What I Found in the Building’s Laundry Room

Marina came from a place where silence was a form of manners and the mist in the valleys seemed to seep right under the skin. She had grown up in a mountain village, among damp meadows and Sunday Mass, with a family as closed off as the wooden shutters of their house. For her, sex was a blurred concept, something murky that happened to other people. At school, while her classmates whispered about kisses and hands under skirts, she hid behind Biology textbooks, quickly smothering a strange heat that sometimes rose between her legs and that she mistook for guilt.

Everything went wrong the day she moved to Valencia to study. The city smelled different: of overheated asphalt, orange blossom, and a freedom that made her dizzy. It was one afternoon in March, on a terrace in the Carmen district, that the veil was torn away. Her new friend Sofía talked about her orgasms, about boys’ skin, about the city’s long, wet nights, with such natural ease that Marina didn’t know what to do with her hands.

—You’ve never done anything alone? —Sofía asked her, stirring the ice in her glass—. Really? Not even once?

Marina shook her head, red to the tips of her ears. Sofía laughed, but not mockingly—more with a kind of conspiratorial tenderness—and kept talking: about what it felt like to lose control, about the way the body speeds up when you dare to touch where you’ve never touched before. Every word fell on Marina like a spark on dry straw.

That night she went back to the shared flat with one fixed idea driven into the center of her chest. She couldn’t stop thinking about the chill of her childhood, about all those years of closed shutters, about the number of things she had forbidden herself without even knowing what she was denying herself.

***

She locked herself in her room. Her heart was beating with a force she didn’t recognize. She undressed in front of the wardrobe mirror and, for the first time, really looked at herself: the firm breasts, the broad hips, the brown body hair. She no longer saw them like an anatomy chart, but as something that was meant to do something. Her fingers lowered, trembling. It was almost an accident, a slightly more insistent caress, a circular pressure on that spot she had never dared to explore deeply.

When the first orgasm came, it wasn’t a sigh. It was a shudder that bent her over the mattress, smothering a cry against the pillow while a current ran through her body from her feet to the nape of her neck. She felt cheated. How have I been able to live twenty years without this? That night, with no witnesses, something broke in her forever.

From then on she lived split in two. At university she was still the diligent, quiet student with the lowered gaze. But one night a week she became another woman. She wore short skirts with nothing underneath and slipped into the shadows of the gardens along the old riverbed, seeking that dangerous adrenaline of knowing she was being watched, of running into a stranger who looked at her as if he could devour her. It never went beyond looks. That was enough for her: the risk, the possibility.

***

That Saturday, though, had been a disappointment. She walked along the paths under the city’s sticky humidity and only crossed paths with a couple of older men who watched her from a bench without stirring anything in her beyond a cold, almost scientific curiosity. She returned to the building with her skin burning and a knot of need she didn’t know how to untie.

She went down to the laundry room, that small, dark little cubby in the building’s lower level, to collect the washing she had left in the morning. The hum of a washing machine was the only sound. The bulb flickered. When she went in, she saw a basket on the tiled bench that wasn’t hers. She recognized the gray sweatshirt immediately, huge, size XXL: it was Bruno’s, the guy from the second floor.

She had always seen him as a kid. Polite, shy, one of those who say hello in a thread of a voice in the elevator and look down. A few months earlier he had started going to the gym, and it showed: broader shoulders, a tighter T-shirt. But to her he was still a boy.

And then, as she came closer to the basket, something changed.

The smell hit her before she could think. It wasn’t the stale reek of strangers in the park. It was an aroma of clean sweat, young skin, warm cotton, and something deeper that went straight to the pit of her stomach. Marina stood still, holding her breath.

She looked at the door. No one. Just the hum and the trembling light. For a moment she thought about leaving, about going back upstairs to her room and forgetting all of it. But her body had already made the decision for her, just like that first night in front of the mirror.

