Chapter Text
"Isabel?"
Belly leans around the left of her monitor, swallowing a mouthful of caramel macchiato as knuckles rap on the doorframe of her office. "Dr. Greer," she greets with a tight smile, a certain level of feigned politeness required when addressing a senior faculty member—even if he did chronically forget her honorific.
The man smiles, and something in it sets Belly on edge, a certain showmanship snagged between his cigarette-stained teeth. The odor precedes him into her office, the acrid earthiness of carcinogens.
Belly lifts her coffee cup, holding it delicately below her chin and inhaling the syrupy vapor. "What can I do for you?"
Brian chuckles, the rosy ping-pong balls of his cheeks pushing on his eyes. "Well, I'm afraid we've got ourselves in a bit of a bind." He clicks his teeth with a grimace, and Belly tips her head in polite inquiry even as dread pools cold in the pit of her stomach.
"Oh?"
Brian nods solemnly, moving to perch his khaki-clad ass on the corner of her desk.
Her fingers clench around her mug as he jostles a picture frame: a photo from her doctoral graduation at Brown, Steven's fist thrust in the air while Laurel and John were each kissing one of her cheeks astride her wrinkled nose.
"Woops!" he chuckles, pushing it next to her pearlescent glass jar of pens. "Bit close to the edge there," he cautions, and Belly wants to say she didn't anticipate her desk becoming seating, but that would be a full-time-faculty retort—and would probably be her last as a mere adjunct.
She sniffs. "You said something about a bind?"
"Ah, yes, yes," Dr. Greer mutters, removing his wire-rimmed glasses and scrubbing them on his tie, a shiny material in a grisly green that would lose someone their leg.
Belly certainly wants to cut the tie off, at any rate.
"It seems Dr. Tanner— I don't know if you've met him," Brian interrupts himself with a frown. "He only teaches one or two classes a semester these days. Spends most of his time in the lab."
Belly shakes her head. "Can't say I have," she muses, and Brian hums as if she's done herself some grave disservice.
"Well, he had this sleep study lined up for this summer. Nothing big," he adds with a trivial jerk of his head. "Just your standard Trier, keeping people up all night to see how it impacts the results, but"—he heaves a doleful sigh—"he's had an…urgent family matter come up," he says, lifting his brows as if this is supposed to convey something more than the sum of its parts, but Belly doesn't know the man at all, let alone well enough to speculate, "and won't be available to head it up anymore." He blinks expectantly at her, and Belly takes a drink of her coffee in the ensuing silence.
Brian coughs. "You would, obviously, have research assistants," he explains, and Belly blinks, feeling as though the conversation has skipped a step over her head. "Eli is always rather hands-on with his studies, so there weren't too many, but we wiggled a bit of room in the budget to open up a head assistant position. Take some of the busywork weight off your shoulders." He grins, tipping his head. "I know you're already teaching two intro courses this summer," he closes sympathetically, and the subtle condescending climb of his tone, the casual dismissal of anything hundred-level, stokes a passive-aggressive spark in her chest.
"I'm sorry," she murmurs, all quiet self-deprecation as she lowers her cup to her desk, "I-I'm a little confused." She chuckles, girlish and dumb. "What exactly are you asking me?"
Brian blinks, his head reeling back on his neck, and then his mouth opens with a barked guffaw that makes her jump. "Silly me!" he chortles, swatting a hand through the air as he—finally—stands from her desk. "Guess I should've opened with that, huh?" He chuckles, Belly's lips smearing with a thin smile. "We were hoping you could take over the study for Dr. Tanner," he offers, which still isn't quite asking her, but it's close enough—at least balanced with how much she wants him out of her office.
"I, uh… I don't know," Belly replies, leaning back and looking to her monitor, her outlines for her two summer 'intro courses' up on the screen. "Do you…have a timeline or—"
"Of course, of course," Brian blusters, tossing his hand as if all the details are semantic. "I'll send you the information. Just thought I'd…gauge your interest first."
Belly hums, clipping a nod. "Well, I'll, uh, look that over and…get back to you." She smiles, and Brian beams, bobbing his head as if the matter, to him, is already decided.
"Excellent!" he chimes, clapping his hands and mercifully moving for the door. "I'll send it over as soon as I'm back at my desk. You can let me know tomorrow?"
