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It is a truth known by all and refuted by none that Conrad Fisher accepts help from no one.
But as is with all universal laws there is an exception.
The exception’s name: Isabel Conklin.
But don’t be fooled. This exception wasn’t birthed easily. It only exists because of a fight, one that is fought time and time again. Even after sincere promises and conscious effort are made, because alas. Not all can be changed with mere hope, no matter how stubborn.
—
Belly knew there was something wrong. She’d known the second she was received by her adorable boyfriend standing at the arrivals gate with an equally adorable cardboard sign in hand.
Palo Alto Welcomes You, Mademoiselle Isabel, it read in messy marker scribble.
She’d squealed, hopping on her toes, before launching into his waiting arms. He’d laughed into her hair, catching her easily in one arm, the hand with the cardboard dropping to the side.
“Hey, stranger. Missed you.”
Belly pulled back, giving him a wide grin. “I missed you more.”
Conrad allowed a smile, shaking his head. “Impossible.”
A frown pulled at Belly’s lips as she gestured to be set down. “No, it is true. I missed you so much.”
“And I’m very confident that I missed you even more than that,” Conrad maintained.
“You’re wrong.” Before he could argue with her further, she thrust the bouquet of flowers in her hand into his face. “Would I have voyaged a transatlantic journey with this delicate cargo if I only missed you a little bit?”
The tulips, a mix of pink and yellow and only a few petals short, tickled his nose. He sneezed.
Belly’s brows softened. She pulled the brown paper cone back, squinting down at them and then looking at him again in question.
“Are you allergic to pollen too?”
Conrad’s lips curved softly. “No.” He took the bouquet from her hands. “Thank you for these. They’ll really liven up the apartment.”
Belly narrowed her eyes at him more, taking note of the redness rimming his eyes and the sunken pockets of skin underneath them, but when he only raised an eyebrow back at her, she let it go. “Tulips are still your favorite, right?”
A look of surprise flashed across his face. “Yeah,” he murmured with a sniff. “I can’t believe you still remember.”
She’d beamed, proud. “I always remember everything about you, Connie.”
“I love you,” he said, kissing the side of her head.
“But not as much as I love you,” she said, just to tease.
“Nope.” And before Belly could say anything else, Conrad smoothly maneuvered the handle of her suitcase into his hand and her backpack’s strap from her shoulder onto his. To compensate for her now empty shoulders, he draped his free arm around her and led her out the airport. “C’mon. Time for you to finally meet California.”
—
So was Belly surprised when she woke up in the middle of the night to the feel akin to fire on her skin? Well, yes. But only because she was still half unconscious. But when her brain finally caught up and strung together all the clues that had been laid out in front of her throughout the day, she wasn’t surprised in the least.
The bloodshot eyes and the sneeze attacks. The uncharacteristically deep groan he’d heaved when he set down her luggage in his apartment after carrying it up the set of stairs and the slight coughing fit that had followed. The easy acceptance when Belly declined his offer to eat out and said she’d rather order in and head to bed early to fight off her jet lag.
With all the bits pieced together, the verdict was clear.
Conrad Fisher was sick.
—
For as long as Belly has known Conrad, he has never gotten sick. Which is not an accurate fact, she knows. Obviously, he has gotten sick. He is human after all, despite what she had believed in her youth. But in her presence, he has never been ill. She has never once seen a wad of tissue victimized by Conrad’s snot (twelve-year-old Belly may or may not have been aggrieved by this) nor has she ever heard the sound of him retching into a toilet bowl.
Which, thinking about it now, seems unfair to her, considering that for all the summers she’s shared with him, there has to have been at least one instance of him getting food poisoning or him barfing after getting wasted. It’s statistically impossible for him to have stayed healthy every single day for a decade of summers, which means she missed out on his moments of weakness. The only times she’s seen him physically vulnerable is when he had a cast on his arm at ten and then when he used to wake up hungover at seventeen. Besides that, Conrad Fisher has always been the picture of perfect health.
