This excerpt, from the beginning of Chapter 1 of My Name Is Rand, originally appeared in Best Gay Erotica 2005, edited by Richard Labonte and William J. Mann.
The novel My Name Is Rand was originally published by Suspect Thoughts Press in 2004, and reprinted by Lethe Press in 2010.
NOTE: This excerpt contains intense m/m tickle torture as well as gay sex acts. All characters are over age 18, but if you are offended by m/m tickling or gay sex, please DO NOT READ.
It was 3:05 p.m. when I took the turnoff into Granger’s neighborhood. To the southeast lay the city, crowded and noisy, but you’d never know it from these quiet streets and small, well-kept homes. Each front yard had one or two trees. The lawns were uniformly clipped, free of fallen leaves or stray toys. They were white houses, mostly, including Granger’s, so square and bright in the afternoon sun that it seemed to hover a few feet off the ground.
I pulled into the driveway, turned off my engine, and listened to it ticking as it cooled. It had been a long drive across the state, with not much to see and a lot to think about. Picturing myself at this very moment, about to meet Granger, ready to discover if I’d taken the right path. But readiness wasn’t something I’d packed in my small bag along with a change of clothes and tape recorder; at the moment it was such a foreign concept that I touched the ignition key, more than halfway inclined to slip into reverse, get away while I still could. Instead I stared at Granger’s screen door, and realized in a minute or so that he was standing there, his outline assembling slowly, a tall broad man wearing white, his face a grayish mystery.
I rolled down my window. “Am I okay here,” I called, “or should I park on the street?”
“You’re fine.” His voice was loud and deep and welcoming, as if I were an old friend or relative. “Come on in.”
“Thanks.” Always self-critical, I felt a surge of pride, as if I’d passed a test: voice normal, nerves normal. It was possible to feel ordinary as I slid out of my SUV, bag in hand, and approached the door, Granger still a ghost behind the screen.
I set my bag in the living room, and Granger gave me a tour of the house, which he’d just moved into a few weeks earlier. My first really clear look at him was from behind as I followed him down a hallway. He was an ex-Marine, with a short gray crew cut and strong frame, his T-shirt stretched taut across a muscular back and shoulders. His white shorts contrasted well with his tanned furry legs, the kind of legs that could carry a man into and out of all kinds of trouble, legs that would always land a man on his feet. His face, his eyes were still mysteries.
The house was much larger than it looked from the outside. He led me through a generous sun porch down to the basement, which he’d had finished in oak. Half of it had once been a party room, judging by the counter that could easily serve as a bar, and in the other half sat a white washer and dryer. “Also,” he said, “I want to build a room over here. For a rack, and some stocks, and a few other things.”
“You could have yourself quite a decent torture chamber down here,” I said.
“It will come. In time.” In the weak light from the basement window Granger’s smile, framed by a closely trimmed mustache and beard, was confident. He wore a small gold ring in his left ear. I still wanted a good look at his eyes.
We sat out on the front stoop for a while, facing the sun that had dimmed just perceptibly, nudging the clock toward late afternoon, enriching the lawns and houses with a light more gold than yellow. A few neighbors came and went, some of them waving as they got in or out of their cars. It seemed like a pleasantly integrated neighborhood, a far cry from the redneck suburbs that surrounded the city where I lived.
“It’s been years,” I said, “since I’ve seen a neighborhood this quiet.”
“It’s quiet all the time, too,” Granger said. He was wearing sunglasses now. “Even on weekends. No kids on this block.”
“And your house is soundproof?”
“Bet your ass.” Again that smile, not only confident but also anticipating something good.
“Was that the first thing you asked your real estate agent—whether anybody would hear guys screaming in this house?”
Granger laughed. “It wasn’t the first thing, but it was high on the list.”
I almost asked him then if I could see his eyes. But how do you ask that question? I was working to make every gesture and word project self-assurance, as if I constantly traveled to meet strangers for intimate encounters and this was just one more.
“Let’s go inside,” he said finally, as the sun came close to touching the tree line.
In the living room I accepted the beer he offered. He had switched on a lamp and as he handed me the beer I got my first good look at his eyes. They were light-colored, a hazel that was almost gray, but their size made up for their paleness—that, and the way they searched my face as if every part of me was to be found there. Eyes that could seek and find anything, with or without cooperation. Escape proof. I was close to picking up my bag and retreating while I still could.
