store on his way back to Monmouth. He bought a fifth of Jack, then he drove home, where he sat in the dark car in the gravel lot for an hour. He turned the music up loud and drank from the bottle, washing it down with what was left of Adam’s warm Coke in the right-hand cupholder.

He was a little drunk and walking the narrow path to hammered when he stumbled in through the front door, holding onto the doorframe to kick his shoes off. He slipped into his room before Gansey could emerge and yell at him. This particular habit might have been ugly, but it was a whole lot prettier than his Kavinsky habit, which ended in far more bruises.

It was irrational that Kavinsky’s behavior made him want to go back to him, but it was also irrational that hangovers made him want to drink again. And going back to Kavinsky led to all other kinds of vices, like the lines of coke Kavinsky dress across the hood of the car, white on white. Like Kavinsky, pushing his head down and wiping the stray powder from under his nose. Sometimes, when Ronan drank before he set after the harder substances, he was just sad enough that he could convince himself it was romantic. But after he wiped his nose, Kavinsky always put his finger in his mouth to gum the leftover powder, because to Kavinsky, Ronan never meant anything more than what he could take from him.

Every person on the fucking planet wanted too much from him, except Adam Parrish, who didn’t want enough from him.

When he felt this way, he used to get into brawls with Declan. While Declan still took a crack at his jaw every now and then, he wasn’t hitting back anymore. After he quit that, he started letting Kavinsky fuck him until he looked like he had been in a brawl, but he was trying not to do that either. All that was left, then, was the only vice left. The first vice, in a sense. The night his dad died, he drank until he passed out and then woke up and grabbed the bottle again. It didn’t leave his line of sight for three days.

Tonight, he drank until he couldn’t see straight, and then he wandered out into the main part of the apartment, the bottle still dangling from his hand and his feet stumbling underneath him. He banged his shoulder into the doorframe but didn’t really feel it.

“Jesus, Ronan,” Gansey said, standing, his reading immediately forgotten. “Are you drunk?”

Ronan grinned and took another swig from the bottle.

“No.” He laughed at his own joke, but Gansey didn’t. Maybe Gansey was the most disappointed in him, he realized just then, because he did know him before his dad died, and he knew he could be better. Maybe that was why Declan was so angry all the time. Or maybe Declan just took the shit out of seeing him crash and burn. Some days, it felt like it could go either way. “I’m only Irish.”

“Irish and drunk,” Gansey retorted, his fists clenching.

“Rather redundant, huh?”

Gansey sighed. “Come on.”

“Whatever.”

In the kitchen, Gansey mixed two eggs in a bowl, then poured them into a frying pan. “Want to tell me what happened?”

“Parrish, then Kavinsky,” Ronan answered. “Then Parrish again.”

“I’ll be honest,” he said, dicing vegetables on the cutting board Adam made them buy, “I’m rather inclined to take Adam’s side here.”

“I’d be offended if you didn’t.”

“What’d he do?”

Ronan fell drunkenly into a barstool, barely keeping his balance. “God, he fucking existed, man.”

Gansey spooned the vegetables into the pan. “What does that mean?”

Ronan dropped his head into his arms. “He would have liked me before my dad died.”

After a troubling length of silence, he looked up to find Gansey watching him with an expression he had never seen on him before, his brows pulled together.

The next morning, Gansey sat on the edge of Ronan’s bed, perched like he wasn’t certain if he was welcome. Ronan rolled over, pressing his face into his pillows. Gansey offered a bottle of Advil and a bottle of water.

“Fuck off, Gans, it’s fucking early.”

“Stop.” Gansey shook his shoulder. “We need to talk.”

Ronan twisted around in the sheets. He wasn’t wearing boxers, but he was sure that the only thing more embarrassing than Gansey not knowing that was having to tell him so. 

“Last night you said—”

Ronan groaned into his pillow. “If I was too drunk to remember it, it doesn’t count.”

And he didn’t remember.

Gansey breathed deeply. “Stop it. Last night, you said Adam would have liked you if he knew you before your dad—”

“He would have,” he grumbled.

Gansey spoke slowly and neatly, pressing the weight of every ounce of sincerity he possessed behind his words. Ronan was too tired and hungover to tell him to shove off, so he listened begrudgingly. 

