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“I know about Christmas. I know you two were together,”
It takes a second for the words to register.
I know about Christmas.
Belly turns toward where Jeremiah is sitting now on the linen loveseat (ironic), her lips parting slightly, arms and hands running cold as anxiety washes over her.
(It won’t be until a few weeks from now, when she’s thousands of miles away and able to fully process this all, that the implications of that admission will sink in. That she’ll realize his cheating had been premeditated.)
“Jere,” she tries, the nickname clumsily tumbling from her lips before she even knows what it will be followed by. She rounds the oval coffee table between them, a chilled bottle of celebratory champagne still mockingly occupying it. Her rapidly numbing fingertips lift the hem of her dress, voice shaky despite her best efforts, stammering out,
“I..I-”
“I know…I know you didn’t sleep together okay?” she hears him say as she takes a seat beside him. He says it with a sort of impatient certainty, in a hurried cadence, his hands gesturing as if to move them past this part; the part where he has to listen to her tell him the seemingly obvious: “We didn't have sex. I would never do that to you,”. He turns toward her, elbows on his thighs, and looks as if he’s just going to continue on. She’s sure he’s just going to continue; she can see he’s already thinking about the next thing he wants to admonish her for, her real transgression. She can hear her heartbeat thrumming in her ears.
But, as quickly as he had brushed the thought aside, he stops. The abrupt absence of his voice and the stiffening of his body sends a sharp jolt up through her. Her palms begin to grow clammy as she looks at him, throat closing, chest welling with sheer panic. She watches his expression shift, on a dime, feeling herself become light headed as the silence begins to stretch, his gaze scrutinizing, and she’s certain;
He knows.
He knows because it’s written all over her face.
“Belly..”
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“Belly..”
There’s a soft crunch as the final flaming log beneath the mantle severs in two, crackling as it crumbles at the edges. She groans, crinkling her nose.
“Belly..” she hears again, a hushed murmur to her right. At some point, probably around when Alan Arkin leapt for Audrey Hepburn out of the shadows, she had fully given in to exhaustion. (She had also, apparently, stretched her legs out lengthwise.) As she shifts, pulling her feet back in toward her body, she feels her heels slide off of what feels like a lap; a thigh. She opens her eyes, squinting with furrowed brows, hair mussed around her cheeks. She can faintly make out Conrad sitting at the other end of the sofa, his dark green cable-knit illuminated by the now dimming orange glow of their dying fire.
“Mm?” she hums, stretching her arms up above her head with a soft squeak, managing to catch the fond smile it elicits from him.
“I’m gonna call it a night,” she hears him say, and she nods, dropping her arms back down, nuzzling her cheek into the quilt she's now re-tucking up under her chin.
“You gonna sleep down here?”
“Mmm,” she hums again, brain still half asleep and playing catch up with the conversation, “Mhm,” she adds after a moment, chafing her ankles.
She sinks down further, her head resting squarely against the striped throw pillow propped up on the arm behind her, eyes closing once more.
“Okay,” she hears him say, a whisper.
She feels the couch dip as he slowly stands, hearing a low grumbling from deep in his chest as he does. She can feel her lips curve up unconsciously, the need to tease him rousing her.
“You’re such a dad,” she mumbles into the edge the patchwork, unable to stop her smile from quirking fully into a smirk. She swears she can actually hear the look on his face.
“Shut up..” he says, playfully, and she snorts, listening to the thudding of his feet as he rounds the ottoman followed by the dulled snapping closed of her laptop. When she opens her eyes again he’s standing over her, and she cranes her neck to look up at him.
“You need anything before I head up?” he asks, illuminated only by the light of the full moon pouring in through the french doors.
She shakes her head with a near-silent “mm-mm”, feeling remarkably young again, reminded of all the summers she had been in this exact position, awoken to a quiet Conrad carefully draping a throw blanket over her after she had failed to make it upstairs following a particularly grueling day of swimming.
It’s in that moment, as she silently reminisces, that he walks over and grabs the throw blanket folded atop the wooden stool beside the fire. To this day she’s certain he can read her mind- actually read her mind. She sighs as he lays it over her, delightfully snug, burrowing further beneath the extra layer. He carefully tucks her feet, the way you would a child's, her eyelids faltering under their own weight. She feels him remain there, standing over her swaddle for a few quiet seconds. She then hears the click of the light switch in the kitchen behind her, and she’s almost all the way back off to the snowy beach in her head when she finally hears,
“Goodnight Belly,”, the words acting as a final lullaby before sleep reclaims her.
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It’s not until about three that she wakes from the cold. They say heat rises and that had always been true of the summerhouse- well, at least on the two occasions she’d been there to experience it. The furnace is old, and the filter likely needs a change, but it's humming along; however absolutely none of it’s warmth is finding her here. The fire is close to completely burned out, the smell of soot and smoke filling the air around her. She's shivering harshly, teeth chattering as she grapples around in the dark under her covers, hand running along the seam of the couch cushions until she feels the plastic edge of her phone case wedged between them. She pulls it out to check the time, seeing Jeremiah just above Missed Call. From the timestamp it looks like it had to have come sometime between Casablanca and Wait Until Dark (Conrad’s pick; “You've never seen it?”), when she was losing the fight against the urge to "rest her eyes”.
She stretches out her legs, willing herself up, keeping the layered blankets wrapped around her shoulders, her grey pullover doing very little for the deep chill that had settled in her bones. Her toes, socks having been kicked off in her sleep at some point, are like little ice cubes as she flexes them against the short tufting of the rug before quickly padding over to the fireplace.
It’s pretty much burned down, she thinks.
But then, even still half-asleep, there's an Eagle Scout in her head, annoyingly responsible and suspiciously Conrad shaped, scolding her.
