Blue Lily, Lily Blue (The Raven Cycle, #3)

by Maggie Stiefvater

“Maybe I dreamt you,” he said. “Thanks for the straight teeth, then,” Adam replied.

Ronan shook his head, but then, with a wicked smile, he began to sing, “Squash one, squash two, s—” “Not that one,” both Adam and Gansey said.

“Thanks for the super helpful alternative suggestions, Ronan Lynch. Your contribution at the end of the world will be tallied accordingly,” Blue said.

“I’ve learned a lot. I’m glad you misdialed.” “Well. Easy mistake to make,” she said. “Might do it again.” A very, very long pause. She opened her mouth to fill it, then changed her mind and didn’t. She was shivering again, even though she wasn’t cold with the pillow on her legs. “Shouldn’t,” Gansey said finally. “But I hope you do.”

Ronan was always saying that he never lied, but he wore a liar’s face.

“You can be just friends with people, you know,” Orla said. “I think it’s crazy how you’re in love with all those raven boys.” Orla wasn’t wrong, of course. But what she didn’t realize about Blue and her boys was that they were all in love with one another.

Blue was perfectly aware that it was possible to have a friendship that wasn’t all-encompassing, that wasn’t blinding, deafening, maddening, quickening. It was just that now that she’d had this kind, she didn’t want the other.

There was no point telling himself not to fight with Ronan. They would fight again, because Ronan was still breathing.

I mean this in the kindest possible way,” Malory said, reclined in Gansey’s desk chair, “but you cannot make tea for love or money.”

The two boys were friendly, but not friends. Henry ran with the Vancouver crowd, and Gansey ran with dead Welsh kings.

“Democracy’s a farce,” Ronan said, and Adam smirked, a private, small thing that was inherently exclusionary. An expression, in fact, that he could’ve very well learned from Ronan.

As they moved through the old barn, Adam felt Ronan’s eyes glance off him and away, his disinterest practiced but incomplete. Adam wondered if anyone else noticed. Part of him wished they did and immediately felt bad, because it was vanity, really: See, Adam Parrish is wantable, worthy of a crush, not just by anyone, someone like Ronan, who could want Gansey or anyone else and chose Adam for his hungry eyes.

“I hear if you want magic done,” he said, “you ask a magician.”

The other boy wore a knowing expression. “Don’t tell the others,” Gansey said. “I’m dead,” Noah replied. “Not stupid.”

When he wasn’t trying to look like an asshole, his face looked very different, and for a tilting moment, Adam felt the startling inequality of their relationship: Ronan knew Adam, but Adam wasn’t sure he knew Ronan, after all.

He wondered if he was going to go through each year of his life thinking about how stupid he’d been the year before.

Adam could not stop seeing his fallible king, hanging in the pit of the ravens.

Instead she said, “You know, you’re not such a shithead.” “No,” Ronan replied, “really I am.”