Work Text:
Belly only applies to three schools: Finch, obviously, DeVry (where her dad teaches) as a safety, and Palo Alto, which is a bit of a stretch. It seems simple, not even really a choice; but then the results come out, and she’s waitlisted at DeVry, she gets into Palo Alto, and she’s rejected by Finch.
“That like doesn’t even make any sense,” Taylor says. Against all advice, she’d only applied to Finch, and she’d gotten in. Full ride. “You make like better grades than me.”
They’d already planned which dorm they were going to live in, two down from Jeremiah’s frat. They were going to get matching bedspreads, and go to all the freshman parties together. Considering this, Belly feels like weeping. “I don’t know,” she says. “I guess that doesn’t matter? My test scores weren’t great. And I mean last year my grades sucked.”
“Have you told Jeremiah yet?” Taylor says, her expression sympathetic.
“No,” Belly says, and then drops her head in her hands. “But he’s going to be like sooo disappointed.”
“Palo Alto is a good school,” Taylor says, putting her arm around Belly’s shoulder. “You’re going to be a West Coast baddie. He’ll understand.”
But Belly is not sure he will understand. She drags her feet for three days, avoiding his calls, and then on Sunday, sits out on her back porch and calls him.
“Hey,” he says. “I keep missing you.” She can hear that he’s at the frat. The sounds of the tv, shuffling, and then him saying, “Cool it, cool it,” and the slam of the door as he goes outside. “You ready for next week? I’ve checked the weather and it’s going to be perfect.”
“Of course,” Belly says. “But uh, I actually called with news.”
“You heard?”
She feels like something has caught in her throat. “I didn’t, uh, get in.”
“What?”
Belly wonders if she’s going to need to repeat it, but then he curses and she knows he heard. “Well, I mean you can take a gap year, right? And move up here and then apply again in the fall?”
Belly winces. “My mom would actually kill me if I didn’t go to college next year.”
“Yeah, but I mean, you didn’t get in. Laurel can’t be mad about that.”
“I did get in. To Palo Alto.”
Silence on the other end of the line. And then he says in a very quiet voice, “You didn’t tell me you applied there.”
“Well, the recruiter came to our game in the fall, and she said I should apply, so I did. I mean it’s a good school and—”
“And it’s on the completely other side of the country.”
“Yeah,” Belly says, deflating. “But I mean there’s still summer. And we’ll be together for breaks. It’s not… Like. The end of the world.”
“Yeah. Right.”
Overhead, the sky is rife with clouds. A drop falls on Belly’s hand, but she doesn’t move to go inside. “I’m sorry.”
Jeremiah exhales. “I’ll see you Friday,” he says, and then hangs up.
.
The next week, they go to Cousins for spring break and they don’t talk about it. It’s weird to be in the house with just the two of them, like a ghost town. They have sex in his bedroom upstairs, and Belly doesn’t think about Conrad. On the last morning, she gets up early and goes and sits on the beach. There is no one waiting for her there, but she stays and watches the sun rise. It won’t be the same, she thinks, all the way on the other coast. Nothing will be the same.
.
Three weeks later, it’s prom and Jeremiah comes down. They get ready at Taylor’s and take pictures out in the garden. Belly’s dress is a deep green. Her flowers are purple. Afterwards, they party back at the hotel room, and then pile like a gaggle of puppies onto the beds together. Jeremiah falls asleep on Belly’s stomach, and she looks down at his mess of curls, feeling welling in her chest, and then she extracts herself to go to the bathroom, climbing into the tub fully-clothed, putting her head in her arms.
The door opens and Steven shuffles in. “Steven, I’m in here,” Belly hisses.
“I have to pee, cool it,” he says.
She closes the shower curtain in a huff. She can hear him washing his hands, and then he pulls it back, and stares down at her. “What are you even doing?” he asks, his lip curling.
Hiding, Belly thinks, though she can’t explain why. Or maybe she could. She wants to say to him, it’s been a year, because she thinks maybe he’d understand what she means. Perhaps he does, because he sighs, and then climbs in the tub with her, telling her to budge over, and then they’re sitting in there together.
“Have you heard from him?” he asks her.
Belly knows who he means. She shakes her head.
“It’s hard, you know. Dating someone still in high school, and trying to start college at the same time.”
Belly tenses. “I thought you and Taylor were happy.”
