Chapter Text
It is early October before it happens—officially, anyway. Autumn is settling over Paris, but it isn’t an autumn she recognizes. The air is cold but never crisp, the sour warmth of steam rising from metro grates and ripples of heat waving behind cars and buses a constant blanket against the damp chill. Dark nights are flecked with only the boldest of stars, cigarette smoke drifting overhead rather than the nutty notes of neighbors’ bonfires and smoldering brush piles. Oktoberfest beers and mulled wine trickle onto every menu, but apple cider remains elusive, baked into a cinnamon-sugar-dusted donut or otherwise. Halloween is an “American holiday,” a novelty entertained for children who have seen it on television or a marketing ploy to lure tourists into the catacombs—though there were rumblings of a few costume-mandatory raves, if you were into that sort of thing—which means the city is already looking ahead to Christmas, decor creeping into aisle endcaps and commercials calling out reminders to preorder your family’s holiday favorites.
Perhaps it is this lack of touchstones, perhaps it is the always liminal quality of the damp, gray time between golden leaves and snow, perhaps it is the two glasses of red wine on a mostly empty stomach or the way the green glow of the signal light catches in Benito’s dark eyes for a moment as he walks her home from the bar, but when he leans in to kiss her at her door after their third proper date, Belly thinks about Conrad.
She has thought about him before, of course, but in the way people say to focus on something else when someone is facing a fear of heights: an unrelenting, all-encompassing devotion to not thinking about it that you cannot falter in for even a moment—or you will look down and be hopelessly lost.
But as Benito takes her hands, dark waves cresting over his forehead as he drops his head with a shy smile, she thinks about Conrad’s hands—larger, drier, somehow always colder than hers. When she tilts her chin up to meet his gaze, she swipes her eyes between his and sees desire, care, and possibility, but nothing stirs in the pit of her stomach, and her heart remains rooted resolutely in place. By the time his lips brush hers, delicate and hopeful and tinged with saccharine alcohol, she knows she doesn’t want it, knows she was foolish to try, knows she will be consuming the fancy cheese and olives and chilled white wine upstairs in her apartment alone tonight despite the giddy intention she had bought them with this morning, and when Benito pulls away and looks at her again, she can tell he knows too, that perhaps he always has, and that he will be fine because there is not enough between them for its end to be felt.
He smiles, resigned but not sad, and kisses her again, this time on the cheek—a friendly farewell. “You still planning to come to the party this weekend?” he asks, and she understands he’s asking if they can go back to before they tried to change things.
She drops his hands and nods. “Of course,” she says with a smile, and a small exhale of relief bobs his shoulders. “Do you need me to bring anything?”
“Just yourself,” he quips with a heatless wink. “And your mixer of choice.”
She smiles, nods again, and turns toward the door of her building, steadying herself with a faltering breath as she jingles her keys out of her purse. It’s after 11 p.m., so she has to punch in the code to get in, and then it’s three flights of stairs before she can lock her apartment door behind her and collapse against it, the strangled beginnings of a sob clawing at her throat.
Somehow, she manages a full wine glass and a plate with a lump of cheese, a torn heel of a baguette, and olives rolling in a pool of oil before collapsing onto the couch, the last of her resolve leaving her as she tugs her blanket over her lap and reaches for her laptop. She hesitates a moment in her library, her vision swimming, and then opens the search function, her throat thickening as she types in the name of a movie she hasn’t seen in almost a year.
As the orchestral opening crackles from her laptop’s subpar speakers, the title is embossed over a black-and-white map of Africa.
Casablanca
Belly leans forward to place the laptop on the coffee table in front of her, trading it for her midnight snack. She pops an olive into her mouth with one hand and tugs the blanket up to her chin with the other, chewing messily as she begins to cry.
She had looked down. And fallen right back over the edge.
