Dirty Laundry: A Tucker Springs Novel #3

one very large OCD handicap, however, that got in his way more than any other: Adam didn’t know how to navigate the anxiety morass that was people and their respective spaces.
    Put simply, Adam’s brain had decided people could only be in spaces in which they belonged. Public spaces, while not his favorite, were tolerable—except for hotels, which seemed to break all the rules while being an exception at the same time and in the end simply confused him beyond his ability to cope. Private residences were his everyday dragon, however. Visitors to his house, even for a few hours, had been a source of stress for Adam since as long as he could remember, and visiting other people’s houses always made him feel anxious and raw.
    His parents told stories about his distress as a very young child when they visited friends or family, of how unsettled he became for reasons they couldn’t understand. After the third time of having to leave a hotel in the middle of the night because Adam was throwing up after crying so hard, they stopped trying to stay in them. They took turns going out until he was old enough to stay on his own, because he’d never been able to tolerate a babysitter, not even his grandparents. Though it had been a winding and awkward road, eventually Adam had been properly diagnosed and began to struggle in a healthy way with the limitations his mental illness placed on his life. He’d come a long, long way.
    He had not, however, come far enough to deal gracefully with the thorny issue of retrieving forgotten items at his former place of residence. Thankfully, Ollie knew about Adam’s tic and stood patiently beside him on the doorstep while logic and OCD waged their war over whether or not Adam could cross the threshold.
    With a deep breath and a promise to himself that he wouldn’t stay longer than necessary, Adam went inside Crispin House.
    To distract himself from too much internal-panic dialog, he tried for small talk. “How’s everyone doing?” he asked Ollie as he made his way cautiously through the space, searching for his forgotten possessions.
    “Great. Mick and Brad are out golfing right now, taking a break from Fundy. Stedman’s brutal, man.”
    “Sorry to hear that. Give them my best.”
    Ollie followed Adam around, chatting in his friendly, eager way as Adam found his things and put them in the box he’d brought to take them back to his apartment. Ollie was an inch shorter than Adam and absolutely adorable. He reminded Adam of that Latino guy from Dancing With the Stars , Mario Lopez, only hotter and more stacked. He was straight, Adam was almost sure of it, even though he’d never seen him date. Whatever his orientation, he was pleasant to look at and not at all a bad distraction from panic.
    Ollie leaned against the kitchen door while Adam went through a section of the cupboard, now simply volunteering gossip as it came to him. “Andrew’s girlfriend broke up with him, but you know how weird he is, so he doesn’t care. Kim—well, I don’t have to tell you. All he does is study, study, study.”
    Adam listened to the rest of Ollie’s report of his former housemates’ lives with half an ear as he moved from the kitchen to the upstairs hall closet, where he was fairly convinced one of his towels had ended up, even though he’d always kept his things in his own room. He’d tried not caring about the missing towel once he’d realized it was gone, telling himself it was a towel and didn’t matter, but it had become his favorite one in some obtuse way, possibly simply because it was missing. Searching for it now through his discomfort seemed less upsetting than trying to live with leaving it behind.
    “So how has it been, living on your own?” Ollie asked. “You get lonely, or just happy to have a place all to yourself?”
    Adam couldn’t find the towel. It wasn’t anywhere in the closet, and now the closet was a mess, which meant he had to stand there and make it right. “A little of both, I guess.”
    “Here, let me help,” Ollie offered, taking some of the towels Adam had rooted through. Adam hid his wince at the idea of Ollie folding anything correctly, but apparently not very well because Ollie smiled at him wryly. “It’s okay, dude. They’re my towels. I don’t mind how they’re folded.”
    Adam sighed and added not caring about poor folding to his already burdened list of things-he-was-ignoring. “I know. It’s just . . . well, you know.”
    “I do,