A/N: Hi, lovelies! I just have a little question for you all. Do you prefer night updates or day updates? Okay, that's it! Enjoy! :)
Maybe the beige, wicker basket in the backseat of his station wagon, resting overtop of the empty, black and red seatbelt buckles and the gray seats where old, gleaming strips of thick duct tape was placed over the holes in the fabric where I knew yellow form would seep out of and sneak into the crevices of the seats where crumbs also laid from the various burgers, fries, and candy bars that had been eaten during the long road trips over highways I imagined he took, with a Buffalo Bills hoodie draped over the back of the seats, bright blue and yellow, filled with polychrome articles of clothing should’ve been a tip-off as to where we were going but when he pulled into the local Laundromat, greenish lighting flickering onto the dark pavement surrounding the building, I was surprised.
“Come on,” he said, gripping the gearshift and cranking it toward and resting it at P for Parked, and then he twisted the key in the ignition until the gentle hum of the engine died away, fading into the cold air, and he slipped the key ring into the pocket of his jacket. His fingers grasped around the door handle and he pushed it open, swinging the door open until it tittered to a stop, and he climbed out. A second later, as I pressed my thumb down on the red buckle of my seatbelt, he opened the backseat and reached for the wicker basket. My cheeks reddened, although luckily this was hidden by the dark, black sky and the strands of brunette hair that fell out from behind my ears and lingered around my cheeks, as I caught a glimpse of his black and gray Calvin Klein’s tossed carelessly in the basket.
The local Laundromat was a small building with a large, paved, and black parking lot it shared with The Iceberg, usually packed in the summer evenings with softball teams, clad in neon jerseys and beige hats with sweaty strands of hair poking out through the rim, teenagers in undersized denim shorts with the white pockets slipping out from the hem of the shorts on the butt, gathered together in one of the white tables either up on the porch of The Iceberg or down on the ground a couple feet away from the shared parking lot, the girls giggling as they liked their non-fat ice cream and the guys releasing deep chuckles as they devoured the cone, and women in their fifties, wearing long, gray cardigans, stopping to do their laundry with ratty magazines tucked under their arms as they dragged their baskets into the mat with grim expressions on their faces.
Flickering, green tinted light shone through the rectangular lighting fixtures attached to the gray ceiling tiles above the faded white washing machines that aligned the wall on one side of the dark green walls and the drying machines on the other side, and fell through the window panes on either side of the door with a neon OPEN sign hanging over the pane smudged with fingerprints, with the letter N at the end of the word broken and dull, a stark contrast from the brightening, red letters before it. Inside, as I could see through the window, there were orange chairs lining the back of the Laundromat, with discarded purses, jackets, magazines, and text books lying in the seats, with a lone woman sitting there on the second to last chair, her pajama clad legs crossed with a pair of UGG knockoffs adoring her feet, and she was knitting what looked like a scarf, dangling beside her thigh, and she looped the yellow yarn through her long needles, before glancing at the washing machine a few feet away from her, and then turned back to her yarn.
The muffled sounds of the soles of our shoes hitting against the faded gray pavement, bright yellow streaking straight lines down the coarse concrete to form the vacant parking spaces, with a couple of handicap signs stabbed into the ground in front of the building, light spilling out onto the bright strips to create space between the handicap space and the regular, narrower parking spaces, were the only sounds I could hear, sans the distant honking of horns and the rumble of semis, as we walked across the pavement, my hands shoved into my pockets and his gripping the sides of his wicker basket, accidentally dropping a sock onto one of the yellow parking lines. He glanced over his shoulder and smiled when he saw me reach down and grasp it by the hem, wondering just how dirty it was, and I felt a smile coil around my lips in return as I picked it up.
. . .
