in service to the king

Adam could feel it, the double-barrel bore of it seared into his forehead like the mark of Cain.

He didn’t meet his eyes. He wouldn’t. He couldn’t.

How could he meet his best friend’s eyes when the long line of Ronan’s spine, the sight of a tangled profusion of blackwork, claws and feathers and vines and knots, was still seared into the back of Adam’s eyelids?

Gansey never made his bed. It was one of his humanisms. Adam, who had been conditioned by years of carefully tucking in the corners of his blanket every morning in the gray pre-dawn before quietly shutting the door to the double-wide behind him, couldn’t fathom it. Even now, living above St. Agnes, he made his bed every morning.

The sprawl of blankets, sheets coming untucked from the corners, the humped form of a pillow half-buried under the blankets, molded to the shape of Gansey’s body, was obscene to him, on public display in the middle of the vast gallery that was Monmouth Manufacturing. It made him want to look away every time he saw it.

Actually, it made him want to bury himself, pull those blankets up over his head. Surround himself on all sides by the smell of Gansey, that boy-smell of slightly stale sheets and mint and deodorant and sweat. He wanted to drag that pillow out from under the blankets by one corner like a wounded animal and bury his face in it and inhale.

In a way he was jealous of Ronan, spread out beneath him. Adam had a long-fingered hand spread across the wrought-iron hooks blazed up the back of Ronan’s neck and used it to press him down, to force his face into the sheets. The blankets frothed around them, white and humped as churning waves, and Adam’s knees sank into the softness of the mattress and for one thrilling, horrifying moment, he had the thought that he might pass right through its surface and drown.

The idea that Gansey might walk in on them fucking in his bed at any moment was an unspoken part of the game. They both tingled with it, and it made them clumsy and frantic and hot, Ronan letting Adam wrestle him down and peel back his clothes, greedy for skin-on-skin contact, both of them thrilling at the trespass of it.

Ronan had cum with Adam buried to the hilt inside of him, with one of those hands he loved so much wrapped around his cock, his groans and curses stifled by the pillows, and Adam had cum an instant later to the jackhammering of his own heart, telling himself it was the sound of footsteps on the stairs.

Afterward, he’d stared down at the damp patch of drool or tears smeared across the pillow, at the little dribble of cum that’d escaped the cage of his fingers. He’d reached out and, deliberately, rubbed it in. Then, while Ronan was getting the shower warmed up, he’d made the bed.

Now he could feel his face heating under the weight of Gansey's stare, as he imagined him coming home hours later, maybe not even, to find the heat of their bodies trapped under his blankets, pulled smooth, the edges tucked in, his second pillow hauled out and laid neatly at the head with the other one.

He imagined Gansey stripping back the sheets, searching for evidence of trespass and finding it, climbing into bed, scrambling on his knees and stroking himself off to the scent of their sweat and cum.

Under the table, Adam made a fist and pressed it against the top of his thigh.

🕯 May you have the 🕯

🕯 absolute thirstiest 🕯

🕯 of thirst dreams of 🕯

🕯 whatever fictional 🕯

🕯 character you’re 🕯

🕯 hyper-fixating on at 🕯

🕯 the moment 🕯

losers: haha see ronan doesn’t want to fuck gansey