From Soul To Sole Ch. 04

0204 The Collapse

Unlike the last time, when he had knelt before Ivy, Wuming had no memory of going down on his knees.

By the time he came to his senses, they were already on the floor. It was as though someone had switched him to automatic.

"Oh, so obedient? You really are a fucking... slut!"

Jessica wore something like a smile, regarding him as she might an object whose inner workings had, for some reason, suddenly been laid bare.

"Didn't you want to lick the soles of my shoes?"

She sat back on the desk and pulled the chair over again to rest her foot on.

"Come here. Crawl over on your knees."

...

Wuming had not expected his first impression of crawling on his knees to be a sound.

He heard the soft rustle as his knees brushed along the floor--the sound of his dignity as a human being peeling away.

But a hazy sense of detachment had taken hold of him. He seemed to be watching himself from the outside, as though all this were happening to someone else.

"Put your chin on the chair." Jessica tapped a corner of the seat with the toe of her shoe. "Yes. Right there..."

He felt the fabric against his chin. Suddenly it all seemed absurd: he was like Louis XVI at the guillotine, kneeling with his arse in the air--except that Louis XVI had faced a cheering crowd in a public square. Wuming faced a foot in a high-heeled shoe.

He had never examined it from so close before: the pointed toe, the smooth upper, the parabolic sweep of its sides, the tapered heel... So white, so smooth. Its surface was like a pebble, its colour like a seashell... No. He gazed at it, spellbound. The shoe before him was almost too beautiful to exist in the real world.

If he had to put it into words, he could only say that it had ceased to be a physical object in its own right. It was his desire.

Jessica slowly turned her ankle as though displaying a treasure about to go to auction. The side, the heel, the toe: she showed it to him from every angle.

Wuming was so entranced that he scarcely dared blink. In his daze, he thought he caught a faint scent of leather mingling with the cold, dry air of the office. It all felt unreal.

"Is this what you've been dreaming of?" Jessica asked mockingly.

"So... beautiful..." he murmured to himself.

"Beautiful?"

Looking at his rapt expression, she suddenly understood. To Wuming, the high heels on her feet were a drug.

You really are perverted to the core, aren't you...

The corners of her mouth lifted in a strange smile.

"So you really do want to lick it?"

His eyes fixed on the shoe, Wuming nodded in silence.

"Then where would you like to start?"

"Hm...?"

The question caught him off guard.

"I think we'll start here..."

Keeping the heel planted, Jessica tipped her toes up a little, exposing the sole.

Wuming studied it. There was nothing remarkable about the tread: black horizontal ridges, dusted with tiny grains of grit and little flecks of fluff.

Then something happened that he could not explain by any logic.

At the sight of that sole, which had nothing whatsoever to do with the word "sexy", his heart began to race beyond his control.

This was more than the sole of a high-heeled shoe. It was a door into the forbidden--a sight that, in ordinary life, he would never see, under any circumstances...

His throat went dry. His breathing grew shallow. His eardrums ceased to vibrate.

At the end of Ragnarök, all existence ebbed away from him like a tide. The world fell silent again.

In all of heaven and earth, nothing remained but the foot in the high-heeled shoe before him.

From above, Jessica watched it all. The desire burning deep in his eyes was so fierce that she found it absurd.

If I filmed a close-up of his face right now, she thought, and showed it to people, then asked them, "What do you think Wuming's looking at?"--probably not a single person in the world would guess it was the sole of my shoe.

What a worthless man. I'm going to have such fun destroying him today...

Jessica rocked her foot on its heel, raising and lowering the sole. Up, down. Up, down...

Overcome with lust at the teasing movement, Wuming stuck out his tongue to lick it.

"Stay still! You don't move unless I tell you to!"

After that sharp rebuke, she resumed the movement. Each time the sole came down, she deliberately stopped it a few centimetres from his face. He could even feel the little waft of air it stirred. Desire tormented him like an invisible hand, teasing his skin into an unbearable itch.

"Let... let me lick it. Just once. Please, let me..."

He was all but begging.

Jessica clicked her tongue softly.

"Since you're begging so nicely... all right, then..."

As she spoke, the sole descended again, landing squarely on the bridge of his nose.

Wuming strained his tongue towards it like an animal. But his tongue reached only the gap beneath the arch, in front of the heel. There was nothing he could touch.

The foolish spectacle made Jessica burst out laughing.

Before she had finished, though, he had reached up again to cradle her ankle, his tongue out, ready to lick.

"Ah!"

She withdrew her foot just in time, shaking her head and wagging a finger.

"That's cheating. I told you to keep your head on the chair. No moving without my permission..."

Wuming, too, realised he had lost control of himself. He apologised over and over, visibly nervous, and lowered his hands again. His head stayed motionless, as though nailed to the seat.

All he could do was swallow, tremble and wait.

Jessica nodded in satisfaction and held her foot out to him again.

"Lick..."

This time she let him. At last, his tongue reached the sole.

Its soft red tip moved slowly over the underside of Jessica's shoe.

The air seemed full of tiny sparks of energy.

His eyes wide and his pupils dilated, Wuming tasted the sole slowly, his breathing barely audible. He carefully licked every ridge. From his expression alone, anyone would have thought he was savouring an exquisite dish.

