Archive of Our Own

The first time Conrad Fisher has sex, he isn’t thinking about Belly, per se. Mostly, he’s thinking about Aubrey, and the way her thick hair feels between his fingers, and the fact that a girl he really, really likes is letting him touch her like this. Conrad feels a little tongue-tied, actually, when Aubrey undoes the clasp on her bra, and he thinks his jaw might drop a little bit when he sees how hard her nipples are. Aubrey laughs a little bit at the expression on his face, but it’s kind, and Conrad might be out of his depth, but he isn’t stupid; he can tell that she’s a little nervous, too.

When he finally enters her for the first time—enters a girl, for the first time, period—she’s on top, because she told him that she heard it was easier for your first time, and a lick of heat shoots up his spine so intensely that he grips her hips a little too hard and yanks a little too cruelly.

“Sorry,” he gasps into her mouth when she whimpers. “Sorry, Jesus, I didn’t mean—”

“It’s okay,” Aubrey murmurs, stilling, and Conrad has to close his eyes, lest he do something absolutely mortifying, like come the second he’s fully sheathed inside of her. He tilts his head to the side and clenches one fist in an attempt at self-control, and he only opens them when he hears Aubrey groan quietly, this time in pleasure.

Conrad blinks, and he suddenly finds himself staring at a photograph of four people on his bedside table, making eye contact with a picture-frozen Belly in a way that makes him feel a little disgusted about himself. The Belly looking at him losing his virginity is even younger than she is now—thirteen, he thinks, because the picture was taken before her birthday last summer—and Conrad does not like the combination of feeling Aubrey clench down on his cock and Belly gazing adoringly at him.

“Hang on,” he mutters, putting the frame picture-side down, and Aubrey laughs again, a little breathless.

“Feeling watched?” she teases, and Conrad smirks back, all reservations suddenly gone.

“Not anymore,” he says, and when he pulls her in for a passionate kiss, all he’s thinking about is Aubrey, Aubrey, Aubrey.

The next times are even better than the first. Conrad likes her so much, which he thinks is maybe the best part of it all. Aubrey’s only been with one person before him, and when she finally admits that he’s bigger than his ex, it irreparably inflates his ego. He likes having sex with Aubrey. More than that, he likes Aubrey herself, who’s gentle and smart and always has a quip on hand, but a few months in, it occurs to him that he doesn’t love Aubrey and probably never will.

The last time they have sex feels like a goodbye, because it is. Conrad tells himself that he’s breaking up with her because of what he’s just found out about his mom, but it’s also the fact that the first thing he thought of—after how to hide their mom’s illness from Jeremiah—was just how much he didn’t want to tell Aubrey what was going on.

The picture on Conrad’s bedside table is upright that last time, and when Conrad comes inside of his girlfriend, he distantly thinks to himself: he wishes he could tell Belly about what was going on. She loves his mom almost as much as he does. She would understand.

Conrad barely feels inside of his body the few times he and Nicole have sex. He can recognize that it’s good. He can recognize how hot she is, and he knows that he’s improved significantly—thanks, Aubrey, he thinks to himself—since their fumbles during the summer he took her to the deb ball, but there are other things on his mind besides sex this summer.

When she asks him to sleep over that first time, he says yes, because it’s obvious from the look she’s giving him that she wants more than to just sleep. He’s even a little excited about it—he has condoms in his bag and everything—but when they finally crawl into bed, Conrad just feels exhausted to the bone.

“I can’t tonight,” he tells her, giving her a kiss as a poor consolation prize. “I’m sorry. I’m just so tired.”

It’s clear that Nicole doesn’t believe him even if, for once, he’s telling the truth.

When they do finally have sex a few days later, Conrad tries his hardest to think only about her. “You’re so fucking good at this,” he gasps, which is true. Nicole’s good at everything when it comes to sex—kissing, sucking his cock until he comes so hard he almost blacks out, tightening around his fingers in a way that has him desperate to fuck her—but she also isn’t…Belly.

The thought occurs to him while he’s got his hands on both Nicole’s hips, pressing himself into her from behind, and she’s fucking back onto his cock in a way he can barely keep up with. Conrad wraps one of his hands around a few of Nicole’s braids to distract himself, because suddenly, all he’s thinking about is Belly getting out of that car for the first time this summer, and the way she was suddenly glowing. When she smiled at him, it was like looking at the sun. Something in him had shifted, and underneath the layers of misery and helplessness, he suddenly felt warm.

“Conrad?” Nicole asks, interrupting his thoughts, and he realizes that he’s slowed down to a barely leisurely pace, just sitting sheathed inside of her while she drips all over him, waiting.

“Sorry,” he says, thinking momentarily about how he can’t stop apologizing for messing everything up this summer, before he starts to fuck her again. Despite everything, it feels good. Nicole always feels good, even if it’s in a dull, muted sort of way that has him questioning why he’s even with her in the first place.

In an attempt at distracting her from his piss-poor performance, Conrad swats her on the ass just once, gently, because he thinks she might like it, and her hips stutter. She doesn’t say anything, because Nicole isn’t the type of girl who will admit to liking that type of thing, but she does spasm around his cock, which makes him smile in a way that feels a little cruel.

Whatever, he thinks. They’re both using each other. He knows they are. Nicole likes him, sure, but it’s a summer fling. After she’d blown him last summer and he’d fingered her, they hadn’t exchanged a single text all year long, until she’d hit him with the u coming to cousins this summer? at the end of May.

“You’re going to make me come, Conrad,” Nicole says, all breathy, when he reaches one hand beneath her to circle her clit, and the satisfaction of that is enough for now. Conrad banishes all thoughts of Belly from his brain, focusing on the hitch in Nicole’s breathing when he uses just the right amount of pressure. He very carefully does not imagine how Belly likes it. Soft? Hard? Quick? Slow? He wonders if she’s touched herself before. He can’t imagine she hasn’t, but there’s something perverted in him that wishes he could be the one to teach her.

“That’s it,” he murmurs, keeping his movements steady while Nicole’s whimpers grow louder and louder. “That’s it, B—baby.”

Conrad’s orgasm quickly follows hers, when he flips her over and fucks her in missionary, locking eyes with her when he comes so that he’s forced to think only of Nicole when he releases inside of the condom. Her gaze is so hot like this, her hands running across his shoulders, and even with everything else, it feels so fucking good when she bites down gently on his shoulder and he finally allows himself to let go.

Conrad fucks Shayla Wang during the period of less than 24 hours that she’s broken up with Steven, and he’s not sure which one of them feels worse about it.

It’s right after his almost-kiss with Belly, which means that Conrad can admit to himself that yeah, his feelings are a thing, but that still doesn’t mean he’s allowed to like her like that. He shouldn’t. Conrad can’t pinpoint the exact moment when he started suddenly seeing Belly in this new light—when he suddenly wanted to kiss her, hold her, tell her that her hair was fucking beautiful, and then run his hands through it. It was like one day, she was just a little kid tagging along and begging the older boys to let her hang out, and then he blinked, and she had grown up before his eyes.

I can’t do that to her, he vows. I won’t subject her to this. To me.

So instead, Conrad fucks Shayla, because she’s a little weepy over Steven, and Conrad has never been able to help himself; he loves to fix broken things. It’s the only way he knows how to be useful. He tells himself that Belly’s too young for him, even though he knows that Shayla is the exact same age. Still, she holds herself with a sort of maturity that makes her seem older than she is, and Conrad takes disgusting pleasure in breaking her poise apart and reducing her to tiny, pathetic whimpers when he fucks her. It’s the first time Conrad realizes that he might be good at this, because Shayla’s tears dry the second they start kissing, and she’s far wetter between her legs than she is in her eyes. She keeps gasping his name like she can’t help himself, and Conrad can’t help it when he starts to feel powerful.

At some point, he puts two fingers in her mouth to hush her, because the sound of her voice begins to grate on him when it occurs to him how much she doesn’t sound anything like Belly. That's when Conrad’s forced to admit to himself that he squints a little, Shayla might look a little like her. The resemblance is superficial at best, but for as long as he can remember, Conrad’s liked dark hair and creamy skin, so he lets himself fantasize, because he knows Shayla is fantasizing about someone else, too.

He wouldn’t fuck Belly like this, he decides, pretending that the girl beneath him is someone else. Or, he reckons, maybe he would, but only after he treated her right. She’d like that, he thinks—being held like the most precious thing in the world. Maybe she is, Conrad thinks deliriously, chasing an orgasm without a care in the world. Maybe nothing else matters but her.

