Chapter Text
After, Ronan went over him inch by inch. That summer his phone camera had six pixels, and Adam had been gunshy as hell; in ten weeks Ronan caught one blurry smear of straight white teeth and copper skin and one shot of Adam’s knuckles around the BMW’s gearshift. Ronan thought he’d remembered it all in IMAX resolution but who’s to say. Pushing his luck now across nicer sheets than they’d ever fucked on, he checked every important part, and everything in between: the watch tan, the pale scar licked over his hip, the odd matched divots on each shoulder where his clavicles sunk down beneath the muscle. Adam, all six feet of him. It wasn’t easy to breathe.
Same eye bags, new crow’s feet. What was to be done, when something you’d thought of daily for a couple decades came home to you? Ronan kissed the nearest part of him like it was just a wristbone and heaved up for water.
From the bathroom he could keep his voice steady. “The dogs’ll fuss soon, you all right with them?”
Immediately Ronan resented his own question: they weren’t strange to each other, and Ronan should know already. He knew him already, still. He wanted—he should wipe himself down. Wretched, what he wanted to keep.
Spare and watchful in the lamplight, Adam turned on his side to take the glass.
“Did you really name them both Declan, or was Gansey fucking with me?”
Making Adam stifle a smile still felt like it should come with a trophy; Ronan didn’t leave the wet line of Adam’s lip unkissed. “He should be flattered, they’re cute as shit. And my sister-in-law tells him bronze place in Best Declans is still a medal.”
This was just the same too, Adam letting himself grin easier when he could hide it in Ronan’s mouth. It made Ronan cocky, greedy. Drunk on his own pining. “Opal’s lobbying for another one, he can whine then,” he said. Adam set the glass down and kissed him with both hands.
Declan and Declan did fuss, and Ronan got nervous, got ahead of himself and let them in, trying to slow his feral heart. His real life arriving in a whuffling invasion. The sluts hauled ass right up onto the duvet and prostrated themselves; Adam found their spots immediately and blushed, of all things, to look up at Ronan with two belly-up mutts kicking their back feet at the ends of Adam’s long arms.
Ronan came back to bed and confiscated Declan, who was older and larger and also called Baby. It was good, it was better this way, not holding Adam—last time Ronan had wanted so much and gotten it, well. He could be smart, he knew how.
“Two brother-dogs and a daughter. Full salt-and-pepper thing going on. What else, since last time?” Adam scratched Beast’s chest in an easy rhythm, head sinking back among Ronan’s pillows. Small talk at one in the morning like they weren’t who they were to each other, okay. Ronan didn’t much associate the idea of civility with Adam. Being looked at felt like being eaten.
He took it slow, rubbed Baby’s ears. “You’re the mystery here, my friend. Seattle’s been good to you, yeah? It’s your firm now? Dick couldn’t shut the fuck up about the office tour they gave him.”
Adam, who’d done very well for himself out there, could touch Ronan if he wanted to, and didn’t. Beast started to snore beneath Adam’s even hand. Ronan knew Adam’s knuckles like he knew the line of mountains across the valley and knew nothing about him.
“Jesus. His eyes aren’t even closed, that’s so fucked up.” Adam’s grimace swung from Beast to Ronan, but Adam didn’t stop scratching. “Yeah, we added an engineering team in-house so the municipal projects—Lynch. Ronan.” Adam stilled and re-settled his head on the pillow, lids low. His jaw in this light, the stubble, Christ.
Right. This would go how it would go, and already it was more than Ronan thought he’d get again. He wanted—the peace, the calm between them, if he got to choose the way the minutes counted down. Straining on his elbow past Baby, Ronan kissed Adam one more time, slow and hedonic.
“Parrish. Adam,” he said. Adam’s hand came up to cradle Ronan’s skull, like it always had.
If Ronan was kissing a ghost, so be it. Easy to love him all over again, blur-eyed like this, with his breath stuttering, an apparition straight out of the summer of Ronan’s life.
The dogs snored, beginning to dream. Humming, Adam put Ronan on his back, a wolfish languor to the way he hung above him. Adam said, “Let me finish a thought, asshole,” but kept marrying his keen mouth to Ronan’s, kept on with it. The house settled around them and the light was low.
Adam said, eventually, in the air between—it took a long while—Adam told him, “I meant to say, before we got—carried, Ronan. Carried away. The firm—expanding east—I’m, I’m. Soon, Lynch, I'll be back out here." Winded, rasped. "For keeps.”
Ronan booted the dogs off the bed and got to work. “If this goes well, fuck,” Adam said, overrun and laughing. “If this goes well, do I have to rename my cat?”