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After narrowly avoiding death, Adam Parrish wanted to lie down. Surprising, considering he had spent the last several days comatose, his consciousness floating untethered in a dark void. But days surviving on drops of sugar water had left him weak and dizzy. He gripped Ronan’s arm — Ronan. Ronan. His Ronan — covertly trying to use him to remain upright.
The three of them were still talking. How long had they been talking? He struggled to refocus on the conversation.
“I imagine you’ll be fucking off then,” Hennessy said. “Where to? Back to pretty boy’s dorms?”
Ronan looked at Adam. “I’m not allowed.”
Technically true, but against his better judgement, Adam had spent most of the miserable nights since Ronan had disappeared hoping that he would materialize outside Adam’s dorm one day and had accordingly considered how he would sneak the most conspicuous man in the world into the building.
“What day is it?” he asked. Directing the question at both Jordan Hennessy and Jordan Hennessy.
Hennessy checked her phone before she replied, “Saturday.”
Saturday. He’d been unconscious for days. His gut twisted at the thought of his inanimate body, as unguarded and unprotected as his consciousness, floating around in the sweetmetal sea. Bile rose in his throat.
Adam had never liked feeling helpless.
He pinched the bridge of his nose, trying to connect his fragmented thoughts. “Fletcher goes home weekends,” he said carefully. “And you don’t have to check guests in until 8 pm.”
“Won’t you get in trouble if we get caught?” Ronan asked. His harsh tone was at odds with the way he looked at him.
Adam would likely be kicked out of residence if caught but couldn’t bring himself to care. He just shrugged, “Who gives a fuck?”
Ronan scoffed, turning to Hennessy, “You sure you put him back together right? The Parrish I know cares about rules.” His tone was casual, yet Adam could hear the thinly veiled worry. But Ronan knew him, and he knew that explicit concern would be swiftly dismissed — a stubborn habit, cemented by years of practice.
How Adam had missed him.
But Adam was still Adam. His memories and penchant for dry remarks had not gone anywhere. And so his response was simply to say, “You must have forgotten Lynch, I’ve never been completely opposed to anarchy.”
Ronan’s answering smile was sharp.
Out of the corner of his eye, Adam saw the shared glance between Jordan Hennessy and Jordan Hennessy. It was the kind of tacit communication he and Gansey had often employed — illustrative of a bond tighter than friendship, a level of closeness that rendered words unnecessary.
No doubt the girls were struggling to reconcile this cool exchange with the desperate way they had clung to each other moments ago. He and Ronan had always resonated at a frequency that no one else could tune in to.
Returning his gaze to Ronan, Adam pulled a hat out of his jacket pocket before shrugging it off and handing both items to Ronan, who looked at the wool and tweed with the same derision he had shown toward his Aglionby uniform.
“So you can fit right in with us uppity Harvard scholars,” Adam said.
“Asshole,” Ronan replied. Adam smiled widely.
Waving goodbye to dream and dreamer, they set off in the direction of Harvard’s campus, shoulders and hips and feet knocking together, arms wound around waists — at first out of a need for closeness, and then to keep Adam from collapsing in the middle of Oxford Street. They shuffled past red bricked buildings and impeccably dressed students with moneyed smiles, stumbling into Thayer Hall and up the never-ending staircase to Adam’s dorm room.
The moment they crossed the threshold, Adam pulled Ronan against him, pressing his face into the junction between his neck and shoulder. He felt Ronan’s hands under his shirt, starving for skin on skin, pulling him impossibly closer.
How Adam had missed this. The soft scratch of buzzed hair under his palm, the steady pressure of hands on his back, the heavenly press of shoulders to shoulders and chest to chest, the desperate, cherishing kisses on his cheek.
With his eyes closed and his hearing ear muffled against fabric, every physical sensation was dialled up to eleven. Or maybe that was just Ronan.
He held him tighter, feeling as eager and impatient for touch as he had been in those first weeks of their relationship. When Ronan pulled away, it was with obvious reluctance. His fingers sought Adam’s, raising them to his mouth, but stopped just shy of kissing his knuckles. He held one up so that Adam could see the dust and dirt caking his skin.
God, he needed a shower. He needed many things in that moment: to press his palm against Ronan’s palm, a glass of water, to press his lips against Ronan’s lips, a proper meal, to press Ronan against his thin mattress and make up for lost time.
Move, he thought, and he dragged himself to the washroom. Thankfully, Adam had spent most of his teenage years dissatisfied with simply burning the candle at both ends, insistent on throwing the whole damn thing in the fire — and was therefore accustomed to ignoring the pleas of his aching body.
