Since Lilina’s foot remained propped in midair to demonstrate the correct indicator on the machine, with fragments of light from above just managing to reach below the desk and sultrily illuminate the contours of her rosy-and-white-fleshed arch under that smooth web-thin garment stretched taut around the curves, Mitch didn’t even need this guidance to keep his attention obsessively glued in place. Taking her advice as an edict, he leaned in as close as he dared venture, just far enough back that his reverent exhales wouldn’t be felt on her foot. Still, this was nearer than he ever dared hope he’d come to Lilina’s sole; as the air below the desk was even more stationary and muggy, it was easy to take notice of the aroma wafting almost-feverishly from the shimmery fibers, especially while she idly balled and flexed her toes, thus exercising the whole plush underside and unconsciously fanning the warm flavor in the direction of Mitch’s nose. It was unquestionably a musk, but not immediately repugnant in the way of old laundry and bitter earth. Sweet-and-sour moisture, the tackiness of long-worn leather, and even a mouth-watering hint of perfume that smacked of vanilla and orange citrus met the man’s hanging jaws. Just as he’d been tempted last night, only lacking in motor skills then, he had to fight the urge to lunge forth and bury his face not just in the nylon folds and silken dimples of her sole flesh, but let himself be enveloped in the heat, the scent, and the complete essence. It was difficult enough keeping himself from taking too deep an inhale, lest he make a sound and alert Lilina to his depravity, but he still had to savor this precious moment, even as his heartbeat spiraled and a bead of sweat rolled down his temple. At any second it could end, or worse, she could lean down just far enough to notice the tent starting to pitch under his belt, though thankfully his genuflected posture helped disguise this damning evidence.

Her foot was everything from up close that he’d ever daydreamed it was. The smell wasn’t in the least bit unpleasant, only intoxicating and human and even a little delectable, and the naked shine of those stockings was more radiant in this vicinity, but not so bright either that it distracted from the loping structure of her lively kissable-soft sole, the uncallused russet-yellow smoothness of her heel like a river stone, or the dainty gumdrop-point pads of her toes.

“Can you see the light?” she asked, the sound of her voice becoming so strangely resonant while Mitch was under the metal-walled desk that he winced like he’d been caught committing a crime, when in reality she’d almost given him no choice but to tuck himself down here with his face mere inches from her foot.

“N-Not yet,” he stuttered, and was glad this was the truth, since he had to milk every second he was allowed to remain here. It felt so appropriate, bowing in the presence of that ped while it hovered just high enough off the floor to keep her cushy toe-tip smushed comfortably up beside the beacon on the CPU, a posture that also created such lovely diagonal ripple-effect mini-ravines along her arch pith for Mitch to pine after.

“Well, keep watching, please. I can’t tell you how frustrating it is to know the solution to all my problems must be so close at hand, and yet I just can’t reach it, no matter how badly I wish to,” Lilina said. Her digits unconsciously flexed, popping quietly at the joints and instigating another narcotically-beautiful lotion-soft tessellation of grooves surging down her whole foot underbelly. This dispersed her scent even more effectively, filling the prostrated under-desk worker’s airways with warmth and fruitiness and pheromones, and he was almost dizzy with hope now that she’d accidentally swing her foot too far to the side, not knowing exactly how well he’d followed her advice to watch from close-up, and brush that lacy-threaded instep across his cheek. Even lasting a fraction of a second, he’d cling to that probably-damp itch forever.

“You have no idea,” Mitch murmured under his breath. Just when his need was growing greatest, and his crotch stood at inconveniently full mast, he saw the green light flicker. There wasn’t much to see, like she’d warned, but what made it more obvious was the way it refracted microscopically through the woven fibers of her light-tan nylon, flashing dim neon over the paler curve of the plusher shelf along the top of Lilina’s sole.

For reasons Mitch couldn’t quite fathom, this subtle sight made the gears in his brain clamp for a moment; his mouth hung open and he more openly breathed in the woman’s foot-aura, so taken by her in this moment and so humiliatingly wishful of the impossible, that for a serious split-second, he considered what the consequences would actually be of pressing his face just a bit further forward, until the actively-scrunching slab of that heated nude-stockinged sole was cupped over his nose and lips.

In whatever few-heartbeat frame of time he was allowed to pay homage to her then, he would huff that meaty sole with all he was worth and rake his tongue over gritty leather-spiced mesh and pucker his lips to the cushiony firmness while he was left half-sobbing with fulfillment. No one outside in the rest of the office would ever have to know, of course, unless Lilina screamed bloody-murder and kicked him square in the jaw, which admittedly was likely to happen, if not assured; still, Mitch became obsessed then with the narrow possibility that she didn’t. What if she felt him press his face into her foot, recognized it was no accident, and said nothing? Did nothing, except bend her toes down at once to maximize the wrinkle-population down her convexed arch and give him even more surface area to bury himself among her hot-blooded classily-garbed ped? What if she understood why he did it, and not only tolerated it, but took a shine to it herself? Where might they end up then?

“The light should be on now. Do you see it?” Lilina queried, breaking Mitch from his libidinous reverie and giving him cause to sigh with disappointment, though too softly for her to hear. This taunting adjacency with the endgame of his sexual dreams had officially come to an end.

“Yes, I see the light.”

And God, had he ever. Even if he wasn’t allowed to touch it.

“Perfect. Then I’ll just try this, change this setting, and… well, what do you know. It seems to have worked now, finally. I can’t tell you how long I’ve been waiting for this.”

Mitch knew that feeling all too keenly as well.

“That’ll do. Thank you for going down there.”

“You’re w-welcome. I’m… glad it works now. Any time.”

“Any time? I’ll certainly keep that in mind, what with how unreliable these machines can be. Believe me, I’ll always trust a human touch first. It’s nice to have someone like you close by.”

“No trouble at all!” he added, wondering if he was laying it on too thick and dog-like now.

“Mitch?”

“Yes?”

“You can feel free to come back out of there whenever you’d like,” she said, though charitably, there was no condescension or irritation in her voice at his having weirdly remained in the shadows under her desk well-beyond when an average person would’ve guessed they were required to do so. Instead, her voice held the same enigmatic lilt from that first day he’d laid eyes on her, like she knew something he didn’t, if not a great deal of somethings.

This was the first gentle command given him by Lilina that Mitch chose to disobey, because if he had actually stayed down there until when he truly wanted, he wouldn’t have budged from that spot until everyone clocked out and the lights switched off. Still, seeing there was no possible way to remain at the altar of her propped-up stocking foot for any longer without risking everything, he withdrew from this stuffy hallowed position beneath Lilina, bidding her peds one last silent look of longing just before she could see him fully again. Once out, he ascended back to his usual height, feeling just a tad askew in the moments after, like he’d strapped on clown stilts. The fatigue he’d felt when she fetched him for duty was largely supplanted now with equally-lethargic sensual daydreams. By some miracle, too, he’d managed to suppress his arousal exactly enough before standing that his coworker had no reason to go bug-eyed with disgust at the sight of a horrifically blatant pants tent, and so Mitch parted with her in seeming innocuousness, receiving another grateful smile for his “troubles.” She hadn’t suspected a thing.

He may not have been able to kiss that feminine stitching-snug arch without wrecking his life, but at least the realness of her vanilla-perspiration fragrance and the ripply dance of those peachy sole furrows would give him much more tactile reference as pre-sleep autoerotic inspiration than the half-remembered wonders of last night.

Mitch laid awake longer past midnight than he should’ve, despite his poor sleep he received the prior night. It was simply impossible to sink straight into slumber, when he’d been unable to get that trip under Lilina’s desk out of his mind for the rest of the day. He was pretty sure he’d botched a few calls throughout the afternoon as a result, too, losing his place in the script and accidentally telling customers that a certain item cost ten times its worth. But he couldn’t help it. The woman had turned him inside-out without ever knowing it or doing anything especially provocative. Her presence, her voice, and the magnificence of those feet that he’d gotten to enjoy for those divine few minutes today for the first and perhaps-not-even last time were more than enough to leave him under a full mind-and-body spell.

            In this state, Mitch had no way of knowing at what stage he finally drifted off, or even if he did at all. He didn’t notice that same unearthly tightening of his frame down to the bed, or the way the darkness swallowed his room so wholly that it might as well have been the size of a concert hall and he’d never have known. It was only the reappearance of the same night visitor’s bare feet weighted on his chest coming gradually into visual relief, twilit and impeccable, that made everything click back into place in Mitch’s mind. When he did recognize those soles as authentic manifestations rested on his body, and not just another wistful reimagining, his heartrate shot up faster than ever, enough that he might’ve gone faint if he wasn’t already lying down and probably-still asleep. He could actually feel the thrum of his pulse against her heels, and accordingly, the unseen woman could no-doubt feel his cardiac thrill at her return. Not that he thought she needed to; the way she’d spoken last night, the way she’d touched him, controlled him, and then drifted back off into the night, he guessed she never had to actually lay a hand, or foot, upon him to know everything about him.

            “You did not think I would just forgive your debt, did you?” she asked, without presumption or malice. While the exact nature of that voice and the finer details of her arches had vacated Mitch’s memory during the day, as though plucked clean out by tweezers, immediately everything came rushing back after one nectary word and a glance across the raised vertical plains of those wonderfully supple soles in all their divoted moon-bathed gloriousness.

            “No!” he peeped. “T-Thank you. For… coming back.”

            “It is good you know the order of things,” she replied. “Though it is also I who will owe you a fair share of gratitude when we are ultimately through. As I said, I am here to accept payment, and while we both know that you have long chased an opportunity such as this, I am not here for the purpose of bestowing your wildest dreams upon you. That is merely… an incidental effect, which you are fortuitous enough to enjoy while you make your tribute. But first and foremost, I am here to stake a claim.”

            Mitch listened to this cryptic explanation and nodded as much as his largely-rigid neck would allow. Part of him wanted to ask what her actual purpose was, since this ghostly shtick had become no less unsettling, but then the other part of him preferred to keep silent, guessing that letting her get on with her business would give him the best chance of feeling one of those soles against his cock again the quickest. She was still just a vaguely-nightmarish dream-state sexpot, after all. And it was probably best to stop thinking so hard and just feel, or else he’d risk waking himself before she even pulled his covers up.

            “You did well, watching my foot at our previous encounter,” she said. “But I think you wish for more.”

            It seemed strange to Mitch that she’d have to suggest this at all, when she’d already gone far enough to sole-jack him to completion using the opposite ped last time. Still, she wasn’t wrong.

            “Y-Yes.”

            “When you looked deeply upon it, you saw its vastness. Its grace. Its marvels. They all fascinated you. Took hold of you. These are not questions, mind you, as I already know your heart. What remains now is what you wish, now that you have seen what is there.”

            Taken aback, the man gulped hard enough to feel like a tennis ball was going down his throat. After the greeting he’d received last night, he hadn’t expected her to take his opinion into account. Then again, she must’ve known the answer before he could speak or even think it, as she had every other one so far, and just wanted to hear him pronounce it himself. Bracing himself and biting his tongue, as he’d never really had to speak these fetishistic truths aloud in his life, Mitch didn’t hesitate then to give her whatever was required to make another deposit:

            “I… want to touch it. P-Please. You’re right. It’s… so beautiful. T-The most… beautiful… sole that I’ve ever seen, or imagined, or… d-dreamt about. Please, if… y-you really want to know how I feel, that’s it. I… want… my face against it. If… if only you-”

            “Enough speaking in circles,” she said, though there was a curl of satisfaction in her timbre, as Mitch’s lips were instantaneously sealed shut. He minded it even less now than he had last night, finding this state almost comfortable. There was less expected of him now; she’d reduced him to a single function, but one which he’d been building up his whole life to fulfill. “You speak the truth. And I will give you what you wish. But there will be no language of tongues, whether through speech or worship, tonight. You will only look on my foot, just as closely as our last meeting, and you will not shut your eyes. You will not deviate. You will search the expanse and discover just as much beauty as you can manage before the next payment is made. When you see that which you adore, no matter how small or large, you will think of it. Sharply. So that I may hear it crying out from within you. Now, we begin again.”

            As the instructions entered Mitch’s cerebellum, he followed them with militant precision. Whereas last night his hypnotic vision-quest dive over that sole resting a distant few inches from his face had been plagued with understandable shock and curiosity over this macabre hookup, he no longer cared to fill in the blanks, not when she’d given him a new even-more intimate purpose. And especially not when he knew the prize waiting at the end. So he locked his gaze onto the center of the fleshy isle, his synapses coming alive as one foot neared while the other retracted into the dark. Indeed he’d seen so much of it last night even through that void, and witnessed the same flushed creasy exquisitely-decadent mass of sole detail right away in the inches that kept them apart, but she was about to remedy that unfortunate disconnect to reveal yet more.

            When that foot met his face (the first one in his life to ever do so despite it being technically not “real” as far as Mitch knew), he’d expected everything to fade to black right away. How could it not, when he was blinded, muted, and gently suffocated by a perfectly-architectured slope between heel and ball? But it didn’t; that same sourceless light which had illuminated her feet yesterday too despite the cosmological pitch of the room was now spread shimmering-wet across every square inch of velvety-soft underfoot brawn like a healing oil, guiding Mitch to spy even the most infinitesimal minutiae across the taut pink wrinkle-lined skin. Yet there was no longer any discernible space parting their bodies.

She didn’t dawdle with some teasing show of brushing her luminous dewdrop toepads over his forehead, or sifting the weight of that heel from his chest to the chin. His night-mistress simply went for it, clapping and compressing the man’s face with an authority just shy of inflicting pain, though once Mitch got over the surprise of her intensity, he felt no ache at all in the force uniformly exerting itself upon him from this pure, balmy, milky-smooth wall of foot flesh that united with his countenance now in utter harmony. And just like that, a pubescent ambition was achieved, and one so fantastic that he could’ve died happy now, if it came to that.

