Archive of Our Own

Chapter Text

Dear Belly,

I'd be lying if I said I knew the right way to start this.

But "I'm sorry" probably isn't the wrong one. So. First things first, I'm sorry.

When you read this—

"We apologize for the delay. Due to a signal issue ahead, we'll be held at the station. Thank you for your patience."

The announcement crackles through the speakers, distorting slightly on the last syllable. Belly doesn't look up from the spotty train window nor the flatness of her own reflection superimposed over the gray platform.

( Three more years have passed. )

Her palm aches. 

When she sets the letter down on her lap and unfurls her fingers, she still sees its words there like she's been clutching the letter so hard the ink bled through paper, Conrad's old apology tattooed onto her lifeline. Or perhaps even through skin, straight into her circulatory system—now ink and blood. 

Belly's kept the letter close to her ever since it floated out from under Jeremiah's bed three years ago, simultaneously terrified to lose it and terrified to wear it down to erasure. 

But she probably has it memorized by now anyway. Every word. Every crossed-out line. Every place where Conrad's handwriting got messier because he was crying or angry or both, bruises on the page's skin.⁠

"Excuse me, is this seat taken?"

Belly's traitorous, eager heart leaps. It slams, really, against her ribs like it's trying to escape through the bone—before her brain catches up.

( The psychology of hope: it's faster than reason. It moves at the speed of pure blind want instead. )

Her gaze rakes up the figure before her: white sneakers (wrong brand), tailored pants (wrong fit), blue t-shirt (wrong shade) to—

The stranger blinks back at her, expectant and unfamiliar. Wholly and devastatingly not Conrad.

Of course it's not Conrad.

Why would it be?

Another announcement garbles through the speakers (akashfwkdfhehjfukjfheuir—stand clear of the doors) and the train lurches to life like something resurrected. Outside, the world becomes brushstrokes, smears of light and color. 

A tunnel approaches with its open mouth, and Belly closes her eyes as the train enters it. Complete darkness, sudden and absolute.

And in that darkness, she remembers everything. 

When you read this, I'll already be gone. I know that's cowardly. I know that's exactly the kind of thing that proves I'm not good at this, not good at being what you need. 

I'm leaving early for school. Not because I want to leave, Belly, but because I need to figure out how to stay. 

I know that probably doesn't make any sense. It barely makes sense to me.

In order to end this story the right way, we must return to the Fourth of July party at the summer house, three years ago, before we can make sense of how we got here.

It was the day the house stopped holding its secrets and started spilling them like blood.

Appropriately, Belly wore red. Not the soft, sweet red of Valentine hearts or summer strawberries, but the red of sudden rage, of an angry flush rushing to the skin's surface. The kind of red that made her look like she was on fire.

And she was.

Conrad couldn't stop watching her even as his world collapsed in slow motion, even as the truth about Jeremiah, about the stolen letter, about the stolen time, about years of manufactured heartbreak, settled into his bones like radiation. Like poison. This was the kind of betrayal that rewrites your entire understanding of reality, rendering all your memories suspect, each one now requiring asterisks.

The sun was setting. Golden hour, as they called it, but there was nothing golden about this light. It was the color of last chances, of something burning down. Everyone was there—Laurel, moving through the crowd; Steven and Taylor and Adam and Cleveland and the other characters in this tale, even the faceless ones; the house itself holding its breath.

And Belly and Conrad, sitting apart from the celebration, imploding.

When Jeremiah finally appeared, tan and careful, already performing remorse like he'd rehearsed it, that implosion became an explosion.

Belly flipped out on him, her voice climbing octaves, her hands shaking, her fury bright as always and justified and finally unleashed.

Conrad, however, was eerily silent beside her, one hand wrapped around her waist. Whether to restrain her from throttling his brother or to anchor himself? It's impossible to say. 

"Bells. I can explain—"

"Explain?" Belly's voice was so quiet it was almost a kindness. Almost. The kind of quiet that preceded violence, that suggested restraint was a choice she was actively making and could unmake at any second. "You want to explain why you stole a letter that wasn't yours? Why you let us, how you let us—" 

She couldn't finish. The implications were too big, too sharp, and there were so many of them. They'd cut her throat on the way out, all those words she wanted to hurl at him: Why you let me hate him. Why you let him think I didn't care. Why you kissed me knowing what you'd done. Why you built relationships on the corpse of ours.

"Look. I was…I was just being an asshole kid," Jeremiah started, and even he must've known how pathetic it sounded, how insufficient. "I'm sorry. You don't know how fucking sorry I am. I was stupid and jealous and mad at Conrad and I didn't think—"

"That was, but that was three years ago! That was before Susannah… And you let me talk about him, be mad at him, you—you kissed me when you knew—" 

Belly's voice fractured completely as she really understood it, the altered consent of it all, the way he'd let her make choices based on false information, the way he'd kissed her knowing she thought Conrad had abandoned her when really Jeremiah had stolen him away.

She was yelling now, worked up and really yelling, and Conrad's grip tightened on her waist, his thumb still kneading circles into her hip like he was trying to soothe a burn, trying to absorb some of her fury into his own body so she wouldn't have to carry all of it alone.

"And you know what's worse? A few days ago—days, Jeremiah—you looked us in the eye and had a chance to tell us the truth. This would have changed everything. My whole life!"

Jeremiah's jaw tightened as the party murmured around them. Even in his groveling, there was something nasty flickering beneath the surface, some last desperate grab at justification, at making this somehow not entirely his fault. 

"Really? Because you two weren't exactly working out back then anyway, were you? Even without what I did."

Conrad's fingers dug into Belly's waist so hard she gasped—not from pain but from the sudden intensity of it, from feeling his rage seep through his skin and into hers and kiss her own anger until they were indistinguishable, until they were one burning thing.

"Don't," Conrad warned him. Just that one word. Soft as a blade drawn from a sheath.

But Jeremiah kept going. Of course he did. "I'm just saying, if it was meant to be—"

The slap happened before Belly fully decided to do it.

Her palm connected with Jeremiah's cheek and the sound of it cut through the party music, sharp and final as a door slamming.

"Fuck you," Belly said, and it came out clear as bells. Her hand was stinging. Her whole body was shaking. "Fuck you, Jeremiah. Our friendship?" Each word was a small violence, a small funeral. But her voice was steady, steady, steady. "We can never get it back."

For a moment, no one moved. The whole party froze like someone had paused it mid-frame. Jeremiah's hand on his cheek, his eyes wide with something that might've been shock or might've been the first real understanding of what he'd actually done. Steven and Taylor had also gone still by the drinks table, twin expressions of repulsion on their faces. 

The summer people pretended not to watch while absolutely watching, already composing the gossip they'd spread like wildfire through country clubs and yacht clubs and book clubs.

Conrad was still silent, still holding Belly by the waist, still holding his fury in his hands. Everyone was waiting for him to explode probably, to pummel his brother, to make a scene. To become the kind of violence they could understand.

He wouldn't.

This was a party meant to honor Susannah's memory, and he wouldn't desecrate it with violence, no matter how much his hands were shaking with the want of it, no matter how richly Jeremiah deserved it, no matter how much easier it would be to hit something than to feel everything. 

( One of the most important differences between them: Conrad knew how to hold his anger like a responsibility, like something that belonged to him and him alone. Jeremiah only knew how to spread it around, to make everyone else carry the weight of his feelings. )

Instead, when Conrad finally spoke, his voice was measured. More terrifying than any shout could be, than any fist could ever communicate. His hand slid from Belly's waist to her hand, threading their fingers together. 

"If she was here, Mom wouldn't even recognize you." 

And that's it, that was all.

The last thing Conrad would say to Jeremiah for a very long time. Nothing dramatic. Just a simple, sad fact required to make a cut that precise. 

It was worse than if Conrad had hit him, of course. This invocation of their mother, this suggestion that Jeremiah had become a stranger to the one person he could never have the chance to reintroduce himself to, to apologize to, to earn back the respect of. Susannah's love had been unconditional, but her respect had to be earned, and Jeremiah had done this when she was still alive, still believing he would grow into the man she'd raised him to be.

He'd betrayed not just Conrad and Belly, but Susannah's memory of him. A son who would carry her kindness into the world after she was gone.

Jeremiah left within the hour, obviously. No one wanted him there. No one could stand to look at him. Bags and random belongings were thrown in his Jeep like he was fleeing a crime scene, like he was being exorcised, like the house itself was spitting him out.

Passing Belly on his way out, he had the audacity to ask: "How long are you guys going to ice me out?"

Belly didn't hesitate, didn't even look at him, didn't give him the satisfaction of her eyes. "I don't know. Jere. But three years is a good start."

If you are interested, I can inform you that sometime in those three years, Jeremiah would miss a very important email.

Something about an opportunity. A culinary scholarship. Something that mattered, is the point. Something that could have changed everything for him, could have been the thing that gave his life direction, purpose, meaning beyond the shadow of what he'd done.

The email would be buried under spam and his own negligence, under algorithmic misfortune, under the universe's sense of irony about stolen correspondence. He would see it too late, the deadline passed, the door closed. And somewhere, in whatever cosmic accounting department keeps track of these things, a ledger would be balanced. A lesson would be learned or not learned, but delivered nonetheless, because the universe is less concerned with whether you learn than with whether you're taught.

But that's another story.

There are three years ahead, and we know better than to let Jeremiah Fisher steal another word from this one. 

That night, Belly and Conrad stayed on the dock long after all the party guests left, after the last car door slammed and the last voice faded into the summer dark. The unofficial fireworks set off by the bored teenagers of Cousins started across the harbor. They watched them in silence, his arms wrapped around her from behind.

After a while, Belly tilted her head up to look at him, and his face was painted in bursts of red and gold and blue, each explosion illuminating him in fragments—jaw, cheekbone, those lips, the intensity of his eyes already watching her like always.

Belly asked him, "Can we read it together?"

Conrad's throat worked. "Yeah," he said, and his voice came out rougher than he meant, abraded by want and fear and years of not saying what he needed to say. "Yeah, Belly. Of course."

They read his letter together under the dying light of illegal fireworks as he held her. She could feel him tense at certain lines, could feel the way his grip tightened when he got to the part about loving her.

By the end, Belly was sobbing these deep, wrenching sobs, the kind of crying that's a release and a breaking and a beginning all at once, the kind that empties you out so something new can grow. 

Conrad turned her in his arms, pulled her against his chest, and let her soak his shirt.

"I'm sorry," he murmured into her hair, over and over. "I'm so sorry, Belly. I'm sorry."

When Belly finally lifted her face from his chest, mascara-streaked and red-eyed and somehow more beautiful for it, she wasted no time in kissing him, messy and urgent. His hands slid into her hair and hers fisted in his shirt and somewhere above them another firework exploded, painting the sky in colors that had no names, light that existed only in a singular moment before darkness rushed back in.

"I need you to touch me. I need—" She couldn't finish, couldn't find the words for the desperate need to erase every inch of distance between them. Her hips were already moving against him, seeking friction, seeking anything. "Please."

So he did.

Right there on the dock, with the summer house sleeping behind them, a benevolent chaperone who'd decided to look away, and the bay stretching dark and infinite before them, and the last illegal fireworks dying in the distance with little gasps of color, Conrad slid his hand under Belly's dress and between her thighs and made her forget every moment she'd ever spent wanting him from afar.

"Is this okay?" he murmured against her neck, and she almost laughed because it was so far beyond okay, so far past any definition of okay that the word lost all meaning.

"Yes, Conrad. Yes, yes. Don't stop."

"I'm never stopping, Belly. I'm never letting you go again. You're stuck with me." 

Conrad backed her up against the dock's railing, the wood rough under her palms when she braced herself, and he kissed her properly—deep and filthy. His hands found the hem of her dress, bunching the fabric in his fists, the red that had looked like rage in the sunlight but now looked like an invitation, a dare. A take this off me.

"Tell me," he breathed against her mouth, his fingers still teasing, circling but not quite giving her what she needed.

"Tell you what?" Belly asked, though she knew. She wanted to make him ask for it. She wanted it as an order, if she was being really honest. This was the constant exchange of power between them now.

"Tell me you want this." Conrad's fingers traced the inside of her thigh, so light it made her shiver. Butterfly-wing touches, deliberate torture. His other hand came up to cup her jaw, thumb pressing against her bottom lip. "Tell me you want me. I really, really want to hear it."

"I want you," Belly said immediately, her lips moving against his thumb. "I've always wanted you."

"Yeah?" His other thumb pressed against her through her panties—lace, he could feel, fuck—and she gasped, her hips jerking forward involuntarily, chasing the pressure. "How badly?"

"Conrad—"

"How badly, Belly?" Each word was punctuated with pressure, with deliberate, maddening circles that made her vision blur, made the stars overhead spin. He hooked his finger under the edge of her panties, barely breaching the barrier, dragging his knuckle through her wetness, just enough to make her gasp and buck against him, desperate for more.

"I— So badly I can't think straight," Belly managed in one breath. "So badly it hurts, Conrad." Her voice trembled. "Is that what you want to hear?"

"Yeah, it is. So I can fix it," he murmured with the satisfaction of a man who now knew for certain that he could. 

Then Conrad was sinking down, not quite kneeling but close, one knee to the dock, his fingers hooking into the sides of her panties as he descended. Almost like a proposal.

The image made Belly very dizzy and sort of crazed—or maybe that was just his mouth, hot and deliberate against her hip bone, kissing a constellation there, connecting stars she didn't know she had.

"You know what this looks like," Belly breathed, and her voice came out strange, caught somewhere between laughing and something infinitely more vulnerable.

"Yeah." He looked up at her, and his eyes were wickedly gleaming. "I know what it looks like."

"Conrad—"

"Isabel Conklin," he said against her stomach, kissing between words, his voice full of barely-contained amusement and desire. His hands spread her thighs wider. "Will you let me—"

"Oh my god, stop," but she was laughing nervously now, threading her fingers through his hair, tugging just hard enough to make him groan, the sound rumbling through his chest and vibrating against her inner thigh.

"Will you let me make you come?" Conrad's voice dropped lower, still filthy and amused but absolutely serious. His breath ghosted over her center and she trembled. "Say yes, Belly. I want to hear you say it."

"Yes," she gasped. "Yes, you—you ridiculous—oh—"

And then his mouth was on her, sloppy and perfect, and the laughter died in her throat, strangled into a moan that she had to bite back because the summer house was right there, everyone was sleeping, Steven and Taylor and Laurel all tucked into their beds. She had to press her fist against her mouth to muffle the sounds threatening to spill out.

But god, god, god.

Belly was so comfortable with Conrad it almost disturbed her. How could it be that the boy who'd once seemed like an impossible dream in cruel proximity, like something from a story she'd made up to comfort herself, was now between her thighs, his tongue doing rather unbelievable things, his fingers sliding inside her like he'd been doing this forever? She could feel him moan against her, could feel the vibration of his pleasure at tasting her.

But it wasn't only the physical pleasure. Though really, that was considerable. 

It was the intimacy of it. The vulnerability. The way he looked up at her while he did it, watching her face, learning what made her gasp, what made her grip his hair tighter, what made her thighs shake and clench around his head. The way he reached up to grab her hand and guide it back to his hair again when she faltered, wanting her to pull, wanting her to use him, to take what she needed.

With Conrad, she wanted things that felt dark and strange and probably embarrassing, things she'd never wanted with anyone else, some things she didn't have names for. She wanted their kisses to be a little ugly sometimes, if only for proof that they were too desperate to care about looking perfect, too hungry to be polite. She wanted to invent a new language every time they touched, wanted to say things with her body that she couldn't articulate with words, wanted him to read her like one of his books with those elaborate fantasy maps, this one written just for him.