Afterward, Shayla cries again, and Conrad thinks he might, too.

“Don’t tell Steven,” Shayla says, and Conrad just stares at her incredulously. He has far more to lose from fucking Steven Conklin’s girl than she does for fucking him.

“This never happened,” he vows, and she nods.

He knows that neither of them will ever speak of it again.

When Conrad finally makes love to Belly Conklin, it changes everything for him forever.

It doesn’t matter that he’s had more experience than her, or that she's the virgin, not him. He’s suddenly reduced to mush, to nervousness, and to the feeling of firsts, because this is the only first that has ever really mattered in his life. Everything and everyone that came before her was meaningless.

“I hope you know I didn’t bring you here just for this,” he says to her, because it’s true, even if he wants her so badly that he thinks every nerve in his body might be on fire.

“Oh, I know,” she tells him, but there’s a light in her eyes that dances when she says it. He can see what’s left unsaid: Of course you did, just as much as I brought you here for this, too. I know you, Conrad Fisher. I see you.

Sex with Belly rewrites the concept of sex for him. Suddenly, it’s not about doing the right thing, or chasing pleasure in the perfect, quickest way—it’s just her, and the desire to touch her everywhere, his hands shaking as they work to remember every inch of her skin. Conrad thinks he could live inside of Belly forever if she let him. Nothing’s ever felt as good as this, and he thinks nothing ever will again.

I love you, he says silently inside his head as he pushes into her, terrified of what saying it out loud will do to the moment. She must know. From the moment they kissed on the beach, she must have known. Conrad doesn’t think he could hide his love for her, even if he tried. It sits unabashedly on his face with every little thing he does, and he can’t bring himself to care anymore. He wants her to know. He wants the world to know: he loves Isabel Conklin.

Conrad kisses every patch of her face he can reach until she’s laughing, and when those giggles turn into gasps that turn into moans, Conrad kisses her so fiercely that he feels something come a little unhinged inside of him.

When they both come—at the same time, him following her by only seconds—Conrad wonders whether anyone else in the world knows what it’s like to be so intimately tethered to someone. Surely, no one else in the world understands what it’s like to be tied to someone the way he and Belly do.

Every time that follows that first night together is better and better, if such a thing is possible. Conrad’s always known Belly like the back of his hand, but he learns things about her hands—her real ones, not just metaphorically—that render him stupid and tongue-tied and gasping in love. He vows to memorize every sound she ever makes, and he uses them against her, learning to make her come harder and harder each time. He loves her. He loves her so much. He loves her when they make love, and he loves her when they fuck desperately after time away from one another, and he loves her when he holds her down just a little too hard and she whimpers helplessly, and he loves when she bounces on his cock, tits in his face, and tells him that he’s going to make her come in that whiny little voice of hers that she reserves only for him.

Conrad loves her, and it’s as complicated and as simple as that. It’s enough, until it isn’t.

Fucking Gigi Boucheron is not something that Conrad ever saw happening in his life. Really, Conrad had never even thought about Gigi as a real person. She’d just always been on the periphery of his awareness, popping up here and there at parties, a vague shadow in the background of the deb ball, a girl Nicole brought around occasionally.

It happens on the Fourth of July after his brother gets together with his girl, and Conrad is downright miserable—not that anyone really cares. He thinks, maybe, that Belly has noticed, because she keeps leaning away from Jeremiah’s kisses, but he doesn’t know what to make of it. He can’t stand the idea that she might be doing it because she pities him, so Conrad keeps a smile plastered on his face permanently, lest he give into the urge to break down crying or punch his brother in the face.

You wouldn’t even let me bring Belly over at Thanksgiving, he wants to yell, and now you’re practically dry-humping her on the beach in front of me? Fuck you, man. Fuck you. I hate you. I hate both of you so much.

It’s a lie, of course. He loves his brother almost as he loves Belly, and those facts make things that much worse.

Gigi shows up halfway through the day, a little tipsy, and wearing a red bikini that Conrad barely looks at, too distracted by Belly, and, pathetically, not even Belly in a swimsuit. Mostly, he’s just been looking at her smile. The crinkles around her eyes. The way the ocean breeze whips her hair in her face.

“It’s been so long,” Gigi gushes. “It’s so good to see you guys.”

That’s when Conrad really notices her, because he sees her hands linger for a bit too long on Jeremiah’s biceps when she hugs him and, pointedly, no one else. He remembers, vaguely, that she had a thing for him last summer. She had wanted him to take her to the deb ball, and was only a little bit pissed when Jere ended up taking Belly instead.

“It’s good to see you too, Gigi,” Conrad says, like they’re old friends. He’s pretty sure it’s the first time they’ve ever spoken to each other, but Gigi’s good like that, he discovers—good at pretending when he needs her to.

“Hey, Conrad,” she says, twisting one of her blonde curls between her fingers. Conrad’s never really liked blondes, he realizes, unless you counted Angie from the boardwalk, which he doesn’t. She’d complimented his Lord of the Rings t-shirt, which had been enough of a basis for a crush, until he’d talked to her for more than 15 minutes and realized that that was about where their similarities ended.

“You wanna join us?” he asks, feeling slightly insane. “I was just going to get more drinks from the house.”

He can feel Belly watching him, and it makes him feel drunk with want. Look at me, he wants to scream. Why can’t you look at me the way you used to?

When he fucks Gigi on the kitchen counter of the summer house, he’s only really thinking about whether Belly knows what he’s doing. Before he left, she’d given him a long, hard look, and he’d smirked back. Her lips had parted in surprise, like she had been shocked he would break his charade of happiness. Fuck you, he wants to tell her, just was much as he wants to say God, Belly, I still love you. Please, I still love you.

Gigi is everything Belly isn’t, which makes it perfect—all simpering, blonde curls and high-pitched whines, and in another situation, he’d be pissed at how fake her desire is, but as it stands, he’s thankful she doesn't make him work for it any more than he wants to. She has an IUD, she tells him, so he can come inside of her, and Conrad’s had just enough beers that he grins at her when she tells him that, and promises her that he will.

For a solid ten minutes, Conrad just lets himself forget about Belly and focuses, instead, on Gigi’s tiny, perky tits and the wetness between her legs. He smirks a little when he goes down on her and she comes more quickly than any girl he’s ever been with, and then she’s grabbing at his cock in an overly performative way that might turn him off in another situation, but right now, he’s mostly just thinking about how much he hates his brother and how the only way he can deal with that is by taking Jeremiah’s consolation prize. I can steal your girl, too, he wants to tell Jere. I’m just not a fucking asshole like you are, you piece of shit.

By the time Conrad’s gotten his cock in Gigi, he feels fine. He feels great, actually. Fucking a girl raw feels incredible, with nothing between his cock and the hot, wet velvet of her cunt. He’s got a girl moaning into his mouth, he’s getting laid for the first time in months, and he absolutely is not thinking about his ex-girlfriend while he chases an orgasm. He’s thinking about Gigi, and her soft, thin hair, and the fact that she’s shaved herself completely bare, which he deludes himself momentarily into thinking is for him, and he is not thinking about Belly—until he is.

The second he comes inside of Gigi, all Conrad can see in his head is Belly, and the fantasy version of her whispers come on, Conrad, and then he’s coming inside of a girl for the first time, and he doesn’t even like her that much. Actually, that’s an overstatement. He doesn’t even know her that much.

When it’s all over, Conrad can’t tell if he feels numb or sated.

“Thanks,” Gigi says, smiling and pulling her bikini bottoms back up over her hips. Conrad is well aware that his come is still dripping out of her. He wonders if Jeremiah will notice. He wonders if Belly will be able to tell. He wonders what they think he and Gigi are doing right now, because getting drinks from the house should not be taking this long. Gigi laughs, putting a hand on his arm. “We should probably head back, huh?”

Conrad smiles back shakily. “Yeah,” he says, opening the fridge and blindly grabbing a case of beer. He doesn’t say what he’s really thinking. Don’t make me go back, he wants to plead. Not to her. Not while she’s with him.

There are plenty of opportunities for sex in college, but Conrad avoids all advances until Agnes. It feels cruel to voice, but that first year, he understands why people say that some men peak in high school. Jeremiah had always been the one everyone wanted—with those eyes, that easygoing laugh, that friendly charisma that drew everyone in. Conrad had always been the weird one—the quiet, older brother who did well in his classes and could talk for too long about nerdy topics no one really cared about. He still moderates a Lord of the Rings subreddit, for god’s sake.