Though she hadn’t been consciously thinking of Conrad, her mind seemed to have been filing things away for the past two months in anticipation of the inevitable occasion, because in the days following her tipping point, she has been able to do little else. Everywhere she’s ever been is somewhere he would love or hate; she thinks about what he would order at every patisserie or cafe or food truck; she wonders whether he started a new job or he’s taking some time like she’d gently encouraged. She wonders if he’s still talking to his therapist. She wonders if they talk about her. She worries that they do almost as much as she worries that they don’t.
There are a few things she knows about Conrad, snippets she’s gleaned from others when they slipped in their apparent dedication to never mention his name to her again. She knows him and Jeremiah still aren’t talking, mostly because Jeremiah still isn’t talking to anyone much—least of all her. Not that she wants to reach out after their last conversation. She had made a lot of excuses for Jeremiah over the years, but she had never thought he would speak to her or Laurel like that, no matter how angry he was. She wasn’t angry at him—wasn’t anything, really—it was just...done. She had put the ring in her makeup bag to get it back to him at some point and barely thought about him since.
She knows Steven is talking to Conrad a lot more now, not that it was possible for them to talk much less, but that relationship seemed to have been rebuilt since all the cats escaped their bags, creeping up to—or maybe even past—his relationship with Jeremiah now. Steven was angry about Cabo, angry he’d been standing up for Jeremiah against Conrad’s apparent nonsense when Conrad had been making some sense after all, but they could have worked through that easily enough if Jeremiah had been willing to talk to him about it. But from the little Belly had gleaned from Steven, Taylor, and Laurel, Jeremiah was still shutting out everyone who wanted to talk about anything more serious than the next frat party, which he was apparently commuting for. At least he seemed to be doing well at his dad’s firm and with his online classes, though Belly wasn’t sure she’d ever fully get her head wrapped around the former. A few weeks ago, Taylor had hinted as delicately as she was able that Jeremiah was dating again—though “dating” was “a strong word for it,” as she said. Belly hadn’t felt anything, not even surprise.
Belly knows Steven went to visit Conrad in California a few weeks ago. She had almost seen him once, when Steven was panning across the sun setting over the ocean during their video call, the only one he’d made while he was there.
“We watched it from our boards last night,” Steven had said, “but Taylor wanted me to get some pictures.”
“So she can post them to Instagram at some point in the future and pretend she’s an illustrious world traveler?” Belly had asked, and Steven had had the good sense not to reply, but the smirk tugging at the corner of his mouth answered for him.
She had heard a voice—quiet, muffled by the wind, but unmistakable—and Steven had involuntarily turned toward it, the camera catching the bottom of a pair of teal board shorts and two tan legs extending across the sand, crossed at the ankles, wisps of hair just starting to pull away from the damp shins as they dried. A hand came into frame, sandy, sun-darkened fingers curling as one pointed out toward the water.
“What!? Shit, Belly, I gotta go; there’s a fucking whale! Taylor is gonna lose her tits!”
“Oh, wow, yeah, okay, bye,” she had spluttered out as he hung up, her mouth mysteriously dry.
She knows Conrad hasn’t contacted her. She knows he probably won’t. She knows, rightfully, that it shouldn’t be up to him.
What she does not know is how to do it herself.
She blinks at her own eyes in the bathroom mirror, coming back to herself to realize only one of them is winged. She looks to her phone perched on the narrow shelf surrounding the sink, tapping the screen twice to reveal the time.
“Shit,” she mutters, realizing she’ll be about twenty minutes past fashionably late, but at least she’ll still be there before Celine, who seems to be allergic to arriving any earlier than an hour late, even when the party is at her place.
She hastily swipes on the other half of her eyeliner, amending the adage to “stepsisters not twins” for her own comfort, and shimmies into a short emerald A-line dress, one of her few Parisian splurges—that she couldn’t eat, anyway.
