Chapter 1: His shirt
"Come on, Louise. I promise it's just me."
"Your promises mean nothing. Turn around."
Through the peep hole, Louise saw Tina heave a great sigh, hold her arms out, and turn 360 as instructed. No babies hid behind her back or toddlers giggled at watching their mom twirl.
"Kids?" Louise called anyway. "Are you there?"
When the hallway remained silent, Tina dropped her arms with a huff, exhausted by the third degree.
"See? I'm alone. Please open the door."
"Alright." She unlocked the door but crouched in case she needed to block anyone from running into her apartment between her legs. The move was unnecessary, but she offered no remorse while standing back up to meet her sister. "Can you blame me after the stunt you pulled?"
"I know, I know," Tina placated. "I was going half-crazy, but I shouldn't have foisted my children on you without warning. It was sneaky and underhanded of me."
"Well don't say it like that. It almost makes me proud of you."
Tina smiled in that small way she did, and the two let the subject rest. Besides, she had about a month's worth of apology tiramisu to plow through in her fridge.
"So why are you here then?" Louise asked, offering to let Tina in but the bespectacled woman declined.
"I just wanted to swing by and drop off Logan's shirt," she said, producing the folded clothing.
"The one that-"
"The one that Ava threw up on, yeah."
Nose wrinkling, Louise refused to take it from Tina's extended hands.
"I washed it," Tina sighed. "I promise."
Regardless of her earlier doubts, a Tina Promise was better than most. Louise relented and grabbed the shirt while her older sister continued.
"I tried his apartment first, but he's either not there or learned from you not to open the door to me."
"He's at Caleb's. There's a big WWE match, and they watch it together," she explained offhandedly.
Tina squinted at her funny but didn't follow up. Louise returned the favor, squinting and shrugging at the other's look. With another sigh, Tina dropped it.
"I'm sorry. I would stay to deliver it myself or talk, but Griffin's got an appointment."
"What's the test this time?"
"Allergy."
Nodding, Louise held up the shirt, and patted it. "You keep your mind on that. I'll take care of this."
"Promise?"
"Promise."
Tina thanked her again with a hug, which was a disgusting show of affection but nice. Waving goodbye, Louise shut her apartment and looked down at Logan's shirt.
It was a simple, cotton thermal. Solid red because did he even own other colors? Signs pointed to no.
Rolling her eyes, Louise considered just hanging it on his doorknob or, better yet, dropping it on the ground in front of his door. Boom bam, task complete.
But what if he got pissy about it and demanded something stupid like Tina rewash the long-sleeve? Her sister had enough on her plate, and Louise wouldn't let that blond moron bug her any more than necessary.
Without looking, Louise tossed the thermal into the first drawer she came across. Logan would get it back eventually.
A Louise Promise didn't mean the same thing as a Tina Promise anyway.
-
Blearily watching the elevator numbers tick up, Louise shut her eyes hard then blinked several times to force away the blurry vision.
She pushed herself too far today, meeting a client for breakfast, helping Dad at lunch, then having dinner with a another client. Racking her brain, she failed to remember if she ate more than a bite at each meal. Business consulting meant finding and talking through solutions, and she couldn't exactly accomplish that with a mouthful of omelet.
The ding of the elevator might as well have been a lullaby, but the entire shaft quaking with an almost violent intent when it reached her floor did get Louise to jolt out of her stupor long enough to flee through the opening doors. She waited a second to see if that was the trip that did it-if the elevator cables finally snapped behind her. Her shoulders slumped to find that, no, she had not narrowly escaped death yet again.
As her feet dragged all the way inside her apartment, she found the weight of exhaustion settling in again.
Louise didn't bother kicking her shoes into the right place or putting her bag away on its hook. By the time she reached her bedroom, she had decorated a telltale line of workwear all along the floor.
She reached blindly into her drawers for a nightshirt. Too cold to sleep in the buff, she slipped the first thing she found on.
Huh. She didn't remember buying a nightgown?
But it was soft and she was tired, so she didn't think anything else of it as she flopped onto her mattress.
