The laundromat ran on one buzzing tube of light and the hum of four dryers nobody was minding. Her washer caught halfway through the spin cycle and died with an inch of grey water standing over everything she owned that needed darks.
The man at the next table didn't look up from the shirt he was squaring into thirds. "Six finishes in ten," he said, mostly to the shirt. "Toss yours in after, if four's dead again." Four was dead again. She hadn't said so yet.
When six buzzed, he opened it and left his own half-dried load inside, pushing his shirts to the back and nodding her in. Her wet tangle went in on top of his, and he started the drum again. Half an hour later the buzzer went again and they both looked up at once, the way you look at a phone that might not be yours.
The drum had done what two loads do when they ride it together: knitted them. A sleeve threaded through a waistband. Her slip, ivory and warmed the color of skin, wound twice around his shirt cuff like it had been asked to stay.
They carried the whole damp knot to the folding table between them and started working it apart by hand under the strip light, not saying much, each piece coming free a little reluctantly.
"That's mine," she said, when he lifted the slip off his cuff. "I gathered," he said, and didn't hand it over right away — held it a second longer than returning a thing required, the warm cloth hanging between his fingers and her open palm.
She didn't take it back fast. He didn't let it go fast. The distance between his hand and hers got exactly as long as it needed to be and not one second more, and when the slip finally crossed it his fingers grazed her wrist on the way, warm from the dryer, warm from somewhere else by then too.
The overhead tube clicked off on its timer while they were still folding, leaving only the dryers' dim windows and the streetlight through the glass. The attendant was waiting at the glass with his keys, and they carried their baskets out past him into the night air, the bolt sliding home behind them with a sound neither of them startled at. Two baskets, one direction, out into the same dark.