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The first time, it was a storm.
That was figurative and literal. Adam could not be trusted except in his ambition, which was not to say that Gansey didn’t trust him completely. But he wasn’t like Ronan, whose lies were about feelings, and whose lies Ronan didn’t fully understand himself, and whose lies were secrets. Adam lied through both sides of his mouth; he lied when he told the truth.
Gansey prefers to think that this isn’t Adam’s fault. Because sometimes when Adam says, “I’ll be there,” he means it, even when later he’s holed himself up in the back of his father’s house, hiding from what Gansey has offered a thousand times and would offer a thousand more. Adam lies with how he walks, with how he speaks, with how he slips the drawl out of his accent as methodically as he fixes the Pig. Adam lies like he breathes; easily and casually most days, but violently and with no small difficulty on others, like every lie costs something and it’s a price he has no choice but to pay.
So the first time, it was a storm.
Henrietta was really too far inland for hurricanes, but every once in awhile one would toss a whipping tail of water and flood and wind, and the entire town would shut down. The infrastructure of the town, such as it was, wasn’t ever designed to accommodate things like reliable power in the wake of a storm that saw fit to howl down even the local cell towers.
Adam arrived nearly twenty minutes after the storm hit - freakishly and terribly, snapping out of the electric blue sky and slamming into the heart of Henrietta - soaking wet. “Damn-” he muttered as he stomped through the door, and Gansey looked up from where he was watching the storm brew a concoction of dark and light against the hills beyond town. “I’m fucked,” Adam added after a minute, as Gansey found a towel in a pile of papers. Everything in Monmouth could be found in a pile of papers.
“Do you need a ride home?” Gansey asked, as Adam toweled himself off, although they both knew it was a stupid question. There was no way that Gansey was going to let either of them get in a car, and there was no way that they could even reach Adam’s house at this point; the streets were washed out, there was no light, and the Pig would not survive the inevitable soaking it would take. Ronan, being Ronan, had hit the streets almost two hours previous and had actually texted Gansey (a small miracle, he thought) to announce that even he wasn’t driving in the rain, and he was going to hole up with Matthew in the dorms for the night, so the BMW and Ronan’s favor wasn’t even an option.
It was bad when Ronan Lynch was willing to be trapped within the same building as Declan for a night; Adam, who had biked from the factory, wasn’t going anywhere.
They both knew what that meant. Every line in Adam’s face spoke of the sullen resentment of it, of the pride that said he didn’t want this, and of the fear, rippling around his eyes, of the inevitable fallout. “Or you could stay here,” Gansey finally offered, and braced himself; it was one thing to watch the storm from the safety of the indoors, but he had just invited it inside the house.
Adam toweled his hair off, and yanked his shirt over his head, toweling his torso off, too angry, furious, too affronted to even speak, and Gansey knew it was bad because there was no outlet for it. Where Ronan’s rage was loud and impossible to tune out, it was Adam’s that scared him, because Adam’s rage crept and skulked until suddenly everyone was surrounded in it. “Noah’s not here,” Gansey tried, and frowned, because he couldn’t actually recall where Noah had gone, “so you could probably stay in his room. You know he wouldn’t mind.”
Adam just looked over at Gansey, and there was a moment where the storm howled and Gansey thought that maybe he should just fling himself from the second-floor door, it would be less painful than Adam’s face, but finally Adam sighed, resigned. “I’ll manage,” he finally said, which meant he would not sleep in Noah’s bed. Instead, he would find some uncomfortable spot somewhere in Monmouth to curl up and resentfully not sleep. Instead he would think of everything he should or could be doing that wasn’t sleeping, and guiltily hate himself for it at the same time he worried about his eventual homecoming the next day.
Managing was not code; it was a lie, pure and simple. Gansey, knew he couldn’t salvage more than the dim hope that Adam might be willing to have a conversation that wasn’t about this. Adam would let his anger fight for him; Adam’s anger wasn’t like Ronan’s, boiling over and causing blackened eyes and bloody knuckles, but it was potent and controlling just the same.
He knew it might have been too much. Adam did not like losing the small vestige of control he had in his life, even when that control was lost to something as primal and elemental as a hurricane. Gansey left the room and went to the dryer, where a load of laundry still sat from three days ago, being picked at slowly until the machine was either empty or Ronan dumped it in a fit of I need to use the machine. Gansey was still working on getting Ronan to use his words like a grown up.
