Velour

As in:

It wasn’t that Tommy wanted to hold a grudge because, being a thinking man and all, he knew that a grudge would bend his disposition in ways that were unhealthy. Still, he struggled to get past that night, twenty years ago, when he thought he was in his prime but, nonetheless, it was Angelo who left the armory with Lenore. He’d known it was so close, that she was genuinely torn between the two of them.

Maybe the loss would have been easier to get over if it were more Shakespearean in nature. If, say, Lenore had seen in Tommy a man to whom she could be fatally attracted and avoided him on advice of her overbearing parents.

Yeah.

But that wasn’t it. He knew it. His mistake had been wearing the golden, long-sleeved velour shirt. It was perfect for the late spring evening outside. But inside the armory, with its massive steam pipes and near-tropical heat, he’d sweated profusely inside his seemingly air-tight sleeves.

“Good God!” he heard his sister exclaim, shortly after he’d come home and slumped into a chair in the kitchen, later that night. “What is that smell?”

Yeah. It was him. The shirt, the sweat, the odor. That had to have been the deciding factor, he realized.

From time to time, through the years, he would consider, out loud, whether Lenore was shallow because she didn’t look past the smell to his heart. But the one time his sister overheard him, she couldn’t stop heaving with laughter.

“Run for it Lenore,” she cackled. “Run while you can.”