Chapter Text
Two AM carries a different kind of quiet, the sort that only belongs to people still awake — whispers meant for no one else, the city settling into its post-midnight embrace. December rain descends upon the streets, cold enough to sting, smearing the streetlights into stretching, bleeding columns of Christmas tones.
Round the block, in every second window, hang threads of colored lights, blurred behind the beaded panes to opaque blots of red and green. On one of the corners, the electric pink from the liquor store scatters across wet asphalt, backlit against the dark, almost dreamlike in the hour when everything else has gone still. It all sits inside Peter's viewfinder, edges squared off, waiting. His finger settles on the shutter.
Then he lowers the camera. He isn't sure why.
Droplets of water plop against the pavement with every step he takes, the cool metal of the camera's lens housing knocking against his sternum in rhythm. He hasn't pressed the shutter on anything worthwhile for longer than he can remember. By the time he nears the laundromat, he's entirely soaked through.
It's the one lit store in an otherwise dark stretch of the block, its one working bank of fluorescent lights throwing a pale glare onto the sidewalk. Inside, a string of half-dead Christmas lights frames the glass panels, fogged at the corners.
A tired chime rings as he pushes the door open. Heat blankets him first — dense, damp warmth of a room full of dryers, laundry detergent, and fabric softener. His fingers begin to thaw, a hot tingle blossoming across the numbness, like a splotch of ink.
No one's around. The faint carol of Christmas Time Is Here crackles over the speakers, and a knee-high plastic Christmas tree sits in the far corner across the entrance. The hum of the one working light and everything else left switched on rests just above the drumming of rain against the glass panels out front, while the empty dryers lining the central aisles sit quiet.
He stays standing for a few moments, water still dripping onto the doormat, and glances at the clock over the counter. Ten to two. No reasonable person would show up anytime soon.
He peels off both his soaked jacket and the damp shirt clinging to his skin underneath, tosses both into an empty dryer with a few quarters, and hoists himself onto the folding table across from his tumbling clothes, ignoring the sign that warns against it. For a few moments he busies himself thumbing the lens of the camera in his lap. Then he leans his head back against the cool wall and closes his eyes.
The bell chimes again. He's not sure how much later.
Jean considers turning back for a second.
The silence had settled into all the places her sister's voice used to be: the once-bustling kitchen and the bedroom they'd trade stories in. Some nights she caught herself answering it. Tonight, the longer she stayed inside, the more she could feel her mind fraying at the edges, strangling itself. She'd finished packing earlier, the final stray belongings stuffed into an old box marked FRAGILE in her sister's handwriting, one she couldn't bear to erase and properly label. There'd been no tree this year. No lights either.
All that was left was the batch of laundry, sheets stripped off her bed. She couldn't wait until morning, couldn't handle another second alone with her thoughts bouncing off the walls, boxes stacked high on every side narrowing each room's path down to one just wide enough for a single person to squeeze by. So she threw it all into a plastic bag and let the rain and neon lights of two AM Brooklyn swallow her, walking towards the one lit building at the end of the block.
Through the fogged glass and scattered dots of Christmas lights, she can't quite discern if it's empty.
Surely it is. No one in their right mind would bother doing laundry at this time.
She regrets not knocking on wood the moment she sees it's not.
He's not on the benches. Instead, ignoring the signage that clearly says not to, he sits on the folding area against the far wall, head tipped back, eyes closed — and very clearly not wearing a shirt.
She almost turns right back around into the downpour, before her eyes find the T-shirt and jacket tumbling in slow circles in the dryer across from him. He's got some kind of camera, expensive, she wagers, resting in his lap, grip loose, but not letting go.
She pauses in the entrance, her eyes tracing him before he notices her.
Mid to late twenties, maybe. Medium-length dark hair, damp from the rain. Face that looks like he's backlogged far too many hours of sleep for it to be healthy, and apparently shoulders, defined enough under the one working fixture that she has opinions about them. Her eyes trail lower, across his bare chest, and linger longer than they should. She has to stop herself from staring.
He's good-looking in a sort of unkempt, worn-out kind of way. Even if he's half-dressed in a laundromat at two in the morning. She tucks that under the file of things that don't and shouldn't matter tonight.
His eyes open and lock with her eyes. Dark brown, she notes. The color that climbs from his neckline to his ears is anything but.
The cold draft from the door is swallowed by the warmth of the laundromat as she lets it shut softly behind her.
"Sorry, I — I figured it was late, you know. Thought no one else was coming," he rambles, one hand threading anxiously through the back of his hair. His voice is oddly disarming, for lack of a better word, and it soothes her, the tone of it melting away some of the tension that had built up in her shoulders.
