Archive of Our Own ^beta

Chapter Text

On a Sunday afternoon in March, Belly gets a call from Conrad Fisher. For a moment, she just stares at his name on the screen, no picture. She’s not sure they’ve talked on the phone at all since the summer when she turned fifteen, and even then, it had only been short calls to say things like, “I’m at the store, do you need anything?” or “Where are you? The moms are waiting down at the end of the boardwalk.” 

Back then, even those kinds of calls were enough to make her heart flutter. 

The call has almost rang through. 

Belly picks up. “Hi,” she says. “Conrad.”

“Hi, Belly.” His voice is the same, of course. Warm, on the edge of laughter. “Steven tells me that you’re in Boston now.”

Belly walks over to her kitchen window, crammed in next to her microwave. “I am. Or Somerville, anyway.”

“That’s good, that’s good. Me, too. In Cambridge.”

“Since when?”

“Since last month? I would have called sooner if I had known you were here. I just started my residency at Massachusetts General.”

“Oh,” Belly says.

“Can I take you to dinner? Sometime this week? We can catch up.”

It’s still pretty grim out, winter dragging on, and Belly feels like it’s been ten years since she saw the sun. The prospect of leaving her apartment for anything other than work seems a bit daunting. She tries to think back to when she last saw Conrad. It must have been the summer after he graduated undergrad, when she and Laurel and Steven had gone out to San Francisco. Four years ago now? And before that, she was pretty sure it had been Susannah’s funeral.

It feels a bit like a ghost has called her. A really hot ghost who had kind of broken her heart.

“Yes, all right,” Belly says. “How is Wednesday?”

“Wednesday is great.”

“Great,” she says, and mostly means it.

Wednesday at seven, Belly waits for Conrad outside the chosen restaurant, an Indian place across the bridge from the hospital where he works. It’s just now dark and it’s on the edge of too cold for her jacket and Belly feels, of all things, nervous. She’d dressed down to remind herself that it wasn’t a date, jeans and a sweater, and then because she was feeling like it, a dark red lip, no eyeliner.  

She’s standing on the street, sort of eyeing every passing man and wondering if it’s him, like maybe he’s changed enough since the last time she’d drunkenly stalked his social media to be unrecognizable, when suddenly she turns and there he is.

Life, she thinks, is really quite cruel. 

Conrad is wearing a dark blue coat and a cerulean scarf and a hat jammed over his sandy hair. He looks exactly the same and entirely different. And it’s funny, because Belly knows that he’s the archetype of her type; but even so, just the sight of him, offering her a broad Conrad Fisher smile, threatens to wobble her knees. How embarrassing.

He comes forward, and then, as if it’s nothing, pulls her into a tight hug, ruffling her hair when he pulls back so it’s all wild around her face. Belly makes a shocked sound, a little overwhelmed by the sight of him (still extremely hot) and the feel (also ridiculously good) and the smell (somewhat antiseptic). 

“You cold?” he says, hands now on her shoulders.

“Just a bit.”

“Come on, let’s go in.”

As if it hasn’t been four years, and eight summers.

The restaurant is a hole in the wall with just a little counter to order and a handful of foldout tables crammed into the small adjourning room. They order their food and take the plastic containers over to the table under the radiator, peeling off their layers and stacking them on top the chairs humorously high.

Belly thinks maybe she should have asked him for drinks instead, that the ease of alcohol might have softened the weight of him. But it’s too late for that now.

“So,” she says when they’re settled. “How have the last four years been?”

He laughs. “Well, I’ve been a med student, so…”

“I don’t know what that means, Conrad. Good? Bad?”

He makes a little face. “Both? Mainly? I haven’t had much of a life, let’s just say. Stanford was pretty grueling.”

“And now?”

He shrugs. “And now I’m here with you.”

This is a potentially crumpling statement.

Belly takes a large bite of her samosa. Probably, she’s smearing her lipstick. Which doesn’t matter. Because this isn’t a date.

“Steven tells me you’re working at a school,” he says.

Belly agrees that she is, and tells him a little bit about it. He knows the school by reputation, because of course he does, and she speaks a little on coaching, how she likes it but would rather transition to college sports once she has a little more experience. He’s nodding and listening in a sort of intent way that people don’t normally and Belly can feel an emotion curling in her gut sort of like longing. It’s a fruitless kind of feeling.

She’s wasted too many years pining for Conrad Fisher to take up the habit again.

But here he is, tearing naan bread into small bits as she talks, and she remembers those hands, though the watch is new. As is the collared shirt, more refined look of him.

She asks him a bit about his residency, which is in Emergency Medicine, and he tells her he did a rotation last year and fell in love with it. “I like feeling like I’m helping,” he says, which tracks with what she knows of him. “That makes it worth it most days.”

“Do I get to call you Dr. Fisher yet?” 

He smiles. “Not technically. They’re particular about that.”

The food is finished, and they collect the trash and make their way to the door, kind of awkward, like it’s not clear if the night is over yet. 

“How did you get here?” he asks her out by the bike rack.

Belly had taken two buses, and then walked a bit. She tells him this, and he frowns.

“How did you get here?” she asks.

“I walked. I live around the corner. I can drive you home.”

So they amble over towards his apartment building, and then they’re standing outside it, by the alleyway that houses his car, still awkward with it. His complex is an old-fashioned charming brick walk up, which Belly immediately likes. 

If this were a date, she thinks, she’d see about trying to get him to invite her up. She tries to think of the words she would use. And then before she can second guess it, they’re coming out of her mouth. “Show me your place?” Which objectively, is a bit blunt. But well, she wasn’t going for finesse.

Conrad blinks, surprised. “Yeah?”

Belly nods, because well, it isn’t worth backtracking now once she’s already put it out on the table. And Conrad pulls his keys out, and they start into the building, which means she guesses it worked. The thought has the air of unreality about it. 

“I’m not fully unpacked yet,” he tells her, which she says is fine.

The apartment is a studio, but it’s neat, even the packing boxes corralled into straight lines. The bed is fully made, and he’s got a small love seat and what looks like a working fireplace, and a real wood kitchen table stacked high with medical books. They both take their shoes off at the door. He’s got a little rack for it, which Belly finds unfairly endearing. 

She can feel that he’s watching her look around and it does feel a little heated, which surprises her. Belly wonders if that means she might have a chance at sleeping with him if she plays this right. Some little girl inside of her is screaming with joy at the thought. Loudly. She tries to tell her to hush.

“A drink?” she asks.

“Uh, yeah.” 

She watches him go over to his fridge. “I have…some not very nice wine. Or some snobby beer.”

“I’ll take the wine.”

His kitchen is small and a bit utilitarian. A pan is still sitting in the sink, soaking, from breakfast. The dish towel is a cheery yellow. She leans her hip against the counter. If she’s staying, she should take her coat off, so she does.

He holds out the glass of wine to her, and she takes it.

“Table?” he asks.

“Sofa.”

So they go and sit on the loveseat. Belly tucks her feet up next to her. The loveseat is small enough that their knees are almost brushing. His hands are sitting pressed to his legs, one holding his wine glass. 

The ability to make conversation has apparently deserted her. She’s thinking instead about crawling into his lap, what it would be like to kiss him. Such thoughts had consumed her once, back before she’d ever even kissed anyone. The fact that they still seem so enticing now that she’s kissed a large number of people is a touch embarrassing.

She’s leaving lipstick marks on his wine glass. She doesn’t care. 

With some amount of intention, she moves her knee forward so that their legs are touching. 

He turns to look at her. “Belly,” he starts. “Maybe we should—”

“Shh,” she says, and takes his wine glass and sets it on the floor along with her own. 

It’s really, Belly thinks, not like she’s losing anything if this doesn’t go well. It’s been years and they aren’t friends anymore and she’s allowed, objectively speaking, to have her home for the holidays moment. Sleeping with him was like her childhood dream and she’s twenty-five now and single and she’s not bad in bed and she doesn’t know at what point she’ll be back in Conrad Fisher’s apartment, if she ever will be, so, fuck it. 

She leans forward and kisses him.

For a moment, they stay there, pressed almost chastely together, and then she feels him soften, his mouth slackening a bit so that the kiss deepens. And okay, Belly can work with that. 

Her hands find the base of his neck, tilting his head back a bit, and they’re kissing again, each one deeper and slower and dirtier than the last. She makes a low sound in her throat, because like, okay, she thought he could probably kiss, but Jesus. 

His hand has found her hip, not guiding her, just resting, and the idea of climbing into his lap is still sounding great, so she does it. 

She’s gotten lipstick all over his mouth, and he looks a bit winded, which is flattering, and makes her want to kiss him again, at this new angle, and somehow she’s allowed to, so she does, licking into his mouth, and hearing his breath catch. This is great, Belly thinks. She should be doing this all the time. Every day maybe.

She’d had no sense that the night could lead here. 

She grinds down on him, and his hands run up her back into her hair, and she’s squirming a bit, from him touching her, like she can’t figure out the correct way to get closer. And there are too many layers between them, objectively. So she puts her hands to her sweater, and yanks it over her head, her top going with it, and then she’s just in her bra and jeans and socks, which feels like an improvement. Yay, she thinks.

Conrad puts his mouth right where the strap meets her bra cup, a wet, bruising kiss, and Belly touches the back of his head.

Somewhere a voice is screaming, I’m touching Conrad Fisher’s hair! And it’s soft! At ten, she’d known it would be. And it is.

He’s pressing up into her a bit, which feels nice, and Belly thinks, I could fuck him right on this couch, just like this. In fact, she would very much like to. If she could just figure out the logistics of removing both of their pants she would do it right this second. 

She’s pretty sure she’s already soaked through her underwear. Just from making out a bit on his loveseat. Because when she was fourteen she thought he’d hung the moon and now he’s mouthing at her breast. This is probably dangerous territory. 

Oh well.

She goes for the buttons of his shirt, her hands a little shaky, and the red color of her lipstick is a bit funny on his face, and she’s sure it’s all over her, too, which is not the sort of elegance she’d always pictured for this moment, but she’s not entirely sure it’s worth it to go for a washcloth, because what if he changes his mind and then she’s riding the bus home with damp panties and she didn’t even get his pants off, and Christ, okay, the shirt is open. 

She puts her mouth to his collarbone and he makes a sound sort of like a grunt. “Belly,” he says into her hair.

No one calls her that anymore. Hearing it makes her feel young. But it’s not like she’s going to request mid-coitus that he switches to Isabel.

“Hmm,” she says, grinding down a little harder to convince him. She can feel that he’s hard, so it’s not like he’s unaffected, but she wants him sure.

Fuck, but she should have worn a skirt. 

She’s going to have to get off him to get her pants off. And that needs to happen like now. So with gargantuan effort, Belly scrambles backwards, and then almost trips on the side table, because she doesn’t feel entirely steady on her feet, which is, of course, less than ideal. 

“Are you okay?” he asks, and he’s definitely laughing a little.

“Yes,” Belly says, firmly. “Shut up, I just—” She pulls at the button to her pants, moving to go for the zipper next. 

His hand on her wrist halts her.

She’s trying not to be dramatic about it, but she really thinks she might cry if they don’t have sex. She’ll do it privately, but the tears will be real, so the halting is a little scary, but then she feels his mouth at her stomach, right where the button rests, and she realizes he’s not trying to stop her after all. 

“Oh,” Belly says. 

He pulls the zipper down further, and then replaces it with his lips, and Belly feels herself melting into him.

“Conrad,” she says. It’s maybe part moan. 

He hmmms against her skin, which feels incredible. She’d like it if he did it lower, too. She’s pretty sure he’s going to. So maybe she’s hit the jackpot. It’s about fucking time.

His hands push her pants down further, and she’s sort of wiggling to get out of them, and he’s saying, “Don’t fall,” a little smugly, his mouth all red and smirking, which feels kind of like a challenge, though mainly Belly is thinking about not falling, and the pants are off, praise the lord, and his gaze has latched to her, deep and hungry, and okay, his pants need to be next. 

She kneels down on the ground in front of him, reaching for his zipper. “Come on,” she says. 

He does what she tells him with a certain degree of elegance that she was lacking, fuck him.

Belly sits back on the floor, and pulls at his wrists, so he is coming towards her down onto the floor. 

“I have a bed,” he tells her. 

“Too far,” Belly says against his throat.

“So eager,” he says, which could be rude, but he says it a little windblown, like it’s delighted him, and yeah, nope, it’s nice instead. 

She is eager. And he’s bare and pressing up against her, making a rough sound at that, just the brush of them together, which is great, and Belly is feeling about as deliriously wet and blissed out as she’s ever been, so she’s very proud for having the presence of mind to say, “Condom?”

He makes a little sound, and then rolls off of her, and pads across the room to his bed, totally naked, and Belly thinks, well, maybe get off the floor then, girl, but she’s not sure her legs would move. When he returns, he stands over her for a second, looking down, and kind of laughing, condom on, and well, whatever, it is kind of funny.

“Please, get down here,” she tells him. “Because I’m not moving.”

And he does, slotting himself back against her, and she’s pretty sure he’d had plans about his mouth and stuff, but she really just wants him in her, so she hitches her leg over him, arches and then he’s sliding into her, just like that.

They both make a sound at how it feels, foreheads pressed together, and she kisses him, just to feel close, as he thrusts in and out, and she kind of has this transcendent moment where she’s pretty sure they were always meant to be doing this, like fate or something. His breathing is all unsteady and his hands are clutching at her thighs so she thinks maybe at least a little bit he agrees. 

“Sorry,” he pants against her mouth. “It’s been a minute.”

It takes her a moment to process what he could possibly mean by that, and she sort of laughs a bit, because it’s funny. And then his hand moves between them, pressing right there, and Belly’s entire leg quivers, hard. “Oh my god,” she says.

“Right there?”

She nods, a little desperately, and he does it again and again, her whole body shaking, her hands clutching at his shoulders, wanting him closer and more, and Jesus fucking Christ, right there. She bites down on his shoulder as she comes, and he makes a new-to-her-ears sort of sound as she does it, and follows pretty closely afterwards, rolling off of her when he’s finished, so they’re both looking at his ceiling, or perhaps more accurately, the undersides of his furniture.

Belly starts laughing. And then after a moment, so does he. 

She rolls a bit to look at him. There are teeth marks on his shoulder and lipstick all over him. The wine glasses, predominantly undrunk, are still sitting on the floor next to them. It’s something of a miracle that they didn’t knock them over.

“So this is the apartment,” Conrad says, grinning.

Belly touches the bite mark, which looks a little raw. “Sorry about that.”

He looks over at it, and then sort of flushes, which is pretty wonderfully delightful. 

The whole thing has been.

“It’s okay,” he says. “I’ve got disinfectant in the medicine cabinet, and I should probably…” He gets to his feet, and then pads into the bathroom.

Belly hunts around for her underwear and then pulls it and her pants on, locating her shirt and putting that on as well. 

When he returns, it’s with a wet washcloth. He kneels down and puts it to Belly’s face, his hand cupping her right at the ear to hold her steady. Warm pressure up and over her eyes and then down her neck. He’d wiped off his face, too, and he looks pink-cheeked and charming.

“Thanks.”

“No problem.”

“Uh,” she says. “I do have school in the morning, so I should probably…you know.” She pulls back from him a bit. “Let me just,” and then disappears into the bathroom.

She looks…completely ravished. She uses the toilet, washes her hands, splashes more water on her face, gives up on her hair, amps herself a bit with a mini pep talk, and then steps back into the main room, where Conrad has put back on a pair of boxers, and is sitting rather sedately on the end of his bed. 

“Everything good?” he asks. 

Belly nods emphatically. “So good,” she says. “It’s just getting late and uh, dark, and it might snow, you know, so…I better…go.”

“Okay,” he says, slowly. “I’ll just get my clothes, and I’ll drive you.”

“No,” Belly says. “I mean, you don’t have to. I’ll just take the bus.”

He looks at her like she’s grown two heads. “I’m not letting you take the bus, Belly. My car is right outside.”

“No, no,” Belly says, already heading back into the kitchen for her coat. “You probably have like work in the morning, so it’s good. Seriously. Thanks for dinner.” 

“You’re welcome.”

She’s got the jacket back on. He’s still mostly naked. It’s a lovely look on him. And it’s been about ten minutes since he was inside her and she’d already like to do it again. Pretty desperately. It’s a feeling that strips her of her skin. This wasn’t what she’d been intending when she’d agreed to meet up. In fact, it's pretty close to her worst fear.

“Text me when you’re home at least.”

“I will.” Belly shuttles herself over to the shoes, and slips hers on. She thinks about saying, and thanks for the orgasm, because that might make her seem jaunty and casual, but she’s not sure she can pull it off.

She feels, in fact, a bit gutted.

She was meant to be past the point of caring so much what Conrad Fisher thought of her. It had been bad enough losing him the first time around. And back then, they hadn't even been anything to each other.

She puts her hand on the door handle. 

Conrad is still looking at her. “It was really good to see you, Belly.”

“Yes,” Belly agrees, kind of morosely. “It was good to see you, too.”

So good, in fact, that if she let it, it could probably ruin her entire life.

Chapter Text

Four days later, Belly goes and gets drinks with Taylor. They are settled at their preferred bar—a tiki themed restaurant exactly equi-distance between their apartments—drinking Mai Tais, when Taylor says, “So, you’ll never believe who Steven had drinks with last weekend.”

“Was it Conrad Fisher?”

Taylor gives her a surprised, impressed look. “You knew?”

“He called me after they met up. And asked me to dinner.”

“And?! Ohmygod, B. Did you go?”

Belly nods. 

“And was he still delicious? Steven refused to say. Like he literally acted like he couldn’t tell. It was ridiculous.”

Belly nods again. “Oh, yeah.”

“You are being so spare on the details. Say more. Where did you go? What did he say?”

Belly fiddles a bit with the little parasol on her drink. “We went and got Indian food,” she says. And then, because she’s not chicken, “And then we went back to his apartment and had sex on his floor.”

Belly wishes she could take a photo of Taylor’s expression. “Excuse me? You slut! How the fuck was it?”

Belly smiles and nods a little maniacally. “Yeah,” she says. “Yes, good.”

“And?! Have you heard from him? What’s happening? Show me the texts.”

At that, Belly sighs. That night, when she had made it back to her apartment, she’d texted Conrad: back home

On the bus ride, she’d written out a longer, gushier message, and then deleted it. It had said terrible things like: i’ve missed you

He had hearted the message immediately, and Belly had stood in her entryway, shoes still on, watching the three dots load and then go silent, load and then go silent, five times over, before at last he had just sent: Glad you made it safe.

And that was the last that she’d heard from him.

Belly shakes her head. “I think that was it. Like, you know, the childhood fantasy has now been fulfilled. It was great. But I don’t have to like ruin it, you know, by like trying for something more.”

“Literally who are you right now? This is like THE guy. You used to give me an entire play-by-play of like what he ate for breakfast.”

That was true. How humilating.

“No, I’m serious, Taylor. Like, he just dropped completely out of my life when he moved to California and we stopped going to Cousins for the summers, and with Susannah dying and everything, I don’t know, it was just like really devastating, that he didn’t seem to care to stay in contact. I don’t want to do that again.”

He’d still called Laurel every couple of months, so Belly had known that he still existed, in broad strokes.  And she had known before everything happened that she didn’t have a claim on him, not really, not outside of summer. She wasn’t his girlfriend. She wasn’t his sister. She was his mother’s best friend’s daughter, and then his mother died, and it had felt to Belly like summer had died with her. And so had Conrad Fisher.

But he wasn’t dead. He just hadn’t cared enough to ever see her again. Until now.

“No, I remember, babe. It was rough.”

In the last four days, Belly has thought it all through. Rationalized it to the point that she feels like she has a plan going forward to protect her heart. That doesn’t mean it feels good, exactly, that he hadn’t texted in all that time, even after they’d had vaguely transcendent sex. She’d sort of been hoping that he’d reach out again, and then, even if she’d decided to ignore it, she could feel as if she’d won. Probably, she wasn’t meant to be thinking of it as a competition. 

