Chapter 5: Rough Laundry Room Release
The hum of the industrial dryer was a constant, grinding bass note that vibrated up through the soles of Stevie’s sneakers. She was folding towels, a monotonous task that usually brought a meditative calm. Today, it felt like laying shroud after shroud. Her hands moved mechanically, pressing the warm terrycloth into sharp rectangles, stacking them into precarious towers on the metal cart.
The storage closet from two days ago was a ghost in her muscles. A low ache she felt when she sat, a phantom scent of bleach and sex that seemed to follow her. David had left for Schitt’s Creek’s only café with Alexis, a perfectly normal activity that felt, to Stevie, like a retreat. The silence he left behind was different now. It was charged, waiting.
She heard the lobby door swing open, then the familiar, light footsteps. David. She didn’t look up. She folded another towel, her fingers tightening on the fabric.
He drifted into the laundry room doorway, a silhouette against the brighter light of the hall. He was holding a small paper bag. “I brought you a caramel latte. It’s… an apology. For the…” He gestured vaguely, his fingers fluttering. “For the tone of the previous… encounter.”
She finally looked at him. He was trying. He’d changed into a soft, black sweater that looked expensive. His hair was perfect. He was performing normalcy, and it made something hot and ugly coil in her stomach.
“The ‘tone’?” she echoed, her voice flat. She dropped the towel she was holding. It landed in a heap on the floor.
He took a tentative step into the room.“Yes. The urgency was… disproportionate. I was…”
“You were using my cunt to exorcise your daddy issues,” she stated, the crudeness deliberate, watching him flinch. “It’s fine, David. We said no strings. That’s what that was. A stress-relief string.”
He set the latte down on the dryer. “It wasn’t fine.”
“Why? Because you didn’t feel good afterwards? Join the club.” Her own anger, banked since he’d left the closet, was surfacing. It wasn’t about the sex. It was about the whiplash—the raw intimacy of being someone’s vessel for chaos, and then the return to lattes and folded towels. The pretense was worse.
“I feel…” He searched for the word, his elegant hands sketching shapes in the humid air. “… adrift. And you’re my best friend. And I dragged you into my undertow. It was selfish. It was… crude.”
She let out a sharp, mirthless laugh. “Crude? You think that was crude?” The industrial dryer clicked, its cycle ending with a heavy thunk. The sudden quiet was deafening.
He stared at her, confused.
All the frustration of the week—the endless motel repairs, the nagging loneliness, the confusing cocktail of want and resentment he stirred in her—congealed into a single, hot point of focus. He was standing there, offering a fucking latte and vocabulary lessons. He wanted to process. She wanted to burn the whole delicate structure down.
She crossed the room in three quick strides. He started to say something, but she grabbed his wrist. Her grip was hard, purposeful.
“Stevie, what—”
She didn’t answer. She pulled him, not towards the lobby, not towards privacy, but towards the back corner of the laundry room, behind the giant, dormant bulk of the washing machines. It was a cramped, hidden space, lit only by the dim utility light, piled with a forgotten mountain of clean, unfolded bedsheets waiting for their turn.
She shoved him. He stumbled back with a surprised “oof,” landing sitting up in the soft, billowing sea of white cotton. The scent of cheap fabric softener rose around them.
He looked up at her, his eyes wide, his carefully styled composure shattered.
Stevie didn’t hesitate. She unbuttoned her jeans, shoved them and her underwear down her thighs, and knelt over him, straddling his lap. His erection was already straining against the fine wool of his trousers—a betraying, undeniable response to her aggression.
“You want crude?” she hissed, her face close to his. “Let me show you crude.”
Her hands fumbled with his belt, her fingers clumsy with adrenaline. She got it open, yanked his zipper down, and reached into his open fly. She pulled his cock out, hard and already leaking at the tip. She positioned herself above him, notching the broad head against her entrance. She was wet, had been since he walked in, a treachery of her own body.
She looked him dead in the eyes as she sank down onto him.
It was a slow, deliberate, punishing descent. She took every inch, her inner muscles stretching to accommodate him, a searing fullness that made her vision blur at the edges. She heard his sharp intake of breath, felt his hands fly up to grip her hips, his fingers digging into the denim of her jeans where they were bunched around her thighs.