It was just a “casual party with friends” at the apartment Celine and Benito shared, but Belly had learned long ago that Paris “casual” and Philadelphia “casual” were distant cousins if they were related at all, and she was not going to be caught wearing Gap Inc. again. As she goes into the bedroom section of her studio to grab her “fancy flats,” as she calls them, from the closet—black leather with a pointed toe and silver star-shaped studs scattered across them—she glances over the small selection of jewelry she kept spread over the top of her dresser. Her fingertips graze the case of Susannah’s pearls, but she doesn’t open them, can’t remember the last time she wore them now. For the moment, they feel like they belong to someone else—and she doesn’t deserve to borrow them.
She opts for simple gold studs and a duo of gold necklaces and heads out, grabbing her red lipstick and small black purse from the table by the door. She gets off the metro one stop early so she can swing through the grocery store nearest their apartment; she gets the biggest bottle of pomegranate juice they have and a small bag of limes and touches her neck where the infinity symbol once rested. Clouds are gathering overhead as she nears the apartment building, the sharp scent of a storm growing in the air, and she thinks about sea creatures and wet hair and fireworks.
It’s impossible to say who buzzes her in, the music loud in the background as a garbled voice comes through the intercom, but Gemma is at the end of the hall when she gets off the rickety elevator, the fire escape door propped open as she smokes a cigarette, silhouetted against the anemic yellow glow of a light in the alley behind the building.
“Isabel!” she says when she sees her, extinguishing the last of her cigarette on the flaking black paint of the fire escape railing and barreling inside with her arms wide. She is already tipsy, and Belly chuckles as her arms latch around her, a little too much weight thrown against her chest, and Belly takes a half step back to steady herself under it. “You came!”
“Of course,” Belly says, returning the hug as best she can with her hands full.
Gemma pulls back and looks at the supplies in her hands, taking the bag of limes from her and beckoning her inside. “I’m so glad you’re here; I’ve been dying for one of your margaritas.”
“Well, we can’t have that,” Belly says, falling into serpentine step behind Gemma as they weave through the crowd. Belly waves and stops here and there to greet the people she knows, but there are always so many new faces, and she never knows if this is because Benito and Celine have so many friends or just make new ones at an alarming rate.
“Isabel!” Max cheers when she walks into the kitchen, rounding the folding table acting as a kitchen island and planting a kiss on each of her cheeks. “And juice!” she adds, taking the bottle from her as Gemma plops the limes next to the cutting board set up on the stove, which Belly has seen used for just about everything but cooking. “Can you pass out the rest of those daiquiris?” she asks Gemma, bobbing her head toward the couple inches of pink slush sitting in the bottom of the blender. “Then we’ll make the margaritas.”
“Yes, Chef,” Gemma says, dislodging the blender and pecking a quick kiss to Max’s jaw before darting out of the room, and Max rolls her eyes and laughs as Belly’s stomach twists.
“Behind.”
“You don’t say behind when I’m behind you. Haven’t you ever seen a cooking show?”
She swallows, hard, and runs her eyes over the impressive array of liquor arranged on the folding table. She grabs a plastic cup from atop the stack and pulls out a bottle of tequila she recognizes, unscrewing the top and pouring a generous shot.
Max is watching her; she can feel it like a hum against her right cheek.
“Bells?” she asks, but that’s all she says: the mom friend, maybe, but not trying to be her mother.
Still, Belly flinches. “It’s...been a week,” she replies, and then tips the shot back, the burn unpleasant for lack of practice.
Max moves in closer to her shoulder, and Belly turns to face her—better but not fully. “Is it... Benito mentioned...” She trails off as Belly shakes her head.
“No, it’s not... Benito and I are cool,” she says, swirling the last drops of tequila caught in the depressed ring around the bottom of the cup.
“It’s not that Jeremy motherfucker—”
“No,” Belly interjects with a soft laugh, lifting her hand to swat the very consideration away. “Definitely not.”
Max frowns, and Belly steels herself, knowing it’s not long before process of elimination leads Max to the obvious next question, knowing she won’t be able to answer it, knowing she won’t be able to hold herself together if it’s even asked.