Conrad isn’t stupid—he knows he’s good-looking. He knows that playing football in high school had made some of the girls realize that, but most of them had tuned out once they actually talked to him. Jeremiah was the popular one in high school. Jeremiah was Homecoming King. Jeremiah was voted most likely to become president in the yearbook during his senior year. Conrad spent most of his senior year in a depression, attached to one girl only.

College is different. At Brown, people really do like him. He makes friends easily in his classes, because his notes are detailed and comprehensive—if you can decipher his handwriting—and he makes for a good lab partner because of his attentiveness. During that first year, he doesn’t make too many attachments, but he can tell that he belongs here much more than he did anywhere in high school. Still, he’s put in an application for Stanford, and he doesn’t want to get too invested.

At Stanford, everything changes. He speaks up in class. He joins the pre-med students association. He finally, at Laurel’s gentle insistence, gets his ass to the student counselling centre, and he cries three times during his first therapy session. (They get easier after that. He starts to get better.) He makes friends, and joins a rec football league on the weekends, and when he meets Agnes, who’s beautiful, driven, and introduces herself to let him know that he will be voting for her for president of the pre-med students association, he thinks he might actually be healing.

Sex with Agnes is formulaic in the best way, in that the steps to get there finally make sense to him, with nothing confusing about what they've both set out to do. He takes her out on a date because she asks him to, and the best feeling in the world is realizing he might actually want to go. They eat at a diner near campus, and Conrad brings her a small bouquet of flowers—because his mom would have wanted him to—and it surprises her in a good way. He tries to like the feeling of surprising someone, even if his stomach is in knots over it. With Belly, he felt like everything he did was already anticipated. He liked feeling that way—seen. Agnes is all uncharted territory, and it’s harder to navigate than he thought it would be. Still, by the end of dinner, she’s laughing, and he’s feeding her a spoonful of ice cream, which is more than he’d thought he’d be able to accomplish with her hard-ass exterior, so the date is a success. Afterwards, she invites him back to her apartment. She lives alone, she says, which is an invitation if Conrad’s ever heard one.

The sex is easy, and Conrad is grateful. Agnes knows what she wants, and Conrad knows how to listen, so he makes her come three times before he gets his cock in her. It feels strange, learning another woman’s body and trying to care. Where Belly likes circles on her clit, Agnes prefers an up and down motion. Belly liked being beneath him, but Agnes prefers being on top. Belly always wanted to be kissed, and Agnes doesn’t seem to care at all. Belly liked having her hair pulled, and Agnes slaps his hand away when he tries.

After he’s made Agnes come on his tongue for the second time—she likes when he sucks on her clit, which Belly never did, saying that the stimulation was too much and felt weird—she finally flops over and tells him to get a fucking condom out, Fisher, before I pass out from overstimulation.

Conrad hasn’t actually had sex in over a year, and he comes embarrassingly quickly once he gets inside of her. “Oh, shit, fuck—” is all he has time to say before he’s spilling into a condom, and then he’s groaning, throwing his hands over his face in embarrassment.

Agnes pries them away from his face, her eyes sparkling. “Jeez, Fisher,” she says, but it’s gentle. “And here you talked such a big game.”

He’s softening inside of her as they speak. “It’s been awhile,” he mutters, and he can feel how red his face is turning.

“I don’t think I can come again, anyway,” Agnes shrugs. “There’s always next time.”

Then, she’s getting up, all practiced efficiency, dressing and going to the bathroom and running her hands through her curly hair to brush it out, while Conrad sits in bed, dazed.

“Study time?” Agnes says, waltzing back into his bedroom with her laptop in hand. Conrad is still naked.

“Yeah, okay,” he says, trying not to think of another time in his life, when study sessions had taken place over the phone in the quiet of the night, two people working in silence, their breaths shared through the static of the phone line, just to remind the other one that they existed.

Sex with Agnes is good until it isn’t. He can see the way she starts to lean into it more and the way she suddenly wants to hold his hand outside of it, and they both ignore it until they simply can’t. It isn’t like with Aubrey, who liked him just as much as he liked her. Sure, Conrad likes Agnes plenty, but sometimes, he thinks that Agnes might love him, which it sends a pang of guilt through his whole body.

He wonders if this is how Belly feels when he looks at her. On his worst days, he hopes it is. He hopes she feels terrible about it. On his best days, he knows that he’s a liar. He only ever wants her to be happy.

“I think we have to stop this,” Agnes says one day when they’re lying in bed, cuddling. He’s got one arm around her shoulder, and she’s tracing abstract shapes on his bare chest. He’d been distant during sex that day, and they both know it. They’d avoided each others’ mouths, focusing on their hands and his cock and her cunt, all clinical and practiced, the way they’ve learned to partially remove themselves from their medical practices, lest they become too invested.

“Why?” Conrad asks, and the question sound stupid the second they come out of his mouth. Agnes gives him a knowing look, and Conrad sighs. Conrad isn’t stupid, and they both know it. Agnes isn’t, either. That’s his favourite part of her, and maybe, he thinks, her favourite part of him. They don’t do the bullshit thing. They never have. “Yeah, you’re right,” Conrad says, moving his arm off of her. It occurs to him that it’s the last time he’ll ever touch her like this. It doesn’t hurt as much as it maybe should. “I’m sorry. This fucking sucks.”

“You’re the best friend I have here,” Agnes says finally, “and an even better study partner. I refuse to lose that. I’ll get over it. I always do.”

Maybe this isn’t how Belly feels when he looks at her, because Conrad could never imagine himself saying these words. He doesn’t think he’ll ever get over her, and here, Agnes is already figuring out ways of moving on when he’s just been inside her minutes ago.

“You’re my best friend, too, you know,” he says, truly meaning it, and that’s the end of that.

They get coffee once they’re dressed, and crack open their books. Life moves on, and Agnes does too. It’s the biggest relief of Conrad’s life to not lose her over it.

The day of Jeremiah and Belly’s joint bachelor and bachelorette parties, Conrad wishes that he could be anywhere else. He’s sipping slowly on a beer, pretending to be engrossed in conversation with Blake, but really, he’s listening to Belly and her friends gossip by the pool.

“Right, this group is messy,” Anika quips, leaning back to soak up some sun, and Conrad is annoyed when he realizes that Jeremiah was objectively right when he teased Conrad about hooking up with a girl. Belly’s friend Anika is hot, and he can tell she thinks he is, too. She’s been looking at him all day, even if she’s barely said a word to him. He knows that look. It’s how he looks at Belly when he’s had one too many drinks in him. It’s the way he looks at Belly even when he hasn’t.

“You guys never told me how hot Conrad is,” Anika says from the pool, unaware that he’s listening, and Conrad tenses when he hears his name. “I’d go for him, if he wasn’t Belly’s first love,” she teases.

Belly laughs, but Conrad can hear the jealousy in it. He shouldn’t feel so triumphant about it, but he does. “No, no you should!” she says, and Conrad almost has to smirk at the unconvincing show she’s putting on. “You should do it!”

Later that afternoon, Conrad’s drunk. He’s the designated driver for their bar crawl, but he can’t do this entire bullshit extravaganza sober, so he decides that he can have a few too many beers at home before the night starts and be fine by the time he needs to drive everyone home.

When he runs into Anika in the house, his head is spinning slightly. “Oh, hey,” he says, when he rounds the corner and sees her in her tiny bikini. She looks objectively fantastic in a swimsuit—tall and lithe where Belly is shorter and softer, but it isn’t her fault she isn’t Belly Conklin. No one else is, really.

“Hi,” Anika says, her posture straight, and for a moment, Conrad likes how confident she is. He hopes it’s been good for Belly, being around a girl like this, so self-assured of herself and her wants. Belly should have everything she’s ever wanted, and the ability to go after it.

“I heard you in the pool,” Conrad says softly, mostly because he’s drunk, and only a little because he can see Jeremiah and Belly kissing outside, and his chest fucking hurts so bad that he needs to do something about it.

“Oh, yeah?” Anika asks easily, barely phased at getting caught. “But did you hear Taylor? I’ve been warned, you know. Conrad Fisher is off-limits.”

Conrad rolls his eyes. “Taylor Jewel, of all people, doesn’t dictate who I hook up with.”

Anika grins, crossing her arms. It pushes her tits further up her chest, and Conrad doesn't bother hiding the fact that he looks. “Oh, so we’re hooking up, now, are we? All I said was that I wanted to make out with someone.”

Conrad shrugs. “We can stop there, if you want to.”

They don’t.

