But it was one hot Saturday that my habit of being the attentive neighbor scored big. I was just glancing out the kitchen window when I saw Ellis washing his car.  He was crouched next to one of the shiny alloy rims. I watched as he placed the saturated sponge against the wheel and soapy water erupted out over his hand, running down around his wrist.  I couldn’t see his feet—the goddamned perfectly formed boxwood spheres were obstructing my view. But I ached to know what he was wearing on them—to see whatever shoes were bent around his feet, glistening with soapy water as it ran in foamy rivulets down the asphalt. 

As luck would have it, I had a loaf of sourdough on the cooling rack. In less than three minutes, I was on the sidewalk and rounding the hedge, cradling a warm foil parcel in my arm like a football.  My curiosity was beyond viscerally satisfied.  I could feel my heart thudding in my throat as I took in Ellis’ shiny black neoprene ankle boots.  The crisp white bands of their outsoles flashed as though smiling at me while he squatted next to the car.  I stood, slack-jawed, and observed him swirl the sponge in the bucket of water before drawing it out, a stream of suds cascading over the smooth dome of his foot as he applied it to the wheel.  The hem of his tan jeans had flipped up at the wide mouth of his right boot, and a wedge of white sock ribbing was visible above the stretchy camo print side panel.  I fought the urge to reach down and adjust my jeans.

The sun must have caught the foil-wrapped bread a that moment because he looked up at me, startled.  “Whoa!  Hey, there–how long have you been standing there?” he asked, poking the sponge into a triangular shaped cavity in the wheel.

Not long enough, I thought, and heard myself chuckle uncomfortably.  “I just walked up.  I brought you some bread.”  I held the metallic lump aloft as if to prove that–no, I wasn’t only here to ogle his incredibly sexy feet.  Of course, I wouldn’t be having any toast for myself at breakfast tomorrow, but I was pretty sure the view I was taking in right now would sustain me.

He grinned and chucked the sponge back into the bucket.  I watched with satisfaction as the white banded outsoles of the boots straightened and pressed against the wet driveway as he stood and wiped his wet hands on his pants.  “Aw, you didn’t have to do that–thanks!” he stepped over the bucket and reached to accept the bread, which I proudly relinquished.  As he pulled at the edge of the foil and raised the still warm crust to his face, I looked down and noticed that his right foot was standing on a loop of garden hose.  The soft boot rippled over the contour of the hose, softly squeaking as the wet surfaces played against each other.  He looked up and gasped softly.  “That smells amazing!  You made this?”  

I smiled at the praise and tried to stifle the mental image of kneeling on the wet driveway and grinding against his feet.  “Yep.  I’ve been doing it for a few years now.  It’s easy once you get the hang of it, and nothing beats freshly baked bread.”  Well, nothing except perhaps the undulation of neoprene boots around your feet.

Ellis looked at me in wonderment.  “This is amazing.  Thanks so much!”

I nodded.  “My pleasure.”  Literally.  I decided not to make this awkward.  As much as it pained me to tear my eyes from my sexy neighbor and his hot boots, I turned and headed for the house (seemingly) without hesitation.  I played through the alternate scenario as I stepped through the front door. I say, “your feet in those boots make me so hard,” and he—what?  Smiles?  Pelts me with sourdough and calls the police, more likely. 

I stood at my bathroom vanity and scolded myself in the mirror. “Get a fucking grip.  You’re an adult. Not a horny teen.”  But I couldn’t unsee the smooth curves of the neoprene that enveloped his feet, or the way his white socked ankle looked framed by the wide flair of the boot’s mouth.  The orange pull loops pushing against the bunches in his pants…

I went to splash cold water on my face, and to my astonishment the faucet handle broke cleanly from the fixture in my hand. I practically laughed out loud—this couldn’t have happened at a better time if I had planned it. I raced back out the front door and held up the handle between my thumb and forefinger as though it were something I had brought up from the bay in a fishing net. “Mind if I cash in the bread offering a little earlier than expected?” I called over. 

Ellis, making large arcs over the body of the car with a microfiber towel, paused mid swirl and looked over the hedge. He squinted those beautiful brown eyes at the amputated plumbing fixture. “What am I looking at?”  he asked perplexed. 

“It used to be my bathroom faucet handle. It just snapped off in my hand.”

Ellis straightened up and cast narrowed eyes in my direction. “And you’re sure this happened AFTER your little presentation of carbohydrates?”  

