He wasn’t wrong. But he had been a rather more brittle version of himself back when they’d first made the decision to not tell him. Saying this out loud felt rather unsporting, though, so she just tried, “You – things – were different then.”
“ ‘Then’? How long has it been going on?”
“Going on isn’t exactly what is happening,” Blue said. A relationship that was squeezed into stolen glances and secret phone calls was so drastically less than what she wanted that she refused to consider it dating. “And it’s not exactly like starting a new job. ‘The start date was x!’ I can’t tell you precisely how long it’s been going on.”
“You just said ‘going on,’ ” Adam said.
Blue’s mental state surfed the crest of a wave that divided empathy and frustration. “Don’t be impossible. I’m sorry. It wasn’t supposed to be something, and then it was, and then I didn’t know how to say anything. I didn’t want to risk messing up our friendship.”
“So even though I might have been decent about it, some part of you thought I’d be so shittily in constant competition with Gansey that you figured it was better to just lie?”
“I didn’t lie.”
“Sure, Ronan. Lying by omission is still lying,” Adam said. He was sort of half-smiling, but in that way people did when they were annoyed rather than when anything was funny.
Outside, a couple paused by the door to read the menu attached to it; both Blue and Adam waited in irritated silence until they moved on, leaving the restaurant empty. Adam opened his hands as if he expected her to tip a satisfactory explanation into them.
The fair part of Blue was well aware that she was in the wrong and so it was her job to defuse his legitimate hurt, but the prideful part of her still would’ve preferred to point out how difficult he had been back when she and Gansey had first realized they had feelings for each other. With some effort, she went with a middle ground. “It wasn’t as calculated as you make it sound like it was.”
Adam rejected the middle ground. “But I saw you guys trying to hide it. The crazy thing is – like, I’m right here. I’m with you guys every day. Do you think I didn’t see it? He’s my best friend. You think I don’t know him?”
“Then why aren’t you having this conversation with him? He’s half of this, you know.”
He spread his hands out at the still-empty restaurant, as if he, too, was amazed by the turn this conversation had taken. “Because I was here to talk to you about how to save him from dying. Then I found out you guys were going to a party together, and I couldn’t believe how irresponsible you were being.”
Now Blue also spread her hands. It was a rather less elegant gesture than Adam’s, more like a fist clench in reverse. “Irresponsible? Excuse me?”
“Does he know about your curse?”
Her cheeks felt hot. “Oh, don’t.”
“You don’t think it’s a little relevant that the guy who is supposed to die in the next year is dating the girl who’s supposed to kill her true love with a kiss?”
She was too angry to do anything but shake her head. He merely raised an eyebrow in reply, an action that warmed the temperature of Blue’s blood by a single degree.
She snapped, “I can control myself, thanks.”
“In any circumstance? You’re not gonna fall on him, or get tricked into it, or magic’s not gonna go wrong in Cabeswater – can you guarantee? I don’t think you can.”
Now she’d definitely tipped over the crest of the wave into boiling anger. “You know what, I’ve been living with this a heck of a lot longer than you have, and I don’t really think you can come in here and tell me how to deal with it —”
“I can when it’s my best friend.”
“He’s mine as well!”
“If he really was, you wouldn’t be so damn selfish.”
“If he really was yours, you’d be happy he had someone.”
“How could I have been happy about it when I wasn’t supposed to know about it?”
Blue stood up. “It’s amazing, really, how this seems to be about you instead of him.”
Adam stood up, too. “Funny, because I was about to say the same thing.”
They faced each other, both furious. Blue could feel poisonous words bubbling up in a dark queue like the sap from that tree. She wasn’t going to say them. She wasn’t. Adam’s mouth went very thin, like he was about to retort something, but in the end, he just swiped his keys from the table and walked out of the restaurant.
Outside, thunder growled. There was no sign of the sun; the wind had dragged the clouds across the entire sky. It was going to be a wild night.
Many years before this afternoon, a psychic had told Maura Sargent that she was “a judgemental but gifted clairvoyant with a talent for bad decision-making.” The two of them had been standing by the side of an I-64 exit ramp about twenty miles outside of Charleston, West Virginia. Both had bags on their backs and their thumbs out. Maura had hitchhiked from points further west. The other psychic had hitchhiked from points south. They did not know each other. Yet.