By the time he came back with a shirt of mysterious origins (probably Noah’s? Maybe? Who could tell), Adam was mostly naked, stripped down to his briefs, toweling off unselfconsciously. Gansey had never seen that much of Adam before; he never knew how Adam’s body was built out of physical labor. In a purely intellectual way, Gansey found it interesting that Ronan (who was by far the one who everyone assumed to be the most muscled) was thinner and ropier than Adam. Adam’s leanness under his clothes was an illusion. Adam’s chest was more filled out, his thighs had better definition.
Gansey looked away before he could think about it more, and tossed the shirt over. “Here,” he said, “while yours is drying.”
And naturally, because the dryer would have required electricity to run, that was when the lights flickered ominously before the power shut off completely. “What was that?” Adam asked, a hint of insufferable smugness in his voice. Maybe the night could be salvaged after all.
It turned out, as soon as Adam was dry and somewhat dressed (in retrospect, the shirt must have been Ronan’s, some relic of a long-ago world when Ronan used to actually wear shirts that had sleeves by choice, because it fit offensively well on Adam’s tall torso) his mood substantially improved. Better, it only improved more when Gansey managed to discover a box of Dunkaroos that he had ordered from Canada on a whim when Noah had mentioned in an off-hand way that he had loved them as a kid.
Of course Noah refused to eat them so the imported and illicit contraband had found its way to the back of a pile of papers, and Adam accepted them with a grace that Gansey was pretty sure only came from novelty. “These must be older than you are,” he mentioned, opening a package, and examining the frosting with a healthy amount of suspicion, but taking a cookie and smearing it with white anyway.
“They apparently still manufacture them in Canada,” Gansey replied, taking his own package and opening it. “Besides, I think they’re all preservatives.”
“Do you eat anything that comes from the earth?” Adam asked, but there was humor in his voice, and Gansey flicked a blotch of frosting at Adam’s head, and Adam laughed, wiping it off his forehead with his fingers and licking it clean. “Don’t waste food, Gansey,” Adam scolded, and they sat and ate their disgusting cookies and frosting and talked about Glendower and favors until Adam fell asleep in Gansey’s bed, his hands fisting the sheets like they were the only thing holding him to the earth.
The rain helped; Adam’s improved mood helped, and Gansey fell asleep then, too, lulled by the pleasure of his friendship and the insistent noise of rain, allowing himself the rarity of it. It was warm when he fell asleep, and the usual whirrings of Monmouth were quieted by the lack of power. When he woke a couple of hours later with morning wood (or two in the morning wood, as it turned out when he stretched and started at the time on his phone, blearily), he barely noticed Adam in the bed with him, stirring too. “Gansey,” Adam muttered, and Gansey looked down to where Adam was not looking over at him, but at his erection where the line of it was clear and tenting his waistband.
Gansey didn’t even know how he was still hard, because surely all the blood in his body was currently occupying the same space as his face. “Sorry-” Gansey started, but Adam barely moved, one hand going to Gansey’s waistband. “I-” Gansey tried, but to no avail. Adam’s hand was already wrapping around Gansey’s dick.
Calluses was really the only coherent thought his brain could formulate, because the rest of him was too focused on how good it felt, on rocking his hips into Adam’s hand. It was dry and it was a little ragged. When Adam took his hand away and licked his own palm, Gansey’s brain gave up the ghost. It only took seconds, embarrassingly, after Adam’s hand went back into Gansey’s boxers before Gansey was coming with a shudder and a sound that he was pretty sure would haunt the rafters of Monmouth for the rest of eternity, along with Noah’s appetite, Ronan’s taste in women, and Gansey’s long-lost dignity.
And then Adam was wiping his hand off on his borrowed shirt, turning, and muttering, “Go back to sleep,” like nothing had happened, like they had just gotten up for a moment, noted that it was still two in the morning, and turned to try and catch more sleep. Gansey realized then that he was a victim of Adam’s notorious pragmatism, another thing in his long mental list of messes he had to clean, items he had to fix, and homework he had to finish.
It was unsettling.
Gansey did not sleep, not until long after the lights came back on unceremoniously at five in the morning, after the storm screeched away, leaving the weak and watery dawn to illuminate them.