The first thing Mitch noticed was the heat. It was all-encompassing, much in the way of whatever spectral influences were mushing his body into the bed now, as the climate of her sole swallowed his face whole; it was overwhelming at first, in the way of stepping from snow-chilled outdoors straight into a sauna. But once Mitch caught his breath, startled to discover he could in fact still draw air in defiance again of physics while her sole was kissed to lavishly to his clamped lips and fluttering nostrils, it became easier to manage. There was something reassuring in the heat now, like standing on a hilltop on a cloudless day and feeling the sunlight radiate straight through him. The next sensation to take shape in his brain was the desperately-touchable texture of it. There was no learning curve here, as the woman’s highly pliable pithy-enriched sole made for the firmest, squishiest, most enticing pillow he could’ve conceived: magnetic and meaty, and instantly correct it the way it made him want to draw even closer than was physically possible, to nuzzle and caress and do show his devotion in all the ways she’d said he wasn’t allowed, at least not yet.

Then there was the aroma, something Mitch had looked forward to almost as much as the contact itself. He hadn’t really known what kind of perfume to expect such a beguiling yet questionably-nonhuman entity to wear, if there even was a scent at all, but he found one after the second more-relaxed inhale, albeit not what he’d expected. There was a note of summery sweat, yes, glazed into the skin with biting salt, but even greater was its sweetness, rather bizarrely, almost stickily saccharine enough to constitute a pastry flavor; the weirdness-factor was akin to hearing a popular song loudly played in minor key rather than major, only smelled instead of heard. Then he detected sourness, not of filth and musk, but from some type of plant-life he couldn’t identify, maybe some poisonous fruit or attractive flower with barbed leaves. Each respectful yet needful intake of air from her foot seemed to develop the essence anew.

Perhaps most delightfully galling of all was its scale, though. Her foot was somehow petite and titanic at once, delicate and heavy in the span of one feature-molding press against a face-length pad of tropical-steamy sole skin. The contradiction was impossible to understand. Luckily, Mitch just had to follow his directions, and hunt for the aspects of her ethereal naked foot that he loved, just as she wanted. Each time his senses fixated upon one of these remarkable new elements, from sight to smell to feel and even a new kind of perception he couldn’t quite identify yet except to know that it made him more fulfilled, he focused on it with everything he had, internally naming it and think-speaking it in the most poetic terms he could, even while Mitch was far from an eloquent romantic, and yet less so while so transfixed with arousal. He was lucky to be able to mentally articulate anything at all except sexual pleading, but the nocturnal visitor’s features were so inspiring, so warm and soft and begging to be explored in the most worshipful manner like hallowed ground, that he found the words anyway.

“Good,” she purred, hearing the devotionals chanted in his head. Again Mitch couldn’t question how she did so, nor worry that she was able to peer into his brain and read his every thought. He’d pleased her; that was all that mattered. “Keep looking. Keep thinking. You see and feel nothing but the foot before your face. Nothing else exists.”

It enchanted Mitch deeper to hear her encourage him this way, but in truth he’d already decided this status for himself. There may as well have been nothing else in all of universal being except his undeserving body, immobilized in nothing-void, with his face buried in the hot lustrous pleasantly-malleable landscape of her foot. He would’ve longed never to have a single aspect of his reality shift away from this moment, never hearing a word but those his mistress instructed and never breathing air except that pheromonal tang from her sole, except for the fact that he knew it was about to get even more perfect. Afraid of offending her by letting his mind wander, Mitch continued pointing out the details of her arch that he adored, which weren’t difficult to choose since there were so many, but still mildly distracted by dire anticipation of her ultimate response to his servitude.

The man didn’t even feel the blankets rise this time, nor the spreading back of his boxers to make way for the opposite sole gliding possessively up his leg. Mitch just felt her naked sole flush on his thigh all at once, the plum-smooth ends of her toes grazing the base of his hard-on, which had materialized back to his awareness just as quickly. Then again, how could he not have become more stirred than ever in his life by this tactile voyage over her sole, even more so than last night? She hadn’t needed to plaster that fleshy sole-curve against his rod yet to get him to this point of intense drive, but damn it if it wasn’t even more amazing than last time when she finally did. Much like the contradiction of simultaneously feeling his face and entire body pressed up against the other ped at once, or breathing perfectly naturally even while the bottom of her foot was hugged flush to his lips and nose, Mitch could’ve sworn on his own life that he felt the woman’s crotch-seeking sole furiously rolling and slaking, scrunching and pat-a-caking his dick, all without so much as moving a muscle, except those required to bunch her toes and gracefully reform the wrinkles along the underside slope. Having no idea which act was actually happening now and which was just imagined, Mitch didn’t care in the end, seeing how he got to enjoy both at once.

And oh how he enjoyed, reacting on the inside like a carnival high striker game, with his brain lighting up and blaring a bell as the still unseen guest’s foot dominated his cock in stillness and locomotion simultaneously. Somehow she was still making him feel every tender rippling groove in her arch creases through slow-mo while also ensuring he felt the firmness and energy of the entire sole working him over with rapid gymnastic strokes, a thing that should’ve been impossible, but no more impossible than the larger-than-life ways he was experiencing her other foot by sight, smell, and contact beyond the bounds of human sensitivity. How he longed to kiss it, to eject his tongue and lick until he developed lockjaw, but for now this was more than plenty. The woman seemed to allow Mitch just enough of his speech back in time for him open his mouth and moan aloud in the home stretch toward orgasm, because he heard himself abruptly sobbing like an animal in heat, though even his most imperious requests for a finish were drowned out by her echoing murmurs, unreadable as either laughter or contemplation.

He sniffed that sweet poison-flower saltiness until his lungs topped off, wallowed in her warmth and cushioning, and descended into a hyper-attentive spiral on a single central X-shaped wrinkle at the vertex of the peachy arch and the ball of her foot, his vision spinning along with his mind. Then in a final sweep and press, the nighttime caller claimed another spurt from her host, perfectly timing the rise and cupping of her sole across the cap of his mast before he even had the chance to vocalize his climax, since she’d known even before him precisely the moment he’d succumb. Mitch spasmed beneath the heavy bedsheets as she circled his cockhead and massaged the goods into her foot, his jitters becoming more fervent as bodily control was gradually gifted back, though it still took adjustment, as though he’d been numbed for the better part of the night. Unfortunately the woman retracted both feet even more quickly than last night, the very instant she’d stolen the last bit of seed, but this time her willing lotioner didn’t panic or even feel true disappointment. After two nights in a row of this sensuous wonderment and god-tier footjobs, more satisfying than any he thought he’d receive in his whole life, he wasn’t so selfish to think he deserved anything more. But even so, the fact that he had seen her again now allowed Mitch to believe that this wasn’t just a two-night stand.

“You are coming to understand your place more and more,” she quietly thundered, with the affection of a pet owner. “The payment is made, and I will return for more. Your debt still stands, closer yet though we may be to making it right. Making you whole. Do not pleasure yourself, remain mindful, but do want. Want for my feet until you can barely stand. Until you struggle to find the strength to remain awake. Yet, do not sleep again until it is time. Remain watchful. Then I will come for you again, and you will come for me.”

That intangible body-thralling weight relaxed all at once, the voice and those angel peds diminished fully into the blackness, and Mitch was projected almost by force into deep dreamless slumber.

Despite feeling even less rested than he had the previous day, Mitch was wired this morning at his desk, taking calls the instant his board lit up and following the script to a tee. The assurance of knowing now that he would vividly dream of “her” again tonight, no matter how kooky it should’ve seemed that his fetishistic nighttime visions could take on such a life of their own, was enough to keep his eyes open and a goofy smile on his face regardless of the pure exhaustion weighing him down.

It really was getting to be an annoyance, almost like his body had been drained of all gusto the moment he opened his lids again after eight hours of solid sack time. He may as well not have slept a wink in two straight days, a kind of fatigue Mitch hadn’t known since college. Still, deciding to take this in stride as a side effect of his desperate eagerness to be invaded in his bed again by the most welcome intruder he could imagine, the man tanked up on espressos to stay conscious and readied himself for another long haul. The call center was no less appealing as a place to waste one’s waking hours today, but at this point, it was just another shift he had to bypass before getting to hop in bed and await his next sole-based vision quest and accompanying orgasmic rush. He hadn’t been so excited to sleep since he was a child expecting presents on Christmas, though in this case, he didn’t even have to wait for the sun to come up before receiving the most satisfying gifts.

“What’s her name?”

For the second day in a row, Lilina’s honeyed voice and abrupt proximity struck Mitch like a bolt of lightning in his seat. There she was, towering regally on high with arms crossed and full lips curved to a similarly reclusive smirk as Mitch’s own. He knew his body was really on the fritz when, two days running, he could be approached by this nonchalant vixen beauty with the most perfect feet outside of his dreams, and not even notice her coming until she was already standing above him.

“P-Pardon?” he whimpered. Artificially awake though he was, he was still woefully ill-equipped in his sleep-deprived state to even speak to Lilina without becoming a stammering buffoon.

“The woman you’re smiling about,” she taunted. “Who is she?”

Mitch sighed with relief, again glad that he hadn’t been caught in the act of bald-facedly checking out her peach-creased stockinged assets – which, in truth, he hadn’t even ogled as much as usual today, while so preoccupied trying to recover the photographic memories of the night caller’s arch landscape details, which had again somehow evaded him as egregiously as sleep. Predictably, though, Lilina had seen right through him when it came to his day-dreamy countenance. He should’ve known a woman as obviously perceptive as her would be able to take one look at his no-doubt dopey expression and know he was smitten with someone, or at least someone’s feet. Was it possible, he wondered, to fall madly in love with someone when he’d only had his face and cock pressed up against her naked moonlit soles until he ejaculated?

“Oh, uh… no one,” he chuckled unconvincingly.

“Don’t go believing now that I haven’t heard that lie before, in that exact tone,” Lilina said with a wag of her finger, again reading him like a book. Nonetheless, there was no judgment in her voice, only dry taunting. She pursed her lips and combed her thumb through silken red-obsidian tresses as though carving it like marble, despite its softness. “But I won’t push you. It’s not like you have any reason to share your life’s most intimate details with your work neighbor.”

“Huh? No, no, it’s not that,” Mitch politely scoffed, not wanting to burn whatever unlikely bridge still might remain that could bring him closer to Lilina. His slumbering visits from the footjob maestro herself would be cherished forever, but as incredible and authentic as that sultry apparition seemed, the woman standing before him was actual flesh and blood, seducing him to pieces without even trying. And Mitch certainly didn’t have the ego to guess she was trying, even though she’d now asked him twice, rather pointedly, about his love life.

“Maybe it’s my fault for not trying harder to make friends first,” she continued.

“F-Friends?”

“Yes. I think it’s only right that people working in such close space should get to like one another. After all, we spend a third of our lives in this place. That makes us a part of each other’s lives, whether we meant it or not. Don’t you agree?”

“Oh!” Mitch’s eyes widened. Again he was glad that most of the desks around them were vacated for lunch breaks, or he otherwise would’ve felt even more self-conscious about his embarrassing blubbery stumble through this whole conversation with this stark-raving beauty. “S-Sure! Of course. I… I’d like that.”

“Maybe it would’ve been more proper of me to ask you for your friendship before I had you crawling around in the dust bunnies yesterday to fix my computer,” she said, resting her cheek on an upturned palm. “Could you forgive me for that kind of indiscretion?”

Considering the kinds of indiscretions Mitch had racked up, watching Lilina’s nylon-swishing soles dance with velvet light and scrumptious wrinkles eight hours straight per day for two months, he was pretty sure she could’ve kicked him hard in the balls for no reason, and he’d still be the guiltier party between them. It still baffled him how she could say things just a shade too peculiar to believe, things that might come off as flirtatious when spoken by anyone else with a voice as alluring as hers. Yet when Lilina addressed him, he knew it was only in total sincerity for precisely what she’d requested. She wanted friendship; maybe this was his way in.

“All his forgiven,” he joked back in a British accent, immediately hating himself for it.

“Fantastic,” Lilina responded with a chirp of low laughter, her gaze unbroken. “You did offer to help any time, as I recall. Maybe now I won’t feel too guilty to take you up on that. Anyhow, I suppose I should get back to the adoring public. Those wares won’t sell themselves.”

Mitch nodded like a bobblehead, too aroused and stupid-tired to come up with anything worth saying in farewell. So he just watched her marching gracefully away, her backless crimson heels dangling from each foot in midair for a gymnastic instant before slapping the leather strip back to her mesh-encased sole and stabbing the ratty carpet for the next strut. Out of necessity, Mitch had scooted all the way up to the desk to conceal his almost-omnipresent pants tent, which today was mostly due to the vague memory fragments of the bed visitor’s amorous voice and angel-kissed sole textures. But the more tangible presence of Lilina had lit a fire in that already-unbearable need, and now he found himself right back in the usual rhythm of sole-watching whenever he had a breather from the phones.

Rubbing his tired eyes, he guzzled another mug of coffee and pined after those exquisite underside-arch slopes. In a moment like this, separated by the tragically wide gulf of the aisle between their desks, Mitch found himself wishing bitterly for that same impossible power which allowed him to scrutinize “her” foot either from afar or when it was smothered up to his face in the dark, yet still spying thousands of details in every pore and flesh-furrow that together made up an underfoot tapestry of crotch-stiffening splendor.

Faithful to his mistress of the night, Mitch didn’t shut his eyes for longer than a wink or even think of groping himself during the day, much as he wished to at the combination of conversation with Lilina and faint recollections from the last cheek-rubbing expedition against the bed invader’s sole flesh. He only ached for her, just as she’d instructed, and when the time finally came for sleep, he did so eagerly and with the swiftness of a falling rock. This time, when he opened his eyes in the recurring lucid dream (ironic, given his lack of control once she arrived), Mitch knew in his heart it was time. His pulse quickened as the room seemed to stretch into a yawning void all around him more so than ever, nearly to a frightening degree, but he drew strength from the intimate presence he perceived flattening him back into the bed, as was her custom and which he now had grown to love. At this point, if only she promised not to leave him, he’d have happily remained pressed inescapably into the mattress as though a warm bare foot the size of a car was gingerly trampling him.

            “You have not strayed.” Her voice pierced through him like a flensing knife, though her feet were still nowhere to be seen.

            “N-No, ma’am,” he squeaked.

            “Ma’am,” she repeated with a murmur. “That will not be my name to you.”

