Sabrina abhorred laundry. Like clockwork, clothes piled up until she was forced to take them down to her apartment’s dingy laundromat. One ordinary Tuesday night, she’d relented and was moving a load into the dryer.

The laundry room was beyond neglected. There were five sets of stacked machines. The first one the left was the only set where both machines worked. The middle three had hand-written ‘OUT OF ORDER’ signs on either the washer or dryer.

The one on the far end was different. It was visibly much older than the others. Larger cardboard signs were duct taped over them, so that the doors themselves were sealed. Sabrina always found it odd that those machines were still there, but her apartment was chronically mismanaged. She never met an actual person in the process of moving in, as her landlord was a faceless holding company.

As she started walking away from the load she’d just put in the dryer, she heard a a strange squeaking sound. She turned, pivoting on one foot, and opened the dryer back up. She merry-go-round of clothes settled down, and she kept and ear peeled. The squeak came again, louder this time. She identified it as coming from her right. The sound was halfway between the spring on an old porch swing and a whining animal. 

Her blood ran cold. Sabrina was the kind of person who stopped for loose dogs in the street and made sure they got home. Hearing that whine, her imagination leapt to the certainty that someone’s pet was somehow locked in a washer or dryer. She opened both doors of the first pair of machines on her right, finding only a sheer pair of panties in the dryer. She heard the squeak again and followed it. She found herself in the far corner of the room, somehow dimmer than what seemed reasonable for such a small space.

She heard clearly that the sound was definitely coming from the old washer on the far right. She bent, and frantically picked at the duct tape over the door. She was furious at whatever sadistic person would lock some poor kitten in a washing machine. The tape, however, nagged at her mind. As she picked it, it was so clearly not tampered with recently. It was sealed down in the exact same way it had been before she moved it. So then, her thoughts conjured up new worries. What if a rat had burrowed into the machine from behind, or even a bat?

By the time she had enough tape peeled to open it, her heart was racing. Not one to back down from an animal in need, she pulled, finding more resistance than she expected. She had to get closer than was comfortable and pulled with her whole body. Finally, the front-load door gave in, and Sabrina fell right on her ass. She immediately regretted doing laundry in just a big T-shirt and thong as her plump ass had virtually no protection from the cold and nasty tiles.

Under normal circumstances, she’d get up immediately and put everything else on hold to take a traumatized shower. Instead, she cocked her head in awe, and crawled forward on her knees. Behind the washer door wasn’t a washer’s interior —it was a tunnel. The floor and ceiling were multicolored shag carpets, separated by red brick walls. It was no higher than the washer itself, but the tunnel was deeper than what was possible. It went for thirty feet before opening to a space she couldn’t see.

Her mind raced. She thought of the tunnel from Coraline, and the wardrobe to Narnia. Then her mind jumped to horror movies where houses had secret tunnels to horrible places where horrible people did horrible things. A chill ran up her spine and she slammed the door and ran as fast as her slippers could take her.

She needed to tell her roommate, Jade. Sabrina had just found the most terrifying and amazing thing in her whole life and she’d be dammed if she wouldn’t share it. She sprinted up the stairs, got into her apartment, and went straight to Jade’s room. She found the door cracked open and went up to it, ready to explode into the biggest story her roommate would ever hear. She stopped cold before she could push the door open, though.

When she looked in, she saw Jade in bed, with her legs splayed and pussy out. She had her phone in her hand with earbuds in. With the other hand, she held her clitoral hood back with two fingers while the middle rubbed her clit. Sabrina forgot why she was there. She felt hot, and she was immediately aware of her own heartbeat in her pussy.

She knew she needed to back away and give Jade her privacy. In a case of faulty wiring, her body didn’t get the message, and she stayed right where she was. She wondered what kind of porn Jade was watching. She wondered, more urgently, if Jade left her door cracked open on purpose. Was she putting on a show? Was this a message? Or even an invitation? Was the right move to just walk right in and chow down?

Perhaps this was just a new step of openness between them. It was no big deal if she saw each other naked now and again. So maybe now, it was fine if they saw each other jack off. Maybe they could even do it together, casually joining each other on the couch for a friendly porn sesh. Maybe the right thing to do would be to drop her panties right here and start masturbating in the hall out of solidarity. That’s what friendship is all about.

Sabrina eventually chickened out of making any kind of move. She quietly inched away, not taking her eyes off of Jade’s glistening labia until she was out of sight. She went into the bathroom and left the door as cracked as Jade had. It was a passive move, but she embraced the moved boundary.

She started taking a hot shower, inwardly remarking how much she needed it. Her eyes went wide when she remembered why she needed it. She was so hypnotized by pussy that the mysterious tunnel slipped her mind. What the fuck was happening with her life today? Would life-changing wonders be behind every door she looked through?

First Sabrina was too horny to remember to be freaked out. Then in the shower, she was too freaked out to remember to masturbate. It all just swirled together into big horny freaky mess. When she got out of the shower, she kept her eyes off the door so she could imagine Jade was watching. She toweled herself off a little at a time, keeping much of her skin on displayed and intentionally jiggling her boobs. To dry her legs, she bent all the way over with her ass pointed at the door.

She left the bathroom naked to cross the hall to her room, not looking to see if Jade could see. When she looked for something to wear, and groaned when she realized all of her clothes were still dirty. She wasn’t going to resort to putting the same dirty pair of panties back on, so she just tossed on her last sleep shirt and nothing else. This would be great for her new fantasy of flashing Jade, but terrible for going down to the creepy laundry room.

Sabrina left her room and found Jade’s door fully open now. Jade was still looking at her phone in bed, but now her blanket was over her lower half. She wondered if she was naked under there. She noted that since Jade had gotten up to open the door, she easily could have peeped back at her.

Jade gave a nod of acknowledgment and a small smile. Sabrina wanted to say something. Her mind was split, though, between saying “I found a secret tunnel in the laundry room, let’s go on an adventure,” or “sit on my face please mommy I’ve been a good girl.” Instead, she just nodded back and kept walking. She sat on the couch and watched some tiktoks to kill time until the dryer was done.

After not much time at all, it was time to go get the laundry. Sabrina was petrified. Either she’d completely lost her grip on reality, or she was about to go back to a place where reality made no sense. She collected herself and went downstairs. Before going in, she circled the laundry room to check to any way the wall behind the washer could be connected to another building. She found no such thing; the laundry room was its own disconnected little shack with nothing against it. She went through the door, passed her own dried clothes and went straight to the mysterious machine. She ducked her head between the machines, and saw that, inexplicably, there was a space between the washer and the wall.

She took a deep breath, and opened the door, half convinced that nothing would be on the other side. No such luck; the tunnel was right where she left it. She now had confirmation that the tunnel not only existed, but was extra-dimensional. She thought of it as her very own laundry TARDIS.

Sabrina considered going up to get Jade, or waiting until morning, or just leaving it entirely. Something called to her, though. A fire lit up in the small part of her that refused to die when childhood faded. This was the part of her that still desperately wanted to believe in magic. That part of her shut out every inhibition and made her crawl right in.