Taylor gives her a sly look. “The sex was good though?”

Belly nods, sadly. “The sex was good though.”

The sex in fact had been so good that for the next week Belly has trouble thinking of anything else. She’ll be standing in front of the apples at the grocery store or out on the field, watching the girls hustle around the icy track, and suddenly she’ll be thinking about the strength of his grip on her thighs or the soft sound he’d made against her stomach or the way he’d smiled at her, lipstick smeared over his face, or how it had felt to press their foreheads together while he fucked her. It’s become a real and actual problem in her life. And trying to solve it late at night with her hands down her pants is getting her literally nowhere. She’s almost mad at him about it.

Maybe she should just redownload tinder. But she doesn’t want to have mediocre sex with a stranger. She wants to have great sex with Conrad Fisher. And it’s keeping her up at night.

And though everything she’d said to Taylor was still true, Belly didn’t think that Conrad had hated having sex with her. In fact, by most measures, it had seemed like he’d enjoyed it. Which meant that there was a possibility that by not asking anything else of him, she could probably get him to have sex with her again.

And so the next Sunday at two a.m, after approximately three hours staring angrily up at the ceiling, Belly just decides, okay, so what the hell?, and sends him a message.

want to come over?

She sends it, and then kind of stares at it a bit in horror, like she can’t believe she’d really clicked send, though she had. She’s losing like six years of progress on the Getting Over Conrad Fisher Agenda. And she’s wearing humongous sweatpants and an old t-shirt and she hasn’t shaved or cleaned the apartment. She should at least change the sheets, if he’s like going to be in them.

So, she gets out of bed and shaves her legs, sitting on the tub and ignoring her phone, and then she changes the sheets and puts away the worst of the laundry, at which point it's three a.m., and he hasn’t texted her back.

And she has work in the morning.

“I’m going insane,” she says, out loud, like maybe God will answer her or something.

She falls asleep with the lights on, and wakes up to zero notifications. 

The next day is busy, and also a little bit sad, because one of her players is having a her-first-experience-with-death crisis because her friend's grandmother has just died and she’s meant to go to the funeral that night, and so, she’s sitting crying in Belly’s shitty back office in the gym during her free block, which Belly had been planning to use to eat her lunch and be morose about her sex life.

She probably needs to get her priorities in order.

The talk goes okay, but it takes forever, and it also means that it’s not until Belly is stepping out of work right at dusk that she’s able to check her phone and see that Conrad has texted her back.

Sorry, I normally go to bed early, he’s written. But I can do Wednesday at 7:30 p.m. if that works?

Belly stares at the text for a long time—standing on the platform waiting for the T, back at her apartment heating frozen potstickers in a pan, and then sitting in the one armchair she has crammed in the corner by her window, folded up with a glass of rose.

He uses proper punctuation, because, of course he does. And he’d clarified p.m, as if she might have thought he meant he could come over to fuck her at 7:30 in the morning. And he’d apologized, like he knew maybe she was losing it since he hadn’t responded, which she had been. Because he’s Conrad Fisher, and he’s mainly kind. 

There was a reason, after all, that Belly had missed him.

Still. Somehow, Belly feels disappointed.

She doesn’t know exactly what she’d been expecting him to say. No, I don’t want to come over and have sex with you again, Belly, would obviously be the worst. And he hadn’t said that. In fact, there’s now the very real possibility that after countless hours of daydreaming about getting to fuck him again over the last two weeks, in like thirty six hours she’ll actually be doing it.

She should be over the moon.

And she is. Mainly.

that works :) , she sends. And then her address.

Belly gets her nails done in preparation, and she picks out a nice set of underwear and a casual please-fuck-me sort of dress, which she can wear in March since they aren’t going out, and she’s planning to do something like light a candle and smoke out her eyes; but practice runs long and one of the girls twists her ankle and Belly has to take her to the hospital (not Mass Gen) and wait till her parents get there, and by the time that’s done, she’s rushing to get home on time for her shower, which she needs, because she smells like sweat and the hospital, and thus, when Conrad texts her he’s outside, she’s still bare faced and a bit frantic. She hasn’t even dried her hair. 

She’d put on the dress though, so she guesses it’s the little victories.

She buzzes him in, and then he knocks on the door, and okay, so maybe it’s a bit of bravado or whatever, but the second she opens the door, she just pulls him into her, both of her hands to his face, him still mostly in the hallway.

He makes a little sound against her mouth, clearly surprised, but then he responds enthusiastically, pulling her flush against him with one of those broad hands and sort of fumbling the door with the other. And okay, yes, this was a good idea, Belly thinks. Fuck the Agenda.

They kiss for a minute, just standing there, long and deep, Belly in her dress, him still cold from the outside. And then he sort of laughs a little, kissing her quickly three times in succession and pulling back. 

“I’m sweating,” he says. 

The radiator is jangling in the corner, and he’s wearing that same coat and hat and scarf as before, this time with the addition of a large backpack, which he’s got slung on both shoulders. He removes all of these things while Belly watches. It doesn’t really feel like sexy watching, to her anyway, but like she’s not sure what she’s meant to be doing with her body while he devests of them. 

“Here okay?” he asks her, gesturing at the little corner of the wall that serves as an entryway. She’s got a shoe cabinet and a mirror and a little dish shaped like a shell for her keys.

Belly’s apartment is also a studio, but it’s smaller than his by about half, and demonstrably less charming, built on weird angles with pipes running this way and that along the walls, and the light over the door always buzzes and flickers in the cold months and she’s pretty sure her windowsill is rotting. And even so, she pays half her salary to it every month. 

“That’s fine,” she says.

Then there he is, Conrad Fisher, in a grey t-shirt and jeans, his gaze darkening as he looks back at her, three steps away, in the dress she’d picked out specifically to tempt him. She is counting this as a win for Team Belly.

She inches towards him, and he touches the hem, thumb on the fabric, which has little roses on it, and then his hand is beneath the dress, on the side of her thigh, and his nose is against her cheekbone, his breath on her ear. Her hands cup his elbows, wanting to pull him closer, and then, once she’s touching him, wanting really just to feel the line of his arms.

“What do you want?” he says.

“Do you need, like, instructions?”

“No.” His hand is brushing the edge of her underwear now. Lace trimmed. Turquoise. “I just want to make sure it’s what you like.”

“That’s very polite.”

“Brat.”

Well, she likes that.

And to appease him, she moves his hand to exactly where she wants him, and shows him exactly what to do. 

He takes the instruction well, and Belly clutches at his biceps as he works her with a sort of relentless precision, her head falling to his shoulder, her breathing increasing, and yeah, she thinks, she’s probably going to come before they’ve even removed any of their clothes.

She’s changed her mind. This wasn’t just a good idea. It was an excellent idea. 

She presses against him as she comes, and he strokes her hair with one hand and keeps working her a bit with his other, which, fuck, is hot. “Jesus, Conrad,” she moans, batting his hand away, as he presses, hard, right where she’s aching.

“Too much?”

Belly shudders. And when she pulls back, she sees his eyes have gone kind of glossy, like he’s been drugged, which is also a bit shudder-inducing. 

I don’t know, Belly thinks, suddenly. Maybe.

Though she’s always enjoyed it, the concept of sex being too much had never really occurred to her. And she has the sudden desire then to hurry things forward to the conclusion, to take the usual steps and reach the usual ending, after which she could safely shuffle him out the door like she has plenty of guys before him.

He reaches out, a bit hesitantly, and touches her right at the temple. 

Belly pulls back, and he drops the hand. 

“Are you okay?”

And what if she wasn’t? she wonders. Did he care?

She isn’t sure what the point is in pretending they are two people who are vulnerable with each other. They are, in essence, strangers. Eight years was enough to make a stranger out of someone.

“Let’s just,” she says, and sort of gestures at the bed. “Do what we came here for. Right?”

“Okay,” he says, and then she watches him bend down and remove his socks, turning and tucking them back into his shoes, before rummaging about in his bag.

For some reason, this is a touch obliterating. 

Belly elects to ignore it, sitting on the bed and scooting up to the headboard. He comes back over towards her, pulling his shirt up and over his head, and then moving and unbuckling his pants and taking them off, too. 

Belly moves to pull her dress up, but he shakes his head. “Leave it,” he says. “I like you in it.”

And, okay.

His hands slide up her thighs, and he’s pulling her underwear down and off, and then moving so he’s atop her. The sight of his face all in close up, his eyes lidded, his mouth parting slightly. 

She can hear the crinkle of foil, his hands moving between them, and then he’s slotting himself into her. “This good?” he asks.

Belly nods a little, because it is.

“You’re so wet,” he says, a touch matter of factly, and then pushes all the way into her. 

He fills her pretty much perfectly. 

It’s enough to make one want to weep.

Their mouths brush, and she kinda wants to swallow him, but she settles just for sucking a bit on his bottom lip, as he moves in and out of her, slow and steady like they’ve got all the time in the world. 

Probably they do. It’s not even eight p.m.

There’s a real possibility that he could ask anything of her in this moment, Belly thinks, and she would say yes. It feels that fucking good.

She says his name, low in her throat, and he makes a sound of that, very pleased, and she squirms a bit, against him, chafing at the burn and the blisteringly slow pace. But, “Just let me take care of you,” he says. “Come on, Belly.”

She clenches at that, an involuntary spasm, and his breath releases sort of on a laugh, his face dropping to her neck, where he places a very strategic series of kisses. And, yeah, okay, she’s pretty sure he’s studying her. 

He bottoms out, and then places his hand right back where she showed him, and she makes a sharp sound. “There you go,” he says. And does it again.

She really should have known he’d be like this.

Maybe she had. Maybe that’s why she’d been so desperate to sleep with him.

He always had been an overachiever.

“That’s so good,” he says, moving a little harder and rougher, his mouth damp against her skin, and suddenly, she wants to study him in return. She wants this to be just as good for him as it is for her. It would actually sort of kill her if it wasn’t. 

She pulls at his waist and arches into him, a desperate press of their hips, while she clenches down on him, hard, and he makes a very low, almost anguished sound, and then, shuddering, comes. Just like that.

Belly feels immensely pleased with herself. That’s another win, she decides. For Team Belly. 

He stays pressed against her for a moment. She’s still mostly dressed and propped on her pillows, and he’s fully naked. Perhaps that’s also a victory. She likes him naked. She runs her hand along his back. She doesn’t know what any of the muscles are called, though she’s sure he does. She’d like to touch each one. 

“Sorry,” he mutters against her skin. “I meant to…Do you want me to…”

“Conrad,” Belly says, exasperated. “If you try to make me come again, I might actually die.”

He lifts his head a little, as if to see if she’s joking. She is a bit.

He rolls off her so they’re lying side by side, and then puts his arm over his face so she can’t see much of his expression.

She wonders what he’s thinking. 

His mouth presses to his bicep in something of a yawn.

“Did you come here from work?”

He nods. “Days for the last three days, tomorrow off, and then two nights. And then I’m free for like three days I think, I’d have to check.”

“Are we scheduling?”

He lowers the arm, and his face is a bit pink-cheeked. She’s not sure if it’s from the exertion or from something else. “Would you want to?”

“Yes.” It’s surprisingly easy to say, considering the emotional rollercoaster she’s been on. “I feel like you know that you’re, like, really good in bed. I’d probably be down to fuck literally whenever you’re free.”

“Ha,” he says. “Thanks.”

She’d like it if he said in return, "You’re also like definitely the best person I’ve ever slept with, Belly," but he doesn’t. Instead, she watches him run his hand over the fabric of her comforter in a kind of idle motion. It’s a deep blue quilt, textured with flowers. 

It’s still a little buzzy. Conrad Fisher in her bed. In her apartment. In her life again. 

She wonders if with repeated exposure she’ll find him less overwhelming. Somehow she doubts it. 

She’s willing to give it a try though. 

“Tomorrow then?” 

He looks up at her. His hair is all tousled—her work, she imagines—and his lips are kiss stained, and she can admit to herself at least that looking at him makes her feel insatiable, like once she started whatever this was, there was no ending it. She doesn’t want to let him go. Not for a second. That’s going to be a problem, she knows. But just now, in the post-coital bliss, she can’t find it within herself to care.

“Tomorrow,” he agrees, and then offers her his hand so they can shake on it.  

Chapter Text

They’ve been sleeping together for three weeks when Belly gets a text from Conrad at six a.m. Five years now working at a high school means that Belly is normally up early, even on the weekends. When the text comes in, she’s in her pajamas, sipping coffee in her armchair, and watching instagram reels cake recipes.

Can I come see you when I get off? Should be around 7:20a.m.

One minute later, another text.

I understand if not.

Belly stares at her phone for a minute, then two, slightly taken aback, and then she scrolls back upwards to look at the rest of their messages. Their text stream is almost entirely clinical exchanges about availability. Can’t tomorrow. or Work running long. Give me an hour.

Almost all of them are from him.  Belly just hearts the messages, because she has no idea what to say.

She has eight years of things to tell him and no words for any of it. 

okay, she sends, and then clicks her phone closed.

He’s there by 7:19 a.m. His hair is wet and kind of crispy from the cold, and there is an odd, hollow look to him that is a bit startling. “Hi,” he says, when she opens the door.

Belly hadn’t done much to prepare for his arrival except put her dirty dishes in the sink and spritz perfume on her wrists. This is the twelfth time he’s been to her place in the last three weeks. It doesn’t really matter. 

“Hi.”

He strips of his bag and his jacket, and then leans down and pulls her into him. His mouth meets her neck, just breath, a little wet, and then his hands go beneath her shirt to meet skin. She’s not wearing a bra, and his hands are cold, so she’s shivering a bit against him. 

One pass, two. His nose burrows into her. She’s standing on her tiptoes to reach him. She feels like a flower reaching towards the sun.

His hands run down and over her ass, and then he hitches her leg up over his hip, while he feels up her leg a bit. 

Her whole body goes boneless.

His mouth opens, and he presses a kiss to her shoulder, bared by her nightshirt. Once and then again, harder, and then harder again. The press of teeth. The hand on her back has turned greedy, moving up and then down along her waistband and then up again.

Belly’s hands find his hair, then his shoulders.

He’s trembling. 

What’s wrong? she wants to say. But she doesn’t know how to. She doesn’t know if he would share even if she could bring herself to ask. 

It makes her feel sixteen again. Like she is standing outside his house, hand pressed against the pane of glass, no clue at all how to reach him.

They stumble the couple of steps to the bed, and tumble into it. His hands pull her into him, somehow everywhere at once. They aren’t even kissing, and in some weird way, it almost doesn't feel sexual, but simply as if he is trying to map the shape of her, how it fits against every possible shape of him. 

Belly squirms against it.

His hand dips into her shorts, finding bare skin, his fingers digging into her flesh, and she keens, the sound muffled by his chest. 

“Fuck,” he says, still gripping her, and then he releases her like an exhale, rolls off of her and goes in search of a condom.

When he comes back, he doesn’t even undress, just pulls his pants open, helps her out of her shorts, and then slots himself inside her, one hand curled around her back, the other on the outside of her thigh. They’re lying on their sides, so close their chests contract as one when they breathe. He’s barely moving, just making small motions with his hips into her, more of a grind than a thrust, and it feels approximately a hundred times more intimate than any way he’s fucked her thus far. They aren’t talking, and the sun hasn’t even risen yet, though it doesn’t feel like night. There’s a sort of hush to the air that only morning brings.

Is this what it would be like? she wonders. If they were really together? 

Or would it be entirely different?

Her hands fist in his shirt. He smells like the hospital, something vaguely chemical. This isn’t new—he often comes from work, and he doesn’t normally wear cologne—but it's sharper now, like he’s still mostly there. Whatever there looked like. She hasn’t asked. 

Sometimes it feels to her like he doesn’t even exist outside her apartment. Like he was only real when he was inside her.

That wasn’t true though. It was just that this version of him was the only one Belly had access to.

The thought threatens to break her heart.

Conrad shudders all over, and comes. And more than anything, Belly…more than anything, Belly feels grateful that it’s over.

He doesn’t pull out of her though, once he’s finished, just runs his hands up and down her back, soothing motions, all of them still connected.

It’s too much, Belly wants to tell him. This is too much. Night was easier. 

“I,” she starts, but she doesn’t know what words are meant to follow. “I need to shower.”

His hands still. “Okay.”

Belly extricates herself from him. Her entire body feels light, like it doesn’t even belong to her. 

Conrad rolls over onto his back and looks at the ceiling. Not saying anything. She doesn’t know what she’d want him to say if he were to speak, so it makes no sense for her to be disappointed. 

She still is.

Belly goes into the bathroom, and turns on the shower. She has to sit on the lip for a bit, breathing heavily, before she can even convince herself to get in. 

She comes back out fifteen minutes later, wrapped in a towel, and finds that Conrad has fallen asleep. Unconscious, his face has slackened, but there’s something of a grey cast to him still, his hair crumpled, his belt unbuckled. 

Belly sits on the edge of her bed, watching him sleep, for a very long time.

It’s almost five when Conrad wakes. Belly had been on her phone for a bit, then gone and made lunch in the kitchen, worked on some miscellaneous work tasks she’d been avoiding on her laptop, and, when that was through, put in headphones and watched Oklahoma! 

Whenever she looked over at him, Conrad still hadn’t even moved. 

When he finally does wake, it’s in a clatter, a sharp inhale before he sits up in a rush. Belly is sitting in her armchair at the foot of the bed, and he just stares at her for a moment, confused, as if he isn’t sure how he’d wound up there in her apartment. In her bed. 

She feels a bit like she’s kidnapped him.

Belly pushes her head phones off her ears. “Hey,” she says, as neutrally as she can manage.

“Oh, shit.” He raises his hand to his forehead. “I’m sorry. I must have fallen asleep.”

“Yeah,” Belly says. “Like nine hours ago.”

“Shit.”

The worst part, she thinks, is that he still looks tired. And she still cares that he looks tired. His hair is sticking up and there’s a sort of slack jawed look about him, like he’s still mostly asleep. It makes her want to crawl in bed with him, let him rest his head on her chest, and sleep some more.

The want for it is so large Belly feels humbled in the face of it.

“You’re working again tonight, right?” she says.

He nods.

Belly lets her eyes skate away from him, towards her iron-framed headboard. Last week, she’d held onto it for dear life while he fucked her hard from behind. Life was fundamentally pretty weird. 

“Belly,” he says, softly. And her gaze goes back to him. “I’m sorry about this morning.”

“It’s okay,” she says, quickly.

“No. I probably shouldn’t have texted you. I just…” He runs his hand through his hair. “It was a really bad shift. And being with you…takes the edge off.”

Belly nods, a little numbly. “I’m glad.”

“I feel like it was selfish.”

“No, Conrad, it was…it was fine. You were just tired, and overworked, and it’s…whatever. I didn’t mind.” 

A lie. 

“I can…” he starts.

“Go,” Belly says, at the same time he says, “Get you off now though.”

For a moment, they both look at each other.

“Okay,” Belly says. 

“No, I mean, I can just go, if that’s what you want.”

He should. In two hours, he’ll be back at the hospital again. He probably has a billion things better to do than make her orgasm. 

Belly shakes her head.

She doesn’t even know if she has the ability to say no to him. Can’t imagine it. She wonders if she should practice, build up a resistance to him. 

She doesn’t want to. 

She wants instead to take whatever he’s willing to give her. Even though to say that to him would feel unbearably pathetic, like she was still thirteen and mooning after him. She could form the words, say, you could text me at three or seven or four in the afternoon, and the answer would always be the same.

Four times a week for the last three weeks she’s seen him, kissed him, fucked him, and it still feels like nothing. 

He comes down off the bed, and kneels in front of her in the chair. His hand runs up her calf, and then his lips find her ankle. Higher. 

