The entire memory, of course, gets dimmer with time. Some things, though, can never be forgotten.
I was a repressed guy in late highschool. I kept to myself and did not keep a circle of friends. In the odd chance I mingled with others, it was because I had to. World Youth Day was coming to Toronto, and being in a Catholic school, we were preparing to house youths from around the world. Part of our preparations included decorating the gym they would be housed in.
Our class wasn't asked to do much, from what I recall. But there was a volunteer opportunity. We were to create a giant felt banner that proclaimed the biblical verse that was being honoured by Pope John Paul II that year. It was Matthew 5:13, most famous for five of its words than the entirety of the verse:
You are the salt of the earth, but if the salt has lost its
flavor, with what will it be salted? It is then good for nothing,
but to be cast out and trodden under the feet of men.
This was not the kind of project that excited or inspired me. Scripture? Religious festivities? But it piqued one particular girl's interest, and that made me raise my hand after seeing her arm go up.
The girl was Melissa.
She was tall and blonde and had the most beautiful smile. There was a rumor she liked me, and I knew about the rumor because it was used to taunt her. I was pretty sure it was a lie. No one had ever liked me. It didn't make sense for my situation to change, and least of all with Melissa.
I was especially intrigued by Melissa because she pretty much exclusively wore sandals or flip flops. And over that year, while she sat in front of me, I had begun to become very aware of her feet and how they made me feel.
Melissa's feet were somewhat of a paradox. They were relatively big, around a size 8 or 9, but they were wide. Her soles were what I would discover were called 'meaty soles', but she had an incredibly high arch from years of acrobatic dancing. She had short toes, but she could use them like fingers, picking up pencils and hair clips and dropped tissues. I had once seen her pick up a calculator with her feet, but the classmate she had picked up the calculator for wanted nothing to do with it after.
I had found myself thinking about her feet out of her flip flops, crossed under her chair, as I would lay in bed at night. My erection would send me squirming as I imagined kneeling and approaching her feet, taking them in my hands, and feeling her silky doles on my face, my neck, my chest, then down my pants. I could not explain why I could not imagine slipping Melissa some tongue in a kiss, but I convulsed at the thought of tongue-bathing the soles of her feet and sucking each toe like a never-ending lollipop. In an era before the internet and easy photographs, this memory game was the closest I had to explore the strange depth and complexity of my more primal urges.
None of this really made sense to me. But what I could understand was how pleasurable it made me feel when I thought about playing with a beautiful pair of feet. Pleasure I could understand, even if it meant walking through hell to purse it.
So my hand rose to volunteer alongside Melissa, while my gaze sank below Melissa's desk. She had been wearing sneakers that day, which frustrated my desire but kept the promise of release. I had yet to see Melissa reach the end of the day with shoes and socks still on. There was still time, and I did not want to miss it.
When we reached our crafting area in the theatre room Melissa kicked off her sneakers. My innocently bold move had paid off already. I watched her tip toe on her black socks to the supplies. She alternated from one foot to the other, pointing and flexing and rolling her ankle. I appreciated the curvy silhouette of her socks, but they would help me keep from getting too distracted.
Had she kept her socks on, things might have been different.
It was soon after we divided our work that Melissa rolled off her black socks. I stole the tiniest of glances, seeing first her heel, then her milky white arch, the strong ball of her foot, and finally, her plump toes, sporting no polish but looking French-tipped with the way she trimmed her toenails.
I was cutting letters out of the white felt, and she was placing and affixing the letters on the banner. She sat on her knees beside the banner, resting her bum on her heels.
I remembered bringing her my first stack of letters and noticing her bare soles. I can still recall the image, crisp and lively as if I just saw it an hour ago. Her bare soles, deeply wrinkled, her heel pressing into her arch, her toes like grapes under the ball of her foot. Her sole was peachy, but as pale as the rest of her skin in the arch, and between the ball of her foot and the toe pads. Her ass was framed just overtop her feet, looking apple-bottomed in her jeans. The waistband was pulled down to show her sky blue panties.
I was entranced. I stared, forgetting about the letters I was supposed to hand-off. Melissa turned to me and I tried to look anywhere except her bare feet. She smiled and I did not want to lose that smile. Not by being a freak and being attracted to something I shouldn't be.
