The Inner Moose
Nice Socks
It was a day that people like to describe as crisp, she had before. But today it was different, like she had never seen it before – well she hadn’t and she had probably thought this before too. Everything was new again, really new and exactly as it was the day before except that today the paint was just dry, everything more vivid.
Nice socks she thought to herself as she looked over her left shoulder. But was it the socks?
Glancing back for a double take, there he was, sunglasses, grey hoody up, dark blue padded jacket zipped up on top. Matching dark blue sweat wicking flimsy shorts, the long socks tight up to the knee over toned calves, paler blue and Asics trainers, in shades of grey, barely worn.
He looked like her in another life, another time - out striding through the freshness, feeling the stinging air run amuck over her skin, his skin. She planned to say something as he passed by about his socks.
Maybe six paces back, he came up behind her, walking in lock step, staying there for a while. A bit too long? Was he approaching or looking on to where he was going? The former dangerous and fun, the latter more likely. Fine. Her body was undeterred.
Like they were two ends of a hot corridor - the sun was warm on the back of her neck, and with him in its’ path, the sun must have been warm on the back of his neck too. A temperature was rising. Not boiling, no loins on fire, but potential flames, some crackling and fizzing, a restlessness in her toes – a certain sign. Is that why she didn’t like her feet being touched during a massage, the souls of her feet being direct highways to her clitoris?
He was mid-late thirties and as he got level with her, roughly the same height, five foot five. Her sense of other people’s height was based on some kind of interior size sensing and not on real inches or centimetres – this way she would sometimes be larger than anyone taller than her nearby. This way some people she had known for a very long time were her height, even though they weren’t. But he was her height for sure.
The socks were great, up to just under his knees and folded over evenly all around at the top, about an eight-centimetre turn down. These were not coming down easily nor were they biting in too hard, as the three bears once found, they were “just right”. Stretched over his nicely turned gastrocnemius, ‘the belly of the calf’ muscles, like two plum tomatoes, travelling down the lower leg along the soleus muscles converging into the Achillies tendon. Ah the Achillies.
In her draw at home, she had several pairs of knee high socks – some seemingly should be worn with Lederhausen, wool, red and green, itchy, where Heidi meets Finisterre, one pair Miyake’s for flashing moments of patterned circles and more serious design situations,
sports socks with strong geometrics and colours and some sheer ones for smooth calves only, sort of impractical like flimsy panties. His socks fell into her sensual category. She imagined pulling them on like they were stockings and walking out of the house, down the road to the gym. Everything freshly laundered and showered, it was all almost brand new like the painted day and ready to bedazzle.
Did he bend down pretending to tighten his laces and show his visible pant line stretched into the shorts when he got just in front of her revealing his smooth arse?
Next to her bed this image materialised as a piece of sculpted marble, with a thin ridge, waiting there patiently all day ready to be stroked. Every night she would run her finger-tips backwards and forwards over the line until she fell asleep.
Using herself as a kind of imaginary test dummy, her knees gave way and she sank down onto the pavement when he was out of sight, pretending to tighten her laces, trying to evoke the sensation of how the technical fibres would have felt stretched around his buttocks. Breathing out almost in a pant, her breath was shortening, turning to steam as it hit the cold winter air leaving her now slightly flaring nostrils.
Dropping further she rolled about on the ground covering herself in the unexpected scent, like a wild crazy moose in rutting season, her chest heaving. Channelling her inner moose, she closed her eyes and dragged her tingling fingers up the contours of his calves and stopped when her palms spread wide over his shorts.
Play dead for a while she lay on the ground until a chill started to seep into her body. Slowly she got up to her feet, stunned. Had she just been rutting or fucking? Hope had slipped in. No one noticed, or she didn’t notice them. And she carried on to wherever she was going, only now she had forgotten and was breathless.