Warmth suffuses Belly.  

She feels now like there’s a flame somewhere within her, always burning. How easy it is for him to stoke it higher. 

He gives the same attention to her other leg, and then pulls her a little so her hips are resting on the edge, him between them. 

“Conrad,” she says.

He hmms in response. But she doesn’t have anything else. She’d only wanted to say his name. 

He presses his mouth to her clothed core, and then the flat of his tongue. Belly makes a sort of choked sound, and he does it again in just the same way. 

She doesn’t think anyone else she’s ever been with has paid attention to her in the way he does. That should mean something, she thinks. But she’s not sure it does. Just that he’s really, really good at this.

Stupid to feel jealous of whoever it was that taught him. Belly feels that way anyway. She wants to be the only one who’s ever touched him. The only one he’s ever touched.

Her hand finds the back of his head. 

His mouth is wide, consuming, eager. Like he’d said to her that first night. Her head tips back. 

This is the fifth time he’s eaten her out, and he’s getting better at it. Like he’s distilling it down to a science. It’s fucking dastardly.

He helps her wiggle forward a bit to take her pajama shorts off, and then he puts his mouth to her bare cunt. And yeah, Belly thinks he’s about to make her come in less than five minutes. She sort of despises him. And then he crooks one finger in her, pressing right where she needs it, and she makes a very sharp kind of sound, and thinks there’s actually a possibility she’s in love with him. 

Conrad doesn’t stop though, when she comes, just pulls back slightly, looking at her, her chest rising and falling, his finger still inside her. “You want another one?” he says, and it’s not clear if he means another finger or another orgasm.

He’s actually trying to kill her, Belly is pretty convinced. “Two for the price of one?” she says, sort of breathily.

“Yeah.” He laughs, and then licks her, one firm stroke of his tongue, like she’s the one on offer, and Belly’s whole body shudders. 

So, she nods.

The look he gives her is immensely pleased, and a little smug. 

If nothing else, Belly thinks, the two of them are extremely good at this.

Nobody else has ever affected her so thoroughly. She hadn’t even known it was possible to be this attracted someone.

She supposes it shouldn’t be a surprise, considering it’s him.

He puts a second finger in her, and presses, searching for the one spot that makes her gasp, and when he finds it, attacking it with a relentless precision, his tongue moving against her at the same time. Her hand claws at his hair, and he makes a sound against her that zings straight through her. 

She feels desperate for him. It’s a feeling that’s becoming rapidly familiar. Three weeks, and she feels like he’s seeping into her, rearranging her insides. The need isn’t abating with more of him, it’s only growing. 

Soon, she won’t want to let him leave at all. 

She comes, hard, and feels herself losing control of her tongue. She’s babbling something, her brain all scrambled with him, and she hears him speaking, too, though the words are hard to parse. Something like, “That’s it, baby. That’s it.”

Belly slumps back against the armchair. 

Conrad sits back a little. 

She can barely even stand to look at him. 

“Good?” he says.

She nods. “I think you broke me.”

He smiles. It’s a bit sinful when she’s still smeared all over his face. Even so, she feels greedy about the sight of it. Like it would hurt more to look away than not to.

He gets to his feet, and goes into the bathroom.

Belly lies there for a minute, her muscles still all twitchy, and then puts her shorts back on. 

He hasn’t closed the door, and she can see the line of his back at the sink. His t-shirt is rumpled at the collar. She wants to step up behind him, slot them together, hold his chest in her hands and hear his heartbeat glug against her palms.

It took the edge off. Being with her.

It was hardly romantic.

Their eyes meet in the mirror. 

Who are you? she wants to ask him. It feels like a burning, all important question. Like she really didn’t know any longer. When they were little, she thought she’d known everything there was to know about Conrad Beck Fisher. She could have filled pages. How he held a football (pinky curved towards the back). Which t-shirts he wore most regularly (blue Cousins rowing, plain grey, green with a white sprawling tree across the chest). His favorite authors (Tolkien, Clancy, some Sanderson). The number of sailing tournament trophies lined in his room (nine). The way his voice changed when he was excited (faster, higher in pitch).  His best subject in school (Math, though he liked science better). He loved raisin bran and football and always chose Mario as his player because he said it was classic. He cried when the owners came to pick up a lost dog they found on the beach, and Belly had thought he was the sweetest boy she’d ever know.

Now, she’s pretty sure she doesn’t know a single thing about him. The last eight years of him. California Conrad. Boston Conrad even.

He must have had friends, hobbies, places he went to eat. She didn’t know if he had broken any bones or traveled abroad or fallen in love. She didn’t know if he missed Susannah every day or if there were periods when he forgot to, like Belly did.

He hadn’t even come to Cousins that last summer. And then at the funeral, Belly had stared at the side of his face, trying to see him through the veil of tears. One and a half years, and somehow he’d already become a stranger, no longer the bright-eyed, smiling boy she remembered. That she felt like she’d been born loving.

“I’m sorry about Susannah,” she told him at the reception, and he had looked at her with dead eyes, as if she were nobody to him. As if she hadn’t lost Susannah, too.

“Thanks,” he said, and Belly patted his arm, and then she’d not seen or heard from him for another four years.

It had felt to her like all of the magic had seeped out of the world. 

People drifted apart all the time, Belly knew that. They grew up and they moved on. Probably Belly was meant to forgive him for leaving her in the past, keeping her as just a memory from his childhood. Some girl that had followed after him once, and was nothing to him now.

Just a way of taking the edge off.

Maybe it wasn’t fair of her, to still be angry. 

But she couldn’t stop noticing all the blank spaces between them. And she didn’t know how to ask him to fill them. She’d never known how to do that, not even when they were kids. And this was worse, so much worse than the childhood seasons they’d spent apart. All the time that wasn’t summer.

She didn’t even know what a bad shift meant to him. If the vending machine was broken or his coworker was a bitch or if someone had died. She couldn’t determine what would upset him most. She couldn’t even guess. 

It was killing her to be so close to him and still feel the largeness of the distance between them.

Easier to just have it be sex. That way Belly could take what pleasure she could from the arrangement. It wasn’t insubstantial.

But she was always doing that. Taking whatever of him he would offer up to her. Telling herself it was enough. Knowing that it wasn’t.

Conrad didn’t know her either. Not the way she’d always wanted to be known. And she didn’t know how to explain herself to him now, to spill twenty-five years of tangled vulnerabilities. What if when she did, he decided that he didn’t like what he saw?

That would be worse. Worse than this.

This, at least, Belly could live with. Even if she knew it was probably going to break her heart. 

Chapter Text

Approximately once a month, Taylor and Steven throw a dinner party. It’s normally a mismatch of people—coworkers from each of their workplaces, old classmates, some of Steven’s gamer friends, or people Taylor randomly befriended at the grocery. One of the only regular attendees is Belly.

Some of them are ridiculously fun, but just as many are soulcrushingly awkward, so Belly learns not to expect much from them. The last one had been cancelled because Taylor had COVID and Belly almost forgets about this one, as she’s coming to it straight from an away meet north of the city. She’d had to stop at Whole Foods on the way to grab bread and cheese, which means she’s the last to arrive and not really thinking, and so when she walks in the door and sees Conrad sitting on the couch, drinking a glass of red wine and talking to Anika, one of Belly and Taylor’s college friends, she feels kinda like she’s been struck in the head with a baseball bat.

“Isabel!” Anika cries. “You’re here!”

“Hi!” Belly says, her voice falsely chirpy.

“Offerings to the kitchen,” Steven says, directing her, as if she hasn’t been here a million times.

Belly hustles into the kitchen, intentionally not looking at Conrad, who she can feel is watching her.

It’s been less than twenty-four hours since he convinced her to ride his face and then proceeded to make her come three times in a row, and she can barely even think about him without blushing.

Taylor and Steven live in a nice apartment in Boston proper, because they both make money. This allows them things like a separate living space and a dishwasher and windows that work. The dinner parties, Belly had been pretty sure, were started as a way of showing off the view.

Belly puts the bread in the oven and then goes back to the entryway to remove her coat. She’s wearing flare leggings and a zip up, because she hadn’t thought she cared enough to change. She exhales heavily. She probably has like field dirt on her face. 

She doesn’t know why she cares so much about that when most of the time she’s been in Conrad’s presence lately, she’s been naked. 

She still does though.

She pours herself a glass in the kitchen, and crosses the island over to where the dinner spread has been laid out on the long floor table. She takes a seat on the ground beside Taylor, who is down at the end, finishing the arrangements.

“You could have warned me,” Belly says under her breath. 

Taylor lights the last candle, and sits back on her heels. “Why? So you could wear a sluttier top?”

Belly whacks her in the shin. 

“Ow. You, bitch.”

Belly looks over again at Conrad, still talking to Anika, head bent so he can listen to what she’s saying. His arm is up over the back of the couch, hand sort of dangling, forearm all on display. He looks…beautiful.

And completely unattainable. This is a feeling that fucking him apparently hadn’t dispelled.

Huh.

Belly hasn’t even told Taylor about the arrangement. The largeness of the secret, and her feelings about the secret, feels like a gulf between them. Belly doesn’t even know how she would describe it.

She might say, Conrad Fisher comes over to my house most nights of the week and we have truly amazing sex, but we don’t talk, and it’s felt to me like he’s some sort of weird sexual fantasy come to life, like we could do absolutely anything I wanted, like he would give me anything in the world except for the thing that I most want. 

Which is him.

She would sound like a psychopath.

“You look jealous, babe.”

“I’m not.” 

“Good. Because you’re the one that said you didn’t want him.” Taylor raises her eyebrows. “Right?”

Belly takes a hearty sip of wine. “Right,” she agrees.

Taylor claps her hands together. “Okay, eat and make merry,” she says, and everyone begins the slow gathering around the table with their plates.

Part of the ritual of the dinners was that everyone had to introduce themselves according to how they had received an invitation, starting at the head. Belly normally says some variation of the same thing. “I’m Isabel. Sister. Bestfriend. I’d kill them if they didn’t invite me.”

The dinner party this month consists of: Maia, Taylor’s coworker, third time attendee, shy but sweet, Geraldine, Belly’s extremely funny elderly neighborhood, first time attendee, wild hit, Anika, sixth time attendee, general treasure, Trevor, Steven’s yoga instructor, second time attendee, horrible laugh, Zion, Steven’s high school friend and Belly’s ex, fifth time attendee, amicable breakup, and Conrad Fisher. Who needed no introduction. 

And yet as the introductions creep around towards him, Belly still feels tension curling in her spine, like it was part of herself being put on display.

“Conrad Fisher,” he says when it's his turn, and gives a little wave. “And I’m, uh, childhood bestfriends with Isabel and Steven.” His gaze cuts to Belly very briefly before flitting away. “I recently moved to the city to start my residency. Happy to meet some more people. Thank you, Steven.” He gives a little private kind of smile, and Steven ruffles his hair, and says, “It’s been too fucking long, man.”

Belly has no idea what the smile means. 

The introductions move onwards.

Anika is beside Belly, and they talk a bit about her roommate Zoey, who Belly also likes but is a terrible roommate, and then True Blood, because Anika has been rewatching. And then Anika says, “Okay, so your childhood bestfriend is hot. Is he seeing anyone, do you know?”

“I thought you were still in New York.”

“I am, but I have some campaigns coming up in Boston. And I wouldn’t mind, like, something casual.” 

“You’d have to ask him,” Belly says, trying for cool. “If he’s seeing anyone.”

She doesn’t think he is. She can’t imagine frankly that he would have the time considering how often they were together. But then how was she to know?

“Okay,” Anika says. “I will.”

“Good.”

Fuck, Belly thinks.

When Belly looks over again, she finds that Conrad is already watching her. They meet gazes for one brief, heated moment, and then he looks away again. 

After dinner, it’s decided that they’ll play charades. The dinner had lightly been a set up, Belly thinks, for Trevor and Maia, which means that it probably won’t conclude until some of the dynamics have played out. She’s seen Taylor and Steven making veiled signals about them all night. It hasn’t been subtle.

Belly chooses her seat on the far side of the party, opposite of where Conrad is. They haven’t spoken once since she arrived. It doesn’t matter. He still feels like an itch beneath her skin.

“How are you Bells?” Zion asks her.

In her haste to escape Conrad, she had chosen a seat by him on the couch. Normally at these parties, she keeps a polite distance from him. Not because she dislikes him, but because she’s trying not to encourage him. He still likes her a bit, Belly knows. Though their high school love story hadn’t been much more than prom, and a disappointing hookup in his Volvo. Not exactly true love.

“No one calls me that anymore,” she says, smiling.

“Isabel,” he says, smiling, too.

Belly wonders if it was a set up for more than just Trevor and Maia. She eyes Taylor, who waggles her eyebrows at her. 

Belly subtly shoots her the finger. 

Charades begins. Belly has a third glass of wine.

Anika and Conrad are on Team Taylor, along with Trevor. Geraldine, Zion, and Belly make up Team Steven. Maia is standing tiebreaker. 

Conrad has chosen the chair closest to the kitchen, while Anika is on the floor by the stereo system. Not within talking distance. Did that mean something?

Belly takes another sip of wine, and contemplates it. After some rumination, she decides that maybe actually it was all totally fine.

So, yes, maybe Anika will corner Conrad and ask him out. He’ll say yes, because, Christ, have you seen her? and then, well, inevitably they’ll get married and have babies, which will mean that whatever was happening between Belly and Conrad would be over, and then… well, then, Belly could return to her normal life. And while the loss of Conrad and all of his associated epic sex would be a bit tragic, at least then she’d be…free of him.

Well, maybe not completely free of him. Just free of whatever he was currently doing to her. Wrecking her insides. Consuming her every waking thought. All of the stress couldn't be healthy for her. She needed something more sedate, less intense. Hadn’t she had that thought a hundred times? That she should end it?

She doesn’t want to though. Not really.

Even if continuing on like this feels impossible.

“Sabrina Carpenter,” Belly says.

Steven cheers. “Fucking yes!” He leans down and high fives her. “Conklin brain meld for the win!” 

Taylor makes a disgusted noise. “Okay, draw next, Team Taylor,” she says, holding out the hat for Trevor. 

Belly gets up and goes to the bathroom. Her hair is escaping from the braid she had corralled it into early this morning, and she looks bright eyed from the wine and a little manic.

“I’m fine,” she tells her reflection. “It’s just a dinner party.”

The introduction of Conrad Fisher to one party’s eco system shouldn’t be enough to send her spinning off the rails. He wasn’t even doing anything.

When she steps out of the bathroom, she finds him alone in the kitchen. He’s rifling through the drawers, looking for the bottle opener. Belly plucks it from the top shelf, where it’s resting next to the weetabix, and then offers it to him.

“Thanks,” he says, and starts opening a new bottle.

She watches his forearms work. It’s pretty unfairly hot. 

“So, Anika, huh?” Belly says, because she’s a masochist.

Conrad looks up at her, something kind of surprised in his expression.

“She’s amazing,” Belly says. “Like really.”

“Yeah, sure.” His eyebrows have contracted a little. “I’m not, uh…”

“Not what?” 

“Not looking to date, I don’t know.”

Belly nods, feeling a bit like a jack-in-the-box. She doesn’t want to have to go back into the other room and play charades. She wishes instead that the two of them were back at her apartment. That they weren’t talking. It always feels like she says the wrong thing. Or that he does.

With somebody else, that would matter. The not talking of it all. Not with him though. She still feels impossibly compelled by him at every second, no matter what he says. So compelled it robs her of the ability to have rational thought.

What would a normal person say or do in this scenario? Belly thinks. But she doesn’t know.

She doesn’t think a normal person would have gotten themselves into this scenario in the first place.

“Belly,” Conrad says. “Is it okay that I’m here?”

“What do you mean?”

“You just seem like…” He shakes his head. 

“Seem like what?”

“It just feels like I’m trespassing. On your life. I wasn’t trying to. Steven invited me, and I’m trying to…”

“What?”

“I don’t know, do something other than work, and…” He trails off, but his gaze kind of darkens a little as he looks back at her.

A little trill goes down Belly’s spine.

“And what?” she says.

It feels supremely odd to be standing in her brother’s kitchen, and having this conversation.

So many years she’s spent trying to picture Conrad’s life. She’d never tried to slot him into hers. Never pictured him fitting in there, not anywhere. She doesn’t know if he does now, or if she just wants him to so badly that it’s as if she’s forced him here through sheer force of will. Another fantasy come to life.

He steps forward a little closer to her.

She doesn’t think they can hear them from the living room, especially with the amount Steven is yelling. He doesn’t need to stand so close.

His green eyes. His smiling mouth, descending towards her ear. Oh, she thinks. God, but the pull of him. Her whole body comes to attention.

“I think you know what.”

She brushes his elbow, arches towards him a bit. It’s not enough at all. “Tell me anyway.”

The touch of his breath. His low voice. “You might have noticed, but I’ve spent most of my spare time these last six weeks fucking you.”

“Yeah?”

“Yes.” His hand touches her hip. 

More, Belly thinks, I need more. It almost feels childish, this degree of greed. Like her whole her life dances to the tune of it. Like it runs her more than she runs it.

She takes hold of his wrist, and he goes instantly pliant. She walks four steps backwards, tugging him with her, and then pushes him into the bathroom.

“Belly,” he starts, but by then she’s already plastered herself to him.

He tastes like wine. 

His hand hits the wall, making a thunking sound, but then, just a moment later, she feels him at the base of her skull, tipping her head back so that he can kiss her more deeply. Something settles in her stomach, deep and satisfied.

That’s the thing about him. Once he’d started, she’s only happy now when he’s touching her.

After only a moment though, she pulls back. His eyebrows are a little furrowed, like he’s confused.

She can help with that.

Belly sinks to her knees. She can almost see his pupils blow in real time.

It. Fucking. Rocks.

His head falls back against the door. “We should definitely”—she pulls open his belt— “definitely not do this here, honey.”

Yeah, not all of him agrees with that statement. 

“It’s fine,” Belly says, almost gently. “You can be quiet, right?”

“Oh, fuck,” he hisses, and then she takes him in her mouth.

His fingers thread into her hair, holding her at the top of her skull, but he doesn’t try to direct her head one way or another, just holds her. The restraint is unfairly hot, and well, also a bit of a challenge.

“Belly?” he says. She hmms around him, and he makes a sort of strangled sound in response. “This is not going to last very long.”

That was sort of the idea. She takes him deeper on the next pass, and his hand spasms. So she does it again. And then again. 

She spares a glance up at him. His eyes are closed, his head tipped back, his face flushed, a bit like he’s in pain. I did that, she thinks. Minutes before, he’d been sitting sedately out in the living room. As had she. As if they were strangers. And now, in approximately thirty seconds he was going to be coming down her throat. The power of that felt fucking incredible. She could get drunk off it. 

She didn’t want them to be strangers.

She wanted her life flooded with him.

He starts shuddering and makes to pull out of her mouth, but she just presses forward, swallowing him down.

“Jesus,” he wheezes when he’s done. His hands make to cup her cheeks. “You’re fucking unreal.”

She sinks back on her heels a little. Her bad knee feels achey, and she’s now more than a little turned on, but she also feels oddly calm. The same feeling you get ticking a task off a to do list. 

Suck Conrad Fisher off at a dinner party. Check.

Belly almost wants to laugh. Or maybe cry.

She gets to her feet, and hears him readjusting himself. Her hair really is a mess now, and she takes out the tie, shaking it out, and then hunting around for some mouthwash. Taylor will forgive her. 

She spits, and then turns to look at him. He looks a touch devastated. It’s gratifying in its own way. 

She doesn’t know how she feels.

“Come on,” she says. “They’ll be looking for us soon.”

But for a moment neither of them move. 

“What just happened here?” he says, voice a bit raw. 

“I thought that was obvious.” She could say something vulgar, but she can’t make the words come out. Like it would cheapen it. 

