The Rigger and the Laundry Girl

The laundry room at St. Jude's ran hot all year round, and Andie had long ago stopped fighting it. She stood at the folding table with a stack of hospital gowns going soft under her hands, twenty-four years old and the supervisor of the steamiest basement in Lyon, and she was thinking about dinner.

The street noise didn't reach down here. What reached down here was the thump of the industrial dryers and the hiss of the mangle, and usually nothing else. So when the door banged open at ten minutes past nine, she nearly dropped a gown.

Johan stood in the doorway, twenty-six years old and grinning like he'd won something, holding his phone out in front of him like a warrant.

"What," said Andie, "are you doing here?"

"You texted me."

"I absolutely did not text you."

He crossed the room and held the phone under her nose. The screen showed a message from a number she didn't know. *Laundry room, 10pm. Wear something you don't mind getting wrinkled.*

She read it twice. Then she put down the gown and covered her eyes with one hand.

"Oh no!"

"Oh yes," said Johan. "I left Sergio covering my rigging checks. He thinks I've gone to buy a proper shirt. I thought you'd gone romantic on me. I wore my good shirt."

"You're wearing the shirt with the curry stain on it."

"The good shirt," he repeated.

Andie leaned against the folding table and started to laugh, the kind that comes up from the belly after a hot shift. "That's Scarlett. That has to be Scarlett. She works admissions, she's always trying to set me up with some doctor she keeps mentioning. She must have your number from... I don't even know. Some group chat. Some wrong tap."

"A doctor," said Johan, sitting down on a linen cart, which protested. "You turned me down for a doctor."

"She meant it for me, obviously. Wear something you don't mind getting wrinkled. That's her idea of flirtatious. She's thirty and she thinks she's in a film."

"She almost got me in a film mood. I took the tram."

"You took the tram in a curry shirt for a text meant for me from my coworker." Andie wiped her eyes. "I'm sorry. I'm so sorry. Stay anyway, I'm almost done with this load. Unless you have a doctor's appointment."

"Very funny."

"I thought so."

She went back to folding. He watched her from the cart, and the dryers thumped, and after a while he said, quieter, "I did wonder. For about ten seconds I wondered if you'd finally..."

"Finally what?"

"Finally stopped stalling."

Andie's hands slowed on a gown. They had been together two years now, her and Johan, ever since she'd walked back into his life at twenty-two after that handshake at a harvest festival when she was nineteen and he'd chickened out of everything else. Two years of dating, of dinners, of his cramped apartment with the thin walls, and not once past a kiss on the cheek. It had become a running joke between them. *Almost ready.* She'd said it so many times she'd almost stopped hearing it.

"Maybe I have been stalling," she said.

"Maybe I have too."

"You first chickened out five years ago."

"I did not chicken out. There was a hay bale situation."

"There was no hay bale situation. You got scared and I went home on the bus."

"The bus," said Johan. "The number four, I remember. I offered to walk you."

"And then you shook my hand."

"Did I?"

"You shook my hand, Johan. Like a dentist."

He groaned and lay back on the linen cart, which protested again. "I've regretted the handshake for five years. Every day. Some days twice."

Andie looked at him lying there among the clean towels, his phone still glowing in his hand, his good shirt with the curry stain, and something in her chest went tired and warm at the same time.

"You know what I realized?" she said. "Standing down here folding four hundred gowns a night. There's never going to be a perfect moment. I kept waiting for one. The right dinner, the right weekend, the right everything. And there's always a shift, or a load of surgical linens, or my feet hurt, or you're mid-rigging inspection."

"So what are you saying?"

"I'm saying I'm tired of waiting for the perfect moment." She set down the last gown. "I'm saying a wrong number text on a Tuesday might be as close as the universe ever gets."

Johan sat up slowly. The cart creaked.

"Here?" he said. "Now?"

"Here is very hot and smells like industrial soap, and the door doesn't lock properly."

"That's two strikes."

"But," said Andie, and she came around the table and stood in front of him, "nobody is coming in at ten past nine on a Tuesday, and I'm done being almost ready."

He looked up at her, and for a second he was nineteen again at the harvest festival, holding a handshake he didn't want to give.

"Are you asking me?" he said.

"I'm asking you."

"Yes," he said. "Obviously yes. God, yes. I just... wow. Okay. Give me a second, I rehearsed a much smoother version of this in my head on the tram and it's completely gone."

"We have time," said Andie. "I locked the outer door behind the last cart. We have all the time we waited."

He dug into his backpack, which he had brought for reasons he now couldn't fully explain, and pulled out a hot water bottle in a knitted cover. Blue, with a sheep on it.

"What is that?" said Andie.

"A gift. I saw it at the market on Sunday and thought of you. Down here with all the steam and the cold floors, I figured your hands get cold. It was three euros. It has a sheep on it."

"You brought me a hot water bottle to a secret tryst."

"To a wrong number tryst. It's different. Less pressure on the gift."

Andie took it and turned it over in her hands. The sheep had one eye bigger than the other. "It's the stupidest thing anyone has ever given me."

"Thank you."

"I love it." She held it against her stomach through her work apron. "My hands are always freezing down here. Sergio didn't put you up to this?"

"Sergio doesn't know I'm here. Sergio thinks I've gone to buy a proper shirt."

