Chapter Text
She hasn’t even made it to her office when it begins.
“How was your vacation, Isabel?”
Belly gasps, the straw of her iced latte slipping out of her mouth as she spins around to face the mystery voice. She coughs a bit, using the sleeves of her blouse to wipe away any coffee that might have stained her lips following her over-the-top reaction. She winces. This was not how she envisioned spending her first day back at the office.
“You scared me,” she croaks. It’s just one of her colleagues – the team’s annoying physical therapist, Ben. He was twice Belly’s age, divorced, and yet, had the emotional maturity of a toddler. “It was good. Thanks for asking.”
“Sorry,” he shrugs. “Didn’t mean to scare you there. You were gone a long time.”
Belly musters a fake smile, glad that he couldn’t see her vacant gaze. She hadn’t even made it to her office before being intercepted by this jerk, so she still had her sunglasses on, indoors, which wasn’t really her style, but this morning, it was working in her favor. “Um, it was just three weeks. I needed to use up my vacation time before the season started.”
She starts walking in the direction of her office again, her footsteps tapping against the tile. Ben follows closely behind her, to her chagrin. His office was literally on the other side of the facility. “Where did you go?”
Belly holds in a sigh as she holds her badge up to their restricted, staff-only area. The sensor flashes green, and she’s let in. Ben slips in after her. “I was in London,” she says, locking eyes with her office door at the end of the hallway. So close, yet so far.
“I love Europe,” Ben says, following behind her like a lost puppy, all the way until she reaches her office.
She wants to tell him he should just quit his job here and move there if he loves it so much, but she maintains her composure. “Me too,” Belly says. “Well, I’ll see you at the staff meeting,” she smiles trepidly, glancing at her watch. “Only thirty minutes until we’re due at the conference room. Bye!”
She slams the door in his face.
Belly lets out the sigh she’d been holding in, glancing longingly at the Eagles green sofas and armchair lining the walls. As much as she could totally sink into those soft cushions right now, those couches were for her players and their problems, not her jet lag or her restlessness from dealing with irritating colleagues.
Her flight had come in last night at eleven. She hadn’t gotten any shut eye on the plane, and her body was still on London time, so she was dead tired. Honestly, she could have requested a sick day or something, but today was the first day of training camp for the team, and she wouldn’t miss that for the world.
She trudges over to her desk, jealous of Anika and the extra two days off work she had requested. Just as she boots her computer up, ready to tackle the mountain of emails she’s certain are awaiting her, a call comes in on her phone.
Belly swipes on the call, not bothering to glance at the screen. She was sure the only person who would want to talk to her at this hour, anyway, was her mother. “Hello?”
“Good morning, Bean,” Laurel greets her. Bingo. “How was your flight?”
“I made it back in one piece,” she says into her phone, wearily clicking on the Outlook application with her mouse. Less than fifty emails was ideal, but she knew she didn’t have that kind of luck.
Laurel clears her throat. “I can’t believe you’re already back at work. Aren’t you tired?”
“I didn’t really have a choice. Today’s the first day of–”
“Training camp,” Laurel interjects. “I know too much about football for my own good. Perks of having a daughter that’s a sports psychologist for the NFL."
Belly laughs, typing out a quick reply to one of her emails at the very bottom. “Thanks for checking in, Mom. I’ll try to make it home for dinner sometime this week.”
“Don’t stress if you can’t make it. Your busy season’s coming up. Eat something before your meetings, and don’t let that physical therapist talk your ear off, okay?”
“Alright,” she smiles. “Bye.” With that, she hangs up, returning her undivided attention to the demanding emails gracing her monitor.
There’s a few from her supervisor, some updates from the head athletic trainer, a bunch of requests for travel paperwork from their operations coordinator, and an inquiry from a rookie player who wants to schedule a session. She makes sure to respond to that one – she loved working with the players the most.
It was only Belly’s second year with the Philadelphia Eagles after graduating with her doctorate in clinical psychology, but she felt like she’d been here her entire life. Well, she had grown up in the suburbs of Philly, so she kind of had, but getting to be here, working with the players and the coaches and being on the sidelines during games – it felt like a dream come true and a homecoming all at once.
