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“You don’t have to go,” Ronan says.
He makes an impressive figure against the grey of Adam’s sheets, all pale pale skin and dark climb of tattoos. Adam envies the ease of his nudity, the casualness with which he allows fabric to fall from unmarred skin. He almost hates him for it. His fingers resume buttoning.
“I have work,” he says.
Ronan takes his hand, sucks the fingers into his mouth.
“Stay.”
Adam releases a breath. If he closed his eyes, he could almost imagine it was Gansey’s lips. He should not allow himself this train of thought. Gansey is dead. He, more than anyone, should know that.
But still, his eyelids flicker closed.
“I have to go,” he says.
But he does not go.
.
Gansey, of course, had been completely ridiculous about nudity. He had been completely ridiculous about everything, always so intently focused on being respectful, on doing things right. A fluttering mess of blushes and flailing arms.
Gansey.
God, they had all been so stupid.
“He’s dead,” Blue had said. She had looked so small standing there, dwarfed by Gansey’s sweater, lips bleached white, face curiously blank.
It had been Ronan who’d stepped toward Adam.
“Adam,” he had said, too gently.
“Adam,” Gansey had said and his eyes, then, had been endlessly sad. “Don’t blame yourself. Promise me.”
“Adam,” Ronan had repeated and taken his hand, pulling him away from the body. Gansey’s blood had transferred palm to palm, bright red against Ronan’s pale skin.
How stupid they had been to think they could have messed with forces beyond their control. How stupid he had been, to think Cabeswater would not have taken its toll.
.
Adam has never been very good at crying. Even when things were… bad, he had never been good at it.
He remembers once, after a particularly brutal night, Gansey had taken him back to Monmouth with him. Adam had protested the whole way, but Gansey had just squared his jaw and held upon the door to the Camero until he got in. They didn’t speak on the way home. The night air stung the cut over his left eyebrow, but he didn’t roll up the window, just let the wind wash over him. He could feel Gansey’s eyes upon him, but whenever he turned, he was always watching the road. When they got back to Monmouth, Gansey went into the bathroom to get some bandages and left Adam alone on his bed, running a hand along the messy sheets. Blood had smeared the white fabric and Adam had thought, then, that he stained everything that he touched.
After a moment, he had felt Gansey’s presence in the doorway, but neither of them said anything for a long moment and Adam didn’t look up to see him there. It would have ruined it.
“Are you crying?” Gansey had asked finally.
“No,” Adam had said, but he’d wiped his eyes to be sure before turning to face him.
He thinks, now, maybe it would have been better if he had cried. If he had let Gansey comfort him, hold him. If he had--
.
Adam’s feet take him to Cabeswater more often than not, almost against his will. He keeps expecting to find it changed, it’s light greyed, the color leached from the trees, the sky, the birdsong to have muted, some sign, any sign, of the destruction that had been wrought there, but it always remained exactly the same as it had always been: beautiful. Adam hates it. It seems his hate spreads to everything these days.
He lies down in the field where they had all used to come, he can almost feel the imprint of Blue, of Ronan, of Gansey on the ground beside him. He rests his head against the cool ground, lets the grass swallow him, strands twining around his arms, his legs, beckoning him into the earth. It had been wrong of the earth to take Gansey. The coffin had been too dark, the day of the funeral, the dirt too pungent, his hair too perfect. It had been wrong, all wrong. It had been the other Gansey they had buried in DC with his parents. His Gansey, his Gansey rests here.
It would not feel wrong for this earth to take Adam. He has thought sometimes that it was always just waiting for him, Henrietta clay calling to something in his bones.
“What are you doing?”
Ronan stands over him. He looks sad.
Vines unwrap around Adam’s body. Only when they release does Adam realize they had been choking him, bruises circling his torso, his biceps, his throat.
“Nothing,” he says.
“Adam,” Ronan starts, but then can’t finish. Adam watches his throat bob with the effort. He wonders if he could end this conversation by kissing him, biting into his collarbone, sucking into the mark peaking out from the collar of his shirt. He already knows the sound that Ronan would make if he did. He feels his palms twitch.
“It’s okay to miss him,” Ronan says, finally.
Adam doesn’t respond. He knows he should, but he doesn’t.
.
Blue doesn’t answer the phone when Adam calls, but he walks over there anyway. The woman who answers the door is tall with a crazed mop of hair and darkly lined lips. Orla, he remembers Blue saying once.
“Adam,” she says, when she sees him and for a moment her voice is not her own. He has the absurd urge to say Gansey’s name.
“Don’t blame yourself.”
“What?”
“Promise me,” she says.