Unbelievable, she thinks. It needs to be tabled for later, but she is absolutely going to interrogate him on all the times he was unwell in the summerhouse. For now though, she has to figure out how to take care of him. She, who is not a medical student. She, who has exactly zero experience in the Ill Conrad Fisher field.
She does, however, have experience taking care of his brother. It was a lot of picking up snotty tissues with gloved hands and washing soiled shirts and hourly back rubs. She imagines it can’t be too different to take care of the other Fisher brother.
The problem is she doesn’t want to mess up.
There’s this fear in her now that she doesn’t remember having when Jeremiah was ever sick. With him, she fell into the caretaker role easily. There was a mild undercurrent of annoyance whenever he would expect her to clean up after him, but eventually, it became second nature to her. She would start making him soups at the first sniffle without even realizing what she was doing.
But Conrad is training to be a physician. What if her standard level of care isn’t up to par with his standards? And though Belly knows he’s become more intentional about letting her in, she also knows it’s still a struggle for him to do so. What if she messes up in a way that makes him retreat back into his old ways? Makes him hesitant to let her in again?
Panic isn’t effective. Taking a breath, Belly swallows down her fear to focus on the task at hand. She twists around to see Conrad beside her. One arm is thrown over her torso, the heat of his burning skin seeping through the thin fabric of her sleep shirt and into her chest. He’s shivering under the covers, his mouth parted slightly as he sleepily pants for air.
Oh, baby. Lifting herself up, she rakes her fingers through his hair, smoothing his matted hair away from his forehead. She leans down to give the sweaty skin a gentle kiss, then springs into action.
Okay, Belly, think. What’s the first course of action?
Sliding out of bed, she pulls the covers to his chin and tucks them deeper around him, then goes off to find another throw blanket. She rummages through his closet, his side table drawers, his dresser, only to come up empty.
She groans. Where would Conrad keep his blankets? She wanders out to the hallway, and opens the door to the linen closet, finding a fleece blanket on the top shelf. Pulling it down, she takes it back to Conrad’s room and drapes it over the duvet, wrapping it snugly around his trembling form.
She hesitates at the side of his bed, biting her lip as she wonders if she should wake him up to take medicine. But looking at his sleeping face, she decides against it. He already doesn’t get enough rest as it is; she doesn’t want to disturb him if it isn’t necessary. Deciding to let him continue sleeping, Belly refills his glass with fresh water and returns it back to his nightstand, then slips in beside him again, wrapping her arms around his waist as she dozes off on his chest.
—
Belly’s fit of nerves is unmanageable now. Just like Conrad’s fever. He tossed and turned all night, keeping her up with his tortured groans of pain in her ear. She managed to convince him to drink some Gatorade after the third time he threw up, but he refused to eat anything, taking his medicine on an empty stomach, which even Belly knew was counterintuitive and he proved her right when he woke up again an hour later to emptily retch into the plastic bag she quickly conjured in front of his face.
But it’s morning now, and Belly can no longer bear to see Conrad in pain. The sounds emitting from him are pathetic and animalistic simultaneously, but she doesn’t know what else to do. She’s given him medicine, fed him electrolytes, tried to cool him down with a wet washcloth to his forehead, but to no avail. His temperature has only risen higher.
Biting her nails, she unlocks Conrad’s phone and dials the third number in his favorites.
It’s picked up on the third ring.
“Fisher, I swear, you better be dying—”
“Um, Agnes?”
The voice on the other side pauses. “Oh. Hey.”
“Hi. This is Belly. Uh, Isabel,” she corrects. “Conrad’s girlfriend.”
“I know who you are, Belly,” Agnes says gently. “What’s up? Is Conrad okay?”
Belly whimpers, eyes drifting towards Conrad’s room. “No, he’s not okay. He’s had a fever since last night. I don’t—I don’t know how long he’s been sick; he didn’t tell me,” she says on the verge of a sob. She inhales, trying to stave off her tears. “But he was sneezing and coughing a lot yesterday, and I’ve tried everything I know, but I just took his temperature and it’s 104 now, and I don’t know what to do.”
