Work Text:
You’d never really been one for small talk, it all seemed too formal and stiff to you. Standing there and asking the most basic level questions where the answers would barely change the response seemed so menial, so trivial. What did it matter talking about the weather? You wanted to know things about people, their deepest secrets, the things that made their hearts beat and their souls tick.
The first time that you met Conrad Fisher you were 11 almost 12 years old and he was 12 and a half. He was slightly shy at the prospect of meeting a stranger, a stranger his mother wanted him to meet no less and he shuffled over to you on the porch with his arms crossed stiffly behind his back. “I’m Conrad” he said and you nodded “y/n.”
There was a beat of silence then the awkward sound of mosquitos buzzing in the air and your mother and Susannah’s laughter drifting from the kitchen as you stood there. “It’s hot isn’t it?” Conrad finally asked you after a moment and you nodded “yeah.”
He cleared his throat, eyes darting around nervously “erm…so do you like the weather in Cousins?” He asked and you sighed internally, hating the prospect of dreaded small talk. You turned towards him and looked him dead in the eye, seeing the way he gulped but didn’t drop your gaze.
“When was the last time you cried because you were happy and why?” You asked him and he blinked.
“What?”
You looked at him with all the stoicism a tiny eleven year old could muster and repeated “I said when was the last time you cried because you were happy? I don’t care about the weather, tell me something real.”
He thought about it for a second and then almost hesitantly as if he wasn’t sure he should be telling you this he replied “when I won my first football game and dad told me he was proud of me…he’d never said that before.”
You smiled at him and the tension started to roll from his body. In the following years you’d come to cringe when you thought about this interaction, at your brazenness and choice of question, but it was your instant openness that had shocked him and drawn Conrad to you in the first place. Just like that the ice was broken and the two of you were friends, the rest was history.
In the present day that felt like a lifetime ago and in many ways it was. Almost a decade had passed, you were older and time had brought you closer and closer until it snapped and now you might as well have been strangers.
You sat at the table stirring your tea for what felt like the millionth time, the sound of the spoon scraping against the cup jarringly loud against the silence. He was too far away, his body angled away from yours even across the table and you ached with the desire to reach out and touch his hand.
“How’s work?” He asked after what felt like an eternity of silence. You paused the incessant stirring of your tea and looked up at him. His eyes were focused on a sugar packet on the table refusing to let you look too closely.
“I quit” you said and for a second his eyes flashed up, shock evident in his features.
“Oh” he replied “I’m sorry.”
“It’s okay” you said instantly “it was a shit job anyway, I think I’m gonna go to college.”
“Really?” You could see that he was remembering how you’d given up your dream college, how you’d moved back home and let the fear of change keep you behind. He was remembering all of the fights that you’d had about not giving up, all the times he’d tried to convince you to follow your heart. It was ironic that it had taken losing him for you to see that he was right, that your stubbornness had only led to regret.
He swallowed “that’s…good” he said “I’m happy for you.”
You were dying inside, the boy you knew would have picked you up and spun you around, he would have laughed, he would have said ‘I told you so’ or teased at the very least. Sitting here, making idle conversation was like sitting with a stranger. It was a performance, an act between two people who knew enough about each other to fill in every single gap but were too shattered to exist together anymore. Two broken puzzle pieces and you only had yourself to blame.
“The weather is miserable” you finally said after another stretch of silence you needed to say something, anything because breathing the still air was starting to feel like inhaling glass “I’ve never seen Cousins like this.”
Conrad turned to face the window, the raindrops beating on the glass were fierce, the wind belligerent and howling. He picked up his cup and sipped slowly his eyes far away as he watched the storm. “It’s like this a lot in the winter, completely different to the summer.”
Your eyes closed automatically, you’d never seen cousins in the winter before except for once. Last December, when it all went wrong, when you tore everything apart.
It hadn’t been raining then, it had been snowing. Powder white snow that crunched under foot covering the little town with a fine mist. Your breath had fogged up the windowpane as you’d driven into town and Conrad had squeezed your hand tight. Everything had started so perfectly, your relationship at that time was so beautiful but so fragile just waiting for the hairpin cracks to fracture.
You could tell that he was thinking about it, about last December with the way that his face was twisted. There was a wrinkle between his furrowed eyebrows he only got when he thought hard, one you’d often teased him for, pressing your thumb over it to smooth out the soft skin. You were too far away to do that now and not just physically, you no longer had the right to tease him, to touch him so casually.
