Archive of Our Own

The phone was to be an early graduation gift to himself.

Adam was cautious about it. He drew up lists of factors to consider: Boyd’s promise of full-time work come mid-June, the potential cost of books in September, the unpredictability of his employment situation in the fall. He filled out columns of calculations in his graph-paper notebook and triple-checked his math. He researched internet bargains on winter coats and cross-country airfare. He didn’t, yet, investigate data plan options or carrier service in different regions, but he did acquire a bank account and a debit card. In January he rinsed out an empty peanut butter jar and started depositing money into it when he felt safe—nights he skipped out on Nino’s to pick up an extra shift, or days he brought down his grocery bill with careful couponing—but he didn’t dare promise himself it was for anything in particular until the admissions letters came.

They came with good news, mostly. Some came with nominally good news rendered pointless by the bill attached. Others came with good news made almost miraculous: in all his scenarios of escape, Adam had never dared to dream it would be less expensive than Aglionby had been. He had not permitted himself to think seriously about what a school could do with an endowment larger than the GDP of some small countries. But here were schools Adam’s classmates had set their sights on since they were middle schoolers in their parents’ old alumni sweatshirts, offering him sums of money almost as inconceivable as the tuition totals themselves.

They arrived digitally in his Aglionby inbox, but he spared a few minutes to print them in the school computer lab once they’d all arrived. He wanted to touch them, to see if the press of paper in his palms might convince him they were real. Looking them over on his bed at St. Agnes, Adam thought he should be happy. Here at last was the door to the escape he had so long worked for. He supposed he was. He didn’t feel it, though. He felt—dizzy. Light in an unfamiliar way. Nervous. There were still five months in which things could somehow go wrong.

He stacked the letters up on his nightstand and lay on his back, looking up at the ceiling. He thought about names and numbers—things his classmates had been cushioned by their whole lives without ever seeing them in black and white, things he’d been scraping towards which were now, apparently, within his reach. The biggest names had given him the biggest numbers. No one had bothered to tell him about that. In fact he’d assumed it would be the opposite: that, if he even got in, he would have to choose between the uncertain promise of a name and the more immediate security of minimizing his debt. Now he found himself remembering the conversation he had overheard in the library last spring, one raven boy telling another, Harvard gave me more financial aid, but the theater program at Wesleyan… His friend had agreed. What was college really for, after all, if not finding yourself? Adam, who could answer that question a dozen different ways, wondered now: What must it be like, to be able to weight that in the calculus of your decision-making? What must it be like to assume your self was something worth expending all those resources to find?

It still didn’t seem real.

It was a long time before Adam fell asleep.

In the morning he rolled over to snatch at the stack of letters in a panic, half-convinced they would have dematerialized in the night. But they were still there, the tangible proof of the future he had built for himself, with their numbers as large as he remembered. Before he left for school, he took his Sharpie and wrote on the lid of the peanut butter jar: PHONE.

*

A few days later, while Ronan was barely pretending to do his Econ homework, Adam caught him looking at the jar and felt his cheeks burn to think of Ronan noticing his slow, pitiful progress towards something Ronan had never needed to inch towards. He waited for Ronan to say welcome to the twenty-first century, Huck Finn, or about time, trailer boy.

Ronan didn’t say those things. He didn’t say anything else, either. He noticed Adam looking at him and sighed melodramatically—the only way Ronan Lynch ever sighed—before abandoning the sword-wielding robot he’d been doodling in the margins and resuming the assignment. Chainsaw, on his shoulder, made a small noise that sounded somehow both approving and weary.

Ronan hadn’t applied to any schools. Gansey had made the mistake of asking him in December what his plan for the future was, and Ronan’s answer had been obscene, illegal, and capped off by an early turn towards his beer stash. Adam used to be envy him the way he envied Gansey, people for whom plans were an option, something they did because they wanted to. But now an image came into his head of Ronan in the fall, dreaming alone at the Barns while Gansey scurried after magic and Adam chased after his life, spending his days and his nights surrounded by all those sleepers. It seemed to be what Ronan wanted, but it wasn’t an image to inspire envy in Adam. Not anymore.

Ronan met his gaze suddenly, sharply, with that knowingness that came into his eyes just rarely enough that Adam could never be sure he wasn’t imagining it. He went back to reading The Sound and the Fury.

That night, when he went to deposit five dollars in the peanut butter jar (the early spring weather had been, in Gansey’s phrase, balmy as fuck, and Adam had dutifully taken advantage by taking his bike whenever possible to save on gas), he noticed that at some point in the afternoon, while Adam had been in the bathroom or otherwise preoccupied, Ronan had edited the text on the top of the lid. It now read: PHONE PHUND.

Dumb. Very dumb; very Ronan. Adam smiled to himself as he tucked the bill in with the rest, a process which, he noted with the limited approval he permitted himself to grant himself, took some maneuvering now that the wad of cash had grown.

*

Adam wound up driving all the way to Radford for the phone. It was at least two hours farther than he needed to have gone, and necessitated waking up before sunrise on a Saturday to make it back in time for his shift at the factory, but he found that when he pictured himself buying a phone any closer to home he was seized with the conviction that somehow, his father would find out. His father would know, and his father would find him, or track the number down, or show up as if prophesied to block the purchase from ever happening, to demand fairness, to bring Adam home—

It was stupid. Adam knew this. His parents had known where to find him for months, and since that one visit, they’d left well enough alone. It was just naked fear talking, a fear he hadn’t even realized he’d had until after he’d left. When he had lived with them, he hadn’t thought he could be afraid. There had never seemed any point to fearing the inevitable. But now his father was no longer inevitable. Now his father was only possible. Inevitabilities, like pain, could be counted on; they could be weathered, learned, survived, and therefore they could be placed aside until the time came again to endure them. It was possibilities that lingered, possibilities that built dread like floorboards creaking in the night, possibilities that grew like tumors or flames. In the space left by his father’s absence, fear had grown like a weed breaking into the sunlight. His father existed now in his mind, and in Adam’s mind Robert Parrish lurked around corners, behind storefronts, in wait at every event, his own personal ghost.

In real life, of course, Robert Parrish no longer gave a shit about him either way. So: stupid. And worse, a waste of gas, which was a waste of money. A waste of time, which was a waste of sleep. Adam hated that, ostensibly free, he was still sacrificing his most precious resources to someone that didn’t deserve them.

But it wasn’t for long, he told himself. In five months he would be out of Virginia, out of reach of his father. Out of reach of his fear, or so he hoped. In five months he would settle into his dorm and meet his roommate and wake up in a space Robert Parrish had never set foot near and could not even imagine. Less than five months. It was almost May. And in the meantime, he was determined to buy a phone.

He brought his acceptance letters with him. They sat nestled in the passenger seat of the Hondayota like a crisp and very white talisman. Having them near him made him feel safe, like the Magician card in his deck still did sometimes. They were something he could touch that promised his life would change.

Many promises to Adam had been broken, but not that one.

He had made it to himself and kept it. He had kept it in every tuition bill barely paid, in every extra credit assignment banged out during his lunch period, in every bubble filled in on every standardized test and every time his bones felt like they would shake apart from exhaustion but he made it to work on time anyway. He was keeping it now, driving to Radford, talking to the professionally cheerful polo-shirted young man behind the counter, asking three different times about the cancellation policy. Handing over his debit card, panicking for a second that he had forgotten to deposit the Phone Phund earlier in the week, signing the receipt with red ears and relief. Thanking Polo Shirt for his assistance. Walking out of the store and into his car.

Adam owned a cell phone.

He felt like he should do something to commemorate the occasion, so he reached into the glove compartment where he kept an index card on which he had written the important numbers in his life. Blue just had the Fox Way landline, and Ronan would receive a text anywhere between three days from now and never, but Gansey felt as much responsibility for prompt telecommunications as he did for everything else he touched.

So Adam texted Gansey: Hey, it’s Adam.

Then, because his name was as common as the rest of him, he added: Parrish, I mean.

Then, because as far as he knew Gansey had never mentioned knowing any other Adams, he sent: Sorry if that was obvious.

Then he started driving home.

Gansey had been delighted but not surprised by Adam’s news, his list of names, even the numbers that accompanied them. Adam thought sometimes that this was the most basic difference between them: that Gansey was never surprised when the world revealed some new goodness, and Adam always was. Adam was learning not to resent him for this. It was slow going.

The numbers were helping.

That spring Gansey had brought a surprise of his own. He had, of course, been admitted to Princeton—in the end, the only school he had bothered to apply to, too busy hunting magic to notice the deadline’s swift encroach—but he had convinced his father to let him defer, on the condition that he seek some sort of marginally gainful employment.

“I’m thinking of trying Nino’s,” he’d said when he announced this, guilelessly, like it was the only place of employment he had ever heard of in all his travels across the world. “Aren’t they always hiring?”

Blue rolled her eyes. “I wouldn’t trust anyone who put a refrigerator in his bathroom near my food.”

“Well, no matter. I’ll find something. I hear some local psychics could use a receptionist.”

“You wouldn’t dare,” Blue gasped, while Ronan hooted.

Gansey raised his eyebrows into a shape that somehow conveyed both total innocence and deep affront. “Whyever not? I’ll have you know I have excellent phone manners and am highly organized.”

Blue smacked him across the arm and he beamed at her, mischief washed away by pure delight that made clear to anyone watching that, whatever he might tell his father or his friends or even himself, the real reason Gansey was staying in Henrietta had nothing to do with Welsh kings.

Adam had felt funny to see it. Something in him had not quite churned but bubbled over, just perceptibly. Not like the bitter flashes of jealousy he had felt some months earlier. Those had felt like swallowing poison. This was just like there was too much of everything suddenly, and Adam didn’t have the room to hold it.

Phone in pocket, letters by his side, Adam could find the right word when he looked at the memory now: intimate. It had felt like he had glimpsed something intimate. Something that should have been hidden away, not for him. But—he probed at this the way Ronan probed at the scabs he gave himself, wanting to know he had healed over or else to bring the pain to the surface—not something he felt should not have been. Something in him had made space for it, and left room enough for a flash of shame—shame that he had spent so long wishing to drive it away.

He should talk to Gansey, he thought. To Gansey, or to Blue.

When he stopped for gas Adam checked the text that had come in a few minutes earlier. To his relief it contained nothing about the novelty of his having a phone. It read: Marvelous to hear from you! Jane and I are trying to organize a stargazing (is that hyphenated or no?) outing next weekend, are you in? (Please say yes; Ronan said he wouldn’t go without you and he’s the one that knows all the constellations!)

Something warmed him, to read this missive from his delightful obnoxious friend who used a fucking semicolon and two pairs of parentheses in his texts, to think about stretching out on grass and looking into the night with his best friends, to know and believe there was a place he could go where he would be welcomed. He texted back (he texted back!): I’m in.

*

That night, his phone buzzed. Adam paused work on his English essay to look at it, expecting it to be Gansey with updates about stargazing/star-gazing. It wasn’t. The message was from a number he hadn’t saved, and had to his knowledge never used, and had certainly never believed he would have cause to use. It carried no introduction, but then it really didn’t need one. It said:

r u going into witness protection or is there some other reason u didn’t give ur number to the only other person u know with a phone

Adam rolled his eyes and sent back: I figured you wouldn’t get a message.

A moment later he got a reply: why not

This was such a patently absurd question coming from someone who had once put his phone in the freezer for a week straight to avoid Declan that for a moment Adam considered not answering at all. He typed back: Honestly I didn’t think you knew how to read.

When his phone buzzed this time, it was a picture: Ronan in all his scowling glory, one eyebrow cocked like a lazy challenge, wicked full mouth pursed, middle finger tilted towards the camera. It was a very Ronan picture—-fire made somehow desultory. Adam had seen him throw the same expression at dozens of wide-eyed underclassmen this year alone.

This time Adam didn’t bother to reply. But he didn’t delete the image, either. Instead he saved it to Ronan’s contact information with a satisfaction almost like that of a child who has captured a firefly and convinced it to glow between his hands.

*

It turned out Ronan wasn’t the only one who knew the constellations. Blue knew them, too. She could trace Cassiopeia and her king, and Hydra and Leo and the big and little bears, and she did so a little defiantly, like she was insulted no one had thought to ask her. Adam thought maybe she was right to be. Blue was curious, and more than that she harbored love for all the vastness of the world she had never touched. It was something Adam admired about her, even as it baffled him. Of course she would know the names people had given the stars.

“Look at you,” Gansey marveled, lying on his side, not bothering to pretend the sky was the most interesting view in his reach. “Where did you learn all this? Is astrology important for psychic work? Like it was for medieval medicine?”

Adam couldn’t see Blue’s face, but he knew her well enough to picture her scorn, and liked her well enough to smile at it.

“First of all,” she said, “it can be, but they’re much more likely to use the phases of the moon if they need some celestial alignment. But thanks for implying my family is stuck in the Dark Ages.”

“That is not what I meant,” Gansey protested.

“It’s kinda what you said, though,” Adam interjected.

“Second, that’s not how I know them.” Her tone softened. “Calla got me one of those science for kids books every birthday for at least six years. One of them was about astronomy.”

It hurt a bit to hear it, this fond familial reminiscence, as alien to Adam’s life as tales of skiing lessons or trips to Madrid. Adam sometimes thought it would always hurt to remember the kinds of memories other people had been allowed to form. But it was like with every day closer to the escape he’d fought to find, he was getting a little better at knowing the hurt lived inside of him, and leaving it where it lay. It was nice now, too, to picture his smart, curious friend as a little girl in mismatched socks and unkempt hair, poring over pages offering tastes of rainforests and mountains and outer space.

“What I’m hearing,” Ronan piped up, “is that there was actually no reason for me to come get my ass wet in the dark tonight.”

“So leave,” Blue said, without heat, “if you’re going to be a baby about it.”

Ronan grunted, but he didn’t move.

“Make new constellations,” Gansey said, his voice so certain that for a moment Adam thought he meant: out of new stars. “What does a dreamer see in the sky?”

“The same thing a dick does,” Ronan said, but he raised his arm and began to draw.

It began as Adam expected it to: stories of Dorian the Well-Endowed, Namor the Flatulent, Milos the Triple-Dicked, rightful heir of the kingdom of Peentopia. Blue and Gansey were more than happy to take up the requisite disapproval, so Adam let himself laugh. It was very dumb, and very Ronan. Adam didn’t allot himself much time to be an idiot, but it seemed less wasteful to do so around Ronan, because the thing about Ronan was that Ronan would always be the bigger idiot. Adam wasn’t sure when he had come to appreciate this, but he did.

But then Ronan’s constellations changed. He paused for a moment before announcing the Sleeper, sketching out her long hair and full skirt. “Legend has it she’ll awaken when the hero finds the key.” Ronan’s voice stayed smooth, but Adam felt his own throat tighten.

Ronan tilted his chin up, pointed almost behind him. “The Raven.” And Adam could see, as clearly as if it had always been there, a beak and an eye and an outstretched wing.

Over to the western horizon: “Equus Altus,” the noble steed, and no one needed an explanation when he outlined a shape with wheels in place of legs.

And finally, right above him, in the center of the sky: “The Magician.”

Adam’s breath stuttered.

Smooth, easy, like he had said nothing worth reacting to, Ronan’s long arm traced a figure off a tarot card, his flowing robes, the wand in his hand. Adam felt for one burning moment like he was seeing himself strewn across the cosmos. Then he felt like actually he was seeing Ronan scatter his own heart among the stars. Then he felt like both of those were laughable ideas, but he couldn’t come up with another option and he didn’t feel like laughing.

Ronan turned his face towards Adam, briefly. In the dark Adam couldn’t read his expression. He felt confronted, exposed.

Possibilities lingered. They took up space at the corner of your eye. They stole the air from your lungs, like smoke.

Then Ronan added Testiculus, of the Testes Mountains, to his personal celestial pantheon, and the moment passed. But it was a while before Adam trusted his own voice to speak again.

*

April swelled over into May. Color returned in full to the Aglionby campus: to the magnolias by the entrance, the Shakespeare garden outside Vernon Hall, the tulip bed by the science building planted decades ago and maintained since through an alumni donation earmarked for that specific purpose. Adam could never pass it without thinking resentfully about what else that money could have gone to, but this spring he found that his bitterness could coexist with a desire to linger briefly among the pinks and oranges and reds. He had officially told the Massachusetts Institute of Technology he would be joining their freshman class in the fall. He would be gone soon.

“Me, too,” Noah said, appearing suddenly at his shoulder, sounding wistful.

Adam tried to think of something comforting to say, but by the time he made himself turn to look Noah in the face, Noah had flickered out again. They barely saw him anymore. Adam thought that this should have upset him more than it did, but he wasn’t Gansey; he didn’t have it in him to revolt against something just because it was sad. Many things were sad. Adam had to conserve his energy for the fights he could win.

Ronan began texting him inscrutably and Adam avoided giving much thought to what that might mean. The texts themselves certainly didn’t mean much. They were mostly jokes at Gansey’s expense or pictures of nothing in particular. Empty pizza boxes stacked by the door of Monmouth Manufacturing. A close-up of a sleeping cow’s nostril at the Barns. Ronan’s untied sneakers. Ronan’s new dream pen, which could mimic the voice of the person using it. Ronan’s tongue after eating a blue popsicle.

