Chapter Text
To have spent my life holding my hands in tightly hidden fists. To try to understand what it would mean, now, to hold them open. I have always felt ashamed at being witnessed in the act of wanting something I could not have.
—Jennifer S. Cheng, from So We Must Meet Apart
The peace, such as it is, doesn’t even last six months.
When she caved to her mother’s demands, laid in her childhood bed that summer and stared at the glow-in-the-dark stars on her ceiling and wondered how long it would be until she felt brave enough to be her own person, she thought that it meant everything would be fine.
They chose to wait. Yes, okay, Laurel, you’re right, marriage is a big step, we can prove that we’re serious about this. We can wait another few years.
And they did. It wasn’t until 37 months later, after Belly finished college and had been working as a case manager for a mental health co-op for over a year, that they actually got married.
Belly was sick a lot, that summer. She went to her GP who sent her to a gastroenterologist who sent her to an internist who sent her to a rheumatologist who told her that she needed to cut out refined sugar. She threw up every day, lost and gained the same ten pounds over and over again, endless cramping in the ladies’ room at her office, phone calls to Jere in the middle of the day that ended with her crying and him saying he was so sorry and he wished he could fix it.
The wedding was pared down to bare bones— family and close friends at a boutique hotel in Boston, dinner afterward catered by the sister bistro of a food science startup that Breaker funded a few years ago. Everyone said the salmon tartare was to die for; Belly spent the evening bent over the toilet.
So much for convincing everyone I’m not pregnant, she told Taylor miserably with bile on her chin and sweat on her neck.
Taylor said nothing and looked at her hard, eyes sadder than they used to be. She combed Belly’s hair back and then wiped off puke with her bare hand. Belly cried.
She and Jere honeymooned in Savannah and Tybee Island and all she could think the entire week was that it was so eerily similar to Cousins that she almost couldn’t enjoy herself. The Spanish moss was nice, though.
She steadily, bravely did not think about Conrad the whole time they were there. She did not think about the low, forward pitched argument they’d had outside the venue after the rehearsal dinner, when Jere wasn’t around to hear that Conrad still loved her, that he felt like he was going insane being around her with everyone else and seeing someone he didn’t recognize, that she was making herself sick trying to twist herself up into something that made everyone happy, and Belly knew that there was no way he had any idea about it and her heart still stopped in her chest anyway.
She didn’t think about the four days she had spent with him leading up to the wedding, when Jere was in Tokyo with Adam, and Conrad had finished unpacking his new Jamaica Plain apartment enough to fill in and take care of the last-minute groom duties with Belly, and riding around town in his front seat with her peonies in the trunk felt like it had been prophesied. She was so hungry that week; it seemed like every thirty seconds she was asking to stop for food.
She didn’t think about the fact that when she and Jere returned from their honeymoon it would be to a city that held Conrad Fisher in it like a torch in a fist, and there was nothing she could say about it that wouldn’t be an indictment.
She definitely didn’t think about the fact that her workplace was a mere six blocks from his, or that the deli he said was his favorite when he was seventeen was situated very cleanly between the two, a nice red brick omen with the best muffaletta you’ve ever had in your life.
But she did think about saltwater taffy, and Spanish moss, and how bad she wished she could have a Long Island iced tea during their ghost tour, and how her stomach would tear itself apart at the mere thought.
They returned to Boston, still married, still them, and Belly tried to learn how to be a wife.
Maybe it was her fault for not insisting on living with him first. Maybe she was naive to think that spending summers with him at the beach house, when they were cohabitating with both of their mothers and his anal retentive older brother, was enough to inform her on what kind of a full-time roommate he would be.
Reflecting on her mistakes wouldn’t have saved her from the toothpaste on the mirror and the dried piss on the floor, though. Nor the fruit flies that she tried over and over and over to banish from their apartment as if they were the problem, as if, once they were gone, everything would be fine.
One month in, she was beset with fruit flies.
Two months in, she was beset by his somehow-still fratty buddies at the dive they met at after work, and she smiled and tried to remember when she thought it was sweet that he wanted all his friends to know how important she was to him.
