#the same impossible stuff

Weirdly enough (not in retrospect, but weird at the time, definitely), it was Ronan’s suggestion.

Blue was alone with him in the BMW; they were in the driveway of 300 Fox Way, dropping her off. Blue stared at him, trying to fit the suggestion into everything she knew about Ronan Lynch and mostly failing. He stared back at her without much of an expression on his face, waiting for her answer.

“Are you serious?” Blue said eventually. “You want to be my roommate? You want to move to Richmond?”

Ronan shrugged. “The Barns will still be here,” he said. When Blue continued to stare, he got testy, leaning into the window and frowning at her. “It was just a suggestion,” he said, almost a growl.

“It’s cool,” Blue said quickly. She didn’t want Ronan to think that she was mocking him. “I mean, I’ll think about it.”

“Whatever,” Ronan said, his defenses back up. Blue scooted out of the car without looking at him again, feeling strangely self-conscious even though Ronan was the one who’d just put himself out there, not her. She was heading to Richmond to attend Virginia Commonwealth University come August, and Ronan had just suggested that they could be roommates.

Blue paused in front of her doorway and turned. She watched Ronan drive off in a squeal of gravel, still marveling over his offer. It wasn’t that she and Ronan weren’t close. Since Gansey had died and Noah had faded away, they’d sobbed in front of each other enough times that ‘close’ was a decently accurate description of what they were to each other. But it was almost never the two of them alone--Adam was usually there, and when plans were made they each went through Adam to make them.

The idea that Ronan might want to live with her while she went to college seemed laughable in its unlikelihood. Blue never would have suggested it herself, never would have dared to presume. But now that she thought about it, she could see why he might want to: Adam was heading off to Princeton, so Ronan would be left in Henrietta by himself. Well, he’d have his family--but Blue knew that Ronan needed the burnt remnants of the group that Gansey had built, as much if not more than he needed blood relatives right now. All three of them did.

It was the end of June, coming up on Adam’s birthday. Gansey had died in February. Noah had held on till St. Patrick’s Day.

Blue wasn’t sure exactly when Ronan and Adam had started dating, it wasn’t like they gave her an announcement, but she first became aware of them as a thing in April. But she didn’t remember much of March. In those first few weeks post-Gansey, post-Noah, Adam and Ronan could have groped each other right in front of her and Blue would have been too grief-numb to notice.

She called Ronan later that night. Surely she had called Ronan before, but she couldn’t remember a specific instance, and the feeling that this might be the first time they spoke over the phone gave her a weird kind of nerves.

Ronan picked up on the second ring. “What?”

“It wouldn’t be like Monmouth.” Blue shut her mouth, suddenly quite glad she was alone in the phone room. She hadn’t meant to start off with that. She didn’t know what she’d meant to say, but not that.

Ronan was quiet for so long that Blue wondered if he’d hung up. Then, “I know.”

“How do you see this working, then? Most apartments are going to be more expensive than living in the dorms would be, for me.” And living in dorms would have already been a stretch for Blue. Enough of a stretch that the original plan had been for Blue to stay with an aunt who lived only 45 minutes away from Richmond during the week, then driving back to Henrietta on the weekends. Blue had begged and pleaded and bargained with Maura, promising to work two jobs if she needed to, in order to get the privilege of living on campus.

Blue had spent the evening, after Ronan had dropped her off, looking up rent prices for places that were within a reasonable distance of campus. It had been very demoralizing.

“I’ll pay the difference,” Ronan said, as if it were obvious. Blue took a moment to resent him for how easily he could say things like that.

“I’m not just letting you pay rent for me, that’s ridiculous,” she snapped.

“But it wouldn’t be strictly fair for us to split it 50/50, if you think about it,” Ronan said. “You’re going to be a student and I won’t be.”

Blue wound the phone cord around her wrist, pulling it taut against her skin. She thought about it. It wouldn’t be strictly fair not because she’d be a student, but because Ronan had more money than he knew what to do with. Ronan could probably afford to pay rent for half of VCU’s incoming freshmen. She appreciated that he had not pointed this out.

“I could swing a third of the rent for a two-bedroom,” she said finally. “If that would be okay with you.”

“Sure,” Ronan said.

Blue badly wanted to ask Ronan why he wanted to do this, why he wasn’t offering to go to New Jersey and be Adam’s roommate. Maybe he already had and Adam had shot him down, or maybe he was okay with leaving Henrietta but preferred to stay within state lines. Ronan’s reasons for doing anything were often mysterious to Blue.

But she felt certain that if she demanded any sort of explanation, Ronan would stop wanting to try this at all. So all she said was, “I have a sewing machine. It can get pretty loud.”

“I have Chainsaw,” Ronan replied. “She’s loud and then some.”

A smile tugged at the corner of Blue’s lips. “I’d want to move in the second week of August, probably. Orientation starts the third week.”

“That gives us a month,” Ronan said. “We should be able to find a place in a month.”

And that was that.

***

Maura had a hard time with it, which surprised Blue. “You’re eighteen,” Maura said, sitting across from Blue at the kitchen table with Blue’s hand in hers. “I don’t like the idea of you going off to the big city and living alone with some boy.”

“Mom,” Blue groaned. “It’s Ronan. He’s very gay, you know that.”

“Gay or not, he’s still a raven boy,” Maura said stiffly. She was avoiding eye contact. “I just don’t want him dragging you into anything or getting you into trouble.”

Blue did not say that this was a ridiculous conversation, considering that the trouble she’d gotten into in the last year had killed her first boyfriend. Maura would probably say that this just proved her point.

Blue tried to placate. “We won’t get into any trouble in Richmond. I’m going to be busy with school. Ronan will be busy with… I don’t know, Ronan things.”

Maura huffed and squeezed Blue’s fingers, frowning down at the table. “What’s wrong with the dorms? It would introduce you to more people, get you involved in the culture of the school and all that. I never would have met Persephone if we hadn’t lived on the same floor during freshman year.”

Blue narrowed her eyes and tilted her head, studying her mother. Then it clicked: it was easier for Maura to accept Blue going off to live in a dorm, a sort of halfway point between adolescence and full adulthood. But apartment living skipped that step. If Blue was living in her own apartment with a roommate, paying her own rent with no R.A. and no shared bathroom or anything like that, it was almost like she was a real adult.

Blue couldn’t help but have very little sympathy for this anxiety of her mother’s. She’d ceased to feel anything like a child when Persephone had died. Any remaining shreds of immaturity had then been further demolished by the twin losses of Gansey and Noah.

“I don’t really feel like living with a stranger this year,” Blue said, playing the grief card without remorse. “I’d rather live with someone who’s already a friend.”

This made Maura look up, meeting Blue’s eyes. “Very understandable,” Maura said, and then sighed, and Blue knew she had won.

“Just promise me that you won’t live anywhere with a combined kitchen and bathroom,” Maura said balefully. Blue had to swallow past a lump at the thought of Gansey’s reckless interior design decisions, but she laughed for her mother’s sake.

***

It became immediately apparent that Ronan had no concept of what was a reasonable rent price.