I hadn't anticipated a third, much less a fourth, installment but such is the tangled web. Again, in the same vain ...
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The first time I tickled a girl who may have consented to being tied up, I was eighteen years old. She was seventeen, a younger woman, sitting on a folding chair in front of me, her leg tucked underneath her, her stocking-covered foot sticking out the back of the chair. We were at rehearsal for the school play, the scene being played out before us. Another cast member, a guy, also seventeen, sat next to me. After what felt like an eternity – eternity in this case being defined as the time until this girl was certain to shift positions – the guy reached out a finger and drew it down the sole of her foot. “Tickle?” he asked. Her foot twitched, and she looked over her shoulder and smiled. “Very much so,” she said. This girl was already on my list, though without an asterisk beside her name because I hadn’t tickled her myself; I had only witnessed her being tickled. Now I was determined to amend that. When she turned around, I leaned forward and, with both hands, tickled her upper ribs and under her arms. “No, you have to do it here,” I explained to the guy, more as a way to excuse my actions for her sake than to educate him on the finer aspects of tickling.
When I had witnessed this girl being tickled, she had been tickled on her lower ribs, just above her waist, and she had been wonderfully responsive, jumping in the air, then pivoting around, her arms thrust forward in defense, her eyes alight, a smile plastered to her face. Given the choice, I would have preferred to tickle her there, not because I worried that she might not be ticklish elsewhere, but because something about tickling a woman under her arms has always struck me as being more intimate. It is a spot closer to her breasts, for one thing, and on at least one occasion that I remember, I accidentally touched a woman there. It was very awkward. Her squirming and laughter stopped immediately, and I retracted my hands as if I had just held them over an open fire. Neither one of us said anything. It is also a spot more naturally protected by the fall of a woman’s arms. To tickle her there is unlike tickling her sides or pinching her knees: often the woman has to present the opportunity; she has to open herself up to it, make herself vulnerable. This might explain why I find tickling a woman under her arms so erotic and, while I don’t share in this, why others might prefer tickling a woman’s feet – or have a preference for a woman’s feet in general. They are both tucked away and inaccessible most of the time, lending to them the thrill of denuding and the possibility of fleeting exposure, whether by the sight of an upraised arm or by the sound of a falling shoe. Unlike other traditional ticklish spots, these areas of a woman’s body are also frequently treated with special care: a woman can shave her armpits, paint her toenails or adorn her toes with rings. In doing so, isn’t she conceding to them a measure of intimacy?
It being more intimate and, possibly, more disagreeable, the act of ticking this girl under her arms could have seemed more audacious on my part. And I wanted neither to seem forward nor to offend. But I was not given a choice in this case, other than the choice not to tickle her at all, which I didn’t fancy. Her lower ribs and waist were not accessible to me, shielded as they were by the backing of her chair. So I made due. As it turned out, the spot I hit was no less sensitive and, it seemed to me, no more offensive to her. She twisted violently, then slumped in her seat. I was thrilled. “You see?” I said to the guy. The girl took a moment to collect herself, then turned to me and smiled brightly – more brightly, I thought, than she had for the other guy.
Over the course of the play, I tickled her more and more often, though never for long and never by design. That was the thing that struck me about her: I never had to create an opportunity; the opportunities just developed. Before every rehearsal, for instance, we did a series of warm-up exercises. Some of them involved partners and some of those involved informal massage. One, in particular, was ideally suited to my purpose. You were given thirty seconds in which to make your partner smile. Of course, the rules prohibited touching. Then again, I didn’t play by the rules. Time and again, when it came to partnering, she turned to me, even though she had to know that, if the exercise involved either, I was going to tickle her.