Don't be weird.
I moved closer to her, ostensibly so that I could pass my cuttings. Working behind her I was also able to stare at her soft, wrinkled soles. I was happy to be sitting. My pants were becoming less roomy.
I noticed dust and motes of floor things speckled the ball of her foot and her heel. Her dancer's arch was clean, and the mixture made me even more curious. I was never into dirty feet, necessarily, but seeing feet dirty made me aware that those feet had been out and about, bare to the world, getting in touch with everything except me.
Soon I had a full-on erection.
That had yet to happen to me at school, so I panicked. It was shameful, to be there with a hard dick in my pants because the feet of the girl closest to me were bare. I tried to get up and walk it off, leaning myself against a table on Melissa's front side, out of view of her feet. I shoved my hands in my pockets to loosen my pants around my raging erection.
Melissa moved too. She swung her legs out and sat directly on the floor. She split and being a dancer, she was able to spread wide. Her soles again faced me, and her feet were free now. She flexed and pointed her toes, wriggling the feeling back into them. I didn't know which was better—the labyrinth of wrinkles every time she pointed her toes, or the smooth curves and wiggling toes when she flexed.
I was afraid I would explode. I turned away and left, stammering that I needed better scissors.
I would not find better scissors. And my erection would not go away. Out of sight of Melissa's feet, I found myself already imagining them, re-living how close I was to her tender soles, how badly I wanted to clean the dust from them with my nose and tongue.
When I returned empty-handed and limping from the fullness between my legs, Melissa was talking with an older girl, Carrie, who she knew from dance. I had no idea how the context of this conversation could have started, but I staggered into earshot just as Carrie said:
"I'm just saying, some guys like feet."
"Yeah, I've heard that," Melissa said.
"It's true. They would love you going about barefoot."
"I just don't like shoes."
"Oh I know, I get it. But still!" Carrie said, shaking her head again at Melissa's bare feet.
"I could wear stirrup pants," Melissa suggested.
"They only cover, like, the middle part. Not the toes."
"Who would get off to toes like that?" Melissa asked.
I tried to hide. I wanted to tear out of my skin, to leave my erection behind like some alien exoskeleton.
But the girls were laughing, with a mixture of amusement and shame about how their bodies could make boys feel. Carrie climbed up on the stage too, and with her foot she tipped Melissa onto her back. Carrie rested her white stocking triumphantly on Melissa's chest and quoted from the banner we had just finished:
"Be cast out and trodden under the feet of men."
Carrie jiggled Melissa's blossoming breasts and they cracked up again.
"Your tights stink!"
"They do not!"
"They're almost in my face, I think I would know!"
"Almost isn't close enough," Carrie grinned. "Here..."
She moved her foot from Melissa's chest to her face. Melissa freaked and tried to shake herself free, rubbing Carrie's stockings into her face even more in the process.
"Oh, I'm sorry..." Carrie teased. "Are my stockings smelly? Are they? But you seem to like it so much..."
The image of Melissa under Carrie's feet—while Melissa's bare feet thrashed and her toes spasmed between squeezing tight and spreading apart—almost made my knees buckle. Had I been in my bed at night, this would have been the part where I would make a sticky mess.
Eventually, Melissa rolled away from Carrie and wiped her face dramatically.
"Ohmigod, Carrie, I freakin' hate you right now!"
Yeah, Carrie. What the hell.
I was bent in half, as casually as I could, when they passed me on the way offstage.
"Time to go," Melissa said.
"Ew, Mel..." Carrie said. "Why does your breath smell like feet?"
Melissa elbowed Carrie, who playfully shoved her back and sent Melissa into me. Momentarily, I felt Melissa press against my hard-on, and once again, I panicked. When we met each others' eyes, she blushed and I stammered something about how great it was to be able to leave class for arts-and-crafts.
The bell rang and signaled the official end of this golden hour.
Marissa slipped her socks and shoes back on, and we walked back to class. The pace helped my blood flow away from my crotch. The relief was temporary, because I still had to spend the rest of the day staring at Melissa's feet in class, and fighting back the urge to confess how madly, deeply, truly, I wanted to be under her feet the way I had witnessed her under Carrie's dominating step.
That day would not be today. But with the way things would go for me, that day would be coming sooner than I wanted it to.