She sighs, dropping her head. “I’m just...feeling a bit homesick, I guess,” she mutters, and it’s close enough to the truth that Max’s supernatural skills don’t flag it as a lie, her face folding with sympathy as she wraps her arms around Belly’s shoulders.
“Aw,” she soothes, running her hand over Belly’s back. “You know what's a cure for homesickness?”
“Pomegranate margaritas?”
“Exactement.”
The party is fun, but she’s relieved when it starts to die down, her social battery flashing red. Celine showed up over an hour late, as expected, and things were perfectly, platonically normal with Benito, also as expected. Belly had switched to water after three margaritas, and then briefly back to margaritas for the last two rounds of the night, but the drinks grew stronger as everyone’s ability to measure deteriorated, and the metro feels faster than usual on the way home. The ascension to street level is welcoming in its briskness, like lying on the bathroom floor, though she’s certain she isn’t that far gone.
She toes her shoes off as she locks the door behind her, heading straight to the kitchen to down a glass of water. She places her purse on the kitchen counter and unzips her dress, and then just stands there, her back open to the air as she drains half the glass. She removes her dress completely after that, draping it over the arm of the couch to be tomorrow’s problem, and strips out of her bra and into the first big t-shirt her fingers touch in the pajama drawer. She wriggles her phone from her purse when she returns to the kitchen to grab her water glass, refilling it to the top before flopping onto the couch, tucking her bare legs under her and scrolling through her phone as she drinks. She’s tagged in a handful of pictures from the party, and she smiles as she swipes through the notifications, liking and commenting as appropriate. She opens her texts, catching up on what’s happened in the group chat with Taylor and Anika—mostly memes and shit-talking Anika’s recently ex-boyfriend, which she happily joins in on.
As it nears one in the morning, she gets a text from her mom asking if she is home; she doesn’t have to check in every night, just on the nights she unwittingly mentions to Laurel that she’ll be out late drinking, which she supposes is fair.
Been home about an hour already, she replies, adding a smiley face emoji.
Her mom reacts to the message with a thumbs-up, and Belly says her goodnights to Taylor and Anika, sends a picture of her water to the Paris group chat when Max reminds them all to drink some, and gets ready for bed. She drains the rest of her water, refills the glass to sit on her nightstand for when she wakes up parched, plugs her phone in to charge overnight, and settles her head on her pillow and closes her eyes.
And then opens them again.
She rolls onto her other side, then back again, then tries to sleep on her back, then tries that comfortable-in-the-moment-but-fucks-your-hip-up Heisman maneuver, but she can’t get comfortable, and her mind won’t quiet.
She grabs her phone again, unlocking it and opening it to her text messages. Benito has eye-rolled her water picture.
Overachiever, he added, and she likes the message, closing the group chat.
And then, quite on their own, her fingers scroll down. And down. And down.
Conrad Fisher
Even reading his name stutters her heart, her thumb hovering over the dormant conversation for a long moment before she opens it.
It hasn’t changed since the last time she looked, even though everything else has. There’s nothing past their messages about Steven’s accident, and before that, Christmas. And before that, everything, gigabytes of memory she has saved and archived and backed up and moved from phone to phone since she had one. It’s the only history she has kept intact—and now the only part of them that’s still unbroken.
Sometimes, especially when she and Jeremiah would fight, she would scroll through it. She didn’t feel good about it, knew it was wrong even if she couldn’t articulate why at the time, and she never knew what she was looking for, but it always made her feel better. He always made her feel better, even if it was a him—a them—that no longer existed.
She scrolls through it now, finds her favorite parts like a child reading a dog-eared storybook. She knows all her lines, and all his too, and she cries and laughs in all the right places—cries in some of the wrong ones, too, the happy moments turned bittersweet.