~~~~~
The crux of it is that none of it is uncomfortable. It helps that Adam doesn’t make it uncomfortable; that there’s nothing that is beholden about what Adam does. He does not accept gifts well, easily, or, frankly, at all, in any measure, except occasionally from Ronan and even then it’s with a snarl rather than a thank you, and Gansey cannot figure it out. Surely the abundance of money should be like some kind of strange osmosis, where friends are concerned. They don’t do it to owe each other things, they do it because they live inside each other’s pockets, frail and fiddly pieces of each other’s souls that happen to reside in different bodies, nestled in different hearts.
Gansey is positive that if he could take his own heart out of his chest and lay it bare to inspect, the muscle would clearly sing about whose tasks would fall where, divided between three people. Ronan to keep it pumping, to inject it with enough life to be irresistible to refuse, Noah to keep Ronan’s strength from being overwhelming, to be the calm response to Ronan’s tachycardic tendencies, and Adam-
-and Adam would just be the blood itself, crucial and vital but wholly independent. Unable to be contained.
And it’s not uncomfortable, or common. It is actually altogether unpredictable, which is not like Adam, whose constancy is reliable even in its irritation. Adam will be firm about work, studying, grades, his future, and refusing money, at the same time he’s soft about pizza toppings, which movie they watch on the nights they can be bothered to start up the projector, and stray cats.
The second time was unremarkable, a forgettable day except that it ended with Adam’s hand down Gansey’s chinos while Ronan played his music so loud it drowned out the whimpering of Gansey’s voice.
The third time was almost a month later, so long that Gansey was altogether sure that it would never happen again.
The fourth, a week after.
And so it went, in an unreliable pattern, with Adam occasionally finding some strange internal reason to manhandle Gansey into a corner, get him off, wash his hands, and continue on with the day. The pattern of the contact itself - Adam’s hand, slick with spit, no kissing, nothing that would denote romance, was so smoothly done and never mentioned that Gansey was starting to think he was hallucinating it.
“Do you want,” Gansey started, once, as he did his fly back up. Adam had handed him a handkerchief and it was long gone, never to be used again, as far as Gansey was concerned.
Adam looked up, his eyebrows raising up into his hairline, practically. “Do you have that book on raven symbolism in 14th century France here, or-”
Gansey looked around the room, and wondered what the hell Adam was talking about, until he remembered that actually, Adam had come to Monmouth to try and help Gansey decode a notoriously prickly book that switched between academic English and French, not to push Gansey into the bathroom/kitchen/laundry room and make him see stars. “It’s on my bed,” Gansey muttered, genuinely wondering if he should possibly mention that perhaps, if Adam was disposed, that Gansey’s hand could be in Adam’s pants, thank you, or if he should just follow Adam’s possibly purposely obtuseness into the waters of denial.
Adam was already looking at it when Gansey came out, hands washed. Adam’s lower lip was between his teeth. “Do you have any idea?” Gansey asked, because hell with it, denial was easy and safe and maybe this was a hallucination, brought on by stress, lack of sleep, and spending too much time looking at porn on the internet.
(It wasn’t that much time, his brain countered. Maybe his brain was trying to tell him something else. Gansey boy, look at more porn.)
Adam mauled his lower lip some more, and Gansey rubbed his face in response, until Adam finally tossed the book. “This is nonsense,” he announced. “This book is nonsense.”
“Malory said-” Gansey began, but Adam was already standing, done. “Really? Nonsense?”
“Symbolism isn’t going to help us unless Glendower littered the way to his tomb with eyeless corpses,” Adam began, one hand flattening against the top of his head.
Gansey was quick to interrupt, “But what if eyeless is something we should be looking for, not literal eyeless, but, I don’t know, what it-”
“What are we going to do, get a blind dog and follow it until it leads us to Glendower’s tomb?” Adam asked.
Gansey was affronted at this for a moment, and then paused. “Well,” he drawled, his accent getting more prominent for a moment, “if I thought it would work.”
Adam startled and then he smiled, and as though God himself came down from the heavens and blessed this moment, he laughed. “Can you imagine Lynch, holding a leash, while a blind dog ran into a wall?”
“That is distinctly unfair,” Gansey retorted, pleased with himself, “although admittedly, mostly to the dog.”
Adam laughed again, leaning back until he collapsed against the bed. “We’d end up at the local butchers and you’d be asking him is there a sleeping Welsh King in the back-”
“I would not-” Gansey interrupted, breathless because he, too, was trying not to shake with laughter.
