If the Glove Fits (Chapter 9) (Patreon)
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“You really did a great job fixing that tear, babe!” Claire practically swooned. Leaning in for a kiss with Alex, she romantically popped her ped slightly off the floor like a Hollywood starlet, thereby concentrating more weight into the ball of her foot, and coincidentally flattening this segment of David’s internally-roaring form so thin that he could actually feel his fibers separating to a discernible degree like a thready grill distancing her thick sole-pith from the ground by a greasily heated hairsbreadth. “Just when I think I know everything you’re good at, you bring up some new talent out of nowhere! I guess that’s the benefit of being a boring ol’ Muggle who got with a sexy-ass witch.”
At first, in the pit of this cottony-straining anguish while spread like too-thin translucent pastry dough beneath and around Claire’s foot, David’s heart sang with revitalized hope. Perhaps Claire had subliminally picked up some dimension of his continuous wailing terror from below, even if indirectly, which had caused her to recall her girlfriend’s curse, which then in turn might’ve created a mental pathway back to him. Then, a few vomitous saltwater-sponging moments later, as his gigantic friend’s bulbous raw-pink toe shafts viciously clutched his slimy insides, David better processed the flirtatious sarcasm in Claire’s voice, and understood with even greater chagrin what she’d actually meant.
She wasn’t remembering the day’s events, or the fact that her friend was still languishing so unimaginably upon her foot; she was just being her usual Harry Potter-loving self, and in fact was teasingly mocking the idea that she was dating someone with powerful sorcery at her fingertips. Which of course could only mean that Claire once again didn’t really believe in any accursed boundary jealously protecting her from suitors, because the day’s manic tragedies (including her friend’s very being) had been wiped clean from her memory, and David was further than ever from alerting her. He wanted so desperately to throw up, and not just because serving as her thick damp odor-fossilizing sock made him feel like he was having her murkiest pore-dredged foot oils directly injected into his body all at once by a thousand syringes.
“You are SUCH a dork sometimes. Or, more like all the time. You’re just lucky I put up with an adorable weirdo like you!” Alex replied, just as amorously taunting, then gave her girlfriend another audibly passionate kiss while laughing from deep in her throat: a noise David couldn’t help but suspect was maliciously aimed his way, rather than meant simply as playful reassurance for the woman she loved enough to damn David to a lifetime of spasms and stenches. “You silly Muggle, you.”
“I am lucky. For sure,” Claire sighed. “I do SERIOUSLY need a shower, though. Today was just unbelievable, especially because I didn’t have anybody backing me up on inventory. I’ll just go do that real quick and then-”
“No! C’mon, look what time it is. Our show’s about to start. And I’m not going to make fun of the stupid corny stuff they say in a room all by myself! Why don’t you take a shower later?” Alex gasped, grabbing her partner by the hand. Though she passed the gesture off as sweetly-needy request, the crestfallen sock-man below had to guess that the diabolical giantess was yet again disguising another method of deepening his torment as simple endearing girlfriend behavior. Of course the shrunken disembodied creature was briefly elated by Claire’s mention of a shower, which would surely promise a fresh pair of socks missing his current form’s wallowed aroma and omnipresent mistiness, even if he’d still have to endure trampling and distending to the brink of psychological collapse, so long as she went gloveless at home.
If the point wasn’t made clear enough to David already, Alex – who happened now to be wearing a pair of scuff-rimmed red high tops – casually pressed the sturdy toe section down against a surplus cotton tuft of Claire’s musk-distilled sock, as though to kiddingly pin her in place, and dug in hard. In response, Claire only scoffed and shook her head, plainly about to give in to her girlfriend’s wish; below, however, the mood was decidedly different, as David shrieked bloody murder in brain-bending distress. Likely hearing his silent lament and thus spurred on, Alex purposefully dragged her stamped-down high top sole backward across the floor by a full two inches, divorcing this region of David’s fabric-body away from her girlfriend’s plump jam-clogged toes, and making the secret victim feel as though his neck had been rubber-banded out to three times its usual length without ever snapping.
“Oh, fine. You win,” Claire laughed, totally oblivious to the fact that, by saying so, David was made the unequivocal loser. “I did want to see what trashy thing happened tonight, anyway, and it’s just not the same watching a rerun.”
So Alex and Claire cuddled on the couch for their show, while David and their feet were propped up on a stool. This position did come with the most minor of benefits, in that he was no longer actively being walked upon, but the leached filth of Claire’s grody after-work essence remained knitted through his every tightly-laced cotton particle, thanks to Alex’s casual strategy to delay his partial relief that much more. At random intervals, half of his patchy insides were either stuck fast as though by craft glue to Claire’s balmy blowsy-soled skin, or puffed out at an awkward angle especially vulnerable to being grabbed and toyed with between his friend’s toes out of a subconscious need to “do” something with her extremities, never knowing the dank tribulations her slightest movements were causing the unknown being who had pieces of his perception slotted in each of her grubby toe crevices.
Even unpressured by her upright-resting peds, David still ached to his very existence. He’d given up on crying for help now, especially while Alex was close enough to punish him for it again, and resorted instead to counting down the endless seconds until the couple’s TV time ended and Claire took a goddamned shower. While he knew there would still be plenty of sour putrid body-morphing purgatory to come, the brief reprieve suggested by that fresh opportunity to become a clean set of socks was enough to keep David from cracking just yet. When the time finally did arrive, he foolishly held out for the pipe-dream that, when Claire was stripped fully naked for her shower, he might become nothing at all: a comparative sensationless oasis in what was otherwise a vast desert of dire contortion and brackish seepage. Unfortunately, that loophole was closed when David found he instead had to remain as the diaphoretic moisture-sac of her discarded work sock until Claire was through cleaning up.
As they were temporarily alone in the bathroom, he resumed mentally howling for his friend’s attention, though over the cascading splash of the shower and Claire’s off-key singing, he couldn’t even hear his own begging. Then once she’d emerged, dried off, and commenced stretching a newly-laundered white tube sock up her foot, David resumed harrowing service to his friend’s unwittingly brutal monument of a body. His senses were no longer smoked out by that creeping brine-crusted decrepitude of her workday efforts, but any relief he might’ve reaped from the soap was overpowered quickly by Claire shuffling around their home to get ready for bed, before at last trapping her feet and David beneath three layers of woolen sheets for much-needed slumber. Though the transformed man himself knew he wouldn’t be sleeping a wink, smothered as he was between tightly-tucked blankets and the brawny wrinkle-matrix padding of her supple sole, where the air was trapped and quickly made to stagnate. By the time Claire and Alex were gently snoring toward happy dreams, David could smell the grace period of that before-bed shower already fading, as the stuffy sheets and overheated bedroom climate caused the first glossy patina of night sweat to bead along the squishy pads of her toes and central pillow-curved underfoot valley.
Tomorrow, David wretchedly promised himself. Tomorrow he would try again, while at work with Claire, when Alex was nowhere nearby to interfere. He had to believe it was possible to reach her, no matter what the witch told him. After all, there was nothing else he could do.