Socks

She has her tongue in his mouth and her hand on his crotch when he becomes aware that at some point in the near future he’s going to need to remove his socks. The rest of his clothes too, yes, but the socks will have to go first. He doesn’t want to remove his trousers without denuding his feet – the look of a man wearing nothing but boxers and socks is, he knows, undeniably unsexy.

So the socks need to go. But when? Probably after his shirt, which she’s already unbuttoning, fumbling with the buttons, giggling and kissing him as she does so. She strips it off him, and kisses down his neck to his collarbone. She kisses his chest, and he feels a rolling swell of arousal pass through him. His cock throbs against his jeans.

The trouble is this: he is tipsy, and they are on her bed, entangled with one another. He cannot think of any easy or graceful way to reach down and remove his socks without drawing undue attention to them.

And, again, that is something he doesn’t wish to do. Feet and socks, he feels, are not exactly glamorous. Well, not to most people. For some they’re the absolute focus of sex, but he’s fairly certain she’s not a foot fetishist. And even though he himself finds the shape and feel of a foot quite wonderful – as complex as a hand but more rugged and bony – now is not the time to bring that up.

He is afraid of Fucking It Up. Afraid of doing something so ungraceful and ungainly that it kills the mood. And so he’s momentarily paralysed. He needs to take his jeans off before she makes him come inside them. And before he can take his jeans off he needs to take his socks off. And he needs to do that in a way that doesn’t look monstrously unsexy, if such a thing is possible.

She rolls on top of him and kisses him on the mouth again, her tongue wet and warm. She’s grinding against him. He can feel her thigh rubbing against his cock through the denim of his jeans. Frantic plans flash through his head. Perhaps he can use the toes of one foot to hook the elastic of the sock on the other and drag it off without her noticing?

Just then she spreads her legs, and she’s not grinding on him with her thigh anymore but with her groin. The only thing separating them now are their clothes. He feels his balls tighten. His stomach contract. If he waits much longer she’ll make him come for sure. If he’s going to get naked at all, it has to be now.

And so he rolls on top of her. It was meant to be graceful but it ends up being a clumsy, thrashing movement. He almost slips off the bed altogether and ends up planting one foot on the floor. With that done, he decides, he might as well stand, and so he lurches awkwardly from the bed and totters into the middle of her room.

She, gorgeous and puzzled, looks up at him from the bed. And he, unable to think what else to do, awkwardly hooks one foot at a time, and peels off his socks. They’re the multi-coloured ones he got for Christmas, labelled in a comic font with the days of the week. He feels himself blushing. Surely he couldn’t have done this in any more graceless or unflattering a way.

She stares at him with those piercing eyes for a moment. Then she sits up on the edge of the bed, reaches down and quite pointedly peels off her own pale blue ankle socks, flicking each one to the corner of the room when she’s done. They both look at one another, dead serious for a moment. Then they both break out laughing.

It dissolves. The anxiety he had. The need to look cool or sexy or whatever it was he was trying to look. It’s gone in a moment. And a moment later they’re kissing as well as laughing. Then they’re just kissing. And then they’re laughing again, both of them, as he awkwardly wrestles his way out of his jeans.