Chapter Text
Belly flushes the toilet on the second try, neglecting to press hard enough the first. Wobbling out to the sink, she leans into the mirror, swiping her index finger under her eye to wipe away the part of her smoky eye that’s gotten a little slimy. She tilts her head, examining the fake fang wound on the side of her neck, twin trails of faux blood drawing over her collarbone to stop on the curve of her breast where it’s pushed up in a red satin corset top with a black lace overlay. She bares her teeth, her canines artificially elongated and sharpened with the fancy glue-on vampire teeth she had splurged on for the occasion.
She was unlikely to have another Halloween in Paris, let alone one that landed on a Friday, and though the city didn’t generally do more than humor the holiday, it never turned down an excuse for bacchanalia—especially of the costume variety. So, when Max and Gemma had heard through their underground rave contacts—which Belly still thought was an incredible phrase to just be able to say—about a literally underground costume party, their group had gone all-in: matching pleather leggings and satin corsets for Gemma, Belly, and Celine, while Max and Benito dressed as their Dracula overlords—or “Dad-culas,” as Max had developed a fondness for saying.
Gemma was absolutely covered in fake blood, her chin and neck possibly stained with it, while Celine and Belly had gone for the more tasteful double puncture wound.
“You can just say it’s sluttier,” Gemma had muttered earlier while they were applying it together in Celine’s apartment, Celine ostensibly fussing over staining her corset if she went the bloodthirsty route. “I’m in love; I don’t need sexy blood.”
“Aww, babe!” Max had crooned, leaning in for a kiss, and then all of them had laughed as her starched white collar got caught between their lips.
After confirming that her teeth and sexy blood are still in place, Belly pulls her phone out of the side pocket of her leggings—a difficult task sober, a nearly impossible one after overindulging in whatever was in the Witching Hour cocktail at the pop-up bar.
She has some notifications on Instagram from the group shots she added to her story, smiling at the fire emojis and hearts, and then, in what’s become an automatic motion, she opens the views, scrolling through the usernames.
The first month or so after arriving, she had been looking for Jere’s smiling face among the profile pictures. Not just Jere, of course, but now, she wasn’t really looking for him at all, hearing through Taylor that he was “fine,” plugging away at his online credits—and any passably attractive single he encountered. Belly thought she should have cared more, but she didn’t, didn’t particularly care at all. She bore Jere no ill will, she hoped they could one day patch together some semblance of a friendship, but she didn’t feel any lingering connection that lent itself to a sense of betrayal or jealousy.
Not with Jere, anyway.
She sighs as she gets to the bottom of the list on the last of the three photos she’s added so far tonight.
Conrad isn’t on any of them.
She swallows, focusing on her own eyes in the mirror, watching them pinch as she feels her lungs fill with the leaden guilt that’s become her near-constant companion over the past month and a half. Not that she didn’t have plenty to feel guilty about before, but it was different since she had received Conrad’s letter in mid-September.
He hadn’t said much, and he’d said nothing important directly, just teased her about not being able to find Sour Patch Kids—she’d given Mom a stern talking-to over that overshare—and asked if she’d made herself sick on croissants or bought a beret yet.
I always picture you in a beret when I picture you there. A red one. And one of those striped shirts. So I guess I picture you as a mime. But I always picture you happy.
I really do hope you’re happy.
She hadn’t replied. She had meant to, had started to, had started to so many times, drafted text messages and gone through at least a dozen sheets of paper, but she didn’t know what to say. She knew what needed to be said, she just didn’t know how to start saying it. And in the meantime, as unfair as it was, she hoped he would do it, would take yet another leap of even more foolish faith and write or call or text or start stalking her on social media, but he never had, and she was driving herself crazy imagining him moving on while she was at a standstill.
Though at the moment, she didn’t feel like she was standing still at all, the bathroom whirling around her, her reflection blurring under the anemic yellow lights that weirdly work in a grungy, vampiric sort of way.
She opens her Snapchat notifications next, finding a few from Taylor and Anika, their Halloween hijinks just beginning while it is already past one in the morning for her. She laughs as she taps through the pictures of their Skanky Scooby Gang—Anika as Velma, Taylor as Daphne, and people Belly didn’t know rounding out the coquettish cast—and then opens the camera, holding it up and angling it this way and that.
