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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.
Opal came to understand that Adam’s car was supposed to be more like Ronan’s, but there was something wrong with it called shitbox.
Adam was all animalness, no dreamstuff, but he seemed nonetheless tuned in to it.
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.
can’t hold it all in my head at the same time,” he’d said once. “What I want it to be. I can’t make a new one without the old one to help me focus. What’s the phrase for that?” “Self-defeating,” Adam had replied. “Fuck you. Catch-22. That’s what I meant.”
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. With intellectual curiosity, she watched ribs and hips and arms and legs and spines. She had no lust, because Ronan
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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.
Sometimes they sat in their cars and cried softly. She liked this best of all, because it was rare, and she found she liked rare things the most.
He said nothing as she grabbed his hand and then danced around to grab his other hand. Ronan was less thrilled to discover Adam’s inventive way of travel. “What the hell, Parrish? I was just about to leave to get you. Who dropped you off?” “I walked.” “Ha ha.” Ronan’s real laugh did not sound like ha ha, but this was not Ronan’s real laugh. When Adam didn’t explain the joke, he said, “Walked. From where?” “Work.” Adam had ceased frolicking and instead removed his shoes and then his socks before sitting at the round table in the kitchen.
“You’ll get into one of the others,” Ronan told Adam eventually. “You’re not going to have to make another list. It won’t be what you imagined, but it’ll be just as good.” “Remind me of that later.” “Count on it.”
Even though Opal went away herself plenty, she did not like the idea of Adam going someplace because he might get old and die without coming back.
Twice Ronan got a phone call from his Ganseyfriend and both times he did not say anything to the phone, just listened to the ebullient patter on the other end and made grunting sounds in response. Both times after this Ronan went and lay down, once in his own room and once in Aurora’s room; the first time, he was very quiet for a long time, and the second time he held his parents’ photograph and cried a little without making any sound.
