Archive of Our Own ^beta

Chapter Text

Conrad. 25. 6’2”. Boston. Resident Physician. Stanford University. Figuring out my dating goals.

It’s stupid, but when she’s unexpectedly confronted with Conrad Fisher’s Hinge profile, Belly’s first thought is: since when is Conrad six-two?

Her second thought is: holy fuck holy fuck holy fuck.

Not exactly articulate, but it’s midnight on a Saturday and Belly is very much not sober. It’s the only circumstance in which she ever finds herself scrolling on this god-forsaken dating app—alone, drunk, back from a long night watching her best friend and her brother happily in love through yet another weekend bar crawl.

It shouldn’t even be that surprising.

Steven told her a couple weeks ago that Conrad moved back to Boston this summer. He started some fancy residency at some fancy Harvard-affiliated hospital that Belly can’t remember the name of in this exact moment. Surgery, apparently. That makes sense, she thinks.

He’s always been good with his hands, drunk-Belly reminds herself, tilting her head to look closer at his profile picture—the width of his fingers coiled around a surfboard, the veins drawn over the back of his palm, that familiar crooked smile.

Her third thought is: Was Conrad always this hot?

The truth is that of course Conrad was always this hot. It was the axiom of Belly’s life. As simple—or, well, not—as those math theories he used to tell her on the phone all those years ago, up late talking about her trigonometry homework. There is at least one infinite set of all natural numbers, and Conrad Fisher is mind-bogglingly attractive.

But it’s easy to forget that kind of thing if you jump on a plane to Europe and pretend Conrad Fisher doesn’t exist.

It’s been almost three years since Belly last saw him, sitting at Logan Airport on the night of her not-wedding. He has an Instagram he never uses—Belly’s checked, sometimes, during her weaker moments—and even though he’s seen her mom and Steven plenty over the years, they’ve had the good sense not to share photos with Belly.

He looks basically the same, she finally decides. Just older. Broader.

Ugh.

So yeah, it shouldn’t be that surprising to see him on Hinge; Conrad lives in the same city, well within that five-mile radius she selected in her dating app settings.

(He’s specifically in Beacon Hill, Belly discovered last Tuesday. Steven let it slip that they were meeting for drinks near Conrad’s apartment and Belly set a reminder to check her brother’s location on Find My Friends later. Sue her).

But conceptually knowing that someone is walking and breathing in the same Metropolitan Statistical Area is different than, like, stumbling across your childhood-friend-turned-ex-boyfriend-turned-almost-brother-in-law while you’re wasted in your shitty apartment doomscrolling on Hinge.

So forgive Belly for the strangled yelp she lets out when she first sees him.

It would probably be loud enough to wake the neighbors, if it weren’t for that old jazz record she had some foresight to play when she got home.

Her fourth thought? Conrad is still single.

It probably should’ve been her first thought, since he’s right here on an app made for single people to meet other single people.

It’s just that Belly has spent three years actively avoiding any thoughts combining Conrad Fisher and love or relationships. At first, because she was petrified at the idea of reaching back out to him—the can of worms it would open, the infatuation rabbit hole she would immediately tumble into, the terrifying risk of heartbreak. Later, because she was certain she’d waited too long and missed her chance—and the idea of Conrad, happy with someone else, was stomach-churning in its own new, heartbreaking way.

It’s a full five minutes of idling and staring before Belly realizes that she’s at a crossroads.

To like or not to like?

Would it be weird if she didn’t like his profile? If she’s seeing his profile, she reasons, then surely he’s seeing hers. What if he liked her profile, and then she looked like a bitch for pretending not to see him?

But would it be weird if she did like his profile? What if he thought she was liking his profile ironically? What if he thought she wasn’t?

She considers calling Taylor. She considers throwing her phone out the window. She considers tracking down her laptop and doing a deep-dive into the operation of the Hinge algorithm, so she can decide whether this chance-meeting-by-app was a matter of fate, circumstance, or mathematics.

But before Belly can make any kind of decision, her phone lights up with an incoming call.

Spam Likely.

At midnight? Belly groans. When she swiftly hits the reject button, she reopens her phone to find the app has refreshed.

And just like that, Conrad Fisher’s Hinge profile is gone. Evaporated into the ether.

* * *

Belly scrolls through Hinge like it’s her full-time job.

(She does have one of those—in the sports counseling center at Boston College. It’s just not nearly as captivating or all-consuming as her mission to rediscover Conrad Fisher’s Hinge profile).

It’s stupid, because Belly could just call him. She has his phone number, the same one he’s used since Susannah and Adam bought him an iPhone when he was twelve, sitting right there in her contact list. It would take ten seconds—less, probably—to scroll to the letter C and click his name, between Celine and Corinne (intro psych TA).

And a few times, she does think about calling him.

Like when she’s sitting in traffic on the drive home from work, shuffling her liked songs on Spotify, and High and Dry by Radiohead comes on. Or when she’s cooking herself dinner and reaches into her pantry for a bag of quinoa (which she’s gradually come to appreciate over the years, not that she’d ever admit that to Conrad).

But calling him would be different than letting fate, or the algorithm, or whatever—anything but her—decide. Calling him would be actively inviting him into her life again. Calling him would be scooping her heart onto a cutting board and handing him a paring knife.

So Belly scrolls.

She scrolls at red lights when she’s on her way to work, in line to get coffee on campus, standing at her bathroom sink brushing her teeth, curled on the couch half-watching Some Like it Hot for the millionth time, and perched next to Taylor drinking an espresso martini at a bar near her and Steven’s place.

“Okay, if you’re gonna sit here on a dating app all night, you at least have to let me participate.” Taylor is peering over Belly’s shoulder from the barstool next to her, characteristically rapt in analyzing Belly’s love life. “Ooh, who is that sexy—Wait, B. Go back. I liked him.”

Belly sighs a little too loudly and clicks the lock button on her phone.

“Babe, I just watched you scroll past like, five hot ass guys with master’s degrees,” Taylor snorts out a laugh, joyfully tipsy. “You can’t actually be sighing like that right now.”

Belly takes a long sip of her drink and contemplates whether she’s reached the point of obsession where telling Taylor would no longer be her worst option.

Her best friend pauses, idly tapping her fingers on the soapstone bar top and studying Belly for a moment.

“And since when do you use Hinge, anyway? I thought you were like, on your self-love, independent city girl, staying single journey.”

That’s not exactly what Belly would have called it, but Taylor is not wrong. Historically, Belly has only been interested in dating apps when she’s drunk or lonely or, more often, both. And for a while, she really was enjoying some time decentering men from her life.

“I don’t even. Like, not really.” Belly says, flipping her phone over so it’s face down. For emphasis, or whatever. “Just a bored habit.”

Taylor doesn’t look convinced. But instead of pushing it, she takes another sip of her own martini and reaches over to fix a piece of Belly’s hair, evidently gone rogue from her slicked-back bun.

“Well, when you do want to start dating in Boston,” Taylor declares, “I have like three guys I can introduce you to. No boring apps necessary. I promise they’re all, like, superhot.”

Belly is sure they are.

The main problem is that now, Belly doesn’t want anyone other than Conrad.

It’s always been like that with him; Belly can almost keep him out of sight and out of mind (not completely, never completely; just enough to stay sane, which counts for something). But the second he reminds her that he exists—crashing her date at the drive in, showing up in Cousins for Christmas, appearing in her Hinge feed—it’s like she becomes a woman possessed.

What was it her mom and Susannah used to say? “For Belly, Conrad is the sun.” And when the sun comes out…

* * *

Lately, Belly’s been imagining what that moment would’ve been like if Conrad Fisher were a stranger.

Drunk, idly scrolling, listening to Nina Simone in her dimly lit living room. She’d be examining a few pictures of Alex, a twenty-five-year-old engineer with a nose ring, before flicking to the next profile and encountering him:

Conrad. 25. 6’2”. Boston. Resident Physician. Stanford University. Figuring out my dating goals.

Would she still have been as endeared by him, at the finish line of a marathon in San Francisco, all sweaty forearms and crooked grin and rosy cheeks? Would she still have been as attracted to him, standing on the dock at the summerhouse during golden hour? Would she still have thought, Oh, right, I love you, as naturally as she noticed the way his sweater brought out the green in his eyes?

Belly has always wondered that, a little bit—what it would be like to perceive Conrad for the first time. It’s one of the more annoying parts about having always known him; she never got to experience meeting him.

Her mom and Susannah always used to tell stories about when her mom was pregnant with Belly. Conrad, still just eighteen months at the time, was the only one of the boys old enough to even sort of grasp the concept.

“Connie was obsessed with Laurel’s bump that summer,” Susannah used to laugh. “All June, he followed her around asking to say hi to baby Isabel. He could never pronounce her whole name; he was still so young. And remember, Laur? He’d put his ear right up against your belly like she might say hi back.” Conrad always rolled his eyes and blushed, especially once the moms started bringing out the pictures of him with his toy stethoscope.

But the reality is that simple: Conrad has known Belly her entire life, and Belly has never not known Conrad.

What would she say, to a Conrad who is a stranger to her?

What would it be like, to message him on the app and set up a date and meet him for drinks or dinner on a Friday night?

(And this, this is about where Belly’s imagining starts moving into dangerous territory).

What would it be like to fall in love with him, all over again? Would they have a picture-perfect courtship—picnics in Boston Common, candlelit home-cooked meals, road trips to the beach—or would it start more low-key? How much of Belly and Conrad’s connection was built on their shared history, a lifetime of casual intimacy, and how much was just innate?

In a parallel universe, one where Conrad was a stranger, would he still be the sun?

And what would it be like to kiss him for the first time all over again? To fuck him?

* * *

Belly dreams about it.

Usually, the images are just little vignettes she can barely remember in the morning: flashes of his toothy smile, his hand engulfing hers during a walk along the Charles at sunset, his fingers gripped around the steering wheel of his Range Rover, his lips pressed to a bottle of Sam Adams in the dive bar on her block.

But one night—a rainy Sunday where she falls asleep early on her couch, before it’s even completely dark out—he appears in her kitchen. It’s a sight she’s never allowed herself to consciously picture.

(And maybe she was right for that, because it’s as devastating in her dreams as she expected it would be).

Conrad is wearing a black polo tucked into khaki slacks, hunched over her range, with one of her tea towels tossed over his left shoulder. Belly can see the flex of his biceps as he works and the gentle shake of his shoulders. She can hear his soft laughter bouncing against the tile as she tells him a story from her seat at her kitchen island.

In her dream, it’s not clear whether it’s daytime or nighttime. And unconscious-Belly was not bothered with imagining the occasion that brought him here, or even what it is he could be cooking.

In her dream, she hasn’t kissed him before. This is their second date, maybe.

Isn’t that funny, the way the subconscious invents pieces of innately accepted context and ignores all the rest?

“Hey, how do you use your broiler?” Conrad asks over his shoulder at one point, and when their eyes meet Belly scrunches her nose. Then Conrad gifts Belly with her favorite Conrad smile—the wide, unselfconscious one where she can just see the tips of his canines. “Not a big chef, huh?”

“Shut up. Sorry I’m not making meals that use the broiler,” Belly says, and he laughs in that wheezy way he used to when they were teenagers. When he turns back to examining the buttons on her stove, Belly slides off the stool and crosses the kitchen to hug herself to his back.

The most frustrating part is that in her dream, she can’t quite conjure up what he smells like. Historically it was all cedar and salt and soap and boy, most intense at the nape of his neck or the spot where his throat met his collarbone. In her dream, Belly can’t smell him.

But she can feel the leap of his skin under her lips when she trails them down his neck. She can feel the heat of his shoulder through his shirt when her nose skims against the fabric of his polo. She can feel his shoulders shake in quiet laughter and the width of his palm over her forearm on his stomach, squeezing gently to hold her against him even as he mutters, “Isabel,” like some kind of warning.

Oh, yeah. In her dream, he calls her Isabel. In her dream, she’s Hinge Belly:

Isabel. 24. 5’6”. Boston. Athletic Counselor. Finch College. Short-term relationship, open to long.

Dream Conrad tugs the tea towel from his shoulder to toss it on the counter, and then he turns in her arms. Dream Conrad ignores the fact that the pasta or chicken or curry or whatever is halfway cooked on her stove is going to burn if they get distracted. Dream Conrad just drops his wrists on Dream Belly’s shoulders and cups her jaw in his hands, the way he always used to. His thumb rests softly on her cheek.

Conrad is looking at her with that focused expression, the one where his forehead creases between his brows and his lips part and curl a little downward. Belly feels her fingers wrapping around his forearms and her thumb stroking over his wrist. She feels the heat of his breath on her lips.

Belly glances down at Conrad’s open mouth and looks up at him from under her eyelashes. She nods, just the tiniest bit, and then he’s leaning down and covering her mouth with his.

This, too, Belly can feel with overwhelming clarity. It feels almost too real.

Conrad’s lips, soft and a little bit cool from the white wine they’ve been drinking. Conrad’s tongue curled inside her upper lip. Conrad’s hand light on her jaw, and then against her throat, and then curved tightly around her waist. Conrad’s soft little grunts as he backs Belly into the counter behind her. Conrad’s thigh settling between her slightly spread legs, and the unmistakable heat of him, hard against her stomach.

Belly wakes up to a crack of thunder outside her window. Her throat is dry, and she has a pounding headache.

She reaches for her phone on the coffee table.

* * *

Despite almost two weeks to formulate a game plan, when Belly does find Conrad’s Hinge profile again, she still doesn’t know what to do.

She’s sitting in her office on a Friday morning, killing time before her eleven-thirty appointment and snacking idly on unsalted popcorn that she doesn’t even want to eat. When she opens the app, his is the first face she sees: that same photo of him in a wetsuit, gripping a blue surfboard, his hair dripping wet.

Conrad. 25. 6’2”. Boston. Resident Physician. Stanford University. Figuring out my dating goals.

Probably, if this happened within those first few days, Belly would’ve stared at the profile for another twenty minutes and then closed the app without doing anything.

But it’s been thirteen days of eating, sleeping, and breathing Conrad Fisher. It’s been thirteen days of thinking about his eyes and the way he wheezes a little when he laughs too hard and the crumple of his face when he told her I don’t think I’ll ever get you out of my system and his hands, so big one can span almost her entire lower back.

If she doesn’t do something, she’s going to do this for another thirteen days.

God, who is she kidding? She’s going to do this for another thirteen months.

So Belly likes his first photo, and then she taps out a message: I’ve always liked you with wet hair.

She sends it before she can think twice about it. And then she wants a sinkhole to open beneath her and yank her away from the wave of embarrassment that rolls over her like the summer tide. Holy fuck holy fuck holy fuck.

But her eleven-thirty is already knocking on the door, and it’s too late to change anything, anyway.

* * *

It figures Conrad wouldn’t even respond.

For the first three days, Belly gives him the benefit of the doubt. He’s a surgical intern at Harvard-or-wherever, he probably works insane hours, he’s never been a social media guy, etcetera.

After a few days with no word, she’s back to feeling overwhelming embarrassment. Either he didn’t match with her (awkward), or he did match with her and he’s intentionally ignoring her (devastating). She’s embarrassed that she spent two weeks wondering what to say to him when it clearly didn’t matter anyway. She’s embarrassed that she still thinks about him so overwhelmingly often when he clearly does not think about her at all anymore.