“I don’t feel obligated to be your friend, Ronan,” he said quietly, hands folded in his lap. “I became your friend before your dad died because I liked you, and I stayed your friend after because I still liked you. I know sometimes Declan makes you feel otherwise, but you didn’t become a different person. You’re just hurting. You’re allowed. I don’t know what goes on in Adam’s head any more than you do, but if I had to guess why he likes you, it’s because there haven’t been many people in his life he could really depend on.”

“Yeah,” Ronan said bitterly, rubbing his eyes with the backs of his thumbs. “Pretty low bar.”

“No,” Gansey disagreed. “I don’t think it is.”

Later, after Ronan had showered off and choked down half a carton of orange juice, he found Gansey hunched over a book on the floor in the middle of his cardboard Henrietta. Arguing with Declan made his blood boil, but more often than not, arguing with Gansey left him with a bowling ball of guilt in his stomach. Making Gansey sad felt rather like kicking a puppy.

“Sorry if I’ve been a dick,” he said, not meeting his eyes, just in case he found pity in them. “Just going through some shit.”

“Are you and Adam arguing again?” he asked diplomatically.

“No,” he answered. “He’s worried about me.”

“He’s not the only one.”

Ronan shrugged.

He knew Adam wasn’t the only one. It seemed like everyone was worried about him these days, but Adam was the only one who knew the full extent of things to be worried about. Sometimes he wished Gansey would figure it out on his own so he wouldn’t have to tell him.

Ronan passed his classes, then promptly withdrew from Aglionby. He would have left the day he turned eighteen, had it not mattered so much to Gansey that he finished the semester. He didn’t leave with a degree, but he left with the knowledge that Gansey knew he could finish something if he tried.

Declan was so angry that he stopped calling him, an entirely uncharted level of rage. All of the belongings he kept at Monmouth could have fit in the back of the BMW, but Gansey insisted on putting two cardboard boxes in the passenger seat of the Pig and following him all the way out to Singer’s Falls to help him move.

Ronan got out of the car at the Barns, the gravel crunching under his boots and his hands shaking in his pockets. He held the house key so tight, the teeth pressed indents into his palm. The house looked exactly as he remembered. He wondered if it would still recognize him.

The inside looked like a photograph, like a moment frozen in time. Once full of loud children and Niall Lynch, their raucous ringleader, it was now just Ronan, a foot taller and a foot angrier but here nonetheless. For today, that was enough.

Gansey helped him bring his boxes inside. Everything in his closet went into the back of the Pig to go to Goodwill. None of it would fit anymore. He didn’t take the time to look through the stacks of clothes, because he knew it would remind him of things he couldn’t bear to remember. The light blue button-down would make him think of the time Declan snuck a box of Oreos into church under his sweater. He only wore the jeans with the holes in the knees to help his dad mend the fences, because his mom didn’t think they were proper for wearing out in public. He begged for the sneakers for months but never got to wear them to school because his dad died two days after they came in the mail. The new clothes, all in shades of white, gray, and black, went in their place, and he tried to forgive himself for the difference.

Here, his old life remained, like his younger self could at any second walk in the door, throw himself onto the bed, and crack open a soda. Ronan couldn’t keep waiting for the person he used to be to return; he suspected he would be waiting a lifetime. So he put his black clothes in the gaping closet and stripped the walls of bands he didn’t listen to anymore. He moved Chainsaw into the kitchen and watched her peck worms from the ground in the yard.

While Gansey busied himself in the attic, Ronan locked his parents’ bedroom and dropped the key in the back of a kitchen drawer. Someday he would have the strength to clear it out, but not today. Today, he was tired.

Gansey lingered late into the afternoon, inventing chores that had to be done before he left. Ronan had to force him to leave, knowing he would sleep on the couch for the next week if he let him.

“It’s okay, Gans,” Ronan finally said, palming his shoulder. “I’ll be fine. This is a good thing.”

“I know.” He nodded decisively, pulling on his coat at the door. He offered a smile far kinder than anything Ronan deserved, considering the way he had treated him in the past year. “I’m glad you’re back, but I’ll miss you around Monmouth.”