“Embers can stay hot enough to reignite for up to three days if not properly extinguished. Just because a fire looks put out doesn’t necessarily mean that it is,”
She sighs reluctantly, obediently beginning to grab for the tools hung on the stand beside the hearth, in search of anything she can use to safely snuff out the few remaining embers, mentally grousing to herself about how annoying Conrad is for making her do this in the dead of night. She carefully removes the shovel once her fingertips feel it out between the poker and broom, deciding she’ll just smother the smoldering bits of wood with their own ash. The metal stand and tools clink about as she removes it and she winces at the sound, trying to be as quiet as she can.
She keeps one closed fist around the corners of her cape of blankets, gripping it tightly in front of her chest, using the tool to messily scoop and pile the grey powder. She’s groggy, and her efforts are sloppy, the edge of her blankets becoming lightly dusted in the process. She jostles them from underneath with her foot hoping to quickly shake it off, but it’s with that decision that the task gets away from her entirely.
Shit shit shit-
She loses her balance, hand still dumbly clinging to her covers rather than releasing them to help catch herself, her shoulder careening into the mantle's edge, shovel dropping to the wooden floor with a loud clatter. She bites her bottom lip, groaning with the knowledge that she’ll be waking with a bruise in the morning, and bends down in search of the fallen instrument. She’s obviously not thinking clearly given her still throbbing deltoid, because she very stupidly wraps her fingers around the first part of it they come into contact with- which, as is her luck these last few years, happens to be the blade. The metal is searing, and she recoils her hand back into her chest with another frustrated groan, finally letting go of the blankets, allowing them fall to the floor behind her. The gust of air from their landing kicks up a bit more ash in a small plume (because of course) and now she’s altogether abandoning the disaster she's created, walking blindly around the floral upholstered armchair toward the wall across the room so she can find and flip on the kitchen light switch, and grab some fucking ice.
Susy Hendrix doesn’t get nearly enough credit, she thinks.
In her haste, and really the cherry on top of this cluster-fuck, she stubs her freezing cold toes on the wooden leg of the ottoman. It makes a loud thump, followed by two even louder thuds as she stumbles forward.
So now she's quite literally limping around the corner to the fridge when she hears footsteps upstairs, a quiet “Belly?” called from over the bannister.
Great.
“M’okay,” she croaks out, her voice rough, unused. She can hear a soft chuckle make it’s way down to her as she grasps an ice cube in her palm, holding to it tightly, water beginning to slowly dribble down her clothed wrist.
“What-” Conrad starts, surely about to ask “What happened?” after seeing the wake of what looks like a mini tornado having torn through where she was once peacefully sleeping, but he stops mid-question when he sees the ice in her flushed fist, and her left foot held up off of the ground.
“Shit-” he says, walking quickly over to her, “are you okay?”
Belly is sure she looks like an absolute mess; hair all over the place, one legging riding up, sweater sleeve darkening from the now steady stream of melt. She’s about to answer him, uselessly, when she feels his hand wrap around her damp wrist.
“Let me see…” he says, and she can’t help but notice just how doctorly he sounds. She wonders if this is the tone he takes on when he’s talking to the patients he practices with.
She opens her hand, the ice cupped in her upturned palm, and he removes it, gently tossing it into the prep sink to his left. He brings his hand up under hers, cradling it as he looks at the pink hue of it (mostly from the cold of the ice now). As his warm skin comfortingly cloaks her knuckles, and his thumb tenderly brushes the side of her index finger, Belly feels herself relax, going pliant in his capable hands.
“C’mere,” he says, leading her closer to the island, better able to assess the damage under the light she supposes. She hobbles a single step and then- oh-
He briefly lets go of her hand to grab the dish towel hanging from the handle of the oven, laying it out flat on the cold granite. And then, without preamble, both of his hands wrap firmly around her waist through the fabric of her crewneck, and he's lifting her right off of her feet like a toddler he's about place into a shopping cart (and with the same ease, which briefly makes her wonder if he’d been working out in California).
She tucks both of her lips between her teeth as he sets her down, his hand returning to hers so he can reexamine it.
(Of course it’s dawned on her that none of her injuries warrant this level of care, but really, who is she to argue.)
“Doesn’t look too bad,” he says, stretching a lanky arm out to open the freezer door, smartly opting for a microwavable bag of Birds Eye frozen sweet peas over a messy bare ice cube.
That’s that med-school training.
He places it gingerly into her slick palm, curling his fist around her hand to close it (as if she doesn’t know how). She swallows, prayerfully inaudibly, and looks up at him, blinking slowly from under her eyelashes.
She realizes she hasn’t spoken a word since he walked in. She parts her lips to say something, anything, really, but then he asks,
“And what happened here?” like she's five, and she lets out a little laugh under her breath instead, watching him crouch to look at her foot.
She’s looking down at the top of his tousled hair as he inspects it, realizing that she rarely sees the top of his head- if ever. And then her brain very unhelpfully supplies for her the memory of the last time she saw the top of his head, between her bare thighs almost four Christmases ago, and she forces herself to look away and at…well, literally anything else.
“Can you move them?” he asks, and she nods, wiggling her toes in his hand. Between you, Belly and I, neither her hand nor her foot have hurt since around when he walked into the kitchen. No harm in him still checking them out though, she thinks, right?
He stands after a second and says, “I think you’ll live,” in a low tenor, tone almost patronizing, and it ruefully travels right between her legs.
Instead of making the noise she’s inclined to, she lets out a soft scoff, the bag of peas crinkling slightly as she juts her other foot out to lightly kick at his knee in a half-hearted retort. He chuckles, the hand once curled around hers now ghosting over the side of her calf. She looks down at it, her skin alight beneath the tips of his fingers.
“Thank you Doctor,” she says quietly, catching the bob of his adam's apple as he stands back up. Her eyes find his, and he clears his throat.
“So..” he says, voice still a bit coarse, “Do you think you can make it upstairs without breaking anything?”
