Chapter 16: Late night calls
The silence after their call felt different this time. It wasn’t empty; it was charged, like the air after a lightning strike. For three days, Belly moved through her routine—classes, work, trig homework—with a new kind of awareness. Her phone was no longer a source of dread, but a live wire in her pocket. She didn’t reach out. He didn’t either. It was a fragile, unspoken agreement. The ball was in no one’s court. It was just hovering between them, waiting.
On his end, Conrad existed in a similar state of suspension. The gray rock from geology lab sat on his windowsill. He’d catch himself staring at the white vein, thinking it looked less like lightning and more like a crack. He thought about calling a hundred times. He’d pick up his phone, scroll to her name, and then set it down again. The courage he’d scraped together for that first call had evaporated. He was back to overthinking every possible outcome.
Thursday night found him in the basement laundry room of his dorm. It was a fluorescent-buzzing tomb that smelled of cheap floral detergent and mildew. He shoved his clothes into a machine, the motion rote and mindless. As he poured in the soap, his phone, sitting on top of the dryer, lit up.
Isabella Conklin.
His heart did a stupid, violent slam against his ribs. He grabbed the phone, fumbling it, his damp fingers almost sending it skittering across the concrete floor. He answered before the second ring.
“Hey.” The word came out as a breath, a release of the tension he’d been holding for days.
“Hey.” Her voice was softer, a little unsure.
He leaned back against the humming dryer, the warmth seeping through his t-shirt. “How are you?” he asked.
“I’m okay. How are you?” The formality was painful. They were better than this.
“That’s good. I’m okay.” He closed his eyes, pressing his free hand to his forehead. This was agony. He scrambled for a thread, any thread, to pull them out of this polite ditch. “So my roommate, Trusky—”
“Oh god, did he sleepwalk in his underwear again?” she cut in, a genuine laugh bubbling up.
The sound loosened something in his chest. “No. Thank Christ, no. But we were talking last night. Turns out he’s a full-blown 5G conspiracist. He tried to convince me the campus Wi-Fi is giving us all brain worms.”
Belly’s laughter filled his ear, rich and unguarded. He grinned at the stained ceiling tile, a real smile for the first time in days. “Brain worms? That’s a new one.”
“He had charts, Belly. Hand-drawn charts. I think he might fail out of Poli Sci and start a podcast.”
“You should be his first guest,” she said, still laughing. “You could talk about the existential dread of brick architecture.”
“And the hidden messages in sedimentary rock layers,” he added, playing along.
The conversation found its groove there, in the absurdity of Trusky. They talked about their weird professors, the disgusting mystery meat in the dining hall, the guy in her sociology class who always argued with the professor about everything. It was easy. It was safe. They were just two friends complaining about college.
The washing machine behind Conrad kicked into its spin cycle, a violent, thrumping rhythm that shook the floor.
“Where are you?” she asked. “It sounds like you’re in a jet engine.”
“Laundry room basement. The one that feels like a murder scene from a bad movie.”
“Charming. Don’t get stabbed.”
“I’ll do my best.” He watched his clothes swirl into a blur behind the little round window. “How’s the trig?”
“Manageable. I used your little box method on a quiz. Got a B.”
“Yes!” He pumped his fist, a quick, private gesture of victory. “I knew you could do it.”
“I had a good tutor.” She paused. He could hear her shifting, maybe settling into a couch. “It’s weird here without you guys. Taylor’s great, but it’s not the same. She doesn’t get the… shorthand.”
He knew exactly what she meant. The shorthand was a decade of inside jokes, of silent looks across a room, of knowing how someone took their coffee without asking. It was the way he and Belly could have a whole conversation with just their eyebrows.
“Yeah,” he said, the word heavy. “I know.”
“I know.” The words were soft, a shared ache. The spinning washer settled into a slower, final rhythm. He could hear her breathing, a faint static on the line. He wanted to ask about Jeremiah. The name sat on his tongue, a bitter pill. He didn’t ask. “Taylor’s dating someone new, right? Some football guy?”
“Yeah. Mark. He’s… fine. He calls her ‘babe’ in this voice that makes my teeth hurt.” She sighed, and it was a familiar, affectionate sound. “Actually, it’s a whole thing. So the guy Katie was seeing turns out he had a girlfriend the whole time and it just sucks he really didn’t seem like the type.”
Conrad sat on the dryer. The metal was warm through his jeans. He was silent for a moment, the news about a near-stranger hitting a fault line deep inside him. “Did you know my dad cheated?”
