Boots

Candace sat on the edge of the large whirlpool tub and turned the golden faucets, glad that the running water was drowning out the snoring that was starting to drift out of the bedroom. She ran her hands under the faucet until the water was warm enough for her and then sat watching as the tub filled up slowly with steaming water.

Absentmindedly, Candace ran a hand to the zipper at the top of one of the boots. Ray had certainly enjoyed the boots, she thought. He even begged her to make sure the lights were left on in the bedroom so that he could watch her grind her hips over him with her legs covered in the form-fitting leather. As the steaming water continued to fill the tub, Candace's fingertips searched for the metal fastener, but only managed to find more folds of supple material. Turning her attention from the hypnotic, bubbling flow of water, Candace looked down to search for the elusive zipper which...wasn't there.

Candace rubbed the sleep from her eyes in disbelief and pivoted her leg around slowly. After a moment, she came to the conclusion that she wasn't dreaming, and that the zippers on both boots were gone, disappeared, as if they had never been there. She shook her head, grabbed the ankle of one of the boots, and tried to slip it off.

But, no matter how hard she pulled, neither boot would come off.

Candace throttled off the faucet, walked into the bedroom, and woke Ray up from his torpor with a sharp nudge from her foot.

"Be a dear and help me get these off."

Ray grumbled, wondering why she had woken him up for something so simple, and groggily began to pull on one of the boots as Candace braced herself against a post of the bed's large headboard.

For fifteen minutes, the pair tugged and yanked and cursed but neither of the high leather boots showed any sign of releasing themselves, and Candace irritably questioned whether or not Ray was trying to yank one of her legs out of its socket. In frustration, Candace wondered out loud if the young man was really as big an idiot as he appeared to be, and Ray stormed out of the bedroom half-dressed, swearing at her with his shoes gripped tightly in one red-knuckled hand.

After the door the door to the bedroom had slammed shut, Candace sat down on the bed with her face in her hands. She'd had enough. She was tired and there was a tremendous amount of work to do tomorrow, if she was to keep the company running smoothly after news of Elliot's death had spread. The employees and shareholders would all need reassuring.

Besides, Candace reasoned, maybe the boots were a Chinese finger puzzle; she just needed to relax and then she'd be able to just slide the boots right off. And, with that thought in mind, Candace shut out the lights and went back to bed.

Sleep enveloped her quickly, until the drone of her alarm awoke her to a new day. Candace sat up and rubbed the sleep from her eyes, as her thoughts compiled themselves around the day's tasks, which slowly seeped through her head like a military parade in single file.

Then, suddenly remembering, she snapped back the bed covers from her legs.

The boots were gone.

Candace gave a little sigh of relief; she must have just worked them off in her sleep.

Foregoing the dream of a hot bath, Candace drained the tub of forgotten, tepid water and twisted on a shower's practicality. As hot water from the shower head's torrent caressed her, Candace reached for a bar of soap and began to wash up, enjoying the feel of the lather on her firm stomach, slowly working her way in slow circles to the soft curves of her breasts up her neck, her face, her ears, and...

Her earrings?

Candace suddenly realized she was wearing earrings, even though she could have sworn she had taken them off before she had begun to run the bath, which she never took, the night before. Ignoring the steaming rivulets that raced down her naked body to tile, Candace got out of the shower and walked to the bathroom's mirror. She took one wet hand and brushed the steam from the glass so she could look at her reflection, raised her fingers to one ear, and touched one of a pair of black circle earrings that decorated her lobes.

The earring was leather, firm and wafer-shaped.

Candace felt behind her lobe for a clasp but there was none. The earring was simply holding on tightly to her ear, gripping it like a pair of fingers. Candace began to pull on it, but the jewelry refused to release itself.

"Where did these god awful things come from?!" Candace hissed at her reflection, which merely regarded her with angry eyes.

