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Dreams are not the safest thing to build a life on.
Like the other Lynch brothers, he was a regular churchgoer, but most people assumed he played for the other team.
Adam. Ronan missed him like a lung.
The opposite of magical is not ordinary. The opposite of magical is mankind. The world is a neon sign; it says HUMANITY but everything’s burnt out except MAN.
You are made of dreams and this world is not for you.
Ronan’s attention stuck on his hands. Lovely boyish hands with prominent knuckles, gaunt and long like his unfamiliar face.
Ronan hadn’t known anything about who Adam was then and, if possible, he’d known even less about who he himself was, but as they drove away from the boy with the bicycle, this was how it had begun: Ronan leaning back against his seat and closing his eyes and sending up a simple, inexplicable, desperate prayer to God: Please.
He tried not to think about all the shining, educated, straightforward faces in the brochures that Adam Parrish might fall in love with instead of him.
They knew who they were. Adam, a scholar. Ronan, a dreamer.
This was as Ronan remembered it. Adam’s ribs fit against his ribs just as they had before. His arms wrapped around Adam’s narrow frame the same way they had before. His hand still pressed against the back of Ronan’s skull the way it always did when they hugged. His voice was missing his accent, but now it sounded properly like him as he murmured into Ronan’s skin: “You smell like home.” Home.
Beneath the table, Adam pressed the rest of his leg up against Ronan’s, his expression unchanging as he did. This card game, Ronan thought, was going on forever.
“Just a second,” Adam told Ronan. Leaning in close, he added, “Don’t kill anyone.” The words were only an excuse to breathe in Ronan’s ear; it made a marvel of his nerve endings.
He and Adam had been making the same memories for so long that he’d forgotten that it didn’t always have to be like that. Adam was here having a new life, becoming a new person, growing from something beaten down into whoever he was meant to be. And Ronan was … Ronan.
Adam was changing. Ronan couldn’t.
They stepped into Adam’s room; they made it no farther. In the dark, they tangled in each other for several minutes, and finally broke off when stubble had made lips sore.
It had never been a fight between them, anyway. For Adam, it was what it always was: a fight between Adam and himself, between Adam and the world. For Ronan, it was what it always was, too: a fight between truth and compromise, between the black and white he saw and the reality everyone else experienced.
“What’s the face for?” “I want it too much,” Adam said.
Adam Parrish wanted him, and he wanted Adam Parrish.
“Tell me to go to school closer to you and I will,” Adam said in a rush, the words piled together. “Just say it.” Ronan pressed the heel of his hand against his eye, checking for nightwash, but it wasn’t bad yet. “I’m not that big of an asshole.” “Oh, you are,” Adam said, trying for humor. Failing. “Just not about that.”
With a sigh, Ronan took a photo of his elbow bent to make it look like a butt, texted it over, and got up.
On weekdays, he gave in to the impulse of adding to his strange herds. On weekends, he spent Mass regretfully apologizing to God for his hubris.
It was Chainsaw, one of his oldest dream creatures. She was a raven and, like Ronan, all the parts that made her interesting were hidden from the casual glance.
A dreamer, a dream, and Declan: that was the brothers Lynch.
The caller ID still showed an active call with DBAG LYNCH.
Ronan’s phone buzzed. He swept it up at once, which meant it could be only one person: Adam Parrish. For a few minutes, he listened to it very hard, and then, in a very quiet, very small, very un-Ronan voice, he said, “Alter idem” and hung up. Declan found it all worrisome, but Matthew just asked with breezy curiosity, “Why don’t you just say ‘I love you’?” Ronan snarled, “Why do you wear your burrito on your shirt instead of in your mouth?”
And one only had to spend a minute with the two of them to see that he was deeply invested in Ronan.
Ronan knew Declan was made of secrets, but he still managed to be shocked by the reveal of a new one.
“Ink on your skin means you’re hiding things,” he told Ronan. “That’s what breathing means,” Ronan replied.
Most men do not go to Mass every Sunday and most men do not fall in love with other men. And no one brings dreams to life. No one brings dreams to life. No one brings dreams to life. These were the things that made Ronan Lynch himself, but he didn’t realize it until he met the rest of the world.
Ronan couldn’t lie even with his body language.
Declan envied him. His love and his grief both.
Ronan didn’t know how to make things right again, and he was afraid of making things more wrong. So he just texted him: dreamt of you.
Adam sounded irritable. “I saved your life because I love you and I was scared and I didn’t know what else to do. That doesn’t sound like Bryde.” This statement simultaneously pleased and aggravated Ronan. His mind stored away the first half for safekeeping, to take out and look at again on a rotten day, and decided to discard the second half because it felt deflating.
“I know you,” Adam said, but he didn’t add anything else, nothing about what knowing Ronan meant.
It was possible that no two students at Aglionby had ever come away with such a thorough understanding of Latin (or, possibly, of each other).
Belonging in more than one world means that you end up belonging in none of them.”
He said, “Ronan, I know you.”
The idea of Adam Parrish on a motorcycle was more than enough birthday present for Ronan; he was senselessly turned on. He couldn’t think of anything else to say, so he said, “What the fuck.”
They hugged again, merrily, waltzing messily in the kitchen, and kissed, merrily, waltzing more.
At night, he’d sit on the end of Ronan’s childhood bed and meet Ronan in dreamspace—Ronan, asleep, in a dream, Adam, awake, in a trance.
Adam’s mind wheeled, untethered, through infinite dreamspace. Wherever it was, it didn’t recall Adam Parrish, Harvard student; Adam Parrish, Henrietta-born; Adam Parrish, Ronan Lynch’s lover. Adam Parrish, cut loose from his physical body, was fascinated by things so ephemeral and huge that these tiny human concerns didn’t even register.
Ronan rubbed Adam’s fingers between his hands until they were warm and then kissed them.
It seemed incorrect that Adam visiting would have made his loneliness worse, but he missed him acutely even as he was looking at him.
Instead it was every time Ronan had been alone. There was no gore. No shrilling with terror. There was only the quiet that came after all those things. There was only the quiet that came when you were the only one left. Only the quiet that came when you were something strange enough to outsurvive the things that killed or drove away everyone you loved.
Philanthropy is a hobby for the emotionally rich.
you’re as big a liar as Declan.” Ronan’s face felt hot. Stinging. “Oh,” he said.
Declan texted him: You leaving me to deal with Matthew today? and Ronan answered with only Dad’s working, sweetie.
In a very small voice, Matthew said, “I’m the fake brother.” “What?” Declan, the true fake brother, asked.
Ronan texted someone as they were walking. Hennessy saw only that the contact was labeled MANAGEMENT. “Who’s that?” “Adam,” Ronan said.
Even after Niall died and Ronan and Declan had fought for a year, they’d remained tangled together, because hate binds as strongly as love. The Lynch brothers, the brothers Lynch. Ronan didn’t know who he would be without them.