She’d always thought that Cousins Beach was her true home, but that was before she’d been on the turf at Lincoln Field. There was room in her heart for both, of course, but it’d been a couple of years since she’d been back to Cousins, and, well, she was here every weekday, and on the weekends during football season.
Before her twenty-eighth birthday, Cousins was the only place in the world to hold true magic, but she’d found that here, under stadium lights and thousands of cheers, magic could last longer than just August. It melted into September and all the way through February, if she was lucky, which she usually was. Her boys had won the past Super Bowl, and made it to the playoffs almost every year as long as she’d been paying attention.
Belly briefly glances at the top of her screen, catching that there was ten minutes to their Monday morning staff meeting. She swiftly gathers her belongings, somehow holding her laptop and her iced coffee with the same hand, and trots down the hallway to the large, white conference room. It was probably the only room in their facility that wasn’t Eagles green.
She slips in through the door, taking a seat at the end of the long table, hoping for a couple more moments of peace before the cacophony of the meeting. She boots up her laptop once again, resuming her inbox clearing with the free time.
It’s not long before Ben’s irritating voice is torturing her ear drums once again.
“So, did you go to London with a friend? Family? Boyfriend?” he asks, sliding into the seat beside her.
Belly pauses on the email detailing the agenda for today’s meeting, keeping her eyes fixed on the jumble of words. Maybe she should’ve sat further up, with the rest of her colleagues. Not that she felt like talking to them this early, either, but it was better than talking to Ben.
She knew how this went. He was relentless – if she didn’t say she’d gone with a male love interest, he’d try to shoot his shot for the millionth time, she’d have to lightly reject him, and things would just get awkward. So, she decides to bite the bullet.
“Boyfriend,” she states.
Ben arches an eyebrow. “Boyfriend?” he asks, skeptical. He leans in closer to her. “You’re seeing somebody? Since when? Who’s the guy?”
It’s only then that Belly begins to panic. She hadn’t planned for a story, just the single word to shut him up. Her eyes flicker to the open agenda on her screen, reading the words ‘Introduction of New Team Doctor’ a couple of bullet points down.
“The new team doctor,” she blurts, cursing herself immediately after saying it.
God, why couldn’t she have picked somebody who wasn’t going to be introduced to their entire staff in the next ten minutes?
“Oh,” Ben vocalizes, looking dejected. “Looking forward to meeting him, I guess.”
Belly gives him a polite smile, but before she can spiral any further, someone to her left calls her name. “Hey, Isabel! How was your trip to London?” one of their public relations reps asks. She sighs in relief. Finally, somebody she didn’t absolutely loathe.
Another one of her colleagues from communications joins them, and they quietly chat about Belly’s vacation for a few blessed minutes. She tries to pretend like she hadn’t just told the most damning lie in her professional life, and quite possibly in all of her existence.
It could be fine, maybe. Hopefully this new doctor was under the age of forty-five, and cool enough to not report her to Human Resources for fabricating a fake relationship with him before nine o’clock on his first day.
“Alright, team, let’s get rolling,” the head coach calls from the front of the room. The projector behind him comes to life, and he claps his hands together. “Good morning! Big week, lots to cover, including welcoming a new face to our staff…”
Belly clamps her eyes shut at that. She was hoping that she’d maybe misread the email and that this new team doctor thing wasn’t actually happening. Maybe this wasn’t the meeting where her fleeting, imaginary boyfriend would be publicly revealed as an actual human man.
She glances around the room, wondering if he’s here already, but she doesn’t detect any unfamiliar faces. Everybody in this room was also here this time last year. She knits her eyebrows together in confusion.
She tells herself it could be fine. As long as she got to him before Ben did, she could talk to this new doctor guy. Possibly ask him to stage a breakup with her. Her stomach drops at another impending thought – what if Ben started going around telling people about the supposed romance between herself and the new guy?
