Here's one I just hammered out. For those counting, this is my 4th story so far, and a break from my 'Coming to his senses' series (which is actually all females tickled, despite the silly title.)
I hope you enjoy this one. And no offence is meant to anyone.
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Wild hen’s nights were an almost unbreakable tradition among women in the town of Northam, and when it came time for Michelle’s wedding to Dave her friends were determined that this would be no exception.
Even in a town as small as Northam, with its one pub, parks and mini-golf centre, the night had been a rollicking success. A ‘piss up’ of the highest order had been carried out, with the result that by 1A.M. all the girls were well and truly drunk, and even the oppressive summer heat could do nothing to ruin the festivities.
Michelle had had the time of her life, and she was certain that all her friends had felt much the same. At 22, she had returned home after a stint at university in Sydney, and was glad to find all of her closest friends from school waiting for her. As they now sat, huddled together in the small lounge room, discussing the kind of ribald things women only talk about when well and truly drunk, she cast her eye over them. It was a small group, but they were as close knit as they came.
There was Katrina, her oldest and dearest friend. They had met when they were just ten, Katrina already sporting braces and with a face full of freckles that always made it seem like someone had had a bit of fun with a pen whilst she was asleep. That was twelve years ago though, and Katrina had certainly blossomed. Her freckles had gone, thankfully, her skin was still fair, and her figure was to die for. Even Michelle sometimes found herself envying her redheaded friend and her newfound charms. 5’5” and very fit, Katrina was the beauty that had been found in the most unlikely of places.
Jackie was quite different in features, but no less attractive in her own way. Taller and much heavier set, she was as strong and wilful as any of the town’s men. She wasn’t fat, but she was far from thin, and fiercely proud of it, to the point of good-naturedly teasing her thinner and more conventionally beautiful friends. Her sense of humour was her greatest feature, and she had always been the perpetual clown throughout Michelle’s school days.
Sitting bemusedly on the rug adjacent to the bride was Christine, a great girl Michelle had met at university who could, with her glasses and neat hair, only be described as pleasantly ‘bookish’. A clever girl, who at the moment was displaying none of her trademark smarts after demolishing almost an entire bottle of bourbon.
Jane was a real girl next door type, the plain tomboy that had grown into a reluctant beauty. Her rolled up jeans, flannelette shirts and habitually bare feet couldn’t hide the pretty visage behind the slightly rough exterior, and Jane was as much a vision as any of her friends. Even now, in the snazzy new dress Katrina had picked out for her for the night’s earlier escapades, she looked both radiant and embarrassed. As if in rebellion, she had been the first to kick her heels off, and even now her bare feet rested wilfully on the coffee table.
Not that Michelle was any frump, she told herself with barely a hint of modesty. She was 5’1”, but no little girl, as her league of bewildered ex-boyfriends could attest to. With raven black hair and piercing green eyes that men seemed to drown in, she was at the very least able to hold her own. And she knew it. She was petite, but she was feisty, and packed a mighty wallop. Her friends had at first been startled when she brought Dave, the debonair accountant, home with her to meet the family and announce they were getting married. He was, they thought, her complete and total opposite – shy and almost amazingly self-effacing. But opposites attract, and Michelle and David were in love to the highest degree. When they eventually did split, it was 60 years later, thanks to the sweet embrace of death. But that was all ahead of her.
And then….well, then there was Clare. Michelle wasn’t quite sure why they had invited Clare. Well, actually she was very sure, but the town’s general way of dealing with Clare was pretending not to know what she was reluctant to admit she knew. Clare had arrived in the town some two years earlier, and worked in the general store. She had become a kind of surrogate friend to all the girls through some means or other, and even if they weren’t particularly close to her she had become a regular fixture at every social event the girls held. Of course, no one really felt particularly close to Clare, not in the way any of them were with each other. This had a lot to do with her habitually cautious nature, but much more to do with the fact that Clare had never spoken a word in the entire two years any of the girls had known her. In fact, as far as they knew Clare had never spoken a word in her whole life. Clare was a mute. Or, as one might even more offensively put it, ‘dumb’.
Her silent beauty and prim and proper attire showed a young girl making the best of life despite the poor hand she had been dealt. She had, through whatever accident of nature or of life she had incurred, lost any ability to use her vocal chords, not just depriving her off speech but of any ability to make any sound with her mouth at all. The girls of course new this and took every opportunity to treat Clare like any one of them, and hence her invite tonight. It didn’t matter to them that Clare had never uttered a word, and never would.
Clare was, Michelle thought, probably the least likely of—
“Eeep!”
Michelle’s train of thought hit a rather sturdy wall as she yelped involuntarily. Jackie had been giving her one of her famous relaxing massages for the past five minutes, but had just ended her reverie with a quick tickle on her right foot.
“Falling asleep there, Cinderella?” the larger girl taunted.
Michelle jerked her small bare feet away, sitting up. “Piss off.”
