Work Text:
“We could just put the vents in the floor? Hide everything else underneath.”
“In the bespoke hardwood flooring? Yeah, right. He’d kill us.”
“Shit. I hate clients. What if…”
Adam zones out of a conversation about ductwork and meets the piercing blue of Ronan’s eyes in miniature over the shoulder of an intern. Leaned on one of the dividers separating the barren cubicles in the office bullpen from the promised land of actual closed-door offices, he has a perfect view of the artnet newsletter on the intern’s screen, and the headline: “New Works by Emerging Artist Ronan Lynch Conceal More Than They Reveal”. Under the headline is an unsmiling photo of Adam’s boyfriend, slouched over a stool in his home studio.
Once he’s tamped down his initial confusion and the brief wrathful pinch of someone is not busy when I am busy, Adam remembers both that reading industry press is part of this intern’s job, and also that Ronan had done a profile with the magazine. Ronan holds his personal brand as an artist in the highest contempt, mitigated only by Gansey, who couldn’t stop promoting Ronan’s interests to blue-blooded dilettantes if he tried, and Hennessey, who likes making them both money. Adam wonders which of them had been responsible for this. Either way, it doesn’t surprise him much that Ronan hadn’t said anything about it. He’d probably scheduled the photo shoot for a day when Adam had been at the office.
For all that Ronan is inexplicably apathetic about the trajectory of his own career, he’s abidingly interested in Adam’s. He’s been particularly locked in in the last month while Adam’s team has been embroiled in an urgent mission to design a sixty-five-floor skyscraper. The client is a nepo baby if Adam has ever seen one, an Elon Musk fanboy who fancies himself a design guru. It’s a combination that has endeared him to exactly no one in the office even as they struggle to reconfigure building systems around a sudden whim towards open concept. Hence, ductwork.
“What do you want me to tell him, Parrish?” Adam’s account partner, Phil, surveys the layered paper landscape of the nearest drafting table. “We have to have a vent somewhere over here, otherwise we can’t fit the ductwork behind this wall. That, or it’ll have to be visible ducts.”
Adam’s phone pings. A message bubble pops into existence over a photo of Blue and Ronan wearing matching novelty t-shirts outside a gas station in Utah. (The sleeves of both t-shirts were abandoned on the floor of their car by the end of the day; Blue wore a sleeve as a headband and Ronan was horrifically sunburnt. The entire vacation had been a ringing endorsement for SPF.)
Adam tugs the top sketch aside. “How sure are you that he’s going to look closely at the mech drawings? He’s mostly ignored them up until this point.”
Responding to proximity to his face, his phone unlocks and Adam catches the tail end of a sentence about couscous. He mutters a quick apology and wrenches himself back to the conversation at hand. Couscous would keep.
“Talk to Emily,” he tells Phil. By all accounts, Emily is a rising star in the interior design department, quiet and serious but ruthlessly effective; Adam likes her. “She’s good at this kind of detail. Ask her how to design the vents so they blend in. If he can’t pick them out right away in the renderings, maybe he’ll just move onto the next thing.”
Phil snorts. “Honestly, you’re probably right. Never thought I’d be glad to be doing this kind of stupid minutiae, but at least it means we’re almost done with this goddamn building.” He begins rolling up one of the large drawings. “Check-in tomorrow morning?”
Adam nods his assent and takes another passing glance at the intern’s screen on his way back to the southeast corner of the floor. She has scrolled down past the photo of Ronan and is reading the rest of the article.
Ordinarily, the snagging of a bid this large, prominent, and complicated would be the kind of project on which Adam thrived, the kind he had entered this field to work on, but the aforementioned design guru had announced without warning on an opening Zoom call that the building should be curved. Sixty-five individual floor designs and several idle murderous fantasies later, Adam had broken the surface of three straight sixty-hour weeks to find himself at the present Tuesday.
“You’re sure you love this job?” Ronan said a week ago in a rare display of actual tact. Adam had been laying flat on the living room carpet at 9:47pm.
“Adam,” he prompted when Adam had chosen not to respond in favor of digging the heels of his hands into his eyes.
“Yes, dear?” The sarcasm was not lost on Ronan. Adam almost never called him dear any other way.
