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Mako doesn't even register her mistake until she catches the knowing smiles directed at her in the mess hall. She stares back as she stacks food on her tray, eyebrows raised. Some of them look away. Mako maintains eye contact as she pays for her food, then glances down to discover she's selected beef shaomai instead of pork and substituted a wobbly cup of red Jell-O for her normal rice pudding. She finds Raleigh, absorbed in his noodles, and sets the tray down. "Why is everyone staring at me?"
"Because you're--" Raleigh starts to say, then looks up and turns the same color as her Jell-O. Mako looks behind her instinctively, but it's just the same dirty and tired people eating in the same dirty and tired surroundings.
"I'm what?" she prompts, trying not to blush herself at the way Raleigh's staring.
"You're, uh." He twirls his fork around his noodles. "You're wearing my sweater."
Now she is blushing. "Oh." She must have grabbed it after their sparring session. She plucks at a loose thread, now aware of the soft way it swallows her from shoulders to waist, too-large sleeves sliding down to her elbows whenever she raises her arms. It smells like pavement after a hard rain. Cologne or just Raleigh? Mako wraps her arms around herself, unwilling to catch that train of thought. She looks up and Raleigh is staring again.
"Do you... want it back?" she asks. "I can't take it off now, but after dinner."
Raleigh's mouth shapes itself around the beginning of several different words before he settles on a strangled: "You can keep it if you want! You look nice."
"I'll give it back. In a little while." Mako smiles, embarrassment forgotten in the face of Raleigh's unrelenting good nature, and pushes her cup of Jell-O toward him. "Here." An old memory of Raleigh and his brother peering into a refrigerator as children surfaces in her mind. "It's your favorite, isn't it?"
"You're my favorite," he says, accepting the Jell-O.
Mako's cheeks heat up again. "You're mine," she replies. His sweater is warm against her skin. Maybe she'll keep it after all.