Instead, Conrad has her from behind up against a wall with a mouthful of thin braids that make it impossible to forget that she's not Belly. He uses them to yank her around a little, and she arches into him when he does. It feels so fucking good that he forgets for a second that he isn’t supposed to be doing this. It’s just that when he closes his eyes, all he can see is his brother pulling Belly into his lap, and when he focuses on reaching into Anika’s bikini top and squeezing her breasts, it hurts a little less.

“Oh my God,” Anika is saying, her hands grappling at the wall with nothing to hold onto. “I don't know what she was thinking. There’s no way Jeremiah can fuck like this,” she mutters, and Conrad stills.

“What did you say?”

Anika trembles. “Sorry,” she says. “I shouldn’t have said that. That wasn’t cool. I just mean—you know, frat boys—I was just—Belly—”

It’s the first time Conrad sees her composure break, and it breaks something in him, too. Fuck his brother. Fuck his brother and his brother’s fiancée, who is currently giggling outside so loudly that he can feel her laughter resonate in every bone of his body.

“Yeah,” Conrad spits, suddenly pissed off. “Bet you didn’t know it could be this good, huh?” He’s running his mouth, working off fumes of confidence he didn’t even know he had. Anika could laugh in his face right now, but she doesn’t. “Stupid fucking frat boys,” he says, pinching her nipples just on the right side of mean, and Anika’s body convulses in this way that feels half like relief and half like fear. “Tell me,” he commands, suddenly very aware of his lack of sobriety. “Come on, tell me how it feels.”

“Good,” Anika moans. “It’s so good, Conrad. I’m gonna come. Gonna come so hard around your cock. You gonna come inside of me, too?”

When they both go back outside later, not even bothering to hide that they were inside together, Belly comes running over to them, smiling. Conrad thinks that he might be hard again, drunk on the power of a secret. I fucked your friend, he wants to tell her meanly. You might be marrying my brother, but I fucked your friend, and I know you would care if you knew.

“Hey!” Belly says, smiling, a little tipsy. “You guys were gone for awhile. Isn’t Anika awesome, Conrad? Everyone loves her. I love her, too. She’s the best, isn’t she? Anika, I’m so glad you’re here.”

Conrad stays for the wedding, because apparently, he’s the world’s biggest masochist. Belly looks beautiful in her wedding dress, but that’s because Belly always looks beautiful. In the back of his head, he has enough rationality left to be pissed at Jeremiah, who’s wearing a perfectly tailored suit while Belly’s in a prom dress from the sale rack. If this were his wedding, she would be wearing whatever she wanted, no matter the cost. She would be smiling, too, because it would be their fucking wedding day, and she would be happy, because Conrad would go to the ends of the earth to make Belly Conklin happy. He can see the bags under her eyes, and wonders if Jeremiah notices them, too. His brother’s always been observant, even if other people think he isn’t. He sees things but stays quiet, and then pulls them out at the worst of times, just to use them against you. Conrad wonders, cruelly, if this will ever come up. If, in a fight years from now, Jeremiah will say to her: You didn’t smile at the altar. That’s why I cheated on you—again.

Conrad dissociates for most of the ceremony, and immediately downs two glasses of champagne when he gets to the reception. He can’t look in Belly’s direction; he’ll fall apart. Instead, he sits in a corner alone, wondering why he stayed. Briefly, he contemplates texting Agnes, but he doesn’t even know what he would say. A text message couldn’t possibly encapsulate the mess he’s gotten himself into.

“God, there you are,” a voice says above him, and when he looks up, it’s at Taylor’s impatient eyes.

“Fuck off,” he grumbles, and Taylor glares at him.

“You chose to stick around,” she tells him, “so get your ass up. It’s speech time for the best man and maid of honour.”

“Co-best man,” Conrad corrects, and he realizes that he’s slurring his words. He doesn’t know which drink he’s on now. His fifth? Six? Adam Fisher’s open bar is both his enemy and his saviour.

Taylor sighs, suddenly looking very sad, and he suddenly can’t stand her pity. “Come on,” she says. “I’ll get you some water. We can skulk in the dark and stalk the loves of our lives after this, but we both made commitments. Get your ass up, Conrad.” He watches as her eyes flit to Steven, who’s dancing with Denise and laughing. They fit together like two pieces of a puzzle, and Conrad doesn’t have any words of encouragement for Taylor. He doesn’t think wow, they look perfect together would be much help right now.

Conrad has a speech pre-written, which he reads monotonously and painfully while Taylor holds his hand. It would be weird as hell if it wasn’t the only thing keeping him upright, and besides, no one can see. They’re hidden behind a podium, so no one but Taylor is subject to the humiliation of his sweaty, shaking palm in hers.

“Congratulations to the happy couple,” Conrad says at the end, finally making eye contact with Belly, who, much to his relief and dismay, doesn’t look happy at all. He raises a glass, and everyone else follows suit.

Afterwards, he barely stumbles out of the hall before he collapses into Taylor’s arms, angrily wiping a tear from his face. She’s crying too, he realizes, and for a minute, they just hold each other. Conrad’s known her almost his entire life, and he doesn’t know if they’ve even so much as shaken hands before. With Belly always came Taylor—they were a joint package, and he always accepted that—but it isn’t until now that he's ever seen Taylor as anything outside of Belly’s best friend. He’s never thought of her having feelings, of being the type of girl who might cry seeing her ex-boyfriend slow-dance with his new girlfriend.

“How about it, Taylor?” he tries, raising one eyebrow at her, even as his voice shakes. “We can’t get much more cliché than the best man and the maid of honour.”

Taylor releases him, smiling sadly. “Conrad,” she says gently, and her kindness makes him hate her almost as much as he hates himself. “Be real.”

When they hug again, it’s full of snot and tears, and Taylor’s so fucking short that he has to bend down to really get any sort of comfort out her. When he pulls her into a chair outside of the hall and sits her in his lap, she doesn’t really protest; she just wraps her legs around his waist and cries a little, which Conrad can work with even more than he can work with having sex, because he can’t help himself—he loves to fix a problem.

“Fuck the Conklins,” Taylor says, and Conrad laughs brokenly.

“Fuck the Conklins,” he repeats, and then somehow they’re kissing messily, and it’s terrible. Nothing about them works, and they can’t find a rhythm that works. Taylor’s mouth tastes weird, like sour red wine, which Conrad’s never liked, and everything’s wet, but not in a good way; it’s only because they’re both crying.

Then, Taylor’s undoing the zipper on his dress pants, and he’s hard, not because he’s particularly attracted to her, but because having a woman in a tight dress on your lap will do that to you, and he’s finding out that she’s only wearing a lace thong underneath her maid of honour dress. He’s babbling nonsense into her mouth about how much he loves Belly, which weirdly, doesn’t even seem to dissuade her. She just kisses him harder, with too much teeth and not enough tongue. It’s so fucked up that it works, and Conrad can feel his cock twitch in anticipation.

“Someone’s going to see us,” he says, with the last bit of sanity in his body, and Taylor laughs without humour.

“No one’s coming to find us, Conrad,” she says softly, and he knows she’s right, which makes him cry just a little bit more.

Fucking Taylor Jewel is the weirdest lay of his life, because he’s never been more grateful for another person, just as much as he’s never slept with anyone he’s been less attracted to in his life. When he sheathes his cock inside of her, he wonders if he’s irreparably broken. If the Belly Conklin-shaped hole in his heart is slowly killing him, and making him do insane, stupid things, like fuck her maid of honour at her wedding in the public, echoing hall of her reception at the country club.

“I just miss him so much,” Taylor is saying to him, mouthing at his ear, and Conrad gets it. His hands move her hips up and down, and he can feel the pressure around his cock, but mostly, he’s thinking about the music playing inside the hall, and how he knows that Jeremiah’s chosen this song, because Belly would never let such a disgusting song play at her wedding if it was up to her.

“He’s an idiot,” he says, thinking about all the times that Steven’s yelled at him all summer, but he isn't really mad about it, just sad. He misses Steven almost as much as he misses Belly—misses their friendship, back before he fucked things up and fell in love with his sister, back when he didn’t need to keep space between them, lest he fuck things up even more. “You’re—you’re amazing, Taylor, and if he can’t see that, he—”

Taylor laughs, clenching down on him. It feels insane to be talking while they’re doing this. Conrad wonders how wrecked he looks right now. “I think that’s the first nice thing you’ve ever said to me, Fisher,” she says, and Conrad almost smiles a real smile.

“God,” he says, his hands wandering over her body. “I’m a real fucking dick, aren’t I?’