“Shit. Okay, is he sleeping right now?”
“Yeah, he just went back to sleep a few minutes ago. He was awake for a little while but he was delirious. He drank a bit of water but he still won’t eat anything.”
“He hasn’t eaten anything since last night?” Agnes asks.
“No. I’ve tried, but he keeps saying his throat and stomach are hurting, and that he feels too nauseous.”
“Dammit, Fisher,” Belly hears Agnes mutter to herself. Then, to her, she says, “Okay, you’re doing great, Belly. I’m on my way. If he wakes up in the meantime, get some food in him. I don’t care if you have to force it in, just make sure he eats something. A cracker, toast, anything, alright?”
“Okay.” And then, smaller, she asks, “You’ll be here soon?”
“Yeah, Belly. I’ll be there in no time.”
Belly nods and the sound of a door closing on the side of closing gives her heart some relief. “Okay. Thank you.”
—
Now, it’s Belly who’s heating up. The jealousy boiling in her veins isn’t fair, she’s aware, but that doesn’t keep it from simmering.
It aggravates her, how natural Agnes seems to be in Conrad’s apartment. There’s a fluidity in her movements as she moves from one cabinet to the next, an ease to the shuffling between rooms to find what she needs, that Belly lacked. She had fumbled to locate the tub of medicine, had spent the good part of an hour to find the thermometer, but Agnes has a hundred percent success rate on her first try with everything.
Belly regrets calling her over.
“Wake up, Patient Zero.” Agnes stands over Conrad’s bed, snapping her fingers in his face. “Bedtime’s over.”
He blinks, wincing when the bright light hits his eyes. “What are—Why are you here?”
Agnes readies the thermometer. “Making sure your sorry ass doesn’t die of pneumonia.”
Conrad rolls his eyes. “You’re a terrible doctor. I don’t have pneumonia. It’s just a seasonal cold.”
Agnes scoffs as she sticks the thermometer into his mouth before he can close it. “Then you’re an even worse doctor because it’s influenza, not a seasonal cold.” The thermometer beeps, and she pulls it out. “See? A hundred and four. Belly was right.”
Conrad’s brows furrow. “Belly?” And the way he says her name might be the worst way she’s ever heard it, as if seeing Agnes made him forget all about her. She wants to curl up in a ball and die but at the same time also wants to sink her fangs into his neck and stake her claim, remind him who he belongs to.
His head turns to her perched on the other edge of the bed.
“Hey, Connie. Remember me? Your girlfriend?"
He has the audacity to ignore her, for which she’ll definitely be laying into him after he’s recovered, and instead tries to glare at her, though it looks pretty pathetic with his reddened eyes and stuffy nose.
“You called—cough—Agnes? Why—cough—would you do that? I told—cough—you I was—cough—fine!”
Belly opens her mouth to reply, matching his glare with a worse one of her own, but Agnes cuts in because she can.
“Hey, eyes on me, hotshot. I’m not done examining you.” She shakes Conrad into looking back to her, then says, “Lay off of Belly. She’s been taking care of you all night; she did the right thing calling me. Your stubborn ass is making her life harder than it needs to be.”
Oh. Belly softens hearing Conrad’s ex-girlfriend defend her. Maybe she should revisit her earlier thoughts.
“I’m fine. And stop talking about my ass. Only Belly is allowed to.”
Another fit of hacking coughs punctuates his insistence.
“Right. You’re fine and that’s why you’re coughing like you’re on your last lung.” Agnes rolls her eyes. She moves a hand down his neck—(Belly watches with a twitching eye)—pressing her thumb at certain points. Conrad moans, and then Agnes wraps her fingers around the column of his neck and squeezes. “Does that hurt?”
“Son of a bitch,” he hisses, his eyes narrowing at the redhead. “Yes, Agnes, it hurts.”
