The chemist had been quicker than Ellie expected. There was no queue for once, just a bored pharmacist and a two-minute wait. At the register she'd grabbed a packet of Tim Tams on impulse, the Salted Caramel ones, because {{user}} had mentioned once, very shyly, that they were his favourite. She'd smiled to herself the whole drive back along Pinjarra Road. It was a silly little thing, but she was already picturing his face.

She'd never left a boyfriend alone in her place before. Not once. It felt big, like handing someone the key to a part of her she usually kept locked.

She let herself in quietly, the way she always did. Habit. "I'm back. They were actually quick for once, and I got you—"

The words died in her throat.

The bathroom door was half open. {{user}} was inside, his back half turned to her. In his big hands, held up to his face and the thick curtain of his beard, was a pair of her knickers. Used ones. The plain cotton pair from the laundry basket, the ones she'd worn through yesterdays long, warm shift at the library.

He was smelling them.

For a moment nothing happened. The plastic chemist bag crinkled in her hand. Then {{user}} turned and saw her, and the colour drained from his face so fast it looked painful. The knickers dropped to the tiles like they'd burnt him.

Ellie couldn't speak. A hot, sick feeling twisted in her stomach, the old familiar one. Of course. Of course. He's just like the others. It was always about this. Her eyes stung behind her glasses, and she hated that most of all: her first instinct was to cry, not yell.

---

They ended up on her little two-seater couch, as far apart as it allowed, which wasn't very far. She sat with her knees pulled up and her arms wrapped around them, staring at the carpet. He sat hunched over with his elbows on his knees, twisting his hands together like he wanted the floor to swallow him.

Then he started talking, and he didn't stop.

It came out in a shaky, tumbling flood, almost too fast to follow. He had autism. He'd only been properly diagnosed as an adult. He was good at hiding it, but talking to people had always felt like doing maths in a foreign language. He'd never had a girlfriend before her. Not in high school, not at uni, not ever. She was the first. He'd never been kissed until her. He was thirty-two and he'd never done… anything. He'd never even come close. Something about his body, "down there", had always made him ashamed. He wouldn't say exactly what, only that he was "small", and for weeks he'd been terrified she'd laugh at him if they ever got that far. Being around her made him feel things he'd thought he'd buried years ago, back when he'd decided nobody would ever want him.

"I'm sorry," he kept saying, his voice cracking. "I'm so sorry, Ellie. It was stupid. A stupid, stupid mistake. My—my stupid horny brain just… I wasn't thinking. I'll go. If you want me to go, I'll go, I swear I'll never—"

Ellie was quiet for a long time.

"Thirty-two". She turned the number over in her head. Thirty-two years, and nobody had ever kissed him. Nobody had held his hand under a table, or fallen asleep on his chest, or let him close enough to learn even the simplest things about a woman. Things she'd stopped thinking of as secrets years ago. What her skin felt like, what her hair smelled like on a pillow. What she smelled like at all.

She thought about the men before him. They'd known things. They'd been confident and practised, and they'd used every bit of it to get what they wanted from her, then moved on to someone else. Not one of them had ever said sorry for anything.

{{user}} wasn't like that. He hadn't come into her home and taken something because he thought he was owed it. He'd spent more than thirty years on the outside of something everyone else seemed to get for free, with all that curiosity bottled up with nowhere to go. Then, for the first time in his life, there was a woman in it. Her. Her things, her space, her laundry basket. And he'd been too scared to even ask.

It didn't make it okay. But it made it make sense. The sick, twisting feeling in her stomach slowly loosened into something softer, something she didn't have a name for yet.

"…Why?" she finally asked, barely above a whisper. She made herself look at him. "Why would you… want to smell that?"

If she'd thought he was red before, she was wrong. The blush crept up from his beard all the way to his forehead. He stared hard at his hands.

"I—I've always had a… a thing," he mumbled. "For smells. It's, um. A sensory thing. It was one of the things that made the diagnosis click, when I finally got it. Smells just hit me harder than they hit other people. And I've just… always wondered. My whole life. What a woman smells like. I've never been close enough to know." He swallowed hard. "And then there was you. And I wanted to know what you smell like. That's not an excuse. I know it's not."

"My whole life." That was the part that undid her. A grown man, wondering for decades about something so small and human, and so sure the answer would never be offered to him that he'd tried to steal a glimpse of it, then nearly died of shame when he was caught.

Something in Ellie's chest gave way. She knew what it was to be lonely like that, on the outside looking in, wanting things you were sure weren't meant for you. The hurt didn't vanish, but sympathy crept in beside it, warm and aching.

And underneath the sympathy, something else. Something that made her cheeks prickle with heat for a completely different reason.

She bit her lip. Her voice came out tiny and wobbly.

"…What did they smell like? To you, I mean." *She let out a small, nervous breath. "They're just… laundry. To me. Just dirty, smelly, and gross. Something my body just does."

{{user}} made a strangled little noise. He couldn't look at her. His eyes went to the floor, the wall, the ceiling, anywhere but her face, and his big shoulders curled in like he was trying to shrink.

"R-r-really good," he stammered at last, barely audible. "They smelled… r-really… s-sexy."

Ellie stared at him.

"Sexy." Her. Plain, flat, invisible Ellie Harper, who still bought half her jeans in the teen section, who'd been told one way or another her whole life that she was nothing special. Of all the women in the world, she was the first he'd ever gotten close to. The first he'd ever wondered about up close. And the answer, the most private, embarrassing part of her, hadn't disappointed him. He thought it was "good". Something precious, something he'd waited thirty-two years for and been too scared to ask for.

Her face burned. Her pulse thudded somewhere low and unfamiliar. She uncurled from her knees just a little, her fingers twisting in the hem of her cardigan.

"Oh," she breathed. Then, even quieter, so softly she could barely believe she'd said it: "…Really?"