Work Text:
For most of that first year, Conrad sort of feels like he’s holding his fucking breath.
Curled up with Belly on the 5am train to Brussels, her cheekbone warm at the base of his neck and her hand gripping the waist of his jacket as she snores—the kind of weary, stuttering breaths he used to hear through the walls at Cousins on nights after a long day in the sun. Conrad’s counting her breaths for at least half of the ninety-minute journey.
Or across from Belly in her kitchen six days later, tipsy on St-Germain and watching her drop fettuccini into a pot of boiling water with what he’s certain is an expression of unadulterated affection. Conrad wraps his forearm around her stomach to ghost his lips across the back of her shoulder and, for one brief second, feels a shock of anxiety so intense his body goes cold. And then Belly melts into him, trails her nails along the skin of his bare arm in that way she did when they were teenagers that would make him shiver and murmur that feels good, and he sighs into the warmth of her sweet-smelling skin.
Or six weeks later, a morning on his couch in Palo Alto, still wearing running shorts and staring at the soft whirl of his ceiling fan with his phone against his ear. Belly’s telling him about her day—about the picnic they had in Parc Monceau this afternoon for Gemma’s birthday; about the spaniel puppy she met that made her think of Rosie; about the new shoes she’s going to wear to the wine bar tonight, and the new guy Celine announced she’s bringing. Conrad can hear the clatter of her makeup, undoubtedly scattered haphazardly across her bathroom counter, and the echo of her laugh on speakerphone, and he feels his heart squeeze with something that is equal parts tenderness and dread.
Or six months later, the morning after Christmas, sweaty skin to sweaty skin, in her bed and buried deep inside her, so out of his mind in love he could probably recite poetry about it if he weren’t so fucking horny. Belly’s thumb is cupped behind the shell of his ear and her breath is hot on his lips and she’s saying his name the way she always has when he’s had her like this—like a sigh of relief. And when Conrad shudders and comes inside her, it’s the I love you whispered into his mouth that staves off the lurking threat of a panic attack.
Because here’s the thing they don’t tell you about finally getting the girl: it’s terrifying.
Conrad can’t feel overwhelmingly in love with her—can’t see the pendant on her neck or listen to her giggle through a story or feel her fingers in his hair or let himself imagine her body swelling with his baby inside it one day—without a parallel tremor of anxiety. A two-for-one-deal, or an unexpected plus-one at the dinner party, depending on how you look at it.
It’s not, like, debilitating or something. He doesn’t feel like he’s being hunted for sport every time he looks at his girlfriend. But it’s always there, a little bit, lurking: a not-insignificant part of him that’s waiting for the other shoe to drop.
Conrad tells Ryan this, sometime around month three, bouncing his knee and drumming his fingertips on his thigh. He’s watching two birds hopping along the high branch of a sycamore outside Stanford’s student health center, and he’s thinking about how Belly’s probably home for the night, studying for her cognitive neuroscience exam, wearing that faded Stanford Med hoodie he sent two weeks ago.
“I get that it’s supposed to be scary,” Conrad says, “but I think if I lose her again it’ll fucking kill me.” Which is putting it pretty charitably.
“Is that what you’re afraid of?” Ryan asks, in that precise tone of his which, exasperatingly, betrays nothing about his real thoughts. “Losing her?”
And, well, yes. Of course. But that’s not all.
Mostly, Conrad is afraid he’ll get used to the way it feels to love her so openly and be loved back. He’s afraid he’ll come to rely on it. Or, worse, that he’ll start to take it for granted.
He thinks about the steadfast, starry gaze of preteen Belly, and the way her love for him was, for so many years, an easy certainty: everyone will die one day, and Isabel Conklin will always love Conrad Fisher. He thinks about her pressing that piece of metal into his palm in her high school parking lot, rain ice-cold and pendant still warm from her skin. He thinks about well-after-midnight on Cousins Beach, the hardened look in her eyes and the way that white hairbow thrashed in the wind when she turned around to leave him there. He thinks about moonlight bouncing off the cobblestone streets of Montmartre, the outline of the cab he managed to hail a little blurry through the tears in his eyes.
He thinks about how standing in the aisle of that commuter train, whizzing through a Parisian suburb with the pad of his pointer finger pressed delicately against the hollow of Belly’s throat, was the first time someone told Conrad they loved him since, well, maybe since his mom died. It took until the sixth or seventh time Belly said it, murmured between kisses and sighed against his heart, that Conrad could even hear the words without feeling like the wind had just been knocked out of him.
He thinks about how many times he’s had her and lost her.
He thinks about his penchant for self-sabotage, and his hero complex, and the fact that his neurochemistry is, clinically speaking, fucked.
