Pat couldn’t stop running her forefinger along the pleats of her trousers. She did this repetitively throughout the day, caressing each fold like it was her favourite pet. Better than her favourite pet, because she got to wear the same garment, day after day, five identical sets of trousers that got worn exclusively for the entirety of the week. On Saturdays, she washed four pairs while still wearing Friday’s pants, and on Sundays, she wore Monday’s pants so she could wash Friday’s. No other slacks would do.

It was all in the way the pleats folded back on themselves so perfectly, so crisply, never needing to be ironed. The material was 100% cotton, of a variety that felt soft and smooth to the touch. It was pure heaven.

Nevertheless, if it weren’t for the four pleats, two on either side, Pat would never have purchased the pants in the first place. It had been five years since she had discovered them on sale at Old Navy. A promotion for the new spring line of clothing that year. Pat had been wandering aimlessly through the store, her hand grazing the fabrics, when suddenly she stopped at these particular pants, her fingers resting on the pleats as though guided there by fate. She didn’t even have to look at them. Appearance never mattered when you found the perfect pleat.

It only ever happened once in a blue moon, like finding the love of your life and deciding right then and there to tie the knot. That’s how sure she was. When you know, you know. She went to the register that day with her first six pairs in hand. She loved them so much, she went back a few weeks later to buy four more pairs. And then back again the month after that to buy another two. Just in case.

It didn’t end there. She mulled it over, and by the end of June, she had returned to Old Navy a total of six times and purchased all the pairs in her size she could find, before they got replaced with their summer stock, twenty pairs in all. Five years later, she was down to the last five pairs. The growing fear inside her —that had started off as a sort of uneasy dread last winter when she had to throw out another set of trousers so threadbare, the pockets were wearing out — was growing daily and building into outright panic.

That was the problem with finding these diamonds in the rough. Perfection didn’t come along very often, but when it did, it never stuck around for very long. The world of fashion was such that the newest, most tantalizing textures were always replacing the old ones, so nothing was actually ever current. New methods of weaving cotton were always under development, and while polyester blends had almost totally been eradicated, some lesser manufacturers still insisted that their fabrics felt just as soft as pure cotton.

Pat knew better, of course. Those poly-blend charlatans hadn’t consulted the autistic community about what was comfortable and what wasn’t before they decided to market their wares. Or perhaps they were sick and tired of catering to a community with such particular and exacting tastes. There were some such bastions of the old ableist philosophy still out there, sticklers for tradition, or maybe just capitalists trying to cut costs while appealing to the normies.

Given that almost half the population nowadays was on the spectrum, those attitudes were going the way of the gas-powered vehicle.

Henceforth, it was going to be all about the sense of touch, that which led anybody of the neurospicy persuasion to almost start convulsing in fits of pleasure over the latest contact high.