Footbound (Chapter 2) (Patreon)
Content
Nearly two months into Lilina’s successful tenure at the center, on a soul-weathering Monday like any other, Mitch was in the break room taking his lunch break. Not much eating was taking place, though, as he furtively spied his coworkers Nola and Avis chit-chatting at the adjacent table, specifically their stilettos antsily bobbing off the ends of their stocking-wrapped toes. Nola was petite, a short-haired blonde with glasses and a high-pitched voice, while Avis was taller, characterized by a daily ponytail in her brunette locks and eyes that were hardly ever not sarcastically rolling. Both ladies had been at the company long before Mitch joined, and had previously been the objects of his quietly sensual fascination, before a certain someone usurped them in his mind, revealing both women as merely ordinary by comparison: pretty yes, but lacking the near-narcotic effect of watching the ethereal Lilina shoe-play in shiny-nyloned slow motion for nine hours straight. Today, however, they again unknowingly demanded his focus.
“Seriously, we’re the ones down in the trenches, making them all this money… would it kill them to put in some real carpeting here?” Nola complained to Avis, after checking the coast was clear of any supervisors. Letting her high heel clomp to the floor, she smacked her size-5 sole to the ground and scraped it back and forth as though to generate static electricity, which elicited an abrasive rustle between her not-quite skin-tight light-tan stocking and the indeed-cheap flooring. That sound made the hair stand up on Mitch’s arms, and his pupils swung to and fro to keep track of the rimples forming in the fabric of that stocking across her foot like melted caramel matching the sweep of her anatomy.
“You’re not kidding. Like, something’s gotta give, right? Either they don’t make us wear the damn three-inch heels, or they give us something soft to stand on.” Avis ripped her own footwear off and let it plop disdainfully beside Nola’s, then patted out a frustrated drum-beat on the floor using her own larger peds, each garbed in a darker beige stocking. “Really, who the hell out there is keeping their shoes on all day long? It’s almost a human rights violation, if you ask me.”
“My feet are just sooooo raw at the end of the day, I can hardly move. I’m telling you. If I work here much longer, I’ll have to get myself one of those little scooters.”
“The end of the day? I can barely get halfway through! Here, look.” Without hesitation, Avis reached under her skirt, found the thigh-taut opening of her stocking, and proceeded to roll it down the seductive length of her gam for demonstration. Lifting her foot to table-height to pluck off the final bit, then, she let the last swaths go elastic, then swish dramatically like sunlight-tinted water over the plush edifice of her long pale sole. She propped her ped up across the opposing leg in easy view for Nola to examine, though Mitch had a plain sightline as well. Sure enough, the brunette’s meaty blanched arch was marked by impressions and reddish pre-callus spots where her high heels hugged the soft architecture of her foot too closely. Sore or not, it was the cleanest glimpse of her naked foot Mitch had ever received, and he was just glad to have his lunch there to keep himself from outright drooling.
“Yep, that’s how mine end up looking, too,” Nola sighed, then without prompting, reached to show off her own battle scars by unsocketing her squatter foot from its nylon tubing as well. Her stocking came off with even less care than Avis’s, causing several seams to rip in the process and create trickling fairer-hued openings that showed long peeks of her leg through the glimmering garment, until her marshmallow-soft sole and adorably beady toes were liberated for a rampant air-out squirm. “It’s absolutely deplorable. You see it too, don’t you?”
Mitch, still skillfully watching every move his coworkers’ feet made without peeping them too egregiously, was deeply grateful in this case that his unassuming vibe as a man and as a person made him practically blend in with the wallpaper. It certainly wasn’t a useful trait when it came to finding dates, but was definitely to his benefit now, where he could act as a fly on the wall, and neither Nola nor Avis seemed to acknowledge his existence.
“I absolutely do,” Avis said, prodding a finger at Nola’s equally-pink sole and causing the tired swollen flesh to yield like unraised bread. “It’s sad, really, to think they care about us so little, that they can’t offer up some kind of solution. What are the odds we could put together a union and do something about this?”
“A union? Just because our feet hurt so bad? No one would listen.”
“Why not? The hours suck, the pay couldn’t be much worse, the floor is hard, the whole building hasn’t had a new air conditioner in thirty years so we end up sitting there just stewing in our own gnarly stocking sweat… how much more reason could we need? The absolute least they can do is give us something fluffy to stand on, so when we stand up to take a break, we don’t feel that pinch, right in the middle of the arch here. You know the spot, don’t you? Right here!”
Avis demonstratively stroked her fingers up and down the considerable slab of her nude sole, unintentionally providing a hauntingly alluring show for Mitch by fondling the sloped foot brawn with enough pressure that her central creases temporarily ironed out and the complexion turned from ruddy tan to almost milky-white. Nola, spotting the precise hot spot on her taller friend’s sole, nodded in fatigued agreement, then offered up her own foot to probe the puffed-up wrinkle-dense skin and show off a similar chafed wound.
“God, yes. I hate it. I hate this floor, these shoes, and this job.”
“Same. But, Jesus, my landlord’s not about to give me a break while I quit and look for something else. It would just be nice to not work for assholes who insist on us dressing like… this.”
Mitch knew that sentiment all too well, since he remained with the company for only one very good reason.
“Might I suggest picking up a good stress ball?”
This abrupt third voice, Lilina’s, arrived so unexpected and warmly in Mitch’s ear, that he had to stifle a flinch. However Nola and Avis seemed not to notice him even then, as both their attentions were turned to the black-crimson-haired mystery siren as she strutted silently into the break room from somewhere outside Mitch’s peripheral. She brushed right past him, closer than she’d come since they met and stood between the aggrieved pair of shoeless coworkers, though to their male audience’s relief, Lilina didn’t block his view to their ongoing arch-wrinkling show.