            “Oh. I’m… I’m really s-sorry!” Mitch replied instantly, still terrified of offending her and losing access to her gifts forever. “Please, forgive-”

            “You needn’t blather on. I am not some petty royalty, to be placated like a child. I would tell you my real name, but you would not be able to pronounce it, nor hear it. Your desire to pay your debt to me has provided a name, however, and so you will call me Eve.”

            “Of course. Eve. It’s… a b-beautiful na-”

            “Your compliments do not interest me, so long as they do not serve your redemption toward me and my feet,” Eve interrupted. Her voice never became angry, just as chilly and simultaneously seductive as ever, but right away Mitch found himself subdued by her lordlier attitude tonight. Not that he was about to complain, when she’d given him so much already. If anything, her dominating tone matched the larger-than-life enigma she already projected by commanding his body to freeze and burying him alive in her arch. “And you are prepared to serve again, aren’t you?”

            “Yes,” he gulped. “Please. Let me. I’ll do anything you want.”

            “That was always the case,” she smarmed. “Whether you offered or not.”

            There was no buildup this time. Mitch went directly from immobilization in the cold solitude of his sheets, surrounded by darkness and empty space, to deep immersion in Eve’s sole. It was instantaneously muzzled across his whole face at once, unquestionably larger than their previous encounter but proportionally so, such that he was fairly certain she could’ve covered his whole torso at once under it too. Of course he was grateful that there was no waiting game to play this time, and before she even prompted, he set off on another trippy visual flight across the lush silky-rippled wilderness of lunar-pinkish foothills, electrified with goose bumps and hardening fast under the sheets.

            She didn’t keep him in suspense long there, either. Magnificent as she was at ensnaring his whole consciousness to the large sole currently masked across his features, making him nuzzle the creamy smooth texture like recently-rained earth and inhale the sweet ethereal musk of those wrinkles, all it took to equally split his attention was the opposite foot firmly greeting his mast just as instantaneously. Much like the ped now resting comfortably across his whole head in an all-consuming embrace, the opposite arch definitely dwarfed his hard-on. Emasculating as it might’ve been to be outsized so thoroughly in this way, however, Mitch was only concerned now with the realization that there was so much more terrain than before for her to softly grind against his trembling need.

            And grind she did, immediately putting her curiously enlarged sole feverishly to work. Funnily enough in the recipient’s mind, while last night it felt as though her foot largely remained in a state of stationary petting as she simultaneously caused him to experience ghostly sensations of rapid-fire sleek-soled massaging, quite the opposite was happening now. Eve was wonderfully assaulting his cock under that humongous and yet strangely delicate sole, causing his boxers to pop fully open and the sheets to flutter in the dark from the force of its motion. She was pressing it taut against every curve of her foot, again somehow made friction-free by her angelic dew of night sweat alone, pinning and stroking and making him feel every intimate detail in the flexed architecture of her soft warm flesh.

Still, Mitch was made oddly calm throughout her effortless techniques, his stasis unmoved and even made more soothing, as though he was being allowed to drift off to sleep with a drowsy final cum while his secret beloved calmingly caressed his rod to orgasm against the silkiest crinkle-divots in tender underfoot slope. However it was that she was able to accomplish this trick, he adored it, and only hoped she still had more to show him.

“You have come now to more fully comprehend the greatness of your debt to me. You have felt what you are in comparison to me. That you are lesser without my collection of you,” Eve continued, though her speech didn’t require the slightest slowdown in her two-pronged rubdowns. The way her feet worked in tandem now, Mitch almost felt like she could drag him right off the edge of the bed under these perfectly domineering sole-slabs and walk upon him like a pair of slippers shooting through the stretched-out blackness of his dreamland. He was fully prepared to become her floor mat for the night, if she requested such a thing, if only to earn his keep. “You do acknowledge this, yes?”

“Yes,” Mitch said, responding telepathically without skipping a beat. “I do. Y-You… these… visits… it’s the best thing that’s ever happened to me.”

“Of course it is. Not that you had much of value to count upon before me, but there is no question that I am offering greater fulfillment to you now that you ever dared dream you might achieve,” Eve responded, nonjudgmental as ever in her sultrily calculating tone. “How then would you thank me for what I’ve bestowed? The payments of your love seed are still necessary, but I believe you have more to pay, in other manners. What will you do, lesser one, when I will not allow you to move your body or speak aloud?”

It seemed the longer Mitch spent in Eve’s presence, the more synchronized his own desires became with hers, as he understood almost instantly what was required of him now. Without further prompting, since she’d already given him everything he needed now by granting back a modicum of control over his mouth but not his voice box to actually speak, he puckered up and reverently kissed the broad pith-rosy valley he’d been longing now for three days straight to worship more effusively. Unfortunately she’d only allowed him back the use of his lips, not his tongue, but even this more direct gesture was a substantially more passionate and meaningful smooch than any he’d ever sloppily shared with short-term college girlfriends. And certainly he’d never been allowed to pay such tribute to the clandestine objects of his affection, let alone a pair as luscious as Eve’s.

When his winnowed lips gingerly impacted her warm skin to give thanks, he witnessed even from this close-up the way those malleable wrinkles and vibrant hues reacted in a more beautiful extreme even than when she fluttered and scrunched her toes for him. Those diagonal ripples running across her sole and into the ball of her foot changed their squishy direction at his lip-lock, pointing like artfully crooked arrows imprinted in the flesh toward the opposing instep. The moonlike paleness deepened, first to a citrine yellow from the minute pressure of his kiss, but quickly transformed again while he decreased the needful force of his closed mouth, turning from a sunset orange and back to that swarthier pink as he regressed from that pucker to catch his breath and draw scrumptious atmosphere again directly from the heated plain of her arch.

“That is a start,” she stated. “Meager, but a start.”

Taking this as a challenge, then, especially considering he’d only been holding back out of fearful respect, Mitch took another gulp of her aura, then launched into a much heartier peck. He’d never ached more in his life to make-out with any person, or any foot, than in this moment now, but still had to make do by expressing as much devotion as he could with these limited lip articulations, while the rest of him laid still – save for his erection, which was prevented from completion yet only because of the concentration required to kiss Eve’s sole as well as she deserved. So he smothered that buoyant central circle of meaty sole with all the affection he could muster via pulsing lips alone, murmuring with thirst and faith. In return, he found he could actually detect traces of that entrancing scent now manifested as a flavor, thanks to the contact with his mouth allowing him sample her even without caressing his taste buds through those furrows. It wasn’t much, but even through this tempting hint, Mitch knew that the taste of worshipping Eve’s foot would be even better than inhaling its essence until his lungs swelled. A saliva-inducing tickle of sour semi-toxic flower petals, lived-in sweat glaze, and vanilla sugar cookie met his throat.

“Better.” Coming from her, this felt like the best compliment Mitch had ever received. “Do not stop, and neither will I.”

Right then, another pre-emptive endorphin shot flooded through Mitch in response to a particularly enchanting swipe from Eve’s twin sole along the back of his cock: a perfect glide from heel to toe-shaft which made him feel every dimple and texture spot on the bottom of her foot, creating such a precise illustration in his mind that he could’ve hand-drawn its elegant loping geometry in the dark. He wanted so badly to cum then and there, feeling that lightness in his temple that ordinarily preceded a climax, but held out by smooching her ped’s landscape with a gasping fervor that again prolonged this ecstatic trip. He alternately rained kisses on her sole as quickly as he could, then descended to a more stimulating slow-draw that allowed him to tenderly suck at this same square inch of foot flesh like a vacuum cleaner spout.

How he’d avoided bursting yet, the man would never know. And indeed Mitch was left so aglow now in Eve’s sole-fondling talents and the damp salted-pastry tincture of her naked foot on his lips, however slight, that he both wished for this instant to stretch into a hundred, and also for orgasm to arrive as soon as humanly possible. The spectacular necessity of it all made the guy feel like he was floating right out of his bed now, suspended in midair by the power alone of a footjob and that marshmallowy arch brawn cupping all his senses toward that decadent vivaciously-hued garden of saccharine sole creases where his lips were united (perhaps eternally) with the underside of Eve’s ped.

“You will kiss my foot once more. Ardently. With all you have, so that I will know the absolute height of your gratitude thus far. And you will not cease until I am through with you for tonight.”

            So Mitch did, smooching like this circle of lunar-lit doughy sole terrain contained the elixir of life. He shut his eyes and clung on via lip pressure as if his continued existence depended on it, and frankly it was starting to feel that way, especially the way his drowsy dead-end-job romance-less waking life was coming along. What else did he have to even look forward to, except the next slumber which would bring another maddeningly erotic reunion with her? Eve and her feet really were the most valuable aspect of his whole life by a long shot, but Mitch couldn’t even feel sorrow for that fact, when he was subject to the whims of such an immaculate-soled celestial creature. Surely other folks went their whole lives without ever receiving even an ounce of the pleasure he’d known the past three dreams. And he actually pitied those people.

            He’d expected her to keep him in suspense longer, but after an allowance of twenty breathtaking seconds, wherein he kissed her sole with a love to mark the ages, Eve put an end to the evening’s affairs. Those toes splayed thickly across his dickhead, the ball of her foot thumped down just firmly enough to make him feel as though his shaft was put into its rounded orbit, and then she rubbed at an angle that claimed the most urgent load of Mitch’s whole life. The way he felt his whole backside smack into the mattress at the moment of euphoric redemption made him wonder if he really had floated off the covers after all, but he couldn’t think straight about such things while the stone-cold bliss rocked through his limbs. Unprompted, he kissed a last farewell for the night to Eve’s sole just as it began to withdraw, re-entering the darkness as quickly as it had appeared flush against his countenance.

Her other foot left its post as well, and earlier than last night, Mitch was allowed back bodily agency, which he used to instinctually wrench and squirm from the absolute eruption of sensual gratification he was still feeling now, even nearing a minute after the finish. It was like she was teaching him new things about his own body and mind at once with every successive visit. How enlightened might he become if she continued paying him visits for a whole week? A year? In another break from their three-night tradition, Eve spoke again as the disciple to her feet writhed in wonder, surprised that she hadn’t yet abandoned him.

“Oh, you are pleasing indeed…” she murmured with a heavenly croon: a noise so heartening that Mitch’s member almost re-hardened on the spot. After all Eve’s coldly seductive commands delivered as a queen to her lowest subject these prior nights, the contrast of her jubilant and borderline-affectionate tone was disarming in yet a new way that her subject couldn’t possibly have prepared himself for. Her joy made him feel even more naked than when her foot crept beneath his clothing for the first time. “If only you were capable of understanding the value of your devotion to me, insignificant one. Though I was able to sense your vulnerability from the first moment you were bathed in my presence, even I couldn’t have longed for a more immediate and useful change. You are going to become mine more quickly than any other susceptible soul I’ve courted before. Do not resist that inevitability, and you just might become my favorite soul as well. As you have now paid enough of your debt that there is no harm in allowing you to imagine your final destiny – though there is yet more to pay – I am claiming you. With every drop of your seed you surrender to me each night, you become more and more mine: every part of you, from your body that I so easily control already, to your mind so faithfully obsessed with my feet before you ever knew of my presence, to at last your essence itself. I will take it all, and you will serve a purpose higher than any you could’ve ever found in the miserable nothing of a life you lead now. Give thanks, because at last you will have meaning. Then take heed, and find no pleasure except in thoughts of me, until we meet again. For we’ve only just begun.”

            The aura of Eve swept away again in a frigid gust blew back the blankets, leaving Mitch alone once more in the shrinking darkness of his bedroom. Unlike the previous two nights, however, he didn’t immediately tumble into sleep, but instead white-knuckled his sheets in the keenest and most bewildered terror he’d ever known. This of course was in spite of the half-chub he maintained for the remaining restless hours of the night.

Mitch sat at his desk, lurching forward and backward in his chair like a metronome. His eyes were bloodshot and his joints ached; it was obvious now, with three nights’ worth of proof, that his body was not resting and recharging as it naturally should’ve in slumber, beginning from the first intimate “dream” he’d enjoyed of Eve. Indeed he made a point of emphasizing the woman’s fictional nature to himself again and again as he sat in a listless statue-state in front of his monitor, getting dazed by its frying blue light and reassuring himself that the footjob goddess’s threats to take his soul were moot, because she was only a figment of his undersexed imagination, much as he wished her more positive aspects were applied to a real person. Frightening and yet still arousing as it had been to hear that hot nectared voice declare his damnation to her as an inevitable finale, not a battle to be won or lost, Mitch smacked himself in the forehead every time he started to feel uneasy again, because he was not a child who believed in fairy tales.

For there could be no actual danger from a nightmare, no matter how vivid, and the fact that his wettest-ever dreamscape full of crinkly soles and sweet night sweat and warm skin had abruptly soured to that demoralizing moment where Eve promised to take ownership of his very spirit told Mitch that maybe three nights in a row of her was plenty. The lack of deep restorative sleep was clearly getting to him in all sorts of unhealthy ways, while both conscious and unconscious, and he decided right then a ndn there that he’d take a sleeping pill tonight, revive, and perhaps afterward give his mind another try at conjuring a foot angel who’d make him kiss and cum to her arches, then politely take her leave without also condemning him to some abyssal eternity.

“Are you going to get that?”

Lilina’s voice droning up-close in Mitch’s ear was no longer a surprise, but it still made him jolt nonetheless in this sluggish slump. His awareness returned, he also realized she was talking about his phone, which had been ringing for at least thirty seconds now. Scrambling for his headset, he almost dropped the rig to the floor, while Lilina calmly witnessed his strung-out clumsiness with her usual mysterious look of nonjudgmental curiosity. She gave him a quiet smile, seemingly out of pity, while Mitch mopped perspiration from his forehead and recited the usual scripted greeting into the mouthpiece. Of course Lilina was just as meticulously refined as always in her beauty today, made-up and collected through every inch, complete with nude hosiery that sparkled like new-fallen snow and her black locks somehow imbued with more of that crimson radiance than usual, though Mitch knew this could’ve just been a trick of his tired eyes. He almost felt embarrassed to look so disheveled and drained in her presence.

“…how may I be of assistance today?” he muttered, barely awake enough to articulate.

“Are you sure you wouldn’t like some assistance?”