"Clearly."
His gaze shifts around the room, first to the dryer, then to the door, and finally to her as he says, "It's a few more minutes. I can wait outside."
She raises an eyebrow, slightly amused. "It's almost freezing out."
"I'm aware."
"Stay," she says. "I've seen worse."
"T-thanks?" he says, like he can't tell whether that was a compliment.
She gives him a final smirk before crossing to a washer a few machines down from his and inverts the contents into the drum — bed sheets and some towels, the last remnants of an apartment she's more than ready to leave behind.
The hoodie's next — its fleece lining soaked through and heavy as a waterlogged towel. It's the only thing she's wearing, save for a thin cotton shirt that's pretty much soaked through, clinging to her like a second skin.
That definitely has to go as well.
She pulls the hoodie over her head and catches him watching her. Not ogling — just caught in the moment he looks up and forgets to look back down.
She pauses for a brief moment, arms crossed in her thin undershirt, and looks back towards him. The blush still hasn't left his ears, and she can tell from the way he's sitting, arms tucked in, trying to take up less room than he currently is, that he's still uncomfortable. It hardly seems fair, him being the only one exposed.
She thinks on it for less than a second before deciding to level with him and steps back towards the central line of machines, out of sight from the windows up front, fingers lifting at the hem of her shirt.
His eyes glance towards the movement for exactly as long as it takes to realize what she's doing before they snap back towards his dryer, towards the circular tumbling of his clothes, as if it's the most interesting thing he's ever seen.
It peels off wet, and even in the heat of the laundromat, the cold bites at her exposed body immediately, and goosebumps race up her arms.
"There," she says. "Now we're even."
A short, surprised laugh escapes him, but his eyes rest courteously on his tumbling clothes.
"Fair enough," he says.
She reaches into her back pocket for change, then the other pocket, then for the strap of the purse she forgot to bring with her. She curses herself silently when the clink of coins behind her turns her around.
Mystery man's got a handful of quarters held out at arm's length between his fingers, still looking politely at his clothes.
"Here. Take it."
"You know, you're allowed to look at me when you talk."
"I'm good. The dryer's really interesting," he says, a smile escaping his lips.
It pulls a quiet chuckle out of her, barely more than a breath. She graciously takes the quarters, or tries to — his fingers land at the edge of her palm more than the middle, and she shifts quickly to catch them before they can fall. For a second, his hand rests in hers, her frigid skin against his warm. He's the one who lets go first. She isn't in any hurry.
"Thanks," she whispers.
The coins clank as they make their way down through the machine, and a second later it spins awake.
The plastic benches sit patiently at the front of the store. She glances at them, reasons they'd more than likely be colder than the back of the laundromat, then up at the signage, before hoisting herself up onto the folding area across from him, not more than a couple of arm's lengths away, her feet dangling just like his off the edge. She fights back a quiet grin.
The washer churns as his dryer tumbles. Rainwater smears the glass, dissolving the magenta lights from the liquor store across the corner into a soft, pulsing bloom of pink. Beyond the window, the post-midnight city has quieted to little more than a distant murmur, its scattered lights bleeding through the rain and settling into the room's darker corners. For a moment, it feels as though the whole city has gone to sleep and forgotten them here — the last dimly lit room left awake.
Over the speakers, the instrumental winds down, and in its place, something warmer — "The Christmas Song" plays. Soft piano and brushed drums, a melody meant for crackling fireplaces, warm eggnog, and the scent of pine and gingerbread. It settles over the room like a fresh quilt pulled straight from a dryer.
The silence sits between them the same way the carol does, easily and comfortably.
"So…" she starts, before trailing off.
"So…?"
"What are you actually doing here?" she asks, gaze turning towards him.
"Laundry." His head tips at his dryer. "As you can see."
"Who does laundry at two in the morning?"
"...People like us, apparently." He gestures at her own clothes sloshing in the washer.
The corners of her mouth lift at that, and she lets it sit for a moment in the air between them.
He shivers involuntarily for a split second. She catches it. There are goosebumps standing along his arms as well.
"You're freezing," she says.
"I'm fine."
"Liar."
"Look who's talking," he says, glancing with a quiet smirk at her own shivering shoulders. A moment passes before his face brightens, an idea taking shape as he hops off the table and heads to his tumbling dryer.
He turns and leans back against the front of his dryer, facing her. The result is immediate: a grin breaks out across his face as warmth wraps him from behind, his dryer now his personal space heater.