“Sit down,” he said. “Let’s talk.”
Like many men I had known, Granger could talk about his erotic history the way others talked about their banking careers or hunting dogs. He took it for granted that I was an expert in homoerotics, had handled male bodies and let them handle me with a familiarity that bred an appetite for more. He assumed I had fucked myself raw, sucked cock till my face turned inside out, and jacked off dicks till my palms were callused. It was when he got to our mutual obsession that my heartbeat sped up and my dickhead stirred in my jeans.
He had learned at an early age that he could make other boys helpless by tickling them, and that it was almost unbearably exciting. As he grew up, reducing a boy to breathless laughter and eye-rolling panic became the central ritual of his life. It got him in trouble, the way he single-mindedly pursued his victims; but it also gave him an expertise in stimulation that few others were able to obtain in a lifetime. He explained this to me, not as a braggart but as a man who need make no apologies for what he has diligently earned. He couldn’t relate all of his experiences, but he told me enough so that, after a while, my tongue felt dry and swollen, and I realized I’d been sitting and listening to him with my mouth hanging open.
As he talked I watched his eyes, those all-encompassing eyes, and was somehow unaware that he’d moved from his chair onto the sofa beside me until his hand brushed my arm and I jumped. I was everything he wanted, everything that excited him, and the more I realized it the more I shrank away, as if I could retract my ticklish nerve-ends the way a turtle hides in its shell. I was certain that I couldn’t stand to be touched, not by him, not anywhere.
“Down at the end of that hall,” he said. “Get going.”
I sat and blinked at him. If just one of his large groping fingers touched my naked skin, I’d die.
“I said move!”
The bedroom had light green walls, small shaded lamps, and a double bed with an immaculate white spread. It was the kind of room you’d find in a B&B, comfortable and inviting, not threatening in the least. But my knees shook as I looked around, because the harmlessness of the setting seemed to add something threatening to it.
Granger grabbed the center of the bedspread with his fist, snatched it off the bed, rolled it up in a ball, and tossed it in a corner. From a drawer he took some cloth restraints—surgical restraints, he said, the kind they used in hospitals. He didn’t look directly at me as he spoke, as if he were speaking aloud to his obsession, stoking it with words. “Some tools,” he said, taking a box from a chest of drawers. I saw hairbrushes, regular and electric toothbrushes, feathers, some wicked-looking hair picks, thick pipe cleaners. I reached out to touch one of the brushes, one he had told me about the first time we chatted online. Called “the widowmaker,” it had steel bristles with rounded nylon tips, and was deadly on the soles of the feet.
He was getting out yet another bag of tools when the doorbell rang. He left to answer it. I was having trouble getting my excited breathing under control. I paced in the narrow space between the bed and the shuttered window, then moved out into the hall. Granger stood at the front door, talking to someone—a solicitor?—standing outside on the stoop. While they chatted I could barely take my eyes off Granger’s left hand. It was in constant motion, the fingers stiffening, then springing into claws, then wriggling ferociously—tickling, tickling the air. Was it a signal to me, or did that hand really have a mind of its own, independent from the judgment and will that normally made it run?
***
I lay naked on the cool sheet, my head propped up enough so I could watch Granger peel off his shirt and shorts in a couple of neat stripper moves. His dick—the kind of dick that can stop an argument—preceded the rest of him from then on, bobbing and swaying as he performed his bondage chores. He grabbed my ankles and easily pulled me down toward the bottom edge of the bed, where he tied my ankles together, first wrapping them in a towel so the black cord wouldn’t cut into the skin. A second length of cord led from my bound ankles to a fixture on the floor at the foot of the bed. Next he slid toe-rings over my big toes, metal rings that tickled as he fitted them snug, making me gasp. It wasn’t a good sign: if my toes were that ticklish, what kind of chance did I have? He tied cords leading from the rings to the cords securing my ankles, so I now had feet that couldn’t move up or down or side to side, soles that couldn’t flex, toes that couldn’t clench. By the time he had fastened the wrist restraints, stretching my arms to the limit, and blindfolded me with a tight dark cloth, I knew the utter helplessness of a victim, unable to fend off the merest threat.