Ronan abandoned his sprawled pose on the couch to step a leg over Adam and lower his graceful bulk onto Adam’s thighs. His reading glasses had slipped a little down his nose on impact, and he reached an absent finger up to push the frames back into place. “I’m fucking serious here.”
Adam sighed. It was an echo of a conversation they had had a year prior, before they moved in together to the big sundrenched loft in Greenpoint. Before sixty-hour work weeks had become the exception, not the rule. His previous firm had been hard to give up, unreasonably hard. Adam’s unique brand of workaholism, while not exactly healthy, had been a familiar, automatic procedure honed over decades of pushing himself as hard as possible. It had felt like failure and a bitter betrayal of himself at the time to leave, and rewriting all his usual patterns was still a work in progress. Ultimately, though, Ronan had been right then and it stood to reason he thought he was right now.
What Ronan didn’t understand was the massive gulf between a lot of work at a job you hate and a metric fuckton of work at a job you love. Which he should, honestly, because Ronan loved his job and spent hours and days in his studio doing it. Perhaps it was the corporateness of it all; Ronan couldn’t fathom loving work that doesn’t conform to the tides of creativity. Or, more likely, he was remembering that it took him six months too long to convince Adam to leave a job he hated. Maybe the plan was to start in on the battle now so Adam would quit this job before things reached critical levels. Not a bad strategy, but misplaced, in Adam’s opinion. He had, in fact, learned from his experience at denial and corporate backstabbing.
“This is temporary,” Adam had assured him. “It’s not the new normal. We’ll finish this building and I can tell the client to jump off it, and things will calm down.”
“You’re evading the question and you think you’re fucking slick about it.”
Adam had wriggled a little into a better position under Ronan and rested his hands comfortably over the strong muscle of Ronan’s quads. “I still love this job. Sometimes the things we love temporarily drive us crazy. Hard to imagine, I know.” A blatantly transparent metaphor, but weeks of sporadic sleep and skipping their nightly episode of Buffy the Vampire Slayer had eroded his capacity for subtlety. “If I stop loving it, I promise to let you know.”
Ronan had eyeballed him for a few more seconds, but let it go all the same. He’d bundled Adam into bed after that and spent long minutes rubbing his hands over Adam’s back before they drifted off. But he’d rehashed the argument in a dozen smaller ways in the intervening days.
A year at the firm makes Adam senior enough for his own glass-walled box of an office, but apparently not senior enough for a truly ergonomic desk chair. He’s sparsely decorated the space with a modestly thriving collection of plants and a ceramic cup of office supplies that Blue had made during a pottery phase. In the privacy of his own space again, he pulls up artnet’s homepage and thumbs open the text chain with Ronan.
1:30 p.m.
going to wf for chicken and couscous what else do we need
At almost a year into cohabitation, Adam still gets a warm, pleased feeling from the mundanities of living with Ronan, that his grocery run is Adam’s grocery run and “going home” means the same place for both of them. It’s a boring, contented little rush. The relief of commuting from the office only to find Ronan already waiting for him is particularly welcome; working till 10pm used to mean not seeing Ronan at all. It had taken some time to meld their living styles and sleep schedules, but overall, Adam has grown to count on feeling settled with Ronan, safe in their home together. It’s good, and he knows that it’s good.
1:36 p.m.
Updated the list just now. I’m about to read this article about an “emerging” artist. Roman Lunch or something?
1:37 p.m.
lying to journalists is the most fun a girl can have without taking her clothes off
Adam smirks at his phone. Far from prone to fibbing in front of the press, Ronan has a tendency to be extremely honest, both in a way that requires his interviews to be heavily censored for language and that made his only PR rep quit very quickly. Pop punk allusions aside, Adam suspects whoever had written the headline had it backwards.
Adam hasn’t yet seen Ronan’s new show, tucked into a small gallery where the Lower East Side meets Alphabet City. There are nine works total, formerly large oil paintings that Ronan had affixed thrift store frames to and scrunched, shredded, or otherwise destroyed the rest, the small section of the painting inside the frame the only intact portion remaining. Adam had seen the canvases before they had been manipulated in this way. They were beautiful, detailed things that he had thought it a real shame to hide away under folds and singed edges. To Ronan, as he had apparently explained to the journalist, this was entirely the point:
“When you pick an element to focus on, you have to sacrifice the rest,” Lynch shares, standing before the large, rucked-up canvas of Hands and Eyes (2024). The exercise here, he explains, is a purposeful tunnel vision to explore the new perspective offered when the viewer is forced to see only part of the picture. “How does the meaning change when you know you’re missing most of the message?” he asks. “It’s how we have to operate all the f***ing time as people in a society, anyway.”