Taylor laughs again, and then they’re both crying again, collapsing against each other. He never comes, and neither does she, but it’s sex, and it’s devastating, and despite his lack of orgasm, Conrad feels unravelled in a way he never has before.

A year and a half after his brother marries the love of his life, Conrad’s pissed off at his dad. That’s nothing new, of course, but the extent of his rage is higher than it’s been in years. Therapy has done wonders for his relationship with his dad, meaning that Conrad’s mostly able to ignore Adam’s attempts to goad him into anger. I can’t control my father, he’s recited one hundred times. I can only control my actions.

Somehow, news of Jeremiah’s infidelity had made it to their father’s ears, and Conrad just about stabs his dad in the eye with a fork when Adam guffaws. “Good thing he locked that one down before she bailed,” he laughs. “Smart boy.”

Even Kayleigh’s eyes flash in surprise at the insensitivity behind that one. It’s New Year's Day, and Conrad’s staying with his father for the holidays. It’s a fucking farce—him, his dad, and Kayleigh, trying to pretend like this is some semblance of a family—but he’s trying. Belly and Jeremiah are staying at Laurel’s, and Conrad has made up every excuse in the world to go out each time they’re around.

Conrad exchanges a look with Kayleigh, which they’ve been doing more lately when Adam’s being out of line, and it makes Conrad hate her a little less, which makes him hate himself a little more. “Adam,” Kayleigh says, putting her hand on his father’s arm. “Maybe put down the bourbon for the rest of the night, okay?”

Adam rolls his eyes, glancing over at Conrad, and his father's displeasure barely conceals the silent women, am I right? in his gaze. Conrad refuses to look back at his father. “Kayleigh,” he says instead, forcing a smile onto his face, “dinner was so great. Thanks for cooking.”

Kayleigh brightens, and Conrad sighs. It’s so easy to please her. His father must be the worst boyfriend in the world for her to be placated so easily. “Thanks, Conrad,” she smiles, and touches his arm. He instinctively moves away, but when he sees his father’s frown, he leans into it and smiles wider.

“You’re welcome,” he says, all boyish charm, and his father frowns even harder.

Fucking his father’s girlfriend is easier than it should be but, Conrad contemplates, it isn’t like her track record makes her the most trustworthy person. If she was willing to fuck a man whose wife had cancer, surely, fucking that man’s son isn’t that much worse.

He’s seen photos of Kayleigh’s ex-boyfriends, back when he found out about Adam’s affair with his secretary and Conrad started obsessively stalking her online, trying to figure out who the girl was that could make Adam cheat on the most wonderful woman in the world. She’d never gone for an older man before, he finds out. In fact, most of her boyfriends had looked just a little bit like Conrad, in the way that Adam looked like Conrad, with a few extra decades and a whole lot more dickishness.

“So, my dad’s kind of an asshole, huh?” Conrad says sympathetically, after his father’s gone to sleep and he and Kayleigh are alone in the living room, pretending to watch a movie on Netflix to fill the silence.

“God, yeah,” Kayleigh laughs, and her candidness surprises him.

“Why are you with him?” Conrad asks, and Kayleigh sighs. In the background, the movie soundtrack keeps the silence from growing deafening.

“He was nice in the beginning,” she says. “I thought…I thought he loved me. He said he was going to leave Susannah for me.” She pauses. “Sorry.”

“It’s fine,” Conrad says, even though it’s not.

“But he never really did. She just…died. I thought it was the same thing, but it wasn’t.”

“I used to hate you,” Conrad admits, not quite knowing what he’s trying to accomplish. He doesn’t remember the last time he was so forthright with someone. His words aren’t full of malice, just truth.

Kayleigh smiles sadly, nodding. “And now?” she asks, suddenly so close to him that he can feel her breath on his face.

Instead of answering, Conrad simply kisses her. For a second, she thrashes in his arms, and he thinks she might pull back and slap him, but then she stills, kissing him back. Conrad hates his dad, and he hates how much he wants to ruin this one good thing for him. It’s probably, he contemplates, because he already tried and failed at ruining Jeremiah’s one good thing. As he licks into Kayleigh’s mouth, he decides that he’s somehow become the worst member of his family. He’s probably deserved every single time any of them have ever yelled at him. His mother would hate him, if she could see him now.

Distantly, Conrad realizes that Kayleigh already kisses the way that he likes and touches him the way he likes, and he shudders, wondering if he and his dad share the same sexual interests. It makes him pause, wondering whether he and his brother are the same. Did Belly feel this way the first time she kissed Jeremiah? Did she touch him the way she touched Conrad? Did it feel just as good for Jeremiah as it did for him?

It couldn’t have, he thinks. Belly loved him. What could feel as good as that?

There’s a sudden pang in his chest when he realizes that Belly loves Jeremiah, too. Belly loves Jeremiah, and his fucking father bankrolled their wedding, even after he found out about the cheating, even after he cheated on their mother, and now Conrad is making himself a cheater, too.

Like father, like son, like son.

“What are we doing?” Kayleigh asks against his mouth, the question making her seem so much younger than him, despite her decade on her.

“Whatever you want,” he says truthfully, because he’s not really in it for the sex so much as he just wants to hurt his father. He probably shouldn’t tell her that part.

Turns out, what Kayleigh wants is to get fucked by a younger man who doesn’t have any issues getting it up, and Conrad delivers easily, pressing her face into the couch to silence her moans. Conrad’s attentive, making her come twice before he does, and he pauses each time, making sure that he doesn’t hear anything from where his father is sleeping upstairs. He wonders what Belly would think of this. Whether he really does deserve it now—the insults she hurled at him and the disgust on her face when he told her he loved her. He wonders what she would say if he saw her fucking the woman he had cried to her about when they were teenagers. Finally, he empties himself into a condom—having his cock directly inside a woman where his father’s was is a little too fucked up, even for him—and groans, pulling out of Kayleigh wetly.

“You’re not going to say anything, right?” Conrad says, softly stroking her hair.

“Of course not,” Kayleigh whispers, and behind her back, Conrad smiles meanly. She’ll never speak of this, but it’s over—he can tell. For the rest of her life, Kayleigh will never be able to kiss his father without thinking about his son. Revenge tastes even sweeter than the wetness between Kayleigh’s thighs when he cleans her up, making her come once more, just as a final reminder.

Conrad does not fuck Laurel Park, but he thinks it deserves an honourable mention on his list just for how fucked up the whole thing is.

He visits her as often as he can, and they talk on the phone every week. In every sense of the word, Laurel is the second mother he never had. She’s the only one who really knows how much he’s hurting. The only one who knows that he still loves Belly, and that he always will.

“Does it ever stop fucking hurting?” he asks her brokenly when he’s in town one weekend, and she rests her hand gently on his face, the way she used to when he was a kid.

Suddenly, her face reminds him so much of Belly’s that his lower lip trembles and he leans into her, unthinking, his lips brushing hers for just a second. Laurel rears back, pulling her hand away immediately, and Conrad bursts into tears.

“I’m not her, Connie,” Laurel says so gently that he feels like a little fucking kid, and when he crawls into her arms, there’s absolutely nothing sexual about it.

“God, I miss my mom,” he says, in the way he can only ever tell Laurel, and he thinks Laurel might be crying with him.

“Me too, kid,” Laurel says, both of them very aware that he's a grown man, now. “Me too.”

“I’m so sorry,” he mutters, well aware of the way he’s curled herself into a tiny ball, desperately wishing that he was a child again, capable of being placated with a hug and a bandage on the knee. “That was—God, Laur. I’m sorry. It’ll never happen again. I didn’t mean to. I don’t even—I don’t know why—”

“I know, Connie,” she says softly. “I know.”

Conrad fucks a complete stranger only once, and immediately knows it isn’t for him. He’s out at the bar after work, run ragged from a 12-hour shift, and she comes up to him with a knowing smile. She’s tall, with dark brown, curly hair, and a pair of hexagonal glasses that are too big for her tiny face.

Conrad is vaulted immediately back to childhood, when Belly had gotten her first pair of glasses at age 9. They were red with sparkly rims. He had gotten his first pair that year, too, and it had felt special, somehow—something for just the two of them to bond over, silly as it may have been. He remembers being 17, and Belly showing up that summer with contact lenses in, her hair somehow smoother, her legs somehow longer, but her smile exactly the same as it was every year before that. I liked you better with glasses, he had said; her expression had fallen, and Conrad could immediately tell that it had come out all wrong. I miss you, he should have said instead. You look different. It scares me that you might be different, too. Are you still that sparkly-rimmed, flushed-cheek girl underneath it all? I'm still that little boy pushing his too-big glasses up his nose so that he can look at you better. I think I might be him forever, Belly. 

