Leah had her limits. She enjoyed being tickled, but it wasn’t something she approached lightly. You would have been hard pressed to find anything Leah approached lightly. (“Helium balloons,” she once suggested, when asked.) She actually had a printed sheet of rules, which she generally offered as reasons one wouldn’t want to play with her. Me, I wasn’t buying it; I looked over her list, grinned at her, and said, “I can do that. When are you free?”
“Huh?” she responded, actually taking a step backwards. I had never thought of myself as an intimidating person, but it almost looked as if she were afraid of me. I toned down the grin a little.
“I said I can do that; if you’d like to play, I’d be glad to respect those limits you’ve set.”
The hardest thing about playing with Leah is calming her down. You want to hold her close and stroke her back softly, she gets that frightened, but that was on the list of things Not To Do. She was scared, that first time, sitting on my bed. I kept my voice gentle, and tried to look harmless as I suggested she put her feet in my lap for a nice massage. She hesitated, steeling herself before doing so, but she did. I slipped off her shoes slowly, and I think she was surprised that I actually did start with a gentle footrub.
“It’s okay,” I soothed softly as I rubbed, “You’re safe. I’m not going to hurt you. Nothing here will hurt. Though it might tickle a little . . . “ I ran one fingernail down her right sole at that, drawing a giggle from her, before I went back to the massage. She -was- slowly relaxing, and eventually I added more frequent tickling, teasing the arches of her feet and the balls in turn. Despite her squirming, she didn’t actually pull her feet away until I stroked along the sensitive area under her toes. She placed them back in my lap, only to whip them away again when I hit the same spot.
“Leah,” I teased, “If you keep that up, I’m going to have to tie them down. The list said I couldn’t HOLD them still, but it said nothing about tying them.” I traced light figure eights over her arches with my fingernails, and enjoyed her giggles. Her words, however, surprised me.
“Okay,” she said. I had honestly thought it an oversight, a loophole about which I could tease her but never risk her trust by exploiting. “What with?”
I hadn’t been prepared for that, needless to say, and I thought quickly about what I could find before she changed her mind. I settled on a long polar fleece scarf, looping it under my own thigh before running the soft, fringed ends over her feet. Carefully, I tied one end of the scarf around each of her ankles, securing her feet to my leg so I could always reach them.
“Ready?” I asked, teasingly. She bit her lip and nodded, enough stress evident that I started slowly again, coaxing soft giggles out of her before moving on to tickle under her toes and even between them with a bit of fringe I clipped off the scarf. (One must keep priorities in mind, after all; what value a scarf next to the opportunity to make a friend laugh? Especially the helpless laughter I got out of Leah?)
With her feet held stationary, all Leah’s squirming had caused her top to ride up a fair bit. Stroking the bottoms of her feet, hardly tickling at all, I speculated, “Mmmm. I wonder if those sides are anywhere near as ticklish as these feet are?”
“No!” she answered quickly, trying to pull her top down. Unfortunately for her, she was lying on her back with a fair bit of it bunched up underneath her; she could tug it down, but it wouldn’t stay.
“Are you lying to me?” I asked, laying a hand on her belly.
“Ummm . . . no?” she asked hopefully.
“Yes you are,” I said, sliding my hand towards her side. She squirmed a little, but didn’t say to stop. “Honestly, this time. Do you -need- me to not tickle you here? Or do you really want it, knowing how hard it will make you squirm?”
She stopped being able to meet my eyes; she looked away from me, but she said, “I want it.”
“It’s okay,” I told her, untying her ankles, “I’m not going to think any less of you because you’re enjoying this as much as I am.” I got up and moved to sit beside her, gently drawing her arms over her head. “Do you want to do this loose?”
“I don’t think I could keep my arms still,” she admitted. When I asked if she really wanted to, she nodded without meeting my eyes again. Ticklish, willing, vulnerable, and scared. And mine with whom to play, as long as I didn’t break her.
“Hands behind your back, then?” I asked. “Or wrists and ankles, to the corners of the bed?” So important not to push too hard; the paper had said no nudity, but I wondered if she’d be willing to strip down to her underthings. The loopholes in the list she had given me, after all, were at least some of them deliberate. I looked at her again, biting her lip, and decided not to ask. Not this time. Keep it simple, hands behind her back, get her squirming a little, but still feeling safe enough to come back.
“Wrists and ankles?” she asked. So much for my train of thought.
“You really like this, don’t you?” I asked, and smiled as she nodded. “Many people find their waist is quite ticklish, too, but you’ve got the waistband of your jeans over it . . . do you think I could pull that down a little?”