Heart laid bare on a cutting board, now expertly julienned. Just as she feared. Or maybe it would be more apt to use a surgery metaphor, she thinks idly.

And then, after a week, Belly is bitter.

What happened to I love you; I’ll never not love you? What happened to I see you again and all my plans go to shit? Why is Conrad even on Hinge if he’s not going to use it to talk to her? And if he’s not talking to her, who is he talking to?

So now it’s been eight days, and Belly is back to crashing out about Conrad Fisher having sex. With her, with that girl he briefly dated in college (Agnes. Belly would pretend not to remember her name, but of course she does), with anyone.

Because that must be why he’s on the app, she realizes. He’s a surgical intern, he just moved back to Boston a month ago, he can’t possibly have time to date, but he must still have time to fuck. It’s probably easy for him, too; the tall-handsome-surgeon thing must be more than sufficient to attract willing participants.

She wonders if he still fucks the same.

It’s been so many years now, but Belly remembers. How could she forget?

First, that he was so attentive. The way he would look up at her from under his eyelashes, examining every hitch in her breath or flutter of her eyelids—he always liked to take things apart and see how they worked, and Belly’s body quickly became his favorite specimen. And God, Conrad Fisher has always been such an overachiever, hasn’t he? After just three months, he knew exactly how to make her come so fast it should’ve been mortifying: a thumb on her clit and a little pressure on her lower stomach, just enough to feel himself rutting inside her; a steady and relentless pace, so deep it was just on the border of painful; his tongue or, god forbid, his teeth on that spot right beneath her ear.

(It was never mortifying. Nothing intimate was mortifying when it was with Conrad).

He was always vocal, too. Little grunts, breathless laughs, dirty whimpers into her mouth when he felt her pulsing around him. The sounds she could draw out of him with her hand tugging at his hair or her tongue dragging along his neck just right… it made her feel implausibly powerful.

But her favorite was when Conrad talked to her. He couldn’t do it very often; Belly’s mother would die before she let her teenage daughter go visit her boyfriend at his college dorm, so they were usually relegated to discreet liaisons in his car outside her house or hiding away somewhere while both their families were downstairs. But when he could, Conrad loved to run his mouth with his lips hovering beside her ear or against the skin of her throat. Belly always came the hardest when he was babbling about how perfect she was, how good she felt, how fucking hot it was to watch her come, and would she please, baby, please come again?

And his hands. Belly thinks about Conrad’s hands more than she would ever admit, even to herself. Wide but nimble, calloused but gentle. His palm cupped over the curve of her breast, his fingers hooked inside her while his lips were wrapped around her clit, his thumb in her mouth to press down on her tongue while he fucked her, his grip digging into her inner thigh to keep her spread open for him. Seven years later, and still, no one has ever touched her like he did.

He's probably even better now, impossible as that would’ve seemed back then. He’s probably louder, more confident. His hands are probably even bigger.

If she wasn’t so overwhelmingly horny, Belly might actually feel nauseous at the idea of Conrad Fisher fucking someone else.

But after ten days, after she’s run through all the stages of grief or whatever, that’s where she’s left: overwhelmingly horny.

She pictures him in a dimly lit bar in the North End, staring at some faceless girl he met on Hinge with those dark sea-glass eyes and that crooked Conrad smirk. She imagines him flirting—like he used to when they were young (“What’ll you give me if I do?”), but infinitely smoother now. She wonders if they’ll go back to his apartment (simple, clean, boring but in the endearing-because-it’s-Conrad way) and he’ll fuck her from behind, or if the faceless girl will give him a blowjob in the bathroom first (Belly would, hypothetically).

(In all their four-ish months of fucking, Belly never gave Conrad a blowjob. Kind of insane, in retrospect, considering she’d been worshipping at the altar of Conrad Fisher for as long as she could remember. At first, it was because she was nervous, and new to everything, and Conrad refused to let her take the lead on anything, ever—sometimes, at first, it seemed like he was even more nervous than she was. Later, it became abundantly obvious that Conrad got more satisfaction out of going down on her than he’d ever get out of Belly going down on him. Still, never getting to feel the weight of him, hard inside her cheek, is one of her bigger regrets).

Conrad would fuck her, if Belly was just a stranger who liked his profile and asked him over to her apartment in Brookline to have drinks and "hang out." She’s pretty certain of it.

Back when they were together, there was so much about Conrad's inner life that Belly was unsure about: did he feel even a fraction of what she felt for him? What was she doing wrong that meant she could never quite get him to open up? Sometimes it wasn’t even clear to Belly that Conrad wanted to be with her.

But one thing Belly was always sure about when they were together was that Conrad was attracted to her. She still remembers the first time she realized it—that Conrad Fisher thought she was hot.

It was Belly's sixteenth birthday, and she was at a dimly lit house party in Cousins wearing that flower crown Susannah bought for her birthday dinner. Belly was gathered with all the deb girls next to a table piled high with tiered cakes and cupcakes (a “Sofia Coppola moment,” Nicole had called it), and they were chatting idly about boys and the ball. Belly had just blown out her birthday candles, and when she glanced over Nicole's shoulder, there was Conrad. He was down the hall from where she was, standing with a few guys she'd never met. 

Even then, there was a mystical sort of magnetism. For so long, Belly wrote it off as a figment of her imagination—Conrad seemed like he was looking at her like that because she wanted Conrad to look at her like that. Surely he wasn't actually looking at her like that, right?

On that night, though, he obviously was. Looking at her like that. It was so undeniable that even sixteen-year-old Belly couldn't deny it.

Conrad was in the middle of pulling a sip of beer from the bottle clutched in his hand, and his hair was halfway covering his face. Their eyes locked on each other's from across the crowded party and her ears immediately filled with static. When Conrad lowered the bottle from his lips, his gaze stayed locked on Belly's. The look he gave her was almost wounded, his eyes gone impossibly dark and his throat visibly bobbing around a swallow. His lips quirked up, almost imperceptibly. And then, in just a blink, he was turning on his heel to disappear into another room.

It was the first time in her life she felt desired like that. It was the briefest of moments. Eight years later, she can run it back in her head perfectly.

* * *

Two weeks after Belly sent Conrad a message on Hinge, he calls her.

She’s sitting on the T, on her way to meet Steven and Taylor at a dinner reservation in Back Bay. The train is above ground as it whizzes toward the city, and Belly is watching the sun sink lower in the sky outside.

It’s still strange, to be in Massachusetts in the summertime but not at the summerhouse. The last time she was in Cousins was almost exactly three years ago, that damp August evening with her wedding dress stuffed in her backpack.

Belly and Jeremiah are mostly good now—he invited her to his birthday party last September, when she first moved back from Paris, and he and Denise are semi-regular guests at Steven and Taylor’s barbecues—but not that good. Not invite-Belly-back-to-the-house-where-she-called-off-their-wedding good.

She misses it, though. In a nostalgic sort of way. Belly misses the windows flung open, the salty breeze off the sea, their dripping wet swimsuits and dripping wet hair, the barbecue smoke that made her eyes water, their popsicle-stained lips. She misses Susannah. She misses the boys—Steven and Jere and Conrad—getting into trouble together. She even misses those stupid Belly flops.

But she’s accepted it, too. Belly knew the moment she left the house three years ago that she would likely never go back, and she had to learn to be okay with that. Still, it’s bizarre to look out on an August night in Massachusetts and not see the dock at the summerhouse, the backyard glowing with fairy lights in the twilight.

She’s halfway to dinner when her phone lights up with Conrad Fisher’s name.

For a second, Belly thinks about not answering it. She sort of thinks it would serve him right, after all the misery he’s unwittingly put her through these last few weeks. She also knows, deep in her bones, that she has no right to feel that way.

And, okay, she's also unbearably curious. 

Belly answers on the second ring.

“Hi.”

For an awkward beat, Belly is left with just the sound of her own breathing.

And then, “Yeah. Hi.”

He’s annoyed. It’s sort of stating the obvious, given the tightness in his voice and the way it’s an octave higher than usual. But then she thinks: he’s annoyed? She’s been going out of her mind—like, nonstop rumination, googling nearby hypnotherapists, masturbating twice a day, out of her mind—for weeks, and he’s annoyed?

“Were you just…” it’s Conrad again, interrupting himself with an audible swallow. “Were you just never gonna call, Belly? After…”

Oh.

Conrad laughs, somewhere between awkward and amused. Maybe even a little angry? “I mean, you don’t reach out for three years, and then you just… Send me this flirty little message on Hinge?”

“So you did get it.” Belly hears herself say, even though it’s definitely not the right thing to say.

But Conrad chuckles against the speaker. She wishes she could see his face so she could decode whether the chuckle is sardonic or endeared. Knowing Conrad, it's probably a bit of both.

“Yes, Belly, I got it,” he confirms, and then he sighs a little bit. The train is creaking on the tracks as it bends around a curve, windows rattling a bit in their old frames. “What the fuck was I supposed to say?” He's quiet, a little vulnerable even.

Belly wonders if he can hear her swallowing around the sudden dryness in her throat. Probably.

“Hi would’ve been nice.” She eventually squeaks. But now that she’s sitting here thinking about it, she can sort of see his point. If she woke up one morning to a brief, flirty Hinge message from Conrad Fisher, she might have gone even more out of her mind. If that's possible.

“Well… Hi.” Conrad says, flatly.

“Hey!” Belly returns, jokingly cheerful, and that manages to draw a short laugh from him. She hates that she can’t tell if he’s still annoyed with her. She hates that she can’t tell what he wants, or why he called. “Um… how are you?” She tries after a second. “I heard you’re back in Boston.”

“Yeah? How’d you know?” Conrad jokes, and Belly feels her face flush. She hears him click his tongue against the roof of his mouth. “No, um... I’m good. I'm busy. But it’s good to be back.”

“How’s your—”

“How're—”

They both start to talk at the same time, and now Belly must be visibly blushing. It’s like she’s sixteen again, sitting in her childhood bedroom on the phone, tongue-tied and self-conscious because the Conrad Fisher is on the line.

When Conrad doesn’t speak, she tries again. “How’s residency so far? Surgery, right?”

She half expects him to make another joke about his Hinge profile, but Conrad just hums.

“I’m kind of just fucking up blood draws and sleeping on really uncomfortable chairs these days,” he offers, and Belly can hear the ironic smile in his voice. She wonders where he is now—if he’s at the hospital, or in that clean and charmingly boring apartment, or on his way out to drinks with friends or coworkers or a date. “How are—” Conrad starts to ask, but then the train is coasting into the denser part of the city and dipping underground.

“Shit, I’m—” She starts, but she can’t finish her sentence before her phone is beeping against her ear.

Call Failed.

“Gonna lose you.” Belly adds quietly, to no one now but the elderly couple sitting across from her on the Green Line.

Over three weeks of nonstop thinking about Conrad Fisher after three years of silence, and it’s only forty seconds into their call before Belly had to lose service. It must be some kind of cruel metaphor bestowed upon her by the universe, she thinks. Or penance for all the ways she’s wronged him in the last seven years. It’s fair, a part of her thinks. Maybe it’s right that she suffers a little for Conrad Fisher again.

At the next station, Belly rattles out a quick text to Conrad. It’s a new experience, opening their text chain for a reason besides rereading their old messages.

(Belly has them all memorized, anyway. The most recent one is from years ago, the afternoon before her bachelorette party. Conrad had texted her, I picked up more ice for tomorrow. It’s in the freezer in the garage. Belly had just liked it—not even a heart).

lost service on the T :(, is what she texts him today.

And then, after a second, she sends another.

talk soon??

Belly stares at her phone, their text chain sitting open, until she sees the little typing bubbles appear. Conrad’s message comes through just as the train is about to pull out of the station again.

Sure. Have a nice night, Belly.

* * *

Belly is a bad dinner date.

That’s what she keeps thinking all night, as Steven and Taylor bicker and laugh and chatter and Belly mostly stares idly at them, slugging pinot grigio and trying not to ruminate on Conrad Fisher’s voice in her ear two—or has it been three, now?—hours ago.

Funny, she thought it would make her feel less insane to finally hear from him.

Belly’s mostly just been thinking about what Conrad said: “What the fuck was I supposed to say?”

And what a question, right? Ironically, she hadn’t really considered it until he asked. What did she want him to say to her?

Was she hoping he would flirt back? (well, yes). Was she hoping he would like one of her pictures and send her an equally “flirty little message on Hinge?” (kind of, yeah. She even swapped out some of her photos after she saw his profile the first time—she might have included one of her in the sweater she was wearing when he fucked her in his car on Valentine’s Day, even though the picture was from four years ago). Was she hoping he would turn up at her doorstep with a Love-Actually-style cue card love confession? (no no no, too much too quickly. And probably unnecessary anyway, after the last time she saw him). Was she hoping he would ask her out for drinks, like she was just another casual Hinge hookup who would give him a bar bathroom blowjob?

Ding ding ding.

Is that insane? Probably, Belly thinks around another long sip of wine. But she’s endlessly intrigued by the thought.

“Hello? Earth to Belly?” It’s Steven’s voice across the table, wearing his typical perplexed-and-exasperated-older-brother expression. “You need to try this scallop crudo before I eat it all, and you have maybe thirty seconds and counting at this point.”

“I don’t even like scallops,” Belly scowls automatically, the way she always does when they get into their recreational squabbling, and Steven scoffs.

“You haven’t even tried them since—”

“Since I threw up on my thirteenth birthday? That’s absolutely reasonable, Steven.”

Taylor is watching their interaction with undisguised amusement, sipping an Aperol spritz through a fond smile.

“Dude, you were a child, and it was that sketchy seafood restaurant the health department shut down before the summer even ended.”

“If the scallop crudo is so good,” Bell’s eyebrows flick up, head shaking a little, “then you can eat it yourself.”

“Whatever. More for me.” Steven rolls his eyes then and Belly does too, but they’re both smiling.

“Okay but B, what has gotten into you tonight?” Taylor suddenly pipes up, and Belly turns to face her. She loves Steven and Taylor together, she really does; but this part, the part where her best friend is suddenly taking her brother’s side disproportionately often (so only like thirty percent of the time, but still), is undeniably frustrating. “You’re being weird.” Taylor adds, eyebrows raised.

Belly is on her third glass of pinot grigio and only has four oysters in her stomach, which is why she says the thing she says next.

“Did you guys know Conrad is on Hinge?”

Steven freezes mid-bite, head reeling back a little on his neck. “Con is on Hinge? How did you—wait, wait, wait… are you on Hinge?” He looks almost disgusted, something drunk-Belly would typically find equal parts amusing and annoying.

Taylor just snorts an echoing laugh into her glass, eyebrows raising impossibly further. Belly doesn’t even need to look at her to see the wheels clicking into place.

“Yes, I’m on Hinge,” Belly mutters, “as like… an anthropological study, or something. I haven’t even talked to anyone.”

“And what, you saw him on there? Belly.” Steven laughs. “You know they have settings to avoid that, right?”

Taylor catches Belly’s eye like she’s trying to gauge whether Belly wants her to engage in this conversation. Belly just huffs a sigh, already regretting the topic she intentionally raised.

