Jazmins Revelation

Jazmin's Revelation

by: SidaivaRevaso

From Xania's perspective, Jazmin had always been so

lucky

.

They had known each for years, and Xania could never remember Jazmin being punished for her transgressions or forced to do something she didn't want to do. When the two had been caught passing notes in class, only Xania was chastised by their teacher. When everybody had to take a swim test at the beginning of summer camp, Jazmin somehow got out of it. Xania couldn't recall a single time when Jazmin had found herself in an unavoidably uncomfortable position. Even when they'd visited the Renaissance Faire, just last month, it was Xania--not Jazmin--who had been playfully grabbed by one of the actors and thrust into the medieval stocks.

Xania had come to resent Jazmin's fortune. Yet at the same time, she couldn't help but respect it. There seemed to be an energy about Jazmin that allowed her to move through the world unbothered, unruffled, untarnished.

It was a kind of confidence or charisma, sure, but it was more than that too. She seemed to have a palpable--almost auratic--sense of purpose, a purity of will that attracted what was wanted and deflected what was not.

People were enticed by Jazmin, but she never allowed them to get close enough to despoil her spirit. And they didn't seem to recognize that she was

responsible

for holding them in abeyance. They didn't seem to know that their interest was being actively tempered--

curated

--by Jazmin herself, or rather by her energy.

But Xania knew. She could sense it. She was affected by it, like everyone else, but she could also pinpoint

why

she was being affected. It had to do with Jazmin's dynamism, with her multi-dimensionality. Xania noted that Jazmin spoke brusquely but with sensitivity, that she presented as a tomboy while also accentuating her lithesome feminine body, that she came off as edgy without drawing upon some inner discomfort. Her paradoxes were tantalizing

and

distancing.

Xania was smitten, and she would often observe Jazmin during class at the university they attended together.

A honey-brown skinned Latina, Jazmin had an alternative/skater look. Her hair was streaked with purple, she used heavy eyeliner, she wore ratty black t-shirts and skinny black pants, and on her feet, at all times, she wore a pair of beat-up old Etnies: bulky skate shoes that she seemed to adore. Xania had never seen Jazmin wear anything but these shoes, and--more to the point--she had never seen Jazmin

without

shoes. Jazmin's feet were always covered. She never went barefoot. She never wore sandals or flip-flops. Her feet were always hidden, and this was maddening to Xania, who desperately wanted to see her bare feet. Jazmin's thin winsome fingers were painted black, and this set Xania's mind aflutter, imagining whether her toes were painted black as well, or if they might move with the same erotic elegance. She wondered whether Jazmin's feet were slender, sexy, ticklish. Since Jazmin had never gone barefoot in her presence, Xania could only speculate.

And speculate she did. At this very moment, in class, Jazmin was seated a row in front of Xania, slightly to her left, and Xania found herself imagining scenarios in which Jazmin would be forced to remove her shoes and socks, to reveal her feet to the world. Or, better yet, scenarios in which she would have her shoes and socks forcefully removed. Would she plead during the process, begging for them not to be taken? Would she be embarrassed once barefoot? If so, why?

Xania found herself drifting into a reverie, but a reverie so purposeful and directed and concentrated that, all of a sudden, as she looked at Jazmin, who had her legs crossed and was absently twirling a pencil in her hair, time seemed to stop.

But...

Xania did a double-take.

Time hadn't

seemed

to stop.

It

had

stopped.

Everything around her was still. Jazmin was frozen, her pencil mid-twirl in her hair. Everybody else was frozen as well--except for Xania, oddly. She could move, and she experienced the strange sensation of lifting her arm and seeing it rise against the backdrop of the classroom's totally arrested motion, and she began to feel as if she were living in a 3D painting. The clock on the wall had stopped. A bird outside the window had seized mid-flight. Had Xania...

done

this? Was this a verifiable ability?

There was only one way to find out, and that was to see if she could control it. Then she would know whether it had been a fluke. So she relaxed and concentrated again, this time purposefully, and she instructed the world to return to motion.

It did.

Jazmin's pencil was twirling again, the clock hands were circulating once more, and the bird had flown by the window and out of view.