Conrad has time to count the not-red-glasses-wearing stranger's ear piercings (13), but doesn’t get her name, before she’s dragging him to the bathroom, getting down on her knees for him and daring him to come in her mouth. He does, panting—only after he closes his eyes and pretends it’s Belly kneeling in front of him—and then kisses her apologetically when he tells her that he has to go. She glares at him for that before sighing, wiping her mouth off, and tells him it was nice to meet him. He doesn’t give her his number. She doesn’t ask for his.

He realizes, upon going home, that he might kind of hate sex. He might, he realizes, sort of hate himself.

The next morning, he books a therapy appointment, and swears off of whatever the fuck it is he’s been doing. It has to stop. He has to stop.

The closest Conrad Fisher comes to fucking someone after that is two years later, when he’s visiting Cousins. It’s Fourth of July weekend, and he’s putting on his smile and enduring the commitment they’ve all made to see each other once a year, because that’s what you do when you’re family.

Jeremiah, Belly, Steven, and Denise are down at the beach, while Laurel and John hang out in the backyard. Even his dad has made it out—Kayleigh has long since left the picture, which Conrad only takes slight responsibility for—and Conrad is alone in the house, jerking off in his room.

He’s trying his best to not think about Belly in her ruffled, blue bikini—he’s actually doing much better at that these days—and succeeding for the most part, except for on each downstroke, when he imagines it’s her tiny fist, squeezing him. Conrad closes his eyes, a heat stroking down his spine that alerts him that he’s going to come soon, and then the door to his room swings open.

“Conrad!” Belly’s voice says, giggling, “We’ve been looking for you. What are you—?” Her laughter dies on the last word, and then she’s looking at him with her mouth agape, her dark eyes zeroed in on where he’s got his hand on his cock. Her lips are in the shape of a perfect ‘o.’

“Oh, fuck,” Conrad stutters, and then he’s coming all over his hand, groaning loudly.

For a second, neither of them move, and Conrad can hear Belly’s breaths quicken. He can tell that she’s affected, and suddenly, it’s like the tide is roaring in his ears. Her pupils are dilated, and so quickly that he might have missed it if he blinked, her tongue darts out to lick her lips.

“Belly,” Conrad begins, and it breaks the moment immediately. Belly’s eyes widen, and then she’s running out, slamming the door behind her. “Belly!” Conrad calls again, trying to stand up, and trips over where he has his pants around his ankles. His hand is still covered in his own come.

“Fuck,” he says out loud, even though the room is empty, his heart pounding so loudly he thinks all of Cousins might be able to hear it. “Fuck.”

There’s one more girl after that. Her name is Sophia, and for the first time in years, Conrad thinks he might be able to fall in love with someone besides Isabel Conklin.

Sophia is quiet but feisty as hell, and she’s doing a PhD in psychology, which leads them to fight the first time they meet. Doctors are so presumptuous, Sophia seethes at him. Not all psychology careers are clinical, you know. I’m a researcher.

Conrad does, in fact, know—he’d been in a biology lab the first semester of his undergrad, when he’d realized that research wasn’t for him, and he tells Sophia this as an apology, before asking her about her thesis topic. My, um, brother’s wife did her grad degree in sports psychology, he says, and she does counselling now, so I’m just biased. Forgive me?

Sophia is wicked smart, and tells him that, ironically, she’s doing her thesis on the psychology of forgiveness. She thinks that people who say that forgiveness can solve everything are idiots who let themselves be walked all over, but that the world sure as hell needs more of it if they’re all to survive. Conrad likes her immediately, and he doesn’t stop liking her the way he usually does a few months in. In fact, he only likes her more as the months go on, when she starts keeping a toothbrush at her apartment and he starts letting her use his Range Rover to drive to work, because her lab is located somewhere stupidly off route of Palo Alto’s limited transit system.

Agnes likes her too, which is a relief, because as he’s learned over the years, Agnes is a far better judge of character than he is. I’m happy for you, she says to him over drinks at the bar one night, after he and Sophia have celebrated their six month anniversary. You deserve it. You deserve to be happy. Conrad isn’t too sure about that, but he likes it, anyway. He likes being happy, and he likes that Sophia doesn’t make him feel bad about it.

Conrad waits to have sex with her for longer than one might normally in their 30s, but she doesn’t seem to mind, and when he finally finds himself inside of her for the first time, it almost feels right. He’s in control of his body and his thoughts and all his appendages, and he smiles the whole time. Belly is barely in his mind, and when he kisses Sophia, he thinks only of her mouth.

Nearly a year into dating, Sophia broaches the topic for the millionth time as they make dinner together; he preps the vegetables and she cooks them. Much like Belly, she loves to tease him for his lack of seasoning, calling him White man in a way that reminds him a little too much of his ex-girlfriend. He thinks that his flavours are getting better, though. He’s picked up the dash-of-MSG trick from Sophia’s mom, and he swears the salt makes every dish addictive.

“Not to pry,” Sophia says, very much prying, “but are we going to see your family this summer?”

Conrad freezes, putting on his mask. “I was thinking of skipping the Fourth of July this year,” he says calmly. Sophia knows he goes to Massachusetts every summer for a week, but they’ve never been together for one. He’s told her bits and pieces about his mother, though, so he knows he isn’t going to get around this one; she knows how important the holiday was to Susannah.

Sophia wraps her arms around his torso from behind, kissing his shoulder. “What are you avoiding, Con? What won’t you tell me?” Conrad is silent, and Sophia sighs coldly. “Fine,” she says. “Call me later when you’re ready to talk.”

He’s left to finish cooking dinner on his own, and when the eggplant comes out underseasoned, he misses his girlfriend, so he takes a container over to her apartment and tells her that she completes him, and then he gets down on his knees and apologizes again between her legs, making her cry out his name over and over again until she’s pushing his head away and dragging him up to kiss her.

“We’ll go to Cousins,” he murmurs against her mouth when it’s over, and he means it. “You’ll love it. The beach is beautiful. The sunsets are like no other.”

“Hm,” Sophia says, and he knows that she’s thinking of her own childhood in Hong Kong, where beaches look different than they do in America and mountains loom atop every aspect of life. “I’m looking forward to it.”

Later that month, Conrad has sex with her in his childhood room at the summer house, just because he can, and she laughs her way through most of it, eyeing up the posters on his walls. “Oh my God,” she says, as he pins her hips down and makes her whimper. “You were a sailing prodigy? Why did you never tell me? Is that four first place trophies?”

“Shut up,” he laughs. “I’ll take you sailing, Sophia. Jesus, let me fuck you now, okay? Come on, there we go, yeah?”

She quiets after that, their bodies speaking for them in place of words. He loves having her here, in this room that’s brought him so much pain. It makes things better, having her around, and this is what he’s thinking as he comes inside of her and she wraps her legs around his waist, pulling him in closer. Then, unexpectedly, the front door of the house is slamming, and Conrad can hear Belly Conklin’s voice drift up the staircase.

“Hello?” it’s saying, all angelic and vibrant. She sounds so fucking happy. Conrad freezes, still inside of his girlfriend, the aftershocks of his orgasm barely passed.

“Oh, shit,” Sophia laughs, and Conrad braces for the impact of a fight, before realizing that his reaction was completely appropriate on the outside. It isn’t weird to be afraid of getting caught having sex by your brother and his wife.

“Shit,” Conrad echoes, pretending to be normal.

They dress quickly—Sophia grabs one of his t-shirts after realizing that her top is completely wrinkled—and wash off before heading downstairs. Jeremiah is sitting on a barstool at the kitchen island with Belly perched on his knee. They’re laughing, quietly. Conrad does a very good job at keeping the smile steady on his face.

“Hey,” he says, holding Sophia’s hand. “We didn’t know when you guys were getting in.” He gestures at his girlfriend, who’s suddenly nervous, the way she often gets around new people—the way he does, too. “This is Sophia.”

“Hi,” she says shyly. “It’s really good to meet you two. Con’s told me a lot about you.”

Belly smiles brightly at her, pulling herself off Jeremiah’s lap to give her a hug, because of course she does—it’s Belly. “You’re gorgeous,” she laughs, and Conrad feels a little crazy, unable to figure out who to look at.

