Chapter Text
It’s late in their call when Belly first brings it up. She’d called him initially at six when she was just back from practice. Conrad had been in his floor study room, and he’d gone out to sit in the stairwell so they could talk for a bit before eventually he’d decided that he should go back for his bag since he wasn’t likely to get any more studying done, and then, bag acquired, he’d walked down to the dining hall and stood outside it for a while, before he’d given that up, too. He’d rather be talking to her than eating anyway, so when she does bring it up what he’s doing is lying on the grass in the middle of Wriston, shivering a bit because it’s cold, but he’s not willing to go inside yet.
“And you have, haven’t you?” is how she does it.
“Have what?” he says.
“Had sex?”
“Um,” Conrad says. Because the answer was, categorically speaking: yes. And previously, they’d been talking about her friend Juliana’s birthday party, and he’s still adjusting.
“You don’t have to tell me, I guess, I just thought, since we’d said, you know, um that we were, now—”
“Yeah,” he says. “I mean, yes. I have.” He puts his hand over his forehead, wondering if the earth would swallow him.
“Oh,” she says, and he can hear in her voice that she’s disappointed, and it makes him want to take it back; but he’d promised himself at least ten times in the last six months that he was being honest with her now. As honest as he could be.
“What was it like?” she says, which is so Belly that Conrad wants to lie and say he was actually a virgin anyway, like he could just rewind the last couple of years and do the whole thing by her side.
Instead, he laughs a little, because it’s awkward. “Which part? Do you want me to describe penetration?”
“Shut up,” she says. And he knows she’s blushing, and he wishes she was close enough that he could see it. She’s silent for a moment, almost mulish, and he wonders if she does actually want him to describe penetration. “I guess it’s not as big a deal,” she says, finally. “For guys.”
“I think it’s a big deal for everyone.”
“So it was a big deal,” she says. And at that, he feels somewhat trapped.
But Conrad doesn’t know how to say that it was after homecoming two years ago, and he’d been sweaty and nervous, because his girlfriend at the time, Leah, had the house free for an hour because her parents were visiting her grandparents in Ottawa and she’d told them she was at Viola’s for the night, though really her girl group was throwing a party, and she and Conrad drank cheap wine coolers as a pre-game and kissed for a bit up in her bedroom before she put her hand down his pants and said, “You want to? Before everyone gets here?” And afterwards, at the party, he had gotten stupid drunk so that most of the night felt blurry anyway. He didn’t even remember if it was any good. Though some of the times later on had been.
“It, um.” He wishes he was better at this. The talking. He wonders if it’s a thing he could study. He tries to picture himself in the self-help section, reading a book, like, How to Sound Like a Forties Movie Star to Impress Your Romantically Minded Girlfriend, like, yeah, that would surely help in this situation.
“Nevermind,” she says.
He knows that Belly hasn’t had sex, though he isn’t sure what precisely she has done. It makes him feel another unwelcome stab of jealousy, even though he knows that would be really old-fashioned of him, and not in a charming way, to have expected her to have just been sitting around waiting for him.
“You haven’t…” he says anyway.
“No!” she says, swiftly. “I mean, like, not past second base.”
It’s weird to be having this conversation, because they haven’t even done that yet. He’d kissed her, on the beach the first time, as thoroughly as he could, and then again two weeks ago, outside her mom’s house, for approximately fifteen minutes before it had gotten too chilly with her in just her sweater and they’d gone inside, where the rest of her family was waiting. And after dinner, Laurel had walked him to the guest bedroom on the second floor, and said, head tilted a bit ironically, Belly just over her shoulder, “Happy for you two. But no funny business, all right?” And Belly had said, “Mom? Seriously?” And Conrad had said, “You have my word, Laurel,” which had made him feel a bit like a prisoner en route to the gallows, because truthfully a bit of funny business would have been, well, rather ideal.
Still, in the morning, Belly had come into the bathroom while he was brushing his teeth in just a t-shirt and boxers, and, smiling, had eagerly licked into his mouth, like they were sharing toothpaste, and Conrad, hesitatingly, had put his hands on either side of her hips, thinking about all the places he wanted to touch her and couldn’t.
“Okay,” he says. “But you…”
“What?”
“Want to?” God. Why had he asked her that? “Belly, Jesus, obviously, we…I mean—”
“Yeah,” she says. “I mean yes. If you…wanted to.”