“Cross my heart,” I replied, outlining the pledge over my chest with the corroded handle. He laughed. 

“Okay. I’ll be over in a few. I’m just finishing up here.”

“Let me help you,” I offered all too eagerly. 

“There isn’t really anything left to do,” Ellis began to protest as I made my way up the driveway. “I’m just drying the car.”  

“I can clean up for you, at least,” I suggested, reaching for the bucket.  Ellis shrugged in resignation and resumed squeegeeing the droplets of water from the driver door.  I heaved the bucket to its side, emptying its contents in a soapy torrent down the driveway. The wall of suds broke over Ellis’ boots, lapping up the camo sides and splattering the bottoms of his pants.  Bullseye. “Sorry,” I murmured, putting a grimace on my face for his benefit. Ellis barely even glanced down, but I was getting rock hard watching foam slide lazily down the slopes of his feet. 

I wrung the sponge out and placed it in the bucket, then turned my attention to the hose.  Ellis was working his way back the quarter panel. I felt a small tremor through my pelvic floor as I watched his right foot step back inside a lazy loop of hose.  This was choreographed to perfection. I tugged on the rubber tube with the pretense of coiling it up.  To my sheer delight, the loop shrank around boot and wetly snaked over it.  If that hadn’t been exciting enough, Ellis—unaware of his rubbery ensnarement—lifted his foot to take another step back, pulling the hose taut around his ankle and wedging the handle of the spray nozzle against the boot. A jet of water pulsed against his pant leg, darkening it in a loud hiss. “Whoa!” he exclaimed, slamming his hands against the car to maintain his balance as his foot fought with the tangled hose. 

“Geez. You okay?” I managed, thinking it was about time I spatter some water on my own pants lest they give me away. 

Ellis chuckled. “Yeah,” he said shaking his foot loose. The hose clattered to the driveway. Water dripped from the hem of his pants into his boot. “At least it’s a hot day, right?”  

I agreed all too enthusiastically as I finished winding the hose. I stood back and took in the spotless car just as he wadded up the damp towel and pitched it into the bucket. “Looks really good,” I approved, my eyes flashing to his feet. 

“Not bad,” he agreed. “Definitely one of the more productive things I’ve done today,” he grinned. “Let me just get cleaned up and I’ll pop over to see about that faucet.”  He headed up the driveway to the open garage door. 

“Please!  Don’t even worry about that,” I practically begged. Ellis paused and turned to look at me, bewildered. “I’m not fussy about the house, and who knows what kind of job this faucet will be. I’d hate for you to get all cleaned up only for you to end up getting grease on your clothes or something.”  I felt like I was rambling like a lunatic—I was so close to having him and those boots in my house. But Ellis shrugged. 

“Lead on,” he capitulated. 

“It’s the master bath upstairs,” I explained when we stepped into my tiled foyer. Ellis glanced around.  

“Yep—it’s exactly like mine but backwards,” he observed. He looked down at his feet, bracing the sole of his right boot against the tab on the heel of the left.  I stood entranced as his white sock slid into view like a foal emerging from its mother. With the pull loops, he removed the right boot, and a slightly darker, damp sock joining the first on the tiled floor. “Let’s go see what we’re dealing with,” he said quietly to himself as he ascended up the stairs. I wanted to stay and look inside the gaping deck boots he had just vacated—really, to run my fingers inside of then—but I knew my place was right behind him. 

Ellis stood in his sexy socked feet before my vanity and examined the maimed faucet. “Well, I could just tell you to get a new handle and be done with it,” he finally announced as he held the corroded end of the handle to the light, “but that wouldn’t fix the problem. You probably need a new cartridge.”

I raised my eyebrows, not realizing that faucets even had cartridges. “Is that…serious?”

Ellis looked at me and smiled benignly. “No. It’s just a replacement part. Yours is full of gunk.  All of that resistance put stress on the handle, which is why it broke.” He pointed to a jagged, sheered off portion inside the handle. “A new cartridge will let your handle glide up and down easily.”

“I’m all for that,” I said jokingly, noticing not for the first time the dampness in my underwear.   “What do we need?”

Ellis rested his foot on the side of the tub, the same way he had put it on the mailbox column the day we met. His pant leg was still wet, still flipped up in the back from wearing the boot. “Do you have any tools?  Pliers, screwdrivers?”

“Plenty of those,” I said eagerly. 

