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.