The husky feminine drawl on the other line licking its way into his ear made Mitch wince so hard that he would’ve dropped the phone, were it not hooked around his skull. Lilina raised an eyebrow at his reaction, but still said nothing, waiting patiently with her head bowed and hands folded across her waist like a nun. Once he caught his breath, though, Mitch even had to question himself during the pause. For the first time this morning, his memory had succeeded in clinging to the sound of Eve, and though for a flash he wanted to swear that he heard that same sultry tone coming through the phone now in his waking life, upon further consideration, it was definitely not her voice. His brain was just cooked.

“Um, pardon? I… no, I don’t need any assistance, ma’am. Is there some way I can help you?”

“None? At all?” she queried with a gasp. “Well, we’ll see about that. Anyway, I’m calling about a very specific product.”

“Great. I’d be glad to help you track it down and make a purchase. If you could just give me some information about-”

“It’s a pretty specialized thing,” she interjected. “See, it’s meant to be positioned under a desk, to put my feet on, and help me relax.”

“Oh, I… I see,” Mitch stammered. “You’re… looking for a footrest?”

“Not exactly a footrest. No ordinary one, anyhow. Like I said, it’s special. Something that isn’t just meant for holding up my feet, but pampering them through the day, the way they deserve. I can’t tell you how badly I’m dying to get my hands, or I guess my feet, on one of these things. Just pull the ol’ workday stockings right off, go barefoot and carefree, and really rub down into it, hard. Get the kinks worked out of my soles, push in on my heels until they’re numb, then spread my toes and massage from end to end to get that nice little tingle running through both my feet, and make them feel so good that they just want to melt…”

Mitch patiently waited for this woman with the admittedly sexy voice to finish gabbing on about her fancy footrest. In his short time here at the call center, he’d encountered plenty of whacky characters on the other end of the line, some pranksters and some just askew, so there was nothing about the unnecessary detail of her explanation that caught Mitch particularly off-guard. Still, he had to heighten his focus and keep the bottom half of his body stowed thoroughly below his workstation, as the chatty stranger was already beginning to make him stiffen, and with Lilina still sagely overlooking him from a foot away.

“…so do you think you could help a poor girl out? My feet would sooooo appreciate it,” the would-be customer said, concluding her flowery exaggeration of the hypothetical super-footrest, but still without giving Mitch a single useful detail to search. He’d have been annoyed if her voice wasn’t turning him on so much.

“Ma’am, I… don’t know if I can pick out exactly what you’re after without a brand name, but I’ll happily just get the catalog up here now and-”

“Do you know the feeling I’m talking about?” she interrupted again, and Mitch was all for it, as her voice took on such a sizzly moan now that, were the subject matter not sales-related, he might’ve guessed her other hand not holding the phone was up to something uncouth below the belt. And maybe it was anyway. “Just pulling a pair of tight stockings off nice and slow, and letting your feet breathe for the first time all day? Getting the air in between your toes, and feeling the fluff in the carpet brush against the cute little wrinkles in your soles? Then when you step onto the cool tile, and it makes the hair stand up on the back of your neck, because your foot is so warm from being trapped inside those nylons that you can almost see the steam rising when you pick your foot off the ground again? Your skin is more sensitive than ever, tender and a little swollen, and it seems like the only thing you need more than oxygen is to have something take care of them? Because that’s what I experience every day, let me tell you, and still no matter how hard I try, I can’t find what I need to make this feeling go away. It’s eating me up inside, you know. To think that something exists out there, must exist, that could give me and my feet everything we need, and yet I have to sit here every day, deprived, just curling my toes and rubbing my fingers down the middle of my soles to make it all better, only it doesn’t do the job…”

“Uh, m-ma’am… ma’am, please, I… understand the problem you’re having, but…” Mitch said, jumping in when she paused at last to take a breath. By now his synapses were on high alert, his pants tent at full salute, though at least the woman’s indisputably sensual rambling had the benefit of forcing the insomniac to sit at greater attention despite his fatigue. But Lilina was also still standing above him, and the longer he allowed this stranger to hold up the line, when it was becoming steadily clear she wasn’t going to purchase anything and only meant to babble, the more difficult it would be to prevent himself from reaching below the desk to touch his pulsating arousal right in front of his perfect-footed coworker. “…is there anything I can help you find?”

“Not today,” she replied, no longer wistfully out of breath, and spoke with such urgency that it almost made Mitch jolt back in his chair. “But maybe soon.” Then the line clicked dead.

“Having a hard sell there?” Lilina teased with a knowing nod.

If only she knew how much.

“Y-Yeah, just… somebody who wanted a free sounding board,” he said, trying to laugh, but it came out a wheeze. “Sorry about that. Do you… need help fixing your computer again?”

“Not today,” Lilina said, and though her voice was distinct from the one he’d heard on the phone, it made Mitch wince all over again. If only he’d seen even a flash of self-awareness in her gaze, he might’ve assumed the call was all part of some elaborate practical joke, but then again, he was so sleep-deprived that just about any conspiracy theory could’ve added up now. “But I did think it only professional to let you know, especially now that we’re going to be friends, that I was promoted this morning, and am now in charge of this whole quadrant of the call center floor, including you. Lucky you, you have a friend in management now.”

“Oh! W-Wow,” Mitch stammered, not sure whether to be jealous or relieved. “C-Congrats. That’s great.”

“Thank you. Now, I don’t know if you know this about me, but I approach any leadership role with an iron fist. You know, real put-your-foot-down style,” Lilina continued, becoming gravely serious at once in tone and expression. Somehow this made her even lovelier, if icier, to Mitch, who nonetheless was unsettled. “So I won’t be able to tolerate any dawdling and lolly-gagging from you, not when there are sales to make.”

“R-Right. Sorry, sorry, you don’t have to worry about me,” he sputtered, feeling a sweat trickle traverse his spine. “I’m just feeling a little-”

“I’m only teasing you,” she said, breaking the tension with a warm smile that nearly melted the frazzled fellow. “So long as the job gets done, then everyone is happy. Symbiosis, you know. But… maybe you should make sure you get better rest. If only for yourself. You’re looking like you’ve been having a few too many of those late-night not-parties.”

“You’re probably right,” Mitch huffed, too exhausted to try disputing her, especially after so much nervous flip-flopping of expectations. “T-Thanks for letting me know. I won’t let you down, um, Boss.”

“I know you won’t.”

Well-before the sun even set, Mitch took two sleeping pills, and while he doubted he would need the help given his level of unhealthy fatigue, he wasn’t taking any chances here, either with his desperately needed sleep, or the dreamlessness he was hoping to achieve – even while a part of him knew he was going to miss Eve’s fourth visit. Regardless of whether she’d threatened to consume his soul, she still continued to be the favorite part of his “day,” aside from his staring contests with the flaxen creases running up and down Lilina’s upturned stocking arches. All he needed was a day away, or rather a night, to clear his head of insomniac paranoia so he could go back to the same blissfully relaxing and frankly transcendently sensual encounters of before.

            Unsurprisingly, then, Mitch was out like a light almost the minute his head hit the pillow, and he was only too grateful. His body had a lot of catching up to do. What did come as a surprise, however, was the way he became indistinctly aware that he was perceiving his bedroom in the dark again, albeit with the shadows seemingly stretching further than ever, as if his dinky apartment quarters had become a concert hall. His bed, too, seemed to extend luxuriously in all directions, which might’ve been a comfort in terms of leg room, except Mitch instead felt a tightening in his throat, strangely similar to a feeling he received once as a child when lost in the woods behind his family’s house. It occurred to him for no discernible reason that if he was to rise in his bed now and climb down to the floor, he might never find his way out of the room. So he just pulled the covers tighter around his neck, so snug that it affected his breathing for a moment, until he noticed and loosened his grasp.

            Unfortunately, letting go of the sheets again didn’t restart the flow of regular oxygen, because as Mitch’s gaze fixated on a spot in the blackness ahead, disbelieving that he was in fact back in the same dream despite those pills which should’ve conked him out cold, his doubt was put to rest by the sudden reappearance of the moon. Or at least his brain told him it was the moon at first, given the way it loomed overhead, with that twinkling silver-white glow and inherent alluring importance, until Mitch realized the slope-sculpted oblong shape was all wrong, as was the peachy luster under that lunar luminescence. And if it wasn’t enough of a clue-in that he was just looking toward the ceiling instead of the night sky, the fact that Eve’s foot was growing the nearer it came was the final indication that Mitch’s attempts to block her out, just for one night, had failed magnificently. Still, pretty traitorously, his heart leapt at that sight of that most beautiful form, especially when it was joined by its mirror-twin.

            Distance between them had become impossible to judge, but even from what must’ve been a space too far to actually reach up and stroke her buttery silken moon-arches, Mitch still found himself drinking in the same degree of detail as when Eve had last pressed her warm, fulfilling sole flesh taut as wet-packed earth up against his wholly accepting facial features. If anything, he was somehow seeing more of her underfoot landscape than ever before, improbable though that was while he was still also able to view the eerily distended dreamscape of his enlarged bedroom. It was like she’d levitated him right out of the sheets in a helpless pre-aroused bundle to force him to come to her this time rather than the other way around, though Mitch never felt his body leave the mattress either. At once he was seeing both the complete architecture of crisscrossing wrinkles and the orangeish-pink flickers of interwoven sole skin cells from a millimeter away; feeling the wonderfully oppressive heat from the meaty ball of her foot, and the midnight coolness breathed betwixt her flexing toes; smelling that aroma of sticky sugared pastry and poisoned garden, the sweetest and most intoxicating yet despite the sting of oceanic sweat-salt being sharper than before.

The visitor’s peds were still nearing his breathless form, dropping through the darkness with the graceful poise of royalty dipping her toes through oily bathwater, but still they seemed so far away, further than the literal moon, and yet close enough to kiss. Mitch’s breath caught in his chest, as it always did, but when he exhaled again he heard himself pitifully gasp aloud, which startled him, given the way Eve had robbed him of his voice so quickly the previous nights. He felt no more confident the closer the undersides of her bare feet came that he had enough gumption or arm length to actually touch her, but still those seductive ovular-angled soles and every deeply-textured furrow lining the supple runway from heel to toe-shelf appeared to perfectly aggrandize, overtaking much of the surrounding void in Mitch’s already-endless and unseen bedroom. During Eve’s prior invasions, her quiet disciple had loosely sensed a single naked foot folding over his whole body at once, even while his eyes, nose, and lips told him she was gently compressing his face alone.

That illusion, too, was shattered, when Mitch became fully convinced that he was looking up at a pair of tender ample-valleyed peds each individually larger than his whole body. There was no confusion of conflicting perception at once: just a gigantic pair of imposing angelically-elegant ultra-feminine feet, slung contentedly up in the darkness, with the rest of their owner’s body still too shrouded to find. And that dwarfing effect on Mitch was rendered all the more galling as the man realized again that he couldn’t even find the edges of his bed now, nor the top of the blankets. He was stranded in a cloth desert, covered still but only paltrily so, feeling curiously small, and looking up to an increasingly well-lit roof constituted solely of Eve’s feet, currently positioned in such a way that they need only have come down another few meters (or perhaps a few hundred, there was no way to tell) to clap him possessively beneath beefy rose-creased contours of fragrant arch flesh.

The question wasn’t so much whether it would hurt to be smushed under those forms, as somehow Mitch still understood that she wasn’t here to break or even harm his physical form, but instead whether he’d ever again shake the feeling of being stood firmly upon by those tremendous landmasses of the most unimpeachable feet he’d ever witness. He doubted it would be a sensation he could ever replace with anymore more significant, hot and plush and airless and all-consuming as it would be to be virtually swallowed by that placid heft of squishy and titanic dual soles. What’s more, he was terrified to consider that maybe he wouldn’t even want to forget that feeling, or even feel anything ever again.

“You really did believe that you could avoid me that easily?” Eve accused in a volume to match the size of her feet, though even now there was no palpable anger: just omniscience. Her toes thumped together and scrunched, causing the skin of her cloud-soft soles to whiten even more from the pressure and thus briefly make Mitch believe he’d been blinded, like he’d peeked too long at the sun, but it was only the fearful attention to her presence overtaking him again. “After these nights we shared, I truly thought we had something special between us. I thought you were progressing into the most ideal recipient of my blessings, and the most ideal source to feed my unending appetite for pure willing souls such as yours. But maybe I was mistaken. It is not often that I so seriously misjudge a candidate to bask in me, but you may be the exception. If you are so eager to block me from your slumber – though I assure you that is impossible, so long as I wish it – then maybe I am better off seeking subjects elsewhere. I’m sure there are many beings, lost and alone and thirsting as you are for satisfaction, who would better appreciate the gifts I have to bestow. Take a final look, then, and wish my feet farewell.”

“NO!” Mitch screamed desperately, again shocking himself with his ability to actually talk, but also cowed by the peep of his mousy voice. He’d never felt so physically miniscule, not even as a toddler, but somehow still that status didn’t seem incorrect for this moment, as the guilt at disappointing Eve quickly overtook his apprehensions about her nightmarish promises.

Even more potent than his remorse at failing a fictional dream-character’s expectations, though, was the stabbing dread he immediately felt at the merest thought of never seeing, touching, inhaling, suckling, or cumming to these inordinately colossal and utopian shapes of beckoning damp-soled dimple-bunched perfection. He’d only wished to be away from her feet for a single night, and even then reluctantly, just to get back on a healthy sleep pattern before he keeled over at his desk in the light of day. Though it thankfully hadn’t occurred to Mitch yet that he might permanently lose her, it was clear that whatever combination of creative subconscious and rampant desires were torturing him this way now were capable of taking away the single best thing in his life. He couldn’t let them.