It was nothing. It was more than Ronan had used his phone for in probably his entire life. It was a side of Ronan Adam had seen but found it easy enough to forget. Not forget. Just not think about. It was very dumb and very Ronan and remarkably un-hostile and when Adam thought about it for too long, long enough to place it alongside dreamed gifts and magicians in the sky, he reminded himself that he would be gone in four months.

It was nothing because it had to be. Adam had worked very hard to ensure that one day, the first eighteen years of his life wouldn’t matter. A few pictures weren’t enough to change that.

They sat for their advanced placement exams at long fold-out tables in the gym, Adam careful and methodical, Gansey sporting and cheerful about the whole affair, Ronan with all the sullenness of a man condemned. Afterwards, the days Adam didn’t have work, they drove to Nino’s, where Adam and Gansey compared answers while Ronan invented colorful methods through which Blue could put him out of his misery if she were so inclined.

“Just drop some bleach in my drink. No one could prove it was you.”

“Don’t tempt me,” she muttered, but she was eyeing Adam and Gansey’s cups.

Their newest Latin teacher, an earnest classics major fresh out of Amherst, had somehow developed the notion that he was expected to continue holding class after the AP test and had even announced that there would be a final. He burbled cheerfully about the chance to explore some of Virgil’s lesser-known works now that they had presumably proved themselves collegiately competent about the Aeneid, but there was a desperation in his eyes that made Adam suspect some sort of faculty prank had convinced him his job security depended on it.

Ronan came over so that the two of them could halfheartedly make flashcards, Adam on his bed, Ronan perched on a crate. Ronan was always halfhearted at best about school, but Adam was distracted, thinking about Boston winters and the list of work-study jobs he’d looked at that would pay him more money to shelve books or make coffee than he’d ever made in Virginia sweating through his shirt over or under some piece of machinery, balancing that against the cost of new shoes there if his gave out, wondering if the meal plan would obviate the need for groceries. It was warm out, too, warm in a wonderful way, teetering on the edge of hot but not quite, the sun bright but not blinding. He kept thinking about the the air outside his apartment, and his future outside Henrietta, and anything but the the stack of verbs on his lap. And then he realized, with a start—there was no longer any difference between what it would mean to excel and what it would mean to do okay. He could get a B on this test and Boston would still be waiting for him.

He could get a B on this test and he would still be able to escape.

Adam looked out the window. The sky was a smooth clear blue, tugging at something in him long unused. It was beautiful, he supposed. Like the tulips. He could notice that now. He could choose to be outside under a beautiful sky, feeling the sun and the soft air on his skin, and the things he’d worked for would still be his.

He turned to Ronan to suggest it.

Ronan had given up approximating the act of flashcard-making. He was folding his index cards into paper airplanes with increasingly less functional designs. He noticed Adam looking at him and sighed, melodramatic as ever, before picking up his pencil and a fresh card. Chainsaw hopped onto the floor and pecked at his foot. A scene from dozens of afternoons, Adam thought, and then, with a shudder of his heart—maybe it was time to change the script.

“Hey,” Adam said. “What if we get out of here?”

Ronan looked up. “I told Gansey I’d watch some boring-ass movie with him tonight. He’s decided he’s super into French films about trains.”

Adam shrugged. “We don’t have to go far.”

“You want to come over? You can stay for the boring movie. It’s your funeral.”

“Oh,” Adam said. “I meant—it’s nice out.” The words felt stupid out of his mouth. Adam Parrish didn’t care about nice days. But Adam Parrish was leaving soon. In the meantime, he could care about what he pleased.

Ronan raised an eyebrow, skeptical. “What, you wanna have like a flashcard-making picnic?”

“No, like—” He wasn’t getting this across at all, Adam realized. He was sounding too much like Adam, proposing a very un-Adam idea. He needed to put it in language Ronan would understand. “Like, what if we just said fuck it?”

Ronan’s eyes went wide, and Adam felt strangely triumphant, to have surprised this surprising boy who had come somehow to know him so well. It felt like power. Like magic. Like turning over a new card. Then a grin spread across Ronan’s face, slow and wicked. “My two favorite words,” he said, and Adam felt it again: his own heart, newly noticeable, unfamiliarly awake.

*

They wound up driving to a creek just outside Henrietta that the Lynch boys used to go to when they were younger. Adam was dubious about anything to which Niall Lynch had given his approval, but he figured it was a scenic enough place to enjoy the day. He didn’t think they were going to swim until Ronan was peeling off his clothes like they were burning him and toppling in, a shiningly naked blur of pure stupid motion.

Ronan let out a whoop and a series of delighted swears at the cool of the water, then called out, “The fuck are you waiting for, Parrish?”

Adam approached the edge. He didn’t know what the fuck he was waiting for. He’d been creek swimming a few times, as a little kid, with friends, before home got bad enough that it wasn’t worth the effort to keep both parts of his life afloat. And wasn’t this what he had wanted? To fuck around, but maybe this, too: for Ronan to drag him, as he had so many times before, somewhere a little wilder than Adam knew how to be.

There was a moment when his fingers curled around the bottom of his shirt that Adam thought, instinctively, You can’t, they’ll see. But then he remembered, like he was learning it for the first time, that there was nothing hiding on his skin. There hadn’t been for nearly a year.

And Ronan had seen all his secrets, anyway.

Adam took a deep breath, stripped—to his boxers; Ronan’s particular brand of boyish unself-consciousness remained well out of his reach—and followed him in.

“Motherfuck that’s cold,” he choked out after maybe three steps. The water was up to his knees. He didn’t know if he could bring himself to take it any farther.

Ronan shook his head. “You’re not doing it right. You gotta just dunk. Rip the Band-Aid off.”

“I feel like my legs are dying,” Adam said. “I might just leave the Band-Aid on.”

“Come on,” Ronan protested. “You made me drive all this way—”

“Made you? When in your life has anyone made you do anything? I’d like to meet that person. Offer my congratulations. Ask for some tips.”

“Do it,” Ronan said.

When Ronan gave commands, they never felt like commands. In this realm he had none of Gansey’s imperiousness, nor any of his grace. Gansey’s commands seemed to descend from some higher sphere. Ronan’s commands were rough and close and wholly earthbound, somehow both lazy and urgent. Maybe that was why they seemed to reach into Adam somewhere beneath the parts of himself he understood, landing on a piece of him that had already wanted to listen to Ronan, even before he had started to speak.

But the water was really fucking cold. So he said, “Okay. Give me a countdown.”

Ronan crossed his arms. “Five.”

Adam breathed in and out.

“Four.”

He bent his knees just slightly, forcing himself not to wince as the water inched up his skin.

“Three.”

He steeled himself to go under.

On two, Ronan—inevitably, Adam realized with the brutal clarity of hindsight—full-body tackled him, bringing him under.

“You asshole,” Adam groaned when he had made it back above the surface. “You unbelievable shithead.”

Ronan ignored this. “It’s better now, right?”

It was. At least, his body had adjusted so that the cold no longer felt paralyzing. So either it was better, or Adam was dying. “I’m gonna get you for that.” It came out pure Henrietta. He couldn’t bring himself to care.

Ronan smirked. “I’d like to see you try.” The words and his face did something to Adam. Sparked in his stomach, lit up his skin. It was suddenly too hot, even in the cold of the creek.

So Adam dove for him.

Ronan was bigger than Adam, taller and broader, but Adam had had to learn how to use his body like a tool, and he wasn’t afraid to wield that knowledge. He got Ronan under first from the sheer force of surprise, but when Ronan had recovered Adam managed to dodge him only briefly before succumbing. He reached through the water to grab behind Ronan’s knees and unbalance him, emerging just in time to revel in Ronan’s vicious shock as his body gave way. Then he felt Ronan’s foot around his ankle and fell backwards.

They wound up tumbling towards dry land until they were sprawled together on the bank of the creek, breathing hard. Slowly, with a grunt, Ronan disentangled himself from Adam’s back. Adam gave himself another breath before turning over, so that the two of them were lying side by side: Adam with his hands beneath his neck, in his drenched boxers; Ronan uncaringly unclothed, peaceful with exertion. They stayed there in contented silence for what felt like a long time, letting the sun dry their skin, watching clouds drift by. Adam couldn’t remember the last time he had allowed himself an afternoon so unproductive and been glad for it. He wasn’t sure he ever had.

Ronan rolled onto his side, propping his chin up with his hands. “Man, I have such awesome ideas.”

Adam snorted a laugh. “You are the first and only person in history to accuse yourself of that. And hey—it was my idea to take the afternoon off.”

“We make a good team,” Ronan said, smiling. Ronan rarely smiled without at least a hint of sarcasm or spite, but when he did—when he smiled like he was now, open and easy, like he was actually happy—it was something to see. Bright like blinding, staring into the sun.

Until then Ronan’s naked body had been nothing Adam hadn’t seen a few too many times before, but suddenly, with his face bare and his voice soft, it was something new. Adam’s heart was beating hard, still, from their tussle in the creek. He swallowed. His body was remembering the slide of Ronan’s skin against his, and his mind’s eye was remembering Ronan’s magician in the sky, and Ronan was smiling at him like he would offer anything up to the person he would share that smile with, and Adam wanted—God, but he wanted—

—and Adam was leaving in four months. He couldn’t forget that.

“We should go,” he said, sitting up. “You have, um. Gansey’s movie.” He reached for his dry clothes and started getting dressed, not bothering to take off his wet boxers.

Ronan splayed out on the grass, a motion that loomed inescapably large even as Adam was careful to keep it in the corner of his eye. “Ugh. Don’t remind me.” To Adam’s relief, though, he began to make himself decent.

As he let himself into the BMW Ronan said, “You want to come? You might not hate it as much as I will.” Ronan frowned, like he wasn’t sure he liked the idea of being betrayed by Adam’s taste like that.

“Wow, what a pitch,” Adam managed. “But I have—stuff to do. And I work tomorrow morning. So you should just drop me off.”

Ronan shrugged. It was the same shrug Adam had watched him shrug a hundred times, but it became now an unbearably casual gesture. It did not seem right that Ronan should be able to shrug while Adam was so freshly aware of himself that he was half-convinced he could discern the placement of individual cells. “Suit yourself.” He looked up through the car window expectantly. “You getting in or what?”

Walking the fifteen miles back seemed considerably more appealing. But Adam had work in the morning, so he forced himself into the car and for once thanked the cosmos for Ronan’s pathological inability to drive like a responsible adult.

*

It wasn’t like anything was changing. It wasn’t like anything could change. The plan was set. Adam was escaping, and he could not regret that. He had sacrificed a lot to secure himself on this trajectory. Most days it did not even feel like he would be sacrificing anything else at all. There was, after all, nothing he had newly acquired and then relinquished. Nothing he could point to and say: This is mine, but I choose not to have it. Ronan’s friendship was his, and it would still be his, the way Gansey and Blue would still be his. Adam thought now that the parade of pictures was in all likelihood Ronan’s peculiar way of proving his loyalty, and most days the thought moved him without unsettling him. Ronan was not a person to come out and say I want to be your friend, plainly, in words. But he was someone who would say: I’ll check my texts for you. And Adam knew Ronan well enough to know that meant something worth being grateful for. That was enough, most days. Most days he felt confident anything else he might have glimpsed was solely in his head.

(It wasn’t solely in his head. That was the worst part. His head was a fractured and exhausted place, but he knew his way around it well enough. But this lived in the wilder terrain of his body, of his fingers curling—had they always done this?—at the sound of Ronan’s wicked laugh, of his stupid stubborn heart picking up its pace when Ronan’s name crossed his screen. It was in his veins and in his nerves and in other places he had spent too long resolutely ignoring to be able to control with any success now.)

They passed Latin. Gansey delivered a surprisingly mundane and empirically sound report on Welsh history at the senior project showcase. The crew team pulled a tame senior prank involving the changing of a number of campus locks. Ronan, who had feigned a lifelong interest in ceramics to secure an independent study period he had mostly spent napping in the library or harassing his friends while they tried to work, stayed up for forty consecutive hours creating a series of figures from his dreams to meet the portfolio deadline and got an A. Adam received a forty-hour schedule from Boyd and put in his two weeks’ notice at the factory.

Graduation came and went. They sweated through their black robes under a tent in the June heat, sticky and smelling unfortunately teenaged by the time they raised their arms after the first speech to give dutiful applause applause. Adam thought that he should feel something when he crossed the stage to shake the Dean’s hand, or when they sang the school song, or when they threw their caps in the air, but he didn’t. He didn’t feel triumph, even though this was what he had been wearing himself through for, the well-earned proof that his life would not be what the people in it had assumed it would be. He didn’t feel sadness, even though there had been a few times—not many, but a few—when this campus had briefly felt like what it had promised to be in admissions materials and campus tours: a new life itself, and not just a long and expensive purgatory. He didn’t even feel spite for his classmate celebrating their journey, as if any one of them had done what he had to make it this far.

He just felt empty. There was nothing left here for him now. Ahead lay only the next escape.

He and Ronan found each other in the throng of crying parents and bored siblings and by mutual unspoken agreement veered across the quad to lean against the old gray stone of Thornton Hall. Chainsaw flew in circles above their heads. Adam felt a fierce gratitude for Ronan, the only other person with no one here for him today, before he remembered that wasn’t quite so.

“Where’s Matthew?” he asked.

Ronan shrugged. “Off with his glee club friends.” That managed to say glee club without scorn was perhaps the greatest evidence of his love for Matthew Adam had ever seen.

Adam didn’t bother to ask where Declan was. Bringing him up would only darken Ronan’s mood. “So. It’s over.”

“Not for you.”

Adam turned to look at him. Ronan was looking at the grass, his expression unreadable. “What do you mean?”

“I mean, for you now’s when the action begins, right? You’re half-gone already. This—” Ronan gestured at the mix of buildings respectably old and ostentatiously new, the carefully pruned trees and the cut lawns, the walls of Thornton hiding the classrooms and the computer lab and the library with its wooden desks. “This was all just prologue, right?”

Adam could feel a protest rising in him: Not all of it. Not Gansey and the ley line and finding Noah’s killer. Not you. But Ronan’s face was calm, if not quite soft; he wasn’t starting a fight. Ronan was just seeing him as Adam had made himself: the Magician. The boy who got away. For the first time that day Adam felt the weight of the occasion stir something inside him.

“I guess,” he said. “Yeah. But—that’s everyone, right?” That was what all the speeches had been about: First steps. New beginnings. Brave risks. Things his classmates were being exhorted to embrace, things Adam had had a head start on learning.

Ronan shook his head. “There’s nothing for me after this.”

He didn’t sound angry—just an awful kind of hollow. It hurt Adam to hear it. More than he would have expected. A few months ago he would have been pissed. If an Aglionby boy had nowhere to go after high school, it was only ever his fault. Ronan had made his choices: to skip class, to ignore his homework, to take tests hungover, to sit stone-faced while the guidance counselor, the Dean, and every member of the college admissions department tried to reason with him until they all gave up. He had decided not to have a future.

But Ronan was right: Adam was half-gone now. Already drifting, with one foot steady on the escape he had secured, he found that Ronan’s life on the other side of away looked different from his new vantage point. He thought about finding a bloody body, and what it might mean to lose a family when family was a place you had known love. He thought about last spring, when Ronan had crawled back from the precipice of giving up for no other reason than to ensure Adam’s sacrifice hadn’t been in vain. He thought about living with a brain that wanted to kill you, that had come close to succeeding more than once.

It would have been hard to imagine a future, when the apocalypse had come and gone. It would have been hard to want a new life, when you had already lost the one you’d cherished. Adam had spent so long powered by the horizon of the future, he didn’t know how he would have made it this far if he didn’t even have that to believe in.

But Ronan had.

Impulsively, Adam said, “You’ll figure something out.”

Now Ronan narrowed his eyes, distinctly unimpressed. Ronan hated platitudes. But this wasn’t a platitude.

“I mean that,” Adam insisted. “I do.”

Ronan’s mouth did something strange, halfway between a sneer and something sadder. “Why?”

Because Adam needed it to be true. Because there was always another card, and suddenly that didn’t seem to matter if Adam was the only one who got to pull it. Because he hated the idea of Ronan sitting alone at Monmouth Manufacturing or even at the Barns, with all its lonesome magic, while Adam built a life and Blue built up her savings and even Gansey built a skillset beyond his money and his mind. Because Ronan was magic, and if there was one thing Adam had learned about magic it was that magic was the antithesis of stagnation. Because Ronan was the most terrifyingly, thrillingly alive person Adam had ever met, and Adam couldn’t bear the idea of him languishing in place, like some half-alive version of an expired dream.

But none of that would convince Ronan. Adam had to offer him something Ronan knew was true. Something Ronan could trust, could believe in. So he offered the sturdiest thing he knew.

He offered himself.

“Because,” he said, “if you were as complete a fuck-up as you think you are, I wouldn’t be wasting my time talking to you right now.”

Ronan looked startled by that. He scowled, but apparently Adam had found something he couldn’t argue with. Good.

Ronan kicked the stone wall behind him with his heel, pushed himself off the wall. He shaded his eyes against the sun to glance up: Chainsaw was still flying in small circles above them. He checked his phone, searched the crowd presumably for Matthew, sent someone a text, put his phone back in his pocket. Then he said, “Adam.”