Her smirk is evil. “Good.” Removing her hand, she says to Belly, “Don’t fret. He has the flu, but his fever should break in a day or two, if”—she cuts Conrad a withering look—“he does as the doctor orders. But if it climbs up again, take him to the clinic.”
Belly gives her a gracious smile. “Thanks, Agnes.”
From the bed there’s another roll of eyes from Conrad. “You’re not the board certified doctor you keep acting like.”
“You’re talking an awful lot for someone whose throat is hurting,” Agnes notes with a lift of her brow.
Belly snickers. “I like her,” she tells Conrad.
Now it’s Conrad who’s skeptical. “Just last week you told me you couldn’t wait to pull out all her hair.”
A dark blush colors Belly’s cheeks. She looks at Agnes sheepishly. “That’s not… That’s just his fever talking.”
Agnes holds her gaze, unwavering, before shrugging. “It’s cool. I called you a bitch when he told me about you.”
Belly’s mouth drops open. She turns to Conrad. “You let her call me a bitch?”
Conrad’s eyes widen. “Guys, stop,” he whines with a sniff. “I’m sick. You can’t be mad at me.” He fakes a cough into his elbow, gazing up at Belly with puppy dog eyes and a pout.
“Aha!” Belly and Agnes share a wicked smile. “He admits he’s sick!”
Conrad gives them a scowl before angrily turning onto his side and burrowing into his pillow. “I hate you both.”
“No sleeping. And you shouldn’t be wearing so many layers,” Agnes orders, ripping the covers away from him. “Get your blood circulating, take a shower, and for goodness sake, eat something. I even brought you popsicles. Those weird organic grape ones that you like.”
“And I made soup. Tomato, like Christmas,” Belly murmurs.
Conrad’s gaze softens at the mention of last Christmas. “Alright,” he replies just as gently. “I’ll have some soup.”
“Great. He’s all yours now, Belly. Apologies.”
Agnes gathers her things, and with a final threat flung to Conrad and a list of notes explained to Belly, she makes her exit, leaving the couple to themselves.
—
“Straight from the Café Isabel: One steaming hot bowl of tomato soup, served with a slice of buttery garlic bread. Only for the best patient in the world,” Belly announces, placing the tray with two ceramic bowls and the slices of buttered toast onto the coffee table. “And his amazing girlfriend, too, of course.”
Bleary eyed, Conrad grants her a gracious smile from where he’s sitting on the couch. “Thanks, honey. This smells amazing.”
Belly beams, joining him.
After Agnes had left, Belly coaxed him into taking a shower. She had offered to help him, nervous that he might collapse in the tub, but he’d insisted he could do it himself. So, while he showered, she changed his sheets and tidied up the room. He had managed himself until Belly finished up, but as soon as she was throwing the last of the laundry in the washer, she’d heard the loud drop of a bottle falling, followed by a muffled grunt. She’d rushed into the bathroom to find Conrad hunched over his knees on the tub’s floor, the stream falling around him in a curtain.
“Oh, baby.”
Quickly, she stripped off her clothes down to her underwear, then stepped into the shower to crouch in front of him.
“‘M too tired,” he mumbled into his arms. “I can’t—Can’t stand.”
“Shh, it’s okay. I’ve got you.” With a palm to his cheek, she carefully lifted his head, then ran a hand through his bangs, brushing away the suds before they could land in his eyes. “You did great, honey. All we have to do is rinse you off.”
His head lolled against the tiled wall, eyes closed. “Mm.”
Cupping her hands under the spray, she collected handfuls of water to pour them over his hair until all the shampoo was washed off. Then, she took the clean washcloth hanging off the hook and wet it before running it down his chest and back in soothing strokes, making sure to clean every inch of his skin. Once she was done, she encouraged him into standing, letting him lean his weight on her as he did a final rinse under the shower to make sure there was no lingering soap.
“There we go. All squeaky clean,” Belly praised as she turned off the faucet.