Her mouth falls half-agape, letting out another scoff, louder this time. A smirk grows on his lips, clearly satisfied with himself. “If you don’t think you can, I can always carry you,” he adds, and she rolls her eyes, a deep flush she prays he can’t see in the dim light rising on the apples of her cheeks.
“Funny,” she says, and- God, are his smile lines deeper than they used to be?
He’s still standing close, unnecessarily at this point, his hips brushing her knees through her leggings. He continues to hold her eye contact, the quiet of the kitchen settling over them both.
She should get down now.
She see his shoulder twitch, like he’s about to take a step back and let her. His eyes flicker between hers, and something seems to stop him from actually doing it; moving, creating that space.
Get down, Belly. Slide off of the counter.
He should be in bed, she thinks, oddly, he shouldn't be up right now; up at almost three-thirty in the morning, standing here, with her, in the kitchen- so close that she can see the hammering of his pulse point just below the hinge of his jaw. He shouldn't be here at all, she amends then; here, in this house, with her. Here, in this house, with her; watching movies, and doing crossword puzzles, and eating tomato soup, and tending to her like this. Looking at her like this.
And then,
He isn't here...he isn't here, as far as anyone else knows.
His eyes are still on hers when she feels the warmth of his palm through the thin black cotton covering her thigh. He's moved his hand up, from her calve to just above her knee.
Her brain is screaming at her.
Go, Belly. Now.
He's the first to break; she sees his eyes glance down to her mouth, then back up. Blink and you miss it.
She's thinks she may have stopped breathing.
She see's him hesitate, only for a second, and then very slowly he brings his hand up from her leg, knuckles ghosting over her temple, tucking a few pieces of still disheveled hair back behind her ear. Her lips part.
His fingertips linger there, on her cheek, tenderly brushing the bone beneath the skin, his breath warming the cold tip of her nose.
Admiring him up close like this again is intoxicating; something in her chest aches, the way her knee does when it rains.
His hand never leaves her cheek, and when she sees the corner of his top lip tug, just slightly (his tell), she knows what's about to happen.
Go. Fucking Go.
He finally begins to lean in, and she allows her eyes to flutter closed; wordless permission.
Please, she hears whispered from deep inside herself.
She feels the tip of his nose brush the bridge of hers, and for a fleeting moment, she feels the ghost of his bottom lip just below her cupid's bow.
One thousand, three hundred and seventy-five days…
But then, with a jarring suddenness, the air around her shifts sharply, becoming cold again. She opens her eyes just as quickly, watching as Conrad almost trips over himself taking a step backward, his shoulders nearly knocking into the cabinet just above the tool crock full of utensils, running a hand down over his chin.
“Fuck,” he curses breathily, shaking his head, as if coming out a trance.
“I’m- I'm sorry-” she sputters out frantically.
He continues shaking his head.
“No-it’s-” he says so quickly it’s almost incomprehensible, “Fuck,” he says again, “I-”
“It’s okay,” she cuts him off, desperately trying (and failing) to smother embers for a second time tonight, it would seem, “It’s okay-” again, “really-”, her stomach still in knots, “We- we’re both-”
“I should go,”
“Yeah- yes,” she says, nodding now, swallowing before, “We should- we should go to bed-”
“I think there’s- I can get a room, in town- maybe near Logan,” he says, almost to himself, “There was a, uh…motel, I think,” he continues, brows furrowed in concentrated recollection as he keeps his gaze down and away from her, “I think I passed it on my way here,”
“Conrad..” she says, shaking her head too now, “no..you don’t..you don't have to leave, it’s not-”
“I shouldn’t have,” he cuts in again, “I mean, I should have, gotten one, a room there..” he says, “when I saw- you were already here and I should have..” he explains, poorly, more so thinking aloud, “This..this was a mistake,”
It feels in the room, for a moment, the way it looks when the tides begin to rapidly recede, the way they do when a tsunami is on it’s way.
Belly stills in place instantly.
A mistake.
She loosens her grip on the bag in her palm, the word cutting through her like a dull blade.
Again.
“This..is your house,” she says, her tone painstakingly masking the storm she can feel begin to take shape inside of her body; barometric pressure falling with her shoulders, wind picking up in her lungs, debris being ripped and whipped around, bouncing off of her bones, nicking her heart.
“No it’s-” he says, seemingly unaware of the natural disaster he’s set into motion, closing his eyes as he goes silent for a second, exhaling and shaking his head again as he continues, “It’s yours, too- Jere’s..” he finishes.
The way he says it..
Belly knows what he’s saying, what he means, but it sounds like something else. It sounds like he’s reminding himself of something; “You’re Jere’s.”
“I'm going to..um..to grab my..” he says then, and the storm finally hits.
“Wait, wait..” she stops him, her tone disbelieving. Any restraint she may have had falters, her brows furrowing deeply, rippling the skin between, “You're...you're really going to leave now?” she goes on, “Like right now? In the middle of the night?”
He just stands there, a bit stunned, she thinks. He's staring at her, silent.
“Are you..are you kidding?” she asks.
She's waiting for him to say something. She's waiting for him to realize his error, and tell her that he’s overreacting, and that she's right, he just needs to get some sleep, if for nothing else than to placate her now. He doesn’t, though. He just keeps fucking standing there, this pathetically shocked look on his face.
“Incredible,” she finally mutters, and before she even realizes what she’s doing, the now slightly defrosted bag is leaving her grip in an angry hurl, and he’s catching it as it hits his chest. She’s already sliding down before it takes flight, dish towel falling to the floor as she does, physically pushing past him toward the dining room.
“Belly, wait-” he says, his hand reaching out for her arm.
“Just go Conrad,” she says, shrugging it off of her, turning the corner toward the stairs, “Leave.”
“Belly-” he says from behind her, his tone almost panicked.
“Leave Conrad!” she shouts at him over her shoulder.
“Belly!” he shouts back, and she spins back around when she makes it to the bottom step.