“Let me do it?” she asked. Ah, still a bit frightened, I thought, and told her to feel free. She unzipped her jeans and folded both the top of the jeans and her navy cotton panties down to rest at her hips instead of her waist. Without prompting, she lay down on the bed, and looked at me.
What could I do? The lady knew what she wanted. Gently I tied her wrists together, then to the centre of the headboard. I motioned her to move down the bed a little and she did, wiggling temptingly and with the desired side effect of her shirt riding up again. I used an old dog collar to attach each ankle to one edge of the footboard, wrapping it around the post and then the ankle. She wasn’t very tall, but even so her feet hung off the end of the bed, exposed.
“Are you okay?” I asked her quietly, stroking the back of my hand down her side from where the shirt stopped to where the jeans started.
She wiggled a little and nodded, her eyes closed.
“You understand that I’ll stop any time you need me to?” I continued, needing to press home the point. I was fairly sure that she’d never been in a position like this before.
She nodded again, a bit more confidently.
“All you have to say is, ‘stop,’” I reminded her, as I began running my fingers up and down both of her sides at once. She squirmed, finding it impossible to avoid both hands at once, even when she raised herself a little ways off the bed. I must have done a good enough job with the wrists, even just using the scarf, because her arms definitely stayed up despite her attempts to protect herself with them
I ran my hands under her shirt, seeking out her underarms, and -really- gave her a chance to test the scarf. She squirmed hard, laughing and objecting, “That tickles!” but she did not say “stop” even when I spared one hand to stroke along her exposed waist. I reminded myself not to even think about running my fingers any lower, until I remembered that there were two spots quite a bit lower that were fair game.
She blinked at me in surprise as I got up and walked away, and her eyes grew wide as I returned with a bandanna. “No gag,” she objected, and I shook my head.
“I told you I’d stop if you said stop, so I wouldn’t do anything that would make you unable to say it.” She nodded, relaxing again. “This is for your eyes.”
“A blindfold?” she asked. I nodded, moving to place it over her eyes, and she didn’t object. I fastened it on the side, with a safety pin, rather than risking a knot getting tangled in her hair.
Very quietly I began to walk around her, watching her get tenser with each second she didn’t know what was happening. I couldn’t have that, so I reached out to dance fingers lightly over her stomach. She eeped and squirmed, but it was over before she expected it to be. I let several more seconds pass before tracing the line of her waist, and a few more before tickling one side and then the other alternately, and a slow count of ten as I silently moved down to her almost-forgotten feet.
The squeal she let out when I attacked them both at the same time made me grin, myself, and I took my time reviewing all the spots that had drawn the most reaction last time. What a surprise: they all still worked. I had to go over them a second and third time.
“Please,” Leah gasped between laughter, “please oh please oh please . . . “
“All you have to say is stop,” I reminded her, slowing the tickling enough that she could both breathe and speak. “Is that what you mean? Please stop?”
“No,” she said, and I picked up the pace once more, probing between toes to get an advanced map of where reactions were greatest. Unfortunately, I kept losing my spot as her feet wiggled and having to start all over again. “It just tickles so much! I feel like . . . “
“Good?” I suggested, in my most innocent tone, moving my hands from heel to toe, focusing only on the parts her reactions had already told me were worst.
“Ack!” she laughed, “Yes, good, but , , , “ she dissolved into giggling as I stroked the line under her toes again, “but it tickles so badly! I can’t stand it!”
I laughed softly, moving to the side of the bed so that I could reach both her feet and her waist at the same time, “That’s okay,” I reassured her, “You don’t have to stand it. You’re lying down!”
I’m sure the laughter that greeted that was as a result of the joke, rather than the fact that one hand was spidering across her waist, with the odd dip into her navel, as the other stroked the bottom of her near foot. It’s not as if she were ticklish or anything.
“You look tired, dear,” I told her as I moved to massage her sides again. She did; she was barely squirming any more, except when I got too close to her underarm. “Shall we say, maybe, three more minutes, and then we’ll call it a night?”
“Okay,” she giggled. Beautiful Leah, so eager for everything she got. “But no more feet.”
“No more feet,” I promised as I fetched back the kitchen timer and set it for three minutes. “Are you ready?”
“No!” she said, apparently having rethought the matter while I was gone. “I can’t. It’s too much . . .”
“It’s only three minutes,” I reminded her, “but if you say ‘stop’, I won’t even start the timer.”
“Three minutes,” she repeated, taking a deep breath. “Three more minutes . . . “
I waited. She had not yet actually said, “Stop.”