As he licked, his eyes closed. He lost himself in the sole of Jessica's shoe...

This high heel...

Somewhere in his daze, he tried to take in the moment. The sole was cold, its taste bitter, its texture rough and hard. But what drew him irresistibly on was the feeling of being filled by that strange, tangible sensation--filled so completely that his sense of himself disappeared.

He felt like a drop of ink falling into the sea, instantly diluted to nothing by the overwhelming presence of Jessica's sole, becoming part of it.

It's wonderful...

So this was what it felt like to be the earth beneath her feet.

For a while, Jessica said nothing. She simply watched his every movement, enjoying the greed he displayed at her feet.

When he had more or less finished with one shoe, she silently offered the other. Without needing to be told, he began again at the toe and licked his way to the heel...

"Take your trousers off..."

Jessica spoke after a stretch of silence.

Wuming froze. His first reaction, in all honesty, was reluctance. That part of him was "virgin territory", to be kept for Ivy.

"Why are you hesitating now? Your body..."

With a wicked smile, Jessica raised her foot and rubbed it against his crotch.

"... is a lot more honest than your mouth. Look how swollen it is. Won't it burst if you don't let it out for some air...?"

Ivy drifted through his mind again. Only two days ago...

"Hurry up!"

Jessica stamped impatiently on his crotch and ground her foot against it twice.

The sudden tingling and sharp pain were like a bucket of petrol thrown onto a fire. The flames of desire surged up, blotting out the sky, swallowing everything...

My God. I really am being trodden on by her...

His head swam. His hands hurried to undo his belt.

But the instant his underwear came into view, the familiar scene brought Ivy back to him again. His hands stopped at the waistband.

Jessica suddenly planted her foot hard against the side of his face.

"Look at me, you slut!"

The shoe blocked his left eye. He could barely see through his right.

The undisguised contempt on her face seemed to say: Everything you're doing now is exactly what you ought to be doing.

"You think you came here today to ask for your wages?" she asked haughtily.

His lips had gone pale. He said nothing.

"I think you came here to accept your fate."

"Your mum gave birth to you just so you could be my doormat..."

She laughed without restraint.

"You were destined to be under my feet!"

Wuming's shoulders gave a slight shudder.

That sentence

was the last camel that crushed the straw.

His underwear came down.

His erection jutted into the air like a signpost.

What happened next...

What happened next, Wuming could not remember.

Looking back, all he could recall was the dull pounding of his heart: dreamlike, unreal, that dull pounding...

One impression would not leave him.

He felt that Jessica had "defiled" his body.

That the high heels on her feet had defiled it...

His first sexual experience, the first sexual pleasure of his life, had been defined by Jessica's high heels. By that tingling and that sharp pain.

Her look of lofty contempt had become the switch that turned him on.

Inside, he cried out: Is this what I really want, deep down? Other people's contempt?

But what truly filled him with despair was his own longing for Jessica to tread on him.

That day, although she had stepped on his genitals, she had not let him come.

Just as he was approaching orgasm, her foot stopped.

"Those wages you want--I can pay you." She suddenly introduced a seemingly unrelated subject. "But not now."

One sentence brought him back to reality, back to "this side" of the world.

Body and soul, he reappeared in the physical world. He was no longer part of Jessica's sole. He was a lonely student adrift in a foreign country, without an NI number, urgently needing money for rent and bills.

"Sunday," she said, in a tone that allowed no argument. "Come to my office after we close at noon."

Wuming gave a noncommittal nod. He knew exactly what she intended. By refusing to let him come, she would send him home to replay everything that had happened, over and over. The sensation of his genitals being toyed with by her high heels would ferment with every replay, leaving him endlessly anticipating the next time she trod on him...

"You don't have to come on Sunday."

He remained silent, and she continued at her leisure.

"You can pretend none of this happened. Of course, you won't get your wages then... And you'll have to spend the rest of your life fantasising about what it feels like to be made to come under my high heels..."

Made to come under my high heels. The words pierced him like a sharp dagger.

Wuming realised that he had become afraid of his "old life".

Afraid of going back to that uneventful existence in which nobody noticed him, in which the whole world ignored him.

"All right..." Jessica lifted her foot, as though she had seen right through him. "Put your trousers on. You can go."

When he moved, gravity felt different from how he remembered it. He was strangely light on his feet.

Jessica waved him away and turned to tidy the disordered desk.

"Remember," she said softly, just as he was about to leave the office. "Sunday. Don't be late."

The door closed behind him.

In the corridor outside, there was only the sound of his breathing.

He stood where he was, his head buzzing as though a thousand bees had flown through it...

Long afterwards, when Wuming thought back to that day, he remembered only two things.

The first was the scent of leather in the air when Jessica's sole had been so close to his face.

The second was the word "Sunday": an iron ball falling slowly, endlessly, through a darkness without a bottom.

That day, as he finally left the supermarket, he thought of Ivy for the umpteenth time.

He did not know how he would face her again.

All he knew was that he had never been so lost. His desire had, in some sense, been "confirmed". But that confirmation had brought him no relief, only a self-loathing he had never known before.

"Sunday..." he murmured.

On the surface, he was still free.

But he knew he no longer had a choice.