Footbound (Chapter 21) (Patreon)

“I’ll take that as a yes,” Lilina whispered with a reassuring smile, tipping her own head down slightly to meet his bleary stare. The fact that she wasn’t scolding him for his tardiness or lack of callbacks actually made Mitch feel guilty, even through this haze of uncertainty about his continued existence. Here she was, making herself out to be the most sympathetic manager anyone ever had, while he’d just been ogling her feet for two months straight, passionately imagining vivid scenarios involving those velvety nylon prisons stretching and snapping away from her flesh until the cool milky-soled lushness within was able to press through the tearing threads and step willfully down on his waiting tongue to-

“Mitch?” Lilina murmured, interrupting his derailing train of lustful thought. “Are you going to get that?”

Once Mitch winced, he noticed the phone at his desk lighting up with a new call, then dutifully nodded.

“Sorry. S-Sorry. I’ll… get to it,” he answered, reaching for the chair and missing at first due to his depth perception taking a bath. “…g-get to it…”

“Hey, now. There’s no need to be sorry,” Lilina said, evidently recognizing the eroded draft of a man shivering in front of her. Her fingertips grazed gingerly beneath his chin, inviting him to look up, to meet her higher gaze instead of requiring her to squat for his. Her pupils danced, searching his for answers, and then Lilina’s seductive lips pursed to another Mona Lisa smirk. “I can see you’ve been having a tough go of it lately. But we’re all in this together. Everyone I oversee here, I don’t just consider friends, and that goes especially for you. We’re a part of one another, you know? That might sound strange, considering where we are, but I believe it, and I think you can, too, if you just give it a chance. Maybe I can help you. You know, whatever problem you’re facing, it’s obvious that you’re fighting in two different directions right now. It’s as plain to see as your nametag was, on the first day we met. My advice? Just do what’s best for yourself, whatever feels like it’s meant to be, and everything else will be all right.”

“T-Thanks. Really.” If only curing his particular problem could be as easy as a little easygoing Hallmark-card therapy session with a lovely generous-hearted woman, owner of the second-most heavenly feet he’d ever seen slipped into netty leggings. And again Mitch stung with remorse over Lilina’s wildly humanitarian response to his poor behavior as an employee. Any other manager on Earth would probably take one look at him and presume he was strung out on illegal substances. Had it been something simpler than Eve’s feet to sober himself from, like cigarettes or heroin, then Mitch knew he’d indeed probably be all right, as Lilina suggested.

But there was ultimately no knowing what would become of him, no explaining it and possibly no escaping, as he shakily took his seat in front of the workstation to answer the still-incoming call, guided by Lilina’s hand still upon his shoulder, and donned his headset. Probably just to make sure he didn’t conk out on his desk the second she stepped away, his faithful red-midnight-haired siren remained standing vigil just behind the seat, while Mitch deployed the typical greeting script with barely-articulated syllables.

“…how… may I… be of assistance… today?” he dreamily uttered as though speaking a new language.

“Oh, you know the answer to that!” the same nectar-voiced nutcase woman rasped.

It was astounding how much could change in a day. Twenty-four hours ago, Mitch would’ve thrilled to get another call from this woman, especially when it seemed she was intent on having him, specifically, there in person to stow away beneath her chair and nestle her feet against for an endless tongue spa while returning the favor by scrubbing her buttery libidinous sole texture-furrows across his relieved features. Today, though, more pressingly terrified for his very soul, and the rest of himself too, Mitch could muster only a palpitating flutter of residual excitement to hear her voice. Even if he didn’t have much bigger existential concerns that took precedence over getting talked off by a potential flirty-footed hookup, Lilina’s looming presence behind him prevented Mitch from playing along much with her anyway.

“It’s… you, isn’t it?” he sleepily responded.

“Of course it is, my little footrest. Don’t you know me?” she cooed.