“-and Lynch would be browbeating some poor assistant into a state of terror-”
The laughter in the room was echoing and filling the corners, and Adam’s smile was infectious. “-and Noah would accuse us of tricking him into coming so we could make him eat-” Gansey supplied.
“-and meanwhile the dog would have devoured three pounds of bacon-” Adam said, and he laughed in the way that made tears come to the corners of his eyes, even though it wasn’t such a comical thing, even though it wasn’t actually that funny. It worked because it’s them, it’s the four of them, but mostly because-
“And you, you would be scowling the entire time and wondering why we were friends in the first place-”
Adam laughed so hard he fell off the bed, and landed with a crack and a thump. Gansey peered over the bed. “Are you all right?” he asked, suddenly worried.
Adam looked up, puzzled, but his smile in a moment was wide and wonderful. “I know why I’m friends with you, you asshole,” he drawled, his accent firing on all cylinders, thick and impossible, and Gansey felt a weight he didn’t know had nestled against his stomach dissipate away.
~~~~~
“Blue,” Adam said, with a vague knowingness to him, although she wasn’t in the room, or, in fact, the building (the building in question being the Aglionby Library) “is not going to want to show up at Monmouth if you keep refusing to buy toilet paper.”
Blue was Adam’s new favorite topic of conversation. Blue was Adam’s new favorite hallucination, Gansey started to think, too, because clearly he was seeing her around corners and behind furniture, with the way that he stared out into space every time he said her name. Of course, she was short enough to fit in those spaces, spaces between spaces, small enough to be there, so Gansey always looked, even if Blue could not possibly be in the building (although really, Blue could never fit into this room, it simply could not contain the full capacity of her ever spreading personality. It was a small miracle that Blue could fit anywhere at all, except perhaps in the ever-widening cavern of Gansey’s heart, for all that he would never admit it). “It’s Ronan’s turn,” Gansey replied. He had started folding up kleenex and laying it gently over where the roll of toilet paper should go, but the hint had not been taken. Civilizing Ronan was akin to training a cat to come when called.
Adam seemed to agree with this, because he rolled his eyes. “We both know that he’s never going to go to the market, so can you just get over it and give in already?” he asked.
“Did you get y equals negative six and x equals seventeen for the last one?” Gansey asked, trying desperately to interrupt this train of thought, even though he wanted it to work for Adam, he did. “Why doesn’t that sound right?”
“Because we’re taking Trig, not basic algebra?” Adam replied, grabbing at Gansey’s notebook and turning it around to see Gansey’s utter failure at his math homework. “Look, nevermind,” he said, correcting some elusive step, and when he turned it back, Gansey stared at the elegant simplicity of the correct answer staring back at him. “I have work in thirty minutes, but I’ll see you after.”
“Ah,” Gansey managed. “Is Jane coming?” he asked, the nickname slipping out of his mouth with the same ease that moans did, when Adam touched him. It hadn’t happened since Blue. That was all right, it was bound to end eventually, wasn’t it?
Adam shrugged, and picked up his things. “It’s not like I can call her, is it?” he pointed out. “But I hope she does.”
Gansey hoped so too; Adam deserved that. Adam deserved better. Adam deserved the best. He raised a hand out, and Adam bumped knuckles, with the same care that he reserved for fixing the Pig and talking about Blue’s comments on Gansey’s terrible clothing choices.
Later that day, Gansey bought toilet paper, and threw the entire package, all four soft white rolls, at Ronan’s head. “You owe me,” he said, and Ronan rolled his eyes. Gansey attributed the subtle and persistent sensation of betrayal to Ronan’s inability to care about anyone’s comfort save his own. He realized, after he lay in his own bed for an hour, that Adam had taught him well to believe lies.
~~~~~
When Blue told Gansey about her kissing issue, he was relieved.
He isn’t sure, however, if he was relieved because that meant that she was responsible enough to know better than to kiss Adam, or because it meant that whatever she got from Adam was equal to what Gansey got from Adam.
(A furtive handjob in the back of a room, whimpering against Adam’s shoulder and glorying in the shape of his hands.)
(The idea of Adam’s hand up Blue’s skirt was shockingly arousing, but Gansey is most shocked by the green slither of jealousy wrapping around his heart.)