“We are. But it’s still hard. Like it’s difficult to feel really settled at Princeton, you know, because I’m always coming back here. Maybe it’ll be easier when we’re both in college, I don’t know.” Silence for a bit, and then he chuffs her on the side of the head. “Palo Alto is going to be good for you.”
Belly’s nose wrinkles. “You sound like mom.”
“Belly,” Steven says, seriously. It’s rare that he ever sounds serious, and it startles her. “I just want to say: When you go, make sure you really go.”
She’s not sure she understands what he means, but she nods anyway.
.
When summer hits, Belly and Jeremiah drive to Cousins. They eat pie on the way in and go to parties at Nicole’s with the debs and see Cam sometimes down at the boardwork. Taylor and Steven stay for a couple of weeks, and Laurel and John and Adam come for the Fourth and they throw a barbeque. Skye and Julia spend a mostly pleasant weekend. And though almost every morning Belly keeps thinking she’ll walk down the stairs and find Conrad, arrived unannounced, in the kitchen, he never comes.
Belly and Jeremiah say farewell on the steps to the summer house, Laurel waiting in the car behind them. They’re driving straight to the airport from there. Belly hadn’t wanted to miss a single moment.
“It’s hard to believe you’re really leaving.” Jeremiah has his arms looped around her waist, his face buried in her neck so the words are all muffled.
Belly strokes her hand along his shoulders. “I’m only a phone call away. And I’ll see you for Thanksgiving.”
Thanksgiving feels like an eternity away though, and when they get in the car, Belly cries most of the way to the airport. Laurel lets her be in peace, but when they’re standing in line to board, she puts her arm around Belly’s shoulders. “I’m proud of you, Bean,” she says.
Her dad had been at a conference, but he flies out to meet them, and they huff and puff all of her stuff into the dorm room. Her roommate is a very pretty black girl named Annika, who already, it seems to Belly, knows everyone on the hall. The room does not feel like home, but like some kind of hastily erected structure, barely strong enough to withstand the wind. Belly hates it.
Though everything is done, Laurel drags her feet about leaving, and John puts his arm around her and says, “That seems like everything, huh?” to signal it’s time to go.
Laurel rushes forward, and clasps Belly tight. It’s an unexpected display of emotion from her mom, and it makes Belly feel like crying again. “My cousin is just up in San Francisco. If you need anything, you have her number, yes? And Conrad is here. You know he’ll do anything for you.”
“I know, mom,” Belly says.
Laurel rocks back on her feet. “It’s okay if it’s hard,” she says, and then puts her hand over her mouth, and leaves the room.
Her dad hugs her, once, hard, and then he’s gone, too, and Belly is on her own.
Belly calls Taylor to take the edge off, and they compare dorm rooms; but then quickly Taylor has to go to a hall meeting, and laughing, says, “Love you, B,” and hangs up. Belly calls Jeremiah; but he doesn’t answer. She wanders the hall next. Nobody is around, so she goes out on campus, where students are everywhere, splayed out across the lawn and enjoying the sun. Belly tries to picture herself walking up to any one of them, sitting down, introducing herself. She can’t see it.
She doesn’t think she’s any good at this. Doesn’t know how to be somebody that people don’t already know. Just one person might be enough to make her feel understood.
Even so, the weeks pass. Annika is nice, though she’s busy and is barely ever in the room. Belly has volleyball most days, which guarantees at least people to say hi to around campus, but she doesn’t really know how to bridge the gap between teammates and friends. She spends most of her nights burrowed in bed, watching old nineties shows: Dawson’s Creek, Buffy, 90210. She puts on It Happened One Night and has to turn it off only thirty minutes in. She wonders if this all would be easier if Susannah had lived. Susannah would say that Belly was ready for all of it—though she doesn’t feel like she is—and maybe if Susannah believed it, it would become true. Like magic.
.
It’s late in September when Belly finally makes it to the beach. She has to take a bus and then walk aways to the boardwalk entrance. The current is too strong to swim, and she’s shivering even in her sweatshirt and jeans, but she stays for a long time, watching the waves. She’d been right. It’s not the same at all. And when she goes to look up the directions to get back home, she sees her phone has died and she hasn’t brought a charger. She curses, loudly.
There are old pay phones up by the road, and Belly goes and sits in one. There is graffiti all over it. Love sux, someone has written, and then in green below it, dick.