He gestures at the empty spot beside him, and for a second she thinks she can bear it, but a cold draft that sweeps through convinces her otherwise, and she hops down beside him, leaning back against the same machine. Heat blossoms between her shoulder blades, and she lets out a satisfied sound she'd normally be embarrassed by anywhere else.
The carol peeks out every so often from under the swishing of the machines. Outside, a lone cab slides past, its headlights sweeping across the ceiling and gone, the city checking in on them before moving on.
"Came out to try and get some shots," he says finally, holding up the camera, his voice worn thin. "First time in what feels like forever. Figured I owed it one more try."
She waits.
He lets out an exasperated sound, halfway between a chuckle and a scoff.
"Couldn't do it." He gives a resolute shrug, one he's used so often it's become second nature. "Used to be able to. Not anymore though. It's all… all the same. Nothing worth shooting."
She knows that shrug. She's worn its twin for the past month.
"At least you had a reason to go looking," she says. "I just needed to get out."
Now he's the one who waits.
She narrows her gaze at the washer. "The apartment." She stops. Starts again. "Everything's packed, and it's still all one big reminder of her. The silence, everything about it is all just so…"
"Suffocating." He takes the words out of her mouth.
Her eyes turn to his, dark and steady, and he offers her a small, worn smile that carries with it the weight of all the words not said.
"Yeah… exactly," she says, her voice softer now. Her heart is going faster than it should. She files that away under the same growing list of things that shouldn't matter.
He doesn't say anything else after, and she's grateful for that more than she'd admit.
She looks over at him, then down at herself, arms wrapped around her middle, gaze fixed on her feet. "Look at us. Two miserable, half-dressed people doing laundry at two in the morning, a few days before Christmas, like it's going to fix anything."
"You're allowed to hate it in there," he says, turning to her.
Nobody has said anything like that to her in a month. A month of hi, how are you doing and let me know if you need anything. Kind but tired, worn-out gestures that have long since stopped being helpful.
She turns and looks at him properly, and her hands, resting against the warm metal of the dryer behind her, slowly uncurl.
A timid smile has crept up the corner of her mouth before she notices.
"If it's any consolation, at least we're miserable in matching outfits together," he adds.
The laugh is out before she can catch it, breaking the silence of the small room, and the back of her hand pressed to her mouth does little to muffle it; her shaking shoulders give her away. It's the kind of laugh that belongs to another version of her — the one who still had Sara — and it's come out for a man she's known less than twenty minutes, in a laundromat in the dead of night.
That unsettles her more than anything else tonight. Being next to him feels like sitting beside someone she's known for years. It's comfortable. Easy.
"Have we met before?" she asks through the muffled laughter, and realizes half a second too late that she can't take it back.
"I don't think so, no." He's smiling, his eyes bright with amusement. "I'd remember those eyes."
It's out before he seems to hear it. Then his smile falters. "I — sorry. That's not — I didn't mean it like that." His hand finds the back of his hair again. "Not that they're not memorable. They are. Very. That's not what I —" He stops, winces. "I'm going to stop talking now."
It's the most earnest mess anyone's made of a sentence in front of her in a long time, and she finds she doesn't want him to take any of it back. That's right about when a wave of heat not from the dryer starts rising from her neck. Not much, just a tingling warmth at her collarbones and behind her ears, but enough to stand out even in the pink light bleeding through the front.
It throws her. She's been the steady one since she walked in: told him to stay, called him a liar.
She holds his gaze anyway and tries to will the color back where it came from.
It doesn't go.
"And here I was thinking we were just two innocent people doing laundry."
"I mean, I am doing laundry." He smirks.
"At two in the morning. Half-dressed."
She hums, unconvinced, and he ducks his head, still smiling, studying the floor for a second like there's something written there.
"I'm not usually like this," he says. "For what it's worth."
That pulls her gaze back up. He's not smiling anymore. His eyes have gone steady.
"Like what?"
"Any of this." He shrugs, the same worn shrug from before. "Sitting here. I've got a flight in less than eight hours. I should be asleep."
He doesn't quite look at her when he says it.
She doesn't answer right away. The dryer hums under both their backs. Outside, the pink from the liquor store pulses once against the glass and goes still.
"Me too," she says, quieter than she meant.
He nods, slow, like she'd handed him something and he was weighing it properly before setting it down.
Neither of them says anything for a while. The song winds on between them, patient as the washer.
He's still hearing her genuine laugh from a few minutes ago — loud, surprised, muffled under the back of her hand. He catches himself wanting to hear it again.
His dryer buzzes first. He tugs the T-shirt on straight from the drum, warm enough that his eyes close for just a second before his hands find the jacket.
