“Need any help?” he asked, setting down a massive structural biology textbook and nodding toward my box.
“No, this is light. Just underwear, but I realized I want to go through some of it,” I said. “Don’t have a copy of Power Girl tucked in there, do you?”
“She’s a comedian,” he grumbled, turning on his heel and following me across the room.
“I could leave you alone for a few minutes,” I offered generously over my shoulder.
I set the box down on the counter and started going through it. Will stepped up next to me.
“Oh, I remember those,” he said when I pulled out a pair of satin panties.
“You do?”
“You had them on at your parents’ house when I visited for Easter.”
Ah yes, the fateful Easter visit, when no one in my family knew that Will and I were seeing each other. I lured him into my room and convinced him to have unprotected sex while my family was obliviously hanging out downstairs.
Lord. Will’s entire life had flashed before his eyes when Jensen knocked on the door.
“You couldn’t remember to pick up laundry soap today but you remembered that?” I asked.
“Yeah. Well.” Will was quite a bit taller than me, and even standing at my back, he could peer over my shoulder. “May I?” he finally asked, motioning to the box and its contents.
“Knock yourself out,” I said, walking to the freezer and returning with a pint of ice cream. Spoon in hand, I hopped up on the counter next to him and popped off the lid.
He pulled out pair after pair, wiggling his eyebrows and kissing me full on the mouth whenever one sparked a particularly happy memory. Turns out, unpacking was way more fun than packing.
“Wait,” he said, slowing as he came to the plainer ones toward the bottom. “Why have I never seen any of these before?”
I dipped my spoon into the container and lifted a bite to my mouth. “Because those are my Ladies’ Days undies.”
His eyes flew to mine. “Your what?”
“Menstruation?”
Will nodded, unfazed as he turned back to the box. “Got it.”
“You’re so progressive sometimes it’s actually a little dorky. Cute, but dorky.”
He looked back up again, giving me a crooked smile. “You have special underwear for when you’re on your period and I’m the dorky one?”
I shrugged. “Well, yeah.”
He blinked a few times. “Why do you bother?”
“These days I wouldn’t want to ruin my nice ones, but back in grad school I didn’t have nice ones.” I snorted as I took another bite. “Nobody saw my underwear then. You know, I even remember a Kickstarter this guy did for something called Period Panties. They all had names like Shark Week or Cunt Dracula. I think there was even a pair that said Rambo: First Blood and had a unicorn that had just been in a bar fight or something.” I lifted a bite of fudge brownie to my mouth, only to see Will staring at me. I paused. “What?”
“I can’t decide if that’s terrifying or absolutely genius.”
I nodded, taking the bite and swallowing before saying, “If I’m remembering correctly, it was so you didn’t have to ward off unwelcome advances that week. So instead of saying, ‘Sorry, baby, it’s that time of the month!’ you could just throw this gang sign near your vagina and flash your Period Panties.”
I made what I’m sure was a crude V motion with my spoon directly at my crotch and then took another bite of ice cream.
“Have you always been this weird?” Will asked.
I stared blankly at him.
He picked up a pair of blue cotton briefs. “What’s wrong with these?”
Hopping down from the counter, I grabbed them and tossed them back into the box. “Well, nothing really. Except they look like something my mom would wear.”
“Okay, yeah, you’ve ruined it.”
I laughed, throwing a pair at him. “Ruined what? I’m as lazy as they come, and if not for Chloe I’d probably still be wearing the same pair until the elastic gave out. But no guy actually finds these sexy.”
“You obviously don’t understand a thing about men. Or, specifically, this man.”
I let out a laugh. “I don’t?”
“No,” he said, reaching for a pair of yellow ones. “I’m not scared of periods, and you could walk out in five pairs of the worst underwear known to man, and I would still want to have sex with you.”
“Is that right?”
Will picked up my spoon and the ice cream and took a bite. “Absolutely.”
Twenty minutes later, I walked out of our room—naked except for a white tank and five pairs of the ugliest Ladies’ Days undies I owned—and sat on the couch across from the TV.
Looking up from the box he was taping, Will watched me. “Hiya, Plum.”
I crossed my legs, picked up the remote, and turned on the TV. “William.”
He straightened, placing the tape gun on top of the bookcase, and walked the box over to a stack by the front door. Crossing back to the couch, he sat on the edge of the coffee table across from me. “What are you doing?”
“Just watching TV.”