Kat's surprised you're staring! - Exclusive 5/25

You and Kat go for a walk with your group of friends, and you take a few minutes to sit down and relax. You're enjoying the nice warm weather, but it's still exhausting!

Everyone huddles together to chat, sipping their iced coffees and checking their phones. You plop down on a bench across from your bestie Kat, digging your fingers into your increasingly-sore thigh muscles. Kat shoots you a small smile and a little wave before turning to her friend next to her.

You briefly scroll through the meaningless notifications on your phone to appease your daily dopamine craving (let's be honest, you're more addicted than you'd like to admit), before a set of words perk your attention.

"My feet are killing me!" you hear Kat groan to her friend.

It's selective attention in its purest form; except instead of hearing your name amidst a crowd, hearing your best friend remark on her feet rouses your focus instantly, like being shaken awake from a deep sleep, or having cold water dousing your face.

"I didn't know we were gonna be doing so much walking, hahah," she remarks. Your phone is still held in your hands, your face tilted down toward it, but your eyes can't help but settle on your friend as she leans over in her seat, tugs at the laces of her left sneaker, and, with only a momentary resistance from the trainer, tugs it off with a hard yank.

"Ugh, god that feels good!" she says with a little laugh. Her friend points out the little worn hole in the toe of Kat's sock, Kat chuckling at the remark. "I knoowww, they're old, I haven't done laundry!"

You look down at your phone, almost expecting something new and interesting to pop up in the feed of algorithmically-curated slop, but your brain continues to wrench your attention back to your best friend.

Kat kept her foot on the ground, heel popped and toes pointed as she stayed leaned over to massage her arch with her hand. "I was going to do it last weekend, but then we had that thing come up, and-- oh my GOD, oh no they stink!"

You feel that familiar tingle run down your spine, as Kat and her friend laugh over the innocent, silly remark. "It's one-hundred percent the socks, it's not, like, just my feet!" Kat laughs, exposing that beautiful horseshoe of upper teeth as she rocks back.

"Kath-e-rine!" the friend says with a half-laugh, half-scolding tone that enunciates each syllable. "How long have you been wearing those?!"

"Only a few days, at most!" Kat replies with a defensive chuckle. She bends her knee and cocks her foot back to peel off the fraying black ankle sock, a small puff of link and dust escaping into the air as the fabric clears her heel.

Your breathing comes to a shuddered halt in your chest, as she unknowingly offers you this unveiling strip tease. The skin of her ankle and the top of her feet is as pale as the rest of her, edging into a soft pink blush on the heel, ball, and toes. The raised arch of her foot, and the lengths of her long, skinny toes veer back into a creamy pale hue. The lateral edge of her foot has small regions where the pink color transitions into a subtle golden yellow; this, along with an unmistakable sheen from the sunlight overhead, indicates to you just how sweaty her foot is.

"Nooo, whhyy," her friend says with a laugh. The two of them keep exchanging silly, playful comments about the smell, but it's clear that neither of them think much more of it than something to goof off about. A part of you wishes that you could be just like everyone else; make a passing joke about something so mundane and stupid, and move on. Instead, you sit there, heart fluttering about in your chest like it's a canary trying to escape its ribcage prison.

"I know I know, they're stinky..." Kat says with a trailing off chuckle, looking down at her bare foot, with her heel popped and toes pressed into the ground. She leans down ever so slightly and massages the tips of her fingers into the soft, parchment-pale skin of the top of her foot, using her slightly-chipped green-manicured fingernails to clean away some small specks of black sock lint caught in the sweat.

It’s then, of course, that she decides to look up. Not that it's particularly-bad timing, as your gaze has been locked onto her for the past two minutes, despite it feeling like two years. Her big golden eyes snap to yours behind bigger glasses in rose gold frames. Your eyes flicker down to your phone in a panic, only to dart back up to meet her gaze again. The next few seconds pass as if the two of you are caught in a gravity well, distorting spacetime. You can see the little gears turning in her head as her gaze bounces a few times between meeting your eyes, and looking down at her own hand cleaning the gunk from her toes. Your throat goes dry in an instant, and your chest feels like it turns to concrete.

Kat leans forward ever so slightly, big eyes narrowing, her gaze now committed to locking into your own. You can't look away now.

Her sound of her whisper is lost in the short distance between the two opposing benches on which you two are sitting, but you can easily read the words that escape her lips.

 "...Are you staring at my feet?"

She caught you.

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