Making a Scene

Did anyone really want to work at a shoe store?

Ruby thought about this often. She certainly didn't, but that seemed to be the way it worked out for her. She was the assistant manager at Green City Shoes, one of the many stores that dotted this large shopping district. She thought that rising up to management would reduce how often she had to look at people's stocking feet.

That was before the restructuring, where significantly less staff were on hand at any given time. Rather than being in the back room, counting inventory or one of her other new duties... she was at the register like any of the other teenagers who worked there. She couldn't get too far away from it to do any of the managerial duties she was assigned because then someone might have to wait fifteen seconds to pay for their shoelaces, and that was apparently unacceptable.

Ruby's head was filled with data about every brand of shoe imaginable. Some of it was corporate buzzwords that made the shoes sound exciting, as though they'd race out of the store by themselves if they didn't have the tamper-proof exploding ink-tags thoughtlessly skewered through them. Some of her knowledge was gained through customer complaints, which shoes would fall apart if they ever got wet or which ones were the latest style. All of it was entirely useless outside of this building.

The sort of person who would actually WANT to work at a shoe store... might be the sort of person who shouldn't. Foot fetishes were evidently one of the most common fetishes, but the same data suggested that incest was also a very common paraphilia. She hoped they'd somehow gotten that wrong, and accidentally sent all their surveys into the hills of Appalachia.

Someone with a foot fetish might find their tastes tested. It might be challenged at the variety of ugly specimens they would encounter through their work, or it might be extincted from massive overexposure. Ruby herself had no attraction nor revulsion to feet... but she preferred them to be hidden inside a comfortable, fashionable pair of shoes.

But for now, she didn't have to deal with anyone's feet just yet. She only wished she could get off hers.

The door opened, the electronic doorbell ringing its soft, welcoming two-toned chime. Ruby turned to the door and the entering customer. She smiled, not as a Pavlovian instinct drilled into her at the store's mandate... but because she recognized who had just entered.

"Hello, Dorothy." She said, moving away from the counter. "What can I get for you today?"

Dorothy wasn't exactly a 'friend,' but was a customer with which Ruby was casually familiar. Most people didn't buy shoes often enough to get familiar unless they were very talkative or otherwise noteworthy. While Dorothy was an attractive woman in her mid-twenties with long dusty blonde hair, this was not why Ruby remembered her. Dorothy worked at the nearby grocer, Lyman's Market, where Ruby would often buy food and other supplies after a long shift. They knew each other as well as one did when working behind a register, and occasionally commiserated about their mutual trials in their retail careers.

But this time... the shoe was on the other foot.

"Hi, Ruby." Dorothy made a small wave. She was dressed in an oversized blue windbreaker that reached a third the way down her thigh. Her bare legs stuck out below them, terminating at her slightly floppy sneakers. "I need a pair of high heels in my size. Black, if you have it."

"I'm sure we have something." Ruby stepped in closer. "Do you have a designer or style in mind?"

Dorothy shook her head. "I'll take anything that fits. I'd rather it be a closed-toe shoe so I don't have to paint my nails. I have something coming up tomorrow, and I want something to wear that's nicer than these."

"Certainly." Ruby put her hands together. "I don't remember your size. What should I look for?"

"Well... that's the thing." Dorothy held her coat closed with one hand and scratched her scalp with the other. "I think standing all day might have changed my shoe size. The pair I bought a few months ago is a little too tight to work a whole day in, but I don't know if that's just because I haven't broken them in yet. Could you measure me again so we know for sure?"

"Absolutely. Come take a seat."

They moved as a pair, as all shoes do. They sat at a measuring seats and Ruby found the steel foot measuring device. She knew this was called the Brannock Device after its inventor. One more neuron in her brain occupied with data that was useless outside of her place of work or an episode of Jeopardy.

Dorothy slipped her foot out of her shoe and placed it in the Brannock Device, pushing her heel into the molded cup at the back. Ruby looked down to the small lines on the device and found the proper measurement. She looked up.

And gasped.

Dorothy had left her legs uncrossed as she sat there. This gave Ruby a look up her coat, under which she evidently wore nothing. Ruby had seen lots of customers oblivious to their poses or lack of undergarments as they were measured.

