I had been folding his boxer briefs for nine minutes when I realized I was making a face at them.
Not a bad face. Not the face I’d make at a stale sandwich or a clogged drain. The face you make at a kitten in a teacup. The face you make when something small and soft has wandered into your life and is now your responsibility. I was looking at navy boxer briefs with a thin red waistband, and I was making the teacup face at them, and I was folding them in thirds the way my grandmother folded my grandfather’s undershirts because he liked them folded that way.
The apartment was quiet. Sunday at three p.m. quiet, the way it gets when the fridge has been humming for long enough that you stop hearing it. Cody was on the couch. He was in the gray sweatpants he wore on Sundays and a T-shirt that was older than me and a backwards baseball cap he didn’t take off indoors because I had told him, in a soft voice, three months into our roommate arrangement, that I liked the backwards baseball cap. Neither of us had planned on any of this when we signed the lease.
I liked it because it meant I could see his face without seeing his hair, and his face was the part I was trying not to stare at, on account of his face was the part that kept looking back at me.
“Luna,” he said, from the couch.
“Yeah.”
“You’re folding my underwear.”
“Yeah.”
“Why are you folding my underwear.”
“Because you left them on the bathroom floor and they were getting wrinkled.”
“I don’t care if they’re wrinkled.”
“I do.”
“Why?”
I considered. I considered a lot of things. I considered because I want to, which was true. I considered because I like taking care of you, which was also true. I considered because the laundry room is the only room in this apartment where I can be alone with something that belongs to you, which was the truest.
“Because it’s Sunday,” I said.
“That’s not an answer.”
“It’s the only answer I’m giving you.”
He made the small noise he made when I did that — the noise that lived halfway between a sigh and a laugh, the noise he made when he was annoyed by me and also liked being annoyed by me, which is the only real form of liking anyone.
He went back to his phone.
I went back to the boxer briefs.
I had been doing this for a while. Not just the laundry. The Sunday afternoon laundry, and the Wednesday dishes, and the Friday night grocery run where I bought the oat milk he liked because he could not, he had admitted once, remember the name of oat milk between the store and the kitchen. I had been doing this for three months, and in those three months the apartment had gone from the apartment of two strangers who happened to share a lease to the apartment of two people who had negotiated the temperature of the butter drawer and the brand of dish towels and the rule that one of us always takes out the recycling on Thursdays.
I was the one who took out the recycling on Thursdays.
I was also the one who had, in March, replaced the bath mat with a softer one and not told him until he noticed, in May, and then not explained why I had done it, and then watched him stand in the bathroom doorway for a long time looking at the mat and not saying anything, and then, the next morning, found the bath mat folded in a specific way on the counter that meant he had been thinking about it.
The specific way he had folded it was the way I folded his boxer briefs. He had learned how I folded things, by watching me, and he had folded the mat that way. He had not told me he had done this.
I told him, two days later, by folding the mat the same way back down.
That was the rhythm of us. Things got folded, and the folding was the sentence, and the sentence was never spoken out loud.
I finished the underwear. I moved on to the socks. He had good socks — thick ones, the kind with the cushion at the heel, the kind I would have bought for my own feet if I had thought to. I rolled them in pairs, left-right together, because that was how you did socks, and I thought, while I rolled them, that I would like, very much, to put the socks on his feet for him. The thought arrived and I let it stay.
In the living room, Cody had switched from his phone to the TV. He was watching something I had been pretending not to watch with him for six weeks. He was watching it on the couch with his legs spread and a blanket over his knees and the baseball cap still on, and he was, without knowing it, making the face at the screen that he made when he was interested but did not want me to know he was interested.
I sat down on the couch next to him. I did not sit close enough to touch him. I sat close enough that if either of us moved six inches, we would.
“You’re on the couch,” he said.
“Yeah.”
“By me.”
“Yeah.”
“On purpose.”
“Cody.”
“On purpose next to me.”
“On purpose not touching you.”
He didn’t say anything to that. I didn’t either. The TV did the talking. After about three minutes he moved the blanket so it covered my knees too. After about another minute, my knee, the one nearest to him, moved about four inches. After about another minute, his hand moved about two inches. After about another minute, his pinky was on the outside of my knee.
We sat like that for forty-five minutes. Neither of us moved except to press pause on the show when one of us had to get water. The blanket stayed on both our knees. The pinky stayed on the knee.
In the morning I would make him coffee. He liked the coffee a specific way — two sugars, half a splash of cream, in the green mug because the green mug kept the heat in better than the others, which I had noticed, and I had bought, and I had not told him I had bought. I would hand it to him at the kitchen counter and he would drink it without looking at me and he would say, good coffee, Luna, and I would say, it’s the same coffee I always make, and he would say, I don’t know why it tastes better today, and I would say, maybe because I’m making it, and he would look up from the mug, finally, and we would look at each other, and the looking would be the sentence, and neither of us would say anything else.