“Hey, Sophia,” Jeremiah says, all easygoing, but there’s a tension beneath his words that Conrad catches immediately. His brother gives Sophia a once over before quirking an eyebrow at him, and then lets out a small huff while Sophia and Belly do the thing that girls do where they compliment each other’s outfits like it’s a friendly competition (It even has pockets! he hears Belly twitter delightedly).

He can tell what Jeremiah’s thinking just from the disgust in his eyes, which is completely unfair in every way. What the fuck is this? Conrad translates his brother’s disapproving gaze silently. What, you couldn’t have my wife, so you got an Asian substitute? That’s just pathetic, Conrad.

Shut up, he wants to tell Jeremiah. It’s not like that.

For once, he isn’t even lying to himself. Sophia doesn’t look anything like Belly—not really. She’s shorter, for one thing, and her frame is more petite. She’s got hair that falls just below her chin, and her nose is angular where Belly’s is rounded. Besides, Belly’s half White, and Jeremiah’s never given him shit for liking a White woman before. It fills him with a sort of revulsion to see his brother reduce both these women to the colour of their skin, and then he feels sort of good about his brother’s immediate fetishization, despite everything. For once, Conrad might not be the worst person in the room.

“Sophia,” Conrad says, pulling her to his side and away from his ex-girlfriend. “Do you want to go to the beach with me?” She loops an arm around his waist, squeezing. He can see Belly’s eyes follow the movement, just as he can see her face drop slightly when he says the word ‘beach.’ That had always been their place. Jesus Christ, Conrad thinks wildly. What the fuck is wrong with her? What the fuck is wrong with me that I still care?

“Absolutely,” Sophia declares. “Show me your world, Conrad Fisher.”

After their beach visit, everything goes about as smoothly as it can, given the circumstances. He makes it through the week, and Conrad gets through no less than six successful—chaperoned by Jeremiah’s watchful eye—conversations with Belly. His brother and Steven put on an impressive fireworks show, and Belly and Sophia both tease him for his shitty cooking and kick him out of the kitchen, whipping up a mix of Korean and Chinese appetizers for the Fourth of July. When Jeremiah complains about the lack of apple pie, Sophia shoves a bowl of mango pudding in his face and tells him to sit down and eat your dessert, White boy. Conrad laughs at the look of shock on his brother’s face, and then kisses his girlfriend enthusiastically in front of everyone.

“Hey, Con,” Sophia says on their last day, and she sounds tired. When she sits down beside him, she doesn’t lean into his side the way she usually does. Instead, she leaves a deliberate foot of space between them, and Conrad gets a sinking feeling in his stomach that usually precedes a panic attack.

“What’s up?” he asks gently. “Is everything okay?”

Sophia shakes her head. “Not really, to be honest. I stayed up late talking with Jeremiah, and…” She trails off, and for a second, Conrad’s heart seizes as he imagines the worst scenario possible. It’s like Belly all over again. His girlfriend likes his brother more than she likes him, and she’s going to leave him, and he’ll have to watch them kiss at every family gathering for the next decade of his life, and— “He had a lot to say,” Sophia interrupts his thought process, “about you and Belly.”

Conrad takes a deep breath. “What about me and Belly?”

Sophia fixes him with a hard stare, and he concedes. “I’m not an idiot, Con,” she says, shaking her head. “Don’t do that with me.”

The problem with liking strong-willed women, Conrad realizes, is that they’re always impossible to pull one over on. That’s his favourite part of them, until it isn’t. “Yeah,” he says. “Okay, yeah. I might not have told you everything. But it was ages ago. We dated when I was in my first year of undergrad. It’s ancient history.”

Sophia sighs. “Yeah, until you told her you loved her the night before her wedding.”

Conrad grits his teeth. “Jeremiah had no right—”

“Belly’s his wife, Con,” Sophia says softly. “I think maybe you had no right.”

Sophia’s right, in the way that she always is, and for the first time in his life, Conrad sort of hates her for it. “So, what?” he laughs bitterly. “You’re going to break up with me because I was once in love with my brother’s girl?”

“You’ve never told me you love me, you know that?” she asks. “And I always just thought, well, we’re adults. We don’t have to say, like, every tiny thing. I see the way you look at me. I thought I knew that you loved me just from that. But then I saw the way you look at her. You’ve never once looked at me like that.”

For a second, Conrad just stares at her. That can’t possibly be true. He likes Sophia. He’s falling for Sophia. He could, given the time, marry Sophia. He looks at her every day of his life because he likes to, and because he wants to, and because he chose this.

“Don’t do this,” he pleads, and then he’s so angry at himself, and at Cousins, because if he just never fucking came back here, this wouldn’t be happening. He and Sophia could be at his apartment right now, watching the next episode of whatever silly reality TV show she’d dragged him into, dissecting each fight with her ridiculous knowledge of psychology theory and telling him Con, it’s because forgiveness is easier than living with resentment, which is why Emily forgives Casey for hooking up with Jude. Instead, they’re here, and everything Conrad’s fought so hard to build these past few years is breaking down, once again, in the sand on the beach at Cousins.

“I could have forgiven you,” Sophia tells him finally, “if you had just told me the truth. It was the not knowing that did it, in the end.”

Conrad bows his head, and thinks back to when he finally learned the details of Jeremiah’s cheating in Cabo. How, at both Jeremiah’s and Belly’s insistence, they had totally been broken up at the time. But he didn’t tell you until months later? Conrad had wanted to scream. If he didn’t do anything wrong, then why didn’t he tell you?

“I’m sorry,” Conrad says finally, because what else is there to say? “Can we—? Can we hold hands, just one more time?”

Sophia’s eyes are shimmering with tears when she looks at him. “Oh, Conrad,” she says, and listening to her say his name so tenderly feels like swallowing glass. He feels it all: the terrible loss of what they could have been and the heart-wrenching grief of what they were, and when Sophia takes his hand and laces his fingers between hers, he realizes the true tragedy of it all—this still doesn’t hurt as much as losing Belly once did.

It’s just after ten o’clock his time when the phone call comes, which means that it's just after one in the morning on the east coast. Conrad’s standing in his room getting dressed for bed when the sound of his ringtone makes him jump. When he looks down at his phone, he can hardly believe the soft smile looking back at him, nor can he realize how young it looks. Conrad has an old picture for her caller ID—she must be 19 or 20—because she hasn't called him in years, so there's been no reason to update it.

“Belly?” he picks up on the second ring, immediately panicked. If she's calling him, something terrible must have happened. “What is it? What's wrong? Is it Jere? Is it—? Are you—?” He barely knows what he's asking, his hands shaking, and when Belly heaves a long, choking gulp on the other side of the phone, Conrad nearly bursts into tears in anticipation.

“Sorry,” Belly says, her voice cracking. “Everything's fine, Conrad. I didn't mean—I didn't realize how it would look, me calling you like this.”

Conrad exhales so quickly that it makes him dizzy, and he has to sit down to steady himself. “Jesus,” he mutters, half to himself. “Jesus Christ, Belly, it’s one in the morning. You haven't called me in a fucking decade. What's wrong with you?”

There's silence on the other end, and then Belly sighs in defeat. “I don't know,” she says quietly, and he can hear that she's still a little weepy. “I just wanted to hear your voice.”

Conrad thinks his heart might fall out of his chest, and he grabs it to steady himself, suddenly pained. “You're drunk, Belly,” he says calmly, because it's the only explanation.

“No,” she says, and he can picture her shaking her head. The last time he saw her, she’d been sporting bangs, and he pictures them swishing back and forth, the ends of her hair brushing against her shoulders. “I’m not, I swear.”

“Then what, Belly, I—”

“One of my clients today told me that Venus is an evening star right now,” Belly interrupts him, and his heart seizes, remembering suddenly the way it felt to be a teenager, whispering astronomy facts over the phone in the name of romance. “I can't stop thinking about it. I can't—I can't stop thinking about you.”

Conrad doesn't know what to say. He’s scared of the shakiness in Belly’s voice, like if he says the wrong thing, he might scare her off. It’s like handling a small, skittish creature, and Conrad realized very early on in his medical career that he was neither cut out to handle children nor pets.

“Why are you calling, Belly?” he asks gently, because they both know the truth. She has all the power here, even if they used to like pretending otherwise.

There's a long, pensive silence on her end of the line. For a moment, Conrad thinks she might have hung up. Then, she sighs softly, and he wishes he could capture that sound and bottle it away—it's been so many years since she's made a sound meant just for him, with no one else around.

“I miss you,” Belly says, and it's a dagger to his chest. “I—I just want—” Her voice is starting to sound whiny, and Conrad almost laughs in disbelief. He knows what she's asking him for, and it's fucked. This phone call is fucked.

