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It’s just at the end of dinner—Ronan’s plate clean, Adam’s with a few more bites remaining—that they’ve mostly passed in companionable silence (occasionally broken by Adam flicking through the newspaper) when he hears the scrape of Ronan’s chair. Without looking up, he says, “There’s a new bottle in the cabinet, if you wanted to try that instead.”
Ronan stops on his way to his feet; Adam can feel the question in his gaze and lets a smile tug at the corners of his mouth as he raises his head to direct it at Ronan. “I know how to do things around here, Lynch,” he murmurs, dry and affectionate, absurdly pleased to have caught Ronan off guard. “You know I don’t know anything about whiskey, so if it’s terrible, blame the man at the liquor store.”
Ronan stares at him for another moment, expression arrested, long enough to make Adam wonder what’s going on—and for the small voice at the back of his mind to wonder if he’s done anything wrong. It was an innocuous enough gesture, he thinks; once a week, like clockwork, Ronan has a little whiskey (always Irish, of course) after dinner, and when Adam noticed the bottle running out, he thought he’d surprise him with a new one, asking after the best and stretching his paycheck to make it happen. A slightly more extravagant gesture than he usually makes, but still, he doesn’t think there was anything wrong with it. He’s starting to second-guess it a little now.
Just before he’s about to give in to his growing nerves and say something, Ronan blurts out, “Let’s get married.”
Adam’s jaw drops, the newspaper slipping from his fingers. “Excuse me?”
Ronan’s sitting back down now, scooting his chair closer and grabbing Adam’s hand, his eyes lighting with that stupid reckless glow that’s not nearly as frequent anymore, but more than makes up for its absence when it resurfaces. “It’s been long enough, let’s just fucking do it. Let’s go. Tomorrow.”
Adam’s thoughts have ground to a complete halt, and he’s reduced simply to staring, face slack with shock.
Ronan’s still talking, the words practically tripping over one another. “I checked, we can do it right after we get a license, in front of the clerk. You’re a morning person, aren’t you, we can go as soon as they open. In less than twelve hours, we could be—” he pauses to wag his eyebrows significantly “—husband and husband.”
Adam can feel his mouth opening and closing, but no sound is managing to come out.
Ronan is grinning at him, the wildness that’s still clung to him around the edges in adulthood now enveloping him like a cloak. “Come on, Parrish. If we called Gansey right now he’d be here by midnight. Blue will tell us it’s about damn time. We’ve been making stupid decisions together since before we were legal. This ‘with all my worldly goods I thee endow’ shit is just extra.”
Adam stares at Ronan for another long moment—the glint in his eyes, the tightness with which he’s gripping Adam’s hand, the intensity in his posture as he leans into Adam—and he says, finally, slowly, “I—I don’t believe this.” And then again, for good measure, “I don’t fucking believe this.”
Ronan’s eyebrows go up, and the corner of his mouth quirks, the expression that looks utterly careless but that Adam knows is hiding an emotion Ronan has no interest in showing. “Well,” he says slowly, dragging the word into multiple insolent syllables the way only Ronan can, “we’ve been doing this for seven years. Some would say ‘unbelievable’ is a stretch.”
Adam is shaking his head, and he gently detaches his hand from Ronan’s. “No, I mean—hang on, okay?” He grabs Ronan’s hand again and squeezes it, quickly, before leaving the room.
He’s back only a few minutes later, a small black box in his hand, which he tosses at Ronan. Ronan catches and opens it, and lets out a low bark of laughter. “Are you fucking kidding me?”
Adam smiles, wry. “You see what I mean, now.”
Inside the box is a ring—a wide silver band engraved with simple Celtic knotwork, without any other ornamentation. As Ronan stares down at it, Adam explains ruefully, “I was trying to plan everything out. I’ve had this thing for a week, and I was trying to figure out how I wanted to do it, exactly—”
“Did the whiskey have anything to do with it?” Ronan demands, looking up from the ring, an enormous grin splitting his face.
