Just some fluff I wrote for Valentine's Day and ended up really liking.  It's not at all what I usually write, so comments would be appreciated.

Guard your laundry with your life, that’s always the advice.  Good advice, too.  Sarah has already lost two blouses and a bra to her dorm’s clothing bandits.  She’d like the blouses back, but whoever took the bra may keep it.  She has also had two loads of freshly washed clothes dumped on the dirty laundry room floor by someone impatient to use the machine.  Since then, she has never left her laundry.

She sits on the cold washer across from the rumbling dryer, fifteen minutes to go on the cycle.  Her finely manicured nails flick idly through the pages of a dull fashion magazine.  After another few minutes, she glances up through her red curls to check the digital time display on the front of the dryer.  Thirteen minutes.  She thumps one high-heeled shoe against the front of the washing machine in a slow rhythm, simultaneously bored and grateful for the opportunity to do absolutely nothing for a few hours this Tuesday evening.

The light overheard is that hard, fluorescent light that washes all the color out of everything it touches.  On the floor between the row of washers and dryers, little puddles from dripping clothes reflect back the harsh light, giving them an eerie phosphorescence from Sarah’s vantage point.  Sarah’s eyes focus on nothing, staring through the magazine’s lipstick ad.  She is just about to let her mind go completely blank when the laundry room door opens behind her with a loud smack against the wall, jerking her out of her trance.

She turns her head quickly and sees a young man of about eighteen or nineteen entering the laundry room, carrying a laundry bag and a bottle of detergent.  He appears to be wearing the absolute last thing in his closet: a pair of too-short jeans and a faded green T-shirt with the logo of The Who on it.  The red center of the bull’s-eye is almost completely gone from countless washings.  He smiles quickly at Sarah, then starts loading his laundry into the machine next to hers, not bothering to sort it.  Guys never bother to sort.

As he gets towards the bottom half of the laundry bag, he up ends it over the machine and shakes the rest of the clothes into the washer.  A few shirts and a pair of smiley face boxers fall into Sarah’s lap.

“Sorry about that,” he mutters, cheeks a little pink, taking the laundry from her lap.

“It’s okay,” she replies, rolling her eyes.  Mid-roll, she notices a label sewn onto the inside band of the boxers just before he drops them into the machine as well.  Jonathon Marcus.

“My mom,” he says, noticing Sarah reading the label.  “She put labels on all my clothes before I left for college.”  He pours some detergent into the machine and slams the lid before jumping up on top of it beside Sarah.  “So, you know I’m Jon.  Will you tell me your name, or should I read your underwear?”

Sarah arches a pencil-thin eyebrow.  “Sarah,” she says after a moment.

“You always get this dressed up to do laundry?” he asks, eyes flicking over her purple jacket and string of pearls.

“Do you?” she asks acidly, her own eyes taking in his scruffy appearance.  He could use a shave.

“Better than nothing.  Good thing I didn’t wait another day.”

She gives a sarcastic smile and looks back at her magazine, turning to a spread on shoes.  The glare from the fluorescent lights overhead makes it difficult to read the shiny pages, but she stares at it all the same.  On the washer beside her, Jon whistles tuneless, staring around the laundry room at nothing in particular.  After a minute or so, he speaks again.

“We use the same soap.”

“What?”

“Soap,” he says, pointing to Sarah's bottle of detergent, labeled with her name and room number.  “We use the same brand.”

“Amazing coincidence.”

“Why do you use it?”

“What?” she asks again.

“Why do you use that brand of soap?”

She stares at Jon for a moment before responding.  “I don’t know.  I just do.”

“I don’t know why I use it either.  I guess just because my mom uses it.  I couldn’t care less about laundry soap.”

“Neither could I,” she replies with a sigh.

Jon gives up on conversation and falls silent.  For several minutes, the only sound in the laundry room is the dull hum of Jon’s washer and Sarah’s dryer and the echoing thunk of Sarah’s heel against the front of her machine.  Then the buzz of the dryer rips through the silence.