“Such spirit…” she cooed. Eve’s feet sifted together, gliding instep-to-instep, but coming no closer just yet. Their overhanging presence was more than enough to keep Mitch rigidly splayed in anticipation of her judgment. “And yet before you still rejected everything I gave to you. You tried to shut me out, to deprive me of what is rightfully mine. That, you must know by now, is unacceptable. The thought of becoming my possession in all forms, I suppose, was too much for your feeble mind to grasp, and so you tried to flee. Unsuccessfully, as you now see, but that is not the point. Down to the core of your fragile being, you know that you have wanted this, even before the first repayment of your debt. You cannot fully comprehend yet what it means to be taken by me, but still you want to remain in orbit of me, and as you know only that to give yourself over to me will ensure that you may continue clinging to the presence of my feet, to surrender and worship and feel them laid intimately upon you as your masters, that is enough for you to give in to a new purpose below me. You know that is enough. So why then, insignificant creature, do you test the patience of the one who has given you everything you ever desired?”

“I… I…” he stammered, but finding no words, even though Eve had still not taken away his power of speech. Of course she had seen everything in his head, being of his own mind, and so she had him dead to rights: her vows had frightened him, because he couldn’t or just didn’t want to grasp what it meant when his own dreams were threatening to eat his soul. But it was just that: a dream. And if the price of continuing to savor the overwhelming sexual nirvana that was Eve’s footjobs and arch explorations was simply a few groggy hours spent zombified at his desk, well, Mitch didn’t even need a second to decide. The only concern left, and which left him feeling more crushed even than Eve’s gargantuan soles might if they trampled him, his hard-on, and the bed straight down like a crumpled matchbox right now, was whether he could apologize enough to salvage their relationship. “I am sorry, E-Eve. P-Please, I… I don’t know why I… did what I did. N-Not really. I didn’t want to offend you, and… God, please, I d-don’t want you to leave. M-More than anything, I want you to stay. I w-want to please you again.”

“But there was a reason you defied me,” she challenged quietly. “What was that reason? You know I see it inside you already, but I would have you speak it aloud, for yourself as well as me.”

“P-Please… it wasn’t because I… d-don’t appreciate everything you’ve done for me. I… was just so tired-”

“You tire only because you still cling to things unimportant,” she interrupted. “Your body is delicate, moldable, easily overpowered. We both know how easily you have given up your seed at the slightest touch. The effort of your body, then, is by far the least useful element of your being when it comes to your devotion toward me… though, I admit, your biological enthusiasm has pleased me nonetheless. But if you wish to continue being visited upon, and continue paying your debt until you belong to me, as I know you do, then you will set aside your more earthly woes. Your “tiredness” is not of concern to me. Nor are your fears of the unknown. Your only wish now should be to rest less, think even less, and then give in fully to me. Is that too great a task for one so desperate and small as yourself to accomplish?”

“No!” Mitch crowed again, and this time realized the answer came from inside his head, though whether Eve had again silenced his voice, or he’d simply become too diminutive in the scope of his swelling bedroom to be heard, he couldn’t guess.

But at his sincere telepathic response, the sky of her feet ceased its mesmerizing activity, with her toes flaring apart again and those milk-pale sole wrinkles stopping instantaneously like curled ocean waves freezing over. And then without Mitch noticing the shift, he was suddenly placed in direct contact again with the unquestionably-expanded surface of one foot’s underbelly: a reunion he’d been painfully itching for now over the course of this whole disciplinary hearing beneath her, in mortal terror that he might not be allowed the chance to touch them again. Or rather, he was buried beneath Eve’s foot upon the interminable plain of his bed, wholly ensconced on his frontside by a delectable velvety-lithe field of cushy flesh pleats along the whole meaty mass of her moonlike undersole. He might’ve squealed and jumped for joy, if he was capable of either speaking aloud or moving a muscle, but she’d officially quieted him for the night, and while her skin was soft and dewy as he recalled, the full brunt of being immersed confidently beneath its humid damp-glazy heft with any degree of pressure matching the strength of such a large being ensured he was powerless to press back against the still-yielding texture of lush pinkish-peachness pinning him down.

Miraculously, but not unexpectedly for the grateful fellow, he could still inflate his lungs and draw breath somehow or other out of a solid ceiling of beautifully-tactile feminine arch brawn, though this seemed less impossible compared to the other physics laws she’d broken this week. And so after recovering from the momentary excitement-induced hyperventilation of realizing his truthful appeal had worked, Mitch just let himself soak up the jubilation of being lovingly mashed down under Eve’s foot, so heartily that the mattress started to sink beneath him until he was certain it had bent and folded inside-out, and yet still he experienced not an ounce of pain, no loss of air, or even the nerves he’d felt upon going to sleep, her threats of soul-reaping be damned. So what if his brain was feeding him some creepy notions? Not even the most traumatizing night terror could make him want to stay away from this.

“I did not need the help to know for certain, but even if I did not have the ability to read every thought running through your simple mind…” Eve’s laughter-tempered voice tremored through her foot flesh like an earthquake. “…your body would surely have betrayed you regardless.”

She was only too right. As her immense foot commenced brushing to and fro over her captive’s shape, Mitch’s hardness was battling to burst through his underpants, again the only clothing he’d chosen to wear to bed: perhaps, he realized, a subliminal hope that he might still meet Eve tonight after all, no matter his other efforts to avoid her. It occurred to him too that she’d technically allowed him to retain his bodily autonomy for the first time, since he was still vibrating in glee, but then again, the size of the sole holding him down meant no tricks were necessary to keep him from any real movement.

Had she not been compressing him up and down with so much pithy arch musculature, Mitch would’ve fought immediately to rip his boxers away as a sign of his total surrender, but he needn’t have worried about this impediment. Although Eve’s foot was far too large now to snake up his pant leg and find his erection within – not even her pinky toe could’ve made it in without shredding the cloth – her ped’s consistent near-hypnotizing slaking of along a short distance which simultaneously fondled and cradled her happy entrapped subject into an arousing hump-like twitch meant that it took only a dozen or so thrusts from her titanic underfoot region to gladly strip the man down to his more-natural state.

“I presume you see what you would have missed now, had you been foolish enough to refuse me?”

“Yes!” he thought, and would have broken into relieved tears, if he wasn’t so busy euphorically perceiving every single point of contact between his insignificant body and the loping ridge-wrinkled sole topography above. Of course the union of his trembling stiffy into the doughy lip-like valley of a wet flesh crease down the exact center of Eve’s arch took up most of his brain’s obsession, and only more so with each repeated slide through its soft depths. Mitch realized now, feeling every wonderful tingle and endorphin source lighting up his entire body almost as bright as her luminous foot, that the generous visitor had been training him the past nights by instructing him to let in every sensation on an almost-superhuman level, seeing and caressing and breathing in so many essences at once, beyond what he ever could’ve handled at once, until these specific peds entered his life. His mind had been opened by Eve, and he only hoped he’d have the will to keep it that way long enough to experience everything she had to offer.

“Remember, then, that this was of your own will. You have vowed to give yourself to me, my little follower of soles,” she hushed, though her full-body foot-rubbing only picked up the pace. Eve pushed harder, causing her tiny host to throb from the crotch-outward, leaving Mitch huffing and pleading via ragged moans. “There is no turning back. You have tried me once before and proved yourself incapable of meaningful survival without the guidance of my feet. Keep that truth in your heart, as you embrace destiny now. Your debt continues to shrink with every offering you make, but still we must make it smaller. Now you will make payments of both seed and tongue. Extend yours from that undeserving mouth and taste your master.”

Mitch almost sprained a muscle in the process of shooting out his tongue at the first whisper of permission. Having been denied this last grace these long days and nights, even with that aching sample through his kisses, he’d allowed himself to wildly build up hopes of the flavorful splendor awaiting once she finally gave the go-ahead to lick her foot in worship. Naturally he hadn’t been able to conceive of the circumstances, where Eve’s ped would rest upon him like an insect caught underfoot, rather than resting luxuriously across his face alone, but this turned out to be better, and even more scrumptious than his fetishistic desires had suggested.

Those previous tempting zests of toxic flora and sugary cake, night sweat and lust, merely inhaled before were all present still now, but took on new dimension once Mitch was dutifully dragging his tongue through the creamy contours of every proffered sole dimple, forming its own ever-flexing ravine in the ecosystem of Eve’s humongous ped. It would’ve been prize enough to just feel his taste buds in sensuous congress with her arch flesh, pushing as hard as he could up against her skin and feeling just enough give to remind him of the invitingly soft vitality of this foot, even without the flavor awaiting. But of course it was there, the interwoven cocktail of saccharine frosting and exerted saline, plus delightfully-zippy petals of alien flower growth, unidentifiable perfume, and that vanilla-orange kiss. Mitch lapped and sucked, drank and smooched, understanding his devotion would never be enough for what Eve and her feet actually deserved, but also knowing for sure that he could be content locked in this moment, more than any other spent with her prior, forever. His spine arched as much as could be allowed by the sweet and sweltering quash-mass petting his whole being, again in the way of a spectral possession trying to float him right out of the bed, but the force of Eve’s regal sole held him fast in place.

Time lost all meaning during that ecstatic marriage of sensations at his mouth and crotch, bathing and humping the same foot at once by the whim of her sole alone, but Mitch guessed he didn’t hold out very long, once he’d given in fully to this new privilege Eve had blessed upon him. At the height of these otherworldly tastes blossoming in his cheeks and pleasure mounting to a point of necessary relief, the visitor’s loyal bed-bound servant paid his next cum tithe with a spine-bending spasm that might’ve caused him to launch from the mattress and spin through the air like a helicopter leaf, if not for the lasting authority of that foot still keeping him trapped right beneath its soft heft where he was needed. Instead he just jolted and tweaked into the malleable skyscape of flesh, raking his tongue back through another squishy arch cleft-line mid-moan and trying so hard to imprint that foot flavor into his brain that it began to numb his taste buds.

This finish had topped any of the prior nights under Eve, and by extension any other bout of pleasure (sexual or otherwise) that Mitch had experienced in his whole life. Again he could only miserably regret having tried to deny this uncanny creature entrance into his consciousness. In this moment, the rationale of his exhausted days, Eve’s imaginary self, or her vows of soul-theft all melted away. The undeniable fact was that he felt better now than he had in any other singular moment of existence, and was not willing to give it up, no matter how much his bones ached or brain went batty with paranoia outside this nighttime void. Eve was worth it, he told himself during the heart-pounding interval following that supernal climax, as the endorphins settled over him in a thousand-pound blanket with just as much potency as her gigantic foot.

“I believe we have come to understand one another better now. For your sake, I hope that is true, as there will not be a second show of such charity,” she said, every word equally seductive and life-threatening. “Another payment is made. Remember what I have said. Do not think or act for yourself, but only for me, and you will not just receive forgiveness for your defiance, but pleasures and worth of being beyond anything you could’ve hoped to reach alone. You will belong to something far greater.”

Mitch nodded as fervently as possible while Eve’s commanding weight affixed his head under mushy-smooth sole mass, but the acceptance he continually repeated in his head for her to hear seemed to be enough. Her ever-enlarged foot did not recede tonight before the illusion of sleep came, but simply pressed down on her devotee until his senses folded and the heated darkness of her moon-shine sole took him.

His fourth consecutive day sapped of all energy and the will to stand erect was no longer even a remote surprise for Mitch. He remembered better now the threats and decisions made last night, the bargaining and debasement, and most importantly, the bliss under Eve he’d pledged to reach no matter what, even if the sexual rapture he’d felt at the mercy of her foot was the exact opposite of the sleepless body-wracking soreness he was plagued by now in the cold light of day. Taking the madness of this whole situation in stride, and consciously choosing not to deal with the nebulous psychological (and possibly medical) implications of becoming an indentured servant to a character from his own restless dreams, he arrived at the call center like usual, booted up his work station, and tanked just the right amount of coffee to keep from collapsing on his desk while also not allowing his heart to explode from over-acceleration.

            “You really are Little Mister Social, aren’t you?” came the expected drawl.

            Mitch no longer had a right to feel startled when Lilina managed to appear beside his desk without even a flutter in the peripheral, though his pulse certainly leapt regardless. Yet once she spoke, he instantly perceived that crimson-black mane shimmering above like a dark halo. He’d been so wired all morning, he hadn’t even yet indulged in his usual favorite pastime of leering at the richly sloped netting-encased undersides of his coworker-turned-superior’s feet while they endlessly dipped and stroked out of those shoes she so loved to remove while seated at her desk.

“What do you mean?” he groggily replied with a twitchy smile, hardly even hearing the voice as his own.

“Those late-night not-parties of yours? Come on now. I have eyes, don’t I? Barely focusing, just holding it together, and happier than ever. You’ve been having the time of your life out there.”

A couple days before this, Mitch would’ve whole-heartedly agreed with that statement, though the lines were beginning to blur, the more his brain was turned inside-out by Eve’s high-priced satisfaction. Yes, he was “happy,” and it was indeed the time of his life, yet he couldn’t be certain it was still entirely still “his” life to claim ownership over. In fact, were he dreaming right now, he’d be in a world of trouble for even considering this a question.

“I think you still have me mixed up with someone more exciting,” he sheepishly answered.

“No, I don’t believe I do,” Lilina said with a whispered chortle, her expression reassuring him that this wasn’t stated in judgment. If anything, there was a spark of encouragement coming through her tone. “You might play coy, but I know the signs. I’ve seen it many times before. The graceful fall. Not that a fall is always a bad thing.”

“It’s… just insomnia,” Mitch said, and tried to sit up straighter. “But it won’t affect my work. Honest.”

“Yes, I believe that you can still deliver and get the job done. Even under pressure. There’s just something about you. As you’ll recall, though, because I’m overseeing this quadrant of the center now, I see it as my personal and professional obligation to help you be the best you can be.”

“H-How’s that?” The lights seemed brighter than usual today, forcing Mitch to squint as he looked up at Lilina, which shrouded her striking features partially in shadow.

“I think it’ll have to be you who determines that,” she said.

The presence Lilina exuded while standing over his gradually exhaustion-withering form, seemingly a daily routine now, made the woman give off an impression of simultaneous potency and slightness. Oddly, it reminded him of Eve’s bare foot during those first nights, which had seemed so petitely sumptuous at a distance, and yet a full wrinkle-mountainous landscape of peach-lunar lushness over which he could soar when its form was examined closer. Lilina’s exacting gaze and simpering smile, deceptively masking genuine kindness and what appeared to be sympathy for Mitch’s descent, suggested she only held more and more secrets by the day, causing him squirms and meek titillation in equal measure as he looked up at her vantage-towering figure.