Conrad finds himself nodding without any sort of control over it. “Hmm,” he says, intelligently.
He wonders where she is just now, and realizes that conceivably this is something he can ask her. “Um,” he says. “Where are you?”
She’s quiet for a beat. “In my room,” she says, finally. “I’m lying on the floor. Where are you?”
He feels stupid suddenly. “In the quad,” he says. “In the grass.”
“Why?”
“I was gonna go eat.”
“You haven’t eaten yet?” He can hear movement, Belly sitting up. “Con, it’s like nine o’clock.”
It was nine forty. “Yeah, it’s not a big deal, I think I have, like, some protein bars in my room.”
Belly makes a distressed sound.
This is unfortunately rather sexy. Conrad tries valiantly to avoid the association, and then wonders why he’s trying, because actually she’s his girlfriend. He’d asked and she’d said yes. And she’d said that she wanted to have sex with him. At some amorphous future point. Possibly Thanksgiving. Which was in, like, two weeks.
He wonders if that means he can steer her back to her lying around in her bedroom, if it’d be corny to say something like, “And what are you wearing?” Or if that was something you were not meant to say when technically you were out in public, because, like, maybe getting a hard-on on a frosty November day out in the quad qualified as a crime, public indecency or something.
But there’s something about the quiet intimacy of talking to her on the phone that makes all other forms of intimacy feel easier. Like the fact that he can’t see her or touch her makes it easy just to say, “You touch yourself though, right?”
There is a brief, hushed moment of silence.
“Sorry—”
“Yeah,” she says, and her voice is different than he’s ever heard it before, low and kind of throaty.
It’s pretty much unbearable.
“You could, um,” he starts. “If you wanted to.”
“Right now?” she says, and she sounds so shocked that Conrad wonders if he’s unspeakably perverted.
“No, yeah,” he says. “Sorry.”
“Okay,” she says, fast, like she’s gotta get it out all at once. “One sec.” He hears a thunk, as if she’s set the phone down, and then a louder one as she closes the door, footsteps, the sound of the stereo, Fleetwood Mac, and then rustling, her voice again, saying his name, like a question.
“Yeah?” he says. His throat feels dry, and above him the tree branches offer glimpses of the midnight sky.
“What do you…um, what should I do?”
It’s so uncalculated, so trusting that for a moment Conrad just closes his eyes and breathes. He feels like something precious and fragile has been shuffled unceremoniously into his palms, and with any too quick movement from him it would shatter. He wants it—sex—to be perfect for her. Every second.
“What do you normally do?” he says.
She’s silent for a beat, and then says, in a tender, shy kind of voice, “Think about you.”
It’s a bit like being punched in the chest. “Oh,” he says. “Um—”
“Sorry, is that? Is that weird? I shouldn’t have—”
“No,” Conrad says. “It’s good.”
“Good?”
“Or fine. You know, whatever. Uh, flattering.” He puts a hand over his eyes, thinking that this was probably a bad idea. It’d be easier if he was close enough to actually kiss her. If he was being good that’s all he would do for the next six months, just press her into the coverlets and kiss her till both their lips went numb with it.
He shouldn’t even be thinking about sex yet, for all that she was the one to bring it up.
She laughs a little, and it’s awkward. He has the desire to say something suave, thinks about the book again even, but the words don’t come easily.
He wants to tell her, I think about kissing you all the time. How the first time he’d done it, it had felt like all the noise in his head, the constant blaring, had just gone off like a light switch. It had been easy. None of the nervous fumblings he’d done before, with other girls, just breath, and feeling, and flashes of a pink grin.
He’d thought, oh, so this is what it’s meant to feel like.
He wants that feeling to spool onwards towards its inevitable conclusion. He thinks all the rest of it might be easy like that, too, might make him go all comfortable and loose and happy in a way that few things ever did. She did that to him: made the world seem simple. He thinks maybe he could be completely satisfied if his only goal in life was to make her smile.
He’s been silent too long. He can feel the tension in her, even through the phone line, and he wishes he could picture her more clearly, wishes he could touch her. He’d be content with just, like, holding her hand.
“What do I do?” he says, somewhat gruffly. “When you think of me?”