He presses his fingers to the bridge of his nose. “Belly,” he starts, but then doesn’t seem to know how to continue.

Sudden self-consciousness comes over her. “Did you…not want to? I thought…you weren’t serious. I wouldn’t have…”

“Christ,” he says. “No, I did. I do. I’d want to do anything you wanted to.”

She’d known that, right? So, she knew him well enough to know that much at least. “Then what’s the problem?”

He’s looking at her. It’s ten o’clock and they’re standing in her brother’s bathroom while everyone is waiting for them outside. Playing charades. He’d said that they were childhood bestfriends and that he wasn’t looking to date anyone. He’d said he’d do anything that she wanted, and that should have been enough.

She’d promised herself she wouldn’t ask for anything more from him. She couldn’t follow him everywhere he went. They were adults. They were separate people. She had parts of him. He’d told her that. She could see it. What right did she have to demand all of him?

You weren’t allowed all of someone else. That was a childish fantasy of what love looked like.

In real relationships there were borders. And so what if the borders were higher than she wanted them to be? He had a right to his privacy, the same as she did.

He was closer now, closer than he’d ever been. Maybe it wasn’t close enough to fully satisfy, but she could make peace with that given enough time.

“We’re having fun, right?” Belly says. “We’re…friends and we’re having fun.”

“Are we friends?” he asks. “Really?”

Nausea overwhelms her. “Don’t you want to be my friend?”

“Yes,” he says, quickly, no hesitation. And then, “Belly, I’ve always been your friend.”

No, you haven’t, Belly wants to say. In fact, she wants to scream it at him. Though she thought she’d managed to let this one go already.

“Okay then,” she says. “We’re friends. Let’s go play charades.”

He’s still looking at her. She wants him to stop. She wants to skip backwards five minutes to him moaning against the door, held in her power.

She doesn’t feel powerful right now. She feels fragile. She’s felt fragile from the very first second she saw him again. 

Longer, so much longer than that.

Nobody has the power to hurt her that he does.

“Okay,” he says. “Just…” He turns towards the bath and flicks on the tap, before hunting beneath the sink for a washcloth. 

“Conrad,” Belly says. “I’ll just go first, that’s probably—” 

“One second. Just…one second…”

He kneels down at her feet. One hand pushes the fabric of her leggings upwards until he has revealed her knee. It’s gone pink from the pressure of kneeling on the floor, and he presses the washcloth to it, his other hand wrapped around the vulnerable curve of her knee.

Emotion courses through her.

She wonders if he knows that she injured her knee back when she was in college. That it still throbs some nights out of the blue, like her body wants her to remember that once upon a time she was hurt badly enough that it changed the course of her life.

It’s fine now. She’ll never play sports professionally, but she can still walk, sit, kneel on the floor of a bathroom and suck off the guy she’s in love with. Things healed, even if they didn’t heal perfectly.

She doesn’t need him to take care of her. Even though she’s pretty sure there’s never been anything she’s wanted more.

“Better?” he asks, looking up at her.

“Better,” she agrees.

It’s a total lie.

Chapter Text

About a week after what Belly is mentally referring to as the Dinner Party Debacle, she decides that perhaps taking a little self-imposed Conrad hiatus is a good idea. She’s gone, she thinks, a little too sex crazy. So, after months of putting it off, Belly finally takes her sugar pills. This way, she reasons, she can just tell Conrad she’s on her period and the hiatus won’t seem personal. She’s moderately proud of herself for this scheme, but it seems a little convoluted to put to text, so sitting in her pajamas at home at six p.m on Tuesday, she calls him. She’d taken a bath to prepare herself, and she feels vanilla scented, and predominately calm. 

He answers, a little out of breath. “Belly?” he says. “Is everything all right?”

They haven’t talked on the phone at all since that first time he’d called her, almost two months ago now. 

“Yes,” she says. “Sorry, I just wanted to talk to you about something.”

“Oh,” he says. “Okay, one sec, do you mind if I put you on speaker phone? I’m pipetting and it’s easier with two hands.”

“Oh, shit. I forgot that you’re still working. I can call you later. Or just like send you a text.”

“Been taken off active duty for the moment, don’t worry. I can talk for a bit.”

Belly tries to picture where he is, and can’t. It isn’t loud anyway. “What does that mean?”

“I’m in the store room. Like I’m still a M2.” Belly isn’t sure what a M2 is or what it means to be or not be one. “I had a little accident, so Ferrandi benched me.”

“Ferrandi is?”

“My R3.”

“I don’t know what that means, Conrad.”

“Oh,” he says. “Year 3 Resident, my supervisor, or sort of, it’s kind of complicated.”

Belly leans back against her headboard. “Explain it to me?”

“Okay, so, hierarchy goes by year. Attending, that’s your full doctor, then fourth year residents, third year, second year, and then first year. That’s me. We’ve got two med students on their rotations, too, who are kind of just glorified interns. Some people think residents are just glorified interns, too, but you’re mostly acting like a doctor, just still learning. Hence the hierarchy. Ferrandi is meant to be ensuring that I don’t fuck it up too badly, which, according to her, is a task.”

“I’m sure that’s not true,” Belly says. “I’m sure you’re doing great.”

Conrad lets out a little huff of breath, which seems to imply he’s skeptical of the fact.

Belly is a little bamboozled by this. She has trouble picturing Conrad as anything other than fully confident. Even as a kid, everything had seemed to come easily to him. His sure hands on the boat’s rigging, his strong voice, commanding the brigade of boys, the shape of him, distant on the beach, how it had felt like he could outrun anyone.

A clanging sound. Then, a voice saying, “Hey, Fish, did you see that bald guy that came in earlier? With the distended abdomen? He just peed on Jimenez. There was piss like literally everywhere.”

“No shit?” Conrad’s joking voice, slightly higher in pitch. 

“He’s in decon now. Again. Think I actually saw Maria crack a smile.” There was a brief moment of silence, just the sound of Conrad breathing, and then, “You really have to stop taking what Ferrandi says so personally, dude, or you’re going to crash out big time. No one died. This like exile thing you’re doing right now is crazy.”

“Yeah, not this time.”

“Jesus. Look. You’ve got to stop punishing yourself for that. Just finish the row and come do chairs with me. You’ll feel better.”

A beat, and then Conrad’s laugh, soft, a bit disbelieving.  “You really are a sap, aren’t you?”

“And you’re a punk ass bitch.”

“Yeah, yeah,” Conrad says. “I’ll come join you. Just give me five.”

The sound of the door, and then a light tapping sound, like Conrad was touching his phone.

“Sorry,” he says. “You still there?”

“Yeah,” Belly says.

There’s a sort of squirmy feeling in the pit of her stomach that she doesn’t know how to unpack.

“You, uh, wanted to talk about something?”

Belly shakes her head as if she could shake off the entirety of the phone call. “Um, just wanted to say I’m going to be on my period this week, so I thought we’d just like pick it up next week. If that’s cool.”

Silence for a moment. “Okay,” Conrad says. “Do you need anything?”

She feels all of a sudden like she should be asking him that. Like the landscape of his life might as well be a foreign planet. Hadn’t she already known that? Why then did it feel so weird to hear evidence of it?

“No,” Belly says, forcing a smile that he can’t see. “I’ll just see you in five days.”

The stupidest thing about the self-inflicted hiatus is that within two days, Belly already misses Conrad. 

She isn’t used now to having the apartment entirely to herself, and it feels emptier somehow without him in it. She spends a disproportionate amount of time staring at the toothbrush he’d left by her sink. It’s green. Like his eyes.

To forestall the inevitable crash out, Belly decides to give herself one hour to lean into it and go back through his social media, something she hasn't done in years. 

Conrad has zero actual posts on instagram, because he’s a monster, designed to frustrate her, but he’s tagged in almost fifty posts, and, sitting curled in her armchair, Belly scrolls back to the beginning to look through them. A lot of the pictures are from high school: him with his football teammates, goofing in formal wear, him and Jeremiah and Susannah at his graduation dinner, Susannah’s arm around his shoulders, him and his high school girlfriend on the stairs at a party, his head tilted towards her instead of the camera. 

This is Conrad as Belly knew him. Pre-Susannah’s death. His smile is wide, his hair is charmingly floppy. He seems happy, personable, confident. 

There are less after high school. One of him with a red headed girl at the end marker of a half-marathon, looking sweaty and self-satisfied. One of him in a row of honors students outside an academic building, seven in on the third row. One of him seated at a restaurant table with a large group of people, and another of him at a bar, way in the back, one elbow up on the hightop table. One of him on a couch, somewhere low lit, talking to someone out of frame, his face animated. He’s saying something funny, Belly knows, though she’ll never know what it is. Three in a row from the same barbecue last summer, each with a different person. One of him at a halloween party, out on the back deck, holding a beer. He’d gone as Rob Pattz Batman.

She thinks maybe a couple years back there were several with a girl that have now been deleted. Women were like that: erasing all traces after the break up. She has no way really then  of knowing if there were more people with photos of him, smiling, happy, in love. She assumes there must have been.

Nothing since he moved back to Boston.

On day four of her period, Belly goes and sits with Taylor while she packs for her and Steven’s couples retreat. It’s up in the Adirondacks at a charming little camp by a lakeshore, where Belly is pretty sure Steven is going to propose. It’s technology free and has scheduled programming with things like yoga and cooking classes, and was stupidly expensive. Taylor is pretty much over the moon about it.

“So,” she says, folding her fourth silky nightgown and placing it in the bag. “Conrad turned Anika down, which is like a first, I think, for her.”

“No,” Belly says. “Jeremy Gibbons did. Remember? Junior spring?”

“Okay, yes. But that’s because he had a girlfriend.” Taylor eyes Belly a little too speculatively for Belly’s taste. 

Belly wonders about the concept of fessing up. She could say, well, it might have been because I blew him like thirty minutes beforehand in your bathroom. But that would be crazy.

She makes an ambiguous noise instead.

“You still like him,” Taylor says. “Don’t you?”

“No,” Belly says, and releases her breath. “No, I just…”

“What?”

“We’re, just, I don’t know.”

“We’re what?”

“Having casual sex?” Belly says, voice pitched a little high, already regretting it. 

“No. Fucking. Way. God. I fucking told Steven.”

“Keep it down.” Belly looks towards the doorway, and then in a hush says, “I don’t want Steven to know.”

“WHY?”

“Because it’s, I don’t know, because it’s weird.”

“Wait. Like how many times? Have you guys hooked up?”

Belly tries to perform a mental tally. “I don’t know. Like…maybe like thirty times?”

“THIRTY TIMES?”

“Taylor,” Belly hisses. This was precisely why she hadn’t wanted to tell her.

“How is that even like logistically possible? He hasn’t even been back here very long. And Steven says he works like all the time.”

Belly shrugs, kind of helpless. “He just like comes over to my place after work, I don’t know. Like most days.”

It had probably been more than thirty times.

“Babe.”

“No. Don’t make a big deal of it.”

Taylor folds her lips in on themselves. “The sex is still good then?”

Belly nods. “I think it’s like getting better. And I didn’t think that was possible.” 

She wonders how to unsnarl the rest of her feelings about it, to lay it out for someone else, but to speak about it to anyone other than Conrad feels wrong. It was weird. There had never been anything she had cared to keep secret from Taylor before. Even when they were teens, she’d let her dissect every last interaction, every emotion.

Why couldn’t she do the same now? She could tell her about the toothbrush, and about watching him sleep in her bed, the phone call and how she wasn’t sure she knew him at all anymore. She could say how he’d said they were friends, and Belly had tried to believe him. She could tell her that four days without him had felt like a lifetime, and she was terrified then of what the rest of her life was going to look like if this kept going. How she didn’t always feel strong enough for this. Whatever this was.

Some of it must have shown on her face anyway, because Taylor reaches over and touches Belly’s hand. 

“Hey,” Taylor says, softly. “Bad bitches need their roses, too, you know?”

At that, Belly laughs.

Belly texts him on Monday at her lunch break. She debates the phrasing approximately sixty times, and then just settles on, you free tonight? which feels for whatever reason kind of cowardly.

Immediately, the dots load, and then go silent, and then load again. I’ll see you at 7:30, Conrad writes, eventually.

p.m.?, Belly writes back.

Ha, Conrad says. Then, 7:30 p.m.

Belly hearts the message, and then stares morosely at her phone, as if willing a more sentimental exchange through sheer force of will.

“All good, Ms. C?” Jennie asks from her seat on Belly’s beanbag in the corner. Belly has been letting her take her lunch in her office ever since the death-related-crisis.

Belly clicks her phone shut. “All good,” she says. 

At seven thirty p.m., Belly is standing in her kitchen, finishing the dishes from dinner. Her hair is up atop her head, and she’s wearing sweatpants already, because one of her kid’s mothers yelled at her after practice, and Belly hadn’t yelled back, because she’s an adult. She’s put on music—something French, because she’s in a mood, and opened a bottle of wine—and she doesn’t immediately hear him knocking. 

He calls her phone, and Belly picks up one handed as she sets the last pan down on the rack. “I’m outside your door,” he says.

She walks the fifteen steps to the door, and opens it, and then there he is, phone pressed to his ear. Her hands are still damp from the dishwater. “Sorry,” she says, still through the call. “I didn’t hear you. Should probably like get you a key.”

It’s warmer now, and he’s not wearing a coat, just a Stanford sweatshirt, and his hair is a little longer now than it was two months ago. He hasn’t gotten a haircut yet. 

She holds the door open to let him in, and then says, “You want a glass of wine?”

The music is still playing. It sounds more romantic than it did when she was alone.

“Yeah,” he says. 

So Belly walks into the kitchen, and pours another glass. There aren’t really places to sit in her apartment apart from the bed, so she just leans against the doorway to the kitchen, and watches him take a sip, standing in the middle of her room. “Do you like wine?” Belly asks him. “I didn’t ask. I have beer, if you want that instead.”

“I love wine,” he says. “I tried to take like a sommelier class last summer, but I discovered I really just like drinking it, more than like, reading about it.”

Belly laughs a little, and then thinks it sounds like the sort of thing you did in a couple. Though she’s not sure why that matters when last summer they weren’t even talking.

“Lots of wine out in San Francisco.”

He nods.

“This one is from Trader Joe’s.”

“It’s fine. It’s, uh, good.”

“Fine was more honest.”

He shakes his head, like she’s amused him.

They don’t normally talk this much, and the talking, instead of calming Belly, is amping the tension in her veins. Like she’s not sure now how they’re meant to proceed. She steps forward towards him three steps. 

“Hi,” she says.

“Hi.”

Closer, and she can see the fine lines beneath his eyes, feel the whisper of his hair against her forehead. She angles her head a bit, and then they’re kissing. 

She loves the way that Conrad kisses. It feels intentional, like he’s thinking about it. He’s still holding the wine glass, and it presses against her lower back. She opens her mouth wider, adds a little tongue, arches into him a bit so their hips meet. Somehow, she can’t seem to stop taunting him.

He makes a low kind of sound, and pulls back enough to set the glass down on the side table. When he returns, both hands run down her back and then over her ass, pulling them together, while his head drops to her neck. “Missed this,” he says against her skin. “God, Belly.”

Belly cups the back of his neck. She feels loose-limbed, almost high. Me too, she wants to say. She misses him every second he’s not inside her. There aren’t words for all the missing him she’s done.

“You can do anything to me,” she tells him. “Whatever you want.”

It comes out raw, more vulnerable than she wants it to be, though it’s true. 

She feels the words run through Conrad, like she’s shaken him very hard, and he makes a pained kind of sound, and then he’s kissing her again. It’s slow, kind of like an unfurling, and almost bruising in its intensity. She lets herself surrender to it. 

She thinks sometimes she’d be happy just kissing him. Like they were still teenagers learning what kissing meant. The thought is a touch devastating. 

She wants to have kissed him at every age. At sixteen and seventeen and eighteen, twenty-one and two and three. Now, and when she’s thirty and forty and sixty. God, but he makes her feel ravenous.

It’s a hunger with no end and no beginning. 

They fall into bed still kissing. His hands are running up under her shirt, and her leg has hooked through his so they are a little bit entwined.

She wonders if they did this for years if it would feel just as sharp. 

He’s stroking her hair, and his breathing is increasing, and it feels just as inevitable as it did the first time. Even though now it’s certainly more than the thirty-first. 

She’s pretty sure the answer is yes. 

She mouths at his jaw, her hand on his shoulder, pulling him closer, and he makes a sharp sound when she flicks out at the pulse point. “Right there?” she asks him.

“Hmm,” he says, so she does it again. 

His hands push at her sweatpants, and she laughs a little as they work to get them and her panties off in one go. “Shirt,” she tells him, so he takes that off, too, though he’s still in his pants. 

She wants to kiss him again, so she does, hands braced on both sides of his neck. The music is still playing, and he’s still the boy she’s loved since she was ten, and she gets to kiss him, isn’t life wonderful?

She bites down on him a little, to punish him for it, and he takes it. 

“Come on,” she says. “Fuck me, please.”

“Okay,” he says, and she hears him working at his pants. 

A sharp buzzing. Her phone on the nightstand. “Do you need to—” he starts

“It’s fine,” Belly says, pulling him back towards her.

But when the call ends, it just starts up again.

Belly stretches to look at it, and then exhales, reaching back behind her so she can wiggle back into her sweatpants. “Hi, mom.”

There’s a sort of pause at the end of the line.

Bad news, Belly thinks. Anything else would be easy to say.

Her mother tells her. Not all of the words land, but Belly hears the words “your father” and “the hospital”, which are the most important ones. Belly says, voice a little hollow, “I can be there by morning,” and Laurel doesn’t ask any follow up questions, just says, “Do you have the number for Steven’s retreat? I need to call him next.” 

Belly says she does, but she’ll have to look, and then hangs up.

“Is everything okay?” 

Belly stands up, though her legs still feel a little wobbly.

“What’s happened?” Conrad says. He’s looking at her in a very careful way that makes Belly want to claw at him.

Unfortunately, she can’t find the words. She’ll need to pack a bag. Fuck, she’ll need to rent a car. She picks up the phone again, but her hands are shaking. 

“Belly, honey, you’re scaring me.”

She forces her mouth open. “I just, uh, need to text my mom the number for Steven’s retreat. Taylor sent it to me so I know I have it. And I’ll have to call in sick to work, too. And then, I don’t know the bus schedule, it might be too late. Do they rent cars at night?”

“What’s happened?” 

Words, Belly thinks. Why were words so hard? 

Conrad touches her elbow, and she flinches, hard, and he retracts it, holding it against his chest, which is still bare. How ridiculous. But the ridiculousness of it she finds calming. She knows his chest very well now.

“My dad,” she says. “He’s uh I don’t know. Had a stroke, they think, maybe, but I don’t know, I’m not sure they know. He’s in the hospital, my mom said, and so I’m going. To Philly. Tonight. I’ve just got to…” She holds up her phone.

“Okay,” Conrad says. He swings his legs out of bed, and begins to collect his clothes.

Right, Belly thinks. He’ll leave her to it. Duh.

He slides on his shoes, and turns back to face her. “I have to go get my car,” he says. “But I can be back here in thirty. Is that enough time for you to be ready to go?”

Belly just blinks at him. “Isn’t your car outside?” She’d assumed he drove here every day.

Conrad pushes his hair flat, looking suddenly almost bashful. “Uh,” he says. “No. The nearest street parking is like ten blocks away, and it’s…it would take too much time, so…”

“So…”

“I’ve just been ubering from the hospital.”

Belly closes her eyes. Right. Okay. Not important right now. Insane, but not important right now.

“Can I leave you right now and get the car? Or do you want me to stay while you make your calls?”

“Conrad, why are you going to get your car?” Belly feels so tired that the concept of driving five hours feels herculean, and it’s her dad, her family, her problem. It didn’t have anything to do with him. “I can just take the bus.”