Amidst the still and near silent air that surrounded us as I sat on one of the orange chairs with a crack splitting the orange material along the back of it, the cracked line looking like one of the naked tree branches dangling in the wind and scratching against window panes in my yard, watching as Orion lifted his wicker laundry basket on top of one of the occupied washing machines, vibrating beneath the wicker, and propped open the lid to another washing machine, the white cap of his Tide detergent sticking out of the corner of the beige wicker basket, all I could hear was the heavy rumbling of the few occupied washing machines that aligned in the center of the room over the dirty, scuffed tiles on the ground, shaking with vibrations, and the faint rattling of what sounded like spare changes escaping from someone’s back pocket.
I curled my fingers over the edge of the orange chair, feeling the rough end pressing into the buried bones of my fingers, and scratched at the coarse, bumpy plastic, as he tipped the wicker basket toward the opened washing machine, multicolored attire tumbling into the washer and out of sight, and then he dropped the basket at his feet before unscrewing the cap to his bottle of Tide, grasped in his fingers. After pouring dark azure liquid in the cap and then letting it run down into the washer with the clothes, drizzling the blue detergent at the rim of the cap, he glanced over the white, propped lid of the machine and over at me, seated in the orange chair at the back of the room, alongside a Vera Bradley bag resting against the chair beside me, and the woman who knitted the yellow scarf, looking up the top of her knitting needles every now and then at her vibrating machine before looping the yellow yarn back through the needle, dangling over her lap.
“Hey,” he mumbled, when I caught his gaze, and he smiled, faintly, before his hazel gaze flickered over to the woman knitting and another guy, bent over in front of one of the drying machines, reaching a hand in and gripping handfuls of his clothing and dropping it in a basket, wearing a sweatshirt stained at the sides with holes in the elbows, revealing his dry patches of skin. I turned away from the scratchy, white-ish skin poking through the hole on his shirt, when I heard the washing machine lid close with a faint, muffled bang, and I flicked my eyes just in time to see Orion amble over to the orange seats.
When he stood over me, hunched over slightly to grasp the patched, variegated handle of the Vera Bradley and lifted it up off of the seat beside me, carrying it onto the ground and setting it on the abraded, black and white tiles of the floor by the woman’s other, larger bag, filled with different, bright shades of yarn. Then he slid into the chair beside me, the old, worn plastic creaking faintly beneath his weight, and he blew out a sigh through his lips, and then glanced over at me.
“Did you like the CD?” he asked after a moment, a moment that he simply stared at me, almost tiredly, but not in the way I expected him to—I expected him to look at me, like he was exasperated by having me tag along with him, washing dishes and watching him do his laundry. Instead, he just looked tired, but not of me.
I nodded, uncurling my fingers around the edge of the orange, plastic chair and placing my hands in my lap, only to start chipping further away at the waning amount of black nail polish on my thumbnail, little speckles of black decorating the skin around my nail fold and falling onto my skinny jeans. “Yeah, I did,” I told him, and it was the truth. When I laid back on my bed, feet propped up against the wall, and eyes closed, with my earbuds tucked into my ears and drowning out the voices of my parents until they crawled into their bed, the old springs squeaking in protest, and the snoring filling the dark room, and blasting soundtracks from The Dark Knight, I felt almost at peace, or at least content for then, until the world woke up again. Then my mother’s lips would purse once more, my dad would overcompensate by baking, cooking, or talking about the benefits of flossing, or something, and Mikayla would sulk around, back hunched, and crimped hair tumbling down her shoulders, and I would have to tuck the music away until later, when the world decided the day was long enough and left me to the dramatic percussion composed by Hans Zimmer.
He smiled at me then, faintly, the tail of his smile just barely lifting toward his eyes, still reflecting the exhausted glint to them alongside his hazel pooling around his dark, enlarged pupil. He turned his gaze away, giving me a glimpse of his profile, a few inches away from me, and he seemed to slump in his chair, shoulders sinking beneath the coarse, plastic of the chair. “I have more if you want them,” he said, quietly, staring at his knees instead of me, leaving an uneasy knot forming in the pit of my stomach.
I just nodded, even though his gaze wasn’t directed at me or anywhere near me, because I didn’t know what to say, which seemed to slowly become the story of my life—speechlessness. Forever ambling around and stumbling into rocks and hard places with nothing but nods and the bitter taste of wordlessness lingering on my tongue.