“Gross, Dick,” he said pleasantly. “Get the fuck out of here before it gets dark.”

“Okay,” he agreed, ducking his head. “See you soon, buddy, okay?”

“Okay,” Ronan answered softly.

He stood out on the porch to wave just before the Pig disappeared over the farthest hill he could see. He didn’t know if Gansey thought to look back, but he hoped he did.

It was quieter in the house than he remembered it, so he found an old radio in Matthew’s room and turned it on. He made the box of macaroni Gansey left behind on the stove. He didn’t cry when he found the pot his mom always used for soup. He wanted to, but if he cried every time something reminded him of his parents, his cheeks would never dry. He ate his dinner straight out of a tupperware container to save a dish, then he took a second beer out of the fridge, more a habit than a decision.

He looked at the bottle in his hand for a long minute.

Things were supposed to be different here, he decided, so he put it back in the fridge unopened and tucked himself into the couch in the living room with a thick knit blanket that his mom used to wrap him in when he was sick. He pulled his knees to his chest.

When the silence started closing in around him like a dream monster, he picked up his phone and called Adam.

He answered on the second ring. “Ronan,” he said, a little out of breath, like he dove after his phone when it rang. “Are you okay? What’s wrong?”

“Relax, Parrish,” he grinned. “Just wanted to chat.”

“You just wanted to—” He could nearly hear Adam’s jaw clench and unclench over the phone. “I don’t understand. Did something happen?”

“I’m back at the Barns,” Ronan said, tearing his thumbnail.

“Right,” Adam said cautiously, like he wasn’t yet convinced that Ronan didn’t have a ransom demand and the barrel of a gun pressed to his temple. “That was today.”

“Yeah. Thought maybe you’d wanna come see. You know, next time you’re not working, or—”

“I don’t work until two tomorrow. Unless, I mean— Unless you want time to settle in, or—”

“Come whenever you want,” Ronan said, because this was his house, and he could decide things like that.

Ronan had forgotten what it was like to wake up without a hangover, but he had also forgotten what it was like to wake up at five with the sun shining through the windows and a mind that wouldn’t stop racing. Drinking himself into a stupor every night guaranteed he slept through until morning. Sometimes risking drunken dream monsters was worth dodging his own thoughts, but he was glad not to be hungover when he heard the knocking at his door at seven.

He found Adam Parrish standing on his front porch, dressed in a worn t-shirt and old jeans. The corner of his mouth lifted into a smile. “Hi.”

“Come on, Parrish,” he said, yanking him into the house, “we’re burning daylight.”

Ronan watched Adam explore the kitchen, glancing in cupboards and opening drawers. In the living room, he made Adam try each of the couches and armchairs so he would know which ones were better than ones, because he didn’t want him to make the wrong choice when the rest of their friends came to visit. Adam didn’t comment on the state of his childhood bedroom, far emptier than it was when he first arrived the day before. There was no way Adam could know he used to have a Kurt Cobain poster on the wall over his bed, but no one guessed things about Ronan so reliably as he did. Adam, after tossing a playful grin over his shoulder, slipped his fingers over rows of hung clothing in the closet, stopping on the Aglionby Tennis sweatshirt he once borrowed. He pulled it off the hanger and slipped it over his head.

“Did I say you could wear that?” Ronan snapped.

Adam shrugged. “Was cold.”

He then smirked, like he knew Ronan wouldn’t say another word on the matter. If he lacked resolve, he might have run to turn the thermostat up, except he wasn’t a complete nutcase, and he also knew Adam was teasing. In his teasing, Adam effectively poked delicately at their shared knowledge that Ronan would race to meet any of Adam’s needs, no matter how small.

Ronan showed him every room in the hall except for his parents’ bedroom and let him infer what lay behind the last white door. It felt rather like opening up his own chest and letting him look in when Adam stopped in front of it and laid his palm against the wood.

He showed him the barns, the pond where he and Declan used to try to catch fish with their bare hands, and the best climbing trees. Adam left after they shared the leftover macaroni from the fridge. Ronan didn’t eat as much as he otherwise would have, because Adam had a long shift ahead of him and his work clothes in the car, whereas Ronan could get in the BMW and drive to Nino’s to pick up a pizza that would last him the rest of the day, which was precisely what he did.

