Absolute Devotion Ch. 08

It was a moment of truth. I took a deep breath and walked purposefully down the hallway to the bathroom. Shirtless and focused, I came up on Ray, who was still talking through the door to Jimmy. All the evidence available told me Jimmy was still crying and babbling. He was apparently convinced he was gay. This had somehow been brought on by his belief that he had gotten very turned on when Ray was about to take his pants off.

"You need to leave," I told Ray.

"I'm not going anywhere," Ray told me as he turned to face me. "I haven't fucked your girlfriend yet."

"And you're not going to," I told him calmly. "Get the fuck out of my apartment. I'll deal with Jimmy. He's my friend and I know how to talk to him."

"No," spat Ray. "Now fuck off so I can talk to Jimmy."

I pushed Ray up against the wall. He pushed me back hard enough to send me sprawling into the laundry room. Luckily, I landed on a pile of sheets I hadn't yet gotten around to washing, and was able to hop back up on my feet with relative ease.

"You shouldn't have done that," I said, gritting my teeth.

I pulled my right arm back, almost dislocating my shoulder in the process, let out a bloodcurdling yell, and punched Ray in the face as hard as I could.

"Fuck, dude, what the fuck is wrong with you?" he yelled as he fell back against the wall, blood pouring out of his nose.

"I asked you nicely to get out of my apartment. The party is over and you are no longer wanted here."

"I brought pizza," he said.

"Yeah, and no one actually ate any of it. Take your stupid cheese slides off the slice too easily pizza and GET OUT!"

Muttering obscenities, Ray stood up and started walking back to the living room. He looked at Erica, still naked on the couch. She stretched out her arm and pointed towards the door while glaring at him.

"This shit is fucked up," he said. "I'm done with you weird ass fucking people."

"Good," I said with my strongest tone of voice. "Don't let the door hit you on the way out."

"My hero," Erica said with a smile as she looked at me.

"One down, one to go," I said after Ray walked out and slammed the door hard behind him.

I walked back to the bathroom door and knocked on it.

"Who is it?" replied Jimmy's voice.

"It's Keith. Are you okay in there?"

"I think I'm gay, man. I can't deal with that shit."

"Well, you need to go try to deal with it somewhere else. I think you're just freaking out and if you go home and go to sleep you will wake up tomorrow morning and realize you just had some kind of panic attack because you're homophobic. Now, open the door before I kick it down and have to send you the bill for the time and materials it will take to repair it."

Jimmy was silent for a minute or two. I waited patiently, hoping he would do the right thing, and slowly the doorknob began to turn. The door popped open and Jimmy gradually pulled it open.

"You don't think I'm gay?" Jimmy asked.

"First of all, it isn't that big of a deal if you are. So what if you're gay. Second of all, I know I'm your best friend, but I really need you to leave so Erica and I can deal with some shit of our own."

"You're being like weirdly assertive, man. Are you on drugs?"

"No, I'm not on drugs. Now, please collect your shit and leave. I'll call you tomorrow."

"I don't want to be gay," Jimmy cried. "I'm not attracted to men."

"Are you even aware of what being gay means?" I sighed. "Just go home, please."

Jimmy nodded quietly and walked out to the living room. He collected his belongings and slowly walked out to the door. He opened it, looked out, and then turned around.

"Um, I came with Ray and he's gone."

"Well, he couldn't have gotten far. Call him on your cell phone or get a cab or something," I told him as I pushed him out the door, closed it behind him, then locked it and set the deadbolt.

"Wow," Erica said. Her eyes had lit up and she was smiling at me in a way she'd never smiled at me before. "You can do things when you're properly motived, can't you?"

"I didn't want you to be unhappy," I told her as I looked down at the floor. "They were making you unhappy, so they had to leave."

"Is your hand okay?" she asked as she got up, still completely naked, and cautiously took my right hand in her hands. "It is swelling up big time, and two of your fingers look all twisted. I think you broke your hand."

I looked down at it, felt woozy, and passed out.

When I came to in the emergency room, a man who didn't appear to be an employee of the hospital was hovering over me, leaning over my hospital bed, his face no more than three feet away from mine.

