Page 59 of Can't Help Falling

She wore long, flowy pants and without too much thought on the matter, he reached down and lifted the hems of both her pant legs by a few inches.

“Hey!” she squeaked, leaning forward and kicking his hands away.

“Oh, for the love of all that’s holy, Fin.” He dragged his hands down the sides of his face, in full horror at what he was looking at. “One of them is a knee sock and one of them is an ankle sock.”

She raised that insufferable emoji eyebrow at him. “I repeat... So?”

He could have sworn she waggled her toes at him to provoke him.

“Your socks are not only two different colors and fabrics, which is bad enough, but they’re different lengths? That is utterly appalling. How can you stand it?” He gesticulated wildly at her feet. “That’s my version of torture.”

“God, I hope you never uncover any national secrets.” She wryly swigged her beer, that emoji eyebrow still firmly in place.

He leaned back in the armchair and just gaped at her for a moment. He knew she was provoking him. But what was he supposed to do? Just sit there and watch a kitchen get made over while he knew that the woman next to him wore one sock up to her knee and one down around her heel? It was enough to make him want to tear his skin off! He stood up suddenly. “I can’t look at this. No. I can’t even go on knowing this is taking place. It’s a travesty.”

She said nothing as he stalked out of the room. Later, he’d realize that he was acting as crazy as he was internally accusing her of being, but he didn’t care. He kept his shoes in neat rows on the floor of his coat closet, his toothbrush in its cup, his vegetables in the crisper and his motherfreaking socks always matched. It wasn’t an opinion thing. It was a necessity.

“Wearing unmatching socks is like only washing half your head when you take a shower. Some things just aren’t done,” he informed her as he stalked back into the living room, a pair of his socks in one hand.

“Ty, forget entitled douchebag, I’m starting to think you’re clinically insane.”

He waved her comment away and plunked down on the couch next to her, scooping her feet off the coffee table and twisting her body to face him. He put her feet against his knees and reached under the hems of her pants legs to strip her socks off.

“Tyler!”

Sitting there, her feet in his lap and her warm socks in his hands, reality finally caught up to Tyler. He cleared his throat and looked up at her shocked eyes, her hair that had tumbled forward when he’d moved her.

“I...might be getting carried away,” he said confusedly. He looked at her socks in his hands, feeling as if he’d just woken up from a dream to find himself standing in his neighbor’s kitchen.

To his enormous surprise and relief, she burst out laughing. It was that huge, eye-pinching, wolf-toothed smile of hers that had been so elusive in the past, but this time it was accompanied by great, husky bursts of laughter. She shook her head at him. “You think? Clearly I broke your circuit board or something.”

He stared bemusedly between the two mismatched socks in his hands. “I guess.”

She leaned back and grinned at him, taking a swig of her beer and wiggling her feet against his knee. “Well? Do what you gotta do to be able to sleep at night, you psycho.”

Still kinda shocked that she hadn’t slapped the shit out of him and stormed out of his house for putting his hands up the legs of her pants, Tyler carefully folded up her mismatched socks and grabbed his matching pair from where he’d set them on the coffee table.

He picked up one of her feet and was starting to put the sock on when he paused, staring down, utterly delighted by what he was looking at.

“What?” she asked, wiggling her toes again.

“You have ugly feet,” he said in complete amazement, incapable of tearing his eyes away.

She made a noise of outrage and attempted to yank her feet away from him, but he held them fast.

“No, no! Don’t misunderstand,” he said with a laugh he couldn’t stop. “I don’t mean ugly.”

“You said ugly.” She continued to yank her feet back.

He kept her feet firmly against his knee. “Well, I meant to say, ah, charmingly imperfect.”

A smile twitched at the corners of her mouth even as her eyes shot daggers at him.

She yanked her feet once more but he held fast.

“Seriously,” he said. “Ugly things are cute. Your feet are cute.”

He looked down at her cute-ass feet, the knobby, irregular toes and bony ankles. She had chipped toenail polish and the tiniest little pinky-toe nail he’d ever seen in his life.

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