Sarah hops off her washer and opens the door of the dryer across from her, putting a hand in to feel the clothes inside.  Her dark load is dry.  She seems to have made a mistake, however.  The dryers are stacked two high, and she had chosen one of the top ones, the bottom ones all being in use when she had first put in the load.  At five-foot-three (counting her two-inch heels), Sarah can barely reach into the dryer.  It had been much easier to throw her clothes in than it seems to be to take them out.  She manages to get most of her clothes out and drops them into her laundry basket on the floor below, but a few items at the very back are beyond her reach.  She jumps up and makes a grab for them, but misses.  After the third jump, Jon speaks up behind her.

“Want a hand?”

“Thanks,” she says, stepping aside as Jon slides off his washer.

He reaches into the dryer and pulls out a few mismatched socks, a dark blue blouse, and a black lacey camisole.  She takes the clothes from him quickly and drops them into her basket with a muttered “thanks.”

“Wait, there’s something else,” he says, pulling something else out of the dryer.  He holds it up.  It’s a very old T-shirt with a faded picture of Elmo on it.  “One of these things is not like the other,” he says with a hint of a smile.

She snatches it from him and adds it to the basket, casually pulling a pair of chocolate corduroys over it.  “I rarely wear it,” she says quickly.

“Yeah, right,” Jon replies, shutting the door of the dryer.  “Just how old is that thing, anyway?”

“I’ve had it since I was twelve,” she says after a moment.  “It barely fits now, but I still wear on the weekends sometimes.  I should probably get rid of it.”

“Why?  You still like it, obviously.  Where’d you get it?”

Sarah smiles a little at the memory and starts to speak.  “My grandfather gave it to me for Christmas.  I was obsessed with Elmo, even years after I’d outgrown Sesame Street.  You know how relatives always give you clothes you hate for Christmas?  I was dreading opening that box, because I could tell it was a clothing box, and I hate pretending to like gifts like that.  You know, your parents always make you wear it when you visit them.  But it was this Elmo shirt.  I thought it was the coolest thing ever, it was always the first thing I’d wear after Mom did laundry.”

“So how you could possibly think of throwing it out?” Jon asks.

Sarah looks up at him in surprise, having almost forgotten that he was there.  “I guess I can’t,” she says with a smile, this one genuine.  “I’d better fold this stuff before it wrinkles.”  She grabs her magazine from the top of the washer and tosses it into the laundry basket.  Jon hands her bottle of detergent to her.

“Nice meeting you,” he says.

“You too,” she calls as she leaves the laundry room.

Upstairs in her room, she folds her clothes and puts them back in their appropriate drawers, leaving out a few things to be ironed.  She sets the Elmo T-shirt on the top of the stack.  A pile of clean sheets she’d washed earlier sits on her bare mattress.  She’d forgotten about those.  With a sigh, she sets about making her bed, thoughts straying back to that Christmas when she’d opened the box with the Elmo shirt.  She’d almost forgotten about that day.  The shirt, seldom worn any more, had often been at the bottom of her drawer in recent years.  It doesn’t really go with anything else she owns.  It’s something she had lately only ever pulled out on a rainy Sunday when she just planned on spending the entire afternoon in her room, studying.  The memory of that Christmas, now brought back to the surface of her mind by Jon, drifts in and out of her thoughts as she straightens her sheets.

The next evening, Sarah returns to her room after dinner to find a note pinned to the bulletin board on her door.  Doing sheets at 8:00 tonight.  If you come, I’ll tell you the saga of the Buzz Lightyear pillow case.  Sarah takes the note from the pushpin and unlocks the door, smiling.  It’s 7:45.  She checks her appearance in the mirror, then pulls her cashmere sweater over her head and drops it on the floor.  She grabs the Elmo shirt from the drawer, puts it on, and starts stripping the already clean sheets from her bed.