For a moment, he contemplates being the one to hang up, but he knows he doesn't have it in him. He should remind her that she's married. He should remind himself that she's married. The right thing to do would be to say Belly, where the hell is Jeremiah?

“Jesus Christ,” he says instead, completely flat. “What the hell is wrong with you?”

“I don't know,” Belly wails, sniffing into his ear, and the fucked up hero complex Conrad’s spent years undoing in therapy rears its ugly head, suddenly desperate to pet her hair and shush her, and then to knock his brother's face in and demand what the hell his problem is, because he clearly isn't taking care of Belly in the way she deserves.

“You're okay,” he soothes, wishing he could hold her as she cries. “Hey, sweetheart, you're okay, I promise. That's it, yeah? Just let it out. Let it out, there you go. You can cry as much as you need, okay? Yeah, you're alright. You're alright. I’m here, Belly. I’m here.”

When her sobs finally subside, Conrad feels like he’s on fire, and he lets out one harsh laugh at the entire situation. Clearly, his body loves to clean up a fucking mess, especially when it's Belly’s. You sadistic fucker, he shames himself. Getting hard listening to a girl cry. What the fuck is wrong with you, you piece of shit?

“The way he touches me always reminds me of you,” Belly says finally, her voice shaking, and Conrad can hear how hard it is for her to vocalize her thoughts. He wonders when the last time was that she was honest with herself. “Even now, I catch myself expecting it to be you. Every time it isn't, I just—God, Conrad, I just—”

“You wish it was me, sweetheart?” he asks, because he's greedy, and he's a masochist, and he doesn't give a shit about consequences right now.

Belly sniffs, and he imagines that she's nodding at him. “Yeah,” she says brokenly. “Sometimes.”

Conrad feels out of his mind. He’s seated in the chair in the corner of his room, and he can barely feel his fingers. “Do you want me to tell you what it would be like?” he asks quietly, “If it were me?”

Belly lets out a low, broken moan, and it's the hottest thing he's heard since, well, the last time he had her. “We can't,” she weeps. “I—I want to,” she says, and he can almost hear the shock in her voice at her admittance, “but we can't.”

“Belly,” Conrad begs. “What are we doing here? I see the way you look at me, sometimes. I know you still feel something for me. I know you do. I know you, Belly. You've never been able to hide things from me.”

“Fuck you, Conrad,” she says, but she's crying again, which makes his heart hurt. His erection wilts immediately, his revulsion for himself taking over. He's made her cry so many fucking times, he can't stand it. “You can't just—I love Jeremiah, Conrad. I love him, do you understand that? He's my husband, not you. You're not—you're nobody. You’re just Jeremiah’s brother, and even then, you're barely family. You don't even show up for Christmas most years, Conrad. I don't even know who you are anymore.”

The words hurt more than he possibly ever thought they could. “I love you,” he says, because he thinks he might never have another chance to say it. After this, she might never talk to him ever again. It would be so easy enough to stop inviting him over to the holidays. Jeremiah wouldn't even be suspicious; it's like she's just said, he's not around enough for it to make a difference. “I know it's too late, but I love you. Goddammit, Belly, I think I always will.” The words taste like salt on his tongue, and Conrad is so goddamn sick of crying over Belly Conklin, but the truth of the matter is that he’d do it a thousand times more, because he would rather have her in this fucked up, heart-breaking way than truly let go of her.

“You don't—Conrad, you don't even know me anymore. You don't love me. You don't—”

“You bite your fingernails when you're nervous,” he starts. “Your favourite cake flavour is yellow, which isn't even a real flavour, but we all let you have it anyway, because we always loved you that much. You love to swim because you love being underwater, and you favour your right leg over your left, but you’re a strong enough swimmer that it’s only ever noticeable when you're trying to swim in a perfectly straight line. You put your eyeliner on your left eye before your right, but your mascara on your right eye before your left, because you insist the balance evens things out. You pretend not to find dirty jokes funny, but you laugh every time, because you grew up around all of us idiot boys, and we indoctrinated you to our humour without you realizing. Your ideal day is sitting at home after you wake up early, because you hate sleeping in, and you’d stay in your pyjamas on the couch and read in the morning. For lunch, you’d eat a box of chocolates if no one fed you, but you’d hope for a pulled pork sandwich, and in the afternoon, you'd turn off all the lights and watch an old movie on the TV with the covers pulled up to your neck but your toes poking out. You—”

“Please, stop,” Belly begs, and she sounds so tired that Conrad cuts himself off abruptly. “I think about you. You know I do,” Belly sighs, and there's a second when Conrad feels a flash of hope. It's a foreign thing that he has to tamper it down quickly. Hope is a dangerous thing, and he can't make a habit of finding it in Isabel Conklin’s breaths.

“But you can't,” he finishes for her, so she doesn't have to.

“Yeah,” Belly confirms dejectedly, and Conrad suddenly feels like throwing up.

“I love you,” he says, well aware that this might be the last time he ever gets to tell her such a thing. If it were up to Jeremiah, he and Belly will never be alone in a room together ever again, and based on this phone call, his brother is probably right to think so. Belly lets out a small, choking sob, and Conrad hates the sound of it even more than he hates himself, which is saying something. “I love you,” he repeats. “I will never not love you.” He laughs, once, and the sound is broken. “I think I might finally be learning to live with that.”

Belly hangs up on him after that, which is hardly a surprise, even though it hurts. The aftermath of her always does, and Conrad makes his way through it, slow and sluggish, taking a long, hot shower and cries until the water runs cold. Underneath the showerhead, his shame runs off him like a stubborn layer of grime, and Conrad scrubs away at his skin until the feel of Belly Conklin washes off his soiled hands.

That night, for the first time in years, he isn't plagued with dreams of soft, doe-like eyes and silky brown hair. Instead, Conrad dreams of nothing at all, and wakes up feeling like there's a weight off his chest that he didn't know had been there in the first place.

Conrad fucks Nicole once more, over a decade after the first time they sleep together. Her hair is different now; she wears it naturally, and it reminds Conrad of a crown around her head, the tight curls barely hitting the bottom of her chin.

They’re both in Cousins for the summer, and Nicole’s got a kid with her but no husband—piece of shit, she grumbles, I filed for divorce last year—and he fucks her while her daughter is at day-camp, in the bedroom of the house they had sex in for the first time. While they’re making small talk, Conrad thinks about Jeremiah telling him that he and Belly are trying to get pregnant, and he wonders if they’ll send their kid to camp in Cousins, too. He wonders what excuse he’ll have to make up that summer to avoid them all, and what Belly and Jeremiah will tell their child when, inevitably, their uncle lets them down in one way or another, the way he’s always let his family down.

Sex with Nicole is, all things considered, fun.

“Wow, Conrad,” she laughs afterward, sated. “You’ve come a long way from when we were teenagers.”

“Shut up,” he says, but he’s laughing too. “You were the first girl I was ever with, you know.”

Nicole’s eyebrows shoot up her forehead. “Shit, really?” she asks. “I didn’t—”

“Well, not exactly,” he amends, running one hand along her bare shoulder where they’re doing some loose semblance of cuddling. “You, uh, were the first girl I ever fingered, though. I lost my virginity to my girlfriend a few months later.”

“Shit, Conrad,” she says. “All the girls wanted you, back then. I never would’ve guessed. I thought I just got lucky.”

“Nah,” he says quietly. “I’m nothing to feel lucky about.”

Nicole sits up, facing him. She’s still completely naked, but she doesn’t seem to care. He likes that after all these years, she still seems like the same person; if anything, she’s gotten more sure of herself with age.

“Whatever happened?” she asks hesitantly. “With you and Belly.”

Conrad’s heart hurts when he answers. He thinks about seeing Belly this past Easter, and the way she’d smiled at him so softly, even with her hand holding his brother’s. He thinks about how when he smiled back, she’d held on even tighter. It didn’t matter, he’d realized in that moment. No matter how much he loves her, and no matter how much she loves him—because Conrad knows that some part of her does love him, somewhere deep down, and that some part of her always will—it doesn’t matter. They can look at each other as much as they want, but she’s never going to let go of his brother’s hand, just as he’s never going to stop wanting to hold hers. It’s something he’s learned to live with, because he has to. Loving Isabel Conklin is as easy and as difficult as breathing. It’s as simple and as complicated as that.

“Nothing happened, I guess,” Conrad says finally. “When I really think about it, nothing ever did.”