Hands and Eyes in its untouched form had been an untamed five-by-seven-foot painting that Adam remembers well being a reference for, laughing in the sun at Ronan’s weird studio shtick. Now, stretched and folded over in intentional mess, he can only see Ronan’s upturned profile and closed eyes, cut off within the only square foot Ronan left intact inside a chipped blue-painted frame. Adam also remembers rescuing that frame off a curb in Bed-Stuy. Before, Adam’s hand had rested on Ronan’s shoulder, face tucked neatly out of sight behind his neck. Now, manipulated by the rippled canvas, Adam’s fingers curl into the long, light-limned line of Ronan’s throat, a suggestion of keen, artistic violence. Offset by the calm of Ronan’s expression, the dappled sunlight is visible in flashes through the other coherent parts of the painting.
Adam swallows. Had he seen this painting in its final form before? Had Ronan said anything about the meaning behind it? Adam is fixated, gaze drawn inexplicably to the vulnerable underside of Ronan’s jaw, the smooth column of his neck. His mind, racing forward without permission, fills in the rest: how soft Ronan’s skin would feel under his palm, the jump of his pulse on the webbing between Adam’s thumb and forefinger. How easily his head would tilt back when Adam pushed further. How his muscles would flex and jump even as he yielded to Adam’s hand. The blue of his eyes, perfect and clear as they’d widen, shut tight, go hazy with pleasure.
Adam hunches over his desk. His heart is thumping hard in his chest.
He tries to remember the last time they’d had sex. Had they even done it since this project started? Adam doubts it. Sex does not always make him relax, and when he’s stressed, it relaxes him even less. It’s certainly been weeks since his brain hasn’t gotten in the way of it, anyway.
And maybe it had been even longer. Couples’ sex lives slowed down somewhat when they started living together, right? The anticipation died down, comfort in the routine, all of that. There were studies, articles. Adam certainly isn’t starved for physical intimacy, but had they really unintentionally deprived themselves of actual sex so much that it was driving Adam fucking insane? That had to be the explanation for the sudden return to a teenaged hair-trigger.
Adam’s brain is cycling through images in bright technicolor clarity. Ronan, holding himself wide for Adam to fuck inside. Ronan, wound up tight and desperate, slick salt tracks pooling in his collarbone. Ronan, so fucking easy for it, sweetly folding to Adam’s whims, open, slutty, gorgeous. Maybe Adam could make him beg, make him trip over his words, gasp out pleas and bribes, take Adam’s cock and fucking cry on it. Fuck, could he make that happen?
Sex was one thing. Adam doesn’t just hunger for sex with Ronan. It’s well past that. Adam is ravenous. He wants to sink his teeth into Ronan, maybe very literally. He wants to push him, find an edge he hasn’t seen yet and shove Ronan right over it, fuck fast, hard, deep, dark, serious. Leave marks. See him insensate, babbling, out of his head. Adam’s, completely and utterly. He wants sex to overwhelm, to dominate, to consume.
And that is new.
It’s never been like that with them. Adam’s libido is a perpetual question to which the answer is often “nice try, buddy”. In a more practical sense, Adam tops most of the time. Sure, in those rarer moments when the answer to the question is “fuck yes”, he tells Ronan how good he feels, how hot he is, how sexy he looks riding him, underneath him. But never that wild, never that dangerous. Adam has never daydreamed before about calling him pretty, pretty little piece, gorgeous slutty boy, so fucking beautiful when you want my come so bad, so tight and hot, taking it so well honey, my perfect little slut but he sure as fuck is now, in the middle of the afternoon in his goddamn office. Ronan was usually so self-conscious about compliments; he made a face at the word “pretty” in any context. Adam has never considered whether Ronan might want him to say those things, to push him that hard. Would he mind it? Would he hate it? Adam’s brain balks at the thought of having this train of fantasy shut down completely.
