Page 2 of Warm and Dry

There was a customer service number printed at the bottom of the screen, so I tried calling it, but it went straight to voicemail. They would be open on Monday morning.

I swiped my card again and still nothing happened. My wet jersey was at the top of the pile, mocking me and my inability to do the most basic adulting. It was a fucking clothes dryer. Why wouldn’t it start?

Something behind my eyes burned, and I squeezed them shut to hold back all the frustration brewing inside me. Breaking down in the middle of a public laundromat was not okay for a twenty-four-year-old man. I should’ve been able to get this to work. And if I couldn’t, I should be able to keep my shit together without a fucking meltdown.

My knees buckled, and I slid down to the floor with my back against the dryer. The fluorescent light on the ceiling was so bright and my wet clothes clung to my skin like I’d just jumped into a swimming pool.

I was fine. Everything was fine. I just needed a minute to take a breath, and then I'd get up and figure it out.

After a few tears escaped, I’d really, really get up.

2

SCOTT

I was frosting a birthday cake when I noticed someone enter on the monitor.

Not a cake for someone else but for myself. See, every year on my birthday, my mom used to make me a chocolate layer cake with cream cheese frosting and four candles. It was a tradition she wasn’t willing to give up, even when she moved to Florida three years ago to finally enjoy her retirement. Before she agreed to move, she made me promise I'd keep making a cake for myself every year. It felt a little pathetic the first time I did it, but I love cake, so it actually worked out to be a good excuse to bake. Now I baked cakes for all my friends and neighbors whenever they had a birthday.

They weren’t fancy, but they were delicious.

As the owner of a fully automated wash-and-dry, I didn’t have to spend much time downstairs. Keeping any eye on the surveillance monitors was sufficient supervision unless someone had a problem with a machine or got rowdy. Spin Cycle was directly below my apartment, and when I bought the building, I renovated the whole place to run on an app-based payment system. No staff needed. Just machines doing their thing while I did mine.

It worked well most of the time.

I was spreading the last of the frosting over the top layer when I glanced at the screen and saw the guy loading a trash bag of clothes into a dryer. It wasn’t usual for people who weren’t regular customers to show up with trash bags or even paper bags. If they started coming on a regular basis, they usually invested in an actual hamper. I’d know soon enough which camp he fell in.

My attention was locked on the poor guy. He must have gotten caught in the rain because he was completely soaked.

Once his clothes were loaded, he took a minute to figure out where the payment kiosk was and then went straight for it. That part I'd seen a hundred times. The payment system wasn't intuitive to everyone. Most people figured it out after a few minutes of poking around at it, but at least a few times a week, I'd have to go down and help someone who couldn't work it out.

This guy was at the kiosk for a while before he tried calling the customer support number. That number went to the provider, but they were closed on weekends, so I’d have to go down and help him out.

I smoothed the frosting on the sides of the cake and could see from the way his shoulders were moving that he was getting frustrated. I felt a little guilty about not posting the tutorial I’d had on my list for months.

The trick was that you had to add the full amount of time you wanted first, and then go back to the machine to enter the code, which wasn’t obvious or well-designed.

But when the poor guy slid down the kiosk screen and slumped down on the floor, I knew I couldn’t let him flounder any longer. I slipped my phone into my pocket and headed for the stairs.

The laundromat smelled like warm dryer sheets when I pushed through the door from the back hallway. He was still on the floor, and up close, he looked younger than he had on the monitor. Cuter too. Light brown hair with a short beard. He would have been sexy if not for the red eyes and utterly defeated aura about him when he looked up at me.

He sniffed and wiped across his face, trying to pull himself together. “Do you work here?”

"Yep." I crouched down so I wasn't looming over him. "Payment system giving you trouble?"

He looked at the kiosk and nodded. "Yeah, I couldn't get the dryer to start. I tried like ten times, and it looked like it was taking my money but nothing happened."

"The kiosk's confusing. I need to put up better instructions." I stood up and held out my hand to pull him with me. "You have to add the time and then take the code back to the machine. The instructions don't make that clear."

He stared at me. "There’s a code?"

"Exactly.” I was fixing this today. It was cruel of me to put people through so much stress when there was an easy fix. “But yeah, it’s on the bottom of the receipt screen. Easy to miss."

He let out a breathy laugh and sighed. "I thought I was losing my mind."

"Nope, just bad design." I went to the kiosk and walked him through it. A minute later, we had his dryer running. For a long moment, he just watched it tumble like it was the most fascinating thing he'd ever seen.

"How long do you think it’ll take?" He looked at his phone and then started to pace. "I've got a game at noon, and I'm already cutting it close."