Belly barely beats back a sigh. "Sure," she clips, and with a triumphant slap of his fingers to her doorframe, his soles flap away down the hall, leaving Belly to thunk her forehead to the edge of her desk.
Twice.
"I just," Belly snarls, shaking her head down at her buffalo chicken wrap, "I hate that he just…assumes I have the time."
"It's not personal," Shireen assures, stabbing a forkful of her Greek salad as she shrugs a shoulder. "Brian looks down on all the adjuncts." She smiles at Belly's narrowed eyes, then pops the cucumber and romaine into her mouth, chewing while Belly sighs.
"I dunno," she mutters, looking out the window of Shireen's office as she leans over the paper plate protecting her desk from the red-swirled ranch dressing dripping from Belly's wrap. "Maybe I'm just annoyed that I do have the time."
Shireen lowers her black plastic fork into the lid of the clamshell container, Belly also having the free time to pick up lunch for the twice-weekly "mentoring"—that is, professional bitching—sessions they had established ever since she had imprinted on Shireen like a baby duckling during one of her first faculty mixers, the woman ten years her senior and three times as confident for it. "You've already applied for license endorsement," she reminds kindly as Belly picks at the steamed seam of her whole wheat tortilla—it felt healthier that way. "It's not your fault California likes to drag its feet."
Belly chuckles, but the point is fair enough, California about the worst possible place she could have been convinced to relocate, out-of-state license endorsements taking an average of six to twelve months for review. If she hadn't completed her post-doc supervision hours in Massachusetts, where the requirement was even higher than in the Golden State, she would have been even more screwed—but she still feels rather fucked.
"And it's just ten weeks, you said, right?" Shireen continues, and Belly nods as she chomps another bite from her wrap, swiping a glob of sauce off her bottom lip with one of the flimsy paper napkins.
"Just through the summer," she explains after she swallows. "And it's not like I need to be there every night," she adds, tipping her head. "There's research assistants for most of that. I'll probably mostly be one of the 'experts'"—she curls her not-greasy fingers in the air—"who come in to do the stress test the next day. But they had an on-campus apartment in faculty housing set aside for Dr. Tanner, so"—she shrugs—"I have access to that too. If I want." She ducks her chin. "For when I…have to do the overnights." She flicks her eyes up through her lashes, meeting Shireen's steady, pointed gaze.
"Well," Shireen muses, returning to her salad with a clear of her throat, "that doesn't sound so bad." Her dark eyes fix on Belly over a halved cherry tomato and a kalamata olive speared between leaves of lettuce, and Belly has to look away, shoving the last of her lunch into her mouth and balling the paper wrapping.
She flaps free two more useless napkins from the intertwined stack, dragging them firmly over her fingers.
The cushion-cut diamond of her gold engagement ring tears a hole in the brown paper, fragments clinging to the pavé wedding band fused below it.
Belly turns the back of her hand to her thigh, brushing the rings clean on her floral skirt.
"Dr. Namazy?" The cracked door swings open, revealing a young woman with spirals of flaming hair tied back into a low ponytail. "Oh, sorry!" she splutters, blue eyes skittering between them, the papers she's holding folding up to her chest over her white lab coat. "I—I didn't— I can come back."
Shireen chuckles, shaking her head and beckoning the woman in. "It's fine, Agnes," she assures, and Agnes smiles awkwardly, stepping deeper into the room. "Isabel, this is Agnes Murphy. She's one of the first years working with me in the clinic this summer."
"Nice to meet you," Belly says, inclining her head, Agnes echoing the gesture.
"Dr. Park is a first-year adjunct here in the psychology department," Shireen adds, smirking as she turns to Belly again. "Though research is her real passion."
Belly rolls her eyes. "It is not," she directs to Agnes, who chuckles in that airy way one always does with half the context. "Dr. Namazy is just rubbing salt in my wounds," she expounds. "I've been nominated last minute to take over a sleep study from—"
"Oh, Dr. Tanner?" Agnes interjects, frowning curiously while Belly frowns with confusion. Agnes shrugs. "Small campus. At least"—she flicks her brows—"as far as gossip goes."
Belly quirks a brow.
"Wife left him," Agnes supplies, tipping her ear toward her shoulder. "Got a 'hey girly' text. From two girlfriends."
