“What did you say?” Sophie croaks, her words devolving quickly into residual weeping by the syllable after she nearly triggered your post-traumatic-sister-disorder. You can feel her palm trembling beneath you, her fingers quaking as they aggressively try to stroke your legs into calmness again.
You’re fighting just to maintain focus on your cousin, as your eyes are magnetized toward the carpet below, where you can just make out the image of her toes grasping at the fibers to recuperate after the trauma she believes they caused you.
“I… I need you to… put me down there with them.”
“Why?”
Your heartrate is picking up, a film of sweat has formed on your upper lip, and an involuntary trembling is rippling through every muscle of your body, despite the girl’s best efforts to corral you back into her palm under her soft and now-clammy fingertips. God, they look so much like Carly’s.
“Dr. Felton was talking to me. About… facing things.”
“F-Facing things?”
“Yeah.” Your windpipe has become so thick it feels like the words are cementing along the roof of your mouth before you can even choke them out.
“You mean… like… Carly’s f…”
“Y-Yes. Not just being able to… avoid everything forever, but resisting what I’m afraid of,” you offer, carefully selecting each syllable, as you watch Sophie’s broad blue eyes digesting every hurtful sound. This has to be perfectly parsed or you won’t be going anywhere. You swallow a lump nearly as large as the one currently lodged in your cousin’s significantly more massive throat: no small feat. “So I think I have to go for it. Just try it. To see if I can.”
“Why me, though?”
“Because I trust you.”
It’s not a lie in the strictest sense. After all, you’d trust Sophie to stand on you in spike heels without even puncturing the skin. Somehow, though, in this moment, it seems counter-intuitive to mention the fact that she could pass for Carly’s twin and therefore is the best possible surrogate to stand-in for the tangible amalgamation of all your dreams, loves, and terrors.
Every toe curve, every nailbed, every fleck of dry heel skin, and even every wrinkle are in identical place, and you should know, because you’ve counted. Those feet planted down there on the ground are, save for where they happened to be during the timeframe of your capture, the physical manifestation of the messianic force that’s been controlling your whole being for six years now, and perhaps even longer than that.
“I’m… glad you do, but…” Sophie sighs, stroking her fingers along your hips and shoulders, her eyes darting about her living room in anxiety. She’s still nibbling her lower lip. “I… I just don’t know if I can… after everything you’ve been through, I…”
“Please, Soph. For me. I’ve… I’ve got to start fighting back. Or I don’t know if I’ll ever be the same again.”
You can tell that did it.
She’s clearly in just as much conflict, though, because whatever part of her conscience that’s finally joined your side has prompted a shift in the slender landscape of her body. Below her you can see her thigh muscles beneath the denim surface flexing, bending inward as she draws her right foot back up toward the couch cushions.
Breath catches in your deflated lungs as your cousin’s titanic naked foot crests over the soft edge, heel first, followed by a swooping sole tracing and mashing the buoyant terrain, and finally her toes, lightly dipping along the pillowed curve until the entire bared ped is propped up on her opposite quad, tilted toward the ceiling, and providing an incline upon which you could stand.
“Okay,” she gulps, taking another three separate swallows of heavy air and saliva before proceeding. Her voice has shrunken almost as low as your body. “Okay. Just… for a few minutes. I won’t… move unless you say something. And I’ll be right here, to… catch you, or…”
“I know.”
“Okay,” Sophie repeats again in the same defeatist tone. It seems to be the only thing allowing her to move forward, so great is her fear for you and your wafer-thin psyche.
You arch your back, maintaining a courageous posture as her hand steadily inches across the plain of her jeaned leg and closer toward the exposed sole and heel, looming ever larger in your miniature sight. You have to do this for Sophie. For your parents. For the doctor. For Carly, even if she never knows it.
For yourself.
Sophie’s cupped palm nudges into the base of her doughy instep, tanned and brimming with lean muscle not quite as weathered by years and athletic suicide drills as Carly’s, but nonetheless powerful and convincing.
A narrow of your eyes and an opening of your throat later, the only thing separating you from the brink of virtual reality is distant knowledge that this is your cousin, not your sister, clasping you nearer to her massive bare foot. It’s so much greater in comparison to your hapless form that you’d be easily buried in the center of that creamy, ridged sole if she was so inclined to turn her hand into the ball of her foot and create a sandwich of foot flesh and her mewling family member. Somehow you’d nearly forgotten it after being away from everyone’s feet for so long, for fear of you being accidentally kicked or smashed or suffocated by stale stench, but habitual memory quickly returns.
Your body shifts easily into a crouch, or more accurately, a bow. Your tiny fists press into the peachy, spongy surface of Sophie’s nude sole, sinking easily into the layer of skin after your triceps tighten. It’s soft, like you remember, but capable of so much worse, especially once you’ve pushed your body weight into your wrists and can experience the tactile proof of raw muscle able to hold up the entire colossus of your five-foot-something cousin.