“What?!”
“I’m- I’m sorry-” he immediately stammers out, frantic.
"Go fuck yourself," she spits back.
"Belly-"
“What are you sorry for?” she immediately interjects, “What?” she asks again. Before he even has a chance to take a breath, let alone answer her, she adds "For almost kissing me?”, and she can see something flash in his eyes, like her saying the words out loud was crossing a line.
“Belly..” he warns.
“What?” she asks sardonically, “What? He’s three time zones away Conrad, he can’t hear us,”
“Belly-”
“Or..” she starts again, the words briefly sticking in her throat, “Or are you apologizing for spending the day with me?”
“No,” he exasperates, “that’s not-”
“Because, y’know, I’m Jeremiah’s property now, so,” she says, and she can see the muscle hinging his jaw dimple; the gritting of his teeth in his closed mouth.
“That’s not what I meant, Belly,” he says, carefully.
“Really? Because that’s basically what you just said- Jere's..this house, me,” she baits again, “Aren’t I?”
Conrad looks, for maybe the first time, in all the time she's known him, like he could hurt someone that isn't himself.
“That's not what I-,” he tries to say again, voice uncharacteristically shaky.
“No, go ahead and say it- you can’t even be around me. Should I have called, when you got here? Gotten his permission-”
“Enough, Belly,” he says, and she can feel it all over, seeing him gripping tighter to the small blue and white bag. It was an order; he sounded like her father when she and Steven would bicker at the dinner table.
"Y'know," she starts to say, her eyes embarrassingly beginning to sting, "I actually thought..”
But then she trails off, because she can't even say it.
I actually thought you were happy being here with me again. I actually thought you missed me the way I missed you. I actually thought today meant something.
She tastes the thoughts turn bitter on her tongue, the sentiment sinking to her stomach like a stone. She feels like a fucking idiot.
“Belly..” he says, pained at having clearly hurt her; again.
“No, no- actually, y’know what?,” she says, her voice thick with emotion, “It’s fine, really. You’re right, this was a mistake,” she quietly throws back in his face, trying to turn around again now but he reaches out for her and grabs her forearm.
“Belly-”
“Three and a half years, and you haven’t changed at all,” she snipes, cutting short whatever weak apology he was going to try giving her again, pulling her arm from his grasp once more.
He swallows, his face falling.
“That’s not true..” he says, and she can see that she's hurt him back now. Good, she thinks.
“Yes it is,” she says, “You push me away, and then you run- to your car, to California, to a motel- that’s still all you know how to do,”
“I’m not fucking running, Belly,”
“Stop fucking saying my name!" she shouts suddenly, so loudly it reverberates off of the walls. So loudly it hurts her own ears.
“What do you want from me?!" he yells back, and then "I almost just fucking kissed you!” he says, his tone now disbelieving, “Am I just supposed to fucking..go upstairs, and act like that didn’t happen?!”
She doesn’t remember the last time she heard him yell like this- maybe not ever.
“You’re not supposed to start reassessing the entire fucking day! You’re not supposed to…to tell me again what a mistake I am!”
“I didn’t say you were a mistake-”
“Yes you did! Again,” she says, and it feels like she’s slapped him. “Now-” she goes on, letting out a wet, rueful laugh as the volume of her voice drops, “Now it’s like all of a sudden it was wrong to be around me at all. Like I’m-”
The loud Pop! of the bag of peas splitting open as it hits the floor silences her, and she looks up, genuinely startled.
“All of a sudden?” he says, “You think it’s just all of a sudden that I can’t be around you?”, his voice losing a bit of it’s edge as he says, “No- don’t fucking lie to me Belly,”, and now she’s bordering on furious, opening her mouth just as he adds, “You know why I stopped coming home, after that fourth,”
Her parted lips pantomime an argument, her head shaking once more,
“I don’t..know what you’re talking about,” is all she musters.
“Yes you do,”
“No, I don’t,”
“Stop lying,” he says, taking a single step closer.
“You had school-”
“Stop fucking lying-”
“Stop being an ass!” she yells back, nearly spitting as she does.
“I had to move across the country-” he starts, but Belly turns, instantly. She doesn’t want to hear this. She can’t.
She tries to leave again, to go upstairs, but this time he gets a solid grasp on her arm and yanks her back, and her eyes go wide.
“I had to move across the country so I don’t ruin all of our lives,” he says, his tone entirely too serious. His voice entirely too piercing in it’s timbre. She feels like the floor is going to fall out from under her. “You know that,” he adds.
“No..I don’t,” she says, looking down at where he’s still gripping her through her sleeve.
“I can’t control myself around you, Belly,” he admits, and she goes completely still, any prepared retort she may have just had a moment ago dying as she looks back up at him. “And I don’t mean that in some fucking..abstract way,” he goes on, exhaling, “I mean…that when I’m around you, I want to…to touch you so badly that I feel sick..” he says, “I mean that it takes everything in me not to say something that I..”
Shut up. Shut up shut up shut up-
“I shouldn’t have stayed,” he continues, “When I saw you were here. When you opened the door, I should have…known better,”
The words are dizzying; the idea of Conrad feeling out of control- the idea that it's because of her.
“You’re..” he starts again, and she’s bracing for whatever's coming next, “You’re the only person…you know how fucked up..” a hard swallow, and then, “What my dad did, to my mom,” he finally says, “How much I fucking hate him for it, Belly,”
He hesitates.
“Do you think I want to be that person?” he asks, “Do you think I want to do that to Jeremiah?”
His name in Conrad’s mouth in this moment makes her stomach twist.
“I would never be able to forgive myself,” he says, the floorboards creaking beneath his feet, “It’s,” he exhales, and she swears she can actually see his pupils dilate further.
Her brain is screaming at her again.
Move. Fucking move.