So it

could

be controlled! So it

was

an ability! Xania experimented a few more times, toggling between a world in motion and a world at rest, and as she did, she grew more and more comfortable with her newfound power.

It was not long before Xania found herself thinking not merely of her power, but of what she could do with it.

She gazed at Jazmin. Thoughtfully at first. Then searchingly. Then lustfully.

Jazmin's subtle, graceful contours were evident as she sat, legs crossed, still twirling that pencil in her hair, and it was interesting (Xania thought) that no matter how tomboyish, most women tended to cross their legs in just such a "ladylike" manner. Was this innate or learned behavior? Whatever the case, the juxtaposition of Jazmin's beat-up old Etnies (so sturdy, so boxy) with her cotillion-esque comportment (so seemly, so delicate) was, to Xania, thrilling. At first, she assumed her excitement could be attributed to discovering a ladylike undercurrent running underneath Jazmin's "rugged" exterior. But after investigating her feelings a bit more deeply, Xania realized that her excitement ought to be attributed to something more like awe. Jazmin was obviously so comfortable with herself, with how she presented herself to the world, that there was no way to simplify her essence to some interior/exterior dichotomy. In fact, concepts like "interior" and "exterior" lost their former meanings and positions in the manifestation of Jazmin's spirit. Everything about her was open to perception, available to analysis--and yet, because it was all there, her shadows and demons sat directly adjacent to her more clement qualities. One gave the other contour... or was it the other way around? What was a primary quality in Jazmin? What was marginal? Xania rarely had any clue, and she found it to be a head-spinning, vaguely psychoactive task whenever she tried to isolate and make sense of Jazmin's indices of self. They were intermingled to such a degree that Xania felt, at times, as if she were looking at Jazmin from several angles and distances at once. In the past, Xania had sometimes felt that even Jazmin's

features

seemed to slip away when scrutinized, though she suspected that they did so not out of cagey refusal so much as deference to their own nature. Xania had long ago accepted Jazmin's power over her, which is why she could find it reasonable in the first place to grant Jazmin's features this insane capacity to be cagey, to refuse. She was beset by Jazmin, befogged by her. What madness! What delight!

But other thoughts were soon to come. Less complacent thoughts. Less submissive thoughts. Sure she was dynamic, but why should Jazmin be so deified? Sure she was powerful, but why should she be so

untouched

?

Xania steadied her gaze. She recognized that the moment had arrived. The moment that, in hindsight, her friendship with Jazmin had always been leading toward.

Her psychological submission to Jazmin's dynamism and power had become its own form of pleasure, but it had also, over time, ossified into a form of self-abnegation. Now, all that needed to...

Stop.

Once again, the world around Xania was entirely still. With a tremor of excitement, she rose from her seat and walked over to Jazmin's frozen body. She knelt by the desk and examined the woman before her, inspecting her long legs, the bare skin between her pants and her black socks, her prominent ankles, the contrast between her slender limbs and the thick Etnies she wore.

Xania could barely contain herself. She wanted to scream. Was she trembling? Gyrating? Why

not

scream? Who would hear her?

Yet instead of screaming, Xania drew a deep breath, tilting her head back slightly. She closed her eyes and visualized what she had just observed. She traced the contours of Jazmin's ankles with her mind, attuning herself to their curves and hollows. She visualized reaching out and grabbing an ankle, wrapping her hand all the way around it... she wasn't sure she'd be able to wrap her hand around all the way, but for some reason she visualized it as total enclosure, with white-knuckle pressure being applied. She visualized running this hand up toward the hem of Jazmin's pants, pushing it up, revealing more and more skin. She imagined teasing herself, running her hand up instead of down, away from the true goal, deriving unexpected pleasure from the avoidance.

Still with her eyes closed, Xania continued to examine this interiorized image of Jazmin.

Her ankles were so thin, so bony, and her achilles tendons were so prominent, tapering down to the heels hidden below. Seen up close, everything directly above the sock was in vivid, almost absurd contrast to the bulky skate shoe below, and Xania felt a sudden pang of guilt, or perhaps just pathos. What right did she have to separate Jazmin from her shoes, these symbols of power--these symbols of self-possession? Maybe there were good reasons for Jazmin always wearing them. Reasons Xania could never fathom. Perhaps the delicacy of Jazmin's ankles reflected a spiritual fragility that she wanted hidden from others.

