#staylor

Pairing: Conrad Fisher x Reader Genre: Romance, Angst, Reunion, Comfort Warnings: Mentions of grief and loss, heartbreak, emotional conversations, kissing Summary: Five years after Conrad let you go, convinced his love would only hurt you, fate brings you back together at a wedding shower. Old wounds resurface, confessions spill, and you are forced to face the love that never died. Note: In case you need more of our Connie baby!

—

We were never just friends. Not really. From the first summer I stepped onto the porch of that beach house, Conrad Fisher had been more than a boy to me. He was the sound of waves at night, the warmth of sunburnt skin, the mystery of someone who kept too much locked inside and yet made you want to be the one with the key.

Back then, it was easy to mistake the way we orbited each other for inevitability. He was there in every corner of my growing up: the boy who teased me at twelve, who taught me to drive at fifteen, who kissed me for the first time under a blanket of fireworks when we were sixteen. 

With Conrad, it always felt like the world was holding its breath, waiting for the moment we would finally admit what everyone else must have already seen that I loved him, and that he, in his quiet, secret way, loved me back.

Our relationship was never simple. It was sharp edges and soft places, fights that left me crying in the bathroom and apologies whispered in the dark. But when it was good, it was so good it almost hurt to breathe. He made me believe in forever, even when forever was something we were too young to understand.

And then came the summer when forever broke. His mother was too sick and I saw him slipping further from me with every day that passed. I tried to hold him, to carry some of his pain, but Conrad didn’t know how to let himself be saved. He kissed me one night like he was starving, and the next day he told me goodbye.

That was the end. Or at least, I thought it was.

—

Five years later, we met again as Taylor and Steven needed us at their wedding shower party. I had arrived early, clutching a small bouquet of wildflowers, trying not to think about the way my heart always betrayed me whenever Conrad Fisher’s name hovered in my mind. I kept telling myself it would be fine. It was just a party. He had nothing to do with me anymore. Or at least, that is what I tried to believe.

The moment I stepped into the hall, he was there. He was leaning against the wall by the dessert table, talking to some of Taylor’s cousins, laughing in that quiet, easy way that had always made my stomach twist with longing. 

I froze, my hand tightening around the flowers, because even after all these years, even with all the time and distance, the sight of him sent me back to sixteen-year-old nights when the world had felt infinite and ours alone.

Conrad turned then. Our eyes met. My breath caught. Five years, and he had not changed, not really. His hair was slightly longer, still messy in that infuriating way, his jaw sharp, his eyes darker, carrying the same weight that had once made me ache to soothe him. The room seemed to fade around us, and for a heartbeat, I could swear we were the only two people in the world.

He approached me slowly, a tentative smile brushing his lips. “You look… beautiful,” he said. It was quiet, almost fragile, and it pulled something raw and unguarded out of me.

“Thanks,” I murmured, my voice trembling in a way I did not entirely understand.

We spoke little at first, small talk forced around the backdrop of balloons, laughter, and clinking glasses. But beneath the words, an electric current hummed, a tension neither of us could deny. Every glance, every accidental brush of our hands sent sparks up my arm, awakening memories I had tried so hard to lock away.

—

Later, when the crowd thinned and Taylor disappeared to help Steven with some detail, Conrad and I found ourselves outside, the cool evening breeze tangling my hair and carrying the faint scent of the ocean. Neither of us spoke immediately. We just stood, letting the silence stretch, feeling the weight of all that had passed and all that was suddenly present again.

“I still love you,” he said finally, his voice low, quivering with emotion. I froze, every nerve in my body alert. He stepped closer, and I could see the vulnerability in his eyes, the raw honesty that had always been both his curse and his charm. 

“I don’t know if I’ll ever get you out of my system. Not completely. I have…this feeling. That you’ll always be there, here.” He lifted my hand gently and placed it over his heart, and I felt it pulse beneath my palm, steady yet desperate.

The world tilted. All the years of hurt, of longing, of unanswered questions collided in that moment. My chest ached, and I swallowed hard, trying to find words, but nothing seemed adequate.

“Conrad, I…” I began, but he shook his head gently, a mixture of apology and insistence in his gaze.

“If I kept you with me, I was going to hurt you somehow. I knew it. I couldn’t have it. So I let you go,” he admitted, his voice barely above a whisper.

I wanted to scream at him, to shake him and demand why he had walked away, why he had left me drowning in the empty spaces he once filled. 

“You hurt me anyway,” I said, my voice trembling. “Do you even understand what that did to me?”

