For a few seconds, neither of us moves.
I’m still kneeling by her chair, one hand half-raised above my lap. My wet socks are cooling against the floorboards. My face feels bare where her foot was resting a moment ago, and every breath still brings back the sour warmth of her sock.
Morgan lets go of the seat and draws a long breath. When she lowers the hand from her chest, her fingers are steady. Her eyes stay on me, as if I might vanish back into the forest if she blinks.
“Are you alright?”
“I think I just got high off your laundry.” My voice comes out flat, slightly furred at the edges. “What the hell was that?”
“The door,” she says. “Opening a way like that, holding two places together, usually leaves a weight behind my eyes for three days. As if the air is too thick to breathe.” She looks down at her foot, tucked back beneath the hem of her dress, then up at me. “It’s gone. All of it. It went straight out of me when you stopped fighting it.”
I don’t remember fighting it. I remember turning my head, and the toes staying where they were.
I rub my cheek with the back of my hand. The skin is still warm.
“Right,” I say. “Glad I could save you some paracetamol.”
She laughs, small and breathless. It makes her look younger, closer to the woman who collapsed on Lea’s stairs over a stuck sofa.
“I didn’t know it would feel like that,” she admits. “The book only says that the burden passes. It doesn’t say how fast.”
“Did the book mention what happens to the person on the floor? For a minute there I couldn’t remember my own postcode.”
“I think that was my fault.” She leans forward, elbows on her knees. “The candles, the forest. That was a large working, and it was fresh. You took all of it at once.”
I shift my weight. My knees complain against the wood. The leaf from the forest has finally come away from my ankle and lies crumpled beside my shin.
“So it wouldn’t always be like being hit with a space heater?”
“I don’t think so. Nobody else has done anything of that scale tonight. What they carry is smaller. Older. The ordinary tiredness that gathers over weeks and never quite clears.” She glances at the closed door. Beyond it, someone drops something metal in the kitchen, and there’s a burst of cheering. “With them, I’d expect less of a rush. Perhaps you’ll mostly just feel… us.”
I look at the underside of the small table. A web of old scratches runs near the joint of one leg.
“In the living room,” I say.
“Yes.”
“Under the table with the crisps and the plastic spider.”
“We’d clear a space for you.” She says it with complete sincerity, as if the floor plan is the main obstacle here. “We’d pull the chairs in. You wouldn’t have to say anything or do anything. Just stay beneath us while we finish the evening.”
I sit back on my heels. The warm fog has gone, and what’s left is far too clear. I am twenty-six years old, wearing bent felt cat ears, kneeling on the floor of a woman I mostly know from furniture and outerwear, while she politely asks whether five of her friends can use me as a footstool for the rest of the party.
If I go back out there and sit on a chair, I’ll spend the next two hours trying to think of normal things to say to women who can walk into a forest through a bedroom door. I’ll hold my glass too tightly. I’ll wonder whether I’m talking too much, or not enough, until it’s late enough to leave.
Or I can lie down in the dark, where nobody is looking at my face, and let them keep me.
“Does Lea know what it’s going to look like?” I ask.
“She knows what the text says. None of us knew until two minutes ago whether it was more than a theory.”
She holds out a hand. Her palm is cool and dry, nothing like the heat that came through her sock. I let her pull me up, then let go as soon as I have my balance.
“If I hate it,” I say, smoothing down my top, “I’m crawling out and taking the rest of the wine with me.”
Morgan smiles, warm and unhurried.
“Fair enough.”
When we come back into the living room, the woman with the silver cheekbones is halfway through demonstrating how someone at her office carries a laptop. She stops with both hands flat in the air. In the kitchen doorway, the bride freezes with a bottle in one hand and a lighter in the other.
Within three seconds, the only sound left is the rain against the window and a synth track pulsing from the speaker on the bookshelf.
Five pairs of eyes move from Morgan to me, then down to my muddy, leaf-stained socks.
I’ve spent most of my adult life avoiding the exact moment when a room goes quiet because I’ve walked into it. My stomach turns over, slowly.
“It works,” Morgan says.
Lea lets out a breath that’s halfway between a laugh and a hiccup. She’s holding a fresh glass of wine by the stem. Her wings shift behind her, shedding a tiny white feather onto the rug.
“Hang on,” Jules says, setting her plate on the edge of the table. Her red horns tilt as she looks at Morgan. “Properly? Like the book said?”
“All of it. The door’s already gone from my head.”
Anna stares at Morgan’s face as if checking for symptoms, then looks at me with sudden, unnerving respect. Or curiosity. Possibly the expression people reserve for flat-pack furniture that has assembled itself.
“Vicky’s agreed to let us try it together,” Morgan adds.
Lea steps forward. For a terrible second I think she’s going to hug me again, or ask if I’ve lost my mind. Instead, she reaches up and straightens my bent cat ear.
“Are you sure, love?” It’s the voice she used when the photocopier ate my scarf on my third day at work. “You don’t have to do anything weird just because Morgan got excited about an old diary.”