Then the most opportune of opportunities came my way. We were sitting next to each other backstage during a dress rehearsal. I was leaning back against the wall; she was hunched forward over a notebook, doing her homework, one leg, the one further from me, set straight before her, the other tucked underneath her, much as she had been sitting in her seat when that other guy tickled her foot. As it happened, the same guy passed by us just then and did the exact same thing, only this time to her opposite foot. He reached down, drew a finger up it, and said, “Tickle?”. She flinched and withdrew her foot. But this time she didn’t smile. “You already know it does,” she said to him. When he was out of earshot, she shook her head. “He’s always tickling me,” she said. I pointed out what seemed obvious to me: that so was I. “Yeah,” she said, “but with you, it’s different.” All the while we had been sitting there, I had been looking for an opportunity. Now I thought I had found one. Different how? I wondered. Was it more ticklish for her? As a way of making my point, I reached around her and squeezed her side. She jerked reflexively to the side, into the tickle, ironically as a way of escaping it. It would have been nothing for me to move along with her and dig deeper, but, in bending that way, she compensated by thrusting her other side, the side nearer me, outward, exposing a more readily-available target. So I poked her there, making her jerk reflexively the opposite way. It was almost like an exchange of volleys in ping pong, a nearly perfect illustration of Newton’s law about action and reaction. I love when I have the opportunity to tickle a woman like this, in part because it is so spontaneous, in part because the longer the volley extends, the more desperate and ticklish the woman becomes and the more unbridled and reactive her movements get. Under the right circumstances, I find, this can take on a highly sexual parallel.
But that was not the extent of my opportunity. When I stopped, after no more than five or ten seconds, at which point I feared her laughter might become uncontrollable and draw attention to us, she calmed down and said, “You’d probably love that, wouldn’t you? If I were defenseless so you could tickle me better.”
I am only paraphrasing. Unfortunately, like the Dallas episode, I had no video to rewind two or three hundred times. I had no transcript to read over and over. I just have my memory of it, and my memory of it was, admittedly, as conflicted as I was. I don’t know what she said exactly or what she meant by it exactly any more than I knew then what I wished she had said or what I wished she had meant by it. She used the word “defenseless” and the phrase “tickle me better”, of that I am certain. There is a part of me that is equally certain that she alluded to being tied up, but I have never been able to piece it together. Not for lack of effort. For years afterwards – to this moment, in fact, as I reflect back on it now – I replayed it in my mind. I’ve considered all the possibilities: what she might have said, how I might have responded and what might have happened as a result. But I realize now that, no matter what she said, no matter how I responded, there was no realistic possibility of it resulting in my tickling her while she was tied up. In a video, yes. In a story, yes. But not in my experience. I was simply unprepared for the possibility, and I was terribly flustered by it. I felt paralyzed and short of breath. You could have fried an egg with the heat emanating from my face. Until then, I honestly don’t know if I had ever considered the idea of tying up a girl in order to “tickle her better,” as this girl put it. I was inexperienced sexually, for one thing, and tying up a woman, to whatever end, clearly crosses a sexual boundary. At eighteen, I was not even a citizen of a neighboring country. For another, I don’t recall ever being confronted with the image of a girl physically restrained – not in my reading, not on TV or in the movies and certainly not in my experience. The closest I think I had ever come to restrained tickling was back in that junior high gymnastics class when I witnessed two guys gang up on a girl and tickle her. It was the same girl, the cheerleader, whom I would later witness tickling her friend in the middle of a backbend, which added a certain spice to the mix: the idea that a ticklish woman would tickle a ticklish woman. Perhaps therein lies the seed of interest for many men, myself included, in indulging in fantasies of female-on-female tickling. In any case, one held her arms up while the other tickled her ribs and stomach. Another time I participated in something similar, with a friend of my sister, as part of a game of hide-and-go-seek. But I was ten or eleven maybe, making her eight or nine, so there was little in the way of sexual undercurrents to our interaction. In either case, there was no bondage.