Adam’s visits became regular things. He drove out to the Barns every Saturday morning without fail.

Ronan filled the days Adam did not visit with tasks. He bought a heavy coat from the Tractor Supply and spent most of his time outside, restoring the property to what it once was. Many of the barns had fallen into disrepair in the Lynch family’s absence. Ronan mended the trusses when he could and razed structures when he couldn’t. Entire sections of fenceline had come down in summer thunderstorms and winter snowstorms that needed to be replaced before he could fill his pastures again.

After three weeks, he went to meet a neighbor who had been using the back half-acre of his property to let her cattle graze. Miss Sandy was a middle-aged woman with gray braids and a horse named Buttercup. She apologized profusely, saying she hadn’t seen anyone at the house in years and didn’t think they would mind. He told her she could use the back five if she liked, in exchange for milk and a carton of eggs. He had hundreds of them. Five didn’t make any difference. She laughed and said she would have given him the milk and eggs anyway.

He found Miss Sandy entirely tolerable. Neighbors never used to stop by the Barns, because Niall Lynch didn’t like visitors. But unlike the adults Ronan had been accustomed to—Aglionby teachers, lawyers, priests, police officers—she didn’t demand anything from Ronan. She stopped by occasionally to drop off eggs or ask for a cup of sugar, and sometimes he told her how his brothers were doing when she asked.

Declan still hadn’t made it to the Barns, either in protest of his decision to leave Aglionby or because it was hard for him to come back here. This place meant something different to Ronan than it did to Declan. To Ronan, it was perfect solace, but to Declan, these hills were fraught with grief and insecurity. He understood why Declan might not want to come back here. He even understood why Declan might be angry with him. Coming home had a way of making things clearer. It eased pains that had followed him for months. He still knew in his bones that he was right to leave Aglionby. His stance had not changed but his anger had subsided. He saw his brothers every Sunday. Ronan and Declan’s interactions were more civil than they had been in a long time, even though they couldn’t yet talk about the Barns without devolving into argument. 

Ronan cooked. At Monmouth, he cooked to satisfy hunger, but at the Barns, he cooked to pass time. He bought produce from the farmer’s market in town and spent long hours over the stovetop, experimenting with spices. Gansey bought him a cookbook that he would never admit to actually using. He started cooking to distract himself from the drink he wanted but wouldn’t let him have. The first time he liked cooking for the sake of cooking was the first time he made a chicken curry for Adam. Adam took slow, assessing bits, then his mouth turned up into a small smile, eyes crinkling. He met Ronan’s waiting gaze like the dish was a secret only they shared.

Sometimes Adam woke Ronan up on Saturday mornings when he came in through the front door without knocking.

“Come on, Lynch,” he said on those mornings, leaning against the doorway to his bedroom. “Burning daylight.”

They weren’t burning daylight. They never were. They always had more than enough time to fry a few eggs and eat them at the table, then they wandered out into the fields whenever they felt like it.

Other times, Ronan was already awake when the shitbox rumbled up the drive, out in the fields doing chores, feeding his animals. Adam always slipped seamlessly into his routines, bumping his shoulder in greeting and pressing a mug of hot coffee from the house into his hands. He liked to perch on the fence, knees bent under him to keep balance. Ronan looked at him sparingly, because he blended into the landscape like he was meant to be here, like he was out of place in every single place in the world but the Barns, with navy mountains in the distance and red clay under their feet.

By the end of January, Ronan had a herd of goats. He brought home two early in the year, bottle-babies that followed him around like baby ducklings. Adam’s eyes lit up the first time he saw them, so now he had twenty. He also had two milk cows, which Miss Sandy taught him how to look after. They were sweet and lazy, wandering the pastures all day and coming back in at night. Adam was cautious around them in the beginning, but not anymore.

Adam insisted on naming each of the thirty-two dream chickens in the coup, one by one. Ronan told him there was no use, because they all looked the same, so Adam took pictures of each chicken and had them developed to hang in the mudroom, each with a name scrawled in Sharpie underneath. It was an unnecessary expense that Adam continued making.