He showed me how easy it was for him, reducing me to blind laughter within a matter of seconds—playfully, using a big soft feather on my nostrils, violating my nose, shoving tickling sensations up into my brain till I was begging him to stop. From there it was a short trip to my ears, feathering all in and around them as I felt them grow, my ticklish ears becoming all of me, then expanding into the room, the street, the city. The tickler and his feathers grew, too, keeping in step with sensation as my laughter, already hoarse, swallowed up all other sound.
I was half out of my mind, and so far he had only touched my nose and ears. He had a lot to teach me just by moving as far down as my neck, where the feathers had me giggling and sputtering like a child, twisting my head, exposing new spots, new angles to the torture. Now my body was a map of the known and the unknown, and I gasped as he reached each frontier, my shoulders, my upper chest….
When he reached my armpits I began to beg in earnest. His strong, quick fingers whirred like eggbeaters in those tender pockets, and I was twisting my head again, choking out laughter that rose in pitch and volume, then babbling whenever my breath could find room, an automatic string of stop-it-please-stop-it and don’t-do-it-don’t-do-it….
Then he jumped whole continents, moving from my armpits to my feet, and I realized how much power he had, how he could turn me into anything. I screamed as his strong fingers raked my soles over and over; it was as if it had been ordained long ago that these were the fingers that could tickle me to death. He paused only to soften up my feet with some kind of lotion. Catching my breath, I pictured that deadly brush—the widowmaker—heading toward my soles, and cursed my imagination for conspiring with the blindfold to scare me witless. But the scare was nothing compared with the actual moment when those stiff bristles ground into my arches. My head exploded. I screamed at him, said I was going to die if he didn’t stop. I spent my precious breath begging him, using every dirty promise, every filthy bribe I could think of, pledging to be his dick-slave, to jack him off, suck his cock, lick his balls, massage his prostate if only he’d stop tickling me. I promised him everything I could think of short of letting him fuck me in the ass, which I’d never let a man do. But my mouth could serve him, I swore I’d make him come like he’d never come before, honest to Christ, he’d never be sorry he took mercy on me….
“Mercy?” He laughed like hell as he scrubbed the flesh beneath my tightly stretched toes. When he finally paused just long enough to say, “Now I think I’m gonna work between your toes for a while,” I pictured again what he was doing, taking up a handful of thick pipe cleaners.
***
Much later, when I was finally free and had had a chance to recover, and we were sitting on the red sofa in his living room, he called me on those promises. I pointed out that they had been pleas for a mercy I’d never received. His counter-argument was convincing, though: “You better get to work, or the next session will be even worse.”
To make his point he grabbed my feet and used his fingernails on my soles. That flipped a switch and I was instantly helpless, writhing and sputtering about how good I could make his dick feel.
“So do it,” he said.
I sank to the floor, took him in my mouth and, excited by the feel of his dickhead against my palate, sucked as if my life depended on it, which it probably did. I sucked and jacked his dick, licked his glistening balls, soaked his groin and navel with my tongue. He lay back, his eyes closed, moaning seriously. I sucked his achingly hard dick again till he was at the point of coming, then moved back to his balls. His moans were louder than ever. I spread his thighs wider, the more easily to reach down and manipulate his prostate with my fingertips. Unable to resist his hairy thighs, I let my fingers roam there too, stroking, then lightly squeezing. His moans grew shorter, sharper. As I continued working his dick with my mouth I let two fingers explore between his cheeks to find his asshole, prying and rubbing and rimming it.
When he was close to coming I started jacking his dick for all I was worth. His dickhead popped free from my mouth and he came in an explosion so long and hard that it left me sitting against the wall with my face, neck, and chest soaked with cum. I was so fucking wet, I thought his dick had literally blown up.
Then I got in his face. He seemed barely conscious, moaning and shaking his head in disbelief at what I’d made him feel. But I knew he was hearing me as I said to him, “Now here’s what I want you to do. Tie me up and tickle me, and keep it steady. Don’t stop for a second, till you’ve tickled me out of my mind. Make me your slave.”