Katrina, sitting next to her on the couch, laughed. “Ooh, is the big grown up bride still a little ticklish? Big girl like you?”
Michelle’s pride demanded a witty insult, but whatever it was died on her lips. “Well, not as much as HAhaha.” The skilful redhead had dug her fingertips into her friend’s slim midriff. Michelle squirmed ticklishly, already laughing hard. She cursed her choice of dress tonight, which left her sensitive midriff bare as Katrina’s thin fingers wrung ticklish laughter out of her, effortlessly flitting across her nerve endings.
“Hahahaha- you-heha-bitch! Hahahaha” she managed, struggling harder to push her friend away, only to find Jackie seizing her wrists. The bigger girl was much stronger and held her effortlessly, the devilish grin on her face looking much more comfortable than the strained, tortured one on Michelle’s face as she guffawed in earnest. Her waist was trim, honed by years of gym work, but seemingly as ticklish now as it had ever been.
Tears had begun to well up in her eyes, her laughter ringing in her own ears, frenzied and agonisingly honest. The tiny girl hated being tickled, both because she was so utterly ticklish and because it seemed in some way to reinforce that Michelle the woman was still the little girl she struggled so hard to appear not to be. She was helpless, and with Jackie holding her arms easily she was fully immobile. Looking appealingly at the other three girls for help, her heart sank, as she saw Christine smiling evilly and Jane doing likewise. Jane was of more immediate concern, however, as she had cunningly taken up residence at the floor in front of the couch, her hands even now moving toward Michelle’s bare feet.
The tomboy’s eyes gleamed. “Bridal tickles!” she taunted, and then grabbed Michelle’s right ankle and scribbled her fingers over the smooth, sensitive sole. Michelle’s frenzied laughter went up an octave. Her feet were always as impressively ticklish as anywhere else on her small person, but the pedicure she had that morning in anticipation of the wedding had if anything heightened the feeling. Her feet were small, size 4 (Aus sizing, just imagine some small feet), but thin and soft as a newborn child’s. She had kicked off her shoes, along with the others, as soon as they had returned home after the pub and this left her feet terrifyingly vulnerable. Barefoot and ticklish as hell, she had no defence against the fingertips that stroked her sensitive soles, turning her normal feisty and stubborn self into a giggling wreck.
Both the tickling on her feet and the tickling on her sides was bad enough, but together it was a new level of hysteria. Michelle was laughing so hard her stomach hurt, and her bladder felt fit to burst. She was spared this humiliation however, as at that moment Jackie chose to let go of the smaller girl’s arms.
Through her own ticklish haze Michelle saw that Christine had thankfully chosen that moment to join in the fun, and in a move more playful than an attempt to help her friend, had proceeded to dig her own small hands into Jackie’s ample sides.
Jackie was obviously nowhere near as ticklish as Michelle, but she reacted ticklishly enough, laughing reluctantly and already clawing at the bespectacled girl behind her back. Christine’s tenuous footing on the end of the couch was lost as Jackie grabbed her, the larger girl softly but nonetheless directly propelling her to the ground. Facedown.
Jackie sat over her smaller captive, laughing in mock revenge, and began wiggling her large fingers in the hollows of Christine’s armpits. The effect was almost instantaneous. Despite her most valiant efforts to keep a straight face, Chris was soon overcome with laughter. She struggled under the larger girl, but was helpless to do anything but take the ticklish onslaught. She banged her right hand against the ground in frustration, serving only to make her armpits more vulnerable and heightening the already impressive display of laughter in the room.
Michelle herself had taken her opportunity and begun to tickle back. She knew from long experience that Katrina was every bit as ticklish as she was, and as she lightly scratched the redhead’s trim tummy they were both in hysterics. Neither girl’s part in the tickling struggle was helped by Jane, who had begun to tickle Katrina’s large, delicate size 8’s as well as the continued feathering she was giving to Michelle’s sensitive toes.
The fair redhead was laughing so much she had flushed a deep pink, and tears were rolling down her face. Michelle was not far off. Both girls were tickling each other senseless, flailing and belly laughing whilst comically clawing at the other and trying in vain to defend their own tickled parts.
The humour was not lost on Jane, tormenting the pristine feet of her friends with consummate skill and a fair slab of glee. It was, then, a bit of a shock when both Katrina and Michelle suddenly stopped tickling each other and suddenly allied against her. In a second they were off the couch and on her, the tomboy already laughing as female fingers deftly probed her upper body, whilst a smaller pair of hands went to work on her feet.
Jane was embarrassed, but quite as ticklish as all of them. Even her feet, which she had told herself had toughened due to her habit of going barefoot, were excruciatingly tickly and more so due to the pedicure she had also had that morning. Jane contorted into spasms of ticklish abandon, head rolling, and mouth open in a perpetual laugh. Despite her predicament she still pursued a policy of attack as the best defence, wildly attempting to tickle her captors between her own bouts of laughter.