“It wasn’t a diary,” Morgan says, already moving a stack of napkins to clear the middle of the long table.
“I saw the trees, Lea.”
Lea’s hand stops near my cheek. Then her mouth softens. “Oh. She did the forest.”
“My socks are wet,” I tell her, as if that’s the main grievance.
“Yeah, she loves doing the forest,” Jules says, dragging two chairs over from the wall. The legs scrape across the floorboards. “Very dramatic. Did you get the bit with the stream?”
“I got mud.”
That breaks whatever solemn spell was threatening to settle over the room. The bride laughs, gathers up yards of bloodstained tulle and pulls a low stool out from the corner. Anna disappears down the hall and comes back with the two chairs from the candlelit room, including the one I was sitting on five minutes ago. The woman with the silver cheekbones, whose name I finally hear someone call as Clara, sweeps a handful of fallen almond fingernails off the floor beneath the table so I won’t lie on them.
It’s horribly efficient. Within a minute, the buffet table has become a dining table. Five chairs and a stool surround it.
None of them are for me.
Lea grabs a dark green velvet cushion from the sofa, crouches beside the head of the table and tosses it underneath. It lands near the middle.
“For your head,” she says, looking up at me. “The floor’s draughty near the skirting.”
“Thanks.” My voice sounds as if it’s coming from the next flat.
Everyone tries very hard not to stare while I get down on my hands and knees. Jules pours wine into three glasses at once. Clara adjusts a candle that doesn’t need adjusting. Lea looks at me, then at the cushion, then at her own hands, as if she can’t decide which of them she’s allowed to watch. Only Morgan watches me openly, holding the back of her chair as I duck beneath the wooden apron.
It’s darker under here than I expected. The orange lights from the window only reach the edges. The middle is a brownish gloom that smells of floor polish, old wood and the salt of crisps drifting down from above.
I roll onto my back and draw my knees up a little so I fit between the heavy square legs. The cushion smells of Lea’s vanilla and sofa dust. My cat-ear headband scrapes against the wood until I give up, slide it off and put it beside my head.
Above me, the underside of the tabletop is unfinished pine, pocked with staples, with an old grey manufacturer’s stamp I can’t read in the dark. Past my feet, the crossbar between the end legs is worn pale and smooth. Years of other people’s feet. I’m lying exactly where they usually go.
Chairs scrape. One after another, from all sides, closing me in.
The space shrinks at once. A curtain of bloodstained tulle drops down on my left and brushes my knee. Opposite it, a black hem hangs above grey woollen socks; beside them, bare calves disappear into slouchy cream knits. On my right, near my chest, Lea’s gold dress and her white socks with their fraying stars. Across from her, dark green socks below the cuffs of Anna’s trousers. Up by my head, where Morgan has taken the end chair, the familiar black hem and black trainer socks.
For a few seconds, nobody touches me. Twelve feet stand on the floorboards around my ribs, my hips, my shins, like a very strange fence.
“Is she alright down there?” Anna’s voice comes through the wood, muffled.
“I’m fine,” I tell the staples. “Just admiring the carpentry.”
Laughter ripples over the table. Jules takes it as permission.
One thick, ribbed grey sock lifts from the floor and settles on my stomach.
I tense. Half of me is braced for the wave of heat that knocked my thoughts loose in the back room.
Nothing happens.
Or rather, nothing magical happens. There might be the faintest hum beneath my skin, like holding a battery that’s nearly dead. It doesn’t cloud my head. It doesn’t blur the wood above me.
What I feel is weight: the solid press of Jules’s foot flattening my top against my ribs, and the warmth of wool that has done a day in boots and an evening on warm floorboards.
Before I can decide whether I’m disappointed or relieved, her other foot joins it, crossing loosely at the ankle over my navel.
Then the rest of them come.
It isn’t a ritual. Nobody chants. It’s more like a tide coming in. A rustle of fabric above, a couple of quiet sighs, and the space around me fills, foot by foot, until there’s nothing of me left uncovered.
Tessa’s feet arrive first, narrow and slightly clammy through patterned nylon, sliding across my thighs. Her toes curl once against my jeans, searching for a soft spot, and find one. Clara’s heavy cream socks plant themselves across my shins and pin my legs to the floor. Lea’s star-patterned socks nudge against my ribs, careful, almost polite, keeping most of their weight back.
Then Anna pushes in from the other side. Her green socks settle over my collarbone and shoulder, and as her trouser hem rides up, the warm arch of her right foot slips sideways and comes to rest against my neck.
I swallow. My throat moves against the sweat-warmed cotton of her arch.
Morgan comes last.
One black sock slides beneath the edge of the cushion and braces against the crown of my head. The other lifts and settles across my cheek and the bridge of my nose, in the exact place she claimed ten minutes ago.
I lie very still under all of them.
My brain is wide awake. There is no fog to hide in this time. I am lying on the floor of a two-bedroom flat while six women use me as a shared footstool, and every breath brings me the end of their Friday.