Adam’s bad mood after Cabeswater was bad enough, but Adam’s bad mood after Blue’s unceremonious fight over the kissing was practically unbearable. The trip up to D.C. nearly killed them both, and none of that had to do with Gansey’s driving (or with the fear of an inevitable breakdown, considering Helen was taking them).
He had hoped, initially, to not spend a single night away from Henrietta, but that had been unavoidable; more were required for this absurd gala, and it was better for Adam. Fortunately, it wasn’t as if the Gansey household wasn’t prepared to take on two houseguests.
It was the middle of the night before the party when Gansey felt a weight depress his bed. The last time this happened - well, no. The last time this happened was when Ronan decided that they were twelve year old girls at a summer camp and tried to put shaving cream in Gansey’s hand during one of the few precious hours of sleep he had managed (it had been three weeks previous).
The last time this happened in this bed, in this house, was when Gansey was five years old and Helen got mad at him for not being afraid of thunder, because her greatest ambition in life was to have a little brother curl around her in terror so she could comfort him. Naturally, this meant that Helen decided that she was going to make him afraid of something, even if that something was Helen, herself, in a monster mask leftover from Halloween.
Anyway, it had been a long time.
“Adam?” he asked, because he recognized his hands, the slim elegance of them.
Adam shushed him, carefully, and pushed Gansey back into the bed. Already, Gansey was hard, already Gansey’s body was expecting this. Already, even though it had been months, Gansey’s muscle memory was embarrassingly acute.
It was Gansey’s brain that didn’t want to get with the program. “Adam, please,” he started, and realized, no, that was probably just making it sound-
-well, to be fair, some still-rational part of Gansey reasoned, that was probably the low groaning that was also pouring out of Gansey’s own mouth that was making it sound like he wanted this.
(He wanted this.)
(Adam’s hands-)
He took Adam’s wrist, and in the dim light, he could make out the planes of Adam’s face, his cheekbones high enough and his mouth red and bitten. “Blue,” Gansey croaked out. He was going to suffer because of this, he could tell already; Adam was going to make him suffer, in the aching and lingering way that only Adam Parrish was capable of. Making Ronan angry was like dipping yourself in gasoline and flinging yourself into a fire - in the sense that at least it was over with quick. In comparison, making Adam angry was more akin to sleeping on a bed of nails. Possibly with a rock being slowly lowered onto you in the night.
But he couldn’t just let go of Adam’s pain for his own pleasure. “We’re talking about this,” Gansey said sternly, but all that responded was Adam’s unwavering silence. “I can’t help you if you don’t talk to me,” he tried, and the instant the words left his mouth, he regretted them.
Adam moved away, then. “This was a bad idea,” he announced, and worse than the expectation of anger was the utter sound of resignation, as though he had always anticipated being let down this way. As if this - whatever this was, outside of handjobs - meant more to Adam than just his hand between Gansey’s legs.
As if it made any sense whatsoever.
This was worse than trigonometry, because at least that followed some esoteric logic that Gansey could, in theory, understand. This was just frustratingly unknowable. Adam Parrish was frustratingly unknowable. “What is this doing for you, Adam?” Gansey asked, but the only thing that answered was the silence of Adam walking out and shutting the door behind him.
The subsequent round of masturbation was cruelly disappointing, and Gansey couldn’t go to sleep afterwards.
~~~~~
The next day was ready to be series of unfortunate events. To begin, Gansey woke irritable, unhappy with his lot, and utterly disappointed in himself. He wasn’t sure what was going on with Adam and he wasn’t entirely sure it was his business to find out (although maybe it was, he considered) but he did know that he didn’t think Adam deserved whatever misery that was being heaped on him by Cabeswater. Surely he deserved better than that.
But just as he came down for breakfast, he was targeted by Helen. “The kitchen staff needs some supplies,” she said, “and I have somewhere to be.”
“That’s ominous,” Gansey muttered, feeling the sweats break out. This line of reasoning never led anywhere good. In fact, usually it led to-
-ah, right, there it was, a crisp list handed to him. Fantastic. He looked it over. “So you’ll go to Williams-Sonoma this morning, take Adam, I think he’s up but doesn’t want to come out yet-”
“-are you listening to him through the door? Were you raised in barn?”
“-and then come back and drop it off, and I don’t think anyone will bother you the rest of the day.”
“How am I supposed to get a mandoline at Williams-Sonoma? Do they have an instrument section now?” Gansey asked, staring at the list. Lord above only knew what a microplane was.