Three months in, she waited for him at the nice seafood place in Back Bay for over an hour before getting the check for her glass of Riesling and boxed salmon, and when she came home to find him asleep on the couch in front of the Patriots game she honestly blamed herself for being surprised.
Four months in, she was greeted by a late notice in their door and sliced it through the air at Jere’s face wondering why the hell they were getting slapped with a fifteen percent late fee if he had in fact taken care of it like he said he had. He told her he didn’t know, that he put his card in the portal like she said to and that it must have been a system error, and when the building manager placidly told them over the phone that, yes, Jeremiah had put in his card info last month but he had not in fact opted to enroll in auto pay, so unfortunately there was nothing she could do about the late fee, Belly dug her fingernails so deep into his forearm that he yelped and said Jesus Bells while Belly thanked the manager and used the skin under her nails as a replacement for the urge to stuff his phone down the garbage disposal.
Five months in, she intercepted his credit card statement in the mail and found a number so frightening she immediately stuffed it in the trash and pretended she never saw it.
They are six months in and she is learning that while the first five plagues may have been punishments, the sixth will be her end: the sex has spoiled.
In her privatest, most unkind thoughts, she once believed it to be perhaps the only thing she could rely on Jeremiah for. Their sex life wasn’t perfect but it had always been enthusiastic, energetic, and frequently occurring.
A week passes before she realizes it. On Monday and Tuesday he worked late and didn’t come home until after she was already asleep. On Wednesday she and Taylor got dinner with Anika while she was in town, and she got home tired, with red wine and laughter pounding in her head, and he pet her hair until she passed out. On Thursday and Friday, however, they are both home by eight and both in a relatively civil mood, and they both go to bed fully clothed with their teeth brushed, no sexual advances to be found.
She tries to remedy that on Saturday. She folds laundry in the living room wearing nothing but a t-shirt and panties and blinks at him when he pats her on the ass with all the sensuality of a post-scrimmage good game. She has to put on clothes twenty minutes later because Steven and Conrad come over to help move their old couch down to the curb.
Conrad’s still in a pair of scrubs, dark blue, cinched at the waist. She doesn’t look when he has to angle himself through the doorway with one end of the couch in both hands, when the smooth skin taut over his tricep bumps into the exposed skin of her stomach as she leans forward awkwardly to hold their front door open without getting too in the way.
Jere doesn’t try anything all weekend. When he runs to the office to grab his forgotten laptop so he can finish his Tuesday presentation from home tomorrow, she lays in their bed and masturbates, the pink vibrator he only ever employed at her insistence pressed deep into her cunt while she stares at the ceiling with one hand laying aimlessly across her tits. She comes twice and then falls asleep.
It happens again the next week; she breaks out a lingerie set she bought for his birthday three years ago and climbs into his lap and grins when his hand automatically falls to her hip, but when she leans in to kiss him he dodges her and says “ah, babe, I’m really— I’m so wiped, I’m sorry.”
She swallows and clambers off of him and says “it’s fine. Sorry they’re working you so hard.”
Two weeks later they do fuck, for the first time in a month. On a Saturday evening, before she heads over to Steven and Taylor’s, they have sex for eight minutes without kissing. Belly makes herself come.
After the wedding, she had a couple months of reprieve from her weird, nebulous stomach issues. She was able to eat more, had stopped throwing up altogether, and only spent about twenty percent of her day staring off into space trying to power her way through the shooting pains in her abdomen.
It’s not very long until it starts back up again, though. She wakes up every day nauseous and stiff and spends almost an hour each morning trying to power her way through a plain piece of toast, sweating and gripping the counter while she stares it down and tries not to let it come back up. She makes an endoscopy appointment for the third.
While Jere is in Munich over New Year’s for work she initiates half-hearted phone sex. She doesn’t come but she makes an excellent show of it, and it settles something in her stomach for a while.
Taylor drops her off at the endoscopy center in Wellesley with a kiss to her head and an apology that Steven is going to have to be the one to pick her up. Belly laughs through her anxious tears.
“I’ll be fine, I’ll just make him buy me Shake Shack on the way home.”
