“Put them on me,” she said.
She remembered. She’d meant it as a joke. But he’d taken off his own boots, pulled off his thick wool socks, and knelt in the snow to put them on her feet. His hands had been red and shaking. His smile had been the warmest thing she’d ever seen.
Pretty , she thought. But cold.
Mark blinked. “What?”
“I don’t want to be cold anymore,” he said into the dark. “I don’t want us to be cold.”
Emma reached down and touched the back of his head. His hair was soft. She’d forgotten how soft.
She hadn’t meant to say I feel like a ghost in my own house . But she had. And Mark hadn’t denied it. He’d just looked at her with that new, tired expression—the one that said here we go again —and walked away. Cold Feet
For a second, he didn’t move. Then he shifted onto his knees on the cold porch, took her bare foot in his hands—her feet were freezing, she realized, she hadn’t even noticed—and slowly, carefully, pulled the old wool sock over her toes, her arch, her heel. He did the same with the other foot. His fingers were clumsy. His knuckles were white with cold.
“You were shivering so bad your teeth were chattering. And I asked if you were cold, and you said—” He stopped, swallowed. “You said, ‘Only my feet.’”
The argument ended the way all their arguments ended now: with the soft click of a door and the louder silence that followed. Emma stood on the porch, arms crossed, watching her breath fog in the October chill. Inside, the warm light of the kitchen framed Mark’s silhouette as he scraped cold lasagna into the trash. “Put them on me,” she said
When did we stop taking pictures of each other?
“I stopped asking you to put on your socks,” she whispered. “I just assumed you didn’t care if I was cold anymore.”
Mark shifted closer. Not all the way—just enough that their shoulders almost touched. He reached into the pocket of his hoodie and pulled out something small and worn. A pair of wool socks. His old ones, the ones from the pond, patched at the heel and faded from a dozen washes. But he’d taken off his own boots, pulled
Emma turned to look at him. The porch light caught the side of his face, the stubble he hadn’t shaved in three days, the faint lines at the corners of his eyes that hadn’t been there on their wedding day.
When he finished, he didn’t let go. He held her ankles, his head bowed, and she saw his shoulders shake once, twice.