Helping him out of the tub, she’d patted him dry and wrapped the towel around him, before drying herself, then walked him out to his room. He’d crumpled onto his bed with a moan while Belly went to get his clothes.
“Do you feel better?” she asked as she tugged a pair of sweatpants over his calves.
Conrad nodded slowly. “A little bit. My nose feels less congested.” The edge of his lips curved downward when he looked down at her kneeling to help him dress. “But I feel bad making you do all this.”
The waistband of his pants snapped against his hips. She tipped her chin up at him. “You’re not making me do anything, sweetheart.” Leaning forward, she gave him a small kiss near his belly button, then stood up, handing him his shirt to let him pull it on himself so he could have a little bit of autonomy.
“Now, I believe you promised me a movie date while I was here. Mind saving me the best seat on the couch while I heat up lunch?”
So while Belly had readied the food, Conrad had taken a short nap on the sofa, and now he was looking more like himself.
“No nausea?” she asks him softly.
A tiny cough emits from him, but he lightly shakes his head. “Not right now.”
She grins. “Then you better eat up as much as you can before it comes back.” Reaching an arm out, she grabs one of the bowls off of the tray. She clinks the spoon against the edge to tap off the excess, then holds it in the air near his mouth, letting it cool down a bit before nudging it closer. “Open up.”
“Belly,” Conrad protests with a disgruntled frown, “you don’t need to baby me. I can feed myself.”
The spoon drops back into the bowl, and she lowers it into her lap, feeling rejected.
“I know you don’t need to be babied, but I like babying you, Conrad,” she tries to explain. “I like taking care of you. Why is that so hard for you to understand?”
His features loosen with apology. “I don’t—I’m sorry,” he replies automatically. “It’s hard for me, I think. To let you take care of me.” He coughs out an exhale, then continues. “To let anyone take care of me, really, but especially you. You’re my… you’re my baby, you know?”
His seaglass eyes are big pools of adoration, and Belly can’t help but feel his love seep into her pores. “I know,” she replies with a tiny smile. “And I love how cherished it makes me feel when you take care of me. I only want to make you feel the same way.”
“But Belly, you already do.”
Belly sets the bowl back on the table, freeing up her hands. She slides onto his lap and takes her face in his hands, her normal temperature palms caressing his jaw on either side.
Conrad’s eyes flutter, a soft sigh escaping his lips. “That feels good,” he whispers.
Her own lips curve. She trails her fingers upward, tracing along his cheekbones and rubbing over the warm tips of ears.
“You were never truly babied, Connie,” she says. “Maybe until you were a toddler, but ever since I have conscious memory of you, there was always this unspoken expectation for you to take care of yourself. I think maybe even you put that expectation on yourself too.”
Conrad blinks at her from behind his glasses. There’s another sigh, this time a less pleasant one. “I think I liked it, that our moms saw me as self-sufficient,” he admits. “And I also saw how much their hands were full with the three of you—not that it was your guys’ fault, obviously. You guys were only kids. But it was hard for them, handling the four of us, all so close together in age, alone while they were so young themselves too, that I thought it would be better, maybe they could love me more easily, if I didn’t bother them as much.”
A pained sound leaves Belly. “And that’s insane, Conrad. You shouldn’t have been thinking like that at, what, the age of six? You were also just a kid.”
His shoulder lifts and drops in a half-shrug as his gaze flickers to the side. “I just didn’t like being a burden on them.” He meets her eyes again, and the vulnerability in them is so strong, it makes him look so much younger than he is. Belly almost feels like crying. “That’s why it’s hard for me to accept your help. With us, it’s always been me taking care of you. The flip of it… it makes me feel like I’m burdening you.”
Her fingers slip into his hair, tightly weaving around the damp curls at the nape of his neck. “Conrad Fisher,” she admonishes, her tone the equivalent to Laurel’s that it makes Conrad’s lips twitch, “you are not a burden. And you definitely have never been one to me.”
