"I need space." Those were the words Jacky said to Ryan the night before they both left for separate colleges. Now, each of them will try to learn who they are without the other. Will their paths lead them back together?
He was only halfway done the sandwich when the washers finished with a hiss, and Ryan hurriedly packed up the remainder so he could dump his clothes in one of the laundromat's rolling laundry baskets. The muumuu lady practically shoved him out of the way to get to the now-empty washer.
With his clothes in the dryer, Ryan didn't have a washer to sit on. There was one empty seat, between the woman with her kids and a man asleep in the corner who looked and smelled like he was homeless. He chose to stand near the door and finish his sandwich, his duffel bag on his shoulder.
Not quite the study time he had hoped for. Once he finished his breakfast, he scrolled through his phone and found himself back at Jacky's last message: Haha Pete doesn't stand a chance of staying straight with you all
A weight settled over him as he stared at those innocuous words. They were perfectly friendly. Upbeat. Inoffensive.
They sounded nothing like Jacky.
So already they had slipped into being familiar strangers who shared nothing real about themselves. But then Ryan realized that Jacky's very first message to him, the one about his roommate, had sounded like Jacky. It had been Ryan who forced that distance, and Jacky who had seen Ryan's carefully crafted response and put up this wall.
Ryan had to put away his phone for a moment to take a breath and a desperate sip of his coffee, which thankfully was just regular coffee and not pumpkin chai or something. He tried to remember all the things he learned in therapy.
Ryan wouldn't have responded to Jacky's message that way if Jacky hadn't broken up with him. He had a right to protect himself. Jacky couldn't do something big like break up with Ryan without consequences.
Heaving another breath, Ryan opened his phone again and closed out Snapchat, then opened Instagram. Charlie's profile page was still up. Ryan's thumb hesitated over the follow button for just a moment before he tapped it. Then he put his phone away before he made any decisions he might regret. Friending Charlie was a good baby step towards getting over Jacky.
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When Jacky returned to the laundry room to switch his clothes over, Fox was no longer there. Granted, Jacky had taken a shower and nearly fallen asleep under the hot stream of water, and taken his time getting dressed, and then Braedyn knocked on his door wanting to know if Jacky wanted to go down to breakfast, which Jacky couldn't exactly say no to when his stomach was growling. So he shouldn't have been surprised that Fox had gone home to sleep or write or hook himself up to an intravenous caffeine drip or whatever he did in his free time.
He also shouldn't have been surprised to find his loads of clean clothes unceremoniously dumped on one of the folding tables, but it was Saturday morning and how did this many people need to wash their clothes on a Saturday morning/afternoon? The dryers were all full, too, the room warm with their heat. Jacky scooped his clothes into his laundry basket and hopped up on the table to wait for a dryer to open.
Then he realized that no one else was in the laundry room, so why should he have to wait?
Peeking out into the hallway, he didn't see anyone else coming. He chose the dryer with the most time left and opened it, only to see it full of lacy bras. "You're not even supposed to put bras in the dryer," he grumbled, only knowing this because that one time his mom lectured him after he put her bras in the dryer and apparently ruined them. But he didn't want to touch them, so he found another dryer with a lot of time left and thankfully it was boy clothes. A guy was less likely to be on time to check their laundry, anyway. He dumped the damp clothing on the folding table and shoved his own clothes inside.
He'd just started the dryer back up when a tall guy with glasses wearing a polo shirt walked in.
"Hey, did you just steal my dryer?" the guy demanded.
"It was stopped when I got here," Jacky lied.
"No it wasn't." The guy stalked over and towered over Jacky. "I had just started it five minutes ago."
"I don't know what to tell you." Jacky threw up his hand in a desperate shrug, and that was when the guy's expression changed. He wasn't looking at Jacky anymore. He was staring at the empty sleeve of Jacky's shirt.
"You shouldn't steal other people's dryers," the guy said, all conviction gone out of his voice. He pushed past Jacky to his pile of clothes, scooped it all up, and struggled past Jacky again to open the dryer right beside the one Jacky's clothes now occupied.
"Oh, so it's okay for you to steal someone's dryer, then?" Jacky shot back.
The guy frowned down at Jacky, then his eyes flicked to Jacky's shoulder. "These are also my clothes," he retorted. "I guess I'll just run it for longer."
An offer to pay for the extra time rose up in Jacky's throat, but he coughed instead and at on the folding table to wait for the awful feeling in his stomach to die down.