“Go.” she said, her whole body tense. I started the timer, and did the best I could for her tension. If you think about it, all the muscle spasming involved in squirming and laughing has to lead to relaxation, right?
Starting at the waist, I took thirty seconds to explore it thoroughly but slowly. Another minute made painstaking progress up her sides, gently enough to draw giggles rather than full laughter. The end of that trip, though, was the one that really perked her up. For eighty seconds, I ran my fingers over her armpits, up her upper arms, back into the pits, and all around. Somehow this seemed to restore her energy, for she was certainly putting a lot into moving ineffectively from side to side.
The last ten seconds I slowed down, drifting back down her sides, gently stroking until the timer went off. Quietly, I released her arms first, then her ankles, letting her remove the blindfold herself.
“How are you doing?” I asked her.
“I need a drink,” she said, sitting up.
I fetched her a glass of water from the bathroom, “You okay?”
“Yeah,” she said, taking a long drink. “That was . . . “
“A lot more than I thought you would want,” I said, when she failed to finish the sentence. She nodded and took another drink.
“I could have stopped it, though,” she said. “You said that you’d stop any time I needed you to, so I didn’t have to need to.”
“That’s how it works,” I agreed. “You’ve heard of safewords. The fact that you chose ‘stop’ rather than ‘red’ or ‘aardvark’ doesn’t make it any less of an absolute.”
“Safewords always sounded . . . scarier,” she said. “A BDSM thing, with whips and pain and . . . “
“Leah?” I interrupted, “What does the B stand for?”
“Bondage,” she said. “Oh. But that wasn’t like . . .”
I interrupted her again. She was fine all through the session; I couldn’t let her get frightened by it again, in retrospect. “It wasn’t like things you didn’t want. That’s rather what ‘consensual’ means.”
“And safe,” she said. I nodded. “And sane?” She’d read the material; she knew the terminology, and maybe that was why it scared her. There’s a lot of stuff out there that is too extreme for my comfort, let alone something I’d show a newcomer as possible.
I grinned a little, “What you think you were insanely ticklish?” She grinned sheepishly. “The point is, did you have fun?”
“Yeah, I did,” she said.
“Good. So did I.” I grinned at her, pushing my luck just a tiny bit. “Do it again some time?”
“Definitely!” Leah said.
I wanted to hug her, honestly. I couldn’t, though; the paper of limitations I had agreed to at the start of this whole thing had said that hugs were frightening, too restraining. Instead, I got her another glass of water.
Leah did have her limits, after all.
“Huh?” she responded, actually taking a step backwards. I had never thought of myself as an intimidating person, but it almost looked as if she were afraid of me. I toned down the grin a little.
“I said I can do that; if you’d like to play, I’d be glad to respect those limits you’ve set.”
The hardest thing about playing with Leah is calming her down. You want to hold her close and stroke her back softly, she gets that frightened, but that was on the list of things Not To Do. She was scared, that first time, sitting on my bed. I kept my voice gentle, and tried to look harmless as I suggested she put her feet in my lap for a nice massage. She hesitated, steeling herself before doing so, but she did. I slipped off her shoes slowly, and I think she was surprised that I actually did start with a gentle footrub.
“It’s okay,” I soothed softly as I rubbed, “You’re safe. I’m not going to hurt you. Nothing here will hurt. Though it might tickle a little . . . “ I ran one fingernail down her right sole at that, drawing a giggle from her, before I went back to the massage. She -was- slowly relaxing, and eventually I added more frequent tickling, teasing the arches of her feet and the balls in turn. Despite her squirming, she didn’t actually pull her feet away until I stroked along the sensitive area under her toes. She placed them back in my lap, only to whip them away again when I hit the same spot.
“Leah,” I teased, “If you keep that up, I’m going to have to tie them down. The list said I couldn’t HOLD them still, but it said nothing about tying them.” I traced light figure eights over her arches with my fingernails, and enjoyed her giggles. Her words, however, surprised me.
“Okay,” she said. I had honestly thought it an oversight, a loophole about which I could tease her but never risk her trust by exploiting. “What with?”
I hadn’t been prepared for that, needless to say, and I thought quickly about what I could find before she changed her mind. I settled on a long polar fleece scarf, looping it under my own thigh before running the soft, fringed ends over her feet. Carefully, I tied one end of the scarf around each of her ankles, securing her feet to my leg so I could always reach them.
“Ready?” I asked, teasingly. She bit her lip and nodded, enough stress evident that I started slowly again, coaxing soft giggles out of her before moving on to tickle under her toes and even between them with a bit of fringe I clipped off the scarf. (One must keep priorities in mind, after all; what value a scarf next to the opportunity to make a friend laugh? Especially the helpless laughter I got out of Leah?)
