Chapter 8: The Underwear Loan
The walk back to the dorm was a silent, shuffling pilgrimage. Every step Scott took made the soaked fabric of his shorts chafe against his thighs with a soft, damp sound. The cool night air, which had been a relief earlier, now felt biting against the wet denim, raising goosebumps on his skin. The smell was a constant, intimate companion, a personal cloud of humiliation that he prayed wouldn’t drift towards any passing students. Thankfully, the paths were empty.
Stiles walked beside him, the basketball tucked under his arm. He wasn’t laughing anymore. The initial hysteria had faded into a watchful, almost protective silence. His eyes kept darting towards Scott, not with judgment, but with a keen awareness of his friend’s discomfort. Scott could feel the weight of that gaze, and strangely, it didn’t make it worse. It made it shared.
They reached their dorm building, a concrete slab that smelled perpetually of industrial cleaner and burnt popcorn. The fluorescent lights in the lobby were brutally bright, and Scott kept his head down, focusing on the scuffed linoleum as they made for the stairs, avoiding the creak of the elevator that might draw attention.
Their room was a snapshot of their lives in chaos. The single desk lamp was on, casting a sickly yellow puddle of light over a landslide of textbooks—The Catcher in the Rye splayed open to a dog-eared page, Sun Tzu’s The Art of War sporting a sticky brown coffee ring like a battle scar. A half-empty can of Red Bull sat sweating onto a psychology text next to a ravaged bag of sour gummy worms. The air was thick with the ghosts of a dozen microwave pizzas and something faintly metallic, maybe from the old radiator.
Stiles tossed his keys onto his cluttered desk with a clatter and dropped the basketball into a corner, where it settled against a pile of dirty laundry. He didn’t turn on the overhead light. The dimness felt merciful.
“Home sweet biohazard,” Stiles muttered, finally breaking the silence. He kicked off his sneakers, which hit the wall with two dull thuds.
Scott just stood just inside the closed door, feeling immensely out of place in his own space. He was the contaminant. The evidence of their stupidity was literally dripping from him. He shifted, and the audible squelch made Stiles wince in sympathy.
“You should… you know. Get out of those,” Stiles said, gesturing vaguely at Scott’s lower half. “Like, immediately. I think my sinuses are clearing just from proximity.”
“Yeah,” Scott said, the word a dry croak. He moved stiffly to his dresser, the wet hem of his shorts clinging to the backs of his thighs. The simple act of walking across the room felt like a performance. He pulled open the top drawer. It was a jumble of socks. He opened the second. T-shirts, mostly folded. The third drawer, where his boxers and briefs should have been, held a single, lonely pair of athletic socks and a tangle of charging cables.
He stared into the empty space for a long moment, reality dawning with a fresh wave of heat to his face. Laundry day had been two days ago. He’d meant to go. He’d gotten distracted. By practice, by studying, by the strange, secret thoughts that had started curling at the edges of his mind since the diner conversation.
“Uh, Stiles?” he said, not turning around. His voice was small.
“Yeah?”
“I kind of… don’t have any clean boxers.”
A beat of silence. Then a snort. “Dude. You are a disaster zone tonight.”
Scott closed the drawer softly. He leaned his forehead against the cool wood of the dresser. The damp front of his shorts pressed uncomfortably against the drawer knob. “I know. Please, Stiles. I’m desperate.” The admission, following everything else, felt like the final surrender.
He heard the rustle of fabric, the scrape of a chair. Stiles sighed, a long, theatrical sound. “You owe me. Like, a life debt. A ‘I will drive you to Taco Bell at 3 AM for a year’ debt.”
“Anything,” Scott said, meaning it.
He heard Stiles cross the room to his own dresser, the one with the “Nuclear Launch Codes” sticky note plastered crookedly on the front. The drawer screeched open on unoiled rollers. There was the sound of rummaging—fabric shifting, something crinkling.
“Catch,” Stiles said.