“Belly. You taking the bus would actually kill me. Please, can I just—Let me do this.”

Belly opens her eyes.

He’s looking at her, something raw and aching in his eyes. It mirrors exactly how she feels.

God, Belly thinks, hadn’t she already admitted that she would do anything he wanted? He only had to ask.

“Okay,” she says. 

Chapter Text

Belly has never been in Conrad’s car. Like everything else he owns, it’s very neat. He has a mint air freshener dangling from the mirror, and the floor mats look like they’ve been recently vacuumed. There’s a sweater sitting on the passenger seat, and Belly wonders if he left it there some time ago, or if he’d brought it especially for her. For once, she doesn’t care to examine it. She just slips it on. The day had been beautiful, but now that night has hit, it’s cold again, and the sweater smells like him.

“Do you want to talk?” he asks her, once they’ve reached the highway. “Would it help?”

What would I say? Belly thinks. She feels like everything has been scooped out of her but worry. She shakes her head. 

“Music? I, uh, have a history podcast I listen to sometimes, when I’m stressed.”

“Would you,” Belly clears her throat, “Would you talk? I don’t know if I can respond really. Just…tell me something.”

She sees him glance over at her, though she’s mainly looking out the window, at the dark stretch of road ahead of them. “About what?”

“Tell me about Cousins,” she says, like if she just wished hard enough for it, that’s where they could be headed instead. “What it’s like now.”

“Um,” Conrad says. “I haven’t really been back. Not since my junior year of high school. I don’t know, it, uh, wouldn’t have made sense without everyone there. Jere goes sometimes with his friends, I think, and my dad, I don’t know, but I would…” A brief, tense moment of silence. “Miss everyone too much I guess.”

Belly looks over at him, but finds that his eyes are on the road. He keeps his hands at the standard driving positions. And all at once, Belly doesn’t want to talk about Cousins anymore, or Susannah or the past. Not tonight, when grief feels too close for comfort.

She rests her head against the side of the car. “Let’s put on the podcast,” she says, softly.

At the two hour mark, they stop and get gas. Belly goes inside and gets a coke slushie and a black coffee. When she comes back out, she finds Conrad sitting, door open, feet dangling out of the car, texting on his phone. 

Belly hands him the slushie. “Get out,” she says.

He gives her a stern look. “Belly…”

“Your eye is literally twitching right now. What if we get in a car accident? What are you gonna tell my mom?”

“Assuming I survive?”

“Assuming that.” Her hand is on her hip.

Conrad gets out of the car, and takes the passenger seat. She watches him take a hesitant sip of the slushie she’d handed him, and then make a face.

“Idiot,” she says, and offers him the coffee. “That’s for me.”

She kinda can’t believe she’s joking with him right now. But it’s either that or crying, she supposes. And she thinks probably there will be time for that later.

“That much sugar is actively bad for your system,” he says, sniffily. 

“Do you have the data on that?”

“Yeah.”

Belly takes a loud sip, lets the sugar and cold and caffeine inject some semblance of life back into her. There are miles to go before she sleeps. And none of this is the hard part.

“I know it’s annoying,” she says. “But I really like to listen to musicals when I’m driving.”

“I don’t care,” Conrad says. “Whatever you want.”

She pulls up Les Miserables on her phone, mainly because it’s long, and clicks play, the hum of the opening on low.

“Is your favorite still Bye, Bye, Birdie?” he asks once they’re back on the highway and Valjean is out of prison.

“You remember that?”

Conrad snorts. “Steven used to call me Birdie, remember? Like nonstop.”

Belly flushes. “Ha,” she says. “I don’t watch it much anymore.” She’d actually evicted it from the musical rotation eight years ago, carefully deleting any song from it from her spotify playlists.

( We love you, Conrad, oh yes we do. We love you Conrad, and we’ll be true.)

“The Stanford Ram’s Heads did a production of it like three years ago. It was pretty good.”

“I can’t picture you at a musical theater production.”

“My best friend in California likes them. She dragged me.”

“Oh? And which ones did you like?”

“I liked, um, the one with the chandelier.”

“Phantom of the Opera?”

“Yeah?”

“You liked Phantom of the Opera?”

“Yeah. The songs were good.”

“The songs were good?”

“They were.”

“Who was your favorite character?”

“I liked the Phantom. Of course.”

“You’re not convincing me you’ve seen it, Conrad.”

“No, they’re in the mirror and they’re dancing and he’s got the feather. The red feather. It’s to show he’s hot or whatever. And then there’s like a boat, and she’s on the prow, right?”

This makes Belly laugh. That he’d said prow. And the thing with the feather. She’d forgotten that he had a knack for it, making her laugh. She’s been so determined to be sad about him.

He’s being kind to her, Belly knows. The kindness threatens to buckle her. It’s a little much that he be kind on top of all the rest of it.

It makes him seem more familiar. And more foreign all at once.

It was hard to marry the two of them. The Conrad she’s spent weeks sleeping with, holding carefully at a distance, and the one in the passenger seat right now, who seemed so much like the boy she remembered from childhood, just grown up, with sharper edges. 

Even at a distance, it had been hard not to be in love with him. 

And in the car, wading through the deep night, the boundaries of what can and can’t be said feel thinner. She was as likely to yell at him to go as to beg him to never leave. 

She’s gone silent, and she can feel his attention on the side of her face, the low hum of the music, mournful and sweet. 

“It’s going to be all right, Belly,” Conrad says. 

“You can’t promise that,” Belly says. “You can’t promise he’ll be fine.”

She hears the soft tsk of his tongue, the acknowledgement in that. 

She already knew there were no guarantees, the same as he did.

It’s four by the time they hit Philly. Belly calls her mom, but she doesn’t pick up. “Do you want to go in now and I’ll park the car?” Conrad asks when they reach the hospital.

Belly shakes her head. She sort of thinks she might collapse if he wasn’t with her. She feels like paper. Anything could crumple her.

They go in through the emergency entrance. Even this late at night, the hospital seems as busy to her as in the daylight, as if normal laws of time don’t apply here. All of the chairs are full. 

She watches something sort of sharpen in Conrad, like he’s come awake again. He already worked a full twelve hour shift today, and he hadn’t even slept in the car. She’d felt him like a heartbeat beside her the entire way.

He weaves his way over to the entrance desk, bending down to speak to the nurse through the glass opening. “Hi,” he says. “Can you tell us where John Conklin is?”

She types something into her computer, and then gives him the room number, and, after a couple of questions, two badges, and directions. The interaction goes so smoothly, Belly sort of marvels at it. 

“That’s good,” Conrad says when they’ve stepped away.

“What’s good?”

“They’ve admitted him, but he’s not in the ICU, which means they’ve deemed him lower risk. That’s a good sign.”

Or that the ICU was full, Belly thinks. Judging by the state of the waiting room it wouldn’t surprise her. She eyes the chairs skeptically.

Conrad puts his hand on the small of her back to guide her around a mother and son duo sitting on the floor. “Mondays are the worst,” he says, gently, as if he’s followed her train of thought.

Belly glances up at him. “Why?”

“It’s all the people who tried to just wait it out through the weekend.”

They reach the elevator. In the metal door reflection, Belly watches the shape of Conrad, his head bowed down towards her. They step out on the fourth floor, and he goes over to the nurse’s desk, and comes back a moment later, taking her by the elbow to lead her down the hall. 

“Down this way,” he says. “He’s under sedation, so he won’t be awake. But she told me the doctor will be by in like an hour, so we should be able to catch him before the handover.”

“Okay,” Belly says. “Is my mom here, did she say?”

But by then, they’ve turned the corner and found Laurel sitting outside the room, tapping on her phone. She looks up when they approach, and then scrambles to her feet. Her mom is in pajamas, her bobbed hair messy around her face, her glasses on. Five steps, and Belly collapses into her.

“How is he?” she asks

Laurel’s mouth twists a little, which feels like an answer, and then she looks over at Conrad, surprise softening her face. “Connie.”

“Hi, Laur.”

Laurel steps forward and hugs him, too, just as hard as she had Belly. “Thank god you’re here.”

Conrad is still looking at Belly over her mom’s shoulder, and Belly busies herself by examining the doorframe, the little plaque on the wall that says the room number. Four hundred and thirty five. 

“What’ve they said?” Conrad asks Laurel.

Laurel launches into a very technical explanation of various discussions with nurses and doctors. Belly puts her hand to the door, pushing it open a little. She can hear Conrad asking soft questions back behind her, and then him saying, “No, it’s fine. I can ask her when she gets here. They’ll know more after a couple hours anyway.”

The room is small and dim. There’s a broad array of equipment around the bed, a flashing screen displaying an assortment of lines and numbers that Belly has no ability to parse. Her dad is in the bed, but it doesn’t really look like her dad. Prone, the word comes to her.

She makes a small sound in the back of her throat. “Honey,” she hears. A hand touches her shoulder.

She looks back at Conrad. His eyebrows are drawn in. “You want to go sit? Your mom is going to try Steven again.” 

Belly doesn’t know. She feels like a little girl, like she’s stumbled somehow into a dream. 

His hand moves from her shoulder to her neck, squeezing the muscles there. Her eyes close. “Come on,” he says, and helps her walk the steps to the bed.

It’s worse there. The smell of the hospital, the greyness of her dad’s face. His hands are under the covers. She can’t even hold them.

When she looks up at Conrad, he’s examining the readings on the monitor. “Bad?” she asks him.

He shakes his head. “Mostly normal.”

“You’d tell me,” Belly says. “If you were worried?”

He looks down at her, his face all cast in shadows. “I’ll tell you,” he promises. He glances back behind him, where there’s an armchair sitting beside the tiny, dingy window. “Come on,” he says. 

“Could we just,” Belly starts.

He blinks. “You want me to—”

“Yeah,” Belly says. “Um, if you don’t mind.”

“No. I mean, uh, I don’t.”

The two of them look at each other for a moment. “Okay,” he says. “Come on.”

There’s barely room for the two of them on the chair, and it seems sort of impossible for them to both fit, Conrad squished all in the corner, and Belly half-perched on the edge, but then he puts his arm around her waist, pulling her so that she’s snug between him and the chair arm, her legs in his lap, her head against his shoulder and it’s…perfect. 

She lets herself relax into him.

“You can sleep.” She feels his hand smoothing her hair back. “I’ll wake you if anything is happening.”

Belly wants to cry, but her eyes are dry, her chest all hollow. “I don’t think I can.”

“That’s okay.”

But she lets her eyes close anyway. She can feel him breathing, and by now, that’s familiar. The line of his shoulders, too, is familiar, and the smell of him. His hand, resting right at the curve of her knee. 

“Aren’t you tired?” she asks him, her eyes still closed.

A huff of breath. “I’m fine.”

A beat of silence. “Conrad?”

“Mmm?” he says. But she doesn’t know what she’d wanted to ask him. It’s all slipping away.

His voice is low when he speaks again, “I’ll still be here when you wake up.”

When she wakes, it’s just at dawn. The light in the window has changed. Conrad hasn’t moved, and neither has her dad. Belly rubs at her eyes. “The doctor been by yet?”

“No,” Conrad’s voice sounds a little raspy, and when she tilts her head up to look at him, the shadows around his eyes have deepened. 

“Did you sleep?” she asks. 

“I’m fine, Belly,” he says. “I promise.” She moves off him, and then watches as he stretches his arm out. “Your mom went back to the house, just to get some things. She’ll be back soon, I think.”

Belly nods, and looks again towards the monitor, with its meaningless numbers. “What does it say?” she asks.

“He’s okay right now. Just still sedated.” He stands, too, pulling his phone from the back pocket of his jeans. “Do you need anything? Water?”

“Water sounds amazing.”

There were footsteps at the door, and then a blonde middle-aged nurse came in the room. “Hey, Cherry,” Conrad says.

Cherry bustles over to the bed, checking the wires and examining the screen. “All good in here?” 

“All good,” Conrad agrees. “Could you possibly get my wife some water though? When you’ve got a minute?”

“Sure thing,” Cherry says, cheerily. “You’re my easiest patients.”

Conrad smiles a bit, and she bustles back out. 

Once she’s gone, his gaze cuts over to Belly. “Sorry,” he says. “Wife normally gets you stuff faster than girlfriend. And I told Miranda at the desk I was family. It can be dicey after visiting hours are over.”

“Sure,” Belly says. Her neck feels a little heated, and she has no room to examine why that is. 

He steps forward and puts his fingers right at the curve of her ear, where the muscles are all snarled from sleeping curled up.

Belly makes a low sound at the feeling. 

“Better?” he asks.

She nods, still feeling flushed, and…vulnerable. 

“Any news, Con?” It’s her mom in the doorway, and Conrad steps back from Belly. 

“No,” he says. “But he’s responding well to the blood pressure meds. They came and did that like an hour ago and it looks stable now. I’m not a doctor yet, but…” He shrugs.

Laurel touches his arm. “Sorry, kid,” she says. “Don’t take too much on.” She’s holding a coffee tray, and deposits one in his hand. 

He reads the label and hands it to Belly. It’s vanilla and hazelnut, and still warm. Essentially heaven.

In a bit, Cherry comes back with the water. And at six, the doctor comes by. The discussion is still a touch too technical for Belly, but her broad understanding is that they don’t think it was a stroke. However, something is definitely wrong with his blood pressure, which will require more tests, and likely he needs to be on medication for it. They want to monitor him for the day, but they think after that, in all likelihood, he can go home. Laurel asks something about recovery, and lingering effects, and the doctor gives a tight little smile, “We’ll know more by tonight,” she says.

When she leaves, Conrad says, “We try not to promise anything.” And it’s weird, a bit, to know someone on the other side of the power dynamic. Who has stood like this with other families and delivered news, both good and bad. 

Belly couldn’t really imagine it, before this night. Even though she’d known they’d gone through it before, with Susannah, she still hadn’t been able to picture it. Not like he or her mom could. 

The plan involves lessening the sedation throughout the day, so John will likely be awake by noon. Conrad doesn’t think much will happen before then. “You all can go back to the house if you need to,” Laurel says. “Take a shower, change. Take a nap if you need to. You’ve driven a long way.”

“Are you okay here, by yourself?” Conrad says. “I can stay.”

Laurel takes the armchair, and pulls out a newspaper. “I’m good. Really,” she says, and gestures them off.

Belly thinks that if she is made of paper, her mother is made of steel.

Belly’s parents live in a brick two story out in the Philly suburbs. They’d gotten divorced when she was fifteen, but moved back in together when she was twenty-one. Now they call themselves recoupled, though they aren’t married. It’s been awhile since Belly had been back there, and they’ve gotten a new couch and changed the kitchen cabinet color to sage green. It’s a little ugly. 

Belly goes upstairs and takes a shower and comes down in fresh clothes. Conrad is in the kitchen, hip leaned against the island, drinking a second cup of coffee, and texting on his phone.

There’s a heaping plate of eggs in front of him, and he’s made toast.

“You should eat,” he tells her.

Obediently, Belly makes a plate, and takes it over to a stool. The shower and coffee have made her feel lightly more human, but only just. She won’t feel truly right till she’s slept another eight hours, and she’s not sure when that will be. She’s asked at least for the next three days off, and then she’ll see. Contemplating that makes her feel weepy even though it seems like probably her dad isn’t going to die.

She takes her first bite of eggs, and then immediately starts laughing.

Conrad is watching her, confusion furrowing his brow. “What?”

It’s not that funny. But the laughter feels good. “Ohmygod,” she says, “seriously, it’s good to know you’re not completely perfect.”

The furrow deepens. 

“Conrad, how the fuck did you ruin eggs?”

His expression morphs to affronted. “They aren’t that bad.”

“Oh, they absolutely are.”

He moves to take her plate, and Belly halts him, hand to his wrist. “Hey,” she says. “I never said I wouldn’t eat them.”

He gives her a sardonic little look. She kinda wants to lick his face. Something maybe is seriously wrong with her, because his hair has gone a little greasy, and he looks exhausted, and he’s standing in her kitchen in her childhood home, where he’s never been before, and the eggs are truly so, so terrible, and she’d probably, like, have his babies, if he asked. 

“Just pass me the salt,” Belly says. “And maybe some ketchup. It’s fucking dire.”

“You’re such a brat.”

“And you love it,” Belly says. She’s aware sort of vaguely that she might be flirting with him. It’s completely inappropriate given the situation. And also a first.

He smiles, a little tentative, his eyes fixed on her face. “I do,” he agrees. 

Chapter Text

Belly had always suspected that this was the case, but sitting by someone’s hospital bed is pretty miserable. It’s also boring. Conrad had taken the newspaper from Laurel and is doing the crossword puzzle, sitting on the ground. Belly is beside him, mainly watching his pen move. His handwriting is atrocious. “Spritz is with a z,” she tells him, pointing. “Not an s.”

“That is a z,” he says.

She shoots him a skeptical look. 

He’s smirking a little, but he obligingly retraces the letter so the squiggle looks more z-like.

“And 42 down is Matthews.”

He fills it in.

Laurel is in the armchair, her head leaned against the side, though she isn’t sleeping. She’d gotten in touch with Steven around eight, when the day staff at the camp came in, and he and Taylor should be in Philly by dinnertime. Belly wonders if he’d proposed yet, or if that’s off. Weird that she can still think about stuff like that. And about aperol spritzes, and the Dave Matthews band, and Conrad’s handwriting. 

The door opens and Latoya, the day nurse, comes in. She turns one of the dials down, watches the monitor, gives them a little smile, and says, “You guys good?”

Laurel asks when the doctor will be back by, and Latoya says she’ll check, and then goes off to do so.

Belly looks at the dial she’d moved.

“She was just moving the oxygen down,” Conrad says. “It’s best to wean off quicker, if you can.”

Belly nods, and puts her forehead briefly on his shoulder. It’s a bit selfish of her, but he doesn’t seem to mind, so she leaves it there.

She can feel her mom’s gaze on the two of them, but she can’t bring herself to pull away, or to offer an explanation. She knows what it looks like, and is much less sure what it actually is. 

She doesn’t think there’s a word that fits.

Around one, John’s eyes start fluttering. Latoya comes back, and she and Laurel speak to him in carefully crafted sentences. He seems confused, which is sort of hard to listen to, his voice all croaky, his hands making as if to take the oxygen tube out of his nose, until Laurel halts him. But he knows the president, and who Laurel is, which Belly takes as positive.

Belly and Conrad stay sitting on the floor, as if through some unspoken decision not to overwhelm him. 

Belly also thinks it's maybe because standing will overwhelm her, too. Conrad seems to get that, without her having to say.

The doctor comes by around fifteen minutes later. By that point, Belly has taken Conrad’s hand, and put it on her knee. It’s pretty much the only thing keeping her steady. 

“I think we can rule out a stroke,” the doctor says. “But I’d like to take another scan of your brain, just to make sure there isn’t any further bleeding, so we’ll get that order in. Someone will come get you soon, all right?”

“Do you still think he can be discharged by tonight?” Laurel asks.

“We’ll check the scan first,” the doctor says. 

Which is meaningless. 

Thirty minutes later, they come take him to get the scan, and Conrad goes to pick up lunch, as they’re all starving, which leaves Belly and Laurel in the room alone for the first time. Belly rests her head against her mom’s knee, and Laurel touches the back of her skull. Her mom has always been sort of utilitarian about affection, but this is nice.

Belly wonders if she is thinking like she is about Susannah. If Conrad is, too. But the topic still feels sort of forbidden. With both of them.

Belly and Laurel hadn’t talked at all about the fact that Susannah was dying while it was happening, or afterwards, though Laurel drove to Boston multiple times a month that whole six months. Belly had only gone with her the once, that last time, and in the car, they’d barely spoken, not either way. 

