Whrrrr. The drum slowed and stopped. Click.
She got up and started pulling the first load out, and that was when she found it, on the floor, half under the bench, where it had come off the top of the basket when somebody kicked the basket.
A shirt. Black and white. Long sleeves. Still warm.
Anybody else in that building would have called it filthy. It was, objectively, filthy. She turned it over anyway.
Seven.
There was one number seven at Notts County, and everybody in Nottingham knew why.
He had come in January off the back of the thing in Germany, and the Post had run it, and the forums had run it for a fortnight, and everybody had a view.
Ellie had read all of it, and she had never believed a word of it, and she could not have told you why, except that she had watched him.
She had half forgotten he existed by about March. He was a name on a website, sixty-one minutes in an empty ground.
Then in July she had started coming in early with the mop, and there was a group of them out on the far pitch every morning who nobody watched, no coach, no camera, no reason to be there, and there was one lad in that group who did every single thing they were told and then stayed out and did more.
He was still doing it in August. She had checked. She checked most days.
Ellie held the shirt in both hands and looked at the door.
Tick. Tick. The dryer.
There's two stewards, and one of them is seventy. The players had been gone thirty-five minutes.
Denise was in a car on the A60. Nobody came down this corridor after eight unless somebody screamed, and she was not going to scream.
She had thought about being caught.
She had thought about it properly, more than once, the way you think about a thing you are going to do anyway, and she had decided that if it ever happened she would say the machine had eaten it and she was checking.
That was the plan. She had never once believed she would be able to say it out loud.
Clink. Clink. Hangers, as she pushed the rail back against the wall.
She went through into the away changing room, because the door in there did not shut and she would hear anyone coming, and she sat down on the floor with her back against the bench under peg nine.
Creak. The bench taking her weight.
Then she put the shirt over her face and breathed in.
"Haa..."
It went straight through her. Sweat and grass and the sharp chemical bite of whatever they sprayed on the ankle, and under all of it, him, and her hips came up off the floor before she had decided anything.
She had her leggings and her knickers down round her thighs in about four seconds.
God. Look at the state of me. She thought.
She was already soaked.
She had been soaked since she picked the thing up off the floor, and when she got two fingers down there, they slid into her pussy with no effort at all and came back out shining.
Schlick.
He had been on the far pitch this morning.
She had watched him through the gym door in the rain with his shirt off, the water running off the back of his neck and down the middle of his back, his ribs going in and out when he stopped with his hands on his knees.
She thought about that now with her fingers working and her mouth open under the shirt.
"Hnn... nngh..."
She got her other hand up under her top and shoved the bra out of the way and took hold of her own boob, hard, and rolled the nipple between her finger and thumb until it hurt.
Both her nipples had gone stiff enough to ache, and every pull on the one sent a line of heat straight down to her clit. The noise she made went straight into the fabric.
"Mm. Mmm."
Two fingers. In. That is it.
Her knees were wide apart and her heels were dug into the tile.
She fucked herself on her own hand and worked her clit with her thumb in fast, tight circles, and the wet sound of it rose up over the drum in the next room, and she could not have stopped for anybody.
Squelch. Squelch. Squelch.
She was thinking about that door not shutting properly.
She was thinking about him coming through it with his shoulders still wet, and what his face would do, and whether he would say anything at all or just cross the floor and put his hand on her.
"Ah... ah, God..."
He would not ask. He would just do it. He would take hold of her and put it in her, right here, and she would let him, and the thought of it made her clit throb under her thumb.
Her back arched off the bench.
Her heels slid. She had three fingers in her pussy now, and she was riding her own hand, hips coming up off the tile to meet it, the heel of her palm slapping against her clit on every stroke.
Smack. Smack.
It was making a wet noise in an empty room that she would have died about on any other night of her life.
"Please. Please. Please."
Him on top of me. Right here. On this floor. His cock in me. All of it.
The shirt came off her face and slid down onto her chest, and she did not care, and she did not stop.
She had her other hand back on her boob, pulling at the nipple hard enough to hurt, and her thighs had started to shake, and she was so close she could feel it coming up through her stomach.
"I'm going to come. Oh God, I'm going to come right now, and I don't care, I don't care about anything..."
Kkiiik.
The hinge.
Ellie's eyes came open.
The door between the drying area and the room she was sitting in swung all the way, slowly, with a squeal at the end, and went tap against the locker, and stopped.
Drip. Drip. Off him, onto the tile.
There was a man stood in it with a towel in his left hand and nothing else.
She did not move. Her hand was still where it was, two fingers still inside her pussy. The shirt with his number on it was on the floor by her hip, face down, seven upwards, and she looked at it, and then at him, and then at it again.
Dark hair, cut short and cut badly. Pale. Wet through, with the water still coming off him onto the tile. He was not big. From row H, forty yards up, he had always read as bigger.
He was five foot ten at the outside, long-legged and narrow across the shoulders, built like a lad who had stopped growing and never started again.
A nose that sat off centre.
A jaw with old scarring along one side that she had never been close enough to see before.
A right ankle with a line of shiny skin up the inside of it, which she had seen a hundred times in the basket as a strapping and never once on a leg.
And he was hard. His cock was standing up under the edge of the towel he was holding, and he was doing nothing whatsoever about it.
He said something.
"Scheisse."
It was not English. She had done German to GCSE and got a C and forgotten all of it, and she had no idea what the word meant.
She knew exactly what it meant.
"I don't know what that means," she said.
Her voice came out of her about half the size she expected. She heard herself say it, and her face went hot all the way up from her throat, the way it always did.
He did not answer.
He was looking at something over her head, a little to the left, at nothing, at the wall, and his eyes were moving across it the way you read a sign.
Drip. Drip.
Then they came back down to her.
And he started walking.