"Agnes," Shireen snaps as Belly bursts into laughter, Agnes's face whipping to the older woman as if she had forgotten she was there. "That's not appropriate."
"Though it does explain some things," Belly muses, and Agnes coughs around a snort while Shireen simply jerks her head with disapproval, though a smile does tug at a point of her mouth. "Well," she chirps, tossing her garbage into the carry-out bag and rising from her chair, "I will leave you to it."
"Okay," Shireen replies, nodding. "Text me later, yeah? About what you decide?" she requests, something honing in her gaze. "After you've talked to Benito?"
Belly's stomach clenches, her left fingers twitching into half a fist. She stretches her wince into a smile. "Yeah," she mutters, a swallow scratching down her throat, "I will."
"And her skin!" Benito urges, rolling his eyes to the ceiling with a groan of admiration as he sips at his glass of wine between bites of Thai takeout. "I mean, even without the rhinestones all over her body, she would have been glowing!"
Belly smiles, poking her chopsticks at her chicken pad thai. "So, it was a good shoot?" she presumes, and he nods emphatically, humming through his yellow curry.
"Fantastique!" he proclaims, Belly's fingers tightening on the disposable wooden sticks, Benito's newfound tendency to use Romance languages when describing his photography already wearing on her nerves despite the freshness of the habit.
Still, she smiles. "That's great, babe," she replies, the endearment bitten off across her lips. She takes another swig of her wine.
"Oh, and did I tell you they're sending me to France next week?"
Belly's lashes stutter, a clump of chicken flopping back to her plate. "What?"
Benito isn't looking, his face bowed into his rice as he paints it with the sauce from his curry. "Yeah," he says casually, indifferently, and Belly waits for disappointment or betrayal to arise at the lack of consideration, but it doesn't come.
She can't remember the last time it did.
"That HBO series, the one about the…crazy white people resort?" He glances up but doesn't wait for confirmation of her understanding. "Vanity Fair is doing a spread on one of the actors, want some on-set shots."
"Oh," Belly mutters, unsurprised but still a little ashamed of the relief soothing cool through her chest. She prefers their apartment to herself these days. "Sounds fun."
Benito hums an affirmative. "Yeah, I'm staying at this resort— It's, like, right on the beach, and…" His voice continues, but Belly stops hearing the specifics, all of the details running together after over a year of fancy food and expensive wine and beautiful people.
Belly had secured the adjunct position at Stanford before they'd moved from Boston, but in the time before the semester started, she had traveled with him some, jetsetting from photoshoot to photoshoot on whatever magazine or celebrity's dime, and she could admit to getting caught up in the glamor of it, at first. But Belly was no actress, and playing the role of supportive wife to a sought-after celebrity photographer grew tiresome—or maybe she just grew less supportive.
It was one thing when he was working in New York, hardly ever more than four hours away. They were newlyweds then—still were, by some estimates, their four-year anniversary coming up in August. Benito had moved to Boston to be with her after two years of long-distance since their meeting in Paris during her second year of her master's, and maybe that was why she hadn't pushed harder when he'd come to her February before last with the opportunity of his lifetime.
"California?" she had spouted, nearly dropping the knife she was using to trim green beans for dinner.
Benito had nodded, his eyes bright, nearly manic. "I mean, I'm there half the time anyway," he had argued, and that had been true, a Hollywood-dependent career demanding a Hollywood-coastline location, "and I have a lot of momentum right now."
He always talked like that, like someone else, carried-over jargon from his latest conversation with whatever editor-in-chief of whichever magazine had most recently hired him.
"I have to strike while the irons are hot!"
Belly hadn't corrected him, having more pressing concerns than American English idioms. "I can't move to California!" she had scoffed, rounding their kitchen island to where he sat on one of the barstools. "I have, like, less than two hundred hours before I'm fully licensed, I— Sheryl's gonna offer me a staff position once my supervision's done!"
"You can be a therapist in California."
"No, Beni, I can't!" she had countered, furiously shaking her head, still caring enough to be hurt back then. "I'm getting licensed in Massachusetts; I—I have no idea what I'll have to do to be able to practice in California! I mean, where is this even coming from!?" she had exclaimed, ripping the kitchen towel off her shoulder to toss it on the granite island. "We had a plan! We were looking at houses last week, for fuck's—"
"Mi reina," Benito had sighed, almost regretful, it had seemed at the time, rising to his feet and placing his palms on her outer arms, "I— This is a huge opportunity for me. For my career." His voice had been gentle, his eyes soft, and Belly had found herself softening with them. "I…I have to take it," he had said, and Belly had understood, had felt it in the stilling of his fingers, the stiffening of his jaw, the drop of his gaze, that this decision had already been made—whether she made the same one or not.
