The Pull

The city never sleeps but tonight it feels comatose an endless stretch of sodium‑orange street‑lights flickering over puddles that refuse to dry. I walk them anyway, counting sidewalk cracks like rosary beads, pretending every eighth one is a prayer that lands. None ever do.

It's 2:13 a.m. when I push through the revolving door of the twenty‑four‑hour laundromat on Ninth. My apartment building's machines coughed their last spin days ago, and the leak under my bathroom sink has claimed everything that used to smell like me. So I haul a garbage bag of damp clothes across three blocks of neon and broken glass, just to fill the dead air between yesterday and tomorrow.

Inside, fluorescent lights hum like flies. Four of the six washers are out of order; the fifth refuses my crumpled bills. The sixth blinks READY but clicks its tongue at every quarter, as if it knows I have more darkness than change.

That's when I notice him.

He leans against the vending machine, one boot crossed over the other, reading a paperback with the cover torn off. Tall, black coat, dark hair cut too close on the sides. He doesn't belong to the hour or maybe he owns it. A single dryer turns behind him, haloing his silhouette in lazy rotation. Heat fogs the glass, and I can't decide if it's the machine exhaling or him.

My quarters spill across the linoleum. The roll bursts like a cheap bracelet, coins skittering under benches and between trash‑clogged vents. I crouch, reach fingertips brushing metal that always stops just shy of my grip.

A hand appears in front of me, palm open. In it sit three quarters and a dime, stacked neat as a promise.

"Yours?" His voice is low, not rough exactly more like velvet folded the wrong way.

I nod. "Thanks." I tip the coins into my pocket, trying not to meet his eyes. Looking at people is dangerous; they tend to look back.

"That washer's broken," he says. "Takes your money, gives you nothing. Like most things."

"Figures." I straighten, heft my bag to the humming dryer beside him. "I'll guess and pray."

He drops the paperback on a folding table. The pages are dog‑eared into a misshapen fan. "Try that one." He points to the only machine I hadn't cursed yet. "It likes being flattered first. Talk nice to it."

I smile despite myself. "Do I have to buy it dinner, too?"

"Only if you want it to spin faster." A small tilt of a grin, like he's not sure he's allowed the full expression. "I'm Austin."

"Nora." My name leaves a bitter taste, stale coffee on the tongue.

Austin offers no handshake, just an acknowledgment a tiny dip of his head, as if our names are already sewn together in some secret ledger. He hands over two more quarters when the machine demands extra and the change‑dispenser laughs in my face.

"You don't have to " I begin.

"Consider it a peace offering," he interrupts. "For intruding on your insomnia."

"My insomnia enjoys company," I say. And it's true. Lately loneliness feels loud enough to burst eardrums.

The washer grinds to life, sloshing grey water over denim and cotton that used to be mine and someone else's. I perch on a cracked vinyl seat. Austin slides onto the one opposite, the tiny aisle between us suddenly too intimate and too wide all at once.

"Rough night?" he asks.

"Rough year," I correct, then instantly regret the honesty.

He doesn't prod. "You don't seem the type who believes in years. Just moments."

I frown. "And what type's that?"

"Broken‑clock girls," he says, as though reciting a line he underlined long ago. "Stuck at the second right before midnight. The rest of the world keeps turning, but you stay perfect in the pause."

No one has ever described me so accurately or so wrong at the same time. My chest tightens, ready to fight or flee, but the dryer behind him thumps a rhythmic lullaby and pins me to the moment.

"What about you?" I counter. "You read paperbacks without covers and haunt laundromats at two in the morning. What does that make you?"

He thinks, eyes flicking to the washer window where my clothes whirl like drowned birds. "A mirror, maybe."

Before I can dissect that, the fluorescent lights buzz twice and the front door creaks open. A man in a delivery uniform lumbers in, dumps a stack of rug runners, and curses at the broken washers. Austin's attention shifts back to me, isolating us in a bubble no interruption can pierce.

"Do you ever wish you could wash the day off your skin?" he asks quietly. "Not the sweat, the actual day. The hours. The thoughts."

"All the time."

"And?"

"It never works," I whisper.

He studies me really studies, as if cataloging fractures invisible to the naked eye. Something in me wants to throw a quilt over the cracks, but the greater part wants him to keep looking. Maybe if he names the pieces, I'll remember how they fit.

My washer chirps completion far too soon. I gather my damp clothes, dripping defeat onto the floor. Austin flips a quarter across his knuckles and nods toward the dryer he's claimed. "Take mine. It's still warm."

"Only if you let me pay you back."

"I don't take money," he says. "Stories, maybe."

I almost laugh. Stories are the one currency I'm bankrupt in; my past is a ledger best left closed. Yet I shove my clothes into his dryer, brush a rogue sock from his boot, and start talking anyway.

I tell him about the ex who moved out but forgot to take his echoes. About the job that feels like fluorescent lights flickering over me eight hours a day. I tell him how the city looks different when you stop pretending it's temporary how permanence steals the skyline and paints it with your own shadow. I don't mention the nights I stand on my balcony and count the floors to the street, calculating wind resistance.

Austin listens, head tilted, as if feeding on every confession. Not judgmental hungrier. When I finish, the dryer is still turning. My words last longer than I expect.

His turn: He grew up three cities away, hated the quiet, came here to drown it. He mentions a sister in rehab, a father who sold silence for whiskey, a love of old books with the covers ripped off so he can invent his own. None of it feels entirely true, but all of it tastes real enough.

The dryer clicks off. Clothes slump into stillness.

"Do you feel lighter?" he asks.

"A little," I admit.

"Good. Debt paid." He rises, shrugs on his coat. "Maybe I'll run into you again."

The suggestion hangs like smoke. The rational part of me screams that laundromat optimism is a chemical imbalance, that chance meetings aren't chance at all. But tonight I'm tired of rationing hope.

"Maybe," I answer.

Austin touches the torn paperback, as though it might remind him of where he left off. "Don't fix the clock, Nora," he says, heading for the door. "Midnight looks good on you."

Then he's gone into the sodium halo, swallowed by a city that never sleeps but always forgets.

I fold my clothes with hands that tremble, not from cold, but from the sudden awareness that I've been seen. And somewhere between the missing washer and the broken clock, the hollow inside me echoes with a single new note:

Something dangerous just found my frequency.

Outside, the neon rain begins again. I shoulder my bag, step into the night, and let it wash the hours from my skin. It doesn't work; it never does. But as I walk, I find myself hoping terrified at the thought that I'll see him under some other broken light, offering quarters like promises, stories like scars.

And maybe next time I won't bother counting sidewalk cracks. Because some prayers don't need numbers; they only need darkness and someone willing to walk through it with you.