I’m not quite cross-legged. My knees are bent and the bottoms of my feet press flat up against each other. I grab them with both hands and stare at them for a moment. My socks are the same color and the same length, I realize, which is a rare occurrence for me. I know it had been for the dance last night but it says a lot about my current life situation to notice that even the little details of my person are changing just to suit the kid sitting beside me.
Though I’m sure he wouldn’t care about mismatched socks.
He probably never even wears socks.
He looks like the type of kid that doesn’t wear socks.
I glance at him in the corner of my eye and he’s still sitting there, watching me, patient as ever. He probably thinks I need these few minutes to wake up properly, but I’m really just biding my time planning out what I need to say next.
But of all the things you could say to the boy whose bed you just woke up in, who kissed your face the night before, to whom you confessed your love to not more than twenty-four hours ago—
“Do you ever mismatch your socks?”
—probably wasn’t my best line.
He doesn’t even respond, just lifts his head a little and stares at me with slightly furrowed brows.
“Wow, sorry, that was dumb, don’t answer that—“
Then he pokes his feet out a little bit more, so that they peek out beneath the leg holes of his pajama bottoms and teeter over the edge of the bed. He’s wearing one pale green sock and it has a hole on the big toe.
So I was half right.