“It's…” he whispers in another breath, like his mind is racing, and she wonders if he realizes he’s almost panting, “It’s all I can fucking think about,” he confesses, his voice rough, “Every time I’m around you,”
She sees his other hand twitch at his side, and his eyes look to be almost pleading with her; pleading with her not to let him do this. The vein in his neck is so pronounced, so blue, his chest rising and falling heavily under his tattered white flannel henley.
“I would…I would never do that,” she says with the last of her resolve.
“Then..tell me to stop,” he says, calmly, and Belly blinks up at him, shaking her head.
“Conrad..”
“Tell me to stop Belly,” he says again, and he actually sounds like he means it. Like he’s really asking her to, maybe if for no other reason than to absolve her. “Tell me..” he says, his breath softly jostling the tiny pieces of hair framing her cheeks.
She tries. She opens her mouth.
But the silence only stretches; the entryway for the next ten seconds is filled only with the heavy sounds of their breathing, and the tick of the clock on the wall.
And then she sees it, the moment it happens; the moment a long-held fast falters. That moment you break after you’ve been denying yourself something for so long, and you begin to rationalize that you deserve to have it, whatever it is; that life is too short, and you're too hungry.
When Conrad finally moves on her he doesn’t kiss her, he grabs her; lets go of her arm and lifts her right up off of the wood floor, with a speed that makes her head spin. It’s entirely unlike any of the times before; it's not for her safety on a beach, or to help her to the couch. He grabs her to take her, have her; for himself.
Suddenly she’s six feet in the air, gasping and grappling her legs around his torso. The moment her mouth does finally connect with his, for the first time in almost four years, it feels euphoric. It feels like what Belly can only imagine hard drugs to feel like; ecstasy, she thinks.
She swears she can taste candy cane.
Conrad moves blindly, nearly stumbling trying to ascend the stairs, and she’s shedding layers of clothing like her skin is on fire; first her crewneck, discarded on the middle steps. He’s trying to hold her up and not fall and desperately trying to reconnect their lips- and she’s trying to, almost knocking teeth with him in the process, but she needs to get her clothes off. She needs to feel his skin on hers.
She pulls back again, gasping a second time as she peels her white turtleneck off over her head in one fluid motion, her hair falling over their faces when she leans back down and retakes his top lip, feeling one of his hands greedily sweep up the bare divot of her spine. The other is under her ass, squeezing, keeping her legs wrapped around his waist. She wriggles them, her legs, biting down on his cupid's bow as she impatiently tries raking her calves down his sides trying to get his plaid pajama pants to fall. She almost takes them down in the upstairs hall in the process, but she manages to squirm them down his hips and they fall to his ankles. Conrad kicks them off uncoordinatedly, stumbling through his bedroom door, the handle smacking the door to his closet as it swings open. He walks her over, sure footed once more, setting her on his desk in front of the window with one hand as the other shoves it’s contents to the side, his tongue hooking into her mouth.
Thirteen-year-old Belly had this fantasy at least twice.
She’s licking into his mouth and tugging desperately at the hem of his shirt, both of his hands now free to grip her waist, cup her jaw, tangle in her hair- and he’s kissing her in a way he never had when they were together. He’s kissing her like she’s not her; not Belly. Not sixteen, not fragile, not this innocent thing that needs protecting. This isn’t the timid boy who slowed down and let her set the pace, who asked “Is this okay?” after every tentative touch. She doesn’t have the time or level of oxygen in her brain required to wonder if this is just how he is now- if this is how twenty-two-year-old Conrad fucks.
The hand of his not in her hair is reaching down between her legs, fumbling open the drawer she had once found a damning black velvet pouch in. The condoms inside are, almost certainly, very expired. Regardless, she’s had an IUD since freshman year, at her mom’s insistence, despite never having had sex without a condom- with anyone.
Belly breaks the kiss when she hears the rattle of the wood, panting as she looks at up him- and then someone else (because it can’t be her) is shaking her head.
And it’s true, she really doesn’t know this Conrad. This Conrad who’s spent three and a half long years holing himself away in some Palo Alto shoebox, trying not to think about his brother’s eyes on her. His brother's hands on her. The theft of it.
Conrad presses his forehead to hers, his skin hot against her own, and then he smirks, wickedly. And then he's kissing her again. It's somehow, impossibly, hungrier than before.
He only pulls back for a moment, a few seconds later, to fucking finally tug his shirt off over his head, her hands helping at the neck, reclaiming his bare shoulders as he tosses it to the floor. She selfishly rakes her nails down over the taught curves and he hisses with his mouth back on hers, his tongue against the inside of her teeth. She almost bites down on it as he abruptly lifts her again, her hands staying firmly planted as the muscles beneath them flex.
He turns and takes two steps, laying her down on her back on his bed. She can feel how hard he is under the seam of his boxers.
One hand slides up the back of her thigh to her ass, panting into her mouth as he pulls her leggings down by the waist, making quick work of them before climbing on top of her now only in her panties and bra. He reaches up under her bare back for the clasped wings, Belly arching to help him, and unhooks them as his other hand keeps him propped up. Once it's discarded to the floor, Conrad leans down to kiss her neck, wasting no time kneading the skin of her bare breasts, and she can feel goosebumps rise up and down her arms. She lets out a soft moan at the intermingling sensations, feeling his teeth nip just below her earlobe while his thumb brushes over the sensitive peaks of her nipples. A realization dawns on her then, momentarily breaking the spell he has her under, shaking her head softly again and pushing lightly against his chest.
“You ca-” his hand squeezes, hard, thumb skirting her ribs. “You can’t- leave a mark,” she breathes, arching her back once more to further fill his palm, and she feels his lips halt, but he doesn’t pull them away. He exhales slowly through his nose, the soft skin of them curling into what feels like a smirk again, both drawing a shiver from her.
He stays hovering over her, lips now trailing down her collarbone, sponging open-mouthed kisses between her breasts, the hum of his voice vibrating through her chest as he says,
“What about here..” before biting into the soft flesh, her hand reaching up from his shoulder to grip his hair.
