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“Look at this. We’ve all discussed it and we think you’re the only one qualified for this project. What do you think?”
Adam inspects the sketch he’s handed, and understands why his crew deemed it too complex. It’s extremely specific, and clients who know what they want usually end up being those who don’t let them do their job as best as they can, too.
He reads the annotations next to it and tilts his head to the side, wondering why the handwriting looks so familiar, but unable to pinpoint exactly where he’s seen it before.
“I’ll take it. Don’t worry about it,” he answers, and his assistant sighs, relieved.
“I’ll send the client in, then. He’s been intimidating Katie at the main desk for almost a half hour now.”
Adam laughs, shaking his head, and reaches for a pencil. The sketch is rough and unprofessional, and it shows a simple drawing of a house almost as big as Blue and Gansey’s is. A backyard large enough to fit three motherfucking airplanes, reads one of the annotations.
He takes a piece of paper cardboard, places it on his drafting table, copies down the measurements the client wrote and specifies the scale on the bottom right corner. The routine of it all has an instantaneous calming effect, and as his pencil traces lines with his ruler and everything comes out mathematically perfect, Adam feels the same kind of relief he felt the first time he did this, when he discovered he never wanted to do anything else.
When his assistant returns with the client, Adam is so entranced in calculations that she has to clear her throat for him to look up. He jumps to his feet, straightens his shirt and extends his hand with a smile practically on autopilot.
And then the client steps forward and Adam gets a good look at him. He’s been intimidating Katie. Three motherfucking airplanes.
Ronan.
His blue eyes look as surprised as Adam feels. His hand still hangs between them, and Ronan steps forward and shakes it, the genesis of a smirk in the corner of his lips. Adam thinks he’s going to be sick. Ronan’s leather bands are gone, but he knew this already. Why did you take them off? he asked him, that one time eight years before. They anchored me. I don’t need them anymore, as long as I have you.
Adam swallows around the lump in his throat.
“Hello, I’m Adam Parrish and I’ll be working with you on your project. Thank you for trusting us, it is very nice to meet you.”
He sits back down and explains what he understood from the sketch, pretends he’d never met him before and that he doesn’t notice Ronan’s eyes flashing hurt.
-
When Gansey first introduces them, Adam is unsure of how he should act.
“Parrish, you know Ronan?” Gansey asks, in that politician tone that doesn't ask as much as command. It isn’t do you know him? It is you’re about to.
“I’ve seen him around,” Adam answers, quietly. Ronan’s eyes are on him, judging, and Adam understands he’s being seen as a threat.
Of course he’s seen Ronan Lynch around. Infamous Ronan Lynch, with a sneer on his lips and his words yielded like a sword any time. Savagely handsome Ronan Lynch, don’t walk too close or you’ll get cut on his edges.
Adam is not going to allow it. He looks up, meets Ronan’s eyes and straightens his back. Surprise crosses Ronan’s features, but a scoff replaces it so quickly that Adam’s almost sure he imagined it.
“Where did you get this one, Gansey?” He asks, and Adam narrows his eyes.
So this is how it’s gonna be.
-
A week into the project, Adam walks into his office to find Ronan waiting for him. He’s not sitting, which is just what Adam would expect of him, and he’s not wearing a single piece of black clothing, which is not. He tries to remember if he had, last week, but comes up blank. The shock didn’t let him study him consciously.
He does now. It’s been four years, and after the first two, he assumed he would never see him again. The bags under his eyes are gone, as the black clothing is, his hair is longer and he sports a perfectly trimmed short beard. The years have evidently smoothed his edges.
“What are you doing here?” he asks, because even though he’s turned it around in his head for a solid week, he doesn’t understand anything.
“I had an idea last night, and I wanted to see if we could modify the design to-”
“No, Ronan. What are you doing here?” Adam interrupts. He suddenly feels incredibly tired, sighs and lets himself fall heavily on his chair before looking up at him again.
Ronan looks at the ground and doesn’t answer, instead reaching for his left wrist and coming up empty. The gesture is terribly familiar, and Adam feels dangerously close to punching something, anything. As long as I have you …
He understands that he’s angry. He’s possibly been angry from the moment he left, four years before.
“I didn’t plan this, if that’s what you think,” Ronan whispers, finally, and Adam definitely needs to punch something. He grips the edge of his desk with both hands, knuckles white, and remains quiet. Truth is, Adam will never unlearn Ronan, and he knows silence is the best way to get him to talk, so he lets his rage implode and waits.
After what must be three thousand years, Ronan grows self-conscious and so, he starts babbling. “I just thought — I love the Barns, but I can’t stay there forever. I need something else and Gansey suggested I tried moving to the city and I thought it might be a good idea. I’ve lived here, in an apartment, for almost a year now and I’ve been surprisingly happy and … I just want a place I get to call mine. Everything on the online portfolio is signed under the company’s name, not yours. I seriously didn’t know.”
Adam buries his face in his hands. He did such a good job at forgetting Ronan, at not letting a single thought about him cross his mind for the last year, at ignoring there was a part of his past that still bled and demanded closure. He doesn’t know how to face the fact that, now, he’s being forced to deal with it.
He won’t. He just can’t.
“Tell me your idea,” he says, and tries very hard to ignore the familiar pang in his gut when Ronan looks at him.
-
A boy goes up in flames that Fourth of July, and somehow Adam knows things are just about to get worse.
Someone paid part of his rent and it wasn’t Gansey.
Adam looks at Ronan to find him looking away and he wonders, wonders, wonders.
-
Seeing him gets easier, Adam tells himself. It’s a lie, but he’s always been a good liar.