Your head is swimming, but your heart is steady. It’s time to test yourself.
And so begins the ascent. Planting your knees next into the cushioned ground, you begin to ease your way up, grinding by shin and forearm up toward the summit: the ball of her foot. Your fingers slide easily into the stippled ridges of clay-like skin, glazed with the lightest layer of humid perspiration, that clings to your palms in a sticky residue.
“Everything… okay?” Sophie queries in a deathly hush, her hands hovering desperately around you, ready to grab you back up into her fingers at the first sign of trouble.
“Yes.” Breathier than you wanted to sound, but there’s no going back now.
“Positive?”
“Yes.”
Despite how short the distance is, you force yourself to take your time, and mentally wrestle with every new sensation, first accounting for and then rejecting it as truth of your being. One step at a time, you tell yourself. That’s all you need to do.
Acquainted with the feeling of her skin on yours, you find the strength to push this aside first, at peace with the realization of gummy summer sweat binding you down to Sophie’s foot, forcing you to pull yourself away just a little harder on each new step. Nothing new. Carly used to sweat geysers of rancid saltwater that coated your body just as thickly as hers in that slick sheen, marking you as hers, and marking her sweat as yours as you lapped it hungrily up for hydration. But it doesn’t have to mean anything to you now.
Next you inhale deeper than before, allowing your face to prostrate closer to the folds of flexed flesh. Careful, of course, not to let Sophie hear you smelling, for fear of what she’d assume - this is among the most vital tests, after all. The aroma enters your body immediately, mingling with what little clear air remains and replacing it instantly with Sophie’s brand of casual, lint-speckled, fruit-washed odor. Lacking the notes of rubber, grass, and soil that once occupied Carly’s peds at a molecular level as a result of her frequent physical activity, you’re instead greeted by a fresher and unspoiled sensation of lilac and melon. The scent clutches your brain in its talons, transporting you back years, to a day in your teens when Carly stomped into your room, smashed your homework up beneath her sole, and within a minute had you offering to snort her toejam up your nostrils directly from the slimy source. No history tied into that pilfered oxygen, just downy cotton and the gentlest note of human salt seasoned in that tanned skin.
Your nose touches Sophie’s sole and drags gently up to the ball of her foot, taking in the cleanest sample it can. Just to be sure. This, too, must be put aside. And it is. Your face rises away. This is all still voluntary, of course. Not an accurate measure of what lies inside you, if anything, capable of taking control of your soul. But it’s a start.
Through your pants, you feel your loosely dangling member tipping along each deep and valleyed wrinkle of Sophie’s sole, sending a tremble through your body, but you ignore it.
Of course, that one’s just a little more difficult to ignore. Your body’s not going to easily rework its hardwiring after half a decade of training to exclusively devote your dick’s attention to the wrinkled, creamy underside of your sister’s foot, and sometimes her tongue, if she’d gotten bored after jerking you off into her sweat-lubricated toes three or four times in a row.
“Is… that all, Jack?” Your cousin’s voice nearly shatters your concentration.
“N-No.”
“No?”
“No, I… I need something else. I don’t know if…”
“Just… tell me what it is, Jack. I want…” Sophie chokes out, shaking her head and clenching her baby blues shut with a last bat of her eyelashes. You feel her thick fingertips trembling at the small of your back. “I want to… help.”
“I need you to… push me into it,” you utter, feeling the words hang awkwardly above you in midair for long enough for Sophie’s entire body to constrict, including her sole, tightening into itself and letting her muscle press closer to the layer of pinkish, pillowy skin surrounding it.
“I f-figured…” she sighs painfully. “Jack, are… are you completely totally one-hundred-percent sure this is-”
“Yes.” There’s no hesitation now. “Please, Soph.”
She doesn’t have to confirm it, or maybe doesn’t have the willpower. Either way, the hand that was previously poised to scoop you back into safety, with her fingertip already halfway crooked around your leg, is suddenly flattening against your back. It’s with an uncommon tenderness that you doubt even your own mother would be capable of enacting. However, given the warmth radiating from Sophie’s palm now clasped to your entire backside, the artful blush of her skin, and the innocent odor ensnaring itself into your senses and teased on your lips which are now being raked along the lightly moistened surface, it’s easy to disappear back into unreality.
It’s getting easier to access now. Every memory, every feeling, ever fear and doubt and adoration you ever experienced while Carly was putting you through the paces of your tiny human limits. Sophie doesn’t press hard enough to truly melt into the past, but it’s enough, as your entire face and body are flush into the curvaceous slope of her sole, fully extended and pristine in its alternately porcelain and bronzed majesty. You’re almost there.
“You have to do more, Sophie. I need to see that I can do it. P-Please. Please help me.”
