Beta in an Alpha World (Chapter 8)

“Good,” Violet said, those emerald eyes widening as she combed back long dark-brown locks from her sightline. She pitched her foot upward by a fraction of an inch, flared all five meaty toes out, and aimed the dewdrop-shaped underbelly of the pinky straight for me. “Then let’s get started. Remember, I’m only doing this for you.”

As much as I trusted that Violet was indeed acting largely on behalf of my safety, I (as usual) felt just a smidge of doubt that my sister was “only” doing this for me, as she proceeded to plop her pinky toe gently down upon where my half-inch body laid. Well-acquainted with what she expected of me already for this exercise, I immediately began practicing a sort of bench-press, using her smallest digit as the weight. True to her word, Violet started me off with an easy one, as she didn’t apply any extra weight through her pink smushy-fleshed “little” toe that still managed to cover more than half my body. Still, right away I had a feeling she wasn’t going to let me sleepwalk through this reintroduction to my underfoot safety classes.

“Come on. Push,” she coached. “It’ll be a lot heavier than this the next time you’re in a bad spot, you know.”

I definitely didn’t need to be told this to believe it, after the last few weeks at work and at home. So I pumped out as many reps as I could from beneath Violet’s lithe pinky toe, not quite perspiring yet but feeling some slight exertion. Of course, we were only just getting started. When apparently satisfied with my level of effort, Violet provided me with a heftier toe to press up against in the form of her middle digit, and not only that, but was evidently applying just a little additional tension to give me more of a challenge. My hands shook subtly as I pushed back, feeling her pillowy foot flesh stiffen against my resistance. I gritted my teeth, taking heavier breaths, which inevitably invited a thicker waft of that fruity saltwater musk from Violet’s feet straight into my lungs. Years ago, in the midst of these same exercises, I’d tried to convince my sister to at least wash her feet before we went through this, hoping it might make the experience marginally more agreeable. She’d countered (unfortunately correctly) that a hypothetical Alpha who’d just obliviously stamped on me certainly wasn’t going to have showered in anticipation of a Beta getting up close and personal with their soles, and that I’d have to just build up an immunity to a certain standard level of grit and grime, since I’d possibly be fighting for my life while squashed down here, and couldn’t afford distractions. So I carried on, inadvertently huffing up warm throatfuls of that scent while letting my sister’s middle toe repeatedly trample me like an enormous rosy-olive beanbag.

“You’re doing well. Or, not bad, at least, for somebody who stopped practicing,” she encouraged, even while she couldn’t help but slip some stern sisterly criticism in too. “Keep it up!”

Finally, just as this was starting to feel more like a workout, Violet advanced me to the “real” exercise by planting her big toe down on me. Naturally, the whole pithy pad of her rotund largest digit totally eclipsed my body, and she was actually pressing down now against the sandal insole in order to better simulate what it might feel like for me to be caught underfoot. Again, not that I needed to play-act this scenario to remember exactly what that felt like. By this point, I was really working up a sweat as, over and over, I hoisted the quashy obstruction of Violet’s ovular big toe off my flattened body and gasped up its essence. I wasn’t the only one feeling some mild burn here, because my sister’s foot had begun developing a fresh glaze of misty sweat too. For an Alpha, it was just a normal thin quantity, the kind that might form from simply walking around.

But because of my size, it meant I had to intensify my focus and channel more of my limited raw strength into every bench-press while now combatting the toastier mildly-damp texture of Violet’s toe. Some of the old familiar humiliation crept back in, because no matter how benevolent my younger sibling’s intentions, it was tough to feel fantastically self-confident while grunting and squirming and perspiring beneath the mere mass of her big toe, and simultaneously feeling her attentive nonjudgmental gaze zeroed in on me from high above. As kindhearted as Violet is, there was no question that she was in absolute commanding control of this entire situation, and deep down I’d always known that so long as I was in the same room as my colossal little sister, that would eternally be the case, just because of her size. Then again, that wasn’t so different a reality than with any other Alpha in my life.

“All right, that was a good start,” Violet declared, right when my strength-sapped arms were shaking too hard to keep pushing back against her toes, and drew her foot back out of the sandal entirely, leaving me ample space to semi-shamefully recuperate down in her sandal. “But I can definitely tell we’ve got a lot more practice to do. Sure, you’ll be fine if somebody steps on you and you just happen to get stuck under their toes, but it’s way more likely you’ll get stepped on under the middle part instead, which you know is way heavier. Now, I’m not going to make you do that for exercise, at least not yet, but it’s safe to say we’ve got our work cut out for us. Thank goodness Izumi is going on vacation, honestly, because if only I’d known how much you’ve been slacking, I’d have invited myself over a long time ago.”

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THE END (for now)