This time, she didn't seem oblivious. Dorothy was not wearing anything under her coat... and her splayed legs let her cock hang between them like a tail. How could she not feel this? She had no skirt or panties, just the coat. She really was dressed like a flasher. This was on purpose... right?

Before this moment, Ruby had no idea that Dorothy was a futanari, one of the rare women born with penises. The word 'penis' didn't seem to do this one justice. This was a cock, flaccid and hanging like a thick banner draped across her large balls. She had never met a futanari, and she assumed the stories of their giant cocks were just unfair sexual stereotypes.

"Last time I was measured..." Dorothy spoke, trying to wrench a smile off her face. "You had me stand up to get the most accurate measurement."

Ruby looked up to Dorothy, and then back at the huge cock she had been hiding this whole time, as if she wasn't sure which one to talk to. "Yes, you should do that to be sure."

Dorothy stood from her seat, which brought her groin closer to Ruby's face. Ruby swore that it swung out and tapped her nose. She was now within centimeters of this thing, Dorothy helpfully parting the bottom of her coat to keep it exposed. Ruby just stared at it, puffing out shocked breaths. She could even see the little blue veins under the skin, sure to grow in prominence at Dorothy's urging.

"That tickles." Dorothy whispered, closing the bottom of her coat and momentarily hiding it again.

Ruby shook her head sharply, trying to remember what she was doing. She looked at the device on the floor. "You're looking for a high-heel pump in... ten and a half." She stood, nearly jumping up. "I'll... see what we have in the back."

"Thank you." Dorothy took a seat again, crossing her legs, her penis no longer visible.

Once Ruby was in the back room, and out of sight, her hand went to her chest, as if she could reach through her sternum and try to settle her pounding heart with her bare hand.

Dorothy just flashed me. She has a cock. A huge one, too. She'd never seen one that size before, not even in porn. Then again, could she be sure? How often were flaccid cocks featured in porn?

That was wrong. What Dorothy just did... she shouldn't have just pulled it out like that. If a man had done that to her, she would have bashed him with the Brannigan Bracket, or whatever it was called. She couldn't think straight. It was wrong to flash someone like that, but then again, it was also wrong to masturbate in the back room of a shoe store, but that's the shit she was currently wrapped up in, oh my god, there's not even a sink back here, she's going to know, someone's going to catch me, why can't I stop myself??

Ruby eventually returned, even more deeply flushed than before, with a box of lovely shiny black high heeled stiletto pumps with a square toe. They weren't accented with buckles or other flummery; they could almost be the platonic ideal of a formal black high heel.

Handing the box to Dorothy, Ruby stayed standing as Dorothy removed her other sneaker. "These are gorgeous." Dorothy turned the shoe over in both hands. The finish reminded her of a polished 8-ball.

"They sure are." Ruby was staring at Dorothy's crotch without meaning to. With that trench coat properly closed... she couldn't see anything. What a thing to keep hidden. It was like learning the hump on her grandmother's back was actually a scorpion tail.

Dorothy squeezed her feet into the shoes and stood, a few inches higher than before. She held her arms slightly out from her torso, palms facing down. For a moment, she held her posture like a tightrope walker.

"Are they too high?" Ruby asked, offering a hand to balance her. "I can switch them out if they are."

"I think I've got it." Dorothy started walking a little more confidently, making her way to the counter, and the tile that surrounded it. The shoes made loud clicks as she walked across the tile, almost like they were tap-dancing shoes. Someone looking at basketball shoes all the way across the store turned his head towards the source of the noise.

Dorothy nodded approvingly. These would do nicely, she thought.

Ruby circled around the counter and stood by the register. "Are you going to wear them out of here?"

"No, that's just asking for trouble." Dorothy slipped them off her feet one at a time and replaced them with her worn-out sneakers. "Haven't stepped in dog poo in ten years, so I might be due."

Ruby watched the whole thing, waiting to see if Dorothy's cock popped out from the hem of the coat again. "You're not going to wear normal socks with those shoes, right?"

"No, I won't. That would be a fashion faux pax." Dorothy answered.

They faced each other at the register. Ruby looked lost for a moment.