He smiles weakly at her. “That’s sweet of you to say.”
Belly huffs. “I’m not being sweet, Conrad. I’m being honest.” She shifts on his lap. “Tell me. Has taking care of me ever felt like a burden to you?”
“No,” he replies instantly.
She nods. “The same way, taking care of you has never been a burden on me either. Do you understand?”
Conrad stares at her as if his fuzzy flu-induced brain is trying to make sense of what she’s saying.
“Do you know how sad it makes me to think about you here all alone? To not know if anyone’s looking out for you?” This time Belly doesn’t stop the tears from welling in her eyes. “Who made you soup when you were sick? Reminded you to eat when you got too swept up in your studying? Who talked you down from your panic attacks? Or kept you company when the loneliness gnawed at your skin? Who stroked your hair when you got too in your head and couldn’t sleep at night?”
She’s full on crying now, unable to stop the images she’s imagined over the years of Conrad battling his pain alone. Her grip on him tightens, wanting nothing more to somehow fuse him with her, to absorb him into her, so he never has to be alone again.
Conrad wraps his arms around her, rocking her gently as he shushes her. “Belly, Belly. Sweetheart, shh.” Lifting a hand, he wipes the tears flowing down her cheeks and slides her glasses up to sit on her head so her vision isn’t obscured by them fogging up. “You’re right. For the first year, I was pretty alone. But that’s no one’s fault but my own. I was the one who didn’t bother to make friends and even with the few people that I became cordial with, I refused to let them see me when I was weak.”
Belly sniffles as she listens to him speak even though she knows she should urge him to not use his voice too much. It’s already coming out scratchy and rough.
“But Laurel called me a lot that year. She made sure I didn’t pull away completely. She sent me care packages every couple of months and would hound me if I ever missed one of our weekly calls. She even visited me that one time in the spring, remember? That was also when she sat me down and told me she wasn’t leaving until I made an appointment at the Student Counseling Center.” He lets out a fond laugh and Belly smiles slightly.
“That kept me going that first year. And then by the second year, after a little bit of therapy helped me come to my senses, I started to connect with other people. I signed up for the rec football team, went to trivia nights at the bar on Fridays, let Agnes drag me to coffee after our orgo lab every week…”
Conrad hesitates for a second, but Belly silently encourages him to keep going.
“Agnes took care of me, the few times that I let her,” he confesses. “She’s quite perceptive, as I’m sure you’ve noticed, so whenever she noticed I was coming down with something, she’d stay alert, making sure I was gulping down a Gatorade if I was dehydrated or keeping me stocked with pocket tissues when I was sneezing too much. She also did make me soup one time but it was awful, so after that she stuck to simply delivering whatever the soup of the day at the dining hall was to my doorstep or Doordashing something from Panera.”
Belly lets out a watery giggle.
“And for the short while we dated… she was the one to stroke my hair when I couldn’t sleep. I don’t… I don’t know if that makes it worse or better for you,” Conrad finishes, voice small with anxiety.
“It makes me feel better,” Belly assures. “I meant what I said earlier—I like her, and I’m glad you have her in your life. That she was here for you when I couldn’t be.”
To that, Conrad shakes his head adamantly, wincing a bit when it messes with the heaviness already weighing down his temples. “You were always here with me,” he informs her. “You were here in the polaroid I carried from room to room whenever I missed you too much. In the vial of the sand I tasted your lips for the first time on that stayed buried in my nightstand drawer. In the secondhand VHS of Sabrina I found in the library book sale. In the dirt bombs I learned to make and the birthday card you sent me for my ninth birthday that I have tucked inside my old copy of The Hobbit and the Sour Patch Kids I’d always see when I was standing in line to check out my groceries.” He tightens his grip around her. “You were here, in every star I saw in the night sky, in every wave that ever touched my skin, in every infinity sign the universe sent my way. I was never without you, believe me.”
A stunned Oh falls from her parted lips.