Her smoky eye looks more burnt to a crisp than she’s comfortable with, and she can’t make a fang-baring face she doesn’t think looks silly, so she angles the shot down, just her neck through the curve of her hips, the lights washing out her skin but making the fake bite mark and racing stripes of red down to her cleavage stand out even starker. She takes three before she deems one thirst-trappy enough to save—she’ll edit it and add it to the photo post on Instagram tomorrow—and then opens her contacts to send it to Taylor and Anika, the girlies always getting first dibs on thirst-trap selfies. She goes to hit the send arrow. And then stops.
And scrolls.
And scrolls.
And scrolls.
Conrad. His little Bitmoji wearing sunglasses and, as far as she could remember, entirely unchanged from the four-and-some years ago since she had last sent him a message—and that one was probably a thirst trap too.
They had always been rather eager that way.
She bites her lip and then flinches with a hiss, forgetting her tooth is a knife now, and when she looks back at the screen, her thumb has selected him, which she might call a sign if she were looking for an excuse.
She swipes down, returning the screen to the frozen image of her chest, and then goes back to the contacts list, Taylor, Anika, and Conrad highlighted.
Mountains and Muhammad and whatnot, she supposes. Though sending vampire boobs to your ex was decidedly less poetic.
She takes a deep breath. Hits send. And pukes into the trash can beside the sink.
The following afternoon, Belly wakes up on Celine’s couch with her lips stuck together and her head throbbing. Her first thought is that she’s never drinking again, her second thought is that she needs to drink water, and her third thought is—
“FUCK!”
“Whu!?” Celine bolts upright in her bed across the room and then clutches her head with a French curse as Belly pushes up to her knees on the couch, her stomach rolling with panic and sudden movement as she scrabbles at her phone on the side table. “Isabel, what the—”
“Oh my god, oh my god, oh my god, oh my gooood!” Belly rails, her hands shaking and her breaths swift and sharp, razors slicing against her lungs.
“What!?” Celine beckons again, getting out of bed now, her makeup ringed around her eyes like a somehow still fabulous raccoon and her hand clenched to the side of her head in her frizzy hair.
Belly fumbles with the phone, opening Snapchat—and then her face goes numb. She stares at the little “Opened” arrow, hollow and red and blurring as she starts to hyperventilate, her upper body bobbing in time with her gasps.
“Isabel!” Celine grabs her by the shoulders, turning her toward her, her eyes wide and frantic as they sweep her face. “What happened!?”
Belly gapes at her, her lips twitching helplessly around words she can’t bear to think, let alone say, and then she pushes Celine aside, leaping from the couch and running to the bathroom to puke in the toilet.
Though Belly sits in her own filth within a cone of shame for that whole Saturday, Sunday is somehow worse because Conrad never replies.
She hadn’t exactly been thinking through the follow-up when she’d sent it, but when she considered it now, there were many things she had been prepared for, but simply nothing had not been among them.
He could have been mad, firing off some “What the fuck, Belly?” or blocking her; that would have made sense. He could have texted her to ask just how drunk she was or how the hangover was holding up in that teasing way that always had an undercurrent of sincere concern—a long shot but still Conrad—but to simply ignore it completely...
Belly didn’t know what to do with that. Maybe she should have been grateful he was just pretending it hadn’t happened, but despite the clumsy, borderline insane way she had gone about it, it was still, technically, reaching out, and so it still, technically, felt like rejection. “I showed you my vampire boobs, please respond” was something she would sooner die than ask, though, so she wasn’t sure what options, if any, were left to her but just trying to pretend it hadn’t happened too.
Belly sighs, lifting her head and looking out over the small park where she likes to take her breaks when the weather is nice, and though the air is crisp in that firmly fall way that means winter is breathing down their necks, the sun is out, making it bearable with her thick tights and peacoat. Her phone buzzes in her hand, where it has practically lived the past day and a half, but the panicked tightening in her stomach has eased somewhat now, the expectation for a notification from Conrad waning with every passing hour.
In this case, it’s Gemma replying to the picture of a dog that had graced the patio of the restaurant she works at for lunch that afternoon that she had added to her Instagram story.
“He’s living my best life,” she’s sent, and Belly chuckles, looking again at the small fluffy creature seated on his own chair in the sun and being hand-fed small pieces of salami from a charcuterie tray.
