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Adam sighed and sat down beside the cow, leaning against her warm body, letting her slow breaths lift him. After a moment, Ronan slipped down beside him and the two of them looked out over the sleepers. Adam felt Ronan glance at him and away. Their shoulders were closed. Overhead, rain began to tap on the roof again, another sudden storm. Possibly their fault. Possibly not.
It struck Adam that the weirdest part of the night really was Ronan. Not the dreamed up things Ronan’s mind imagined or their intertwined connectivity to Cabeswater but Ronan himself. The unknowable parts of him that made a whole that was difficult to see except in the right light. Adam thought maybe, if he asked nicely, Ronan would show him everything. The way Ronan’s shoulder slumped against his sang of a vulnerability even Gansey wasn’t privy to, and once again, Adam was filled with guilt for his brief, insane, and desperate want of Ronan’s affection, his attention.
To be worthy of something more than he knew he deserved.
Ahead, as far as Adam could see, dream things. Behind, a dream thing. And beside him? Not a thing that was dreamed up but the dreamer himself.
It was more than a little humbling. Adam realized with a start that he was in awe of Ronan, jealous and proud and altogether confused by the rush of emotions that flooded him when he felt Ronan’s elbow against his own.
“If I tell you something right now, can it just be a dream?” Adam asked. His voice was barely as loud as the large cow breathing drowsily behind him. Barely there, a figment of the imagination if Ronan wanted it to stay that way. Some confused sound that they could pretend wasn’t Adam’s trembling voice.
“Sure, man.” Ronan’s voice didn’t sound any better.
“Promise?”
“Jesus Christ, is this a pinky swear thing or what, Parrish? Spit it out.”
Adam purposely didn’t look at Ronan, even though Ronan’s fiery, insistent gaze flung to him at those words. Adam couldn’t look. He was a coward, and he knew it, but he couldn’t look.
“Sometimes, I think about what it would be like to be one of your dreams.”
The words were out and between them, released from the depths of Adam’s soul, and shit, he wanted to take them back just as suddenly as he’d let them out. Like a fire he didn’t mean to start, a flame he couldn’t un-light. He could feel every last inch of himself buzzing with electric energy. Not even Cabeswater could save him now.
“I have dreamed you,” Ronan admitted, like he wasn’t at all phased by Adam’s confession. He even affected a shrug, a casual grunt. It sounded very perfect, but a little too much to be real.
“No,” Adam said.
“Yes.”
“No, I mean, no, that’s not it. That’s not all I want to say, and that’s not how I meant to say it.”
The electricity caught between them. Adam was suddenly aware that the heat creeping over his own body belonged to Ronan, that it was sluicing off Ronan like rainwater off a freshly polished fender. Straight into Adam to fuel the desperate fire.
He was suddenly reminded of Kavinsky and the fireworks, that night when he and Ronan had clicked seamlessly in a dream or Cabeswater or both, the knowledge that they both had somehow become so much more in the past year than either of them could have ever thought possible.
“I know.” Ronan’s voice cut through the edge of things, hardly clean as a knife through butter but catching like an old and half-dulled pair of scissors through thick cloth. “I know what you meant. I just don’t know what I’m supposed to do about it.”
Adam swallowed. His Adam’s apple bobbed, quivered. The rest of him bobbed, quivered, the entire world tilted over on itself like those might have been the purest definition of ‘famous last words’. Was he really going to do this? Right here? Right now? In a barn that might or might not be dreamed up that smelled of probably real shit and hay?
“Nothing,” Adam said. His voice was still exceptionally quiet. He knew he could get up and leave if he wanted, but he kept on thinking instead of Ronan slouched in the chair, a solitary, figure wrapped in a single blanket, dreaming and working and so, so alone.
Lonesome.
The worst feeling to Adam. Being somewhere without anyone else and honestly not knowing if there was any other way. He thought of the broken ley lines coursing underneath them, of the favor he wanted to ask Glendower which kept changing on him - save me, no save Gansey, no save Ronan and Gansey, no - and of the promise he made to Cabeswater and of his father’s looming court date and of all the things he did or didn’t do in the short years that made up his life so far.
“You don’t have to do anything,” Adam clarified. And then he twisted his body and kissed Ronan Lynch on the mouth.
It wasn’t a very graceful kiss, but Ronan would have to excuse Adam, because it was his first. He’d never felt worthy of kissing anyone, and truthfully he didn’t feel worthy of kissing Ronan now, but Ronan wanted him. And Ronan was lonesome. And it hurt something deep in Adam’s chest to think of him like that, of any of them like that, and he’d be lying if he said he never considered this as a possibility.
Ronan tasted dangerous. Neither light nor dark but some gray in between that spiced and soothed against Adam’s lips.
Their mouths stilled against one another. Adam didn’t open his eyes to see what Ronan looked like. In a perfect world, they could just do this without dwelling it into dust. Ronan’s lips were softer than they looked on the outside; Adam’s were chapped and bitten. Neither of them opened their mouths, even though they both surely knew that was the next step. For a time, the two of them just kissed in a tender, clumsy press of lips without breathing or moving or knowing what came next.
Adam was the first to pull away. He did so as gingerly as he could with his lips protesting as they stuck against Ronan’s. Finally, his eyes opened. Ronan’s face was tight, an expression pinched in the lines like raw emotion. It would have frightened Adam, but he’d seen Ronan so many times with warring expressions mixed into one that it ceased to bother him.
“Okay?” Adam asked, tentative against the threat of breaking the moment with speech. Where Ronan was concerned, he made things convoluted when he opened his mouth.
“No,” Ronan said. His expression darkened. “Not okay.”
Before Adam could ask why not, Ronan was on him, a clash of teeth and tongue and lips so brutal it felt like an attack. Adam didn’t like to be attacked.
He shoved at Ronan’s chest. “That hurt,” he snarled.
“Good. I meant for it to.”
“Jesus, Lynch.”
Adam’s hand on Ronan’s chest, he felt the rampant, eager heartbeat beneath his trembling fingers. It thudded loud and strong, like Adam could reach in and grab it if he wanted. He allowed them another quiet moment, giving Ronan time to reflect. Ronan wasn’t an idiot, no matter how he made himself look on the outside. He was capable of understanding why this couldn’t be any faster than what Adam was prepared to give.
“Greenmantle,” Ronan said abruptly. “His web. I want to wrap it around his neck.”
Just like that, it was over. The moment, the kiss, the entire evening spent together, Adam’s momentarily hallucinatory bravado. Adam pulled away until it was just his shoulders and elbow touching Ronan Lynch, like before. He bowed his head and rubbed the back of his neck to calm the goosebumps. The last thing he wanted to talk about was Greenmantle.