xoxo, Ur Bro

Life in their matchbook apartment revolves around that table. He was reading the paper (the finance section) idly. Later, he’d make himself a plateful of scrambled eggs. For now, he was still mostly asleep, sitting up like a prop to well-wish his partner out the door. 

Blue’s cell phone was going off, chirruping insistently. She took one last big spoonful of strawberry-flavored dairy goodness and kissed her fingertips before she answered Blue Sargent, pressing them to his mouth as she passed on her way to defend the disenfranchised masses. 

“What.” Gansey mumbled to himself again, and then got up to go water all his plants. Their apartment resembled some kind of strange urban jungle, with greenery lush and alive on every possible surface. On their tiny balcony, he had a potted lemon tree that lived in their bathroom on winter nights but thrived now in the summertime light, fruited and vital. He liked it— being surrounded by so much life. 

He was a gentleman of leisure; he spent his days trading stocks and caring for his plants and going to the gym and working idly on his thesis. He’d be a PhD sooner or later— Dr. Richard Campbell Gansey III. For now, he was content to be just this— just Gansey. 

Gansey grunted his way through another rep, an inelegant sound that only made him more desirable to passerby. It humanized him. “The car is Blue’s, and I don’t think Adam would mind terribly.” 

Odd— he hadn’t thought about Adam being jealous. It seemed just so beyond the pale. Why would Adam be jealous of him and Ronan? It was. Well. Okay, it wasn’t inconceivable, but Gansey sometimes forgot he wasn’t operating with the same wiring as everyone else around him. 

“I’m gone for five minutes, and you’ve dissolved into polyamorous debauchery.” Henry commented dryly, as if he weren’t thick as thieves with Blue and Gansey in life and in bed, both. “Speaking of, how’s my favorite girl?” 

Gansey breathed in through his nose, out through his mouth. Another rep. “She’d kill you for calling her that. Jane’s good, she’s got a big case right now, but it’s going well. She thinks she’ll get the acquittal.” 

From there it was the innocuous— Henry’s travels, RoboBee’s latest mishaps, Gansey’s stories about his nephew, the erstwhile Richard Campbell Gansey IV, Henry’s wistful sighing, Gansey’s bittersweet heartache when they hung up. Cathartic. 

He’d learned, in the intervening years between Henrietta and the here, the now, how to allow the holders of his heart to have their space without hating them for it. 

He spent his days chasing butterflies and reading books and smiling at passerby and making piles of money in the stock market and eating new flavors of ice cream. And and and. 

He was alive, and he was free, and somehow everyone was okay with that. Helen had grown into a prince among men, the Gansey heir that had been foretold in the American Dreams of his great-great-grandparents. Gansey was the spare, and unneeded now, able to live out from under the crushing weight of Virginian high society and their expectations. 

All of this to say, he’d known that Ronan would break his own body upon jagged rocks in the sea if Gansey had motioned for him to do it, much less said the first word. 

“I want to have sex with you,” he said instead of that, and Ronan’s whole body jerked, coffee mug falling to the floor, shattering into a million pieces, splashing both their shoes with the hot liquid. 

The movement was interesting, if Gansey had the cold blood required to watch it with a dispassionate lens. Ronan’s body moved as if to obey, to prostrate itself with spread legs and open arms and gaping mouth there in front of everyone in this little cafe, and then to stop itself, Ronan’s mind catching up to all the reasons that would be a bad idea. 

“What in the fucking fuck, you fucker?” Ronan said, too-loud, deep voice almost shrill. He was bigger than he’d been when they were sixteen, seventeen, eighteen together. Taller and broader, with a low rumbling burr and more tattoos decorating the exposed skin of his throat, his arms. A thick black beard covered that sharp jawline, made his eyes seem almost too blue to bear. 

He was still Ronan, but he’d grown up, too; the scars on his wrists were hidden with flowers, all the riotous colors of the dawn, disrupting his monochromatic aesthetic. Mussaenda philippica. Lady Aurora. 

The razor-sharpness of him had given way to a sturdiness, unmoving, steady. 

He did not immediately throw himself down to be ravaged, like he would’ve when they were young and bleeding internally with every breath of air into their jagged-glass lungs. 

People were staring. 

Gansey smiled, because he couldn’t not. 

“Do you want to have sex with me? Because I want to have sex with you.” 

Life in their matchbook apartment revolves around that table. He was reading the paper (the finance section) idly. Later, he’d make himself a plateful of scrambled eggs. For now, he was still mostly asleep, sitting up like a prop to well-wish his partner out the door. 