"How much do I owe you?" Dorothy asked.

Ruby shook awake again, grabbed her handheld scanner and pointed it at the barcode on the side of the box. She tapped a few keys. "These are ninety dollars."

"That's a good deal." Dorothy said, patting one of the many pockets in her coat. She wasn't actually sure it was a good deal.

"Well, they let me offer some small discounts here and there." She said. "It's to encourage sales for sizes or styles that don't move as much, like high heels in sizes above ten, so..."

Her sentence trailed off. Dorothy finally stopped patting her pockets, remembering where her wallet was. "Well..." She smirked. "You know what they say about women with big feet?"

Dorothy pulled back one side of her coat, not enough to expose a nipple, but enough to let her huge erection slide out from inside the coat. Turgid and pulsing with her heartbeat, a thread of precum hanging from the inside of the coat to the tip.

Ruby unabashedly stared at it. She grit her teeth behind her lips and swallowed. If she thought it looked big before...

"Yoo-hoo? Earth to Ruby?" Dorothy said, holding the credit card she had retrieved from the inside pocket of the coat, waving it like a white handkerchief. She was grinning broadly, breathing deeply... and her cheeks were starting to grow red.

But not nearly as brightly as Ruby, who felt like her face was burning. She rang the order through and returned the card to Dorothy, who tucked it, and herself, back into the coat. The stupidly long receipt emerged from the printer and Ruby handed it to Dorothy.

And then, she forgot to let go of her end of the receipt. Dorothy pulled at it, but not hard enough to tear it. Just enough to keep it taut between the two of them.

"You not ready for me to go just yet?" Dorothy asked. "You want to try to sell me some laces?"

Ruby said nothing. She didn't even think to point out that those heels didn't need laces. She relinquished the receipt and watched as Dorothy left, new box of shoes under her arm. Ruby was left behind, face still flushed, heart still thumping...

"Victor? Can you cover the register? I need to go to the bathroom."

--

Several Months Earlier...

Lyman's Market. A quiet supermarket that had so far survived the encroachment of larger market chains in the surrounding areas. When the original Lyman disappeared in 1983, the store was taken over by a trust of his descendants as they slowly passed more and more responsibilities to cronies, toadies and parasites. The market was still there, but on the inside, it was not much different than a Kroger or a Food Lion.

The décor was decidedly outdated, some walls plastered with a few cartoonish caricatures of the original Lyman, his mustache drawn as big as the bottom of a push broom. Despite the old-fashioned feel of the store, the brands were all the same one could find somewhere else. The sole distinguishing feature of Lyman's was the complimentary coffee. It wasn't great coffee, as Lyman himself would readily confess... but it was free.

There were days where standing on the tile floor for hours on end got to Dorothy. Some days, she dreamed about helping the stock boys. Getting to move about, lift heavy boxes, organize shelves that were carelessly disorganized by thoughtless customers, trying to sort through many similar products to place this properly... it didn't sound like fun, but at least they could move around. They weren't trapped in a box much smaller than the average desk. Those that complained about working in a cubicle all day got no sympathy from Dorothy.

She wondered if the stock boys had as many unpleasant interactions with customers as she did. Today, an elderly woman asked her to price-check every single item in a cart filled with stuff. She wanted to see what she really wanted and what she could do without. At least she didn't have to put them back... unless she did. She sometimes got stuck with that job as well.

The woman was polite, at least, but the customers waiting behind her would surely take it out on Dorothy, as if it was her fault that this transaction would take six times as long. This was when she was allowed to DO price checks in the first place. Sometimes, the button that said PRICE INQ. would be replaced with paper slip that said "DO NOT USE" for some unexplained reason. Apparently, price checks were a finite resource that had to be mined in some far-off country at the cost of young men's lives.

The registers were all near a big picture window. About one-third of the year, the sun would shine in over the roof of the buildings opposite the window. Another third of the time, the sun would reflect off the windows across the street and shine in that way. She fantasized about spraying their windows with hair spray, or something else to make it not so reflective. Apparently, someone who worked there had enough hours to keep that window as clean as the lens of a telescope.