In no time I was tightly stretched, tied down and blindfolded again. I knew whatever he had done to me before was now going to be ten times worse, but it turned out I was wrong. It was a hundred times worse. His tickling was relentless, keeping me in such steady laughter that I couldn’t speak. Even when he stopped to lotion up my feet for the widowmaker, I couldn’t beg for mercy because I was panting so hard. Those bristles dug into my soles again and I was screaming, a steady hoarsening wail that rose in pitch and intensity like a siren gone haywire, taking all my breath, threatening to burst my own eardrums. I screamed for what seemed like forever as he scrubbed my slickened feet all over with those bristles, and I was no longer tied to a bed but floating, suspended in endless space, held aloft by nothing but agony.
When that particular torture was over I had no time to recover, for he was at the rest of me again, from my neck to my knees, and my screams subsided into steady, hysterical laughter as his strong, quick fingers seemed to move everywhere at once. When I could get out a word, finally, one exhausted word, it was “Don’t!”
“Don’t what?” he asked. “Don’t what?” But of course he wouldn’t stop long enough to let me get out another word, I was off on another course of breathless laughter.
“Don’t!” I managed to say again, perhaps an hour later.
“Don’t what?” he asked again, jabbing my belly with all ten fingers, my laughter so shrill now that it sounded like the keening of a madman throwing himself against the rubber walls of his cell.
When the widowmaker came again I broke completely. The time when I thought he couldn’t totally break me belonged to ancient history, when the earth was flat. Now, with those bristles as merciless as fire on the center of my soles and beneath my toes, I knew, for the first time, what it was like to lose the will to survive. Through my struggling the cords had loosened enough so I could clench my toes a bit, but now, after another long, high-pitched wail, I relaxed them for the first time, allowing them to spread, surrendering them to him. Immediately bristles forced themselves where they couldn’t quite reach before. I was laughing, babbling, and wailing all at the same time.
After my feet had been totally destroyed, broken down into ticklish molecules and down again into nothing, he moved back to the rest of me, kneading, squeezing, pitilessly poking and pulling the lethally sensitized flesh from my neck to my thighs. I was reduced to panting with my tongue hanging out, drooling down my chin like an idiot.
The session lasted all night.
***
The next day, after we’d slept a few hours—I’d stayed on the bed, too weak to move from the sweat-soaked sheet—we had eggs and toast, sitting naked at the kitchen table with a pot of black coffee, then ended up on the red sofa again. I lay on my belly with my feet hooked over his thigh, which let him play with my soles with his right hand as he jacked himself off with his left.
After a while he said, “Now I want your ribs,” and like the obedient tickle-slave I’d become I rolled over, got to my knees, and raised my arms above my head. The unspoken rules of engagement demanded that, if I wanted to get him to stop tickling my ribs, I had to beg him to tickle my belly; and in order to rescue my poor sore belly I had to beg him to tickle my armpits. “Please, master,” I said again and again, offering up my feet, then my lower back. Soon we were writhing together, slick with sweat and precum, and I had his dick in my mouth. It seemed even bigger today, as if it had swollen with use. He had to admit that he liked my dick too, showing it in his own way: no obliging hand jobs or sweet suckoffs, not without a lot of agonizing apple-polishing first. Did it make me more ticklish? Of course it did. Everything did—breathing the air, processing oxygen, replacing dead cells with new ones.
Sometime in the afternoon we got stoned. I was afraid at first, but fear had also become as standard as breathing. Being with Granger was all about fear, because I was so scared of being tickled to death and he was so ready to make it happen. The grass that we smoked was moist, as if he grew it himself in the backyard. Maybe he did; a hidden plot of marijuana was no more subversive than a torture chamber, which he did a pretty good job of improvising even if he didn’t have all the equipment yet.
Being stoned was dangerous. My buzzing brain kept losing track of my skin. There I was with my feet in his face, shoving them against his tongue and teeth; how’d that happen? And how did I ever allow him to wrap me in plastic like a mummy? Not that it was much work for him—he had only to spread the thick plastic sheet on the floor, have me lie down on it, grab an edge and roll. His work consisted of tying ropes to keep the plastic in place, making absolutely sure that I couldn’t move my arms, hands, or even fingers. As I lay on my back, completely helpless, he put toe-rings on my feet and secured them. I was breathing hard, out of panic. This was an advanced stage of bondage, much different from being tied spread-eagle to a bed, where it was at least possible to move enough to prove to yourself you were still alive. The only part of my body I could move at all was my head, and that not very much. It didn’t seem to count, anyway, when there was little my head could do but measure the devastation to come, like a seismograph.