Out of habit more than hope, she scrolls through the views, a gasp zipping in her lungs as she stalls partway down, blinking at the screen.
Conrad Fisher, with the shrunken circular profile picture she could conjure in her sleep—and has, once or twice—for how many times she’s looked at it: him wearing a wet suit and straddling a surfboard on the Pacific Ocean somewhere.
She swipes back through her story archive as far as she can before the activity is deleted; he’s looked at all of them, everything since Halloween.
She blinks at his name, then lifts her chin, taking in a deep breath at the blue sky overhead...and laughs.
The following week becomes a study in subliminal messaging, which is a subject either Belly or Conrad is very bad at because she still doesn’t hear from him.
On Monday, when she and Celine go to Gemma and Max’s apartment to watch a movie, she holds a box of Sour Patch Kids in front of her phone, snapping a picture with the box in focus and a rom-com on in the background. “Found em!” she adds on the image, along with a sticker of a roving magnifying glass.
Conrad only views it.
On Tuesday, she goes grocery shopping; she posts a picture with the peaches in focus in the foreground and picks a filter that really pops the orange tones.
Still nothing.
Wednesday, they all go out to the bar after work, and she wears the black-and-white striped shirt she already had but rarely wears because it feels a little too on the nose; she adds a bright-red lip and takes a selfie sipping her red wine. She adds a jaunty red beret sticker and positions it on her head, the hat flexing in a rhythmic loop.
He says nothing, likes nothing, but he sees it.
Thursday, she’s starting to come a little unraveled after staring at his stupid surfing face and his stupid surfing hair so much that week; she adds “At Last” to a video spanning a pastry case brimming with croissants and other golden goodies, but the radio silence continues.
By Friday night, she’s completely unglued, her thumbnail caught between her teeth and her right knee bouncing where she crosses her legs on her bed, staring at his picture in the list of people who have seen her most aggressive effort yet: an in-focus macaron in front of what is very clearly The Fellowship of the Ring on her laptop. She didn’t actually watch it, just waited until there was a scene that looked recognizable—the One Ring held in a grubby palm—but she had posted it hours ago, and with the regularity she had been checking, she could be sure Conrad had seen it somewhere between two hours and thirty minutes and two hours and forty minutes ago, so he definitely should have been asking her about it by now in the fantasy scenario she had concocted for this and all her previous efforts.
“Proud of you,” he might have teased to the Sour Patch Kids.
“Are they better in Paris?” he could have asked of the peaches.
“Are you trapped in a box?” he may have taunted of her mime cosplay.
“Pace yourself,” he could have advised on the croissants.
Tonight, he was supposed to ask her what she thought of the movie, and she would say she had gotten bored and turned it off, and he would tell her she must have been watching it wrong then, and she would insinuate that they should watch it together, and—
She sighs, exiting Instagram and dropping her phone screen-down on the comforter, grinding the heels of her hands into her eyes as she hangs her head.
She wasn’t even talking to him yet, and she was completely obsessed.
Shaking her head at herself, she picks her phone back up, checking the time. It’s nearly one a.m., and she’s exhausted after working the breakfast shift that morning, but she has tomorrow off, so at least she can sleep in. She carries her phone with her as she stands, pulling the blankets down and climbing into bed to hold it over her face.
In what’s become another ritual, she opens Snapchat just in case there’s been some worldwide glitch or software update, and she’s missed a notification, but she hasn’t, and she sighs, tapping the back button. The app returns to the camera, her face on the screen, but her eyes drop down to where the straps of her worn white tank top extend above the bunched fabric of the sheet and duvet. She swallows, lifting her fingers to the covers and pulling them down just a little more, the ribbed fabric of the scoop neck washed close to sheer where it stretches over her breasts before the thick cotton sheet covers the essentials. She takes a breath, angling the phone so her face isn’t in frame, and then navigates to one of the time-sensitive filters that currently says “Goodnight” at the bottom. She taps the screen to capture the photo, then draws the phone close to her face, her heart pounding in her ears.
She’s completely sober this time, but she feels drunk, drunk on a week of desperation and fantasy and sheer terror that surfing-profile-picture Conrad Fisher has moved on with that stunning redhead with the Irish curls and the impish smile that had her arm around him in that picture from a football game from early September, but he’s still watching her stories, and that has to mean something.
