angel baby by troye sivan is a pynch song: a comprehensive study
Ronan wrapped his arms around Adam, pinning Adam’s upper arms against him. He was contained. “Forsan et haec olim meminisse juvabit,” Ronan said into Adam’s hearing ear, and Adam’s body sagged against Ronan, chest heaving. His hands still jerked and strained to violence. He gasped, “You asshole,” but Ronan could hear how near tears he was.
Noah cackled and showed them the cassette. It boasted a handmade label marked with Ronan’s handwriting: PARRISH’S HONDAYOTA ALONE TIME. The other side was A SHITBOX SING-ALONG.
Adam had come for him. All this way. He had not given up. He had risked everything.
The choice was death or hurting Adam, which wasn’t much of a choice at all.
For that first summer, the Barns was paradise to Ronan Lynch and Adam Parrish.
For a long time, it was paradise, and the dreaming was good.
When he opened his eyes, he saw that Ronan was looking at him, as he had been looking at him for months. Adam looked back, as he had been looking back for months.
His mouth remembered Ronan Lynch’s. What was he doing? Ronan was not something to be played with. He didn’t think he was playing.
It was Ronan, unperformed. No. Ronan, unprotected. This tone reminded Adam of that unshielded smile from before. Don’t play, he told himself. This is not a game. But it didn’t feel like a game, if he was being honest.
What do you want, Adam? To feel awake when my eyes are open.
Instead, though, he just stood there and watched it approach. Even at the last minute, as he heard the rain pounding the grass flat, he just stood there. He closed his eyes and let the storm soak him. That was this kiss.
The proper truth struck Ronan: The plants had not saved their lives. Adam Parrish had saved their lives.
His head rested miserably on Ronan’s shoulder, everything shaking, standing only because Ronan did not allow him to sink.
Adam could not decide if this was the worst thing that had happened to him, or if it felt that way because he had been so recently and senselessly happy that the comparison was making it so.
Ronan felt that he had caught happiness without meaning to. He could do anything.
He just lived in the moment with Ronan instead.
And that was before Ronan even got to worrying if Adam made it to the afterlife at all, with his agnostic tendencies.
Ronan hadn’t thought much about the future.
Adam felt Ronan’s eyes glance off him and away, his disinterest practiced but incomplete.
Adam had recently realized Ronan was a weakness to his ambition, since it was harder to work with two moving pieces rather than one, but he couldn’t talk himself out of it. He tried each night he was alone in the apartment over St. Agnes, and he failed every time he saw Ronan again.
They sprawled on the living room sofa and Adam studied the tattoo that covered Ronan’s back: all the sharp edges that hooked wondrously and fearfully into each other. “Unguibus et rostro,” Adam said.
Ronan crossed his arms to wait, just looking. At Adam’s fine cheekbones, his furrowed fair eyebrows, his beautiful hands, everything washed out by the furious light. He had memorized the shape of Adam’s hands in particular: the way his thumb jutted awkwardly, boyishly; the roads of the prominent veins; the large knuckles that punctuated his long fingers. In dreams Ronan put them to his mouth.
Adam, as a secretive creature, understood secrets.
Ronan’s second secret was Adam Parrish.
Adam, a secretive animal, was acutely tuned to other people’s secrets.
Gansey met her eyes, and then the Dog’s, in the rearview mirror. "Adam keeps his secrets pretty close."
Adam would have never pried — secrets were secrets — but he couldn’t deny that he’d been curious.
But Adam knew everything, both because he’d been there when certain things had gone down, and because Ronan shared everything with him.
Every minute that the Barns had been his all of the time he’d spent here alone or with Adam, dreaming and scheming. Home, home, home.
He was so raw and electric that it was hard to believe that he was awake. Normally it took sleep to strip him to this naked energy. But this was not a dream. This was his life, his home, his night.
Seeing the two pairs tumbled together, a nameless feeling had suddenly overwhelmed Ronan. It was about Adam’s gloves here, but it “was also Adam’s jacket tossed on a dining room chair, his soda can forgotten on the foyer table, him somewhere tossed with equal comfort in the Barns, his presence commonplace enough that he was not having to perform or engage with Ronan at all times. He was not dating Ronan; he was living in Ronan’s life with him.
This was like walking the line between dream and sleep. The night-sharp balance of being asleep enough to dream and awake enough to remember what he wanted. He knew Adam had figured out how he felt. But he didn’t know if he could step off this knife-slender path without destroying what he had.
Ronan sometimes dreamt of Adam too, the latter boy sullen and elegant and fluently disdainful of dream-Ronan’s clumsy attempts to communicate.
Adam was in the dream, too; he traced the tangled pattern of the ink with his finger. He said, “Scio quid hoc est.” As he traced it father and father down on the bare skin of Ronan’s back, Ronan himself disappeared entirely.
His feelings for Adam were an oil spill; he’d let them overflow and now there wasn’t a damn place in the ocean that wouldn’t catch fire if he dropped a match.
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