Despite knowing that Dex lives in the basement now, Nursey is not expecting to see him when he brings his clothes down to wash. He really needs to wash his clothes (as he spilled pasta sauce on his jeans at dinner and if he doesn’t wash them right away, his whole hamper will smell like garlic forever) so despite coming down the stairs to see Dex taking his clothes out of the dryer and Nursey wanting to turn right back around, he continues down the last two steps to the basement.
“Thanks,” Nursey says, quiet, and takes his place next to Dex at the washer.
The silence isn’t exactly comfortable, but it’s familiar, which is probably the next best thing. Dex folds his clothes like they’re about to be put on sale at The Gap or something, and it makes Nursey wonder vaguely if he’s ever worked in retail. He doesn’t think Dex’s temperament would be great in that environment, but he’s also pretty sure that Dex can be polite (to a ridiculous extent) when the situation calls for it, so it’s a toss up.
He has a half-formed thought about Dex working in a Hollister and doesn’t muffle his snort well enough to avoid a side-eyed look. After that, it takes him all of two minutes to get his clothes and soaps into the machine and have it running, and then he’s left with two options. One, go back upstairs and ultimately forget about his laundry and return to it hours later, which means he’ll have to start the dryer then, which will annoy Dex and keep him up when they have (or, well, just Dex has) practice early in the morning.
Or option two, stay here and watch Dex fold his clothes for half an hour while the washer runs. Ding ding ding, we have a winner! Ugh. Nursey turns and leans back against the washer. He surveys the basement, but there isn’t much to look at aside from Dex’s new home, and that hurts to stare at for too long, so he keeps his eyes on Dex. Folding clinically, hands smoothing over the fabric of t-shirts, arms flexing as he lifts pants high so they don’t brush the ground as he folds them in half.
This observing makes Nursey fidget and feel stalkerish, so he tries to give himself something else to do. “Need help?”
Seconds after he says it, he realizes how stupid it sounds. Of course Dex doesn’t need help folding his clothes. That is just a really weird question and there was no reason to ask it and now Nursey’s gone and made himself look like an idiot in front of Dex of all people. Dex looks at him, eyebrows furrowed and squinted eyes skeptical, and Nursey braces himself for the sure-to-be-scathing retort but–
“You can do the socks,” Dex says instead. He bends down and picks up the laundry basket on the floor, which holds an assortment of unmatched socks. “If you want,” he adds, dropping the basket on the top of the washer.
Nursey blinks once, twice, and then shrugs. It’s something to do.
So he begins sorting, matching together socks and tucking them inside one another. Dex, next to him, continues to fold, piling the clothes on top of each other one after the other. It’s warm in the basement and quiet, except for the whirring washer, and the atmosphere is–domestic. Comforting, almost. The only thing unsettling is how comfortable it is, and even then, it’s so nice that Nursey disregards the weirdness.
After some unknown time later, Dex says, unprompted, “I used to do that.” Nursey looks over at him and Dex clarifies, pointing with his chin at the socks. “For my mom,” he adds, “when she did laundry.”
Nursey– doesn’t know what to say to that. He says nothing in the quiet hope that Dex will keep going.
He does. “When I was a kid she brought me around for housework and stuff. She didn’t have to,” he says, and when Nursey glances at him, he’s pointedly focused on the clothes in front of him. “She left my brother with aunts. He wasn’t good with chores. Everyone thought it was so funny that I was.”
If this was something that they did frequently–which it isn’t– then this would be the moment that Nursey would make a joke, chirp Dex a little, lighten the mood, but he doesn’t. He waits, almost holding his breath, because this feels–breakable. Important.
“I wasn’t good enough at folding yet, so my mom would set me up with the socks, and she’d–she’d complain about her day or tell me something funny that had happened, or–or whatever. It was like–like a venting thing for her, you know? Like she relaxed while she was cleaning.” He sounds almost–reverent in his words. Or at the least understanding in an intrinsic, deep-set kind of way. Nursey looks at him, blatantly, and Dex just frowns a little at the shirt in his hand for a minute before shaking his head. “I don’t know. It was weird, I guess.”
Nursey keeps watching, even as Dex begins folding again. He thinks how the dishwasher never runs when Dex has a big test coming up, or there’s a tough team they’re playing, because Dex washes all the dishes by hand. Nursey thinks about the incessant vacuuming around midterms, the Spring cleaning every time he has a too-long talk with his brother. He thinks about their shared room–now just Nursey’s– how Dex would start cleaning up Nursey’s stuff without asking permission, how stressed he’d get when he even thought it wasn’t perfectly clean.
“My mom’s thing was music,” Nursey offers, looking back down at his socks. Dex’s socks. “Whenever she had a bad day at work or something, she would pick me up from school and we’d drive around the city for ages, just, like, blaring the weirdest mix of songs.” He smiles, thinking back to it, circling blocks as they screamed along to Missy Elliot and then The Beatles and then ATCQ in a weird sequence that never made any sense.
Dex doesn’t say anything back. The wrinkles between his eyebrows smooth and the frown dissipates, but he says nothing. Nursey doesn’t try to say anything more either. Dex keeps folding, Nursey keeps matching socks. The washer rumbles on.
The basement is warm, and they share the space without notice.
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