Mitch opened his mouth to bumble through another well-mannered brush-off, before Lilina could have the chance to fully appreciate what a subdued puddle she’d turned him into during the course of a few sweetly invasive sentences. He doubted severely that she or any mortal being had any way to help him solve the particular problem he was facing, maybe short of an electro-shock therapist, which meant the only outcome of this conversation (especially in his weakened husk state) was to babble even less coherently while his arousal became harder to hide. Saving him from stammering through any more brain-dead excuses, however, his workstation lit up with a new incoming call.

“Don’t worry. We’ll find out whatever it is you need sooner or later,” Lilina declared, and receded by several steps, much to Mitch’s relief, as his gaze guiltily fell to her stockinged peds below and watched the mesh overtop stretching a creamier hue each time that sleek material caught gently against the leather lip of her clogs to arc backward again. His headset rang again. “Go get ‘em, tiger.”

Mitch recited the greeting script to the caller, but relied entirely on the muscle memory of his lips, as his limited remaining attentive brain cells were immediately sucked in by the shuffling march of Lilina’s feet as she trekked back to her own desk, letting the hefty insoles clop with soft satisfaction up against her momentarily-dangled silk arches.

“How may I be of assistance today?” he finished.

“If you only knew,” moaned a familiar voice.

Yesterday, Mitch had just barely managed to keep his antsy composure when the same minx-throated customer captured his ear, since Lilina had been patiently staring him down throughout that entire meandering footrest-related non-conversation. Today, though, his systems were too depleted to handle the surreal surprise of hearing that same naturally eroticized voice leaking into his senses again. It was like her words zapped and then relaxed every near-dead muscle in his body at once. Mitch slumped straight forward, knocking his chin against the desktop and almost biting off the tip of his tongue: an almost-tragic loss, Mitch acknowledged, because he needed that tongue to please Eve tonight when next her naked behemoth foot came down on his bed like a flip-flop and wore him in between.

“Pardon me, ma’am? Is there something I can help you find?”

“Come now. Are you really going to treat me like a stranger? As if we haven’t crossed paths already?”

“Ma’am, I’m… afraid I don’t know what you’re talking about.” Mitch propped himself up on one arm, but still felt strangely exposed in the call center, even though no one else could hear her, and so slunk lower, pressing his cheek to the desk and muttering at a barely-audible volume. It was as though the woman’s voice had reached through the phone like a disembodied hand, pulled his pants down, and suspended him in midair above the room so everyone could witness the humiliating one-two punch of his attraction to the caller’s tone and Lilina’s nylon-contorting shoeplay.

“Don’t you? But we had such a wonderful chat yesterday. Even though you decided not to help me, I still knew that only you could. So I’d just love to have another go at it.”

“Right,” Mitch gulped. “You were… looking for a footrest?”

“YES! See, you do know what I’m talking about. More so even than you admit.”

“Ma’am, I truly would like to help you find exactly what you’re looking for. I just don’t have-”

“My feet are so sore. So deprived. Much worse than yesterday, and I think it’s only going to get worse. It’s like they’re crying out to me. Please give us something, they say. Please give us something to lay across. To rub, and squeeze, and press. Something we can call ours. It’s really very sad. I can’t concentrate on anything else. Can’t eat, can’t sleep. Don’t you feel any pity for my feet? Wouldn’t you like to hear that they’ve finally gotten the care they deserve. Wouldn’t you move heaven and earth to help them, in their time of need?”

The words hitting Mitch’s ears were so soapy and melodramatic, yet spoken with as much conviction as Eve interrogated him last night (albeit much less frightening than that shellacking from his personal sleep-goddess and her bed-squishing foot had been), that he didn’t disbelieve for a second this mystery nutcase lady was deadly serious in her loopy questioning. He definitely sympathized with her supposed sleeplessness; he just doubted he’d be able to do anything for her but numbly babble on in unhelpful response while hiding his hard-on under the desk, until she got bored of tying up his line again.

What if she called again tomorrow, though? Then the next day and the next? For a man whose primary goal in life was turning out to be the full-body worship of beautiful feet belonging to all manner of deserving ladies both human and hellishly angelic, at the expense of all other pursuits including self-preservation, this really wasn’t such a bad arrangement: visits with a soul-reaping giantess’s insatiable foot-fuckery in his dreams by night, and by day, regular calls from a kooky honey-toned mental patient who could probably make some good money in a phone sex business if only she could get her mind off this miraculous footrest of hers. So, feeling more blearily out of it than if he’d downed a bottle of whiskey in lieu of coffee, Mitch shrugged and just let himself enjoy this wild second gift from the universe.

“I… do feel bad about that,” Mitch whispered back to her, 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.

“Imagine what a fool you would have been to refuse this,” came Eve’s echoing chortle, while her catastrophically humongous bare foot caressed and pumped her shrunken bedbound host’s gratefully quivering form. “To refuse me.”

            “Yes. Such a fool,” Mitch droned back to her in his mind, and didn’t even have to massage the truth to appease his keeper. The previous night, he’d gone to bed in fear of his own dreams like a coward, but this time, he couldn’t wait to dive into bed the minute the sun set. His spirit was willing this time, and it made all the difference, just as she’d taught him. Laying facedown in the sheets, his limbs splayed for sacrifice to her higher power, it seemed like only seconds passed before he was experiencing amorous pressure from both sides. The transformation of conscious reality around him was even more invisible tonight. He never sensed the moment he was miniaturized in the void, or when Eve began to push him down into the mattress with her nightly-expanding sole, nor the scrunching manipulation she performed using those magic arch furrows to squinch his boxers back down his legs for access to his seed dispenser. She was just suddenly present and above him where she rightfully belonged, or rather the only part of “her” that Mitch had been allowed to touch, see, or taste yet.  But all that mattered now was the moment-to-moment ecstasy as the flexing flesh pleats of her possibly-infinite underfoot lands rolled pliably over his standing member like a gentle foamy tide lapping at shoreline, while an insignificant distance higher, his gasping jaws puckered and licked and even gnawed with all the worshipful passion his tiny fragile frame could muster.

Those cosmic flavors of creamed vanilla and sweat, exotic plant life and lust, had compounded again to such a salivating fulfilling degree that Mitch honestly began to believe that he could survive exclusively on a diet of her foot’s aroma and tincture greeting his tongue and airways. Before, he’d wondered how it was possible to breathe normally while buried so wholly under the warm living-clay sky of her delicate moon-kissed skin, the sole simultaneously muscular enough to pulverize him to pulp with a deeper press, but sufficiently tender still that if Mitch let his thoughts drift yet further, he might not be able to distinguish Eve’s muggy claustrophobic sole-jacking from the freedom of swimming in cool open water. Yet now he understood that, in slumber, the giantess had replaced his need for oxygen with an unquenchable thirst for her essence, which he greedily suckled like piglet from every overlapping peach wrinkle that masturbatorily kneaded past his lips. The greater danger would in fact be to have her monolithic foot peel off and away from him, leaving Mitch stranded and vulnerable and probably choking in the lonesome blackness created by her exit. He could only hope she didn’t abandon him until the job was finished and his next “payment” given, and even then he would mourn her.

It had truly never occurred to Mitch until now that he could feel this warm and wanted, this perfectly fed through every sense, and this sexually enlightened inside each cell of his puny body with equal fervor, as though he’d become an organic battery of carnal energy that only burned hotter with each of the hundreds of rhythmic back-and-forth strokes this blessed foot had committed upon him tonight alone. Though he no longer “saw” with his eyes the same rippling hue-blushing details in her foot from ball to heel while she stood upon him at such scale, in the way he’d enjoyed the view during those tempting early nights of gazing-but-no-touching, Mitch instead realized that the combination of his other perceptions all working in beloved congress for Eve could instead create an even more vivid ever-shifting roadmap of her sole. By inhales, tongue-scours, and hip-humping, the soaring landscape formed of her every curve and crease took crystal-clear form in his mind’s eye, seemingly realer than even the best looks he’d snuck from Lilina in the waking world through the smoky veil of those stocking strings stretched across her beauty.

Mitch had become almost as one with the motion of Eve’s foot by now, its scents and textures and heat, allowing him to vivaciously anticipate the next firming of the gridlined arch slope due to bowing boulder-toes, the oncoming especially-salty puff of celestial cakey perfume from her pores, and the oscillating of its pulse-pounding climate back toward once-frightful but ultimately pleasantly smothering feverishness. In this way, the experience strangely was felt on multiple dimensions again, not just in exploring her foot from both up close and faraway at once, but in a string of moments in time as well all compressed together, with every one of those euphoric bursts felt several times over in the most stimulatingly intimate and mind-blowingly vast ways. Each invigorating thrust by Eve’s meaty groove-enriched arch across his undeserving erection nub, as well as every other vulnerably naked piece of him, plus the surfing of his miniscule tongue through equally-wonderful divots in her transformative sugar-sour pheromoned foot flesh, brought with it a fount of everything Mitch could’ve ever wanted or needed for worthwhile life: it was a banquet, it was music, it was salvation, and it was an exponentially more erotic experience than he could’ve ever conceived without her ownership of him.

“You are so near now,” Eve tolled in a voice that could’ve shaken the heavens. Her foot seemed to expand even broader atop of Mitch, so massive that he would’ve feared becoming lost in the yawning valley of a single peach-glinting sole wrinkle, if he wasn’t so deep in her spiral already. “You have ventured so far and become so much less your own, as you are meant to. And though you struggled briefly, giving in to old thinking while depriving yourself of your purpose, you have seen the way forward now. It is in your grasp, just as you are within mine. This is the penultimate step. The final preparation before your joining. Your soul will cleave to my essence, absorbed, nourishing me, and in return, you will discover the meaning you have always sought, and the pleasures even greater. Now, with the same spirit that you devoted your every thought to my soles, pay your seed – and yourself – to me. Finish, for my foot.”

Fully committed at this utter apex of underfoot bliss, Mitch spasmed to obey her.

And then everything came crashing down.

As though he’d woken up behind the wheel of a truck just before it hurtled off a bridge, Mitch’s peal of moaning was only entirely pleasurable for the first nanosecond of his release to the giant foot stamped over him, before his orgasm was joined by something new, and his cry turned to one of existential confusion. Hollowing and completely consuming at once. It wasn’t quite pain, and in fact didn’t “hurt” in the slightest, though Mitch wished it had. A stomachache or a kick to the balls could be understood, at least. There was no frame of reference for what he was feeling now, but it terrorized him nonetheless. What made it all the wilder was that he could still feel the goodness of her colossal foot’s cock-kneading charity even now, though intertwined yin-and-yang-style with the impression that he’d been pitted like a fruit. He wished to cry out, to disconnect himself from the creamy moon-blessed burden of her ample arch that seemed now to stretch more than a mile in all directions from where his nakedness stayed sensuously adhered to it, but neither of these goals was possible. Mitch was overcome by the sensation that he’d been emptied out like a deflated balloon, the very husk of his naked body becoming thinner and thinner by the second, until he would’ve blown away by the gust of a single exhale, if he wasn’t so firmly rooted now in this diminishing ever-paltry state like a wet sticker conforming to the rimples of Eve’s sole. If the feeling kept up, he might just melt straight into her foot, with the last whiny gasp of his climax being his final will and testament.

Screw dreams, screw fetishes, and screw whatever “seemed” unreal: Mitch knew in his core, right then and there, maybe for the first time, that this was happening to him. There was no telling how much the façade of Eve’s demanding aura and impossibly immaculate sole were just figments of his overinflated yearnings, but once the little sleeper felt this frightfully authentic internal nothingness taking hold and spreading so fast, he knew beyond a shadow of a doubt that something inside him was changing, and dramatically for the worse. Whether Eve was an actual entity or just the manifestation of deepening madness, “she” was doing exactly as she’d vowed. Mitch’s soul was coming untethered from him, and getting gummed up in the flexing flesh ridges of her lust-baked arch, until she was practically wearing it – and him – like a tiny tattoo.

And even as everything seemed hopeless in this moment, horrific and assured, Mitch remembered what Eve had just told him in her pre-cum pronouncement. She’d said this was his second-to-last payment before he was entirely hers. Which meant, for whatever zany biblical reason, that she couldn’t take him now. Not yet. Not tonight. There was still one chance left not to give in. Having truly no concept of where he found the will to move, except by divine intervention, Mitch gave a pitiful roar and endeavored with his whole consciousness to fling himself toward safety. It certainly wasn’t physical strength which allowed him to divorce his satiated shape from Eve’s foot, because a thousand of same-sized others could’ve also been trapped under her sole here with him, all pushing against her weight as a unit, and she still would’ve effortlessly squashed their attempts. But still he felt himself separating from the warm silky not-so-goodness of that eternally broad sole and its tessellating creases, falling further and further away into the cold beyond, the more he believed that he still had this singular opportunity for redemption remaining.

“What is this?” Eve demanded, imperiously as she had when last scolding his ingratitude. That heart-stopping roar of hers enveloped Mitch again, while he watched her foot above seem to chase him through the void. It grew and grew, expanding past every comparable scale reference he could imagine, until the little escapee could’ve been but a grain of beach sand stowed unknowingly in one of the gleaming salt-bathed flesh furrows of her arch for God-knew how long. Still, it didn’t press down into him again. “What… are… you… DOING?”

“I’m s-sorry,” he tearfully whimpered, and meant it, whether or not Eve was real. Mitch was tumbling faster now through the emptiness of this sleepy foot-worshipping realm, getting further from the object of his obsession even as it enlarged, and still savoring the memory of that devoted and climactic period of paradise with her astronomic sole even while knowing that to be fucked by it one more time would be to surrender his whole self on every layer of reality. “P-Please… d-don’t be mad. I c-can’t… I won’t f-forget you.”

