Footbound (Chapter 18) (Patreon)

“I… do feel bad about that,” Mitch whispered back to the woman on the phone, while peeping in all directions to ensure no coworkers were in earshot. “F-For your feet. I’d… like to help you. Help them.”

“Oh, thank God. YES. So good, so good. You don’t know how much it means to hear you finally say that to me!” the woman ravenously moaned like they’d not only known each other for years, but like Mitch had personally reached through the phone with his voice too and began finger-pumping her loins. “I just don’t know what I’m going to do if you can’t get me the help I need. But you will help me, won’t you?”

“Y-Yes, I will.”

“This special footrest I’m looking for… do you think you have an idea of what it might be?”

“I-”

“No, no, please. Don’t hesitate like that again. Don’t abandon me and my feet. You KNOW what they need, don’t you? Even before I asked. The answer is on the tip of your tongue. Say it to me. What do I need?”

“It’s… me, right?” Mitch experienced a similar cranium-revolving heartbeat-panic high now as he’d felt during that first uncertain encounter with Eve’s feet, only today he was just dizzy, exhausted, and disempowered enough not to take the same pause as before. From now on, he simply had to embrace his fortunes. “Your… feet… need me.”

“Yes, yes, they do!” she heaved, cooing then inhaling deeply through pursed lips. “You DO know! I’m telling you, there is no piece of furniture made of wood or leather or wicker that could ever match the feeling, the relationship, of that shape coming alive beneath your feet. It is more special than anything, to run your soles up a body, to feel air pumping inside, the pulse racing under your heel. To press the bottoms of your feet down onto the face of that body and just start to know every inch of their face as you feel them, stroke them, knead them. Please them. To feel their cool breath slipping up between your toasty little toes, and their smile opening up right across the middle of your arches to tell you with a taste that your feet are cared for now. Loved. Appreciated. Where they’re supposed to be. And, God, I can’t tell you how lost it makes me feel to have no one below me for so long. I have missed it so terribly. You understand that, though. YOU. Yes, I must have you here before me. Brought low, humble, sweet and willing as you are. You would do that for me, wouldn’t you?”

“Yes, I would.” Mitch could hear his voice getting louder now, but he couldn’t help it. “I would love to.”

“It’s settled, then. Please don’t make me wait, when the time arrives, because I can only survive so long without your body there to hold my feet. I just know it’s going to be something special. You’ll never wish to leave. Because just as you take care of my feet, they will take care of you, in all the ways you want. All the ways you deserve for being so helpful. Thank you. Thank you…”

“WAIT! M-Ma’am, I… didn’t even get your information, you-” Mitch wailed as if he was being thrown out a window, upon hearing the line click abruptly dead. Looking around, then, and seeing several irritated coworkers frowning back at him for his shouting, he sheepishly mouthed an apology to them, then slammed the redial switch on his workstation. Surely it was just a mistake that she’d hung up then, right when they’d reached an understanding? She must’ve intended to tell him something he could use to find her, right? She might’ve been crazy, and he may not have even known her name, but Mitch could hear through every sensuously dripping syllable she spoke that the mystery woman was sincere in her pleas to have him at her feet. Unlike Eve or Lilina, this woman (whoever she was) had the benefit of being both real and attainable, respectively.

“The number you have dialed has not been recognized. Please try again,” came the automated voice as Mitch breathlessly waited to hear those dulcet come-hither tones again. He was so sleep-stunted and frenzied to get this woman’s address so he could go serve as her human ottoman at the earliest possible instant, that he actually mistook the robotic feminine declaration at first for the mystery caller herself, before cold breath caught sharply in his throat at the thought of never getting her back. That call was his only way to reach her.

If there even was a “her” to begin with. His anxieties mounting now to a dizzying point that surpassed his prior arousal over the stranger’s voice, Mitch first attempted the redial function ten times in a row like a brain-dead maniac, to the same failure, then manually wrote out each digit of that same phone number on paper, double-checking each, before tapping the buttons himself. Again the heartless auto-message came back to tell him that his husky-tongued seductress just might be as imaginary as the gargantuan malevolent part-deity who came into his room every night to absorb his naked body up against her miracle of a foot. Sweating, dejected beyond belief, and feeling a new stinging sensation like a pair of disturbed hornets working its way behind both his eyeballs, an ashen-cheeked Mitch slumped back in his chair, let the headset fall into his lap, and rolled his head back so the ceiling lights could start burning greenish-blue glow impressions into his retinas.

What the hell was happening to him?