Adam swallowed, keeping himself very still. Ronan had said his name the way Ronan had always said his name. Or else Ronan had said his name and it was something new. It didn’t matter. He was leaving in three months. He was being crazy, deluded. Ronan was looking at him as if he were waiting for Adam to speak although all he had said was his name. Ronan was looking at him and Adam couldn’t read his expression, but then Adam could never read his expression. Adam wished he would just say it already, and he didn’t know what it was or what he would do if he heard it.

Ronan said, “I—”

Then Gansey bounded over to invite them to a celebratory Gansey family meal at a restaurant way up north, which caused Adam to have a physical reaction like a nuclear reactor shutting down. “The reservation’s been made, but I’m certain they could squeeze in another chair or two. My father used to summer next door to the owner up in Nantucket.”

“I promised Matthew we’d get pizza,” Ronan said. His eyes never left Adam’s face. “But I’ll see you guys at Cheng’s party.”

“I thought you weren’t coming!” Gansey said, sounding delighted. “See, Adam, now you have to come. Who else will help me make sure he doesn’t get arrested?”

“Yeah, okay. I’ll be there.” He didn’t know what he was agreeing to, or who he was promising. Ronan nodded at this and sprinted across the quad without another word. Adam forced himself not to watch him go.

“So. Will you be joining us then, or will I be left to parry with the parentals over my career un-ambitions alone?” Gansey was smiling, but Adam could detect a hint of anxiety in his eyes. “I asked Jane, of course, but public schools aren’t done for another two weeks. It’s barbaric.”

“Sure. Thaniks.” Adam didn’t particularly want to spend his afternoon with the Ganseys worrying about which fork to use while various millionaires made passive-aggressive remarks about the true value of a minimum wage job, but he wanted less to be alone with his thoughts. He felt unmoored and strange, his future secure but his present suddenly shaken. He could use a distraction from wondering what the evening might hold. Perhaps he might even be able to convince himself by then that it would hold nothing, because he was beginning his future, and nothing more would fit.

*

Cheng’s party—it was somehow undeniably Cheng’s party even though the house was not Cheng’s house—was exactly how Adam had spent two years picturing Aglionby parties. Boys were mixing drinks in red cups and spilling beer on each other. Some jangling indie rock was playing from luxury speakers, interrupted by the occasional top 40 selection that elicited a round of semi-ironic singing along. There was a sprinkling of girlfriends, looking either blissfully drunk or deeply judgmental. Adam felt a kinship with the latter group, who seemed about as happy to be here as he was.

Gansey had hovered by his side for a while, but it would have been a waste for Gansey not to use his relevant skills, so Adam had waved him off, promising to be fine. Gansey had clapped him on the back and hurried off, his singular capacity for charm apparent even in the way he walked towards the epicenter of masculine clamor. Sometimes Adam really did think he would hate Gansey if he didn’t like him so much.

Now he was left standing awkwardly with a plastic cup of Sprite, and he was beginning to question his decision to come. After an unsuccessful attempt to locate someone he felt he could have maybe five minutes of neutral conversation with, during which he accidentally interrupted a hand job in a linen closet, he decided it might be best to get some air.

He wound up sitting on the curb outside the house, listening to the echo of a baseline and occasional swells of noise from some drinking game. Out here, it wasn’t so bad. The night air was warm with a hint of a breeze; the sky was full of stars. He sipped his soda, pretending he wasn’t waiting for anything.

The illusion didn’t hold long. Ronan sauntered over to him a few minutes later, coming from inside the house. They must have missed each other in the crowd. Adam nodded by way of a greeting.

“Tad said he’d seen you go out,” Ronan said. “Figured you’d gone home.”

Adam shrugged. “Gansey gave me a ride over. I think I’m his designated driver now.”

He thought, but didn’t say: You said you’d see me here, and I want to know why. In the aggressive mundanity of the party, Adam found it once again easy to believe he was seeing nothing but the shadows of his own useless impulses. To say, he said he’d see the both of you, Parrish. To say, you didn’t miss your chance because there was never a chance to miss.

He was leaving in three months.

He eyed Ronan, looking oddly still in the dark. “You seem uncharacteristically sober.”

It was Ronan’s turn to shrug. “Best laid plans.”

Adam wondered about that. Ronan didn’t strike him as the type to plan much of anything. But then he had, sometimes. He had planned to keep Adam at St. Agnes, and to bring Adam to the Barns. And sometimes when he described his dreams—not the ones that resulted in a plastic ball that smelled like lemons, or a flower the color of water, but the ones he showed Adam sometimes, the ones that took work, the drafts along the way to something more—those seemed to take planning.

But before Adam had a chance to inquire further, Ronan said, “I fucking hate June.”

This time Adam didn’t have to wonder. He thought again about a body on the ground, a loss you would do anything to erase and never could. He thought about the Ronan who had existed before that loss, who Adam would never get to know, and the Ronan who had existed since, who Adam did know. Who was Adam’s friend. Who was so wild and brash and alive it was easy to forget everything he had had to bury.

Adam said, “Yeah.”

“But—” Ronan’s mouth worked, but he couldn’t seem to find the words he wanted. “Fuck it.” He put his hand on the side of Adam’s face. His own face was very steady and very close.

Adam tried to tell his heart: It’s nothing. It has to be nothing.

He said, “What are you doing?”

“Figuring something out,” said Ronan, and kissed him on the mouth.

It wasn’t much of a kiss. It wasn’t much of anything. Just a brief, firm press of lips on lips, a statement of intent more than any kind of desire. Then it was over and Ronan was looking at him like it was his turn to do something. Which was a problem, because Adam was frozen. Adam couldn’t do anything except breathe, and even that was a challenge.

He thought that he should have felt something clarifying and monumental, overwhelming revulsion or some hot thrill, but instead he felt—dizzy. Light in an unfamiliar and disorienting way. Nervous.

“Cool.” Ronan stood up. “I’m going to go do shots until I puke on Henry’s shoes. See you around.” He stalked off, apparently none the worse for what had just happened. Or not happened.

Adam thought that he should say something. But he couldn’t move his mouth.

Anyway he didn’t know what he would say, if he could. Wait. I’m sorry. Come back. You can’t. I can’t. I’m leaving.

Do that again.

*

“You kissed Ronan?” Blue sounded incredulous, like maybe she had the situation confused. “Ronan Lynch?”

“Technically,” Adam said, “he kissed me.”

Blue tilted her head, frowning. “Yeah, not less weird. Was he like… I mean, why? Is he like, into you?”

His nominal ex-girlfriend was, Adam could freely admit, not the ideal choice with whom to discuss the matter. But he was desperate, and with Ronan obviously out of the running, his alternatives were Noah and Gansey. Noah was dead and therefore likely to be cryptic and unhelpful. Gansey—Gansey probably should have been the one he’d gone to, and Adam felt a little guilty about deciding otherwise. But sometimes Adam couldn’t shake the feeling that the version of Ronan in Gansey’s head was still the version of him who had first moved into Monmouth Manufacturing two years ago, raw with fresh grief. A Ronan who needed tending and looking after. Adam couldn’t blame Gansey for seeing so clearly the boy who’d almost died on the floor of his room, especially considering that Ronan often took such pains to avoid giving off the appearance that he was a normally functioning human being. But he didn’t want to talk about what Ronan needed right now. He wanted to talk about what Ronan had done.

And he hadn’t known Ronan then, but he suspected that that Ronan had very much not been up to kissing anyone.

“I think—” Adam hesitated. It felt like so much power to grant himself. “I mean, he doesn’t really do casual stuff.”

Blue considered this. “Huh. Okay. So are you into him?”

Adam didn’t have an answer for this. Adam couldn’t have an answer for this. Instead he gave the answer he did have: “I’m leaving for college in three months.”

“Yeah, but—” Blue shrugged. “When there’s someone you really like, it’s not like you can just—turn your feelings off.”

Adam thought he was actually pretty good at turning his feelings off. He’d been practicing for eighteen years, and it had served him well so far. He wasn’t sure how he would have made it as far as he had without turning his feelings off. He was about to say so when he looked closely at Blue’s face. She was biting her lip, looking caught-out, her eyes—her heart—somewhere far away.

Suddenly the question of Ronan Lynch seemed very far away, here in Blue’s bedroom at 300 Fox Way. Much larger was the question of Blue, the girl he’d run to advice for on the exact topic she would never bring to him.

God, he’d been a lousy friend.

He let the guilt of it turn his stomach for one awful moment. Then, as deliberately as he might ease Cabeswater’s agitation, he reminded himself: there was always another card. He was leaving in three months, and he didn’t want to leave the two of them like this.

“Look, you and Gansey—” Adam paused, trying to get the words right, but when he saw the note of worry in Blue’s eyes he rushed to smooth it out. “It’s—whatever. It’s fine. It’s—” He wanted to be honest. He wanted to say something true. He wanted them to be the kind of friends who could be real with each other. “I wish you hadn’t kept it a secret. But you don’t have to anymore, okay? I mean—I mean, not that you ever did. Just. Yeah. It’s fine.” He ran his fingers through his hair, feeling hideously awkward.

“We just—we never wanted to hurt you,” Blue said softly.

“I—” Adam leaned over, face in his hands. He wanted so badly to say I wouldn’t have been hurt, but he knew that wasn’t true. It had hurt, to see Gansey wind up with another thing Adam had wanted so desperately, without even trying. It had hurt to watch his friends place another secret between themselves and him.

But Blue wasn’t a thing. He felt rising in him the shame of this, another lesson he had taken too long to learn, and he steadied himself, trying to remember: magic was movement. It was change. It was choice. Blue was a person, a friend, someone he wanted to call. Someone he wanted to be happy. And if she and Gansey hadn’t been honest, well—Adam hadn’t broken the silence either.

So he said, “I don’t want to hurt you, either. And that’s—I want that to be the thing that matters most.”

Blue looked like she was on the verge of tears, but she didn’t look exactly sad. “Okay.”

Then she was hugging him, tight, and it took him a moment but he hugged her back, feeling first overwhelming relief, then the same solid warmth that came with aligning himself with the ley line. He couldn’t believe he had ever felt like this wouldn’t be enough for him: the presence of someone who cared about him enough to let him fix things.

Then again, he had never known this kind of care well enough to imagine what it might mean.

When they broke apart, Adam smiled at her experimentally, and she grinned back. It felt like together they had let something go, or made something new. It felt like magic.

His phone buzzed and he pulled it out of his pocket to check it. “Ronan,” he announced, probably failing to sound casual. He showed Blue the text: a picture of the jeans he was wearing from above, the grass stains on his knees.

Blue eyed it skeptically. “Is this his idea of flirting with you?”

“Um. Maybe?” Adam could feel his cheeks flush. He hadn’t thought about it in those terms.

“I don’t know,” she said. “I mean, he’s hot or whatever, but you’re going to MIT. There are like, smart people there.”

“Yeah,” Adam said. He didn’t want to weigh a sudden kiss against a future sea of unknown classmates. In fact he didn’t want to think about Ronan right now at all. He had three months left in Henrietta, and he wanted the time to be spent with Blue to be time for the two of them. He felt like he was making up for something he’d missed. “Hey, let’s forget about him. Let’s do something else.”

Blue pursed her lips, considering. “You wanna go try to make something edible before my mom takes over the kitchen?”

“Let’s do it,” he said, and then they were bounding down the steps, and Blue was borrowing Orla’s laptop to google recipes they could make without buying anything new, and they were mixing ingredients to the strains of Blue’s Spotify playlist of female singers getting revenge on their ex-boyfriends, and Adam found himself almost reeling from the simple happiness his day had filled up with, from how it had come so easily, like it had been waiting for him to let it in.

(He thought of Ronan precisely once: when they cracked an egg that turned out to be double-yolked, and Adam snapped and sent a picture of it before he had the chance to think better of the idea.)

*

Adam had meant to go straight to sleep upon getting home, but he found himself lying in bed strangely energized. Well: not strangely. Alone again, he couldn’t stop thinking about Ronan. about what Ronan had done, or what he might have meant to offer. Adam could guess that much, at least; he had spoken truthfully when he’d told Blue that Ronan didn’t do casual. But it was as impossible as it was unavoidable. Adam was leaving, Ronan was not. There was nowhere for anything between them to grow.

Only if it was so impossible—why couldn’t he let it go?

Impossibilities, inevitabilities, were simple, easily faced or easily discarded. It was possibilities that took up all that space. Adam knew that. Possibilities haunted and lingered and echoed off the walls of what was real. They cluttered the room, filled up the body. Moved and wouldn’t stop moving, like fire. Like magic.

He couldn’t stop going back to Ronan in that one moment: the eyes, the hand, the kiss, quiet and calm and other distinctly un-Ronan-like things. Adam tried to examine his reaction in that moment, but it was as if his body had sealed the record. His memory retained the barest impression of himself there, and it contained no useful clues. He didn’t think he had particularly wanted—anything. But he hadn’t particularly not wanted it either. And if he hadn’t not wanted it, then wasn’t that almost the same—?

He groaned into his pillow. He couldn’t stand to think about it anymore, but he couldn’t think of anything else, either. He shut his eyes, willing sleep to take him and free him from the endless loop playing in the dark of Ronan, Ronan’s eyes, Ronan’s hand, Ronan’s kiss.

He was just beginning to finally drift off when his phone buzzed. Adam warred briefly against his morbid curiosity, but his better judgment lost out. And indeed, there he was: Ronan Lynch, continuing to destroy his chance of sleep, this time with a picture of a bowl containing at least three different children’s breakast cereals.

This seemed patently wrong. It could not be fair to just go around kissing people without preamble or explanation, leaving them to sort once again through the ancient question of what the fuck is Ronan Lynch’s deal, and then text them in the middle of night to show off your Lucky Charms like everything was the same. Adam felt at last something familiar bubbling to the surface—exasperation—and clung to it like a life raft. He texted: so are you going just going to pretend like nothing happened?

that was the plan yeah

Well. Tough shit, Lynch. that’s a bullshit plan

Adam felt a momentary satisfaction at telling Ronan what he deserved to hear before it vanished at the sight of three little dots appearing, disappearing. Appearing, disappearing. Appearing, disappearing. For a miserable second he felt like buying a phone had been a terrible mistake.

Finally Ronan sent: i don’t want to talk about this in a fucking text

Adam typed: so come over

It was a dumb idea. Very dumb; almost Ronan levels of dumb. But he was tired and he was pissed and he had three months left to get some kind of answer to what the fuck is Ronan Lynch’s deal. So he hit send.

There was a long hateful moment of nothing, then a single inscrutable letter—k—which was somehow even worse.

Adam got up and turned the light on. He definitely wasn’t sleeping anytime soon.

*

It was theoretically a twenty-minute drive from Monmouth Manufacturing to St. Agnes. For Ronan, with his apathy towards red lights and speed limits, Adam knew it wouldn’t top fifteen. That was simultaneously too little time to plan what he was going to say and too long to spend feeling like he was probably about to have a stroke.

There was nothing to be done so there was nothing to be said. It had been almost as stupid to call Ronan to St. Agnes as it had been for Ronan to kiss him. Adam frequently did not understand himself, so he had learned to rely on his own capacity for logic: he could understand the things he did because he knew them to make sense. But this didn’t make sense and so he had no framework for understanding what the fuck he was doing.

He wondered if this was what Ronan felt like all the time, and felt a sudden, awful tremor of empathy at the thought.

He kept trying to sit down, to plan, to think about what he wanted out of this and what he should say, but he kept coming back unfruitfully to that moment: Ronan, an impossibly bright snapshot; Adam—what? What had he felt? What had he wanted?

Maybe he just wanted to know that.

There was a knock at the door.

Adam opened it.

In an instant Ronan was not a memory or a picture but a boy in the room with him, and somehow this was so much worse. He was tall and sullen, his mouth a sharp line, his hands shoved in his pockets. He had put on jeans, but he was wearing a worn T-shirt that had once a long time ago been black and he had come without Chainsaw, and these things made Adam feel like he was seeing some strangely exposed Ronan. He could feel his heart beating in his throat so strongly he felt sure it must show through his skin.

“Hey,” he said, idiotically.

Ronan lifted a single eyebrow.

Adam stepped back to let him in. Any other day he would have gone to sit on his bed while Ronan joined him or else made his way to the chair or the floor, but suddenly, stupidly, the presence of a bed he and Ronan had sat on dozens of times seemed horribly obscene, so he stayed standing. Ronan followed his lead. Adam felt weirdly aware of his arms and crossed them to stop thinking about them. It didn’t work.

“Did you call me over just to give me the fucking silent treatment in person?” Ronan said. It sounded less vicious than it should have. Like he had been aiming for a growl and somehow landed on a mumble.

I didn’t call you over, Adam wanted to say, but it wasn’t actually true. He had. That seemed wrong, though. Ronan Lynch wasn’t someone to be called over. He was too wild and spiteful for that. Even Gansey couldn’t manage it. The rest of Ronan’s world had given up trying long ago.

But when Adam had called, Ronan had come.

He felt like he might throw up.

“I’m not giving you the silent treatment,” he said instead. “I’m just—” But he didn’t know what he was doing. So he switched tacks. “You just—” But he didn’t know that, either. And asking Ronan what the fuck are you doing had never yielded helpful information.

So Adam stuck to the truest thing, the thing he had worked his whole life to make true. “I’m leaving in three months.”

