Footbound (Chapter 24) (Patreon)

“I… I’m so sorry,” Mitch muttered in answer, and kept his eyes clenched while feeling his cheeks blushing rouge with shame that seared straight to his core. Even with his frayed mind pulled in so many directions at once, questioning what was real and what would become of him, he wasn’t above some rightful humiliation, upon realizing through a casual admission that Lilina had heard him hanging on every word from the once-mysterious footrest-shopping woman, and worse, engaging right back with her in ways that meant his fetish was no longer a secret. “B-But… you have to understand. P-Please. She’s… that’s… that wasn’t REAL. Or, it was, but she’s not a-”

“Now, now. You really do insist on putting in work, don’t you, even when you’re quite clearly off the clock. At least for now,” Lilina again quietly interjected, softly laying her pointer finger across his babbling lips. Somehow she didn’t seem to even think his flirty foot-themed phone sex with Eve’s auditory ghost was worth further discussion. While muting him, she lithely eased the rest of her body up onto the bed, gymnastically curling her stockinged legs up and over the edge, yet somehow all without causing the mattress to sink any lower. In one smooth motion, she was perched at the end of the bed, with her thighs pulled in close to her body: a posture that should’ve appeared bizarre, especially for someone dressed in business-semiformal, but for Lilina was as natural as the way she’d just materialized into the locked apartment. “I’m afraid I’m going to have to pull rank on you here, and say that the best and only thing for you now is to just ease into this. I tell you that not just as a friend, but as your supervisor, and someone with whom you’ve become a part. I meant it, what I said in the office. Everyone can and should be a smaller piece belonging to something greater. You most of all.”

Mitch batted his eyes, now in a battle with his own body to avoid descending into slumber. The only light remaining in the apartment came from a lamp in the corner, and even that was dimming orange, like the sun about to drop over the horizon. Watching the bulb flicker through the shade, he somehow felt its dying glow was linked to his own wavering essence that Eve was so confident she would possess, if in fact she existed. So he focused harder on the unusual but tantalizing visage of Lilina crouched at the end of his bed, knowing that at this point, when he was figuratively hanging off a cliff by two fingers, the one thing that would force him to stay safely awake was his thunderstruck revere for her form. Especially those nyloned peds, which were crossed at the ankles, and sliding closer to his inner leg by the second. No amount of embarrassment, illogic, or the woman’s bewildering professional-philosophical buzzwords could take away from the fact that Lilina herself was actually here, in Mitch’s bedroom, looking down at him in the sheets with her elegantly encased feet edging nearer to his body.

“You caused quite a stir at the office, you know,” she declared. Her sheer fiber-sleek left foot separated from its counterpart then, gliding an inch over the man’s blanketed quad, with no apparent destination except closer to where his face was sunken into the pillow. At this incredible proximity, Mitch could feel the heat of her foot on his body even from inches away and through a layer of bed sheets, not to mention make out its addictive sweet-fruit-and-salted-pheromones redolence again, but even as he funneled his narrowing gaze until everything except her beautiful lamp-lit underfoot was tuned out into the surrounding blackness, he couldn’t determine where those lustrous nude stockings ended and the creamy wrinkle-puckered sole flesh beneath it began.

“I know,” he peeped with sorrow, but again was fixated upon and speaking only to Lilina’s foot, just as when he’d fallen before her in the other room. Having zoomed out his sightline again, he found that the bedroom had grown too shrouded to plainly distinguish his manager’s face, though he could at least see her silhouette, somehow darker even than the shadow that had swallowed the rest of his apartment. Just the silky heaven-sent contours of that single sole remained visible to Mitch, except brighter now than the corner lamp’s fizzling embers. “Are you… here… to tell me I… lost my job?”

“Not exactly. I’m going to carry out the last part of your initiation, before your new position takes effect.”

“New? The center, they… d-didn’t fire me?”

“Oh, they certainly did. You made such a scene, after all,” Lilina said from the darkness, quick as a whip and matter-of-fact as always. Her sole had become a shining beacon for Mitch, until it was hovering close enough to her underling’s face that he could no longer even see the outline of her svelte hunched-over physique, as the perimeter of her sole and slowly bobbing hilltops of her toes had overtaken it. “But you haven’t got to worry about that place anymore. No looking book. You never wanted to be there, anyway. And you could’ve left at any time. But still you stayed, draining yourself, all so you could chase a certain something. Or somethings. A meaning. A reason for getting up every morning and doing it all over again, just for the chance of a fleeting glimpse. Isn’t that true?”

Mitch felt his whole body going rigid just before he lost his sense of anything below his neck, except the weightless but still palpable presence of Lilina on the bed with him. She’d spoken no word of explanation for the way her foot was traveling nearer to his face, but still it came, until the bedridden creature felt some of his same dream-learned senses kicking in, and his vision pulling him into a spiraling flight over the worship-worthy details of Lilina’s sole. For the first time he could spy and comprehend the division between the sifting ultra-thin shell of her naked-hued stocking and her arch itself, and the way the material and flesh moved almost as one, like a spirit fitted snugly over its body. Either something unearthly compelled him to respond honestly to her, or he was literally too depleted now to remember how to lie.

“Yes. It’s… true.”

“I wonder, then, why you never asked.”

“What?”

“Why you never asked if you could give yourself to my feet.”

The sparkling diamond-peachy terrain of her underfoot skin flushed and blanched in the smooth microcosm of every sole crease as the lines folded gently in and out of existence, these vibrant colors seeming in Mitch’s up-close perception like just as much a reflection of her feelings as any of Lilina’s cryptic words, if not more so. The interwoven nylon threads, invisible to any mortal eye except one taken to this same depth of exhaustion, obeyed the ebb and flow of their master’s pith-riddled landscape like gushing crystal-clear spring water by stretching and bending to the will of her sole slab’s pudgy crinkling, yet still remained solid enough to catch and be pinched in those honeyed furrows.

At either a glance or a hypnotic stare-down, Mitch couldn’t tell for sure whether there was moisture dotted across every underfoot skin cell like the million-odd kisses he’d wished to languish on her peds for months, or if it was just another trick of the shifting light and Lilina’s garb. What he could judge for sure was their radiant climate, the welcome humidity and pulse-quickening heat he’d only been able to guess at before while under her desk or simply cowering before her from fatigue. Her stocking-clad sole wasn’t quite touching his face yet, but as during his trippier encounters with Eve, Mitch felt he was experiencing multiple moments of time simultaneously, and so bristled with electroshock-like pleasure at so tangibly receiving a full-facial press under Lilina’s arch, from the toe shafts to her heel curve, even while he could still clearly see into every illuminated sole dimple cusp across the gorgeous earth-blessing bottom of her foot.