“Another tough caller?” Lilina asked softly with a pitying smirk, appearing suddenly inverted in Mitch’s upward perspective. With her enchanting countenance looking down on him, the blocked light from above made the blood-red highlights in her hair radiate like embers.

“Something like that.”

“They just won’t quit. Were you able to be of service this time?”

“I… tried. She hung up, before I could… learn anything.”

“That’s a shame,” she said. “But not your fault, I’m sure. You do know how to get things done, after all, even when those after-dark friends of yours make you melt the candle at both ends. Just remember that the customer is always right, even the crazies, and everything will turn out all right. Exactly the way it’s supposed to. Trust me on that.”

Then Lilina drifted out of Mitch’s overhead view again, and the lights above made the hangover-like twinge in his skull tenfold times worse. Curling back toward his desk one vertebra at a time, the debatably-hinged fellow again ignored the nagging omen in his gut, shuffled tighter up to his workstation so as to better hide his surprisingly unsunk pants tent, and put the headset back on. Immediately his neck bowed deeper like the device was made of limestone, but after another jerk to reverse course, Mitch forced himself to remain as upright, if shakily, as he could manage on what sure felt like more than one hundred hours straight without slumber. He only had to get through the day.

And then what, his last shred of survivalist logic demanded? He’d just keep this up until he keeled over like a marionette with its strings cut? Or he’d believe so hard that Eve was actually real, along with her vows to claim his being as hers, that she’d do precisely as she’d been threatening and finally save him from this restless self-defeating cycle? Whatever the answer was to any of this, Mitch decided he was too weak, too tired, and too horny now to be trusted with deciding.

Not a single call reached his ear for the rest of the day: an odd and unlikely coincidence which he didn’t try to puzzle out for an instant. While the hive of the call center otherwise hummed along with bell tolls and bored script-reading, the rest of the bustling life around Mitch carried on as if his enfeebled wakefulness-inebriated body had become a ghost. So he slumped forward across the desk again, propping himself up with elbows that might collapse again at any second, and zeroed in on The Lilina Show taking place as usual at her diagonal station. Before this week, his wistful observation of those dangling arched-up instruments popping clean from her leather clogs had merely acted as sensuous motivation to keep him at this spirit-killing job.

Now, though, they felt like his only anchor point left to the world around him. Mitch’s vision was so blurred from exhaustion that everything surrounding the pinhole of his gaze had become gray nonbeing, but Lilina’s feet had alone had taken sharper form than ever. Alarmed at first, the man realized that his special superpower granted by Eve’s tutelage was taking hold outside his dreams, and only at the cost of every other sense. Blinking, he found he could witness his new boss’s upturned nylon soles from “closer” than ever, without ever leaving his desk. Unlike the overwhelming thrill that had come of this view when it first happened under Eve, though, Mitch skipped the helplessness of that skydiving-without-a-parachute sensation, and just savored those feet which not only gave him reason to come to work, but to stay awake at all.

He could perceive the shine emanating like crushed diamond dust nestled into half the checkered fiber separations in those nude lightly-caramel-tinted stockings. Through the other half, he saw the milky yet rosied luster of Lilina’s supple undersole itself. Even from such distance, the lovely odor was present and heavily indoctrinating, with remembered notes of that sweet-citrus allure, detergent like windy grassland, and feminine musk gelled permanently into the material, plus the added damp leather kiss from inside shoes. The same welcome smells from his excursion below her desk earlier this week again blossomed to the forefront, then as with his pilgrimages over Eve’s feet too, matured and developed to something yet more delicious, even though his nose and lips may as well have been on the other side of the county now from his crimson-streaked superior’s gifts.

One instant, the stockings seemed to expand to almost twice their ordinary fit, creating droopy dimples in the fabric that mirrored the artistry of Lilina’s arch; in the next, they had become so vacuum-sealed in their snugness to the point that Mitch could scarcely recognize she was wearing them at all. The elastic complex of that naked nylon terrain, spread like semi-liquid film from pointed big toe to heel and every cupped inch between on both peds, formed a collage like a thousand honeycombs filled in either by gemstones of dried sweat, the natural woven sparkle of ultra-tight nylon lacing, or windows through to Lilina’s crimp-riddled sole dough. The only method which could’ve made him feel any closer than this would’ve involved crawling across the call center floor on his unworthy belly, splaying at the base of her throne, and willfully pressing his facial features into the itchy silken shell of both luscious garments until the twin malleable sole slabs took on an imprint of Mitch’s countenance.