So this was a novel proposal, if a proposal it was, and, for me, one that was distinctly threatening and, besides that, distorted and perverted. Not something “normal” people would consider or play out, certainly not something I would consider or play out. To make sure this girl understood that, to make sure she didn’t confuse my tickling her with an interest in tickling or, worse yet, a fetish for tickling, I responded coolly, even angrily. When I think back on it now, it is not the loss of opportunity I regret; it is the way I distorted her comment, the way I tried to turn something that was mysterious and embarrassing to me into something that would be embarrassing and, dare I say, ticklish for her. It made for a very awkward situation. She turned defensive – What did I think she was implying? – and we parted ways. Not surprisingly, such an opportunity didn’t present itself again. At least not with her.
In my freshman year of college, there was a girl who lived down the hall from me whom I quickly found to be extremely ticklish – with an asterisk beside her name – who, from what I had heard, was also extremely open to such ideas as sexual experimentation and restraint, and who, as if to bear out this notion, owned a pair of handcuffs that she left dangling from her bedframe or from the back of her desk chair. I was sitting on the edge of her bed one day while she was laid out on her back. The two of us were alone, although the door to her room was cracked, and we were talking aimlessly. I have to admit that I was far more interested in her on a sexual level than I was on a personal one. More to the point, I didn’t like her at all. But such misgivings are easily overlooked after I’ve learned that a woman is ticklish, all the more so when she is as keenly ticklish as this girl was. She looked ticklish. It’s difficult to explain what that means to me; there are a variety of looks, unrelated to hair color, skin quality or ethnicity, that strike me as ticklish. Through some aesthetic equation that I am unable to reverse engineer, one that takes into consideration such variables as a woman’s posture, the flatness of her stomach in relation to her breasts, the curvature of her sides and the outfit she is wearing, I am somehow able to predict, not necessarily accurately, whether she is likely to be ticklish. Whatever the benchmark, this girl scored high marks and, for whatever it was worth, it proved out in her case. She looked very ticklish; she was very ticklish. My only reason for visiting her or talking to her was to further the possibility that I might tickle her. So we were talking when, suddenly, with an exaggerated, almost affected sensuality, she stretched, taking hold of the bedframe on either side – she slept on the bottom half of a bunk bed – and held her position, looking at me. I didn’t pass up on the opportunity to tickle her but I did what might have been an invitation to make use of her handcuffs. I’ll never know. I tickled her experimentally, as if I didn’t already know she was ticklish, then engaged her in one of those are-you-ticklish-here, how-long-can-you-last games. The answers were: everywhere I touched her and not long. But she was such a willing contestant that, by game’s end, she had outlasted me. The laughter, the squirming, the occasional rubbing of her bare knee against me, it was too much: I came in my pants. I waited out an unendurable period, then excused myself, shamed and spent.
Then, the summer before my senior year of college – I was twenty-two and late again to the dance: I had neither graduated college nor lost my virginity – I briefly dated a girl who, when I admitted that I was a virgin, must have found the idea of guiding me to consummation a pleasant one. After we slept together for the first time and lay side by side on my mattress – an air mattress, which I don’t recommend, especially for first-timers – she said to me, “I think we should do everything tonight.” As unseasoned as I was, I didn’t know what she had in mind by “everything”, but at the top of my list was tickling with bondage. Much had occurred since last the opportunity was presented to me. There was no Internet to surf – I wouldn’t go online for several more years – but I had come across references to tickling, with restraint, in issues of Variations magazine and Penthouse Letters. I had discovered, in a book of X-rated movie reviews, the first three in a series of CalStar Tied & Tickled videos. And, though I had bought only one – and promptly threw it away after reading it – I had learned that there was a market for tickling-specific magazines, complete with pictures of stocks and X-frames and all manner of restraining devices and positions. It was a sordid business, the magazines wrapped in plastic, the books filed away in dark recesses of the bookstore, the videos available only by mail and at exorbitant prices. I can’t say that I felt any easier about the prospect of engaging in such activity – I felt disgusted for having allowed myself purchase of the magazine – but, in much the same way that I could forgive unappealing qualities in a ticklish woman, I forgave myself. I rationalized. I justified. I had no choice; the temptation was too much. Only one thing stopped me this time: the girl wasn’t ticklish. Not at all. Or hardly. Not ticklish, hardly ticklish – it was all the same to me: disappointing. In fact, while this was the first time we slept together, it wasn’t the first time we had tried to sleep together. The first time, when I found that she wasn’t ticklish, I was so deflated that I couldn’t go through with it. I think she attributed it to nervousness – and, to some degree, it probably was – but the fact that she wasn’t ticklish didn’t help.