Candace grimaced and walked back to the bedroom. She was running late on a day when she absolutely, positively could not afford to. Determined to ignore the questions the earrings posed, Candace quickly put on a pair of panties and began to dry her hair in front of her dressing vanity. She ran a brush through her long, brown hair, dryer roaring in her hand, when a tickling trickle began traveling down her back. Annoyed at the trickle, Candace switched off the dryer and stretched from the vanity's cabriolet, searching for one of the towels she had thrown onto the floor. Grabbing one of the damp lumps of cast off terrycloth, Candace straightened herself in the chair, looked in the mirror, and cried out.

The earrings...they were...melting!

She quickly reached up her hands to her ears to yank off the earrings, and her fingers were soon covered in a thick viscous fluid that crawled over her fingertips.

"Oh God!" she shouted.

She could feel the cool, ebony fluid dripping over the body, expanding and shaping itself to her as if it were alive, pressing and grasping at her as it ran down in liquid tendrils from her ears. Candace tried to shake the liquid from her fingers, tried to scrape off the oily substance from her breasts with her hands, but she only smeared the fluid further over her body.

"This isn't happening!" she told herself.

Where is all this stuff coming from?!

The fluid was running down her legs now, aggressively molding itself to her feet, and she felt her heels being raised up from the carpet. Still, she tried to scrape the muck from her body with her hands, but the liquid was like paint, drying and stiffening, very quickly.

Candace ran to the bathroom and nearly tripped over a forgotten towel.

She had to get to some soap and hot water, to wash off whatever this stuff was.

She had to...look in the mirror.

Candace stared wide-eyed at her reflection once more.

She was dressed seamlessly, almost from head to toe, in black leather. She ran a gloved hand to the high collar which plunged to a deep "v" of the double-breasted jacket she now wore which was decorated with a series of hard, black leather buttons as it narrowed down to her waist, and decorations were truly what the buttons were, because Candace could not detect any seams or openings on the jacket whatsoever. She stared at the short black gloves she wore on each hand and then ran them along the back of the knee-length, skin tight skirt. She couldn't feel a snap or zipper of any kind. She looked down at her feet, already anticipating the black leather pumps she found there.

Candace raced back out to the bedroom to grab a pair of scissors from one of the vanity's drawers and took one snip from the long sleeve of the jacket in an effort to cut the garment off. But the jacket sealed the cut immediately and seamlessly in an instant. In tears, Candace threw the scissors to the carpet and looked dejectedly at the bedroom clock, which blared back at her with bright red, digital incriminations.

Candace couldn't think anymore.

There wasn't any time to think anymore.

And so, she picked up her briefcase, her purse, and her car keys, and left for the Northbay corporate headquarters.

Candace's head was reeling with improbable possibilities as she entered the lobby of one of the city's dozens of glass and steel monuments to capitalism. She made her way across the marble floors to one of the large elevators, collecting appreciative looks from the sparse traffic of three piece drones and R and D lab coats who rushed with their briefcases bulging, in and out of maze like corridors. She caught an elevator quickly, after all, it was almost ten-o-clock, and most of the building's occupants were either sitting in their offices or squeezed into their cubicles by now. Candace pushed the button for her floor and watched the elevator's heavy doors close and sighed, glad to be alone with a chance to collect herself.

Suddenly, a strong hand beneath a drab green sleeve forced itself between the elevator doors, which reopened in response. The hand belonged to a deliveryman who was struggling with several large express envelopes, his electronic clipboard, and a long, stiff cardboard tube. He gave Candace a cheery "good morning" as he struggled to hold onto his small cargo of packages while getting on the elevator and followed it with an easy smile that seemed very at home on his face.

Startled by the intrusion, Candace managed to carve out a half smile of her own in response to delivery man's greeting, but stepped to the back of the elevator as he walked to the console and pressed the floor number of his destination. The deliveryman ignored Candace's gesture of distance, and when he'd finished hitting the button for a floor that was two above Northbay Electronics', he turned to her and made some small talk about the traffic outside.

Annoyed, Candace could feel the man's eyes all over her.

She nodded curtly at the delivery man's observations, only to find her irritation belied by her own gloved fingers, which had dropped her alligator handbag and slid slowly to a lapel of her jacket, gently stroking the warm leather finish. Candace took in a sharp breath and willed her hand back down to her side, only to find the effort useless. It was as if her arm was no longer her own, and Candace fought down a rush of panic as her hand continued to move along the jacket's lapel until it coaxed itself between the leather and her skin, stroking the nipple of one of her breasts with gloved fingers.