There are only two numbers Belly knows by heart, and she doesn’t want to call her mom.
She sighs and starts to dial.
He picks up on the fifth ring.
“Hi, Conrad.”
“Belly?”
Belly considers hanging up. Maybe she could ask a passing stranger to look up the bus route, and she could write it down. People used to do that, back in the day.
“Are you all right?”
“I am!” Belly says, attempting bright. “Yes. Uh, just, are you busy?”
There’s silence behind him. “Is everything okay?”
“Um, can you come get me? My phone’s died and I’m at Half Moon Bay and I don’t really know how to get back; though if you can’t, I get it, and I’ll definitely figure it out—”
“I’ll be there in,” a brief pause, “fifteen. Just um, stay on the boardwalk okay?”
“Okay,” she says, and hangs up.
She finds a bench to camp out to wait, and she’s still sitting there facing the water when he finds his way to her fifteen minutes later.
He’s wearing a sweater and a windbreaker and she wonders if for the rest of her life every time she sees him it’ll be like the band starts to play.
He stands over her for a minute, and Belly just looks up at him. “Hi,” she says finally.
“Hi.” He looks back behind him. “You hungry?”
She is. They go to a dinner three blocks down, and Belly charges her phone, making a sigh of relief when it boots up again.
“Sorry you had to come all the way out here.”
“I’ll always come get you, Belly,” he says.
It’s a repetition. She flushes and looks down at the linoleum countertop. “How’s Stanford?”
“It’s good. I’m playing Club Football this semester.”
“That’s good.”
“How’s Palo Alto?”
Belly shrugs, and then braves a look up at him. He’s already watching her. It’s been more than a year since they stood in that terrible motel room and said goodbye. It feels like a lifetime. She hadn’t really thought about the fact that he must know she’s here. In the same city. “Are you good at making friends?” she says.
He looks startled.
“I’m not,” Belly admits. “It seems so easy for other people. But for me? I don’t know. I can’t figure out the right things to say.”
“You’re only a couple of weeks in,” he says. “It’ll get easier.”
“Do you think so?” The words are a bit too earnest, but it doesn’t seem to frighten him.
“You’ll make friends, Belly. I promise.”
“Pinky promise?”
He rolls his eyes. “Pinky promise.” And he holds out his pinky.
They link pinkies, and even now, it still feels….
Her phone rings, and she disconnects from him to pick it up. It’s Jeremiah. She’d sent him a picture of the waves, back before her phone died. “Hey,” he says. “I tried you earlier, but your phone was off.”
Belly stands up from the table and heads over to the window. “Yeah,” she says. “It uh died. But… all good now.”
He’s somewhere with noise. “Are you at a party?” she asks.
“Yeah, yeah. It’s Redbird’s birthday, I thought I said.”
She looks back at the table, where Conrad is shredding his sugar packet. “Oh, well, I don’t want to keep you.”
“Everything’s good?”
“Everything’s good,” she agrees.
Conrad drives her home, and they idle in front of her dorm. Belly unfastens her seatbelt, but doesn’t make to go. “Are you coming to Thanksgiving?” she asks.
He shakes his head. “I’ll probably just do something here. It gets crazy, you know, with finals and stuff. And it’s far when I’ll be flying out like two weeks later.”
Belly nods, and puts her hand on the door; but he calls her back. “Belly,” a hint of hesitation. “I am good at making friends. It’s just… the rest of it I’m bad at.”
“The rest of what?”
He shrugs, and Belly looks at him. I’m always going to love him, she thinks. How stupid she had been to think it would be any different.
“I know I messed up with you,” he says. “I couldn’t…” He sighs, like there aren’t words for all the things he couldn’t do.
“Let’s not talk about it anymore. It’s in the past, right?”
He looks relieved at that. “Okay.”
“But let’s be…friends. I could really use a friend right now.”
She holds out her hand to him. He looks at it for a minute, as if he doesn’t quite know what to make of it, and then shakes it. “Friends,” he agrees.
.
During midterms, they go eat icecream at three a.m. and bring their books, and when it hits October, they carve pumpkins at the patch south of the city. Conrad gets hay in his hair and makes fun of her for carving eyelashes on hers. When she sets the pumpkin in her windowsill, it makes her think of him. As the month closes, she texts him ideas for his costume—Steve Harrington, Bart Simpson, Aaron Samuels from Mean Girls— but the day of, he sends her back a picture of him smiling in a Superman tee.