Helen gave him a look. “Don’t be facetious, Dick,” she snapped, and started heading off.
And so that was how Adam and Gansey ended up at the Williams-Sonoma, both of them sulkily looking at the gold and cream store entrance. “What if we just tell her we got lost,” Adam suggested, and on any other day, with any other person, Gansey would desperately latch onto that idea. However he knew that Helen would destroy him if he returned home without an avocado pitter (why not use a spoon), and heaven help him if that wasn’t rattling about in the back of his head.
Gansey sighed, and indicated forward. “Excelsior,” he muttered with a little less gusto than usual, feeling as though maybe, maybe, it betrayed the spirit of the thing to say it when they were both so disgruntled.
But actually, Williams-Sonoma wasn’t so bad. It was always a toss up with Adam, if he would go into a store like this one and have that desperate, wanting look on his face, or if he would have that other look, the one that stated without any ambiguity that rich people were, beyond any shadow of a doubt, a weird alien species and Adam was the only anthropologist who seemed to notice.
Before Cabeswater, it was easier to figure out which Adam would be joining Gansey on any particular adventure. After, it was less clear, so when Adam picked up a tin of corn muffin mix, saw it cost $18.99, and snorted, Gansey felt his shoulders lighten. In fact, he felt better than he would have if he had let Adam finish that handjob. This was the Adam he loved, the Adam Ronan claimed Gansey had sainted. This was the of Adam that the truth stuck to. The Adam whose lies were unintentional fabrications of the world around him.
“Cornbread costs 99 cents to make, Gansey,” Adam said, and Adam would know, as Gansey was pretty sure it’s the only thing that Adam could cook reliably in his tiny kitchenette that didn’t come out of a can, “if you’re really a big spender.”
Gansey reached for the tin, which probably cost more to manufacture than the contents. It had that old-timey look to it, as if it was something someone could pick up at a market in 1900, along with a bag of flour and two pieces of sugar candy for a penny. It looked like a mockery of what Adam was before, something poor and rural. It looked like how Adam’s accent sounded.
Gansey put the tin back. He wanted to buy it, because it had made Adam laugh and made Adam able to suddenly enjoy this ridiculous store and laugh at the ugly crockery and the shiny metallic kitchen devices that, for all Gansey knew, were used to disembowel dead turkeys, and to not care that Gansey could afford all this. But that was precisely why he didn’t buy it. Because he could afford it, and he didn’t want to remind Adam of that.
“I still don’t know what a microplane is,” Gansey wailed about twenty minutes into the excursion, for all that they were having a good time messing with the fancy coffee machines. (And they found the mandoline, which turned out to be nothing like a musical instrument at all. I feel lied to, Gansey muttered, and Adam laughed.)
Adam shrugged and held up one of the machines. It was shiny chrome but the edging was pink and bright. It looked like something one of Gansey’s mother’s friends would have in a matching kitchen. “How long would it take before Lynch broke this one?”
Gansey glanced over, his brain fixating on Adam’s fingers, wrapped around the base of it. “That one might survive, but only because Ronan would be too disgusted with the kitsch to touch it,” he replied. “Adam, focus, if we don’t find a microplane we’re never leaving this store.”
Adam set the coffee machine down and raised both eyebrows. It made him look slightly more like an alien. The store girl was circling them like a shark, fixated on Adam with that hungry look of someone who had their first hit of a new drug, that new drug being the desire to touch Adam’s cheekbones, and Gansey did not blame her, but he didn’t want to ask. He didn’t want to turn this into a thing.
And then Adam turned back to poking at something chrome and shiny. “It’s a grater. For small things, like lemon zest and nutmeg.”
Gansey did not let his jaw drop, but that was because he’s generally far more composed than anyone gives him credit for. “How do you know that?”
“How do you not?” Adam shot back, and there was a tugging on his lips, like a gotcha moment. Gansey looked around again - another sweep around the store while the shop girl clearly wanted to jump on Adam and ride him out like a horse-
(Gansey did too, and couldn’t blame her for it.)
-and found the microplane two minutes later.
But of course, when the day improved, the party was a disaster, and then Adam was gone, and Gansey felt like his entire life was washing away in a flash flood, right until he found him again.
