Footbound (Chapter 23) (Patreon)

But as he’d become too weak now to do anything else, Mitch’s vision dropped straight to the floor, where he confirmed that Lilina remained shoeless, and was still wearing those magically sheer stockings that could be said to be either totally invisible or garishly textured, depending on the angle he tilted his head to admire her godlike feet cocooned inside. Though he knew his concerns should’ve remained with maintaining the perimeter and keeping his soul intact, he couldn’t help but ripple with arousing goose bumps upon seeing Lilina’s blessed nyloned feet shuffling tenderly across hisfloor, and listening to the tamped-down stocking fibers coming briefly unstuck from the luscious furrows of her suckably peachy soles and microscopically snagging instead against the brushing tufts of carpet fluff. Due to a combination of reverence and near-total energy depletion, and completely lacking the attention to even stay conscious of his decorum in Lilina’s electromagnetic presence, he fell to his knees while still gripping the table, until he was again hunkered like a dying quadrupedal animal, his face hovering near enough to her firmly planted mesh-painted peds that she could’ve hardly extended her leg and brushed her toes along his sleeplessly stubbled chin. Again the perfumed tang of sugary fruit and feminine perspiration-glazed garb became tangled hotly in his airways, especially once Lilina arched one heel slowly off the ground, bracing it against her ankle again while tilting the underbelly sole back toward the light, until Mitch again witnessed the crisscrossing choreography of swishing tugged-free stocking filaments atop a luxuriously sloping plain of foot flesh that both scrunched and recolored paler the closer into direct light it was beheld.

“H-How… how are… you’re… you’re here,” Mitch stammered uncertainly, though he spoke directly to Lilina’s feet. Yet still his powerless awe of her overstepped any logic questions, beyond the immediate shock of finding her standing over him in his dead-bolted home. If he was indeed seeing what he was seeing.

“My goodness. You really have done a number on yourself, haven’t you?” Lilina questioned, evidently barely registering the insane peculiarity of Mitch’s behavior or the way he’d turned his apartment into a sense-offending shield against footjobbing demons. Her tone instead suggested she’d seen him yawn one too many times at his desk, much in the way she’d apparently taken a pitying kind-hearted interest in him these past several days. “You know what would do you the most good? A long, long rest. No more work, no more worrying. Just laying yourself down where you so clearly need to be, and staying there. Doesn’t that sound just about right to you?”

Lilina stooped to his level, took her probably former employee by the forearms, and guided him to stand. It surprised Mitch how deftly she could lift him, requiring almost no effort of his own, since he had none left to give. Still, the tantalizing view he received while climbing past her perfectly sculpted nylon-clad gams silenced any confused wonder from Mitch. Even when he was upright again, she maintained her hold, wrapping her arm around him in a way that made him feel so stimulatingly wanted that his knees nearly gave out again, but Lilina didn’t allow him to fall. She hugged his crumbling frame closer until his head was pressed to her breast, and he had to fight every urge to reach out and use her stocking-snug thigh for support, feeling as though he was being dangled over a great height, with her feet below as the ultimate prize for the inevitable deadly plummet.

And then they began to walk, marching as one unit, with Lilina’s momentum carrying Mitch right along. He doubted he’d have been able to fully pick his own legs off the ground if not for his impressively athletic visitor’s own confident gait, the thrill of having her body pressed to his energizing him just enough to move along. Only once they entered his bedroom, and Lilina lowered Mitch to sit on the edge of the mattress, did he fully process what was happening. Logical though it probably seemed from the outside to put an unhinged sleep-fiending man to bed, as the extremely charitable Lilina was obviously intent on doing, this bed was now the most dangerous object in his whole home. Still, like the first returning lick of a long-kicked addiction, the moment Mitch sunk onto the side of the cot, he ached to collapse into slumber that would probably rival the earlier sexual satisfaction Eve had provided him with her feet under the covers, in terms of sheer life-giving gratification.

As a result of that pull toward the rush, he could only get out a happy murmur in protest at first, rather than the longer-winded plea that he should’ve instead begun: begging Lilina to drag him away from the bed and then probably run for her own life too, before a certain astronomic fetish-feeding night witch squashed him into the bedspread under her heel like a gnat. Also delaying his resistance was the sudden eerie realization that his various sleep counter-measures deployed around the apartment had been cancelled out, though when that took place, he couldn’t say. Lights were dimmed or switched off, the fridge closed, the TV and sound system had been cut silent, the drapes were shut, and even the smoke detector had ceased singing. Had Lilina done all that out of the kindness of her heart and he was just missing frames of memory in his veiny-eyeballed fatigue-addled state? Or was Mitch himself responsible, shutting everything down and then erasing it from his mind out of some subconscious yearning, despite all his fears of sole-soul reaping, to still give himself over to Eve’s power?

“It just won’t do. What you’ve done to yourself,” Lilina said. Placing a hand on Mitch’s shoulder, she pushed just lightly enough to encourage him to fall into the sheets. “How could you expect yourself to do your best job, to fulfill your purpose, if you fight every natural urge? I’m not a doctor, but just about anyone could tell you that when your body is trying to tell you what it needs, you should listen. So what has yours been telling you, my friend? What have you been stuffing down deep, thinking you could just ignore it forever?”

Mitch was still too wigged out by Lilina’s surprise presence and his own skeleton-wracking need for sleep that he didn’t quite register the way her already offbeat speech patterns were even more askew than usual. The feeling of her hand pressing on his body localized almost all his focus to the tactile warmth of her palm and spread fingers, so tactile he somehow almost felt her fingerprints even through his clothes. Once Mitch felt his spine slump flat into the mattress, though, all hell broke loose within him.

“W-Wait! Wait… I… I can’t! She’ll… s-she’ll FIND me!”

“Now I really can’t imagine how that could be,” Lilina said, easily resisting Mitch’s attempts to rise again from the bed with one hand still massaged against his collarbone. Again he couldn’t blame her; even knowing the truth, he understood how much like a mouth-frothing mental patient he appeared. “Oh, this wouldn’t happen to be about your mysterious prank caller, would it?”

“NO! I m-mean… yes, sort of, but-”

“Shhhh. You’ve let her get too much into your head. A stranger. A no one. Just a voice trying to mess with you. And all because, what, she offered to make your dreams come true? To… make you her footstool?”

Mitch’s jaw drooped open. He snapped it shut again as quickly as he could, but Lilina had already seen his deer-in-headlights stupefaction. She only smiled, shaking her head, then took a seat on the bed while soothingly dragging the covers up and over Mitch’s body, right up to his chin.

“You know all too well that calls may be monitored to assure satisfaction. That goes for employees just as well as customers,” Lilina said, as if this would explain everything. Once Mitch was buried under the bed sheets, albeit comfortably, he stopped struggling as hard, but only because the combination of his boss’s hand at his chest and the wooly blankets over everything else kept him pinned in place so well that even an instant of struggle might threaten to knock him out cold. He was operating at 1% as it was.