Scott turned just as a ball of brightly colored fabric sailed towards his face. He caught it against his chest instinctively. Unfurling it, he saw Pikachu’s grinning yellow face staring up at him from a field of electric blue. Pokémon boxers. They were soft, well-worn cotton.
A reluctant, grateful smile tugged at his lips. “Thanks, man.”
“Don’t say I never gave you anything,” Stiles said, his back still turned as he continued to root in his drawer. “Those have seen me through many a tense exam. Consider them lucky.”
Scott clutched the boxers, a clean, dry talisman. He was about to head to the bathroom when the sound stopped him. It wasn’t the rustle of cotton. It was a distinct, soft crinkle. A low-volume plastic rustle he recognized.
He looked over.
Stiles was pulling something out of the drawer. It was thick, padded, and white. The overhead light from the hallway leaking under their door caught the slight sheen of its plastic backing. It was a diaper. A disposable brief, adult-sized. Stiles held it casually by one tape panel, letting it unfurl slightly.
Scott’s eyebrows shot up. His breath hitched.
Stiles turned, caught Scott’s frozen stare. He didn’t flinch. He didn’t shove it back in the drawer. He just shrugged, the movement easy, as if he were holding a spare pack of batteries. “What?” he said, his voice carefully neutral. “Remember how I was wearing a pair on the bus ride? And how they, you know, saved my life from eternal bus-seat humiliation?” He gave the diaper a little shake, making it crinkle again. The sound was absurdly loud in the quiet room. “Well, sometimes I need to wear them at night too. Doctor’s orders, sort of. Overactive bladder plus sleeping like the dead equals… precautions.”
Scott stared. His mind didn’t flash back so much as plunge into it. The diner. The sticky vinyl booth. His own voice, low and shaking with a confession he hadn’t even fully understood. ‘I think about it sometimes. What it would be like. Not to have to hold it.’ And Stiles, not laughing, just nodding. ‘Yeah. I get that.’
Stiles was watching him, his sharp eyes missing nothing. He saw the direction of Scott’s gaze, the arrested motion of his body, the way he was still clutching the Pikachu boxers like a shield. A slow, knowing smile spread across Stiles’s face. It wasn’t mocking. It was wide open, an invitation.
“Hey,” Stiles said, his voice dropping into that conspiratorial zone they’d occupied on the court. He held the diaper out, offering it. “I won’t judge you. Not even a little. You said you were curious, right?”
The offer hung in the air between them, heavy and immense. It sucked all the sound out of the room. Scott could hear the frantic hammer of his own heart, the rush of blood in his ears. His face burned, a fire that spread from his cheeks down his neck. But he didn’t look away.
He thought of the race car briefs, hidden then revealed. He thought of the wet, dark stain spreading on the asphalt, the feeling of total, shocking release. He thought of the way Stiles had watched him—not with disgust, but with a focused, unwavering attention that had somehow sanctified the humiliation, made it a shared thing, a secret ritual.
This was a different door. A quieter one. Not a public forfeit, but a private experiment. A chance to explore the curiosity that had been gnawing at him, that had somehow led him here, to this moment, standing in piss-soaked pants in his best friend’s presence.
His fingers twitched at his sides. The soft cotton of the Pokémon boxers felt suddenly insignificant.
“I…” he started. His voice cracked. He stopped, swallowed. The word ‘no’ formed and dissolved. It wasn’t true.
Slowly, as if moving through deep water, he reached out. His fingertips brushed the soft, quilted plastic of the diaper’s front panel. He took it from Stiles’s hand.
It was heavier than he expected. The padding was thick, yielding. The plastic backing was cool and smooth. He could feel the gathers at the legs, the shape of it. It was an object of profound utility, and now, in his hands, it felt like the most transgressive thing he’d ever held.
“Thanks,” he whispered, the word barely audible.
Stiles’s smile softened into something gentler. “No problem, dude.” He leaned back against his dresser, crossing his arms. The question that came next was delivered with a casualness that was utterly deliberate. “Want me to help you put it on?”