“What the fuck does that have to do with anything,” Ronan spat. This time he was closer to the expected intensity, but there was still something strange under his voice. Or maybe not. Maybe Adam was just having a nervous breakdown.

“It means we can’t—we couldn’t,” Adam said. Pathetically, he couldn’t put into words what it was they couldn’t do. But then it seemed so obvious to him that he didn’t understand why Ronan needed him to explain.

Ronan seemed to be deliberately avoiding his eyes. “I don’t need your fucking excuses, Parrish.”

Adam rolled his eyes. “It’s not an excuse.” This was so typical: Ronan looking for a fight when Adam was just trying to get through the hour. He was so annoyed that he didn’t even realize what he’d said until he noticed Ronan’s face.

Ronan was looking at him and his expression was not an expression Adam had ever seen on his face. It was like someone had opened a door inside Ronan, just a crack, and a sliver of light was being let out. Ronan opened his mouth; closed it. Opened it again to say: “What do you mean, it’s not an excuse?” His voice had that strangeness again, only Adam could identify it now, and it became stranger in the knowing: Ronan sounded… embarrassed.

“I mean—” Adam started, and had to stop, caught out by the truth of his own words, stunned by the enormity of what he’d accidentally admitted. It wasn’t an excuse. If he took the future out of the equation—if he left himself with just Ronan, fierce, infuriating Ronan, always dragging him into some dumb idea, making him stupid with laughter, pulling him towards a sparkling wildness—if he had a life without timelines, without plans, a life that could accommodate wildness without falling apart—

—he didn’t know what that life would look like. He couldn’t imagine it. He had fought too fiercely for the life he had to picture an alternative now.

But in that life, Ronan would be front and center. The way he was in almost all of Adam’s best memories, the ones that made him smile to look back on, the ones where he had felt wide awake and glad to be. Adam couldn’t believe how long it had taken him to piece it together.

“I mean what I said,” he finished. “It’s not an excuse. If I weren’t leaving…”

If he weren’t leaving—if he hadn’t had a life that made it so he needed to escape—what could they have been?

“But you are leaving,” Ronan said, insistent.

“I am leaving,” Adam agreed. He was. He had to. He didn’t regret it, even now. But he felt suddenly the shape of another loss, another thing his past had stolen from him that he had never even known to look for, and the bitterness of it made something in him curl up like a fist. Made him reckless enough to say: “But not for three months.”

It was a Ronan-like thing to do: to cast out some reckless spark and wait for people to react. Ronan always managed to look calm while he waited. Adam felt like he was going to pass out.

Ronan did not look calm, but Adam could not figure out how he did look. He held Adam’s eyes, steady, considering. Then he took a step forward; another; another. He was in front of Adam now, and Adam was finding it hard to breathe.

Ronan lifted his hands, slowly, then rested them on Adam’s arms, just below his shoulders. The warmth of his hands traveled down Adam’s body. Ronan waited there, and after a moment Adam took the cue to uncross his arms. Ronan nodded, once, then waited again.

Adam recognized what he was doing: giving Adam every chance to say no. To back out of what his words had offered. To go back to pretending neither of them knew.

Adam didn’t think he could go back. He could pretend Ronan didn’t know, maybe; he’d been doing that for months. But he had won something back from the mystery of himself tonight. He didn’t want to let it go.

He didn’t say no.

He said, because Ronan was still waiting, oddly still, “I meant it, Ronan.”

“Alright then,” Ronan whispered, and kissed him.

This was not a kiss like the kiss at the party, brief, introductory. This was long and slow, a kiss with the force of Ronan’s whole body behind it, and Adam’s whole body reacted in turn. He wasn’t sure exactly where to tilt his head or how to move his jaw, and on some level he intuited that Ronan wasn’t either, but his body didn’t seem to care. There was no mystery now: it was all electricity, running through him like current through copper. Like aligning with the ley line, sensation sharply present in his limbs.

He didn’t know what to do with his hands, but he wanted—it was so clear now—he wanted to touch Ronan. He was pretty sure he could, so he did. He rested his hands on Ronan’s waist, lightly, even though it wasn’t a light wanting, because Ronan was being so careful with him and it seemed right to return the favor. It was already something new just to do this, to feel Ronan through the soft fabric of his ancient T-shirt, to touch him with purpose. It was something new and then Ronan leaned in, still slow, kissing him all the while, so that their bodies were pressed close, and Adam felt awake and dazed. He couldn’t believe how good it felt, how good he was allowed to feel in it. Ronan moved his palms up across his shoulders, a shockingly controlled motion, to his neck, to the sides of his face. He broke off to kiss Adam’s neck, and it was hard to stay standing when that was happening. It was hard to keep himself from making some embarrassing sound in response. He ducked his head to catch Ronan’s mouth, to kiss him again. Ronan let him, and this time Adam did make an embarrassing sound. It was so good.

Then, abruptly, Ronan stopped, stepped back. Adam was left holding air and trying to figure out what had gone wrong.

Ronan was scowling. Adam didn’t want him to be scowling. He wanted Ronan to be kissing him, but failing that he wanted Ronan to feel better than he was looking now. “What’s wrong?”

Ronan said, “I can’t do this with a fucking expiration date.”

It wasn’t a request; it was just a declaration. Nothing would change, because nothing could change, and Ronan had just named his way of living with that.

Adam nodded. It made sense. Ronan carried loss, too. It made sense that he wouldn’t want to sign up for more of it. It was not unfair. In retrospect Adam should have known better than to open something neither of them would be able to keep. “Okay.”

Ronan looked like he was about to say something, then changed his mind and left without a word.

Adam sat on his bed, head in his hands, suddenly exhausted.

He should have known better than to want more than what he’d already secured.

*

This time things did change. The texts stopped. Ronan did not stop by St. Agnes or invite Adam to the Barns. Adam felt the loss of this with a keenness that surprised him. To have Ronan Lynch in his life at all was already so much more than he had ever accounted for. It was stupid to have grown accustomed to Ronan as a regular presence, to have acclimared to the feeling of having someone around to make him laugh or bring him places Adam would never have thought to go. It had been even more absurd to consider, even momentarily, that there could have been between them—something more. Something Adam wasn’t sure he had a name for. Something that had grown in shared silences and locked eyes, in long drives and two brief kisses. The impossibility of it made sense with the life Adam lived.

Still: it hurt. Adam hated having found a way to open himself yet again to hurt.

The days became sticky and sweltering. Adam closed the curtains at night to keep the sunrise from waking him up before he needed to. Blue asked him to help her make a budget for saving up to go back to school. They spent an afternoon drinking iced tea and peering at a spreadsheet on her computer until their eyes crossed and they went to watch some marathon on TV with Maura and Calla, Blue comfortably familiar, Adam buoyed by the sensation of having nothing due to which he needed to devote his evening. Gansey started working as an assistant at the local public library and within a week was bubbling over with ideas for themes for young children’s story hours.

It made Adam him smile to hear it. Sometimes in the summers when he was a kid his mother had foisted him off on a neighbor who frequented library events. Her kids were toddlers, and Adam was really too old for the stories they went to, but the library was air conditioned, albeit weakly, and the woman reading the stories had had a kind smile that suggested she liked him even if she didn’t know his name. Once he had come in with a mottled bruise creeping out from under his T-shirt and tried belatedly to hide it when he saw the flicker of concern. He didn’t know what had been said by whom to whom, but that had been the end of his time at the library. For a while, though, it had been a welcome respite. He thought that if he were a scared and sad kid now, walking in the library to find Gansey there, inexplicably thrilled to see him and every other person in the room, might make him feel that same sweet peace he’d discovered there back then.

Ronan stayed at the Barns, or at Monmouth. Maybe he was dreaming something new; maybe he was spending time with Matthew. But Ronan didn’t tell Adam what he was doing, and Adam felt he had lost the right to ask.

Gansey rounded them up to spend a Saturday at Cabeswater, seeking refuge from the end of a Virginia June in Cabeswater’s eternal springtime. He packed pretzels and made little sandwiches cut into triangles. Blue brought yogurt and a small cooler with a box of Popsicles in it. Adam managed to pick up some trail mix and a bag of cherries. Ronan contributed an enormous bag of jelly beans and declared it a rule that you had to close your eyes when you ate them so the flavor would be a surprise. It was very stupid and very Ronan and Adam felt something in him seize up fiercely at how all of that had become newly untouchable.

The whole day passed like that. Ronan was not cold to Adam, but he rarely spoke directly to him unless Adam had spoken first. He avoided Adam’s eyes, which Adam noticed because now he couldn’t stop looking at Ronan: at his long body stretched out on the grass, his well-shaped arms folded under his head, his eyes closed under the unnaturally mild sunshine. It was like a physical struggle not to touch him. Adam wanted to rest his knee against Ronan’s leg. To touch the underside of his wrists. To kiss him again. Just once. Even though it made no sense. Even though he wasn’t allowed.

Gansey and Blue were allowed to touch each other now, and it was excruciating. It struck Adam as darkly funny that less than two weeks after he had assured Blue his jealousy was long laid to rest, it had returned in full force, in a newer, deeper form. He wasn’t jealous of Gansey for getting to be with Blue, or of Blue for getting to be with someone like Gansey. He was jealous of the two of them together, of how obvious they were with each other, of their easy joy. Of the lives they had lived which had let them fall into this kind of closeness.

Adam had been jealous of so much of Gansey’s life—his money, his well-bred charm, his looks, his name—and he had fought his way through that to be Gansey’s friend, but this was like a thorn he could not dislodge. He felt sick with jealousy, and sorry to be jealous again, and guilty to have told Blue about the first kiss and then gone silent because he didn’t want to talk about it, and guilty not to have told Gansey, and meanwhile, every time Ronan swallowed or smirked or moved, something under his skin burned.

Eventually Blue started making noises about getting back to help Maura with something. Gansey obediently stood up, and Adam followed, having ridden in the Camaro with them from Fox Way. They dusted themselves off and began readying themselves to leave. Ronan halfheartedly kicked in Gansey’s direction, eyes closed, when Gansey inquired as to his plans, which they all took as an indication to leave him alone. They were turning to go when Ronan said, “I can give you a ride back if you want to stay a little longer, Parrish.”

Adam froze.

It would have been easy to say he needed to run some errands at home; it would not even have been untrue. Nothing was stopping him from walking away and leaving whatever had flickered between them at rest except himself. It was only some unknown, stupid instinct of his own that led him to say, “Yeah, okay. I’ll see you guys soon.” He could feel Blue trying to give him a significant look, and kept his gaze steadily on the ground.

When Gansey and Blue had left, Adam sat back down next to Ronan, then, when Ronan didn’t join him upright, nervously lay down to match him. He tried to look up at the trees, but he couldn’t break his gaze away from Ronan, so still he could have been asleep. His whole body felt charged with the awareness of Ronan’s presence next to his.

“Ronan,” he said, when he couldn’t stand the silence any longer.

Ronan opened his eyes, then turned his head to Adam. Adam felt pinned by his gaze. Slowly, his body coiled with tension, he rolled over onto his side, then brushed a lock of hair behind Adam’s ear. The moment of contact made him feel lightheaded.

“I need a haircut,” Adam said. He couldn’t figure out if it was a normal or a very stupid thing to say. He didn’t know what the rules were. He didn’t even know what game they were playing.

“Your hair looks fine,” Ronan said.

This did not seem normal, but Adam didn’t have it in him to contest it. He asked, shakily, “What are you doing?”

Ronan took a long, deep breath, his fingers still in Adam’s hair, before answering: “I’m changing my mind.”

Adam could not pretend to be surprised when Ronan kissed him this time. But if it wasn’t a surprise, it was still a shock, something he felt in every piece of him. Ronan kissed him wildly now, the way Adam would have expected him to kiss all along, like he had used up all his capacity for restraint. His kiss was messy and deep and his hands didn’t seem to be able to pick a part of Adam they wanted to touch the most and within a moment he had adjusted himself to be on top of Adam, straddling him right there in the grass. It was clumsy and imperfect and Adam felt like it shouldn’t have felt as good as it did except for the way he could feel how much Ronan wanted this, how fully he had abandoned any hope of control.

But maybe it was Adam who could no longer hold back. He had wanted this maybe for longer than he had let himself know, and he had been painfully aware of wanting it all day. Having it was enough to send away questions of what the fuck and why and how bad an idea is this, but it wasn’t enough to calm his wanting. Somehow having Ronan like this, finally, only made Adam want him more. More: like kissing him back just as wildly, feeling Ronan’s wildness seep into him, welcoming it with a full-body yes. More: like running his hands down Ronan’s back and under Ronan’s T-shirt, thrilling to the feel of Ronan’s skin under his palms. More: like gripping Ronan’s hips and feeling his own rise up involuntarily when Ronan sucked at Adam’s neck.

It was wild and fierce and overwhelming and somehow not enough, not ever enough. Adam felt like he might pass out at any second and like he wanted to do this forever, like he could kiss Ronan Lynch forever and it would never stop making him feel so awake and so new. It would have been a terrifying thought if his brain had had any room at all for fear.

“Parrish,” Ronan hissed, and Adam made an awful strangled sound at the feel of Ronan’s breath on his ear. As revenge he dug his teeth lightly into the skin just below Ronan’s jaw and was rewarded by a low, rough groan that was not like any sound he had heard Ronan make before. But then Ronan lifted himself out of Adam’s reach. He was so obviously reluctant that Adam didn’t bother to worry, but he was disappointed. He didn’t want Ronan up there. He wanted Ronan down here, kissing him again. He didn’t know where this insistence had come from.

“Parrish,” Ronan said again. “Do you want to go do this some place where my mom’s not maybe gonna walk in on us?”

Adam blinked up at him. It was such a normal, everyday concern, the fact of the magical forest where his dreamed-up mother lived notwithstanding, that it did not seem to belong at all with Ronan Lynch, much less with the insanity of what they were doing. Ronan’s face seemed torn between embarrassment and desire. Adam wanted to marvel at it, but he could do that in the car. “Yeah. Yeah. Take me home.”

*

It was an hour drive from Cabeswater to St. Agnes normally; with Ronan at the wheel, they made it in forty minutes. Still, that was enough time for Adam's heart to slow down, for his body to cool off. For thought to creep back in.

It didn’t make sense. Ronan was wild and impulsive and reckless—but not about this. In the whole two years Adam had known him, Ronan had never been careless with this part of himself.

So when the BMW pulled into the St. Agnes parking lot, and Ronan managed to imbue even the act of turning off the ignition with a furious energy, Adam said, “Wait.”

He expected Ronan to curse at him, or roll his eyes, but Ronan just sat, hand still on his keys.

“This isn’t…” Adam drew a breath, looking for the right words. “This doesn’t seem like you.”

Ronan scowled. “And you’re the fucking expert on what I’m like?”

“I…” He was doing this all wrong. Ronan was angry with him now; who knew when he would be amenable to talking again? Much less anything else.

But Ronan leaned back then, palms on his knees, chin tilting up like a slow uncoiling. Took a breath like he was steadying himself and said, “I didn’t mean that.”

Adam stared. Ronan bullshitted him on a near-daily basis, but he had never admitted it before. It was the closest he had ever seen Ronan come to apologizing. Maybe it meant more an apology, even, for Ronan to give up the cover of pure honesty.

Adam tried again. “I just—I don’t—”

“If you don’t want to—” Ronan said, almost too quickly.

“No, it’s not that. It’s really, really not that.” He didn’t know why it seemed important that Ronan know this. If he was going to back out, it would have been kinder, maybe, to pretend that was why. But Adam didn’t want to lie. Whatever this thing was they were doing, he wanted it to be true.

“Then what?”

Adam thought: I don’t want to be one more thing you hurt yourself with. But that seemed too big to say out loud. He didn’t want to see how Ronan would react to the accusation. “Just—are you sure? If I’m leaving?”

Ronan shrugged. “Not for three months, right?”

“That’s all,” Adam said. “That’s all this can be.”

“I’m not stupid,” Ronan said. “I know what we’re doing. I told you. I changed my mind.”

Adam wanted to ask—why? But he felt he’d pushed as far as he could. And Ronan had given him what he’d wanted. They both knew the score. Their eyes were open. Three months of living the impossible, and then the inevitable would set in. Adam could live with that. And Ronan had decided he could, too. No one would need to get hurt.

“So,” Ronan said, drumming his fingers on the steering wheel. “Are we doing this or not, Parrish?”

He turned to look at Adam then, one eyebrow raised, and Adam didn't know how he could do this, how he could look simultaneously lazy and alert, indifferent and aching, cocky and hungry. How Adam felt like he could look at his face forever and still find new things shadings in his eyes.

Maybe—Adam let himself think it, his skin prickling at the novelty of allowing himself to name what had been lying beneath his words—maybe it was just a good face. A handsome face, an attractive face. A face Adam wanted to—a face Adam wanted. "Yeah. We're doing it.”

“Then unbuckle your fucking seatbelt, you dweeb.”

Adam obeyed but nonetheless rolled his eyes. “Sorry the idea of flying through the windshield doesn't exactly get me in the mood.”

Ronan, somehow already over by Adam's side of the car, raised his eyebrows in scorn. “In the mood? What are you, like fifty years old?”

Adam stepped out of the car. Ronan was closer than he expected; with his body near enough to touch again, with the permission of three months laid before them, he was feeling that edge come on him again, the feeling of wildness Ronan always gave him. “Is that your idea of dirty talk, asshole?”