“Yes, Steven, I know that. I would’ve blocked him if I knew he’d be on there.” It’s a lie. And then, not as hesitantly as she should, she asks, “Do you know, though, is he like…?”

“Dating?” Steven looks at her like she has two heads. Did you know Conrad is joining a traveling circus? might have evoked a similar expression. Admittedly, it makes Belly feel a little better. “I mean, I don’t think so.” He shrugs after a few seconds. “He barely even has time to get drinks with me lately.” And then his gaze narrows in on her. “Do you care?”

“No.” Belly lies, far too quickly.

“Um, I’m tired of talking about Conrad,” Taylor suddenly declares. She’s always been good at reading the inner workings of Belly’s brain. Like how currently, she might start pathetically spiraling if they stay on this subject. “I want to hear the latest about that bitch Nancy at your job.”

Belly is grateful for the distraction.

But she can’t stop thinking about how Steven’s reaction all but confirmed her theory: that Conrad must be using Hinge so he can fuck random strangers in his spare time.

Chapter Text

That night, Belly calls Conrad back.

It’s almost midnight on a Friday, and if she were sober or sensible she would have known better than to call so late. But she’s neither, so she lays down on the rug in her living room, stares at her dark ceiling, clicks his name at the top of her recent calls list, and rests her phone atop her sternum, speaker tapped on.

“Hey.”

When he picks up, she can hear the faint sounds of a hospital in the background—the rhythmic beep of monitors, the sharp crackle of an intercom, the hushed chatter of people, the muffled whir of wheels on tile. Conrad sounds tired.

“Hi.” Belly probably seems a little out of breath, which will be embarrassing to remember in the morning. “Sorry. Is this,” she hiccups, which will also be embarrassing to remember in the morning, “uh, a bad time?”

Conrad laughs, a deep throaty chuckle, and she feels the sound right between her legs.

“You’re drunk?”

“Um, no.” Belly responds instantly. A lie, obviously.

She hasn’t been this drunk in months. She likes it: the warm, fuzzy feeling in her extremities; the way the world has gone soft and a little blurry at the edges; the fact that she can talk to Conrad without her body shifting into fight or flight mode.

Conrad just hums. “’Kay.” It’s almost a whisper, but Belly can hear the smug smirk in his voice.

“I’m not drunk.” Belly tries again.

“You are drunk.” He scoffs, without any real irritation. “Your voice always does this—this whiny thing, all high pitched.”

Belly mumbles, “I’m not whiny,” and even she can tell that she sounded a little whiny just then.

“Mm-hm.”

She hates (loves) when he does that—lets her win a fight she’s picking just for the hell of it, just because she likes bickering with him sometimes, just because she likes the way his voice sounds or how he says her name when he thinks she’s being a brat. Immediately letting her win, though? It’s his ultimate trump card, and he plays it at the most annoying of moments.

Belly doesn’t even have to see Conrad to know what he looks like now—eyes dancing, bottom lip caught in his teeth, dimple denting his cheek, like he’s endlessly entertained. She hates (loves) that, too.

“Are you at the hospital?” Belly asks him. Her head is resting on the floor just in front of her couch, and she can see a loose thread on one of the cushions that she really wants to reach up and pick at.

“Yeah. Sorry, I’ve got you on speakerphone.” It’s the first time she notices his voice is a little distant and echoey; Belly is wasted enough she kind of assumed that was in her head. “It’s really slow tonight, so I’m in the on-call room practicing sutures.”

And oh, the image of that.

The summer she turned fifteen, Belly spent hours watching Conrad practice his sailing knots at the big kitchen table in the summerhouse. Sometimes she would find an excuse to sit beside him—picking at a bowl of grapes she definitely could’ve brought out to eat by the pool, reading-but-not-really-reading a book with her knees tucked into her chest—but other times she’d admit to wanting to keep him company. They would chat about movies or music or the latest knot he was learning.

He was always so intense about it—eyes narrowed, brows furrowed, teeth worrying the center of his thick bottom lip, hair hanging over his face.

Belly didn’t watch his face much, though. She watched his hands. The length of his fingers, the width of his knuckles, the tendons working under tanned skin. She wasn’t sure which she liked more: when he was learning a new knot, fingers slow and methodical; or when he was practicing one he was already good at, nimble and effortless.

“That sounds… fun,” Belly hears herself say now, only her eyes are closed and all she can picture is Conrad in scrubs, suture needle and thread impossibly small between his fingers. She knows, logically, that he doesn’t wear a scrub cap if he’s sitting in the on-call room waiting for a page. But she likes to picture him in one anyway, with wisps of hair falling out at his temples.

Conrad laughs, still sounding drowsy and a little distracted. “Yeah, well. It’s better than blood draws,” he mutters.

A few beats pass. He’s probably going to ask her what she did for dinner, and she’s going to tell him how her seafood pasta was delicious and Steven and Taylor are still disgustingly, adorably in love. Then she’ll ask him about his job again, and he’ll ask about hers, and they’ll catch up like two normal people—old friends, perhaps—would do.

But Belly doesn’t want to talk about any of that.

“So… Hinge, huh?” She says, and it’s quiet on Conrad’s end. Belly can hear that same faint cacophony of hospital sounds in the background.

“I could say the same thing to you, you know.”

“I don’t even really use it.”

She keeps telling people that, which is hysterical because her screentime summary two weeks ago told her she averaged almost three hours per day on the app. I didn’t even really use it until I saw you, is what she should probably say.

“Uh-huh.” Conrad’s tone is doing that same hot and arrogant thing again. “Except that one time a couple weeks ago?”

“Except that one time a couple weeks ago,” Belly echoes. “What does ‘figuring out my dating goals’ mean, by the way?”

“It’s just a setting, Belly.” Conrad clucks, like she’s still fourteen watching him tie a constrictor knot around a wooden dowel. “My friend Agnes set up a profile for me, before I moved out here in June. She was worried that I was gonna hibernate or become a monk or something. Honestly, I barely open it.”

“So you haven’t found your future wife?” Belly jokes, and the silence that follows is punishingly awkward.

Eventually Conrad coughs. His voice is quiet when he simply replies, “No.”

And if Belly were sober or sensible, this is officially where she would change the subject. This is where she might suggest they get coffee sometime and then hang up the phone like a normal person.

But Belly is not sober. She’s very deliberately not sober, because she knew that was the only way she’d be able to call him back when she got home and ask him what she’s been dying to—all night but also all month. And she’s obviously not sensible, either. She hasn’t been sensible since the second she saw that picture of him holding a surfboard, almost four weeks ago. She especially hasn’t been sensible since he called her earlier tonight, all snarly and Conrad-y again. This conversation was sort of fated, in that sense.

So Belly says, “Have you hooked up with anyone, at least?”

Conrad is quiet for an almost uncomfortably long time. Belly would worry their call dropped again if it weren’t for the ambient sounds still drifting in from around him. And then, suddenly, his voice again—loud enough to drown out the hospital. He must’ve taken her off speakerphone.

He says, “You actually want to know the answer to that?”

Yes. No. Maybe. Definitely.

“It’s why I asked,” Belly hears herself respond, and that, too, sounds a little whiny. Now that he’s pointed it out, she can’t stop noticing.

Ugh.

“I…” Conrad sighs. “Belly, you know I’ve always—” He’s searching for the right words, and Belly’s wondering what in the world he thinks she supposedly knows about him. Belly can count the things she knows about Conrad’s feelings on one hand. “It’s been three years.” He finally says, like that’s an answer to her question or even explains anything at all.

“I know it’s been three years,” she hears herself say next. “I’m not, like, mad that you’ve fucked girls from Hinge, Conrad.”

(And she’s not mad. Not really. She’s been ruminating on this exact possibility for weeks, after all. And she has no right to be, she reminds herself. Obviously. Belly has a lot of feelings about the topic, but anger isn’t at the fore. It’s closer to fifth on the list, well after intrigue, lust, regret, and self-consciousness).

But Belly thinks she might sound a little mad, so she tries to laugh. Conrad doesn’t mirror her. He just swallows, audibly, and she can picture the way his throat bobs. It’s enough of an admission for her to carry on with this reckless pursuit.

“So you have?” Belly doesn’t even have the presence of mind to blush when she follows up with, “When?”

“Belly.” She can’t tell if Conrad sounds surprised or irritated or pained. Then, wearily, he says, “The last time? A month ago, maybe.” Half-heartedly, and with an awkward chuckle, he adds, “I’m kind of busy these days.”

They’re both quiet for a second.

In her heart of hearts, Belly knows that this is fucked up. What she’s doing to him right now, after everything they’ve been through, is borderline punishing. After everything he said, and everything she didn’t.

But she’s in deep now, and the room is heavy and spinning—from the alcohol and the weight of her newfound knowledge. It’s a little like emotional waterboarding, speaking to Conrad Fisher, even if tonight it’s entirely self-inflicted. What she says in any given moment can feel almost entirely outside her control.

So instead of apologizing or changing the subject, Belly can’t help herself from asking, “Is that why you never responded to me?”

Another second passes, and then Conrad laughs. Another short, harsh chuckle.

“I’m sorry, is that what you think?” Belly’s throat is too dry to say anything. “That I’m caught up on some random girl from Hinge?” He keeps saying Hinge like that, like it tastes bad in his mouth. She wants to point out that he literally has it downloaded to his phone right now. “We’ve been over this, Belly. No one I’ve been with since you has compared. Not three years ago and not now.”

“No,” she frowns, because this is starting to spiral out of her control.

“I think I’m the authority on that, actually,” Conrad tells her, without much humor anymore. “Or do you want me to lie and say any of them mattered?”

It’s intimate and earnest and maddening.

And it’s all wrong. This isn’t what she called for. She did not call for him to reup everything he said three years ago. This is heart on cutting board, paring knife, reopen the rabbit hole -type shit.

(Tomorrow morning, Belly will remind herself that as of four weeks ago, the rabbit hole is very open. She’ll remind herself that right here, drunk dialing Conrad Fisher after three years and asking him when he last fucked a girl he met online, is bottom-of-the-rabbit-hole behavior).

Belly takes a deep breath.

“So, you’ll go out and fuck other girls from Hinge, just not me?” She tries to make her tone sweet, but the words come out so much pricklier than she wanted them to. God, she really is a whiny sixteen-year-old again.

Immediately, she hears the sharp whistle of Conrad’s inhale.

“Jesus, Isabel…” He finally breathes out, sounding borderline exasperated, and her name on his tongue is hot syrup seeping into the pit of her stomach. “That’s what you wanted from me?”

Belly’s silence is probably enough of an answer.

Still, she steels herself for another moment of bravery, or delusion, or stupidity, or whatever this whole thing is.

“I’ve just been thinking about… what it would be like, you know? What we’d be like. If everything hadn’t… if we hadn’t…” Conrad is still silent. And Belly’s never been someone who’s good at letting silence linger, so she speaks again. “I know,” she adds, in a brief moment of clarity, “that I’m being unfair.”

She hears him exhale something that sounds like a laugh.

“Was this whole thing some fucked up way of asking me out?” Conrad pauses. “You really could’ve just called, Belly.” She can tell he’s smirking again. Smug, annoying.

“Don’t,” Belly huffs, “laugh at me, Conrad.”

“I’m not laughing,” Conrad says, but his voice is doing that buoyant thing that suggests he is laughing a bit. “I’m just… always surprised by you.” He adds, gentler. And then there’s a startling beeping noise on Conrad’s end, and he heaves a frustrated sigh. “Fuck. I know this makes me seem like a dick, but I—Shit. I just got paged.”

Once again, Belly wants to curse the universe for the cruel punishments it’s doling out today. She’s being heartlessly edged with Conrad Fisher.

She just takes a slow breath and resists the urge to groan, sliding a palm over her face. “Okay, Dr. Fisher. Go save lives or draw blood or whatever.” He rewards her with a short laugh.

“Hey. We’ll finish this later,” Conrad says, and his voice is gentle but laced with something heady, “when you’re sober. Okay?” And then, irrefutably tender, he says, “Please drink some water for me, Belly.”

* * *

Belly wakes before the sun fully rises.

She’s not surprised to be up early, even though she’s irritated by it. Belly always wakes up at an ungodly hour the morning after she’s gotten especially wasted.

Conrad explained it to her once, back when they used to spend nights on the phone talking for hours about anything and everything—something about alcohol interrupting REM cycles and the rush of adrenaline your brain produces. When she was young, she thought maybe Conrad knew everything.

The analog clock ticking on Belly’s bedside table says it’s just before six.

Normally, she would be able to pop a couple ibuprofen, chug a glass of lukewarm tap water, and fall back asleep for a few more hours. But the second she’s experiencing conscious thoughts this morning, she’s flooded with agonizing memories of everything she said last night.

And there’s that startled, mortified sensation again: holy fuck holy fuck holy fuck.

Did she ask Conrad Fisher about his sex life and then to fuck her?

She definitely did.

A part of her is a little relieved, to have it out of her system. Like the brief bliss that comes immediately after vomiting, momentarily relieved from nausea. Like putting those thoughts out into the universe might lift some of the burden she’s been collapsing under all month.

But then she remembers that she put those thoughts out into the universe on the phone with Conrad. The Conrad who told her he loved her and inspired her to break off her engagement to his brother. The Conrad she subsequently ghosted for three years. The Conrad who was rightfully annoyed when he called her on the train yesterday, because her first attempt to reach out after those three years was a stupid coy message on a dating app.

Fuck, she’s an idiot.

She checks her phone right about then—to send Conrad an apology or text Taylor an SOS or book a flight to Antarctica (do they have those?). When she unlocks it, Belly discovers she has three new texts from Conrad Fisher.

The first came in at 2:11 AM, a couple hours after they spoke:

If you’re not too hungover, can I buy you a drink later? I’m on call until noon and then I have 24 hours off. There’s this jazz bar near my apartment I think you would like.

Five minutes after that, Conrad texted:

I thought your profile was cute, by the way. Nice sweater.

Finally, not even two hours ago, at 4:03 AM, he said:

And just so we’re clear? Of course I want to fuck you, Belly. I always assumed that was obvious.

Belly reads and rereads the gray bubbles until her vision is going a little blurry and her entire body feels fifteen degrees warmer.

Two minutes ago, Belly was sleepy and queasy and potentially on the border of dying—from her hangover or her humiliation or both.

Now, Belly might actually be floating somewhere outside her body. It takes every ounce of her self-control not to imagine Conrad fucking her over the side of a couch tonight in that charmingly boring apartment of his.

She doesn’t reply to Conrad’s texts right away. She gets that ibuprofen, and that glass of lukewarm water, and she laughs out loud at her bathroom sink, honestly a little delirious.

She’s laughing because her first real interaction with Conrad in three years was a certifiable disaster that ended with Belly drunkenly asking him to fuck her, basically. She’s laughing because Conrad’s reaction was not just to text, but triple text her. She’s laughing because her unhinged, drunken, vaguely cruel plan to goad him into asking her out worked. And then she crawls back into bed with her phone, equal parts giddy and nauseous and completely drained.

Belly texts him:

i’m not hungover

(Another lie).

Then she says:

and i love jazz

* * *

It’s a little after eight at night, and Belly is winded and already running ten minutes late.

She’s winded because her uber driver was an asshole too lazy to take a detour around a closed street. Belly has to walk four blocks uphill in heels and a late evening heat that still hasn’t fully burned off. And quickly, because did she mention she’s also late?

