the laundromat on eighth is open all night, and at 2am it’s just me, the hum of two dryers, and a guy folding a fitted sheet badly in the corner. i’d walked down to the vending machine for sour gummies and was gone maybe four minutes. when i came back he was standing at my dryer, holding my thong.
not dangling it. holding it up between two fingers, the way you’d hold up a question you already knew the answer to. black, the little bow at the front, still warm from the cycle.
for the record: i hadn’t put anything in that load by accident. i’m twenty-five and i do my delicates at 2am on purpose, because the laundromat at 2am is empty and quiet and the only person who’s ever going to see my laundry is me. i wear the nice things every day now. a therapist would have a field day. i call it maintenance. i was in the slip i sleep in and a denim jacket over it, and i remember thinking, distinctly, that if he was going to look at me holding my underwear i was glad it was one of the good ones.
“these yours,” he said. not a question.
“i’m not sure what you think you found.”
he came around the dryer, close enough that i could smell detergent on his shirt and something warmer under it. he was tall the way doorways are tall. “i knew when i saw these they were yours.” he slid his hand into my hair, and i was.
“that’s a lot of confidence for a man holding my underwear.”
“that’s a lot of wet for a girl who went to the vending machine.” he didn’t smile. he turned my head a few degrees with his thumb, exactly the way you’d check a coin for a mint mark, and looked at my mouth and then at the slip collar and then back up. “you put these on thinking about something,” he said. “i hope it was me.” then, before i could get any cleverness out: “car’s out back. you’re coming with me, my pale girl, and you’re going to be on your knees before the engine’s warm.”
my hand was already on the door handle before i decided to move. my breath came short. i went.
his car was a silver sedan with the seat pushed all the way back and the dome light already off. he didn’t touch me until the door shut. then he pulled me down by the hair, and i went across the console and down between his knees, and the thong went into the inside pocket of his jacket like it was always going to end up there. i watched him do it and something under my ribs went warm and permanent. he patted the pocket once, like checking a wallet, and that was the whole conversation about it.
he was already hard. i wrapped my hand around him, thick and hot, and ran it down the length of him once before i put my mouth on the head. tongue flat under the ridge, slow, and he breathed out through his teeth like i’d surprised him, which is the best sound there is, the sound of a man finding out the thing he picked is better than the photo.
“pretty little thing,” he said. “look at you in the middle of the night, halfway in a stranger’s lap in your bedclothes.”
“i like being looked at,” i said, honestly, around him. i don’t know where it came from. it came out before i could vet it, and he hummed low, like the answer had cleared some bar.
“good,” he said. “then look up while you do that.”
i looked up. his hand settled in my hair, heavy, thumb moving against my scalp, and i took more of him in — a few inches, pull back, a few more — until my nose was against him and my throat was full, held it a beat too long, then pulled back fast, gagged once, spit running down my chin and onto the slip, and went straight back down. by the third time through my jaw was aching and my eyes were streaming and he was moving under me in small, low thrusts that he’d stopped trying to hide.
“my dark hand in your hair, and you’re still going slow for me,” he said. “you know i’m gonna keep these.” he meant the thong. his hand tightened. “been thinking about whose they were since the second cycle. now i’m gonna think about the girl who wore them on her knees with my cock in her mouth. say thank you.”
“thank you.”
“again. like you mean it.”
“thank you for keeping them.” and i meant it. god help me, i meant it, and he heard that i meant it, and something in the way he held my head changed — not softer. surer. he’d found the price and i’d paid it and now he could stop being polite about what he wanted.
the back door of the laundromat was propped a foot open for the heat and through it i could hear my dryer still going. he pushed me past the point where i would have stopped him and held me there, throat full, eyes streaming, my hands flat on his thighs, and just watched. some drunk kid stumbled past the mouth of the alley singing to himself and he didn’t even pause. he didn’t hide me and he didn’t hurry and he didn’t explain, and that — the total unbothered ownership of the whole thing — did more to me than anything else he could have said.
“don’t stop,” he said.
i didn’t. he came in three hard pulses with his fist in my hair, pushing me down that last half inch, and i swallowed around him, throat working, eyes wet, staying exactly where he’d put me. when he finally let go i came up gasping and he looked at me — chin wrecked, slip ruined, lips swollen — and said one word.
“pretty.”
he exhaled once, slow, like he’d been holding it since the dryer. “same time next week,” he said, not looking at me.
that’s it. one word, flat, from a stranger, at three in the morning, and it’s going to keep me warm for a week.
i sat back on my heels and wiped my mouth with the back of my hand. he tucked himself away, adjusted, and got out first — like a man who’d already concluded his business, which, fair. i climbed back out into the cold and walked back into the laundromat.
the dryer was still going. the fitted-sheet guy was gone. he didn’t follow me. i didn’t expect him to; there was never a version of this where he followed me. i moved my clothes into a basket and folded everything twice as slow as it needed to be, and i did it with no underwear on under the slip, which was the entire remaining inventory of what he’d left me.
i caught my own reflection in the dark window over the folding table on the way out: jacket, slip, no thong, one dark print of his hand still setting in the top of my hair. i stood there and grinned at it like a girl on a greeting card. i didn’t even own the thong anymore. it was the best gift anyone’s taken from me.