The deliveryman fell silent, and his eyes grew wide.

Beads of sweat formed on the widow's forehead as she struggled to move in a way that she wished to...in any way at all, but she the movement of every muscle denied and twisted by the suit. It was if she were nothing more than a leather marionette, acting under the guidance of some unseen puppeteer. Candace stood there silently, her pulse racing and her breath becoming shallow.

"Um, are you alright ma'am?" the deliveryman asked.

Candace couldn't even acknowledge the stranger. A slow creeping sensation had begun along her legs, and as she felt her head tilted down by the jacket's high collar, Candace watched dumbly as her skirt reached out along her calves with pseudopods of black leather which wrapped around her legs and melded with the tops of her shoes. Soon the soft grip of material around the back of Candace's neck had become a firm chokehold as ebony tendrils wrapped around her throat, covering her from head to toe in leather.

At the sight of her, the deliveryman inched backward towards the closed doors of the elevator, but Candace followed.

Candace tried to resist the pull the suit was putting upon her, but she found herself powerless. She was pushed down upon her knees and forced to send one gloved hand climbing spider-like up the deliveryman's loose cotton slacks. Her puppet's hands found their mark easily, and the deliveryman could only grip his packages tighter as Candace unzipped his pants and pulled out the length of him with gentle insistence.

She took the messenger's sex and guided it toward her lips.

Candace tried to call out to the messenger...tried to speak, or shout, or make any noise at all in an effort to wake herself from the dream she felt she must surely be trapped in, but as the leather mask formed over her face, Candace found herself only capable of taking the delivery man's hot, firm sex over her tongue and into her waiting mouth so she could suck every drop of excitement from his body.

*

When the elevator doors opened to the floor of Northbay electronics, Candace stumbled out of the lift, leaving the deliveryman, pants undone and mouth agape, far behind her. Once again, she was wearing the leather suit Candace had stepped into the building with...only now the jacket was cut down to a deep "V" that gave just a teasing glimpse of her, now heaving, breasts. Candace reached down to adjust the short skirt, only to find the garment smoothing itself down for her of its own volition. Taking a deep breath, Candace began the long walk through the gauntlet of scattered desks and cubicles of Northbay peons and lickspittles, leaving behind a whispering wake of leering gazes and half murmured condolences.

When she reached the closed doors of the main conference room, Candace paused for a moment and mentally shrouded herself in an air of casual authority and confidence that for the first time in her life seemed alien to her.

Candace reached out for the knob with one hand and opened the door.

She felt the suit growing tight around her body as she paused in the doorway and looked at the half dozen, upturned faces that suddenly turned their attention, wide-eyed, toward her.

That's right everyone, she thought to herself sarcastically, take it all in.

When the composure returned to the eyes in the room, Candace apologized to the assembled supervisors and junior executives for being late, and they gently nodded from their plush swivel chairs with sympathetic understanding.

"Everyone," Candace began, "I know Elliot's death has come as quite a shock to all of us, but I think you'll agree that he would have wanted things to get back to normal as soon as possible."

Candace felt the suit shift slightly around her body as the room mumbled its agreement while she walked to the end of the long table, plopped her handbag on the top, and stood behind the vacant chair of her dead husband.

"I," Candace hesitated, "plan to carry on Elliot's dream to make Northbay electronics a major player in the next ten years, but in order to do that, I think that the time has come for the company to take more aggressive steps towards that dream."

The leather continued to tighten its grip around her body.

Candace coughed into one gloved hand; terribly afraid she might let on to the small assembly that something was wrong, but the faces simply regarded her with doe-like eyes, full of pity, for the widow who was trying so hard to carry on.

"As part of that dream I plan to downsize..."

Before she could finish, Candace felt the suit squeeze the last breath out of her with its supple grip as if she were a tube of toothpaste. Now she could not even muster enough breath to let out so much as a single peep, and she bent over the table, gripping the edge with both hands.

Joel Gray, a senior partner who had been with the company for years, stood up from the chair on her left and placed a wizened hand on Candace's shoulder.