They’re intrusive thoughts, uninvited and unwanted and a regression on his years of methodical and consistent therapy. They persist regardless.
Conrad also, for the record, tells Belly about all this.
He’s pretty sure she already knew, from the way he must’ve looked at her that very first night in Paris (devout and defenseless, like some kind of trembling and wounded animal). But if there is one thing the last ten years has taught Conrad, it’s that he shouldn’t—can’t—expect Belly to know how he’s feeling if he doesn’t tell her.
So he tells her, between the kisses he layers beneath her ear and on FaceTime marinating salmon fillets and in the love letters he continues to send her biweekly, like clockwork every second Friday from the post office on campus.
“Again,” Conrad whispers constantly that first week, swallowing her delighted laughter and backing her into the door of her apartment without even bothering to turn on the light. His hand is curled lightly around her throat, and she tastes like the bottle of Syrah they shared over dinner, pepper and blackberry mixed with something chalky that he’s come to recognize as her newly beloved shade of red lipstick. The windows are still thrown open from the lazy afternoon they spent fucking atop her tangled sheets, and Conrad can hear the muffled sounds of crickets and house music over her heavy panting.
“Every version of me,” Belly says dutifully, between smacking presses of their lips, and yanks the shirttails from his jeans, “in every world.” And then Conrad is on his knees, pushing her linen dress over her hips, mouth warm against her kneecap. He can already smell how much she wants him as he licks a line up the inside of her thigh and she adds, smile audible even through the hitch in her breath, “Always chooses you.”
At first, it’s sort of like that: a game. Tell me you love me, baby. Prove it.
And Belly and Conrad have always been good at games.
August, a hotel bathroom in Marseille, their initials in her handwriting on the fogged-up shower door: BC + CF 4ever.
“Do you have practice writing that particular phrase?” Conrad teases, with his fingers working gently through the knots in her hair, and she tilts her head back to look at him over her shoulder.
“Oh, so now we’re pretending you never stole my diary in elementary school.”
Conrad’s eyebrows knit together. He scoffs, feigned offense, and the sound echoes against the Carrara coating the walls.
“Conrad, the moms made you—”
“Take you to the boardwalk for ice cream to apologize?” His smile is wry and his eyes are undoubtedly sparkling. “Yeah, Belly, I remember.”
Maybe it is a little more elementary-school-diary-entry than transatlantic love letter; but that subtext quickly vanishes when Belly’s message is joined by the unmistakable imprint of her breasts, pushed into the glass when Conrad crowds her against the door and slips his hand between her thighs a few minutes later.
Belly sneaks a photo of the evidence after their shower, which Conrad only learns two weeks later, when she texts him the picture in the middle of his first day of MS3: i miss you. i love you. infinitely.
December, her mouth at his ear, sharing a deep emerald velvet chair at a piano bar in the Marais, with Belly’s body draped over his lap and her hand cupped possessively against his jaw. “How much do you love me?” in a voice scratchy enough for him to know she’s well-past-tipsy.
Belly’s friends are at the bar getting another round of drinks, and she has a lit cigarette dangling between two of the fingers currently caressing the stubble on his face, which Conrad could've sworn he’d never find hot until he sees Isabel Conklin do it. A part of him wants to nod at her hand, case in point: he loves this woman so much, he’ll kiss the taste of drunk cigarettes off her lips in a loud, crowded room full of strangers.
“You know how much I do,” Conrad tells her instead, with a thumb denting the skin just below her bottom lip.
“Enough to fuck me in the bathroom right now?” Belly asks, and there’s something dreamy in her wide-eyed gaze. Her pupils are massive, which could be from the darkness or the Burgundy they’ve been drinking, but Conrad would like to think is just from looking at him.
“Enough to fuck you wherever you want, baby,” he says. “Whenever you want.”
April, his bed, her hair still wet from the shower she took when they got home from the beach this afternoon and fanned across his pillowcase, Conrad propped on his side and leaning forward as Belly very delicately removes his glasses from his face.
“I thought you liked them on me,” Conrad smiles, and when she stretches her arm out to leave the frames on his bedside table, he takes the opportunity to duck down and kiss the silver chain resting right over the spot where her neck meets her shoulder.
“It’s because I like them so much that I needed to take them off,” Belly returns. Her fingers are already weaving into his hair, nails biting soothingly against his scalp, and she’s wriggling her hips toward him on the bed. And, well, it’s ridiculous, Conrad thinks, that a person could be so precious when she’s also making him this hard.
