Page 22 of Exchanged

I yelp, lose my balance, and fall onto Garrett’s bed, my face mashing into his pillow. My brain registers the residual scent of his shampoo and hair product. It reminds me of those perfumed strips in the middle of magazines that are chemically engineered to smell like beautiful men.

I sit up. Emma leans against the doorframe, a bemused smirk playing across her face. The sunlight from the hall’s window illuminates the piles of brown curls on her head like a halo, as if she’s a judgmental angel who’s caught me doing something wrong.

“I’m doing laundry,” I lie.

“You’re in Garrett’s bed.”

I stand up. “No I’m not.”

She tilts her head to the side. “You do Garrett’s laundry now?”

“I can do nice things.”

Her eyes narrow, and she nods at the jersey. “I don’t think that’s dirty.”

“Duh.”

We look at each other across the room.

“Well,” I say, “what do you want?”

“Dad needs you,” she says. “Something about taking inventory of the Precious Moments figurines.”

“Then I should go help him,” I say, moving toward the door.

“I thought you were grabbing Garrett’s laundry.”

I glance at the clothing spread around his floor. A pair of inside-out joggers. Wrinkled T-shirts. Dirty boxers. Too many socks to count. I’m a guy. I know that some of those socks have more than just foot sweat in them. There’s no way in hell I’m touching another dude’s Special Socks.

But Emma is watching me suspiciously, and I’m not ready to admit why I’m really here. I bend over and pluck a pair of athletic shorts off the floor and toss them into the laundry basket in the corner. Then a sweatshirt. Then a few T-shirts. I avoid touching the socks and underwear, waiting for Emma to leave so I can drop this whole charade. But she won’t budge because she knows I’m lying. So, under her watchful eye, I collect every sock and every pair of musky boxers and place them in the now-full basket.

“This is really nice of you,” she deadpans.

“Thanks.”

Finally, having touched every piece of Garrett’s dirty laundry, I grab the basket and follow Emma downstairs. She peels off into the living room, and I back through the swinging door to the kitchen, having accepted that, at the very least, I’ll need to load all of this into the washing machine.

That’s when I run into Garrett.

Literally.

He’s standing on the other side of the door, looking at his phone, home early from football. He’s wearing a tank top today. He looks good in a tank top, like he intentionally chooses the kind of clothes that will make other people want to take them off of him. He’s all striped fabric and hard curves and warm skin. As the laundry basket in my arms collides with his chest, his gaze shifts from his phone to the basket to my face.

He pops his earbuds out. I can hear the tinny sound of country music. “Is that my laundry?”

I look down at it, trying to buy myself precious seconds to come up with a valid reason for holding a basket of his laundry. “Oh,” I say with a shrug, “I was just doing a load, so I thought…”

“That you’d do my laundry?”

“Yes.”

He scowls at the basket. “I don’t see any of your clothes in there.”

“Shit,” I say. “I must have forgotten them upstairs.”

He squints at me. “You went into my room. And grabbed all of my dirty laundry.”

“Yeah. I guess.” At this point, I wonder if it would be less awful to just tell the truth, but I’m unsure which is worse: admitting to snooping around his room, or pretending to be his laundry bitch.