“Conrad-”
It actually stings, the bite. She thinks he might be a little angry; she’s never been more turned on in her life.
He drags his mouth, hot and wet, over her tender skin, sinking his teeth in to the underside of the other as he begins to tuck two long fingers into the thin waistband of her panties. She thinks she’d let him draw blood if he really wanted. She thinks she’d lay here, and let him do whatever he wanted to her.
He gets the cotton and lace down to her mid-thigh before he has to break his mouth away to pull them the rest of the way off. He drops them, sticky and crumpled, beside her bra.
His hand is between her legs before she can say a word, fingertips relishing in how slick the tips of her inner thighs are.
And they are. It would be embarrassing just how turned on she was if it wasn’t so apparent to her that he loves it.
“Is this for me?” he rasps, and Belly nods breathlessly, looking up as he presses a kiss to the inside of her bent knee. “Tell me,” he breathes against the skin, and Belly feels painfully empty. She thinks might cry if he isn't inside of her soon.
“It’s- it’s for you-” she says, gasping when she suddenly feels the tips of two of his fingers run up and then down her slit, coating themselves.
“Say it again,” he instructs.
Belly isn’t sure what masochistic part of her decides this, but she needs to feel the stretch of him. No fingers, or tongue- nothing to ease her open. She wants the fullness of it; of him. Nothing, and then everything, all at once.
“It’s for you,” she says again, reaching down between her legs to wrap her tiny hand around his wrist. She slowly brings his hand back up to her chest, the tips of his middle and index fingers glossy with her as she places the heel of his palm onto her left breast just below her nipple, and then she takes those two fingertips into her mouth. She sucks on them, eyes round and supplicant, shaking her head one more time, spreading her legs a little more for him. Conrad immediately understands, watching her with eyes so dark they're nearly black, his cock twitching as her tongue swirls over his top knuckles. He returns to hover back over her wholly, mouths parting in sync when he removes his wet fingers, and then kisses her again, his tongue deftly curling against hers.
He pushes his boxers down and kicks them away, and Belly can feel the hard length of him brush between her thighs. The cavernous feeling is excruciating now, and so fucking good. He reaches down between them and grasps the base, running the head up and down twice between her legs, lubricating it, brushing her clit with each pass. Her eyes go a little wide when he lets go to hike her right knee up to hook against his hip, her heel brushing the hairy back of his thigh.
“I want you to look at me,” he says, his voice sounding so unlike himself, and she wonders if he felt the throb it elicited from her. She nods, eyes staying on his; it's sinfully intimate. His hand blindly retakes his cock, guiding the tip lower until it catches, and she feels a little stretch as he pops the head just inside.
As Conrad slowly pushes into her he watches her intently- watches the way his presence inside of her body washes over her features; her brows knitting, mouth opening a little wider the more she takes, the slightest bit of shock in her eyes. Belly shakily exhales, feeling herself tighten around him- fighting him.
It hurts, there's no sugar coating it. He does give her a little break, allowing her to adjust about halfway in, one of her small hands loosely bracing against his abdomen. When he bottoms out, hips flush to hers, her mouth remains open; the last time she felt this full was her first time. He inadvertently shifts inside of her as he leans his forehead down to rest against her temple, huffing a breath against her cheekbone, and she lets out an almost pornographic whimper. It’s better than she remembers. She wonders if he’s gotten bigger, somehow, improbably. (He hasn’t; she’s gotten used to less.)
She thinks he's shaking a little, watching the concentrated set of his jaw as he stays perfectly still; she knows he can feel her heartbeat around him. She can feel it everywhere. One of her hands is back to clutching at his shoulder, rippling beneath the pads of her fingertips, the other coming up from just below his navel to hook around the back of his neck, gripping and tugging at the shorter hairs there in an attempt to self-soothe. Conrad only gives her a few seconds before he begins to pull out again; he moves tortuously slow, Belly watching as the drag of her body trying to keep him in place nearly buckles him. Once he’s almost all of the way out, he presses his hips forward, and again he bottoms out.
A half swallowed “Fuck Belly,” is all he can get out, and she nods dazedly. Her eyes, watery and blown, find his again as he brings the hand not propping himself up down, four fingers on her clit, working it with small quick swipes just to take the edge off for her as he continues to move, to work her open.
Despite how wet she is- and she is, her body is resisting every time he tries to pull his hips back, and the feeling is fucking incredible. And she can tell it is for him too, if the almost pained look on his face is any indication. After he gets her used to the size he brings his hand back up from her clit to her hip, fingers still wet with her as they curl around it, and he settles further down on top of her, ducking his face into her throat, chest brushing hers, grunting something like “fuck you’re so tight”, but it’s a little hard to make out over the blood rushing in her ears. She feels her eyes actually roll back when he starts to pick up the pace, finding a steady, mind-melting rhythm, the roaring of blood turning to a sharp high pitched tone. She digs her nails in to his shoulder, just to ground herself, and he bites at her's in a kind of scolding.
Her head falls back on her neck against his pillow, her hearing beginning to come back to her in full and- fuck, the sound; the wet clap of his hips against hers, and the soft tap of the posts of his wooden headboard against the wall, echoing in his small bedroom. Her leg slips slightly and she immediately feels him grab it, re-securing it and holding it in place, his long fingers clamping down around it, his hips never letting up.
“Conrad-” Belly chokes out, and he brings his head back up, forehead to hers, damp and warm and jerking from his thrusts as he asks a rhetorical,
“Yeah?”, and she flexes the foot he has now re-draped over the back of his leg, nodding as best she can, almost cross eyed as she tries to look up at him. “Tell me,” he breathes harshly.