“I miss her too, you know,” he murmured, so softly, so quietly, that I was almost sure that it was part of the boisterous rumbling and rattling of the washing machines in front of us that shook the tiles beneath our feet, clad in worn sneakers with ratty, browning laces laying limp on the floor, or maybe something the woman beside us was mumbling as she knitted her yellow scarf, draped across her knees and dangling close to a dirtied, white tile, until I saw him glance at me out of the corner of his eye, but he never turned his neck to look at me fully, continuing to aim his gaze for the denim concealing his knees, a faint hole forming in the knee with light blue strands poking out and sticking up in the air.
I stared down at my thumbnail, swallowing, and feeling my eyes beginning to sting and blur the image of the scattered flecks of dark nail polish dotting the pasty skin on my hand, reaching up to my knuckles before the uneven dots disappeared, unless you looked closely at my jeans. “I know,” I replied back, in an equally soft tone, forcing the words through my chapped, stiff lips that quivered slightly, like the washing machines in front of us, as I said this. I pressed them together, in case the guy closing the drying machine happened to glance over and thought I was an escapee from the loony bin, and I looked at Orion.
I didn’t want this to be one of those times I would look back on, like flipping through the pages of a photo album, recalling memories that were captured as a single second in a photograph, out of focus and bright, and realize that there was something I could’ve said or done that would’ve made things better.
So I closed my eyes and felt my tresses of dark hair tumble out from behind the backs of my ears and tickle faintly beside the bare skin of my neck where the collar of my shirt didn’t reach, and leaned my head against his hard shoulder, the scent of icing and sugar filling my nostrils, along with Degree deodorant and the very faint aroma of Tide detergent. I could feel his muscles stiffen beneath my cheekbone, and I could practically feel the thoughts racing through his mind—is she crazy? Is she making a move when I’m clearly still in love with a dead girl? How many seconds would it take to grab my clothes from the washer and make it out of here?—but at this point, I was too exhausted to care, and not because it was nearly two in the morning.
After a few moments as I could feel his shoulders rise and fall beneath the material of his shirt as he breathed, rustling the fabric of his thin T-shirt shirt beneath my cheekbone, almost in unison with my own breath, I felt his muscles relaxing, causing my cheek to sink a little further into my shoulder, and a second later, I felt the top of his head touch mine, resting there, and his breath warm on my skin.
When I opened my eyes a few seconds later, still feeling the weight of his head on mine, his breath warming my ear, hot and red, and ruffling my hair in a way that caused it to tickle against my skin, I took in the flickering light filtering into the room before my eyes landed on our reflection in the windows in the front of the Laundromat, faint but there. I was leaning against him; head rested in the crook of his shoulder, dark strands of hair lying against his arm, and touching his neck and his head was placed against mine. His eyes were closed, eyelashes casting long shadows down his cheeks, and to anyone, we looked like a couple, both night owls, staying up past our bedtimes to do laundry. But we weren’t that.
We were broken beyond repair, shattering across the floor, and we were simply trying to endure right now, trapped in this prison of endlessness, of forever.
But I felt a little less broken when I was with him.
. . .
“Amanda.” I felt the gentle grasp of his fingers holding onto my upper arm, fingers pressing lightly through the layers of multicolored fabric from my jean jacket, splattered with yellow, green, and light blue dots of paint from when Mom decided that it was time to redecorate the first story of our house, and my sweater, and squeezing. He shook my arm, softly, and his voice was quiet and just as tender as his touch. When my eyes fluttered open, light suddenly seeping into my eyes, causing them to squirt faintly, the first blurred image to become clear as my eyes adjusted was him, knelt down in front of me, one hand on my upper arm, and the fingers of his other hand touching the half of an inch of the orange plastic from the chair, hazel boring into me. “Hey. Are you up?”
