The Shirt (Patreon)

He saw it as soon as he put down the bin in the apartment. The bin was filled with hot clothes, straight from the dryer in the basement of the complex, and right on the top of it was a blue shirt. He picked it up, surprised by how the fabric moved, almost as if it was liquid. It looked like an electric blue T-shirt with a neon orange Under Armor logo printed on the back, just by the neck.

Not counting PE class over a decade ago, he had never been inside a gym, and he didn’t own any exercise clothes. Beside brief brushes inside sport goods stores, he’d never touched gym clothes either. But it did turn him on. Everything about athletes of any kind was sexy. Olympians with their high tech gear hugging their bodies to the occasional jogger in compression pants and shorts, preferably in different colors, to the high schoolers in sweatpants skating outside the mall to the posing hunks he looked up online. But weirdly he had never wanted to join in, to work out, or even just buy any sport clothes.

Why hadn’t he? It’s wasn’t like this was contraband you needed to hide. You didn’t have to go to a shady alley and by adidas shorts next to dildos and fisting cream. He could, at any point in his life, just walk into any of the numerous shops in the mall and buy a compression shirt. They even have a floor of the stuff at Nordstroms and Macy’s.

But now he had one in his hand, with no idea where it came from. Had it been in the dryer, and he had just missed it? Did it fall in at some point? It was odd that it was the first item he saw when he put it down back inside his apartment.

He hesitated, then gave it a sniff.

It had a deep, musky smell. It somehow reminded him of pan fried beef, with some sour tones added. Was he a pervert now? A weirdo? Smelling someone else’s armpit sweat isn’t normal behavior. He should walk straight down and put it in the “found items” bin.

He felt the soft fabric in his hand. Not long ago there had been a man inside of it. His warm body had moved underneath the fabric, stretching it in different directions. The shirt had tried to hug him as tight as possible. Touch him as much as possible. As he moved with ever more purpose, exerting himself, he would get hotter, heating the fabric. Then he would break into sweat. Microscopic beads of water with salt, oils from the skin and some stray protein strands with his DNA would be wicked from his body as the fabric move across him. More and more sweat would form, as the muscles strain under load. The fabric would do its best to transport the moisture from his abs, his chest, his armpits, but eventually the evaporation gets too limiting and the shirt starts getting damp. It will lead the moisture sideways, to maximize the area it can evaporate from, spreading minerals and generic material across its surface and inside its fibers. At one point the man starts to slow down, perhaps ending with light cardio, perhaps stretching. The shirt does the best it can, but it doesn’t have enough time to dry before the man hits the shower. Instead the shirt rests in a steaming bundle, losing moisture at an ever slower rate. It gets stuffed with other warm worm clothes in a gym bag, exchanging steam with socks and underwear and synthetic leather shoes within its confines. Eventually it is dumped in the laundry, and somehow ends up in his hand.

He moved the shirt to his nose again, but this time inhaled long and slow. It is not going back down to the found items bin today.

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