“I love it-”, she says, instantly, and he groans, and then Belly slurs softly, "It feels so good- you feel so good-", adding another rake of her nails down the skin of his back, and it all but brings him to a halt base deep. She feels his hand run up her thigh to hip, asking,
“You miss this?” as that hand snakes between them, four fingers splaying over her stomach, gently pressing down, his thumb beginning to circle her clit in a more refined motion than before. She nods again, her mouth falling back open.
“Yes-” she gasps out, shamefully, and she means it. God does she fucking mean it.
“I know you did,” he grunts, pressing a little harder on her stomach with his hand.
It’s wrong how good this feels. It’s sick.
“I want you to tell me,” he grits out.
“I missed it- I missed it-” she shudders out, and then “Oh my God-”, her body tightening around him. She's already going to fucking come.
His tongue returns to it's home inside her mouth, her hands losing a bit of their grip on him as her body weakens, her mind turning to Silly Putty. She thinks she might be babbling into his mouth some more about how it's “so big”, and he's “so deep", and "it's too much, it's too much ". She feels his hips stutter at that last one; she knows he liked that.
And it really is so fucking big- or rather, so much bigger. (“It’s the tall, skinny ones,” Taylor would say.) And he really is deep- like Belly is pretty sure she can feel him in her stomach. She's pretty sure he can feel himself in her stomach, his four fingers still pressed there.
Belly manages to get out a choked "Conrad, I'm-", and then again, "Oh my God-"
And then, because he's fucking insane now apparently, he curves his spine a little, and looks down- at himself buried inside her, with his hand over her stomach and his thumb working her clit, soaked and wrecked and his, and Belly lets out something just short of a sob. He keeps his eyes on where they’re joined, his head bowed, and then she's coming. He curses under his breath, bottoming out again when she clenches down, stilling so he doesn't come with her as he feels her walls flutter in waves around him. An intense warmth floods her body, and her mind immediately loses all cognizance, feeling nothing other than overwhelmingly full, and happy- just so fucking happy.
“Fuck Belly- yeah-” he says, like he’s proud of himself, “Fuck,” he adds again, in a stupor, a long groan being swallowed by her thick hair as he moves to bury his face into it fanned over his pillow.
Conrad was always vocal when he’d come, always saying the sweetest, dirtiest things to her when he got close to finishing into the latex inside her.
Instead, Belly (still maybe only half-conscious) feels a curled fist in her hair on the other side of her head, and then it's being pulled, taught at her scalp. She can hear him gruffly panting as he begins to move inside her again, fucking her back open. Her jaw drops, the sharp pain of the pull burning at her roots, forcing her back into the room, and she hears, “His fucking property huh?” grunted against her ear.
She lets out a strangled whimper into the humid air, her toes curling.
“N-no,” she says, letting out a cry as he pulls her head further back, her view now solely the ceiling, "No-"
His grip is unwavering, her entire body blisteringly hot. He has the hand he was rubbing her clit with holding him up so he doesn't crush her, the other using her hair like a leash.
"No what?" he pants, bringing his face back up, forehead to forehead again. She's grateful.
"I'm not- his..property-" she squeaks out as he pulls her hair again, eyes watering, "I'm not- I promise- I promise-"
“Yeah," he nods, pressing a far-too-tender kiss to her lips as she shakes in his grip; she can't move her head. "Whose are you?” he asks, pressing another to her jaw, then her neck- and then bites there, where she told him he couldn't, hard. She cries out again.
She should say she's nobody’s- she’s nobody’s property.
Instead she says “Y-yours," and then again, "yours- I'm yours-"
The sound he makes against her throat is animalistic. He keeps his hand knotted in her hair, his thrusts becoming erratic. The sound of it is obscene.
Belly had always wondered what it would feel like, if she would be able to feel it at all. (Taylor had said it really depends on the angle.)
Well, she does. She feels all of it.
Conrad instinctively buries himself as deeply as he can, finally letting go of her hair so he can reach down and squeeze the messy base of his cock, the sound of his ragged, spent whimpering making Belly's head spin. She's flushed from her cheeks down to her thighs, still trembling as he comes inside of her. Belly's hand finds itself loosely hanging on to his bicep, the back of it slick with sweat, and then Conrad collapses on top of her. She can barely breathe.
He has to lift himself off of her to pull out, to her dismay, and when he finally does he looks down again, still a little breathless, watching himself withdraw, slick with her. She's pink and throbbing, and her thighs are twitching, his shiny limp cock resting heavy against one of them. As she pulsates she feels a bead of his come drip down her ass until it hits the sheet beneath her, leaving a thin stream behind it. Conrad watches with lips parted, eyes fixed between her legs at what he'd done. He returns once again to hover over her, slowly, brushing some of her damp hair off of her forehead, and then he's kissing her- and it's filthy; tongues languidly tangling in their joined mouths as Belly feels a little more trickle out- wet and warm and his. His, his, his.
════════════════════════════
“Oh my god Belly..”
“Jere-”
“Oh my god…” he says again, “oh my god-”
“I never…I never meant..” she says, her voice cracking, watching as he stands, suddenly loosening his tie like it’s choking him. Like he can’t breathe. He walks back across the room, hovering near the door, and his hands are visibly shaking.
“I can’t…I can't even fucking look at you..” he says, eyes trained on the door frame, “You’re..” he trails off, his jaw flexing in anger. He manages to look back at her again, and it looks like his lip might be quivering. “Fuck you both,” he grits out, voice raising to a volume she’s sure can be heard by outside ears, and she flinches.
She saw what he had done to Conrad’s cheek, and right now he looks like he’s trying not to do the same to the wall behind him.
“The two of you in the house all summer..” he says, “How many times Belly?”
“Jeremiah-”
“How many times?”
She swallows, shaking her head at her lap, her throat tightening. She can't meet his gaze.
“How many fucking times Belly-”
“Stop it!” she shouts, her voice trembling, finally looking back up.