And so the girls were one, big ticklish mess.
In what seemed like ages to Christine, trapped under the bulk of Jackie and laughing into the carpet as hard as any of the others, but what was actually only about twenty minutes, everyone was tickled until, exhausted, they finally reached a mutual conclusion.
Free of each other, they lay panting on the carpet, residual giggles petering out into amused silence.
“God, I haven’t been tickled like that since boarding school” Christine said.
“I didn’t know I still had it in me” Katrina replied, smirking, still looking flushed but less so now.
“God I hate it” Michelle began, and the others laughed.
“At least we all got it, Mik, can’t say fairer than that” Katrina mocked, in a bad impersonation of their old school principal.
“Well, not all of us,” Jackie muttered, gesturing toward Clare, who seemed to be making rather a nervous attempt to pretend to be asleep “Clare missed out.” She grinned.
All eyes turned toward the silent girl. Michelle wasn’t sure…tickling a mute? Was that…alright?
But Katrina and Jackie had already stalked forward, hyena like, and were now sizing up their prey. Katrina had taken off her shoes like the rest of the girls, returning home to the hot house after the exuberance of the pub earlier on. She sat huddled up in the old rocking chair, pretending to be asleep but quite obviously awake and listening, her bare feet pulled up beside her in a futile attempt to hide them. In effect, whilst they were not accessible from the front, a person reaching around the side and under the arm of the chair could have full play over her naked soles, and she would in fact be at a disadvantage, unable to move them. This was exactly how the girls liked it.
In a flash, Jackie had secured her arms, much like she had done to Michelle. Clare looked up, her sleep fakery forgotten now. Katrina was at the side of the chair, and had full reign over her bare soles, which were partly wedged between the gap in the arm, upturned and vulnerable. She smiled.
Michelle was unsure as to whether this was exactly kind, though after her ordeal it seemed fair enough in a way. She was also vaguely intrigued…how would a person who could make no sound react to being tickled? She couldn’t laugh...but…the possibilities were evilly intriguing. And Clare was mute, she couldn’t exactly complain. Clare was mute. She couldn’t talk.
At least, as far as they knew. And, as Clare and only Clare could tell them, this was not very far at all. As far as they knew, Clare was a hopeless case who through the charity of old Mr. Winton had been given a token job at the general store and who supported herself quite well. The townspeople made allowances for the fact she couldn’t speak, and she got on almost as well as any of the young women in the room that night.
What they didn’t know, and what nobody but Clare knew, was that she was not the poor ‘disabled’ country girl they all took her for. Clare had come to Northam two years earlier, an aspiring novelist and method actor who saw no better way to research and write her not-so-subtle fictitious critique of the dying Australian country town than to live in one. Improbably, she had settled in Northam, determined to glean from its inhabitants every miniscule detail, which she would then pour into her slanderous opus at night, a book that was in its own way so eloquently treacherous that ‘My Life In Hicksville, The End Of The Universe’ would surely be the recipient of every literary prize the nation had to offer once it reached publication, and it’s author escaped to the civilisation of inner city Melbourne.
Clare, the oddly pretty but homely shop worker was in fact a sophisticated university graduate, prior to her ‘undercover’ stint more accustomed to wearing designer outfits than the understated dresses she used as her part of her cover here.
Michelle whispered to the girls that they should go easy on her, just tickle her feet, at least to start off. She wasn’t quite sure why she said this, but later she would realise that it was only to save some sort of face. She was intrigued by the prospect of tickling a silent person, even though the political correctness of the idea gnawed at her. She was even helping Katrina tickle her feet, securing one ankle with her hand and leaving the other poised over a bare sole, ready to tickle.
Clare’s mind was abuzz with panic, as she frantically tried to fortify herself against what she knew was coming. She had been ticklish, she told herself, but that was a long time ago. Surely someone as successful and devious as herself could not still be. That was kid’s stuff. It was the realm of these silly country girls, not a sophisticate city-dweller like her.
By the time Katrina and Michelle started stroking her soles, she almost believed it. She was strong, she told herself, and she could handle anything.
Katrina started her fingers scurrying all over the flawless flesh of Clare’s tender soles. Michelle did likewise. They were both slow at first, but Clare knew this was only the beginning. She was unnerved to find her body already tensing; the odd feeling of electricity she dimly remembered flickering across the skin of her feet.
She concentrated harder.
Michelle had begun tickling slightly faster, brushing the tips of her fingers nimbly over the bottoms of Clare’s feet - now under her toes, now her soles.
Clare was appalled to find her resolve wavering. She gritted her teeth. DON’T LAUGH, she screamed inwardly at herself.
Katrina started tickling a little quicker too; covering the whole of her left foot with quick little strokes.
Clare had set her jaw, but already she could feel the urge to laugh bubbling up inside her. Her eyes were squeezed shut, her body held rigid. But it seemed to do nothing to lessen the ticklish sensations playing across the bottoms of her sensitive feet. YOU CAN’T LAUGH.