She’s late because she might have luxuriated a little too much in getting ready—like, took a long hot bath where she touched herself but didn’t let herself come, shaved and moisturized every inch below her neck, drank a single glass of red wine at her bathroom vanity, and laid no less than five outfit choices out on her bed. After she was ready, she proceeded to spend fifteen minutes taking down and putting her hair back up in front of the mirror by her door.

It’s honestly a pleasant surprise she’s only running ten minutes late.

Ultimately, Belly settled on hair down. Because she doesn’t want to waste the fact that yesterday was a wash day, but mostly because she knows he’ll prefer it. For as long as she’s known him, Conrad’s looked for excuses to run his fingertips through the ends of her hair like wind-chimes, to carefully unknot the tangles, to smooth a flyaway with his palm or to tuck a stray strand behind her ear.

Maybe tonight she can tempt him into winding his fingers through it—to play with while she sips her drink, or to tug her head back on her neck and kiss her, or to grip while he finally fucks her.

He’s going to, right? Fuck her?

She’s probably reread his last text fifty times already.

(And that’s a conservative estimate. That’s, like, only five times per waking hour today; gun to her head, she’d guess it’s closer to double that).

And just so we’re clear? Of course I want to fuck you, Belly. I always assumed that was obvious.

Of course I want to fuck you, Belly. I always assumed that was obvious.

Of course I want to fuck you, Belly.

I want to fuck you, Belly.

Honestly, she should probably be a little scared. The one time she taunted Conrad into fucking her when they were together, he made her come four times.

They were allegedly watching Sunset Boulevard, curled on top of her haphazardly made bed with the door flung open (a Laurel Park Rule), entirely out of habit; the house was blissfully empty, because her mom and Steven were off visiting Princeton (so Steven could “scope out the best dorms” or something. The nerd hadn’t even gotten in yet). Belly assumed Conrad would’ve been all over her the second they heard the car pull out of the driveway—but he was doing some gallant I-don’t-want-to-break-Laurel’s-trust thing that she was simultaneously endeared and infuriated by.

He was so soft that day, in his sweatpants and a Brown hoodie she was already scheming to steal, and when she laid her head on his shoulder his fingers looped mindlessly through her ponytail. Belly kept feeling the ghost of his lips on her forehead. But any time she tried to kiss her way across his neck, he’d breathe a sigh and say something about how she should watch the movie, Isabel.

After three rebuffs, Belly slipped her fingers under the front of his shirt to play with the coarse hair beneath his naval, and the sound Conrad made was somewhere between a grunt and a moan.

“Come on, Belly…”

“Watch the movie, Conrad,” Belly mocked, tilting her head on her neck to kiss across the underside of his jaw again. She dragged her nails along his stomach in that way she’d learned drove him crazy, and when her tongue flicked out to taste the pulse in his throat, Conrad rewarded her with a slow, trembling exhale. And how was she supposed to stop touching him if he was going to keep making sounds like that?

His voice was borderline hoarse when he muttered, “Baby, I’m—you’re being unfair."

A couple months earlier, she might’ve worried he meant it—that he really didn’t want her to touch him, that she was really bothering him.

But baby was always the tell. Baby was what Conrad called her when he wanted something. Baby was what Conrad called her when he was inside her or trying to be. So Belly knew then that this was a game.

It’s why she sat up and closed her laptop where it was playing their movie in his lap, shoving it onto the duvet beside him.

It’s why she moved to straddle him even as his jaw tightened and he tilted his head to stare at her like she was still the grating little kid that followed him around at the boardwalk every summer.

It’s why she looked him dead in the eyes as she slid her hand into the front of her leggings and huffed, “Fine, Conrad. I’ll do it myself.”

And ladies and gentlemen, it worked.

Conrad heaved an exasperated sigh and then he was yanking her hand away to replace it with his own. She finished twice on his fingers before he flipped her over and pinned her down to fuck her with one of her knees to her chest. And after Conrad made her come once more like that, he went down on her and managed to earn yet another orgasm.

Tonight, Belly’s just hoping she can channel some of her sixteen-year-old self’s ingenuity.

She’s wearing an outfit that would make Taylor Jewel proud: a backless strappy dress that skims her thighs and cuts in to frame what is hopefully a tasteful amount of side-boob. It is, at best, loosely draped around her torso. On any other occasion she’d be fashion taped into it like a mummy, but tonight she thinks that would kind of defeat its purpose.

(Not that Taylor can know about this, by the way; the amount of shit she would give Belly for ending up at a bar with Conrad barely twenty-four hours after her outburst at dinner last night would be equal parts humiliating and deserved).

So, to summarize: Belly is miraculously only ten minutes late; she’s primped and adorned herself with a laser precision aimed squarely at driving Conrad Fisher as feral as he’s been driving her; and if everything goes according to plan, she’s anticipating not being able to walk tomorrow.

She’ll probably never truly be ready to see Conrad again—indeed, she probably has no idea what she’s getting herself into right now. But this is certainly as ready as she’s ever been, and probably as ready as she ever will be.

* * *

The jazz bar is intimate and picturesque.

It’s dim under deep red lights and low, barrel-vaulted ceilings. Black mosaic tiles coat every surface, and there are old Persian rugs scattered throughout. One corner houses a tiny stage and another a pool table. Belly can hear a woman’s voice covering Lilac Wine before she even steps all the way inside.

It reminds her of cold winter nights in Paris, of bitter red wine, of great sex. And it makes her chest squeeze a little bit, that Conrad knew how much she’d love it.

Improbably but completely predictably, he’s the first person that Belly sees when her eyes adjust to the low lighting inside. He’s sitting on a dark velvet loveseat along the back wall, already halfway through what looks like a tequila soda.

Conrad doesn’t see her at first. It’s a blessing, honestly, because Belly could use a bit of privacy to process.

On the surface, he’s exactly the same: ashy brown hair perfectly messy and parted down the middle of his forehead, eyes a little sparkly watching the stage as he scratches idly at his bicep, outfitted in a variation on the Standard Conrad Uniform (a collared gray cardigan tucked into black pants. His sleeves are pushed up and fuck, there’s that stupid little vintage Omega on his wrist).

But Belly can’t remember ever looking at Conrad before and thinking he looks like such a man.

The pictures did not lie.

He’s broader than she remembers, even three years ago. And under the dim lighting, his face looks older and more lived in—she can see the shadow of those creases beneath his eyes and the promise of light stubble along his jaw. He’s beautiful, of course. Frustratingly beautiful, striking, sexy, etcetera.

Then Conrad looks toward the door, and when he spots her it’s like his entire soul softens.

It couldn’t be more different from that night across Nicole’s party all those years ago.

He was ravenous back then, all dark dilated pupils and nervous intensity. This Conrad still looks like he wants her. (One revelation Belly had in those days leading up to her not-wedding is that she’d become deliberately blind to that, the way he was always looking at her like he wanted her; it’s impossible not to see it now). But there’s an undeniable patience in this Conrad’s eyes, too, like he’s softened into his hunger. It’s keen in a way that feels practiced and confident and maybe a little dangerous, like he could hold her gaze, hot and unblinking, all night.

Belly feels a visceral gush of warmth as all the blood in her body pools between her legs.

And suddenly, all her preparation for this moment seems incredibly futile. No amount of preening and grooming and scheming would be enough to outweigh the dizzy breathlessness she feels when she looks at him. No amount of wine would be enough to steady the sharp pounding in her throat.

She’s so fucked.

* * *

Twenty minutes later, Belly is sitting beside Conrad on that same velvet loveseat, snickering as he tries and fails to fish a bug out of his glass with one long, hooked finger.

He’s already gotten up once to get them drinks—another tequila soda for him and an espresso martini for her (“Of course Isabel Conklin would drink espresso martinis,” he said, but it was with a smile so fond it made her throat dry), and Belly couldn’t stop staring at the way his hand dwarfed her coupe glass on his weaving walk back from the bar. When he stood in front of her and passed down her drink, she was admittedly pretty shameless about sweeping her fingers over his as she grasped the stem.

“You could get a new one, you know,” Belly says now, flicking her head toward the wide mahogany bar across the room. Conrad glances up at her with a sneer, but the sparkle in his eye is unmistakable. “There’s this, like, cool spot over there where you can ask for a drink and someone will make it for you.”

“Fuck off.” He snorts, and he’s giving her that fond smile all over again.

“Or you could just drink it.” Belly is probably all sparkly eyes and fond smile now, too. “Maybe there are some added nutrients in there. Isn’t that the kind of thing you’re into?”

“God, I forgot what a brat you are,” is what Conrad says back, a little breathy, and Belly scrunches her nose at him because she can’t be responsible for what might come out of her mouth otherwise.

Up close again, it’s almost hard to look at him.

She forgot how long his eyelashes are. And the faint freckle on his right cheek. And the way his upper lip flattens against his teeth when he grins.

They’ve spent the past twenty minutes in a weird liminal space, trying to ignore their last conversation in favor of performing friendly small talk. Belly dutifully asked Conrad about work and heard all about how he scrubbed in on two cholecystectomies this week (she doesn’t know what that is, but it’s cute to watch him get excited about it). Conrad, in turn, asked Belly about her job, and heard all about that bitch Nancy who keeps sending officewide passive aggressive messages on Teams.

It's honestly a little nice, remembering how inexplicably easy it is to talk to him. Remembering that he’s funny, in a wry unexpected way. Remembering that he’s thoughtful, pulling long-forgotten details about her from his memory like it’s as easy as grabbing car keys off the counter.

But can you really blame Belly for letting her thoughts wander?

Of course I want to fuck you, Belly.

Beside her, Conrad slides his glass onto the table with a huff of irritated acquiescence. The bug is still floating in there.

“So.” He looks up from under his eyelashes, then, and raises his eyebrows like he’s been reading her mind. (Oh god, can he do that?) “Are we going to talk about last night?”

Belly takes a sip of her drink just for an excuse not to answer right away, and his lips quirk at one corner.

“Isabel.” He prods, but it’s soft, and Belly blushes. The woman on stage is singing I’ve Got A Crush On You, and Belly could laugh at the irony if she wasn’t staring so intently at Conrad’s face. “You were pretty drunk when you called me.” He says it like he’s trying to be nonchalant, but she can see the bob of his throat. And then, a little quieter, “Did you mean what you said?”

“Yes.” Belly responds instantly, blinking back at him.

Conrad tilts his head to the side, and his expression is unreadable. Usually, Belly is a little better at that, but she’s three years out of practice.

“Which part did you mean?”

He’s looking at her like he did that morning before her wedding in the kitchen, she decides. Like he knows something about her that she doesn’t.

How did she forget what this was like? The intensity of their eye contact, the same mystical magnetism that wrapped around her lungs from across a high school house party or her fucking rehearsal dinner, even. Of course she remembered, in theory. But god, it’s so much different to be sitting right next to him again, so close she can feel the warmth of his breath coat her eyelashes.

(They had to sit this close, thigh to thigh and shoulder to shoulder, to hear each other over the sound of the music. Obviously).

“You’re gonna have to be more specific, Conrad,” Belly just breathes.

Conrad’s teeth sink into the flesh of his lower lip, and his eyes are studying the lines of her face. Belly’s not composed enough to even know what expression she’s making now. Wide-eyed and nervous and lovestruck and pitiful, probably.

His head tilts to the side. “Did you mean the part where you said you’d been thinking about us?”

“Mm-hm.” Her head bobs in a little nod.

And before she can overthink it, Belly touches him. It’s just the smooth of her palm over the dip in his chest, and she can feel the rapid flutter of Conrad’s heart beneath cotton fabric. Almost immediately, his hand covers hers. His palm is cold and a little wet from the condensation on his glass.

He looks at her, long and hard, and it takes every ounce of effort to hold his gaze—but she very bravely manages to do it. Conrad’s fingers squeeze around her own, and it feels like he might as well be reaching somewhere deep inside her body.

“Did you mean the part where you asked me to fuck you?” He finally murmurs, sweetly, and it’s perfectly timed with the Ella Fitzgerald song coming to an end.

I didn’t ask you to fuck me, the insolent part of her brain wants to say, even though it was very much implied. But he’s looking at her with the kind of quiet vulnerability she’s still not used to seeing from him. It’s almost breathtaking.

Belly just whispers, “I meant it, yeah.”

She watches the way Conrad inhales, sharp and accompanied with a few rapid blinks. His eyes fall closed a little, and when they slide back open, they’re unmistakably darker. Sea-glass lit by the moon over the beach.

“’Kay.” Conrad breathes out, nodding at her, and his fingers squeeze again.

A couple beats pass like that. She thinks about kissing him, tasting the tequila on his tongue and melting into the warmth of his embrace. He’d let her. She thinks about apologizing, for leaving him there on the beach that night and for pretending it wasn’t the biggest mistake of her life. He’d let her. She thinks about standing up and dragging him to the bathroom like she’s been imagining doing all day, week, month. He’d definitely let her.

But instead, Belly hears herself say, “Do you wanna play pool?”

It catches Belly by surprise almost as much as it does Conrad, who’s looking at her now with one of those broad, unguarded grins.

“That’s what you’re thinking about right now?”

She twists back a smile. “No. But the night is still young, Conrad.”

The truth is that she knows the second she touches him—really touches him—the world is going to shift on its axis again. The truth is that Belly has complained about the universe edging her with Conrad Fisher all month, but maybe she doesn’t want it to end just yet.

(The truth is also that the second she walked in and saw the pool table, she was assailed by a vision of Conrad hunched over with a pool cue balanced on his knuckles, touching her back while she took her shot, critiquing her form with a delicious glint in his eye).

And as it turns out, playing pool with Conrad Fisher, tipsy on a Saturday night in a jazz bar, might just be the sexiest form of foreplay that Belly could dream up.

“Are we doing eight ball or nine ball?” Conrad glances over his shoulder from where he’s pondering the racks.

Frankly, Belly doesn’t know the difference. She hasn’t played pool since she was at Finch and Jere used to drag her to a dive bar his frat brothers frequented on Thursday nights.

So after a beat, she says, “which one are you worse at?”

Conrad refuses to dignify that question with an answer, and soon enough he’s set up an eight-ball rack on the felt. Belly tries not to stare too much at the way he can hold four balls in one hand as he arranges them.

They spend thirty seconds bickering over which one of them should break, and finally he sighs and does a terrible job of twisting back a smirk, head tilting. “Alright.”

When Belly leans over the edge of the table Conrad does touch her lower back, right where the silk of her dress gives way to bare skin. She feels his pinky finger dip below the surface of the fabric to skim the bottom of her spine, and it distracts her so much she fucks up her shot. The cue ball hits too softly, and the other balls scatter lazily from their tight triangle formation into… something vaguely still resembling a triangle.

“Should’ve let me break,” Conrad tsks near her ear. He’s probably about as smug as Belly’s ever observed him.

It turns out Conrad is annoyingly good at pool, in the same way he’s annoyingly good at most things. He steals sips of her drink (“I don’t know why anyone would ruin one of life’s simple pleasures with all that sugar,” he mutters, “but I fucking love caffeine”), he teases her form just as she anticipated, and he continues to pocket one ball after the next with a relentless sort of precision. It makes sense that he’d be a natural at this, chalking the pool cue between his fingers and flexing his shoulder with each shot he takes.