Low effort, he says.
Lame, she responds, but she’s smiling, too.
Annika invites her to a party with some of her friends. They’re all going as the Powerpuff girls. Belly does an Audrey Hepburn bit. My Fair Lady. It’s a good night, one of the first, and at the end of it, once she’s back home, scrubbed and clean, she calls Conrad.
“Did you save the city?” she asks him.
She can hear the hum of voices behind him. “One sec,” he says, and then there’s a closing door, and everything sounds muted and dull.
“How was your party?” he asks.
“It was good. They’re all so nice. They didn’t even make fun of my British accent. Much.”
“Oh, there was an accent?”
“Well, duh.”
“Let me hear it then.”
“No,” Belly says, laughing. “How was your party?”
“I’m still at Trevor’s, but it’s pretty calm now.”
“I can let you go. I didn’t think you’d still be out.’
“You’re good. I’d rather be talking to you.” There’s something naked and vulnerable in the statement that makes her wonder if he’s drunk.
She’s not drunk, she doesn’t think, just warm and happy, for what feels like the first time in a long time. She should have called Jeremiah, she doesn’t know why she’d called Conrad instead.
“Let’s get hangover fries tomorrow morning,” she says. “From Paulie’s.”
“Okay,” he says, and she can hear he’s smiling.
.
At Thanksgiving, the weather is terrible and Belly’s flight is cancelled. Everyone is upset, but there’s nothing to do about it. The break is too short to even reschedule for the next day. She calls Conrad and he offers to bring her along to his Friendsgiving. “I don’t have anything to bring though,” she tells him, so they go to the grocery store. It’s mobbed with people, and they stand in line for a half hour to buy cool whip and the last can of cranberries. Somehow at the end of it though, they’re both laughing.
At the dinner, he introduces her to everyone as his childhood best friend, which causes warmth to bloom in Belly’s chest. She hadn’t ever known he thought of her like that.
“So you know all of Conrad’s secrets,” one of them, a brusque redhead, says to her. “What? He’s like so mysterious. We need her to dish.”
“He’s just a softie at heart,” Belly says, and reaches out and ruffles his hair. “That’s all.”
“Don’t reveal everything about me,” he says, wagging his finger, and then going over to help his friend at the stovetop.
She doesn’t.
At the dinner, he seems happier, more relaxed, more like the Conrad she remembers from childhood. He cracks jokes with Abby (the redhead), and helps do the dishes in the kitchen with the girls while the boys watch the game.
Afterwards though, when they’re driving home and have stopped at a red light, he says, not looking at her, “Thanksgiving is hard. It was my mom’s holiday, you know? I don’t know if it’ll ever be…” He stops.
Belly hesitates, then puts her hand over his on the gearshift. He doesn’t do anything in response, just frowns, hard, like the expression you might make before you start crying. “And you know, even after all of it, giving up the house in Boston and everything, I can’t even make myself go home to the fucking summer house. I miss her, Belly, I just don’t know how to…” He breaks off, an angry, choked kind of sound. “I don’t know how to be close anymore, you know? To her things.”
“I miss her, too,” Belly says, softly. She wants to say that he’s doing it anyway. That he’d been lovely at dinner, that she hadn’t even known that it had been hard for him, but she doesn’t know if that would help.
She should have known it would be hard.
The light turns green, and they start forward.
“Do you want to come up?” Belly asks him when they reach her dorm. “I have Malibu in the mini fridge.”
“Tempting,” he says, shaking his head.
“Connie,” she says, gently. “Are you going to be all right?”
He looks up at the ceiling, blinking rapidly. She’s not sure she’s ever really seen him cry. Like that was something she thought that he never did. That had been stupid of her, too. She reaches across the distance and pulls him to her. He clutches her back, tight, hands scrambling at her jacket. It’s a bit of a startling display of emotion, but she just shushes him, lets it roll through him and onto her.
She wonders what he did last year. Jeremiah and Adam had come to Philly to do Thanksgiving with the Conklins and the Jewels. It had been a bit of a disaster—the turkey dry, the pies all burnt, the green beans jellified, Adam, well, Adam—and afterwards, the kids had all gotten drunk in the basement like that would take the taste of melancholy from it.
Belly’s phone rings, and Conrad startles back from her, rubbing at his eyes. It’s Jeremiah. She lets it go to voicemail. “It’s fine,” she says. “I’ll call him back.”
