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Aglionby parties were the worst parties. The first time they’d brought Blue to one, she had turned around before they got through the door. Adam was considering something similar, but he was already inside. There was something dense about the air in this house. He wasn’t sure whose house this was, actually, but Gansey was; as soon as they stepped into the main hall, someone shouted, “Gansey boy!” and Gansey flashed his Night Out smile, a king among men, a man among kings.
Electric nights like this were rare for Gansey and rarer for Adam. Electric nights like this made Gansey light on his feet and Adam light with his eyes, skipping over lights and limbs until he found Ronan, and back again, and back again. Electric nights like this made Ronan unreachable. Adam couldn’t complain - unreachable Ronan was a Ronan he didn’t have to be afraid of touching. But it boiled in his stomach, insatiable.
Blue was with them tonight, and she stayed with Adam in the kitchen, keeping Gansey at her side with her left hand and Henry at her back with her right. She watched the party around them with a mixed look: distaste and curiosity, pulling at the edges of her mouth and the lids of her eyes. Ronan was away. Unreachable. Untouchable. Already. Adam poured soda water over a cup of ice and sat on the counter.
“Jane,” Gansey said plaintively, “not that I dislike being with Adam, but I would like to dance.”
“Dance with Henry.” Blue reached for a cup and filled it with water from the tap. “I’m dancing with Adam.”
Adam looked alarmed, and Henry grinned, pulling Blue away and into the crowd of people. “Go find Ronan!” He yelled over his shoulder, so Adam did.
Finding Ronan was easier said than done. Aglionby houses were the old English castles of Henrietta; every hallway led to at least two others, and staircases were so plentiful and so similar that Adam wasn’t sure if he had walked up the same one he walked down two doors ago. All the walls were painted varying shades of beige and wouldn’t let Adam follow them with his fingers. Sound crushed at Adam’s ears, and picking it apart was almost impossible, and after nearly an hour of wandering, he had twisted his hands in his shirt and his eyes were tired from searching for Ronan.
The party back downstairs was pulsing, almost. A haze had drawn itself over the house, smoke and steam and sweat, and light stumbled through it in indistinct distractions. It was the season of large parties. Senior students were leaving and had a last chance to make a loud show of their shameless money. This was a graduation party, Adam knew, and it must have been the one of the year; there were too many people for it to be a usual Aglionby smasher. Blowout parties, while highly celebrated, happened less than one would expect of rich boys. He found Blue and Henry after pushing through the crowd for what felt like hours. Henry was drunk, and Blue, while still reasonably upright, had a flush in her cheeks and was laughing breathily into Henry’s ear.
“Where’s Gansey?” Adam had to shout to be heard over the music. Blue jerked a thumb over her shoulder.
“Getting more drinks! Where’s Ronan?”
Shaking his head, Adam spotted Gansey coming towards them, balancing three plastic cups in one hand.
“Adam!” He looked delighted, but something about Gansey was always delighted, even when it didn’t want to be. Adam pushed away this particular thought, but was still aware that, at this moment, he was the fourth wheel on a tricycle.
“Help me find Ronan.”
Blue took two of the drinks from Gansey’s wobbling stack and handed one to Henry, nudging his side. “Want to come?”
“Yes,” Henry said, then smiled in a surprised, self-serving way. (Adam suspected he was proud that he had managed a coherent statement. For all his bravado, Henry couldn’t hold any liquor.) They pushed out of the crowd again, this time after Gansey, for whom a halfhearted path of escape cleared almost immediately. He nodded and smiled, and Adam was struck again by how much he had wished and wanted to be Gansey the first time he’d met him. There was a gracefulness held tight in every part of him that no one seemed to be immune to, and Adam was a mess of scabs and bruises and calluses, too purposeful to bother with charm.
Finding Ronan was quicker with the four of them. Adam hadn’t known where to go, but either Henry or Gansey had clearly been here before, because they walked in the halls as if they could tell them apart, and knew when they had skipped rooms or floors or staircases. Blue stayed by their side, holding tight to Gansey’s hand as Henry flung open door after door, and Adam hung back, checking around corners and trying to let the three of them and himself forget that he was there.
Eventually, one room yielded Ronan, asleep and tangled in sheets. The bed was piled in scrambled metallic objects, so intricate and spidery that Adam was afraid to touch them. Henry wasn’t; he picked one up immediately and started to trace the wiry bits with the curve of his thumb, then spun it on the tip of his finger. It caught hold of every bit of light in the room and sucked it in, then threw it out again. A dream.
“Can we wake him up?” Blue asked, and Adam realized they were looking to him.
“Not… all at once. He can’t come back so easily, sometimes,” he tried to explain. “Taking something from a dream -- from Cabeswater -- kind of means it has to take a piece of you. An eye for an eye kind of deal, except Ronan doesn’t actually have to give anything up. He has a running tab.”