And so, she had moved, had left her job and her family and her friends to build a new life on a new coast, because that's what you did for someone you loved, or that's what she had thought at the time, but over the past year, Belly had started to wonder why compromise always felt like a one-way street.
Benito's spoon clinks to the side of his bowl as he picks up his wine, slurping a sip.
Belly takes a deep breath, twisting the base of her wine glass against the small, circular dining table. "I, um— Dr. Greer stopped by my office today."
"Who?" Benito asks, and Belly doesn't even bother telling him again.
"He, uh…asked me to head up this sleep study the research lab is running through the summer." She shrugs, lifting her wine glass to her mouth. "I guess the professor who was gonna run it is, um…no longer available."
"Huh," Benito muses, acknowledgment more than curiosity. "So, what do you have to do?"
"Well, it, um— Basically, people come in for a couple nights, and then, the second night, we either make them stay up all night or let them sleep, and then, the next morning, we stress them the hell out"—he chuckles, and she smiles—"and test their cortisol levels. The idea is to see how much sleep impacts an increased stress response," she summarizes, and Benito nods, humming around the collar of his glass. Belly measures an exhale. "So, uh— I might— They have an apartment set up for me on campus," she ventures, plucking at a bean sprout in what she hopes is a casual manner, "for when I have to stay in the lab overnight. So I'm not…driving on no sleep or…whatever."
"Oh," Benito chirps, unaffected, "well, that's nice. Probably safer." He nods into his bowl, and Belly watches him spoon curry into his mouth, watches the pendant light over the table catch in his dark curls like the Santorini sun from the lazy mornings of their honeymoon when they woke up tangled in one another, unable to imagine ever being more than arm's length apart.
She folds her hands in her lap, her right thumb and index finger twisting at her wedding ring. "Yeah," she breathes. "Safer."
Belly squints at the wall, scanning to the left and right of the picture frame she holds in place against the drywall, quite certain it's centered. Shuffling her left hand to hold up her diploma, she pulls the pencil out of her mouth, hatching a dash above the center of the frame. She lowers the frame to the floor, leaning it against the wall, and then picks up the hammer and shimmies her fingers through the torn cardboard backing of the box of finishing nails on her desk—the only thing other than Command products she's allowed to use on the walls of her office. The nail pinched between her fingers catches on the packaging, sending the box of nails clattering to the floor, sharpened metal bouncing and rolling across the thin gray carpet.
Belly sighs, the hammer thumping against the side of her thigh. "Son of a—" she grumbles, rolling her eyes at herself as she sets the hammer on her desk chair before dropping to her knees, starting to gather the errant metal into her palm.
"Dr. Park?" a deep male voice sounds, followed by a rap on her open office door.
Belly moves to push up to her knees, the back of her skull colliding with the underside of her desk. "FUCK!" she trumpets, ducking down again, the nails spraying from her palm as she instinctively moves her left hand to the back of her head. She groans, clenching her teeth and her eyes shut. "God!"
"Shit, sorry!" There's a thump of something hitting the floor, and Belly leans out from under her desk just as a figure rounds the side of it. "You okay?"
A small, choked sound squeaks through the back of her throat before she clamps down on it, her palms instantly sweaty.
It's a man—young, tall, tan, tall—his dark hair loosely styled to hang over his forehead in a windswept sort of way, or maybe he just looks like that, like he just stepped in from the salt air of a sunset beach, and Belly doesn't know why it's sunset, why she's built golden hour around this stranger. He's wearing lightweight khaki trousers with eerily white sneakers, as if he changes to something else before he goes outside, and a lavender polo shirt that by some unnatural law of color theory deepens the green of his eyes.
Which are staring at her, narrowing with increasing concern.
"How many of me are there?" he murmurs, a joke in the twitch of his eyebrow and tilt of his head.
'One too many,' Belly thinks, her fingers trembling against the carpet. She spasms a smile. "Just the one," she says, her voice fast to her ears, but then, he's never heard it, so maybe he won't notice.