( Belly's deepest desire was and still is: she wants to be known. Not just seen, not just loved, but understood at the cellular level. She wants to be witnessed in her messiness and wanted anyway. Wanted for it. She wants to be the kind of beautiful that doesn't require somebody else's curation. )

And Conrad gave her that. Conrad gave her the feeling she'd gotten when she read Peeta's words in The Hunger Games for the first time—I want to die as myself—but with Conrad, it was the opposite, the inverse, the mirror image that made more sense in their story.

Belly was gasping now, rocking against his open mouth, grinding shamelessly against his face, chasing the feeling building low in her stomach, pleasure sharp and sweet. His other hand came up to cup her breast through her dress, thumb brushing over her nipple, then fisting the material to drag it down, exposing her skin to the night air, to the salt wind, to his palm as it came to claim what it wanted.

With Conrad, she wanted to live as herself.

At the final breakfast the next morning, Conrad wiped syrup from the corner of Belly's mouth.

In front of everyone.

It was such a small thing. Except for the way he did it: his thumb pressed to the corner of her lips, his eyes holding hers for a beat that stretched into infinity. There was a hint of a smile playing at his mouth that told her he knew exactly what he was doing. Rewriting an entire summer in a single gesture.

Steven made gagging noises immediately, theatrical and obnoxious, ninety percent performance, ten percent genuine brotherly horror. But even through the dramatics, Belly caught the satisfaction gleaming in his eyes. Finally, his expression said. Fucking finally.

Taylor kicked him under the table, her grin wicked and knowing, entertained by the spectacle of it all, already pocketing this moment for future teasing.

And Laurel smiled into her coffee, saying nothing, her expression soft with memory, fondly thinking of being that age. Fervently praying never to be that age again.

When they said goodbye an hour later, the air tasted bittersweet.

Steven was headed to his gaming internship, some startup where he'd spend the summer debugging code and pretending he didn't miss them. Laurel was driving Belly and Taylor back to Philly, where they had summer jobs—Belly at a bookstore, Taylor at a boutique and begrudgingly helping her mom at the salon, both of them saving up to look for what would surely be a shoebox back in the city. But their shoebox, their queendom.

And Conrad had his own internship back in Rhode Island, something biology-adjacent and impressive that Belly…didn't fully understand but loved hearing him talk about anyway. She loved the way his hands moved when he explained cellular processes like they were stories, like mitochondria were characters, like ATP was the currency of a microscopic kingdom. The way his eyes lit up. The way he looked at her to see if she was following, if she was interested, if she thought he was being too nerdy. 

( She never did. )

He'd already promised to visit her every single weekend he could, to make the drive to Pennsylvania with the kind of devotion usually reserved for quests in old stories. They were giving their all to long-distance before it even began, already armoring themselves against absence again.

( Long-distance love is a specific kind of magic, after all. It requires faith. It requires the belief that separation is just another word for until. That miles are merely a test, not a verdict. )

Steven had already done his brief, funny, refusing-to-be-emotional goodbyes with all of them, complete with elaborate handshakes and older brother threats issued with affection. "I know where you live, Fisher," he'd said, pointing two fingers at his own eyes and then at Conrad's. "I know your schedule. I know your habits. I will find you."

"Noted," Conrad had said, grinning. "Terrifying. Really…feeling the brotherly love."

Steven had clapped him on the shoulder, then, quieter, almost awkward with sincerity: "Good. 'Cause I do love you, man. Both of you."

Conrad inhaled and nudged him back. "You too." 

He said goodbye to Cleveland next, easy and warm, teasing the man about heading back to Pennsylvania with Laurel, about becoming a more permanent fixture in their lives.

"All I have to say to that is…" Cleveland paused dramatically, glancing over at Belly lugging her duffel bag out of the house, then back at Conrad, cryptic and smiling. "Kintsugi."

Conrad understood immediately. "Yeah," he said quietly.

They planned their next sail.

Then Conrad and Laurel said their goodbyes, which was harder than he'd expected given he knew he'd see her again very soon when he came to visit Belly. And given that he already called her all the time. She pulled him aside, though, away from the others. Her hand on his arm was gentle and grounding.

"How're you doing, Connie?" she asked quietly, searching his face with her brand of intensity, the kind that made you feel seen all the way through, x-rayed down to your intentions. "With everything. With Jeremiah."

Conrad tensed. He'd been avoiding thinking about Jeremiah today, about the betrayal that still felt raw and red and angry in his chest, about the conflicted thoughts of whether he could hold onto this anger for the rest of his life. Anxious thoughts that whispered maybe he really had deserved it for being a shitty brother in the first place. Angered thoughts of how even if he could eventually forgive Jeremiah for himself, he could never forgive him for what he'd done to Belly.

Most of all, he thought about what his mother would have thought of all of it. Really.

"I don't know," Conrad admitted finally. "I don't know if I can…be in the same room with him again, Laur. Let alone forgive him. And. I don't know if I should."

Laurel was quiet for a moment, considering. Then: "I can't stomach what Jeremiah did, Conrad. I won't pretend to understand it or excuse it. What he did was cruel, and it was calculated, and it hurt you both terribly."

Conrad nodded, grateful for her honesty, for her loyalty, for not trying to make it anything other than what it was.

"But," Laurel continued, her hand squeezing his arm, "I will always look after both of you." She paused, choosing her words carefully. "And I hope that one day—maybe not soon, maybe not for a very long time—if Jeremiah has ever earned your forgiveness, you can at least create something new. Even if it can never be the same or even half of what it was. Maybe it can be something else."

Conrad felt his eyes sting. "I don't know."

"You don't have to know yet. You just have to leave the door open, for your own sake, if that's what you want to do. Just a crack, so you don't have to drive yourself insane deciding right now." Laurel's eyes were kind, fierce, full of a love that didn't require him to be anything other than what he was either. "But most importantly, Connie, and I need you to really hear this and understand this, you have been a good brother who didn't deserve that. A good brother. And a good son. Your mother knew that. She knew it all the way to the end. You deserve to be happy. And I'm so happy for you both that it's with Belly."

Conrad's breath hitched, and he had to look away, had to blink hard against the tears threatening to spill over, against the grief that was always there, just beneath the surface, waiting. "Thank you," he murmured. "Thanks, Laur."

"Okay. Enough," she said when she pulled back, her voice deliberately lighter, trying to save them both from drowning in feeling. "Anyway, I'll see you soon, kiddo. Something tells me you'll be a frequent visitor the rest of the summer."

She gave him a pointed, funny Laurel look—eyebrows raised, mouth quirked—just as Belly came up to them, slightly out of breath.

"I can't believe I have to say goodbye to you right now," Belly said, her fingertips at her lips as if to bite her nails, a nervous habit she'd never quite broken. One that Conrad found unbearably endearing.

As she spoke, Conrad kept fixing her hair even though it didn't really need fixing, brushing it over her shoulder, tucking it behind her ear, smoothing it down her back. Tender, reverent, like he was memorizing the texture of it, the way it caught the light and turned from dark brown to gold to something in between. Like he was trying to imprint the feeling of it on his fingertips so he could conjure it later, alone in his room in Providence, missing her.

They were standing by Laurel's car now, everyone else tactfully giving them space, pretending to be very interested in loading luggage and admiring the hydrangeas that bloomed in wild, impossible profusion.

"It's not goodbye," he said. "It's just…it's a pause. A really shitty pause."

"A pause," Belly repeated, trying the word out. It didn't fit right in her mouth. It tasted like more distance and more longing and all the ways they'd already lost time.

"Hey." Conrad's voice dropped, playful now, comically serious. "You have what I asked you for?"

Belly snorted a little and rolled her eyes, momentarily forgetting her despair. "Are we doing a drug deal right now?"

"Just hand it over, Conklin."

She pulled the photo from her back pocket with exaggerated caution, playing along—one of the many her camera had snapped that summer. But this was the one he'd taken of her by their cottage, the fairy ring visible in the background, proof that magic was real and they'd found it together. Proof that some stories were true.

Belly watched Conrad open his wallet and slide the photo carefully into place, and tried not to swoon too obviously.

"You're such a secret sap," she teased instead.

"I had to update it," Conrad explained simply, like it was the most obvious thing in the world.

Belly frowned. "Update what?"

Conrad pulled out the polaroid that had been behind it, held it up for her to see. This one was faded, edges soft with years. It's the one of her smiling and wrinkling her nose at him from when they were younger.

"It's the one I used to keep in my bedroom drawer here," he said quietly, watching her face. "But I brought with me that summer when I left early for Brown." His thumb traced the edge of it. "One way or another, I was bringing you with me, Belly."

( This was another confession. This was more proof. I really have loved you longer than you know. Just like magic, I have been yours in ways you couldn't even see. I have carried you with me through every distance, every silence, every year we spent apart. )

Belly burst into tears. Again. 

Because, well—poor Belly. This was far too many romantic revelations from the boy she'd loved her entire life in far too short a timeframe! Her heart couldn't take it. Her body couldn't contain this much feeling, this much love, this much proof that she hadn't been alone all these years. She was going to combust, right here in this driveway, in front of everyone.

"We're terrible at this for people who are so crazy about each other," she said through her tears, laughing and crying at once. "At communicating. We didn't talk for three years because I didn't ask you a question! Because you didn't tell me you'd written a letter. We're so good at everything else together, but we're so bad at this, Conrad. And that scares me."

( List of things Belly and Conrad are good at together: kissing, obviously. Laughing. Talking. Making each other laugh. Reading in comfortable silence. Existing in the same space like they're two parts of the same organism. Wanting each other with a desperation that borders on religion... List of things they're bad at: saying what they mean. Asking for what they need. Trusting that the other won't freak out and/or leave. )

"I know." His forehead pressed to hers, grounding them both, creating another small world where only they existed. "I know, Belly. It scares me too. But we're going to be better. I'm going to be better. We're going to talk. About everything. No more secrets. No more running."

Belly's eyes darted from his lips to his eyes to his lips again in rapid succession. "Promise?"

"I promise."

Conrad kissed her then, annotating her lips with his own, writing a new story over their old one. 

"Wait. I love you," Belly said suddenly, pulling back just enough to speak, realizing she had to say it, realizing she'd thought it so many times and felt it so deeply that her love for him had become as obvious as breathing. So much so that it almost hadn't occurred to her she needed to say it out loud. To match his letter. To answer him properly. "I love you, Conrad. I love you so much."

His eyes closed, and for a moment he just breathed, just existed in the reality of her words, in the gift of them.

Then: "Say it again," he whispered.

Belly smiled. "I love you."

"Again."

"I love you, I love you, I love you." She was giggling and kissing him between each repetition, punctuating each declaration with her mouth on his, making it real, making it true, making it impossible to take back.

When Laurel finally called her name—that's very sweet, but we're gonna hit traffic—Belly pulled away slowly and reluctantly, like separating from him required enormous physical effort.

"Every weekend we can," Conrad said.

"Every weekend we can," she echoed.

"Remember what I told you, Belly," he called out as she climbed into the car, as she stuck her head out the window to hear him better, waving and beaming through her tears, her hair whipping around in the breeze, wild and beautiful and his. "I'm not letting you go."

"Good!" she called back. "Don't!"

The rest of that summer was like a dream.

Belly worked shelving novels and recommending her favorites, smelling perpetually of paper and vanilla candles and something ineffable that made Conrad's chest ache when he buried his face in her hair. And Conrad drove down every chance he got, which was often, which was compulsively, because now that he could have her he was greedy for it.

He always stayed in the guest bedroom of her childhood home out of respect for the rules. Though they often had the house to themselves anyway, and the house rules said nothing about when Belly was allowed to sleep in the guest bedroom. Vacant or not.

Laurel had let her hair down in ways that surprised them both, disappearing on whirlwind adventures with Cleveland or writing retreats that everyone knew were just elaborate euphemisms for romance. 

The house became theirs in her absence: a realm of two, a kingdom with no subjects except desire and the ghosts of their younger selves watching from the corners, amazed.

They even hung out with Taylor sometimes, all together. She'd cornered Conrad at the end of their stay in Cousins, eyes sharp amid all the goodbyes.

"Look, Fisher," she'd said, examining her nails like she was bored of the conversation before it started, "I realized if I can't out-bitch you, we should probably just collaborate. Take down my number."

Conrad and Belly went on dates. 

So many dates. The kind that felt like research—though very fun research, the kind where the hypothesis was how many versions of you can I fall in love with before I run out of heart and the answer kept expanding.

Conrad was conducting a summer-long intensive on every iteration of Belly he could discover and commit to memory: adventurous Belly who said yes to things that scared her, intellectual Belly who annotated her novels in three colors. The Belly who got dressed up and nervous and wore heels that made her legs look like they went on for days. The Belly who still laughed so hard she got the hiccups and then complained, indignant and betrayed: well they hurt, Conrad, it isn't funny.

( It was a little funny. )

There was the rock climbing date in Connecticut, which existed primarily so Conrad could watch Belly do something that terrified her but overcome it anyway and discover he was perhaps a little too into that. 

They'd already been going on morning runs together, conjugating their bodies to each other in sweat and breath and the grammar of motion. She was fast; he had endurance. She pushed him; he steadied her. On the horizontal trail, they were fluent.

But vertical? Vertical was different.

Belly was kind of terrified of the climbing wall but refused to admit it, her knuckles bone-white on the holds, her jaw set in that stubborn way that made him want to kiss her and also wrap her in bubble wrap and never let her do anything remotely dangerous ever again. A contradiction he'd have to live with.

"You've got it, Belly!" he called up, belaying her with steady hands, the same tone of voice he'd used when they were kids and she was attempting something that had once felt impossible to her. "Just a little more—trust yourself—"

Earlier, when Conrad had been the one climbing and she'd been belaying him, he'd been merciless. 

"Better belay, Belly," he'd teased from fifteen feet up, making a play on her name that he knew was starting to irk her, that he deployed specifically because it irked her. Her eyes had squinted up at him in that ferocious frown he loved, while he grinned down at her—all teeth and audacity and the cockiness that only emerged when he had her full attention. "Or I'm toast!"

"Oh my god, Conrad, if you fall I'm going to kill you," she'd shot back, but her hands had been steady, competent, and sure. Conrad wasn't worried. He'd trust his life to those hands. He already had, in other ways.

Now, watching her conquer her own fear, Conrad felt something vast and inarticulate move through his chest. Love, yes. But also awe. Also…gratitude that he got to witness this, her becoming. That she let him see her scared and see her brave and see the moment one transformed into the other.

When she reached the top, she screamed so loud the entire gym turned to stare. "I did it!"

"You did it!" Conrad was grinning so wide his face ached, and when she rappelled down he caught her mid-descent—impatient, unable to wait those last few feet—spun her around, tasted the adrenaline and triumph on her tongue when he kissed her. 

"I'm so in love with you," he said against her mouth.

They also had their movie date tradition (sixty-year-old-married-couple-coded, Steven and Taylor often mocked them) where they'd see something at the little theaters on small town main streets and then argue about plot points over pancakes at the nearby diner after, both of them stubborn and animated, gesturing wildly with forks.

There was the fancy date where Conrad wore a dress shirt that made him look like some sort of maritime prince and Belly wore a dress that made him salivate, and he spent the entire dinner trying to be smooth while also forgetting how to perform basic motor functions like using silverware.

There was the weird date where they went to a faux taxidermy museum, monument of North East oddities, and she made up elaborate backstories for every animal—tragic, funny, absurd—until they were laughing so hard they had to sit down right there on the floor, gasping, and a very stern docent asked them to leave.

They'd stumbled out into the parking lot still laughing, Belly's hand in his, the summer air thick and warm around them.

"We're banned from the taxidermy museum," she'd said, delighted. "That's so embarrassing."

There was the intimate date that was just them in his car, parked by the beach, talking about nothing and everything, her feet in his lap, his thumb tracing circles on her ankle, the ocean breathing beyond the glass.

But what surprised Belly most was the shyness. Even now, after everything, there were moments where they were shy. Where she caught him staring and he glanced away quickly. Where he held her hand in public and she felt sixteen again, giddy and nervous and impossibly lucky. 