Scott’s head snapped up, his eyes wide. “No!” The word burst out of him, too loud. He took a breath, lowering his voice. “I mean… I’ll figure it out.” He clutched the diaper to his chest, the crinkle of plastic loud against his damp t-shirt. The thought of Stiles… helping. Taping it. The intimacy of that was a cliff edge he wasn’t ready to peer over.
Stiles held up his hands in surrender. “Alright, alright. Your show. Don’t take too long, though. I still have to… you know.” He gestured to his own groin, then back to the open drawer. “Take my own precautions.”
Scott nodded, a jerky, mechanical motion. “Yeah. Okay. Be right back.”
He turned, the diaper a strange, secret weight in one hand, the cartoon boxers in the other. He pushed into their small, dingy bathroom and closed the door behind him. The click of the latch was final.
The click of the latch was final.
Scott stood with his back against the door, listening. The old dorm plumbing groaned in the walls. From the other side of the plywood-thin door, he heard the distant screech of Stiles’s dresser drawer, another soft crinkle, then the familiar thump of Stiles collapsing onto his bed. Normal sounds. Life moving on. He was in a pocket of suspended time.
He let out a breath he hadn’t realized he was holding. The small bathroom was oppressive, lit by a single harsh bulb above a medicine cabinet speckled with rust. The sink was littered with Stiles’s styling putty and his own toothpaste splatters. The shower curtain, a mildewed blue, hung limply.
He placed the clean Pokémon boxers and the pristine, crinkling diaper carefully on the closed lid of the toilet. The diaper seemed to dominate the space, a stark white monument to his decision.
His own clothes felt like a contaminated second skin. He peeled his damp t-shirt over his head, the fabric releasing a waft of sweat and the sharper, more pungent note of dried urine. He tossed it into the corner on top of his gym bag. His fingers went to the button of his shorts, fumbling with the wet denim. He shimmied out of them, the soaked lining clinging to his thighs before letting go with a soft, damp sound. They joined the shirt in a heap.
Now he stood in only his briefs. The race car pair. He turned to face the medicine cabinet mirror, its surface streaked with old water spots.
The underwear was a ruin. The once-vibrant red and blue design was now a blurred, darkened map of shame. A deep, shadowed grey soaked the entire front, saturating the fabric so completely that the white of the cartoon race cars was now a dingy yellow-brown. The moisture had wicked up the back, creating a damp, spreading halo. The elastic waistband was the only part that had escaped, a stark, dry red line cutting across his hips, emphasizing everything below it. The fabric sagged heavily, weighed down, the outline of him clear and pathetic within the wet cotton. He looked exhausted, his hair mussed, his face still flushed from the walk of shame. The boy in the mirror was a stranger, standing in soiled underwear, about to do something utterly inexplicable.
He hooked his thumbs into the sides of the briefs. The wet cotton resisted for a second before peeling away from his skin with a cold, tacky pull. He stepped out of them, holding the sopping garment by the waistband. The smell intensified, concentrated—a sharp, ammoniac, deeply human reek. It was the scent of the court, of loss, of his own body betraying him in front of his best friend.
Against every rational judgment, a morbid, compulsive curiosity took over. He lifted the damp wad of cotton slowly toward his face. He closed his eyes, inhaled briefly, and immediately jerked his head back.
It reeked. Acrid and pungent, it was unmistakably, overwhelmingly pee. A hot, childish smell that carried the entire humiliating narrative of the last hour.
A soft, disbelieving chuckle escaped him. He stood there, naked in the chilly bathroom, laughing quietly at his own stupidity. He’d sniffed his own pissed-in underwear. After everything. The absurdity was perfect. It broke the last of the tension coiling in his stomach. He dropped the briefs onto the pile with the shorts, a final dismissal.
