Chapter 22: Bloody Foot Worship
The silence became a physical presence in the apartment. It lived in the dust motes swirling in the afternoon sun, in the quiet crackle of the vinyl record spinning a melancholic jazz tune, in the careful, shallow sound of Ben’s breathing.
He knelt on the rug, a familiar position now. His eyes, as commanded, remained fixed on the floor in the space where Clara’s feet would eventually appear. The world had narrowed to a rectangle of worn Persian wool. He saw every fiber, every faded crimson thread. His neck ached from being held in a bowed position for forty-three minutes. He didn’t shift. The threat of the previous week—the stiletto, the cockroach, the taste—was a fresh brand on his mind.
He heard the soft click of her laptop closing. The shift of her weight on the couch. The gentle thump as she lifted her legs and settled them onto the coffee table, right at the edge of his visual field.
His breath hitched. They were bare. She’d painted her toenails a deep, bloody crimson since the balcony.
“You can look,” she said, her voice a casual interruption of the jazz trumpet.
His gaze traveled up, over her ankles, the elegant arches, to the ten perfect crimson points. He stared, his hunger a hollow, hurting thing inside him.
“We’re going to play a game,” Clara announced, sipping from a mug of coffee. “A guessing game. You get it right, you get a reward. You get it wrong…” She trailed off, letting the old threats fill in the blank. “Where did I go today?”
He blinked. His mind, fogged with submission, scrambled. He hadn’t seen her arrive. He’d come straight to the rug. “I… I don’t know.”
“Guess.”
“The… the library?”
She laughed, a light, tinkling sound. “Wrong. Try again.”
“The gym?”
“God, no. One more guess.”
He wracked his brain. “A cafe?”
“Nope.” She wiggled her toes. “I went to the animal shelter. I volunteered. Walked dogs for three hours. In the mud. In the rain.”
His eyes widened slightly. He saw it now—a faint, dried line of greyish mud just below her left anklebone. A tiny speck of it wedged beside her pinky toe.
“It was very charitable,” she continued, setting her mug down. “Very giving of me. Don’t you think?”
“Yes,” he whispered.
“Now, for the game. Which foot do you think worked harder? Which dog pulled more? Left or right?”
He studied them. They looked identical in their perfection, save for the mud. It was a trap. There was no right answer, or the right answer was arbitrarily hers. “The right,” he ventured.
“Interesting.” She leaned forward, examining her own feet. “I’d have said the left. Mr. Pickles, a very enthusiastic pit bull mix, favored that side. So you’re wrong.”
She slid off the couch and padded to the kitchen. He heard the sink run, a brief splash. She returned not with clean feet, but with a damp paper towel. She didn’t use it. Instead, she sat back down and placed her left foot, the mud-flecked one, onto the coffee table again.
“Since you guessed wrong, you don’t get to taste the sweat,” she said, her tone conversational, almost friendly. “You get to taste the charity.”
She picked up the paper towel and carefully, deliberately, wiped the streak of dried mud from her ankle. It came away in a grey-brown smudge. She then rubbed the towel between her toes, collecting the granules of dirt and who-knew-what from the shelter kennels. The paper towel was now a damp, filthy mess.
She folded it neatly into a small, dense square.
“Open,” she said.
Ben stared at the square, his stomach clenching.
“Now.”
He opened his mouth. She placed the wet, gritty parcel on his tongue. The taste exploded—earthy, gritty, chemical from cleaning solutions, a faint, gamey hint of animal. He gagged, his throat convulsing.
“Don’t you dare,” she warned, her voice cold. “Swallow it.”
Tears sprang to his eyes as he forced his tongue to work, mashing the paste against his palate. He felt the grit between his teeth. He swallowed in a hard, painful convulsion.
“Good,” Clara said, as if approving a pet. “Now, the reward for playing. Since you were so wrong, you have to clean the right foot. The one you insulted by saying it didn’t work hard. Make it spotless. Use your mouth.”
A reward that was a punishment. A punishment that was a reward. His head spun. He crawled forward until her right foot was before him. It smelled of leather and rain and dog. He began to lick, lapping at the arch, sucking each crimson-tipped toe, chasing the lingering traces of the outside world. It was heaven and hell conflated.
He was so engrossed in the ritual, in the attempt to be perfectly, completely thorough, that he didn’t notice her getting up again. He only realized when her left foot, the one he hadn’t cleaned, came to rest gently on top of his head. Not a stomp. A resting place. She leaned her weight on it, pressing his face down toward her other foot as he worked.
“You’re getting better at that,” she mused, her voice above him, distant and thoughtful. “Quicker. More… dedicated.” She increased the pressure on his head, grinding his mouth more firmly into the arch of her right foot. “I have a party tomorrow. Liam might be there.”
The name was a bolt of lightning. Ben froze.
“I’ll be wearing open-toed shoes, of course,” she continued, her foot keeping him in place. “I’ll probably take them off. My feet will be on display all night. People might look. Liam might look.” She paused. “I want you to think about that while you’re here, alone. Think about all those eyes where only your eyes are allowed to be.”
She removed her foot from his head and walked away, leaving him on the floor, the taste of mud and shame and her skin layered in his mouth, a new, more terrible silence descending. The party loomed in his mind, a crowded, laughing monster, and at its center, her perfect, crimson toes, seen by everyone. The thought was a colder, deeper violation than any dirt or any grind of a stiletto heel. It stole the air from the room.