“You better.”
But when she comes to in the recovery room with a sore throat and a fuzzy head, her phone is full of texts from Steven: a confusing litany of increasingly frantic messages about his car engine and he was sorry but he would figure it out, and her head throbs as she tries to figure out what the fuck he’s talking about when a medical assistant pops in to tell her that her husband is here to pick her up.
Belly’s brain is so foggy she doesn’t even question it; she grips her discharge papers in one sweaty hand and follows the MA back out to the entrance, and feels something go warm and shivery in her recently-excavated stomach when she looks up to see Conrad waiting for her by the front desk.
Oh, no, she thinks, and remembers very quickly that she’s always emotional post-anesthesia when she feels tears needling at the backs of her eyes and she doesn’t stop walking until her forehead is pressed up against Conrad’s chest.
Your husband is here for you, Mrs. Fisher.
“Sorry,” she says nonsensically, burying her face in his sweater.
“Hey, you’re all right,” he says, one broad hand rising to grip the back of her neck, the other curling around to the small of her back, rubbing firm, deep circles into her spine. His thumb sweeps back and forth along her hairline. “You’re okay, honey.”
She sniffs loudly, trying to force back the urge to fall into him and cry until she can’t breathe.
He lifts her chin to make eye contact. “How do you feel?”
Belly swallows. “Better,” she says, while her throat aches and her head throbs and the corners of her mouth are cracked and dry and painful. “Better.”
The receptionist hands Conrad his own set of general discharge papers, rattling off the first set of instructions at the top while he nods, eyes still on Belly’s own, hand still on her face. It occurs to her: he probably already knows all of this.
“He’s a doctor,” she rasps at the receptionist for no reason. She doesn’t look away from him.
“That’s great,” the receptionist says, and turns back to her computer.
Conrad holds her hand the whole ride home, even while he’s ordering Shake Shack.
He calls her a few days later.
“I just wanted to see how you were doing.”
Belly’s “working from home:” laying in bed with the tv on mute, her kindle propped up on the pillow next to her, halfway through some horny regency romance and about to get to the good stuff when her phone vibrates on her bare stomach.
“I’m fine, Conrad, honestly. I just get— sorry. I know I get emotional after anesthesia. Sorry for crying on you.”
“It’s fine, Belly, that’s normal. You can cry on me any time,” he says gently, and Belly digs her nails into her palm and remembers the feeling of his fingers threaded through hers. Don’t tempt me.
Holding his hand was a sensation she’d had to reheat over and over again in the privacy of her own mind, a memory she held closer than most. There were times she worried she was romanticizing it completely out of proportion, turning Conrad into some Apollonian figure capable of soothing all her ills and solving all of her problems with the touch of one warm, broad hand. Now she wonders if she wasn’t right about all that.
“Thank you, again, for coming to get me. You really didn’t have to, I could have Ubered back.”
“To the South End? All right, Mr. Rockefeller, next time, I’ll let you do that,” he says, fondness bleeding in around his consonants.
“Okay, I think I can afford a— a what, thirty dollar Uber ride? Forty, max.” Belly laughs, putting him on speakerphone so she can cross her arms and lean back against her pillows.
“Maybe if you budget really, really hard,” she can hear the smile in his voice, just as she can hear when it begins to fade, “but you don’t have to.”
Belly swallows hard. “You know you don’t have to fix, like… all of my problems, right, Conrad?” She tries for teasing but it just lands somewhere north of sore.
“Oh, Belly,” he breathes, and her stomach swoops.
They jerked off for each other on FaceTime a few times when he was away at college. Belly had liked it a lot more than she thought she would; trying to get the good parts of her body in frame at a flattering angle was even more difficult than she’d imagined, but she was shocked speechless by how hot it was to watch Conrad stroke himself on her screen like that.
They didn’t send each other a lot of pictures. Conrad was too paranoid about her internet safety to ever request anything risqué from her, and the craziest thing she ever sent him unsolicited was a faceless shot of her tits pulled out overtop her bra when she was tequila drunk one weekend.
