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What words he did unsheathe turned out to be knives, glinting and edged and unpleasant to have stuck into you.
Boredom and secrets: an explosive combination. Something was going to burn.
It was Declan’s car, Ronan’s trip, Matthew’s vacation. Declan had a letter from the insurance company offering him better rates for his exceptional driving record. Ronan had a letter from the state advising him to change his driving habits lest he lose his license. Matthew had no interest in driving; he said if he didn’t have enough friends to drive him anywhere he wanted to go, he was living his life wrong. In any case, he’d failed his driver’s test three times.
Adam Parrish was the destination of this road trip. Is there any version of you that could come with me to Cambridge? Adam had asked the day he left.
It sounded like everyone else’s heartbeat, he thought. Just like Adam’s heart when his head was resting on his chest. Ronan wasn’t that different. Well, he could seem not that different. He could move to follow the guy he loved, like anyone else. He could live in a city, like anyone else. It could work.
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.
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.”
They were not even the same species as each other; they were peculiar, distinct individuals. They were also more openly and gleefully queer than any Aglionby student Ronan had ever met. Ronan, who’d spent most of his high school years assuming other people were rich assholes and being the only gay person he knew, found these developments somewhat unsettling.
Adam was changing. Ronan couldn’t.
The bed was right there; Adam felt warm and familiar; he longed for him even while holding him.
And like that, the fight was over. 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.
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’?”
Declan didn’t know how much complication was too much complication for Adam Parrish. It wasn’t like Adam was the most straightforward of people, either, even if he was pretending he was at the moment.
She shied away from metal, coming suddenly alert when she nearly touched a doorknob or a faucet, before falling dazed once more.
He was filled with desire. The dream was made of longing for things just out of reach. It floated in the air like humidity. It washed up on the shore with the salt water. He sucked in more longing with every inhale, he exhaled some of his happiness on the other side. How miserable.
Ronan snarled, “It’s like you checked out of the family at birth.” He knew it was nasty. He knew it was the kind of thing that would’ve made Gansey say Ronan and Adam give him a knowing look. But he couldn’t help it. It was as though the less Declan got riled up, the less he seemed to care, the more Ronan wanted to make him break.
“I just want to know,” Adam said finally, in a slightly different voice from before, “that when I come for break, you’ll be there.” “I’ll be here.” He was always here. Double-sided murder crabs had made sure of it. “In one piece.” “In one piece.” “I know you,” Adam said, but he didn’t add anything else, nothing about what knowing Ronan meant.
“I have to go paint over some crab blood,” Adam said eventually. “Tamquam—” It had been over a year since either had sat in a Latin class, but it lingered as their private language. It had been one of the languages spoken in Ronan’s dreams for a very long time, and so Latin had been one of the few classes Ronan had thrown himself into when they were at school. Adam couldn’t stand not to be the best at whichever class he was in, so he’d had to throw himself into it with just as much fervor. It was possible that no two students at Aglionby had ever come away with such a thorough understanding of
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He hadn’t realized that seeing his parents’ faces on living bodies had affected him so thoroughly until this moment of seeing someone he loved very much and yet not knowing if he could believe it.
Then he looked rueful, realizing. He said, “Ronan, I know you.” He said it just the same way he’d said it on the phone the night before. Ronan’s adrenaline melted out of him. He discarded all weaponry on a side table. “I’m convinced. Only you would listen to sociology notes on a motorcycle.”
They hugged again, merrily, waltzing messily in the kitchen, and kissed, merrily, waltzing more. “What do you want to do with your three hours?” Ronan asked. Adam peered around the kitchen. He always looked at home in it; it was all the same colors as him, washed out and faded and comfortable. “I’m starving. I need to eat. I need to take off your clothes. But first, I want to look at Bryde.”
Gansey had asked Ronan to keep his mint plant alive while he road-tripped, and Ronan, unsure of how to keep plants alive inside, had dreamt the outside in.
Again, just as when Ronan had been holding the gun on Adam, there was no distress, no anger. Adam would never judge someone else for their skepticism. His default setting was mistrust.
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. And then Ronan was through and swiping away the tears before Adam joined him by the shoulder, emerging from the dark with the bright dreamt light cupped in his hands. “Break will be here in just a few days,” Adam said. He kissed Ronan’s cheek,
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“What’s wrong with her?” Matthew asked. Something about Matthew’s voice made Declan look sharply to him. His youngest brother’s expression was very un-Matthew-like. Eyes tight. Brows low. Intense. Pensive. His blue Lynch eyes were fixed at a point directly past Declan; he was looking right at the other limp dream creatures. Shit, thought Declan. He’d never thought it would happen. He had no road map for the journey after this. “Same thing as me,” Matthew said flatly. Fuck you, Declan thought miserably. “If I was Dad’s, I’d be asleep,” Matthew said. “So I must be one of Ronan’s.”
Hennessy said, “So is your Bryde your subconscious, then?”
Ronan texted someone as they were walking. Hennessy saw only that the contact was labeled MANAGEMENT. “Who’s that?” “Adam,” Ronan said.
need.” Something dangerous, like you, he thought. And like you, the forest whispered back.
It was his friends leaving in Gansey’s old Camaro for a year’s trip without him. It was Adam sitting with him in the labyrinth in Harvard telling him that it was never going to work. It was tamquam, marked unread.
Ronan had loved Richard C. Gansey III far more than he loved himself at that point, and he hadn’t known how he was going to ever face him when he returned from out of town.