Where he introduced her as my girlfriend, Belly or Isabel Conklin, my girlfriend and she had to bite down on a smile so big it hurt, had to swallow the giddy shriek threatening to escape her throat.

"What?" Conrad asked one morning over brunch in Boston, catching her mid-swoon, his mouth quirking up at the corner. She wanted to vault across the table and into his lap.

"Nothing," she said, unconvincing. Her voice gone soft and wondering. "I just. I really like being your girlfriend."

"Yeah?" His voice dropped, playful, a little smug.

Belly's lips twitched, losing yet another battle against a smile. "Yeah."

Conrad lifted her hand to his mouth across the table and kissed her knuckles slowly, his eyes never leaving hers.

"Great," he murmured against her skin, his lips brushing the ridge of each bone. "Because I really like being your boyfriend. And I don't plan on retiring the title."

( Well. Conrad would make an exception eventually. Once he was up for a promotion. )

But one thing does make sense.

There's one thing that I know is true, and I need you to believe me when I write it: 

I love you, Belly. 

Every good thing I can remember is connected to you somehow. You're in all my favorite memories, the ones I turn to when the present feels impossible. 

In the fall, back in New York, Belly sat at her desk pretending to write an essay about epistolary novels. But her mind was composing a different kind of thesis built from her encyclopedic, obsessive knowledge of Conrad Fisher.

She knew he liked to sleep to her right. (Always, a gravitational preference.)

She knew he ran when he was anxious, surfed when he was stressed, but when he was both, he just drove. Windows down, that old dad rock playlist running, no destination, chasing horizons until the highway hypnotized him into something like peace. Until the wind scraped him clean, flayed him down into something manageable, something that fit back inside his skin.

She knew the way his voice went when he spoke about his mother. Not sad, exactly. Tender. 

She knew he was funnier than people thought—that under the beautiful severity of his face (Resting bitch face, baby, she'd diagnosed once with a heavy sigh, tracing his jaw with her finger, But! It's very handsome on you…), there lived a wicked sense of humor. Dry when he chose to deploy it, and best friends with her own wit.

And the things Belly knew about herself because of him: the unconscious way her fingers found her collarbone by the infinity pendant when she thought of him. The way her body had learned to anticipate his touch, arching toward him before he'd even reached for her. The way she'd stopped apologizing for taking up space because he wanted her bigger, louder, more.

The intimacy of it still stunned her sometimes. That she got to witness the beautiful mundanity of Conrad Fisher, the small sigh he made when he finally let himself relax, the way he said her name when he was half-asleep, all the consonants soft. That he wanted her to see these things, these private unglamorous truths. 

That he'd let her in and kept her there.

Miles away at Brown, Conrad was supposed to be studying for an exam. The mechanisms were swimming on the page—electrons moving, bonds breaking and forming, little arrows indicating the dance of molecules. But his mind kept drifting to the way Belly's voice went drowsy when she said his name right before sleep claimed her on FaceTime. How she fought it, always, wanting just five more minutes with him even as her words started to blur together into lovely nonsense. Conrad... m'tired but I don't wanna... you're so... wait, what was I...

It was two in the morning. He had this exam in seven hours. The diagrams on his laptop screen blurred into the shape of her mouth.

His phone lit up: are you sleeping?

Conrad smiled at his desk like an idiot, all rumpled dark hair and tired eyes in the blue glow of his screen. He typed back: are you sleeping?

There were video calls where neither of them spoke, just watched each other exist in the glow of their respective screens, a modern séance summoning each other across the impossible distance.

Conrad always fell asleep first now, and Belly loved that, how he surrendered to rest so easily when she was there, her presence permission to stop being so vigilant.

She'd watch him for a while before she'd whisper goodnight and end the call, carrying the image of him into her own dreams.

There was the night Conrad missed her call during a study group, and Belly left him a voicemail singing Stay by Maurice Williams & The Zodiacs—a song from childhood summers—terribly off-key, laughing through the lyrics. 

He kept it forever and listened to it often, playing it in his car on lonely drives back to Providence, whenever the distance felt particularly distant. 

Whenever he needed to hear her voice say just a little bit longer.

The holidays strung themselves together like lights, each one illuminating something new about them: 

Halloween, when they dressed as Arwen and Aragorn and Belly felt something interesting stir low in her stomach when Conrad let his scruff grow in to fit the role. 

At the college party they went to that weekend, he kept his hand possessive on the small of her back, thumb tracing circles through the gossamer fabric of her dress, silver and ethereal. 

( No, I love it, it's just…I didn't think you were as into LoTR as I was, he'd said when she proposed the costumes. And she'd replied, Oh trust me. I'm not. It's just—you love it. And I…well, I just really have a thing about this dress. So. It works! Conrad didn't need to know every detail of what feeling hot in an elf princess costume would heal in Belly. )

Belly in that dress that night, dark hair falling in waves down her back, brown eyes bright with laughter? Conrad couldn't stop looking at her.

"Stop or people will talk," she murmured jokingly, her dark eyes glittering with mischief.

"Sorry, can't help myself." His voice was low. "My girlfriend's the most beautiful woman in Middle-earth."

Belly was so pleased, holding the hand of her inner preteen with glee. She practically glowed, pressing closer to him, her hand finding his chest, feeling his heartbeat through the costume fabric. "Just Middle-earth? Well what about regular earth?"

"Especially regular earth," he said, and kissed her in front of everyone as Taylor snapped a photo nearby.

Later, Conrad fucked her in that costume. He was careful with the delicate fabric, reverent with her body, but rough with his need. Pointy ears and all. She laughed when they kept slipping off her, and he kissed the laugh right out of her mouth, swallowed it whole, made it his.

"You're so pretty," he said against her throat, and she could hear the awe in it, the disbelief that he got to have this, have her. "Do you know that? Do you know how fucking pretty you are?"

Thanksgiving was in Philly with Laurel and Cleveland, John and his new girlfriend whose name Belly kept forgetting ("forgetting" — Conrad would like to emphasize), Steven who was newly single again and doing…whatever he was doing with Taylor. 

Conrad sat at the strange, familiar table and felt the ghost of his mother in every tradition, every passed dish, every moment of gratitude. 

Then Belly's hand found his atop the cloth and squeezed, and he squeezed back, and somehow he was still here, still breathing. Still capable of feeling thankful.

On Christmas he escaped there too, redeeming his open invitation as often as he could, leaving Jeremiah to fend for himself with Adam—another due punishment, another necessary severance.  

The Conklin house glowed with lights and warmth, and Conrad stood in the doorway feeling like an imposter, like he was taking up space that didn't belong to him. Like at any moment someone would realize he wandered onto the wrong set.

It was just that sometimes Conrad felt he was…glomming onto the Conklin-Parks too much, grafting himself onto their family tree like some desperate transplant. Both Conklin siblings told him he was being ridiculous. Laurel told him he was being ridiculous. Even Dr. Mellow, in that gentle therapeutic speak, told him he was being ridiculous. 

But anxiety was louder than reason, always had been for him, and the very loud voice in his head kept asking: What makes you think you belong here? This is weird. You're the boyfriend who won't leave. You're invading her space. They're just being polite.

( He was glad that the people he loved had no problem speaking over it. )

"You're being ridiculous," Belly said, threading her fingers through his and pulling him inside, her grip unyielding. "Get inside, it's cold!" She was wearing a red sweater and jeans and her hair was in a tight bun, and she looked at him like he was the only present she wanted.

"So ridiculous, bro," Steven agreed, shoving a beer into his hand and powering up the Wii. "Now get your ass over here. I'm about to destroy you."

"Very ridiculous," Laurel called from the kitchen. "Hey Connie, did you pick up that smoked paprika for me? Or was Cleveland getting it."

Belly gave him a pointed, satisfied smile. See? You're stuck with us.

"Yeah, no, I got it," Conrad called back to Laurel, shrugging off his snow-dusted coat, leaning down to kiss Belly properly, tasting like hot cocoa and home. "One sec."

On New Year's Eve, they drove to the beach at Cousins, just the two of them, because they say how you ring in a new year is how you'll spend the rest of it, and they figured they couldn't go wrong with just the beach and each other. 

Close to midnight, they sat in the sand in the cold with big coats and a bottle of champagne that was probably too expensive but felt necessary anyway. The ocean was loud and dark, and overhead the stars were sharp and bright, immune to human timekeeping and resolutions.

"What are you hoping for?" Belly asked him, her head resting on his shoulder, dark hair spilling across his coat. Her hand was palm-up between them, like she was trying to cradle the hope itself, make it tangible for him. "Like, this year. What do you want?"

Conrad was quiet for a long time, watching the waves, feeling the weight of her against him, the warmth of her even in the December cold. The question felt too big. Too close to the fears he tried not to name. Then.

"This," he said honestly, "Just this. You and me and—" His voice caught and broke a little. "More time."

Belly's hand found his, fingers threading, squeezing. She understood. She always understood.

At midnight, they kissed like they were sealing a pact with the universe, like they could taste the future on each other's tongues.

"I love you, Belly," he said against her mouth.

"I love you, Conrad," she said back.

The old year died. The new one was born. They remained.

One afternoon in February that just so happened to be Valentine's Day, Conrad drove down and surprised Belly at the women's shelter where she volunteered. He'd been standing outside for thirteen minutes trying to look casual and respectfully distant from the space, hands shoved deep in his coat pockets, breath clouding in the cold.

A woman exited the building, clocked him immediately, and gave him a look that questioned and accused: Creep?

"I'm—I'm waiting for someone," Conrad said quickly, which was exactly what someone suspicious would say. Fuck. "My girlfriend. She volunteers here. I'm—I'm not—"

"Mmhmm." The woman walked past, boots crunching on salt-scattered sidewalk. Then she stopped, turned back, eyes narrowing in reassessment. "Are you Conrad?"

"I—yeah?"

"Honey, relax. You look like you're about to pass out." She adjusted her purse, something in her expression softening into amusement. "It's just that I think everyone Isabel Conklin's come into contact with in New York City must know your name by now. That girl doesn't shut up about you."

Conrad's heart skipped, not one beat but several, a whole rhythm section going rogue. 

( To be loved so loudly it echoes into the lives of strangers. To be loved so largely you become a legend in the small spaces of someone else's world. )

"She'll be out in a bit," the woman continued, her smile going fond, maternal. "She's reading to the kids right now." An eye roll that was pure affection. "They ask for that girl specifically, you know. She does all the voices, gives it everything she's got. Makes them forget for a minute why they're here."

Conrad managed a smile though he was finding it hard to stand upright under the weight of how much he loved her. "Yeah. That sounds like her."

When Belly finally emerged, she looked tired but luminous, hair escaping its ponytail in dark tendrils, sweater slightly askew under her large coat, face still lit with the gleam of persistent joy she carried as a flashlight. She saw him and stopped dead in her tracks, her expression cycling through disbelief, delight, wonder.

"You're here!" she said, voice awed, like she was witnessing something impossible. "Yay, but…what? Conrad, I thought you couldn't come until next week!"

"I made it work," Conrad confirmed, pushing off the wall, closing the distance between them. "Surprise?"

Belly laughed—the sound that lived in his chest now, that had replaced all the old quiet—and launched herself at him. Conrad caught her easily, he always would, wrapping his arms around her waist and lifting her off the ground, burying his face in her neck and breathing her in.

"I couldn't wait," he murmured against her skin. "I missed you too much. Fucking…pathologically. I think I have a problem."

Belly put her finger on her chin and pretended to realize something profound, "You know what, I think I have the exact same one."

After a very romantic dinner, they walked back through the February cold with their fingers laced together and her cheeks flushed pink from drinks and wind. Back to the charming shoebox she shared with Taylor—who was conveniently absent, off with her own mysterious Valentine's Day plans—and Conrad pressed Belly against the door before she could even turn on the lights.

"I'm so proud of you," he said against her neck, hands sliding under her shirt to find warm skin, the curve of her waist, the soft planes of her body beneath his palms. "Do you know that, Belly? How fucking incredible you are?"

She made a sound—half a laugh, half whimper—and turned her face away, cheeks flushing pink in the darkness. "Don't start."

"Don't start?" Conrad kissed along her jaw, her throat, feeling her pulse jump beneath his lips. "I drove four hours to tell you this. You're gonna listen."

( Here's what Belly couldn't accept: that to him, she was extraordinary. That she walked into rooms and made them brighter. That children barely remembered details but asked for her by name. That she led with her goodness and refused to let the world's darkness put it out. That he saw all of it—every bright burning bit of her—and wanted to worship at the altar of it. )

"Conrad…" She was breathless already, arching into him despite herself, despite the way compliments always made her want to disappear into something smaller than she was.

"Say it back," Conrad whispered, ignoring her protest, his hands tightening on her hips, fingers digging into the soft flesh there, pinning her in place against the door. The wood was cool against her back. He was warm against her front. She was caught between. "I just want to hear you say it."

"I—" Belly squirmed looking up at him, hating this as much as she loved it. How exposed this made her feel, how raw. "I can't just say—"

"Why not?" He kissed her jaw, her throat, the spot behind her ear that made her gasp and grab at his shoulders, nails biting through his shirt. His mouth was everywhere. His hands were relentless. "Say you're incredible, Belly. Say it like you believe it. Say it because it's true."

"But."

"Say it. For me, please."

And because he always made her brave: "I'm incredible," Belly whispered in that okay fine tone of voice, the words tasting strange and true at once. 

She felt Conrad smile against her throat like she'd just given him the world, like she'd just said I love you in a new language.

"Again."

"I'm incredible." Louder this time, believing it a little more with each repetition, letting the words reshape her from the inside out, rewriting her origin story.

"And I'm so proud of you," Conrad prompted, pulling back just enough to look at her.

"And you're so proud of me." Her voice cracked on it, overwhelmed.

He kissed her then.

Afterward, after the desperate fumbling and the gasping, Conrad pressed a kiss to her temple and said quietly, "I really am proud of you. In case that got lost in the, uh—"

"The hot sex?" Belly supplied, grinning against his chest.

"Yeah. That." She could hear the smile in his voice. "But I mean it, Belly. What you do, the way you show up for people. It matters. You matter."

( A simple but essential thing to say to a girl who'd spent much of her life worried she didn't. )

In May, Conrad graduated from Brown with honors and a heart that belonged entirely to a girl sitting in the audience wearing a sundress the color of summer.

Belly sat in the crowd wedged between Steven and Laurel, Cleveland on her mom's other side, her dress sticking to the backs of her thighs in the humid auditorium. She watched him cross the stage, tall, broad-shouldered and handsome. 

His cap and gown did nothing to diminish all that sharp jaw and composure. She had to press her knees together and think about something other than the way his mouth had felt on her collarbone that morning, the bruise he'd left just above her breast like a doctor's messy signature.

The ceremony stretched. Speeches about futures and potential and doorways opening. Conrad's name was called—Conrad Beck Fisher, magna cum laude, lucky enough to have his mother still attend through his name—and Belly watched him shake hands with the dean, accept his diploma, and become something new. She clapped until her palms stung. Beside her, Laurel dabbed at her eyes. Steven wolf-whistled. 

Somewhere in the audience: Adam with his new wife and plastic smile, never missing the opportunity to claim credit for a son he barely raised. 

( And, in a seat three rows back, Jeremiah sat with his hands in his lap and his heart in his throat. He left before the recessional, slipping out the side exit like a ghost at a feast, and nobody noticed except Laurel—who'd invited him anyway with Conrad's neutral permission—and Belly, who caught the movement in her peripheral vision and felt something very complicated twist in her chest before she let it go. )

Afterward, there was dinner, some restaurant in Providence with white tablecloths and seafood and toasts that made Conrad duck his head and squeeze Belly's thigh under the table until she squeaked. Laurel cried again, then got annoyed about it. Cleveland told a great story about Conrad saving him from a sailing disaster. Steven made inappropriate jokes. 