Belly sighs loudly as she considers the many possibilities, but she’s honestly just embarrassed. She was nearly thirty, for crying out loud. She was far too old for these kinds of shenanigans, and yet, here she was, entertaining them.
She tries to propel the ruminations out of her head as they make their way through the agenda still sitting idle on her screen. She takes a sip of her coffee, but it’s watered down at this point. She pushes it away easier than she can push away her thoughts.
Eventually, they land on the bullet point that makes Belly feel like she might hurl up last night’s plane food. She looks up, her eyes landing on the projector.
“He’s just running a few minutes behind – his flight got in late last night,” Coach says, holding up his clicker.
Belly exhales. Had she been spared?
The slide changes, displaying the name of their new team doctor, and Belly feels like all the air has been sucked out of her lungs.
The presentation reads ‘Dr. Conrad Fisher.’
There’s no picture, no description, no career history. Just the name of the boy that had haunted Belly half her life.
There’s no way, right?
Belly hadn’t kept up with Conrad in a number of years, but she knew he hadn’t specialized in sports medicine. Had he? Last she’d heard, he’d wanted to go into oncology, but that was years ago, while he was still in med school.
She decides that there’s probably hundreds of doctors named Conrad Fisher, and that there’s no way that this Conrad Fisher is her Conrad Fisher. Her Conrad had gone into oncology, and he lived on the west coast. He had no business being the team doctor for the Philadelphia Eagles. There was no world in which that was the case.
She repeats it to herself like a prayer.
Coach shifts to talking about preseason scheduling, but Belly can’t focus on a single word he’s saying. She wants him to lift his clicker and change slides so that she doesn’t have to keep staring at her ex-boyfriend’s name, but he doesn’t.
Her palms sweaty, Belly opens up another tab in her browser and quietly types ‘Dr. Conrad Fisher’ into Google, but it’s not helpful at all. It’s just a bunch of people not in sports medicine, living in states far away from Pennsylvania. Whatever. Whoever it is, it’s not her Conrad.
She barely notices Ben leaning over and whispering, “You guys weren’t on the same flight back from London?”
She flinches. “Um, no,” she whispers back, awkwardly. “We booked separately.” Another ridiculous lie to add to her repertoire. She was on fire this morning.
“Your boyfriend’s got terrible time management,” Ben mutters under his breath.
What would she even tell this guy when he arrived? And when he did show, if he mentioned that he was on a flight last night from anywhere besides London – and the chances of that happening were quite frankly, nonexistent – she was fucking cooked.
After a couple of minutes, they get a knock at the door. Belly resists the urge to hide under the table. Maybe she could say she was sick. Fake a seizure. Anything to avoid seeing who was behind that door. Although, if she faked some kind of medical disturbance, they’d probably just task this dude with fixing her up.
Fortunately, Coach throws the door wide open before she can follow through with any of it. “That should be our new team doctor. Come on in, man!”
Every head in the room turns to the front as the meeting comes to a halt. A tall, dark man steps in, dressed in slacks and a white button-down, white coat slung over his arm. Belly can’t help it. Her jaw falls open, because she knows that walk, those shoulders, and his hands more intimately than anybody in this room can even begin to imagine.
It’s Conrad, who had broken her heart and put it back together more times than she could count. Conrad, the first boy she’d ever loved. The person she thought she’d spend infinity with.
Coach spins around, guiding him to the center of the conference room. “Everybody, please give a warm welcome to Dr. Conrad Fisher!” Conrad – her Conrad – lifts a hand to wave at their staff, eyes sweeping around the room to take everything and everybody in.
He freezes after landing on her. His eyes widen, his mouth parting slightly in surprise. She suddenly feels twenty-nine and sixteen at the same time, and then, they’re just staring at each other, suspended in time.
Conrad blinks, bringing his hand down. The shock evaporates off his face, and he swiftly replaces his astonishment with a charming smile. “It’s nice to meet you all,” he says.
And Belly doesn’t know how her white lie could possibly get worse, but somehow, it’s just gotten so much worse.