The Soft Parts

When you came in she was counting her abs in the mirror, and getting it wrong.

"...eight, nine, ten... wait." She frowned at her reflection, poked the top row through the soaked sheer cotton of her tee, and started over from the bottom with her tongue between her teeth. "Six, seven... okay they keep moving. Baby! Baby, come count my abs, I get a different number every time. I think I grew a new one but it might just be the light."

That was the picture waiting for you in her little teal room: your girl kneeling up on the end of the bed, still shining from posing practice, oil and sweat soaked so deep into the white tee that it had given up being clothing an hour ago and gone fully see-through, pasted to everything underneath. The pink pleated skirt sat high on hips that had outgrown it two sizes back. Her brown braid was coming apart over one shoulder, and around her throat sat the collar you gave her, black leather, little chrome spikes, the small red heart resting in the notch of her collarbone. She wore it everywhere. She'd asked you once, very seriously, if she should take it off in the shower so the heart wouldn't rust, and then forgotten your answer and kept it on anyway.

You did not count her abs. There were ten. There were always ten. She squinted at them like they were a math test, gave up cheerfully, and bounced around to face you, hands on her thighs, beaming.

"Okay! So. I've been so good all week. Extra leg day Tuesday, and then I did another one Thursday because I forgot I already did it." She held up fingers and began listing, folding them down one at a time. "So tonight you can pick. I could flex stuff. I could lift you, I love lifting you, you're my favorite weight. I could do the thing where I crack the watermelon except we ate the watermelon. I could..." She stared at her remaining fingers, blinked, and lost the whole inventory at once. "...I forget the rest, but me. You can have me. Whatever part. Any part. Pick a part!"

And you have to understand what pick a part meant, coming from her. It meant a body that barely fit on the bed it knelt on. Shoulders packed up past softball and arguing with cannonball on either side of her neck. A back that blotted out the window behind her. Arms with veins she has names for. Two years of giving everything to the iron, offered up like a snack tray.

You said, "Your feet."

Her whole face did the thing. It's your favorite thing her face does and it did it completely: the sea-glass eyes going perfectly round, lashes flaring, glossy lips falling open into a soft astonished O. Then, because she is who she is, she looked down at her own feet. Then behind herself, genuinely, like there might be some other feet in the room you meant instead. Then back at you.

"Mine? These?" She lifted one off the bed and regarded it, sole up, the way a person checks a shoe for gum. "Baby, they don't even do anything. They just... stand there. They're like the interns of my whole body. I've got..." and she gestured at herself with both hands, a sweep that took in the acreage, the slabs, the veins, everything, "...ALL of this, two whole years of this, I can put you on my shoulders and do squats, and you want the two parts that never lifted anything?"

Then the coin finished dropping. You watched it land somewhere behind her eyes, watched them go even rounder, and she gasped so hard she nearly toppled off her knees.

"Ohmygosh. You have a thing. You have a thing for my feet! Since when?! How long?! Why didn't you..." She grabbed her braid with both hands in delight and scandal. "I've been doing biceps at you for two YEARS and the whole time... okay. Okay okay okay. Don't laugh at me if I'm bad at this. Wait." A pause. Total sincerity: "Do I face you? How do feet... no, I know how feet work. I know how feet work! Sit there."

She turned and settled back onto her elbows, and even that was a show she didn't know she was giving. Her weight hit her arms and the triceps caught it, each one flaring off the back of her arm in a hard horseshoe the size of your forearm, skin drawn taut and shiny over the pressed shape. The bed groaned. Everything groans under her; furniture has opinions about her now. She wiggled herself importantly into position, took a breath like a diver, and lifted her legs.

Watch the right one go up, because one at a time is the only honest way to take her in.

The thigh rose first, and the thigh was not a thigh in any sense your hands ever learned. It was a column, a single continent of quad so thick that lifting it shoved the pink pleats up and out of the way like a curtain giving up. At the top of the lift the muscle set, and the whole front of it carved itself into being: the outer sweep swelling wide as a keg, the teardrop above her knee bunching into a fist-sized knot, a trench splitting the two heads deep enough to sink your thumb to the last knuckle. And over every inch of it, the veins. Not a vein. A system. They spread across that quad the way ivy takes a wall, rootlike trunks branching into vines, vines into threads, a river delta standing up under skin the oil had turned to glass, all of it fattening lazily in time with her heartbeat.

She caught you staring at one and immediately got distracted by it herself.

"Oh, that's Roadmap. That one's new-ish." She flexed, watched the vein swell, and grinned like it had performed a trick. "I name the big ones. Is that weird? Don't answer."

Then the calf, as she pointed her toes at the ceiling. The calf might be the worst of her, worst meaning best, worst meaning the one that makes strangers walk into signposts. Pointed, it split into its two heads and locked into that hard diamond, a diamond bigger than her own head, veins forking across it in bolts, and something inside it creaked, an honest little leather creak from inside her own leg.