Their touches become bolder as they play. From soft, nervous grazes of hands against arms, the warmth of fingers through clothing, and the (literal static) jolt of his fingers tucking a piece of hair behind her ear (which they both giggle about), to his hand on her hip while she bends over, his chest hovering behind hers and his breath on her neck. It’s teasing and hypnotizing and aggravating. Like, Belly thinks the whole experience might be putting her in some kind of strange trance. Maybe the world has already tilted on its axis, she decides.

Oh yeah, and another teasing and hypnotizing and aggravating thing? He’s wearing a ring. A simple silver band on his pinky finger. Belly noticed it the first time he picked up his drink earlier and immediately trained her subconscious not to look at it. For self-preservation, or whatever.

But Conrad catches her staring at it now, resting on the wooden rail of the pool table while he rocks the cue on the back of his knuckles, and she feels her entire face flush.

“Resized Mom’s wedding band,” He mumbles idly, but he’s smirking as he aims.

(At any other time, Belly might feel bad about so shamelessly sexualizing something of Susannah’s. But she’s also spent weeks now pretty fucking shamelessly sexualizing her son, so maybe not).

Belly just nods, her gaze flickering from his hand back to his face and then to the green felt stretch of the table, as if it’ll somehow distract her again. She hears him laugh once, muffled, and then the harsh clink of the cue ball hitting the eight ball. It sinks into the pocket beside her resting spot with a soft thump.

She can’t even find it in herself to be mad that he won; the fact that their game is over and they’ll need to decide what to do next is too exhilarating.

“Belly?”

She looks up again and Conrad’s twisting back a smile. His eyes squint a little, and he flicks his head to the side.

Come over here.

Her legs feel like jelly as she makes her way around the table, abandoning her pool cue on the felt, and when she rounds the corner Conrad is already reaching out to pull her into him with a hand cupped against her waist.

It’s the closest they’ve been since their brief hug when she arrived. She feels the stroke of his thumb on her bare lower back, the heat of his thighs pressed to hers, the rise and fall of his chest. Belly lets her palms rest against his sternum and Conrad turns them to back her into the pool table. When he looks down at her, it’s with that same small, smug smile.

“Not even gonna rub it in?” Belly asks wryly as she looks up at him, and Conrad just shakes his head, his eyes searching her face.

She’s feeling bold enough now to reach up and smooth her thumb against the stubble along his jaw, and he lets out a shuddering breath. He’s going to kiss her. She knows it, and she’s anticipating it with the kind of excitement she hasn’t felt since she woke up as a child on Christmas morning.

Conrad whispers, “Can I take you back to my apartment, please?”

It’s not what she expected him to say, but it pools in her stomach all the same.

“Mm-mm.” When she shakes her head, he bites back a smile.

“Did you wanna play darts or something? Should I see if they keep Monopoly around here?”

Fuck off, she wants to tell him. I love you, she wants to tell him.

“Take me to the bathroom.” Belly sighs instead, and Conrad’s smile fades until he’s looking down at her with a dark and unbearably focused intensity.

“’Kay. Let’s do that.”

* * *

The jazz bar is thankfully one of those establishments with two single-stall, gender-neutral restrooms in a back hallway.

Belly and Conrad have to wait for a vacancy, and as they’re leaning against the wall together, still chest to chest, Conrad is tracing his fingers idly over her face—tucking a piece of hair behind her ear, rubbing his knuckles against her jaw, running his thumb across her lips.

(It’s moments like this that make Belly realize how mind-bogglingly dumb she used to be. Because how could a man look at her like he loves her this much, without her even noticing?).

“You’re so beautiful,” he mutters, in the even-dimmer light of the back hallway, and Belly lets her eyelids flutter under his attention. “I missed you so fucking much.” When she looks back up at him, she can see the nervous bob of his throat. “I don’t know if I—” Conrad shakes his head. “Belly, I can’t pretend this means nothing. If that’s what you want, I can’t—”

“No,” Belly breathes through a tiny shake of her head. Her brows furrow, and then more firmly, she repeats, “No. It doesn’t mean nothing.”

There’s are so many things she wants to say to him right now. None of them would sufficiently capture everything she wants and needs to convey to him: I’m so sorry for leaving you, and I’m so sorry I didn’t call, and Sometimes it scares me how much I love you, and How could this mean nothing when it means everything, and I want you so badly I think I’m definitely going to need to throw away this thong.

Belly just settles on, “I missed you too. So much.” The look he gives her is almost pained. “And I really, really want you right now.”

It’s not the sexiest or most romantic spot for a second first kiss. They can vaguely hear the muffled whir of a hand dryer mixed with the drifting lilt of a Billie Holiday cover.

It doesn’t matter.

Conrad leans down to brush his nose against hers, and Belly’s tilting up to meet him with an open mouth, and then they’re trading the kind of kisses she likes to remember when she touches herself: the kind punctuated by the burning, slick slide of his tongue, the loud, hot puffs of air under his nose, and the stinging tug of his hands threaded roughly in her hair (just as she planned it, a faint voice triumphantly reminds).

They fall into a rhythm so easily it’s hard to believe it’s been so long. It’s hearing an old song again, the one they used to know all the words to because they’d heard it hundreds of times, for the first time in seven years; they sing along without even needing to think twice about the lyrics.

Belly opens wide for him, the way he always encouraged her to with a thumb digging into the hinge of her jaw, and she’s already whimpering as he turns the rest of the way to pin her against the wall.

Sometimes Belly thinks Conrad’s tongue was created in a lab just to drive her insane. Maybe it’s the shape or the taste or the texture, but probably it’s the way he uses it—curled between her lips or against the back of her teeth or into the inside of her cheek. Sometimes she wishes there was a way to swallow it (and believe her, she’s tried).

The most dizzying part is knowing Conrad must want her as much as she wants him right now. First because he’s kissing her like this in public, and second because she can feel the outline of his already hard cock against her stomach.

He’s rocking into her, slowly but crushingly, as she tugs the thin weight of his cardigan from his pants and shoves her hands under the back of it. Conrad hisses against her mouth and Belly smiles faintly, nails scratching lightly over his skin as they kiss.

She’s so wet a part of her almost wonders if he can smell it.

Distantly, Belly hears the click of a lock and the swish of a door opening. From inside her eyelids, she can appreciate the wash of warm light from the bathroom over Conrad's shoulder, and then he's reluctantly pulling back from where he’s been attached to her mouth.

They stare at each other for a beat, a little out of breath with pupils the size of saucers. Belly idly reaches up to smooth away a smudge of her lipstick from his chin, but Conrad is quicker than she is, tilting his head to take her thumb into his mouth. She makes some kind of strangled noise she would be mortified about, if this wasn’t Conrad, and he lathes his tongue thickly over the pad of her thumb once before dropping his mouth open to let her have it back.

“I need—” She starts suddenly, and Conrad nods.

“Yeah,” his voice is hoarse, but he’s giving her a lazy smile. “Yeah, me too.”

The bathroom door is thick, heavy, made of some kind of metal, and shuts behind them with a satisfying thud. Conrad twists the lock and before he can finish turning around, Belly is already sinking to her knees in front of him.

“Abso-fucking-lutely not, Belly,” Conrad scoffs, a tad winded. She opens her mouth to protest and he laughs, wheezy and a little sheepish. “Baby. I brought you in here to fuck you, not come in your mouth in three seconds.” Two hands reach down to cup her face, thumbs stroking the heat rising in her cheeks, and Conrad bobs his head toward the sink. When he speaks again, it’s in a whisper. “C’mere. Let me fuck you like you asked, hm?”

Belly has barely risen all the way to her feet before Conrad is kissing her again, wet and dirty and dizzying.

And then he sweeps her off the ground with two arms wrapped firmly around her lower back. Belly’s legs fold up easily, naturally, to curl around his thighs, and then she’s arching into him and threading all ten fingers through his hair.

The top of her ass just barely hits the porcelain sink and then Conrad is kissing down her neck and across her collarbone, open-mouthed and grunting.

Her dress is already caught up around her waist, thong doing a mediocre job of covering the space between her legs, and when he grinds into her like this, she can feel the entire length of his cock against her cunt.

Belly reaches between them to start working at his belt, and now Conrad is nosing his way into the front of her dress to wrap his lips around her nipple (exactly as she planned it, that faint voice triumphantly echoes once more).

“Jesus—fuck, Conrad.” Her cry sounds faraway, even though it’s very much echoing inside this tiny bathroom, and she can hear and feel his short, smug laugh against her skin as he bites down around the flesh. “Condom,” she hears herself say, “do you have a—”

Conrad nods, but he seems far too preoccupied with yanking the straps of her dress from her shoulder and nipping his way across her collarbone.

(Belly should’ve brought condoms, she knows. She spent three weeks waiting for this moment, three hours planning for it today, and she forgot to bring a fucking condom).

“Con—You need to—”

“Give me a fucking second, Belly, I’m trying to—”

She interrupts him with a hand pushed into the front of his pants and Conrad makes a staccato sort of choking sound, his forehead rolling into her neck as she wraps her hand around him.

“No, baby, no, no…” He’s muttering now, breathless, and she’s tugging his cock from his pants with an impatient huff.

To say Conrad is hard is stating the obvious; he’s already deep red and weeping and it’s simultaneously clear why he wouldn’t let her put her mouth on him and that much more tempting.

Belly briefly releases Conrad’s cock to gather her own slick on her fingers, and then she’s reaching back out to stroke him, slow and firm and familiar. He shudders against her and then bites into her shoulder, so soft it doesn’t even sting—a bite grounded in the urge to just have something in his mouth.

She's only three pumps in before Conrad is inhaling against her skin and reaching down to wrap his fingers around her wrist, his mouth open and sticky on her skin. His head rears back to look at her and Conrad looks delightfully ruined, pupils shot and mouth swollen.

(Because of me, Belly thinks, and it makes her cunt clench around nothing).

“Stop. Stop, I’ll—I want to be inside you when I come. Please.” He says, and the earnestness almost catches Belly off guard.

Conrad keeps her wrist gripped in his hand, even when Belly reluctantly uncoils her fingers from the length of him, and ducks back in to kiss her once more.

It’s more tender than any of the other kisses they’ve shared tonight: soft brushes of their lips and the faint graze of his tongue over the seam of her lips. It’s in stark contrast to the way he’s currently using his grip on her wrist to tug her hand behind her back, loose but unrelenting, until the rear of her palm is trapped between her back and the cool faucet of the sink.

When their lips separate with a quiet smack and Conrad tilts his head down to press their foreheads together, Belly realizes for the first time that she’s shaking.

Conrad must notice it too, because he gives her a look so dark and affectionate she thinks she might melt. I love you. I love you I love you I love you.

“Okay?” He whispers, eyes searching her face, and when Belly nods he rewards her with a blissful little sigh. “You’re a fucking dream right now,” Conrad murmurs, and then he catches her lips in another kiss.

They’re back to those open-mouthed, dizzying ones where she can’t control the noises she starts making against his tongue. Conrad is rocking his hips into her once more, and they’re hot and slippery and bare against each other.

Belly makes a strangled sound against his mouth and he has the audacity to pull back, just the tiniest bit, and mutter, “Shhh,” before tightening his grip on her wrist and sliding his tongue against hers once more.

She thinks it’s probably a matter of minutes until she starts crying.

But she’s not going to fucking beg, not after she put on a big show of resisting him earlier tonight, so she just uses her leg on his hip to pull him in tighter, closer, meeting the rocking of his hips with her own.

The hand that’s been dutifully wound in Conrad’s hair drops down to pull her thong the rest of the way to the side, ignoring his grunt into her mouth. And then she’s wiggling and pressing until the length of his cock is gliding between her folds with each rocking motion Conrad’s hips take.

And yeah, she determines immediately, she’s going to come from this.

Conrad makes a whimpering sort of sound and then he’s reaching for his back pocket like he’s going to finally grab that stupid condom, but Belly is so irritated with his procrastination that she wrenches his spare wrist back with her spare hand.

She’s not strong enough to really stop him. But Conrad lets her, pulling back from where he’s kissing her to look down under heavy eyelids.

“What, baby? You wanna come like this first?”

She nods, whimpering despite herself, as her eyelids flutter over the tension she can already feel building in her stomach. Conrad's a mirror nodding back at her, tightening his grip on the hand behind her back.

She tugs on his wrist until she can deposit his palm on her breast again. And Conrad, always a fast learner, immediately cups the flesh and leans down to take her nipple back into his mouth.

And fuck yeah, she’s going to come.

The steady rock of his hips, the head of his cock bumping against her clit with every movement, the press of her hand into her back under his grip, the sharp sting of his teeth against her nipple—it’s overwhelming and blistering and maddening, and he isn’t even inside her yet.

It can’t even be ten seconds before the room is turning hot and white and static.

“Fuck, that’s right. There you go,” Belly hears Conrad whispering into her skin, licking sloppily against her breast and then her neck and then into her open mouth. “God, Belly, you’re so beautiful,” he says again, and she’s pulsing pitifully at every word that leaves his lips.

Belly is still coming down from her orgasm when she hears the thump of his leather wallet closing and then the tear of a condom wrapper.

“Still want me to fuck you?”

Belly laughs—happy and horny and delirious.

“I think I might die if you don’t,” she sighs, forehead rolling into his cheek. She opens her eyes to watch him sliding the condom on. She can feel the soft shake of his shoulders in silent laughter and the ghost of his lips on her ear.

“Do you want your hand back?” Conrad whispers, and she glances up at him to shake her head. He swallows thickly, readjusting his grip on her wrist.

(She might have a bruise tomorrow. She hopes she has a bruise tomorrow).

Conrad’s eyes stay locked on Belly’s and then he’s stepping forward and guiding himself into her in one long, fluid motion. She somehow feels it in every inch of her body at once. Conrad hitches her thigh up higher on his hip, and she wriggles a little closer to the edge of the sink, and then he’s bottoming out, so deep she might really, truly cry.

“Jesus Christ, Isabel,” Conrad’s forehead drops to hers and Belly whimpers out a breath that she tries to form into something resembling his name. “Is that—”

“Yeah,” Belly confirms, nodding. It’s a second before he starts rutting inside her, and immediately her head falls back on her neck. “Oh…. Yeah, that’s… Yes.”

Belly can hear her heart beating in her ears. She can hear Conrad’s shaky swallow and the heavy panting of his breath. She can hear how wet she is, echoing off the tile through every roll of his hips. Faintly, she can hear the muffled jazz music playing somewhere in the bar she honestly completely forgot they were still at.

“Fuck, I missed this,” Conrad breathes something that sounds like a laugh, and she feels his nose against the hinge of her jaw. “I fucking missed you,” he adds, for the second time now tonight. The words, combined with the steady and punishing roll of his hips, already has Belly clenching around him. “Yeah? You gonna come again? Already, baby?”

“Fuck off,” there’s no bite in her words, and she makes a blissed out laughing-sighing sound before Conrad is leaning forward to kiss her again, open and dirty.

(She is going to come again. She’s going to come again, like, shockingly soon. It should not surprise her at all. And yet).