“As if you have a CHOICE!” Eve seethed. There wasn’t just disappointment and self-assured surliness in her voice now, as Mitch had heard when displeasing her before, but total volcanic rage surging out of her immense presence. Even though all he could see of her now was the bottom of her foot, and in fact had still never comprehended any part of Even above the ankles, there was fury in the dreamy atmosphere enough to make it seem as though an incensed god was hovering overhead in the ether to strike down a mortal civilization with a single footfall. It was like her voice had become a unified choir, a shrieking trill and baritone growl at once, along with every other pitch on the spectrum. Slowly the colorless nothingness all around Mitch and that moon-dewy flesh sky of arch slope began to glow with a distinct swell of sanguine red. “Do you believe that I am MERCIFUL? That I accept the refusal of a weak-minded soul, once it has begun to GIVE itself to me? Do you think this pathetic faithless INSULT to the one who has given you EVERYTHING will do anything but delay what was, is, and always has been inevitable?”

Mitch was full-on weeping now for the necessary loss of this most precious gift of Eve’s ginormous soul-eating feet, not to mention the inherent fright that came of falling at glacial pace in a crimson abyss while the owner of a country-sized sole screamed at him with Old Testament ferocity. All he could do was close his eyes while the ethereal giantess’s denouncements carried on louder and louder, not at all certain that he would be survive this, and focus on the foreign-seeming feeling of laying in his bed at a natural size, clothed and safe, without the sultriest set of naked peds he’d ever dreamed slipping below the covers again to tame him. Unlike the previous nights in service to Eve, Mitch didn’t lose track of where his consciousness began and ended, but knew that he’d “won” only when his eyes snapped open as he physically thrust himself out of bed. Crashing to the floor in a clammy jittery heap, he panted as though spread-eagle in the desert, then scrambled toward the light switch, knocking objects to the floor in his dire impatience, and only let himself really breathe again once the lamplight was burning his dilated pupils, and Eve’s foot was nowhere to be seen.

It was over.

Even with those wee hours of night he had left to outlast, Mitch didn’t dare let himself try to sleep another wink. Turning on every light and appliance in his apartment, he refused to lie down, chugged some coffee, and watched TV on full blast until his neighbors angrily rapped on the door. Even then he quieted it down only enough to make them go away. Mitch might’ve gotten away from Eve by the skin of his teeth that time, yet made no mistake that it wasn’t his own cunning or capability that allowed him to still be standing here, almost fatigued enough to belong in a grave, but with his soul still intact.

Instead, he owed his escape to whatever rule that decreed he could only make one orgasmic payment a night in the full sequence before she took him, whether that was his own lunatic subconscious trying to give him an out, or if there truly was some beautiful demonic presence bound by unnatural laws. If he fell asleep again, and Eve (whatever kind of entity she was, be it mental illness hallucination or skyscraper-sized witch) hadn’t yet been purged, there would be no other chance. He believed that much.

The second the sun rose, when normally he would’ve been getting ready for work, Mitch instead took a long bus ride to an emergency medical clinic. Afraid of being lulled to sleep by the rocking of the vehicle, he slapped himself hard across the cheek whenever his chin started to droop, which at least helped keep any strangers from sitting down around him. After doing the same thing in the waiting room, staring dead ahead and corporeally punishing himself to stay in the moment, he was seen by the doctor.

Aside from an evident case of sleep deprivation, there was nothing physically wrong with Mitch, by the physician’s estimation. Which was just as he’d guessed, though there’d still been a hope, right until hearing that clean bill of health, that all his problems might be solved by science and a pharmacy fluid. Scrounging together cash he usually relied on for rent money, then, he bought additional tests to search his brain for any mysterious tumors that might’ve been keeping him from retaining rest, or indeed making him think a cosmically humongous giantess and her gorgeous inter-dimensional sole wrinkles were going to excise his spirit from his exhausted body. By noon, Mitch had let the techs poke, prod, and scan just about every conceivable part of him that could’ve been poisoning his sleep. Though the results couldn’t be known for sure the same day, the doctor assured him that there was no reason to believe there would be any negative findings. The visit ended with a prescription for some heavy-duty sleeping pills, the kind that seemed like they could tranquilize a gorilla, though obviously Mitch had no intention of taking them, as that would mean wandering back into enemy territory unarmed.

On the bus ride back toward home, Mitch discovered he had six missed calls from Lilina. This was understandable, seeing how she was his supervisor, but keeping his employers happy was low on his priority list today, when the fate of his soul or at least unknown parts of his brain might’ve been at stake. Supposing the call center chose not to keep him for an unexplained absence, it was deeply saddening to think that in the span of one day, Mitch might lose access to both pairs of feminine feet he’d come to cherish so deeply, the real and the unreal. But then again, keeping his body, mind, and spirit exclusively laser-focused on silky rippling-rimpled naked soles, whether they were dangling out clogs in nude stockings or expanding over him like celestial bodies in red darkness, seemed to be the reason he’d gotten into this mess. Maybe, for his health, it was time to give them a break for such obsessions, assuming he found a way out of this indescribable conundrum.

Gazing out the window and still slapping his cheeks to keep cogent, Mitch saw a church whiz by. As he’d never set foot inside one before, it hadn’t yet occurred to him to try it under these unique circumstances. It seemed a long shot, but then again so did an MRI, when it came to healing him of a night-witch’s orgasmic sole warmth. At the next stop he disembarked and trekked back to the mostly-deserted holy site. If Eve’s influence couldn’t be diagnosed in his physical body, maybe it was time to check in on that soul of his that she was so hell-bent on peeling out of Mitch’s diminutive frame and fastening to her arch-flesh scrunches like a victory flag. The first pastor he found, after scoffing at the idea of performing an exorcism on him, kindly performed a blessing over Mitch instead, and insisted that he could stay there to pray. Presuming though that the only sort of “prayer” which might or might not win him any salvation would be one of weeping apology to Eve (not any God or gods) once she caught up to him again in non-slumber, though, Mitch thanked the man and shambled through town instead of waiting on the bus again.

Though he didn’t make many conscious directional choices while pacing the streets, since it took all his already-frayed brainpower working at its current capacity of roughly seventeen percent to try and decide his next probably-powerless move, Mitch somehow or other found himself standing in front of the call center where he worked. He hadn’t planned on coming in today, perhaps ever again depending on if he could purge Eve’s feet from his life or not, despite now having thirteen missed calls from Lilina. But then again, if neither the doctor nor the priest could help him, maybe fate was trying to throw him a bone by bringing him to this spot. Besides, it wasn’t like he had any other ideas.

The ultra-sterile white lights inside seemed brighter than ever, so harsh that Mitch had to keep his head bowed the whole march inside, heading toward his desk at slug-pace based only on muscle memory and making a sharp turn whenever he saw someone’s legs about to crash into his. Mere steps away from his workstation, he was already beginning to feel weaker, less mentally sound, and even more afraid. It was too late to turn the other way, though, because just as his chair entered his floor-bound field of vision, so did a beguiling pair of svelte legs encased skin-tight in nylons sheer as a crystalline gel, and at the root of each, soft beautiful exquisitely-proportioned feet unencumbered by stiletto heels or backless slip-ons. They startled Mitch so much that he had to actually grab onto his knees to keep from stumbling into a hunch, a collapse that very well might’ve caused him to face-plant into Lilina’s peds.

“Well, there you are,” she said with an unlikely lilt in her voice. “I thought I was about to have to go looking for you myself. Get a late start, did you?”

Mitch blinked, braced his pupils for impact, then looked up for the first time. The bloom of the blinding call center lights made everything except the woman’s silhouette fade into anonymous white, but even while the glow stung his retinas, he could still see Lilina there before him clear as day. Though the rest of the world had become a sickly-gray blur, on the bus then the clinic and in the church pew, this woman alone had actually gained radiance from Mitch’s already-superior opinion of her painfully attractive visage, with those full lips, dual-toned tresses, and hauntingly piercing obsidian-brown eyes. Maybe it was the hunch in his back that came of not getting a wink of actual sleep for six days, but even while she wasn’t wearing shoes, Lilina seemed to tower head-and-shoulders over Mitch. Still afraid he might wobble forward and crumble at her feet, the man tried to find the right words and his center of gravity at once, but could locate neither. Helpfully, though, his self-proclaimed friend in management reached out before he could stumble, clasping her surprisingly strong hand on his shoulder, and instantly he was stabilized.

“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?”

With a squeal of marrow-deep fright like he’d been quietly stabbed between the ribs, Mitch flung his headset off and chucked it clean into his computer. The screen flashed various neon shades from its central crack like a cartoon vortex, then sparked to black. Stumbling out of his seat onto all fours, swaying and then scraping his cheek against the ratty carpet in an effort to find balance, Mitch was struck still again upon finding his face inches away from Lilina’s meticulously comely stocking-gowned feet. It just so happened, in this moment following a zenith of hopeless terror for him, that his manager had one foot stamped flat to the ground and the other arched half into the air.

Her nyloned heel pressed to the opposite ankle, forcing that underfoot slope into its curviest possible arch that strained the twilight-glinting fibers of aromatic stretchy silk so obscenely that, even as Mitch refused to blink and squinted with hypnotic intent into the populous tide of pithy wrinkles treasured within the garment that he might never see again after this moment (given the call center’s likely no-tolerance policy on destroying company equipment with an impassioned shout), he found it impossible to judge whether she really was wearing those things or not. Lilina, every seductive and impossible part of her combined, rightfully seemed like the only tangible being alive who could wear these ethereal Schrodinger’s stockings, leaving her feet both hypothetically naked and shrouded at once. Mitch couldn’t be sure he’d ever seen anything more beautiful.

“I’m… I’m sorry,” he wheezed, clawing his way up the desk to stand again. He felt Lilina’s hand at his shoulder as if to help him, but she said nothing, unlike the chorus of gasps that understandably rang out from their coworkers at surrounding desks. Mitch concentrated his gaze only on his manager, though, etching the vision of her feet into his memory and hoping they’d bring him strength, even though he was likely to never see them again. “I… have to go.”

Before Lilina could reply, before anyone could approach to ask what the fuck his problem was, and before any authorities could arrive to heave him out the front door themselves, Mitch shambled back out the way he’d arrived. He was so tired now that he could barely distinguish his own steps, let alone whether he was still balanced upright, feeling instead as though he was pushing through a hip-deep lagoon with swamp waters that only thickened more to mud the further he traveled. All he could concentrate on now though was the need to return home, believing his odds of withstanding Eve’s ever-evolving power would be marginally better there, as well as the comfortingly present imagery of Lilina’s stockinged peds sifting those plucky nude silk thread across miniscule dunes of sole dimples and raindrop-shaped toepads. That vivid sight hadn’t lost an ounce of vivacity even when she was no longer standing above him, the lovely specter of those feet lingering in the same way of Mitch’s blue-spotty vision after staring up at the ceiling fluorescents for too long. Though this was far preferable.

Mitch couldn’t recall whether he’d taken a bus back home, though his legs certainly hurt much worse by the time he crash-landed back in the apartment. First things first, he locked and dead-bolted the front door, then jury-rigged a bike lock around the wall and knob, as if any of this would prevent Eve from coming inside to get him. As if she required the use of doors. Next he switched on every light, like he had upon escaping that last dream, threw open the curtains and cranked the AC way up to turn the place as stingingly bright and frigid as possible. The TV and stereo he put on full-blast again, the fridge was left open and the smoke detector batteries removed so the device would continuously wail. Only then, when he’d placed himself in a protective hive of sleep-depriving discomfort, and picked up a baseball bat to use in self-defense that he absolutely expected would not save him from the wrath of Eve’s underfoot judgment, did Mitch stop to breathe in the center of his home.

Cold, blinking against the blaring lights and wincing at the ringing in his ears, he revolved slowly in place for hours, watching every wall and window, expecting with each pivot to see the architecture melting away to be replaced by a foot humongous enough to crush far more than just the entire building, but the city, the planet, and his spirit at the center of it all. If Eve could literally call him on the phone outside his wet dreams, could make him think he was just speaking to some horny customer for three days straight without ever noticing the parameters around reality being stripped, who was to say he’d even have to lie down and fall asleep for her soles to take him? Doubt tormented him over whether anything he’d done here would even remotely keep him out of the grasp of Eve’s giant humid sweet-musked existence-pancaking soles, but then again, there was nothing else for Mitch to do but stand here, painfully awake, and refuse to passively descend back into that nighttime realm where her control over him was significantly more potent.

Maybe if he could just break the cycle once, and outlast a single night without offering that last drop of seed into her dewy arch creases for the claiming of his soul, then maybe Eve would have no choice but to abandon her quest to take him, or at least get bored of his meddling and leave him be, deciding he wasn’t worth the trouble. Unsure, but intent now on seeing the sunrise in hopes of it preventing Eve from stomping him out for good, Mitch waited nervously as the light through the window gradually turned orange and then vanished. He was vaguely aware that he was hungry, thirsty, and sore to the point of involuntary twitching, yet all of these needs were vastly overtaken by his exhaustion. Once deeper into the night, the neighbors complained again, banging on the walls and front door, but this time Mitch didn’t heed them, even turning the volume higher to drown them out. Though he fully expected cops to break inside later in response to the noise complaints, there were soon no other signs of life to interrupt Mitch’s wakeful marathon to outrun Eve’s mission of sole-fucking him a final time into offering up his measly being. Even the street lamps and lit window squares in buildings across the street went black, leaving him alone in a buzzing blooming sonic din to hope and pray for just enough energy to see the sun again.

“Well, if this is the sort of activity you’ve been getting up to every night to string yourself out so badly, I have to say, I’m disappointed. Surely there are much more enjoyable ways to keep the sandman at bay. With friends? And better music? And a back room where the real party is happening?”

Hunched over, his eyelids half-drooped, Mitch spun around and gripped the coffee table for support. He’d been surprised by Lilina’s voice with the same instantly-recognizable clarity as he had nearly every day of this sordid week, but since it had been uncountable hours since he heard or saw another hint of humanity, especially because of his triply-locked door, it did seem particularly unlikely that the original object of his fetishistic obsessions had managed to sneak up on him here.

Yet there she was all the same, standing right in front of the still-bolted entryway, and wearing exactly the same smoky-hued smart-and-sultry business attire from earlier. Only now with an extra button in her top undone, and her hair let down into a wilder mane – those follicle tones of rich black and saccharine red more indistinguishable than ever in the spectral yin-yang atmosphere that Mitch had crafted here of blinding glow and yet still pitch-darkness bleeding in through the window. Lilina’s gorgeous brown eyes, too, were more of a sunken-abyss color than he’d seen them before, making her pupils swell larger and more piercing, in tandem with that familiar seductive full-lipped smile that appeared to hide increasingly-juicy secrets every time the corners of her mouth curled upward anew.