"You heard that, right? That wasn't me. I mean it was me, but it wasn't me me." She patted the diamond fondly, like the flank of a horse. "These are the twins. This one's Lefty." It was her right calf. You let it go. "Twins, be nice tonight. Best behavior. I mean it."

And then, at the end of all of it, at the summit of the most monstrous limb you have ever seen on a human being, came the foot.

Small. Soft. Pink at the heel and the ball, high-arched, toes round and neat as a row of pearls. Unmarked, uncallused, unveined. Perfect in exactly the way the rest of her had deliberately stopped being. Everything else she owned had been fed to the iron and come back harder, but there is no machine for feet. She checked.

"I looked, you know," she said, wiggling her toes at you. "At the gym. There's a machine for literally every part of me except these. I even asked Marco and he made me draw what I meant and then he said please never draw that again." She flexed her toes, and the tiny motion ran back down the chain and made the entire calf jump like something alive, and her own leg startled her, and she giggled at it. "So they never got strong. They're just... soft. They're the only soft parts left." A beat. The airhead fog parted, the way it does sometimes, without warning, and something shy and completely clear looked out at you through it. "You noticed them at the beach that time. You thought I didn't see you looking. So I kept them nice. Just in case." Then the fog rolled sweetly back in: "Also I like the little brush at the pedicure place. It tickles."

She reached forward, absurd little hands at the waist of your pants, and freed you, and her face did the thing again, the round eyes, the O, even though she has seen you a hundred times, because she is the only creature alive who can look freshly astonished at the thing she asked to see.

"Okay," she whispered, and brought her soles up on either side of you, hovering, warm air off her skin already touching you. She fixed her eyes on her own feet with the total concentration of a bomb technician. Her tongue crept out to the corner of her mouth. "Gentle. Gentle gentle gentle. Twins? Gentle."

And here is the thing you learned in the next half hour: for her, gentle is the hardest lift there is.

Those legs close on things. That is what they are for. They have leg-pressed the whole stack with you sitting on it laughing. They popped a yoga ball between them by accident last month, and she apologized to the ball, and then to you, and then to the ball again. For her to cradle you between her bare soles and apply almost nothing, when every fiber in that quarter-ton chain wants to close like a bear trap, took more focus than she has ever aimed at any single object in her life. She caged you in soft warm skin, pressed until you groaned, eased off the instant you did, found the line, and held it, whisper-counting to herself the whole time like she was doing reps.

"One gram... two grams..." Pause. "Wait, is that how grams work?"

It didn't matter how grams worked. What mattered was what holding back did to her. Her calves stood in full diamond and trembled there, quivering with the effort of not squeezing. The hamstrings under her thighs drew up into thick cords and shivered. Her quads set hard as poured concrete and stayed that way, veins standing prouder every second, her own muscle creaking now and then with the strain of its own restraint. She was working harder at tenderness than she has ever worked at violence, tongue at the corner of her mouth, brows knitted, the single most serious expression you have ever seen on her face aimed entirely at her own feet.

"Is the pressure okay?" she asked, breathy and fast. "Blink once for good, twice for... no wait, talk, you can talk. Talk to me, Baby, I can barely feel you all the way down there, my feet are so far away, that's so unfair. My legs don't know how to do small. Nothing about me knows how to do small. So you have to tell me if I'm doing good. Am I doing good? Tell me if I'm doing good."

You told her she was doing good, and the words went down her spine like a swallow of something hot, and her soles tightened a fraction in helpless thanks, and you watched the pump arrive.

It started in her calves, because the calves were doing the finest work, the slow milking flex-and-release that slid her soft soles up your length and back down, oil-slick, unhurried, devastating. Each stroke bunched them, each bunch trapped a little more blood, and within a dozen strokes they had visibly grown, the diamond heads swelling rounder and angrier, the bolts of vein fattening from cords to cables. Then it climbed. Her thighs began to fill the way a pump fills them under the bar, engorging by degrees right in front of you, glassy skin stretching tighter over the ivy-work, the trench between the quad heads sinking deeper, the pink skirt riding higher because the muscle under it was gaining ground in real time. She glanced down at herself and gasped, scandalized.

"Guys. GUYS. Not now." She actually addressed her own thighs, sternly, like dogs jumping on a guest. Then, to you, mortified around a moan: "They pump up when I'm excited, I can't stop it, it's like they think this is a workout. I mean." She considered. "It IS a workout. Is it distracting? Should I... no. You know what? No." The scandal melted off her face and something warmer and dumber and hungrier slid into its place, her lashes coming down halfway. "Look at them. Look at them while my feet make you feel good. You get both. That's... nnh... that's the whole point of me. I'm a value bundle."

