If you’re a #Bonrad truther and last week’s peach scene between Conrad and Belly in The Summer I Turned Pretty is STILL making your heart race, “Last Name” (Season 3, Episode 6) gives you even more to cling onto. But before we get to the sexually tense moment that closes out the episode, we have to rewind.
It’s Belly’s bridal shower weekend, and our girl is still bummed about many things: she’s bopping from the Cousins beach house to Adam’s living room while fighting with her mom, she and Laurel are still not speaking, and the wedding of her dreams is slowly becoming the wedding of Adam’s dreams as she continually makes concessions on the details now that her future father-in-law is footing the bill. To make matters worse, while the engaged couple is apartment hunting near campus, Belly discovers that Jeremiah is carrying around a ton of credit card debt on an account he opened to win Bruins tickets—which is separate from the card that his dad already pays for him. Jere waves this off, saying they can find an apartment that doesn’t require a credit check (good luck!) and tries to push her into signing a lease for a place that smells like cat pee. She pushes back and he concedes, but when he rushes back to work he leaves Belly to handle all of the difficult details of both the apartment hunt and the wedding planning. Jere’s pursuit of his dad’s approval is slowly turning him into a mini-Adam, cheating included. The Summer I Turned Pretty is clearly showing us how much he is not a suitable husband, and we’re seeing the signs loud and clear.
The next day Belly goes to the country club to walk through the wedding details, but as the club employee shoots down some of their desires (like an anatomical heart ice sculpture and a much more reasonable request for lobster rolls) and reminds her that the invitation list is filled with people she doesn’t know, it’s hard not to feel for Belly that the wedding she had envisioned when she said “yes” is slipping through her fingers. Talking to Jere doesn’t exactly calm her down as he routinely diminishes her feelings, but she seems hellbent on staying the course and making this work.
Feeling unwelcome at Adam’s (though, this might be of her own making as she’s been a bit of a slob at his place), Belly reluctantly goes back to Cousins where Conrad is still hiding out. They have an awkward encounter in the kitchen where he offers her chicken yet again, but she refuses, seemingly in an effort to avoid him after #PeachGate. But after she returns dejected from the country club and doesn’t eat his food again (he even left her a post-it note with the message “eat me! :)” on the plate), he takes matters into his own hands. We see him text someone an ominous, “Can we talk,” and soon we find out that he’s asked Laurel to sit down with him to discuss Belly’s current state of mind.
Initially Laurel is headstrong about her decision to skip the wedding and all of the related festivities, but talking to Conrad softens her. It’s another point for #TeamConrad as he puts aside his own feelings yet again in order to make sure Belly is happy. Conrad details how much the wedding has strayed from Belly’s original plans and even mentions that Adam’s assistant Kayleigh—the woman that Adam cheated on Susannah with—is helping them plan. Laurel is surprised that Conrad knows about Kayleigh and the affair, but presses him on what his interest in this wedding is. He doesn’t reveal too much, only saying that he’ll be happy when the wedding is over and he’s back in California.
Conrad’s nudge was enough to get Laurel to change her mind about her attendance at the shower: she shows up to the soiree hosted by Taylor and her mom Lucinda (who makes her true feelings about Laurel known before she shows up), and Belly’s day is immediately made when she sees her mom standing amidst her friends.
The party is a modest affair. Belly opens gifts—including a photo album of Jere and Belly’s relationship from her college friend Annika and a stationary set emblazoned with “Isabella Fisher,” which forces Belly to confront whether she wants to change her name or not. Laurel privately gifts her a passport and airline gift card. While she knows Belly has decided not to do the semester in Paris, she reminds her daughter that there’s a whole world out there for her to still explore—even after she’s married.
Belly also plays a trivia game based on facts about Jere. She thinks she’s aced it, but when Steven challenges her about the detail of one of her memories about his first pet, it makes her angry to even consider the idea that she doesn’t remember the details accurately. Jere later confirms that Steven is correct and that it was Conrad who found the stray dog they fell in love with, and it makes her question herself and her instincts entirely.