Desperately, she willed herself not to laugh, to not be ticklish. She tried to concentrate, to think of anything but the hands making a mockery of her resolve. She thought of the book she was writing, her literary success, how well received it would be. Her thoughts of glory and fame. Prestige, all won by her hard work undercover. IT WILL ALL BE FOR NOTHING IF YOU LAUGH. They will find out!
The tickling was only intensifying, the two girls at her feet noticing that she was obviously trying to block them out. Clare bit down on her tongue.
She was not used to going barefoot, her feet were overly sensitive, and she had bared them only to keep with what the others had done. Like one of her ticklers before her, Clare cursed herself for removing her shoes. But she knew this was stupid, if her feet were still this ticklish then every inch of her was undoubtedly still sensitive. Oh why, why the fuck did she have to be ticklish? It had all been so perfect
Her inner resolve shattered, Clare was still holding on, but only just. Even as she was beginning to give up, both Michelle and Katrina began tickling under her toes, and she lost it. And suddenly, everything was lost.
“HAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHA!!!!!!!!” she almost screamed, the laughter that had been trapped inside of her for what seemed like forever finally unleashed.
The room went quiet. All eyes were on her. The tickling stopped. The girls stared at her, stunned.
Jackie was the first to pick her jaw up off the floor. “What….what….what the hell?”
Michelle was just as surprised. “She…you…she can talk? What…how…?”
Just as quickly, their surprise turned to anger, shock to suspicion.
Clare was desperately trying to save face, shaking her head and keeping her mouth shut. But it was no use.
Jackie was, of course, the first to react. “You were just pretending?” she began angrily.
Clare shook her head.
“Don’t give me that shit! We know!”
Katrina grabbed her foot, “So, your toes are ticklish? Let’s see if we can’t get something out of you!”
Both she and Michelle started raking Clare’s bare soles, paying particular attention to underneath the traitor’s delicate toes.
Her strength was lost, and now Clare could only maintain her silence for a few pathetic seconds. Soon she was howling with laughter, shaking her head. It wasn’t like before, when the tickling had been subdued, almost playful. This was even more torturous, and each stroke had only one goal. It tickled more than she had ever been tickled before in her life, and she was reduced to a hysterical mess just as the others had been. They didn’t stop there though; they tickled and tickled until she was forced to start talking.
“HAHSTOP! STOP! HEHEHE! PLEASE!!!”
But they didn’t stop.
“Ah, so that’s getting to you is it, you little faker? Tell us what the hell you’re playing at?!!!” Jackie began angrily digging her fingers into her thin waist, eliciting further guttural laughter and more squealing from the besieged woman. When Jane began working her fingers away under her armpits, Clare simply cracked.
“HAHAHAHA I’M HAHAHAHA CAN’T HAHAHAHA STANDHEEEEE HEEEEE HEEEEE IT!!! STOP!!! I’M HAHA OH GOD HAHAHAHA I’M HEEEH AN UNDERCOVER REPORTER!!!!!” It was well meant, even if it wasn’t strictly true.
She had expected them to stop there, but the girl’s resolve was admirable. They tickled on and on, even the meek Christine getting in on the action and tickling her navel as well, eliciting an even deeper depth to her already guttural laughter. She was helpless.
By the first-half hour of this torture, she would have told them everything, if only she could form words in between the paroxysms of involuntary laughter. By the end of the first hour, she would have confessed to anything they put in front of her.
But her tormenters were not interested in confessions anymore, they only wanted her to laugh. And laugh she did, until her throat felt raw, her stomach ached, and she emptied her bladder all over the chair. But still, they did not stop tickling.
It was all gone. Two years work up in smoke because of something as pathetic as a feathery feeling across her soles. In some deep recess of her head Clare cursed herself, but she was barely capable of thinking of anything else but the torturous tickling racking her entire sensitive body. Soon, all traces of thought were lost to her.
It was driving her insane, she couldn’t stand it, and yet she was as powerless to stop reacting and cease laughing as she was to get them off her. Her body was contorted in convulsions of pure laughter, and she was nothing more than a receptor to the horrible ticklish sensations that covered her whole person.
In the end, they finally did stop, throwing her out shortly after dawn. She was a damp, dishevelled mess, still barefoot as she stood in the centre of the country road, panting heavily but still giggling unwillingly. She couldn’t go back to the town, the news would travel fast, and the townspeople would want revenge. At the very least. More likely they would want to extract some of the torture that had broken her in the first place. Her head swam at the idea. She couldn’t even return to her room to collect the beginnings of her book. She was done here, that was for certain. Her bare soles were still tingling, but she forced herself to begin the trek to the nearest bus stop, miles out of town.
It was a long walk. She resolved to think about her choice of character more carefully next time, if there was a next time. Or at the very least, she thought, she would keep her shoes on.