Her breath catches a bit, like she’s surprised, and maybe a little pleased, and then he can hear her shift. The rustle of covers. He thinks: now she’s lying in bed.
The thought is lurid. Almost obscene.
“Kiss me,” she says, finally. “Like you did on the beach.”
He nods, though she can’t see it, because he would do that. “Okay,” he says, “And then?”
“It’s embarrassing," she says, though she sounds a little breathier, and Conrad aches so completely that it makes a mockery of his chest. He wants to see the flush spreading across her face and down her neck. More than that. He wants to see everything, all the fine details.
“I promise,” he says. “Nothing is too much.”
“Nothing?” she says, obviously skeptical.
“Nothing you’d come up with,” he amends. And probably not even then.
He watches a group of girls walk past, eyeing him on the ground, like, who is that freak?, and thinks: I should probably go back inside. Though there wasn’t really anywhere with the appropriate degree of privacy. He knew that Trusky is in the room right now, because Trusky was pretty much always in the room.
“You, um,” she says. “You take off my top.”
Conrad’s eyes close. “Okay,” he says, completely unmoving. “You should do that.”
There’s a sort of rustling sound, and Conrad contemplates whether he thinks this is a circle of hell, what it is he might be being punished for.
“And the bra, too?” he says, helpfully.
A little huff. “Yeah.”
At this, Conrad wonders, purely theoretically, if asking Belly for pictures of her chest at some point is something only a total skeezebag would do. But maybe he is a total skeezebag, because even under some scrutiny he’s still pretty sure that he’d like to do that. And then he wonders if he can get hard like this, out in the cold, lying fully clothed on the icy grass. And then he decides that okay, this is definitely a circle of hell, because she’s made a soft sort of sound, and he’s very sure she’s touching her breasts now.
Maybe facetime would be better.
“You should, um, take your pants off, too,” he says.
“Okay,” she says, so obligingly that he kinda wants to kill himself.
“Do you, uh, do you want me to say what I’m doing?” she says, after a moment.
Yes. Fuck.
“You should, um, you should just do whatever feels nice,” he says, thinking, don’t ask her if she’s wet, or if she’s just touching her clit or if she likes to put her fingers inside herself, and how many, and, god, don’t think about what it would be like if it was your fingers instead, fucking into her, making her come undone.
He turns his head so his cheek is pressed against the grass, and he’s smelling the earthy dirt. This is very embarassing, he thinks, to be so affected, and he wouldn’t fucking trade it for anything. “Does it feel good?” he says, which is neutral, and mostly normal, nevermind that his voice has gone high and a little ragged.
“Yeah,” she says. “Though,” and then she cuts off making a little sound, raw and unpracticed.
“Though what?”
She shakes her head. He can hear it, her hair against the pillow, how the phone shuffles.
He’s never wanted to transport himself through a device more.
“I don’t know,” she says. “It’s just, I want,” She sounds breathy and turned on and fucking perfect.
“I know,” he says. Because he’s pretty sure he does. That if he had her under his hands he could find out just where she wanted him to touch her. “I know, baby.”
“I want you,” she says. “I want you so much.”
He knows that, too. And what he wants, more than anything else, is to give it to her. To give himself to her, just as she wants him. Whatever that might be.
He shouldn’t have spent the whole summer holding back. Not when he could have been showing her how to find out just what she needed instead.
He releases his breath, harsh, through his teeth. “You can do it,” he says, and then because his patience is pretty much fraying, “How many fingers are you using?”
“One,” she says.
He laughs at that, which is probably the wrong reaction, because she makes a huffy, bratty sound, and he says, trying not to sound too condescending, but knowing he’s probably failing, “It’ll feel better if you do two. Or three.” Because suggesting four is probably a bad idea. This time.
There’s quiet for a moment, and then she moans, loudly, gasps, and then there’s sound of flesh against flesh, as if she’s maybe clapped a hand over her mouth, which he’s pretty sure means she’d listened to him.
“Feel good?” he says, somehow both endeared and turned on by the fact. He hadn’t known those two feelings could go hand on hand.
“Shut up.”
“Do it again. Whatever you just did.” And then, because he’s already pretty committed, “Imagine they’re my hands.”
Silence, then, “I am,” she says, which is, yeah, frankly pretty devastating.
“Fuck.”
“Are you, um, you know? Too?”