Typically, foot traffic through Lyman's slowed down around 1:00PM. This meant Dorothy's mind started to wander... towards anything that wasn't this job or her current life situation.

Dorothy gazed out the window, and the gentle wave of humans that passed her by. Each of them had a unique story, but most of them seemed to be reading from the same script. Most of them looked miserable, as if they were trying to find the store that sold happiness... maybe in convenient six packs. That was a road Dorothy didn't need to go down twice.

If only something interesting would pass this window... something exciting...

Once she had this thought, a nude woman appeared behind the large window, moving right to left. She walked straight forward and looked directly ahead, as if oblivious to her nudity. Her golden blonde hair blew behind her loosely, and her breasts bounced with every long stride.

Dorothy stared out the window, rubbing one eye with her knuckle, expecting the nude woman to break up like a mirage. She was still there, still walking. What on earth was happening here?

The answer came to her when she saw someone following her... with an expensive looking camera. It looked like the kind of camera a news crew might use.

"What the hell?" Dorothy said aloud, watching as the woman and the photographer passed off the proscenium edge of her window.

"Have you never seen that?" Came a male voice to her right. It was Tom, a man of about twenty-two and one of her coworkers. Below his mandatory uniform polo, he wore unfashionable khaki cargo pants year-round and could seemingly summon anything he needed from one of the many pockets.

"Have I ever seen a woman walk by that window naked?" Dorothy clarified the posed question. "No, I haven't seen that."

Tom scoffed with a smile. He looked like he was about to tell her about the local cryptid, a piece of Lyman's folklore that had somehow passed her by. "Sometimes between 1:00 and 2:00PM on Wednesdays... that photographer and a nude model walk past that window. It's almost as regular as a train."

Dorothy looked out the empty window, as if it would happen again, like a restless tiger circling his enclosure. She used to not be available to work Wednesdays because that was the day set aside to meet with her probation officer. One more reason to hate her fell on the top of the pile.

"Are they shooting... porn?" Dorothy whispered the last word, unsure if a customer would pop up out of nowhere like a groundhog.

"They are, evidently." Tom shrugged. "I've never looked them up, since it's not really my kind of thing."

"Naked women aren't your thing?"

"Don't get me wrong." Tom put his hand over his heart, pointing with his first two fingers, as he did when he wanted to indicate his sincerity. "If I'm at the register when this happens, I gaze out there and take in each model's unique beauty. But it's weird, isn't it? Just... showing if off like that? Don't women like to be mysterious?"

"If those are just porn stars and not just misguided wanna-be models... I don't think they want or need the same thing normal people need."

The conversation about Internet porn thankfully dried up before the manager, Frank, came down to bring Dorothy up to the office to close her bank for the day. She hung up her name tag on the peg board, as there was no locker room in this location. She never needed the name tag anywhere else. She folded her green smock to take home to launder.

Before she could escape, Frank asked her if she could discuss something. For once, it wasn't about anything she did wrong. Frank was asking for her opinion about a dispute between two different keyholders who had differing opinions about how something went down. He wondered if she was a witness to any part of this exchange.

The men at Lyman's fought over some picayune detail of their jobs that didn't make a damn bit of difference. (Tom insisted he avoided such conflicts by always being prepared.) The women gossiped and told tall tales about each other behind their backs while calling each other besties and organizing nail dates.

And as she always seemed to be... Dorothy was stuck between the two.

That night, she looked at herself in her full-length mirror. She was definitely 'full-length,' with a substantial penis hanging between her legs. As it was, this extension only served to fuel her libido fruitlessly. Her life wasn't nearly in a place where she could begin a courtship. She didn't even want the semi-anonymous relief of casual sex, and all the pitfalls that could bring. Most of it seemed latched onto the culture of alcohol consumption, but those days were in her past... hopefully forever.

All she really wanted was a new damn job.

--

The sight of the nude woman followed by the cameraman stuck with Dorothy. She never fantasized about sexy stuff at work. If she became 'inspired,' then everyone would see it, lifting up her green smock like a drawbridge. Nobody in this town even knew she was a futa, and that was how she liked it. She was not going to get tangled up in anything until she had her life more organized. First cast the beam out of thine own eye and so forth.