“I saw the way you two were looking at each other,” he says, forcing out an angry scoff, and then spitefully adds, “So that’s what you two were doing while I was fishing-”
“Stop it,” she says again, a single tear rolling down her cheek that she brushes away.
“God you are such a fucking hypocrite..” he mutters under his breath.
“It isn't the same thing,”
“You’re right Belly, it isn’t. I didn’t fuck your brother,” he counters hatefully, raising his voice even higher this time, and very clearly purposefully so.
“He isn't just your fucking brother to me Jeremiah,” she all but yells back at him, and in an instant the smug look he was sporting is wiped off of his face.
“Yeah? Tell me what he is Belly,”
She stays silent again, watching the weight of it settle between them.
“Yeah,” he says, followed by a bitter laugh. “So this entire time, huh?”
Yes.
“No.”
He rolls his eyes and smiles sickly, nodding.
“Yeah, I’m sure,” he says. After what feels like a full minute of silence, in which he stares at the floor beneath his feet, he finally looks back up, and then states more so than asks, “So that's it then,”, and Belly just stares at him, a bit stunned. He says it as if he’s closing an account at Breaker, not affirming the end of an engagement; the end of a four year long relationship, whatever the hell that's worth.
The way he’s looking at her now, like she’s worth less than the chewed gum he’d scrape off of his shoe, reminds her of the way he'd looked at her as he removed his presumptuous hand from her thigh and told her to get out of his room the morning after the debutante ball. The way he’d treated her when she’d chosen Conrad the first time. Her silence gives him his answer; Yes, this is it. He reaches then for the door knob, but her voice finds itself again,
“You knew,”
He keeps his hand on the brass but turns back to look at her.
“About Conrad,” she continues, “That he was…is in love me,”. Despite everything, those words still feel so unbelievably foreign to her, still coming out so unsure. “This whole summer,” she adds then, quoting him verbatim, “Even longer,”
His eyes stay on her, but the hand wrapped around the door knob twists it in place. She wonders if he’s really just going to walk out.
She waits. She waits what feels like minutes, and with every second that passes he looks more frozen in place. And so she says again,
“You knew this whole time,”
For years Jeremiah had allowed Belly to believe that Conrad never cared about her, that he had “dropped” her as he had so eloquently put it that night outside the summerhouse, what feels like lifetimes ago. He made her feel like an idiot for wanting him, their whole lives; made sure to let her know how stupid and shortsighted she'd been for not seeing her heartbreak coming. And all the while he knew.
The clarity is almost overwhelming. It feels like when she was seven, and got her first pair of glasses. For the first time she could see every leaf on the tree just outside her bedroom window, completely defined as they blew in the breeze, and she wondered: "Does everybody see like this?". Had she really been the only one without a clue all this time?
She watches him continue to stand there, motionless, mouth shut. She knows, deep down, he’ll never take accountability; he's incapable. How ironic, she thinks; Conrad had so feared being like their father, when Jeremiah was always going to be the one to take up that mantle.
He takes one last look at her before he finally opens the door, pausing in the open doorway. She thinks, rightfully, that he'd still marry her if she asked him to. Ever after everything; even after all of this.
She doesn't.
And then, just like that, he’s gone.
After the door clicks shut behind him every ounce of adrenaline dissipates from her body at once, and she collapses back down onto the cream colored cushions, elbows on her knees, head in her hands.
She allows herself to cry; really, truly, cry. Minutes pass like that, heavy sobs flooding out of her into the empty room.
And then, somewhere amidst the tears (and oxytocin), she allows herself a single hopeful thought:
It’s finally over.
════════════════════════════
The morning after, after Conrad had left to catch his flight, Belly called Jeremiah back. She had told him her phone died the night before, lost in the couch cushions, and that she had just seen the notifications of his missed calls. Calls, plural; he had tried her two more times while she and Conrad…anyway, he believed her.
One week later she was there, concealer expertly applied to her neck, ready to greet him when he got home. She dutifully helped him unpack, even offered to do his laundry, and she let him have sex with her as soon as Adam went to bed. After, when he'd fallen asleep, she had gotten up to empty the dryer and was loading a second pile of clothes (whites he had poorly sorted) into the wash, sucking on the end of a leftover candy cane, when she saw it; Conrad’s shirt. She did a double take, and then had to look it over once more to be certain, but it was his; the size was one bigger than Jeremiah wore, and she remembers the seam of the inside back collar was popped.
It must have gotten mingled in while the two of them were packing, she tried to rationalize. Or maybe he leant it to him; extremely unlikely, but not impossible.
She wondered, briefly, if Conrad had intentionally snuck it in.
She stood there in the laundry room holding it, running her thumbs over the waffle-woven cotton. It still smelled so strongly of him, of that night, that it almost made her want to cry. It also made her ache. She very warily cracked open the frosted glass-paneled laundry room door of Adam’s loft, taking three steps out to peer into the adjoining room to make sure Jeremiah was still sound asleep on the air mattress. When she was sure he was, she walked back inside and closed the door, leaning back against the open washing machine, pressing the collar of the shirt to her cheek just below her nose, and closed her eyes. She was right back in his bed, watching the shadows of snowflakes dance across his closet doors. What she had done didn't really hit her until that moment, standing there holding his shirt.
I cheated, she thought.
She opened her dry eyes and looked down at the shirt again, and she realized…she was impenitent. It was beyond shameful, the silent thrill it gave her to be holding it; looking at evidence of what they’d done. She hated herself, but she’d never felt more alive.
And so, she took it.
If Conrad had, for some reason, leant it to Jeremiah, then he probably would have noticed it was missing from his laundry the following day. If he did notice, he never said a thing.
She managed to smuggle it back to Philly in her duffel before the spring semester started, and hung it in her closet, unwashed. She slotted it in beside his cousins rowing t-shirt that, yes, she had also kept. It would remain there, tucked away for a year and a half before it, and she, found their way home.