That was the view she built for you, stroke by stroke: your cock framed between two soft pink soles, and behind them, rising like scenery from a much larger world, the twin columns of her calves in full flex, and behind those the swelling wall of her thighs shifting with every pass, and above all of it the rest of her working. The motion had to come from somewhere and it came from her core, so with each slow pull her abs surfaced through the soaked cotton one row at a time, a wave from bottom to top, all ten of them, however many she thinks there are, and at the summit of the entire tectonic event was that soft freckled face with its ruined braid, watching you with enormous shining eyes, mouth open, astonished at what she was doing, astonished that it was working, astonished at every sound she pulled out of you like each one was the first.

Somewhere in the middle of it she gasped, delighted, staring down between her own soles.

"You have a vein!! On you, I mean. I can feel it on my arch, it's throbbing. Baby. Baby, we match." She said it like the two of you had shown up in the same outfit. "Does yours have a name? Can I name it? I'm gonna name it. Watch, when I flex, it throbs harder. Watch!" She flexed, a long slow crush of everything from toes to hips, calves cracking into full relief, the pressure climbing one careful gram at a time, and she watched your face come apart with her lips parted and her breath held, like a kid watching a chemistry demo. "Oh. Oh. Do that face again. Please? I'll trade you. A flex for a face. That's fair, that's so fair."

She set a rhythm and it wrecked you by degrees, and it wrecked her too, that's the part she'd never figure out on her own. Every reaction you gave her went somewhere. Her thighs shook now with something only half restraint. Her toes curled and uncurled against your skin. The little red heart on her collar was jumping with her pulse, and she'd started making sounds in the back of her throat on every stroke, small punched-out things, half effort and half want, the sounds she makes at the end of a heavy set when it hurts in the way she likes.

"I'm close," you told her, because she'd begged you to narrate, and her whole body reacted like a lift command.

"Yeah?! Okay. Okay okay okay." She rose up off her elbows into a crunch to see better, and her abs stacked into a shelf so deep the sheer shirt hung off the top row like cloth over a stair, and both monstrous legs gathered themselves, soles pressing you snug between their warm soft arches, and she went to work with her whole devoted chain at once, calf to hip, every stroke a full-leg confession. Her eyes flicked between your face and the place where the only soft parts of her held the hardest part of you, and the babble poured out of her without any gaps in it. "On them, okay? On my feet. Please? They're yours, I literally kept them for you, that's so romantic, I just realized that's romantic, do it on the soft part of me, please, Baby, please, did I do good, tell me I did good, tell me while you..."

You did. It took the last of you out at the root, and she gasped like the astonished girl in her always gasps, eyes flying wide, that perfect O, as you came across her soles and the delicate bones of her ankles, ropes of it landing hot on skin she'd pumiced and oiled and guarded for two years for exactly this, one lash of it reaching the base of that swollen diamond calf and sliding, slow, along the top of a vein as thick as your finger. She held perfectly still while you finished, both feet cupped around you like she was carrying water, not one gram out of place, the strongest legs in the world doing the gentlest thing they will ever do. Her lips moved silently. She was, you realized, still counting grams.

Then, silence, and her looking at her own feet like they'd just graduated.

"...I did good," she said. Not a question, for once. Pure wonder. She turned her ankles carefully, this way, that way, watching the mess of you catch the light against soft pink skin. "Look at that. LOOK at that. I made that happen with the two parts of me that don't even have muscles in them." A pause. A genuine frown of inquiry. "Wait. Do feet have muscles? Don't tell me. If they have muscles I'm training them, and then they won't be soft, and then... no. Okay. Feet don't have muscles. I've decided."

She admired the wreckage a moment longer, glowing, and then delivered her verdict to the ceiling: "That's going in the log. In glitter pen. 'New PR: one whole Baby. Zero plates.'" She paused, and her brow creased with the strain of the math. "...is zero plates a lot? It felt like a lot."

She still hadn't let you go. Her soles pressed together around you, warm and careful and weirdly possessive, and you could feel her legs humming with the pump still in them, thighs fat with blood, calves ticking softly as the fibers settled, all of it flushed and swollen and nowhere near done, because she is never done, she just sometimes forgets what she was doing. Not tonight. Tonight she looked up at you through the loose strands of her destroyed braid, and the fog and the hunger stopped taking turns and held hands.

"So um." Her toes flexed, just barely, and your whole spent body jumped, and her eyes went huge at the discovery, and you could see her file it away in whatever glittery cabinet she keeps these things in. "Next time can I try the twins? They've been practicing being gentle. I had them hold an egg." A beat. "We went through some eggs. OR, okay, hear me out: thighs. No. No no no, forget I said that, you've SEEN what they do to things, I'd have to be so, SO careful..." The heel of one soft foot stroked you once, absently, tenderly, like an apology in advance. "...but I would be. I'd be so careful. I can be strong for everyone else and soft just for you. That's my favorite lift now. It's the only one I can't fit on a machine." She blinked. "That was almost smart. Did you hear that? Somebody write that down."

The strongest legs in the world held you like something breakable, and did not let go, and waited, warm and pumped and patient and only a little confused, for their next command.