“Yes,” he said, and the single word struck deeper than any accusation I could muster. “That night, I didn’t sleep at all. I stayed up, thinking about what to do. What was the right thing to do? Because I knew I loved you. But I knew I shouldn’t. I didn’t have the right to love anybody then.”

The floodgates of memory opened between us. I remembered the way he had pulled away, the way he had left me with nothing but a ghost of what we had. But now, he was here, and he was speaking the truth, exposing his heart as I had always longed to see him do.

“I loved you, Conrad,” I said, my own voice cracking as I reached for his hands. “I never stopped loving you. Even when I tried. Even when I thought I had to move on, I couldn’t.”

His gaze softened, sorrow and longing mingling in a way that made my stomach twist and my hands shake. “I know,” he said simply. “I know you did. And that is why leaving was the hardest thing I have ever done.”

The night air seemed to thicken around us, as if the universe was holding its breath for what came next. Our confessions had stripped away the pretense, and all that remained was the raw truth of two hearts that had never forgotten each other.

“I tried, Conrad. I tried to forget you,” I whispered, my forehead resting against his. “But you were always there. Always in my thoughts, in my dreams, in the spaces I didn’t even know existed.”

“I never wanted to hurt you,” he said, voice tight with emotion. “But I was broken in ways I couldn’t fix, and I didn’t want to take you down with me. I thought letting you go was the only way to keep you safe.”

“Safe?” I laughed softly, bitterly. “You think I was safe without you? You left a hole in me that nothing could fill.”

He closed his eyes briefly, taking a shaky breath. “I know. And that is why I came back. I can’t live with the thought that I let the best thing in my life slip away. I don’t want to live without you.”

We argued, not harshly but with the force of pent-up emotion and years of unspoken pain. We bared our hearts, each revelation heavier than the last, each confession rawer than I could have imagined. 

He spoke of nights spent in silence, of empty apartments and hollow dinners, of a longing he could not quench without me. I spoke of the nights I cried into my pillow, of the memories that haunted me, of the love that never diminished even in his absence.

Finally, words gave way to silence. Our faces were inches apart, our breaths mingling, and I felt a trembling in my chest, a pull that defied reason. He cupped my face, and I leaned into his hands without hesitation.

We kissed like it was the last day of our life, the kind of kiss that burned away all doubt, all fear, all the years we had spent apart.

It was desperate, tender, and urgent all at once, as if every unspoken word, every ache and longing, could be expressed in the press of lips and the curl of hands. 

My fingers tangled in his hair, his hands roamed the curve of my back, and the world fell away until nothing existed except the two of us.

When we finally pulled apart, gasping, our foreheads pressed together, Conrad whispered, “I cannot believe I finally have you again.”

“Don’t ever leave me,” I murmured.

“I won’t,” he promised, and I believed him because the way he held me, because the way he looked at me, because the way the years of pain and absence had melted into this one perfect, impossible moment.

The party long forgotten, the night stretched before us as if waiting for us to reclaim everything we had lost. We talked, we laughed, we cried quietly into each other’s shoulders, and for the first time in five years, I felt whole.

—

The next days were a slow rediscovery. We spent hours walking through the city, hands intertwined, revisiting old haunts and discovering new corners together.

Every time he brushed against me, my heart stuttered, but it was no longer the panicked, anxious pulse of unrequited longing. This was the pulse of something real, something rekindled, something neither of us could deny.

He told me about the intervening years, about his career, about the hollow victories and the successes that felt empty without someone to share them with.

I told him about my life, the quiet victories, the heartbreaks, the moments I had thought he had missed entirely. And always, always, there was the current of us, the undercurrent of a love that had never truly gone away.

One evening, sitting on the rooftop of my apartment, the city lights reflecting in his eyes, he leaned against me and said softly, “I still do not understand how I ever let you go.”

“I could ask you the same,” I said, resting my head against his chest, feeling the steady beat of his heart beneath my ear.

“Maybe we were just not ready,” he murmured. “Maybe we needed time to become the people we are now. People who can finally be together without fear.”

“I like this version of us,” I said, smiling up at him.

He smiled back, brushing a strand of hair from my face. “Me too,” he admitted. “And I am never letting you go again.”

We kissed again then, slow and sure, the kind of kiss that builds a promise without words, the kind of kiss that says everything we had lost had returned, stronger and more certain than before.

I wrapped my arms around him, and he held me close, and for the first time in years, I felt that the past was exactly where it belonged.