Chapter Text
On Sunday, Adam didn’t work.
In the early days, as Ronan and Adam worked the kinks out of this fragile thing they held between them, they made a number of begrudging compromises in the name of peaceful coexistence. Both Ronan and Adam were prodigiously stubborn, and that often meant that Ronan’s hard lines bumped into Adam’s. Sometimes Ronan gave him butterflies that fluttered in his stomach for hours after he left the Barns, and sometimes Ronan was so infuriating that Adam had to step out of the room to avoid saying something he didn’t mean. Slowly, they maneuvered their boundaries into shapes that could co-exist in the same space.
They were too hot-tempered and unbudging to last beyond a year if they didn’t learn to compromise. Ronan didn’t drive too fast anymore—well, nothing more than 20 over, and never up in the mountains—and Adam didn’t work on Sundays. This summer, their first together, he worked full-time at Boyd’s during the week, and he picked up weekend shifts at the factory on Saturdays. He saw Ronan only fleetingly from Monday to Saturday, but Sundays were always spent at the Barns.
Ronan always rose early to feed the chickens and the goats. He claimed larger animals were harder to take out of his dreams, so he was working his way up. The goats were tricky, and some the earlier iterations looked rather more like sheep. He attended the early service at St. Agnes with his brothers, but he almost always made it home before ten. Adam had never been one to sleep in, but he took up the habit that summer. Work was tomorrow, not today. Class was next month, not this month. The farm chores were already handled, they did the dishes the night before, and there wasn’t a single thing in the world to worry about. Only here could he sleep so late.
Adam woke to find Ronan in the kitchen, frying bacon and slipping eggs after he got home from church. Ronan hadn’t yet changed out of his church clothes, but he did kick out of his shoes to walk barefoot on the cool kitchen tile. His tie hung from his neck, and his shirt collar gaped. He hated any shirt with a collar, but his hunger outweighed his discomfort.
Adam hypothesized that dreaming must require a higher caloric intake, because Ronan was a garbage disposal. He ate, ate, and ate , and he never gained a pound. Adam accepted the inevitability of Ronan grocery shopping for the both of them only when he discovered that Ronan ate of the food he bought anyway. He was always picking at something, one meal bleeding into the next. Adam had seen him make a plate of fettuccine alfredo with grilled chicken at three in the afternoon.
Some mornings, Declan and Matthew stayed for breakfast. Adam liked having them around. He never had a big family, and there was something indescribably wonderful about having them around, even when Declan was lecturing, Ronan was snarking, and Matthew was breaking things.
Other mornings, like this one, he got Ronan all to himself.
Ronan Lynch was very handsome, and Adam was very accustomed to ignoring how handsome he was. To most people, Ronan’s good looks were just a part of his predatory allure; he used his piercing blue eyes and his handsome bone structure like a poison dart frog attracted its prey with bright orange skin. The prettiest, most eye-catching creatures tended to be the most deadly. But Adam had never been stung, poisoned, or bitten—figuratively speaking. He never had butterflies this bad before Ronan, and he quickly learned that having him didn’t make them go away. Having Ronan intensified them.
Adam slipped his fingers over Ronan’s spine as lightly as the cross-breeze that swept through the kitchen from one window to the other.
“Good morning.”
“Come here, you lazy fuck,” Ronan said, when Adam shifted away from him. “Get back here.” Adam grinned. Ronan lopped a piece of bacon out of the pan onto a paper towel to soak up the excess grease, then tore off a piece and held it to his mouth. “Try this.”
Adam let him feed him and chewed slowly. He nodded and kissed the corner of Ronan’s mouth. “It’s good.”
Adam and Ronan melted seamlessly into their quiet morning. Adam asked for three eggs instead of his usual two. They sometimes aimed lazily at productivity on days like this one, but idle chores often turned sideways. A trip out to one of the barns to clear out some of Ronan’s father’s things quickly led to their clothes thrown about the dirt floor and their bare backs pressed into prickly haystacks. Changing the bedsheets was a futile task; they never made it past the fitted sheet before Ronan tackled Adam into the mattress. This morning, they didn’t even aim.
After they finished their breakfast, they piled the dirty dishes into the sink and ventured into the living room. Somehow, in the time Adam took to walk to the bathroom and back, Ronan lost his shirt and pants and now stood by the bay windows in nothing but his underwear. Ronan opened the windows, and Adam laid out across the sofa.
In time, Ronan draped himself overtop Adam, burying his face in his bare chest. He left a long string of kisses without urgency, sending a deep flush to Adam’s cheeks. He supposed he would never grow entirely used to Ronan’s easy affections; it would always make his heart race.
As Ronan’s eyelids grew heavy, Adam traced the lines of his tattoo.
“Will you dream me some flowers?” he whispered in the moments before Ronan drifted off.
Ronan didn’t answer, but they both woke hours later covered in sunflowers and white daisies.