“Granger?” I asked, just wanting to hear his voice. “Hey, Granger.” He wasn’t near my stretched, bound feet; where was he? Twisting my head to the left, I could glimpse the kitchen area, the light from the open refrigerator glowing on the tiles. Cellophane crackled, a jar popped its lid. The son of a bitch was making himself a sandwich. Pulling a chair over to the kitchen counter, he sat where I could see his bare feet as he ate, making plenty of slurping and smacking sounds but not saying a word. “Hey, Granger.” He was probably reading a magazine, too. “Granger, goddamn it!”
It was tough to appraise a situation where, thanks to pot, my senses lagged behind my observations. I was in deep trouble, its depth revealing itself slowly, like layers of a dream. While most of me could do nothing, my pot-sensitized feet perked up like a retriever’s ears, registering everything—air currents, particles of dust, sound waves from Granger’s squeaking chair. Idiot feet, bragging about how sensitive they were, as if to reassure me. “Hey, Granger?” I said. Maybe it wasn’t too late to call this off. “Granger.” I was growing warm in my plastic cocoon, my sweat seeming to tighten the sheath even more. “Granger,” I said, twisting my head toward his bare feet on the kitchen floor, all I could see of him. Unlike mine, his feet were confident, in control. Feet that would always land a man on his legs. What, what was I going to do? What could I do? The unacceptable nothing echoed through my mind in a voice very much like Granger’s. I shook my head vigorously, like a child throwing a tantrum, until I heard Granger’s voice again, for real this time.
“Here you go,” he said. As if he were handing me a glass of water, instead of fitting a blindfold over my eyes. “Here you go,” and there I went, into total darkness.
What he did to my feet over the next hour should not have been done to anyone, ever. I would never know what he used on them, for he refused to tell me, even after he finally stopped. I assumed it was something from his kitchen, something that was never meant to be used on human flesh. It burrowed into the core of my ticklishness and multiplied like a corrosive virus, flaying my feet down to raw nerves. At each touch I howled a desperate laughter and the touching never stopped; he kept me on the brink of passing out but I never quite crossed over. When he finally stopped tickling me I kept howling, stuck in my hysteria till he grabbed my chin with one hand, turned my head back and forth. It was then I knew it was over, also realizing that my midsection had become unbearably warm and moist: I had pissed myself.
Something was different in me after that. For a long time I sat across the living room from Granger and looked at him looking at me. He sat with one bare leg hiked up, a forearm resting on his knee, a vaguely satisfied expression on his face, the look of a champion trying to appear humble. Even his dick, which I had rubbed and sucked raw over the past twenty-four hours, looked satisfied, lying on his belly as if it were taking a well-deserved nap. Still half-stoned and hardly sane, I began listening, almost against my will, to the tiny voice in that part of my brain that could still organize thought. The voice was telling me that somehow I was going to have to pull myself together. Somewhere the world kept turning, and I would have to join it again.
“You want anything to eat?” Granger asked.
I shook my head.
“Anything to drink? Water?”
I just looked at him. “How am I going to do this?” I asked.
“Don’t worry,” he said. “Just take it slow. Do you want to make a phone call?”
Yes, that was another thing that just came back to me: I wasn’t going to be able to make it all the way across the state tonight as I had originally planned. I needed at least another couple of hours before I would be in any shape to drive. I looked at my watch and figured out, with the time-consuming, roundabout logic of someone under the influence of too much stimulation, that David would not be home from his law office yet, even though it was Saturday. That meant I would get his answering machine. That was okay, I could handle being coherent enough to leave a message.
By my watch it was 8:15 when I left. Granger, still naked, saw me to the door. Even in the hallway the air reeked of sweat and cum and piss, and I felt I had his scent on me too—hard to describe, a clean but strong smell, like a no-nonsense soap. In spite of what they had done to me I was going to miss his enormous hands. And his dick, which I stooped down and took in my mouth one last time, clutching it with my tongue. He cuffed me on the shoulder as I picked up my bag and stepped outside. The late evening sun was surprisingly strong.
I was still feeling a little stoned, and drove with the kind of overcompensation that can be so amusing in someone who’s high—keeping twenty miles under the speed limit, braking far in advance of a red light. There wasn’t much traffic, though, on the quiet streets leading to the highway.