Conrad was in California while it all went down. He came back, she knew, for the holidays, but Belly hadn’t seen him. She’d done Thanksgiving with her dad that year. She’d been too frightened to face the Fishers, and her mom hadn’t made her. Steven had gone instead, and come back a more hollow-eyed version of himself, and Belly had felt guilty and grateful in equal measures, not to have born witness to any of it. 

Truthfully, other people’s grief had terrified Belly almost as much as her own had. 

“I’m glad you brought Connie with you,” Laurel says, at last. 

Belly closes her eyes. “Me, too.”

There’s a small lounge down at the very end of the fourth floor hallway, which is really just a matching set of scratchy chairs and a large faux floral arrangement on a dinged up side table. Belly finds Conrad there, bent over a little bit as he talks on the phone, the lunch bags at his feet.

He looks up at her approach, shoes first, and then all the way up to her eyes, where he holds her gaze. One sec, he mouths.

“Okay,” he says into the phone. “No, it’s fine, man. I’ll see you Sunday.” 

He hangs up, and then runs his hand into his hair. There’s a sort of visible agitation to the line of his shoulders that is new. 

“Everything okay?” Belly asks.

His mouth twists a little. “Yes,” he says, eventually. “I just, uh, can’t get anyone to cover my shift tomorrow night. And we’re already short staffed on nights, so I might have to…”

Leave, Belly fills in.

“Oh,” Belly says, her shoulders rising a bit, like the tension was transferring itself from him over to her. “I mean, it’s okay.”

He’s looking at her very intently. “It isn’t,” he says. “I’ll just, I’ll figure something out.” He rises to his feet. “They back yet? From the scan?”

Belly nods, and then follows after him down the hallway. Don’t be greedy, she reminds herself. It’s been her mantra for the last two months.

Hadn’t he done enough for her already? 

The scan is clear, and they agree to release her dad at six. Taylor and Steven’s flight gets in at seven, just when they’re settling John back at the house. There aren’t any bedrooms downstairs, and he’s pretty wobbly on his feet and will be for at least a couple of days, so Belly and Laurel make up the couch for him. He’s still bleary from the sedatives, and mainly just watches them move around in silence. But, “Thank you,” he tells Belly when she finishes adjusting his blanket, so gently it sort of makes her want to weep.

In the kitchen, her mom phones in a large order of Indian food, and then calls Conrad to pick it up on the way back from collecting Taylor and Steven.

By the time they arrive, John is sleeping again and they go eat out on the back porch. It’s sort of the perfect spring night, and Laurel gives up and brings out wine, too. They’re all a bit giddy from relief, Belly thinks. That he’s home. That it hadn’t been worse. It makes the night feel perilously close to joyous.

Conrad is sitting by Steven, their heads bowed together as they talk. He’s filling him in, Belly can tell, on the medical side of things. Steven’s brow is furrowed as he listens, and he puts a hand on Conrad’s knee once, a sort of macho bro kind of pat, as if to say, thank you, dude, really. 

Feeling curls in Belly’s stomach, too complicated to unpack. 

Belly can feel Taylor watching her curiously, and when she gets up to go to the bathroom, Taylor follows her into the house. Belly nods her upstairs, and they go sit in her room.

It’s been a while since she’s been here, in her childhood bedroom. The small little daybed, the pictures all posted on the wall, it makes her feel like a teenager again.

“The news seems good,” Taylor says. “Right?”

Belly agrees that it is while she fiddles with the duvet cover.

“But you don’t seem happy.”

“I am,” Belly says. And then repeats it, when it hadn’t sounded convincing enough.

Taylor gives her a look, and Belly releases a breath. “I don’t know,” she says. “It’s just been a really long twenty-four hours.” 

“No shit it has.”

Belly eyes her, and her gaze trails to Taylor’s hand, where there is a ring. “Holy shit,” she says.

Taylor grins, and waggles the finger. “I mean, I knew,” she says. “But still. He did good.”

Belly takes her hand, tilts the ring up. It’s pretty obscenely nice, which it should be. Taylor had shown Belly pictures of it a year ago, and Belly had helped her, like, plant the seeds.

“He did good,” Belly agrees. 

“But we are not talking about that right now. What I want to know is: how did Conrad Fisher wind up here?”

Belly’s nose wrinkles. She would have preferred proposal talk. Or maybe even talking about her dad. “He was just with me when I got the call. And he…wanted to help. You know how he is.”

“Uh, no, I don’t,” Taylor says. “I know nothing about this man. And also. This is not like an I just wanted to help sort of situation. This is like a boyfriend of three years sort of situation.”

“No,” Belly insists. “I mean he’s like, a family friend—”

“Who you’re sleeping with.”

“Taylor.”

“What?”

“I don’t know!” Belly’s chest feels sort of claustrophobic, like great hiccups of emotion are buried right beneath the surface. “He’s, like, probably leaving tomorrow anyway, so it’s just…I don’t know, not worth getting into.”

“Leaving for Mars?” At Belly’s expression, Taylor raises her hands. “Okay. Not the time. Not the place. I’m just glad your dad is doing better, okay, babe? That’s all that matters right now. Right?”

It definitely should be. But somehow it isn’t.

Belly buries her face in her hands. “I’m like totally in love with him.”

It feels weirdly easy to say out loud suddenly. Like she's been staring at it so constantly in the face for the last twenty-four hours, it can't help but come out of her mouth. 

She hears Taylor’s huff of breath, almost laughter, though just slightly more polite. “I know, babe. You literally have been since you were like ten.”

Belly raises her head. “It’s humiliating.”

“Well, duh,” Taylor says. “Love always is.”

But Belly doesn’t want to be humiliated. She doesn’t think she could stand it. Not again. She’d been in love with him before—so in love that anyone who looked at her could see it, starry-eyed, flushed cheeks, horrible stutter—and it hadn’t made one lick of difference. He’d still left and never looked back. What was to stop him from leaving her now? 

And despite her best efforts, it would be so much worse now; because this wasn’t a school girl crush any longer. This had the potential to be like earth-shattering, devastation-inducing, real love. She’d known that since the first night, when he’d wiped the lipstick from her face. Since he’d kissed her three times in a row like he was talking to her. Since she’d sat on the edge of her bed, and watched him sleep. Since he’d told her he went to see Bye, Bye Birdie and called her honey. Since she’d remembered that Conrad Fisher was many things, but the foremost one was kind. 

Every millimeter closer to him she got, the more afraid Belly became of him leaving. That was the problem.

But she couldn’t let go of him either. She thinks that she could probably do anything in the world but that.

After dinner, Conrad takes a shower and then comes into her bedroom with wet hair in a t-shirt and boxers.

Belly is already in her pajamas, tucked in bed, determined to be cool as a cucumber. Alas, even just the sight of him shakes her conviction. Something about his wet hair…

“Is it okay?” he asks her, once the door closes behind him. “That I stay in here? I could like go get a hotel room or something.”

“Don’t be stupid,” Belly says, and scoots over.

He gets under the covers with her.

It’s a twin bed, not really meant to be shared, and they have to lie right next to each other, Belly facing the metal frame, Conrad behind her. 

He’s silent, and after a minute, Belly turns back towards him, and sees that he’s looking at the photo on her nightstand. It’s from Cousins, back when she was thirteen, Jere and Steven fourteen, him fifteen. They’re all out on the back deck, like they were every year. Belly still wore glasses back then, and she’s glancing up at him, a little shy, a lot adoring, while he grins straight at the camera, his arm slung over her shoulders. She can still remember the exact moment of the camera flash. How Belly hadn’t been able to believe her luck with Conrad Fisher close enough to share a frame. How Susannah, behind the camera, had said, “ouistiti” instead of “cheese”, because she thought it was charming.

Belly feels emotion choke heavy in her throat. 

He looks back over at her. She wonders when the last time he slept was. Thirty-six hours? Or more? She wants to put her lips to the circles beneath his eyes, to wrap herself entirely around him. 

“Light out?” she says.

He nods, and then douses the room in darkness. 

Belly faces the wall again, and he settles down beside her. “How do you sleep?” she asks.

“What?”

“Like on your side or your stomach or what?” 

“Uh,” Conrad says. “On my back normally.”

Belly nods, tucking her head in closer to her chest.

“Conrad?” she says, after a bit has passed. Though she’s waited long enough she’s worried now he’s already asleep.

He makes a soft sound in response.

Belly tries to think of how to sum up all of her feelings into words. It feels like an impossibly large task. “Thank you,” she settles on, at last.

It’s pretty much what she means.

She feels light pressure, like butterfly wings, on the back of her neck. The pads of his fingertips. Her eyes close, like if she only stayed still, she could hold the moment in her memory bank forever. Like, unmoving, anything could still happen.

“I’m glad,” he says. His voice has gone a touch rough. “I’m glad I could be here.”

Belly knows that. So, she knows him well enough for that, too, she supposes. To know that he’d be glad, that he was still on some level that same boy who the summer she was ten had rescued her from a riptide. 

“It’s just a little further,” he'd told her when he reached her, struggling against the current, panicked and frightened half to death. His hand hooked under her armpit to help drag her. “Come on, Belly," he said. "You have to swim.”

Belly doesn’t remember everything about that terrible day. But she remembers the pressure of the water and his dark head bobbing above the waves in front of her. How when they made it all the way back to land, she had sat shivering on the sand, long after any actual danger had passed. How she’d vowed she’d never get in the ocean again.

But the next day, Conrad pulled out an array of tidal charts and local maps, and showed her how to identify where riptides were likely to form and at which point in the tide cycle they were most dangerous. He made her repeat back the findings until he felt confident she’d understood. “Now you’ll know,” he told her, twelve years old and serious as a scholar. “And you don’t ever have to be frightened again.”

Like it was that simple.

Like armed with enough knowledge, Belly was totally capable of rescuing herself.

His hand touches her forearm, right by her elbow, a brief, reassuring squeeze. And Belly can feel the warmth of him at her back. In response, she squirms closer. His exhale hits the back of her neck, and he moves the hand to her waist. It’s large enough that it spans the width of it, fingertips almost to her belly button, and a sharper heat follows, almost inappropriate, here, in this room, in this bed where she’s spent so many nights dreaming of him over the years. 

But fuck it. She takes his hand, and pulls it beneath her shirt, running it up her ribs until it meets her bare breast.

Her name, said almost like a warning.

But Belly doesn’t want to be warned off. Not when she can tell he’s half hard already, and he’s so warm and close and Conrad. So perfectly Conrad.

“Please,” she tells him.

What was that she’d said about asking more of him?

But she thinks she can make a gift of herself to him, too. Like that would make up for it. For the fact that it was her. 

“I don’t have anything with me, honey,” he says, voice low. “Let’s just—”

“It’s fine,” Belly says. “You don’t have to—You can—I mean, I want you to. If you…want.”

“Jesus, Belly.” His mouth drops to her shoulder, she can feel the wet of it through the fabric of her shirt, the raggedness of his breathing, his thumb moving almost absentmindedly over her nipple.“Okay, just…okay.”

Her head tips back against him, and his lips find the curve of her collarbone, his hand palming her a little harder, his hips grinding into her. “I want you,” she murmurs. It’s easier than, I love you, though she means that, too. She says it again, and then again on a moan.

He makes a sound against her skin. 

They probably shouldn’t be doing this. It’s been the longest day she’s had in living memory and she’s tired and emotionally strung out and her entire family is right down the hall and he’s leaving tomorrow back for Boston, she’s pretty sure, though he hasn’t said explicitly. And that’s not a betrayal, but it sort of feels like it is. 

But Belly doesn’t know, in this moment, none of that matters, not really, not like he does.

She turns so she’s facing him and kisses him. He tastes like toothpaste, and his mouth is soft from exhaustion. The kiss is almost sloppy like they’ve just crushed themselves together with little intention behind it. She doesn’t care about that either.

She pushes her pajama shorts off, and moves to straddle him, her hands on his chest. He’s looking up at her, a little hazy, like maybe this is part-dream. It feels that way to Belly, too, like the actions of some other person. 

She works herself down on him slowly and watches how it slackens and tightens him at the same time. They’ve never done it like this before, with nothing between them, and it feels like…god, but it feels like…

Like Belly wants to say his name. Like she wants to cry, and scream, and claw at him, and beg, and beg, and beg. 

Her hand scrambles for his, and he holds it, pressed against his chest. His heart is beating fast, through the fabric of his t-shirt. She’s seen him in this one several times before, pale blue with the outline of a boat. Haven’s Marina. And his eyes have closed, and there’s tension in the line of his neck, and every time she grinds into him, it lights up her clit, and, fuck, but Belly could spend the rest of her life chasing this high. 

Hadn’t she already been doing that?

“So good, baby.” His eyebrows wrinkle. “You feel so…” The words trail off, his teeth biting into his lip.

If she confesses love to him right now, Belly is probably actually going to lose it big time.

She sort of wants to do it anyway.

“Conrad?” Belly whispers.

His eyes blink open, searching for her in the dark. “Hmmm?” 

Belly leans down and kisses him again instead of answering, because fundamentally she thinks she might be something of a coward. Still, she wonders if he can taste the words she can’t quite say.

I love you. I’m so thankful for you. Please, please, please don’t go.

Chapter Text

The next morning, Belly wakes to sticky thighs and Conrad Fisher wrapped tight around her as a glove. Her shirt has rucked up to just below her breasts, and his leg is pressed between both of hers, his arm clenched across her midsection, elbow by her hip, hand on her shoulder, his face buried in the junction of her neck. She can feel the full length of him, a little too hot for comfort, and a lot too close. 

He’s still sleeping, and she doesn’t want to wake him, because if she does…Well, she’s not sure what would happen if she does.

Lying here, held by him, is sort of tortuous though.

She shifts slightly, to see if she can extract herself, and feels him start to stir. His fingers fluttering, his face pressing more firmly against her, his hips moving just a little bit into her, and yeah, so, Belly is fucking human. She’s sort of turned on just by, like, watching Conrad put his lips on a glass rim. And this is a lot more than that. It’s kind of everything she’s ever dreamed of.

She wiggles in his hold. He makes a sound at that, pulling her more tightly back against him, his mouth opening to press against her skin, teeth, a little tongue, and Belly makes a sound which probably could be categorized as a mewl.

He lifts his head. “Hi,” he says, voice all sleep-rough.

And fuck, if that isn’t hot, too.

She would definitely, definitely let him fuck her raw again. Like right now. He’d like that, too, she’s pretty sure, from the feel of him. And she’s not even wearing underwear. In, like, three easy motions, he could be inside her again. The thought is threatening to tip her right over the edge. 

She tilts her hips backwards in invitation. His hand moves from her shoulder to the outside of her bare hip, pressing briefly, and then he huffs a breath, rolling onto his back away from her. 

“We probably, uh, shouldn’t do that again,” he says.

Belly feels the breath rush out of her. She pulls her shirt back down, and pushes herself to sitting. The sun is fully up. She’s not sure the exact time, but she thinks they probably slept for at least ten hours. 

He’s definitely right. That they shouldn’t. Something about him just, like, seriously clouds her judgement. “Yeah,” she says. “We probably should have, like, talked about it first. Before we, you know.”

His eyes cut over to her. “What do you mean?”

“I don’t know, we haven’t had, like, the STD talk or whatever.”

“Oh,” he says. “I mean, I got tested in January. I’m clean. I can show you the results, if you want. They’re on my phone somewhere.”

Belly pushes her hair back behind her ear. “And you’re like…”

He frowns. “Like what?”

“I don’t know, like, not hooking up with anyone else?”

Conrad blinks. He looks entirely befuddled. “Are you…serious?”

“Yeah?”

He drops his head to his chest, and kind of laughs, though it sounds more sad than amused. “Are you?”

Belly feels a sort of mulishness settle over her. “It’s not crazy for me to ask, Conrad. I, like, don’t know anything about your, like, sexual history.”

“Sexual history,” Conrad repeats, a little hollowly. “Christ, Belly.”

“I mean, like, how many people have you been with?”

“I’m not telling you that.”

“Why not?”

“Because I don’t think it would help anything.”

Which probably means it’s a lot. “I’ll tell you my count.” And when he doesn’t say anything to that, she adds, “Sixteen. If we’re talking, like, penetrative sex.”

“Okay.” His jaw has clenched a little, and he looks sort of angry. It’s probably fucked up of her to be glad about that. She wants him to fight back. She wants that more than almost anything. Like if he was willing to fight with her that meant that he actually really did care.

And she does want to know. Almost as much as she doesn’t. She wants to know who his first kiss was. Who he’d lost his virginity to. Who he’d told I love you to for the first time. 

She wants them all to have been her, like she could retroactively take over his entire life.

She knows that’s not fair, that they’d lived life separately, but she feels it anyway. 

She’d had her first kiss that last summer at Cousins, when she’d been trying to pretend that she was okay about the fact that he had already gone ahead to California, not even bothering to say goodbye. And she’d lost her virginity her junior year of high school to a guy she’d been dating for three months the spring that Susannah died. She said I love you to her boyfriend senior year, because he’d said it first, though she didn’t think she, like, actually loved him. She’s slept with sixteen people over the last seven years, and maybe been in love with three of them. But none of it had anything on whatever this was. 

She wants it to be the same for him. 

Maybe it’s wild to feel such all-consuming jealousy when she’s still got his come on her thighs, but Belly feels it anyway. She doesn’t know how to stop.

“I’m trying,” Conrad says, voice stretched thin, “really hard, Belly, to play by your rules. But sometimes I feel like—” He cuts himself off, like he’s swallowing something nasty.

His eyes have gone the color of slate, and he looks sort of queasy, doused in morning light. How strange that moments before he’d been nuzzling at her neck.

It was her that had done this. That had made him like this. Unhappy.

“But you what?” Belly demands. 

“I don’t know, Belly. Like maybe I find it a touch confusing when like one second you’re begging me to fuck you raw or, like, I don’t know, sucking me off at a dinner party, and the next moment, you, like, won’t even let me say hi to you in public. I have no idea what’s allowed or not. I don’t do this.”

This was such a vast mischaracterization of the whole thing that Belly feels bowled over. She wasn’t even sure, really, what he meant by this. What it was he didn’t do.

“I’m not dictating what you’re allowed to do, Conrad. You can do what you want. You know that.”

“Do I? Because it feels like ever since we first started this thing what I want doesn’t even matter to you, and I…”

“You what?”

He deflates. “I don’t know, Belly. I’m just tired.”

He won’t stop saying her name. It feels sort of like how Belly imagines hives feel, pressure bubbling up under her skin. She should have told him to call her Isabel, that first night. The intimacy of this, her childhood nickname, makes the past seem too close to stand. “I don’t know what you want,” she admits. “I honestly have no idea, Conrad.”

He’s silent. 

“I don’t think that’s true,” he says, finally.

“It is,” she says. “You left me.”

She’d wanted to brandish this like a weapon against him, but it comes out terribly raw instead.

How embarrassing.

“What?” he says, shaking his head. “I never—”

And suddenly, Belly can’t stomach being there a moment longer. Trapped by him against the wall. In this room, that makes her feel so small and helpless. In her parent’s house even. She scrambles over his legs, making for the door. 

Conrad catches her by the arm. “Belly, wait. Could you just—”

“Let go of me,” she hisses, tugging at her arm.

He does. “Okay,” he says, raising his hands in a gesture for peace. “Okay, just—Just, tell me what you mean by that.”

Belly doesn’t want to. She really, really doesn’t want to. 

He’d said he was tired. Of it. Of her. And Belly feels that way, too. She is so fucking tired. Holding him at a distance has been killing her. Like she’s been drowning slowly for weeks.

“Please,” he says.

In her metaphor, being honest should feel like a breath of fresh air then. But it doesn’t. “You’re the one,” she says, voice choked, “who went off to California and never looked back. And then you show up, out of the blue, and you’re all Conrad Fisher about everything, and it’s just…it’s not fair. It’s really fucking not fair, Conrad.”

Conrad looks like she’d smacked him.