Gansey nodded, but Henry was still trying to make sense of this. “So he’s-”
“Don’t worry about it,” Blue cut him off, pressing a kiss to the side of his jaw. He nodded into her, looking warm and pleased, and Adam knelt by the bed and pulled at the sheets where they were clenched in Ronan’s hands. His eyelashes flickered once, twice, and one eye slid open like it was trying not to. For all the times Adam had seen Ronan wake up, he was still surprised by how gradual and how sudden it was, how it happened piece by piece and then all at once.
“Morning,” he said, trying to make it brusque, but his voice was soft. Ronan pulled his jaw from side to side until his mouth could move again, and he sat up, pushing another light catcher onto the piles around him. Adam hadn’t noticed it in his hands, but he had never seen the exact moment when anything Ronan brought back appeared, either.
“Get bored?”
“Deaf, actually. In my other ear this time.”
“We should put you in a senior center.”
Henry took an armful of the metal things and put them gingerly on the floor, then sprawled across Ronan’s legs like a large puppy. “Can you come and dance with us?”
“Fuck no.” Ronan sat up, pulling his ankles out from under Henry’s torso. “Why do you think I’m up here? Christ.” He looked at Adam, who realized he’d been staring at the edge of Ronan’s neck and closed his eyes, feeling a flush start to creep across his cheeks. It was hard not to look at Ronan’s neck; his tattoo poked and prodded at the skin there, jet black and curling to his collar.
“So we’ll stay up here,” Blue said. Gansey looked pained.
“Do we have to?”
Ronan’s eyebrows crept up. “Not good enough company for you, Richard?”
“That’s not it,” Gansey said quickly, but Henry was already laughing, and even Adam had to hide a snort in his sleeve. He’d never suspected Gansey to be a party person, and yet whenever they went to them, he was about as at home as he was huddled over his journals at Monmouth, scribbling down more about Glendower or the ley line. It was possible he viewed parties as an out-of-body experience.
In any case, the door was shut, and everyone moved to the floor. Henry dragged the duvet with him, pulled over his shoulders like a cape, and settled to Gansey’s left, almost letting their knees touch but not quite. “We should-” he started, but the door burst open, and a loud group of Gansey’s rowing friends choked through it.
“Knew you’d gone somewhere, Dick!” one of them said, and then they were all sitting, and the room became a brief pile of long legs and friendly nudges. Henry seemed vaguely cross - someone had pushed between him and Gansey, but he still had Blue on his left. Adam was crushed between Tad Carruthers and Jackson Hamburg, both of whom were wearing slightly off-kilter button ups and seemed to have more alcohol in their veins than blood. Tad tried incoordinately to reach for Adam’s hand, and Adam moved it carefully to the side, shaking his head minutely at Ronan across the circle, who was mouthing he wants you and making strange head movements. If he hadn’t been so overwhelmed by the suddenness of Tad and Jackson and the entire rowing team, he might have gotten stuck on this, but as it was, he was preoccupied with having to sit on his hands to keep them out of reach.
Now that he was looking at them, maybe it was only half the rowing team, or a third of it. There were several girls who had come with them, probably from Blue’s school, and the mess of them had looked larger and more complex when they were all attempting to fit through the door at once. Henry cleared his throat.
“Up for a game?”
“Yes,” Blue said immediately, and was hurriedly seconded by the rest of the room. Something about Blue was commanding; even here, she was the moon, and they were the tide. “Seven minutes in heaven.”
“You’re going to play?” Gansey looked at her, astonished and slightly put off, but she shook her head and patted his knee.
“How’s that?” Someone objected, and was fixed with a look from Gansey that would make anyone slouch; Adam had been hit with it a couple times himself, and it was not an experience he’d readily repeat. He felt Ronan looking at him from across the circle, and he looked back. Electric nights like this were soaked in recklessness, drenched in it. He reminded himself he’d only had water to drink, and pinched his fingers around the dense folds of fabric at his bent knee.
There was a large, sudden amount of hooting, and Adam looked up to find that one of Gansey’s crew friends was being pushed toward a wardrobe in the corner with a girl with long hair. “How do you play this?” He asked, and Henry’s eyes widened.
“You’ve never played seven minutes in heaven?”
“Cheng, I don’t mean to be rude, but why else would I ask?”
Ronan snorted at this. The space next to him was empty and he had leaned over into the center of their misshapen circle, propping himself up on one elbow. He was close enough that Adam could shift just slightly and touch his arm with his knee. “It’s a party game.”
“No shit,” Adam commented, and Ronan slapped his ankle with a lazy hand.
“Let me finish, would you? You get shoved in a closet with someone for seven minutes, and the whole idea is that you make out, have a blowjob, whatever. But the fact is” - he stretched, and Adam’s eyes caught on his hip - “you’re in a fucking closet. You could have a discussion about your grandparents and people would still whistle at you when you came out.” Henry winked. “Got some experience there?”
“Fuck off,” Ronan said, not without affection - half-reluctant and exasperated Ronan-brand affection, but affection nonetheless. “Bet you’ve done this more times than you can even count.”