Fortunately, as I’ve told my wife, that isn’t a problem with her. Not to suggest that there aren’t any problems related to tickling – there are, and they’re mine – but my wife not being ticklish isn’t one of them. So I have the luxury of not having to contemplate what might have happened if the woman who would become my wife, like the woman with whom I lost my virginity, wasn’t ticklish. I’ve had enough difficulty coping with this fetish; I don’t feel the need to compound it with a hypothetical issue. To think that I might not have pursued the woman who would not only be my wife but also my best friend and the love of my life because she wasn’t ticklish …. Well, like I said, fortunately, that isn’t a problem. And, more fortunately still, her most ticklish spot coincides with the spot I most like to tickle. Far from being a problem for me, her ticklishness has been a blessing. It is my reluctance that has been the problem.
None of these opportunities were gift-wrapped for me like the opportunity my wife handed me on Valentine’s Day a few years ago. This was several months after my confession – I don’t remember how many – but in that time she had allowed me to tickle her regularly. Sometimes, she lay on her back and raised her arms over her head; other times, she lay on her stomach and raised her arms over her head. I’ve always preferred light, erotic tickling to kneading and prodding, but sometimes, when she was particularly sensitive or I was particularly anxious to test its effect on her, I engaged in both. It never lasted long, mostly because neither of us could last very long: for her, it was too … I hate to use the word torturous for all it’s associations with pain and discomfort, but it’s the word my wife has used … and for me, as it had been that time during my freshman year of college, it was too exciting.
Even so, my wife surprised me. On Valentine’s Day she handed me a gift bag. In the bag were a pair of fur-lined cuffs and three varieties of feathers.
To be continued (one last time) ...
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The first time I tickled a girl who may have consented to being tied up, I was eighteen years old. She was seventeen, a younger woman, sitting on a folding chair in front of me, her leg tucked underneath her, her stocking-covered foot sticking out the back of the chair. We were at rehearsal for the school play, the scene being played out before us. Another cast member, a guy, also seventeen, sat next to me. After what felt like an eternity – eternity in this case being defined as the time until this girl was certain to shift positions – the guy reached out a finger and drew it down the sole of her foot. “Tickle?” he asked. Her foot twitched, and she looked over her shoulder and smiled. “Very much so,” she said. This girl was already on my list, though without an asterisk beside her name because I hadn’t tickled her myself; I had only witnessed her being tickled. Now I was determined to amend that. When she turned around, I leaned forward and, with both hands, tickled her upper ribs and under her arms. “No, you have to do it here,” I explained to the guy, more as a way to excuse my actions for her sake than to educate him on the finer aspects of tickling.
When I had witnessed this girl being tickled, she had been tickled on her lower ribs, just above her waist, and she had been wonderfully responsive, jumping in the air, then pivoting around, her arms thrust forward in defense, her eyes alight, a smile plastered to her face. Given the choice, I would have preferred to tickle her there, not because I worried that she might not be ticklish elsewhere, but because something about tickling a woman under her arms has always struck me as being more intimate. It is a spot closer to her breasts, for one thing, and on at least one occasion that I remember, I accidentally touched a woman there. It was very awkward. Her squirming and laughter stopped immediately, and I retracted my hands as if I had just held them over an open fire. Neither one of us said anything. It is also a spot more naturally protected by the fall of a woman’s arms. To tickle her there is unlike tickling her sides or pinching her knees: often the woman has to present the opportunity; she has to open herself up to it, make herself vulnerable. This might explain why I find tickling a woman under her arms so erotic and, while I don’t share in this, why others might prefer tickling a woman’s feet – or have a preference for a woman’s feet in general. They are both tucked away and inaccessible most of the time, lending to them the thrill of denuding and the possibility of fleeting exposure, whether by the sight of an upraised arm or by the sound of a falling shoe. Unlike other traditional ticklish spots, these areas of a woman’s body are also frequently treated with special care: a woman can shave her armpits, paint her toenails or adorn her toes with rings. In doing so, isn’t she conceding to them a measure of intimacy?
