Borrowed from the Future l Conrad Fisher x Reader
Pairing: Conrad Fisher x Reader Genre: Emotional slow-burn, angst, second chance romance Warnings: Past emotional betrayal, references to illness, tension, heavy longing Summary: Years ago, you were Conrad Fisher’s closest friend. Then he chose Belly and left you behind. Now you return to New York as a powerful woman, forced to face the boy who broke your heart because he’s your father’s doctor.
—
My office was carved from glass and silence. At the top of the high-rise, New York looked like it had surrendered to the clouds, buildings piercing through mist like dreams too sharp to touch. People often called it a view. I called it a shield.
Nothing could reach me up here.
Or so I thought, until I answered the call that shattered everything I had built to keep the past out.
My father had collapsed. Heart failure, they said. Stable, but fragile. The kind of fragile that claws at you when you are too far away, when the sound of the city suddenly feels like static instead of a heartbeat. I left meetings unfinished, emails unread. I packed the heels, the suits, the control, and flew down like the sky would break if I didn’t.
Mount Sinai was colder than I remembered hospitals being. My mother met me with a look I couldn’t translate. She had always been better at silence than I was. She held my hand too tightly in the elevator, like I was a little girl again. The one who used to drag Conrad Fisher across lawns by the wrist, declaring him her favorite person in the world.
I didn’t expect him to be standing in the room when the doors opened.
He had aged in the smallest ways. His jaw was sharper, his hair a little longer. But his eyes. God, those eyes. They still knew me. And they still made my heart catch like it had never learned to beat right without him.
He looked up from the chart and froze.
“Hi,” I said, because nothing else made it past the lump in my throat.
He blinked. “Hey.” —
My father was sleeping, soft beeps tracking the hours. My mother sat near the window, her hands wringing a tissue that had long since given up being useful. The nurse said he’d be okay, but fragile. He would need rest, care, and a cardiologist who knew what the hell they were doing.
That was Conrad.
Of course it was Conrad.
“I didn’t know,” I said later, outside in the hallway. My voice sounded foreign, too measured. “That it was you.”
“I didn’t either. Until this morning.” He scratched the back of his neck. “I got the file, and I saw your name. I thought—”
“That I’d never come back?”
His silence said more than his words ever could. —
We were a story that never got a final chapter. He had been my best friend, the one I trusted more than anyone, even when trusting felt like falling. I knew him in ways no one else did. I knew what made him laugh before he could smile. I knew the way he stared at the sky when he wanted to escape, and the way he avoided eye contact when he was about to lie.
He had lied to me the last time we saw each other.
He said I was the one person he could never hurt.
Then he chose her.
I left Cousins the next morning and never looked back. —
Days passed like a dream I kept trying to wake up from. I shuffled between the hospital and my father’s apartment, answering work calls with one hand and feeding him soup with the other. My mother watched me with quiet pride and exhaustion. Her world was shrinking to one room and one man, and I had to be everything else.
Conrad was careful. He kept it professional. He explained test results to me like I wasn’t the girl who used to quiz him on biology from a hammock, legs tangled, laughter spilling into the air like it would never leave.
One afternoon, he stayed a little longer. We sat in the hospital lounge, not speaking at first. I had undone the top button of my blouse, the day stretching behind me like a battlefield. He handed me a coffee, just the way I liked it. Two sugars, no cream. I didn’t ask how he remembered.
“I heard about your company,” he said finally.
“Is this the part where you say I’ve changed?” I asked without smiling.
“No. You were always this person. You just had to grow into her.”
The compliment landed too softly. It made my chest ache.
“You were always meant to fix things,” I said. “And you did.”
He looked at his hands. “I still think about that summer.”
“So do I.” —
The storm came later, as it always does when you ignore the clouds long enough. My father’s heart rate dropped. There was a code. I watched Conrad run down the hallway like he didn’t remember I existed, like all that mattered was keeping my father alive.
He did.
He saved him.
But something broke in me while I watched.
When it was over, and they wheeled my father back into his room, Conrad stepped outside and found me in the corridor, slumped on the floor, tears staining the silk of my dress.
“I need you to leave,” I whispered.
He crouched in front of me. “You don’t mean that.”
“I do. I can’t do this with you again. I barely survived it the first time.”
He reached for me, then stopped. “I was a coward.”
I laughed bitterly. “Don’t flatter yourself. You were just young.”
“I thought choosing her was what I was supposed to do. It felt easier. Safer.”
“And was it?” My voice was a knife, clean and sharp.
“No.” He exhaled slowly. “It was the biggest mistake of my life.”
I looked at him, really looked at him. “You don’t get to say that to me now.”
“I know.”
We didn’t speak again for three days.
—
My father got stronger. I started bringing work into his room. He joked that he hadn’t seen me sit still this long since high school. My mother hummed around the apartment like she was seventeen and in love all over again. She even started cooking again. The smell of garlic and warm bread filled the rooms where grief had started to settle.
And then, Conrad knocked.
He stood at the door with a bag of groceries. “I wanted to check in. As a friend. If that’s still allowed.”
My mother let him in before I could say no.
That night, we sat on the fire escape, like we used to. The city buzzed beneath us. He passed me a beer. I didn’t ask how he knew my favorite brand.
“I keep thinking,” he said, “that if I had asked you to stay, maybe you would have.”
I looked down at the traffic. “I would have said no.”
“Because of her?”
“Because of me,” I said. “Because I finally realized I deserved more than being someone’s almost.”
He nodded slowly. “You always did.” —
He started coming around more. To see my dad, to see my mom, to see me. I told myself it was nothing. I told myself the way he looked at me now was just guilt. But one night, as I walked him out, he brushed a strand of hair from my face and didn’t move away.
“I’ve never stopped caring about you,” he said.
“I’ve never stopped missing you,” I replied.
The silence between us cracked like glass.
“I know I don’t deserve another chance,” he whispered.
“You don’t,” I said, heart beating out of my chest.
“But I’m asking anyway.” —
The summer ended slowly, like a curtain falling on a show we weren’t ready to leave. My father recovered. My mother smiled again. I sat at my desk in my office in the sky, looking out at the world I had built.
And I thought of Conrad.
The boy who broke my heart.
The man who was trying to make it whole again.
I didn’t know what came next. Maybe nothing. Maybe everything.
But I remembered what he said once, years ago, on a beach we used to claim as ours.
“If the future’s already written, I hope it’s messy. I hope it’s full of mistakes. Because then maybe I still have a shot at writing you in.”
And maybe, just maybe, I was ready to let him.