Adam wants to reach for her, but she shakes her head, one of her curls falling from her haphazard updo, and when she looks up the moment is over. Her eyes sharpen, focus in on him.
“Blue is upstairs,” she says, and lets the door stand open.
“Thanks,” he says. He glances back at her at the top of the steps, but all traces of Gansey are gone. His feet move quickly after that.
.
Blue fiddles with the hem of her frayed shirt. She won’t meet his eyes.
“Have you been back to Monmouth?” she asks.
“No.”
He hadn’t. Not since the night when they had dragged Gansey’s body back from Cabeswater, the flesh heavy and slippery and not-Gansey. Blue, grief stricken and shaken, had made all of them coffee, moving like a ghost in the kitchen, eyes unseeing, feet bare and tracking mud through the rooms. She’d pressed warm mugs into all of their hands and Ronan had produced a flask and they had all poured the liquor into their coffee and drank it, feeling it deep in their gut, warm against their cold, soaked skin. They had stayed up the whole night in Monmouth, just watching the body, Blue and Ronan crying, Blue softly and Ronan so loudly it had sounded like howls, and Adam silent, a spectator to their grief. Afterwards, Ronan had stood fully clothed in the shower with Adam and they had watched Gansey’s blood circle down the drain. “You can cry,” he had said, but Adam couldn’t. Perhaps that was worst of all.
“Have you seen Noah?” he asks.
“I keep expecting him to just appear one day. But I think he’s just...gone.” She shrugs. Adam thinks of when he’d first met her, how there’d been fire in her eyes, how he’d felt, when he’d looked at her, that they had the same thirst. She looks broken now. How fitting.
She laughs and it’s a bitter thing.
“Gansey held us all together, didn’t he?” she says, and it’s not really a question.
Adam takes her hand then. It feels fragile in his grasp, like something precious, but when she squeezes back, her grip is surprisingly strong.
“It’s going to be fine,” he says, and he can’t tell if he’s lying or not.
.
Adam doesn’t think Ronan has been home in weeks. He just shows up at the end of Adam’s shift, leaning against the tin wall of the auto-shop, bleeding shades of grey, breath coughing smoke into the air. He falls in step beside Adam and they walk together all the way back to St. Agnes. Most days, they don’t talk, but when they get inside Ronan will let Adam fuck him and if Adam listens closely enough his moans almost sound like words. Gansey would have made him talk about it, Adam knows. He would have said all the wrong things and Adam would have too and they would have ended mad and seething and so uncomfortable that it hurt and if Adam had been braver he would have kissed him then. But he had never been brave enough. So, he just lets the silence sit, digs his fingers into Ronan’s skin, pretends he is not thinking about someone else.
.
In his dreams, there is blood on his hands.
Gansey reaches out for him, twines fingers into his hair.
“Promise me,” he says. “Adam, promise me.”
“I promise,” Adam says, but when he kisses him, his lips taste like rust.
.
“You weren’t at school today.”
Adam drops his bag on the floor, shucks the coat from his shoulders. Ronan doesn’t speak. Adam turns around and finds him on the floor, leaning against Adam’s bed, shirt unbuttoned, face a wreck. He had been crying, eyes puffed up and skin pale and blotchy. He had been drinking too. The whole room smells of liquor.
Adam sighs and goes to sit next to him.
“He’d be eighteen today,” Ronan says after a silence.
Adam doesn’t know what to say, so he just places his hand on Ronan’s knee. Ronan doesn’t even look at him.
“He hated his birthday,” Ronan says and takes another drink.
Adam wishes, not for the first time, that he was better at speaking, but his grief was never meant to be shared. It’s all too easy for him to forget that he was not the only one that loved Gansey. So he just wraps an arm around Ronan, lets Ronan collapse into him, cards his hands through Ronan’s hair.
“Your hair is getting long,” he says, a poor substitute for actual comfort.
Ronan scoffs, but buries his nose in Adam’s collarbone, presses the noise into his skin.
.
“I’m not like you,” he tells Ronan later.
They are lying in bed, both fully clothed this time, which feels different and… not bad. Ronan curls into him, tufts of hair fluttering against Adam’s jawline, legs mixed together, limbs tangled. Ronan stays still, but Adam can tell he’s listening.
“I don’t know how to…” he stops, tries again. “I don’t know what I’m doing.”
Ronan shifts then, holding himself over Adam. Adam doesn’t know if they’ve ever been like this, Ronan above him, face haloed by the grey light from the tiny window, eyes staring down at him. Adam thinks, abstractly, that he looks sort of stunning.
He doesn’t say anything for a long time and Adam finds himself getting lost in the blue of his eyes.
“Adam,” Ronan says finally, and then Adam is leaning up and kissing him.
.