“I… M-Ma’am, I don’t m-mean to take up any more of your time. If there’s not a specific product you’re looking for, I-”

“Oh, no, is our relationship really back to this?” she practically sobbed, her voice still of that loopy almost-drunken quality, yet intoxicatingly arousing in its own right. “And here I thought we were making such beautiful progress. Don’t you remember what you said you were going to do for me? And now it’s as if we didn’t share anything special at all. How can you possibly claim to put the customer first, when you make a girl like me believe she’s really going to have the footrest of her dreams at last, only to go back to these disgusting robot words, right when you have her on the hook? Don’t you have anything to say for yourself?”

“Ma’am, I’m very sorry…” Mitch offered at last, completely out of responses to her and every other woman currently in his wilted remnant of a foot-obsessed life. He meant this apology just as sincerely as he had toward Lilina just now, and Eve last night, even while guessing it wouldn’t ever be enough.

“Tell me what you’re going to do for me,” she demanded next. “Please. You can’t know how badly I need it, and I’ve heard it in your voice, too, how much you need my soles. Not just on your face, in your mouth. Lower, too. Much lower. Just as hard as you must be getting now to my words alone is how I want you beneath me. Nothing but my feet could coax all of that pent-up desire out of you. And they will, again and again. Oh, I can be rough, but gentle too, when you need it. So what good could possibly come of all this round-and-round? I’ve told you what I’m going to do, once you finally come to your senses. Tell me again what you’ll do.”

Mitch chewed his lower lip, wanting very much to spiral into a licentious heap to the tune of this woman’s voice while parroting every submissive thing she wished to hear. But still he couldn’t do it, even if Lilina hadn’t been standing right behind him, already with the right idea that something was deeply amiss in him. The deceptively harmless pull of this stranger on the other end of the line, who’d now upped the stakes to feeding his insatiable need for release at the feet of an angelic superior, was the same self-destructive appetite which had brought him to this low point in his sleepless dreams with Eve. Despite the mystery caller being absolutely correct that her words had made his exhausted manhood surge below the desk, he couldn’t follow that lure any longer, if he still wanted there to be anything left of him by the day’s end.

“N-No, ma’am, I’m sorry. I can’t do anything for you,” Mitch sighed, his voice cracking as though he was going through a breakup with his soul mate for the second time in twelve hours. If anything, it might’ve been less painful to be separated from that sort of “sole” mate instead of facing the near-impossible choice he’d had to make while tenderly lashed upon the holy ground of Eve’s arch flesh. “If… you’re unsatisfied with the customer service you’ve r-received today-”

“Oh, my pathetic little vessel. Unsatisfied doesn’t even begin to DESCRIBE it…” came the rolling thunder of Eve’s godlike displeasure-drenched voice through the headset receiver. Had Mitch not already been gripping the legs of his desk as stiffly like he was dangling off the edge of a cliff, he would’ve been flung straight back into Lilina by the force of pure soul-rattling shell shock inflicted on his haggard body. As it stood, his eyes nearly bugged from his skull and he gritted his teeth as though bracing against the momentum of an endless roaring wind tunnel. At no point before would he have ever compared the sound of Eve, with her resonant multi-layered thwoom, to the horny tittering foot-sex call girl-wannabe who’d rung in his ears the past three days. Yet when he heard his night invader’s all-encompassing timbre exploding through his device, now out in the real world instead of restricted to subconscious visions, he could hear no difference between their voices. Like he’d been hearing Eve, and only her, all along. There wasn’t even time to hope that it was an auditory hallucination, before another deific haranguing from her confirmed that he was neither asleep nor imagining:

“I told you that you were just prolonging what you have been bound for since the day you were created. But you did not believe me. Here, I even tried to make it easier for you to give in, and became this, but you have rejected her as well. You were foolish once before, too afraid to know your own self, and I was kind enough to give you another chance. And now you have not merely forsaken, but blasphemed, by thinking you have the right to defy me. All I have promised will still come to pass, as it always has and will, but are you truly pitiful enough to think that you will not answer now for your transgressions against me and my feet? There will be no absolution for you. I will take the final offering of your seed, you will feel pleasures beyond any you deserve, and then you will join with something greater. My foot. Beneath my foot. As has been ordained. The question is, will you take this last opportunity I present to surrender of your remaining will, or must I pluck you screaming from your essence and cleave you to my sole MYSELF?”