He puffs a laugh through a smile, drawing her eyes to the curves of his Cupid's bow, a beauty mark dotting one side. "Here," he says, offering his hand, his eyes scanning the floor. "Watch your step."
Belly blinks at his hand, at his long, tan fingers, at the calloused lines on his fingertips, a tingling building at the back of her neck, an awareness of something inescapable, something inevitable, closing in on her. She steadies her legs under her before she places her hand into his, putting as little pressure into the hold as possible, but she still notes the warmth of him, the subtle strength in his grip, the muscles of his arm pulsing when he hoists her up.
"Careful," he reminds, lifting her hand like he's escorting her out of a carriage as he backs up, guiding her through the maze of nails. Once safely out from behind the desk, he lowers her hand back to chest level, his fingers dropping away to tuck into his pocket as he shuffles a step back. He ducks his face, clearing his throat, and Belly jolts back into her body.
"Uh, thank you, um…" She frowns, rolling her hand toward him.
He chuckles, dragging a hand through his hair and drying out her tongue. "Conrad," he says. "Conrad Fisher. I, uh," he stammers, shuffling to the side, closer to the front of her desk. "I'm your, uh, head research assistant."
Belly's stomach falls through the floor, through the foundation, through the Earth's mantle to be incinerated by its swirling core.
"For the sleep study." He flicks a smile, and Belly swallows, stiffening her posture and looking to the floor.
"Oh," she rasps, then clears her throat. "That, um…that was fast," she mutters, stepping back toward her desk chair, though she can't sit on it, a minefield of nails between her and relief for her unsteady knees. "They only put up the posting a couple days ago. I—I didn't realize they had"—she darts a glance at him—"picked someone."
Conrad frowns, tilting his head. "You didn't?" he questions, his confusion deepening when she swipes her head. "I—I just assumed you would have…been involved."
Belly sniffs, bobbing her brows. "Yeah," she scoffs, "me too." She sucks in a breath, her eyes widening at him. "I mean, not that— I'm sure you're fine," she splutters, heat rising into her face. "I mean, not—not just fine, I— I'm sure you're—" Her lips skip soundlessly, and Conrad doesn't help her at all, though he does look like he's barely restraining a laugh, so she supposes she has to give him credit for that. She gusts a deep breath. "I'm sure you're perfectly qualified," she concludes, and he trembles a smile.
"Well, I dunno about perfectly," he muses, and Belly has an irrational urge to sneer at him, an easy, impossible familiarity draping over their interaction, "but I get by." He smirks, and she laughs, her head bobbing.
"Yeah, there might be a lot of that going around," she mumbles, turning to lean her butt against the side of her desk, crossing her arms. "This study kind of, um"—she tips her head side to side, searching for the words—"took me by surprise."
"Yeah, I know," Conrad says, tilting a shrug when she frowns at him. "Dr. Tanner and his wife and three girlfriends."
"Three?" Belly bleats, and Conrad hums with a solemn nod. She chuckles, shaking her head at the wall in front of her. "How does he find the time?"
"Maybe we should be studying that," Conrad mumbles before his face whips to her in alarm, as if he can't quite believe he said that out loud, and the whole scene sets her laughing until her stomach aches, which doesn't take long, the muscles out of practice. Conrad laughs too, if less so, shaking his head and carding his fingers through his hair again as he bends down to pick his messenger bag up off the floor. "Uh, well, I just wanted to…come by and, um…introduce myself," he says, rolling a hand in front of his chest, and the spark of joy in Belly's dies at the reminder, at the rude awakening.
She pulls her spine straighter, dropping a perfunctory nod, a perfectly appropriate, professional interaction with a summer research assistant she probably has ten years on.
And she's married.
There's that too.
"Right," she clips, and she hadn't noticed the light in Conrad's eyes until it dims, the shutters drawn between them.
"Right," he echoes, moving for the door; he pauses at the threshold, looking back over his shoulder. "I, uh— I look forward to working with you," he says, but his voice is different now, blunted somehow, and Belly shouldn't know that, shouldn't notice. "Dr. Park," he adds, the words landing soft on her ears, and either time slows or they stare at one another a beat too long, a flush chafing at her sternum.
And then he tucks his chin, a decisive farewell, and Belly stares at the void of him long after he's gone, her fingers spinning on her wedding band.