But after a second, Conrad’s phone starts to ring, too. He pulls it out of his jacket pocket, and then raises it to his ear. “Hey, Jere,” he says. The vulnerability has gone from his voice, as if it had never been there in the first place. “Yeah, I heard.” He puts his hand to his temple. “Hmm,” he says. “Sucks.” Then, “No, I just went over with some friends. Abby and them. Yeah. No. Well, tell Laurel…” A moment of silence. “All right. Yeah. You, too.” And then he hangs up.
“You didn’t tell him I went with you,” Belly says.
Conrad exhales, heavy. “We don’t talk about you.”
It’s what Jeremiah had told her, years ago now. It still makes her sad. But when Jeremiah calls her again a half hour later, she doesn’t tell him either. They don’t talk about Conrad, and sometimes it feels as if he doesn’t even have a brother.
.
Finals is a mad dash. She and Annika stay up all night together, drinking soda and studying. Around three, they get giggly and take a break to watch Vampire Diaries, and get in a wild debate about Team Stefan and Team Damon that gets so heated they eventually break out in laughter. “Fine,” Belly says. “But you can keep your blue-eyed demon.”
“I’m so tired,” Annika says, lying back on their floor. “Why am I studying biology?”
“Because you’re going to save the world,” Belly says, lying down next to her. “I have no idea what I’m going to do.”
Conrad finishes his exams a day later, so they can’t go to the airport together. It doesn’t matter anyway, he and Jere and Adam are going to Colorado for the holidays to see Adam’s parents. He won’t be changing coasts.
When she gets home from the airport, Jeremiah is waiting on her front steps. He pulls Belly into a bear hug, but doesn’t kiss her. It’s been months now apart, longer than it’s been since they started dating, and she feels suddenly awkward, and raises a hand to her hair as if it’s out of place.
“You both go on,” Laurel says, shooing them. “Belly and I will catch up later.”
They go for a walk in the neighborhood. It’s colder here than on the West Coast, and Belly is shivering in her coat.
Jeremiah is quiet as they walk, like he’s chewing on something. It’s an unfamiliar look on him.
“What?” she says.
She wonders if he knows she and Conrad have been hanging out, if there’s a way she can explain that it’s just friendship, that she’d needed someone who knew her as well as Conrad did, that it had been really lonely out in California, and she’d just—
“I don’t know if I can do this,” he says.
“Do what?” she says, uncomprehending.
“This,” he says, gesturing between them. “It’s just. Long distance is harder than I thought it was going to be.”
A flare of anger sparks in Belly’s chest. “Is it?”
It was Jeremiah who was still at a familiar place with all of his many friends, who could go home or to Cousins on the weekends if he wanted. It was Belly who was asea. What was hard about it for him?
“You know it is, Belly. We barely talk.”
“That’s because you’re always busy. You spend like ninety percent of your time at the frat, partying.”
“Yeah, and if you were at Finch, you could be there with me!”
“It’s not my fault I didn’t get in!’ Belly yells. “Stop blaming me! I would have come with you if I could have, but I couldn’t, so I did something else instead! Why are you so mad at me for that?”
“I’m not! But you can stop fucking judging me for enjoying my time in college! Just because you’re not, doesn’t mean that I should just like stay at home and wait for you to call.”
Belly freezes. “I never said I wasn’t enjoying it.”
“Oh come on, Belly. It’s obvious.”
She thinks about trying to say now how hard it’s been, how much she’s missed him, missed her family and Taylor and the time before Susannah’s death, and can’t find any of the words. Instead, tears just flood her eyes, and she turns from him so he can’t see it. “Fine,” she says icily. “It’s too hard, we don’t have to do it. Whatever you want.”
He softens, and touches her arm. “It’s not what I want. I just…”
She shrugs him off, and stomps back to the house. She spends the rest of the break moping. She and Taylor do the whole thing—Burn Book, Titanic. She cries a bit and goes for walks. It feels different than the break up had with Conrad. That had been so steeped in grief it had seemed as if the world was ending. At the end of the moping period, she just sort of feels angry.
She and Taylor sit out on her back patio sipping Mike’s in the snow on her last night before her flight. “I mean, aren’t you like, just a little bit relieved?” Taylor says.
“Why would I be relieved?”
