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Exasperatedly, she thought. Like it was obvious.
Then when it clearly wasn’t, he just seemed to break.
“Do you really not get it? Okay look, if I was your boyfriend, I wouldn’t be able to stand that. I would see it when we were out and want to sort it. I wouldn’t be able to help myself. And it’s not the only thing I wouldn’t be able to stop doing, either. There’s also that you haven’t buttoned the jacket right. You’ve missed one and it’s puckering. Oh, and your shoelace is undone—which to be honest is something that drives me mad even as someone who isn’t pretending to be your boyfriend. All I can see isshoelace shoelace shoelaceand all I can think of is you tripping over it and so if you could either fix it or quickly tell me how you feel about me doing these things so I can fix it, that would be a weight off my apparently bonkers mind,” he said.
He needn’t have worried about doing it, however.
All she could think after he had was:
Why the fuck are you not up to your eyeballs in amazing relationships?
Because god, she could hardly imagine having someone who cared so much about you that they noticed your fucking shoelaces. It seemed like a myth. A thing up there with fricking Bigfoot. She almost wanted to ask him if he’d ever had John Lithgow yell at him to go back to the forests.
Then tried to respond in a more normal way.
“I feel fine about them. You can if you want,” she said.
And watched him blow out a big, relieved breath. Then gesture at her foot.
“Oh, thank Christ for that. Come on, let’s have it, then,” he said. So she did, unthinking. After all, what was there to think about? He was only going to be touching her through shiny red leather. There was about three inches of the stuff—not to mention the fake phone receivers on either side of the heels. So it wasn’t going to be like the hand hold, or the hair thing, or when she’d touched his chest.
This was a super boring, near contactless kind of touch.
Or at least that was what she thought.
Until his fingers were suddenly on the back of her ankle.
On that arch, she thought, that seemed both sturdy and delicate.
Then after that she didn’t know what to think. It was hard to, really, when you could see someone cradling you in his massive hands. Gently, so gently, like they weren’t really massive at all—which she supposed was the real killer.
It was that contrast between how he looked and how he was.
That brutishness of him, as he moved like she was made of glass.
It made her go all rigid, in ways she didn’t really understand. Then just as she was at the maximum possible level of tension she could feel, just as she was holding her breath, he ran one stroking, smooth-as-silk finger around the inside rim of her boot. Like he was trying to make sure the thing was sitting righton her, she thought. Like he was trying to make the leather lay flush against her skin.
Just a simple action, really.
Though of course it didn’t feel like that.
It felt like he’d somehow managed to make love to her ankle with his hand. She actually bit her lip over it, then had to force herself to stop so he wouldn’t see. Or ever know that having her laces tied was inexplicably giving her a lot of inappropriate feelings.What the fuck is wrong with you, she imagined him saying, and that helped. She managed not to squirm as he pulled the laces taut.
But god, it was a close thing.
He just did it so firmly.
So forcefully.
The way people did when they were lacing up far sexier things, like corsets or saucy underwear or maybe some kind of kinky device that she didn’t want to really think about right now.He’s just doing it professionally, like how he probably did his boots before going onto the pitch, she told herself.
Not that this helped.
Now he was highly competent, on top of all the rest of it.
And really her only consolation was that he appeared to be finished. He set her foot down, and sat back, satisfied with his handiwork. “Job done,” he said, and she was home clear. Or at least, she was home clear until she realized: now they were going to have to discuss other things. Lots of other things.
And the other things weren’t just hand-holding.