The sun was coming up, the already oppressive heat increasing as it did. It was going to be another scorcher in the small town of Northam.
I hope you enjoy this one. And no offence is meant to anyone.
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Wild hen’s nights were an almost unbreakable tradition among women in the town of Northam, and when it came time for Michelle’s wedding to Dave her friends were determined that this would be no exception.
Even in a town as small as Northam, with its one pub, parks and mini-golf centre, the night had been a rollicking success. A ‘piss up’ of the highest order had been carried out, with the result that by 1A.M. all the girls were well and truly drunk, and even the oppressive summer heat could do nothing to ruin the festivities.
Michelle had had the time of her life, and she was certain that all her friends had felt much the same. At 22, she had returned home after a stint at university in Sydney, and was glad to find all of her closest friends from school waiting for her. As they now sat, huddled together in the small lounge room, discussing the kind of ribald things women only talk about when well and truly drunk, she cast her eye over them. It was a small group, but they were as close knit as they came.
There was Katrina, her oldest and dearest friend. They had met when they were just ten, Katrina already sporting braces and with a face full of freckles that always made it seem like someone had had a bit of fun with a pen whilst she was asleep. That was twelve years ago though, and Katrina had certainly blossomed. Her freckles had gone, thankfully, her skin was still fair, and her figure was to die for. Even Michelle sometimes found herself envying her redheaded friend and her newfound charms. 5’5” and very fit, Katrina was the beauty that had been found in the most unlikely of places.
Jackie was quite different in features, but no less attractive in her own way. Taller and much heavier set, she was as strong and wilful as any of the town’s men. She wasn’t fat, but she was far from thin, and fiercely proud of it, to the point of good-naturedly teasing her thinner and more conventionally beautiful friends. Her sense of humour was her greatest feature, and she had always been the perpetual clown throughout Michelle’s school days.
Sitting bemusedly on the rug adjacent to the bride was Christine, a great girl Michelle had met at university who could, with her glasses and neat hair, only be described as pleasantly ‘bookish’. A clever girl, who at the moment was displaying none of her trademark smarts after demolishing almost an entire bottle of bourbon.
Jane was a real girl next door type, the plain tomboy that had grown into a reluctant beauty. Her rolled up jeans, flannelette shirts and habitually bare feet couldn’t hide the pretty visage behind the slightly rough exterior, and Jane was as much a vision as any of her friends. Even now, in the snazzy new dress Katrina had picked out for her for the night’s earlier escapades, she looked both radiant and embarrassed. As if in rebellion, she had been the first to kick her heels off, and even now her bare feet rested wilfully on the coffee table.
Not that Michelle was any frump, she told herself with barely a hint of modesty. She was 5’1”, but no little girl, as her league of bewildered ex-boyfriends could attest to. With raven black hair and piercing green eyes that men seemed to drown in, she was at the very least able to hold her own. And she knew it. She was petite, but she was feisty, and packed a mighty wallop. Her friends had at first been startled when she brought Dave, the debonair accountant, home with her to meet the family and announce they were getting married. He was, they thought, her complete and total opposite – shy and almost amazingly self-effacing. But opposites attract, and Michelle and David were in love to the highest degree. When they eventually did split, it was 60 years later, thanks to the sweet embrace of death. But that was all ahead of her.
And then….well, then there was Clare. Michelle wasn’t quite sure why they had invited Clare. Well, actually she was very sure, but the town’s general way of dealing with Clare was pretending not to know what she was reluctant to admit she knew. Clare had arrived in the town some two years earlier, and worked in the general store. She had become a kind of surrogate friend to all the girls through some means or other, and even if they weren’t particularly close to her she had become a regular fixture at every social event the girls held. Of course, no one really felt particularly close to Clare, not in the way any of them were with each other. This had a lot to do with her habitually cautious nature, but much more to do with the fact that Clare had never spoken a word in the entire two years any of the girls had known her. In fact, as far as they knew Clare had never spoken a word in her whole life. Clare was a mute. Or, as one might even more offensively put it, ‘dumb’.
Her silent beauty and prim and proper attire showed a young girl making the best of life despite the poor hand she had been dealt. She had, through whatever accident of nature or of life she had incurred, lost any ability to use her vocal chords, not just depriving her off speech but of any ability to make any sound with her mouth at all. The girls of course new this and took every opportunity to treat Clare like any one of them, and hence her invite tonight. It didn’t matter to them that Clare had never uttered a word, and never would.
Clare was, Michelle thought, probably the least likely of—
“Eeep!”
Michelle’s train of thought hit a rather sturdy wall as she yelped involuntarily. Jackie had been giving her one of her famous relaxing massages for the past five minutes, but had just ended her reverie with a quick tickle on her right foot.
“Falling asleep there, Cinderella?” the larger girl taunted.
Michelle jerked her small bare feet away, sitting up. “Piss off.”
Katrina, sitting next to her on the couch, laughed. “Ooh, is the big grown up bride still a little ticklish? Big girl like you?”