He would be enchanting to watch, is the thing. Sweeping, tense lines and corded muscle, light on water and mountain cliffs and deep movements of the earth. All of him on display and so out of his head that he wouldn’t have room to give a solitary fuck about the fact that Adam’s mouth is on a direct line from his brain. It’s selfish, possessive and sharp, what Adam wants to do to him. The depth of his want is sudden and frightening, acutely overwhelming. But the overwhelmingness is seductive in a way, too, the chance to feel something that’s too big to control, too big to be contained by his own body so he needs Ronan’s, too. To be swept away by it. To be drowned in his own storm. To drown Ronan in it, too.
Adam’s storms are only ever internal. He takes great care to make sure that they are. He feels keenly off-balance now, unmoored from himself. The only thing more unsettling than the feeling that something is very wrong is the suspicion that it actually isn’t wrong at all. That what he is holding in his chest isn’t actually a freak stress response but something that has been part of him the whole time.
He pulls out his phone. His fingers shake over the screen.
2:02 p.m.
Are you going to that gallery opening tonight with Noah?
Adam tries to breathe evenly, shirt beginning to stick to his back under his blazer. His usually militant self-discipline is out to fucking lunch. There’s no way he’s revealing this full, euphoric froth of filth to Ronan without a full panel of internal affairs review, but maybe he can ease some of the tension, just a bit, just enough to get back to work.
The stakes feel astronomically high. It doesn’t seem to matter how safe he knows he is with Ronan, how many other parts of himself he’s revealed, broken and mangled and ugly, and Ronan hasn’t shied away. The part of himself he knows was taught by Ronan wants to bare himself completely, right now, immediately, to put himself entirely in Ronan’s hands and trust, blindly trust, because they’re building something real and true together.
But because he is still himself, he’ll hold back something that could draw blood if he’s not very, very careful. How strange and horrible it is, to know someone so intimately that you could hurt them if you wanted to. All the same, he doesn’t like it when there are things about him Ronan doesn’t know, not anymore.
He leaps for his phone when it buzzes.
2:05 p.m.
yeah i guess so
2:05 p.m.
Okay. I’m doing a weird feral yearning thing today so will settle for kissing the shit out of you when we cross paths on your way out. Should sate the yearning for the evening I think. Maybe take more drastic measures tomorrow?
2:06 p.m.
yearning at work? mr. parrish!
drastic measures tomorrow it is
you could just call it my dick no need for nicknames
Adam then makes several very valiant attempts to accomplish a task.
3:18 p.m.
So. Feral yearning not dissipating into a manageable level. Fair warning that when you come back from your thing tonight I might be a mess. Not an ideal moment for a brain spiral but here we are.
3:21 p.m.
mess like emotional mess?
There’s no point in lying.
3:21 p.m.
Mess like i want to fuck you real bad
It’s a single drop in the ocean of what Adam wants to say. He puts his head down on his desk. His heart rate has not slowed in what feels like days.
3:22 p.m.
well damn baby why didnt you say it was like that
you have a way with timing
hmmmm i could just skip
Ronan never ditches plans with Noah. He’s been talking all week about how excited he is to hate all the art and drive the gallerinas crazy. A wave of heat cracks down Adam’s spine. His knee bounces frantically of its own accord as he types back a response.
3:23 p.m.
Don’t say that shit if you can’t deliver Lynch we are not firing on all logical cylinders today
3:23 p.m.
i didn’t wanna go that bad anyway :-)
3:24 p.m.
Fucking damn I love you
3:32 p.m.
noah says :( but he can deal
i want you to fuck me real bad too
lets watch buffy after
3:34 p.m.
Yes
Fuck
I haven’t accomplished a task in two hours
To be honest I care so little
Adam is wired, jittery like he’s taken a shot of caffeine directly to his bloodstream. He’s nervous, he’s excited. He’s struck suddenly with a shy urge to walk back what he’d written to Ronan now that he’d admitted it, never mind the fact that Ronan is in love with him and very aware that Adam wants to fuck him and has done so already many, many times. He hasn’t even revealed a hint of the depravity going on in his head, but he feels exposed anyway.
And the imaginary Ronan continues his stunning begging in his head, please Adam baby please I want it please let me come please –
He’s not going to get anything done for the rest of the day. Fuck, the rest of the day is going to be fucking interminable.