"Hello! I'm glad you're awake! You broke two fingers in your hand and your wrist and we're going to have to take you in for surgery!"

"Get out of the way, Linus," someone else's voice said. A man in a lab coat with a stethoscope around his neck appeared. Behind him, two men in scrubs were grabbing the arms of the man who had been hovering over me and forcefully leading him out of the room.

"Are you the doctor?" I asked.

"Yes, I am. Sorry about Linus, he gets out of the psych ward a little too often for my tastes. Now, he was right, you did break two fingers and your wrist. We'll have you patched up in no time."

After they brought me into another room and set my broken bones and gave me copious amounts of prescription painkillers, they put me in a wheelchair and wheeled me out to the waiting area where Erica was flirting with a male nurse. She was dressed relatively conservatively, with sweatpants and a sweatshirt and sneakers, but she exchanged phone numbers with the male nurse regardless.

"Hey!" she said when she saw me. "You lived!"

I held up the cast on my right hand and shrugged. "They put me back together."

"My hero," she said as she stood up and kissed me on the forehead, making me blush. "How about we celebrate on the way home? Maybe stop for ice cream... or something else?"

"Yay!"

We got into Erica's car and started back towards the apartment.

"So, not too much pain?"

"They gave me a big bottle of painkillers," I told her. "Were you flirting with that nurse?"

"Freddy? Is that any of your business, monkey boy?"

I started stuttering my response. "I... didn't mean... um... I didn't..."

She reached over and put her hand on my knee and gently patted it. "It's okay, sweetie, it's good to know you care. I actually was talking to him about a group I used to belong to. I met Freddy there a couple of years ago. He's still part of the group and was trying to convince me to come back."

"What kind of group? A rock group? Are you like Stevie Nicks or something?"

She laughed. "No, not that kind of group; this was a sex addicts anonymous group. I was in it for about a month at the urging of my then boyfriend Gil. He thought I was a nymphomaniac for some reason and, well, as you can see, Gil and I are no longer together."

"Maybe it would... you know... help?"

"Help with what?"

"Maybe you are... you know... a sex addict."

"Excuse me? The sick little monkey who jacks off thinking about my feet ten times a day thinks I'm a sex addict? Are you serious?"

"I didn't mean... well, I just meant, maybe it wouldn't hurt to..."

Erica pulled the car over and stopped by the side of the road. It wasn't a very busy street. An occasional car drove by but it was late and there was very little traffic. She told me to get out of the car.

"I'm sorry, I didn't mean to say..."

"Shut up and get out of the car," she said sternly.

I swallowed hard and got out of the car, trying not to bang my cast in the process. I was stuttering and shaking, not knowing what was going on and afraid she was going to leave me by the side of the road and I'd never see her again.

She got out of the car as well and stood by the driver's side door after closing it. I closed the passenger side door and looked over at her with trepidation in my eyes.

"Come around this side," she said.

I walked around the front of the car, paused as a car went by, and slowly walked towards her. She was standing there glaring at me, and then put on a pair of dark sunglasses, pulled up the hood of her sweatshirt and pointed down at the ground by her feet.

Her right sneaker was off and her foot was bare. She had her heel off the ground and her toes firmly pressed against the concrete. The street lights gave a dim, almost movie theatre quality to the scene, and in that lighting her high arch looked like the divine gateway to heaven.

I needed no further encouragement. I got down on my knees, put the heel of my left hand on the ground for support, and tried my best not to lose balance on account of the cast on my right hand.

"Start kissing," she told me with a sigh.

My trembling lips found the side of her heel. As I kissed a trail from one side of her heel around the back and to the other side, I could see and taste every line, every crease. Her foot glistened under the streetlights, and when I found her arch I moaned. The flesh inside her beautiful high arch was so soft, so much softer than any other part of her foot, and I ravaged it with my lips and tongue, hoping she would appreciate my efforts. An occasional car drove by, and sometimes they slowed down as they passed, but I tried not to pay them any mind.

My erection was rubbing against the inside of my pants, making me wonder what had happened to the underwear I had been wearing earlier. The friction from the head of my stiff cock rubbing rhythmically against the fabric of my pants was making me moan almost as much as the overwhelming sensations that shook my body any time I made love to Erica's feet with my mouth.