The shower was a ritual cleansing. He turned the water as hot as he could stand, letting it scald his skin pink. He scrubbed with his generic body wash, lathering twice, three times, focusing on his thighs and abdomen as if he could wash away the memory of the feeling along with the scent. The steam filled the room, fogging the mirror, obscuring the stranger. For ten minutes, he was just Scott McCall, getting clean. Normal.
He shut off the water. The silence rushed back in, broken only by the drip from the showerhead onto the tub. He toweled off vigorously, the rough cotton bringing a flush back to his skin. He wiped a clear circle on the fogged mirror.
There he was again. Clean. Dry. Himself.
And there, on the edge of the sink where he’d moved it, was the diaper.
It sat, innocuous and yet profoundly significant, next to his toothpaste. The Pikachu boxers lay beside it, a cheerful, normative alternative. A fork in the road, laid out on porcelain.
He pulled on the boxers first. A test. A return to baseline. They were soft, familiar. They felt like nothing. Like any other day. He stood for a moment, considering stopping. He could walk out right now. The bet was fulfilled. He was clean. It was over.
But the curiosity wasn’t. It was a live wire, buzzing softly in the base of his skull. You said you were curious, right?
He took the boxers back off, folding them neatly and setting them aside. He picked up the diaper. It was surprisingly soft. The quilted padding was thick and pillowy under his fingers. He turned it around, figured out the front from the back by the tape panels. He unfolded it, the crinkle echoing in the tiled room.
He stepped into it, one foot at a time, pulling it up his clean, dry legs. The padding settled against him, a foreign, encompassing presence. It was cool at first, then quickly warmed to his skin. He pulled the front up between his legs, aligning it. The feeling was… immense. It was not like underwear. It was a cushion, a barrier, a container. The plastic backing was smooth against his fingertips as he fumbled with the tapes.
The first tape he placed too high, the second too loose. He peeled them off with a ripping sound, the adhesive still strong. Second try. He pulled the left side snug across his hip, securing the tape. Then the right. It was tighter, more secure. He adjusted, making sure the leg gathers were sitting right. He looked down. The bulky, padded front protruded slightly, a soft white curve. He turned to see his profile in the mirror. It was blatant. Obvious. A distinct, padded silhouette he’d only ever seen on toddlers or in late-night, shame-fueled online glances.
He pressed his hands against the front. The padding gave way, then sprung back. It was incredibly soft. A profound sense of security, of permission, washed over him. It was the antithesis of the desperate, agonizing clutch in his bladder on the bus, the opposite of the frantic loss of control on the court. This was an answer to a question he’d been afraid to ask.
A jolt, electric and entirely inappropriate, shot through him. His body, confused by the novel sensations, responded. He felt himself stirring, hardening against the soft, enveloping padding. Heat flooded his face again, but it was a different heat—mingled shame and a sharp, shocking thrill. He pressed the heel of his hand against himself, through the thick diaper, squeezing slightly. The pressure was diffuse, muffled by the layers, but intensely stimulating. A soft groan caught in his throat.
No. Stop.
He snatched his hand away, clenching his fists at his sides. He took deep, slow breaths, forcing his heart rate down. This wasn’t about that. It couldn’t be. Stiles couldn’t know. Stiles could never, ever know how this felt, how part of him immediately, instinctively loved the weight of it, the secret promise of it. This was just curiosity. An experiment. A one-time thing.
The urgency faded, leaving a buzzing aftermath in his veins. He looked at himself again, now with a critical eye. The diaper was unmistakable. If he walked out like this, Stiles would see the bulk, the outline through his pajama pants. It would be a confession louder than words.
Feeling self-conscious, but also practical, he picked up the Pokémon boxers. He stepped into them and pulled them up over the diaper. The elastic waistband stretched to accommodate the extra bulk. The soft cotton settled over the plastic backing. He looked in the mirror. Better. The boxers disguised the most obvious lines, though if you looked closely, the puffiness was still there, the way the fabric hung differently. But it was a shield. A plausible deniability layer between him and the world, between this secret Scott and his best friend.