My throat was dry as I swallowed, my eyes roaming away from the hazel orbs that followed my movement, glancing at my side as I hoisted myself in the chair, causing it to creak beneath me, squeaking in protest, and he pulled his hand away from my arm, wrapping his fingers on the wicker basket at his feet, freshly cleaned clothes, smelling faintly of detergent, piled haphazardly inside in a rainbow assortment of garbs, instead.
As my eyes scanned the room, taking in the now tranquil washing machines, where a hot pink laundry basket had been placed where Orion’s wicker one had been laid when I last saw it, and the single dryer with a rotating variety of whites tumbling around inside, as I could see through the murky, circular window, I noticed that the woman who had been knitting her yellow scarf was now gone, taking her dangling, knitted, yellow yarn and Vera Bradley bags with her, apparently. Then, as I propped myself up on my elbow, pressing the bone hard into the plastic of the chair, I also saw that I was sprawled out across the orange alignment of chairs, the rims digging into my sides and my thighs, and at the end was a girl, flipping through a Vogue magazine, occasionally glancing over at me, as if wondering when, exactly, I’ll stop occupying five of the chairs.
Wrinkled and rumpled into a little, dark ball was Orion’s jacket, an indent the size of my head burying into the fabric, and a long strand of brunette hair lingering on the jacket until I reached down and pulled it off at the tip, my eyes flickering over in his direction as he still remained squatted in front of me, the toes of his shoes pressed into the tiles of the floor and heels lifted up off of the floor, and his wrist dangled over his knee as he watched me lift my hair off of his jacket.
“Sorry I keep stealing this from you,” I told him, somewhat weakly and hoarsely, and he merely smiled, giving me a halfhearted shrug. I shoved the jacket in his direction. “What time is it?”
He gripped the jacket by the collar, rang it out a little, and then dropped it into the wicker hamper along with the rest of his newly washed clothes, overlapping a pair of jeans and a black T-shirt. “A little after three,” he replied, turning his attention back to me. “I should probably get you back home.”
“No.” I shook my head firmly, causing a couple of strands of dark, brunette hair to tumble out from beneath the backs of my ears where they had been tucked at some point, and dangle in the air surrounding my neck, and for my thoughts to thin, a slight ring occurring in my ears and remaining seconds after I stopped, blinking back to my ambiances, and sucked in a breath. I didn’t want to go home, trot across the damp grass, leaving shoeprints in my wake, and then latch my hands around tree branches until I reached the black, coarse shingles of the rooftop, and lay awake beneath the navy covers of my bed, replaying my parent’s conversation until their voices had become the mantra of my mind. “I don’t want to go home.”
Orion exhaled, letting his shoulders fall beneath the thin fabric of his shirt, rumpled on one of the sleeves—the same one I had laid my cheek against before drifting off, leaving him and his Laundromat behind, and then he ran his fingers through his ruffled, blond hair, causing strands to fall sideways over his face. “Come on, Amanda,” he said, gently, eyes landing on me as he rested his hand back on his knee, balancing himself on the toes of his shoes. “You’re obviously tired. Let’s just go back before your mom notices your gone, okay?”
I looked at him, taking his the drained look to his hazel eyes, turning the variegated shade of his iris almost dull, and how his lashes were hanging low, and the red mark on his cheek just below his cheekbone, like a sheet crease or something, and I realized that maybe he might be tired—that he might be trying to pry his eyelids apart at this very moment, just wishing that this broken, annoying girl would get the hint that his pillow was more important than she was. So, I told him, “You can go home. Just drop me off somewhere.”
“Amanda, I’m not—” He stopped then, before he had a chance to finish his own sentence, and paused, inhaled, and wiped his palm across his palm, somewhat tiredly, exhaling deeply, and he closed his eyes, leaning his cheek into the palm of his hand, with his elbow poised on his kneecap, for a moment. When he opened his eyes, he said, his voice tired but sure, “I’m not just dropping you off somewhere at three in the morning.” He blinked, his brow furrowing faintly as a few seconds ticked away on the clock above the door, and then a small smile broke out on his face. “You really sure you don’t want to go home?”
I nodded.
The corners of his smile extended a little further. “Then I have an idea.”