My orgasm ran up on me quickly, and once I knew there was nothing I could do to stop it, that it was going to erupt, I began feverously licking the bottom of Erica's foot. I began as low as I could get before my face hit the concrete of the roadway, along her arch, over her heel, around her heel again, and then down along the outer edge, over the top of her foot and then back down along her arch from a new direction.

I moaned very loudly and my body shook. With my right hand in a cast I had to try to grab onto Erica's leg for support. I moaned, I whined, I panted and when I caught my breath I found my hand sliding down her leg, trying to grab onto the sweatpants she was wearing, but I slid haplessly all the way back down to her foot.

She slipped her right foot back into the sneaker and then pulled of her left sneaker and stood up on her toes like she was wearing six inch heels.

"Show this foot the same kind of love you showed the other one," she said.

I started over again with her left foot the same way I had with the right. Kissing my way around her heel from one side to the other, tracing the lines and the creases in her skin behind her heel, trying to show my love for every beautiful detail before making my way down to her arch and lapping feverously at it, my body shuddering and my erection again brushing back and forth uncontrollably against the fabric of my pants.

"I love your feet so much, Miss Erica," I breathed out between long licks of her soft and smooth arch. I then moved across the bottom of her foot before losing my balance and falling on my side. She lifted her foot up from the ground and over my face. I turned as it hovered in the air above me, her long and succulent toes right over my hungry lips.

I started to lick each of her toes in slow, deliberate succession. My breathing was once again deep and fast. I tried to ignore the sound of my own panting, my very audible moans, as I moved towards her big toe. I admired, as I always did, her beautiful toenails, always manicured so perfectly. They were a light pink color now, and as her big toe slid into my mouth I ran my tongue around it, trying to pull her toe deeper into my mouth.

I sucked back and forth on her toe, my eyes open wide as I looked up and admired the full length of her foot, from the base of her toes all the way up to her ankles. They were pronounced, like tiny handles for the most beautiful foot in all creation, but neither swollen nor bony, just somewhere between that made them a work of art in and of themselves.

I came again, trembling and crying, knowing that my time with her feet was over, at least for the night. I closed my eyes and dreamed of the night I would have this opportunity again to make love to her beautiful feet.

She slid her foot back into her sneaker and then crouched down to offer me her hand. She helped me to get up on my feet and then opened the driver's side door.

"That was my way of thanking you for standing up for me tonight," she told me as I staggered and stumbled over to the other side of the car. "Now, if you are interested in joining the sex addict recovery group, I'll give you Freddy's number."

"I'm very happy, Miss Erica," I told her as I opened the passenger side door. "I wouldn't change a thing."

"Good. I had a feeling you'd say that."

We drove back to the apartment. It was almost three o'clock in the morning and I was extremely tired. I'd already gone one night with barely any sleep and I was about to have another night with little rest.

"Goodnight, my love," she said with a smile before walking into her bedroom and closing the door.

I put on clean pajamas and jumped into bed. I was happy to get four hours sleep before I needed to get up and prepare for work. After a quick shower and a bowl of Lucky Charms, which truly are magically delicious, I got into my car and went to work.

Because it was difficult for me to shred documents with two broken fingers and a fractured wrist, not to mention the bulky cast I had to wear, the company hired a temp to assist me in my work.

Cat was young, in her early twenties, and when I met her I was unable to understand, for the first time, what people meant by "bright eyed and bushy tailed." She was that. She came to my little room with the paper shredder full of excitement and energy. She had big brown eyes like a rabbit, hopped around excitedly, and thanked me for trusting her to do mundane tasks like cleaning the top of the paper shredder with a commercial grade cleaning product.

She would have been a model employee, if perhaps a bit too hyperactive, except for the truly strange thing about her. She was wearing pants, casual type women's business pants, and they had some kind of fluffy white bunny tail attached to the back of them.

From what I could tell, this bunny tail wasn't part of her anatomy. It had been glued, or sewn onto her pants for some purpose I could not ascertain. It was hypnotic, and although I made every effort not to stare, it was at times very hard not to.

Just before lunch she very casually said, "You want to know about my tail, don't you?"