The whole time, she and Conrad kept catching each other's eyes, a private conversation happening in the space between glances. 

Can we leave yet? his eyes asked. 

Not yet, hers answered. But soon.

Then they drove to Cousins, just the two of them again.

They had urgent, grief-edged sex against his old bedroom door first, her sundress shoved up, his hands bruising her hips, both of them gasping like they'd surfaced from deep water. No soft touches. Just his mouth on her throat and her nails in his shoulders and the door rattling in its frame.

Then on the bed, sheets tangling, her nails dragging red lines down his back that he'd see in the mirror for days and refuse to let fade. Then against the wall, because he couldn't stop, because she couldn't stop, because they were trying to fuck their way through time itself, prove that they could have this, have each other, without it destroying them the way it almost had before.

( The truth: they were both terrified. Of this much feeling. Of things being over, and how historically terrifying that was for them. Of what came next. Of the fact that love this big could swallow you whole if you weren't careful, and they'd never been careful, not once. Or maybe they'd been so careful it was reckless anyway. )

When it was over, they lay in the tangle of sheets, hearts still hammering, skin still flushed. Belly traced the slope of his nose with her fingertip, then with the tip of her own, and tried to see his eyes in the dark.

She couldn't. But she was pretty sure he cried.

They fell asleep tangled together in his childhood bed, limbs knotted like rope, hearts synced. And in the morning, when light filtered through the blinds the same way it had for years, it cast half his face in shadow. Janus-like once more.

The god of doorways and thresholds. Of looking both directions at once…forward and back, beginning and ending, hello and goodbye all at the same time.

Conrad was leaving this room, this version of himself. Shedding his skin. Becoming. Medical school waited on the other side of the country. A future he'd built with his own hands, his own discipline, his own desperate need to save people channeled into professionalism.

But he was taking Belly with him this time. Not literally, but as the constant part of every one of his worlds, his hero's journeys. The variable that remained unchanged. 

And that had to mean something different.

I know you've had a crush on me forever. I'm not saying that to be a jerk, I promise. I just know you look like you're waiting for me to catch up to something obvious sometimes. And I guess I always knew it, but I didn't know what to do with it. 

I'm telling you this because having someone look at you the way you've looked at me is fucking terrifying. Belly. You've had this idea of me since we were kids, and I'm scared that if I let you get too close right now while I'm this messed up and everything's falling apart, you'll see that I'm not who you think I am. 

That I'm just some…guy who can barely hold it together, who snaps at people he loves, who doesn't know how to process anything without pushing it down. 

I know I'll just disappoint you. I know I already have.

The summer Belly turned twenty, perched on the precipice of a study abroad year in Paris, a year of cobblestones and pain au chocolat, and Conrad was California-bound for medical school, they took a road trip across America that was really just an extended goodbye wearing the costume of an adventure.

Belly knew this, obviously. She wasn't stupid. But she was also twenty years old and in love with Conrad Fisher in a way that felt like it might actually kill her if she thought about it too hard, so she was choosing delusion. Radical, sunshine, top down on the highway with wind in her hair delusion.

So: a road trip. 

Conrad's idea, actually, which surprised her until it didn't. He'd always been better at romantic gestures when he could hide them inside practicality, hide the softness beneath logistics. 

I was thinking, he'd said, eyes not quite meeting hers, jaw doing that thing where it flexed like he was working up to something. I have to drive my stuff to California anyway.

What he meant was: Come with me. Let me pretend we have more time than we do.

What she heard was: I love you enough to let this hurt more than it already will.

But Conrad only offered it with the stipulation that he'd buy her plane ticket back to the East Coast once it was over, like Belly was the one doing him a favor, like she wasn't about to tattoo these weeks all over her heart and carry them with her to France.

They departed from Cousins at the end of July. The car was packed with boxes that would eventually end up in an apartment Conrad hadn't seen in person yet, in a life she wasn't part of yet. Belly wore cutoff shorts and one of his old t-shirts. Her hair was still damp from the outdoor shower after a morning swim, dark waves leaving wet marks on her shoulders.

"You know, we don't have to do this," he said, hand on the gearshift, not looking at her because if he looked at her he might not leave at all, might park the car and drag her back inside and let medical school and the future and all of it go to hell. "I know it's a lot to ask, with Paris coming up—"

"Conrad." She put her hand over his. "My Conrad. Please just shut up and drive."

Conrad rolled his eyes fine and did.

They took the long way. 

Because what's the point of a cross-country drive if you were trying to get somewhere quickly? The whole point was to not arrive. 

Day three, they pulled off at a rest stop somewhere in Pennsylvania or maybe Ohio that was just a gas station and a field of sunflowers stretching toward infinity. The sky was that shade of endless clean blue that only existed in certain places, as if some celestial painter had run out of other colors and just kept going with this one.

"Pretty!" Belly said, already unbuckling her seatbelt, already moving toward the flowers like they were calling her name. 

And Conrad did look, but not at the flowers. At her instead: golden girl in a golden field, dress fluttering around her thighs, all that dark hair loose and wild, face tilted up toward the sun like she was photosynthesizing. 

"Come on," she called back, already halfway to the flowers, drawing him into the yellow labyrinth of them watching with their single cyclops eyes.

"We're trespassing," he pointed out, following her anyway.

She looked back at him, squinting in the sun, and smiled with all her teeth. "Then we better make it worth it!"

They pushed through stalks taller than their heads until they were surrounded, swallowed up by yellow, and then he was kissing her, tasting like the terrible gas station coffee they'd been drinking all morning. 

The sun was directly overhead, brutal and beautiful. They could hear cars on the distant highway, a sound like the ocean, like the blood in their ears, like the future rushing toward them whether they wanted it or not.

Conrad pulled back just enough to look at her, really look at her. Her lips were kiss-swollen and red, her eyes dark and soft, her hair tangled with pollen. She was the most beautiful thing he'd ever seen. 

"What?" Belly asked, self-conscious suddenly, touching her face. "Do I have something…"

"No," he said. "You're just." He didn't finish. He couldn't finish. Because how did you finish that sentence? You're just everything. You're just the sun and you could break my heart right now and I'd still think I got the better deal.

Instead, he kissed her forehead.

They stood there for a long time, wrapped up in each other, surrounded by flowers that would be dead in a few weeks, under a sky that would look different from Paris, from California, from wherever they ended up next. 

Day seven. A rainstorm that came out of nowhere, the kind that made driving impossible. They pulled over and then they were in the backseat. 

Her shorts ended up on the floor, more denim pooled with his jeans. His mouth found her neck and he set up residence there, sucking and biting gently. 

Her hands braced against the ceiling, nails scratching vinyl, and he kept saying her name—Belly, Belly, Belly. 

Afterward, they were tangled together in the backseat, her head on his chest, his fingers tracing lazy patterns on her spine. The windows had fogged completely, condensation blooming like frost, turning the car into a terrarium, a snow globe, a world separate from the world. 

Belly sat up slightly, reaching out to draw on the glass. Her finger squeaked as she traced a heart, then their initials inside: B + C.

The dive bar appeared like a mirage, neon beer signs glowing in the dark like beacons for the lost. It was the kind of place where time had stopped in the 80s and never really started again, wood paneling, cracked vinyl stools, a jukebox in the corner.

Conrad fed it quarters: The Strokes, Last Nite. Belly smiled and hummed, and they shared a basket of fries. 

His knee pressed against hers under the table. She stole fries from his side of the basket even though she had her own. 

"Eat your own, thief," Conrad complained around a bite while actively giving her more of his.

And Belly thought: Marry me marry me marry me. Belly thought it so loud she was afraid he might hear it.

Then a rest stop with flickering fluorescent lights and vending machines that hummed to communicate.

They met a couple there: Melanie and Joshua, middle-aged and road-worn, with matching silver in their hair and the kind of tenderness that only comes from surviving decades together, from choosing each other over and over even when it would have been easier not to.

"We spend much of our summers out East actually, at this sweet little place!" Melanie said, noticing Conrad's license plate, and that's what started it, the conversation that felt like fate reaching out a hand.

"We were first loves too," Joshua added, and the way he looked at his wife made Belly look at Conrad the same way. 

They found a lake that wasn't on any map, belonging to no one and everyone. The sun was setting, turning the sky into watercolor. Or maybe it was Susannah somewhere up there, sitting down to paint.

They stripped down to their underwear, Belly's skin glowing gold in the fading light, Conrad's shoulder blades sharp and beautiful as he dove into the cold first.

Belly followed, gasping at the shock of it, and underwater Conrad found her, kissed her until they had to surface gasping for air.

On the bank after, he wrapped her in his sweater—brown, worn soft, smelling like him—and built a fire with branches and lighter fluid and casual competence.

They just existed together. Reading their respective books beside each other, murmuring about random topics…cryptozoology, astronomy, mythology. His chin resting on top of her head, his heartbeat steady against her spine, her fingers laced with his. 

The fire crackled. The lake was glass.

Nearing the West Coast, close enough now that the ending had weight and a shape, Belly posted a picture of them on Instagram. It was slightly blurry from the road, his arm around her shoulders, her face tilted toward his, both of them sunny and happy in a way that felt almost indecent to display.

The caption was just a map emoji. 🗺️

Conrad studied it for a long moment, thumb stroking over the image of their faces on her screen.

Then he kissed her forehead, her nose, her mouth. "I'm sorry that I ever made you feel like you couldn't—"

She put her fingers over his lips. 

The thing about giving head in the backseat somewhere between Salt Lake City and Reno was that it required a certain kind of devotion. A willingness to be uncomfortable. To make a sacrament out of a cramped space and turn leather and sweat into cathedral.

Belly had always been good at devotion when it came to Conrad Fisher.

They were parked off the highway, down a dirt road that led to nothing but more sky and plains and the kind of quiet that made you feel like you were the only two people who'd ever existed. When Conrad killed the engine, the silence was massive.

"Come here, come here," Belly said excitedly, pulling at his sleeve, and he climbed into the backseat with her, trying not to kick the gearshift or knock his head on the roof. The space was way too small, architecturally hostile to what they were about to do. Knees bumping. Elbows catching. But she liked it—loved it, actually—liked being crammed together, liked that there was nowhere to go but closer.

( Belly had always liked small spaces with Conrad, even when they were kids playing hide and seek. Closets. Tents. Blanket forts. Anywhere Conrad had to fold himself down to reach her. )

She kissed him first, slow and deep, tasting like the synthetic red slushie she'd drunk an hour ago. His hands cupped her face, cupped the back of her head.

"Belly…" Conrad started, but she was already ignoring him, unbuckling his belt, sliding down between his legs.

And then Belly took him in her mouth, and Conrad stopped thinking in words. 

Just sensation, hot and wet and the soft hum in her throat that made him see stars. She was thorough about it, always relearning him with her tongue and her hands and the rhythm that made his breath catch and his hips jerk involuntarily. 

Belly was so fucking sweet about it too. Of course she was, making these soft pleased sounds like she was the one receiving, like his pleasure was hers, like his broken sounds were gifts she was unwrapping one by one.

Her hair fell across her face, and Conrad brushed it back with shaking fingers just so he could see her—those pretty lips wrapped around him swollen and slick, those sparkly eyes looking up at him through her lashes.

"Belly, that feels really." His voice went ragged and raw. One hand fisted in her hair, dark silk between his fingers, the smell of her shampoo mixing with the summer night air creeping in through the cracked windows. "Fuck, Belly—"

She hummed around him, and his hips jerked harder, hand tightening in her hair until it had to hurt but she didn't pull away, just took him deeper.

"You taste so good," Belly murmured against him when she pulled off a bit for air. Her voice was thick and dreamy. Her hand kept moving, kept him desperate.  "I love how you get so hard for me. Love how you can't help it."

Conrad let himself get rough then. He let himself grip her hair harder, guide her movements, lose himself in the heat of her mouth and the filthy wet sounds she was making and the way she moaned when he tugged, like she got off on his loss of control.

And he was trying to be careful, trying not to push too deep, but Belly kept taking him further, kept hollowing her cheeks and relaxing her throat and asking for more with her eyes.

Belly whimpered around him and he felt it everywhere—in his spine, in his chest, in the base of his skull where pleasure lived. She loved this. She loved being guided, loved being held, loved giving over control while somehow maintaining all of it.

Conrad's other hand came to cup her jaw, his thumb stroking her cheek, feeling himself moving in and out of her mouth from the outside. Fuck.

He could feel himself getting close, that tightening in his spine, that heat building low. His movements became less controlled, more desperate, his hips snapping harder, but she didn't seem to care, just opened wider for him, just took everything he gave her.

After, Belly wiped her mouth with the back of her hand and grinned at him. Her lips were red and tender. Her eyes were dark and satisfied. There was a mark on her neck from where he'd pressed his thumb, freshly bloomed.

He wanted to apologize and then do it again.

The last day, in a hotel room approaching Palo Alto, Conrad went down on her for so long the sun moved across the sky. He made her come once, twice, three times, four—an almost antagonistic amount of times, really, like he was trying to leave a mark she couldn't erase.

"You're overthinking this," he murmured against her inner thigh. "Just enjoy it."

"How can you possibly know—" The words fell into a moan as he pressed his tongue flat against her, nice and slow.

"Because," he said between movements, "your breathing changes. Gets all—" he demonstrated by taking a shaky inhale, mocking her gently, "—uneven."

"You're so annoying," Belly managed, but her hand was already in his hair, tugging hard enough to make him groan.

"Patience, Belly."

"I don't have any more patience," she pointed out. Not new information. "I've been patient for years."

That made him pause, made him look up at her. "I know," he said quietly. "I know you have."

The first time was almost easy. Belly was already wound up so tight from the drive, from the knowledge of ending, from the way Conrad had been looking at her all morning like he was trying to snapshot every angle of her face inside his memory. When she came it was bright and sharp, pleasure that felt like relief, like finally.

The second time was harder, more intense, her body already sensitive and overwrought. 

"That's it," Conrad murmured, kissing her hip, her stomach, letting her come down slowly. "That's my girl. So fucking perfect."

Belly's brain was static, white noise, every coherent thought scattered like dropped change. She could feel tears on her face but couldn't remember when she'd started crying. Her thighs were shaking. Her hands were fists in the hotel sheets that smelled like industrial detergent and California.

She was so pretty like this, Conrad thought, all flushed skin and dark hair spread across white sheets, her lips swollen and bitten, those big brown eyes glazed and unfocused. He wanted to photograph her, paint her, write her name in every language he knew. He settled for kissing the tears from her cheeks.

"You're done, right?" she said hopefully, reaching for him with shaking hands, wanting him close and inside her now, wanting to kiss him and taste herself on his mouth and feel the weight of him.

Conrad caught her wrist and pressed it back against the mattress.

"No," he said simply.

"Conrad."

"Belly." He kissed the inside of her wrist, right over her fluttering pulse, and she felt it everywhere—in her chest, between her legs, in the base of her throat. "We get there tomorrow. Let me have this. Let me have you like this before we do. Please."

The third time he added his fingers, two of them sliding inside her while his tongue worked her clit, and Belly genuinely thought she might die. Her hands were fists in the sheets, in his hair, nails probably leaving marks on his scalp. But Conrad seemed to like that. He didn't flinch away.

When Belly came the third time she actually sobbed his name, wrecked and desperate, her thighs shaking around his head. Conrad kissed his way back up her body slowly, giving her time to remember how breathing worked, how to exist in her skin again.

"Okay," Belly said when she could form words again, when the room stopped spinning and she could see straight. Her voice was hoarse. "Okay, we're definitely done now. That was—Conrad, that was insane."

"Just one more?" he asked.

"You're actually trying to kill me. This is murder. I'm going to die and they're going to find my body and know exactly what happened!"