If Ronan thought Adam was handsome in a tie and shaggy hair, he was something else entirely in muddy jeans jammed into borrowed muck boots, his shirt hung over the fence, soaked from an early spring rain that blew in without warning. They ran from the house to the nearest barn, laughing all the way. Adam launched himself onto Ronan’s back, one arm slung around his shoulders. Bare skin pressed against bare skin. They stumbled into the barn with enough momentum to send them both sprawling into the hay.

Adam laughed so hard, tears slipped down his cheeks, hay caught in his hair.

Adam never missed a Saturday.

Once, on a rare occasion he wasn’t scheduled to work, he spent the whole day with Ronan at the Barns, following him around on his chores and making requests for dinner. Late in the afternoon, they returned to the house. Thunder grumbled outside, threatening a thunderstorm that was as likely to come as it was to pass. Ronan started on a spiced lentil soup. Adam asked about the absence of his usual six-pack of Coronas when Ronan sent him into the fridge to collect the vegetables.

“Not drinking anymore,” Ronan admitted stiffly. He hadn’t yet told anyone and firmed himself to hear the reaction. “Lame, right? Turns out I’m not great at moderation.”

Adam looked at him for a long time, then nodded and clasped his shoulder in passing. “Not lame at all.”

Declan would be thrilled to hear that he hadn’t had a drink in weeks, but Ronan wouldn’t give him the satisfaction. He supposed he ought to tell Gansey, just so he would stop worrying so much. He wondered if Adam reported back after their Saturdays together but quickly assured himself that he wouldn’t. He trusted Adam without reservation. 

Through the spring, Saturday visits became entire weekends, plus every afternoon that Adam could accommodate enough time to drive out to Singer’s Falls and back. Sometimes Adam came to see him even when he didn’t have the time. On those nights, he slept in Declan’s bed, studied until the late hours at the kitchen table, and drove back to Henrietta for school in the morning. Ronan didn’t know why Adam spent so much time at the Barns, but he wasn’t stupid enough to question luck as good at that. There was a time when he thought he liked being alone, but in fact he might have despised it more than anyone else he knew. He hated being alone. He just hated most people’s company more. Near-constant closeness from someone liked was a happiness unmatched.

When the Harvard letter came in the mail, Adam drove it all the way out to the Barns so they could open it together, claiming he couldn’t bear to be disappointed alone. Ronan supposed they had both come a long way, if Ronan could be a reliable source of emotional support and if Adam could accept someone else witnessing his rejection. The rejection, as Ronan predicted, did not come. Ronan pulled a batch of celebratory cookies out of the oven that he began baking while Adam drove over, and they spent the evening watching Declan’s old Star Wars collection on the TV in the living room, tucked under blankets on the couch.

Adam fell asleep during Empire Strikes Back, his head on Ronan’s shoulder. Ronan fell asleep shortly after. He didn’t bring anything out of his dreams that night, but when they woke, the house still smelled like chocolate-chip.

When Ronan was seven, he broke his arm in the kitchen, by the oven. He and Declan had been brawling partners since they were big enough to grapple. Their mother didn’t like it, but their father goaded them on. He waved her away, saying they were just being boys. Then they took it too far, because they were Lynches before anything else back then, and Lynches alway took things too far. It wasn’t on purpose, but they both fell, and Declan was a lot bigger than Ronan. A year was a long time when they were only seven and eight. Declan pushed him too hard, Ronan landed wrong, and his wrist snapped underneath him with a nauseating crack.

As the story went, he jumped right back up and, through his screaming and his tears, clocked Declan in the face with his good arm and broke his nose. An eye for an eye , their father used to say. According to his particular brand of justice, if somebody broke your arm, you had every right, whether he was your brother or not, to hit back just as hard. Maybe you even had an obligation to retaliate. Men who never hit back got hit twice as often.

Adam was horrified to hear that particular story.

“ Ronan ,” he said, setting his fork down beside his plate. “That’s awful.”

He supposed it was, but to them, their father’s word was as good as the words in their Bibles.

“I was so mad, I wouldn’t let him sign my cast,” he said, shaking his head. “Those were the rules, you know? I couldn’t understand why Declan didn’t understand our dad’s way of seeing things. It made such perfect sense to me. It was in the Bible. Eye for an eye, and all that.”

