Fists full of clothing came out of the dryer. Shirts, pants, towels, and yes, underwear, piled up on top of the machine so I could dry my clothes. It was a woman’s collection, not that I recognized any of it. I said a silent apology, hoping she wouldn’t be too pissed that her thongs and sheer T-shirts ended up on the machine, but hey, she should’ve been by to get them!
I held a suspiciously tiny pair of purple underwear up and shook my head. It was followed by a lacy white bra that made me blush.
“That’s mine,” she said.
By that time, I knew her voice. Soft. Melodic. A tiny sarcastic bite that only made me more curious about her. That night, with her underwear in my hand, she approached me with a laugh of disbelief and a casual swagger that made me want to sell my soul to the devil.
“S… sorry!” I slammed her underwear on top of the pile. Tucked beneath her arm was an empty laundry basket. “I didn’t know what else to do. I’m sorry.”
“Hey, no problem.” She kept her eyes forward as she came closer to me. God, she smelled like spring rain. I didn’t know what that smelled like until that point. Was she fresh from the shower? Was that why she took so damn long to come get her stuff?
Or had something else been afoot? Something from the cosmos, conspiring to make us bump into each other? I know we lived in the same dorm, but it was a big one. What were the odds that the woman whose thong I had in my hand belonged toher?
“Better you than one of the guys.”
I cocked my head, still flabbergasted that this had happened. “Huh?”
She began dumping her clothes into the laundry basket. “Better you than a guy going through my underwear. Can you imagine if one of these dudes found this?” She held up a pair of electric blue underwear. Naturally, my brain wentthere.Images of her wearing that, and nothing else.
Obviously, she didn’t know I was gay. Because my twenty-year-old brain was so dirty that I had been undressing her with my eyes every time we bumped together. I didn’t mean to. I couldn’t help it! She was everything I found attractive in a woman, and I yearned to know what else there was to her. Including beneath her clothes.
Well, now I knew. Electric blue underwear and lacy bras. That did not improve things.
“By the way,” she said, tucking her feathery hair behind her ears. “Thanks for coming to that party the other night. It could’ve been a total bomb if you didn’t bring your friends.”
“Hey…” My attempt to sound normal almost embarrassed me to my core. Surely, she saw right through me. She knew how much I wanted to kiss her. She had to have! It was tattooed on my forehead and throbbing with every glance she shot me. “I hear there’s free food around here, and I show up! Although I really did need to drag my friends.” Sara was antisocial, and the exchange students still not confident in their English abilities. Making sure they had fun at the party had distracted me from my growing attraction to this woman. “If you have more parties like that, I’ll help!”
It was the beginning of my overeagerness. I wanted excuses to see her more often. I wanted to get to know her. I wanted to either fall more in love with her, or discover reasons why it would never work – so I could get over her. It didn’t matter how we did it. I’d join the fucking dorm council if it meant seeing her every week at the meetings.
Dinner with her. Doing homework with her. Even if we never dated, I wanted to at least be a friend who saw her often enough to bask in her aura. Her energy was like a magnet pulling me to her. Bam. A chain in my gut. Dragging me. Cutting me open.
“That could be helpful. What was your name again?”
“Jessica.” Why did I tell her my full name? Even my friends didn’t know my real name was Jessica. “You can call me Jess.” I wanted that to sound special. That only she got to call me that, though everyone – from close friends to professors in my department – knew me by that name.
“See you around, Jess.” She hoisted her basket up and showed herself out. Not once did she look back at me.
She left a plain white sock behind. By the time I worked up the nerve to chase her down and give it to her, she was already gone.
Next time.
***
That same twisted fate that made Jess grab Shannon’s underwear must have been the same one that made her shopping cart slam ahead.
Shannon jerked up from the freezer. Her bra strap was all the way down her arm now, and when she spun around, her black tank top revealed a nipple breaking free from its cotton prison.Great. You were standing over that freezer for a while, huh?
“Hi…” Jess pushed her cart out of the way. “Sorry.”
The man in the fedora shoved his way between them. A convenient excuse to move farther apart.
“What are you doing here?”
Jess was taken aback by the sudden hostility. Because that nipple wasn’t the only sharp thing on Shannon’s person. “Shopping. Like you, I guess.”
“Do you live around here or something?”
A woman shopping with her toddler looked at them. This was Portland, after all. Even the gentrified core of Northwest wasn’t immune to random fights breaking out in the middle of any supermarket.