It being more intimate and, possibly, more disagreeable, the act of ticking this girl under her arms could have seemed more audacious on my part. And I wanted neither to seem forward nor to offend. But I was not given a choice in this case, other than the choice not to tickle her at all, which I didn’t fancy. Her lower ribs and waist were not accessible to me, shielded as they were by the backing of her chair. So I made due. As it turned out, the spot I hit was no less sensitive and, it seemed to me, no more offensive to her. She twisted violently, then slumped in her seat. I was thrilled. “You see?” I said to the guy. The girl took a moment to collect herself, then turned to me and smiled brightly – more brightly, I thought, than she had for the other guy.
Over the course of the play, I tickled her more and more often, though never for long and never by design. That was the thing that struck me about her: I never had to create an opportunity; the opportunities just developed. Before every rehearsal, for instance, we did a series of warm-up exercises. Some of them involved partners and some of those involved informal massage. One, in particular, was ideally suited to my purpose. You were given thirty seconds in which to make your partner smile. Of course, the rules prohibited touching. Then again, I didn’t play by the rules. Time and again, when it came to partnering, she turned to me, even though she had to know that, if the exercise involved either, I was going to tickle her.
Then the most opportune of opportunities came my way. We were sitting next to each other backstage during a dress rehearsal. I was leaning back against the wall; she was hunched forward over a notebook, doing her homework, one leg, the one further from me, set straight before her, the other tucked underneath her, much as she had been sitting in her seat when that other guy tickled her foot. As it happened, the same guy passed by us just then and did the exact same thing, only this time to her opposite foot. He reached down, drew a finger up it, and said, “Tickle?”. She flinched and withdrew her foot. But this time she didn’t smile. “You already know it does,” she said to him. When he was out of earshot, she shook her head. “He’s always tickling me,” she said. I pointed out what seemed obvious to me: that so was I. “Yeah,” she said, “but with you, it’s different.” All the while we had been sitting there, I had been looking for an opportunity. Now I thought I had found one. Different how? I wondered. Was it more ticklish for her? As a way of making my point, I reached around her and squeezed her side. She jerked reflexively to the side, into the tickle, ironically as a way of escaping it. It would have been nothing for me to move along with her and dig deeper, but, in bending that way, she compensated by thrusting her other side, the side nearer me, outward, exposing a more readily-available target. So I poked her there, making her jerk reflexively the opposite way. It was almost like an exchange of volleys in ping pong, a nearly perfect illustration of Newton’s law about action and reaction. I love when I have the opportunity to tickle a woman like this, in part because it is so spontaneous, in part because the longer the volley extends, the more desperate and ticklish the woman becomes and the more unbridled and reactive her movements get. Under the right circumstances, I find, this can take on a highly sexual parallel.
But that was not the extent of my opportunity. When I stopped, after no more than five or ten seconds, at which point I feared her laughter might become uncontrollable and draw attention to us, she calmed down and said, “You’d probably love that, wouldn’t you? If I were defenseless so you could tickle me better.”