Michelle’s pride demanded a witty insult, but whatever it was died on her lips. “Well, not as much as HAhaha.” The skilful redhead had dug her fingertips into her friend’s slim midriff. Michelle squirmed ticklishly, already laughing hard. She cursed her choice of dress tonight, which left her sensitive midriff bare as Katrina’s thin fingers wrung ticklish laughter out of her, effortlessly flitting across her nerve endings.
“Hahahaha- you-heha-bitch! Hahahaha” she managed, struggling harder to push her friend away, only to find Jackie seizing her wrists. The bigger girl was much stronger and held her effortlessly, the devilish grin on her face looking much more comfortable than the strained, tortured one on Michelle’s face as she guffawed in earnest. Her waist was trim, honed by years of gym work, but seemingly as ticklish now as it had ever been.
Tears had begun to well up in her eyes, her laughter ringing in her own ears, frenzied and agonisingly honest. The tiny girl hated being tickled, both because she was so utterly ticklish and because it seemed in some way to reinforce that Michelle the woman was still the little girl she struggled so hard to appear not to be. She was helpless, and with Jackie holding her arms easily she was fully immobile. Looking appealingly at the other three girls for help, her heart sank, as she saw Christine smiling evilly and Jane doing likewise. Jane was of more immediate concern, however, as she had cunningly taken up residence at the floor in front of the couch, her hands even now moving toward Michelle’s bare feet.
The tomboy’s eyes gleamed. “Bridal tickles!” she taunted, and then grabbed Michelle’s right ankle and scribbled her fingers over the smooth, sensitive sole. Michelle’s frenzied laughter went up an octave. Her feet were always as impressively ticklish as anywhere else on her small person, but the pedicure she had that morning in anticipation of the wedding had if anything heightened the feeling. Her feet were small, size 4 (Aus sizing, just imagine some small feet), but thin and soft as a newborn child’s. She had kicked off her shoes, along with the others, as soon as they had returned home after the pub and this left her feet terrifyingly vulnerable. Barefoot and ticklish as hell, she had no defence against the fingertips that stroked her sensitive soles, turning her normal feisty and stubborn self into a giggling wreck.
Both the tickling on her feet and the tickling on her sides was bad enough, but together it was a new level of hysteria. Michelle was laughing so hard her stomach hurt, and her bladder felt fit to burst. She was spared this humiliation however, as at that moment Jackie chose to let go of the smaller girl’s arms.
Through her own ticklish haze Michelle saw that Christine had thankfully chosen that moment to join in the fun, and in a move more playful than an attempt to help her friend, had proceeded to dig her own small hands into Jackie’s ample sides.
Jackie was obviously nowhere near as ticklish as Michelle, but she reacted ticklishly enough, laughing reluctantly and already clawing at the bespectacled girl behind her back. Christine’s tenuous footing on the end of the couch was lost as Jackie grabbed her, the larger girl softly but nonetheless directly propelling her to the ground. Facedown.
Jackie sat over her smaller captive, laughing in mock revenge, and began wiggling her large fingers in the hollows of Christine’s armpits. The effect was almost instantaneous. Despite her most valiant efforts to keep a straight face, Chris was soon overcome with laughter. She struggled under the larger girl, but was helpless to do anything but take the ticklish onslaught. She banged her right hand against the ground in frustration, serving only to make her armpits more vulnerable and heightening the already impressive display of laughter in the room.
Michelle herself had taken her opportunity and begun to tickle back. She knew from long experience that Katrina was every bit as ticklish as she was, and as she lightly scratched the redhead’s trim tummy they were both in hysterics. Neither girl’s part in the tickling struggle was helped by Jane, who had begun to tickle Katrina’s large, delicate size 8’s as well as the continued feathering she was giving to Michelle’s sensitive toes.
The fair redhead was laughing so much she had flushed a deep pink, and tears were rolling down her face. Michelle was not far off. Both girls were tickling each other senseless, flailing and belly laughing whilst comically clawing at the other and trying in vain to defend their own tickled parts.
The humour was not lost on Jane, tormenting the pristine feet of her friends with consummate skill and a fair slab of glee. It was, then, a bit of a shock when both Katrina and Michelle suddenly stopped tickling each other and suddenly allied against her. In a second they were off the couch and on her, the tomboy already laughing as female fingers deftly probed her upper body, whilst a smaller pair of hands went to work on her feet.
Jane was embarrassed, but quite as ticklish as all of them. Even her feet, which she had told herself had toughened due to her habit of going barefoot, were excruciatingly tickly and more so due to the pedicure she had also had that morning. Jane contorted into spasms of ticklish abandon, head rolling, and mouth open in a perpetual laugh. Despite her predicament she still pursued a policy of attack as the best defence, wildly attempting to tickle her captors between her own bouts of laughter.
And so the girls were one, big ticklish mess.
