You should be relaxed.
That’s what you tell yourself.
With Leah off to Washington to support your dad and the continuing battle to protect the human race from being reduced to the size of a thumb, you’ve been left at your aunt’s house alone with Sophie as your sitter, and a quiet weekend stretched before you to glue your fragile emotional state back together. You won’t even have Chloe around to induce your more traumatic personality traits.
You should be relaxed, but you’re not.
You know this feeling all too well. Creeping just under your skin, across your muscles and between your bones, cascading over your teeth. It always finds you, no matter how peaceful you are, no matter how calmingly low your heartrate has descended as you recline in your gigantic cousin’s upturned palm as she lays on the living room couch with her hand rested solemnly on her jean-clad thigh.
It’s the trembling you find pricking and pulling at your skin from time to time, most often in the evenings when you’re faced with the blindness of a night sky through a window and your own stinging memories.
Tonight is different, though. And you suspect it will be after the bittersweet realization of your previous visualization with Dr. Felton. She felt highly positive after your report that you did, indeed, manage to outclass your visualized sibling for the first time. Still, you’re burdened by that burning question of whether you could ultimately stand up to your fears of ownership like you could in the confines of a warped imagination. It’s all starting to overcome, but before you can break into full convulsions at the possibility of Carly owning you for the rest of eternity no matter how hard you fight back, you feel Sophie’s fingers moving in closer around you.
Previously her fingers had just been acting as armrests and stools for your weary limbs, but in the blink of an eye those bronzed pillars of such unending generosity become something else entirely.
Guardians. Your guardians.
She’s merciful enough, as usual, not to mention your residual shuddering as her thumb and pinky clasp gingerly into your sides, ruffling at the hem of your t-shirt in the way of a hug until you can feel the warm skin of her hand pressed into your hips. For a moment it provides a sense of bizarre déjà vu in its most foreign form, watching tanned fingers curling around your bare sides until you can experience the tingle of every pore on the girl’s flesh.
Much like the care Carly used to display when plucking you from any given surface that was, uniquely, not a part of her body. And usually just before jamming you into the rank hovel of a recently worn sock, succinctly followed by the mass of her foot and potentially unending darkness.
It still sits like a half-forgotten childhood melody in your brain. Haunting, yet relentlessly present and somehow impossible to move on without.
“Jack?”
The musical ring of Sophie’s voice hangs in your eardrums. There’s no need to trouble her with any of this. Miraculously, you avoid flinching, instead curling your arms tighter around her fingers, encouraging her to embrace your frail form more tightly.
She obliges, of course, furrowing the pads of her fingers against your exposed sides and stomach, letting you savor the delicate sensation of the ridged pads of her fingertips grinding with a velvet smoothness on your body. It’s soothing like little else to be wrapped protectively into Sophie’s hand, though the wretched irony of this fact is not lost on you.
“Sophie.” At length you say her name back to her with the same tone of voice, hoping to cut her concern with some lightly feigned humor.
You hear the low rumble of a chuckle inside her throat from up above, though she doesn’t let it escape her lips. She doesn’t like to let you off the hook too easily when she fears something’s wrong. Finally you crane your neck almost backward to see up to her face, upside down and fraught with worry as it so often is when she has you in her palm and physically on the verge of a minor breakdown.
You could get lost in it. That face, and its features that share so many similarities with her cousin. They were clearly carved on the same day and by the same deity with a cruel sense of comic timing. Her hair descends around you in flowing cataracts of silk in varying degrees of amber and gold, framing those curious blue eyes.
“You all right?” She doesn’t wait long for an answer before her hand begins to ascend, her knuckle tracing up the length of her sky-azure top, over the hill of her right breast and up to her chin.
“Yeah. Yeah. Sorry. Just a little cold.”
“Oh,” she says, eyes narrowing momentarily as they zero into your vulnerable form swaddled in her fingers, but they quickly reopen to their normally friendly width. “I can help with that, then.”