Conrad laughed. "You're not going to die, Belly." He kissed her again, softer this time. "But you are going to give me one more. Because I need to know you felt this. I need you to remember this, tomorrow and next week and next month when I'm here and you're in Paris. When you're far away and I can't touch you. I need you to remember what it feels like when I love you like this."

Oh. "Okay," Belly whispered.

"Yeah?"

"Yeah. Okay. One more."

The fourth time was different. Slower. Conrad settled back between her thighs like he had all the time in the world, like the sun wasn't moving across the sky, like tomorrow wasn't coming. His movements were almost lazy now, languid, no urgency at all. Just his tongue moving in slow circles, his fingers gentle inside her, like he was savoring it.

Belly's body didn't know what to do with this kind of attention. Every nerve ending was raw, oversensitive, pleasure bordering on pain bordering on something transcendent. She could feel herself climbing toward it again, slow and inevitable, and this time when she came it felt like falling, like surrendering, like letting go of something she'd been holding onto too tight.

And then she noticed: Conrad's other hand had disappeared. His shoulder was moving, his arm shifting with a rhythm she recognized, and the realization hit her like lightning.

He was touching himself. Getting off on this. On her.

"Conrad," she breathed, and he looked up at her, his eyes murky green and half-lidded, his mouth still on her.

"Can't help it," Conrad said against her, shameless. "You taste so fucking good. You have no idea what you do to me. I'm so hard it hurts and I can't—fuck—I can't stop touching you."

The confession did something to her, flipped some switch deep inside her brain. Knowing that he was getting off on this, that her pleasure was his pleasure, that he wanted her so badly he couldn't help himself.

Belly was really crying again by the end.

"I don't want this summer to end," she said, even though it already had.

Conrad climbed back up to hold her, gathering her against his chest, his heart beating steady against her ear. "Then let's pretend it won't," he said, like the pretending could make it true. Like if they believed hard enough, the road could go on forever.

But, inevitably, they did run out of road and arrived at Stanford on a Sunday morning. 

The campus was absurdly beautiful, all red terracotta roofs and palm trees and sunlight that looked different from East Coast sunlight, warmer maybe. Everything looked new and scrubbed clean, like a movie set, like a place where people reinvented themselves and left their old lives behind.

Belly looked at the building and felt something dark curl in her stomach despite her excitement for him. This was where he would live now. This was where he would eat breakfast and study and make new friends without her.

Conrad pulled into the parking lot of his new complex and killed the engine. Neither of them moved to get out.

"Belly," Conrad said softly.

She turned to look at him. He was already looking at her, had probably been looking at her the whole time, looking at his home the way she'd been looking at his home too.

"This isn't goodbye," he said. "It could never be goodbye with us."

But they both knew it was. Maybe not forever. Maybe not even for long. 

It was goodbye to this version of them, to the people they'd been on the road, to the fantasy that summer could last forever if they just kept driving west.

So I'm going back to school early because I need to get my shit together. I need to figure out how to carry all of this without letting it destroy me, maybe talk to someone. I need to learn how to be someone honest and present and not so fucking scared all the time. Because that's what you deserve, Belly. And because if I stayed right now, if I tried to start something with you while I'm like this, I would ruin it. I would ruin us.

And I can't have that.

That's not an excuse. I'm not trying to excuse any of it. I'm just trying to explain why I've been so impossible. Why I pushed you away even when all I wanted was to pull you closer. 

I was drowning and I thought if I grabbed onto you, I'd just drag you under with me.

The distance between them: roughly 5,600 miles. Nine time zones. An ocean that has swallowed empires.

Belly wrote him her first postcard from a bench near the reconstructed Notre Dame, sitting in the shadow of the cathedral's flying buttresses while tourists swarmed around her like bees and the gargoyles watched over. The stone creatures were terror and hope both—just like love, she wrote, feeling very profound that day. Very far from home.

She looked up at the gargoyles again and thought of him sitting at the pool's edge watching her swim that first night of summer all those years ago. When she'd been brave enough to kiss him and set this story on its course. Belly smiled, snapping a picture of a particularly scowl-y one and sending it to him with a heart.

Romantic, Conrad responded a few minutes later, and she laughed, disgruntling an old French woman.

( Belly had called him a gargoyle that night to tease him. And true as it was that Conrad was far too handsome to fit the role properly, he was watchful. Protective. He'd seen darkness and still chose to guard beautiful things. So perhaps she hadn't been so far off. )

Belly studied, she ate croissants, and she often got lost. 

Very often. Spectacularly. Once, she'd ended up in the 19th arrondissement trying to find a bookshop in the 6th, and she'd called Conrad crying-laughing about it. He stayed on the phone with her for an hour while she navigated back, his voice steady and entertained: No, yes, I can read, Isabel. I'm looking at it on my phone. You take a left at the bakery, Belly. No, your other left. See? There's my girl.

She found a women's volleyball club that practiced in a gym near Bastille, all scuffed floors and fluorescent lights. A good serve was a universal language, it turned out. You didn't need perfect French to communicate I'm here, I'm present, I'm alive in my body and it feels like flying.

Belly came home from practice sore and happy, texting Conrad photos of her bruised knees, and he'd sent back: Beautiful.

And then she met new friends one afternoon when her backpack was stolen outside a cafe in the Latin Quarter and she'd stood there uselessly, ready to cry, before four strangers materialized around her like characters summoned from a story: Gemma with her infectious laugh, Celine who smoked hand-rolled cigarettes, Max who managed to be both very warm and totally aloof, and Benito who always had a Spanish poem to recite on the ready.

"Isabel," Gemma had said, testing her full name like it was a spell. "You feel familiar. Like we've done this before."

( They became her people. Her Paris people. The ones who knew nothing about Cousins or Conrad or the girl she'd been before, which meant they only knew the girl she was becoming. It was terrifying. It was necessary. It was its own kind of love story. )

Belly interned at a small independent press in the Marais—Éditions Mauve, tucked between a vintage clothing shop and a falafel stand—reading manuscripts in cafes that smelled of burnt espresso and cigarettes and rain. She discovered, somewhere between a memoir about grief that made her cry on the Metro and a novel about a woman who fell in love with the sea and walked into it fully clothed, that this was still what she wanted.

She wanted to be the person who found stories. Who recognized them. Who held them carefully and said: Yes, this matters. This is worth saving.

One night, on FaceTime, Conrad's face pixelated on her laptop screen, beautiful even through bad connection, even fractured into digital squares, and he said: "Do you ever think about it?"

Careful.

"About what?"

"That summer. Before everything..."

"We're really doing this at one in the morning my time, Conrad?" Belly shifted on her bed, pulling her knees tighter to her chest. But her heart had already started racing, that Pavlovian response to his voice when it went low and serious like this.

"We said honesty."

Fine. Fair. She'd been the one to establish the rule during their first real phone call after she'd landed in Paris: radical honesty, even when it hurt, even when it was inconvenient.

Belly shifted, watching him watch her through the screen. He looked tired, worried about something. "Which part?"

"The—" Conrad paused. "When we…"

( He didn't know what to call it. Hooked up felt reductive. Fooled around felt blasphemous. There wasn't a word in any language for what they'd done to each other that summer. )

"Before I left early. I think about it, and I..." Another pause, longer this time, and she could see him struggling with it, wrestling with the words. "I worry that I messed you up? That your first experiences of that, of us, were all tied to me being a disaster. That I defined something for you, shaped it wrong. I'm fucking this up, I'm not saying it right—"

"Conrad."

"I'm serious, Belly. I was so fucked up that summer and you were just—you were so ready to love me and I couldn't get out of my own way long enough to—"

"Conrad, stop."

She watched him physically close his mouth. Watched him lean back against whatever wall he was propped against in his bedroom, probably surrounded by textbooks and empty coffee cups, probably having been thinking about this for days before finally saying it out loud.

Belly took a breath. This was the kind of conversation with Conrad that required the right words, the true ones, the ones that didn't hide behind jokes or deflection. The kind of honesty that felt like undressing in front of someone for the first time, every time.

"Okay, facts," she said, borrowing his steadying mechanism, his calming technique, because they shared everything now, even the tools they used to keep themselves from flying apart. "Yeah. Yes. That summer shaped me. You shaped me. But I don't think…not in the way you're afraid of."

"Belly—"

"Wait. Let me finish." She held up a hand. "Yes, you were...complicated. But Conrad—" She paused, watching his expression change on screen: the slight parting of his lips, the way his eyes went dark even through pixels and continents. "The way you touched me that summer? You touched me like I was…" Belly blinks, almost smiling involuntarily at the memory of it, "precious. Even when it was weird or new or you were falling apart, you made me feel safe enough to experience it all. Do you understand how much that mattered after loving you for so long? How, like…rare that is?"

Conrad swallowed. "What do you mean?"

"A lot of crushes don't live up to the intimacy, maybe. But with you, I couldn't have even imagined how good it could get. Every single time."

He was very still now, just watching her. 

"And yeah, I had other experiences after," Belly continued, pushing through the vulnerability like jumping into the pool that first night when she'd been stupidly brave. "And that's—"

She paused. How to say this? How to make him understand?

"Those other experiences taught me what I didn't want, Conrad. Made me even more sure that you were what I did. Want. They taught me the difference between someone touching you because, because they want something from you, and someone touching you because they want you. All of you. The difficult parts and the easy parts and everything in between."

"I remember being so desperate to be good at it," she went on to confess, the words tumbling out. "Like I needed to prove I deserved to be there with you. And you just kept telling me to slow down, that we had time, that it wasn't about being good at anything."

"You were perfect," Conrad said, finally unable to help himself, and his voice had gone thick with memory. "Belly, you were so perfect I couldn't deal with it. I'd lie awake after, replaying everything, hating myself for wanting more when I knew I wasn't in a place to give you what you deserved."

He made her heart beat so fast, even across the world.

"What did you want?"

"Everything, Belly." No hesitation. "I wanted to be your first. I wanted to be your only. I wanted—" He stopped, quieting. "I wanted things I had no right to want."

"You have the right now, Conrad," Belly said quietly. "You've always had the right."

Conrad was in the library at Stanford Med, drowning in cardiology notes that made his eyes cross, when his phone lit up with a notification: Package for you at the front desk.

Agnes had just left. She was his new study partner and friend, all fire and dry wit, the kind of person who could make a joke about cadavers that actually landed. 

( Belly had gone a little quiet when he'd first mentioned Agnes. He knew that meant she was filing the information, cross-referencing it against every insecurity she pretended not to have. Conrad noticed, filed it away under things to reassure her about later. )

The box was from Paris, covered in international postage stamps and Belly's looping handwriting. Inside: 

• Junior Mint, the stuffed bear who'd witnessed more of their history than any living thing, on loan. A study mascot.
• A slim French edition of Le Petit Prince clutched in the bear's paws. 
• A postcard of the Pont des Arts covered in her handwriting in blue ink: Miss you! Love you!
• A stack of flashcards bound with red string—the kind of red that looked like it had been stolen from fairytales, from the thread that connected soulmates across impossible distances.
• And a USB, small and silver, that felt heavier than it should.

Conrad plugged it into his laptop right away.

It contained a video. Belly, in that impossibly small blue apartment the university had placed her in, sitting cross-legged on her bed in his Stanford sweatshirt—the one he'd mailed her after she'd admitted, sleepily over a video call, that she missed the way he smelled.

"Hi," video-Belly said, and even through the screen he could see the specific brightness in her eyes that meant she was excited about something, nervous about something. Both. 

"So. I know you have that big test next week, and I know you've been stressed, and I know you won't ask for help because you're you and asking for help makes you break out in hives or whatever—" She smiled, that sweet mischievous thing that had been ruining his life since they were kids. 

"So I made you something instead."

The video cut to Belly holding up flashcards she'd made, the same ones sitting in the package right now. Color-coded—blues and greens and soft yellows, the colors of Cousins and the house—with her notes crowding the margins in that messy earnest handwriting: you've got this and remember to eat something that isn't coffee and I'm so proud of you, I love you!!!

Little smiley faces scattered throughout that looked just like her.

"Voilà," video-Belly continued, biting her lower lip in that way that made Conrad forget, momentarily, what language he spoke. "Okay. I don't actually know if these are helpful? I'm not in med school like some people, obviously, I just—" She paused. "I figured. Hey!  Worst case scenario, you have flashcards with my handwriting on them. Which is basically like I'm there studying with you! Right? Which I would be, if we didn't live on different continents..."

She was quiet for another moment. Conrad watched her decide whether to say the next part, watched her take a breath and square her shoulders the way she did before diving into cold water.

"I miss you," she said finally, and her voice had gone soft, stripped of its performance brightness. "I miss your voice when it's right there instead of through a speaker."

A pause, a smile that didn't quite convince.

"But I'm really glad we're doing this—you know the…distance thing, the pursuing our dreams thing, the trusting each other thing. It's hard, but it's good. We're good! We're going to be okay."

( Belly was trying to convince herself. He could hear it in the way her voice lifted at the end, turned it into a question she was answering for both of them. )

"Anyway. Call me when you're awake and I'm awake, which is basically never, but we'll figure it out. We always do." She pressed her fingers to her lips, then to the screen. "Je t'aime, Conrad Fisher. Don't forget that when you're elbows-deep in cadavers or whatever horrifying cool thing you're doing this week. Bye!"

The video ended. Conrad sat there in the library surrounded by his peers, settled in with his headphones, and watched it three more times. He wasn't ashamed.

Then Conrad texted her: You made me flashcards.

Three dots appeared almost immediately, and he could picture her in that blue apartment, probably in his shirt again, probably smiling at her phone. I made you flashcards!!

Belly.

Conrad.

I love you so much I don't have words for it.

The three dots appeared and disappeared and appeared again. He imagined her typing and deleting, trying to find the right way to say something, the way she always did when she was feeling too much. Finally: Then get an A so my hard work wasn't for nothing!

He laughed out loud, earning dirty looks from the people around him who were trying to study in peace, who didn't understand that sometimes love was flashcards and time zones and a girl in Paris who remembered you liked smiley faces in the margins. Yes ma'am.

That's actually: yes my beautiful brilliant girlfriend who spent three hours making me study materials because she's secretly a huge nerd and also the love of my life.

You're not secretly anything Belly. You're an openly huge nerd. 

Those in glass houses, Conrad.

Yeah, yeah.

Belly drunk-called him at 2:47 AM Paris time, which meant it was 5:47 PM in Palo Alto, which meant Conrad was probably just getting back from his last class, tired, that crease between his eyebrows from concentrating too hard on things that would save lives someday.

Still, he picked up on the first ring.

"Hi," she said, and her voice came out wrong, thick and wet and fractured at the edges.

"Belly." Alert now, fully. She could hear it in the way he said her name, in the sudden sharpness of his breath. "You're up? You okay? What's wrong?"

"Nothing's wrong." But Belly was crying, of course she was crying, and he could hear it in the spaces between words, in the way her breath hitched and caught like a fish on a line. "I just—I wore the dress tonight. The one you bought me in Providence? The blue one with the—"

Her voice cracked clean open, a pomegranate split down the middle, all seeds and sweetness spilling out.

"God, I'm so fucking drunk."

"That's okay." The sound of him moving, settling. Taking her seriously even when she couldn't take herself seriously. "Tell me about the dress."

Belly laughed, bitter and sharp as broken glass. "Everyone kept asking who I was looking good for. And I said my boyfriend who's on the other side of the world and can't even see it but that sounds pathetic, right? That sounds like I'm this, this sad desperate girl who can't—"

"It's not pathetic."

"I miss you so much it's making me crazy, Conrad." His name broke completely in her mouth, shattered into something unrecognizable. Syllables she'd said a thousand times suddenly foreign on her tongue. "Like, I think there's something wrong with me. Like, clinically. You're in med school, you should know the way I love you, it, it can't be normal. I can't do this. I came home early and I'm wearing the dress you bought me and I just."

Conrad's breath caught, audible across the ocean. 