In what seemed like ages to Christine, trapped under the bulk of Jackie and laughing into the carpet as hard as any of the others, but what was actually only about twenty minutes, everyone was tickled until, exhausted, they finally reached a mutual conclusion.
Free of each other, they lay panting on the carpet, residual giggles petering out into amused silence.
“God, I haven’t been tickled like that since boarding school” Christine said.
“I didn’t know I still had it in me” Katrina replied, smirking, still looking flushed but less so now.
“God I hate it” Michelle began, and the others laughed.
“At least we all got it, Mik, can’t say fairer than that” Katrina mocked, in a bad impersonation of their old school principal.
“Well, not all of us,” Jackie muttered, gesturing toward Clare, who seemed to be making rather a nervous attempt to pretend to be asleep “Clare missed out.” She grinned.
All eyes turned toward the silent girl. Michelle wasn’t sure…tickling a mute? Was that…alright?
But Katrina and Jackie had already stalked forward, hyena like, and were now sizing up their prey. Katrina had taken off her shoes like the rest of the girls, returning home to the hot house after the exuberance of the pub earlier on. She sat huddled up in the old rocking chair, pretending to be asleep but quite obviously awake and listening, her bare feet pulled up beside her in a futile attempt to hide them. In effect, whilst they were not accessible from the front, a person reaching around the side and under the arm of the chair could have full play over her naked soles, and she would in fact be at a disadvantage, unable to move them. This was exactly how the girls liked it.
In a flash, Jackie had secured her arms, much like she had done to Michelle. Clare looked up, her sleep fakery forgotten now. Katrina was at the side of the chair, and had full reign over her bare soles, which were partly wedged between the gap in the arm, upturned and vulnerable. She smiled.
Michelle was unsure as to whether this was exactly kind, though after her ordeal it seemed fair enough in a way. She was also vaguely intrigued…how would a person who could make no sound react to being tickled? She couldn’t laugh...but…the possibilities were evilly intriguing. And Clare was mute, she couldn’t exactly complain. Clare was mute. She couldn’t talk.
At least, as far as they knew. And, as Clare and only Clare could tell them, this was not very far at all. As far as they knew, Clare was a hopeless case who through the charity of old Mr. Winton had been given a token job at the general store and who supported herself quite well. The townspeople made allowances for the fact she couldn’t speak, and she got on almost as well as any of the young women in the room that night.
What they didn’t know, and what nobody but Clare knew, was that she was not the poor ‘disabled’ country girl they all took her for. Clare had come to Northam two years earlier, an aspiring novelist and method actor who saw no better way to research and write her not-so-subtle fictitious critique of the dying Australian country town than to live in one. Improbably, she had settled in Northam, determined to glean from its inhabitants every miniscule detail, which she would then pour into her slanderous opus at night, a book that was in its own way so eloquently treacherous that ‘My Life In Hicksville, The End Of The Universe’ would surely be the recipient of every literary prize the nation had to offer once it reached publication, and it’s author escaped to the civilisation of inner city Melbourne.
Clare, the oddly pretty but homely shop worker was in fact a sophisticated university graduate, prior to her ‘undercover’ stint more accustomed to wearing designer outfits than the understated dresses she used as her part of her cover here.
Michelle whispered to the girls that they should go easy on her, just tickle her feet, at least to start off. She wasn’t quite sure why she said this, but later she would realise that it was only to save some sort of face. She was intrigued by the prospect of tickling a silent person, even though the political correctness of the idea gnawed at her. She was even helping Katrina tickle her feet, securing one ankle with her hand and leaving the other poised over a bare sole, ready to tickle.
Clare’s mind was abuzz with panic, as she frantically tried to fortify herself against what she knew was coming. She had been ticklish, she told herself, but that was a long time ago. Surely someone as successful and devious as herself could not still be. That was kid’s stuff. It was the realm of these silly country girls, not a sophisticate city-dweller like her.
By the time Katrina and Michelle started stroking her soles, she almost believed it. She was strong, she told herself, and she could handle anything.
Katrina started her fingers scurrying all over the flawless flesh of Clare’s tender soles. Michelle did likewise. They were both slow at first, but Clare knew this was only the beginning. She was unnerved to find her body already tensing; the odd feeling of electricity she dimly remembered flickering across the skin of her feet.
She concentrated harder.
Michelle had begun tickling slightly faster, brushing the tips of her fingers nimbly over the bottoms of Clare’s feet - now under her toes, now her soles.
Clare was appalled to find her resolve wavering. She gritted her teeth. DON’T LAUGH, she screamed inwardly at herself.
Katrina started tickling a little quicker too; covering the whole of her left foot with quick little strokes.
Clare had set her jaw, but already she could feel the urge to laugh bubbling up inside her. Her eyes were squeezed shut, her body held rigid. But it seemed to do nothing to lessen the ticklish sensations playing across the bottoms of her sensitive feet. YOU CAN’T LAUGH.
