Technically it was clean. The gym shirt, I mean. It had come out of the dryer ten minutes before, warm and soft and smelling like detergent.
But I had my face in it anyway, kneeling by the basket on the hallway floor, because it was his, because there’s a particular stretched-out collar that still remembers his neck, and I was pretending I could smell him through the fabric softener. I wasn’t even folding anymore. I was just breathing into a T-shirt like a weirdo, one hand shoved down my shorts.
The key hit the lock.
I didn’t stop in time.
Brett stood in the open door with his gym bag on his shoulder, hair damp, flushed from the squat rack, looking at me kneeling there with his shirt over my face and my hand moving.
“That’s mine,” he said.
“It’s clean—”
“I know whose it is.”
He didn’t set the bag down. That’s the part I keep replaying. He just dropped to his knees behind me, still in his shoes, bag swinging against my back, shoved my shorts to my knees and pushed in with two slick fingers and then not fingers at all. I screamed into the cotton. The pile of folded towels tipped over. He fucked me into the rug with the strap of the bag digging a line across my spine and my own face still smothered in his shirt.
He came deep, bag still on, grunting my name.
The laundry needed re-folding after. All of it.