I am only paraphrasing. Unfortunately, like the Dallas episode, I had no video to rewind two or three hundred times. I had no transcript to read over and over. I just have my memory of it, and my memory of it was, admittedly, as conflicted as I was. I don’t know what she said exactly or what she meant by it exactly any more than I knew then what I wished she had said or what I wished she had meant by it. She used the word “defenseless” and the phrase “tickle me better”, of that I am certain. There is a part of me that is equally certain that she alluded to being tied up, but I have never been able to piece it together. Not for lack of effort. For years afterwards – to this moment, in fact, as I reflect back on it now – I replayed it in my mind. I’ve considered all the possibilities: what she might have said, how I might have responded and what might have happened as a result. But I realize now that, no matter what she said, no matter how I responded, there was no realistic possibility of it resulting in my tickling her while she was tied up. In a video, yes. In a story, yes. But not in my experience. I was simply unprepared for the possibility, and I was terribly flustered by it. I felt paralyzed and short of breath. You could have fried an egg with the heat emanating from my face. Until then, I honestly don’t know if I had ever considered the idea of tying up a girl in order to “tickle her better,” as this girl put it. I was inexperienced sexually, for one thing, and tying up a woman, to whatever end, clearly crosses a sexual boundary. At eighteen, I was not even a citizen of a neighboring country. For another, I don’t recall ever being confronted with the image of a girl physically restrained – not in my reading, not on TV or in the movies and certainly not in my experience. The closest I think I had ever come to restrained tickling was back in that junior high gymnastics class when I witnessed two guys gang up on a girl and tickle her. It was the same girl, the cheerleader, whom I would later witness tickling her friend in the middle of a backbend, which added a certain spice to the mix: the idea that a ticklish woman would tickle a ticklish woman. Perhaps therein lies the seed of interest for many men, myself included, in indulging in fantasies of female-on-female tickling. In any case, one held her arms up while the other tickled her ribs and stomach. Another time I participated in something similar, with a friend of my sister, as part of a game of hide-and-go-seek. But I was ten or eleven maybe, making her eight or nine, so there was little in the way of sexual undercurrents to our interaction. In either case, there was no bondage.
So this was a novel proposal, if a proposal it was, and, for me, one that was distinctly threatening and, besides that, distorted and perverted. Not something “normal” people would consider or play out, certainly not something I would consider or play out. To make sure this girl understood that, to make sure she didn’t confuse my tickling her with an interest in tickling or, worse yet, a fetish for tickling, I responded coolly, even angrily. When I think back on it now, it is not the loss of opportunity I regret; it is the way I distorted her comment, the way I tried to turn something that was mysterious and embarrassing to me into something that would be embarrassing and, dare I say, ticklish for her. It made for a very awkward situation. She turned defensive – What did I think she was implying? – and we parted ways. Not surprisingly, such an opportunity didn’t present itself again. At least not with her.
In my freshman year of college, there was a girl who lived down the hall from me whom I quickly found to be extremely ticklish – with an asterisk beside her name – who, from what I had heard, was also extremely open to such ideas as sexual experimentation and restraint, and who, as if to bear out this notion, owned a pair of handcuffs that she left dangling from her bedframe or from the back of her desk chair. I was sitting on the edge of her bed one day while she was laid out on her back. The two of us were alone, although the door to her room was cracked, and we were talking aimlessly. I have to admit that I was far more interested in her on a sexual level than I was on a personal one. More to the point, I didn’t like her at all. But such misgivings are easily overlooked after I’ve learned that a woman is ticklish, all the more so when she is as keenly ticklish as this girl was. She looked ticklish. It’s difficult to explain what that means to me; there are a variety of looks, unrelated to hair color, skin quality or ethnicity, that strike me as ticklish. Through some aesthetic equation that I am unable to reverse engineer, one that takes into consideration such variables as a woman’s posture, the flatness of her stomach in relation to her breasts, the curvature of her sides and the outfit she is wearing, I am somehow able to predict, not necessarily accurately, whether she is likely to be ticklish. Whatever the benchmark, this girl scored high marks and, for whatever it was worth, it proved out in her case. She looked very ticklish; she was very ticklish. My only reason for visiting her or talking to her was to further the possibility that I might tickle her. So we were talking when, suddenly, with an exaggerated, almost affected sensuality, she stretched, taking hold of the bedframe on either side – she slept on the bottom half of a bunk bed – and held her position, looking at me. I didn’t pass up on the opportunity to tickle her but I did what might have been an invitation to make use of her handcuffs. I’ll never know. I tickled her experimentally, as if I didn’t already know she was ticklish, then engaged her in one of those are-you-ticklish-here, how-long-can-you-last games. The answers were: everywhere I touched her and not long. But she was such a willing contestant that, by game’s end, she had outlasted me. The laughter, the squirming, the occasional rubbing of her bare knee against me, it was too much: I came in my pants. I waited out an unendurable period, then excused myself, shamed and spent.