She's behind him loading up her dryer with the batch of wet clothes from earlier — sheets first, then her shirt and hoodie, followed by a few towels, and feeds the machine the rest of his quarters.
Under the one working fluorescent, her hair has dried to a dark auburn at the ends, the kind of red a camera never quite gets right. She stays standing, arms folded across her chest, and Peter crosses the distance before he's decided to, pausing just a step away from her.
He drapes the unzipped jacket around her back, left shoulder first then right. She flinches for a second at the sudden warmth then goes still when she sees it's his.
"Thanks," she says quietly as she shrugs herself into the jacket, threading her arms through warm fabric. It swallows her as she turns to face him, the sleeves falling past her fingertips, and she exhales slowly, eyes closed, the same way he did — a timid smile gracing her lips. Wrapped in it, she's a lamp turned down low, the glow kept close.
Up close, he gets his first real look at her. Freckles scatter across the bridge of her nose, like flecks of paint across a canvas. A strand of damp copper clings to her cheek. Her eyes open, and a clear, striking blue greets him, like the sky right before snow, the pink from the window caught faintly underneath it all. He hadn't been lying back there. He just hadn't meant to say it out loud.
When she hops back up onto the folding table, it's a little closer to him than before. Neither of them mentions it. She nods at the camera in his lap.
"What did you used to shoot? Back then."
He turns the lens cap over in his fingers. "Everything, really. Nature, scenery, a lot of it at night. The city's different at this time. So are the people."
"So what happened?"
"Life, mostly. I started taking whatever paid, and somewhere in there I stopped noticing I'd stopped."
"That's a careful sentence."
"I've had practice with it."
She lets him keep that one. He can tell she's heard the shape of what's underneath, and he can tell she's choosing not to pull on it, and he isn't sure which of those he's more grateful for.
"And now?"
"Corporate stuff. Suits in front of windows." He shrugs. "That's what I'm in town for. Wrapped yesterday." He nods at the bag by her washer. "What about you? Where are those boxes headed?"
"A new city. A teaching job — a real one this time, not adjunct. It starts in January."
"You don't sound excited."
"I'm trying to be." Her thumb worries the cuff of his jacket sleeve. "It's the first thing I've picked for myself in about six years."
"What were you doing during the six?"
"Taking care of my sister." Her hands find each other in her lap. The territory is familiar. "She passed last month."
"I'm sorry."
He doesn't add anything to it. Doesn't ask how, or reach for a platitude to soften the moment. Just lets the words sit there, ringing true.
She looks at him sideways. "Most people say that and then ask what happened."
"Figured you'd tell me if you wanted me to know."
For a second her composure slips entirely — not into tears, just into surprise, bare on her face before she can put anything over it. "Thank you," she says, and it sounds like she means more than the sentence holds.
"My flight's at ten," she says eventually.
It takes him a second. Same as his.
"Which airport?"
"LaGuardia."
"JFK."
She lets that sit. "So tomorrow we're strangers again."
It lands soft and final, like the last page of a book turned over.
"I don't think I'd be very good at that."
She looks over at him. He's already looking at her, and he doesn't try to turn it into a joke. They're close enough on the folding table that the sleeve of his jacket, the one swallowing her arm, brushes his bare forearm and stays there.
The pink from the window catches along her cheek. For a moment there's only the hum of the dryer and the soft piano over the speakers, and she doesn't look away either.
The dryer buzzes. Neither of them moves.
"I'm not going back to that apartment yet," she says.
"That makes two of us." He rubs the back of his neck. "I'd rather not be walking around by myself anymore tonight. If that's not a strange thing to say."
"It's the least strange thing I've heard this month." She hops off the table. "There are a few places I never got the chance to say goodbye to." A beat.
"Come with me."
It's out before she can stop it. He watches it surprise her as much as it does him.
"Alright," he says, and doesn't need to think about it.
She hauls her load out warm and stuffs it into the bag, hands him back his jacket, then shrugs into the warm embrace of her undershirt and hoodie.
He pulls the jacket on. Her warmth lingers, and when he turns his head, a tinge of something's caught in the collar that wasn't there before — faint, honey and citrus. He doesn't mention it.
By the time he looks up, she's at the door with the bag over her shoulder, waiting on him. Backlit by the street, she reminds him of the pictures he used to stay out all night for. He crosses and holds it open for her.
Outside, the rain has stopped, as if it knew they were about to leave, awnings dripping every now and then, sidewalks slick. The cold waits for them out there, and behind them the laundromat stays lit, the half-dead Christmas lights on the glass still blinking at nobody.
The bell chimes as it swings shut. Twice tonight it's rung for someone coming in alone. This time it rings once, for two people leaving together.