“God, I want you to,” Conrad speaks against her lips. When Belly’s eyes flicker open he’s already watching her, his gaze dark and hooded and hot. “What do you need so you can come, Belly? Hmm?” His words are punctuated by relentlessly digging thrusts.

If she doesn’t answer quickly he’s going to start guessing, which might actually be the death of her.

“I—” Belly shakes her head, and her eyelids flutter as he adjusts his hips to an even-slightly-better angle. “You, I just need—"

“Look at me, then,” Conrad mutters, and her eyes slide back open to meet his.

He finally drops her wrist behind her back, and she’s about to whine about it when she feels his hand slip between her thighs, thumb pressing to her clit for the first time all night—and god, why did he wait this long? Why did she let him? 

Conrad works his thumb over her clit in firm circles, gaze still intent on hers, and it’s barely a full heartbeat before she feels the swelling begin. “There you go,” he chuckles once, harsh and breathless. “Come on, Belly. Let me see you come, hmm?”

And she does.

It rolls through her body in one long searing wave, and she’s making a sound she hopes to god no one outside this room can hear, but she doesn’t even care because Conrad Fisher is inside her again and she’s coming as hard as she has in seven years and why the fuck did she wait so long and oh my god is she coming again?

She knows Conrad’s babbling nonsense against her neck right now, but Belly can’t hear it—she can’t hear anything but the static in her ears and the pounding of her own heartbeat.

Conrad twitches and stiffens against her and then he’s biting down into her shoulder, harder than last time, as he finishes.

Thirty seconds pass, and she feels the faint stroke of his thumb on her hip, and the ghost of his lips on her neck. He tilts his head up and suddenly they’re both smirking at each other, quiet and exhausted and sated.

“That was…” Conrad starts, interrupting himself to pucker a short kiss to her lips.

“Better or worse than the girl from—”

“Oh fuck off,” Conrad snorts a laugh against her lips and then he’s sliding a hand into her hair and really kissing her, languid and syrupy and warm. “Better, obviously. The fucking best.” He adds when he pulls back, and his forehead drops to hers with a contented grunt.

“Yeah,” Belly hums, reaching up to pet the hairs beside his temple. “Yeah, for me too.”

Conrad smiles, one of those wide easy grins, and slides his nose over hers. When he speaks again, the heat of his breath coats her entire face. “Now can I take you home, Belly?” She pretends to think about it for a minute, and she can feel the air around his lips lift into a mockingly-irritated snarl.

“Yes.” Belly smiles. “Yes, please, I’d like that.”

Chapter Text

Conrad guides Belly out the front door of the jazz bar in record time, barely five minutes after he fucked her against that sink in the bathroom.

It would’ve been sooner, probably, except Belly spends a full two minutes trying to wipe up the mess that’s become of her inner thighs. Despite its many perks, the jazz bar has only single-ply toilet paper and a very weak hand dryer.

(Belly thinks briefly about leaving a review on Google: “highly inconvenient bathroom for public sex aftercare”).

She ultimately gives up on the task, and when she moves to shove her thong in the bathroom trash can (a lost cause), Conrad nicks it from her fingers and tucks it in his front pocket with just the trace of a smirk.

Jesusfuckingchrist.

The outside temperature is finally nearing something you could call pleasant for a humid August evening in Boston. Their faces are a little flushed and their skin a little shiny, but it’s emphatically not from the weather.

Belly can’t stop glancing over at Conrad as they walk along the narrow streets between the bar and his apartment. It might be dark out now, but he’s lit under the glow of gas streetlamps. His hair is still messy in that just-fucked kind of way, and his pupils are blown wide.

Almost as wide as the smug smile he keeps giving her every time he notices Belly staring.

Ugh.

By the third or potentially fourth time, Belly has to resist the urge to roll her eyes at him. She wants to tell him he has a stray eyelash on his cheek or something, but she’s not that good of a liar.

Besides, Conrad’s looking at her, too.

His gaze is dark and glassy and interrupted only by his rapid blinks. It flits between her eyes and her mouth and, not very subtly, her legs and cleavage.

At one point his tongue even flickers out at the corner of his mouth to lick his goddamn lips. Belly’s focused so intently on it in the moment that she stumbles on the brick sidewalk and almost rolls her ankle. Conrad catches her at the waist, because of course he does, and sputters a laugh against the back of her hair.

“You good? You should watch where you’re walking.”

Belly doesn’t have to face him to know he’s smirking.

“And deprive you of a chance to play hero?” She huffs, stepping out of his grasp. “I could never.”

The smirk does not leave his face. Conrad just rolls his eyes and offers his hand for Belly to tug him further down the street.

The thought occurs to her that she’d almost forgotten what it’s like to hold his hand.

Belly has held Conrad Fisher’s hand more times than she can count: nine-year-old Conrad leading her toward their moms when she fell off her bike and skinned her knee; fourteen-year-old Conrad teaching her to dance at the summerhouse; eighteen year old Conrad kissing the back of her palm across the center console of his car; twenty-two year-old Conrad reaching out to her for balance when he stood from the bathtub, woozy from a surfing wound.

But tonight, walking down a narrow street in Boston holding hands with a twenty-five-year-old Conrad Fisher, the experience somehow feels novel.

It’s not so much that the sensation of holding his hand has changed—it’s still warm, and a tiny bit dry, and completely dwarfs her own. It’s not even that she’s getting distracted observing and cataloguing everything about the encounter.

(Though she is, obviously. Observing and cataloguing everything about the encounter).

Belly has a cartoon-lightbulb moment when Conrad’s pinky finger strokes the back of her palm and she realizes it’s probably that stupid fucking ring.

He’s worn it all night, but this is the first time she’s consciously noticed its presence against her skin.

She can’t help it when she curls her thumb in his hand to rub across the metal. Conrad chuckles, so low she almost doesn’t hear it, at her side. And Belly has to close her eyes around the thoughts that flash in marquee lights across the inside of her mind.

Conrad’s fingers in your mouth, Belly’s brain shouts. Conrad’s fingers on your clit again, Belly’s brain very unhelpfully adds.

Fuck fuck fuck fuck.

The street they’re on now is quiet, neighborhoody, lined by dark brownstones with lush flowerboxes and American flags. Crickets are chirping, and somewhere in the distance, a group of women are laughing. It’s quaint and wholesome and certainly not the sort of street to walk down wearing no underwear and ruminating on Conrad’s fingers.

Conrad’s fingers pressing so deep you can barely breathe, actually, Belly’s brain amends.

“What?” Conrad asks, with a curious little grin, and for a second Belly worries she just said all—or, frankly, any—of that out loud.

“Nothing.” It’s an unconvincing lie, even to her ears. “I just… feel like a freak.” Belly eventually admits through a humorless laugh, breathless. Conrad snickers softly at her side.

“Why?”

“You know why.”

When she glances at him out of the corner of her eye again, it’s clear he absolutely does. His eyes are dark and he’s doing a very poor job of hiding his smile.

“Maybe I just wanna hear you say it.” Conrad shrugs a shoulder up, and there’s that arrogant tilt in his voice again.

“Mm-mm,” Belly shakes her head.

She feels his intense stare, and the deliberate brush of their shoulders together on their next step. She’s not looking at him anymore, but Belly knows this version of Conrad: dog with a bone. He’s going to stop them right here in the middle of this sidewalk and wait for hours, if that’s what it takes.

“Fine.” Belly eventually huffs. She’s only had one espresso martini, and this is a three-espresso-martini-confession. But the sooner they get through this, the sooner they'll make it to his charmingly boring apartment. “Fine, Conrad. Your mom’s ring is making it really hard not to think about your fingers inside me.” Her body is on fire when she says it.

“Freak,” Conrad mutters, but his tone is teasing.

“Shut up,” Belly squawks, laughing a little despite her best efforts.

When Conrad chooses that moment to stop in the middle of the sidewalk, she’s forced to turn and look at him. His smile is triumphant and smug and annoying.

She wants to pull him into an alley and finally get on her knees.

“Belly?” He murmurs, suddenly almost tender, and then he takes a step closer to her—close enough that she has to tilt her head back on her neck a little to look up at him. “We just had sex at a bar fifteen minutes ago. I,” his eyebrows raise, “just agreed to have sex against a sink in a public bathroom.”

(Belly has to twist back a smile at the reminder: she, Isabel Susannah Conklin, is powerful enough to make the man in front of her—a surgeon-in-training—lose his inhibitions in the least hygienic place on earth. That'll definitely be making its way onto her rotating list of morning affirmations).

Conrad laughs, bites his lip, shakes his head. “I don’t… you’re not… I promise I’ve been thinking a lot fucking worse.”

Belly can feel her heart pounding between her thighs.

Her voice comes out in barely a whisper when she very bravely asks, “Like what?”

And you know the old phrase, curiosity killed the cat? Accurate, as it turns out.

Because Conrad’s throat bobs and he tucks a piece of hair behind her ear, gentle and a little bit nervous, before he says, “Like… finally getting you naked in my bed. Like you sitting on my face. Like, I don’t know, Belly, all the ways I still want to make you come tonight.” He pauses, and she can tell he’s trying not to smile by the twitch in his lip. “If you’ll let me.”

If she’ll let him?

* * *

Conrad’s apartment is so close to how Belly pictured it, she almost wonders if she should consider a career in fortune-telling.

(But then she thinks maybe her powers are limited to Conrad Fisher specifically, and that’s not exactly a profitable client base).

His place is on the second floor of an old rowhouse, and he has to jiggle the key and shove his shoulder against the front door to unlock it. The movement should not be as attractive as it is.

The door opens right into an open-concept kitchen and living room. It smells like laundry detergent and some kind of citrus cleaning solution inside, and he’s picked a vibrant color scheme: gray, navy, and beige.

(Okay, so Belly is not being entirely fair. There are a couple of what look like Susannah’s paintings, and an old black and white photo of a sailboat in the kitchen. Still, it’s exactly what she anticipated: simple, clean, Conrad).

Belly sets her purse down on the bench by the door and toes her shoes off, staring as Conrad crosses the room and starts flicking on lights—a floor lamp beside his couch, then a smaller one atop a bookshelf. He glances over at her as he does, and she realizes from his tight smile that he’s nervous.

With the lights on now, it’s like the bubble they were walking in outside has burst. It’s not awkward, exactly. It’s just… tense. Hot.

They always have been better at communicating with each other in the dark.

“Cute place,” Belly says, mostly just to break the silence, and Conrad breathes a laugh over his shoulder.

“It still needs a lot of… living in, I guess. I’m barely here.” His voice echoes in the otherwise quiet apartment. Proof, perhaps, that it’s still under-decorated.

“Yeah, how often do you work?”

Shoes off now, Belly crosses the room to shamelessly examine his belongings up close.

(It’s the first time she’s been in a space that is just Conrad’s, she realizes. She knows his bedroom in the summerhouse like the back of her hand, and once-upon-a-time she knew the inside of his bedroom at the Fishers’ place in Boston. But Susannah’s influence in both of those rooms was undeniable. By contrast, everything in this space is something Conrad picked himself. Even the ugly gray curtains).

“We’re supposedly capped at eighty-hour weeks.” Conrad is padding toward his kitchen now. “But, uh, it’s usually six twelve-hour days a week? I need to be in by five-thirty for pre-rounds and I’m there till anytime between five and… eight, maybe. It depends on the rotation, and when I'm on call.”

Belly looks up from where she’s in the middle of studying the contents of a shelf at eye level—a Lord of the Rings box set, a little glass bottle filled with sand, and a framed photo of the summer kids a decade ago—to scoff.

“Oh my god, Conrad. How are you walking right now?”

“Most days it’s a mystery, honestly,” he snorts. Belly moves toward him, and the old hardwood feels a little sticky under her bare feet. Conrad’s fiddling with a wine bottle and a corkscrew. He glances up with a crooked smirk. “Tonight? Sheer determination.”

Belly can feel the heat rising in her cheeks, but she ignores it in favor of leaning against his island and watching the way his fingers curl around the corkscrew.

She thinks maybe her dress is gaping enough that he can see down her cleavage, but she doesn’t mind. Hopes it is, really.

“Your neighbors must love you, at least.”

Conrad makes a noncommittal sound under his breath just as the cork vacates the bottle of wine with a muffled pop.

“Yeah, well, we’ll see how long that lasts.” He glances up at her again, ever so briefly, and his lips twitch. Quietly smug.

And… what the fuck are they doing? Belly wonders suddenly.  

She’s standing in Conrad Fisher’s kitchen wearing no underwear (underwear that are now in his pocket, she recalls with a shudder), her brain is glitching over a repeating image of herself straddling his mouth (an image he put there, she would like to add), and he’s… opening a fresh bottle of wine and flirting?

Is this a test? Is the universe back to edging her? Is he edging her?

“Conrad.” Belly says, maybe a bit too urgently, and he looks over from where he’s extracting two wine glasses from a kitchen cabinet. “What are you doing?”

If he’s taken aback, it doesn’t show. Conrad just shrugs, with the same smug smirk that’s barely left his lips in a half hour, and says, “Maybe I’m trying to romance you a little bit, Isabel Conklin.”

“And what if I don’t want to be romanced?”

Belly tries to keep her tone teasing, too, but she must fail. Because that does appear to stop Conrad in his tracks; it’s subtle, but the little downward flicker at the corner of his lips is unmistakable.

“I thought… I mean, I kind of thought this was more than a Hinge hookup, Belly.” The wine bottle is still hovering, tilted in his grip at an angle over the empty glasses.

“Of course it’s more than that,” Belly says.

Oh god, does he think she’s only interested in fucking him? Does he think she doesn’t want him to romance her?

(Okay, yes, to be fair, she did sort of just say that. But it’s not exactly what she meant. Fuck, why does she keep doing this?).

“It is more, Conrad. I just…” Didn’t think we were doing that right now, after you told me you wanted me naked in your bed five minutes ago.

Conrad scrunches his face up, one eyebrow raised. On the surface it might look like pain, but even after years apart, Belly knows Conrad Fisher better than that. It’s restraint. She wishes he wouldn’t do that. Then again, she hasn’t given him reasons to trust her in a long time.

He sets the wine bottle down with a quiet clink, and then he lets out a long breath.

“Sometimes I feel we’re speaking different languages.” Conrad says, with one short, frustrated laugh. “Which is fucking crazy, because most of the time I feel like I can still read your mind.”

And for once, they’re on the exact same page about something.

“Yeah, okay,” Belly nods, voice soft. “So tell me what you’re thinking.”

His eyes meet hers, that same soft gaze he wore all night at the jazz bar. “I think you know what I’m thinking. I need to know what you’re thinking.”

“I don’t.” Belly can’t help it when she laughs, equal parts incredulous and genuinely amused at the idea. “I have no clue what you’re thinking right now, Conrad.”

And the look Conrad gives her next? That’s Conrad looking pained. It’s wounded, the way his eyebrows furrow and his eyes inspect her face. And it aches in a spot deep beneath her sternum.

“That I love you, Belly,” he says, then, like it’s obvious. Maybe it is? It probably is. Belly sort of feels like she doesn’t know anything anymore. The admission hits her with a twist in her stomach regardless. “I know that sounds insane. I know we’ve barely spent two hours together in three years.” Conrad adds. “But honestly, I don’t think it’s physically possible for me to stop. Believe me, I’ve tried. I still want you. I want this.”