“Yes,” he says, because he definitely is.
“I mean, are you, uh, touching yourself?” she says, all heated.
“Uh,” he says, because if he reminds her that he’s literally outside right now that would probably make him sound certifiable, and it was hardly like he could say, I will later. “You should keep going,” he says instead.
If he’d known this was the sort of conversation they’d be having tonight, he’d have planned his evening differently. Put a sock on the door maybe.
He’ll suggest that. For next time. Pre-planning.
She’s close to coming, he’s pretty sure, because she’s making needy little sounds in the back of his throat that are pretty excruciating to listen to when he’s not inside her.
He’s going to be inside her, he promises himself. Soon. Like, really soon. It feels, like, distressingly inevitable.
“I bet you look so pretty like this,” he says. The words are completely disconnected from his language processing system, like they’ve just come out like that with no thought behind them. “God, Belly.”
She says his name, high and thin and reedy as she comes, and after, her breath stays heavy for a time, and Conrad just listens to it, thinking he’d like to capture this moment and bottle it for whenever he was feeling bad. He thinks it’s probably a cureall. His name. Her pleasure. All of it intertwined.
“Holy shit,” she says, eventually and then laughs.
Conrad wants to kiss her cheek, each one, and then touch her hair, fall asleep with his nose pressed to her neck. But mostly, he just wants to be there. Two weeks was too long. To be apart. To wait to see her again.
“I, um, I really like you,” he says, because he doesn’t have any other way of expressing it, this feeling that’s currently overwhelming him. Longing maybe.
She’s silent for a moment. “Yeah?”
He nods, though she can’t see it. “I know it’s kinda weird. Us doing all this when we’re so far away. But just, yeah, fuck.”
“People date long distances all the time.” Her voice has a breezy, put on quality that he thinks means she’s trying to deflect. “And it’s not that far.”
That’s okay. He doesn’t want to delve too much into it either just now. How unlike other people who do this all the time he feels.
There will be time for all that later.
“What? You don’t think we should be writing letters?” he says. “Like in, I don’t know, ye olden times?”
She laughs. “I bet sometimes people’s were, like, really dirty. And then when the grandkids, like, found them in the attic it was super horrifying.”
“I think you just have a dirty mind.”
She’s silent for a moment, and he wonders if he’s offended her, though it was the sort of joke he’d made a hundred times before they were dating.
“Belly?”
“Um. Just, uh, sorry, do you think about me ever? When you…you know? I know you weren’t just now, but, uh…”
Conrad should definitely not tell her how much he thinks about her when he masturbates. Because it will probably come across like he’s objectifying her, taking advantage somehow.
“Sorry. You don’t have to answer that,” she says, before he’s had time to come up with something to say that doesn’t sound like a lie.
“Uh, yeah, sometimes,” is what he decides on, mumbling a bit, since he has to move quick or risk digging himself in deeper.
“Sometimes?”
“Like a statistically significant amount of the time.” Close to a hundred. For awhile now.
“Oh,” she says. “Okay.”
The ground is cold underneath him, and he’s pretty sure his butt has gone to sleep. “I should probably head inside,” he says, because this would be an objectively humiliating way to get sick, though, like, in a list of pros and cons it would come down on the side of totally worth it.
“Ohmygod, are you still outside? It’s freezing out.”
“Not technically,” he says. “It’s thirty four here.”
“Ass.”
He laughs, and rises to his feet, beginning the walk back to his dorm. His legs feels jittery, and there’s a sort of jubilant buoyancy happening somewhere midshoulder, like he might start flapping around or something. “We should, um, we should revisit this stuff,” he says. “When we’re in person.”
“Revisit what?” she says, and he’s not sure, really, if she’s teasing or not.
“Belly.”
“Yesss?”
He thinks about how to say, I really don’t want to fuck this up. With you. In fact, the not wanting to fuck it up feels so overwhelming his tongue’s gone thick with it. The need of it, of wanting her, makes him feel hasty, though he hasn’t done anything yet.
Though probably this counts as doing something. At least a little bit.
He’d helped her come anyway, so he must not be doing too poorly.
“I don’t know,” he says. “Just. I’m excited to see you.”
“That’s good,” she says, and in this moment, she sounds warm and close and his, for all the many miles between them, “because I’m excited to see you, too.”