The bridal shower also gives Steven and Taylor some much-needed face time, but their new dynamic is harder to settle into than either of them expected. Taylor is flirtatious and Steven lightly recoils, holding strong to his feelings that they aren’t good for each other romantically. He offers friendship, though he’s skeptical whether they can ever be just friends and thinks no contact is the more realistic way to go. Taylor, desperate to keep him in her life in general, promises that they can be platonic. She teases him about his flirtation with his co-worker Denise, though she is clearly crushed when he doesn’t outright deny his interest in her. When Taylor is social media stalking Denise later, Lucinda convinces her to take matters into her own hands, pointing out the wedding as a perfect opportunity to make him jealous.
But things with Denise may not wind up being romantic after all. She has started to warm up to Steven both at work and outside of it, but it seems like she has more of a professional interest in him than personal. She comes to his apartment on a Saturday to propose a business partnership, taking the game he created to the next level. Of course, this is TV, so it’s highly likely that there will be at least a kiss between these two before the season (and series) ends, but it would be nice if they swerved and showed a healthy, platonic male-female friendship.
While Belly’s bridal shower is happening, Adam takes his two sons to get custom suits made for the wedding. Jere, as always, is dying to get his father’s approval, and every scene with Adam shows us why—Adam constantly caters to Conrad, cutting off a deeper conversation with Jere to give his input on Conrad’s suit design, and changing lunch plans to Conrad’s favorite steakhouse instead of getting oysters like Jere wanted. Adam even suggests that Conrad not bring a +1 to the wedding so that he can hook up with one of Belly’s friends at the wedding. As much as Jere is becoming the show’s villain, it’s clear that Adam’s behavior is the root of why.
It’s not long before Adam drops a bombshell: he wants to bring Kayleigh to the wedding, going public with their relationship. Armed with the knowledge of Kayleigh’s role in his parents’ divorce, Conrad is visibly upset. The normally stoic son pushes his father, asking if he’s serious and when their relationship started, and presses him about the timing. But he ultimately stops himself from saying too much about what he knows. Conrad is a pressure cooker waiting to blow and the next needling about his life forces him to come clean with a different secret. At lunch, he admits that he’s not just hanging out at Cousins aimlessly—he got fired from his clinic job and is trying to figure out his path forward. Neither Adam nor Jere have much to say aside from, “good on you, Con,” which is the farthest thing from what he needed from his family in that moment.
The reunion with Laurel provides an opening for Belly to go back home, and she takes it. They settle into an old tradition of watching old musicals together, and Belly’s film of choice is none other than Bye Bye Birdie, whose main character is named Conrad. It forces Belly to remember how much she used to pine over her Conrad when she was younger, serenading him in the bathroom and writing B+C in a heart in the fog on her mirror. Her voiceover notes that that was the past and Jere is her future, but it seems like she’s trying really hard to convince herself that that’s true.
And then there’s the sequence of the episode. Belly returns to the Cousins house just in time to catch a shirtless Conrad heading out to longboard in the ocean. She’s writing her bridal shower thank you cards at the table when he returns, injured. He waves off her help, but when she checks on him, she finds blood on the stairs and follows him to the bathroom where he is tending to a gushing wound. She takes over for him, washing the blood off of his leg, and when she pours some rubbing alcohol on the wound, he winces so hard that he leans into her shoulder.
She freezes, totally caught off guard. With Taylor Swift’s “False God” playing in the background (a show favorite during their moments of near-intimacy), the sexual tension rises as Conrad lifts his head and looks into her eyes. Their lips are in each other’s vicinity for a few beats, but he cuts the moment off by asking her to help him get up. His hand presses on her shoulder as he gains his balance, and Belly holds her hand over the spot where he touched her as she watches him leave. Her voiceover reveals that her heart is beating just as fast as ours. “This isn’t like the peach incident—this time it was all me,” she admits. #TeamConrad, we up!
Radhika Menon (@menonrad) is a TV-obsessed writer based in Los Angeles. Her work has appeared on Paste Magazine, Teen Vogue, Vulture and more. At any given moment, she can ruminate at length over Friday Night Lights, the University of Michigan, and the perfect slice of pizza. You may call her Rad.