Chapter Text
Adam Parrish was not nervous.
There was no need to be nervous, because he was completely prepared, as was the Adam Parrish way. After completing his undergrad at Harvard, Adam got his paralegal certificate and worked for a year while preparing for his future—law school. That meant getting a recommendation letter from every professor and internship that could remember his name, studying for and taking the LSAT— 178 Parrish? Can’t believe Elle Woods wiped the floor with your ass— and applying to every law program that he could afford to. In the end, he had gotten into Harvard, Columbia, Yale, UCLA, NYU, and Georgetown, all with generous scholarships. But NYU was the only school that offered him a full ride, his entire future on a silver platter, free of charge—the decision was practically made for him.
At least, that’s what Ronan said. Adam wasn’t so sure, and the argument was one of the scariest he’d ever had with Ronan, because it was the only argument they’d ever had where the outcome may actually affect their relationship. Adam and Ronan were always solid and sure. They had stupid arguments and petty disagreements, but those never mattered, because they were something bigger, more important—something more. The second Ronan finally closed the distance and kissed Adam in his childhood bedroom, their fates were sealed. Adam went to Harvard, and there was no question about whether he was coming back. Ronan couldn’t follow him to Boston, but of course, they were still good; it was hard, but it was worth it. And then, Adam did come back. He was a paralegal at a disability rights legal center in Richmond and they were finally living in the same place, waking up in the same bed at the Barns everyday. Adam had no intention of fucking it all up by leaving again.
—“You’re going,” Ronan insisted, his harsh tone leaving no room for argument. “It’s a full fucking ride, even drop outs know that’s a big fucking deal.”
“I’m not saying it isn’t,” Adam replies, because it is, objectively, a ‘big fucking deal.’ A full ride through law school is not something that many people get, and Adam had assumed that he was going to come out the other side with debt since he shut down the offer for Ronan to pay before he could even get the words out. “I’m just saying that it’s far away and I have other options. I could go to Georgetown and come back every weekend.”
“Or, I could come with you, and you can see me every fucking day,” Ronan said with finality.
That silences Adam—he hadn’t even thought to ask Ronan to come. He’d spent the last five years planning and preparing for his future—his and Ronan’s future together—and it always ended with Adam coming back here to the Barns, to Ronan, so they could start their lives together. The idea of them leaving together, starting a life together somewhere else, wasn’t a dream he’d allowed himself since he was a naive nineteen year old. “That didn’t really go well last time,” Adam said hesitantly.
Ronan’s jaw tenses at the reminder of what happened Adam’s freshman year—when Ronan came to Cambridge excited and hopeful for a future they both ached for, and left to return to an empty house that was beginning to feel more like a prison. He shows remarkable restraint in not telling Adam to fuck off. “Things are different now,” Ronan implores. “The ley line’s stronger, as long as we keep tending to it, I’ll be fine.”
Adam squinted at him, considering. After what happened at Harvard, Ronan dedicated all his time and energy to looking for a cure for the nightwash. The unfortunate truth seemed to be that there wasn’t one. The best solution they’d found was to strengthen their ley line, which connected to another line that spanned the entire east coast. The downside was that it merely gave Ronan a slightly bigger cage. The upside, Adam supposed, was that he could live in a place like New York.
But that wasn’t the only issue. “I can’t make you leave the Barns for me,” Adam said, turning away from Ronan’s piercing gaze, swallowing thickly.
Ronan exhaled an angry breath through his nose. “You aren’t making me do shit, Parrish. But if you don’t want me there then fucking fine—”
“That’s not it!” Adam interjected quickly, panic making his heart stutter at whatever the end of that sentence was about to be. “You can’t just leave your home to follow your boyfriend across the country.”
“Fine,” Ronan said, his voice gruff, but level. “Then I’ll follow my husband across the country.”
It takes Adam a moment for him to process what Ronan had just said, but when he does, he feels as if the wind is knocked out of him. He stares at Ronan, eyes wide, and Ronan meets his gaze unwaveringly, patiently waiting for Adam to collect his thoughts. All he manages to get out is, “Did you just fucking propose to me Lynch?”
In lieu of a response, Ronan shifts in his chair and roots around in his pocket. He flicks something with his thumb, making it spin in the air between them, and Adam catches it reflexively. When he looks down at his palm, he’s holding a small ring. It’s silver, but not too shiny, with three curving, intertwined lines making up the band connected to small leaves. Adam could tell as soon as he touched it that it was a dream thing. He looks up at Ronan, mouth agape.
Ronan snorts at him, forcing his mouth shut with two fingers at his chin, making Adam glare at him. “Hope you weren’t expecting me to get down on one knee.”
Adam takes a deep, steadying breath. And then another. He studies the ring, running his fingers over the delicate branches and smiles, feeling the love and wonder and something quintessentially Ronan that emanates from all of Ronan’s dream things. “When did you dream this?” Adam asked, glancing up at him.
Ronan shrugs, but a light pink rises on his cheekbones. “Right after our first date,” he answers quietly.
Adam’s brain short circuits. “Why—”
“I was waiting for it to be time,” Ronan interrupts, his voice still quiet, but firm. “It’s time.”—
Adam walked into the lecture hall half an hour early for the first class of the semester—Contracts. He did his due diligence, having read all the assigned reading up to the midterm and reading practically everything that Professor Marotta-Wurgler had ever published. Adam Parrish did not half ass things; he put all he had into everything he did. In this room, he would be the best—he had to be.
The lecture hall was empty when Adam got there, so he sat in his usual seat and opened his laptop to read over the syllabus, even though he practically had it memorized. People filtered in gradually, some of them sitting in their seats quietly, reading something over on their laptops like him, others chatting with their seat neighbors, voices laced with equal parts excitement and anxiety.