The line went utterly quiet. He could picture her face, the way her brown eyes would widen, her hand flying to her mouth. “Adam cheated on Susannah?” Her voice was a whisper, disbelieving.
“Yeah. The first time my mum was sick. He had an affair with his secretary.” He stated it plainly, the facts he’d carried like shrapnel. “I found out about it last spring. On the same day I found out about my mum’s cancer coming back.”
“Oh, Conrad.” Her breath hitched. “How’d you find out?”
He looked at the cracked linoleum between his boots. “Umm, I came home early one day and heard the fighting. She was crying so much, Belly. I never heard her cry like that before.” His own voice tightened. “So I left. I went back out, I drove two hours out of town and came back pretending not to know anything.”
“I’m so sorry. It sucks that you had to carry that secret for so long.” Her words were fervent, aching with an understanding that went deeper than pity.
“Yeah.” He pushed the heel of his hand hard against his closed eyelid, seeing spots. “It’s just exhausting. I couldn’t turn my brain off. It was like, if you do that, then this horrible thing is gonna happen, but if you do this, then you know this catastrophic thing will happen.”
“Oh my god, that sounds so stressful.” Her voice was close, as if she were right there in the damp room with him.
He let out a breath, long and ragged. The admission hung in the humid air, a beast finally uncaged. A glance at his phone screen shattered the moment. “God dammit. It’s two o’clock. You said you have practice early. I should let you go.”
“It’s okay, I can—”
“Belly, you should get some sleep,” he said. His voice had gone gentle, the rough edges smoothed out by a weariness that had nothing to do with the hour.
“Five more minutes?” she asked. The plea was small, a child’s negotiation against the dark. She pulled her comforter up to her chin, the fabric soft against her skin.
“Five more minutes,” he agreed. He laid down on his bed, breathing out a long, slow stream of air that whispered across the receiver. The springs of his mattress creaked faintly. “Tell me something good. Something that doesn’t suck.”
She thought, her mind skimming over the mundane details of her week. “The bookstore got a shipment of new editions in today. All the classics with these beautiful, cloth-bound covers. They smell incredible.”
“Like what?”
“Like… glue and paper and possibility.” She smiled in the dark. “I spent my break just smelling ‘Pride and Prejudice.’ My manager thinks I’ve lost it.”
He chuckled, a low, comfortable sound. “You’ve always lost it for books. Remember when you tried to read ‘Moby Dick’ on the beach in, like, eighth grade? You got so mad at the chapter about whale anatomy you threw it in the sand.”
“It was boring! And a seagull almost pooped on it.” She laughed, the memory vivid and warm. “You fished it out and brushed it off for me.”
“Someone had to save Captain Ahab.” His voice was soft with memory. They lapsed into a quiet so deep she could hear the faint digital hum of the connection. It was a silence that felt like sharing a blanket.
“Conrad?”
“Yeah?”
“Thanks for telling me. About your dad. I know that wasn’t… easy.” She chose the words carefully, handling them like the fragile things they were.
He was quiet. She heard him swallow. “Thanks for not saying it’ll all be okay.”
“Would you believe me if I did?”
“No.”
“See? I’m learning.” She turned onto her side, cradling the phone. “Five minutes is up.”
“Liar. You didn’t time it.”
“You’re right. I didn’t.” She yawned, the sound cracking through her words. “My eyes are closing on their own.”
“Then let them.” His voice was a murmur, a lullaby. “I’ll stay right here until you hang up.”
“Okay.” Her words were slurring now, the weight of sleep pulling her under. “Good night, Con.”
“Night, Belly.”
She didn’t hang up. Her breathing deepened, evening out into the slow, rhythmic pattern of someone slipping into dreams. He listened to it, the simple, trusting sound of it, until the call disconnected on its own twenty minutes later. He lay there in the dark of his dorm room, the silence now profound and aching, holding the ghost of her breath in his ear.
The next day was a haze of lectures where the professors’ voices sounded muffered and far away. He navigated campus like a sleepwalker, the conversation with Belly a live current beneath everything.
Trusky launched into a theory about fluoride. Conrad just nodded, which seemed to satisfy him. By evening, the need to hear her voice was a physical pull, a centripetal force tightening in his chest. He waited until the clock read a reasonable hour back East. He called.
“Hey.” She answered on the third ring, her voice clear. She wasn’t sleeping.
“Hey.” He was on the floor, his back against his bed frame. The talking came a little easier now, the initial hurdle of contact already cleared.
“I had a really weird thought today,” Belly said. He could hear the soft click of a laptop keyboard in the background.
“Yeah? I love weird thoughts.” He pulled a knee up to his chest, bracing.