He’d sent her a furious string of texts saying she was nuts and she should delete it and he was going to delete it but before he deleted it he needed her to know that she was the hottest thing he’d ever seen in his life.
It had lit something incongruously pure in her chest, a comfortable, affectionate warmth every time she thought about the fact that her boyfriend liked looking at her tits and also refused to keep any pictures of them in his phone.
Of course, she’d immediately called him and demanded he prove how hot it was while she watched, and that was the first time she discovered that there was something dizzyingly sexy about watching him come all over his hand while he groaned her name into his AirPods.
It reminds her of that, a little. Hearing him say her name in that pained, raspy tone, invisible as he is, sends a bolt of heat straight to her pussy.
“You’re perfectly capable of fixing your own problems, I know that, it’s just…” he clears his throat and his tone lifts, “let me make up for running off to California by myself for so long, huh? Trying to carve out a little redemption arc for myself.”
She rests her hand on her lower stomach. Her fingertips are cold and she tucks them just beneath the waistband of her underwear, just enough to warm them up, she tells herself. “You don’t— you were never a villain, Conrad.”
Silence hovers for a beat too long. “You’re too boring to be a villain, what villain goes to bed at ten PM?”
“Villains that have real jobs!” he laughs, and Belly sinks into the sound. Her hand slides further between her legs, enough to discover that, yes, she’s wet. She’s wet from chit chatting with her brother-in-law about Uber prices while her husband is at work. Something black spreads throughout her stomach.
Conrad says something wry on the other end of the line, and she feigns a laugh.
“What was that?” he asks.
Belly pauses. Sometimes she really wishes he didn’t know her quite so well. “Nothing,” she says, “just something Taylor sent me, she’s got the weirdest for you page in the world.”
“Ah.”
The timbre of his voice is interminably warm. Belly feels goosebumps wake up all down her forearms, and a liquid, breathing heat slides down her throat toward her hips.
She sits up and hesitates; is she really going to do this? Her teeth dig into her lower lip. She reaches into her nightstand and pulls her favorite vibrator out of its case, settling back into the pillows as quietly as she can. The tip slides easily through the seam of her cunt; she’s already embarrassingly wet. Conrad’s been talking the entire time.
“I guess I didn’t realize things had gotten that serious between them,” he says, and her head swims.
“Wait— who? Sorry, you… you cut out a little.”
“Harmony. Adam’s girlfriend.”
“Oh,” Belly says, and wonders if it’s weirder that she’s masturbating while talking to her brother-in-law or that he’s not even talking about anything sexy. “How long have they been together again? I never really see him, not since— not since last year, I guess.”
“Uh, like a year? I think? I don’t know, Jere keeps up with him more than I do. I don’t… we don’t really talk much. Me and Adam.”
Belly hums, weirdly focused on what he’s saying despite the fact that she’s worked her vibrator all the way inside her now and is pushing at her g-spot with a deep, dirty grind. “I don’t think anyone could blame you, Conrad,” she keeps her voice low.
Conrad snorts. “Jere could.”
They both fall silent. Belly’s hand stills.
Before he can apologize, she asks him, “did you ever…?”
And he says “no,” in a rough, resigned voice. “I don’t want to take that from him.”
Since they were very young, Conrad has had a tendency of saying things like an adult, as if he had stumbled across more years than the rest of them had purely by virtue of being born first and being born Conrad. Steven and Jeremiah always found it irritating and rolled their eyes and did their best to shove it out of him, but Belly, as she was wont to do, always thought privately that it was a little romantic of him, that he was an old soul, like her, and he saw things differently from other people.
Conrad shouldered responsibility like it was his birthright, like it was predetermined that he would be the one to protect everyone from the world and from themselves.
She thought about him like that, once, very early on in her relationship with Jere, and quickly realized that she would poison her relationship from the inside out if she spent any time at all reflecting on how easily Conrad slipped into the role of caretaker, and how she’d never seen Jere do the same.
Her breath pauses in her lungs when he speaks, the acceptance of his own role in Jeremiah’s life, the knowledge that, at some point, Conrad and Adam had switched places, and no one had bothered to tell Jere.