Her throat is so dry she’s starting to wish he had poured them that wine. She also thinks that maybe she’s crying a little bit.

“That does sound a little insane, yeah.” Belly eventually whispers. She’s looking him in the eyes when she says, “I guess that means we’re both a little insane, Conrad.”

(Really bad way to tell him “I love you too,” she’ll scold herself later).

They stare at each other for what feels like a very long time but can’t be more than five seconds.

Belly watches the slideshow of emotions play out on Conrad’s face, almost like a pop quiz on Conrad Fisher facial expressions: first a rapid blink, a flicker of his brows, and a parting of his lips (surprise); next a long exhale, a softening of his eyes, and a bite into his bottom lip (relief? love?); and finally, a slow shake of his head and a tightening in his jaw (confusion? irritation? Belly’s not acing this quiz).

“Then why are you—what’s going on right now?” Conrad says. “What do you…” He trails off, head still shaking a little bit. And then, in a flash, something dark and heady registers in Conrad’s eyes. His whole face softens again, and he swallows. “Oh.”

And then Conrad looks down and laughs, once, before he steps back from where he’s been leaning against the kitchen island.

His eyes are dark when he tilts his head. “Come over here, then.”

It’s like they’re beside that pool table again, only so much better—because this time Belly twists her hand in the front of his cardigan and Conrad ducks down to kiss her before she’s even fully in his embrace. His tongue still tastes like tequila and her espresso martini. The entirety of his hand covers the back of her neck, thumb pressing to one side and middle finger the other.

It’s impolite, the way he’s kissing her. It’s impolite in the best possible way. Conrad nips sharply at her bottom lip and licks into her mouth. He makes a sound halfway between a groan and a whimper when Belly closes her lips around the tip of his tongue.

She decides that they could do this forever and it still wouldn’t be enough.

When her hands find his belt buckle for the second time tonight, Conrad grunts and breaks away from her mouth to kiss down her neck.

“Don’t,” he mutters, right below her ear, with his palms sliding down her back and over her ass until he can grip firmly at her thighs. And then Conrad is lifting Belly right off her feet.

Three weeks ago, when she was constantly dreaming about this kind of thing, Belly couldn’t quite summon Conrad’s scent.

After this—after burying her nose in his throat while he carries her across his apartment—she thinks she’ll never forget, even subconsciously, what Conrad Fisher smells like again: like cedar, and like pepper, and maybe even a little bit like peaches.

(But she’ll admit she could be imagining that last part).

His bedroom is even more sparsely decorated than his living room.

Not that Belly really takes any time to survey it. She can see enough, as Conrad deposits her on his bed (heather gray duvet, crisply made, no throw pillows), and stands in front of her (beige walls, a wood veneer dresser that looks like it’s from IKEA, a single bottle of cologne).

Now that they’re here, it’s like a race to see who can undress the other faster. And they’ve always been competitive, haven’t they?

It’s not a fair race, though, because after Belly yanks his cardigan off, all Conrad has to do is tug at the hem of her dress and pull it up and over her head. Rigged game, and entirely her own creation.

The way Conrad’s lips part and eyes glaze over at the sight of her naked body would be earth-shattering, if Belly allowed herself to revel in the expression.

But, again, competitive, she uses his distraction as an opportunity to keep undressing him.

Belt: unhooked and pulled through the loop. Button: unfastened. Zipper: tugged down.

At long last, she’s about to have Conrad Fisher naked in front of her. And then, of fucking course, his hands close around her wrists again.

“Conrad, I swear to fu—” Belly looks up only to be met with the hard press of his mouth against hers again.

He swallows her protests, dropping his knee onto the mattress between her legs. And then Conrad leans over her until she’s forced onto her back, dragging her wrists in his hands to pin them to his bed above her head. He’s back to kissing her like he has been all night, hot and dirty and dizzying. The outline of his cock is rigid against her thigh, and one of his hands is skimming and squeezing at her flesh—breast, waist, thighs—while the other is curled around both of her wrists.

The whole experience is starting to feel a little bit like drowning. Belly is drowning in a sea of cedar and peach and Conrad Fisher, as he grunts and moans into her mouth.

It’s a demise she’ll enthusiastically accept.

Idly, Belly wishes she could see the way they look right now: her completely naked, him shirtless on top of her; the flex of his jaw as he kisses her; the stretch of his bare back as he pins her hands down and holds himself up on an elbow.

She’s been wet since that first glimpse of him at the jazz bar, to be honest—but it’s starting to get a little excessive now.

And just when she’s thinking about wriggling out from under him or forcing him onto his back, Belly feels it: the warm press of Conrad’s fingers against her clit. Only the pads of two fingertips at first, exploratory and far too gentle. He hisses against her mouth and then his palm dips lower and hooks two fingers deep into her.

That’s more like it.

She can hear her whimper echoing against his (bare) bedroom walls.

“Is this what you wanted?” Conrad’s lips move against hers when he speaks. Their foreheads are touching while his fingers pump inside her, unhurried but insistent. “So much you wouldn’t even drink a glass of wine with me first?” Belly is already arching her spine and rocking her hips up beneath him, trying desperately—and unsuccessfully—to get a little more friction against his palm.

She breathes out a “fuck you,” but it’s not remotely malicious—it probably sounds pretty affectionate, honestly.

“Yeah, baby, I’m trying to,” Conrad just mutters, and they both giggle at his lazy joke before he catches her lips again.

Belly’s memory didn’t do the length of his fingers justice, she thinks. He’s hitting a spot inside her she could only dream of reaching on her own. Combined with the perfect amount of upward pressure and a slide of his tongue against hers, she knows she could come from just this.

“God, I forgot how wet you always get.”

With anyone else, it could come across cheesy, or even arrogant—but with him, it sounds something like reverence.

It’s why Belly breathes an admittedly blissful sigh and says, “Only for you.”

(And it’s true; the first couple times they had sex, Belly was almost embarrassed by it. Multiple years and partners later, she thought maybe it was just youth and the novelty of it all. Evidently not).

She can already feel her orgasm creeping up on her, bright and burning in the pit of her stomach. She just needs a little…

“Touch me,” Belly requests, and even though Conrad is touching her, he seems to know what she needs: a shift of his hand to thumb over her clit as his fingers work inside her, a dip of his head down to suck against the skin of her collarbone, and then her orgasm lurches right through her—quick and harsh and shuddering.

“There it is.” Conrad’s working her through her release yet again, even as her inner thighs quake and her hips twitch against his palm. “Fuck, Belly… look at you.” She feels his lips moving against her skin, and the soft press of open-mouthed kisses in his words’ wake.

Her head is spinning, and Conrad’s fingers are still inside her, and as impossible as it sounds, Belly knows she could come again if he keeps this up for another thirty seconds.

Conrad meets her gaze, then, and his expression could only be described as tender. Combined with the way his fingers are still filling her in slow and unrelenting strokes, it’s overwhelming. “Will you do something for me, Belly?”

Belly would do anything for Conrad in this moment. She thinks he knows that. But she still nods.

“Will you sit on my face?”

Only Conrad Beck Fisher could string those six words together in a cadence so lovestruck and affectionate.

God, and Belly thought he’d never ask.

What happens next couldn’t really be described as a scramble of limbs, because Conrad is still moving her with the kind of steady intentionality that he has all night.

(Maybe—probably—it’s Belly’s brain that is scrambled at this point).

She just knows that one second Conrad has her pinned under him with his fingers inside her, and the next he’s rolled over for Belly to straddle him, one hand wet and sticky on her hip and the other tucking her hair behind her ears.

He’s looking up at her now the way he did when they were teenagers: from under his eyelashes, with parted lips and glassy eyes. I love you I love you I love you.

Conrad’s thumb brushes over her bottom lip, and then he says, “Come up here,” his voice heavy and low in his throat.

It should feel more vulnerable than it does, crawling up his body until her legs are astride his neck and his breath is coating her inner thighs. Belly’s never done this before. And a part of her, an annoying little insecure part of her, wonders if Conrad has—with one of those strangers from Hinge or anyone else.

Those thoughts can’t linger for long, though, because Conrad is already wrapping his hands around her thighs and pulling her down until she is, quite literally, sitting on his face. His nose—that perfectly pointed nose—nudges her clit, and his tongue immediately lathes the length of her cunt, and for just a second, Belly literally forgets how to breathe.

Suddenly, Belly loves Conrad’s boring black bedframe.

She especially loves the headboard, with its sturdy-enough horizontal slats. One palm slips easily around one slat, and then Belly is steadying herself on her knees as Conrad eats her out with relentless concentration.

He always used to love doing this—was incredibly thorough, even competitive, about it. But he never did it from this angle.

He did bring it up, once; on the phone, late one night in March, with Belly in her bedroom and Conrad in his dorm room. It was in the privacy of their own dark bedrooms that they could talk the most freely about sex—everything they liked and everything they still wanted to try.

“You know how much I love going down on you, right?” Conrad said, his voice low against the speaker, and Belly remembers having to press her thighs together beneath her sheets. “Sometimes when you’re on top of me I think about what it would be like to just… pull you up until you’re sitting right on my mouth.”

He almost sounded sheepish about it, until Belly whispered, “Would you touch yourself while you did it?”

Actually sitting right on Conrad’s mouth is an almost weightless sensation; Belly might as well be a balloon bumping along the ceiling somewhere, tethered to the earth only by the steady grip of Conrad’s hands and the wet warmth of his lower face, tucked right into her core. His breath is hot against her and the sounds he's making are obscene: muffled repetitions of her name into her wet heat and moans that vibrate through her entire body.

And she can see so much from up here, with one hand twisted in Conrad's hair: the furrow of his brows, the length of his eyelashes as they flutter in concentration, the slick on his nose when he closes his lips around her clit, the veins in the back of his hands as they cover her thighs.

His hands don’t stay there for long, though; once Conrad is satisfied that Belly has melted into him and isn’t going anywhere, he’s groping and fondling anywhere else he can reach—squeezes of her hips, her ass, her waist, her breasts. At some point his palm spreads over her lower stomach to pinch her clit between two fingers, his tongue still lapping at the bud in short strokes; she almost yelps, and she feels the deep vibration of Conrad’s smug laughter into her cunt.

She’s absolutely making noises that his neighbors will hear, now. But all Belly can hear is Conrad’s low, satisfied groans, and the unmistakable clink of his belt as his hand rustles through fabric.

And when Belly glances over her shoulder to look down at where Conrad is sprawled out on his bed beneath her, her suspicions are confirmed: his hand, stupid little fucking ring and all, is wrapped around his hard cock while he gets her off.

That sight alone is probably enough to make Belly come.

What ultimately gets her there, though? Wondering how long Conrad’s been imagining her straddling his jaw like this.

Since earlier tonight? Since they talked last night? Since he saw her Hinge profile and her stupid flirty message? Longer? Since that night on the phone all those years ago? Maybe all of the above. Maybe he’d forgotten about the fantasy for a while, until he saw that picture of her in that pink sweater and remembered the Valentine’s Day in his car. Yeah, maybe that’s what did it.

And it’s with that visual—Conrad, alone in this bed, getting himself off to a daydream of Belly sitting on his face, every day for weeks after he stumbled across her profile—that Belly comes, for the fourth time tonight.

* * *

Belly is pretty sure they’re together now.

They haven’t had a conversation about it, exactly.

(They've had lots of other conversations, ironically—about all the ways they fucked up last time, about three summers ago, about that night on the beach, about Belly running away to Paris. Just never the big What Are We discussion. It's classic Belly and Conrad, really. Maybe they don't need to talk about it because they're just on the same page? Or maybe that's exactly why they do need to talk about it?).

But Belly is staying over at Conrad’s charmingly boring apartment most weekends, and he calls her during his lunch break to tell her stupid stories about his coworkers and hear her yap about anything—what she had for breakfast, all the places she wants to go on vacation, a pilates class Taylor dragged her to before work. He sends flowers to her office, once, just for the hell of it. Belly knows the name of his downstairs neighbor, because she brings in Conrad’s mail so often that Greg (the neighbor) thought Belly lived there, too.

Okay, and they also have sex, like, five times per week.

It’s impressive, really, considering how much Conrad works—he wasn’t joking about that eighty-plus-hour-workweek thing.

It’s usually not in public bathrooms anymore, although he does let her go down on him in the bathroom at that dive bar on her block once.

(Something something about her lips on her beer bottle looking “way too provocative, Isabel,” blah blah blah, etcetera. The second Conrad rubbed his thumb over her bottom lip and nodded his head toward the back of the bar, Belly stopped listening to a single word that came out of that very handsome mouth).

Belly usually meets Conrad at his apartment, since he lives so close to the hospital. Sometimes they cook dinner together first, if he’s home early enough, but other times they just fuck.

And oh, do they fuck.

In his bed, on his couch, against the kitchen counter, even in his shower once (too slippery to be sexy, they decide). He comes over to her apartment in scrubs one night and they don’t even make it past her front door—he fucks her right there, with her legs around his waist and his teeth sunk into her shoulder.

(Her neighbors definitely hear, and Belly contemplates taping a photo of Conrad Fisher to her door with a little note: “I’m sorry, but can you blame me?”).

It's as good as it used to be and more, she wants to reveal to earlier-this-summer Belly. Conrad is better, and louder, and more confident.  

Gone are the days of discreet fucks in his car or her childhood bedroom, where he was stuck whispering in her ear. He’s always praising her, always telling her what he wants now, loudly and without hesitation (“Come over here so I can feel how wet you are.” “Touch yourself for me, Belly.” “God, you’re beautiful. Shhh, no, not yet. I want you to come for me again first.”).

He lasts longer; Belly never really considered that possibility in all her daydreaming, but it’s torturously true. Sometimes he’ll have to cool off, and he’ll spend ten minutes between her thighs before he fucks her again, but she’s discovered this older Conrad loves to draw it out as long as possible.

Conrad still remembers how to make her come shockingly quickly. And like the good little overachieving Eagle Scout that Conrad Fisher is, he’s discovered about ten new ways to do it, too. He puts her in positions they never would’ve thought to try as teenagers. He always knows how to adjust her hips or shift her body so he can hit that much deeper or that much better inside her.

So the sex is amazing.

It's also, like, really nice to be in Conrad’s orbit again.

She missed noticing his funny little habits—the same two books he rereads every night before bed, how he tucks her shoes under the bench every time he walks past his front door, the very specific way he likes to load the dishwasher, the careful routine of taking his watch off and putting it back on every time he washes his hands—and how he looks in sweatpants with the crossword puzzle on a Sunday morning. The truth is that Belly just likes being around Conrad. She always has.

So, for all intents and purposes, they’re together. It’s been eight weeks, and Belly can count on one hand the number of days she hasn’t seen or spoken to Conrad. A conversation about that is probably unneeded.

It's just... well, they haven’t said they love each other since that first night.

(And Belly didn’t exactly say it then, did she?)

It’s in everything they do: the little notes Conrad writes and leaves on the bedside table for her when he leaves her in his bed to go to the hospital before dark (“There’s some new disgustingly sweet coffee creamer in the fridge for you. Miss you already.”); the way Belly hugs herself to him and kisses the inside of his shoulder on the nights he comes home from the hospital looking broody; the way he easily tucks her into his side when they’re sitting across a diner booth from Steven and Taylor one Sunday morning, smiling down at her and mindlessly wiping syrup from her lip.

