“I’m sorry we have to wrap it up before we were expecting to,” Claire sighed, her bronzed digits busily fiddling with the straps of her bus-sized sandals as she sat on the edge of the living room couch again. Her still-gleaming cell phone sat on the cushion beside her. “But I guess this is what it’s like to be a working girl. All the time, right?”
Ashley nodded as she stood back on the glass coffee table with Jack perched in her hand. She acknowledged the fervor in the Junior Enforcer’s voice, though from both word of mouth and intimately personal experience, she knew full-well the Omega didn’t have anything even approaching a cavalier attitude with regards to her work.
Still, it was nice to be back in Claire’s presence without the constant sense of humanist duty hanging between them. It was an atmosphere the Alpha hadn’t quite felt since before her impromptu lesson two years before, when she’d spent a hellish half hour wedged under her sister’s foot, tossed like a ragdoll between Claire’s palms, and given the verbal beatdown of her lifetime in Jenna’s fist. Since she’d crossed the enormous threshold of the Lindon household this afternoon, the Alpha had been anticipating the specter of that event to haunt these tauntingly fulfilling games, and while it had to an extent, it had receded with every minute spent here.
No, this. This was all right.
She could manage this.
“T-Thank you!” the Beta piped up from her hand.
“You’re so welcome, Jack,” Claire said, tilting her head as she leaned in nearer to his palm habitat. “I’m glad I was able to help you both, even if it was just a little. Sean is, too.”
The Omega’s boyfriend, seated coolly on the girl’s tanned knee with his hands folded in his lap, briskly nodded his head.
Ashley shot him a smile and a bob of her own head. Frankly, she was surprised he’d lasted this whole afternoon without folding into himself due to crippling embarrassment.
She supposed that was a positive thing to see. If this pair whose relationship and corresponding couple’s hobbies were, ultimately, startlingly similar to hers with Jack, then it shouldn’t be so impossible to imagine she and her Beta could reach that level of comfort with one another. Or at least something close to it.
“Anyway…” Claire said, at last setting her unstrapped sandals back to the floor beside her bare feet. Her palm slid down the length of her exposed thigh, opening up just behind Sean and curling him into her fingers, which immediately descended toward the floor with trapped Alpha in tow. “…I know we didn’t get through your whole list. I’d… we’d… be glad to help you out sometime with the rest of them. In fact, I insist on it.”
“That’d… be great,” Ashley said, genuinely believing it as she gazed down to Jack in her palm, gently batting her fingertips against his tiny outstretched hands. She brushed a sweeping lock of honey hair away from her eyes, letting her mouth spread into a wide grin.
It was hard to remember when she’d felt this grateful for anything. The distant memory of forcing this precious being in her palm into a place of terror stung now only in how inconceivable it felt to her. “Really… great,” she repeated.
“And of course, if you have any questions… any questions… about anything we did today, then you can text me right away. Nothing’s too much. Like, seriously, don’t be shy. Ash, you’ve got it in your phone. And you can go ahead and give Jack my number too, okay?” Claire continued as she stooped back toward the ground, resuming her preparation to leave as she slid her left foot between the winding straps of its sandal, her toes wriggling comfortably into place and arching above the leather base. Next she lifted the right appendage, the Omega’s instep wrinkling as it passed into the warm-weather footwear.
“Wait,” Ashley breathed loudly.
“Yes?” Claire questioned, eyes bright. She paused, shutting off the motion of every muscle in her body in tandem.
“I… I just want to make sure it’s… still in my mind,” Ashley said. “That I remember how it feels, and… what it all means.”
“What’s still in your mind?” Claire asked softly as she furrowed her brow. The words were poised as though she already knew the answer and was simply seeking confirmation.
“You know,” the Alpha stated.
The Omega nodded solemnly, having sifted through the nervous jumble of explanation and picked out the significance. Her hand rose over the edge of the glass table again, pausing just before the pair. However, rather than flattening to the translucent surface for Ashley to climb aboard, Claire leveled her monumental digits off at the Alpha’s chest, where Jack was standing in the girl’s palm.
The boy’s heart skipped a beat finding himself at this kind of proximity to an Omega’s hand. He studied the neatly lined and grooved fingertips, each spiraling into a peachy center, every pliably curved ridge nearly deep enough for him to climb like a mountain wall. As it was, each one constituted an ascent akin to a sand dune for Jack.
“Jack?” Claire murmured. “Would you like to climb in?”
“Not… Ashley too?” he asked, though he already felt his Alpha handler’s palm hovering closer to the proffered gangplank of expansive fingers.
“Just for a minute,” the Omega said. “We have one more lesson. But it’s just for Ashley this time.”
“Oh… um, okay,” he mumbled uneasily, looking up to Ashley for reassurance, who puckered her lips again and bowed her chin in the direction of Claire’s state-sized hand. Understanding passed between them in a flash.
Obeying, and spurred on by the beckoning kindness in those enormous dark eyes outlined by laugh lines far above, Jack stumbled onto the plush terrain of Claire’s hand. Unnerved for an instant at the rock-solid geography that didn’t even necessitate him to grow sea legs, the boy began his trek down the wide path of the Omega’s middle finger. Both girls waited patiently as he padded all the way down to the valley of her palm, only occasionally slowing to gawk at the endless sea of skin cells laid across one another like fleshy building blocks to construct this goddess-sized organism.
“All right,” Claire said at last, raising her hand up higher once Jack was comfortably seated deeply in the center of her hand, his feet propped against one of the river-like creases that formed a velvety “M” across her flesh. Next she reached for Ashley.