"You own one shirt without a stain?"

"It's in the wash."

She laughed again and set the bottle on the folding table next to the pile of gowns. Then she walked to the outer door, the one she'd locked behind the last cart, and tried the handle. It rattled the way it always did, that half-lock that never quite caught, and she frowned at it and pushed it with her hip until something clicked deeper in the frame.

"There," she said. "Now it locks properly. It just needed a hip."

"You've worked here three years and you've never done that before."

"I've never needed it to lock properly before." She came back toward him, wiping her hands on her apron, and stopped an arm's length away. The dryers thumped. Somewhere above them a trolley rolled across the floor of the ward, and the street noise from outside was completely gone, swallowed by the machines.

"So," she said.

"So."

"I'm nervous," she said. "I want you to know that. I'm twenty-four years old and I've been dating the same patient, careful man for two years, and I'm nervous in my own laundry room."

"You're the supervisor of this laundry room."

"That's what makes it worse. I have keys to this room. Authority." She sat down next to him on the cart, which groaned under both of them, and their shoulders touched. "Johan. Can I tell you something without you making it a joke?"

"I'll try."

"Five years ago, at the festival, when you shook my hand instead of... whatever else. I went home on the number four and I was so angry. And then about two stops later I started laughing, because you looked so terrified. You looked like a man being handed a live pigeon." She turned to look at him. "I liked you even more after that. Isn't that stupid?"

"A little."

"I know."

"It's not stupid," he said. "I've been terrified for two years, if that helps. Every time it got close I found a reason. The apartment walls are thin, Sergio's always home. My back hurts from rigging. Once I think I blamed the tram schedule."

"The tram schedule."

"There was a strike that week. It felt relevant."

Andie reached over and took his hand. Deliberately, watching her own fingers do it. Not a handshake. She laced her fingers through his and held on, and her hand was warm from the fold of the gowns, not cold at all, and he looked at their hands like they belonged to other people.

"Okay," he said. "Okay. I'm going to say something and then I'd like to kiss you, if that's still on the table."

"It's been on the table for five years, Johan."

"I love you. I've loved you since roughly the second stop of the number four. And I'm not going to chicken out tonight. Whatever happens, however badly I do, I'm not going to stop and find a reason." He swallowed. "That's the speech. It was better on the tram."

"It was fine," she said, and her voice had gone a bit rough. "Come here."

He leaned in, and she met him halfway, and it was not a handshake. It was slow and it lasted, and she made a small sound against his mouth and pulled him closer by the front of the curry shirt, and the linen cart shifted under them and neither of them cared. When they finally broke apart she was breathing hard and grinning.

"Two years of that we've been wasting," she said.

"We could have been doing that this whole time."

"Five years, if you count from the handshake."

"Don't count from the handshake."

She stood up and pulled him up by both hands. Then, instead of leading him anywhere, she started untying her apron, and stopped halfway and looked at him.

"Wait. Here? Actually here? On the floor of my workplace?" She looked around at the machines, the carts, the four hundred gowns. "I talked a big talk five minutes ago."

"We can go to my place. The tram's still running."

"The tram." She snorted. "No. No, I meant it. Here. I just wanted to say it out loud once so it's real. Besides, if we go to your apartment Sergio will be home, and the walls are thin, and I refuse to spend our first time being quiet for Sergio."

"He'd be delighted for us."

"He'd make it weird. He'd congratulate us at breakfast. There would be a toast." She finished untying the apron and hung it on the hook by the sink, and stood there in her work trousers and her t-shirt with the hospital logo half washed off it, and she looked, he thought, exactly like herself, which was the whole point of everything.

"There's a cot in the back office," she said. "For night shifts. It's not romantic. It's a cot."

"I do rope and steel beams for a living. I have slept on a coil of rope in a tent. A cot is luxury."

"You sleep on rope?"

"Once. It was a long show load-in. Don't tell Sergio, he'll put it in my performance review."

She led him past the folding table, past the shelves of stacked sheets, into the little back office with its desk and its flickering fluorescent tube and its narrow camp cot with a blanket folded at the foot. It smelled faintly of her, of the hand cream she used, under the industrial soap. She flipped the light off at the wall and on again, and it buzzed and settled.

"This is it," she said. "The perfect moment. It's a cot in a basement."

"It's the best cot in Lyon."

She sat down on the edge of it and pulled him down beside her, and kissed him again, longer, and when she pulled back she kept her forehead against his.

"Johan."

"Yes!"

"Touch me. Please. I've been waiting two years and I'd like to stop narrating it now."

"I can do that," he said, and his hand found the hem of her t-shirt, and she raised her arms without being asked twice.

The fluorescent light buzzed. The dryers thumped on the other side of the wall, steady as a heartbeat, and the cot creaked under them like it was apologizing for every noise it made. She laughed once when her elbow caught the metal frame, and then stopped laughing when his mouth found her throat.

He took his time. He had waited two years and apparently that had taught him something, because he went slow, and she kept her hands in his hair and told him, in a voice that kept breaking, things she'd never said out loud in this basement. The light flickered once, hard, and they both froze and then dissolved into giggles, and the giggles turned into something else again.

"Off," she said, tugging at his shirt, and he sat up and pulled the curry shirt over his head and dropped it on the floor