What I Did with My Daughter’s Friend’s Sandal

I never thought I would write something like this, but there are things one needs to get out, even if it’s only in a notebook no one will ever read. I’ve carried this for years. Feet turn me on. Not in some vague way, not the way someone likes a pretty leg: they obsess me in a way that sometimes scares me. A bare foot, a well-defined arch, small toes, the pale mark left by sandal straps on tanned skin. That can ruin my whole day or, depending on how you look at it, make it unforgettable.

I’m fifty-one, widowed, and I live with my daughter Lucía. She studies, goes out very little, and every now and then brings friends home. For a long time that wasn’t a problem. Until Bianca showed up.

***

Tuesday. Bianca is twenty, and she’s the kind of girl who seems unaware of the effect she has. Brunette, petite, with an easy smile and that habit of always walking around barefoot. Lucía met her at university, and since then she’s been coming over almost every week. I try to behave. I really do try.

The problem is that Bianca has the most beautiful feet I’ve ever seen in my life. And she shows them without shame, because to her they’re just feet, an ordinary part of the body. She doesn’t know that for me they’re something else. She doesn’t know that every time she crosses the living room in those flip-flops, I have to pretend I’m watching television.

Yesterday she arrived in the afternoon. Sweltering heat, the kind that sticks clothes to skin. She was wearing short shorts and a cropped blouse that left her stomach exposed, and on her feet, white rubber sandals with a red stripe. I greeted them from the couch, trying to sound like any other father, bored and kindly.

—Good afternoon, sir —she said, taking off her shoes beside the door as she always does.

And there they stayed. The two sandals, one tipped over on top of the other, abandoned on the entry mat while she walked barefoot into Lucía’s room.

Don’t look. Please, don’t look.

But I looked. I saw her bare feet step onto the living room floor, lightly tanned, with that pale mark the straps had left. I saw the arch curve with each step, the toes gripping the cold tiles for a moment. My mouth went dry and something hardened inside my pants in a way impossible to disguise.

I muttered some excuse and locked myself in my room.

***

What I’m about to write now embarrasses me, but since I’ve started, I might as well tell it all.

I sat on the edge of the bed with my heart pounding in my chest. I could hear the two girls laughing on the other side of the hallway, talking about things I wasn’t part of. I reached down, opened my pants, and started touching myself, thinking about those feet. About the pale mark from the straps. About what that arch would look like if I traced it slowly with my tongue.

It wasn’t enough. No matter how tightly I closed my eyes, the image in my head wasn’t enough. And then I remembered the sandals. They were there, a few meters away, by the door, still holding the exact shape of the foot that had worn them.

It was a stupid idea. Dangerous. The kind of thing that could cost me my relationship with my daughter, my dignity, everything. And even so, I stood up.

***

I strained to listen. The girls were still in Lucía’s room, with the door ajar and music playing. I figured I had a few minutes. My house has a tall wall out front, no one can see the entrance from the street, so I went out the back and circled around in silence, like a thief in my own home.

The sandals were still there. I crouched and picked up the left one with two fingers, almost afraid, as if it might burn me. I turned it over. The rubber still held the imprint of her sole: the mark of the heel, the hollow under the toes, everything drawn by use. I brought it close to my face.

The smell hit me full force. A mix of hot rubber and a soft, intimate trace of a woman’s foot after a hot day. It wasn’t a strong or unpleasant smell. It was her smell, concentrated in that piece of plastic, and it was enough to make me hard all over again.

I inhaled slowly, eyes closed, filling my lungs with that forbidden perfume. I thought of Bianca walking barefoot through my house without imagining that I, her friend’s father, the boring man on the couch, was doing this with her sandals a few feet from the door.

***

I took the other sandal, the right one. I held it with one hand while I kept smelling the left. And then I did what my head had been screaming at me to do for a while.

I slid my cock between the two rubber straps of the sandal, right where her toes had settled just moments before. The plastic fit me just right, snug, and I started moving against it, imagining it was her. That it was Bianca’s tight pussy and not a white flip-flop with a red stripe.

I licked the left sandal while I fucked the right one. I ran my tongue over the area where her heel had been, where her toes had left their mark, tasting the rubber and something else, that trace of her skin. The arousal was so intense I could hardly stay on my feet. I leaned against the wall, my knees shaking, moving faster and faster.

In my head I saw her clearly: lying down, feet lifted toward my face, letting me lick her arch while I went into her. The girls’ moans farther inside the house blended with my fantasy until I no longer knew what was real and what was imagined.

I couldn’t hold out much longer. I clenched my teeth so I wouldn’t make a sound and came between the rubber straps, staining the sandal with a thick spurt that slid over the edge. I stayed there for a second, stunned, my forehead against the wall, my heart nearly bursting out of my chest.

***

The shock of reality came immediately.

I heard a noise behind the door. Footsteps. A muffled laugh. My blood ran cold. Was someone there? Had they seen me?

With trembling hands I wiped off what I could with my shirt sleeve, put the two sandals back exactly as they had been, one fallen over the other, and ran crouched toward the back of the house. I came in through the kitchen, washed my face with cold water, and stayed leaning on the counter for a long time, waiting for my pulse to settle, telling myself it had been madness, never again, that I was sick.

But you all know how that “never again” goes.

***

Half an hour later Bianca came out of the room. Lucía walked her to the door, the two of them chatting about something from university. I had gone back to the couch, pretending to read the newspaper, with the pages strategically draped across my lap because just seeing her had set me off again.

—Bye, sir —she said, waving.

—Take care, Bianca —I answered, my voice rougher than I would have liked.

And then came the worst part. Or the best, depending on the dark side of my mind.

She sat on the front step to put her shoes back on. She took the right sandal, the one I had used, and for a moment she hesitated. She looked at it. Her brow barely furrowed, as if she noticed something odd in the rubber, some moisture that shouldn’t have been there. I stopped breathing.

But she didn’t say anything. She adjusted the straps between her fingers, slid her foot in, and stood up. Watching her step on my semen with that perfect foot, without knowing it, was one of the most disturbing and exciting things I’ve ever experienced. I had to grip the newspaper hard so I wouldn’t give myself away.

***

Before crossing the threshold, Bianca turned and looked at me.

It wasn’t an ordinary look. It was a long look, with a half-smile at the corner of her lips, the kind of gesture that can mean everything or nothing. Did she know something? Had she been the one making the noise behind the door? Or was it all just my own imagination, the paranoia of a man with a dirty conscience?

—See you soon —she said, and that “soon” sounded to me loaded with an intention that probably existed only in my head.

Then she left, walking down the sidewalk in those white sandals, one of them carrying a secret only I knew. I watched her from the window until she turned the corner.

***

Two days have passed and I still feel something trembling inside me every time I remember it. I know it’s wrong. I know it’s a dangerous game, that one slip and I lose everything. I tell myself I have to control myself, that next time I’m going to stay seated on the couch like a normal father, watching TV, ignoring those feet.

But I also know that’s a lie.

Because I’m already counting the days until Bianca comes back. To see her take her shoes off at the door again, leave her warm sandals on the mat, and walk into my daughter’s room without imagining what’s going through my head. And that half-smile at the end, that look I can’t decipher, haunts me every night.

Maybe next time I’ll dare to do more. Maybe she’ll want me to. Or maybe I’m just another poor fetishist writing fantasies in a notebook he’ll never dare to act out.

But the sandal, I swear to you, I can still smell it when I close my eyes.