The first time Adam had kissed Ronan he had pushed him off.
“What are you doing?” he had asked, breath erratic, pupils blown wide.
It had made Adam feel powerful to know that he had that sort of effect on Ronan, to hold someone so fragile in the palm of his hand. He had known he could crush him if he so desired.
Adam had leaned forward, sucked on the skin of Ronan’s neck and felt the other boy’s knees weaken. Tough Ronan with his sprawled tattoos and his $300 jeans and his brooding stares, clutching onto Adam’s arms with all of his strength, needing him. It had felt like a drug, the first clear thing since Gansey had last looked at him.
“What do you want?” Adam had asked.
“You,” Ronan had whispered. If you had listened closely, he had almost sounded broken.
.
“Let’s go for a drive,” Ronan says one day, removing himself from the wall of the auto-shop.
There is a blue scarf tucked into the black of his motorcycle jacket and he kisses Adam when he comes near. Adam lets out a surprised sound into his mouth, but then melts into it, wrapping his arms around Ronan’s neck. For once, it doesn’t lead to anything, but it still feels… nice.
“Okay,” he says, lets Ronan take his hand. “Where do you want to go?”
Ronan just smiles.
“You’ll see,” he says.
.
They drive for a long time in silence, winding into the Henrietta hills, up and up and up. Adam thinks back to last year, how Ronan had always smelled like gasoline and Kavinsky, a firestorm brewing in his eyes.
He wonders when Ronan became the stable one.
It’s almost an hour before Ronan turns off the road, pulling into the parking lot of a small diner. The restaurant is quaint in a dilapidated way, not somewhere Adam could have ever pictured Ronan, but when they walk in the door, the waitstaff nod to him and smile.
“Do you come here a lot?” Adam asks.
Ronan just shrugs, sliding into a booth by the door. He looks nervous, suddenly, his leg jumping beneath the checkered cloth.
“What?”
“Look,” Ronan says. “You loved Gansey, right?”
It wasn’t what Adam was expecting him to say.
“I loved him too,” Ronan says. His eyes look serious. “And I just wanted to let you know that it was okay with me that you loved him. That I understood. We were all in some weird sort of fucked up codependent thing and it’s good.”
Adam sits in silence for a long time. He shreds the napkin in front of him, strips and strips and strips.
“Okay,” Adam says, finally.
Ronan’s expression doesn’t change.
“Okay?” he asks.
“Yeah. Okay,” he says. “Now what’s good here?”
.
Adam and Blue prowl through Henrietta streets in silence. Adam thinks longingly of all of their nights huddled around the table at Nino’s, Gansey’s notebook between them. Gansey talking loud and bright, his excitement somehow both infectious and draining, Ronan lounging in the corner of the booth, all shaded eyes and disparaging comments, staring at Adam when he thought Adam wouldn’t notice, Noah laughing at all the jokes, folding napkins into different shapes and passing them to Adam under the table, like a secret, Blue rolling her eyes in the corner, dropping passive aggressive notes whenever she passed. Adam had felt like a different person then, not Henrietta Adam, but Aglionby Adam, Gansey Adam. It had been exhausting. It had been wonderful. Now, everything feels too silent.
“Is it getting better?” Blue asks him, finally.
She looks more like Blue than she has since the day Gansey died, black coating her eyes, fringed layers hugging her body.
Adam lets out a breath, air fogging in front of him.
“Yes,” he says, and it feels almost like a betrayal. “It’s getting better.”
.
Helen calls and invites Ronan and Adam to spend the holidays with the Ganseys. It is excruciating, but Adam can barely imagine the alternative, and the look on Mr. and Mrs. Gansey’s face when they see the two of them almost makes all of it worth it, all the endless party small talk, the “where are you going to college”s and the “he really was the best lad, wasn’t he chaps?”s, and the itch of his uncomfortable, too small clothes and the endless, constant reminders that Gansey is gone, gone, gone.
He and Ronan escape the party halfway through, stealing a bottle of champagne from the bar on the way out. The cold hits them as soon as they step outside, the air crisp and bright, the snow refusing to fall from the sky, just waiting. It feels, Adam thinks, as if they are standing on the brink of something. Adam shivers through his thin coat, never good enough, and Ronan puts his arm around him. Normally, Adam would shove him off, but he is warm and so very alive, so Adam lets himself, just this once, slide into him.
“It’s worse here,” Ronan says.
Adam hums his agreement.
“But soon we’ll be home,” Ronan says.
Adam doesn’t know when St. Agnes became home or if wasn’t so much the small cramped apartment that was home as the ways in which Ronan fit against him, all bare limbs and lips.
“Soon we’ll be home,” he repeats.