The hoodie says GREENFIELD SOCCER across the chest and has a bleach spot on the left cuff shaped like Ohio. I know that because I’ve been wearing it for three weeks and he hasn’t asked for it back once.
It’s Marcus’s. He’s my roommate. He’s a mid on the club team, he goes through deodorant like it’s a personality, and he left the hoodie balled up on my side of the closet the first week of October and never came for it. On me it hits mid-thigh. On him it probably fits.
So that’s what I had on at 1:50 in the morning when I went down to the basement to switch his laundry over. The hoodie, a pair of cotton panties I’m not going to describe, and socks. That’s it. I know exactly what I was doing.
Some context, because otherwise this sounds crazier than it was.
Back in September, three beers in, sitting on his bed while he complained about his ex, I said it. You know you could just have me. Whenever. You wouldn’t even have to ask, you could just bend me over something. He looked at me for a long time and said noted and went to sleep. He never brought it up again. I wore his hoodie every day after that and waited to see if he’d ever cash it in.
The laundry room in Hartley is two washers, four dryers, a folding table bolted to the wall, and a corkboard covered in flyers for a lost cat that I’m fairly sure was found in 2024. Dryer 4 is the only one that gets hot. Everyone knows. You put your stuff in Dryer 4 and you guard it.
I was leaning on it, letting it cook my back through the hoodie, scrolling on my phone, when the door opened and Marcus walked in barefoot in gray sweats and nothing else.
He’d been asleep. His hair was flat on one side. He looked at me and then he looked at the hoodie and then he looked at where the hoodie ended, and he stayed at that part a while.
“You weren’t in bed,” he said.
“Your jerseys were in the washer. They were gonna mildew.”
“You’re doing my laundry.”
“Somebody has to. You’d wear that blue one wet.”
He didn’t laugh. He came across the room. The floor down there is that speckled tile that’s freezing in every season and I watched him step on it barefoot and not even notice.
“That’s my hoodie,” he said.
“I know.”
He stopped close. Close enough that I had to tip my head back. Dryer 4 thumped behind me. He put one finger in the front pocket of the hoodie, the big kangaroo one, just hooked it, and pulled. Barely. I came forward maybe an inch.
His knuckle was against my stomach through the fabric. I could feel how fast he was breathing from that alone.
“You said a thing,” he said. “In September.”
“I did.”
“Is that still—”
“Yes.”
“I didn’t even finish.”
“You didn’t have to. Yes. It doesn’t expire. I said that part.”
He let out this breath like he’d been holding it since September. Maybe he had.
And then he just kissed me. No buildup. One hand still hooked in the pocket and the other on the side of my neck, and he kissed me like he’d done the math a hundred times and finally decided to stop doing it. He tasted like sleep and the spearmint gum he keeps on the windowsill.
I kissed him back so hard my head bumped the dryer.
He picked me up. I want to be clear that I did not expect that. He put his hands under my thighs and lifted me onto the folding table like I was a laundry bag, and the table creaked and both of us froze and looked at the bolts.
“It’s held worse,” I said.
“What has it held.”
“You don’t want to know what the RA said about move-in weekend.”
He laughed into my neck. Then he stopped laughing, because his hands had slid up under the hem of the hoodie and found out what I had and hadn’t put on.
“Luna.”
“Mm.”
“You came down here in this.”
“I came down here in yours.”
He made a sound I have thought about every day since.
I could feel him through the sweats, hard against the inside of my knee. I put my hand there, flat, over the fabric, and he pushed into it without meaning to, and then he looked at me with this wrecked, embarrassed face like he’d been caught.
“You can,” I said. “Whatever you want. I meant that.”
“I don’t know what I want first.”
“Then I’ll pick.”
I slid off the table onto my knees on that freezing tile. Pulled his sweats down. He wasn’t wearing anything under them either, which, honestly, made me feel better about my outfit choices. He was flushed and thick and already wet at the tip, and I wrapped my hand around him and looked up at him and said, “Hi,” like an idiot, and he put his hand over his face.
I sucked him slow. I wanted him to feel every second of it, because he’d waited six weeks and so had I. I took my time getting him all the way into my mouth and he grabbed the edge of the folding table above my head so the whole thing rattled against the wall.
“Fuck. Luna. Fuck.”
Dryer 4 buzzed. His jerseys were done. Neither of us moved.
When he started pulling at my hair to get me up I thought for a second I’d done something wrong. I hadn’t. He just said, very fast, “I want to fuck you,” he said, rough.
“Then do it.”
He dug in the front pocket of the hoodie where I’d left the lube and condom and laughed into my neck at the fact that I’d been ready for him all along. He tore the packet open with his teeth.
He bent me over the folding table. The surface was cold laminate and smelled like dryer sheets. He pushed the hoodie up my back and pulled my panties down to my knees, and then he just stood there a second with his hand on my lower back, and I could feel him looking.
He pushed two fingers into me, slick and careful, watching my face. Marcus, who slams every door in Hartley, who sneezes like a car alarm. He was tender about this, about taking what he wanted. When I pushed back on him and said his name, he didn’t ask permission again.
When he pushed in I had to put my forehead down on the laminate. Big. Hot. A stretch that went all the way up my spine. He held still until I pushed back on him, and then he started to move.
It was not graceful. The table knocked against the wall on every stroke, a dull thunk, thunk, and I was sure the whole first floor could hear it. He had one hand fisted in the back of his own hoodie, holding me down by it, and that’s the detail I can’t get over. He held me by the thing he gave me.
“You’re so—” he kept saying. “You feel so—”
He never finished either sentence. He didn’t need to.
I touched myself. He saw and moved my hand away and did it for me instead, his fist sliding on me in rhythm with his hips, and I came first, with my mouth against my own sleeve so I wouldn’t scream in a dorm basement at two in the morning. He came a minute after, pushed all the way in, his forehead dropping between my shoulder blades, saying my name into the hoodie.
Afterward he sat down on the tile with his back against Dryer 4, because it was warm, and pulled me into his lap. Both of us half-dressed. The fluorescent light buzzing. A cat on a flyer looking down at us.
“Your jerseys are wrinkling,” I said.
“I don’t care about the jerseys.”
“You will on Saturday.”
He laughed, and then he didn’t, and he put his face in my neck.
“I’m sorry it took me so long.”
“You weren’t late. It doesn’t expire.”
He was quiet a while. Then he tugged the hood up over my head, gently, so it flopped over my eyes, and kissed me through it.
“Keep it,” he said.
“The hoodie?”
“Wear it when you want me. I’ll know.” He thought about it. “Wear it all the time.”
I’ve basically been wearing it all the time.
We folded his jerseys together at 2:40 in the morning. He’s bad at folding. He keeps the hoodie on the back of my chair now, washed, every Sunday, Dryer 4.