“No!” Adam exclaims, shaking his head. “That was just, you know, a present. For you.”
Ronan laughs again, too loudly (relief as much in it as joy, Adam thinks), and gets to his feet, crossing the room to take Adam’s face in his hands and kiss him, briefly but thoroughly. Adam smiles into his mouth, twining his fingers through Ronan’s and pulling him closer for another, longer kiss.
Ronan’s smirking when he pulls away, leaning his forehead against Adam’s. “Who’s fucking surprised that this is how we get engaged?”
Engaged. Adam’s heart zings, sudden and almost painful, in his chest. Trying to keep his tone light, he retorts, “Well, are you going to put the ring on, then?”
The intensity rushing through Adam’s veins is reflected in Ronan’s eyes. He steps back to lift the ring out of the box, and without looking away from Adam, slides it onto his finger.
It fits perfectly, of course. It looks good on him—really good. Adam’s overwhelmed with the sort of emotion that’s too big to even try putting into words, so instead he shoots Ronan a slightly shaky grin. “So—what, I don’t get a ring?”
Ronan’s answering laugh is a little unsteady as well, Adam’s gratified to notice. “Didn’t exactly plan this,” he points out. “But you did. Do I ever get to find out what you had in mind?”
“I wasn’t done planning all of it yet,” Adam admits, sheepish. “But we’ll do it all anyway, once I figure it out.”
He’s reaching for Ronan’s hand as he speaks, unable to stop looking at the shine of the silver on his ring finger. He still can’t quite believe this is happening, here and now, even as he’s brushing his lips across Ronan’s knuckles.
The unguarded tenderness on Ronan’s face—still rare enough to catch him off guard—pulls the words from Adam’s mouth, before he can think twice about them. “Were you serious earlier? About just going to the clerk tomorrow morning?”
Ronan arches an eyebrow at him, pointedly. Adam gets the hint; Ronan exaggerates, and Ronan mocks, but Ronan doesn’t lie, or say anything on impulse that isn’t rooted in truth.
“Right,” Adam mutters, and Ronan asks, “Why?”
Adam turns Ronan’s hand over in his as he thinks over his words, carefully. Even now, there are plenty of things that prickle Ronan too much, and religion is one of them. It’s one of those things Adam’s never asked about, how he navigates his sexuality and his faith, because he knows Ronan needs things that are his alone. “I would have thought that you—I mean, it’s you—that you would have wanted it, you know, traditional. In a church, with a priest and everything.”
The Ronan Adam had first known would have given a biting response without a second thought, raw in its opaqueness. Now, he tilts his head in consideration, squeezing Adam’s hand as he thinks.
“I do want that,” he says eventually. “It’d feel right to go back to St. Agnes and do it there. Get Blue to make some dumb decorations, get some food and booze together for after. Stand up at the front of the church, see you in your suit walking down the aisle—”
“Why am I walking down the aisle?” Adam interrupts.
Ronan smirks at him, undeterred. “But we need to do this first either way, and we can have that later, too, if we want it. But what’s stopping us now? We both own suits. Gansey and Blue will come. Mostly what I want is you.”
The stark simplicity of the declaration clogs Adam’s throat, thick and raw, and all he can do in response is tighten his grip on Ronan’s hand.
The moment stretches between them, effortless in its significance, until Adam clears his throat and says, “Well—go ahead. Call Gansey.”
He relishes Ronan’s moment of shock, which slowly gives way to a smile more cautious, if no less triumphant, than most that find their way to Ronan’s mouth. “Seriously?”
Adam lets his fingertips trace over the cool metal of Ronan’s ring, loving the unyielding bump it makes against his fingers. It feels solid. It feels permanent. “If you mean it—I mean it.”
He doesn’t add that he thinks he’s never meant anything more in his life, but as Ronan tugs him closer, bending to kiss him again, he also thinks that Ronan already knows.