“Oh yeah?” He brushes her hair behind her shoulder, then, letting his lips linger just to feel the way her breath catches in her throat. “Tell me how that works, Isabel.” Belly shivers under his mouth, which is an even better reaction than Conrad could’ve asked for. “Sensitive,” he hums, somewhere under his breath, and the laugh she huffs out is both doting and impatient.
“Fuck off,” and then, “I need you.”
And if Conrad had to pick—if he had to sift through every single moment he’s spent with her, and every time he’s touched her, and every place they’ve been together—he’d say that right here, with her foot looping around the back of his knee and her nipples hard under the silk of her camisole and her breathy little voice telling him exactly how much she needs him, is the only place Conrad ever wants to be.
But it’s in the quiet moments after that Conrad feels the most pitiful about it.
“So. Back on your birthday,” he murmurs into Belly’s hair that next morning, hands beside her hips on the edge of the quartz island and chin resting in the crook of her neck. The coffee machine is gurling, and sunlight is streaming in through the window over the kitchen sink—a perfect spring morning in Palo Alto, and Belly is here to witness it. She’s wearing one of his old t-shirts, perched on his countertop, with her bare legs wrapped around his waist and his come still inside her body, and he’s fucking ruminating.
“Our anniversary, you mean,” Belly corrects, lightly, with her chin against his temple and her fingers carding through his hair the way they always do when Conrad collapses into her like this. If he weren’t a little embarrassed about the particular mood he’s found himself in, he might’ve reared his head back to fix her with an exasperated look.
“Before,” Conrad mutters instead, with a small kiss to her nape to assure her that he is not actually grumpy.
“Before I kicked you out?” She tries. He can hear the smile in her voice. And again, if Conrad were in his right mind, he would acknowledge that this—the fact that they can talk so openly about everything that has happened over the last six years—is evidence enough that they’ve built something that will last this time around.
He does look at her for this next part.
“I said you were stuck with me forever.” Belly brushes the hair from his forehead with her fingertips as Conrad speaks. “A, uh,” he pauses, nose wrinkling sheepishly, “a shitty joke.” And his lips are quirked, but it doesn’t quite reach his eyes.
“No,” Belly shakes her head, brows furrowed. She’s looking at him with a familiar doe-eyed expression. “No, Conrad. Rewind.”
Conrad’s hand slides under the back of her (his) shirt, thumb against her spine, and he feels her skin pebble with goosebumps. “To which part?” He asks her. His voice catches a little bit in his throat. He’s pretty sure he knows which part she’s talking about, but he needs to hear her say it anyway.
Belly’s throat bobs, and she tilts her head to the side. Her hair has grown out since last June, brushing beneath her collarbone now—or, in this particular moment, the distressed navy collar of a Patriots tee he’s owned since high school.
“To when I told you I’d wished for you on every birthday,” Belly whispers, with that same tender tilt to her head. Her fingers press into his temple, a delightfully grounding pressure, and Conrad’s eyelids flutter. “Not even sort of a joke,” she adds, and her gaze drops to his lips.
And would you look at that? Conrad is smiling again, the kind that most assuredly reaches his eyes and could perhaps even be classified as smug. He is also, potentially, blushing a bit. He can feel the warmth in his ears, and he can’t even bring himself to care.
“Every birthday?”
“Mm,” she nods, and her legs tighten around Conrad’s waist to pull him impossibly closer. He’s already getting hard again, and he knows Belly can feel it from the way her breath hitches and her teeth sink into her bottom lip.
Conrad leans in to bump his nose against hers. “Even the year Steven and I hid the remote so we could watch the Celtics in the playoffs and you and the moms missed your annual Sixteen Candles rewatch?”
Belly’s eyes narrow, but her stubbornness is betrayed by the slight twitch at the corner of her lips. “Even then, Conrad.”
And Conrad has to kiss her then, so he does—soft and lingering and toothpaste-flavored. He can feel her breath on his lips when he asks, “Even the years you were with him?” It probably sounds shy, embarrassed even, the accompanying noise he makes in the back of his throat.
But Belly’s answer comes immediately.
“Especially those years.”
Conrad does rear his head back this time, if anything just to confirm the seriousness in her expression. And it’s the same expression, he’s been realizing more and more, that she’s always saved just for him: quiet, lingering, unguarded devotion. It’s the way she looked at him dancing at the Cousins Beach Debutante Ball; tilting her chin up for a kiss on a dark, snowy beach three days after Christmas; glancing across the passenger compartment of his Range Rover with the sun on her cheeks and his brother’s ring on her finger. It’s easy, in that moment, for Conrad to imagine that same pretty smile half a century from now, framed by whisps of graying hair.
He swallows around a lump in his throat and tucks a piece of her hair behind her ear, a nervous tic more than anything. Conrad exhales, “Yeah, I know.” And he does.