Ronan smirked. “Guess you'll just have to find out.”

Adam kissed him, then, right there in the parking lot, just a quick hard kiss because he could. When they broke apart they laughed even though nothing was funny and Adam thought: Okay. Okay. I can do this. Okay.

And then they were going up the narrow staircase, past the landing by the crack in the wooden bannister, past the bucket in the hall placed under the leak in the ceiling; then the two of them were together in Adam’s apartment, Ronan was in Adam’s bed, Adam was in his body in a way he had never been, every nerve ending electric, every piece of him awake; then there was kissing, and other things too, like Ronan’s broad hands and how unexpectedly polite he was about asking Adam for permission for the things he wanted to do, and the wonderful pink flush in his cheeks when Adam wasn’t polite at all, the ocean of heat set off by touch and the rush of power in his stomach, as good as anything Ronan was doing with his hands or his body or his mouth, as he learned one way and then another that he could send Ronan Lynch off balance, make him twist with pleasure and groan with a dark voice Adam had never heard him use; then there was Ronan saying Adam’s name in that same dark voice, reverent, amazed, and there was Ronan’s name in Adam’s mouth, tasting like it never had before—

It was good. It was better than he could have imagined, if he had let himself imagine it. He said so, afterwards, still breathless, too dazed to worry about keeping it cool: “That was so good.”

Ronan grinned, happy and perhaps a little smug. “See? I told you I have the best ideas.”

“And we do make a good team.” Adam couldn’t help but smile back. His body felt like it was made of helium, floating above the air. Almost to himself he murmured, “And we get to do it again.”

Ronan laughed. “Damn, Parrish. You’re fucking insataible, aren’t you?”

“What,” Adam said, embarrassed, as Ronan leaned in to kiss at his neck, “oh, I didn’t mean—now, just—the rest of the summer—”

“It’s what I like about you, magician,” Ronan said, his lips close enough to Adam’s good ear that Adam could feel his breath hot there and it sent his eyelashes fluttering briefly back. “You always want more.”

And, oh—Adam realized his mistake then as he heard the truth in Ronan’s words: he did want more. He would always want more. He should end this now, before he could no longer stop himself from wanting. But Ronan was kissing along his jaw, then, trying out a soft scrape of his teeth, and it turned out Adam liked that, and it turned out Ronan liked it when Adam pushed a little harder than he had intended to get him on his back, and it turned out the point at which he could have stopped himself was long gone.

*

The way Adam justified it was this: he was overdue a few bad ideas. He had carved his way through Aglionby on stubbornness and grit, spent Friday night after Friday night disciplining mind and body to power through his exhaustion for one more paragraph of an essay, one more chapter of a textbook, one more problem of a set, while his classmates, born spitting distance to the finish line, had wiled away their weekends on booze and drugs and other predictable teen tawdriness, not even realizing they had anything in their hands worth sacrificing, much less worth sacrificing for. Now he could glimpse his own escape hatch, and in the dwindling summer days between now and then, it made sense that he would want to taste something akin to that rich boy recklessness, just for a moment before setting off on the life he was supposed to lead. And it made sense that this would all happen with Ronan, the richest and most reckless boy of them all. Ronan who had never met a bad idea he didn’t love; Ronan who drove like a bank robber on the run and could drink them all under the table; Ronan who sometimes leaned against his car looking less like a real person and more like some lonely dreamer’s snarling personification of a bad idea come to life.

Told like this, the story had some internal narrative coherence. Adam liked it much better than the other version, in which he had simply lost his mind.

And it fit the contours of what they were doing: the unspoken agreement of secrecy, the furtive looks held just a breath too long. They acted normal in public, and never stayed the night. They kept themselves to places no one would find them: Adam’s thin mattress, Ronan's sun-drenched room at the Barns, and once, uncomfortably but memorably, the back of the BMW, parked on the side of some rarely traveled Virginia road. Sometimes Ronan stretched out his long legs under their table at Nino's and brushed against Adam’s ankle, face kept carefully nonchalant, as though daring Adam to react, and Adam would hold himself very still, and later when they were alone they would jump on each other with a desperation that had spent hours brewing in the slightest of touches where they hadn’t been allowed to touch. This was crazy, but it was fun. It was good—good enough to be worth chasing. After all this time chasing the most responsible options available, Adam deserved three measly months of chasing something that just felt good.

The only problem with this version of events was that Ronan didn’t fit into it.

Sure: there were moments in the half-light of dusk when he grinned at Adam with he same wolfish heedlessness Adam had seen him carry into fights and races and nights that ended with Ronan leaving the Latin room twenty minutes into first period to go puke in the hallway trash can. There were moments when Ronan sent Adam an absolutely filthy text message at work with a memory or a promise that burned through him like a fever, and moments where he whispered filthy ideas into Adam’s ear and Adam shocked himself by responding in kind. In these moments the story Adam wanted to believe fit. Ronan was reckless, and impulsive, and for some reason he saw something in Adam worth going wild for. Adam couldn’t deny the thrill of knowing he could do that to Ronan. He couldn’t help wanting to taste his wildness, while he could.

Other times, though—other times, Ronan lingered in the overheated attic bedroom, sweat pooling in the curve of his bare back, complaining about the heat but not getting up to move or letting Adam out of arms, and Adam didn’t know how to square the feral creature he had just fucked with the familiar boy lounging casually on his bed, as much Adam’s friend as he had ever been. Or Ronan brought Adam to the cool and spacious rooms of the Barns, and after they had worn each other out doing what they had come to do, he said nothing about how it was time for Adam to leave; instead he asked if Adam was hungry, if he wanted a snack cobbled together from Ronan's ample resources and limited culinary skills. It sat somewhere heavy in Adam's throat, the sight of Ronan, half-dressed, making them PBJs in the kitchen, serving them with the crusts cut off as if it had never occurred to him it were possible to eat them any other way. It would have fit with the easy story to believe Ronan was just being polite, the sandwiches a gentlemanly gesture, but Ronan was neither polite nor a gentleman, and Adam couldn’t account for the tenderness the unexpected gesture filled him with.

Maybe it was just that he had lived nearly a whole life where no one had ever asked if he was hungry, and here on the other side he was still starving for more than food.

Because nothing was ever enough for him now. Adam had hoped that perhaps after that first long afternoon touching and being touched, going again and again late into the night, if he couldn’t stop wanting more then at least the knowledge that more would be coming would provide some semblance of calm. Instead the opposite had happened. Now when he was not touching Ronan, he was thinking about touching him. He thought—he couldn’t stop thinking, with a terrible, unrelenting intensity—of the shape of his shoulders and how the back of his neck felt cradled in Adam’s palm, the shape of his knuckles and the way they fit into Adam’s mouth, the urgency with which he would pull Adam closer by his belt loops, the way he said Adam’s name when he was getting close, like Adam was something sacred. He was collecting, grasping, besieged by memories that lived in his muscles and ghosted along his skin, sending a flush of heat to the pit of his stomach so that sometimes at work he had to go to the bathroom just to splash cold water until he could calm down. Then he would examine his face in the dirty mirror, feeling like he should be marked somehow, like the sudden newness of his body, all these sensations he had never even known to imagine it could feel, should be visible on his skin. In the mirror he was the same old Adam: freckled, oddly angled, too thin, nose an unflattering and peeling red after weeks of the Virginia summer sun, despite the brave efforts of his drugstore sunscreen. But it felt different, still, to look at himself now, knowing what his body could do and feel. Knowing that his face was a face that Ronan wanted to look at, his body a body Ronan wanted to touch.

He wasn’t used to his body holding secrets he was glad to be keeping.

On his birthday Ronan picked Adam up at sunset and drove him to the Barns and when they arrived Blue and Gansey were there with a cake and a set of shiny bags overflowing with tissue paper and that stupid song he’d glared about over drugstore cupcakes all through elementary school knowing that the other summer birthdays in his class had someone at home who would sing it for them, and he felt horribly like he might cry in the face of such simple proof of being cared for. But luckily he didn’t; luckily he laughed and let Blue cut him a piece and let Gansey recount his full conversation with the elderly sisters working at the bakery. “Should I be jealous you’re looking elsewhere for your dose of local color?” he teased, and Gansey said, “Well, I have to, you won’t be local much longer,” with a beaming pride that was insufferable and sweet, and Blue said “I cannot believe I hang out with the two of you on purpose,” and Ronan said “Same” and shoved half a slice of cake in his mouth before instructing them through crumbs and frosting to come outside. And out on the grounds, watching Ronan’s impossible fireworks blaze prismatically across the darkening sky, pinwheels and constellations and sparklers that glowed till they were embers on the earth, explosions like stars, like flames, like the crystals in Blue’s house full of magic, Adam did cry a little, thinking: I didn’t know it could be like this. His life, for a moment, for a summer, for the first time: light and sugar and the heady summer smell of damp grass, and the laughter of his friends, and Ronan’s hand at the small of his back, under the night where no one would see.

All his endless aching wanting, and it had never occurred to him to want something as easy and as lovely as this night beneath the stars. And in three months—less now, barely two—it would be gone.

*

July at the Barns: balmy breezes cooling the sweat gathered on his way over through the thick Henrietta air, trees which had remained barren all spring suddenly laden with lumpen bruise-colored fruit, tiny pink fireflies dotting the grass at dusk. Adam lay in Ronan’s room, which for all the magic and money of the place was the same mess of primary colors and dirty laundry you might find in the rooms of a hundred teenage boys in town. Ronan had gotten up for some water and as had become his custom in the moments he found himself freshly alone Adam was torn between the stupefied contentment of his bodily pleasure and his increasing concern over what that contentment entailed. However free he was to make bad choices, however still time seemed when Ronan pressed a soft palm over the skin of his hipbone or his chest or his shoulder after they’d both come, which he did nearly every time with startling deliberateness as if to demonstrate that no matter how efficiently they might operate his touch was not strictly utilitarian—however newly livable his life had become, he couldn’t let himself forget that he was leaving. He couldn’t let himself get used to this.

He sat up on the bed, scanning Ronan’s nightstand (abstract ironwork, like a three-dimensional ink splatter) to distract himself: bottle of Advil with the cap left off; a lightly glowing clock that contained seventeen hours, none of which were identified by a numeral; unbent paperclips, some re-bent into shapes like little dogs; a stress ball; a hopefully empty can of PBR; a fountain pen he suspected did not require ink and next to it a sheet of looseleaf paper, folded neatly into quarters. It was so unusual for Ronan to write anything of his own volition that before he could think better of it Adam had grabbed it and opened it up.

No title, no date—just Ronan’s blotted chicken scratch listing:

farmer
glassblower
vet
inventor
NASCAR/long hall trucker
circus?

Reading it Adam felt—he didn’t know what. A soft almost-sadness in his throat, a flutter in his stomach almost like shame. The list had a nakedness to it. He knew Ronan wouldn’t have wanted anyone to see.

“What are you doing?”

Adam slammed the list back on the table, trying to swallow back the heat of anxiety spiking up his chest. “Sorry,” he said. “I’m—I’m really sorry.” He braced himself for the impending fight, the fight that might end everything.

But Ronan simply shrugged. “I shouldn’t have left it there if I didn’t want you to see.” He picked up the list and sat next to Adam on the bed, looking it over.

“Still,” Adam said. “It wasn’t any of my business. I’m sorry.”

“It’s not a fucking diary, okay? It’s—whatever.”

“Okay,” Adam said. “Sorry.”

“I swear, if you apologize one more time—”

“Okay,” Adam said, and then, idiotically, “Sorry. I mean for— ” For the way the word was always waiting behind his teeth, ready to fall out, for the way he could not stop feeling sorry once he started, for how he was never sorry enough, I’ll show you what fucking sorry looks like, boy, no godforsaken son of mine—

—at some point without realizing he had started breathing through his mouth. He closed it, forced air to come smooth and steady into his lungs. His own voice in his head now: A fucked up dad thing, really? Christ, Parrish, are you really that cliché?

Ronan looked at him sidelong. “Are you, like, okay?”

“Yeah,” he said, a little too loud. “Yeah, just—” Just a human after-school special, just broken in the brain maybe forever. Just haunted by a ghost that wouldn’t let him be. Just really fucking sorry. “Yeah.”

Ronan’s mouth tightened slightly, like he didn’t really buy it but he respected a person’s right to keep his fucked up shit to himself. Adam was flooded with appreciation.

“I was thinking I should get a job,” Ronan said conversationally, like this was not the antithesis of every value Ronan had ever expressed in word and deed.

“Yeah?” said Adam, grateful for the change of subject. “To—” He searched for a polite way to say but like, why? “Like, for fun?”

Ronan snorted, then hunched slightly into himself. “For Matthew.” He spoke in the quiet tight voice he used whenever he let slip something close to his actual heart. Adam filed away for later or perhaps for never the fact that he had heard that voice enough to recognize it.

“Oh,” he said, trying to work through the logic. “Because you want to…” He trailed off, unable to find a suggestion that was not absurd as applied to the situation: provide for him, secure his future, save up for his college tuition. All taken care of, dozens of times over.

“I want—” Ronan took a long pause. Adam wondered if he had made a mistake. “I want him to be proud of me.”

“Oh,” Adam said again, simultaneously touched and confused. “I mean—I think he’s pretty proud of you.” It did not seem appropriate to add: because of how your toddler brain programmed him to be. Thinking too hard about Ronan’s family stressed him out.

“I want—if I—” Ronan scowled, as though frustrated by the demands of language. “If something happened to me, he would…” A silence filled with Aurora in the forest, cheerful and alone. “So I need to find a way to change that. And I figure that when I do, he’ll—he won’t be like he is now, maybe. And that means he’ll have a choice. And I want that. I want him to have a choice.”

He was talking, Adam realized, about making Matthew real. It was very in-keeping with Ronan, who sometimes felt the most exhaustingly, thrillingly real person Adam knew. He understood that his brother had not been granted the same freedom he so fiercely relished, and he wanted to correct that inequity. “Makes sense.”

“So,” Ronan said, “if I want him to be proud of me, I need to give him a reason, for when I—when I fix it. So, ergo…” He gestured at the list.

Adam felt—he wanted to hold Ronan close, or to say something that likely would get him kicked out of bed. “Gotcha.” He looked at the list again. “Vet?”

Ronan shrugged. “I like animals.” Elsewhere in the house, Chainsaw cawed in fond assent. “Not really a people person.”

“Right.”

“Any ideas?”

Adam thought about it. “Not really,” he said. “But I think it’s long haul trucker with a U. Like, in it for the long haul.”

“Oh,” Ronan said after a beat. “I guess that makes more sense.” He picked up the pen and crossed out hall, wrote in the correction above it. The tiny gesture of care made Adam look away.

“I should go,” he said. Although they often dozed together after sex, still they had not spent the night together. The idea seemed to violate some unarticulated boundary set out by their initial agreement of three months.

Except then Ronan said, “You don’t have to.”

It was the least committal way to phrase an invitation. Adam wondered briefly if he was meant to respond by deflecting until he remembered Ronan would not ever allow anyone in his home longer than he wanted them there. “I don’t have a change of clothes.”

“You won’t need them.” Ronan grinned with almost automatic lasciviousness, then shrugged: “Or you can borrow some of mine. Or you can go home. It’s whatever.”

Adam wanted to—god, he really wanted to. To stay, to fool around some more, to eat leftover pizza in their underwear. To fall asleep curled up with a kind of closeness Adam had never known, could hardly imagine, hadn’t had any idea he wanted this badly. The rise and fall of Ronan’s chest. Their bodies tangled in the sheets. Waking up together—starting the day knowing they were anything but alone. One more thing he wanted. One more thing he’d then have to live without.

“I really should go,” he said, “I’ve got to do laundry.”

Ronan shrugged. “Suit yourself,” he said, like it was easy. Adam took some consolation in knowing that at least for him, it was.

*

At Monmouth, late into a foreign movie night Blue had to skip for a baby-sitting gig and Ronan boycotted on principle, Gansey announced: “I’m concerned about Ronan.”

Adam felt his body tense up. Their longstanding differences of opinion about the appropriate ways to deal with concern about one’s friends had never been a topic Adam was eager to discuss, The idea of revisiting it now, when Adam had a secret store of Ronan memories to which Gansey was not privy, was faintly agonizing. “Like, more than usual?”

“It’s just that,” Gansey started, with a kind of mannered spontaneity that suggested to Adam he had in fact rehearsed this conversation privately, perhaps several times, “Aglionby was a kind of structure, at least. Of course he chafed against that structure”—Adam fought the urge to roll his eyes—“but it lent a necessary framework to his days. Now, obviously, a four-year college degree isn’t the path for everyone, but it isn’t about getting him to follow a particular path. I merely think he’s benefited from structure in the past, whether he enjoyed it or not, and I worry he hasn’t taken that into account when making his choices. Now…”

“Now he’s harder to supervise?”

“That’s uncharitable.”

“Sorry,” Adam said, because it had been, and because he didn’t want to get in a fight.

Gansey pursed his lips in one of his very Gansey-est expressions. “Are you really not worried about him?”