( He knew she was just drunk, feeling everything more than usual, all her careful compartments blown open like Pandora's box. But he'd never heard her sound like this before—like she was drowning in the space between them, like loving him was a violence she couldn't survive. He felt worried, helpless, too far away to fix things for her when he'd just regained that power, when she'd just started letting him be the person who could. )

"I probably sound so stupid," Belly continued, words tumbling out in a wine-dark rush.

"No. No, you don't. I think about you all the time," he said. "Constantly. Every fucking second. I think about you until I can't think about anything else. I feel the same way as you, Belly. I do."

Silence. Long enough that she could hear both of them breathing, uneven and quick, like they'd been running toward each other and couldn't quite catch up. 

"I'm touching myself," she whispered.

A pause.

"Yeah?"

His voice had dropped an octave. On the other end of the line, Belly could picture him exactly: sprawled on his bed or maybe sitting at his desk in those sweatpants he knew drove her crazy, one hand already moving south, body tight with want. Those stupidly long fingers she'd been dreaming about for months, that beautiful mouth she'd memorized in minute detail, the slight asymmetry of his top lip.

"I'm sorry, I..." Belly moaned, soft and breathy. She could hear Conrad curse under his breath, could hear the exact moment his control started slipping. "I know that's—I shouldn't have called when I'm a mess like this, I just—"

"Don't." The voice that made her knees weak, that made her want to be good and very, very bad. Then, softer, to balance: "Don't ever apologize for this, sweetheart."

Belly settled under the blanket of the word—sweetheart, the name he saved for when she was falling apart or falling into him.

( Conrad's hand was already sliding into his boxers without conscious thought, his body responding to her voice the way it always had, helpless and hungry. She could hear the rustle of fabric, the sharp intake of breath, the barely audible groan that meant he was already hard, already aching. )

"Are you—" He paused, and she could hear him swallow. "Show me. Please."

The video call request came through.

Belly had propped the phone against a pillow, and Conrad could see everything: her hair messed up and falling around her face in dark waves, mascara smudged like bruises under those big brown eyes, lips swollen from biting. Wearing that pretty dress pushed up above her hips, and he, fuck, he could see the edge of her panties, could see her hand already between her thighs. 

"Oh god," he breathed.

"I miss you." Belly was crying for real now, tears sliding down her flushed cheeks even as her fingers moved beneath the cotton. "I miss you so much I feel like I'm dying. Like there's a piece of me that's six thousand miles away and I'm just, I'm just this incomplete thing walking around pretending to be whole—"

"I know." His hand was moving now, visible in the frame, and she couldn't look away from it, from the way his jaw tightened or the way his eyes went half-lidded. From the flex of his forearm, under his skin, tinted by the sun. "I know, baby. I feel it too. Every fucking day."

"Tell me what to do."

"Slower," he guided her. The voice he used when he had her pinned beneath him. "I want you to feel every second of it. How I'd do it."

Belly whimpered but obeyed, her fingers slowing to a torturous pace. He watched her face contort.

"Good," he murmured, and watched her shiver at the praise. "Now use your other hand. You know how. Pretend it's me."

She did, sliding her free hand under the dress, palming her breast the way he would, rough enough to make her gasp. He was stroking himself with purpose now, and she could see how hard he was through the gray fabric, could see the way his hips shifted up into his fist, seeking friction, seeking her.

"Are you wet for me?" His voice was sex and honey, dark and sweet. "Tell me how wet you are, Belly."

"So wet," she breathed.

"Slip your fingers inside. I want you to feel how empty you are without me. How much you need me to fill you up."

She obeyed, sliding two fingers inside herself with a breathy moan that made him grip himself harder, made his hips jerk up involuntarily. Watching her touch herself was the best and worst kind of torture—better than anything else in the world, and also not nearly enough, would never be enough until he could touch her himself.

"Conrad." His name was a sob, ragged and desperate. "It's not enough, it's never—I need more, I need you—"

"I know, sweetheart." 

Conrad was stroking himself faster now, his breath coming in harsh pants that she could hear even through the distance, even through the pixels and bandwidth and all the technology trying to close the gap between their bodies. She could see the muscles in his stomach tightening, could see the flush spreading across his chest, the way his free hand gripped the edge of his desk like he needed something solid to hold onto.

He said, "But this is what we have right now. So I need you to come for me, okay? I need to see it while you think about me."

"Yes." She was shaking now, her whole body trembling as she obeyed. "Conrad, I'm—I'm so close—"

"Look at me." Sharp, authoritative. "Eyes on me when you come."

Thanksgiving, Christmas, New Year's Eve. 

The holidays passed this time like stations on a train neither of them could stop. Three chances to see each other, three failures dressed up in reasonable excuses: someone's schedule was unforgiving, someone's budget wouldn't stretch to last-minute international flights, someone was always thousands of miles away when it mattered most.

Their love had become more virtual and less tangible. A love of screens and longing, of can you hear me and frozen video feeds, of pretending the lag in their connection was technical and not something deeper or more fatal.

( This is how love dies in the modern age: not with a bang but with buffering. )

"Hi," Conrad said into the phone.

"Hi," Belly echoed back.

Fifteen minutes. They had fifteen minutes before he had to start his day, before she had to meet her friends for a dinner that wouldn't have the right kind of stuffing or the right kind of anything.

"How's—"

"Good! Yeah. Good. You?"

"Good. Good."

They were lying. Both of them.

Belly could see it in the way he wouldn't quite meet her eyes through the screen, in the way her own smile felt like it had been borrowed from someone else's face. 

"I miss you," she tried, because maybe honesty would save them.

"I miss you too," he said, and it should have helped but it didn't.

Dear Belly,

I'm attaching this letter to very precious cargo. When he gets there, tell Junior Mint he was a huge help with my exams. Very cool dude.

Agnes asked about you yesterday. Said to tell you she's still waiting for that article you promised her. I think she misses you almost as much as I do and she hasn't even met you in person yet. (I repeat: almost. Just to be clear, no one misses you like I do.)

School's kicking my ass this semester. But you know that. Last night I dreamed about anatomical structures instead of you. Just that once, I think it was all the sleep-deprivation. Forgive me? My subconscious is a traitor.

I keep the photo you sent me on my desk, the one from the Seine, your hair all in your face. I'm still not sure about this Benito guy, but I'm a fan of his camerawork.

Sometimes I talk to it like you can hear me. Pathetic, I know. But I've given up on dignity where you're concerned.

And in case you forgot, I'm still not letting you go.

Love,

Conrad

The manor house belonged to Celine's very rich family (who knew?), all honey-colored stone and climbing ivy at the edge of a vineyard in Provence, the kind of place that looked like it had been growing there for centuries, patient and golden in the afternoon sun.

It was Belly's spring break. A vacation with all her Paris friends. Finally, a reprieve. 

Belly had been in the middle of explaining something to Gemma and Benito—what exactly, she'd forget later, something about the light here or the wine or how different French butter tasted—when she heard it: the sound of tires on gravel, a crunch that meant arrival.

She knew it was him before she saw him.

"C'est qui?" Celine asked, but Belly was already moving, already out the door and down the steps, her bare feet on warm stone.

And then Conrad was there, climbing out of a rental car that was too small for his frame, looking rumpled and exhausted and so beautiful.

White t-shirt, jeans, sunglasses pushed carelessly into his hair. His hair was a golden-brown from the sun, and he'd grown a fuller beard this time, though short and neat, the kind that would feel rough against her inner thighs if she let him put his mouth there. 

( Belly was going to let him put his mouth there. )

His smile was lopsided, and a little uncertain.

Belly threw herself at him. 

"You made it," she breathed into his neck.

"I made it," he said back, his hands spanning her waist, holding her up like she weighed nothing, like he could hold her forever and never get tired.

Conrad had flown for eleven hours from San Francisco to Paris, then driven three hours south on roads that turned from highway to country lane to gravel path. He'd done this all on four hours of sleep and sheer determination, because Belly had mentioned, casually, that she'd be in Provence for spring break, and he'd thought: fuck medical school (temporarily), fuck distance (forever), I need to see her or I'm going to lose my mind.

They made it through approximately forty-five minutes of polite socializing before the wanting became unbearable. Conrad charmed her friends with his surprisingly competent French—rusty but sincere, peppered with pardons and self-deprecating grins, the kind of effort that made Belly fall a little more in love with him. He was good at this, she realized. Good at fitting into her life, even the parts of it he'd never seen before.

Belly's hand found his under the table, fingers lacing, palm to palm, and the contact was electric. She could feel the warmth of him seeping into her skin.

"We're going for a walk," she announced, standing abruptly, her chair scraping against the tile.

Gemma smirked. "A walk."

"A walk!" Belly repeated, and the smile on her face was pure mischief, pure want, pure finally. She was already pulling Conrad toward the door, already dragging him toward privacy, toward the thing they'd both been starving for.

The orchard was a ten-minute walk from the house—gnarled fruit trees and dappled shade, the grass tall and wild with late spring, soft enough to lie in. It was the kind of place that felt stolen from time, private yet open.

Conrad hadn't let go of her hand since they'd left the house. His thumb traced circles on her palm, absent and deliberate, driving her slowly insane. She could feel the heat building between her legs with every step they took deeper into the lush groves.

When they were deep enough into the orchard that the house had disappeared behind the trees, when they were alone in the green-gold light filtering through leaves, Conrad backed her gently against an apple tree. His hands came up to frame her face, and he just looked at her for the longest moment.

His thumbs brushed her cheekbones, traced over her brow, the bridge of her nose, the curve of her jaw. Even that simple touch made her shiver, made her breath catch.

"I thought about you," Conrad said. "Every day. Constantly. Do you want to know what I thought about?"

Belly nodded, furrowing her brow, trying to focus, but she couldn't speak. She couldn't do anything but stare up at him.

So he told her. Quietly, his mouth close to her ear, his beard brushing her cheek and making her breath catch: every specific thing he'd been wanting to do to her. 

His voice was low and sure, and Belly felt her knees go weak.

"Conrad—"

"I'm not done," he said, and kissed her finally, the kind of kiss that was close to erasing time.

He laid her down in the wild grass with a gentleness that contradicted everything she could feel hard against her hip. The sun was warm on her skin, filtering through the leaves above them in shifting patterns. She could smell green things growing, earth and grass and apple blossoms.

There was no rush to it. Conrad always liked to take his time with her, mapped her with his fingers, the curve of her hip, the soft skin of her inner thigh. He told her she was beautiful in the spaces between kisses, told her he'd missed her, told her she was perfect, told her he loved her.

His hands slid under her sundress, pushing it up her thighs, over her hips. She lifted up so he could pull it over her head, making a mess of her hair, and then she was laid out before him in just her bra and panties, her skin flushed, her expression excited.

He unhooked her bra and tossed it aside—always: can I do it?—his mouth immediately closing over one nipple while his fingers worked the other, pinching and rolling until she was arching up into him, spewing desperate sounds that made him groan against her skin.

Conrad kissed down her body, taking his time, making her squirm. When he finally put his mouth on her, she gasped, her hands flying to his hair. The beard felt exactly as good as she'd imagined, rough and perfect against her sensitive skin, leaving marks she'd trace later in the mirror.

Then he was fumbling with his jeans, freeing himself, and Belly's mouth went dry at the sight of him, thick and hard and flushed, precum beading at the tip. He stroked himself once, twice, his eyes locked on hers.

He fucked her into the grass, rough and relentless and exactly what she needed right then. His hips snapped against hers with a force that would leave bruises, his cock hitting so deep she could barely breathe, and she loved it, loved the way he was taking her like he owned her.

After, they lay tangled together in the grass, sweaty and sated and utterly unwilling to move. His fingers traced absent patterns on her hip, idle and possessive. She could feel his heartbeat gradually slowing against her chest, could feel him softening inside her, neither of them ready to separate yet.

"We should probably go back," Belly said eventually, though she made no move to get up.

"Probably," Conrad agreed, also not moving. His hand tightened on her hip. "In a minute."

A minute turned into ten, turned into twenty. When they finally did get dressed, they discovered grass in her hair, dirt on his jeans, and...her underwear missing.

"Oh my god," Belly said, searching frantically through the tall grass. 

"Leave them," Conrad said, grinning in a way that made him look young and mischievous and absolutely unrepentant. "I'll find them for you later."

"I am not going back to the house without underwear on, Conrad."

"Sure you are." He caught her hand, lacing their fingers together. "Think of it as a secret. Something only I know."

At dinner, Belly and Conrad sat too close, obvious and glowing and shameless. Under the table, his hand rested on her bare thigh under her dress, thumb tracing circles that made her lose her train of thought mid-sentence. Every time he touched her, she was reminded that she was bare under the thin fabric, and from the smirk on his face, he knew that.

"You have grass in your hair," Benito observed, delighted, reaching over to pluck a blade from behind Belly's ear. "Traviesa."

Belly flushed scarlet. Conrad just smiled, a little smug, and reached over to remove another piece she'd missed.

"You have some too," Celine pointed out helpfully, gesturing to Conrad's shoulder, and Belly wanted to sink through the floor and disappear forever.

"How do you two make it work?" Gemma asked, genuine curiosity beneath the teasing, her wine glass paused halfway to her lips. "The distance, I mean. It's so romantic, but it seems impossible."

Conrad looked at Belly, and something passed between them.

"I don't know how not to," he said simply.

But you make me want to be better, braver. When I'm around you, I feel like the person I'm supposed to be instead of the version of myself that I've become. You see me clearly and you don't look away. 

Fuck, that sounds so heavy. But it's true. You make everything lighter. You make me less afraid of the things I can't control.

Except: Conrad proceeded to take a summer job in California instead of coming home.

Which was fine—which Belly would've normally encouraged, championed even, her bright optimism about his future usually outweighing her own wants—but the plan this summer was the East Coast. The rock solid, very decided, very fleshed-out plan.

Long afternoons. No rushing. No stolen hours between flights. No goodbye sex that tasted like rehearsal for loss. 

Time with Laurel and Cleveland. Hanging with Taylor and Steven. Agnes and Gemma even making plans to come visit, bridging more of their worlds, laying real solid plans for their shared future. Finally.

That was the plan.

Then Conrad mentioned the job. Casual. Like it was nothing. Like it wasn't the summer Belly had been counting down to since January, marking the days off on her calendar and everything.

( Belly felt anger first, then annoyance, then a terrible immaturity that comes from wishing, selfishly, someone would just choose you over something important by default. Conrad didn't need to take this position, after all—his med school trajectory was already golden, already assured. Except she loved him because he was the kind of relentlessly ambitious and quietly brilliant to want to anyway. So Belly was really mostly mad at herself for feeling mad at him. Which was worse. )

"I know this wasn't the plan," Conrad said on the phone, his voice all reasonable and measured, like he was trying to convince himself as much as her, like if he just explained it right she'd understand. "But I'll still have time to see you for a week. Belly, and it's a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity. People would kill for this. It'll look incredible for residency applications."

"Right," she said. Her voice came out flat. "For your future."

"Yeah. For our future," he corrected, and she could hear him running his hand through his hair, could picture him pacing his apartment. "I'm doing this so I can—so we can—"

"Oh. Right. So. You're spending the summer apart from me for me? Sure, Conrad."

Belly hung up. Mostly out of frustration and despair and to shut herself up before she made it any worse.

She knew it was mean even as she did it, but she felt wounded and embarrassed and small, like a child throwing a tantrum. So she didn't answer when he called back. Or the next five times. Or the text that came at two AM: Please let me explain. I'm just trying to build something good enough for you.

( The problem with Conrad Fisher, Belly thought sourly, throwing her phone across the bed where it landed with a satisfying thump against her pillow, was that he was always trying to deserve her instead of just having her. Like love was something you earned through suffering instead of something you chose, over and over, in the mundane daylight of regular life. )

So began the summer of their discontent.