Why the fuck did he pick an outfit today that took time to remove? Blazer and button down and oxfords and fucking tie for a morning client meeting. Ronan is probably barefoot in their apartment, wearing a sweatshirt and stretched-out t-shirt. So easy to push up the fabric and get at the soft give of his sides and back, fuck. Adam’s body is running away with the rest of him, pedal to the metal on the highway. Ronan is delectable and Adam wants to fucking eat him and isn’t that just the problem? Ronan plans to let him and he doesn’t even know it.
3:35 p.m.
parrish
babe
just breathe and do like 3 things
then the day is over and you can come home
3:35 p.m.
Okay
He’d need Ronan to shut up. He’d need to shut up, himself. They couldn’t talk while they fucked today, there was no way. Adam couldn’t explain this. It just had to be what it was. If the anticipation didn’t fucking kill him first.
Somehow, in all the possibilities Adam had considered in texting Ronan, getting what he wanted was not one of them. Maybe Ronan just knows him better than he knows himself and could tell that this was an emergency, something he doesn’t know how to stop. Ronan always knows him so much, so deeply. Who taught him that?
3:51 p.m.
you want me to make you food or no?
i can make a big pot of pasta and we can eat it after?
Adam feels like he’s dying. He feels his pulse in his toes. He likes the message.
An hour later, Adam finds his previous delusions of dominance truly laughable. The way he is desperate, horny, take-me-now-or-I’ll-fucking-die is slutty to the core. Ronan is going to ask him, in that teasing, smirking way he does, what had made him like this and it’s going to make him embarrassed, turned on, needy. Already, he wants to kneel down before Ronan and stick out his tongue. He needs to fuck, be fucked, it doesn’t matter.
By 5:15, Adam is truly dickmatized, and all he has in front of him is a mostly-empty spreadsheet and the tantalizing tab of the artnet article still open on his browser like the well-turned ankle of a Victorian harlot. His desire has reached such a fever pitch that he is sure, surer than he’s ever been about anything, that Ronan’s willingness to cancel plans to fuck him is the only thing standing between himself and total oblivion. Jerking off while Ronan was out would never have alleviated this feeling. Waiting it out wouldn’t have dissipated it either. Only Ronan can save him from this.
What had caused this lightning strike of single-minded need? How does he make it happen again? More pressing question: how fast can he sprint out of the office at 5:30?
The answer is very fucking fast. Adam is through the elevator doors and in the lobby before he even registers that Phil had called a “see you tomorrow”. The February wind snaps the edges of his coat as he crosses to the 7th Avenue subway, cold barely registering against the heat in his gut. He makes the E-G transfer at Court Square like a man possessed, moving on autopilot, water flowing downhill towards the sea. His feet know the way. His heart pumps the syllables of Ronan’s name into a persistent thrum in his chest.
He’s fumbling with the keys in the lock when the whole door is wrenched away from him. Ronan stands in the threshold, breathing a little fast, like maybe he was listening hard for the door, like maybe he ran to it. Adam only has time to gasp out his surprise before Ronan’s hand is gripping the front of his shirt and Adam’s back hits the back of the closed door.
Ronan’s lips are on his and it feels like a balm, like pure liquid heat, finally. Pleasure, lush and deep, unfurls across his skin. Adam can’t decide where he wants his own hands. He scrapes blunt fingernails over Ronan’s scalp and the strong lines of his shoulders, dips under the fabric of his sweatshirt (he knew it, he fucking knew it, he knows this man inside and out, what heady fucking days) and crushes Ronan’s whole body to him with two hands gripping firm handfuls of his ass. Ronan is not wearing underwear. He is solid and strong, inescapably present, keeping Adam from floating away from himself completely. Ronan’s cock is a hard line sliding over Adam’s hip through basketball shorts. Adam’s hips jump forward too, automatic, falling into a familiar rhythm
“Adam.”
Adam’s fingers fly over his own shirt. He’s going to rip a button if he can’t get it off any faster. His coat is on the floor already.
“Fuck, Adam.” Ronan’s hands are over his. Yes, Ronan can help. Ronan can do this faster. Adam kisses him again, grateful. He feels Ronan’s groan through his own lips, hands gripping the sides of his face, tender but strong.