The Alpha held serene within Claire’s gently closed fingers as the ground swelled below. She was initially puzzled, expecting to see Sean standing somewhere below where the Omega’s hand had brought him, until she noticed a slender arm embraced into the doughy crevice between Claire’s big and second toes encased in her stylish left sandal. The rest of his body was wedged under the arch of the girl’s sandbag-esque toeprints.
Apprehension gripped Ashley as it once had as she helplessly witnessed her one-hundred-sixty-foot older sister’s toes preparing to mash her beneath their socked heft. However, as she felt her cheek press to the mushy fabric stretched over the bottom of Claire’s sandal, she realized it wasn’t the same. Not exactly.
Then the toes came, expertly dexterous as they crested over Ashley’s prone body like a bridge of fleshy, tanned spires. Though they were laid down carefully, much as the Alpha had been taught to do this afternoon, they offered plenty of weight, settling firmly into place over her stomach, challenging her to take shorter breaths and trust in the giant girl currently wearing her inside a sandal. There was a lesson to learn here, and Claire didn’t have to ask whether or not to hold back.
The familiar oily aroma, pungent and unwanted as it had been back on that fateful day beneath Melody, was almost instantaneously forgotten by the Alpha. More pressing concerns were impending.
As Claire’s big toe curled inward, the lightly-greased toe spiral brushing along Ashley’s face, the Alpha felt realization strike. The fear wasn’t for her wellbeing, or even the shaken love of those closest to her, as it had once been.
It was for herself, her grasp of her own power, specifically over Betas. And even more specifically, the one Beta who meant more to her perhaps than anyone else now in the world.
As Claire ascended back to full height, finally distributing full weight into her heels and the balls of her feet, Ashley noticed the pressure increasing, constricting her whole body into a narrowing tunnel between the well-worn leather plain and the slightly sticky archway of toe flesh above.
She felt the mechanical pull of skin as Claire shifted momentum to the front of the sandal, taking a step and suspending both her foot and Ashley in limbo for a moment before she took a step further into the room. Then another, and another. Before long the giantess was moving at a normal gait around the room, regularly grinding her protégé into her insole with a friendly, yet educative firmness.
No, Ashley vowed silently. She would not forget. What this felt like, and what it could feel like if she ever forsook her responsibility for even an instant. What that would mean.
She could never forget.
The Alpha continued digesting these vital wisdom pearls within her cortex as she at last felt the pounding cycle coming to a stop, the giant toes unstrapping and clinging clammily to her face for just an instant longer before barreling out of the shoe.
Claire leaned over the couch and faced the floor, making immediate eye contact with Ashley as her cupped palm containing Jack was raised just out of view of her billboard-sized expression. Little was conveyed as the Omega’s lips pulled tight, her deep brown eyes examining the Alpha between the caging strings of the sandal straps.
But Ashley knew she didn’t need anything more. The promise was plastered in her own eyes. She could feel it.
Claire only nodded, the corner of her mouth upturning at the slightest of angles. At last the enormous expanse of her palm was lowered, fingers outstretched as they collected their target from out of the shoe and brought her back to Jack in the other.
Ashley could hardly wait to have the Beta back in her palms. He seemed to harbor equal levels of enthusiasm as he practically pounced up from the buoyant texture of Claire’s palm, all but diving into Ashley’s waiting and considerably smaller but nonetheless all-encompassing hands. By the time they were back together, cheek-to-cheek and nuzzling at a flurried pace, the Omega had reloaded her shoe with the bulk of its ample occupant, sealed it up, and leaned back into the couch, outstretching her legs under the coffee table.
Both Alpha and Beta were so caught up in the moment as Ashley lowered into a seated position, laying moist kisses on Jack’s entire face, that neither was privy to the idle bouncing rhythm that Claire’s twin sandaled feet settled into. Nor did they notice as the Omega’s left foot began to alternately flex and soften with practiced pace inside the strappy platform, her toes caressing together with furious intensity, flesh-on-flesh, continually grasping and curling at something just between them and the summer sandal. Neither, then, did the Alpha and Beta hear the impassioned moan released like a desperate prayer from between the young woman’s colossal toes as they reached their zenith of sweat-lubricated pumping.
When the seemingly innocuous pattern was complete, a knowingly triumphant smile creased in Claire’s lips. The Omega silently shifted her weight back to her heels and stood up, making for the door at a joyful jaunt.
“I’d be glad to give you two a ride back to Ashley’s,” Claire said as she reached the front door, her opposite hand wrapped around the luminous handle and prying it open, allowing the bright mid-afternoon sun to flood into the dizzying foyer. “It’s on my way, after all.”
“Yeah. Sure,” Ashley gasped, coming up for air from their only half-covert snogging. Jack, having plunged into the moment without even considering his normally bashful disposition, wiped back the remnants of smeared lip gloss currently painted over every square micrometer of his face. He chanced a glance up to Claire as she stepped out into the outdoors, feeling his cheeks burning hot, and couldn’t say whether it was more embarrassment or the build-up from this painfully titillating afternoon.
“Good,” the tanned monument said, giving the toes of her left foot an extra wriggle as she reached the street.
“Claire?” Ashley offered. She sprawled onto her back, with Jack hugged to her cheek, hopefully for the foreseeable future.
“Yes?”
“T-Thank you.”
“You’re welcome, Ash,” the Omega said again as she started down the sun-bathed pathway, strolling alongside the Alpha transport system below as a silver-bullet train whizzed by her foot with a slick ping. “Any time.”