Xania, with a surge of primal lust, chose to reject these thoughts wholesale. Even immobile, Jazmin held such sway! Who would Xania be if she gave in yet again, as she always had, to Jazmin's influence? She would be regressing via inertia. She needed to break a habit. She needed to violently transform. She needed to wrest power back from the silent phantom within her, the one exerting subtle influence on her actions, her mind... and she finally knew this phantom by its name: Jazmin.

It was Jazmin who always

got away with it

, who--by luck, by constitution, or by pure force of will--always evaded moments of soul-scorching revelation, those moments of exquisite vulnerability to the world's unblinking eye. Today, however, she would be dragged into that field of beautiful, ruinous attention.

Xania had worked herself into a quasi-religious fervent, one sustained by regular spasms of carnal desire. She was on her knees, glistening with sweat, and her back arched at an extreme angle. She was wet now, wetter than she'd ever been before. She craved desperately, but in her passion had forgotten what it was she wanted. It was only then that she realized that her eyes were still closed. She opened them slowly, and saw again those delicate ankles, those huge grey shoes. Those goddamn shoes. Those goddamn, ever-present shoes, hiding what should--must--be seen. Metaphysics be damned. The time had come for the purely carnal pleasure of accrual--of a great

taking

.

Xania reached out with her right hand and grabbed Jazmin's left ankle, doing so harshly, a snarl on her face. Of course, the ankle was not glass. "Not so delicate after all," Xania whispered nastily to herself. She gripped as tightly as she could, then released and drew back, observing the white imprint of her hand on the brown skin as it slowly faded from view. Now drunk with power, Xania flashed her teeth and brought both of her hands back to the ankle. She made contact with the skin, and in doing so her right thumb grazed the top of Jazmin's sock for the first time. She ran her thumb over the tightly woven fibers extruding from the sock, lightly at first, planning a rougher handling to come--one that would, inevitably, displace that tight black sock ever so slightly from its familiar position, just enough to see a part of Jazmin's foot that had hitherto been concealed. Even still within the shoe, the sock would have received its warning, had its future foretold.

But something about physical contact with the sock quieted Xania's fervor, brought her back down to Earth. She decided she must approach her work more gently, more patiently.

She began by removing Jazmin's famous skate shoes, the ones that had always adorned and disguised her feet.

She untied their laces, relishing the moment, and when they were undone she loosened the tongue of each shoe, relishing this too. She felt a delightful, slight resistance, and she heard a soft rustle as the shoes were removed from Jazmin's feet, drifting along and away from her tight black socks.

With dreamlike slowness she saw that she now held Jazmin's empty shoes in her hands, and she stared at them in disbelief; but then, as her eyes turned to what the shoes had been hiding, the muscles in her hands faltered, or else her motor skills betrayed her, and all at once the shoes dropped to the floor and bounced gracelessly upon it.

Jazmin's black socked feet were now visible, and with her legs still crossed, her left foot hovered in the air with her right foot grounded. The outline of her toes was visible, and they seemed longer than Xania had anticipated, which gave her an immediate erotic charge. The socks clung to Jazmin's feet, and their tightness revealed something of her supple, subtle arches as well. These were slender feet, in keeping with Jazmin's build, and Xania guessed that she wore a 7. She grabbed a discarded shoe and looked inside. 7.5. Slightly longer than expected, but seeing them for the first time without such bulky shoes gave Xania an impression of daintiness--of how accustomed they were to protection.

But this was a vague impression, in keeping with the obscurity afforded by her socks. They were dark shadows laid atop more intricate form, more sensual matter. They would have to be cast aside. Illumination was needed.

And so, shaking slightly, Xania reached out to Jazmin's hovering left foot, ready to remove its sock.

A thought occurred to her as she reached. It was a strange thought, almost puritan in nature. It occurred to her that Jazmin's sock fit so snugly to her foot that it seemed somehow improper--heretical--to remove it. It occurred to her that she was about to violate the accepted reality of her world.

Almost instantaneously, however, another thought made its presence known: perhaps Jazmin's aura was

making

Xania feel this sense of guilt.

