Chapter Text
When the wine and the weed had worn off, and post-Conrad clarity had kicked in, Belly felt something that had previously relaxed begin to re-twist itself up in her chest.
Whether it was born from the weight of her uncertainty in their situation—Who shows up, unannounced, to someone’s apartment in Paris after not speaking for a year?—or the decade of history between them, anxiety had began to settle into Belly’s bones. She needed answers, if only to soothe over the freshly healed hurt that loving Conrad Fisher for so long had caused.
“What was your plan coming here?”
Sure, it’s a bitchy question. He’s half-naked in the bed she had fled just moments prior, looking much younger than he had in ages. For the first time, she muses to herself, he’s not in control of what happens between us. If she were vindictive, if he were anyone else, he would already be on his way out. But Paris-Isabel is mature, she reminds herself, and she can do hard things. Like ask the love of her life why the fuck he showed up on her doorstep asking to spend the day with her like last summer hadn’t wrecked them both.
“I didn’t….I didn’t have a plan,” Conrad says softly. He fidgets, and she knows it must hurt something in him to admit it. Conrad was never the impulsive one, not if he could help it. He was always so serious, so in control. And yet in this moment of vulnerability, that boy was nowhere to be found.
“I just, I thought I….I wanted to see you, I wanted to tell you-“
Belly already knows the answer to this question, but she interrupts him mid-sentence nonetheless. “Tell me what?” she demands, laughing breathlessly at how a year later they’re having the same damn conversation she had run away from in Cousins.
“That I love you,” he answers, refusing to break eye contact so she can’t hide from it.
This Conrad is just as sure of it, just as sure of himself as he was last year. The Earth has completed one full journey around the sun, they are both a year older and maybe wiser, and Conrad still loves her.
The restless part of Belly’s heart settles at his declaration. Despite everything that has changed, this one thing has stayed the same. But just like before, she doesn’t know how to handle him sitting there, heart in his hand, offering it to her yet again. As much as her heart wants to just give in, her head wins just as he flashes half a smile at her.
“And?” she asks, impatiently. Conrad is not malicious by nature, but he keeps his cards close to his chest, and she is out of energy to guess what he wants from her.
He finally glances down, and she gets a brief reprieve from eyes that could read her look a book.
And then it is decimated, because he says “I wanted to know if any part of you still loved me,” the end of the sentence trailing up like he decided it was a question halfway though.
The sheer audacity of the insinuation Conrad was making filled her with anger. No one has ever questioned my love for Conrad Fisher. Susannah knew, Laurel knew, even Jeremiah could see straight through me by the end. I spent four years trying to get over you, trying to choke down something that has been baked into the core of my being, and ruined my wedding to your fucking brother, she wanted to scream, because I couldn’t stop myself from loving you! And you think a year could change that for me? She has to look away from him before she says something she regrets. Although they’ve both done their fair share of taking things back, it’s not something she could walk back now. Not when the past few hours has been filled with the most honesty they’ve ever shared with each other. She studies her hands instead, contemplating how to answer him.
But Conrad interprets her silence differently.
“You don’t love me anymore?” his voice breaks, shoulders raised like it would defend him from the anguish written plainly on his face.
Belly shakes her head in exasperation, turning back to him. “I’ve always loved you,” she laughs softly, “That’s the problem.” She smacks her palms down on her the bed in emphasis. It has always been my problem when it comes to you.
“I don’t really think that’s a problem,” he whispers, anguish lifting slightly as he forces a smile.
You aren’t getting it! the voice in her head wants to scream as the retaining walls that have held back every anxiety-fueled doom-spiral of doubt break.
“How are we supposed to know if we love each other because we want to and not because we were told to?” she questions.
Conrad gives her an indecipherable look, one that exists somewhere between “Am I missing the joke here?” and “Have you completely lost your mind?” but Belly means every single word she says.
(When you spend the majority of your life in unrequited love with someone, the notion that they could return that love of their own volition, and not because their late mother had insisted that you were made for each other, was incredibly hard to believe. Especially after Jeremiah had all but confirmed that his side of their relationship was not so much about loving her as it should have been.)
“You think that I love you because when I was six years old, my mother thought that we should get married,” Conrad tries to follow her reasoning, staring at her incredulously.