Morgan’s sock first: the same lived-in, sour trainer heat as before, thicker now, with my face trapped between her sole and Anna’s ankle. When I turn a fraction to breathe through my mouth, I get Anna instead, warmer, humid at the heel, a trace of leather insole and a kitchen she’s spent the whole evening in. Under it all, rising from my chest, the heavier smell of Jules’s wool, and something sweet and stale from Tessa’s tights.
Above the table, someone lets out a long, shameless groan.
“Oh, fuck off,” Jules says. Her heel digs deeper into my stomach as she slouches back. “Is that what that is?”
“Give it a minute,” Morgan says.
“I’ve had a stiff neck since Tuesday,” Anna says. “Since I did that ward for my sister’s flat.” Her toes flex against my jaw, dragging the fabric over my skin. “It’s just… melting.”
“Sorry, Vic,” Lea says to the tabletop. Her left foot finally gives up being polite and settles its full weight beside my breastbone. “Are we squashing you?”
“I’m alive,” I manage. It comes out muffled, because Morgan’s toes shift over my upper lip when I speak.
“Good,” Jules says. I can hear the grin. “Don’t go anywhere. Somebody pass the crisps.”
What surprises me most isn’t that they do it. It’s how fast they stop talking about it.
For maybe two minutes, there are a few more murmured comparisons. Clara’s wrists don’t ache. The bride, whose name turns out to be Tessa, says she feels as if she’s had an eight-hour nap. Someone clinks a bottle against a glass. A bowl scrapes across the pine six inches above my nose.
Then Clara goes straight back to the man at her office and his laptop.
“No, listen,” she says, somewhere above my shins. “He holds it like a cafeteria tray. Both thumbs on the trackpad. Every time he walks past my desk, he opens seventeen browser tabs.”
Jules barks a laugh.
Down in the dark, her heel punches into my solar plexus with it, then settles back, heavier than before. Tessa leans forward for a napkin, and her feet slide an inch higher up my thighs.
Nobody apologises. Nobody looks down.
I wait for the familiar tightness in my chest, the reflex that tells me I’m being weird, or doing it wrong, or taking up the wrong kind of space.
It doesn’t come.
The conversation rolls on, from Clara’s colleague to a disastrous flat viewing Jules went to on Wednesday. Clara’s foot starts tapping against my shin in time with the music. Lea’s toes rub back and forth along my ribs, warming themselves, or me; I can’t tell which. When Lea makes a dry comment about estate agents and everyone laughs, I feel the joke before I hear it: Lea’s feet pressing into my side, Anna’s arch flexing against my pulse, Morgan’s toes curling against my nose as she chuckles.
I’m right in the middle of them. Closer to them than I’ve been to anyone in months.
And I don’t have to say a single clever thing to stay here. All that’s required of me is to lie still, breathe the warm, salty air beneath the table, and let them rest.
“What about Sunday?” Tessa asks after a while. Her right foot lifts from my thigh, rubs the back of her other calf, and drops onto my hipbone. “Are we still doing the woods near Finchley, or is it going to be a mud bath?”
“Mud bath,” Jules says. “Bring the big boots. Actually—” Her top foot uncrosses and plants itself flat on my stomach, spreading the woollen warmth wider across my middle. “Does this mean Vicky’s coming on Sunday?”
My heart gives a small, ridiculous thump against Lea’s heel.
So that’s what Sunday is.
“Wait until we’re back at mine afterwards,” Morgan says. Her voice floats down from the head of the table while her sole slides half an inch lower, until the soft pad of her big toe sits over the tip of my nose. “There’s no sense dragging her through a bog at seven in the morning when she can be here with a blanket and the radiator on when we get back.”
Nobody asks me which I’d prefer.
Against my ribs, Lea’s foot goes still.
Earlier tonight, I sat on the arm of that sofa and wondered how long it takes to get to the part where someone mentions Sunday and nobody has to explain. About an hour, apparently. If you’re prepared to lie down for it.
“God, yes,” Anna says. She shifts in her chair to reach for her wine, and her left foot, the one resting on my collarbone, slides up until the heel is wedged beneath my chin.
The green sock is hot and fuzzy from washing, and smells of a long day on her feet. The cuff presses against my lower lip. It’s an awkward angle; her ankle is twisted to keep the heel where my neck curves down to the cushion.
Without thinking about it, without anyone asking, I tilt my chin up and turn my head a fraction to the left.
It opens a neat hollow between my jaw and my throat. Anna’s foot sinks into it with a small, contented flex of her toes, her damp arch flattening against my skin. Morgan’s sock settles more securely across my cheek.
Above the table, Anna doesn’t even pause on her way to the cheese board. She hums, a soft, unconscious note of approval, and asks Lea if there’s any of the ginger rum left.
In the warm, close dark under the pine, I close my eyes, let the cotton and the wool fill my lungs, and listen to them plan the weekend.
At the head of the table, a pencil begins to scratch.