Blue’s cell phone was going off, chirruping insistently. She took one last big spoonful of strawberry-flavored dairy goodness and kissed her fingertips before she answered Blue Sargent, pressing them to his mouth as she passed on her way to defend the disenfranchised masses. 

“What.” Gansey mumbled to himself again, and then got up to go water all his plants. Their apartment resembled some kind of strange urban jungle, with greenery lush and alive on every possible surface. On their tiny balcony, he had a potted lemon tree that lived in their bathroom on winter nights but thrived now in the summertime light, fruited and vital. He liked it— being surrounded by so much life. 

He was a gentleman of leisure; he spent his days trading stocks and caring for his plants and going to the gym and working idly on his thesis. He’d be a PhD sooner or later— Dr. Richard Campbell Gansey III. For now, he was content to be just this— just Gansey. 

Gansey grunted his way through another rep, an inelegant sound that only made him more desirable to passerby. It humanized him. “The car is Blue’s, and I don’t think Adam would mind terribly.” 

Odd— he hadn’t thought about Adam being jealous. It seemed just so beyond the pale. Why would Adam be jealous of him and Ronan? It was. Well. Okay, it wasn’t inconceivable, but Gansey sometimes forgot he wasn’t operating with the same wiring as everyone else around him. 

“I’m gone for five minutes, and you’ve dissolved into polyamorous debauchery.” Henry commented dryly, as if he weren’t thick as thieves with Blue and Gansey in life and in bed, both. “Speaking of, how’s my favorite girl?” 

Gansey breathed in through his nose, out through his mouth. Another rep. “She’d kill you for calling her that. Jane’s good, she’s got a big case right now, but it’s going well. She thinks she’ll get the acquittal.” 

From there it was the innocuous— Henry’s travels, RoboBee’s latest mishaps, Gansey’s stories about his nephew, the erstwhile Richard Campbell Gansey IV, Henry’s wistful sighing, Gansey’s bittersweet heartache when they hung up. Cathartic. 

He’d learned, in the intervening years between Henrietta and the here, the now, how to allow the holders of his heart to have their space without hating them for it. 

Life in their matchbook apartment revolves around that table. He was reading the paper (the finance section) idly. Later, he’d make himself a plateful of scrambled eggs. For now, he was still mostly asleep, sitting up like a prop to well-wish his partner out the door. 

Blue’s cell phone was going off, chirruping insistently. She took one last big spoonful of strawberry-flavored dairy goodness and kissed her fingertips before she answered Blue Sargent, pressing them to his mouth as she passed on her way to defend the disenfranchised masses. 

“What.” Gansey mumbled to himself again, and then got up to go water all his plants. Their apartment resembled some kind of strange urban jungle, with greenery lush and alive on every possible surface. On their tiny balcony, he had a potted lemon tree that lived in their bathroom on winter nights but thrived now in the summertime light, fruited and vital. He liked it— being surrounded by so much life. 

He was a gentleman of leisure; he spent his days trading stocks and caring for his plants and going to the gym and working idly on his thesis. He’d be a PhD sooner or later— Dr. Richard Campbell Gansey III. For now, he was content to be just this— just Gansey. 

Gansey grunted his way through another rep, an inelegant sound that only made him more desirable to passerby. It humanized him. “The car is Blue’s, and I don’t think Adam would mind terribly.” 

Odd— he hadn’t thought about Adam being jealous. It seemed just so beyond the pale. Why would Adam be jealous of him and Ronan? It was. Well. Okay, it wasn’t inconceivable, but Gansey sometimes forgot he wasn’t operating with the same wiring as everyone else around him. 

“I’m gone for five minutes, and you’ve dissolved into polyamorous debauchery.” Henry commented dryly, as if he weren’t thick as thieves with Blue and Gansey in life and in bed, both. “Speaking of, how’s my favorite girl?” 

Gansey breathed in through his nose, out through his mouth. Another rep. “She’d kill you for calling her that. Jane’s good, she’s got a big case right now, but it’s going well. She thinks she’ll get the acquittal.” 

From there it was the innocuous— Henry’s travels, RoboBee’s latest mishaps, Gansey’s stories about his nephew, the erstwhile Richard Campbell Gansey IV, Henry’s wistful sighing, Gansey’s bittersweet heartache when they hung up. Cathartic. 

He’d learned, in the intervening years between Henrietta and the here, the now, how to allow the holders of his heart to have their space without hating them for it.