Ronan leans back to breathe, and Adam lunges forward teeth-first. Yes, fucking yes, Ronan’s throat bares itself, clean and smelling of him (the painting could never capture that, only Adam knows, only Adam will ever know). Adam can feel the shudder of a gasping breath under his lips. It only serves to urge him on, grinding his cock onto Ronan’s eagerly presented thigh. It’s some relief, but barely. Adam wants skin, now.
“Hey, hey,” Ronan’s grip has tightened, holding him in place. Something growls, pleased, in Adam’s chest at the show of strength, but Ronan doesn’t follow through.
“Baby, hey…” With effort, Adam hauls in a breath. From where his forehead is pressed to Ronan’s, he can’t see his face properly, but the quicksilver sliver of a grin is evident, as is the quiet puff of laughter.
“The key’s still in the fucking door,” Ronan is saying. “You’ll kill me later if I don’t bring it in.”
He pulls Adam back a little more. In the shadow of the front hall, the living room light edges him in gold. Ronan smiles, sly. “A little desperate today? The fuck’s gotten into you, huh?”
Adam wants to plead the fifth on the grounds of temporary insanity, but all he can do is shake his head, at the mercy of the moment. He knew this would happen, had made it a key part of his little fantasy, in fact, but it’s much more potent now in his own hallway. He can feel his cheeks flush, hot like fever.
Ronan doesn’t move right away. He pauses, one hand on the door behind Adam, one burning a brand into his chest. He narrows his eyes a little. Adam doesn’t know what exactly he’s looking for, but he sees the moment of understanding, glinting in Ronan’s gaze like polished metal.
“Okay,” Ronan whispers. “Okay.” He kisses him again, fast. He eases Adam’s blazer off his shoulders, rubbing his hands up and down Adam’s arms in his wake. “Just go in the bedroom if you’re so fucking determined to be naked, okay? Just get undressed, I’ll be there in a second.”
Adam rips at the laces of his shoes and leaves his shirt and pants where they drop in the hall. Each layer gone feels like flaying off a layer of skin, the exposed, raw parts of himself bared to the open air. By the time Adam reaches the bedroom door, the unfettered, wind-tossed pleasure has gripped him again. He sways a little in the doorway.
Ronan catches him before he can list too far, pulling Adam back into his chest – his warm, bare chest, thank God – and kissing a teasingly soft line up his neck. There’s a barely-there tremor in Ronan’s hands, an unevenness in his breath that Adam doesn’t understand. Ronan’s hand wraps light, too light, around Adam’s bared cock. Adam gasps, arching up hungrily for more.
“How do you want it, baby?” Ronan chases the question with a nip to Adam’s earlobe. “Huh? What do you want?”
Adam whines. “I –,” he shudders, grips Ronan’s forearm tightly where it’s pressed into his collarbone. “I can’t talk about it, I just – Ronan, come on.”
Ronan’s arm squeezes tight around him. He rewards Adam with a matching squeeze to his cock, a warm, tight ring to fuck himself into. Adam whines again, reedy and breathy to his own ears. His cock is weeping, slicking its own way.
“Oh my God. Fuck, you just need it so bad, huh?” Ronan kisses Adam’s shoulder, his jaw, drags searching lips over his cheek. “So fucking hot, God, I can’t fucking believe you right now.”
“I got you,” he says. “I got you. I’ll give you whatever you want, baby. You want me to fuck you?”
“Yes,” Adam moans. “Yes, fuck me. Ronan.”
Ronan is walking them towards the bed. “Okay, baby, okay. Just climb on up, I’ll take care of it.”
Adam crawls onto the mattress and Ronan follows a breath behind. He kisses the back of Adam’s hip and the small of his back, bites a small hickey into the meat of Adam’s flank. He’s fast and efficient when he wants to be, rubbing slick fingers to Adam’s hole. He apologizes for the cold and Adam can’t care, couldn’t even register the cold over the blinding heat of his own arousal.
Ronan is working patient, probing fingers into Adam’s ass and Adam is not patient, can only writhe in a desperate attempt to have them touch so deep inside him they’ll never come out again. His fists clench and unclench in the bedspread.
Ronan hauls him up, suddenly. Adam’s head lolls back against his shoulder, groans muffled into Ronan’s neck from behind clenched teeth. Ronan’s arm is an iron band around his chest, and as he touches Adam’s cock again Adam bucks, mindless.
“You gotta relax a little, baby. Let me make you come first, okay? Can you go twice?”