~~~~~~
So how they got here, at this moment: none of it is a surprise. He can trace it back from that awful night and he can trace it back past that awful night, to the awful night before, and then to the nights that weren’t awful, and attaches them to all those moments when Adam’s strange and beautiful face was so close but Gansey never close enough. He can trace it back in how Adam fell apart a little, when Blue dumped him, and he can trace it back to what he thought; that Adam was too good for him, that Adam was too pragmatic and mature and hard-working, too perfect to want Gansey, because Adam was the person who saw Gansey-The-Person and not Gansey-The-King or Gansey-The-Rich-Boy.
He can trace it even as he’s tracing his fingers over Blue’s hip, and she’s whimpering her want at the same time she says, “No, you know we can’t.”
The Pig is a small space but it feels like the only space that they can, as if the Pig defies time and space and reality to give them a pocket where Gansey can love this girl (he does, he loves her), and he doesn’t have to think about how he also loves Adam (he does, he loves him), and how those two things are incompatible forces at war with each other. He can just breathe in the smell of Blue, summery and sharp and slightly musky, like all that incense her family uses has stained her skin, seeped into her blood. He can just hold his face inches from hers. “I know,” he tells her, and it hurts because this should be the easy one; this should be the one that happens naturally.
Blue’s hand is touching his cheekbone, like she can’t quite puzzle him out, and it’s so engrossing, the fine tips of her fingers, smooth and just against his face, that he doesn’t hear the steps outside until someone is yanking the door to the car open and the crisp late-autumn air is seeping in.
And then the world of the Pig is shattered, because Adam leans in. “Ronan asked me to come down here and, I quote, tell Gansey to hurry the fuck back up, or he’s losing his ranking at pool,” he says, and there’s a bite to his voice. His accent is gone; he sounds, for all intents and purposes, like he’s become utterly soulless.
There’s a pause that lasts a small eternity. Children are born and die, civilizations rise and fall, and stars burn out in the span of the pause, and then Gansey is scrambling. He wishes, later, that he had thought of Blue, but the reality is that he’s not thinking of her at all as he pursues Adam, who is moving with startling alacrity, as if he had gotten a stage direction to leave while pursued by bear.
But where Gansey thinks he’s going to leave, he doesn’t. He heads up into Monmouth, up the stairs and Gansey follows him right to where he finally lands, like a furious bird, next to Ronan, which is appropriate because Chainsaw is on Ronan’s other side. Ronan is flanked, suddenly, but he doesn’t seem at all bothered. “You playing?” he asks, offering the cue. Ronan is clueless in the most literal sense of the word. He didn’t know.
“Adam,” Gansey says, the words filtering from his brain and stopping before they reach his mouth. “Adam, can we talk? Please.”
Ronan looks at Gansey for a long minute, and then at Adam, and Gansey can see the cogs operating at full capacity before he swears something creative and awful and accurate, tosses the cue on the table and stomps into his room, slamming the door. The sweet melodic stylings of something that sounds like it was recorded inside of a fax machine that was on fire slams through the walls.
Adam looks unimpressed with the entire sequence of events. “I’m sorry I walked in on that, I didn’t mean to,” he says, coolly, tilting his head in a way that Gansey has learned means he’s trying to balance his hearing, but gives the impression he’s looking down his fine nose at someone.
Gansey rubs his eyes with the heels of his hands, moving his glasses along with it. “Can we please just talk about it?”
Adam scowls, fiercely for a moment. “What do you want me to say? Do you want my blessing or something? God, Gansey-”
“I didn’t do this to upset you-”
“-of course you didn’t-”
“-and I didn’t even know you were here-”
“-well that’s hardly surprising-”
“-it was just so easy, it was like floating-”
“-please, Gansey, can we not include metaphors in this-”
“-and we didn’t know how to tell you-”
“-God, why do you think you owe me that much?” Adam asks, and Gansey feels the words bounce inside his ribcage. Once he was on horseback, at age nine, and he fell off, and the experience winded him completely. It feels something akin to that.