Her brain shut off until the next morning when an alarm in her pants pocket halfway in between her bedroom and the hall went off.
Groaning, she rolled out of bed, and her joints protested.
"Quiet," she said to the unending popping. With heavy feet, she trudged and shut off her phone.
Another day, she thought to herself and sighed her way into the bathroom.
She froze stiff once she caught sight of the mirror.
Red.
Not like... not like blood red, but a soft deep red blanketed her. She didn't own anything like this...
No, she didn't, but it dawned on her slowly that Logan did.
Her hands jerked to rip the cotton shirt off her, but her muscles paid dearly for the too quick movement. With an attempt to relax, Louise let her arms fall. Besides, it was just her and the shirt. Who would know?
The thermal came down to her thighs-god, how long was his freaking torso-and the sleeves needed to be rolled up or her hands completely disappeared. She felt small but... comforted. And she hated that. Obviously.
She would fold the shirt nice like her sister, put it away until she saw Logan again, and forget about the whole incident. Louise swore to never let this happen again.
-
It only happened again... a few other times. A handful at most. No more than ten times.
-
Returning to her apartment with a few bags of groceries, Louise left the elevator and barely noticed her neighbor waiting for it.
"Spawn of Satan," Logan addressed her casually with a nod.
"Shit for brains," she said just as casually, returning his nod.
Back turned to the elevator and already a few paces down the hall, she couldn't see how Logan reacted to their oh so loving pet names for each other. She did, however, hear his feet as he abandoned the lift to follow her.
"Hey," he said, trotting to catch her. "Have you heard from your sister lately?"
"Uhh, yeah, she's my sister. I talk to her pretty often."
"Okay, smartass, then can you tell me where my shirt is?"
Dammit. She moved one of her grocery bags to rest on her hip in an effort to buy time. Scrambling for a reason, she settled on playing dumb.
"What shirt?"
"What shir- the shirt your niece puked on." He stared at her incredulous, and she kept on with the act, looking off into the distance. If her hand wasn't busy fishing out her key, she would have scratched her head.
"Mmmm, not ringing a bell."
"Well, it traumatized me, so I'll never forget."
"Oh please," Louise scoffed. "It was a little baby spit up; get over it."
"Ha! So you do remember it."
"No doy. Tina just hasn't mentioned anything about your dumb shirt is all."
"She was supposed to-"
"To what, Logan? Have it back to you immediately? You're asking a MOTHER of two very small children to do chores for you at the drop of a hat??"
Logan stepped back, squinting, a confused "huh?" erupting from an open mouth.
He likely wondered how asking for the return of his own property turned on him this quickly, but she didn't give him time to piece it together, her apartment unlocked.
"She'll get it to you when she gets it to you," Louise said, shutting her door behind her.
-
Practically buzzing with potential energy, Louise let the motivation course through her veins suddenly. It guided her to the bedroom, and she picked up a few stray items along her path to put away.
She knew this feeling well, and, if she sat down or paused for too long, then she could forget deep-cleaning her apartment. Setting the bits of paper and water bottles on her dresser, she looked for a suitable cleaning shirt.
On the first drawer pull, she pursed her lips. She mentally added laundry to the list of things to accomplish today. Pulling open the next yielded similar results, and she huffed. Louise refused to clean in anything nice that she actually liked. It would just get gross.
Yanking open the last drawer, Louise found her nightshirt. Or, uh, Logan's shirt.
She ran her thumb over the cotton, not fondly or anything. It certainly wasn't a shirt that she liked. She only wore it out of necessity.
One look at the state of her apartment and an internal check-in on her motivation, Louise decided today was a necessary day.
No time to waste, she slipped it on and went to grab trash bags, a scrubbing brush, and the Out Damn Spot.
-
Well, she was right about how cleaning affected the shirt. The problem with her being right, however, was that she couldn't return it in its current condition, smelling like elbow grease and stray cleaners.
Laundry time, she reasoned and stripped the thermal off to throw in the pile she had collected in her frantic shuffle to get the apartment in order. After a few seconds to think, she shifted the articles of clothing so that The Shirt hid under a pair of leggings.