Conrad threw himself into the California job the way drowning men reach for driftwood, which is to say: desperately, uselessly, with the sinking knowledge that he was only postponing the inevitable. He called Belly every day for a week. She answered exactly none of those calls, and each unanswered ring felt like a small death, like proof of every terrible thing he'd ever believed about himself.

Meanwhile, Belly worked too. She edited submissions at her lit mag with a red pen that felt lethal in her hand, each correction a small violence she couldn't direct at him. She shelved books with more force than necessary, alphabetizing her anger into neat rows. She played volleyball with Taylor on sun-bleached courts until her thighs ached and her lungs burned and she was too exhausted to think about the space in her bed where he should have been.

When Gemma and Max came to visit in mid-June—we're still coming, Isabel, you don't get to mope alone—she showed them her favorite spots with manic brightness: the hidden community gardens, the rooftop bar where you could see the whole glittering city, the weird vintage boutiques. She performed happiness like a role she'd studied for, and maybe they believed her, or maybe they just loved her enough to pretend.

Agnes came next—uh yeah I'm still going, Conrad, she's my friend now too thank you very much, let me work my mediating magic—and let Belly vent and rage and cry into her slice of pizza, expertly navigating the impossible task of staying loyal to Conrad while validating every one of Belly's hurts.

Belly even went to Cousins by herself for a weekend, walked the beach alone, felt small and stuck and caught in some terrible loop of her own making.

He finally wore her down in early July, catching her on a Friday night while she ate takeout, watched Casablanca, and felt sorry for herself.

"What, Conrad."

"I—fuck. Hi, Belly. You answered."

"My mistake, I'll hang up."

"Don't. Please. Shit. Just—give me five minutes."

She gave him three before the battle started.

"We made plans! You could've found something here, you could've—" Belly drew in a deep breath. "It was the one summer we could have actually been together after all of this long-distance bullshit, and you just—what? Decided your resume was more important than us?"

"That's not fair, Belly. I wanted to take it because I'm trying! I'm trying to be worth the wait, to be someone who can actually give you the life you—"

"You're already worth it! You've always been worth it! You're just deflecting from the actual point. Again! Because you always do this."

Conrad stared at his phone for a long moment, getting nowhere. His hands were shaking—no, his whole body was shaking, that old earthquake of anxiety that had been dormant for months suddenly active again, fault lines splitting open. The voice in his head—his mother's voice distorted by grief, his father's voice exactly as it had always been, his own voice at its cruelest—whispered: See? You ruin everything. You always ruin everything. She's better off without you.

"Maybe we just can't take a hint, Conrad!" The words came out manic, desperate, wrong the second they left Belly's mouth. "Maybe we're—I don't know, not some big destined love story. Maybe it's always this hard because it's just not meant to be."

Belly didn't mean it. She knew she didn't mean it the second it left her mouth. She could feel the wrongness of it like touching something hot, immediate and searing, but it was too late. The words were out there between them, and she could hear him breathing on the other end of the line, could hear him believing it—

"How could you fucking say that, Belly?"

His voice wasn't angry. That would have been easier. His voice was broken, and she'd done that, she'd broken him with a few careless words because she was frustrated and scared and lashing out.

"I'm sorry. I'm...I'm tired, and I hate this. I didn't mean it."

"Yes. You did, Belly. You wouldn't have said it if some part of you didn't—"

"Conrad, I swear—"

"Is that what you think? That we're just, what, too stupid to know when to quit?" His laugh was bitter, self-lacerating. "Or maybe that's just me. Maybe I'm the only one who can't let go of something that's clearly not working."

"No! No. I was just—I'm tired, and I miss you, and I hate that you're there and I'm here and we can't just—" She was crying now, ugly crying, the kind that made her voice go thick and desperate and young, made her sound like the girl she'd been at fifteen, still wanting him from across an impossible distance. "Please don't do this. Please don't believe me when I say stupid stuff I don't mean. I take it back, okay? Conrad? Just let me take it back."

Conrad sighed through the phone. "No, I know. I know. I am, too. I'm sorry. It's okay."

But the next week, they had some variation of this same argument. And the week after that. And the week after that.

( Summer, unraveling. The opposite of a love story. Or maybe just the middle, the dark forest, the trial by fire. The part where you have to decide if you're brave enough to keep going. )

Here's what saved them, in the end:

Conrad started opening up more in therapy about his fear of not being enough—that he was a house with too many rooms left dark, that love was something you had to earn through perfect behavior and flawless execution. Dr. Mellow gave him homework that felt impossible: tell Belly one true thing every day, even if it scared him. Especially if it scared him.

So he did.

Day 1: I'm afraid you'll wake up one day and realize you wasted your youth on someone who can't even finish a sentence without second-guessing whether he should speak. I second-guessed this text by the way.

Day 3: I keep a list in my head too. Remember when you told me that? Of all the things I want to tell you when I see you again. It's so long now I've started forgetting the beginning.

Day 7: Sometimes I get mad at you.

That one stopped Belly cold. She'd been curled up on her bed in Brooklyn, phone in hand. The words glowed on her screen menacingly.

Why? she typed back, her thumb hovering over send, heart suddenly loud in her ears.

His response came slowly, like he was writing and rewriting: Because you think everything I do and say is some kind of secret way of trying to hurt you, Belly. When it couldn't be more the opposite. And I know why, I know I gave you reasons to feel that way. But no matter what I do, I feel like. I feel like you've already decided I have the worst possible intention.

Belly frowned at the text, read it again, frowned again. She wanted to get defensive. Every instinct in her body screamed to protect herself, to list all the ways he'd earned her defensiveness.

But she fought it. She bit down on her tongue until she tasted copper, and let Conrad feel understood. Because, well, fine, she did understand why he would think that.

I understand.

And then she told him a truth of her own: Sometimes I get mad at you, too.

Why?

Because you get so logical—

Belly frowned again, backspaced. Because, from my perspective, you get so logical about everything to cope with it all that you forget some things just hurt, Conrad. You think about solutions, and I'm still just thinking about how it feels. And then I feel stupid for being hurt when you didn't "mean it that way."

She watched him type.

Okay. I understand.

Then: Thank you Belly.

They didn't come up with an answer that day. Didn't solve anything. But it was enough to let both things be true at the same time—that he could be scared and she could be scared and they could both be trying their best and still fucking it up sometimes.

( This, maybe, was what love actually looked like. Not the absence of conflict but the willingness to stay in the room when it got hard. To not make the other person a villain in your story. To remember you were on the same side even when it felt like war. )

They had started having phone dates again. Real ones. Where they'd both cook dinner in their respective kitchens—hers cramped and chaotic in Brooklyn, his sparse and angular in Palo Alto—and eat "together," phones propped up so they could see each other.

"What did you make?"

"Pasta. It's edible. I...think." Conrad held up a fork twirled with spaghetti that looked, honestly, pretty sad. "Maybe I forgot to salt the water."

"How do you forget to salt the water? That's like, step one." Belly shook her head. "You say you want me to be healthy, Conrad, and then look at how you stress me out."

"Well, I was distracted," he said, and the way he looked at her through the screen made it clear what had distracted him. Made her feel warm all over, like she was still in the shower, steam curling around her. "What did you make?"

"I made ramen," she announced, holding it up to the camera with childlike pride, the bowl painted with little blue flowers. "The fancy kind. With an egg and everything." 

"Wow. Gordon Ramsay is shaking."

"Shut up, Chef Boyardee," Belly scoffed, but she was smiling, that smile that made her look like someone had turned on a light inside her.

They ate in comfortable silence for a while, just the sounds of chewing and the ambient noise of their separate lives. Then:

"I miss you," he said, because Dr. Mellow said to say the true things, and that was the truest thing he knew. "I'm sorry we fought so much this summer, Belly."

"Me too. I miss you too," she'd said, and then, softer, almost shy: "Only a few more weeks. Then you're coming to visit, right?"

"Wild horses couldn't stop me."

She bit her lip, trying not to smile too big. "Okay."

"Okay."

By late August, they'd found a rhythm again. Not the exact same rhythm as before, that was gone, broken by distance and hurt and all the ways they'd temporarily failed each other. But a new rhythm. Something harder-won and more honest.

When he finally flew to New York, she met him at the airport and they collided like they were the only two people in the terminal, in the city. Maybe in the world.

"I'm sorry," Conrad said between kisses, his hands tangled in her hair, her legs wrapped around his waist, anyone watching be damned. "I'm so fucking sorry. That was so stupid."

"I know," she'd gasped against his mouth, clutching at his shoulders. "I'm sorry. So stupid!"

They spent the weekend doing aggressively normal couple-y things in the city: brunch where they split an overpriced avocado toast, a walk across the Brooklyn Bridge at sunset where he took photos of her that made her look like some kind of urban angel, a reading at a bookstore where they held hands in the back row and whispered commentary.

"I like this," she said on Sunday night, curled up on her tiny new couch in her tiny new apartment with her head on his shoulder, his fingers absently playing with her hair. "Us, like this."

Conrad pressed a kiss to the top of her head. "Me too."

And maybe. If you feel even a fraction of what I feel, if you want to give me another chance, maybe we could try this. Really try. When we're together for Thanksgiving, we could talk about it. Start fresh, start right. 

I want to do this right with you, Belly. I want to be the kind of person who deserves you looking at them the way you look at me.

Belly was in her senior year at NYU, her life a constellation of final classes and thesis deadlines. Her hair had gone through phases that year—past her shoulders in September, chopped to her collarbone by November in a fit of something she couldn't describe now, growing out again by March with dark ends that curled against her neck. Sometimes she wore red lipstick that made her feel more put-together on days she wasn't.

Conrad was drowning in his second year of medical school, learning the human body while still forgetting how to inhabit his own sometimes. His shoulders had gotten broader—when did that happen, Belly wondered every time she saw him, like he'd been rebuilt in her absence.

His jaw was sharper now, too, more defined. Sometimes he grew out his stubble until he looked like a man who'd forgotten to come in from the cold, dark and a little dangerous. Other times he shaved it all off and looked young, like the boy she'd fallen for in the first place.

She liked both. Loved them, actually. The rough and the smooth. But it was still strange sometimes, reconciling all the versions of each other they'd loved, still loved, and would keep loving.

In his Palo Alto apartment, he was constantly leaving room for her. An extra toothbrush. A drawer she didn't ask for but found waiting anyway, already cleared out, already hers. Her shampoo in his shower.

But it wasn't just the physical space. It was the way he arranged his life around the idea of her. When she visited and left things behind—a hair tie on his nightstand (black, twisted into a figure-eight), a book on his coffee table, one of her sweaters draped over his desk chair—he didn't move them. He set them in place like they belonged there. Like she belonged there, like she was just coming right back from the store. Like he was building a home for her one forgotten object at a time.

Conrad was also getting better after that rough patch—the one that had nearly swallowed him whole, that had him white-knuckling through panic attacks in bathroom stalls between classes—he was slowly, unevenly climbing back to himself.

Still seeing Dr. Mellow virtually every other week. Still playing football on weekends with guys from his program, coming home with grass stains and bruised ribs and something like peace in his eyes. He was thinking about specialties now: emergency medicine, maybe, something that required split-second decisions and steady hands. Or maybe something gentler, something that would let him save people in the long stretches, in the quiet accumulation of days, the way no one had been able to save his mother.

Belly kept a silver locket around her neck, his picture inside, a tiny paper Conrad she could carry everywhere, pressed against her heart. 

In the photo he was laughing, caught mid-moment at the beach, looking at her like she'd just said something clever (she had—something about how he looked like a sea creature, and he'd tackled her into the waves for it). She wore it openly now, alongside her infinity pendant, layered like their love. 

And Conrad, of course, still kept a photo of her in his wallet, another on his desk, another as his phone background…anything that would allow itself to be a miniature shrine to Belly, scattered across his life like breadcrumbs leading home.

They liked keeping each other close, even when close was impossible. Distance made them hoarders of each other.

Belly wrote in her journal one night: If this were a story, we'd know how it ends. But we're inside it, and everything is just happening, and I can't see the shape of it.

Sometimes it was like she heard this narration in her head, some omniscient voice trying to make sense of the mess they were making, trying to find the pattern in the chaos, trying to tell her whether this was a love story or a tragedy or some secret third thing.

Christmas arrived like a gift they'd both been too afraid to ask for.

They finally spent it together at Cousins, just the two of them rattling around in that big house full of ghosts and memories. It was healing in a way neither of them expected, like the house itself was blessing them, like Susannah's spirit was woven into the walls saying yes, finally, this is what I would've wanted!

Conrad flew back East through a snowstorm, three delays, one missed connection, arriving at Logan with his hair a mess and his eyes rimmed red from exhaustion. He drove straight to Cousins through the dark, the house a beacon at the end of winding coastal roads, and when he finally walked through the door, Belly was there waiting, curled up on the couch in an oversized sweater, fighting sleep.

The next morning, light came through the kitchen windows in shafts of pale gold, forgiving everything it touched, and Belly was standing at the stove making dusty cocoa from the ancient tin she'd found in the back of the pantry, humming something off-key. She wore her red pajamas, soft flannel that made her look like something out of a storybook, like a girl magic sought out. They smelled like cinnamon and her.

They watched movies and did the crossword and exchanged gifts on Christmas morning, sitting cross-legged on the floor in front of the fireplace like children. 

He gave her a very expensive ornate edition of a fairytale anthology, his careful inscription on the inside cover: You're all my favorite stories. Love always, C. 

She gave him a vintage sailing map of the New England coast, hand-colored and beautifully detailed, places marked that they'd never been but could go together. Places with names like Possibility and Hope.

Belly visited Palo Alto in February, showed up at his apartment unannounced on a Friday night. When he opened the door, she was standing there with a blindfold in one hand and a wicked smile on her face.

"Belly."

"You always have to see everything coming," she said, stepping inside and closing the door behind her with her hip. "You always have to be prepared, have to be in control, have to know what's next." She pressed the silk ribbony tie into his hands. "Not this time."

"I…" Conrad's breath caught. Perhaps he was hallucinating, surely this was a wet dream, he really needed to get more sleep…

"Nope, I'm real," Belly disputed, reading his mind. "Trust me," she said softly. She rose up on her toes, lips brushing the shell of his ear. "For once, just trust me and don't think."

So he did. Conrad let her tie the blindfold over his eyes, let her lead him to the bed by his belt loops, let her push him down. 

Belly rode him slowly, torturously, her hands braced on his chest for leverage, nails digging little crescents into his skin. He could feel her thighs trembling with the effort of keeping the pace controlled, could feel how wet she was, how her body kept clenching around him in involuntary pulses.

"Please," he gasped, his hands reaching for her hips, trying to guide her, trying to take back some control.

"No," she said firmly, catching his wrists and pinning them to the bed. "You don't get to. Not tonight. Tonight you just take what I give you."

Conrad made a pained sound. She could feel him pulsing inside her, could feel how close he was, how desperate. She kept him right there on the edge for what felt like hours, lifting off every time he got too close, ignoring his increasingly frantic pleas.

"Belly, please, I can't—"

"You can," she whispered, just like he taught her, leaning down to catch his lower lip between her teeth, biting hard enough to sting. "You will. Because I said so. Because you're mine and you'll take what I give you and you'll be grateful for it, Conrad."

( Okay. Well. This life had been nice. But Conrad was sure he'd actually died then. Thought his heart had given out from how badly he wanted her, needed her, would do anything she asked in this moment or any other. )

When Belly finally let him come—sinking down on him hard and fast and mean—he gasped "I love you" like the words had been waiting at the back of his throat for years, choking him.

After, when they were tangled together in his sheets, he pulled off the blindfold and looked at her with awe.

"Where did that come from?" he asked, his voice still rough, his pupils still blown wide.

She smiled—satisfied and secretive and still a little feral around the edges. "Wouldn't you like to know."

May again, this time Belly walking across the stage at Yankee Stadium to receive her diploma from NYU. Conrad was impossible to miss even in the vast audience, holding a bouquet of peonies so large it obscured half his face, looking absurd and beautiful and entirely hers.

