Anna unlocked the front door of her apartment a little after midnight. As she came through the entryway, she noticed the lights in the kitchen were on, signaling that her husband Ryan had beaten her home from work. This made Anna's spirits lift. Knowing she would get to spend the next two days with her husband had been keeping her going through her long week; now that they were both home, she couldn't wait for them to start what passed for their weekend together.
The young couple were still very much newlyweds, having married almost immediately after their college graduation just three months prior. Once back from their Bahamian honeymoon, they had packed up their meager belongings and left their sleepy little college town for the big city (well, the suburbs of the big city) where Anna had been recruited for a nursing position at a major hospital and Ryan's business degree had allowed him to upgrade his part-time college movie theater job into a full-time management position.
Hospitals and movie theaters, however, keep long and odd hours, so the pair had been forced to adjust to not being able to spend as much time together as they had while dating in college for the last two and a half years. They both possessed high sex drives and had been accustomed to enjoying multiple weekly extended liaisons; since moving, however, they had been lucky if they got in a quickie or two in passing each week around their hectic work schedules. Now, though, they had finally been able to coordinate having the same days off. Anna's probationary period had ended last week and her supervisor had gladly approved for her to regularly be off on Mondays and Tuesdays to match Ryan's schedule.
As Anna dropped her purse and lunch satchel on the kitchen counter, Ryan emerged from the bedroom. He clearly had not been home for long himself, as he was still wearing a dress shirt and slacks, although his shirt was untucked and his tie was gone. His face lit up as he hurried over and pulled the petite brunette into a bear hug before lifting her off her feet and kissing her deeply.
"Welcome home, babe!," Ryan said, as he set Anna back on her feet and released her. "Ready for a couple of days off?"
"You have no idea," Anna replied. "This has been the week from hell. Between still not being completely familiar with everything and one of the other nurses being on vacation, I've been run ragged. You had better have some quality TLC lined up for me, baby."
As she spoke, Anna turned her back to Ryan while she dug around in her purse looking for her cell phone. Ryan took the opportunity to begin kneading her tense shoulders, causing Anna to cease her search and place both palms flat on the counter while she luxuriated in the feel of her husband's massaging fingers. Ryan's height advantage placed him at the perfect angle to utilize his body weight to apply a little extra downward pressure into her tight muscles; it also, conveniently, placed him at the perfect angle to stare down into her cleavage from over her shoulder. Anna enjoyed the impromptu massage for a few moments before pulling away.
"I've got to get out of these scrubs and into something fresh. I can't stand being dressed for work for even one more minute."
"You could just get out of the scrubs and forget the something fresh," Ryan replied hopefully.
"Oh, we'll get to that, mister," his wife laughed. "But first things first."
The couple exchanged banal details about their day as they moved into the bedroom. While they chatted, Anna began stripping out of her sweaty scrubs, dropping them on top of the other dirty clothes in the basket outside the bedroom closet door.
"I'm going to run over and do a quick load of laundry tonight, if you have anything you need washed. I should be able to get a machine at this time of night," she said over her shoulder to Ryan, as she peeled her restrictive sports bra over her head with a grateful sigh and added it to the pile. She turned to face Ryan as she shimmied out of her boy shorts, letting them fall to her ankles before kicking them into the basket, as well. Seeing her husband ogling her nude body, brought a small smile to her face; they had been together for almost three years now, and she enjoyed the fact that he still looked at her with such open awe and desire.
"Dude, laundry," she chided, getting Ryan to glance up briefly from her pink, quarter-sized nipples. "Get it in the basket, or it's not getting washed." Still, she playfully made a point of adding a little extra wiggle to her hips as she bent over and opened the drawer in the dresser where she kept her comfy loungewear. Anna kept an eye on Ryan's reflection in the dresser mirror as he began slowly undressing, giggling to herself as he tried to do so without taking his eyes off her heart-shaped ass.
Anna selected a pair of loose red and black plaid flannel pajama shorts and a well-worn midriff-baring pink t-shirt from the items in her dresser drawer. A glance in the mirror revealed that Ryan had finished stripping and was becoming visibly aroused as he continued staring at her shapely rear. As much as she was enjoying the effect she was having on her husband and, truthfully, the effect he was having on her as well, she decided she had best retreat to the bathroom and finish changing or the laundry might never get done. Anna had big plans for their first days off together in weeks, and those plans required the laundry to be out of the way.