Adam shrugged. He had never had much energy to worry about Ronan Lynch; he had less energy for it now that the question of Ronan Lynch had gotten so thoroughly tangled with the question of what the fuck was Adam doing with himself. And in truth, even when prompted to look, Adam didn’t see the Ronan he’d been spending his summer with as someone to worry about. He was sober more often than not; he had not purposely or accidentally endangered his own life in weeks. He had made a motley, hopeful list, which was almost like admitting the future was real and he wanted to see it. He had kissed Adam, and taken it back, and changed his mind, and made him PBJs with the crusts cut off. “I don’t know. I mean, we’ve definitely seen him worse.”

“That’s true.” Gansey tilted his head, as if he were debating with himself whether this was a comforting thought.

“And he mentioned to me he was thinking of getting a job.” Adam hoped it was a watered-down enough version of the truth that it didn’t count as a betrayal of Ronan’s confidence.

“Did he?” Gansey said, surprised. “Well. That’s something. Now his follow-through isn’t the most consistent…”

“He’s figuring it out,” Adam said, a little less casually than perhaps he should have. “He made it through high school. I think it’s okay for him to take some time to figure out what’s next.”

Almost as if Adam hadn’t spoken, Gansey said, “I know he puts up a strong front—”

“Does he?”

“—but you weren’t there when he—when Niall died. It was like—like a switch went off, or—I’d met this person who was so living, and in the weeks after… he was gone.”

Adam couldn’t help it: he thought of a smile that flashed white sharp teeth, a voice low and urgent near release, the pale curve of his body jumping into the creek or stretched out on Adam’s bed. His laughter, his hands, the hunger in his kiss. His sparkling dreams, his tentative list. “He seems pretty alive to me. I mean, did he actually go off the rails after finals? When was the last time he seemed super fucked up to you?”

Gansey was looking at him strangely. It must have been startling, Adam realized belatedly, to hear him coming to Ronan’s defense. But then, all along he’d beieved that Ronan Lynch needed to grow up. The only thing that had changed was that it had begun to seem as if Ronan might agree.

He didn’t know why it mattered to him so much to get Gansey to see that.

“I guess you’re right,” Gansey said finally. “I hadn’t noticed before, but it’s true. He has been—stable.”

“He’s going to be okay,” Adam said, and swallowed against the hot flush of panic that raced through him then. Ronan would be okay, but it was getting harder to believe he would be.

*

He didn’t know where the idea came from. He didn’t know if it came from a lingering and inarticulable resentment at how stubbornly Gansey held on to his assumptions, from some idiotic internal drive to wring as much contact out of these last few weeks as possible, or simply from the longstanding unshakeable association of Ronan and cars. But when Boyd mentioned as he was getting ready to leave one day that he’d need to hire Adam’s replacement soon so that Adam would still be around to show him the ropes, Adam found himself saying, “Actually, I might know a guy.”

Boyd looked at him skeptically. This didn’t mean anything; after two years Adam knew that Boyd looked at everyone skeptically. “Alright, well, if he’s looking and able, bring him in. Hope he’s a quick learner. Like you were,” he added after a thought. Adam smiled, almost embarrassed. From Boyd a compliment like that was almost akin to a hug, or perhaps a declaration of love.

At St. Agnes that night, after they had ordered pizza and fucked while waiting for it to be delivered and gotten each other off again after eating, while Adam was lying in bed head clouded by exhaustion and incomprehension at the life he was even temporarily pretending to live, he said, as much to distract himself as anything else, “Are you still thinking about getting a job?”

He half expected Ronan to scowl at him or storm out of bed. The list still felt like a form of intimacy beyond anything else they’d shared, and one they had stumbled into by accident. But Ronan just said, “Yeah. Why?”

“Because…” Adam hesitated, remembering the disdain with which Ronan had always considered his work. But after two years he knew that Ronan considered everything with disdain. And it wasn’t like he was suggesting Ronan work in an office. “My boss at the garage hasn’t hired someone for when I leave. I could let him know you’re looking. You know, it’s easier to get a job when you have a job, and—” Adam tripped over his words, thrown off balance by how thoroughly the words coming out of his mouth seemed to belong to a reality other than the one to which Ronan Lynch belonged. “And like, I know you think it’s beneath you, or whatever, but it’s not an office, or like, customer service, and like you said, you’re not really a people person, like you basically like cars better than people, so—so I just thought…”

“I don’t think it’s beneath me,” Ronan said, with a pointed look Adam chose to ignore. Then he shrugged. “Yeah, whatever. It’s not like I have a better plan. How’s the boss?”

“Boyd?” Adam considered. “Well. He likes hiring teenagers with no experience so he can pay them like shit. But you’re not actually doing this for the money.”

“Nope,” Ronan agreed. He had brought his hand to Adam’s face and was tracing the line of his cheekbone softly back and forth.

“Other than that, he’s fine. Not a raging dick or anything. Pretty much leaves you alone if you get your work done.”

“Mm.” Ronan brought his foot to cross over Adam’s ankle. Adam against his better judgment found himself putting his hand on Ronan’s waist, thinking about the warmth of him against his palm and how well he had come to know the curve of skin there, every twist of every muscle of Ronan’s body, all these pieces he had unwittingly memorized and soon would never again have cause to use.

“I’d be training you,” Adam said. “So—” Somewhere behind his mouth, he realized with alarm, was something pathetic like so we could spend more time together before I leave, which even rephrased into more appropriately lascivious form betrayed the miserable kind of greediness he had about Ronan, more humiliatingly acute every day closer to his departure. “So if you think you can handle taking orders from me…”

Ronan shrugged. “Yeah, okay.”

“Okay?” Adam echoed.

“Okay,” Ronan repeated. “I don’t have any better ideas. If it sucks I can quit. And—” He smiled a little. “You’re right. I do like cars better than people.”

“I’ll talk to Boyd, then,” Adam said, half disbelieving. “But, Ronan, if he says yes you have to like, be on time. Jobs aren’t like school.”

“Thank God for that,” Ronan said. “I’ll be on time. That part about taking orders from you, though—that seems like it might take some getting used to. Maybe we should practice, hm?”

Ronan cocked an eyebrow, devilish and playful at once. Adam felt lightheaded at the invitation. He’d thought they were done for the night but his mutinous body was heating up once again at the offer of more, more, more. “Sure,” he said, trying to sound calm. “Step one is finally shutting your mouth.” He’d meant it as a joke, but when Ronan mimed zipping his lips and throwing away the key, real heat went through him. He sat up, trying to look less eager than he was beginning to feel. “Now why don’t you lie back…”

And Ronan obeyed, as happy to follow as Adam had ever seen him; and Adam straddled him, marveling at the sight of this beautiful boy spread out beneath him, waiting patiently to do as he asked; and the touch of him was so right, so much, when Adam pressed his mouth against his neck and Ronan’s back arced up so that the distance between them was gone, replaced with heat, with friction, with new tricks still left to discover for making each other feel good, that soon Adam once again forgot not to wonder how he would survive letting this go.

*

And so: Ronan joined him at the garage, on time, and Adam remembered that Ronan was actually smart enough when he wanted to be, picking up quickly basic skills and an intuition for which wrench to reach for. Adam, who had always thought of this work which left him coated in sweat and smelling of oil as a recurring stain on his status, found to his shock that there was something thrillingly erotic in watching Ronan emerge from beneath a car gleaming with exertion and animated by a focus he had only ever seen Ronan apply to dreaming or to sex. Sometimes when they were left unsupervised during a slow time Ronan dropped his tools and grabbed Adam’s shirt to position him against a car or the wall or a relatively uncluttered bench and they moved together quick and hot and hard; Adam felt abstractly that the cliché of the situation should detract from his enjoyment and was startled to discover it did not. In the evenings they left together, eating dinner in companionable silence at the Barns or St. Agnes or meeting up with Gansey and Blue, walking along the outskirts of town in the golden-blue haze of twilight, sitting occupied with personal absorptions (a science-fiction novel Blue had recommended; attempting to train Chainsaw to fetch) brought new warmth by the glow of companionship.

And so: the calendar turned once more and the time until his departure was measured now in days. Each sprawling August sunset brought him closer to the end of this thing between them, and instead of thinking about buying a suitcase Adam was trying not to picture how easy it would be for the two of them one day to simply go home together and in the morning take a single car to the garage. He didn’t know what was wrong with him, that he wanted so badly more of something soon ending, that having gotten what he wanted he felt worse but wanted it still. In his increasingly rare hours alone he missed Ronan with a kind of primal ache, a whole new way to want that threatened to flood his mind entirely like a spigot he could not turn off. Lying in sleepless exhaustion he couldn’t stop picturing what it would be like for Ronan to be there: the weight of another person on his thin mattress, the gravitational warmth of his body, his arms heavy against Adam’s waist, breath hot above the scratch of stubble resting against his shoulder. Not for him, not ever for him; not for the life he had worked so hard for, not for the escape he had so meticulously planned.

Escape. It seemed such a hollow word now. Because Blue had been right: you couldn’t just turn off your feelings. Adam had gotten around this as often as possible by avoiding things that would lead him places he couldn’t control, holding himself alone, holding himself apart, even from his closest friends. But then Ronan Lynch had kissed him, and Adam had been stupid enough to let the memory of Ronan’s body sink like talons into his skin. Now he was leaving in two weeks for Boston and more certain by the day that he would never again be free.

*

On a Friday evening when Adam had biked to work and received a hasty and almost painfully satisfying blow job from Ronan while leaning against the hood of a Jaguar brought in for transmission problems, they wound up in Declan’s room. Ronan had dreamed some kind of tenacious stinkbomb and then proceeded imuplsively to test it in his own room, which was now still airing out, and while Matthew was at an expensive and academically unrigorous enrichment program in Barcelona whereas Declan was technically liable to return home without warning, Adam suspected Ronan considered sex in someone else’s bed to be a form of defilement which he respected Matthew too much to commit and resented Declan just enough to secretly enjoy. The master bedroom, whose door had been shut every time Adam had seen it, felt frankly haunted even to Adam; he couldn’t imagine what Ronan felt even passing by it in the hall. As they settled in, sitting on the bed to take off their shoes, Adam couldn’t help but look around. It was always interesting to him, what was said by a person’s bedroom, especially those with enough money that their bedrooms could plausibly communicate all kinds of things beyond dead broke.

Declan’s room compared to Ronan’s was, unsurprisingly, a study in contrast: clean right angles and plenty of flat white space, everything neatly in its place, scant decorations communicating an almost studied blandness. Although Ronan had several times voiced the belief that Declan lacked a personality to a pathological degree, Adam had come to suspect there was something deliberate in Declan’s blank cautiousness. Privately, he felt a little sorry for him, the only Lynch who had seemed to notice before Niall’s death that anything about their lives was strange. It must have been hard, trying to learn the rules of reality in a household that refused to follow them.

On his bookshelves, where Ronan kept mostly battered graphic novels and haphazardly stacked Latin textbooks, Declan had an assortment of respectable-looking volumes, organized by genre: prestigious literary fiction of the kind assigned in Aglionby English classes, a handful of works from famous thinkers (Machiavelli, Sun-Tzu, Marx, perhaps to understand the enemy’s point of view), texts on business strategy and military history, some Pulitzer-winning nonfiction. The bottom shelf contained four years of Aglionby yearbooks. Impulsively Adam reached out to take the one from the year before he had transferred.

“What are you doing?” Ronan asked.

“Just curious,” Adam said, “since I only got there two years ago. Wanted to see if Tad’s hair had ever seen better days.” But maybe he had taken it for this moment, when Ronan would have to decide whether or not Adam was allowed to glimpse the version of himself that predated their acquaintance.

“He wishes,” Ronan said, but he didn’t tell Adam to put it away. Adam felt a relief that immediately curdled into an inarticulable anxiety.

What are you doing, Adam, he thought—hardly for the first time.

The yearbook was mostly uninteresting. Adam had, of course, never met any of that year’s graduating class, who took up most of the space. He spotted Henry Cheng and Tad Carruthers posing on their way to a Model UN conference in suits that made Ronan snort. Other classmates appeared in candid shots, winning science fair prizes, in togas and stage make-up in the auditorium for the spring production of Julius Caesar. He tried to conjure up some emotion about these people who had populated his life for two years, some nostalgia or even lingering resentment, but he came up empty. He’d gotten what he needed from Aglionby; he could leave everything else behind.

Then, on the page for the tennis team, he found what of course he had really been looking for. Not the posed group shot, in which rows of boys in boxy whites and stiff smiles blended into interchangeability. But below it, in the assemblage of photographs surrounding a blurb high on in-jokes and low on athletic achievement, was a picture of Ronan. This was the Ronan Gansey had met, Ronan as Adam had never known him: hair dark and thick, a little long, tousled and stuck to his forehead and neck with sweat; body at rest, sitting with knees wide and shoulders relaxed in an unfamiliar posture; and most of all his face—open, laughing in simple happiness, perfect white teeth not bared in ferocity but revealed in delight. He could be any raven boy, the way raven boys had always looked to Adam before he joined the clan on a technicality: confident and breezy, like true concern had never once wrinkled his brow.

He looked so young.

It hurt to look at. To see the proof of what Ronan had lost: not just a father, not just a family, not just a life. A whole self, memorialized only in glossy black and white. Looking at it felt—Adam regretted taking the book off the shelf. This seemed private, this version of Ronan which Adam’s Ronan had as long as they had known each other worked so diligently to conceal from view. He imagined Ronan couldn’t be happy to see his memory resurrected.

Ronan craned his neck to look closer at the picture of himself and let out a low whistle. “Damn. Look at that asshole.”

There was a darkness in the voice that made Adam feel guilty for bringing the picture to the surface. “Hey, now. Lucky for you, some of us like assholes.”

He had expected Ronan to smirk and say Fair enough, or some other lighthearted gesture to punctuate the moment so that Adam could turn the page and they could make fun of the young sociopaths who joined the Economics Club. But Ronan’s eyes were fixed on the page, his brows drawn in a pensive frown. “Trust me. You would have hated that guy. And he would have hated you. It’s a good thing we didn’t know each other back then.”

“It’s not like we hit it off right away when we did meet,” Adam reasoned. “Maybe we would have grown on each other.”

Ronan shook his head. “He… I thought I knew fucking everything. And I didn’t know shit.” He met Adam’s eyes then, his gaze sharp. “That’s why I didn’t like you. Because I didn’t know shit, and you made that so goddamn obvious.”

Adam wanted to apologize, even though in truth that was exactly how he had first thought of Ronan Lynch. “I didn’t—”

“Stop,” Ronan said. “Stop. You were…” His mouth made a tense line. For the second time in his life, Adam marveled at the expression he was witnessing on Ronan’s face: embarrassment. Maybe even shame. “All that fucked-up shit I used to say to you, about—your dad and your house and your money—being an asshole because I knew you could see exactly what a fucking idiot I was, and I couldn’t stand it—” He inhaled deeply, straighening his back. “I’m sorry. About all of it.”

“It’s okay,” Adam said automatically. He felt half-dazed by the confession. This was so unlike Ronan he didn’t know how to process it. His blood was rushing like that first night Ronan had come to St. Agnes, the wild nauseous thrill of being offered a piece of himself Ronan didn’t show anyone, ever: his embarrassment, his regret.

“It’s not okay,” Ronan said, firmly. It occurred to Adam that this apology did not have the ring of a spur-of-the-moment confession. He tried to picture Ronan thinking in his private moments about—about what he wished he’d done differently for Adam. He couldn’t manage it. “And you know I hate bullshit, so I’m not asking you to be fucking nice about it. It was messed up and stupid and I’m sorry and I wanted to say that before—I wanted to say that. Alright?”

“I—yeah,” Adam managed. “Um. Thanks, I guess? I mean, I’m not mad anymore. It’s been a while, since you…” His mind cast backwards through their last months together, through dozens of evening spent tangled in each other’s breath, hours of quiet listening to Ronan’s heartbeat through his chest, weekends traipsing out to Cabeswater with their friends, and before that, even, the last weeks of school spent passing notes and exchanging looks in the back of the class, talking through Ronan’s dreamed experiments at the Barns. “A long while, since you stopped.”

Since he—it hit Adam so clearly he couldn’t believe he hadn’t put it together before—since he had decided to stop. Ronan had made a choice about who he wanted to be. Months before their first kiss, he had chosen it. And months after, he had wanted Adam to know he was sorry for ever choosing anything else.

Adam’s heart was thrumming in his throat. He didn’t know why. None of this changed anything. Ronan was his friend; Ronan was growing up. He’d known both of these things before. There was no reason for his skin to feel suddenly overheated and too small.

Ronan brought a finger to the page to trace the outline of that faraway person Adam had never met. “I might grow my hair out.”

Adam tried to sound normal. “Yeah?”

“Everyone always said how much I looked like my dad,” Ronan said. “So that’s why I started shaving it, when he… And I mean, I still look like him. Probably more, now that I’m older. But.” He shrugged. “Two years is a long time.”

“It is.”

“What do you think?”

“I think…” Adam swallowed. “I think you’d look good. I mean, you look good now. But—it might be nice to do something new.”

Ronan gave him a small, soft smile, half-teasing, half-pleased. “You think I look good?”

“Yeah.” They’d been fucking for nearly three months; they’d whispered all kinds of dirty appreciation for each other’s bodies. But somehow, tonight, this still felt like an admission.