It’s definitely in the way Conrad looks at her when he fucks her sometimes, so gentle it feels inapt to call it fucking. It’s not just the affection in the set of his brows, or the softness in his eyes (though it’s probably, in large part, that). It’s also in his little, unselfconscious smiles when Belly tucks a piece of hair behind his ear to keep it from flopping in their faces. It’s in the way he whispers, “you’re perfect,” between sighs into her mouth.

Sometimes she’s not sure what they’re waiting for, and other times she thinks it’s nice that they’re doing this in some semblance of a “normal” order.

“Normal” couples don’t say I love you on their first Hinge date, right? “Normal” couples who meet on a dating app and hook up at a jazz bar wait a few months, don’t they? And Belly wanted to see what it would be like to be a “normal” couple with Conrad, didn’t she?

* * *

Despite everything, Belly still can’t stop thinking about Hinge.

She really figured that would have stopped by now; it’s been eight weeks, and Conrad is inside her more nights than he’s not. Belly has the spare key to his apartment, and Conrad’s baked muffins for her four times. She’s his, he’s hers, the whole shebang.

But the more she sees him—the more nights they spend exploring each other’s bodies and the deeper down the infatuation rabbit hole she tumbles—the more acute the obsession becomes.

Because now, when Conrad puts his thumb in her mouth while her leg is hitched over his shoulder, Belly wonders who else he’s done that to. When he pushes into her for the first time and groans “fuck, you’re wet,” she wonders who else has gotten to hear that voice and those words. And when she watches his bare ass walk toward the bathroom after, to bring back a warm washcloth, she wonders if any of those faceless girls from Hinge had the privilege of a similar sight.

So actually, maybe it’s totally fair and expected that she’s thinking about Hinge all the time. Maybe that’s a really reasonable thing for her to do.

She doesn’t have the guts to tell Conrad about this new hyper-fixation.

But against her better judgment, she does tell Taylor. They’re getting pedicures side by side, and Taylor is being predictably nosy about Belly’s love life. For once, Belly is happy to indulge.

“Is it… weird, that I can’t stop thinking about the people he’s been with since the last time we dated?” Belly asks, only sort of successfully ducking to hide behind an old Good Housekeeping magazine that she’s not even reading.

Taylor snorts. “Babe, you’ve been with his brother since then. I don’t think you really have a leg to stand on.” Belly feels her cheeks warm. She rolls her eyes.

“I’m not jealous, exactly,” she mutters, even though she definitely is. A little. “It’s not really about the who as much as the what. I guess I sort of always hoped we had this special—”

“Epic, infinity, soulmate bond. I know, B.” Taylor is not mirroring Belly’s attempt to be discreet about this conversation. Classic. “Look…” Her best friend sighs, turning to look fully at her now. “I have never seen Conrad Fisher look at another person the way that he looks at you. And I really, really doubt he’s been whoring around asking random women to sit on his face—"

“Oh my god, Taylor, I told you that—”

“I’m just throwing it out there. That’s the kind of freaky shit he’s been saving just for you, babe.”

Taylor makes an excellent, and potentially revolutionary, point.

And, well, suddenly that becomes Belly’s new obsession: collecting all the things Conrad Fisher will do to or with her, and no one else, like rare trading cards (or stamps, maybe?).

Would he go down on anyone else for an hour? Belly doesn’t think so.

Would he kiss anyone else awake in the middle of the night, half-asleep and hard against her lower back, to mumble “Can I please, baby? Can we get you ready?” Almost definitely not.  

Would he take anyone else to the summerhouse on a rainy night in early October, eat lobster rolls on the ground in front of the living room fireplace, and carry her upstairs to fuck her in his old bedroom? Easily, no.

(It’s as surreal as Belly thought it would be, going back to Cousins. Conrad doesn’t even tell her where they’re going—just instructs her to pack an overnight bag and picks her up from work on a Friday afternoon, windshield wipers squeaking and some early Bob Dylan song playing on his car stereo. Belly has a sneaking suspicion about where they’re going, especially with the way Conrad is smiling conspiratorially at her across the front seat, but it doesn’t become real until they’re actually on the Cape. They sleep in his bedroom and leave first thing the next morning, so he can make it back to Boston in time for his next twenty-four-hour shift, and Belly decides it was one of the best days of her life).

At some point, Belly becomes fixated on the idea of Conrad finishing inside her. They’ve never done that, because Conrad is nothing if not responsible, but there’s really no reason they can’t; Belly’s had an IUD for years.

She’ll never, ever forget the look on his face when she finally asks him. It’s one of those nights they go out—to an Italian restaurant near her apartment, so nothing particularly fancy—because Conrad has the next day off. They share an entire bottle of wine at dinner, and his lips are an adorable shade of purple when they get home and Belly straddles him on her couch. They’ve probably been making out for fifteen minutes, his hand finally dipping into her underwear, when she works up the courage.

“Conrad…” Belly’s murmur of his name is paired with a nuzzle of her nose against his, and she sighs when his fingertips probe right at her entrance, teasing.

“More?” He’s whispering to her. His breath is warm, wine-scented, and coating her cheeks. “Tell me what you want.”

It’s not an answer to the question he’s truly asking, not really, but Belly can’t help it when she moans out, “I want you to come inside me.”

Conrad’s head rears back on his neck to study her face. His eyelids are heavy and blinking, but he’s looking at her with an unmistakable awe. “Yeah?” Conrad’s voice cracks over the word.

“Please,” Belly says, and it’s not him slipping his fingers all the way inside her that she’s begging for—though Conrad, in the moment, does that too. “Oh, fuck, Conrad.”

“What, baby? You like having my fingers inside you while you think about my come?” Conrad’s clearly recovered from his momentary disbelief, because now his voice is back to that sweet, soft tenor he always pairs with short kisses against her neck.

“Not just your come, Conrad,” Belly finds it in herself to say. She’s rocking her hips against his hand, and when he tilts his head back to look up at her, she pets her fingertips over his lips. “Your come inside me.” The sound he makes is something like a whimper.

Conrad does finish inside her, twenty minutes later while she rides him on the couch. He’s looking at her from under hooded eyes when he does, and there’s no way to describe his expression other than unadulterated love. He goes down on her after, maybe just to taste them together on his tongue.

Belly is certain Conrad wouldn’t have done all of that to anyone else, either.

And, well, yeah… there is also the love aspect of it all.

* * *

It comes to a head when they show up together to Steven and Taylor’s last barbecue of the season.

It’s mid-October, before the leaves fall off the trees and it gets too cold for these monthly backyard soirees. The party is Oktoberfest themed. Taylor decked their yard out with fairy lights and floral arrangements made of sunflowers and asters. They have beer steins shaped like barrels, and three kegs, and Steven convinced Jeremiah to bake like a million Bavarian pretzels or something—it seems there are at least that many, stacked on wooden dowels everywhere. A firepit is lit on one end of the deck, and on the other, Steven and Jere are at the grill wearing lederhosen and flipping sausages.

When Belly and Conrad arrive hand in hand, just after the sun’s finished setting, she expects a moment of awkwardness. But there isn’t one—Steven and Jere spot them stepping into the yard and immediately drag Conrad back inside.

(Likely to present him with his own pair of ugly leather breeches from Amazon, if Belly had to guess. When Steven told Taylor and Belly about this barbecue idea a few months ago, a couple weeks after a trip to some tech conference in Munich, he’d been adamant about the costume element. To the point Taylor said, “babe, you can just get lederhosen, if that’s what you’re into.” Belly and Taylor vowed to wear their hair in braids and call it a day; Steven, apparently, was undeterred by their nonchalance).  

Belly is only three sips into her drink when her best friend materializes at her side and squeals, “Oh my god, B, you’re glowing.”

“Yeah, well, the fire was not necessary. It’s like, barely sixty degrees right now,” Belly jokes, but she’s trying very hard not to obviously beam.

“Fuck you, you know what I mean,” Taylor rolls her eyes. And then, a little lower, “The sex is still that good?”

Belly just smiles into her mug, eyebrows shooting up to her hairline, and the two of them dissolve into laughter.

It’s not just the sex, obviously. It’s everything about Conrad. It’s waking up on Sunday mornings to his sleepy grin against her pillow and the way his irises are the brightest in the morning light. It’s cooking dinner together most nights, Conrad in a stupid lacy apron one of his med school friends got him as a gag gift, stealing kisses between chopping vegetables. It’s knowing he’s hers again, and that she’s his.

It’s—God, it’s that she loves him, that she’s so in love with him, and why the fuck hasn’t she said that to him every single day?

As if on cue, the back door slides open and out steps Conrad Fisher, wearing a stupid pair of faux leather breeches and suspenders, grinning sheepishly. Weirdly, he almost pulls it off.

(Almost).

Taylor wolf whistles at Conrad across the deck and he does a curtsy. It’s so endearing Belly thinks she might want to devour him. At the very least, she would like to crawl into his lap while he drinks a beer at Steven and Taylor’s firepit and kiss his whole face.

Forty minutes later she finally gets the opportunity.

Belly is on her second beer and her third pretzel, and she’s wearing Conrad’s jacket—because despite the shit she gave Taylor earlier, the autumn evening chill is settling in. Conrad wordlessly deposited it over her shoulders as he brushed past her a few minutes ago.

Now he’s sitting at the firepit with a few guys Steven knows from Princeton that Belly sort of remembers from previous barbecues, mostly nodding along and smiling politely. His face is glowing under the firelight and, well, he might as well be eighteen in front of that blue-and-white-tiled mantel in Cousins again.

Conrad turns his head to glance across the deck. His eyes connect with hers immediately, easily, over the lip of his beer mug. Belly tilts her head, and Conrad lowers his mug from his mouth, still rapt in her gaze. She watches him swallow and the way his eyes go a little bit darker. And there’s that mystical magnetism, just like at Nicole’s party. Just like at her rehearsal dinner. Just like at the jazz bar. It’s electric, it’s sacred, and it’s like nothing else Belly’s ever felt.

He lifts his lips in a little smirk and bobs his head to the side to beckon her over. Belly does not need to be asked twice.

Conrad’s eyes stay on Belly’s her whole journey across the deck, until she’s dropping into his lap and he’s sliding his hand under her (his) jacket to loop his arm around her waist. When she’s settled into him, warmth from the fire coating one side of her body and warmth from Conrad radiating against the other, she looks up from under her eyelashes and thinks, I love you.

“Hey,” Conrad just murmurs down to her, and they smile at each other stupidly for what must be at least ten seconds.

It would be rude, inflating their own private bubble in this Adirondack chair, if Steven’s friends weren’t gripped in some conversation about “the future of SPACs,” already ignoring Belly and Conrad anyway.

And fuck it, Belly thinks. She doesn’t want to wait another second. So she reaches up with the hand not holding her beer to brush her thumb against his jaw and whispers, “I love you.”

Conrad blinks at her, his mouth briefly dropping open. The expression almost makes her giggle. “I—” And then a deep swallow, and a few more rapid blinks, and his eyes go glassy and fond. “I love you too, Belly. Always.” It’s soft, for only her ears, and maybe Belly’s new favorite sound in the world.

They’re back to smiling stupidly at each other, until eventually Conrad leans down and rubs his nose against hers. Belly tilts her chin up and then they’re kissing, easy and unhurried. One slow kiss, and then two, and then someone whistles from across the yard, and they’re smiling into each other’s mouths. Belly drops her face into Conrad’s neck with a giggle and a contented sigh. His fingers stroke her hip absentmindedly, the firepit crackles loudly in front of them, and she can feel the warmth of his breath on her forehead.

“Fuck, was it the lederhosen?” Conrad suddenly jokes, from right above her head. “I can ask Steven if I can keep them.”

“No,” Belly sputters out, and she feels him smiling into her hair. “No, you idiot, it was despite the lederhosen.” Conrad’s chest shakes in silent laughter beneath her, and she feels him drop a few kisses into her hair. “Can I ask you something?” Belly says after a minute, tilting her head back up to look at him once more. “Why didn’t you say it again? After that night at your apartment?”

Conrad’s head tilts, and his eyes scan her face. He says, “I just wanted this to be on your terms, at your pace. After, you know… everything that happened that summer.” A second later he chuckles, once. “And shit, Belly, I thought you knew.”

She bites back a smile at that and resists the urge to roll her eyes. “I did. Of course I did.”

Conrad kisses her forehead and murmurs, “Yeah, me too,” against her skin. And then he drops his cheek to rest on top of her head and Belly hums, settling back into the warmth of his neck. Back to her favorite place to drown—cedar and pepper and peaches and Conrad’s skin.

The others get up from the firepit and now it’s just Belly and Conrad, cuddled up under the heat of the flames and a full moon.

She’s thinking about Hinge again. But it’s not like the last time, or the time before, or the hundreds of times before that. She’s not thinking about who Conrad might have met before she had him again, or what he thought of her profile, or whether he would ever respond to her flirty little message.

Belly’s thinking about how inevitable this feels. She’s thinking maybe the Hinge sighting was fate, but not because an algorithm decided they were mathematically compatible, destined to be together by the laws of chemistry or gravity or attraction or whatever. Maybe it was just a cosmic push—one they needed so they could find each other again, all on their own, like they always do.

“What are you thinking right now?” Conrad mutters, placing his beer mug on the arm of the chair so he can play with her hair, resting in a braid against his chest.

“Do you think it would be the same,” Belly asks, “if we met for the first time this summer? Would we still love each other?”

Conrad stills beneath her, and for a second, she thinks he might be trying not to laugh. “What, like if we met on Hinge?”

“Mm-hm,” she just nods into his neck. “If we were strangers on a dating app. Or, you know, a singles speed-dating event. Or this barbecue, or—”

“Yeah, baby, I get it,” Conrad really does laugh now, cutting her off with a kiss against her forehead. And then, easily, he shrugs, “Of course I do.”

“Why?”

When Belly tilts her chin up to look at him again, Conrad is frowning down at her. Not in irritation, or anger, or frustration, or impatience. It’s something more like deep concentration, if the furrowing of his brow and the parting of his lips mean anything.

He shakes his head a little, breathes out a soft sigh, and he says, “Because I’ve fallen in love with you, like, four times now, Belly. Every time we’ve been apart for a while, and we’ve both changed, and I worry we might feel like strangers to each other… I just see you again,” his tongue clicks against the roof of his mouth, and he sounds a little breathless. “And every time, it takes maybe an hour. To know that I still love you.”

Belly thinks about that for a second. She thinks about that night at the jazz bar. She thinks about the summer of her wedding. She thinks about that beautiful, perfect Christmas. She thinks about that last summer in Cousins—the one when Susannah got sick. She thinks about the Conrad she loved when she was thirteen, and the Conrad she loved when she was sixteen, and the Conrad she loved when she was twenty-one, and the Conrad she loves now: the Conrad she saw on Hinge a couple months ago.

Conrad. 25. 6’2”. Boston. Resident Physician. Stanford University. Figuring out my dating goals.

After a few beats, Conrad murmurs, “What, do you not think so?”

Quickly, she shakes her head.

“No, I do,” Belly breathes out, and she’s surprised to feel how sincerely she means what she says. “I don’t think there’s a version of me that doesn’t love every version of you, Conrad.”