Adam shifted until his knee rested against Ronan’s.

“Took me a while to actually read the Bible. Took me a while just to read, for that matter. I didn’t see any use in it. I just wanted to play with the cows and swim in the pond. But I finally got around to it when my dad told me I would go to Hell if I didn’t read the Bible. Leviticus 24:19 says ‘eye for eye, tooth for tooth,’ but Matthew 18:21 says—” His brows pulled together. “Shit, I can’t remember it. Hold on.”

Ronan twisted around in his chair and took his battered Bible from a kitchen drawer. It looked like it had been thrown down the stairs as often as it had been read, which wasn’t far from the truth. Adam hung from his every word, an honor he wasn’t sure he deserved.

“It says, ‘Then Peter came to Jesus and asked, ‘Lord, how many times shall I forgive my brother or sister who sins against me? Up to seven times?’ Jesus answered, ‘I tell you, not seven times, but seventy-seven times.’’”

Adam’s mouth quirked into a reserved smirk. “Took you a while to learn that one.”

“Yeah, well.” He waved him off. He was working on it. “I went to Father Andrews to tell him that I broke Declan’s nose. I was ten or eleven by then, and I got that same awful silence from him as when I just told you now. Probably because he, like you, realized it wasn’t Declan’s fault for pushing me too hard or mine for thinking I had the right to hit him back. It was our dad’s fault for letting us take things too far, for teaching me that you had to retaliate to be a man. The thing is, Declan could already read, because he liked to figure things out on his own instead of just believing whatever Dad told us was right and wrong. I guess he already knew about Matthew 18:21, because he wasn’t mad that I broke his nose. Or, he was mad, but he forgave me before I even hit him back.”

“It’s not your fault,” Adam said quietly.

“I know that,” he nodded. Then amended, “Now. I know that now. I didn’t figure it out until Dad was gone, but Declan knew it all along. I guess that’s why it’s hard for him to come back here.”

Declan came the next morning for breakfast. Ronan made banana pancakes and cleaned the house. Declan stayed as long as he could bear, and Ronan forgave him when that was only two hours.

They didn’t fight, so Ronan told him that he wasn’t drinking anymore.

One Friday evening, Ronan found Adam on his doorstep rather than at work where he was supposed to be. He wore a neat sweater. Ronan knew what this was, because what had once felt impossible had begun to feel inevitable. Rather than insulting him to misdirect from his feelings, he let them lay where they laid. He let Adam catch him looking, and he let him take his favors to mean whatever they meant. In turn, Adam’s gaze lingered where it once drifted. Sometimes, on lazy afternoons in the kitchen at the Barns, when he stepped past Ronan, his fingertips grazed the small of his back. Adam Parrish belonged at the Barns like no one but a Lynch had ever belonged.

Ronan brought him into the house, because the cool spring weather still bit at their noses and the tips of their fingers. Adam looked at him with purpose, like he had something he came to say. He carried a lumpy paper bag in his arms.

“You work Fridays,” Ronan said, following him into the kitchen, where he began unloading the contents of the bag onto the counter.

Adam sorted mushrooms, carrots, unions, tomatoes, and various cans of broth on the counter. He handled the vegetables carefully, in perfect order. He had always appreciated food in a way Ronan was only beginning to. Adam appreciated food because every brown paper bag was a cost he could hardly afford. Ronan appreciated food because there was comfort in arranging ingredients in a way that comforted someone else. Like his mother warmed them with soup on a cold day, he could temporarily soothe Adam’s woes with a casserole in a thunderstorm.

“Not today,” he said.

“Why not?”

“I want to make dinner.”

Ronan wanted to offer to pay him back for the groceries, but he had been cooking dinner for Adam for months now, and giving him money for groceries would open a door he preferred to keep shut. He didn’t want Adam to return to treating their friendship like a series of quantifiable exchanges like he did in the beginning, so he kept his mouth shut and watched him search through the cupboards for a casserole dish. He told him about Declan’s visit while the dish cooked in the oven, but they ate in silence, save for Ronan’s compliments about the potpie. He would have teased him about his cooking on a normal night, but this didn’t feel like a normal night. And the potpie happened to be very good. There was something about Adam that made comfortable silence easy. He didn’t feel any need to make crude jokes to soften the awkwardness because there was none.