Adam can only moan and touch every place on Ronan he can reach. Ronan, to his credit, doesn’t ask followups, only strips Adam’s cock with single-minded focus, pushing Adam further and further with the steady, agonizing thrusts of his fingers. The thread of Adam’s pleasure tightens, builds, and snaps. He leans heavily back on Ronan’s chest as he comes, trembling. He knows, distantly, that Ronan is murmuring in his good ear, that it makes his gut squirm pleasantly.
Adam collapses forward onto his elbows, dropping his forehead to the bed as Ronan starts moving again. It feels indulgent, a rich, viscous flow of pleasure, but not satisfaction, not yet. His pulse rushes and races and suffuses him with warmth.
He floats on the feeling a while. Ronan’s hands are so good, so clever. They know him so well, know every way to make him melt from the inside. Adam closes his eyes and breathes and allows himself to enjoy this. This is good. This is already so good.
Ronan leans forward over Adam, lips to his ear. His cock, blood-hot and insistent, rubs purposefully between Adam’s cheeks, slicked by lube and sweat. Adam can feel the crucifix around Ronan’s neck drag light and smooth over the top of his spine. It’s been warmed by their combined body heat already.
“Do you want to do it like this?” Ronan asks. “Or do you want to turn around?”
And just like that, Adam’s body registers that what it really wants has yet to come, that it’s still being offered freely and wantonly and he can have this, yes, he can have Ronan’s cock inside him. Adam makes a sound he’s too far gone to properly register. His fingers are moving, scrabbling at the outside of Ronan’s thigh, at his ass, urging him forward. He can’t look at Ronan right now anyway. This is too much, already, for all that he wants more. Adam is suddenly, keenly grateful that Ronan chose this position, inertia slotting them together just the way Adam needs.
It’s overwhelming always, taking Ronan’s cock. There are reasons why Adam doesn’t do it often. He’s had to go slow before, take breaks or give up entirely, push through until it really starts to feel good. But Ronan’s inexorable push inside his body is pain relief, is absolution. There’s no air in the room and Adam can feel himself gasping for it.
“Okay?” Ronan is asking him questions again. Even the one word is too much for Adam to parse. He wants every millimeter of Ronan, wants to feel his cock in his fucking throat. Adam shoves back onto Ronan so hard it shocks a loud groan from his heaving lungs. Ronan’s hands spasm painfully into his hips. Adam has to do it again only once before Ronan takes over, draping himself bodily over Adam to drag him backwards, and then Adam is lost.
The feeling is rapturous, caged in by the strong bands of Ronan’s arms, being filled, being fucked, his greed rewarded with more of the same. Ronan’s hips cant forward, unyielding and absolutely fucking perfect. Adam is a furnace, a dying star, a molten core of throbbing need.
“Fuck,” Ronan bites the word into his shoulder. He keeps touching Adam, broad and proprietary, where they’re wet and connected, like he can’t help it. “You feel so fucking good, baby. So fucking good. Fucking shit. You’re going to make me come really fucking soon. You want me to come inside you?”
“Good,” Adam gasps. “More, Ronan, more.”
Ronan’s rhythm stutters, intensifies into thudding crashing thrusts. “Adam, fuck. Jesus fucking Christ.” His hand is back around Adam again and, oh, Adam is close too, he’s on the edge too–
The wave crests over his head and Adam rides it out, helpless and overcome. It’s too fucking good, it’s perfect, it’s everything. The moment stretches on and on, and when Ronan slows again Adam claws behind himself to keep him close, keep him fucking him just like this, don’t stop Ronan, you can’t stop, keep going, just keep going. Adam’s body knows what it wants and Adam trusts it implicitly in a way he never has before.
Adam is shaking hard, half-collapsed and sweating. Every breath is a ragged, scalding kind of sob that he knows, distantly, is embarrassing. He’s drooling onto the sheets and he doesn’t care. Adam is dissolving, sublimating into an ecstatic wreck at the sloppy, possessive way Ronan is fucking him. He can feel Ronan’s come making everything messier and it’s so easy, his cock slamming home with every beat of Adam’s heart.