“I was thinking if my dad had cheated on my mum she probably wouldn’t have even cared. Is that harsh?” The words came out in a rush, as if she’d been holding them all day.
Conrad considered it. He thought of his mother’s shattered crying, the raw sound of it through the door. “No. But you really think Laurel wouldn’t have a reaction?”
“Kinda. I mean nothing about my dad ever excited her, you know?” Belly said, and he heard her shift, maybe closing her laptop. “They were like never romantic with each other. Not that I saw. It was all grocery lists and who was driving Steven to practice.”
“Did you wanna see your parents being romantic?” He asked the question honestly, trying to picture his own parents in any kind of tender moment and drawing a blank.
“Maybe. I mean, I just can’t imagine marrying someone who didn’t give me fireworks.” Her voice took on a wistful, determined quality. “You know, like electric jolts every time I saw them.”
The words landed directly on the fresh bruise of his memory: the jolt of her kiss on the beach, the current that had lit him up and terrified him in equal measure. He cleared his throat. “Were you surprised when you found out they were getting divorced?”
“Yes and no.” She let out a short breath. “I always thought divorce meant fighting, and there was none of that. I mean, they were cold for a little while, but now everything’s back to normal. They’re weirdly friendly. It’s like they downgraded from spouses to mildly annoyed college roommates.”
“In a weird way, that must almost be a little harder to understand,” Conrad said, thinking of the stark, brutal clarity of his own parents’ betrayal. A clean, horrible break versus this slow, painless fade.
She laughed, a sound of pure recognition. “Exactly.”
“What?” He asked, smiling at her tone.
“I don’t know. Just never said any of this to anyone before.” Her admission was quiet, almost shy.
He smiled, his head tipping back against the mattress. The truth of it vibrated between them, a shared frequency only they were on. “Me neither.”
The line hummed with that confession. It was bigger than trivia about roommates or stupid classes. This was the marrow of things, the unspoken histories that shaped them. He had told her about his father’s affair. She was telling him about the absence that defined her. The trust was implicit, and staggering.
The trust was implicit, and staggering. It sat between them on the line, a third presence. Conrad felt scraped raw, but in a clean way, like a wound finally aired out.
Belly exhaled, a slow release into her pillow. The silence wasn’t empty anymore. It was full of everything they’d just given each other.
“Hey, can I ask you something?” she said, her voice small in the new quiet.
“Anything.” The word was immediate, an open door.
She was silent for a moment, the pause filled with the rustle of her sheets. “How’s Jere? Is he doing okay?” she asked.
Conrad’s shoulders tensed. He hadn’t expected that. “Uh, yeah. He sounds okay on the phone. Why?” He tried to keep his voice neutral, flat.
“I, uh, wanted to text him to see how he’s doing, but didn’t think I’d get a reply.” The admission was rushed, tinged with a shame that made his jaw tighten.
“Yeah, I mean, he’s probably just busy with college.” It was the easiest, most pathetic lie. They both knew Jeremiah’s capacity for holding a grudge, for weaponizing his charm into a colder kind of silence.
“Or, you know, he said he’ll never get over what I did and hold it against me for the rest of our lives.” Her voice was hollow, reciting a verdict.
“Belly.” He said her name like a plea, a stop sign. He couldn’t bear the guilt in her tone.
“Never mind. Forget I said anything.” She backtracked instantly, the words clipped. She took an audible breath, a deliberate shift. “I learned something kinda cool.”
“Tell me.” He said. She could tell he was smiling, grateful for the lifeline.
“Did you know that Venus is an evening star for 263 days out of the year, and then it disappears from the sky for 50 days before returning as a morning star for 263 days?” Her voice lifted, finding solid ground in a fact.
“I did not know that.” He let out a soft chuckle, a release of the Jeremiah-tension. “That is very cool.”
“Right now it’s a morning star, really bright next to the moon. I’m actually looking at it right now.” He heard her window slide up, the faint whisper of outside air.
He stood and walked to his own window. His view was the brick wall, a slash of orange-tinted night sky above it. He craned his neck. “I can’t see it from here. Just a bunch of light pollution and that damn wall.”
“It’s probably against the rules to say this, but, um, I wish we were looking at it together.” Her voice dropped to a near-whisper, confessing a crime.
He closed his eyes. “Me too.” He was looking up at the sky anyway, as if he could burn through the brick and the miles with just the force of wanting to.
“And, Belly?” he says, the words forming before he could cage them.
“Yes, Conrad?” Her reply was a breath held.
“I couldn’t be with someone who didn’t make me feel electric either.” He said it. The words hung in the cosmos between them, clear and undeniable.