“How’s your mom?” You asked and he looked up from the napkin he was twisting between his fingers and caught your eye for the first time.
“She’s good” he murmured and his voice was tender and full of love. No matter what happened between the two of you you’d always have a shared love for Susannah. No one else in the world apart from Jeremiah understood how wonderful she was like you. “She got the all clear last month…she’s getting better every day.”
You’d heard it from your own mom but hearing it from Conrad directly was still a wave of relief. The bridge between you two narrowed ever so slightly as you shared a look of desperate relief.
Looking into his eyes directly was hell. These were the eyes you’d once called home, the soft blue your paradise and your dreamland. Now there was a wall behind them, the easy openness gone and you couldn’t blame him for that. His guard was up and you knew why.
December flashed across your mind again and you saw Cousins painted in snow once more, picturesque, beautiful and blissfully unaware that in her cold lay the end of it all. You saw Conrad and the bouquet of crimson red roses, so bright and vibrant against the pale grey sky. “I love you” he’d said “I’ve always loved you” the words were so sweet but they tasted bitter when you breathed them in. Everything was happening at once, Conrad was in college and you were working at home so far away from each other. Life had been padding along all this time and suddenly it had decided to sprint and everything was changing. Susanna was sick again, you’d given up your dream, Conrad was changing so afraid to lose his mom. The future which had always been something to look forward to was suddenly a terrifying thought, vast and open and bleak in front of you with no clear direction.
He held out the roses to you, told you that he loved you and asked you to move out to be closer to him and you fled. You abandoned your plans of spending a pre Christmas weekend in Cousins and ran all the way back home. You’d lost everything, most importantly your sense of self and you didn’t feel like you deserved Conrad’s love. You left without turning back, leaving the roses on the kitchen island.
Bizarrely in the coming days, weeks, months as you mulled over your decision the roses would be what you came to focus on. Did he throw them away as soon as you left? Did they wither and crumple at the bottom of the trash can buried under cans of beer and pizza boxes? Or maybe he threw them straight onto the fire, watched them be consumed by flames turning to ash and curling into smoke burning out as fast as the two of you. Or maybe he did what you suspected he did, what the most Conrad thing to do would be. Maybe he put them in his mothers big pink vase on the kitchen window sill…watched them slowly die day by day, petals falling and crumpling to the ground as he waited for you to come back and claim them, unaware that you never would. Did each crumb of hope wither away with every hour that the roses died? You thought that maybe as the scent of their decay filled Susannah’s lovely bright kitchen, cloy and thick in the air, that he finally gave up on you and left December behind.
You couldn’t look at him anymore and you broke away from his eyes shamefully. You looked at the house, the kitchen island, the old white chairs, the fireplace and the white washed walls. It was all so familiar but so different, once again you were seeing it in a new season for the first time and with Spring some of its life had washed away. In every crack in the plaster, every scuff on the hardwood floors there was a memory.
Every summer since you were 11 years old, had taken place in this house. All those beautiful, vibrant days coloured every room in shades of grey, the present failing to compare to the memories of the past.
You saw Conrad sitting next to you at the table, squeezing your hand when Jeremiah teased you. You saw yourself drinking Susannah’s sweet tea on the porch, playing chicken in the pool, laughing till your lungs ached in the living room. The summer everything became new flashed through your mind, Conrad kissing you for the first time on the porch, Conrad with sand in his hair laying beside you. Your hands tangled together, your laughter echoing in the car, sneaking down to the beach at midnight, playing games in the surf. A mirage of happy memories contrasting with the dreary April that you lived in now.
You were silent and sedentary, trying to stop the tears falling from your eyes as you thought about all you’d lost, the memories that made it hard to sleep at night. Conrad was the one to break the silence, his voice cutting over the ringing in your ears and bringing you out of the sunshine filled memories into the grey. “Why are you here?” He asked finally and his voice was defeated, tired and worn.
You swallowed hard, that was the question of the day, the question of the hour. You’d asked him to meet you in Cousins, asked him to drive down in the middle of his college break and he’d done it, despite everything he’d made time to see you and now he needed to know why.
“I-“ your voice caught and you clenched your fist under the table keeping ahold of your emotion “I needed to see you.”
His voice was thick, his gaze steadfast down at the table as he refused to look at you “why? after you left I thought you never wanted to see me again so I need to know why.”
