What I Look for in My Friends’ Laundry Basket

I locked the bathroom bolt and within seconds I felt the blood pooling between my legs. It was a reaction as old as I was myself, almost a reflex. Ever since I understood that laundry baskets live in bathrooms, and that inside them hides the only treasure that truly matters to me, my body learned to respond before my mind did.

I’m aware of what I am. A pig, a depraved man, a man who pretends to be normal at dinners and parties while calculating how long it will take before he can be alone with someone else’s intimacy. I didn’t choose it. One day I simply discovered this part of myself and, ever since, I’ve never managed to turn it off. Nor have I wanted to.

I leaned my back against the door and took a deep breath. The music from the living room came muffled, my friends’ laughter sounded distant. I had time. I always make sure I do before I begin.

There’s a part of all this that I find hard to confess even to myself. It isn’t just desire. It’s the humiliation that comes with it, the certainty of kneeling before something none of them has offered me, stealing it in secret like the lowest of men. And yet that same shame is what excites me most. The lower I feel, the harder I get. Years ago I stopped fighting that contradiction.

***

I still remember the first time, almost by accident. Like so many men like me, my initiation was my mother’s panties. She’d had me very young, barely twenty, so when I finished high school and started university, she was still a splendid woman, the kind who turned heads in the street without even trying.

That afternoon I got home earlier than expected. I’d skipped my last class at university and went in with the idea of lying down for a while. She had already left for work after lunch, leaving the entire apartment to me. I went straight to the bathroom, still with my backpack over my shoulder, and then I saw them on the tiles.

I suppose she’d showered in a hurry, because she’d left her clothes strewn carelessly across the floor. Like a well-mannered son, I bent down to pick them up and put them in the basket. But when I lifted the pair of sweatpants, I noticed the panties tangled in one of the legs. They were white, plain cotton, and in the center they had a yellowish stain, right in the area where her body had rested for hours.

I don’t know what drove me. I brought my nose close almost without thinking, and the smell that flooded me marked me forever in that very instant. Sweat, dampness, something warm and intimate that had no name. The smell of a woman, of desire kept locked away. My erection came with a force I had never felt before, and my hand went to it purely by instinct.

It wasn’t the first time I’d touched myself, not by a long shot. But it was the first time urgency had mastered me like that. I masturbated clumsily and violently, my face burning with shame and excitement in equal measure, while I ran my tongue over the fabric and filled my lungs with that scent. I lasted only a few seconds before I came all over the bathroom floor, biting my lips so I wouldn’t moan out loud.

That afternoon I came two more times. The last time, directly onto the panties, adding my own trace to the stain that had driven me insane. I put everything back together carefully and nobody ever knew.

From then on I couldn’t stop. I learned the schedules, the habits, the oversights. No basket in that house was ever safe from me again. I came to recognize each garment by touch, to distinguish the days when she’d been in a hurry from the days when she’d come back tired and undressed slowly. Each one told a story that only I knew how to read.

I also learned to control the risk, to count the minutes, to erase any trace. That discipline became part of the pleasure. The waiting, the stealth, the heart racing while I heard the lock in the front door: all of it was part of the same game. And when I moved out on my own, I discovered that the world is full of baskets, of other people’s bathrooms, of women who leave their intimacy forgotten without imagining that someone turns it into an obsession.

***

The basket I had in front of me now belonged to Carla. Several friends had gathered in her apartment to celebrate her birthday, and I’d spent the whole night waiting for this moment. After the second drink, with people split between the living room and the kitchen, laughing loudly, each minding their own business, I knew my turn had come.

I’d spent the whole night watching her without it showing. Every time she leaned over to refill the glasses, every time she crossed her legs on the sofa, I filed the image away for later. She laughed, completely unaware, convinced she had just another friend among the people who had come to celebrate her day. That blind trust was, perhaps, the most exciting part of all.

“I’m going to the bathroom for a minute,” I said, standing up with the practiced ease of someone who’s done it a thousand times.

“The one at the end of the hall,” Carla replied, barely looking at me, busy pouring another round.

I lifted the lid slowly and memorized the exact position of every garment, as I always do. It’s a rule I never break: everything must be left exactly as it was, down to the last fold. I moved a pair of folded jeans that covered the rest aside with two fingers and held my breath.

Prize. A pair of black cotton panties, low-rise, with the back cut high, the kind that barely cover half the ass. I took them as if I were holding something sacred and brought them to my face. For the first time I smelled Carla’s intimacy, and the sensation drew a silent sigh from me.

It was an intense smell, dense, much stronger than I had imagined in all the times I’d glanced at her out of the corner of my eye. A small pale stain had dried right over the center seam, and my tongue flew there while my erection finally freed itself from the pressure of my pants. A couple of brown hairs had gotten caught between the fibers of the fabric. I had always suspected what she was like under her clothes, and those hairs were the confirmation.

They were big, generous panties, made to fit wide hips I’d been watching all night. The idea that that fabric had been pressed against her skin all day clouded my judgment. My heart was pounding hard against my chest.

I wrapped myself in them and began to masturbate desperately, swallowing every moan before it could escape my throat. One ear stayed on the door and the other on the hallway, alert to any footsteps, any voice coming too close. The danger of being walked in on didn’t stop me. The opposite: it pushed me faster toward the finish.

I felt the orgasm climb up from the depths of my belly and I braced myself. I placed the fabric right in front of me, the stain brushing the tip, and then I let go. I came like an animal, in spasms, spilling over the black cotton while I held onto the wall with my free hand so I wouldn’t lose my balance. It took several seconds to get my breath back, bent over myself, panting in silence. My legs were trembling and I had to sit for a moment on the edge of the tub so I wouldn’t fall.

When I came to, I brought the soaked panties back to my mouth to seek that other flavor I had also tasted for the first time on my mother’s clothes, a long time ago. My own semen’s, though that first time, of course, it hadn’t been mine.

I licked and cleaned off everything I could, leaving the fabric almost as I had found it. Then I put everything back where it belonged, arranged the garments in the exact position I had memorized, and lowered the basket lid again. I washed my hands, looked at myself in the mirror for a moment, and put on my usual calm smile, the one belonging to the trusted friend nobody looks at twice.

I stepped out into the hallway and went back to the living room as if nothing had happened. The noise was just the same, nobody had noticed my absence, nobody suspected what had just happened a few feet away from them. Carla smiled at me from the sofa and raised her glass toward me in a distracted toast. I returned the gesture without letting my voice shake, holding her gaze a second too long, already thinking about who would be next to give me her secret without even knowing it.

Maybe it was time to pay my mother a visit. After all, it had been far too long since I’d seen her.