I watch in dismay as Syd slams his fourth empty pint glass on the pub table and wipes his mouth on his sleeve, before throwing his arms in the air. Bastard has won again. Why it surprises me I don’t know, he wins every bloody week. So far I – the Loser – have had to foot the booze bill for a night, I’ve had to buy pizzas on the way home, and walk to the shops for smokes in the pissing down rain.
Up until tonight, all of our weekly forfeits have been light on awkwardness and heavy on the wallet, mostly because I, the reasonable one, have chosen the tasks. But this week Syd asked if he could choose and, naively, I said yes.
Banging his hand on the table and laughing at me as I sink the last dregs of my pint, Syd starts to chant.
“King for a day, king for a day! Sun up to sun down, I’ll be king for a day!”
Fuck. May God strike me down on the way home to save me from tomorrow.
___________
Syd wasn’t kidding when he said ‘sun up’. As soon as the birds started to sing, he was in my room, playing some stupid royal fanfare on his phone and poking at me with a, thankfully new, toilet brush. Or as he called it, his sceptre. Dickhead.
So far I’ve made pancakes and bacon for his breakfast, I’ve pressed four jugs of coffee, squeezed oranges – squeezed fucking oranges, for Christ’s sake! – for juice. I’ve cleaned his room from top to bottom and done all his laundry, stopping only to make cheese toasties for the lazy fucker while he sat and watched my favourite TV show.
He’s run me ragged all day and, according to the clock, I still have an hour to go. I’m sure there isn’t anything more he can get me to do. I’m also sure he’ll find something. Anything, just to get his days’ worth from me.
I hear him snuffling and my heart sinks. That’s his ‘trying not to laugh’ snuffle. As predicted, he’s thought of something. I look at him and catch the tail end of a mastered smile. He turns to me and says,
“Peel me a grape.”
“Do what now?”
“Peel me a grape. I want a grape, but I don’t want to have to bite through the skin. The feel of it splitting in my mouth is vile.”
Asshole. I’m so tempted to tell him not to have a frigging grape if they gross him out so much, but I don’t. I just sigh and rummage around in the fruit bowl. Grape peeled, I offer it to him. I know exactly what he’s going to do, and as sure as God made little green apples, he does it.
“You can go fuck yourself, I’m not hand-feeding you,” I laugh.
Waving his sceptre above his head he points at his mouth. I half fling the grape in, hating him and finding him hilarious in equal measure. With a click of his fingers, he demands another, then another. My fingers wind up sticky with juice and, without thinking, I lick them clean before I select the next grape.
Syd shakes his head. “I don’t want it now that you’ve got your germs all over it. You’re such a dirty bastard, Ian.”
I can’t keep my face straight. “I’m sorry, I didn’t mean to do that.” I try all ways to apologise but my manic grin doesn’t do much for my sincerity. The harder I try the more I smile, then laugh, but something Syd says slaps the amusement off my face.
“Uh, could you repeat that? I didn’t hear what you –”
“Yeah, you did. I said massage my feet. If you’re gonna be dirty, I’m gonna do you dirty.”
“Nah, man, I’m not touching your feet, your monkey toes will give me nightmares.”
Syd hikes his legs onto the sofa. His feet rest in my lap and I stare at them in horror. “King. For. A. Day. From sun up to –”
“Yeah, yeah.”
The first touch is a fingertips only affair, snagging the edges of his socks and pulling them off his feet. I’m faced with ten waggling toes that all seem to want my attention. They don’t get it, though, I opt for running the heels of my hands over Syd’s ankles, pressing my wrists into his insteps.
“Bitch, please, put some effort in,” he says, still fucking laughing at me.
Bitch, eh? Okay.
I take his feet in my hands and start to squeeze. Mashing my knuckles into his arches, rolling his toes between my thumb and forefinger. Every ounce of frustration the day has given me gets rubbed into those pasty slabs and after a couple of minutes, I realise that I’m half enjoying myself.
Syd’s a bit ticklish, so he keeps on jerking and giggling. I give his heels a bit of a pounding, giggle back when I slap his soles and he squeaks. For a sweaty guy, his feet are pretty dry, and there isn’t a rough patch on them. I notice that his nails are short and neat, unlike my own. He gets ribbed for having monkey toes but, in reality, he has pretty tidy feet. Good job, really, cos his next demand is a corker.
“Suck my toes,” he says quietly.
I stop, thumbs mid-grind on the ball of his right foot, and try to catch his gaze. He doesn’t look at me, he just half-heartedly brandishes his toilet brush and blushes.
“King for a day?” he shrugs. It’s more of a question than a reminder.
Something in my chest rages at me, insists that I shove his feet to the floor and storm off in disgust. But another part…another part of me realises that I’ve started rubbing his feet again. Slowly now. Carefully. The same way I stroke his hips while I suck his dick or knead the flesh of his arse cheeks while I fuck him. I don’t like feet, I’ve never liked them, and yet…
I slip out from under his legs and kneel on the floor. Leaning in, I look closely at the toe nearest to me. Small, pale, the pointed nail in stark contrast to the squared-off shape of Syd’s other toenails. It takes so much effort to stick out my tongue and lean closer but I do it, and the very tip skims the fleshy pad.
I do it again, pressing my tongue harder this time. Slipping it beneath the second toe, then the third, looking up the length of the shivering body stretched out beside me so I can make sure Syd isn’t freaking out. He’s not. He’s just staring, his eyes lazy. One half of his bottom lip is trapped between his teeth in the most innocent yet entirely erotic way.
Oh, he really wants this. And he is king for another thirty minutes.
My eyes are closed when I draw his big toe into my mouth. I’ve mentally prepared myself for the rush of nausea, for my gag reflex to be triggered by disgust. But neither of those things happen. Instead, I experience the weirdest clenching sensation in my arse and realise that it’s fear. The feeling of his toenail on the roof of my mouth stokes it, the worry that I’m not going to be able to do it right makes it worse.
I’m about to chicken out when I hear something that changes the quality of the tension in my pants. Syd’s muffled whimper reveals that the moan he just let off was an escapee, and the quivering fear becomes something else. It quickly turns to desire and my cock throbs in tandem with each needy little twitch of my arse.
There’s no stopping this now. I’m sucking on Syd’s toes as eagerly as I’d suck his dick. Letting saliva trickle between them, catching it with my tongue and swirling it around. Running my lips over his soles, kissing his veins, biting his toe pads, all the while rocking my hips to rub the head of my cock against the elastic waistband of my boxers.
I’ve never seen Syd react this way. I’ve fucked him, he’s fucked me, we’ve mouth-fucked each other both at the same time, but I’ve never seen him move with such aching desperation. He’s snapping his hips, working his legs, pushing his chest out and pinching his nipples through his t-shirt. His head thrashes, his back arches, and I become still with his big toe pressed against my tongue, watching a dark stain spread over the crotch of his grey sweat pants.
When he’s done, I wait until he’s looking at me before slowly spitting out his toe. “This is a coup,” I say, swiping the toilet brush off the floor. “I’ll be king for a day tomorrow, so make sure you prime your tongue, my friend, cos you’re gonna be using it.”
“Oh yeah?”
“Yeah. Right after you’ve made my breakfast, tidied my room, and peeled my damned grapes, you’re gonna be spit shining my asshole.”