He wants to get this project done as soon as possible, and finishes sketching within two weeks, preferring to let the rest of his work pile up instead of sitting on this one. When construction begins and he has to inspect, it’s better to forget the past version of himself who thought one day he would move to the city with Ronan by the hand.
Forsan et haec olim meminisse juvabit. He wishes it were that easy.
-
When Adam leaves the house to find Ronan on the porch, his mind is driving him crazy with questions and theories.
If this is a night for truth, then he needs to be honest with himself, but he’s afraid he might have forgotten how. He’s afraid he might have never even learned.
Ronan says, “Adam?” and that simple word is brimming with longing. It enraptures him. Something’s quiet, and he takes a moment to realise it’s himself.
He makes me quiet.
Adam tells himself the truth.
He kisses him.
-
Ronan informs him that he’s given his current landlord the key, and that he will live at a hotel for two weeks until the house is finished. He tells him this while they’re standing outside, looking at the workers finish the paint job.
Adam is almost sure this is the best house he’s ever designed. His chest aches while looking at it.
Ronan says, “I remember you working on miniature models at the kitchen table. I always knew you’d get here.” It’s just a whisper, but it resonates deep inside Adam.
His chest aches.
He drives Ronan back to his hotel, and tells himself that accepting to have a drink at the bar is no sin. He’ll leave right after.
Later, when he climbs into his car with his hair made a mess and the feel of Ronan’s mouth all over his body, he wonders if he will ever stop trying to lie to himself.
-
“Fuck you, Adam.”
“You’ve always known I can’t stay.”
“I never fucking asked you to. I’m done with this. It’s been four years and I’m done with it.”
“What do you mean?”
“Don’t come back for spring break, or summer vacation or ever again. I’m fucking done.”
-
When they see each other again after the hotel incident, Ronan won’t look at him. He looks extra fidgety, and Adam notices a single chain bracelet on his left wrist.
As long as I have you.
How the tables have turned.
The house is finished and perfect, modern and geometric in a way that’s Adam’s trademark and he went ahead and chose the furniture, and he likes it even more than the loft he designed for himself. Maybe it’s time to consider a house.
Together, they walk around, admiring every room and its individual personality. The back of their hands brush between their thighs. Adam pretends he doesn’t notice and when he kisses Ronan against his bedroom door, he makes sure to do it in that all-consuming way of theirs, deep and leaving him senseless.
When he pulls back, Ronan still won’t look at him. It pains Adam.
“I don’t think—,” Ronan starts, then stops. He’s never been good with words. He guides Adam out the door and doesn’t say anything else. The project’s done, Adam’s been paid and the whole thing is over.
Finally, he tells himself. I’m glad, he tells himself.
For the first time in years, he doesn’t buy his own lie.
-
Adam doesn’t even take his stuff out of the Barns. He doesn’t think he can deal with the disappointed look Ronan gives him. He can’t live with Opal crying silently after asking him not to leave and receiving a no for an answer.
This isn’t them. They fight, but they get over it. They love each other. This isn’t them.
But it’s done, and it’s Adam’s fault.
Four years they were together, and that proves an incredibly short amount of time compared to how long Adam had planned to stay with him.
He gets in his car —new, at least for him. A used Ford Fiesta he got as payment for designing the rough sketch of one of his friends’ apartment— and drives away, up north, back to campus. In six months he’ll have a degree, and real life will begin.
He won’t look back, but does look at his rear-view mirror, and how the Barns disappear, and eventually Virginia. He won’t look back.
-
Ronan texts him a week after the house’s finished. It’s a very informative message.
Opal wants to see you.
With this, he tells Adam a number of things. Some of which are: Opal’s finally back from Henrietta, I’ve told her you designed the house and she wants you to come, even if I don’t.
Adam can’t even think to say no. As soon as he leaves the office, he’s driving down town.
A young, blonde lady opens the door from him and throws her arms around his neck and he almost doesn’t recognise her. He last saw her when she was twelve, and she’s sixteen now. He can’t believe she’s almost the age he was when he first met Ronan.
She takes him inside by the hand and he notices tears in her eyes, so he squeezes. The three of them have dinner, and Opal wants to catch up and tells him everything about high school, about how she’s thinking of pursuing a career in architecture because of what he taught her when they were together, and asks him to tell her in exquisite detail how he’s lived his last few years.
It’s all so familiar, yet so new, that Adam’s throat and eyes burn. He pushes the feeling away.
After dinner, Opal leaves them with the excuse that she has plenty of homework to do, but Adam knows what she’s doing. He saw what she hoped for. It’s not what I want, he tells himself, but his inner voice has lost credibility and he’s tired of lying.
“I’m sorry,” Ronan says, and it’s ambiguous but Adam knows what he means. He closes his eyes and allows his true feelings to be free for the first time in four years.
“You said you never wanted to see me again,” he says, and can’t mask how wet his voice sounds. Ronan looks right at him, the polar opposite of the last time.
“I didn’t mean it.”
“You never lie.”
“I didn’t know I didn’t mean it.”
Adam nods. He understands this. He presses his eyes closed so they won’t leak away his feelings, but it’s late, and there are drops between his eyelashes already.
“We found each other again,” Ronan continues. Adam nods, again.
“Coincidence,” he mutters, shakily, because it was not.
Ronan laughs, loud, and Adam opens his eyes to find that he’s crying, too. Adam stands up and Ronan imitates him and they find each other’s arms immediately, because four years could never erase what they had, no matter how hard Adam told himself they did.
It’s over now, the endless lying to his own head. He’s done with it.
Adam tells himself the truth.
He kisses him.