Even though the time is displayed in the corner of the screen, it’s nearly 4 a.m. before she notices it, and she curses herself; she has the breakfast shift tomorrow. She moves to prop herself up to place her phone back on the table, but the awkward kink of her body as she scrolled has caused her arm to fall asleep under her, and it fails to hold her, her phone tumbling over the edge of the bed and into the darkness below. She throws her head back against the pillow with a frustrated sigh, and then tries again, pushing through the pins and needles to lean over the side of the bed. The phone has landed face down and a couple feet under her queen-sized bed, the reflection of her sparkly case in the city lights her blinds never completely shut out the only clue to its position. She sighs again, leaning her chest over the side and bracing one arm on the nightstand as she swats under the bed with her more coordinated hand. She catches the phone by the corner and drags it out into the open, pulling it up in front of her face as she flops onto the bed on her back.
And then sits bolt upright with a choked scream, a chill racing down her body like a bucket of ice water has been dumped over her head.
Calling Conrad Fisher
“No, no, fuck, no!” she cries, smashing frantically at the end call button, her heart in her throat and beating so fast it’s more of a steady hum than individual vibrations.
The call ends. Did it connect? It didn’t say it was connecting. Does it show up if it doesn’t say it connected?
There’s a strange sound whistling in her ears, and she realizes it’s her own heaving breath. She presses a hand to her heart and remembers the breathing exercises she learned—“for Conrad,” she tries to skip over in her mind. It helps with her racing heart but only clarifies the racing thoughts.
Should she text him? Say it was a mistake?
She starts to type. Erases it.
He’d probably think she was lying, that it was some sort of manipulative ploy. But that wasn’t fair, was it? To either of them? He wouldn’t think that.
She starts to type again. Erases it again.
It wasn’t worth the risk.
She does the math in her head. It’s 7 p.m. in California. Maybe he's still at work or out with friends or eating dinner. Maybe it's chicken. Maybe it's with someone else. Maybe they are laughing at her.
She puts her phone down on the comforter atop her legs and groans as she grinds the heels of her hands into her eyes.
“Get it together, Belly,” she orders herself. She drops her hands from her eyes and looks at her phone screen again.
He isn’t typing. He isn’t calling her back.
“It didn’t go through,” she says, wills, commands.
In through the nose. Hold. Out through the mouth.
“It didn’t go through,” she repeats, but this time, she sounds disappointed to her own ears, her slowing heartbeats taking on a hollow tone.
She closes her eyes, presses them tight, forces the tears back. She counts one last breath, then opens her eyes, places the phone back on the nightstand, and rolls onto her side, facing away from it. She turns back to check for a message three times before she falls asleep.
Nine time zones and 5,586 miles away, Conrad Fisher glances down at his phone as it vibrates face down on the bar next to his half-finished beer. There’s a Stanford away game today, so he and his intramural football buddies are at their new usual bar: a craft brewery that offers both physical and psychological distance from the undergrads they are trying to convince themselves they have matured beyond.
Agnes had been bugging him for weeks to introduce her to some of his “buns of steel” football friends, but he wasn’t sure which ones those were, exactly, so he'd invited her out the next time they were all getting together. She isn’t there yet, though, so he turns the phone over, expecting to see the ridiculous black-and-white senior photo of her peeking around a tree that he’s set as her contact photo because that’s what friends are for.
He drops his phone back to the bar, and though it only falls a couple inches, the thud feels like an earthquake rumbling through him.
Belly Calling
He reads it twice before he twitches his hand toward the screen, muscle memory more than a conscious thought, and then it disappears.
Missed Call - Belly
He frowns, tilts his head, has the fleeting awareness that he probably looks like a dog, and then all the blood rushes to his head in a roar. His fingers seeming to move in slow motion, he unlocks the phone, swipes away the notification, and opens their chat.
She’s typing.
He holds his breath.
She stops typing.
A hiss of air whistles into his nose.
She’s typing again.
He swallows.
She stops typing again.
He stares. He blinks. His fingertips tingle as they hover over the message box, then curl back into his palm.
This hasn’t changed that he has no idea what to say.