“Thank you,” Ronan said afterward, carrying both of their plates to the sink.

Adam shrugged. “You always cook for me.”

“I like to cook.”

“I like to cook for you,” he countered.

“Where’d you find the recipe?”

“Gansey’s mom.”

He barked a laugh. “You asked Gansey’s mom for a recipe?”

“No, I asked Gansey,” he said, blushing, “who asked his mom, who asked their cook.”

He grinned back at him. “Why?”

Adam’s eyes, the same color as Virginia clay, met Ronan’s. “I wanted to cook for you.”

Ronan struggled to catch his breath, even as they stood perfectly still. “Why?”

He turned and stepped toward him, cornering him against the counter. “You’re asking a lot of questions that I think you already have the answers to.”

“I wouldn’t presume,” he whispered.

Adam’s gaze dropped, and if Ronan was an ounce more confident, he might have believed he was looking at his mouth. “You’re always presuming.”

“Not about this.”

“This?”

“Come on, Parrish, put me out of my misery.”

“Misery?” He tilted his head. “I don’t think you’re miserable at all. Not anymore, at least.”

“No,” Ronan answered honestly, “not anymore.”

Adam’s fingers slipped around his hip. Two of his fingers pressed bluntly against bare skin, where his shift had lifted from his waistband. His touch was white-hot. Ronan inhaled sharply. Adam’s forehead dropped to his shoulder. Instinctively, Ronan wrapped his hand around the back of his skull, twisting his fingers into sandy hair like the most natural thing he had ever known.

“Sometimes,” Adam said against the cotton of his shirt, “I miss you even when I’m looking at you.”

“Sometimes,” Ronan answered, pulling away to look him in the eye, “I think I’ve miss you since the day I was born.”

Adam kissed him, his fingers resting on his cheek. Ronan tangled his arms around his narrow waist, pulling him to his chest. He kept most people at a firm distance, but when it came to Adam, he wanted to pull him closer and closer and closer until they weren’t two separate people but halves of a whole reunited. Adam was the purest thing he had ever known, and proximity made Ronan feel like he too could again feel pure.

Kissing him back felt like placing the last piece of a puzzle. It felt like coming home.

They kissed against the kitchen counter, their dirty dishes long forgotten, until Ronan’s head spun. Adam smelled like a rainstorm, earthy and fresh. He moved his hands cautiously, shifting them slowly from Ronan’s hips to his back to his ribs like the change might make him shrug him away. But once assured he was allowed to touch, he pressed in close with renewed vigor. He took no more than Ronan enthusiastically encouraged. Ronan dreamt of this more times than he cared to admit; he had always imagined it would be intense, but he hadn’t known to expect the desperation, like Adam might die if he couldn’t kiss him one more time, then twice. They parted only when they had no choice, gasping for breath, their hands still wandering. Ronan pressed their hips together. Adam made a noise that Ronan was sure would slip its way into his dreams every night for the next week.

Many minutes—or perhaps only a moment—later, Adam took him by the hand and led him to his bedroom, heat flashing in his gaze when he looked back over his shoulder. His touch hot, he pressed him down into the sheets and pushed his hands under his clothes like he had been planning his advances for weeks. Ronan decidedly wouldn’t mind if he had. In fact, the thought made his head spin.

He had never before had sex that didn’t feel like a brawl, but Adam held him with cautious hands and breathed hotly against his cheekbone. Ronan hoped to god Adam was serious about this, because he didn’t think he could bear to have him this way only once.

Afterward, Adam held him tight, like he worried he might leave.

“Nowhere else I wanna go, Parrish,” he mumbled against his collarbone where he laid his head. “You can detract the claws.”

Adam snorted and flicked the back of his arm. “Asshole.”

He turned his head to kiss his sternum.

He spent so many long months itching to be anywhere but where he was, but tonight, Adam tangled around him like a twin vine, he didn’t plan on moving until Adam did. Tonight, Ronan Lynch was still.