Greg Van Helsing was wearing Peter’s stupid, skin tight, purple carebears t-shirt. Again. The last of his clean black v-neck t-shirts was lost to the razor sharp nail of a night hag. He’d been going through shirts like he was in a hurry to lose them lately and was considering purchasing replacements in bulk when Peter began (poorly) humming some depressing melody. The sound was awful and it grated on Greg’s every nerve. He may even have resorted to violence were they not in such a public place.
After Greg’s showdown with a troll under a bridge in Seattle a week before, Mrs. Mayhew forbade them from doing laundry at the house after an evening of monster hunting ever again. In her defense, they had made a hell of a mess and the scent of rotting garbage from the troll blood all over Greg’s clothes and person lingered for days.
And so there they were, folding clothes on a long white table at a laundromat close to Portland State University, where Peter often took classes. They pooled the clothing, separating by color and type at Peter’s insistence, and then took up several washing machines to get it done all at once. Greg was more of an everything-in-one load kind of guy, but Peter wouldn’t hear of it.
Greg’s clothes were exclusively black, which made his favored method of laundry perfectly acceptable. Mrs. Mayhew, too, favored black with a few dark colored items scattered in. Peter, not so much. The flamboyant man seemed to have a polo for every color in the rainbow and more graphic t-shirts than anyone really had a right to own.
Greg folded a pair of his black trousers and put them atop the appropriate stack of identical trousers. He was in a sour mood already and Peter’s continued humming was quickly becoming unbearable.
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“At least we can get all of the laundry done in one go this way,” Greg said, mainly to force Peter to respond and cease his humming.
Peter grumbled in frustration.
“Yeah. There’s that,” he said. He tossed one of Renea’s blouses, an elegant black button up, into a laundry basket beside the table without folding it. “But at home I have my whole workstation. Now I’ll have to take these out of the car and bring them into the laundry room, and then iron, hang, and put them away.”
“You know,” Greg said brightly, “you’re usually the optimist. Between the two of us, I mean.”
Peter folded one of his stupid graphic t-shirts, placed it on the pile, and then sighed dramatically as the next article of clothing followed Renea’s black button up into the basket. He looked at Greg consideringly for a moment, and then put on a clearly fake smile.
“You’re right. This is great. We should do this every laundry day,” Peter said without meaning a word of it.
The flat sarcasm in Peter’s voice made Greg’s smile stretch from ear to ear. He couldn’t be certain of exactly why, perhaps because Peter, for once, was not obnoxiously happy and upbeat. Or maybe it was just the simple act of trying to be optimistic. One way or the other, Greg Van Helsing found his sour mood melting away with each passing second.
He resolved then to both antagonize Peter and attempt optimism more often, just to be safe.