The inside of Gansey’s head is trying to compile all the information together, to figure out why Adam would say something like that in the first place. But there are pieces he’s missing, the crucial bits of Adam that Gansey can’t ever perceive, as if Adam is the iceberg and Gansey is the misfortunate ship slicing its hull on the portion that no one could ever imagine was ever there. “How could I not?” Gansey manages to reply, sputtering. This is unreal. No, surreal. “Adam, why do you think I wouldn’t? Didn’t you touch me for a reason?” A horrible thought passes through Gansey’s head, and he voices it because he can’t possibly filter everything, when everything is falling apart. “Did you do it to control me? Like how you think money can control you?” Adam’s face is stricken, then, and Gansey presses on, because he can’t stop: the words keep falling from his mouth and he thinks of that fairy tale with the girl who when she speaks snakes and lizards fall from hers. He’s speaking and something is striking at Adam, and none of it was intentional but it’s Gansey’s fault regardless. “Please tell me that isn’t what it was to you, please say we were above ownership of each other-”
Ronan’s music bangs through the walls and Adam is silent for what feels like he passing of an entire year. But finally there’s a lull in the grind of whatever nightmare instrument is conducting this awful symphony, and Adam shakes his head. “It wasn’t supposed to do this,” he says. “It wasn’t supposed to torment you like this.” And whatever he was going to say next is never said, because he turns heel and strides to Ronan’s room, opens the door, and closes it behind him.
~~~~
Gansey goes down and gets an earful from Blue, and apologizes before he drives her home, and apologizes again. She’s right to be angry with him, he thinks. The word love sits heavy on his tongue as he wishes her a goodnight, as he sees Orla come down the steps and give Gansey an unimpressed look before she escorts her cousin back in the house, almost bent double to tell her something. Psychics. Who needs Facebook when the universe beams the drama right to your brain?
By the time he drives back, there’s silence in Monmouth, and Gansey thinks that Adam is gone; his car isn’t in the parking lot, at least. He finds his way to his desk and moves piles of papers to sit.
“I didn’t think you would come back so soon,” Adam says from Ronan’s doorway. When Gansey turns, he’s standing there, hesitant. Ronan is nowhere to be seen; he’s probably inside his room, hopefully not listening. But Gansey doubts it.
Gansey looks at Adam like he’s never seen him before. This boy is all-encompassing, distracting to the point of disaster, beautiful and strange and stunning all at once. Adam Parrish; infinitely worthy of love but unable to comprehend why anyone would love him. It breaks Gansey’s heart. “I shouldn’t have said-” he starts, but Adam just looks at him, and he doesn’t finish.
And then he crosses the space between them, stands next to Gansey, so Gansey has to look up at him. “Do you have that little faith in me?” Adam asks, and Gansey realizes how angry he is right then. This is not the kind of anger that leaves slow, methodical welts. This is the kind of anger that Adam fears most, the Robert Parrish kind of anger, the anger that goes off like an atomic bomb, and irradiates whatever is left of Adam’s relationships. “Did you really think I did it to control you?”
No, Gansey wants to say, that’s not it, he wants to explain, I didn’t know why and I still don’t, sits just at the tip of his tongue. He doesn’t say any of those things. “I can’t figure you out,” Gansey finally settles on.
“You should have known better,” Adam snaps back. “I knew better,” he argues against air, because Gansey just wants this to be resolved, he just wants Adam to smile and love him again, he just wants Adam, and the revelation of that takes his breath away. “It was just a gift, Gansey!”
“Most people don’t gift handjobs on their best friends,” Gansey counters, furious then, but still wanting this to be over. He hates fighting, and he hates fighting with Adam the most. At least with Ronan it’s never really personal; Ronan spills his anger out on anyone who settles by, and Gansey is the subject of it at least twice a day (and three on Sundays). With Adam it always feels like he’s being eviscerated. Adam knows him too well. He doesn’t know Adam at all, some days.
Adam’s face fills with shame; he’s a bright, brilliant scarlet in a moment. He opens his mouth and closes it. “We’re not most people,” is all he can produce, and Gansey stands up, and puts his arms around Adam’s shoulders. They don’t move.
And finally Adam’s arms come up around Gansey’s waist. “I can’t lose you,” Adam says, and Gansey understands it was never about control.
~~~~
There is weak, watery sunlight when Gansey gets up. Adam is just leaving; Ronan is standing next to him. They’re saying something, heads bowed together, and it looks like a prayer, or a promise; the lines of Ronan’s skull near Adam’s soft, dusty hair pointing in every direction. Even without his glasses he can make out the shapes of them, and he’s just so fond, so fond of whatever complicated magic that passes between all of them.
And then Adam looks over, and sees that Gansey is up, and he crosses the room. He reaches out his fist, and Gansey responds in kind. They bump knuckles, quickly, just like that, and then Adam is leaving.
It’s the most honest thing Adam has ever done.