Taylor huffs. “Like, you know I love Jeremiah; but I mean he’s kind of a ho.”
Belly stiffens. “He didn’t—”
“No, no. I mean, I don’t think so. Just… he gets around, you know? I’ve seen him at parties. He’s all over everyone. It’s not very you, B.”
“I’m fun,” Belly says, defensively.
“You are totally fun,” Taylor agrees, but there’s a but involved. “I think Steven and I are going to break up.”
“Again?”
“Yeah,” she says, morosely.
“Taylor?” Belly says, sort of hesitantly. “Do you like Finch?”
“Uh, yeah. It’s the best.”
“It’s not…” Belly shakes her head.
“It’s not what?”
“I don’t know…lonely?”
Taylor’s expression softens. “You should think about rushing. It might help you meet people.”
“I don’t think that’s my scene either.”
Her nose wrinkles, but she gives an acknowledging shrug.
Belly reaches her hand out to her. “I miss you.”
“I miss you, too, dude.”
“I’m sorry this break has been all about the break up. We were meant to have more fun.”
“Dude, it’s fine. You have sat with me enough. This summer we’ll go hard. Though it sucks we won’t be in Cousins. I sort of came around on it.”
Belly feels her stomach drop. “You think?”
Taylor seems to realize she’s erred. “Er, well, maybe you and Jere will make up.”
Belly harrumphs. She’s not sure she wants that to be honest. Still, the idea of losing Cousins hits her like a train.
.
The dorm room looks less terrible on her return to California. It’s two days before classes start and she and Annika go up to San Francisco for the day. They go to a Farmer’s Market by the water and drink warm chai and eat beignets and laugh till they’re sick of it.
And during syllabus week, the volleyball girls go out to a party in one of the sophomore dorms and Belly drinks enough that the world turns sloppy and wonderful. They have strobe lights in one of the rooms and she dances till she gets dizzy. A guy puts his hand on her hip and moves with her, a whole rush of motion. It isn’t romantic, but she still kisses him in the hallway outside the party again and again and again.
“I didn’t even get your name,” she tells him giggling, as one of her teammates drags her away.
“Night, night for Belly.”
Tucked safely back in bed, after being forced to drink water and eat three slices of bread, Belly looks back at pictures of her and Jere, smiling, from last fall. And then, feeling drunk and morose, scrolls all the way back to the one of her and Conrad on the beach. They’d both been so happy that night. And then later, they’d gone back inside, and he’d…
Warmth spreads all the way through her chest and down between her legs. She hasn’t let herself think about that in ages.
She clicks the phone shut.
.
The next Wednesday, as she’s coming out of her lecture, Conrad calls her. “Do you like ramen?” he asks.
“I think my blood is like half Shin powder at this point,” Belly says.
He laughs. “I meant like at a restaurant. There’s a place I’ve been wanting to go. You free?”
Belly is free.
They get it so spicy that Conrad’s eyes water, and he’s crying into his bowl while Belly fans him. “You’re so white,” she tells him. “Like it’s disgusting.”
“Please eat this,” he wheezes. His nose is running, and she can’t stop laughing.
Beach volleyball starts in the spring, which is a shift in focus, more time outside, which makes her happy. She’s chosen better classes this time around, too. She likes psychology and education, though she doesn’t know what she plans to do with that info.
“You’ve always seemed so like sure,” she tells Conrad. “I’m never sure.”
They’re in the park by her campus, running for a bit and then walking to cool down and then starting up again.
He runs a hand through his hair. “On the outside maybe,” he says. “On the inside, I don’t know. I mostly feel like a fraud.”
She frowns at this.
“Next year, I’ll have to start doing the apps for med school and it’s…” He shudders. “Yeah, I don’t know. I haven’t changed my mind, I just…” He trails off. “Abby is thinking of applying, too, and she’s like a workhorse. Nothing scares her. I don’t think I have that.”
“I’ve never seen you fail at anything.”
He smiles, rueful, and he doesn’t say it, but she thinks she knows what he’s thinking. Just one thing.
“Race you to that tree,” she says, to break the tension. “Three, two…” and they’re off.
Afterwards, panting, leaning against the tree, Belly says, “What do I get since I won?”
Conrad looks at her, his eyes dark, and says, “Come on, I’ll buy you lunch.”
.