Once he was fully sheathed inside her, she paused, letting them both feel the shocking totality of the connection. No condom. The thought flickered, distant and irrelevant. This was about now. This was about contact.
Then she moved.
She rode him with hard, grinding strokes, using her whole body. It wasn’t about pleasure, not exactly. It was about exertion, about sweat, about proof. Each upward stroke was a question; each downward slam was her answer. The sheets beneath them rustled wildly, becoming a tangled nest.
“This,” she gasped, the words punctuating her movements. “This is crude. Me using you because I’m pissed off. Because I’m confused. Because I don’t know what the fuck this is.”
David’s head fell back against the sheets, a moan torn from his throat. His attempts at control were gone. His hips bucked up to meet her, his grip on her hips brutal, helping her set a relentless, driving rhythm. The metal of a washing machine dug into her back, a counterpoint to the heat building between them.
“Fuck,” he choked out. “Stevie… Jesus Christ…”
“Shut up,” she breathed, leaning forward, her hands braced on his shoulders. She changed the angle, taking him deeper. A bolt of pure, white-hot sensation shot through her core. “Just… shut up and feel it.”
He did. His eyes were clenched shut, his face a mask of agonized pleasure. The intellectual was gone. This was all animal. His thrusts became more ragged, losing their rhythm. “I’m going to come,” he warned, his voice strangled. “I’m gonna… I can’t…”
“Do it,” she commanded, riding him harder, the slick sounds of their coupling loud in the tiny space. “Come inside me. Make a mess.”
He shuddered beneath her, a sharp gasp escaping his lips as his body began to tense, the warning becoming a physical tremor she could feel deep inside her own. His control snapped, his hips bucking up erratically as he drove into her with a final, desperate thrust.
She felt the hot, abrupt pulse of him beginning, the first surge against her inner walls.
And she pulled off.
Her movement was swift, almost violent, disengaging from him with a wet, sucking sound. She slid down his body, her knees hitting the rumpled sheets as she leaned forward. He cried out, a confused, ragged noise, as she took the length of him into her mouth just as the climax fully gripped him.
His hands flew to her head, his fingers tangling in her dark hair, not guiding but simply holding on as he came in hot, salty spurts down her throat. She swallowed, once, twice, the act feeling more intimate than anything they had done in the storage closet or here on the sheets. She took everything, until he was spent and softening, his body slumping back into the cotton with a broken sigh.
She released him, sitting back on her heels. A stray bead of cum traced a path from the corner of her mouth. She wiped it away with the back of her hand, the taste still coating her tongue. The silence was different now, hollowed out.
David stared at the ceiling, his chest heaving. His pants were still open, his cock now soft and wet against his thigh. He looked wrecked, his carefully constructed persona entirely dissolved into this raw, sweating reality.
"Why?" he finally whispered, the word barely audible over the hum of the machinery restarting its cycle nearby.
"I don't know," Stevie said, her own voice hoarse. She tugged her jeans back up, the denim cold and stiff against her damp skin. The anger had drained, leaving something else, something bleak and recognizable. It was just them again. A mess on a pile of clean laundry. "Because I could."
He turned his head to look at her, his eyes searching her face. "It's not no strings, Stevie."
She didn't answer. She stood, her legs unsteady, and reached a hand down to him. He looked at it for a long moment, then took it, letting her haul him up. His clothes were impossibly rumpled, his sweater askew. He fixed himself slowly, mechanically, not meeting her eyes.
"I have to check on Room 4," she said, because someone had to say something, had to reintroduce the mundane world. "The shower head's leaking."
He just nodded, picking a piece of lint from his sleeve with excessive focus. As she turned to leave the cramped space, he spoke again, his voice low. "The storage closet didn’t feel like this."
She paused, one hand on the cold metal of the washing machine. "I know."
"This felt real," he said, the admission landing softly in the humid, smelling room.
She walked out, leaving him standing there in the aftermath, surrounded by the scent of their bodies and clean linen. The caramel latte sat cold and forgotten on top of the dryer.