Her thumb winds further around your side, meeting the tip of her pinky and effectively pinning you down into her palm under the soft digits, and you’re completely at ease, turning to human putty beneath Sophie’s tender expertise. You allow the pad of her thumb to cover over your stomach, kneading at your abdomen and rapidly turning your tensed infrastructure to liquid. Splaying your limbs fully into Sophie’s control, you allow her to initiate a practiced pattern, every finger hard at work rubbing along your hips and shoulders.
“You sure you’re fine?”
“Yes,” you say, finally able to tell some shred of truth, once the tremors are completely banished from your body. “You’re just… warmer than the shirt. It surprised me.”
“Oh?” she repeats, a sly smirk crimping the corner of her lip in a way you’ve witnessed happen many hundreds of times. It’s usually at this exact same proximity and often before you’re tossed head-over-heels between that fleshy barrier to have your head teased against spit-shined molars and your junk suckled by that muscled serpent of a tongue. Of course, a split-second of staring allows you to remind yourself this is Sophie above you and not the hijacking return of your dream-sister.
“Y-Yeah.”
“So… hold you tighter, then, huh?”
“Sure.”
“Under the shirt, probably.”
“I… I mean…”
“Well, I guess that’s the best way to keep you happy, then, isn’t it?” she responds instantly, allowing that hint of a smile to spread fully over her lips. The left eyebrow cocks playfully as she leans in closer to monitor your satisfaction. “I’m just joking around, Jack. You don’t have to look so worried.”
Her exuberance often doesn’t reach these heights for weeks at a time, as you know how fearful she is at the thought of reminding you for even a second of your powerlessness, but she seems to detect how thoroughly relaxed you’re becoming under her affirming fingers.
“Uh-huh.”
“Is this okay?” No sooner has the question left Sophie’s pursed lips before her thumb is prodding further up your shirt, filling up the fabric with the girth of her gentle fingertip and bestowing fractional ounces of pressure from her flesh onto your chest, massaging you from just below your neck and back down to your navel, repeatedly sliding back and forth until a calming sequence is established.
“Y-Yeah.”
“Good,” she whispers now that her lips are close enough to you that even the softest utterance will be picked up. “Feel warmer?”
“Yes. Thank you.”
“You’re welcome,” she says with a smile, supplying you with a wink and a bat of those long eyelashes before her hand lowers back down toward her thigh, though she keeps up the rhythm of exploring your chest and stomach with her thumb. Her attention gradually returns to the low hum of the TV blazing with the scandal some late-night reality rerun, but yours remains centered on your body and the tactile metamorphosis steadily taking place. The subtle reactions, snapping inside your spine and throughout your nervous system that cause your corpus to willingly surrender in every way possible.
You’re not sure whether it was owing to fear or just plain common sense, but you haven’t experienced contact like this in a long time.
Where you’re narrowed down to your essence, fragile as you can be, with a much mightier being’s hands responsible for every aspect of your wellbeing, ensuring your safety, including from your own foolishness. It’s been a year and a half, in fact, as closely as you can estimate it, judging by your memory of the final time Carly cradled you in all her fingers and seemingly limitless power, dredging your will and committing your very soul into her ownership, right before the door burst open and your freedom was returned to you in a flash of chemicals and a crackle of ozone.
In ways you’d hate to have to explain to Dr. Felton, your parents, or Sophie, let alone yourself, the feeling is undeniably comfortable. Correct, somehow.
It’s at this particular moment your gaze drifts down the harrowing stretch of Sophie’s slender denim-wrapped leg, over the hump of her knee and the gulf between the couch and the coffee table where she’s propped her ankles, and for oddly the first time in the past few hours the pair of you have been vegetating in front of the TV with cold popcorn and lemonade, you realize she isn’t wearing socks or shoes.
Puzzling, really, that such a thing could’ve slipped by your notice, given that both of her freshly tanned and svelte peds have been positioned in the foreground between you and the television for the better part of two hours, even standing tall enough that the tips of her bulbous toes poke over your visage of the flat screen’s frame.
Several more intensely passive minutes of bodily comfort and increasing warmth tick by as your cousin’s fingers sweetly pet you into a blissful state of half-consciousness. You become aware that you’ve been gawking, even without blinking, judging by the watery refuse dammed in your eyelids, at Sophie’s bare feet for this entire time.