But that was the morning. The afternoon was the laundry.
When the laundry was done I carried the basket down the hall and stopped in his doorway.
His room was the only room in the apartment that was fully his, and for three months I had not crossed the threshold without being asked. I set the basket on my hip and looked at his unmade bed, the gray sheets, the phone charger wrapped around the bedpost, and I thought about the line a little differently than I had in March.
I went back to the living room.
“Laundry’s done,” I said. “Do you want me to put it away in your room?”
He looked at me for a long time. The cap put a small shadow across his forehead.
“Yeah,” he said. “Put it away in my room.”
He paused the show. I went.
I did the T-shirts first, the top drawer, stacked by size. Then the socks. I was crouched at the bottom drawer, putting away the navy boxer briefs I had made the teacup face at, when the floor creaked behind me and I looked up and he was leaning in the doorway with his arms crossed.
“You fold them in thirds,” he said.
“My grandmother did.”
“I folded the bath mat in thirds.”
“I know. I folded it back.”
“I know you know.” He uncrossed his arms. “Luna. Can I say a thing out loud for once.”
I stood up. My face was hot. “Okay.”
“I want you in here. Not putting stuff away. In here.” He swallowed. “If that’s not what this has been, tell me and I’ll go back to the couch and we never talk about it.”
I put the last pair of boxer briefs in the drawer. I closed it with my hip. Then I crossed the room and stood in front of him and took the baseball cap off his head, which I had never done, and put it on my own, backwards.
“That’s what this has been,” I said.
He kissed me so hard the cap fell off.
We ended up on his bed, me on my back on the gray sheets and him over me, his hand pushing my shirt up my stomach, and it was so fast after three months of pinkies and knees that I started laughing into his mouth.
“What,” he said.
“Forty-five minutes on your inside knee. Now this.”
“I was being polite.”
“Stop being polite.”
He stopped being polite. He pulled my shirt over my head and got his mouth on my chest, then lower, then he was pulling my shorts down and I was lifting my hips to help him, and he sat back on his heels and just looked at me for a second, at my cock, hard and flushed against my stomach, and I watched him decide he didn’t need to think about it.
“I’ve never done this,” he said. “With a guy. With you. Any of it.”
“You don’t have to—”
“I want to. Tell me if I’m bad at it.”
He wasn’t bad at it. He was careful and slow and a little clumsy and very, very into it, his hand around the base of me and his mouth working the head, and he looked up at me every few seconds like he was checking the answer key. I had my fingers in his hair, the hair I never got to see under the cap, and I was saying his name in a voice I didn’t know I owned.
“Cody. Cody, I want you to fuck me. Is that—”
He pulled off. His mouth was wet. “Yeah. Yes. How do we—”
“Top drawer of my nightstand,” I said. “My room. Lube and condoms. Go.”
He went. He came back so fast he must have run the length of the hallway. He tore the condom wrapper with his teeth and got it on with shaking hands while I slicked my own fingers and opened myself up for him, knees up, watching him watch me.
“Jesus,” he said quietly.
“Come here.”
He knelt between my thighs and I guided him and he pushed in slow, so slow, his forehead on mine and his breath stuttering. It stretched and burned and then it didn’t, it was just full, just him, and I hooked my ankles behind his back and pulled him the rest of the way in.
“Okay?” he said.
“Move.”
He moved. He found a rhythm, lost it, found it again, swore, laughed at himself. His bed squeaked. Of course his bed squeaked. I’d heard it through the wall for three months every time he rolled over, and now I was the reason it was squeaking, and that thought alone almost finished me.
“Touch me,” I said, and he got his hand around my cock and stroked me in time with his hips, rough and uneven and perfect, and I came first, all over my own stomach, clenching around him, his name breaking in half in my mouth.
He lasted maybe six more strokes. He came with his face pressed into my neck, groaning, hips stuttering, holding me so tight I couldn’t breathe and didn’t care.
Afterward we lay in his sheets, sticky and stupid. The show was still paused in the living room. I could hear the fridge.
“I have to wash these now,” I said. “The sheets.”
“Leave them.”
“They’re gross.”
“Luna.” He pulled the blanket over both of us, which was the same move as the couch, and I knew he knew it. “Leave them. Make the pasta later.”
“The lemon one.”
“Yeah, that one.”
His hand found the back of my neck, where the warmth was. I stayed.
On Monday I washed the sheets anyway. I folded them in thirds. When I put them back on his bed that night, he’d moved my pillow in from my room.
Want to keep up with Luna? Visit on Fanvue. New Luna fiction posts roughly weekly — same voice, same laundry, same fridge humming.