By the time Anna emerged from the bathroom, Ryan had pulled on some gray sweat shorts, an old college t-shirt, and sneakers. After he added his few things to the basket, to Anna's surprise, he stooped down and scooped up the full basket of laundry. Anna regarded her husband with a raised eyebrow; while Ryan had many endearing traits, he wasn't usually very enthusiastic about helping with the laundry.
Seeing the surprised look on his wife's face, Ryan explained, "I thought I'd at least go hang out with you in the laundry room. It feels like I've barely been able to see you at all this week with how crazy our schedules have been. I need me some quality Anna time."
Anna smiled broadly, elated as much by Ryan wanting to spend time with her as she was by avoiding the drudgery of doing the laundry all alone in the middle of the night.
"Aw, that's so sweet, baby! I've missed you, too," she said brightly. Anna grabbed her keys from where she had dropped them on the kitchen counter just a few minutes earlier, retrieved her phone from her purse, then dug a half-used roll of quarters out of the cookie jar where they kept their loose change. Ryan retrieved some detergent and dryer sheets from one of the kitchen cabinets just before the couple made their way out the apartment door.
They paused briefly on the little open landing area shared by the four apartments on their end of the building's second floor while Anna locked the door. The happy pair chatted about their day as they made their way down the double flight of steps and out into the brightly lit parking lot. It was late summer and, even though it was late, the air was still oppressively warm and muggy. Anna almost immediately felt beads of sweat beginning to form.
"Ugh. Why can't it be fall already?," she complained. Ryan just chuckled and set off across the parking lot with the basket of laundry. Anna fell in behind him as he wove through the parked cars towards the entrance to the pathway leading around the neighboring apartment buildings to the complex's laundry facilities. Once they reached the concrete path, Anna become doubly grateful that Ryan had decided to accompany her; the long sidewalk was only sporadically lit and overgrown shrubbery along the side opposite the apartment buildings left wide swaths of it in deep, creepy shadows. The couple followed the path for several hundred feet, past two more clusters of apartments, before the single-story support building which housed the complex's meager facilities came into view.
The side of the building facing the pathway had two doorways with an odd little corridor in between them which passed through to the other side of the building. The glass door to the right was the entryway to the exercise room; the room was poorly equipped, in Anna's opinion, but it was available free of charge to residents 24-hours a day. At this hour of the night, the room's floor-to-ceiling windows were dark, indicating it was unoccupied. The door to the left was a solid steel, windowless door into the dreary little cinderblock walled laundry room, also available to residents at any hour, but decidedly not free of charge. The open-air corridor in between had just enough room for three vending machines down one side, one each for sodas, snacks, and individual packets of laundry supplies. You could pass through the tunnel-like corridor to the parking lot on other side of the building to reach the entrance to the rental office.
As the couple neared the building, they triggered the blindingly bright motion-activated security light mounted above the corridor entrance. Anna's startled little jump when the light came on elicited another chuckle from Ryan, one which earned him a momentary glare from his wife as she maneuvered past him to open the door. As expected, the laundry room was just as dark and unoccupied as the exercise room. Anna flipped on the lights and Ryan set down the basket of clothes in front of one of the three old-fashioned top-load washers. The windowless, poorly ventilated little room was just as hot as it had been outside, perhaps even hotter, and the strong smell of heated lint indicated that someone had probably only just recently finished using the dryer before the couple's arrival.
Anna began sorting through the laundry, but quickly decided that it just wasn't worth trying to separate it into multiple loads; it was mostly just underwear, socks, and scrubs, since a lot of Ryan's work clothes were dry-clean only. Satisfied that she could make just one big load of it, Anna dumped the basket's contents into the machine as Ryan began placing quarters in the slots on the push in tray. Anna measured out the detergent and poured it in, then reached to close the lid but found Ryan's hand blocking her. Anna looked up to find her husband staring at her with a mischievous glint in his eye.