He waits, staring at the messages, sliding a finger over their last words every so often so the screen doesn’t go to sleep. Nothing happens. He checks the time, does the math.
He can’t think of a good reason Belly—or anyone, for that matter—would call him—or anyone, for that matter—at 4 a.m. He can think of plenty of bad reasons, but Belly wouldn’t call him in an emergency, though he wasn’t sure if the literal or the figurative ocean between them was the bigger reason why.
He opens his chat with Laurel but doesn’t want to worry her. He opens his chat with Steven but figures he wouldn’t have any idea what Belly’s Saturday night plans had been. He opens his chat with Taylor but knows she would immediately tell Belly he’d been asking, and somehow that is worse than just asking her himself. He cycles through them all again before he calls Agnes.
“I know, I know, I’m sorry! I’m on my way, I just—”
“Agnes,” he interrupts, his voice sounding strange even to him, so he’s unsurprised when she snaps into diagnostic mode.
“Conrad?”
He can hear her moving faster, the phone rustling against her face.
“Conrad, are you okay? Where are you?”
“I’m—I’m at the bar. I’m...fine,” he says, and he’s confused that he means it, puzzled by his lack of panic.
“You don’t sound fine,” Agnes says, her tone sharp. “What is it, what happened?”
“I—” He blinks, watching the bubbles rising in his beer. “Belly called me. Sort of. I think.”
A small hiss of surprise, then silence.
“It, like...rang for a second. And then disconnected. And then she was typing. And then she wasn’t.” It sounds stupid saying it aloud, stupid needing to say it, needing to call someone to share and make sense of it.
“Fuck,” Agnes breathes, the weight of the word in her mouth making him feel a little better, like he isn’t imagining that it matters. “I’ll be there in five, and then we’ll go back to your place.”
“What?” Conrad asks, coming back to his senses just enough to be confused. “But...you wanted to meet the guys. Buns of steel, remember?”
Agnes huffs a bark of laughter. “Conrad, your buns are more important right now,” she says, and he thinks, tomorrow, he might find that sweet.
Right now, all he manages is, “Oh. Okay.”
“I’ll be right there, okay? Pay your tab,” she says, and then the line goes dead.
He pulls the phone away from his ear, lifting his face and looking around as if he’s just been dropped into this bar from another planet. It certainly doesn’t feel like the same one he was on five minutes ago.
“Uh, excuse me?” he says, lifting a hand to draw the attention of the bartender collecting glasses a few feet down the bar. “Can I cash out? When you get a chance?”
The man nods. “Sure thing,” he says, turning away toward one of the too-bright screens mounted on the underside of the bar.
Conrad looks down at his phone again. He exits his chat with Belly and opens the call log, but it hasn’t disappeared, and he hasn’t imagined it.
Missed Call - Belly
Suddenly, something hot and sharp zips across his eyelids like a branding iron, and he blinks rapidly to stall the rising tears, drawing in a stuttered breath.
“Here you go,” the bartender says, and Conrad forces himself to look at him, to smile, to perform normal for a few more seconds.
He adds the tip, signs his name, makes a vague and hopefully nonchalant excuse to the guys, and then streaks toward the door, tugging his jacket on as he goes. As he bursts into the dying evening light, he sucks in a gasp like a dying breath, or maybe a first one, a drowning man breaking the surface to reach toward the sun. He moves away from the windows and leans against the building, the red brick rough and grounding against the back of his skull as he tips his head toward the twilight sky, smiling despite the hot, sticky tears rolling down his cheeks.
“Jesus,” Agnes puffs when she finds him a couple minutes later, out of breath and a little sweaty, and he’d tease her about it if he wasn’t so grateful. “You look... Well, kind of insane,” she mutters, and Conrad laughs then, which he’s sure isn’t helping his case.
“I feel kind of insane,” he admits, shaking his head as he drops his chin. “I feel... I feel...” He blinks at the sidewalk in front of his sneakers and smiles even as his vision twists in watery swirls. “Awake.”