I had to be careful with my answer, because the wrong combination of words used in a response to her question could lead me down the road to an affair. The tail was intriguing and I couldn't help wanting to know more about it.

"It is not something I have seen before," I told her. "There isn't anything wrong with that, and I am fully aware that curiosity has killed many cats, but I would like to know more if you are willing to share."

"Well, I have a really nice ass, which I'm sure you've realized, and I like to give people an excuse to stare at it. And I like that I'm never really sure if men are looking at my ass or my bunny tail. It is like a little riddle every time."

"I don't think that qualifies as a 'riddle,' and I am sure they are usually looking at your tail. Your ass really isn't that nice."

"Wow. Seriously?"

"Maybe it would be nicer if you didn't have that bushy white bunny tail, because that distracts people from noticing anything else about your ass. It is hard for me to say, but I shouldn't be looking anyway. I have a girlfriend."

"Do you ever cheat on her?"

"Never."

"You know, just something she never finds out about and stays a nasty little secret forever?"

"No. That kind of thing leads to pizza parties and people questioning their sexual orientation. Secrets never stay secret. The mayonnaise always leaks out of the sandwich."

"I never knew that," Cat said, looking bewildered.

"Know what?"

"I never knew... about anything you said there. Cheating leads to pizza parties and questioning your sexual orientation? Wow, dude."

"They don't lead to me questioning my sexual orientation. They lead to other people questioning their sexual orientation," I said in order to clarify.

"So, you've never questioned your sexual orientation?"

"Someone tried to fix me up with a man once at a dinner party. It wasn't much of a dinner party, just an excuse to introduce me to this single gay man who this guy and his girlfriend wanted me to meet. I ended up stealing the guy's girlfriend, the one who owned the house the dinner party was at, and the guy went out for drinks with his gay friend."

"Wow... um, that is, um, interesting..."

"So, I'm not gay, otherwise I would have left the dinner party with the gay man and not the host's girlfriend. Although, to be honest, the gay guy was kind of a jerk, so even if I was gay I don't think I would have been interested in him."

"So, what happened when you stole this guy's girlfriend away? How did that turn out?"

"We live together now and we're very happy."

"So, you were getting set up on a date with a man by this couple. You went over to their house for dinner and instead of hitting it off with the guy, you hooked up with the guy's wife?"

"They weren't married. They weren't even engaged. He didn't appreciate her. He didn't love her."

"You don't seem like the type of guy who would swoop in and steal a woman away like that."

"I'm full of surprises," I told her. "I'm sort of like this paper shredder. You put a piece of paper into it, with all kinds of sensitive information on it, the machine shreds it and keeps the little strips inside of it until it is emptied."

"I don't understand how you're like that at all."

"Erica and I connected on a different level than most people. We fulfill needs the other has in ways that aren't at all easy to come by. We push each other, we challenge each other, and we become more together than we ever were apart."

"How is that anything like a paper shredder?"

"Why do you sew a bunny tail onto the back of your pants?"

"To draw attention to my ass."

"That's absurd."

"I don't care what you say, I have a great ass. I mean, look how round and full and perfect it is. The thing is, men weren't looking at my ass. They were looking at other women's asses, but not mine. So I had to do something to get them to look at my ass."

"That's like me saying, 'Gosh, women never look at my face so I'm going to splash acid all over my face and burn it and that way women will start looking at my face.' They are looking at your ass not because they think it is cute and they want to hold onto it while fucking you. They are looking at it because you have a fucking bunny tail glued to it. That is two totally different things."

"Don't you have something that really floats your boat that you'd do just about anything to do or have or experience?"

"Well... yes, you could say that."

"I like when men check out my ass. It does something to me. I get a boost of confidence and excitement and it helps me get through the day. So what if they are just looking at the bunny tail? I forget I'm wearing it and then a guy looks at my ass and smiles and I get all giddy and start walking on air. What's wrong with that?"

Out of the corner of my eye I saw Jimmy, walking past my shredder room with his head hung low. He looked very sad, so I told Cat to hold on for a moment and rushed out into the hallway and called out to Jimmy.

"Could you come into my shredder room for a minute?" I asked him.