He gathered his soiled clothes from the floor, bundling them tightly to contain the smell, and opened the bathroom door.
The dorm room air, still smelling of ramen and dust, hit him. Stiles was on his bed, back against the wall, laptop open but his eyes on his phone. He was wearing a thin pair of grey sweatpants and a faded tee. He glanced up as Scott emerged.
For a suspended second, Scott felt utterly transparent. He was sure the crinkle was deafening, that the outline was a glaring neon sign.
“All good in there?” Stiles asked, his voice carefully neutral. His eyes flicked over Scott, taking in the Pokémon boxers, the clean t-shirt, the bundle of clothes in his arms. Scott saw his nostrils flare, just a tiny bit. The werewolf senses. He’d smell the clean soap, the toothpaste. Would he smell the new, sterile scent of the diaper’s padding? The plastic?
“Yeah,” Scott said, his voice only slightly strained. “All good.” He walked to his hamper, stuffed the bundle deep inside, and closed the lid. “Thanks for the, uh, loaners.”
“Don’t mention it,” Stiles said, returning his gaze to his phone. But the silence wasn’t empty. It was charged, waiting. “So. Feel different?”
Scott froze, one hand on the hamper lid. “What?”
“You know.” Stiles shrugged, not looking up. “After. On the court. Does it feel… I don’t know. Weird? To have done that?”
Scott walked to his own bed and sat down on the edge. The diaper compressed beneath him, a soft, rustling presence. He was hyper-aware of the sound, but Stiles gave no reaction. “Yeah,” Scott said, honestly. “It feels weird. But also… I don’t know. Done. Like a weight off.”
“Literally,” Stiles said, a grin finally breaking through. It was their normal dynamic, a lifeline.
Scott managed a weak smile back. “Literally.”
Stiles put his phone down. “Look, man. About the… other thing.” He gestured vaguely toward the bathroom. “It’s cool. Seriously. We all have our shit. My shit just happens to involve bulk discounts on absorbent polymers.”
Scott chuckled, the tension in his shoulders easing a fraction. “It’s just… new.”
“I bet.” Stiles watched him for another moment. “You don’t have to sleep in them, you know. The boxers are fine. I was just… putting the offer out there.”
“I know,” Scott said quickly. Too quickly. He forced himself to slow down. “I think I’ll… keep them on. For tonight. Just to see.”
“Okay,” Stiles said, simple and accepting. He went back to his phone. “Your funeral if you wake up feeling like you’re sleeping in a cloud made of crinkly space blanket. It’s an acquired sensation.”
They lapsed into a more comfortable quiet. Scott pulled back his covers and slid into bed. The feeling was extraordinary. The bulk of the diaper pressed between him and the mattress, a constant, snug awareness. The plastic backing made a soft sound against his sheets as he shifted. He lay on his back, staring at the ceiling, listening to Stiles tap on his laptop keys.
Every minor sound from his own body was amplified in his mind. The rustle when he turned onto his side. The way the padding settled. He was terrified to move, terrified to give himself away, yet simultaneously basking in the secret comfort of it. The memory of the court—the sheer, desperate relief—was now wrapped in this soft, secure package. It was a solved equation. A secret power.
“You’re thinking too loud,” Stiles muttered from the other bed.
“Can’t help it,” Scott whispered.
“Try. Some of us are attempting to cultivate a healthy sleep denial habit over here.”
Scott closed his eyes. The blush returned, warm in the dark. He was wearing a diaper. His best friend, three feet away, knew, and didn’t care. The world hadn’t ended. The weird, humming curiosity was quiet, satisfied. For now.
He drifted, the unique sensation both alien and deeply calming, a boundary between him and the world that felt, for the first time in a long time, perfectly, quietly safe. The last thing he heard before sleep was the faint, crinkling echo of his own careful turn, and the soft, even sound of Stiles breathing in the dark.