She plunged her hand into Bruno’s clothes with an urgency that frightened her. Her fingers found a pair of gray cotton briefs, still damp from training. She pulled them out slowly, as if she might burn herself. She knew it was wrong. She knew that if anyone came down at that moment there would be no possible excuse. And precisely because of that, she couldn’t stop.

She brought them to her face and closed her eyes. She inhaled deeply. They smelled like him, like his skin, like that sweet-salty scent a young body gives off after exercise. A sharp stab went through her body all at once.

—God... —she whispered into the fabric.

The garment still held its shape, the heat of having been pressed against his body for hours. Marina imagined him running on the treadmill, lifting weights, sweating, with not the slightest idea of what that fabric was about to provoke. She couldn’t help it. She leaned back against the cold laundry-room wall and, with her free hand, pulled up her skirt. Like every night she went out, she wasn’t wearing anything underneath.

Her fingers found a wetness that even surprised her. She was so hot that the first touch tore a gasp from her. She began to rub herself, first slowly, gauging the room’s silence, then with a fury she didn’t know she had. She pressed Bruno’s briefs against her sex, rubbing the cotton over the exact spot, imagining it wasn’t fabric brushing her but him. The contrast between the rough weave of the garment and her own softness drove her mad.

She slipped two fingers inside while pressing the fabric against her lips with her other hand. She pictured Bruno coming through the door, finding her like that, with her skirt up and her breathing broken. She imagined him dropping his backpack, pinning her against the vibrating washing machine, suddenly losing all that shy good-boy timidity. She imagined his weight, his mouth, his clumsy, hungry way of claiming her.

—Come here... —she moaned under her breath, unable to keep completely quiet—. Come...

The smell of the garment mixed with her own body made something thick, almost narcotic, build inside her and push her farther and farther. Her fingers moved at a frantic pace, in and out, while her hips sought more pressure against her own hand. Her legs started to tremble. She felt the cold tile against her back and her heart battering her ribs.

She was close. She clenched her teeth, threw her head back against the wall, and let the current sweep her away. The orgasm shook her in a series of spasms that left her frozen in place, biting her lip so she wouldn’t scream, with the briefs still pressed against her mouth. It took her several seconds to hear the washing machine’s hum again.

***

When the pleasure began to ebb, she opened her eyes slowly. Reality came back like a splash of cold water: she was in the shared laundry room, hair disheveled, a neighbor’s underwear in her hands and her knees trembling. A burning shame climbed up her neck. She dropped the briefs into the basket and tried to put them back as they were, with absurd care, as if that could erase what she had just done.

And then, when she looked down, she saw it.

On the floor, beside the bench, were her own white panties with the pink bow, the ones that had fallen out of the pile when she rushed in. She picked them up. She squeezed them in her fist. She looked at them, still breathing hard.

A perverse idea came to her, one of those ideas she wouldn’t have dared think in another life. Bruno would come down to collect his clothes at some point during the night. He would find his basket exactly where she had left it. And if, among his T-shirts and his briefs, there appeared a garment that wasn’t his, with a pink bow and a scent he couldn’t quite identify... what would he think? Would he return it, asking around the building? Or would he keep it, intrigued, without knowing who it belonged to?

Marina smiled in the half-light. A smile the mountain-village woman would never have recognized as her own.

She folded the panties carefully and slipped them among Bruno’s clean clothes, right at the bottom, where it would take him a while to find them. Then she gathered her own laundry, smoothed her skirt, and went up the stairs two at a time, heart racing and a nervous laugh stuck in her throat.

That night she didn’t sleep. Every time a sound moved through the building’s pipes, she imagined Bruno opening the basket, finding the pink bow, frowning. And every time she imagined it, she felt that current between her legs again, that mix of fear and desire that had become the only thing that truly made her feel awake.

The next morning, in the elevator, she ran into him. Bruno greeted her in his usual thread of a voice, looking down, his cheeks a little flushed. But this time, before the doors closed, he lifted his eyes for a second and looked at her. Just one second. Enough for Marina to understand that the game, whatever that thing was, had just begun.