Once inside the small bathroom, he carefully washed his hands, wincing at the sharp sting of soap against his chapped skin. He cupped water in his now-clean palms and drank greedily until the dryness of his mouth subsided and his head stopped pounding.
Ronan had discarded his outerwear and was standing in the middle of the room when Adam returned. He watched as Adam opened his wardrobe, procured two clean towels and a change of clothes, and headed back to the washroom
“I’m showering first,” he said.
“Selfish bastard.”
“Try not to wreck the dorm,” Adam’s called through the door, turning on the water.
“Try not to keel over in there, Parrish. Fucking pathetic to survive another murderous psychopath just to be taken out by a hot shower.”
“Asshole.”
God, how I've missed you, he thought.
***
Ronan’s eyes followed Adam as he emerged from the bathroom. He drank in the sight of him — the artful way in which his white shirt hung off narrow shoulders and the ends of his damp hair clung to the elegant planes of his face — and studied the familiar constellation of freckles scattered across Adam’s skin, pausing on the small cluster over his temple that he used to press his lips to. How could he yearn for someone who was right in front of him?
“Shower’s all yours,” Adam said, and he sounded like himself again. No longer concerning himself with clipping the vowels of his Henrietta accent. The warm drawl of it soothed something deep in Ronan’s chest.
Ronan stood under the warm spray until the water at his feet ran clear. Careful around his freshly tattooed arm, he scrubbed at his skin until he felt human again. Or at least half human again.
Climbing out of the shower, stiff and unused muscles groaning in protest, he dried and dressed slowly in the clean clothes Adam had handed him.
When he opened the bathroom door, he saw Adam perfunctorily eating a granola bar, plastic bowl held in one hand to prevent crumbs from dirtying his spotless floor. Baffling, practical Adam Parrish. His heart soared.
A slight gleam caught his eye, and his soaring heart reached extraordinary heights. Because Adam was wearing the watch that Ronan had removed before heading into the shower. It was back where it belonged, its band resting beneath the prominent bone of Adam’s wrist, covering the pale strip of skin that revealed how routinely he had worn it. The watch had been a love letter from Ronan. One that asked Adam to keep thinking of him, to keep wanting him, to keep loving him.
The fact that Adam had put it back on the first chance he got told Ronan that he had.
He waited for Adam to finish his bar, placing the bowl on his desk and throwing the wrapper in the bin. He watched as Adam walked over to him, placed his hands — his hands — on either side of Ronan’s neck, and kissed him. Ronan curved his palms over Adam’s, deepening the kiss.
Their last kiss had been a sad parting. This was a joyous reunion. He could taste Adam’s smile against his mouth, could hear his breath catch when Ronan caught his lower lip between his teeth, could feel the pounding of his pulse as his hands circled Adam’s wrists before trailing down his arms, his sides, settling around his waist and hauling him closer. Ronan Lynch was made of feelings, and he finally understood what that meant. In that moment, he felt everything.
Adam was impatient and eager. Tactile. Starved. His thumbs brushed along Ronan’s cheekbones, followed the tendons on his neck, traced the lines of his collarbones. He sought the bare skin of Ronan’s stomach, curved his fingers into the waistband of his pants. They were both gasping. Breathing was a secondary need.
But exhaustion was a lead blanket, slowing their movements. Hands and lips gentled, and Ronan pressed soft kisses to the cluster of freckles on Adam’s temple, to the chapped skin of his palms, to the protrusion of each knuckle, to every callused fingertip. He pulled back gently.
“You need to get some sleep, Adam.”
Ronan could see his pride warring with his practicality. But his knee-jerk instinct to reject concern was beaten by his rational understanding that he needed rest, and he allowed Ronan to gently push him towards the bed. Climbing under sheets, they slotted limbs around each other in a long-familiar arrangement.
Later, Ronan thought, we’ll have to talk about all this.
But for now, he let himself relax, waiting for sleep to pull him under.
He was only just beginning to drift off when he felt Adam push off the covers and quietly slip from the bed.
He cracked his eyes open and saw him digging through the depths of his wardrobe, until he triumphantly pulled out a small white container. Ronan didn’t need to see the bottom to know what the label would say.
Adam crawled back into bed, twisting off the lid and rubbing the moss-scented lotion onto his dry, cracked hands. Ronan stared, a question in his eyes. Why would pragmatic Adam keep a much-needed item in such an obviously inaccessible place?
As if he had asked out loud, Adam shrugged, “You disappeared. I didn’t want anything from you.”
Baffling, prideful Adam Parrish. Ronan kissed him softly. “You’re a proud, stubborn fuck, you know that?”
Adam Parrish, who knew him better than anyone, easily cut through the statement and found the clear truth behind the words:
God, how I’ve missed you.