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 his floor, 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.

“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.

“I… was… afraid. Didn’t think… I… could. Thought… you’d… hate me,” he replied, upon realizing he’d probably been thinking, ogling, and smothering against Lilina’s foot for at least five minutes of patient silence on her part.

“You were afraid. Yes. So afraid. That doesn’t surprise me. You’ve always been that way. Long before I met you,” Lilina said, not hypothesizing, but adamant in these statements as she was in the act of forcing her sole closer to her subordinate’s weary face. Her foot seemed to press more firmly against his features, even while Mitch still couldn’t be sure he was touching it at all, such that it was all he could do not to pant, audibly inhale, and get his tongue coiled in nylon filaments until they melted like frosted sugar, giving him access to the true prize beneath that he’d been chasing all along. “You know that I tried to help pull you out of your shell. I did my best, in so many ways. But no offense, my little friend: you don’t seem like the kind of man who’s ever had the courage to do anything but place himself quietly in the path of his desires, and only hope they just trample right over him on accident. Luckily for you, that strategy did pay off, because your new position is going to give your life a sense of value that you never dreamt of before, despite your own sad self-sabotaging efforts. Much as I’m amused by you, I can’t help but pity you too. Maybe I even mourn the thought of what you’ve deprived yourself, of the peace you could’ve felt by accepting all you’d been given from the start, but which will be lost to you now, because you’ve insisted on breaking yourself down so far. Yes, you will still have everything you wanted, but it will still come at a cost. Why couldn’t you have just given in? Why couldn’t you have just asked me, and saved yourself the trouble? Because, you funny little foot follower, I would have let you belong. In a heartbeat.”

Mitch’s perception felt like it was fracturing now across a flattened plain of all time and space, flashing back and forth between those encounters with Eve in the abyss, and Lilina now in the same near-pitch darkness, seeing and smelling and feeling both their feet confusingly at once, as though shaken through a kaleidoscope and merged. The closer his superior’s stocking ped crested, the less distinguishable he found those incredibly fine-silk filaments in her nylons, which seemed to be keeping their same glistening cobweb-like daintiness even as her foot itself seemed to grow, her expanding sole swallowing more of his visage with its mileage of loping marshmallow-kissable arch smoothness, until the harshly seared memory of Eve’s bare feet had elapsed Lilina’s own in his mind, making them appear one and the same at the firm clarified center of Mitch’s otherwise-spiraling senses, no longer draped in those seductive nude-matching fibers. Everything else on the fringes was buzzing noise and untrustworthy blackness, but in the middle of his world, as always, was this naked ebulliently-puckering feminine underside, whose owner Mitch could no longer be sure of. Was he still looking at Lilina’s foot, or only recalling Eve’s?

And then, like perfectly-tailored hosiery stretching languorously around the elegant curves of its destined foot, everything snapped into place for Mitch. Shock might’ve wiped him clean off the map in both sleepless reality and sensual dreamland at the same time, if it wasn’t for her foot, now tangibly pressed across his face and tethering him irrevocably back to her. It was the same out-of-body madness he’d experienced when hearing the horny housewife’s footboy-clamoring voice morph suddenly into that of his gigantic nightmare temptress over the phone at work uncountable hours before, only now to a degree of infinity that left Mitch well and truly stiff-as-a-board catatonic on the altar of his own bed, with a blissful meaty-padded female arch sending him on another vision quest across its fragrant landscape of Promised Land sole flesh.

It was her. All along. Eve was Lilina. Or rather, Lilina was Eve. And she was the moaning nutcase on the phone. And she was the reason why Mitch hadn’t slept for seven straight days, why his brain lacked the capacity now to conceive or appreciate anything beyond the foot currently clasped over his features, and why there was no going back. In a pouring rush of automatic knowledge that was learned all too late to do anything about it, if he could’ve ever resisted it at all, Mitch became acutely aware – surer of this now than he’d ever been of anything in his life – that every insane, soul-stealing, footjobbing ride he’d lived through this week was real. Each hallucination, uncertainty, and orgasm were the result of her: his queen, his goddess, his night terror all rolled into one ethereal inhuman sexily-soled paragon.

“I… w-wha… how…” Mitch whispered into the spacious ether while, from his warped vantage, hovering over a living vibrantly-hued nation of wrinkle-mountain arch, the largest he’d ever beheld her glorious foot, even while the other half of his senses told him that this incarnate waking-world Eve’s sole was still the same natural size as in her Lilina form, covering his eyes, nose, and lips while compressing his motionless ragdoll frame down into the pillow. These fearful murmurs were lost like gentle exhales into the vast creamy-skinned geography of her underfoot, so quiet that they might as well not have been spoken aloud at all, though for the first time, Mitch didn’t doubt if he was heard by this singular omnipotent being he’d come to revere and revile so dearly. There was truly nothing she couldn’t do, whatever she was, and so he said the only thing he could: “W-Who… are… you?”

“Oh, come now, my plaything. Have we really not grown close enough these past days, the best of your near-worthless being, to understand one another fully already?” she taunted. “Very well. It is time you knew.”

Just like her foot, Eve’s sound had united completely with Lilina’s, and Mitch heard his one-time coworker friend’s tone interwoven with the other multi-tiered cries that made up her voice, still somehow furiously malevolent and yet provocatively inviting at the same time. Corresponding to each part of her voice, Mitch believed he was feeling every possible emotion at once now: frustration, exaltation, terror, relief, and above all, once-in-a-lifetime lust that ensured while every other part of him save for his lips had gone inanimately rigid, his manhood was erecting up toward its most perfect provider as she stayed royally throned at the end of the bed.

“I have been known by many names. Several to you alone,” Eve continued. “And endless other designations by my former conquests throughout both fact and folklore, all of whom have contributed their essence to my greater being, sooner or later. Though you have certainly struggled harder than anyone I have collected for several hundred years, if not what you call a millennium. Surprising, really, as your desires, weakness, and utter dependence on the power of the female foot make you a more ideal selection than most men to feed my requirement for paraphilic yearning of subordinate creatures. I found you with such ease, drawn straight to your pitiful mess of a being. So I became what I needed to be in order to prepare you, and illustrated myself as your superior in waking and in sleep, so that you would accept your fate calmly and with gratitude, when it came to your payment of seed and then final taking. The necessity of binding your soul to a sole cried out to me so desperately, I could not have ever moved on once you were chosen, and yet you pushed back for so long. I must say, that as greatly as you displeased me in doing so, I feel more satisfaction now in claiming you than I have over the many lessers I have absorbed before. Not that it matters to me how you ultimately choose to feel during these waning moments of illusory autonomy you still hold, but maybe you will find comfort in that special place you hold for me, as the “you” that you have always known ceases to be, permanently, and your true purpose is initiated. I have called you many things during these past seven cycles: Coworker. Family. Friend. Stool. These were but words, and meaningless, next to your ultimate virtue, the climax of your being, which is to become my Footbound.”

When Mitch heard this word spoken, not merely a descriptor but a title bestowed by a higher power that supplanted all other aspects of his former humanity, something clicked inside his already shattered perception, like a sleeper agent awakening after decades in exile by a few choice syllables. All previous reason and panic left him the more hopeful and aroused he turned, making it difficult for the man to comprehend why he’d ever denied his only real significance so long. It all just seemed so distant and childish now, his life and job and basic personality characteristics outside of his religious fervor for this feminine entity’s feet all rendered insultingly meaningless. His hardness was fully tented beneath the blankets now, and as was her custom, Eve was already manipulating them in literally-impossible fashion such that they remained tight over his body as embalming material, yet also spread as her opposite foot parted the cloth en route to the union of Mitch’s legs. He didn’t ponder how his tattered garments had disintegrated away, leaving him just as vulnerably bare from head to toe as he already was in the nonphysical realm, nor did the Footbound creature flinch with either fright or bursting pleasure when he felt Eve’s other sole mold warmly across his cock, as by now he could’ve wanted nothing less.

“You will speak words no more for all your eternity, nor devote thought to anything but what you see now. The only function of your mind will be to give thanks, the only use for your lips to part and worship,” she said, as that reliably lush curve of her sole valley – texture of milky ointment and deific velveteen with or without visible nylon worn – began plushly caressing his shaft at measured pace in the dark.

Automatically, as if fully synchronized already with Eve’s cognizance instead of his own, Mitch widened his mouth for the kind of passion-drenched smooch that would make even the most star-crossed lovers blush, then as instructed, commenced dedicating his tongue to the only language it would ever articulate again, being that of massaging his taste buds rough and thirstily against her sweet succulent arch divots while the crease patterns spread and firmed to the touch.

“And as for the rest of your form…” Eve drawled with demonic depth but godlike reassurance. Like the foot already being tongue-baptized across Mitch’s face, the isle cupping his member too seemed to be swelling back toward its actual grandeur, sensitively containing his junk against only the doughy arch-butter center of her celestially-musted undersole mass. He was shrinking, this time he knew forever, but couldn’t be bothered to divert even a fleeting notion to fret for this transformation, while so busily engaged still with licking one goddess sole and fucking the other. “For example… this most telling center point of your dedication, from which I will pull the final donation of seed, your faithful pleasure will nourish, moisturize, and honor the bottom of my foot, without bounds or end. The remainder of this mewling body you once called yours will cling to my sole, cushion and decorate and please it as often as I have need to take earthen form again. Because as much disdain as I may hold for certain of your kind’s conventions, I will admit that which you already know so well yourself: I know how to wear a set of stockings and heels, and wear them well. It is, after all, the primary method I use to draw in new quarries of souls indentured to my foot. I can sense the elation it brings you, after so many days spent trying to catch a glimpse inside my shoes at work when you thought I never knew, craving that space between where my feet meet the insoles, inhaling and occupying it, to know that soon you will be the closest of all to that spot, when I house you inside my nylons and shoes each new day: to refresh you in the aroma of your servitude, to be kept clean and smoothed by your tongue and phallus. The only occasions when you will not be at my foot, you will find yourself at another, if only briefly, when I see fit. After all, I did promise poor Nola and Avis that I would let them in on the secret of my lotion-dispensing stress object. How cruel it would be to let them go on thinking it may have been too good to be true? You, Footbound, of all things, should know the pain of wishing for what seemed impossible for so long. Do not trouble yourself with the thought of such unevolved beings discovering your true nature, however, nor of being separated from your master’s foot for long. They will not recognize you when I gift you to both of them for a time. They will be spared their aches, as you will christen their soles with but a token few of the limitless seedings my foot will reap from you throughout the eons to come. Though I know such temporary distance from the soles of your one true phantasma will only deepen your hunger and lust, and when you return to my foot again, no matter your past sins, it will be with gladness enough to shake the heavens. The time approaches. Give in, Footbound, and complete what became inevitable from the moment your existence was created for me.”

Eve had retaken her “true” size now, or rather her chosen devotee had finished shrinking down to an uncountable sliver of his old stature in the resumed void, tiny and bedless, naked and stickily fastened across every bodily iota including his needfully throbbing pecker to the sleep-daemon giantess’s sole. In the earthliest known sense, he had technically been reduced down to one-half inch tall, though throughout every other level of being, he was both of “ordinary” stature still and just a microscopic speck on her beautifully perpetual foot. Like a soft wet mist that had inexplicably taken solid form, the balmy savory intimately-wrinkling archipelago of Eve’s sole flesh seemed to be reconstituting of its own accord, its dimpled terrain adjusting until it was perfectly fused against her Footbound’s form like liquid plaster. Here she held him in place by no discernible physical force, but still maintained his draw to her skin using a planet’s worth of gravitational pull.

Despite being in a position snuggled nylon-tight to a foot that would’ve lethally smothered anyone else in one minute who was still prone to the weaknesses of a homo sapien, though, the little thing could breathe just fine, even with more delicious clarity than he had in the cleanest air available away from her foot. Here, open and willing, he feasted upon the inflated scents he’d merely sampled from before, but which now tasted as universe-reaching and multi-dimensional as Eve was herself: the mushy grinding earth, the sluiced leather, the poison nectar-coated bouquets, the dripping bakery vanilla, the spiced humidity of shared passion, the musked secretions simultaneously both human and supernatural. He felt it in his lungs, his nostrils, and caking across his tongue each time he vigorously lapped at her foot again, which taught him he was still quite capable of achieving. Just as he could view from her foot from afar and in contact, could experience her opposite sole jacking his manhood both gingerly and ravenously at every angle melded together in one moment, the Footbound creature could also remain in hot blind stillness, glued to her sole as though just a deceased trophy of this underfoot subjugation, but on another plain of perception she’d been kind enough to create for him, he was gyrating and humping her naked sky of underworld arch pith to a fever pitch of tonguing pricking heartbeat-rampaging ardor.

She had purged him of every possible question or worry now. The miniaturized man couldn’t even remember most of his old life’s details, as they flaked rapidly away from his mind in time with the burgeoning avalanche of erotic fruition mounting doubly and triply each time her astronomic sole pumped his undeserving hard-on again. There was nothing to do but exist here, busily mouthing her infinite sole with the combined tongue-twisting zeal he would’ve felt for all his possible soulmates, until he and Eve together reached the ecstatic peak of her masterful orgasm-taunting footwork (probably honed over the entire timeline of human history), and his ownership was completed. When the dam did break, the shrunken being was so desperately close already to surrendering his essence, that the actual gifting of his cum – though her sole’s technique unquestionably brought on the most incredible riptide of foot-melting ecstasy any orgasm ever had for him – was made soothingly incidental to his final transition. It was finished. He was hers. And no sooner had he spasmed to her majesty, coasting out the full bout of resulting sexual rapture, when the sensation snapped to reset without the need for such mortal annoyance as a refractory period, and her gigantic arch started stroking on him again. Could there be any purpose higher than this, no matter how low it might’ve seemed from the outside, to be cinched by sheer want to the voluptuous spongy golden-peachy sweat-slathered cosmos of this succubus’s pulsating sole?

If there was, Eve’s Footbound didn’t care to experience it. And he would never have to.