Desperately, she willed herself not to laugh, to not be ticklish. She tried to concentrate, to think of anything but the hands making a mockery of her resolve. She thought of the book she was writing, her literary success, how well received it would be. Her thoughts of glory and fame. Prestige, all won by her hard work undercover. IT WILL ALL BE FOR NOTHING IF YOU LAUGH. They will find out!
The tickling was only intensifying, the two girls at her feet noticing that she was obviously trying to block them out. Clare bit down on her tongue.
She was not used to going barefoot, her feet were overly sensitive, and she had bared them only to keep with what the others had done. Like one of her ticklers before her, Clare cursed herself for removing her shoes. But she knew this was stupid, if her feet were still this ticklish then every inch of her was undoubtedly still sensitive. Oh why, why the fuck did she have to be ticklish? It had all been so perfect
Her inner resolve shattered, Clare was still holding on, but only just. Even as she was beginning to give up, both Michelle and Katrina began tickling under her toes, and she lost it. And suddenly, everything was lost.
“HAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHA!!!!!!!!” she almost screamed, the laughter that had been trapped inside of her for what seemed like forever finally unleashed.
The room went quiet. All eyes were on her. The tickling stopped. The girls stared at her, stunned.
Jackie was the first to pick her jaw up off the floor. “What….what….what the hell?”
Michelle was just as surprised. “She…you…she can talk? What…how…?”
Just as quickly, their surprise turned to anger, shock to suspicion.
Clare was desperately trying to save face, shaking her head and keeping her mouth shut. But it was no use.
Jackie was, of course, the first to react. “You were just pretending?” she began angrily.
Clare shook her head.
“Don’t give me that shit! We know!”
Katrina grabbed her foot, “So, your toes are ticklish? Let’s see if we can’t get something out of you!”
Both she and Michelle started raking Clare’s bare soles, paying particular attention to underneath the traitor’s delicate toes.
Her strength was lost, and now Clare could only maintain her silence for a few pathetic seconds. Soon she was howling with laughter, shaking her head. It wasn’t like before, when the tickling had been subdued, almost playful. This was even more torturous, and each stroke had only one goal. It tickled more than she had ever been tickled before in her life, and she was reduced to a hysterical mess just as the others had been. They didn’t stop there though; they tickled and tickled until she was forced to start talking.
“HAHSTOP! STOP! HEHEHE! PLEASE!!!”
But they didn’t stop.
“Ah, so that’s getting to you is it, you little faker? Tell us what the hell you’re playing at?!!!” Jackie began angrily digging her fingers into her thin waist, eliciting further guttural laughter and more squealing from the besieged woman. When Jane began working her fingers away under her armpits, Clare simply cracked.
“HAHAHAHA I’M HAHAHAHA CAN’T HAHAHAHA STANDHEEEEE HEEEEE HEEEEE IT!!! STOP!!! I’M HAHA OH GOD HAHAHAHA I’M HEEEH AN UNDERCOVER REPORTER!!!!!” It was well meant, even if it wasn’t strictly true.
She had expected them to stop there, but the girl’s resolve was admirable. They tickled on and on, even the meek Christine getting in on the action and tickling her navel as well, eliciting an even deeper depth to her already guttural laughter. She was helpless.
By the first-half hour of this torture, she would have told them everything, if only she could form words in between the paroxysms of involuntary laughter. By the end of the first hour, she would have confessed to anything they put in front of her.
But her tormenters were not interested in confessions anymore, they only wanted her to laugh. And laugh she did, until her throat felt raw, her stomach ached, and she emptied her bladder all over the chair. But still, they did not stop tickling.
It was all gone. Two years work up in smoke because of something as pathetic as a feathery feeling across her soles. In some deep recess of her head Clare cursed herself, but she was barely capable of thinking of anything else but the torturous tickling racking her entire sensitive body. Soon, all traces of thought were lost to her.
It was driving her insane, she couldn’t stand it, and yet she was as powerless to stop reacting and cease laughing as she was to get them off her. Her body was contorted in convulsions of pure laughter, and she was nothing more than a receptor to the horrible ticklish sensations that covered her whole person.
In the end, they finally did stop, throwing her out shortly after dawn. She was a damp, dishevelled mess, still barefoot as she stood in the centre of the country road, panting heavily but still giggling unwillingly. She couldn’t go back to the town, the news would travel fast, and the townspeople would want revenge. At the very least. More likely they would want to extract some of the torture that had broken her in the first place. Her head swam at the idea. She couldn’t even return to her room to collect the beginnings of her book. She was done here, that was for certain. Her bare soles were still tingling, but she forced herself to begin the trek to the nearest bus stop, miles out of town.
It was a long walk. She resolved to think about her choice of character more carefully next time, if there was a next time. Or at the very least, she thought, she would keep her shoes on.
The sun was coming up, the already oppressive heat increasing as it did. It was going to be another scorcher in the small town of Northam.