With that, she grabbed her bottle of Colonel Sudsers Detergent and left for the thirteenth floor.
Superstition was a funny thing.
The original owner of the complex assumed that no one would want to live on the thirteenth floor, so he instead turned it into the laundry room, mail room, and some kind of abandoned theater wing? It guaranteed everyone in the building would have to visit the floor at least once. Although, Louise did know a few residents who went to the laundromat a few blocks down and paid others to retrieve their mail for them.
Stepping out of the elevator, she couldn't blame them.
Only half the lights on the floor worked at any given time, and the ones by the abandoned wing always flickered, signaling their permanent state of almost dead. The washing machines and dryers were so out of date they hissed and screamed when anyone used them. In front of the mail slots, a puddle never dried, but it was too dark to decipher the liquid.
Yeah, she couldn't blame people for avoiding the thirteenth floor, but Louise was braver than them.
Logan was too, she reminded herself. They ran into each other every now and again, so she kept on high alert. After a quick glance down at her laundry basket to confirm the shirt remained hidden, she nodded and continued on her quest.
It seemed she had the whole floor to herself, opening the door to the laundry room. She popped her clothes into a machine with detergent, and the sound of the washer locking shut comforted her. No one saw. No one would see.
It was the same story when she came back down to switch the load into a random dryer.
An hour later, all she needed was to retrieve her clean clothes.
Peeking into the laundry room, Louise saw no one again and breathed a sigh of relief.
She unloaded the clothes into her basket to the sound of the machine next to her buzzing its completion. She didn't think much of it, folding a few shirts she didn't want to wrinkle and tucking them back into the basket.
Amateur hour, she scolded herself when who else but Logan opened the door with his own bag of laundry.
At the sight of him, she abandoned folding to instead scoop the clothes into her basket without care, hoist it on her hip, and make towards the exit.
"Umm, okay?" Logan tilted his head as he noticed her hasty retreat. "I'm not trying to peek at your delicates. You can calm down."
"... banter."
"Did you.. Did you just say the word banter? Instead of bantering?"
But Louise didn't continue, already in the lobby-like area of the thirteenth floor. She backed against the wall, holding her basket tight, then sighed, shuffling through the clothes to make sure he couldn't have possibly seen-...
Seen-??
SEEN-?!
Nothing, no red thermal hid beneath her pile.
She turned back to the laundry room, peeping in through the small window on the door. Though barely able to make out the contents of the dryer she used, she saw the littlest hint of Logan's shirt peeking out.
Said blond stood at the neighboring machine, cleaning out the lint trap before grabbing his clothes. Why did he always have to be right next to her??
Maybe this was a good thing, she thought and backed away from the window. If he spotted it, then it would be off her shoulders. Both metaphorically and literally.
But he knew she used that dryer. What if he found the shirt and accused her of boggarting it?
She could argue it got mixed into laundry when Tina gave it back. Big deal.
But what if he questioned when Tina first dropped it off?
She could lie about the timeframe. Big deal.
But she wouldn't have the shirt to sleep in anymore.
Big... deal...
She waited another moment, set down her laundry basket calmly, then charged back into the room.
"I can't believe you wou- what the-?!"
Louise didn't respond during her full-fledged dash. Seeing him crouched by the machine and retrieving his finished clothes, she used the position to her advantage and shoved his head and upper torso further into the dryer.
"Louise?!" Logan yelled from inside. "What kind of stuck in the washer step brother bullshit are you pulling??"
Again, she failed to respond, but she couldn't. She had already grabbed the lone long-sleeve and sprinted out into the hallway, scooping her basket and taking the haunted stairs in case he tried to follow her.
She exited on a floor that wasn't theirs to throw him off the scent, but it seemed her efforts were an unnecessary precaution. Panting, she peered down at her pilfered goods.
Was it even worth it?
-
Later, she stood in front of the mirror, evaluating her life choices as she once again wore the red thermal.
The smell changed by now anyway, a combination of her apartment, her detergent, and her. He owned a million shirts just like this one. He didn't need it, and he could always buy another if he did.
After another long look in the mirror, she nodded.
"My shirt now."