If you kiss your true love, he’ll die.
Yes, he knew. He also knew why Adam was asking, and he could feel the temptation to bluster and joke his way out of it, because it was strangely embarrassing to be talking about him and Blue. Blue and him. He had been transformed into a middle schooler again. But this was a night for truth, and Adam’s voice was serious, so he said, “I do.”
“Do you think it applies to you?” Adam asked.
Carefully, Gansey replied, “I think so.”
Adam glanced to see that Ronan and Blue were still safely in the kitchen; they were. “What about you?”
“What about me?”
“The curse says you’re her true love. What about you? Do you love her?” Adam pronounced love very carefully, as if it were an unfamiliar element on the periodic table. Gansey was prepared to deflect this answer, but a glance at Adam told him both that his friend was quite invested in the answer and that the question was probably really about something else entirely.
“Yes,” Gansey answered plainly.
Now Adam turned to him, intense. “What does that mean? How did you know it was different than just being her friend?”
Now it was really obvious that Adam was thinking about something else entirely, and so Gansey wasn’t sure how to answer. It reminded him in a flash of being in the hole with Henry earlier that day, when Henry hadn’t needed anything from him but for Gansey to listen. This was not that. Adam needed something. So he tried to find a way to articulate it. “I suppose … she makes me quiet. Like Henrietta.” He had told Adam this once before; about how the moment he had found the town, something inside him had gone still – something he hadn’t even realized was always agitating inside him. Adam hadn’t understood, but then again, Henrietta had always meant something different to him.
“And that’s it? It’s that simple?”
“I don’t know, Adam! You’re asking me to define an abstract concept that no one has managed to explain since time began. You sort of sprang it on me,” Gansey said. “Why do we breathe air? Because we love air? Because we don’t want to suffocate. Why do we eat? Because we don’t want to starve. How do I know I love her? Because I can sleep after I talk to her. Why?”
“Nothing,” said Adam, a lie so outrageous that they both looked out into the yard again in silence. He tapped the fingers of one hand on the palm of his other.
Ordinarily, Gansey would have given him room to roam; it was always dubiously productive to bully either Adam or Ronan into talking before they were ready. But in this case, it was late, and Gansey didn’t have months to wait for Adam to come round to the topic of discussion. He said, “I thought this was a night for truth.”
“Ronan kissed me,” Adam said immediately. The words had clearly been queued up. He gazed studiously into the front yard. When Gansey didn’t immediately say anything, Adam added, “I also kissed him.”
“Jesus,” Gansey said. “Christ.”
“Are you surprised?”
He was chiefly surprised Adam had told him. It had taken Gansey several furtive months of dating Blue before he’d been able to bring himself to tell the others, and then, only under extreme circumstances. “No. Yes. I don’t know. I’ve been given about one thousand surprises today and so I can’t tell any more. Were you surprised?”
“No. Yes. I don’t know.”
Now that Gansey had had more than a second to think about it, he considered all the ways such a thing might have played out. He imagined Adam, ever the scientist. Ronan, ferocious and loyal and fragile. “Don’t break him, Adam.”
Adam continued peering out the window. The only tell to the furious working of his mind was the slow twisting together of his fingers. “I’m not an idiot, Gansey.”
“I’m serious.” Now Gansey’s imagination had run ahead to imagine a future where Ronan might have to exist without him, without Declan, without Matthew, and with a freshly broken heart. “He’s not as tough as he seems.”
“I’m not an idiot, Gansey.”
Gansey didn’t think Adam was an idiot. But he had had his own feelings hurt over and over by Adam, even when Adam had meant no harm. Some of the worst fractures had appeared because Adam hadn’t realized that he was causing them.
“I think you’re the opposite of an idiot,” Gansey said. “I don’t mean to imply otherwise. I just meant …”
Everything Ronan had ever said about Adam restructured itself in Gansey’s mind. What a strange constellation they all were.
“I’m not going to mess with his head. Why do you think I’m talking to you? I don’t even know how I …” Adam trailed off. It was a night for truth, but they both had run out of things they were sure about.