If so then it was, in the end, a useless--even counterproductive--tactic, for it managed only to generate in Xania a burning cacoethes. There was no turning back now.

She placed her index finger above Jazmin's sock, next to the outside of her ankle bone, and slowly she slid it down until her finger had slipped beneath the sock. She let her finger linger there for a moment, feeling the slight warmth of Jazmin's covered foot. Then, very slowly, she continued to push her finger down, stretching the sock's fabric. For a moment the sock stayed in place, clinging to inertia, but finally it could cling no longer, and it slipped off Jazmin's heel. A mighty resistance had given way, and now that the sock was loosely gathered underneath Jazmin's foot, exposing her bare heel, it seemed simple--suddenly

proper

--to just remove the sock entirely. Having passed beyond the curve of Jazmin's heel, it would slip off so easily.

Refusing any longer to stand on ceremony, Xania used her finger to slide the rest of the sock from Jazmin's foot and then beyond her toes. Finally--and for the very first time--she could see Jazmin's naked foot.

It was a beguiling, seductive sight. Slim and soft-looking, obviously cared for despite never being shown. The nails were unpainted and all the sexier for it, as this only emphasized how deliciously unprepared Jazmin had been for her foot to be revealed. There was a purity and innocence to its natural appearance, one made all the more evident by Jazmin's socktan.

Her foot was decidedly pale, contrasting with the honey-brown skin above; obviously Jazmin never exposed her feet to the sun, never wore sandals or flip-flops in public. The white of her foot was noticeable, yet still a gradation, technically the remotest shade of brown rather than a blindingly pale porcelain. Xania thought back to when she had gripped Jazmin's ankle--and more specifically, when she had released her hand and observed the white imprint of her hand as it faded from view. The white of Jazmin's foot existed somewhere along that fading spectrum.

Her socktan was discernible but not stark like a golfer's, and Xania couldn't help but think it had been designed (by whatever cosmic force Jazmin prayed to) not to be

too

noticeable, or at least only intermittently noticeable--so that, if need be, if it came to it, the foot might escape attention if it were bared in public or exposed at the beach; for it was not an alabaster so much as an albescent white.

This struck Xania as unfair: another way in which Jazmin had been touched by fortune.

And so she decided, then and there, that after removing Jazmin's other sock, she would take both--along with her Etnies--and toss them out the classroom window. And then she would start time again, leaving Jazmin suddenly, inconceivably barefoot, in public, for the very first time.

She needed to see Jazmin uneasy. She needed to see Jazmin embarrassed. She need to see Jazmin collapse.

So she tossed out the shoes and socks and closed the window, then returned to her seat, taking a final look at Jazmin's frozen, barefoot self. Then she started time again.

The world rushed into movement, and Xania watched as Jazmin slowly grasped her situation.

She had flexed her left foot down, surely expecting the resistance of her shoes, only to feel the tip of her toe touch the tile, and what followed was a chain-reaction of autonomic responses. Initially her lips parted, ever so slightly. Then her eyes widened. Then she gripped the desk.

She never looked down, which Xania interpreted as a sign of shock, or an attempt to wish the circumstance away by not acknowledging it--or perhaps she believed that looking down would only draw unwanted attention to her plight.

Whatever the case, she quickly uncrossed her legs and brought her feet together under her chair.

Then, in an endless cycle, her right foot would be placed on her left foot, as if to hide it, but this position would offer no cover for the right foot, so it would retreat under the left, which would of course bring the right back into vision... there was no respite from this cycle, and it played out several times, much to Xania's delight. Finally seeing the dynamism of Jazmin's delicate feet, which had always been enclosed in form-concealing sneakers, shocked Xania like she'd touched an exposed electrical wire. She felt the currency running through her, animating her body and arousing her beyond belief.

Jazmin's feet were so vulnerable-looking without her shoes. And they were moving in ways that they never had. There they were, bashfully and futilely trying to conceal each other, yet ensuring through this process only more visibility... and more movement! Jazmin's footwear had always been so sturdy that it had never given away movement from within--no sign of wiggling toes, no evidence of an involuntary flex or an urge to dangle. Now that her feet had been liberated from their rigid dwellings ("How beneficent of me!" thought Xania), they seemed unsure of how to keep composure.