Laurel, who had just published her new book—the detective series she'd been working on for three years, the one about the female investigator who solved cold cases in coastal towns, was there too, of course, sitting next to Cleveland. Steven was slouched in his seat beside them with his phone out, pretending he wasn't tearing up. Alongside him was Taylor, whose graduation would be next week. And John was there, awkward and earnest dad as always, cheering and taking too many photos.

( Jeremiah wasn't invited to this one. He was working on writing them an apology letter, apparently. Yeah, seriously. Not a bad one, actually. But Conrad and Belly would take their time reading it. )

After the ceremony, Conrad found her in the crowd. He didn't say anything, just pressed his forehead to hers and breathed her in.

"Proud of you," he murmured against her skin.

"I know," she said, grinning. "I'm pretty great."

He laughed, that real laugh, the one he saved for her, the one that made his eyes crinkle at the corners. Then he pulled back to look at her properly, his hands framing her face. "Yeah. You really are."

Later that week, they walked through the Met, fingers laced so tight she could feel his pulse through his palm. They stopped in front of paintings—Klimt and Rothko and O'Keeffe—and he kept asking her: "What do you think? What do you see?"

As often as she wandered these halls, Belly still didn't know a lot about fine art, not really, but he asked anyway. Conrad listened like her half-formed thoughts were the exhibitions worth studying, like she was the most interesting thing in the room.

That night in his hotel room, he looked at her like she was something holy, something he should kneel for. And maybe he should have. Maybe they both should have been on their knees for what they'd survived and were still surviving.

"You're so fucking beautiful," he said quietly, almost to himself, like he was still discovering this fact, like it still surprised him every single time. His eyes traced over her, the curve of her waist, the swell of her hips, the way her hair fell over her bare shoulders, the contrast against her skin. "Like something out of a painting from the museum today. Like something I can't touch."

"Then don't touch me," she said, bratty and testing, lifting her chin in that way that meant she wanted him to prove her wrong.

Conrad's eyes went dark. "Baby," he said, easily now, and she felt it between her legs. "You know that's not how this works."

His hands were on her thighs then, pushing them wider, positioning her with the careful confidence of someone who knew exactly what he wanted and exactly how to get it. "Hold your legs for me, Belly," he said. "Can you do that? Can you be good and keep them open while I fuck you?"

Belly sucked in a sharp breath and reached down, hooked her hands behind her knees, pulled them up and open. The position made her feel vulnerable and obscene and desperately aroused all at once, exposed in a way that should have embarrassed her but didn't. Not with him. Never with him.

"Good girl," he murmured, and she clenched around nothing, whimpering.

He pushed inside her slowly, torturously, letting her feel every inch. Her breath caught. He was so thick, stretching her open, and the angle made everything more intense—she could feel him deeper like this, could feel the way her body yielded to make room for him.

"Conrad—"

"You feel—" His voice broke. "Belly, you feel perfect. Like you were made for me. Were you?" He rocked his hips, grinding deep, and she gasped. "Were you made for me?"

"Yes," she sighed, nails digging crescents into her own thighs, trying to keep her legs open like he'd commanded even though every instinct screamed to close them, to protect herself from the overwhelming intensity of being split open like this, of being seen like this. "Yes, only you, always you, I—fuck—"

His hand slid up her stomach, between her breasts, wrapped loosely around her throat. "Say it again."

"I was made for you," she gasped.

"And I was made for you," he said, and thrust into her so hard stars rained down on her from the ceiling.

But then reality returned, and it had teeth.

They talked about every option: her moving to California (abandoning New York, abandoning the self she'd fought to build there), him transferring East (unraveling the careful sutures of his future, the promise he'd made to his mother's ghost), or both of them continuing like this—neither together nor apart, existing in the cruel mathematics of time zones and airport gates.

Every path required blood. Every choice was a small death.

Belly had a real job waiting—not an internship where she fetched coffee and pretended to matter, but an actual position at a literary press in Manhattan. She'd just midwifed a book into existence: a strange, gorgeous thing about subverted fairytales and sports psychology wrapped in myth, about how you could take different roads and still arrive at the same inevitable ending. The author had thanked her in the acknowledgments. Her name was going to be in a real book.

Conrad had Stanford. Had medicine. Had a future he'd designed with his usual precision: finish med school, match for residency, become a doctor. Make his mother proud from whatever garden she was tending in the afterlife. Those were his dreams.

But they weren't his only dreams.

Conrad wanted to give Belly everything. Books and coffee and orgasms and a house with good light. Her own set of keys. A ring. He wanted to watch her become whatever she was going to become. He wanted to be the person she came home to, the person who got to see all her versions.

But wanting was never enough. Hadn't they learned that already? Hadn't they been taught that lesson in hospital rooms and funeral homes, in the gap between I love you and I'm leaving anyway?

One night in June, they sat on the floor of her apartment. The windows were open. Someone's music drifted up from the street, something with a bass line that felt like a heartbeat. Between them, all the futures they could choose sprawled out like a map of uncharted territory, full of blank spaces and uncertain borders. The kind of map that warned some places were unknowable, some territories too dangerous to cross without losing something vital.

Belly pulled her knees to her chest. She was wearing one of his old t-shirts and her hair was piled on top of her head in a messy knot. She looked young like this. Younger than she was. Conrad wanted to wrap her in something safe.

( But safety was never what she wanted from him. )

"So," she said, and her voice only shook a little. She was getting better at this—at being brave, at saying the hard things without shattering. At not falling apart every time the future looked like a cliff edge. "You'll go back. And I'll stay here."

The boulder rolled down the hill.

Mom's decided to fight this. She's going to fight this thing with everything she has, and I have to believe that means something. 

So I have to believe there's time. Time for her. Time for us. Time for all the things we haven't said yet.

I'm sorry for being so complicated and difficult and scared in the meantime, Belly. I'm sorry for all the times I should have been honest and wasn't. I'm sorry for leaving like this.

But I'm not sorry for loving you. I never could be.

I hope I see you at Thanksgiving. I hope you understand, even if you can't forgive me yet. I hope you know that loving you is the least complicated thing about me.

You make me hope for a lot of things.

You're it for me, Belly. There will never be anyone for me but you.

Yours (if you'll ever have me again),

Conrad

Now it's late July, and the train jolts. 

Belly blinks back into herself—out of the memory of him in her apartment, out of orchards and Christmases and fogged car windows, out of every version of them that led here. To this moment. 

To not knowing what comes next.

She's twenty-two and untethered. Diploma in a tube somewhere in her childhood bedroom, and—what? 

Belly's thinking about California. About how the light there is different.

She's thinking about Conrad in that light, white coat and dark circles, saving lives while she's—what? Figuring out what comes next? Making it all about him by moving there, or making it all about fear by staying away? Why can't there be a third option that isn't as painful as the one they're stuck with?

So she's been sitting here, trapped among impossible futures, which is why she doesn't notice that the guy is still standing over her waiting for the empty seat until he snaps, "Lady, you doing an inner monologue or something? Sheesh, forget it."

Belly blinks, opens her mouth to apologize—

And then she sees him.

Behind the annoyed commuter who's now shuffled off to the next vacant bench, backpack slung over one shoulder, clean shaven, hair a little too long, eyes finding hers with the brand of inevitability that's defined them since they were kids. Since before either of them had words for what this was.

( In fairytales, they call this fate. In real life, they call it choice. )

Conrad.

"So…is the seat taken? Or."

Belly lets out a choked sound as he sits beside her.

"What are you—" she starts. "You were going to fly straight into Boston and meet me there." 

Conrad sets his backpack down, settles into the seat like he's been planning this all along. Which he has. His knee presses against hers. 

"Right. Except. We're always meeting up or finding each other," he says, and there's something sheepish in the way he ducks his head, like he knows how it sounds. "I know it's crazy, but I thought. I thought...it would be better to arrive somewhere together this time."

And Belly knows then—knows it the way you know the sun will rise, the way tides answer the moon—that she doesn't care what configuration it takes. Her in California with the wrong kind of light, or him figuring out how to return to his born coast, or both of them meeting somewhere random in the middle of the country over and over again like characters in a road movie. 

She would do anything to make this work.

She would do anything to keep him forever.

The train keeps moving. Connecticut becomes Rhode Island becomes Massachusetts.

They stop at Cousins first. It's a habit, superstition, the way you touch wood for luck. The house looks the same as it always does in summer: the hydrangeas overgrown in that romantic, deliberately wild way. 

They go inside just long enough for Belly to find something she'd forgotten she was looking for. Deep in her bedroom drawer upstairs that still smells like the lavender sachets Susannah used to tuck everywhere, she finds the list. The one she made when she was thirteen, all earnest hope and uneven handwriting: Things to Do Before I Die!!! (Dramatic, even then.)

Belly unfolds it with trembling fingers, half-afraid of how many unfinished dreams she'll find.

But.

There are so many she could cross off now: See the Eiffel Tower. Learn a new language. Live in my very own apartment. Read 1,000 books. Kiss in the rain. Go on a road trip. Publish something with my name on it.

And scribbled in the margins, the truth she's been carrying since before she knew what to do with it: I ♥ Conrad Fisher. Isabel Fisher. Mrs. Conrad Fisher. B ♥ C 4ever.

She laughs, a bit teary, breathless, at her little self and her achingly obvious heart. No different than the one beating in her right now.

Conrad appears in the doorway, watching her with an expression that makes her feel like a painting. "You ready?"

"Yeah." Belly folds the list and tucks it in her pocket. "I actually am."

The cottage is waiting.

Their cottage. The one Conrad rented three years ago—that first summer after everything fell apart and then, miraculously, fell back together.

They haven't been back since.

( Some places are too sacred to revisit until you're ready. )

The door swings open and the cottage exhales salt and memory. Everything is exactly the same: its weathered blue shutter eyelids, the kitchen table with one short leg and all its rings, the bookshelf full of summer reading left by strangers and past selves.

And Conrad is standing by that bookshelf now, holding something. The guestbook: the cottage's history, written in dozens of hands, spanning decades. Stories layered on stories. People marking their presence, their love, their fleeting claims on happiness.

He's holding it open to a page near the middle. His handwriting, three years old.

"Oh, so I finally get to read this very mysterious..." Belly's words trail off as she skips over to read what he wrote.

Isabel Susannah Conklin, will you marry me?

The words blur. She has to read them again. And again, like if she reads them enough times they'll start making sense.

"You—" Belly's voice breaks, and she blinks. "Did you. When did you write this?"

"Three years ago. Because I wanted you to know, even back then," Conrad explains to her, holding the book steady, even as her hands shake while taking it. "Even when everything else was uncertain. I wanted you to have proof of how sure I am about you."

She blinks again, frozen.

"Belly." Conrad sets the book down now, turns to face her fully. He's beautiful like this, so nervous and certain at once.

He opens his palm and there's a ring nestled in it—something that makes her breath catch. It's breathtaking. The band is wrought in delicate white gold, twisting like infinity itself, like the endless loop of waves returning to shore. But it's not just infinity. Woven through the curves are intricate vines and branches, so finely detailed they look like they grew there, like something from a fairytale forest married to mathematics and eternity. Where the two motifs meet, tiny diamonds are scattered like dewdrops. And at the center, a sapphire the color of the ocean at twilight. The special blue between day and night, between known and mystery. It's surrounded by a halo of smaller diamonds that make the blue seem to glow from within.

"I wanted—" He looks at her, and she feels it like a touch. She always does. "I really wanted it to be ours."

Tears burn behind her eyes, hot and sudden.

"Will you marry me, Belly?" he says, and it's not really a question anymore. It's an offering. A promise. A choice he's making in front of whatever gods are listening. "Now. Someday. In three more years, if that's when you feel ready. Because I'm done being afraid of anything other than my future without you in it."

Conrad steps closer, and she can feel the heat of him. She'd live forever in those green eyes.

"Marry me because this—" He gestures between them, around them, at the cottage and the ocean beyond and the whole complicated history of them. "—this, you, are the only thing I've ever been sure of."

The first few tears chart their courses down Belly's cheeks.

"We don't have to figure out everything right now," he continues, and his hands are in her hair, on her face, thumbs wiping away tears. "California, New York, wherever. We'll figure it out. Together. But I need you to know—" His voice drops. "I'm choosing you. I chose you then. I chose you when I got on that train. And I'll choose you every day for the rest of my life if you let me."

"Yes," Belly gasps, and then she's kissing him before he can even finish, kissing him like she's trying to write her answer directly onto his mouth. "Yes, yes, yes."

The guestbook is still open beside them, pages fluttering in the ocean breeze from the window. Conrad breaks the kiss—just barely, just long enough to breathe—and reaches for a pen. Then he hands it to her, and his hand steadies hers, and she can feel him breathing, can feel the moment expanding to hold them both.

She takes the pen. Her hand shakes only a little—brave, even braver than she's been—as she writes beneath his three-year-old question:

Yes.

Then Belly's hand stills. Because there's something else. Something she wrote three years ago.

She flips back one page, and there it is in her own handwriting, slightly smudged.

Conrad leans over her shoulder, reading it. She can feel his breath catch.

"It's silly. I was still thinking about our facts, I think," Belly explains quietly. "I wanted to write down three things that would always be true."

"You have brown hair," Conrad murmurs, reading, and she can hear the smile in his voice. "And brown eyes."

"And I love you," she whispers. "Those are the things about me that don't change."

He turns her around gently, and his eyes are bright with tears he's not bothering to hide. Then he takes her left hand, and the moment slows down—becomes something they'll both remember forever, something they'll tell their children about, something that will live in this guestbook and in their bones.

Conrad slips the ring onto her finger. The infinity and vines catch the light, the sapphire glowing like a piece of the ocean itself, and it fits perfectly, like it was always meant to be there. Past and future bound in metal and stone. And then they're kissing again.

The book's pages turn in the wind as they do, revealing all those blank ones ahead.

once upon a time,

Conrad is ten. All knobby knees and serious eyes, holding the DVD remote like it's a weapon he might need. 

They've watched The Princess Bride at Belly's request four times this week alone. Susannah keeps saying they'll wear out the disc, but she says it fondly, like wearing things out from love is the best possible way for things to end.

"Do you think Westley and Buttercup are happy after the end?" Eight year old Belly asks, because she's already the kind of person who needs to know what happens after the credits roll, who can't just let a story rest.

Conrad pauses the movie. The frame freezes on the kiss, the sunset, the promise of ever after. He's quiet for a long moment, and then:

"I think they get to decide what happens next," he says, and there's something in his voice that's too old for ten, too knowing. "That's the best part, Belly. The story doesn't decide for them anymore."

Young Belly considers this with the gravity it deserves. Outside, the rain is letting up. Soon Jeremiah and Steven will come barreling down the stairs asking if they want to play Mario Kart, and Susannah and Laurel will call them for dinner, and the moment will dissolve into the thousand other moments that made up their summers. 

But right now, in this parenthesis of quiet, it's just the two of them and a question about whether love gets to last.

"Well I hope they're happy," she says finally, very seriously, like she's making a wish.

"Me too," Conrad says.

He doesn't unpause the movie right away. Instead he looks at her—really looks at her, in that way he sometimes makes her feel like he's seeing something she hasn't grown into yet—and for just a second, she wonders if they're still talking about Westley and Buttercup at all.

Then Jeremiah thunders down the stairs, Susannah calls about dinner, and they're just kids again.

the end

THE BLUE HOUSE 

BELLY & CONRAD'S LOVE SHACK AND BED AND BREAKFAST 

no, Belly

you're so boring! fine,

THE BLUE HOUSE

GUESTBOOK

Second summer as fiancés!

— B & C

Mr. and Mrs. Conklin-Fisher were here. (I'll never get tired of writing that.)

— B

Our little one loves it here too.

— C

We bought it! The cottage is officially ours now.

Our very own summer house.

— B & C