Then, the summer before my senior year of college – I was twenty-two and late again to the dance: I had neither graduated college nor lost my virginity – I briefly dated a girl who, when I admitted that I was a virgin, must have found the idea of guiding me to consummation a pleasant one. After we slept together for the first time and lay side by side on my mattress – an air mattress, which I don’t recommend, especially for first-timers – she said to me, “I think we should do everything tonight.” As unseasoned as I was, I didn’t know what she had in mind by “everything”, but at the top of my list was tickling with bondage. Much had occurred since last the opportunity was presented to me. There was no Internet to surf – I wouldn’t go online for several more years – but I had come across references to tickling, with restraint, in issues of Variations magazine and Penthouse Letters. I had discovered, in a book of X-rated movie reviews, the first three in a series of CalStar Tied & Tickled videos. And, though I had bought only one – and promptly threw it away after reading it – I had learned that there was a market for tickling-specific magazines, complete with pictures of stocks and X-frames and all manner of restraining devices and positions. It was a sordid business, the magazines wrapped in plastic, the books filed away in dark recesses of the bookstore, the videos available only by mail and at exorbitant prices. I can’t say that I felt any easier about the prospect of engaging in such activity – I felt disgusted for having allowed myself purchase of the magazine – but, in much the same way that I could forgive unappealing qualities in a ticklish woman, I forgave myself. I rationalized. I justified. I had no choice; the temptation was too much. Only one thing stopped me this time: the girl wasn’t ticklish. Not at all. Or hardly. Not ticklish, hardly ticklish – it was all the same to me: disappointing. In fact, while this was the first time we slept together, it wasn’t the first time we had tried to sleep together. The first time, when I found that she wasn’t ticklish, I was so deflated that I couldn’t go through with it. I think she attributed it to nervousness – and, to some degree, it probably was – but the fact that she wasn’t ticklish didn’t help.
Fortunately, as I’ve told my wife, that isn’t a problem with her. Not to suggest that there aren’t any problems related to tickling – there are, and they’re mine – but my wife not being ticklish isn’t one of them. So I have the luxury of not having to contemplate what might have happened if the woman who would become my wife, like the woman with whom I lost my virginity, wasn’t ticklish. I’ve had enough difficulty coping with this fetish; I don’t feel the need to compound it with a hypothetical issue. To think that I might not have pursued the woman who would not only be my wife but also my best friend and the love of my life because she wasn’t ticklish …. Well, like I said, fortunately, that isn’t a problem. And, more fortunately still, her most ticklish spot coincides with the spot I most like to tickle. Far from being a problem for me, her ticklishness has been a blessing. It is my reluctance that has been the problem.
None of these opportunities were gift-wrapped for me like the opportunity my wife handed me on Valentine’s Day a few years ago. This was several months after my confession – I don’t remember how many – but in that time she had allowed me to tickle her regularly. Sometimes, she lay on her back and raised her arms over her head; other times, she lay on her stomach and raised her arms over her head. I’ve always preferred light, erotic tickling to kneading and prodding, but sometimes, when she was particularly sensitive or I was particularly anxious to test its effect on her, I engaged in both. It never lasted long, mostly because neither of us could last very long: for her, it was too … I hate to use the word torturous for all it’s associations with pain and discomfort, but it’s the word my wife has used … and for me, as it had been that time during my freshman year of college, it was too exciting.
Even so, my wife surprised me. On Valentine’s Day she handed me a gift bag. In the bag were a pair of fur-lined cuffs and three varieties of feathers.
To be continued (one last time) ...