“I made a mistake” you whispered “Conrad I made the biggest mistake of my life when I left you and from the minute I walked out of here I knew it was wrong…I - god” the tears that had been threatening to spill finally flooded out and you couldn’t speak, crying hard, pressing your palms into your eyes desperately trying to stop the flow.
You didn’t hear him stand up, didn’t hear him close the distance between the two of you. You jolted with surprise when you felt his hand on your shoulder, so warm in contrast with the freezing room. He said nothing, looked only at a fixed point above your shoulder but he stepped closer and closer until his chest was level with your head, his other arm stiffly coming to stroke through your hair. Even after everything he was still comforting you and the thought made you cry harder, tears soaking the thin fabric of his Henley.
It reminded you of another night Conrad had comforted you, the first time he’d ever seen you cry. The glum September after your beloved pet died. You were 14 and Susannah brought the boys over for a weekend in an attempt to cheer you up. It resulted in you hiding in your room crying your eyes out when Conrad had tiptoed in. He’d said nothing even then but he’d held you in his arms letting you cry until your breath was rattly and your voice was hoarse. “It’s okay” he finally whispered to you, “I’m here.”
The force of that memory was what made you finally be able to stop the tears, you pulled away and looked up at Conrad, wiping away the tears on the back of your hand. He started to say something but you cut him off “please, please just let me say this” you begged him and he paused before nodding and reluctantly taking the seat opposite you once more.
“I’ve made so many mistakes in my life” you began “so so many but none as big as when I let you go…I never explained it to you I didn’t know how to but you deserve that…I asked you here because you deserve that. I don’t expect you to take me back, I don’t expect you to forgive me, I don’t expect you to do anything.” Your voice wavered “I hope we can be friends again one day because well…because I miss you but I wouldn’t blame you if you never wanted to see me again after this.”
You took a deep breath and he went to speak again but you cut him off. “I left you because I was afraid, I loved you too much and I was so scared that you’d realise I was messed up and leave that I left you myself.”
He made a sound of surprise, indignation, shock you couldn’t tell which but you carried on “you were in college, you’d met all these people and I just felt like I didn’t fit in your life anymore…you were driving for hours almost every weekend coming to see me when you should have been having fun moving forwards but instead I was making you stay stuck with me…”
You finally looked at him “I tried to set you free Conrad, I thought it was for the best but every second of ‘freedom’ has been nothing but missing you, wishing I’d realised that you were right and you were everything to me. From the minute I left this room I’ve lived here, I go back to December all the time wishing I could change my own mind and see what was real, what was my future, because it wasn’t my insecurity or my fears…it was always you.”
Conrad’s eyes were glossy with his own unshed tears and he reached across the table taking your hand in his, squeezing your fingers hard like he couldn’t believe you were there in front of him “I thought you outgrew me” he confessed “I thought I was overcrowding your life, coming around all the time when I was unwanted.”
You shook your head “that couldn’t be further from the -“ and he interrupted you, his words hurried and rushed like he needed to expel them.
“I lied to you” he said “I told you college was good, that I was having fun but the truth was I hated it. I really hated it. I missed my mom, my brother…I missed you. I didn’t care about any of the parties, no one understood about my mom or even understood me…I thought if I hid that from you and made you think I was having fun you wouldn’t see how much of a loser I’d become…that you wouldn’t move onto someone better.”
You stood up abruptly, your chair scraping loudly against the hardwood floor. “Conrad Fisher” you rushed to his side, squeezing his hand tightly “you were never a loser…not to me I had no idea I thought -“
“I should have told you, we should have talked to each other. I could tell you felt scared of the future but all I did was push you when I should have asked what was wrong, don’t take all the blame.”
You sniffled, wiping away a tear “how did we become such a mess?” You asked and he stood up, looking down at your face as he cupped your cheek.
“Life’s a mess” he whispered “but you were always the best part of it.”
You pressed your own fingers over his, closing your eyes briefly “I love you” you whispered “I’ve always loved you.”
You felt his breath fan across your cheek as he exhaled “I love you too, so goddamn much…do you think we could ever be what we used to be?”
You shook your head “no” you replied instantly “because If we loved again I swear I’d love you right, no more roses left to die…all in.”
Conrad blinked “I’d like that” he said “on one condition.”
Your breathing stopped “anything.”
“Let me love you too” he leaned in until your lips were inches apart, blue eyes warm as they stared into yours “please.”
You bridged the gap and kissed him, the cold frost of winter melted away in seconds, December already fading into an old memory. Spring was in bloom and you had a really good feeling that everything would be okay.
___