Chapter Text
From: [email protected]
bcc: [email protected]
Subject: New project!!
Hey team,
We got the new park in NoMa! Congrats all who worked on the bid. Primary design team will be Adam and Ronan on this one. You can go ahead and set up a meeting to start talking specifics. Let me know as you progress.
This is a big one, guys. SO excited!!!
Cheers,
Piper
It was 9:34 on a Monday morning, and Adam Parrish was ready to quit his job.
Primary design team will be Adam and Ronan on this one.
Ugh. This was the third time in as many months that he had been assigned to a project with his work nemesis. He just could not understand why this kept happening to him.
Well, okay, it’s not like they turned in garbage or anything. The work always ended up…fine. More than fine, if he was being truthful. But the ends were getting extremely close to not justifying the torturous means. Which was completely infuriating. He was good at his job, and more importantly he actually liked it, which was something he never imagined could be possible while growing up. So if he was extra salty at Ronan Fucking Lynch for making him even contemplate quitting, no one could really blame him.
And so Monday morning found Adam head down on the desk in his office, silently pleading with the universe to stop putting him in this position. Adam didn’t think he was being unreasonable. He wasn’t asking for lightning to strike the guy down, or anything. He wasn’t even asking to cut off all contact. It was inevitable that they’d run into each other occasionally. As they were two of Cabeswater Consulting design firm’s rising stars, it was likely to happen semi-regularly. Adam would have been fine with that. Some happy hour small talk, a hello or two in the halls, even polite disagreement during department meetings would be bearable. Instead, some horrible twist of fate kept forcing them to actually work together. He didn’t know if he believed in fate, but he was certain that if it existed, fate definitely had it out for him.
He was worried that it would soon become a liability to his reputation at the company. He had spent years of his life carefully crafting a calm and stable persona, projecting outward all the ease he desperately wished to feel inside, and Ronan Fucking Lynch was hell-bent on smashing through it with a sledgehammer.
Every goddamn day brought some new knock-down-drag-out fight over steel beams (“ugly”), wood floors (“overrated”), or how many windows could conceivably go into a wall (“the limit does not exist”, apparently). Not only did Lynch have no concept of the laws of the physical world, he seemed to delight in the fact, not least because he could tell it drove Adam insane.
Once he literally designed a house with no front door. When Adam asked (“what the actual fuck, Lynch?”) he just shrugged and pointed to some hybrid ladder-staircase leading to a second story window. Much like their creator, his designs were fantastical, beautiful, and wholly impractical. It then fell to Adam to engineer them into reality. Simply put, his job was impossible.
But the really pathetic part was that Adam was pretty certain he’d be able to deal with Lynch’s bullshit if the man wasn’t also so visually…striking.
His gaze was intense and chilly, with irises like ice chips. They were unfriendly eyes, made only for glares and unkind laughter. Coupled with coal-black hair cropped short on top and shorter on the sides, sharp brows and sharper cheekbones, and the glimpsed edges of a tattoo under his (obviously never starched) collar, he was unapproachable at best and downright terrifying at worst. The fact remained that he also could have easily graced magazine covers the world over. He was, quite simply, stunning.
Honestly, it was probably a good thing that beautiful Ronan Lynch was also such an unholy douchebag. Adding a winning personality on to a physical package like that would be too much for anyone to handle. He’d have the entire office falling at his feet in seconds flat.
The whole stupid situation in general was just a little hard to swallow. Adam felt off-kilter and jumpy every time they were in a room together, half-convinced that Lynch was either looking down on him or laughing at him. This vague unease and embarrassment might have led to his lashing out more than he normally would, sure, but Lynch’s attitude only fueled the fire. This was not some weird one-sided grudge of Adam's—it definitely took two to dance this fucked up tango they had going.
Then again, Adam really should be above trivial things like getting mildly unraveled by a pretty face…okay, and body…and voice. Still. He was a grown-ass adult with an apartment, a cat, and a master’s degree in civil engineering, dammit. He was perfectly capable of handling a (very, very) hot asshole in a professional manner.
“Lynch, for God’s sake! There is no way this measly twisted bit of fancy wood will hold up the roof! How many times do I need to re-explain the concept of load-bearing support to you? Or are you actively trying to kill our clients?”
“Parrish, I swear to God, if you come near my design with that eraser, I will throw hands.”
…Okay, so maybe “professional” was too much to ask.
__________
Adam did not end up quitting his job. Ronan Fucking Lynch problems aside, he did actually love the work. He loved being able to apply his specific abilities, both innate and diligently acquired, to his projects. He loved the stability of a 9-to-5 schedule. He loved the closet-simplifying business casual dress code that went along with a white-collar office job. Above all, he loved the regular (not insubstantial) paycheck. These steady markers of a good job fit in nicely with his good steady life.
He lived simply and frugally, saving up his money by cooking at home and taking Metro instead of getting a car that he would barely use. In a few years he was hoping to buy a place of his own, maybe even downtown. He was far more aware than most how fragile stability could be, and how hard-won his own normal(ish) life was. The easy routine of it all allowed him to let out a deep sigh of relief when he got home every evening to his one-bedroom condo and his tabby Moxie.
So what if he didn’t have close friends at work? People who gossiped in the break room were lame.
So what if he saw his college and grad school friends only very occasionally these days? They were all busy now that they had real lives.
So what if hadn’t been on a date in six months? He was self-sufficient and independent. Alone, maybe, but not lonely. He preferred it that way, because things could always be much, much worse.
See, the problem was that despite outward appearances Adam Parrish was a complicated creature. He lived with several secrets, each one more troubling than the last.
Growing up in Henrietta, Adam had collected lots of little pieces of evidence that clued him into all the ways he wasn’t like the other kids. Each piece was dropped on top of the one before, until they all coalesced into one big tangled pile of Danger inside his chest.
When he noticed boys in the same way that other boys noticed girls, it was clear that his brain and his heart and his eyes were somehow all linked up differently. Not that he didn’t also notice girls in that way too. He just felt like he could maybe want—more. He soon learned that this was not a normal way for little boys to think.
When classmates talked about their parents, and laughed with their siblings, it was clear that their homes were wildly different from the casual violence of his own. To them, the word home evoked feelings of love and security, not dread or the desperate desire to escape. That, too, was not normal.
And when the kids from the neighboring trailers found him speaking to an older man near the dirt road, he was branded a freak and ridiculed for months. The problem there was that the man was dead. And Adam quickly realized that he was the only one who could see him.
After that first incident, he kept his visions to himself. He never stopped seeing them, though, and so he kept himself to himself as well. Friends were for normal kids, who didn’t grow up with anger and fear, who didn’t grow up with unnatural urges, who didn’t grow up with impossible visions. Adam Parrish didn’t have the luxury of friends.
All he ever wanted was to be normal. His actual life was impossible, so normal was what seemed impossible to him. As he grew up, his wants grew up with him, and he dreamed not only of normalcy but of meager success. His past might be filled with horror, but if he tried hard enough he just might be able to escape it for something better. He knew he was smart, and could work hard, and had the discipline to make a decent life for himself, far away from the dusty roads littered with the dead.
If only the dead would stop following him.