Ronan lifted a hand to Adam’s jaw, a gentle touch which sent a shiver through Adam like he had done much more, and kissed him, deliberately and without heat. It was different from their typical manner of kissing, which tended to be frantic, bordering on desperate. Usually they only kissed like this—soft, patient—after they had already slept together. Adam felt himself going weak at the tender press of Ronan’s lips on his. When he was done Ronan held Adam’s face in both his hands. Adam had the irrational thought that if he had wanted to, Ronan could crush his skull between his palms. “Stay with me tonight.”

Adam was leaving in two weeks. He had a hundred excuses at the ready, a thousand reasons to refuse. But this had always been the problem with Ronan: not that he made it impossible to say no, but that he made Adam want so badly to say yes. Against every one of his better instincts, against everything inside him except that bottomless hunger for more, he said, “Okay.” Then he kissed Ronan, quickly, so he wouldn’t have to know what the word had done to Ronan’s face.

*

In the morning, as Adam’s mind started drifting towards consciousness, his body was so warm. It was a warmth that spread over every inch of his skin and beneath it, into his marrow. The warmth of golden sunlight, of living blood. Warmth like the lazy hush of summer, like a fireplace’s rosy glow.

Adam had never sat by a fireplace. But it seemed easy to imagine, now. Everything felt easy to imagine. The world felt like a dream, full of anything he might want, if he just thought it.

Ronan’s arm was draped halfway across his chest, his own warmth heavy against Adam’s body. Fingers curled at the hollow of Adam’s throat, hand at the center of Adam’s ribs. Adam’s heart beat to meet the site of Ronan’s pulse beneath the thin pale skin of his wrist that he had touched so often now and come to know so well. Ronan’s face was nestled against his shoulder. Adam could feel the soft shape of his lips, the edge of his nose, the curve of his forehead. Their bodies fit so well together. He could feel the soft rise and fall of Ronan’s sleep-slow breathing. It sounded so right it was almost familiar. It was one more thing fitting into place.

Adam thought: Nothing has ever felt this good. Never had he felt this sublime rightness, this sense that everything was as it should be. He didn’t want more. He only wanted this. Never had he felt such a complete and all-encompassing peace.

Then he woke up for real and the heat started to burn.

Tension sized him, head to toe. He felt sick. What had he been thinking, to stay the night like they were something real, like he wasn’t leaving in a matter of days? What had he been thinking, to act like he was someone who could stay? Someone who could linger eternally here in this dreamworld of the Barns, with a dreamer by his side. Someone who hadn’t staked everything on the future, hundreds of miles away.

What had he been thinking, giving himself this—this one perfect jewel of a moment—when he knew all it would do was burn a hole in his memory he’d never be able to close?

He forced himself to breathe. He had to get a grip. He needed to get some space from Ronan, who was too good at convincing him to pretend they could be the same. Ronan was the one whose world contained whatever he wished. Adam was the one who had had to scrape and sacrifice for every piece of what was his, who had never once grasped something new without giving something up.

Adam was who he was: a boy from nowhere, bred in the dust. He had made his peace with that, and he had made a promise to be more. But he knew keeping that promise depended on remembering, always, what the road was like for someone like him. He didn’t have the luxury of forgetting.

He’d been allowed a bad idea. But it had gone on long enough.

Ronan stirred against his side, instinctively tightening his hold on Adam as he shuddered awake with an unconscious sweetness Adam hated. He blinked his sparkling eyes open, smiled up at Adam like smiling had always come easy. “Morning.”

“Hey.” Adam wanted—he wanted so, so badly to stay in Ronan’s bed, indulging in the rasp of Ronan’s voice at the start of the day. But that wanting was exactly why he needed to leave. “We should, uh. We should get up. Or I, I should, I need—” He sat up, freshly aware of his own nakedness. “I just have, like, a lot of errands to run today, since I’m…”

He had planned to finish the sentence since I’m leaving soon, a perfect and simple excuse even though he had so few possessions that in fact preparing for departure was a task for a few hours’ time, but he found that he could not make himself bring that reality into this room. And hadn’t that been the problem all summer? His real life, the one he had fought for, was waiting for him, and here he was wearing this dream-life like borrowed clothes.

He had to get out of here.

He started to get dressed, trying not to look at Ronan lying beautiful and alone in the bed where Adam had left him.

“You want a lift?” Ronan said.

“It’s fine,” Adam said, “the ride’ll wake me up.”

“I could give you a ride to wake you up.”

Very dumb, very Ronan. Adam’s throat was tight. What was happening? What had he done to himself?

With a start he realized Ronan was getting out of bed. “Really, you don’t have to—”

“Now, what kind of a gentleman would I be,” Ronan drawled, “if I didn’t at least walk you to the door.”

Adam tried to stay light, to stay normal. The last thing he needed was for Ronan to know how badly Adam had fucked this up. “Since when are you any kind of gentleman at all?”

“First time for everything, Parrish,” Ronan said, sounding bizarrely pleased.

At the door to this house of magic in which he had only ever been a temporary guest, Adam bade Ronan a hasty goodbye, stepping outside before Ronan could pull him back into his orbit. But then Ronan said, “Wait, Adam—”

God—even now, at the end of it all, at the end of something Adam should never have let be what it had become in his head—even now, it stopped his heart to hear Ronan say his name like he was something Ronan wanted. Even now, he was powerless against that.

Thinking horribly of Orpheus, Adam turned around.

It was awful to see: Ronan in bare feet and sweatpants, the shadow of morning stubble on his face; Ronan softer than Adam had known he could be, softer than he’d ever let anyone else see him. Ronan as Adam would ache to remember, Ronan as Adam had never really had him.

Ronan had his arms crossed, shoulders rounded just slightly. “What if—” Ronan bit his lip. Adam had never heard him sound this uncertain. “What if we kept this going?”

Adam stared uncomprehendingly. His face felt feverishly hot. “Kept what going?”

“This. You and me, like, what we—what we’ve been doing. Not just—” Ronan rolled his eyes, embarrassed at himself, half a smile tugging at his mouth like Ronan Lynch felt sheepish. “Not just, like, the sex or whatever, but like—us. Hanging out, being—being an us, kind of. Or—or more than kind of, maybe.”

Adam couldn’t speak. The impossibility of what Ronan was saying pressed on his lungs, the miserable final confrontation between reality and dream. Between his world and Ronan’s.

All this time, he had assumed that at least he would be the only one hurt. That he would emerge from this with a scarred heart but a clean conscience. But the way Ronan was looking at him—“You can’t be serious.”

Ronan tried a shaky smile. “I mean, it’s hardly the worst idea you’ve heard me have, Parrish.”

“I—we said three months,” Adam began, feeling stupid and guilty and betrayed, “We agreed. You said you were, you were fine with that.”

Ronan frowned. “Yeah, I was. And I am. That’s not—”

“You don’t sound fine with it. You sound like—” Adam couldn’t say it. Couldn’t even think the words.

The line between his brows deepened. “Look, Parrish, I’m not gonna slit my wrists over this, okay? If the answer is no, then, whatever, that scuks but I’ll get over it. I just thought maybe—if we didn’t have to end it, maybe you’d want—”

“If we didn’t have to?” Adam laughed bitterly. “Ronan, we can’t. Do you have any idea how far away Boston is?”

“I can drive,” Ronan said. “Or I can dream. I can dream something up, to make the trip shorter. Or—shit, I don’t know, get a place up there after Matthew graduates. We could figure it out.”

“Are you crazy? You can’t move cities for—for some guy you met in high school, that’s not how the world works. And I’m—I’m going to be in college, I’ll be really busy—I’m gonna have a work-study job, some of us actually need to work for money, you know, not just to make ourselves look good, and—long-distance relationships never even work out when the people were actually, like, dating, and not just fucking around—”

“Fucking around?” Ronan echoed. “Is that what this was to you?”

“I—that’s what it has to be,” Adam said pleadingly. “It’s not—I told you, okay, I fucking told you, if we could—but I can’t. I’m leaving. I—”

“Don’t bullshit me, alright?” Ronan looked truly angry now. It was almost a relief to see it. Ronan’s anger was safe ground. “If you don’t want to, then be a man and fucking say so. But don’t give me these excuses to like, spare me—”

“They’re not excuses, Ronan.” Adam could feel his own anger starting to build. “Reality is not an excuse. It’s something most of us actually have to contend with. Most of us actually don’t get to live life coasting from excuse to excuse, because other people don’t make them for us. Most of us have to make choices about—”

“Oh, bullshit with your fucking choices,” Ronan spat. “Like you’ve ever once let that keep you from anything you really wanted.”

Adam laughed disbelievingly. “Yeah, right. I’ve never wanted to sleep eight hours a night. I’ve never wanted to eat breakfast every day. I’ve never wanted to have an actual weekend—”

“You wanted Aglionby, you got Aglionby,” Ronan said. “You wanted out, you’re getting out. You’re—”

“If you’re about to say something about me being some kind of, some kind of magician—”

Ronan made an exasperated noise. “But you are!”

“No,” Adam said flatly. “I’m not. I’m Adam Parrish. That’s it.”

“That’s my point.”

“That’s the problem.”

“That’s idiotic.”

“Whatever,” Adam said in frustration. “I said I was leaving in three months. You said you were okay with that, but clearly you were hoping I’d changed my mind. I kept my side of the deal. You’re the one who lied.”

Fury lit Ronan’s eyes. That was no surprise; Adam knew that accusing Ronan of lying was as good as throwing down a grenade. He’d said it because he was angry, but also because Ronan’s rage was something he could handle.

But Ronan didn’t explode. He grit his teeth and looked upward, briefly, as if seeking divine guidance. When he spoke his voice was low but controlled. “You know what? Maybe I was hoping you’d change your mind. And maybe that was kind of fucked up of me. But I wasn’t lying when I said it was okay. Believe it or not, asshole, I’ve lived through worse than losing access to your dick. I decided I could live with it, if three months was all we got, and I can. If this ends now, I’ll survive. But at least I can admit that I actually want something. That I want—you. I want you, even if it’s hard, and god knows you’ve never made anything fucking easy.”

“I don’t make things hard. Things are hard. Some things are more than hard. Some things are impossible.”

“And you do them anyway,” Ronan said. “You’ve spent your whole fucking life doing impossible things. But not this. So you should at least have the decency to tell me the truth. Do you not want me, or are you just too scared?”

Adam set his jaw. “That’s not fucking fair, Ronan.”

“Life’s not fair. You know that better than anyone. So say it. Say you’re a coward, even though we both know you’re not a fucking coward. Or tell me to my face you don’t want me enough to fight for it. That this whole time, you were just—fucking around. But don’t hide behind impossible. That’s never stopped you before.”

“I—”

It should have been so easy, Adam thought, just to say it. To pick one more untruth after a summer spent pretending, to end this now. Ronan would hate him, but Ronan already hated him. It should have been easy to say goodbye to one more impossible thing. But his voice was frozen. He couldn’t make himself say the words.

“Yeah. Thought so.” Ronan shook his head. “I didn’t really think I’d talk you into keeping it going. You have your whole fucking—future. Your new life. But I did think you respected me enough to be honest with me. I thought whatever else happened, at least I had that. So if I can’t even count on that—then get out of my fucking house.”

There was nothing else to be said. Adam turned to go. When he got home, he turned his phone off and threw it in the bottom drawer of his dresser before sprawling stomach-first on his bed, bringing a pillow to his mouth to muffle his scream.

*

It made no sense for it to hurt like it did. When he looked at the facts of what had happened, he didn’t see anything to justify any sort of collapse. He had lost something that had never really been his; he and Ronan had had a fight, like any of a hundred fights they’d had over the years; he was back in the life he had briefly wandered from, the one that back in the spring had looked like escape. He was going to MIT. He was going to get a degree, and maybe another one after that, and a job in an air-conditioned office where he would wear stiff white shirts, and an apartment in a city where no one would know where he had come from. It seemed the height of greed to want any more than that—any more than everything he’d ever wanted.

But god, it hurt.

He had packing to do; he didn’t do it. He lay in the bed where he and Ronan had first undressed each other with clumsy fervor and Ronan had touched him gently, with unexpected shyness, and Adam had learned what his own name sounded like out of Ronan’s mouth when he was trembling with desire, and he felt sadness along all his limbs like a ghost of the memory of Ronan’s body beside his. He told himself perhaps this was simply the last indulgence in his summer of indulgences, a final bad idea before practicality resumed its customary position at the helm of his life: going through the motions a heartbreak he knew he had no right to feel.

It didn’t help.

It was evening when a knock came at the door that. Anxiety flooded through him before Gansey’s voice announced itself and he let out a shaky sigh.

“Hey,” Adam said as he opened the door, confused. Gansey rarely came to St. Agnes. Although he had never said so, Adam suspected the place depressed him in its unmonied bareness. “What’s up?”

Gansey’s face displayed an uncertainty to match his own. “You weren’t answering your phone.”

Adam started. He’d forgotten all about it. “Oh. Sorry about that.”

“I, um.” Gansey was staring at the floor, which meant he was gathering his words. Wherever this was going, Adam didn’t think he liked it. “I talked to Ronan.”

“Jesus.” Adam rolled his eyes. “Did he send you here?”

“No, that’s not—he doesn’t even know I’m here.”

Trying not to let the tension leak into his voice, Adam said, “So why are you here?”

Gansey worried at his bottom lip. “I just… I just don’t understand what you were thinking, Adam.” His tone was as kind as his words were infuriating.

“What I was thinking?” Adam said. “What about him? He was there, you know. In fact, it was his idea.”

“Well,” Gansey said, “sure. But Ronan has a lot of ideas. Many of them are terrible.”

“But all my ideas have to be good, right? I’m not allowed to screw up? Only Ronan gets to do that. Only Ronan gets to fuck around and screw up and be an idiot and everyone forgives him in the end.”

“Is that why?” Gansey ventured. “You wanted a chance to—to mess up, without—consequences? Because certainly I could understand—”

“No,” Adam said with a vehemence that startled him considering how often that summer he had thought exactly that. It seemed transparently stupid in retrospect. He hadn’t lain in bed all day mourning the loss of some juvenile anarchic freedom, the ability to playact at recklessness or wallow in his faults. He missed Ronan: his laugh and his touch, the curve of his waist when he lay on his side, the smirk he gave when he beat Adam to the garage in the mornings, like he was daring Adam to be shocked at his newfound capacity for responsibility. The tense hopeful light in his eyes when he showed Adam a piece of himself he had never revealed. How filthy he could be, and how sweet. How around him, Adam could almost believe the world was a beautiful place, and his life one of the beautiful things in it.

Adam wanted so much more of that. He didn’t know how he would ever stop wanting more.

He covered his face with his hands. “Because—god, why am I even acting like this is a real question you get to ask me? Maybe it’s none of your fucking business why.”

“I’m just trying to—”

“You’re just trying to fix things, but some things can’t be fucking fixed, Gansey. And I don’t feel like getting a goddamn lecture eight hours after accidentally breaking up someone I wasn’t even technically dating. Trust me, I feel shitty enough as it is.”

“I didn’t come here to make you feel worse.”

“Guess you just have a natural fucking gift.”

“That’s not fair,” Gansey said quietly.

Adam didn’t have the energy for this today. “What’s not fair is that two of your best friends are having a miserable fucking day, and only one of them gets the sympathy treatment. The other gets—whatever the fuck is happening here. You didn’t even ask how I was doing about it. Do you care about what I’m going through, at all?”

“Of course I care.” Gansey looked terribly wounded. “It’s not that I care less about you, Adam. It’s just—you know Ronan. He’s not like you. You’re a survivor. I admire that so deeply. Ronan—he’s fragile.”

“I fucking hate that word,” Adam said.

Gansey frowned. “Which?”

“Both,” said Adam. “Surviving isn’t something you are. It’s something you do, or don’t do. It’s not about if you’re fragile or—unbreakable. I’ve broken a hundred times over, and I’m still fucking here. And you know what? Ronan is, too. He’s been through hell, and he’s a mess, but he’s still here. He’s figuring it out. I mean, Christ, he got a fucking job. A job I have to fucking see him at on Monday.” Why had Adam thought that was a good idea? His past self had so much to answer for. “So, maybe give him a little credit, okay? He’ll probably drink himself to sleep a couple nights and then get over it.”

Gansey’s mouth quirked. “Funny. That was pretty much what he said. Almost verbatim.”

“Great fucking minds.” Adam remembered Ronan saying, back before the beginning of all this: We make a good team. It made him want to cry. He missed Ronan. Already he missed him so much.

Gansey rocked back and forth on his heels, hands in his pockets. “It’s hard, you know? When his father died—I’d never seen anyone change like that. He was one person, and then someone else. And I couldn’t get him to change back into the person he was before.”

“Maybe he can’t change back,” Adam said, “but that doesn’t mean he can’t change at all. Two years is a long time. People can be more than the worst thing that ever happened to them.”

Ronan showing him a dreamed flower that sang like a bird; Ronan kissing his way towards Adam’s hips. Even Ronan spiteful but alert at the Barns that morning was a Ronan who knew he was alive. Adam had come to like this Ronan so much. He didn’t know how he was going to let him go.

Gansey tilted his chin like he was turning the idea over in his mind. “I suppose that’s true.” He folded his arms. “I—I am sorry I didn’t ask before. How are you doing with all this?”

Adam shrugged. “Shitty. But I’ll survive.” That much hadn’t changed. It hurt, but it was true: Adam knew how to live with pain.