“True.” He sighed wistfully, looking again at Gansey, then back at Blue when she pinched his knee, pressing his lips to her cheek. “You, too, if I could.”
She leaned into him, and Adam felt a pinch below his collarbone. It had been hard enough for him not to kiss Blue when they hadn’t been in love, when she hadn’t known if it was safe. He couldn’t quite imagine the torture it was for Gansey and Henry, to be numb for this girl and unable to kiss her on the mouth.
The two who had gone into the wardrobe returned again, to an amount of cheering and wolf whistles that nearly made Adam want to leave the room entirely. (He didn’t, of course; Ronan was still lounging in the center of the circle, and it was difficult for Adam to ignore the starts and stutters that were vibrating in his wrists at the sight of him.) Another bottle spin, another couple, another seven minutes. What was heaven, really?
His eyes fell to Ronan, to his full lips and dark eyelashes and skin so smooth that when Adam had dreamt about running his hands over it all those times over, he had felt it on his palms where Ronan’s lotion had filled the cracks.
Another round of loud teasing. Another bottle spin. Another couple. Another seven minutes. Another, another, another, until the nose of the bottle nudged Ronan’s elbow.
Adam’s blood paused in his veins.
“Who’s your other half, Lynch?” someone giggled, and the bottle spun in the circle, indecisive until Gansey kicked it and it flew into Adam’s lap.
“Adam.”
There was a split second of silence, and the room erupted in howls and claps, “Adam!” who got to his feet, confused if not dubious, and looked down at Ronan, who was pushing himself up and dusting his hands on his jeans and saying, “Alright,” and then he was following Ronan to the wardrobe and the door was closing and there was a rush of darkness and the only identifications of either of them was the sound of Ronan’s fingers tapping on his palms and Adam’s pulse in his ears.
“Seven minutes,” Ronan muttered under his breath, and it was then that Adam realized how close he was, how small it had gotten between the four planks of wood. The wardrobe smelled like dust and cold and old mothballs, and Adam tried to pay more attention to that than the smell of Ronan. “Seven minutes,” he said again. “Want to play chopsticks?”
“Hard to play if I can’t see.”
“Well, you don’t need to see if you’re good enough at it, Parrish. Here-” he fumbled in the dark for one of Adam’s hands and pushed three of his fingers into a fist. “This is how it starts.”
Adam was almost sure Ronan could feel his heartbeat in his wrist. “Both hands?”
“What, are you stupid?” He grabbed for Adam’s other hand anyway and pressed three fingers of that one into a fist, too.
“Now what?” Breath was too heavy in Adam’s throat, too light from Ronan’s nose. His hand was still curled around Adam’s, warm, unsteady.
“Now…” His voice dropped low, more air than sound, and when he said, “Adam,” it was a surrender, and all Adam needed to pull his fingers into his hand and pull Ronan in to his mouth, thinking of how many times his name had been said tonight and how many times it had felt this even. A kiss, a breath, a kiss, a breath - it was slow and grounding and pushing Adam so far off his balance that when he pulled back, he had to put a hand out to brace himself against the wall to keep from falling.
“Weak knees?”
“I’m not that easy.”
Ronan’s smile was a flash in the dark. “We still have five minutes.”
“You can teach me to play chopsticks.”
“I did,” Ronan said, and tapped his finger against Adam’s knuckles. “Now you have two on that hand.”
“Why?”
“Jesus, fuck-” Ronan breathed out a frustrated sigh and Adam kissed him, drawing the sound from his throat. His skin was burning. He’d have thought it would cool after he had kissed Ronan once, but he must have kissed him at least six or seven times by now and there was still fire running over his elbows. Ronan’s hands there didn’t help; they were light on his arms and pushing to his waist and turning Adam to liquid, inch by inch. Breathing was different without solid lungs. He couldn’t feel the air, just the warmth, or maybe he was too preoccupied with Ronan’s touch, Ronan’s taste, Ronan’s tongue in his mouth, to pay much attention to anything else. His hands slid around Ronan’s shoulder blades and brushed the skin on his neck lightly, and Ronan’s lips parted in a shock of a gasp that rolled into Adam’s good ear and down his spine.
There was a sharp knock on the wood next to Adam’s head, and Ronan pulled back from him a second before the door to the wardrobe was pulled open and sound washed over them, suggestive comments and whistles and a particular wide laugh that was distinctly Gansey’s. Upon seeing them, Blue’s eyes widened, and she hooted, “Get it, Parrish!” and collapsed back into Henry’s lap in an un-Blue-like fit of giggles. Ronan stepped on her ankle, but Adam saw that his ears were red, and felt himself flush. He coughed and leaned to spin the bottle, and the game was off again.
Ronan didn’t look at him for the rest of the night.
-
It was only after a week of avoiding Ronan, a week of stolen glances and closed doors, that Adam caught him alone on the couch at Monmouth.
“Hey.”
“Oh, hey.” Ronan looked up at him and grinned. “Want to play chopsticks?”