“Just because now you’ve, like, suddenly remembered that I existed, it doesn’t just, like, make up for all the time that you…” Tears prickle at her eyes. “I didn’t hear from you for eight years. At all. And I know, okay, I know we weren’t ever anything to each other, but I still…” 

Was waiting for you. Was longing for you. Was hoping like a stupid, foolish little girl that one day, you’d just…call.

And then he had.

“Belly—”

“Stop,” she says, raising a hand between them, as if to halt even the sight of him, spread out amongst her covers, hair rumpled, expression so horribly open and aching. “Please, just, like. I can’t, okay? I really, really can’t.”

And with that crushing series of admissions, Belly flees.

After she showers, Belly carefully dries her hair, and even bothers to put on mascara. When she slinks back to her bedroom, towel-clad, however, it’s empty. The living room, too, is empty, the covers on the couch neatly folded up.

Conrad and her mother are both in the kitchen, and Belly pauses on the bottommost stair, unwilling to put herself in their line of sight just yet.

Their heads are bowed towards each other, Conrad on one side of the island, her mother on the other, both of them holding still-steaming cups of coffee. Conrad has the green Kermit mug that Steven bought as a joke. Her mother, a Finch mug.

“It’s fine, Laur,” Conrad says. “I normally work the day of. If I didn’t, I wouldn’t know what to do with myself.”

Laurel exhales. “And when’s the last time you took an actual break?”

“That’s not fair,” Conrad says, a little wry. “I took two weeks before I started my residency. It’s only been like three months. I don’t need a break.” 

“Yeah, for that godawful drive. I don’t see why you didn’t just sell your car.”

“Hey, I stopped in Chicago. And New York. It wasn’t fun-less.”

“Hmm,” Laurel says, skeptically. “And how is Agnes?”

“She’s good. The Big Apple is her bitch, you know how she is.” Conrad fiddles a bit with his mug, Laurel watching him, Belly watching the two of them, utterly and completely frozen.

She’d forgotten.

“Your mother would be so proud of you, sweetheart,” Laurel says. “You know that, right?”

From this angle, Belly can’t see Conrad’s expression, but she can see how his shoulders hunch. “Thank you,” he says, eventually. “That means a lot, coming from you.”

“Today is hard.”

He shrugs. “All of the days are hard.”

And suddenly, Belly can’t take any more.

She backs up the steps, one at a time, careful not to trip, or to make a sound until she’s safely back in her bedroom, where she rests her forehead against the door, screwing her eyes shut. 

Today was the sixteenth. 

Belly feels so stupid. She hadn’t even thought once about the fact that the anniversary was approaching now that it was May. Even though she’d spent most of yesterday thinking about her. Even though she’d spent months now in Conrad’s company.

A small choked sound escapes Belly’s throat. She tries to swallow it down—she doesn’t remember when the last time she actually cried was, least of all about Susannah—but she finds that it won’t go. 

In addition to being a coward, she thinks she might be a terrible person.

When she comes back downstairs, everyone is at the long dining room table, her dad at the head. He’s clearly showered, and he’s in fresh clothes, and some of his color is back. “You look better,” Belly says, because he does.

“Nothing a shower can’t fix,” he says, smiling.

“And five separate medications,” Laurel says, wryly.

“I made shaksuka,” Steven says, gesturing with a hand. “There’s some still on the stove.”

“And there’s coffee,” Taylor says.

Conrad is right by Taylor, and he’s intentionally not looking at Belly. 

Belly feels shy, and somewhat skittish, and like it’s probably obvious that she’s been crying. “Uh, in a minute. Conrad, can I talk to you for a second?”

He looks up. His plate is still only like half-full. “Yeah,” he says.

Belly nods him outside, and they go sit on the front steps. The day is gray and overcast, the air humid, like it could already be summer.

She’s the one who called the meeting, but for a moment neither of them speak, and then when they do, they both try to talk at the same time.

“I couldn’t—”

“I didn’t—”

They both pause.

“You go,” he says.

“Earlier, I didn’t realize,” she says. “About the anniversary. I feel like such an idiot.”

A brief, horrible silence, then, “It’s—it’s okay, Belly.”

“It isn’t,” she insists. “I should have remembered. I’m so sorry, Connie.”

He exhales, then says, “I couldn’t find anyone to get my shift, so I have to leave soon to be back for work tonight.”

“Oh.”

“I’m going to fly, so you can drive back in my car. When you’re ready. I’ll, uh, leave you the keys.”

“It might not be until the weekend. I want to stay and make sure everything is settled here.” 

“That’s fine.”

“Okay,” Belly dusts off her legs, and then gets to her feet. Conrad stays sitting, looking down at the pavement below, where grass is leaping up amongst the cracks. It hurts, looking at him. She can’t, it would seem, stop doing every single thing wrong.

She’s not even sure what would be right. Maybe that’s the problem.

He doesn’t say anything, and Belly goes back inside. Ten minutes later, her brother comes down the steps, fully dressed. “Yo,” he says. “Tell your boyfriend I’m almost ready to go.”

Belly looks towards the door, like it’s a gateway to another world. “He’s outside,” she says. “Tell him yourself.”

That night, the whole family does a movie night on the couch. They watch Young Frankenstein, because it pretty much bridges everyone’s interests. It was that or The Greatest Showman. Belly curls up by her dad, her head on his shoulder, and listens to him laugh. Taylor and Steven are sharing the armchair by the window—the whole proposal had been gone over at dinner, a story which somehow involved a cat named Cliff, a cheesemonger named Stefon, and a lightly famous rapper named Lawrence—and Belly is watching them and thinking about what it would be like if Conrad had stayed.

She wishes he had stayed.

The next morning, she gets up and makes waffles for everyone, and then goes to the store and gets some mobility aids for her dad. He doesn’t need a walker, but some rails by the toilet and in the shower and a sturdy walking stick feel like good purchases, in case he gets woozy again.

She spends the afternoon watching youtube to figure out how to install them, and then goes and does a big load of laundry. It’s three and she’s sitting in the laundry room, watching the dryer spin while she plays a sixth round of tetris, when her phone rings. 

It’s Conrad Fisher.

For a moment, she just stares at it. She still hasn’t put in a picture for him.

“Hey,” she says when she picks up. It feels sort of high school. To be so nervous. Especially after everything they’d done. Everything they’d said. “I wasn’t expecting you to call.”

“Is it okay? That I did?”

“Yes,” Belly says, quickly. “Of course. Just, um, how was your shift?”

He exhales. “Yeah. Total shitshow. How’s your dad?”

She snorts. “He and my mom are at the local brewery right now for trivia.”

“He probably shouldn’t be drinking. Or driving.”

“Oh, he knows. Watching them get in the car was a production. But he didn’t want to let the team down. It’s apparently deeply competitive.”

Conrad laughs. It only sounds a little forced.

“What was involved in the shitshow?”

A brief moment of silence. 

“You, like, don’t have to—”

“No, I. Um. Nights are always hard, because there's less staff, and also people don’t normally come unless it’s serious, so it can get kind of…intense.”

After having spent one night at the hospital, Belly can imagine that’s true. “I’m sorry,” she says.

“No, it’s fine. It’s just…Uh, I don’t know. I worked nights in med school, so it’s not new or anything. Just…”

“Just what?”

Another long pause. “The other week there was just sort of a bear of shift, really busy, because it was a soccer weekend, which sounds like it wouldn’t be a big deal, but anything drunken is kind of well, a recipe for disaster, and I had more cases than I normally do, and one of my patients, this fifty year old woman, she like seemed fine, like she’d had this terrible migraine, but I’d given her morphine to help with that and was just like waiting to see if that cleared it, but I just, must have missed something, and she started seizing when I was with another patient, and um, when I came back, and I saw her…like that, I just…totally froze. And, uh, yeah, Ferrandi had to step in and take over, but, um, she died anyway. Like within minutes.”

“Jesus, Conrad.”

“People die,” he says. “Like every shift, so it’s not…News to me. This one just felt…like it was my fault.”

“How would it be your fault?”

“I don’t know, like I should have been paying more attention.” He’s silent for a beat after that.

“Are you still punishing yourself?” Belly says, and hears him inhale, sharp with surprise. “I heard. What your friend said the other day. On the phone. He’s right, you know? You can’t expect yourself to be perfect. That’s like an insanely high bar. You just have to do your best. Like everyone.”

There’s a sort of rustling sound, and Belly wonders where he is. If he’s still in bed, or if he’s not even at home at all. She’s still only been to his place that once. When they’d fucked on his floor.

“I know,” Conrad says. “I’m, uh, I’m trying.”

Me too, Belly wants to say. 

She’s trying really hard.

“Hey,” she says. “Topic change, but you wouldn’t believe what I found today when I was searching for a quarter inch drill bit in my parent’s closet.”

Conrad pauses. “What?” 

“You remember Sorry? Like the board game? My parents still had it, like, way in the back of the closet, and I showed it to Steven, and now he’s demanding a championship once my parents are back from trivia. So that’ll be interesting.”

“I remember you cried the last time we played.”

“Yeah, I think it was you who cried when you lost, and, like, demanded we play two out of three.”

“Your memory is spotty,” Conrad says, though he’s laughing.

And she’d forgotten, too, that she had a knack for it. Making him laugh.

“We should all play. Next time you’re here.”

“Yeah?”

She nods, though he can’t see it.

The silence sits for a moment. “That sounds nice,” he says, finally.

She’s already said thank you, and I’m sorry, but she hasn’t said I miss you yet, which feels ludicrous, because it’s been, like, twenty-four hours since she’s seen him. And also they’re currently talking.

She misses him anyway.

“Belly?”

“Hm?”

“About yesterday—”

“We don’t have to—”

“My number is four. Including you.”

Belly’s brain goes, well, frankly, a touch blank. “Oh,” she says. 

“Yeah,” he says. “I just wanted to be clear. I don’t really do casual sex. Like ever.”

Belly thinks about saying something blithe, like, until now; but she doesn’t. Because she meant it, about trying. “Okay,” she says instead. “Good to know.”

They both just breathe for a moment, and then Conrad says, “So, um, can I take you to dinner? When you’re back in town?”

Belly’s eyes close. It’s completely and totally mortifying, but she sort of feels like squealing. Like she’s still fourteen years old and can’t believe Conrad Fisher might want to go down to the boardwalk with her. Just the two of them. “Yeah,” she says. “I’d love that.”

Chapter Text

Belly leaves Philly early Friday morning so that she can make it back in time for her afternoon meet. It’s a bit weird driving Conrad’s car up to the school instead of trudging all the way from the T, but she’s careful pulling it into a spot in the parking lot, and it feels nice, she can admit, to be sitting in it with the aircon on, looking at the tree-shaped air freshener, and texting him, made it back to boston. me and car both safe :)

Oh good, he texts back, almost immediately, I was really worried about my car.

Belly laughs, and then, deliberating, pulls open her camera, fluffs her hair a bit, and takes a picture of herself in the front seat. She’s maybe wearing his sweater, too, though outside the car, the day is beautiful.

She watches the dots load and then go silent for like five minutes, before she decides she really does need to hustle to the gym, so she pockets it. She’s on the field already when she’s able to pull it out again, and see his response.

You can keep the car. And then a minute later, It looks better on you anyway.

Conrad is still at work when she gets back from the meet, so she just parks the car by her apartment, knowing they’ll do the trade off tomorrow. For their date. 

He’s not wrong: the closest street parking is forever away, and she can sort of see the uber argument. A little. He’s still insane.

On her way in, Belly runs into Geraldine on the stairway. She’s out sweeping her stoop, which is a thing only she does. “Bonjour, Isabel,” Geraldine says, cheerily, as Belly passes, which is something of an inside joke. “Tell your sweet man he was right. Herpes. You should have seen the old bat's face when I confronted her at bingo night. Caught in my pinchers.”

Belly has too many questions in response to this to be able to put them to words. “I’ll tell him,” she says.

Back in her apartment, there’s nothing in the cabinets but ramen, which she heats up and eats on the floor, because she’s a lady. When she’s finished with the bowl, it’s 7:15, and she calls Conrad. 

“Hey,” he says.

“Did you tell my neighbor one of her bingo buddies has herpes?”

“Geraldine?” 

“No. My other neighbor.”

“Oh,” he says. She can hear that he’s walking. There’s the sound of the street, and his footsteps, and it’s weirdly calming. She thinks she could listen to it like a lullaby. “Uh, maybe? We chat sometimes.”

“You and Geraldine chat sometimes?”

“Yeah? We met at Steven’s, and then I, like, helped her with a lightbulb thing like three weeks ago. She was sweet about it. Honestly, I think she’s kind of lonely.” He pauses. “And she likes to gossip.”

Belly thinks that there is a possibility that she underestimated Conrad Fisher. He’s fucking dastardly. “Okay,” she says. “So, tell me. How did Herpes come up?”

The next afternoon, Belly spends like three hours trying to decide what to wear to dinner, which, she can acknowledge, is a bit pathetic, but she’s nervous. And she doesn’t get nervous like this for dates, not normally. She sends Taylor pictures of her in like fifteen outfits, and Taylor hearts the sluttiest one, a thigh skimming green slip dress, which Belly considers with a certain degree of seriousness, before deciding that was, like, the total opposite vibe of what she was going for.

She settles eventually on a dark blue sundress that hits her mid calf. And she curls her hair and does a smoky eye, because okay, she is still trying to seduce him, and wears a white pair of sneakers, because the only thing he’d told her was to wear comfortable shoes.

She drives his car over to his place, and stares up at the great big brownstone for a bit, stomach all aflutter, before she works up the nerve to call him to come down. It takes him like five minutes, and when he appears, he looks a touch breathless at the sight of her, and it feels like it’s been more than three days since she’s seen him, though it hasn’t been.

“You look wonderful,” he says.

“Thank you. So do you.” Which he does. He’s wearing a white button down and high waisted pants, and yeah, it’s good.

“Thanks,” he says, shaking his head. “We’re, uh, walking, if that’s cool.”

Belly agrees that it is, and they start down the street together. Like the last time they were here, it feels a touch awkward. It’s also early, like old man dinner early, which she teases him about to break the ice. He laughs, and says, “Ah, well, we’re going somewhere after. I just, like, wanted to feed you first.”

“Like I’m a dog.”

“If you want,” he says, smirking, and by then they’ve made it to the restaurant.

It’s a tiny Mediterranean place, not particularly fancy, but it has a back patio out in the alleyway, which is strung with multicolored flags, and it’s only a little bit damp from the afternoon rain.  

They get sangria and three small plates to split. As they’re eating, Belly tells him a bit about the end of the season games, how they’re exciting all the way up until the championship is over, when it suddenly gets sad, because she remembers that her senior players are graduating, which is worse this year, because these are the players who were freshman her first year at the school, so it’s like five times more emotional. 

In return, he tells her about his coworkers in the ER. The ones he likes: Demola, who was the sap on the phone, who he’s trying to set up with one of the nurses in the ICU, and Lauren, who is going to join his and Steven’s DnD campaign next month. And the ones he doesn’t: Miles, who was a pompous ass, and Frederick, who’d been the one to get peed on. 

They laugh a lot. 

As they’re waiting for dessert, however, Conrad keeps checking his watch, like a tic. After the seventh time, Belly raises an eyebrow. “Is this thing afterwards time sensitive?”

He flushes. “Yeah,” he says. “Sorry. I didn’t mean for it to, like, stress me out, being on a schedule. But now I’m, like, thinking about traffic. Stupid, sorry.”

Belly places her hand over his on the table, and he looks at it, and then back up at her.

The thought comes to her in a flash: Conrad Fisher is nervous. This concept would have bamboozled her two months ago. She didn’t think he got nervous.

But he is. She can totally tell that he is.

“It’s all okay, babe. We won’t die if we don’t make it, right?”

He blinks at her. There’s something a little bit childish in his gaze, like a slackening, or an opening maybe. Like he’s trusting her with it. “Yes,” he says. “You’re right.”

She removes her hand from his. “Now eat your cupcake. And I’ll signal the waiter.”

“Aye, aye,” he says, giving her a salute. 

“You’re such a dweeb,” she tells him, laughing. The fact that he was, like, phenomenal in bed had somehow tricked her into forgetting that. She likes that about him, too, though. 

She’s pretty sure she likes everything about him.

Belly has no clue at all where the mystery after dinner location might be all the way up until they walk into the building, turn a corner, and are confronted by a dance floor. There’s a row of cubbies right at the front, and a check-in station, a long hardwood floor, and in the back, a stage where people are setting up instruments. A piano, drums, a saxophone.

“They do lessons before the band plays,” Conrad says. She can feel him watching her, trying to gauge her reaction.

Conrad, it would seem, has taken her swing dancing.

Belly, a little absurdly, feels tears well. “You remember?”

He smiles. “I remember everything.”

And, well, okay. 

They line up in a circle to do the lesson. Belly starts with Conrad—one hand polite on her shoulder blade, the other held in hers—as the instructor walks the group through the basic footwork. His mouth is smirky, like he’s not taking it entirely seriously, and once they are through the first song, just bopping to the step, step, rock step, he gives her a very awkwardly executed twirl.

Belly finds it totally endearing. He’s a terrible dancer. Who’d have thought?

They switch partners after that and Belly doesn’t see Conrad for the rest of the hour, though her gaze keeps getting drawn to him across the room, and she can see that he’s looking for her, too. At the very last, they come back together again. 

Belly has just been dancing with a moderately handsy man named Stanley, and she feels so grateful for the switch that when she reaches him again, she exhales loudly and says, “Oh thank god.”

“Missed me?” Conrad asks. It’s sort of a joke; but a little bit not.

“Never leave me again,” Belly tells him.

His beautiful grin, stretched wide. “All right,” he agrees.

After the end of the lesson, the band starts up. It’s old-fashioned jazz classics mainly, with a croon-y female vocalist that looks like she’s approximately ninety-two. Belly and Conrad stumble through two songs, and he’s a little better than she first thought. Though neither of them are very good, they both at least have rhythm, and Conrad likes doing the more daring moves, even if they’re a little off beat. This leads to a general sense of hilarity.

At a fast one, a middle-aged woman comes over and asks Conrad to dance, and he tilts his head at Belly in question. “Go on then,” she says, shooing him off.

When he comes back, he looks windblown. Belly has taken a spot by the water cooler, and he comes and leans beside her. “Do you like it?” he asks.

“It’s perfect,” she admits. 

He relaxes, his elbow on the counter next to her, his body turned towards her. Even just standing near him causes prickles of awareness to go up her spine. She moves their elbows closer together to chase the feeling, and he brushes one finger down her arm in a long, slow caress.

It’s one of, she thinks, the more sensual things to ever happen to her.

The opening notes of a new song start. In like three beats, Belly recognizes it. “Oh,” she says. “I love this song.”

Blue Moon. Frank Sinatra. Ella Fitzgerald. Like a throbbing heart beat. 

(You saw me standing alone…)

Conrad pushes off the counter, and holds out his hand to her, eyebrows raised.

(Without a dream in your heart…)

Belly takes it.

(Without a love of my own…)

The song is far too slow to do any of the moves they’d just spent an hour learning; but that doesn’t matter. Conrad pulls her into him, cradling their hands close to their bodies, and they just sway to the music on the busy dance floor. And for a moment…Belly doesn’t want to be anywhere in the world but right here.

The feeling is as fragile as a spring bloom, and just as beautiful.

It’s only ten thirty when they get back in Conrad’s car, though it might as well be three a.m. for how punch drunk Belly feels. If this had been a regular first date, she would have been like putting ten hearts by his name in her phone. But it’s not a regular first date.

It’s Conrad Beck Fisher.

Which makes her sort of feel like running screaming down the street, and also… kind of like proposing marriage.

“I can,” Conrad starts, when they’re buckling their seat belts, “Show me your apartment?” Belly finishes for him.

Because, well, it had worked the first time.

“Yeah?” he says. “We don’t have to.”