With her feet held stationary, all Leah’s squirming had caused her top to ride up a fair bit. Stroking the bottoms of her feet, hardly tickling at all, I speculated, “Mmmm. I wonder if those sides are anywhere near as ticklish as these feet are?”
“No!” she answered quickly, trying to pull her top down. Unfortunately for her, she was lying on her back with a fair bit of it bunched up underneath her; she could tug it down, but it wouldn’t stay.
“Are you lying to me?” I asked, laying a hand on her belly.
“Ummm . . . no?” she asked hopefully.
“Yes you are,” I said, sliding my hand towards her side. She squirmed a little, but didn’t say to stop. “Honestly, this time. Do you -need- me to not tickle you here? Or do you really want it, knowing how hard it will make you squirm?”
She stopped being able to meet my eyes; she looked away from me, but she said, “I want it.”
“It’s okay,” I told her, untying her ankles, “I’m not going to think any less of you because you’re enjoying this as much as I am.” I got up and moved to sit beside her, gently drawing her arms over her head. “Do you want to do this loose?”
“I don’t think I could keep my arms still,” she admitted. When I asked if she really wanted to, she nodded without meeting my eyes again. Ticklish, willing, vulnerable, and scared. And mine with whom to play, as long as I didn’t break her.
“Hands behind your back, then?” I asked. “Or wrists and ankles, to the corners of the bed?” So important not to push too hard; the paper had said no nudity, but I wondered if she’d be willing to strip down to her underthings. The loopholes in the list she had given me, after all, were at least some of them deliberate. I looked at her again, biting her lip, and decided not to ask. Not this time. Keep it simple, hands behind her back, get her squirming a little, but still feeling safe enough to come back.
“Wrists and ankles?” she asked. So much for my train of thought.
“You really like this, don’t you?” I asked, and smiled as she nodded. “Many people find their waist is quite ticklish, too, but you’ve got the waistband of your jeans over it . . . do you think I could pull that down a little?”
“Let me do it?” she asked. Ah, still a bit frightened, I thought, and told her to feel free. She unzipped her jeans and folded both the top of the jeans and her navy cotton panties down to rest at her hips instead of her waist. Without prompting, she lay down on the bed, and looked at me.
What could I do? The lady knew what she wanted. Gently I tied her wrists together, then to the centre of the headboard. I motioned her to move down the bed a little and she did, wiggling temptingly and with the desired side effect of her shirt riding up again. I used an old dog collar to attach each ankle to one edge of the footboard, wrapping it around the post and then the ankle. She wasn’t very tall, but even so her feet hung off the end of the bed, exposed.
“Are you okay?” I asked her quietly, stroking the back of my hand down her side from where the shirt stopped to where the jeans started.
She wiggled a little and nodded, her eyes closed.
“You understand that I’ll stop any time you need me to?” I continued, needing to press home the point. I was fairly sure that she’d never been in a position like this before.
She nodded again, a bit more confidently.
“All you have to say is, ‘stop,’” I reminded her, as I began running my fingers up and down both of her sides at once. She squirmed, finding it impossible to avoid both hands at once, even when she raised herself a little ways off the bed. I must have done a good enough job with the wrists, even just using the scarf, because her arms definitely stayed up despite her attempts to protect herself with them
I ran my hands under her shirt, seeking out her underarms, and -really- gave her a chance to test the scarf. She squirmed hard, laughing and objecting, “That tickles!” but she did not say “stop” even when I spared one hand to stroke along her exposed waist. I reminded myself not to even think about running my fingers any lower, until I remembered that there were two spots quite a bit lower that were fair game.
She blinked at me in surprise as I got up and walked away, and her eyes grew wide as I returned with a bandanna. “No gag,” she objected, and I shook my head.
“I told you I’d stop if you said stop, so I wouldn’t do anything that would make you unable to say it.” She nodded, relaxing again. “This is for your eyes.”
“A blindfold?” she asked. I nodded, moving to place it over her eyes, and she didn’t object. I fastened it on the side, with a safety pin, rather than risking a knot getting tangled in her hair.
Very quietly I began to walk around her, watching her get tenser with each second she didn’t know what was happening. I couldn’t have that, so I reached out to dance fingers lightly over her stomach. She eeped and squirmed, but it was over before she expected it to be. I let several more seconds pass before tracing the line of her waist, and a few more before tickling one side and then the other alternately, and a slow count of ten as I silently moved down to her almost-forgotten feet.
