“Don’t worry, Ashley. Just stay focused,” Claire proffered. “Go ahead and start reading.”

            “Okay,” the girl said, her palms growing clammier as she did her best to evenly divide attention between the phone cradled in her hand and the fragile body of her boyfriend sheltered under her toes. She unlocked the screen and began to decipher the bolded letters as she lifted her sandaled ped off the ground, momentarily suspending Jack in midair before gravity bungled him back into the velvety undersides of her digits again. Clearing her throat, she began to simultaneously walk and dictate the words Claire had texted to her: “Some assert penurious indigence as inevitability, eschewing with obdurate entan… ent…. um… I hope I’m pronouncing all of these right?”

            “It doesn’t matter if you do. The point is to see if you can engage your mind while still keeping Jack at the center of your awareness. Not that you’ll be reading stuffy economic articles all the time, but it’s a good reference point,” Claire said, eyeing the awkwardly marching Alpha. “Your steps don’t look very comfortable.”

            “They’re… not,” Ashley responded, pivoting her heel against the reflective coffee table to give Jack another break as she let him cuddle back into her foot. She tried not to let a warm gasp escape her throat as she felt his little tongue slide along the inner stretch of her second toe again. “But it just seems too… risky to walk like normal. Especially after last t-”

            “I know you’re worried about that,” the Omega reassured. “But it’s just like riding a bike. Once you get your whole body working together, it’ll be instinctual.” Claire carefully stepped off the glass island of the table to demonstrate the practice herself and immediately started walking a steady lap around the couch, passing by the bubbling shark tank and glossy entertainment center before returning back to Ashley. To anyone who wasn’t aware she had a person sandwiched between her writhing toes and the dampened insole of her shoe, her gait wouldn’t have appeared to be at all out of the ordinary. If anything, she had more spring in her step, propelling with just a little added bounce off the balls of her feet.

            Ashley couldn’t help but wince at the sight, especially in remembering how she’d once walked on Jack for most of a day with half as much vigor and still left him a mewling, bruised mess.

            The Omega read the distress on the scrunched face of her student and shook her head. Arching her right foot up and planting it back on the coffee table, the smugly smiling Claire fixed her hands to her hips like a gladiator returning victoriously from a conquest.

            “See? Nothing to it,” Claire reported, meaningfully eyeing the footwear as she flexed her toes out enough for the contents beneath to be viewed between the straps. Taking the hint, Ashley delicately bent over to peer in at Sean, who appeared to not only still be exactly where he was when his girlfriend began her brief voyage around the room, but entirely unharmed and with his limbs still mounted around his handler’s bronzed digits at peculiar angles. He flashed another uncomfortably broad grin like he’d been caught with his pants down.

            “Nothing to it,” he repeated supportively, peeping several times back up to the Omega in hopes of being covered back up again.

            A revering chuckle emanated from Claire’s throat as she gave him what he wanted, coiling Sean back into the muscular flesh with added strength as a show of gratitude for his continued compliance. Ashley was pretty sure she heard a shuddering sigh leak out from between the squirming crevices of the Omega’s digits as Sean set back to semi-privately fondling his doughy prison on all sides.

            “So just stay centered on Jack, even if your mind is on something else. I know you won’t let anything happen to him,” Claire said, suppressing a giggle as a louder moan eked out from under the caressing carriage of her toes. “And the sooner you get used to that, the sooner it’ll be fun… for both of you.”

            “Okay,” Ashley sighed, snapping her eyes back to the phone and lifting off the ground again for another step. One foot at a time, the girl promised herself her charge would be all right as the dense syllables of the document poured more easily from her lips: “…but an indolent paucity of ana… anachronistic partisans cannot account for a surfeit of fiscal sluggards, where obloquy and… divesture are made to fester. Temperance from apostate practices on remunerative measures is inexorable, and only the most pedantic of delegates would argue a more commodious marketplace will placate the downturn. However-”

            The Alpha paused, catching herself a few steps from the edge of the table, and realized she’d just walked the length of its surface with the same energetic pace as Claire. Quickly she dropped to her haunches, shifting all her weight into her heel, and began prying back the leather straps of her shoe.

            “Jack?” she blubbered, peeling her toes away from his body and finding the boy in a state of fulfillment similar to when she’d first gently mashed him into her insole. “Are… are you…”

            “Yes,” he swore before she could finish voicing her worries, wrapping himself around her big toe and laying another kiss on its rotund arc. “T-Thank… thank you.”

            Breathing a sigh of relief, Ashley found herself more easily sharing his look of beaming ecstasy, and blushed again as his pecks of wet gratitude wandered in soft circles around the rings of her toeprint. Shifting her gaze from the wonderful little hands working her foot to the brunette sentinel looming above, the Alpha saw a smile even wider than her own plastered on Claire’s face, if such a thing was even possible.

            “That’s great. You’re really getting the hang of it,” the Omega congratulated, shifting the gaze of those chocolate orbs onto the comparatively crumb-sized life form fervently nuzzling Ashley’s toes. “Both of you.”

            “I guess… it’s something we’ll be able to do now,” the Alpha said somewhat uncertainly, propping her foot up against her knee and parting the sandal straps again with her fingers. “I… I still-”

            “Don’t let it get to you too much, Ashley,” Claire ordered as kindly as possible, knowing better than most where the girl’s mind would go when it came to this game. Her dark eyes flashed with that familiar cordial luster. “With more practice, you’ll be just as comfortable as Jack is right now. Believe me.”

            “Okay,” Ashley answered with a nod, comforted in the minutest sense, and was consoled again to see Jack scrambling up the improvised ladder of her toes to make himself seen.

            “That was great,” he said with more confidence than he’d displayed all day. “Really. You did so well.”

            She could only smile this time, tracing the tip of her thumb up from the Beta’s little chin, along his tender cheek, and to his hair, which she stroked back and forth a few times, letting the feathery strands brush along every groove of her thumbprint. If he believed it as strongly as his voice suggested, Ashley supposed she ought to try as well.

            “That was one of the riskier numbers on your list, so I’m glad we got to it first. If you want, though, we can move on,” Claire suggested. “We only have the house to ourselves for so long, after all.”

            “Sure, let’s do it,” Ashley said, looking down to Jack, who bobbed his head in confirmation as he allowed himself to slide comfortably back into the swaddling arch of plump digits. He’d clearly been waiting too long for this particular activity to want to lose any precious moments of it, especially if their teacher was suggesting changing it.

            “I’ll bet the boys are ready for a break, anyway,” Claire added.

            Ashley couldn’t help but crack a smile as the Omega tittered jovially at the near-impossibility of such a concept; she’d hardly managed to utter it without breaking into booming laughter, especially where Sean was concerned. She lifted her sandal back onto the table, planting the rubber sole so tamely upon the surface that Ashley and Jack barely felt any vibration. Taking the hint, the young King stooped back down and followed suit as both Alpha and Omega towed the straps away from their tepidly encased feet, liberating their willingly imprisoned significant others from beneath their five floundering friends.