“Bring what you have, and I’ll see about what replacement parts you need.”

I rummaged through the utility room and unearthed the tool kit I had been gifted by my father years before. I had never used it, but that’s how I knew it would be complete. By the time I returned to the bathroom, Ellis had mapped out what items I needed from Home Depot down to the aisle. It was agreed that while I was gone, he would be working on removing the old cartridge from the limescale clutches of the fixture. 

I grabbed my keys and bounded down the stairs. When I got to the front door, I didn’t even think—my dick completely usurped my free will and I found myself kicking my pumas to the side and plunging my feet into Ellis’ boots. “Oh my god, oh my god,” I heard myself repeatedly whispering as I got into the car and punched the ignition button. Much like my pants, the boots were warm and damp inside. Ellis had bigger feet than I did, and my socks explored the soft, roomy neoprene interior as I backed out of the driveway. I could feel the dents that his toes had made on the insole. 

The entire trip to the hardware store was a blur. I remember crouching in the aisle before an array of replacement faucet handle parts and watching the boots wrinkle as they bent around my feet.  They had dried off at that point, and their dull black finish shone blue under the fluorescent lights, the white bands of the outsoles practically glowing in their outlines of my feet. God, they were sexy. Did I look as amazing when I wore them as Ellis did?  Hell, half as amazing?

That Ellis would—I don’t know—actually miss his shoes in my absence didn’t really occur to me until I pulled back into the driveway. Like a balloon deflating, the sexual energy that had been thrumming for the last thirty minutes quickly dissipated over the dawning revelation that I had possibly made a grievous error from which there was no easy recovery. What would I say if Ellis met me at the door, eyebrows raised as he stared at his boots on my feet. “I thought they might dry off better if I took them?” Ridiculous. “I’ve been thinking of getting myself a pair of these so I thought I’d try them out?” Absurd. There was nothing that could extricate me from this predicament gracefully. I uttered a silent prayer as I climbed the front step and opened the door. 

Ellis was nowhere to be seen, my pumas remained by the door. “Ellis, you up there?” I asked as I slid the boots off. 

“Yeah,” came his voice from upstairs. “You get what we need? I just got this damned cartridge loose.”

My relief was palpable. “I did. I’ll be right up!”

Have you ever felt utter relief that you got away with something, only to then be immediately thereafter replaced by mild disappointment?  That’s my only explanation for the self sabotaging behavior that came next. It wasn’t enough that I had splashed soapy water on Ellis’ boots, or wrapped a hose around them, or soaked them, or stole them and wore them. I wanted my juices in them. I wanted to know that the next time Ellis slid his sexy feet into the waiting mouths of these boots, those white socks would come to rest in my cream. Ellis would almost certainly figure it out, and there would definitely be no verbal acrobatics to get out of it. 

And I didn’t care. I didn’t think. I was a slave. 

It didn’t take long. I cupped the left boot over my throbbing cock and felt the soft neoprene lining enfold my shaft. And my body unfurled. Tension that had trembled under my skin from the day we met was answered like a knife to guitar strings, the shockwave of each final reverberation focusing to a single point inside me and exploding like hot light. And what sharpened it into an even sweeter, more searing eruption was the sudden epiphany that it was all quite unwittingly done on Ellis’ part. He was utterly oblivious to his power over me. Whether he was putting on running shoes, throwing a pair of dirty boots on the back step, or donning waterproof shoes to wash the car, none of this was significant to him, yet it was everything to me. 

I’d be willing to bet that not two minutes had passed during which time my Earth had shattered and reassembled itself. I surveyed the inside of the left boot with approval, then pulled myself together and took the purchases upstairs to Ellis. 

As it turns out, by the time the faucet was reassembled and in decent working order, and by the time I had seen Ellis back down to the front door and thanked him profusely for his help, my cream was undoubtedly nothing more than a damp, sticky spot on the bottom of his boot—nothing that would arouse suspicion. But I watched him walk down the drive in complete satisfaction knowing that I had achieved my objective.

I closed the door and picked up my hastily cast aside Pumas. And that’s when I noticed the right one had been untied. I had simply kicked off the sneakers, yet the laces on this shoe had been carefully pulled out in loose arcs from the eyelets, and the tongue had been peeled back. Almost as though someone had…put their nose in it?  My heart thudded as I turned and looked out through the kitchen window at Ellis, slipping through his front door.