Adam’s startled out of his reverie by a light tap at his shoulder, making him jump in his seat, jostling his laptop. “Shit!” He exclaims, moving quickly to steady his laptop before it falls.
“Sorry,” someone says from his left side, his deaf side. Adam turns around all the way in his seat to hear the speaker of the voice better. He sees a man standing to the left of his seat, looking alarmed at startling him, his dark brown eyes wide. “Sorry,” the man repeats, “I didn’t mean to scare you.”
Adam takes in the medium brown skin, dark curls, and the large, serious-looking man in a dark suit behind him, and Adam’s brain supplies him with the information that the man standing in front of him is the First Son of the United States. He, of course, knew who Alex Claremont-Diaz was, but he only knew the details about him that he needed to know for his education. He took a sociology class his senior year—Law and Justice with Doctor Sheer—where they often debated current events, one of which being whether a leak in the White House email server was likely to affect the election and what it meant about Claremont’s administration. Adam read only the assigned articles so he could form the correct response. Adam hadn’t learned anything personal about the man or his alleged boyfriend, the prince. He was far too busy to worry about celebrity gossip.
“It’s alright,” Adam replies reluctantly, unsure of what exactly the First Son wanted from him. He waited a few seconds for Alex to say something, and when he didn't, Adam raised his eyebrows at him expectantly. “You need something?”
“Oh…yeah,” Alex replies, rubbing the back of his neck anxiouslyly. Adam clocks a subtle accent to his voice, not completely unlike his own. A syrupy sweetness rounding out his vowels, but with r’s a little harder than his own Virginia drawl—Texas, Adam recalls, Ellen Claremont was Texan. “I kind of…need your seat.” Adam raises his eyebrows impossibly higher, his forehead wrinkling. “It’s just for you know,” he says, motioning back to what Adam assumes is a secret service agent at his back, “security.”
Adam looks to the emergency exit, only about five feet from his own seat. This is the seat that Adam has sat in every year, in every lecture hall since he was a freshman at Harvard. Front row, furthest to the left—it put his deaf ear against the wall, so he could hear everything the professor said with nothing to muffle the sound. He imagines what Ronan would say in this moment—‘fuck off,’ or ‘you need this seat so us plebeians can be your bullet shields?’ “There’s another emergency exit over there,” Adam replies with a little more tact than his husband seems to be capable of, pointing to the other door, opposite the one that Adam is sitting next to.
Alex’s eyes flick up and he releases a deep sigh; Adam suspects that he’s holding back an eye roll. “There’s a person in that seat,” he explains, sounding exasperated.
“There’s a person in this seat,” Adam says slowly, emphasizing every word. This time, Alex does roll his eyes dramatically, but Adam thinks he sees a flicker of amusement on the face of the secret service agent that clears away quickly to return to its stony expression. “If you need a specific seat so badly,” Adam continues, his voice level, “you should consider getting here earlier.” He turns in his seat to signal that he was done having this conversation, looking at his laptop without registering the image on the screen.
Adam hears Alex huff and grumble as he walks away. The sound of Alex’s conversation with the girl in the far right seat is lost in the noise of the room, and they are all settled in as the professor walks in, letting the lecture hall door fall shut loudly behind her.
———
Adam is exhausted when he steps through the door of his and Ronan’s Flatbush apartment, leaning his head back against the door as it closes. He pulls off his work boots and lines them up neatly next to Ronan’s dirt smudged ones haphazardly resting near the mat by the door. Adam looks around at his apartment, small and modest, but sun soaked and intimate. He and Ronan weren’t decorators. Most of their walls were bare, save for books and odd dream things on shelves and photos of their friends. There’s a diverse array of plants along the wall under the windows, meticulously cared for by Adam, and sworn at by Ronan when he runs into them every time he exits the bathroom. He sees Ronan as he passes the kitchen on his way to their bedroom, chopping an onion without shedding a tear—what a freak.
Adam was already shedding his grease smudged coveralls when he stepped into their room. He deposits his dirty clothes in the overflowing hamper and steps into the bathroom, rubbing out his sore muscles. Adam looked for a paralegal job when he first moved to the city, but couldn’t find one that would accommodate his law school schedule. He was adamant that he pay half their rent and utilities, so he defaulted to what he knew and found a job at a garage. It paid better than Boyd’s ever did—New York had too many cars and too few people who knew how to fix them—and the work was easy, mostly oil changes and body damage from fender benders. He didn’t hate it as much as he used to, but he couldn’t shake the feeling that he was moving backwards and always had his eye out for another job.
Adam sauntered up to Ronan, wrapping his arms around him from behind and pressing a kiss to the edge of his tattoo visible on his bare shoulder. He leans up to rest his chin on Ronan’s shoulder, his damp hair dripping onto Ronan’s dark tank top, and looks down at the basil that Ronan is chopping on the cutting board.
“How was your day?” Adam asked, his chin pressing further into Ronan’s muscular shoulder.
Ronan releases an amused snort. “Fucking awesome,” Ronan said. “Had a workshop for a bunch of kindergarteners and one kid took a bite out of a tomato like it was an apple and fucking threw up.” Adam imagined it—Ronan watching as a five year old vomits on a tomato plant—and laughs loudly. “What about you?” Ronan asks, stretching his neck to look at him over his shoulder, “How was your first day?”
Adam shrugs, releasing Ronan from his grasp and crossing the small kitchen to get water from the fridge. “Fine,” he answers, “the classes seem hard, but nothing I can’t handle. The professors are great.”
“I don’t want to hear your nerd shit Parrish,” Ronan says. Adam snorted, knowing that it was a blatant lie. “Anything exciting happen?” Ronan asks, turning to him with his dark brows raised.
“Nope,” Adam answers, cracking open his bottle of water and taking a sip. “Nothing to report.”