Then Ronan urges the very tip of his finger in alongside his cock, and Adam is coming again, a searing, annihilating release. When it finally ebbs, Adam is a euphoric smear across the landscape of their bed. He’s trembling, still gasping those deep sobbing exhales that seem to catch on each of his ribs on the way out. He feels scraped clean from the inside. Each one of his cells is gilded with pleasure-pain and buzzing sharply. He feels so unimaginably good, the pulpy, grimy strands of each breath dragging with them something he didn’t know had been stuck. His mind is quiet.
He becomes aware, slowly, very slowly, that Ronan is kissing him. His lips press softly to his brow, his cheekbone, the corner of his mouth, the sweaty curling hair behind his ear, over and over, reminding Adam that his body exists, that it aches pleasantly, that Ronan has surrounded it with his own, curled in protectively.
“Baby,” Ronan murmurs into his temple. Another kiss, to the hollow of his eyelid. Adam breathes out again, coughs a little against the blockage in his throat, breathes easier the next time, and the one after that.
“That was fucking intense.” Ronan’s voice is still low and soothing. Adam likes it, how it keeps the moment soft, everything easy and warm. “Are you good?”
“Yeah,” Adam whispers. “I’m really good.”
He feels Ronan’s chuckle vibrate through his back. “Glad to hear it.” He’s quiet for another long minute, rubbing a gentle hand over Adam’s chest and side and placing more kisses where his face is tucked into the back of Adam’s neck. Their bodies begin to cool and slow, finding stillness again.
“You wanna talk now about what brought this on? Not that I’m complaining, that was extremely hot.”
With great effort, Adam rolls over in Ronan’s arms. Ronan’s eyes are so clear, so blue. The storm in them has calmed to a mild, gleaming sea, a welcoming horizon. Adam’s gaze traces over the well-loved, angular lines of his brow and nose and the languid curve of his mouth. Ronan’s heart beats steady under his hand. He is so, so beautiful, a Baroque statue of exquisite detail, carved to fit Adam’s palms perfectly.
“I can’t,” Adam says, finally. “Not yet. I don’t fully know what it is. I had a lot of thoughts about it today…” He trails off. The urgency of that initial stab of want is dissipated now, washed away by the lazy satisfaction of being naked in bed with Ronan with nowhere to go, but he remembers the sharpness of it. He remembers that it untethered something inside himself he doesn’t understand yet. He remembers the prick of fear, too, though it feels very, very far away now. That’s not what this moment is for. “Just…not yet.”
“Okay,” Ronan says. Generous, always so generous with Adam. Patient for all that he’s the opposite with everyone else. “There’s always later. We’ll figure it out.” Adam is sleepy and at peace and very in love with him.
Ronan drops a gentle kiss between Adam’s eyebrows. “Let’s get you some water and a shower,” he suggests. “Pasta’s made. Buffy after?”
Adam laughs. “Your Spike fixation should be studied. Should I start wearing a leather trench coat and bleach my hair?”
Ronan is already moving, gently bullying him out of bed and towards the bathroom. “His arc is very compelling, and you damn well know it.” This is a line of argument Adam knows well.
Ronan holds out a hand, helping Adam step over the lip of the tub on unsteady legs. Adam registers distantly that everything in the shower is wet already. Ronan must have showered before Adam got home. He’d probably even prepped himself and everything. But that’s not what Adam had needed him to be in the feverish scramble in front of the door, and he’d seen that and adapted, better than Adam had himself. Generous, always so generous.
As predicted, familiar exposition about the narrative freedom of 22-episode television seasons brews under the hot water. Adam lets the words wash over him with the spray. He lets his limbs brush Ronan’s skin in a dozen places, you’re here, I’m here, I know you.
He’s not sure what to do with the whole experience. Recreate it in some less-rabid way, hopefully, Jesus. Ronan was right, it was unmistakably hot, if a little freaky and hell on his productivity. He’s calling it a success because the hunger is gone for now, and he’s warm and safe and about to be clean with a belly full of pasta. He could still summon desire, he thinks, if pressed, the relief alone enough to make him want Ronan again, but he doesn’t need to. There would be time for that, just as there would be time to unpack and analyze and Adam Parrish Special the shit out of his own mental processes. But for now, Ronan had offered domesticity and the refuge of his love, and Adam would take it, let himself be taken care of for a little while longer.
Because Ronan was right again. There was always later. He’d have to instate a “no artnet at the office” policy, but there was always later.