It surprises her how the time passes, and soon the semester is almost over. A year out in California. Volleyball is a year round sport and she only has a couple of weeks off, before they’re back playing again. “It’ll be weird not to do any time in Cousins,” she tells Conrad, morosely.
He’s in a single this year, and so they’re sitting on his floor to study, books spread in two halos around them. She’s been over here enough that people on the floor know her now.
“Why not?” he asks her. “I thought you were going.”
Belly blinks at him. It hadn’t occurred to her that he didn’t know. But then again, she hadn’t told him. “Uh,” she says. “Jere and I broke up. I don’t think he’d want me like hanging around your house.”
Conrad stills. “Oh,” he says, his voice very casual. “When was this?”
Belly shrugs. “Like start of winter break? Before you went to Colorado?”
“And you’re okay.” It isn’t clear if this is question or not.
Belly exhales. “We don’t have to do this,” she says. “Talk about it, I mean. I know it’s weird.”
“Okay,” he agrees easily, and she wonders if that was the wrong move.
Three days later, he calls her and asks her to bubble tea at a little spot around the corner from the park they like going to. They munch on it while walking. “You can still go to the house,” he says. “It’s partially yours, you know. Jere will get that.”
“Yeah,” Belly says. “But it’s not the same. I don’t want to be there alone.”
She thinks about what he’d said at Thanksgiving, how hard it was to be close to Susannah’s ghost, and she thinks she understands him a little better.
“Just go when I go.”
She looks at him. Nobody is moving this time, but she still feels music stirring. “Hmm?” she says to ward off the feeling.
“I’m going in a few weeks. Come with me.”
“Just the two of us?” Belly says, hesitantly.
He shrugs. “We can invite Steven and Taylor, too. And Laurel, if she wants. Whoever.”
Belly takes another sip, mulling it over. “The sunrises aren’t the same here,” she tells him as answer.
.
Once finals are over, they catch a flight. Belly and Annika have agreed to live together next year, but Annika is staying in the dorms over the summer, too, as she’s a gymnast, so the goodbye is only for a bit. Conrad falls asleep on the flight, all mushed up against his neck pillow, and Belly resists the urge to do something childish, write on his face with marker maybe. Instead, she just settles for watching him, the worry washed from him so he looks like a little kid.
They take an obscenely expensive cab from the airport, and reach the house just at sunset. They’re too tired to cook, so they walk into the village and get fried fish and eat it on the boardwalk, afterwards walking the two miles back along the beach. The air smells different here than anywhere else, and it settles on her skin like an embrace.
“This is my favorite place, you know,” she says.
The house is in sight. They’d left the lights on, and for a moment, it could be another era. The realization that it isn’t, that it’s now and the house is empty, at least until they return to it, makes Belly feel young and old at once.
“I know,” he says, gently.
Once they’re back, Belly comes out for a swim. “You joining me?” she asks when she finds him sitting and waiting for her by the pool side.
“I don’t mind watching.”
Belly slips into the water, feels it caress her skin, ghost over her hair. She swims up to his dangling feet, puts a hand to his bare ankle. He’s watching her very carefully. “Belly,” he says. Part warning.
“Come in,” she says, and then when he doesn’t move, repeats it. But she doesn’t want to force him, so she lets go of his ankle and swims backwards a bit.
He looks at her for a moment, and then pushes off the side, sinking into the water, and coming back up, much closer to her. His hair is wet. She puts a hand to it. “Hi,” she says.
Their foreheads are touching, and the night is like a blanket around them. “Hi,” he says, softly.
His hand brushes her hip, and for a moment, it feels like they could be dancing. Belly closes her eyes to savor it.
One, two, three. Her eyes open. Conrad, in close up. His eyes, gone hazy, the fall of his hair, his lips, curling into a half-smile.
They press together, chest to chest, mouth to mouth. She can feel his heart beating against hers, and her bones go liquid. After a moment, he pulls back though, and smiles, as if just kissing were enough. Enough for now.
Belly sighs. For the moment, she, too, feels perfectly content. “I always hoped we’d end up here,” she says.
He flicks her behind the ear. “Kissing in the pool? This some sort of thing for you?”
She rolls her eyes. “Shut up. You know what I mean.”
He’s silent for a moment. His hands are on her shoulder blades, and she feels completely weightless. The sky up above them, the whisper of the waves, the warmth of him, like the world was built just to hold the two of them. Like magic.
“Yes,” he says, at last. “I know what you mean.”