“No! That’s not….that’s not what I mean,” Belly shifts on the bed, trying to put jumbled 4:00 a.m. thoughts into an explanation that can articulate the fear that hasn’t abated.
She inhales deeply and tries again. “If your mom hadn’t gotten sick again, would we have even gotten together?” she asks, gesturing between them. Conrad flinches and his breath stutters like she had pressed on broken skin as his eyes grow wet. “You know, or would you have just gone off to football camp that summer,” she pauses to swallow the sob trying to claw its way out, and then lays her deepest fear at his feet, “…and never looked twice at me again?” She forces a laugh, an attempt to tack on levity to something that had haunted her for years.
He doesn’t interrupt, so she fills the silence. “You know, if we didn’t lose Susannah…..would it loom so large for us?” She can’t hold the fake smile any longer, and she’s struggling to keep her tears at bay. “What if….what if, you only love me because that’s what your mom wanted, and then your mom died?”
Conrad looks wrecked as he processes what she has hypothesized. “That is not why I love you,” he protests, and she nods in acknowledgement while swiping a traitorous tear off of her cheek. Even now, in the midst of questioning his love for her, she doesn’t want Conrad to see her cry.
For a second, Belly wonders if Conrad is trying to read her mind with the way his gaze is locked onto her.
“I have tried everything not to love you. For the sake of Jere, for the sake of-of…not dragging you down with me in my grief. I fought it…way before the summer that my mom got sick.” He pleads with her to understand him, and she presses her lips together hard to repress the urge to do something she shouldn’t.
“You’ve always been a precious person to me. I have always cared about you.” He leans forward, refusing to break eye contact so that she can’t escape hearing this. “And then, at some point…I started to see you differently and that scared me because I didn’t want things between us to change.”
Belly looks down at the floor, trying desperately to fight the insecurity still threatening to drown her. She covers her mouth with her palm.
“But the way that I feel about you, Belly, has nothing to do with my mom,” he grimaced. “If I met you for the first time tonight, I would love you.” That’s where he loses her again; his words completely delusional at best and an outright falsehood at worst.
“Oh, come on Conrad,” she scoffs, half rolling her eyes before she looks back at him. “I mean, how do you know that?”
She expects an excuse, or maybe an “I just do” for him. Something familiar, and worn that she sees straight through. What Belly does not expect, is for Conrad to yell at her.
“Because I’ve changed everything about myself, and the one thing that never changes is that I love you.” He’s exasperated, almost like he’s forgotten the number of times he’s given her everything she wanted and then walked it back like it didn’t destroy her. About how he could always hurt her in ways that Jeremiah cheating on her couldn’t even scratch the surface of.
Belly sighs. “Conrad, I…I wish I could be as sure as you.” His face falls.
“But I can’t,” she laments, shaking her head ever so slightly. “I’m sorry.”
For a moment, Conrad is frozen in her bed, blinking rapidly at the wall like it would help him understand her better. And then he nods, almost to himself, and turns to her and says “I’m not.” And then he tells her he’s going to catch the train to Brussels. The one he’d offered to miss if she would possibly want his company on her actual birthday. The one she’d tried to shove him towards all day, minus the brief reprieve from any kind of higher thinking that had taken place just before this disaster of a conversation.
She turns away from him as he gathers his clothes, arms wrapped around herself to keep her heart from taking over and begging him to stay. From making promises she doesn’t know if they can keep.
It feels like an eternity has passed but also mere seconds before she hears her front door closing, and it propels her off of her bed like there’s a string attached between their bodies. Belly tries to shake the hollow feeling in her chest off, but there, accusatory stare in full force, is Junior Mint. Right where Conrad had left him earlier.
Reality crashes over Belly in an instant. How many times had she been jealous of some other girl because she thought Conrad was paying attention to them and not her? Despite the way he had always seen her not as a nuisance the way Steven and Jeremiah did, but as a person worth spending time with. A person worth caring about. She wishes she could go back to the boardwalk that day and tell and little Belly that Conrad was trying to win the bear for her, not trying to show off for some random girl. She is good enough the way she is, and that’s why he—
Oh my God, I’m doing it again.
The next thing she knows, she’s in motion.