Right?
Belly closes her eyes, her mind clouded with wet hair and Christmas and surfing accidents and peaches and roof work.
“I love you. I will never not love you.”
She sends it. Then stares at the phone until she falls asleep.
The first thing Belly does when she opens her eyes is find her phone, which has somehow ended up under the covers and by her stomach.
The second thing she does is almost shit herself because Conrad Fisher has replied, sending her a Snapchat image that she simultaneously can’t wait to and just plain can’t open.
She stares at the phone where it rests on her lap over the duvet, her torso hunkering over it where she sits up in bed. Her fingers hover above the screen, fluttering up and down, but it’s nearly one in the morning for Conrad, and he’s almost certainly in bed by now, even on a Friday night, concerned about his regular sleep schedule as he is. Or was, last she knew.
She takes a breath, then flicks her wrist, tapping her middle finger on the waiting arrow.
It’s just a picture of a collection of half-finished drinks on a bar—a sports bar, by the look of it, considering the blue light of the TVs mounted to the wall in the background—and that might be the knee of his jeans in the lower left-hand corner, but the picture isn’t supposed to be the point, though Belly wonders if maybe the hopped courage is why he replied at all.
“Did you mean to send me that?” a slightly transparent bar of text says across the middle, and Belly looks out over her apartment, sightlessly scanning the walls.
She could say no. She could say nothing. He would let her away with either.
She had a sneaking suspicion Conrad Fisher would let her away with almost anything, and though there were some potential consequences that were mortifying to imagine, there were others that she didn’t want to avoid at all.
She opens a reply, swapping the camera to look out over her apartment as she takes a picture of the bottom of her bed and the light encroaching around the curtains over the window on the opposite wall.
“yes” she adds in the same text banner, all lowercase feeling more appropriate, less confident. Less brave.
Even ninety-five percent sure he won’t be awake to see it at this hour, Belly still stares at the phone for twenty minutes before getting up, in for a long day of waiting for Conrad to get his beauty sleep. She still checks every fifteen to twenty minutes or so in case he wakes up in the middle of the night with a burning desire to talk to her—or a burning desire of any kind, really—but she still hasn’t heard anything as they sit at their table at the cocktail bar they’re getting a drink at before heading to a show at a jazz club that evening, checking more frequently now as it passes eight a.m. in California.
“Isabel?”
Belly blinks up from the screen, her startled eyes lifting to Gemma. “Huh?” she hums, and Gemma frowns.
“Thanksgiving,” she evidently repeats, tilting her head at her. “Are you going home for it?”
“Oh, uh, no,” Belly murmurs, shaking her head and taking another swig of her stiff, vodka-based cocktail. “Everyone’s kinda...doing their own thing this year,” she mutters, and Gemma’s smile is sympathetic before it brightens.
“Well, that’s good,” she chirps, her gaze shifting to the rest of the group, “because I heard about this huge party...”
The conversation moves on, but Belly can’t keep up with it, her eyes drifting between her drink and the phone.
And then the screen lights up, a notification bar spanning it, and her stomach jumps to stick against her lungs as she reaches for the phone in a hopefully casual way.
It’s just a picture of a ceiling, the blades of a fan casting long shadows in the gray autumn morning light.
“Oh. Okay.” the text bar says.
She frowns at the message, her stomach trying to drop out of her ass now.
“Oh. Okay”? Like “Good to know” or “Thanks but no thanks” or “Sorry but I'm in love with my Irish girlfriend” or—
Another picture comes through, and she taps to it—and all the noise in the room is suddenly underwater.
A wheeze squeaks from her lungs like a rusted hinge on a wooden shutter, her fingers lifting to pearls that aren’t there while her palm rests over her thumping heart.
It’s essentially the same picture she sent him last night, but his version of the filter says “Good Morning” and his sheets are a little farther down his naked torso because his chest isn’t sexualized as much—by society in general, that is, but she is certainly leering, her face heating as she scans the column of his neck, the ridges of his collarbones, the fine dust of hair between his pectorals.
The pads of her fingers lift to her mouth of their own accord, her teeth biting into her lip beneath them.
Oh...okay...