Two Rivals, One Dryer

Spec: 700 words, explicit, two rivals, 2am laundromat, slow burn ／ 754 words ／ delivered as a public URL (this mailbox receives only)

The laundromat on Kottani Street had one working dryer, and at two in the morning it was the only warm thing in the ward.

Nao had it. She'd claimed it at midnight, with a basket of coveralls and a paperback she hadn't turned a page of in an hour, and she had her boot on the coin slot like a claim stake.

Ren arrived dripping. Rain came off his jacket in sheets and pooled at the threshold, and he looked at the dryer, then at her boot, then at her face, with the particular misery of a man who has lost to the same woman three times in one month.

"Move your foot."

"Make me."

He had a plastic bag of clothes, all of it wet, none of it folded, and a duffel that had clearly been dragged through a puddle on purpose. She knew where he'd been. Everyone at the depot knew. He'd taken the shift she wanted and had spent fourteen hours getting soaked for it, which was only fair, and she was still not going to give up the dryer for him.

"Twenty minutes," he said.

"Forty."

"Nao."

"Forty, Ren. You took the night run."

He sat on the bench across from her, an metre and a half of linoleum between them, and pulled his shirt off over his head without any shame left to spend. Under the strip light he was all lean shoulder and old scar, water tracking down the line of his spine into the waistband of his trousers. She looked at her paperback. She looked at it for a solid thirty seconds and read nothing at all.

"You're staring," he said, not unkindly.

"I'm assessing. There's a difference."

"Is there."

"Mm."

The dryer ticked. Rain crossed the window in long slanted runs. Somewhere a machine finished its cycle and left, and the laundromat got quieter, down to the drum and the two of them breathing.

She closed the book. "Come here, then."

He came across the linoleum slowly, like a man expecting a shove, and stopped with his knees against her chair. She put her hand flat on his sternum to hold him at that distance, and he let her, and neither of them said anything for a while about the fact that her hand was shaking.

"Three times this month," she said.

"Four."

"Four." Her hand slid down the hard plane of his chest, over the ridge of his hip, into the wet waistband, and his breath came out like something had been pulled loose in him. "You're warm."

"You've been keeping it all."

"Someone has to."

He kissed the hollow under her ear first, an apology, and then her mouth, which was not one. He tasted of rain and metal, and his mouth opened over hers with a roughness she'd spent nine months pretending not to want, and both hands came up to hold the back of her neck, careful at first, then not careful at all.

The bench scraped. Her paperback hit the floor, spine-first, unforgiving. She got his shirt off the bench and threw it at the machine behind him without looking, and he laughed into her mouth — a real laugh, off his face, so she kissed the corner of his jaw to make him stop.

"Quiet," she said.

"There's no one—"

"I don't care."

He picked her up out of the chair and she let him, legs around his waist, damp trousers cold against her thighs and his skin hot everywhere else, and turned her to face the glass. Rain on one side of it. Him on the other, solid and shaking. She arched into the hard line of his body and felt him groan against her throat, and he pressed her back against the window until she got a small sharp sound out of her and he tried to apologise and she bit his shoulder instead.

The dryer stopped at forty-one minutes and the silence was absolute.

"Assessing," he managed, a little dazed.

"Shut up and hold me higher."

The clothes on the floor stayed there. The rain kept going. When the light came on behind the counter at six the attendant found two people asleep in the last booth behind the folding table, tangled up in one blanket that belonged to neither of them, and he took his coffee and did not say a word.

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