Snapping back to reality, you will yourself to watch the flapping lips and screaming matches playing out on the TV, though now that you’ve noticed those toes bouncing merrily just below the visage of the screen, it’s almost impossible to tear yourself away.
Why?
You know you don’t really have to wonder.
It occurs to you that your primary impulse at the most subconscious level was to watch them. As if this was the expectation. Her assumption, given your lower stature. The complete and total devotion of your senses pointed at Sophie’s feet, idly resting within your sight while her fingers break down barriers of arbitrary privacy, her thumb stroking nearer and nearer to your beltline, probably without her even realizing.
For a painful split-second you catch yourself tingling with some distant desire for her finger to pass just a few decimals of an inch lower until she has your manhood pinned rightfully beneath her thumb.
Like a wallop to the skull, that’s when you realize you’ve got to pull yourself together and stop this before it goes any further. It probably already has.
You regain muscular control of your limbs, gently resisting the pull of Sophie’s fingers still snaked possessively around you at every angle and under some of your clothes, and part your lips, ready to make the declaration that you’re certain your cousin will obey without pause.
And in the same instant those words are sucked back into your throat, unable to escape, as you feel the seismic activity of a shift in Sophie’s right leg. Her hand adjusts for the movement of her limb as it bends at the knee, curling inward and crossing over the left as she draws her foot in nearer to her body, closing the distant by the millisecond and literally enlarging your view of those peds that could so easily pass as the twins of Carly’s own great and terrible pair of soul-crushing, sweat-and-floral-scented titans.
A flash of your cerebral confrontation under your sister’s bedsheets.
The feelings return in full force, and with no way to stop them.
Sophie’s toes part, airing out and displaying her sole at its full length: a pure landscape of alternately pinkish and sun-kissed skin. Completely independent of your presence and existence as your cousin simply readjusts, and yet you’re glued in every way except physical, since your body is still tangled in your cousin’s commanding hand instead.
You stare, startled and then gob-smacked beyond recall as you watch Sophie’s free hand reach toward her exposed sole, wrinkling in anticipation as her toes curl and pop at the joints for a stretch. Her fingertips sink into the doughiest ridge of her sole, testing the plush strength of them and easily yielding into the instep, kneading at it and scratching at an itch between the folds of feminine flesh as the underside of her foot is carefully eased along her leg, closer and closer to you.
It hardly registers until the yelp has fully swelled and spilled out of your lips, and despite how quickly you snap your teeth back together to quell the reverberation, the damage is done, and only worsening as you feel your body beginning to shake again. In the same moment Sophie puts the pieces together in entirely the wrong way, her eyes snapping to you from the television. She slams both feet out of sight and down to the carpet, her hand rising at near breakneck speed up to her already trembling chin.
“Oh my God, Jack,” she huffs breathlessly, her voice quavering in that telltale manner. You can see the glisten in her eyes beginning to move with the same fervor as her words. “Oh my God, oh my God, oh my G… I… I didn’t even think about, I… I’m sorry.”
“N-No, no… wait… it’s fine. Really. I’m sorry.”
“Don’t say that! Don’t try to cover it up just for me. I can’t believe I was so stupid to not even think about you and your… fuck…”
“I’m not… covering anything. I swear, Soph. Honestly.”
“What was that, then?” she begs. A fat tear trickles down her cheek in record time and plops onto her shirt, staining it a darker blue. “Tell me how that wasn’t my fault.”
What could you possibly say?
In what reality would it be acceptable to tell her that it wasn’t, in fact, terror and PTSD broiling in your gut at the mere sight of a rapidly advancing bare foot?
How could you ever look her in the eye again if you just laid out the truth: that you were so shocked by the return to an at-once familiar reality that your body reacted in the only way it knew how with a cry of relief, bordering on elation? That if you’d allowed your basest animal instinct to take over, you’d have hurled yourself through the air and plastered into that wall of rosy, marshmallowy foot flesh, never to let go?
And that’s when you feel the seed of an idea planted in the back of your mind. Perhaps the one chance to prove to yourself, the world, and Carly, wherever she might be, that you are your own and no one else’s.
“Sophie,” you breathe. “I need you to put me on your foot.”