“I want to,” Belly tells him.

So, he drives her home. He’s finished with the move-in by now, the packing boxes neatly stowed away, and though it’s mainly the same, a couple more personal things have been put around the place. There’s a cozy looking cream throw on the loveseat, and books flooding the bookshelves, along with what looks to be a coin collection leaned on the top shelf, and a slightly funky bottle-green glass lamp on his dresser. His bed is perfectly made, and the place smells like Pine Sol and linen candles. She’s pretty sure, too, that he regularly dusts. 

She finds that, like, humorously sexy.

Still, the apartment could use a woman’s touch. His curtains are concrete grey, and she’s not sure he’s ever heard of a throw pillow. 

Belly pauses in the corner by the window. There is a painting hanging there. It’s small, and clearly amateur, a slapdash arrangement of color, yellow and blue and green and pink; but Belly recognizes the shapes, the bend to the coastline, the size of the sky, and she would know the artist even if she hadn’t seen the scratch of letters down at the bottom right corner.

She raises a hand, almost against her will, and touches the raw wood frame. Cousins Beach, at sunrise.

She feels Conrad come up behind her. He’s poured wine, and he taps the back of her hand with the glass, and she takes it from him.

“I thought you said you hadn’t been back,” Belly says.

“I haven’t,” he says. “I found this, like, five years ago when my dad sold the town house and we went through all my mom’s stuff. She had some canvases that she’d brought over from the summerhouse, I think to make gifts of them, maybe, I don’t know. I liked this one though.”

Belly likes it, too. A lot. Though looking at it makes her chest hurt. 

“This is the first place I’ve actually hung it,” Conrad says. “It was in my closet before that. At three different apartments.”

“It looks good here,” she says, and turns so she can see his face. 

Conrad isn’t looking at her. Instead, he’s studying the painting very seriously, and Belly feels as if a corner of a curtain has been lifted, and she can see what lies beneath. And it’s just…raw, unfiltered grief. 

Belly would be lying if she said it didn’t scare her. 

But she feels grateful, too, that he isn’t running. That she isn’t either. Like she’s reached the end of a long marathon, ragged and out of breath, and there he is in the crowd. After all this time. It’s kind of a miracle.

“I don’t know if your mom told you,” Conrad starts, a little haltingly. “But I found out about my mom’s cancer returning my senior spring. And that’s why I didn’t go that last summer. To Cousins. I couldn’t stand to be there, knowing it wasn’t…forever. That none of it was going to last. Later, I was so mad with myself about it. That I could have had one more summer with her, with all of you, if I hadn’t been so…frightened.”

“Connie,” Belly starts, but he isn’t finished.

“I think sometimes those summers were like perfect memories, you know? I know they weren’t, that we got sunburned and hot and annoyed with each other, that the roof leaked that one summer and nobody noticed the mold, and then you got so sick you couldn’t get out of bed for days, and, fuck, remember when Steven and Jeremiah got in that terrible fight when they were thirteen and nobody thought they’d ever talk again? But, I don’t know, none of that is what sticks out to me when I think back on it. I always think about the dinners we used to have on the first night, bouillabaisse and us boys sneaking wine, or how the night before you got there, my mom would go around making sure your rooms were all perfectly laid out, and then all morning, just wait by the window, looking for your car. And Jere and I would pretend we weren’t doing the same thing.”

Belly’s not sure she’s ever heard him say so many words about himself. But it was as if the floodgates were open, and now Conrad can’t stop. He’s still not even looking at her, just holding his wine glass and staring at the painting, and it feels sort of like the two of them were frozen in time, and also like they were walking backwards towards different, younger versions of themselves. Like a long festering wound was finally being uncovered.

“I quit football that summer,” he continues, “to spite my dad. But, fuck, Belly, I can’t even count all the things I quit because they made me miss my mom. It wasn’t just Cousins, it was like after she died everything that I liked about the world reminded me of her. Daffodils, because she believed in wishing on them. And lobster and chocolate icecream and steak frites. Swing dancing, and old movies. Crossword puzzles. I even hated flowers sometimes. Rainbows. Perfect sunsets. I think maybe I hated being happy, too, I don’t know.” He exhales, heavy. “I’m still working on that.” 

Tears are dripping down Belly’s face by this point, probably making a mess of her makeup. She doesn’t care. She’s not sure what she can possibly say in response to this series of admissions. It sort of feels like the fabric of her world is rearranging itself. 

Summer, Cousins, the Beck house, it had always felt like it was precious only to her, like maybe it even existed only for her. She’d thought her whole life that she had cherished it more than anyone else possibly could. It had never occurred to her that Conrad might have been doing the same thing. That the memories of it, after it was gone, could hurt him just as much as they did her. Maybe even more so. Because it was his mother. Because he could still go back there at any time, and every day, he chose not to. Like he was punishing himself for missing it.

She’s been so unfathomably stupid.

He turns towards her, finally, and she watches his expression slacken. “Don’t cry,” he says. “Jesus, I’m sorry. I shouldn’t have—”

“No,” Belly says. “It’s okay. Don’t say you’re sorry.” He makes to take her by the arm, to pull her towards him, but Belly resists. She wants to be able to look him in the eye.

His eyes are very green, damp with tears, too, like hers are, and well, this wasn’t exactly how she thought the night was going to go. She’s not mad though. Not even a little bit.

His thumb brushes her cheekbone. “I’m really sorry, honey,” he says. “That it took me so long to call you.”

Belly’s face screws up. “Conrad,” she says, and then exhales. “I missed you. That last summer.”

It’s not all she wants to say. In fact, there’s a very, very long list of things she’d like to go over with him. But she thinks it’s an okay start.

His mouth twists. “You wouldn’t have liked the guy I was that summer.”

Belly shakes her head. “I would have,” she insists. She might not know much, but she knows this is true. 

There isn’t a version of him she wouldn’t have fallen in love with.

The details didn’t matter, not really. She was always going to choose him.

She glances back towards the bed, and then towards the kitchen. “Come on,” she says. “I’m hungry, and I’m, like, dying to see what seasonings you have in your cupboard.”

He blinks at her, clearly surprised. But he recovers quickly. “I’m never living down the eggs, am I?” 

She smiles. “You’re never living down the eggs.”

Chapter Text

It’s nearly midnight, and Conrad still hasn’t come to bed. Belly pads across the apartment, and peers into the kitchen, where she finds him still bent over his kitchen table. 

“It’s legitimately fucked up,” she tells him, “that I’m, like, naked in your bed and you’re in here doing…what exactly is it that you’re doing?”

“You know what I’m doing. Don’t make me explain it to you again. And you aren’t naked.” His eyes flick up to check, however. He’s wearing his glasses, and a red Stanford t-shirt, and he looks entirely delectable. 

And he’s right. Belly isn’t naked. But she is only wearing one of his t-shirts, which is sort of close enough, in Conrad-speak. And okay, so, yes, she does know exactly what he’s doing. He’s drawing his dungeon maps for tomorrow’s DnD game. She just likes to hear him get all pedantic about it. It’s, like, a television show for her.

“You just like making me beg you to fuck me,” she says. “It’s sick, Conrad.”

He smirks a little. “Maybe. Or maybe I just do really need to finish this before tomorrow, because  there won’t be time once Agnes gets here. You can wait till I’m done, can’t you?” 

“I don’t know,” Belly says, drawing out the vowel. “I might have to get started without you.”

She’s only walked backwards two steps, however, when she hears his chair moving.

So, Belly wins. Yay.

He catches her around the waist, pulling her back into him, one hand pressed right at her belly-button, the other tugging her hair back so he can reach her neck. The feel of him is wonderfully familiar, even down to the scratch of his wire-rims against her skin. Belly stretches against him, spine gone languid, completely self-satisfied. She wonders what number this time  is, and then decides it doesn’t matter.

He lathes at the skin right by her ear, and Belly reaches to clutch at the back of his head, moaning, “Not there, baby. I have that interview next week.” 

He pulls the shirt aside, nosing at her bare shoulder. “What about here?” The flash of teeth, the bruising pressure of his mouth.

“Yeah, um, fuck, Conrad, yes, there is good.” Her shirt will cover that at least. 

He rolls her hips back into him and pulls the shirt up past her thighs, running his hands beneath it. “Isabel,” he says, voice all faux-scandalized, because he’s a total dork. 

“I told you I was naked,” she says, breathless. 

And finally, he presses two fingers into her, making a sound against her neck when he feels how wet she already is, because she’s been lying there for ages, thinking about him and waiting, and…

He bites down on her shoulder, and Belly makes a loud sound, part moan, part yelp. He releases the skin, and goes back over it with his tongue, soothing motions. 

“Jesus, Conrad,” she gasps.

He raises his head from her shoulder, fingers still filling her. “Hey,” he says. “Remember when you bit me on our first date?”

Belly’s head falls forward. They’re still standing in the middle of his kitchen. She needs to like usher him towards bed. Post haste. “That wasn’t our first date. Swing dancing was our first date. That was just dinner.”

“And then you seduced me,” he says, a touch smugly. She can’t see his face, but she can picture the expression exactly.

He sucks.

“No,” Belly says. “Then I had my wicked way with you. There’s a difference.”

“And what is the difference, Isabel?”

“How do you make my name sound so dirty?”

She knows how. It’s because he only ever calls her Isabel in bed. Or in mixed company. Which sometimes leads to a confusing array of emotions at inopportune times. He’s conditioning her, she’s pretty sure. To be obsessed with him.

Like she wasn’t already.

“I think it’s you who has a dirty mind,” he says, clearly amused. 

And, yeah, she does. That’s, like, beside the point though.

Belly squirms back against him. He stills her with a hand to her hip, and she leans forward, putting her elbows on the countertop, and arching into him. He makes a low sound, hand running down the length of her leg and then up to her ribcage. 

She wonders if he really is going to make her beg. It wouldn’t be the first time.

But then, there’s the rustle of fabric, the brush of him, and at last, him filling her—slow, aching pressure—which feels, yeah, just as transcendent as the first time. “What do you want?” he asks her, voice hollow with awe. 

“You pick,” she tells him. Because she’s magnanimous. 

In response, he snaps his hips into her, hard, and Belly makes a very loud, surprised sound. His neighbors sort of hate them.

She doesn’t give a fuck.

Some nights, Conrad fucks her so slowly it feels like her whole insides are melting, like he’s trying to touch every nerve in her body. That’s good. It’s so fucking good. But she thinks she likes it best when it’s like this, raw and a little messy, like he can’t quite control himself. 

She never gets tired of it: him wanting her.

“Come on, honey,” he says, voice gone all soft like all the air’s been taken out of him.

She never gets tired of that either.

His hands are tight on her hips, and he’s pounding into her just right, hitting deep inside her with every thrust, and Belly gets what all the love songs are about. Like, really, really she does. The dirty ones, and the sweet ones, because, she thinks, loving him feels to her like a full-blown orchestra. Literally symphonic.

She’s very, very sure she’s going to do it for the rest of her life.

Conrad and Steven’s DnD group meets on the third Saturday of every month. It usually lasts like five hours, and is humorously, quite raucous. Belly and Taylor have taken to using it as a chance to catch up, and work on wedding planning stuff.

“It’s a good thing your boyfriend is in the group,” Taylor says, seriously. “Otherwise, I’d make them do it at a bar. I need you here to keep me sane.”

Belly snorts. “Show me the bridesmaid options again.”

Taylor obligingly pulls out her phone, and swipes through them. “It’s essential to me that you look good, babe, so you pick. Seriously. I’m not going to be one of those brides who has to, like, orchestrate everything.”

Belly laughs. “Uh, yeah, you totally are.”

“No,” Taylor says. “No, I’m completely calm. It’s Steven who is going to be bridezilla, I swear to god. He was, like, losing it about cufflinks the other day. He’s so lame.” 

Belly pauses on the third one, which is the simplest option. Plain green silk. “I like this one.”

Taylor taps a heart over the photo, and tosses the phone back behind her. “Connie can get off for the bachelor trip, right? Tell me he can.”

“He has marked it in his calendar,” Belly says. “With little hearts.” Well, she had done that. Because his calendar was, like, upsettingly utilitarian. 

“Good,” Taylor says. “Because the other groomsmen are, like, and I mean god bless them, completely lacking in common sense. They need an adult in tow, otherwise I think they’d wind up like, I don’t know, I don’t even want to think about it.”

Belly knows her brother’s friends, and she doesn’t disagree. And Conrad has already said the word itinerary to her, and he isn’t even the best man.

There’s a knock on the door, and then Agnes pokes her head in. “Hey,” she says. “I’ve been killed.”

“Sorry,” Belly says with sympathy.

“Oh no, it’s fine,” Agnes says. “I was expecting it. I’m apparently a part of Griffen’s tragic backstory. That’s what I get for saying I’d do a oneshot when I visited.”

Belly laughs. “I don’t know what that means.”

“It means,” Agnes says. “That I’m joining the ladies now, if that’s cool.”

Belly scoots over to make room for her on the floor, eyeing Agnes a little curiously. She knows that Agnes is Conrad’s best friend, and he’s told her tons about her, but this is only the second time Belly has met her in person. The first had been when they’d gone up like a month ago to New York to see Hadestown for their three month anniversary, and Agnes had met them at a place near their hotel for lunch, and talked almost the whole time.

She was, like, pretty wildly intimidating as a person.

And she was one of Conrad’s four, which Belly was totally normal about. Or was trying to be. She was apparently the only person Conrad had ever tried to have casual sex with, and he’d hated it, and they’d both agreed afterwards that they were better as friends anyway. So, Belly was fine with it, really. And Zion was in the DnD group outside, so she had, like, negative legs to stand on.

Life was fundamentally a bit messy.

“How do we feel,” Agnes says, slyly, “about drinking while they do this?”

Taylor’s grin spreads. “We feel fucking excellent about it.”

It’s approximately three hours later when they finally finish the session, and the girls are more than a little tipsy, listening to Heathers spread out on Taylor’s floor, and giggling at all the balls jokes. 

Conrad props the door open with his hip. “Okay,” he says. “Should I be frightened by this?”

“Oh, definitely,” Agnes says. 

Her head is resting in Belly’s lap, because like fifteen minutes ago Belly said she would braid it. Limited progress has been made on this front. 

“You’re done?” Belly asks him. “Were dragons slayed?”

Conrad rolls his eyes. She knows he’s dying to tell her it’s actually a necromancy campaign, and there weren’t always dragons in live action roleplaying, but he’s trying not to give her the satisfaction of watching him nerd out. 

Spoilsport. 

“Con,” Agnes says. “Karaoke.”

“Was that a question?”

“No. It was a demand.”

“Oooh,” Belly says. “What’s your song?”

“The list is so long,” Agnes says. “I’ll show you. I’ve got a playlist.”

Conrad shakes his head. “I’m going to be overruled on this, aren’t I?”

“One hundred percent,” Belly says. “And I’m going to make you do a duet. So, like, start prepping song options, or I will choose for you.”

“How,” Conrad says, incredulous, “do you make that sound like a threat?”

There’s a karaoke bar only one bus stop away, and the lot of them—minus Lauren, who has a shift in the morning—trudge out in the rain to go.

In the dim, private karaoke room, only a little damp, Belly curls against Conrad’s side. She’s the perfect level of drunk—sipping from a glass of soju, but mainly content with water—and his arm is around her, his hand positioned a little precariously against her side, almost but not quite on her breast, which she sort of wants to tease him about, but then he might move it. And she likes it there. Likes how it’s not how anyone else in the world would touch her but him.

Belly has already put their song in the rotation, like five songs from now, after she and Taylor do Before He Cheats but before Steven does his, like, Harry Styles thing. It’s totally annoying, but Steven is probably the best singer there, and he knows it. Though Agnes, they had discovered, is weirdly good at rapping. She’d done a Weird Al song that had almost made Belly cry she was laughing so hard. 

The night, Belly thinks, is pretty much perfect. She’s determined to cherish every second of it.

She tilts her head up to look at Conrad. The blue-green lights have washed over his face, turning him multi-colored, and he’s bopping along a little to the beat. It’s a Queen song. Zion’s choice.

It’s extremely weird to think that six months ago they weren’t even talking. 

Belly can’t picture her life now without him in it.

And though that’s still a little—okay, a lot—scary, Belly is making do. Some things were worth being frightened over.

After karaoke, Conrad drives Belly home, all the windows in his car rolled down. It’s about as wild as he gets. The air is crispy with that perfect fresh-fall feeling, and they play Lana Del Rey, because, mood. Agnes sings along lightly in the back seat, and Conrad holds Belly’s hand as he drives, and the wind touches her all over. 

At her apartment building, Conrad gets out to walk her to the door, which is, like, ridiculous, but also makes her feel sort of like a princess.

And god, she loves him.

Belly leans through the window to say goodbye to Agnes. “Agnes,” she tells her, seriously. “I think I am in love with you.”

“Don’t tell Conrad,” Agnes says, dryly. “I think he’d actually perish if you left him.”

“Hey,” Conrad says. “Don’t gang up on me.”

“I’m joking,” Agnes says. “You’re a paragon of mental health. And always have been.”

“And you are cruel.”

Belly pulls herself out of the car. “Brunch tomorrow, yeah?”

“Yes,” Agnes says. “And then we’re doing pickleball.”

“And then we’re doing pickleball,” Belly agrees.

Conrad puts his arm around her shoulders to walk her the like ten steps to the outer door of her complex, where they both pause, reluctant to say goodbye. That’s probably cringe, but whatever. His hair looks almost blonde in the fluorescent safety lights, and he hasn’t quite lost his summer tan. He looks bronze-y and beautiful and hers. Perfectly hers.

Belly tilts her head to look at him a little more. He looks at her back. “I like it when you do that,” he says, softly. 

“Do what?”

“Look at me.”

Belly smiles. “I’m always looking at you.”

“I know,” he says. “I always like it.”

He reaches out and tucks her hair behind her ear. He makes her feel like a girl going on her first ever date, or someone from a different time period, who only suspected what went on behind closed doors. He also makes her feel like someone who definitely knows what goes on behind closed doors. She still has a purple bite mark on her shoulder from last night, and she’s pretty sure she’s blushing. Just from the touch of his fingers against her cheekbone.

Belly presses forward on her toes, and brushes his mouth with hers. It’s a chaste kiss, predominately sweet. “Goodnight,” she says. 

She pulls back, just enough that she can see his smile. “One more,” he says, and kisses her more firmly, his hand against her back to pull them back together.

Belly is a little breathless when he releases her, which isn’t fair. “Hey,” she says, pointing a finger at him. “You aren’t getting lucky tonight, mister. So, no funny business.”

“Untrue,” he says, grinning. “I think I’m very lucky.”

“Cheesy,” Belly says. “Extremely cheesy.”

“Well, it’s still true.”

He takes one step down, and then another. Belly gets what Shakespeare meant, too, about such sweet sorrow. She pretty much never wants to say goodbye.

“I love you,” she tells him when he’s on the bottom step.

He pauses, looking up at her. His expression is unbearably fond. “Text me when you’re inside, please.”

“It’s, like, two flights of stairs,” Belly says.

“But what if you trip?”

“Conrad. Would you like to walk me to my apartment door?”

He looks up at her building, like he’s actually considering it. This is the first time Belly has been back at her apartment for more than a change of clothes in like three weeks, and while she’s already resigned the lease for this year, she doesn’t think she’ll be living here next September.

Probably that’s jumping the gun a little. For a four month relationship. But you can bite her.

She’s been in love with him for, like, fifteen years. 

There’s the loud blare of a horn. Agnes has crawled through to the front seat. “Loverboy!” she calls out. “I want pizza! So stop mooning over your girlfriend and come drive me!”

“One second,” Conrad calls back behind him. He takes two more steps. There’s like eight left before he hits the car. She’s going to count every one of them. “I’ll see you in the morning?”

“I promise,” Belly says. “I’ll see you in the morning.”