Opal (The Raven Cycle, #4.5)

by Maggie Stiefvater

“It’s not like we can give it back to him. She’s gone completely feral.” “She was never tame,” Adam replied. “Only afraid.”

She had to content herself with stolen glimpses through cracked doors, slender one-inch views of duvet and sheets piled like thunderheads, Adam and sometimes Ronan pillowed among them.

“Of course,” one of the other ladies had said. “Did you think you’d lost everything when Cabeswater died?” “Yes,” Adam had whispered,

Opal had felt a rush of love for him. She loved him the best when he was very sad or very serious or very happy. Something about his voice breaking filled her with feeling, and something about the vacancy of his expression when he was thinking hard felt like she was looking at a dream with nothing bad in it, and something about when Ronan made him laugh so hard that he couldn’t stop made her love him so hard that she felt sad because one day he would get old and die because that was what things with animalness did.

Sometimes they would stop talking and instead begin kissing, and Opal would eavesdrop on this as well. Her capacity for voyeurism was boundless and incorrigible. They were always coming together in surprising moments, going from easygoing to urgent in the space of a few breaths. She watched them kiss messily in the car in the driveway and she watched them tangle around each other in the laundry room and she watched Adam unbuckle Ronan’s belt and slide his hand against skin.

Adam had taken the cassette from Ronan’s hand, working Ronan’s fingers loose and putting his own fingers between them. For a moment Opal, hidden, had thought they were going to kiss. But instead, Ronan pressed his face against Adam’s neck and Adam quietly put his head on top of Ronan’s head and they did not move for a long time.

Ronan paused to kick off his own shoes and stuff his socks in them. Leaving them by the side of the track, he continued alongside Adam with matching bare feet.

Opal hated this small animal world and all its small, limiting rules.

It was funny how a dream really just contained the absolute best and absolute worst parts of the animal world. She’d been so afraid of the absolute worst that she’d forgotten how she missed the absolute best.