The line went so quiet he thought it had died. Then he heard it: a sharp, stifled inhale that wasn’t quite a sob.
He waited. His own heart was a frantic thing against his ribs.
“You can’t just say things like that,” she finally whispered, her voice thick.
“Why not?” he asked, his voice low. He pressed his forehead against the cool glass of his window, as if he could get closer to the distant star she described.
“Because.” A tear escaped, tracking hot down her temple and into her hair. She wiped it away angrily. “Because it makes it impossible to just be friends who talk about conspiracy theories and trigonometry.”
He had no answer for that. The truth was a geography without a map.
“You’re right,” he murmured after a moment that stretched thin. “I’m making it impossible.”
“Yeah, you are.” She didn’t sound angry. She sounded resigned, and that was worse. She took a shaky breath, an obvious attempt to reset.
“Belly.” Her name was a plea. He heard the wet fracture in her breath and it unstitched him. “Don’t.”
“Don’t what?” Her voice was small, defensive. “You say something like that and then I’m just supposed to… what?”
“I don’t know.” He admitted it, the words hollow. He slid down the wall until he was sitting on the floor, the dorm carpet rough against his palms. “I just… it’s the truth. That’s all.”
“The truth is a really inconvenient thing to just drop on someone at midnight.” She sniffed, and he could picture her wiping her nose with the back of her hand, a gesture she’d had since she was ten. “It changes the shape of everything.”
“Does it have to change things?” he asked, but even as he said it, he knew the answer. Their friendship had already been a glass bowl with a hairline crack; he’d just tapped it.
“Yes.” The word was final. “You know it does. You felt it too, that whole summer. We pretended it wasn’t there and then you kissed me and we still pretended. We’re really good at pretending, Conrad.”
“Belly.” He said, breathing out. It was less a name and more the sound of something breaking.
“Yeah?” she said. Her voice was cautious, bracing for impact.
He pressed the phone so hard against his ear it hurt. The fluorescent light above him buzzed like an angry insect. He saw the ghost of her smile from hours ago, the one she’d worn talking about book smells, and it felt like a artifact from a different lifetime.
“I shouldn’t say this right now.” He began, each word dragged over gravel. He closed his eyes. The darkness behind his lids was a relief. “But, uh. I don’t want to pretend with you.”
Silence.
It wasn’t the comfortable silence from before. This was a vacuum. It sucked all the sound, all the oxygen, out of the world. He could hear the soft shush of her breathing, or maybe it was the static on the line. He couldn’t tell.
“What does that mean?” Her question was barely audible. It was the voice she used when she was scared, the one that made her sound twelve years old.
“It means I’m tired.” The confession was a dull, exhausted thing. “I’m so tired of editing every single thing I say to you. Of trying to make it fit into the ‘friend’ box. Of talking about rocks and roommates when all I’m thinking about is that night on the beach.”
“Conrad—”
“Just let me say it.” He cut her off, a rare surge of will. He opened his eyes to the sterile, awful light. “I think about it all the time. I think about the way the sand was cold underneath us. I think about the way you tasted like salt and cherry lip gloss. I think about how I ruined it immediately after by being me. I have a perfect fucking recording of it in my head and I play it on a loop when I’m trying to fall asleep. It’s the only thing that works.”
He stopped. His heart was hammering, a wild, trapped thing against his ribs. He’d never said any of this out loud. He hadn’t even known he could.
On her end, Belly had pulled her knees to her chest. She was sitting in the center of her bed, the comforter rumpled around her. She was holding her breath. The streetlight outside her window cast long, distorted shadows of tree branches against her wall, like claw marks.
“You think about it?” she whispered.
“Constantly.”
“Why?” The question was a plea for a map, for instructions, for anything to tell her how to navigate this.
“Because it was real.” He said it simply, as if it were obvious. As if the entire foundation of their world hadn’t just tilted. “Everything else that summer was a fucking performance. The deb ball, the parties, the polite conversations. But that wasn’t. That was just you and me. And I can’t pretend it wasn’t the most important thing that’s ever happened to me.”
A sob escaped her. It was a raw, guttural sound she tried to smother against her knee. He heard it. It traveled down the line and wrapped around his throat.
“Don’t cry,” he murmured, his own voice fraying. “Please don’t cry. I called to stop pretending, not to hurt you.”
“You are hurting me,” she choked out. “This hurts. Because what are we supposed to do with this?”
“Belly, I’m sorry I’ll let you go.” He said.
she took a breath “Goodnight Conrad.”
“Goodnight Belly.”