Spirits lifted, Belly plants her hands to his chest, then rises slightly to press a kiss to his pinkened nose. “And you’ll never be without ever again,” she promises into his skin. When she pulls back, she levels him with a stare. “But if you want to make sure that remains true, you need to stop locking me out.” Cradling his face in her hands again, she tells him, “You’re my baby, Conrad, and if we’re going to be equals in this relationship then that means you have to let me take care of you too.”
Conrad leans into her palm, and blinks up at her. He gives a nod. “Okay.”
Rewarding his acceptance, Belly launches an attack of kisses all over his face.
Beneath her, Conrad’s chest rumbles with laughter. His arms try gently to shove her away. “Stop. Belly,” he says between little wheezes of air, “I’m gonna get you sick.”
She pulls back with a grin. “Good thing I have a doctor boyfriend then.”
He presses his tender smile to the tip of her nose in return. “Hmm. Lucky you.”
“Our soups have probably gotten cold again. Let me go heat them up again,” Belly says, scrambling off his lap.
Conrad moves to stand. “I’ll do it. You sit down.”
Belly rounds on him with a glare, carefully holding the bowls away from his reach. “Conrad, we literally just talked about this.”
He raises his hands up defensively. “I’m only saying because you’ve done everything else!” he counters. “I can manage walking over to the microwave.”
“Can you, Conrad? Can you, really? Because you nearly fainted in the shower just now,” she points out. “Sit.”
Conrad dutifully sinks back into the couch. “Yes, ma’am.”
Belly sets down one of the bowls to give him a quick pat on his head. “Good boy.” She giggles when she hears his mournful whimper as she steps away.
When the soup completes its round through the microwave, she retrieves them and delivers them back to the living room. This time when Belly goes to feed Conrad, he obediently parts his lips and lets her slip the spoon between them.
He hums as he sips at it. “That really does taste good.”
“Better than Agnes’s?” Belly asks, eyes downcast on the spoon she’s swirling around in the creamy tomatoes as she tries to pass her tone off as nonchalant.
The edge of Conrad’s mouth tugs upward, knowingly. “Much better,” he supplies.
Belly’s eyes sparkle with pride. “You know that new bistro I told you about? The one near the Sorbonne where I get lunch sometimes?”
“Mhm.”
“They have the best tomato bisque. I managed to snag the recipe from one of the waiters,” she tells him gleefully, preparing another spoonful for him. “This is a really lame version of it, obviously, but when you come for Christmas next month, we’re definitely having lunch there.”
Conrad’s tender smile returns to accept her offering. “Can’t wait.”
“Is it warm enough?” Belly asks softly as he swallows. Her hand lightly curves around his throat, thumb caressing up and down his column with a featherlight touch. “Does it feel good?”
“Yeah, Belly,” he murmurs, “it’s perfect.”
She smiles and kisses the spot beside his Adam’s apple. “Because a true love’s kiss cures everything,” she explains against his heated skin.
His fingers brush over her hair. “Thanks, love.” After she feeds him his third sip, he asks, “Actually, can I make a small request for the soup?”
“Sure.” Tearing off a chunk of the garlic bread, she dunks it into her own soup before taking a bite. “What is it? More garlic?”
Conrad shakes his head, fiddling with his glasses. He gives her a bashful smile. “Can you add the little alphabet noodles next time?”
Belly laughs, but replies with a small nod. “Yeah, baby. I’ll make you alphabet soup next time.”
Conrad’s face lights up in gratitude. He brings her back into his lap, unable to bear being apart from her, tightly curving his arms around her stomach, then burrowing his face into her shoulder. “I love you,” he whispers into her skin, nose nudging at her soft spot. “You’re my favorite person, Belly Conklin.”
Reaching an arm behind her, Belly twines her hand into his hair. She twists her face to press her lips to the point between his ear and cheek. “And you’re mine, Conrad Fisher. Til the end of time.”
A matching kiss to her shoulder blade. A vow made into her skin. “And even after that.”