"Candace, there's really no need for this. Why don't you take a break for a few days."

Candace could only nod her head dumbly, wheezing and staring at the golden wood grain of the table's surface.

Joel turned to the other tailored suits and expensive haircuts.

"Everyone...why don't we adjourn for now. I think we could all really use a little bit of time to ourselves to mourn our loss."

As the little assembly trickled out of the room, Joel whispered to the widow, "Elliot was a good man Candace...and a good friend. If you ever need to talk to someone, please feel free to come to me. I know we haven't always gotten along well in the past, but I hope that can change."

Candace merely nodded at her reflection in the polished surface of the table, her breath coming back in little gasps, and Joel returned the gesture toward her before walking out of the meeting room and closing the large double doors behind him.

Candace felt the leather loosen around her, and she released the death grip she had on the table, taking in great whooping breaths of air.

Candace began to cry.

Christ, I'm going insane. That's the only possible explanation.

She sat down in the large chair at the head of the table and laid her head in her hands, the long, dark sweep of her hair falling over the black leather gloves in soft trickles.

Then there was a tremulous little knock on the huge double doors.

"Yes," Candace whispered.

The doors opened a little way and a small head with mousy brown hair popped in.

It was Elliot's secretary, Kathy.

"What is it Kathleen?" Candace groaned.

"Um...Mrs. Allen, I'm so sorry, I don't mean to bother you...but, um...but on Friday I had asked for an advance from Mr. Allen...because, um...because my husband was just laid off. Mr. Allen was on his way out, so he told me to talk to him Monday morning, and he'd write me a check...and, um...and I wouldn't even dare ask you right now, but I desperately need the money and...

Before she could force herself to finish, Kathleen shook her head from side to side, put a tiny hand to her eyes, and began slinking back out the door.

"I'm so sorry I bothered you Mrs. Allen. This must be a terrible time for you...I feel so stupid. Please forget I asked."

And just when it seemed Kathy would leave the way she came, Candace raised her face up from her hands and called out to the secretary.

"Kathleen, please come in and close the door."

"I really am sorry Mrs. Allen," Kathy whispered.

Not as sorry as you're going to be, you little twit, Candace thought to herself as she stood up from her dead husband's and faced the demure secretary squarely. Candace was going to load every ounce of frustration from this terrible day into her voice and then let this little waif have it with both barrels before she sent the woman away to clean out her desk.

"Kathleen," Candace said sternly before being cut off by the horrible squeezing of leather on her flesh.

Candace watched helplessly as one gloved hand crept slowly of its own volition, like a spider, to her handbag on the table. Candace looked down at her purse and mewed like a kitten as her other hand opened up the snap that held her simple bag closed. She was the puppet again, and Candace's hands jerked a little as the unseen master forced her to pull out her checkbook and a pen. As beads of sweat trickled down her breasts, Candace wrote out a check, for what was surely an entire month of the secretary's pay, to the order of Kathleen Wagner. Candace trembled as her fingers scribbled out "gift" in the "For" section of the check and then signed it "Candy Allen." Candace tore out the check and felt herself jerked to her feet, holding out the slip before her, silently.

Kathleen took the check gingerly like a wild bird feeding from the hand of a stranger.

"Thank you Mrs. Allen, thank you so much," she said, her face flushed with shame and embarrassment.

As Kathleen rushed silently out of the room, Candace felt herself released again from the clutch of the suit.

She stumbled around the room, her head reeling, until she turned to face Elliot's portrait, hanging next to his father's on the dark paneling of the meeting room.

Candy, she had signed the check Candy.

"It's you, isn't it?" she snarled at the portrait.

Candace felt the leather ripple on her skin in gentle waves like fingers stroking her flesh. She screamed and threw herself at the picture, grasping it with both hands, wanting to rip it off the wall and rend it into a thousand shredded fragments to match the tattered kaleidoscope she felt her sanity being torn into...but all she could do, all she was allowed to do, was to stand there frozen with tears streaming down her eyes.

The heavy doors of the conference room burst open and Kathy, still holding the check, burst into the room.