And God help you, she seems to be onboard now, because you can feel her palm sliding away with a final thrust at your back that momentarily adheres you to the sole, which by now is shaded a deeper pink and beginning to sprout a glistening gloss of nervous sweat. In the interim you cling to her skin, grasping at sole wrinkles, squeezing your facial features deeper into the plush skin until you’re sure there’s at least some kind of imprint left, and grinding your groin in to a particularly soothing wrinkle such that it might act as an anchor point. A shift takes place, a grand motion of denim and thigh muscle below, but you’re hardly aware now.
Before you can unpeel from Sophie’s sole, you feel something heavier, mightier, and far more authoritative at your back. It’s soft at first, as it always is, testing its mettle on your thin clothing that’s already partially sopped with her moisture.
“That’s it, Soph. You’re doing well. I know we can do this.” The words mostly get lost in a sea of sole flesh, but you can tell they were head anyway.
“Jack. I won’t let anything happen to you. Understand?”
“Yes, I do. But I need it tougher. Please. Don’t be afraid. Give me all you have.”
Fully with the program now, Sophie brings her left foot to bear with greater strength against you, effectively sandwiching you between her twin soles that feel frightfully like going home after so long away from Carly’s own personally constructed cave of foot skin. Parts of your rear end and legs are going numb under the weight, the bulbous flesh all but altering the very geometry of your body.
Now, at last, you’ve arrived back in familiar territory. Where nothing was certain except the threat of your body squelching beneath the power of a foot, and the even worse threat of giving yourself over to it in the process.
She’s trembling, but keeps up with the control of a practiced yogi, concentrating controlled strength with you between her velvety insteps like a pressure cooker. Sophie’s feet effectively adopt your frame and life force, cradling but also mashing you between them in the same florid act that couldn’t possibly be categorized to benevolence or malevolence alone. It’s far, far more, and Sophie seems much more capable of slipping into this role than you ever thought. Another a reminder that you’re never more than a question away from the brink of enslavement and godhood. You are the underling, the precious nothing that exists to be here with your lips forcibly collided with a giant’s foot, and right now, Sophie is the substitute for your necessary deity counterpart that Carly once served with such transcendent honor, carrying the size and power and all that it entails except for the singsong demand that you deliver your spirit into her deserving ownership.
But it’s damn close enough.
It’s not too long before Sophie begins to twist her feet, slowly at first, but with more confidence once she senses your determination. A corkscrew pattern, and then a parallel sweep, smushing the marshmallow wrinkles along one another, erasing them on every motion but keeping you at the center of it all. With this, of course, comes friction, greater heat on that buttery skin, and an increased film of sweat leaking from her pores. Every fresh bead of the stuff plinks against your lips, flavoring you in the likeness of your cousin’s lowest body part and repeating the process of what now feels like half a century ago, not half a decade.
Because now comes the last bastion.
You can feel your tongue poised against the back row of your teeth, pressing so hard you’re wondering if you’re going to break skin or knock out a molar first. A second slip and soon it’s only the barrier of your clenched lips keeping your small red muscle from launching out of your mouth and implanting itself onto the hallowed plain of Sophie’s sole, perhaps permanently as you allow yourself to fade into a previous life of becoming property, and with it, surrender what remains of your being. It’s merely that shred of selfhood that keeps you from opening your jaws now and descending into a licking frenzy.
And you honestly have no idea yet which side of yourself will win: the half that dares to dream of existing as a human being again, or the half that willingly gave itself over to be smashed and fondled under Carly’s toes for the rest of eternity.
“I’m done being under you, I’m done being yours. I was never yours. I’m mine.” You repeat the words to yourself from the visualization, hammering them against every lobe and wire of your fragile nervous system.
“Oh, that’s so cute, Jackie-poo, it really is.” Carly’s voice repeats back in kind within your skull, much louder than your own voice, of course, but you don’t give up.
“Don’t you see? I’m beating you right now. I can say no to you. It’s possible. I see that now.”
“Oh, sure you said no in a dream, little bro,” Carly repeats again, as if she was tonguing at the very fibers of your brain, dribbling saliva into your bones below. “Try it in real life and you’ll bend like a little piece of gum. And fit right back inside my mouth. Like always. I know you’re not afraid to try and fight back, Jackie-poo. That’s how you escaped in the first place. But that doesn’t mean a thing. Not when you’d come back to me in a second if you had the chance.”
“Jack?”
You hardly register Sophie calling out your name as you feel the blood rushing to your head, threatening to pop an artery as you feel yourself engaging in the last war of yourself, struggling with the specter of your omnipotent sister inside your body. Everything stings, because it has to. This, right now, will answer everything. You feel the giant feet on every square millimeter of your body, and Carly’s words swallowing you whole. And you feel the part of you still not ready to give up.
“JACK!”
As if your synapses finally managed to reorganize the arrival of sensory perceptions, Sophie’s scream, the crunch of the porch door falling to the carpet, and the seismic impact of forced entry all arrive at once in your head. For a moment you can just make out a figure in black standing in the doorway, hand fixed to a trigger, and then everything goes white.