The squeal she let out when I attacked them both at the same time made me grin, myself, and I took my time reviewing all the spots that had drawn the most reaction last time. What a surprise: they all still worked. I had to go over them a second and third time.
“Please,” Leah gasped between laughter, “please oh please oh please . . . “
“All you have to say is stop,” I reminded her, slowing the tickling enough that she could both breathe and speak. “Is that what you mean? Please stop?”
“No,” she said, and I picked up the pace once more, probing between toes to get an advanced map of where reactions were greatest. Unfortunately, I kept losing my spot as her feet wiggled and having to start all over again. “It just tickles so much! I feel like . . . “
“Good?” I suggested, in my most innocent tone, moving my hands from heel to toe, focusing only on the parts her reactions had already told me were worst.
“Ack!” she laughed, “Yes, good, but , , , “ she dissolved into giggling as I stroked the line under her toes again, “but it tickles so badly! I can’t stand it!”
I laughed softly, moving to the side of the bed so that I could reach both her feet and her waist at the same time, “That’s okay,” I reassured her, “You don’t have to stand it. You’re lying down!”
I’m sure the laughter that greeted that was as a result of the joke, rather than the fact that one hand was spidering across her waist, with the odd dip into her navel, as the other stroked the bottom of her near foot. It’s not as if she were ticklish or anything.
“You look tired, dear,” I told her as I moved to massage her sides again. She did; she was barely squirming any more, except when I got too close to her underarm. “Shall we say, maybe, three more minutes, and then we’ll call it a night?”
“Okay,” she giggled. Beautiful Leah, so eager for everything she got. “But no more feet.”
“No more feet,” I promised as I fetched back the kitchen timer and set it for three minutes. “Are you ready?”
“No!” she said, apparently having rethought the matter while I was gone. “I can’t. It’s too much . . .”
“It’s only three minutes,” I reminded her, “but if you say ‘stop’, I won’t even start the timer.”
“Three minutes,” she repeated, taking a deep breath. “Three more minutes . . . “
I waited. She had not yet actually said, “Stop.”
“Go.” she said, her whole body tense. I started the timer, and did the best I could for her tension. If you think about it, all the muscle spasming involved in squirming and laughing has to lead to relaxation, right?
Starting at the waist, I took thirty seconds to explore it thoroughly but slowly. Another minute made painstaking progress up her sides, gently enough to draw giggles rather than full laughter. The end of that trip, though, was the one that really perked her up. For eighty seconds, I ran my fingers over her armpits, up her upper arms, back into the pits, and all around. Somehow this seemed to restore her energy, for she was certainly putting a lot into moving ineffectively from side to side.
The last ten seconds I slowed down, drifting back down her sides, gently stroking until the timer went off. Quietly, I released her arms first, then her ankles, letting her remove the blindfold herself.
“How are you doing?” I asked her.
“I need a drink,” she said, sitting up.
I fetched her a glass of water from the bathroom, “You okay?”
“Yeah,” she said, taking a long drink. “That was . . . “
“A lot more than I thought you would want,” I said, when she failed to finish the sentence. She nodded and took another drink.
“I could have stopped it, though,” she said. “You said that you’d stop any time I needed you to, so I didn’t have to need to.”
“That’s how it works,” I agreed. “You’ve heard of safewords. The fact that you chose ‘stop’ rather than ‘red’ or ‘aardvark’ doesn’t make it any less of an absolute.”
“Safewords always sounded . . . scarier,” she said. “A BDSM thing, with whips and pain and . . . “
“Leah?” I interrupted, “What does the B stand for?”
“Bondage,” she said. “Oh. But that wasn’t like . . .”
I interrupted her again. She was fine all through the session; I couldn’t let her get frightened by it again, in retrospect. “It wasn’t like things you didn’t want. That’s rather what ‘consensual’ means.”
“And safe,” she said. I nodded. “And sane?” She’d read the material; she knew the terminology, and maybe that was why it scared her. There’s a lot of stuff out there that is too extreme for my comfort, let alone something I’d show a newcomer as possible.
I grinned a little, “What you think you were insanely ticklish?” She grinned sheepishly. “The point is, did you have fun?”
“Yeah, I did,” she said.
“Good. So did I.” I grinned at her, pushing my luck just a tiny bit. “Do it again some time?”
“Definitely!” Leah said.
I wanted to hug her, honestly. I couldn’t, though; the paper of limitations I had agreed to at the start of this whole thing had said that hugs were frightening, too restraining. Instead, I got her another glass of water.
Leah did have her limits, after all.