*

Blue came by in the morning with an offer to help him pack. Adam didn’t really need the help, but he could use the company. The two of them sat on his bed, theoretically filling his suitcase but mostly just killing time. “I yelled at Gansey for you, by the way.”

Adam smiled. “You didn’t have to do that.”

“I mean, it wasn’t just for you, Blue said. “Like, it was on your behalf, but—if he’s going be my boyfriend, he needs to get his shit together on some things.” She placed a folded T-shirt into a suitcase.

“I’m sorry I didn’t—I don’t know,” Adam said, “tell you what was going on, after the beginning.”

She shrugged. “It’s cool. I mean, I’d be basically the biggest hypocrite in the world if it wasn’t, so.” She looked at him out of the corner of her eye. “Do you want to talk about it now?”

Adam was going to say not really, but he found much to his own surprise that he did. He was tired of keeping another secret. He was tired of his feelings existing only in the contained environment of his brain. He knew how to live with pain, but he was tired of carrying it alone. He’d had a summer to feel what it was like not to be alone, and although most of it had been an illusion, some of it had been real. He didn’t need to lose all of it, he thought, just because he couldn’t keep Ronan. So he sat on his bed and told her everything, the whole ridiculous melodramatic mess of it, stretching back into the spring.

“So that’s the story,” he said when he had finished. “I mean, it’s so stupid, right? Stupid of both of us. It’s stupid for me to mope around like I, like I’m heartbroken or whatever, when we weren’t ever—when we couldn’t ever—right?”

Blue did not jump to agree that his feelings were stupid. Adam didn’t know whether to be annoyed or grateful. Instead she said, “The way you talk about him… it sounds like you do really like him.”

“I guess I do,” he admitted. It was the first time he’d said it out loud. It hurt, but less than it had hurt to keep it to himself.

“You can’t turn off your feelings,” she said.

“I thought I could, though. I thought I was pretty good at it. It was the thing that kept me sane.” Seventeen years in that house—how else had he survived, if not by shutting down what it felt like to live there?

Blue gave him a crooked smile. “I think it’s a little harder when some of the feelings are good.”

Adam swallowed. “But I’m leaving. I want to leave. That’s been the goal for two years. Longer, even.” College had been the goal for two years. Escape had been the goal his whole life.

“You can still leave,” Blue said. “Long distance sucks, but people do it.”

“I can’t do that to him,” Adam said.

She frowned. “But you’re not doing it to him. He wants that. And Ronan kind of hates everyone, so it’s not like you’re keeping him from going out and meeting the love of his life. Of course, if you want to go meet that love of your life, who’s like, a hot scientist at MIT, then you should do that. Or if you think long distance just sucks, then, whatever. But if you want to be with Ronan—I don’t think it’s crazy. It’s your life. You get to decide if it’s worth it or not.

It was his life. Adam had worked so hard to make that mean something. “I feel like that should make me feel better, but it makes me feel worse.”

Possibilities lingered, possibilities echoed. Possibilities took up space, pressed down on you with their weight. Possibilities grew like weeds, a garden that refused to be tamed, stretching towards the light. Insatiable and wild.

“I don’t think there’s a wrong answer here,” Blue said. “And whatever you choose, I’ll be here for you.” She laced her fingers with his and gave his hand a squeeze.

“I’m really gonna miss you,” he said, “when I leave.”

“Me too,” Blue said. She rested her head against his shoulder. “So you better believe I’m coming to visit. And—I know this place hasn’t been good to you. But if you ever do want to come back for a break, Fox Way is always open. It’s an incredibly annoying place to live. But you’re welcome, if you want to stay.”

“Maybe I will.” Adam let himself lean back into her. “You’re right. I fucking hate it here. I always have. My whole life, I’ve been waiting for the day I could get out. And I never thought—all those years, I never thought that when I was finally leaving, there would be anything here for me to miss. I never would have thought that was possible.”

“Gansey would say that anything’s possible, if you believe.”

“Is that what you think?”

“No. But—I didn’t think it was possible for me, either, you know? To be friends with a raven boy, much less a whole flock of them. Since meeting you guys… I don’t think anything’s possible. But I guess I’m a little less quick to make my mind up, about whether something is or isn’t. You can’t really know until you’re on the other side. The world is big, and weird. Magic is real. And we’re only eighteen.”

“I’m nineteen,” said Adam.

“Oh, right,” said Blue. “Well, in that case, forget it. It’s all over for you.”

He laughed at that, and so did she. It felt good, laughing in the midst of his heartbreak, even as it felt strange. He would have thought it was impossible, to be so sad and laugh anyway. He would have thought his laughter had left him for a long time, maybe for good. But here it was. Impossible, strange. His.

*

He let Blue talk him into tagging along for lunch at 300 Fox Way. Sitting at their dining table, he felt a surge of appreciation for this house and the people in it, all the sharper for Blue’s words about coming to visit. He was welcome here. He had felt that so rarely in his life, but he could feel it here. When he was getting ready to leave, Maura clasped his hands in hers and said, “I don’t think any of us have remembered to tell you this, but you should know before you leave for school—Persephone would be proud of you.”

“Thank you,” Adam said, voice tight, and impulsively leaned in to give her a hug.

She squeezed tight around his back. “You need anything, don’t forget to ask.”

Afterwards, Adam drove to Cabeswater. It was a risk; he could imagine that Ronan might have headed there for the same reason Adam was going now. But it was a risk he was willing to take. He wanted to be alone and not alone, and Cabeswater was the place that came closest to coming true.

To his relief, no one else was there when he arrived. He strolled beneath the canopy, enjoying the relief from the summer heat, the sunlight filtering perfectly through the leaves to dapple the grass just so. After a while, he sat by the roots of a tree and pressed his palms to earth, closing his eyes. He wanted to feel—this. The power of the ley line, the energy he had worked so long to understand. The touch of the ancient entity to which he was bound, and by which he no longer felt trapped.

Magic. He could touch magic. He could hear what it wanted to tell him, and do what it asked him to do. He could send a piece of himself into its realm and emerge still whole. He’d never wanted any of that, but he couldn’t imagine his life without it anymore.

Sometimes, these days, he almost forgot that it had been a sacrifice, once. That he had walked into the forest Adam Parrish, his own man, and walked out Cabeswater’s eyes and ears. That there had ever been a time when those had seemed like different things. Sometimes he almost forgot that it had ever felt like he was giving something up.

He was still his own man. He was Cabeswater’s man, too. He hadn’t lost any of himself. Instead, new pieces had bloomed like flowers in the forest’s soft soil. Not less—more.

Always more.

He thought about what Blue had said: that you couldn’t always know what was possible until you were on the other side. Cabeswater was proof of that. The forest, the ley line. His bargain, and how much he didn’t regret giving over what he had offered up.

He thought about Ronan—Ronan who had touched death more than once, and who was more alive than anyone Adam had ever met. Who made Adam feel alive—not just surviving but living, awake and eager for what the next moment brought. Ronan who had spent two years clawing his way out of the grave, and had emerged standing on solid ground with a smile like the sun. The boy who’d found his father’s corpse, the boy who’d kissed Adam at a party, in his attic, on the forest floor where Adam sat now. The boy who was figuring things out. The boy who changed his mind. Who had said he was okay, not because he didn’t want more, but because he trusted himself to survive another loss. He thought about what he had said to Gansey: that people could be more than the worst thing that had ever happened to them. Ronan was; Adam had no doubt of that.

Was Adam?

He wanted to be. He had always wanted that—to be more than Robert Parrish’s son, more than a bruised little boy in a dusty trailer. More than he had been made to be, more than where he was from. And he was. He had gone to Aglionby; he was going to MIT. He had magic and more financial aid than he’d dreamed he could see. He had a psychics’ house to stay at and people to miss when he left Henrietta behind. None of that should have been possible, but all of it was real.

He thought about what Ronan had said—that Adam didn’t want him enough to fight for it, Adam who had always fought for the impossible. But Adam had fought for specific things: he’d fought for money, for access, for the next rung on the ladder that led out of his life. He’d fought for his escape.

He’d never fought for his happiness. He’d never believed it was possible enough to be worth fighting for.

And yet it had bloomed in him anyway. Like flowers in the spring: one day, the branch was barren, and the next—a starburst of color, opening for the day.

He had been so happy, all summer long.

He was so happy to be stepping into the future he’d worked for.

Did he have to sacrifice one happiness for another? Or could it be like Cabeswater—could there be more of him yet than he knew? Enough to hold both. To carry his past into his future. To bind himself, and still remain free. To be his own man, and give himself to someone else.

He had done it once before. He didn’t know if he could do it again.

But there was always another card.

When he got home, he took his phone out of his drawer and turned it on. His heart thudded to see a notification from Ronan. The text read:

im sorry about yesterday. i got mad and fucked it up. i should have said that no matter what happened i want to be your friend. i still do if you do.

Adam stared at the letters on the screen. Ronan was not a person to come out and say, I want to be your friend. And yet here it was. Plainly, in words. Impossible, strange. True.

Adam started to type a text back, then decided—fuck it. He didn’t want to do this over text. He called Ronan’s number, holding his breath with his phone pressed tight to his ear until Ronan’s tentative voice answered.

“Hello?”

“Hey. Can we talk?”

*

Ronan was sitting on the front steps at the entrance of the Barns when Adam drove up. He looked very Ronanish—his body dressed in black like an inkblot, elbows on his knees, his fine mouth a firm line, his eyes two bright fixed points. There was a wariness in the line of his brow. Adam couldn’t tell if it was new, or if it had been there all along and he had never noticed.

“I’m sorry, too,” Adam said as soon as he was in earshot.

Ronan narrowed his eyes. “For what?”

“For bullshitting you,” said Adam. “You were right. I was scared. Still am.”

“Since when are you scared of anything, Parrish?”

Adam barked a laugh. “Since always, Ronan. Jesus. Since the first time my dad hit me. I don’t fucking know.”

Ronan flinched. “Sorry.”

“I didn’t mean it like that.” Adam took a seat next to Ronan. “I thought I wasn’t scared, you know? Eight years old, waiting to get my ass kicked, and I thought I wasn’t scared, because I knew what was coming. I knew how to deal. I knew that one day, I’d find a way out. But of course I was fucking scared. That whole time. Hell—I’m still scared. I went all the way to Radford to get a phone, because I was scared he’d find me. Dumb, right?”

“No,” Ronan said, simply.

Adam shrugged. Maybe. Maybe not. “I did deal, though. I got really good at it. All those years I was so scared, I just pretended I wasn’t. Shut it off, like my life was a bad TV show happening to someone else. Kept my eyes on the prize and shut off everything that wasn’t helping me get the hell out. And I did get out. It took everything I fucking had. But I did it. I’m doing it.” He rolled his knuckles on his knees, back and forth on the worn demim. “This summer, I spent a lot of time thinking about what the past couple years were like for you. I used to think it was so stupid, the way you never thought about the future. Things have been so fucked for you, though… I get it now, I think. But me—for years, I’ve been thinking so much about the future, I’ve barely been able to look at anything else. And I don’t regret that.” He sat up a little straighter. It was important to him that Ronan know this. “I did what I had to do. I wouldn’t take any of it back.”

“You shouldn’t,” said Ronan. “And fuck anyone who tells you different.”

Adam smiled. “At graduation, you said all this was prologue, for me. It was supposed to be. But it wasn’t. Some things, I couldn’t stop looking at. Gansey. Blue. You.”

Ronan leaned down to pluck a blade of grass and began twirling it between his fingers. He had such well-shaped hands.

“I got lucky,” Adam said. “I’m really good at the future, and pretty shitty at everything else. But I got you guys anyway. I got a life that I—I liked being in. I got a fucking cell phone, because somehow I knew people that I actually wanted to be able to call. The only problem is—now that I have a life I actually want, I can’t just shut it off anymore. Turns out it’s kind of all or nothing. I can keep sleepwalking through my life, always on to the next thing, ignoring whatever’s going on. Or I can wake up, and see—all these fucking miracles around me. And all the fucking nightmares, too. It’s a package deal.”

Ronan nodded. “Yeah. They really are.”

“This has been the best summer of my life, and the worst summer of my life. I’ve been so—so happy, some days. Hanging out with you and the others. Laughing at dumb jokes and watching Gansey’s pretentious movies and having, like, really good sex.” Ronan, to Adam’s delight, blushed a little at that. “And I’ve been terrified, the entire time. Like the second I let open the door to, to feel that much, all that fear I’d spent so long shutting own came back. I was still looking at the future, but this time it wasn’t a beginning. It was an ending. And I freaked out on you yesterday, when you asked if we could keep it going, because—I can’t keep living like that. I’d go out of my fucking mind.”

“I get that,” Ronan said. “Look, like I said, I’m sorry that—”

“Wait.” Adam took a deep breath. “I can’t keep living like that. But maybe I don’t have to.”

Cautiously, Ronan looked at him, sidelong. “What do you mean?”

“I mean I thought I had to choose,” Adam said. “I thought I could have the future or my life, because choosing the future was how I’d survived. But I’m not just Robert Parrish’s scared little kid anymore. The world is bigger than my dad’s fucking trailer. Magic is real, and I’m a goddamn magician. And there’s always another card.”

A slow smile was spreading across Ronan’s face. “And what’s this one say?”

“It says I like you a lot,” Adam said. “You make my life feel like somewhere I actually want to be. Like there’s more for me to do each day than wait for the future. Like it’s worth it, just to be here. I want you, Ronan. I do. Enough to fight for it. And I don’t know if—if I can learn how to, how to hold it all without going nuts. But I think maybe I can. I think maybe there’s enough of me, for the future and for us. And I want to try. If you still want to.”

“Obviously I still fucking want to.” Ronan sounded almost offended, as if Adam had said something very stupid. “How could I not?”

“I mean, you’re Ronan Lynch,” Adam said. “You could have anyone. It’s hard not to think—why me?”

Ronan gave an incredulous laugh. “You want to know why the C-student making minimum wage would be into the future, like, science-lawyer or whatever?”

“I don’t think science-lawyer is a thing,” said Adam. “And you don’t care about that kind of shit anyway.”

Ronan tossed his blade of grass back onto the ground. “What you said about, I make your life somewhere you want to be—you make the future somewhere I want to go. You make it seem possible to even have one.”

Adam’s breath hitched in his throat. “Jesus, Ronan.”

Ronan shrugged. “Also, you’re hot and fun and really good at sex. What’s not to want?”

It was Adam’s turn to blush. “Well. When you put it like that.”

“I can put it some other ways, too.” Ronan began ticking off on his fingers. “You’re good with cars. You’re like some kind of genius, and a magician. You’re probably the bravest person I’ve ever met.”

“I just told you about how scared I am all the time.”

“Yeah, and I said what I said.” Another finger: “Even though you like Gansey’s bullshit movies, you also like my movies that are awesome.”

“Die Hard is a classic.”

Ronan lifted another finger, then tilted his head, considering. “Are blow jobs different from sex?”

“That’s a question for the philosophers. But okay. I get it.”

“I’m not sure you do,” Ronan said, his face soft. “But that’s okay. We have time, right?”

“Yeah,” Adam said. “We have time.”

They had time. Not a countdown, not an expiration date. They had a whole future to walk into, together.

It terrified him, still. But he wouldn’t take it back.

“You should know,” he said, “I don’t know what I’m doing here.”

“With what?”

Adam shrugged. “Being a—boyfriend, if that’s what we are. Being happy. Take your pick.”

“I pick both,” Ronan said. He slipped his hand into Adam’s, rubbing beneath Adam’s knuckles with his thumb. “You’re definitely my boyfriend. And that makes me happy.”

Adam rolled his eyes. “Helpful.”

“Your problem is, you’re too good at too many things,” Ronan said. “Take it from your favorite C-student: you get used to it.”

“Used to what?”

“Not knowing shit,” Ronan said. “Figuring it out.”

“I guess that is kind of your area of expertise.”

“I’m also really good at drinking,” said Ronan. “And I’ve been arrested like three times. Just in case you needed more reasons I’m way out of your league. Hey, since you nabbed this total catch, we should celebrate. Go out to Nino’s tomorrow. Start making out at the table to see if Gansey’s as much of an ally to the gay community as he’s always claiming to be.”

“I’m not going to do that,” Adam said. “I’ll go to Nino’s, though. Why wait till tomorrow, though? Why not celebrate tonight?”

“It’s getting late,” Ronan said. “We work in the morning. Don’t you need to get home?”

“I brought a change of clothes,” Adam said. “Thought we could drive in together tomorrow.” Ronan smiled, broad and easy, and Adam knew in that moment he would never regret the choices that had brought him that smile again. He would fight for that smile, and for every other lovely thing between them. For as much as his life would hold.

“See,” Ronan said. “You’re good at this already.”

“I’m basically just stealing your ideas,” said Adam. “You have great ideas.”

“I have terrible ideas,” said Ronan. “But we make a good fucking team.”

Adam grinned. “Yeah. We do.”

Ronan kissed him then, a happy and excitable kiss, so full of energy it sent them laughing in each other’s mouths; then they kissed again, a kiss deep with all the ways they knew each other and eager with everything still to come. A kiss like possibility, insatiable and wild. A kiss like a promise Adam knew they would keep: the promise of more, and more, and more.