A weight like warm water breaks over her head, and she shifts, bearing down on the pressure deep in her core.
“God, Conrad.”
“Sorry,” he says, taking a deep breath, “I didn’t mean to—”
“No, it’s just, Steven used to call you Papá, you remember that? When he was sick of you bossing everyone around?” The vibrator eases out, back in.
“Oh, god,” Conrad groans. “Yeah.”
“Sometimes you just take on too much, I think. You don’t need to be the parent all the time.”
He sighs. Several long beats pass while Belly listens to her own heartbeat and fucks herself slowly, drunk on the knowledge that he’s on the other end.
“But then how will I make sure you’re actually eating a vegetable every once in a while?”
And it’s so stupid, and Belly knows he’s joking, but the thought of Conrad standing alone in his kitchen across town worrying about whether or not she’s eating a healthy diet has her clenching down on a searing burst of arousal.
“All right, d-dad,” she tries to tease him back, but she speaks too soon and it’s all breathy and trembling and she knows immediately that she’s given herself away when he pauses starkly.
“Belly…” his breath comes harsh and loud in one quick, short swoop, “are you… touching yourself right now?”
Her stomach roils. The shock in his voice, the shame pouring over her like a scalding shower, the twist of her vibrator inside her— she can feel it start.
“Conrad,” she gasps, still trying, like a desperate, cheating little whore, to disguise the fact that she’s using a friendly phone conversation with her brother in law to get herself off. “You’re. That’s so fucked up.” But she doesn’t say no.
Conrad is silent, she can’t even hear him breathe. She wants to be able to hear him breathe.
“Conrad?” Whiny.
“You’re right, Belly, that is fucked up. That’s more fucked up than I thought you were capable of.”
Disapproval stains every vowel. Belly gets wetter.
“I can’t believe you would even say that to me,” she says, but she sounds breathy and turned on even to herself, and she’s working her vibrator in and out so fast he’s probably able to hear the slick squelching noises by now. It probably sounds cartoonishly porny. She rolls her head back into the pillow and turns the vibrator on. Fuck it.
“Oh, god,” she says, and Conrad groans on the other end.
“Jesus fucking Christ, Belly.” A clunk. In her mind’s eye she sees him dropping his head to his kitchen counter.
“Don’t hurt yourself, tiger,” she breathes. He laughs miserably.
“No, you’re doing enough of that for me, huh.”
Belly whines, wiggling down into the sheets, “not trying to, Conrad, I just— I just—”
“You just what, pretty girl? Just needed to abuse my empathy so you could get off to the sound of my voice? Is that how bad things have gotten? God, Belly.”
She bites her tongue, a teenager again, stupid and shimmering at all the wrong things: you think I’m pretty? And part of her wants to melt, to say yeah, Conrad, that’s what I needed, that’s how bad things have gotten. Won’t you come save me?
But, God, if she hasn’t worked for this, what has she worked for? A car door slams outside her window, and she remembers that Jere— that her husband will be home within the hour.
“You don’t know that for sure, asshole,” she bites, bitter even as it comes up her throat.
“No?” He sounds amused. She cranks the vibrator up higher.
“No, you don’t.” She fucks herself harder.
“I feel like I probably do, though.”
Whining, squirming, wishing he was here so he could watch her do this for him: “and why is that?”
“I know what you sound like when you’re about to come, Belly.” She chokes on her own tongue.
Because he does, and then she does, choking and whining and throbbing, and they both breathe heavily into the phone without speaking for several long breaths.
“Are you hard?” she asks stupidly after a minute. Conrad laughs. An actual, loud, chesty, honest-to-God laugh.
“What do you think, baby?”
It’s like she can feel his hand warm on her breast. She thinks about it, projecting it into the space between them, for a long time.
“I miss you.”
Conrad says nothing. She pictures him closing his eyes, dropping his head back. She pictures damage done to his expression, working an ache onto his brow in real time. What’s wrong with her?
“Are you allowed to say that?”
“Definitely not allowed to have phone sex with you. So. In for a penny, you know.” She picks at the bedsheet and listens to him breathe.