The interstate was a different matter, especially at the point where it merged with another major highway. Suddenly I found myself in the midst of eight lanes of stalled traffic—a thousand taillights flaring at random as brakes were lightly touched, no car moving more than a few inches at a time. Whatever caused the jam lay far ahead, unseen; I couldn’t spot even the flashing lights of a police car or ambulance. It seemed like a long time before traffic moved freely again.
The ugly, over familiar highway offered little to see but gently rolling countryside, flat and featureless. I kept to the speed limit, letting tractor-trailers and anxious SUVs rush by on my left. Alert now, I could see each step of the journey ahead: stopping at a cheap but adequate motel, catching seven or eight hours’ sleep and taking off again with a thermos full of coffee, finally reaching home around noon. Calling David, who would surely be at home then, reading the Sunday paper. I’d told him that I was visiting an “old friend.” He’d have no inkling of what I’d been through; if I tried to explain that I had been tied up and tickled to within an inch of my life he would only stare at me, wide-eyed and openmouthed, letting his Parade magazine fall to the floor.
Traffic grew sparse as I approached the center of the state. With no oncoming headlights or a clear radio station to keep me company, I reached into my bag on the passenger’s seat and found the cassette tape player. Granger had turned it on and kept it near me during our most intense sessions. As soon as I pressed the PLAY button my own raucous laughter, so sharp and clear in the dark of night, took my breath away. I was neither seeing him nor feeling him, but at that moment Granger seemed more alive than anyone I had ever known.
The novel My Name Is Rand was originally published by Suspect Thoughts Press in 2004, and reprinted by Lethe Press in 2010.
NOTE: This excerpt contains intense m/m tickle torture as well as gay sex acts. All characters are over age 18, but if you are offended by m/m tickling or gay sex, please DO NOT READ.
It was 3:05 p.m. when I took the turnoff into Granger’s neighborhood. To the southeast lay the city, crowded and noisy, but you’d never know it from these quiet streets and small, well-kept homes. Each front yard had one or two trees. The lawns were uniformly clipped, free of fallen leaves or stray toys. They were white houses, mostly, including Granger’s, so square and bright in the afternoon sun that it seemed to hover a few feet off the ground.
I pulled into the driveway, turned off my engine, and listened to it ticking as it cooled. It had been a long drive across the state, with not much to see and a lot to think about. Picturing myself at this very moment, about to meet Granger, ready to discover if I’d taken the right path. But readiness wasn’t something I’d packed in my small bag along with a change of clothes and tape recorder; at the moment it was such a foreign concept that I touched the ignition key, more than halfway inclined to slip into reverse, get away while I still could. Instead I stared at Granger’s screen door, and realized in a minute or so that he was standing there, his outline assembling slowly, a tall broad man wearing white, his face a grayish mystery.
I rolled down my window. “Am I okay here,” I called, “or should I park on the street?”
“You’re fine.” His voice was loud and deep and welcoming, as if I were an old friend or relative. “Come on in.”
“Thanks.” Always self-critical, I felt a surge of pride, as if I’d passed a test: voice normal, nerves normal. It was possible to feel ordinary as I slid out of my SUV, bag in hand, and approached the door, Granger still a ghost behind the screen.
I set my bag in the living room, and Granger gave me a tour of the house, which he’d just moved into a few weeks earlier. My first really clear look at him was from behind as I followed him down a hallway. He was an ex-Marine, with a short gray crew cut and strong frame, his T-shirt stretched taut across a muscular back and shoulders. His white shorts contrasted well with his tanned furry legs, the kind of legs that could carry a man into and out of all kinds of trouble, legs that would always land a man on his feet. His face, his eyes were still mysteries.
The house was much larger than it looked from the outside. He led me through a generous sun porch down to the basement, which he’d had finished in oak. Half of it had once been a party room, judging by the counter that could easily serve as a bar, and in the other half sat a white washer and dryer. “Also,” he said, “I want to build a room over here. For a rack, and some stocks, and a few other things.”
“You could have yourself quite a decent torture chamber down here,” I said.
“It will come. In time.” In the weak light from the basement window Granger’s smile, framed by a closely trimmed mustache and beard, was confident. He wore a small gold ring in his left ear. I still wanted a good look at his eyes.
We sat out on the front stoop for a while, facing the sun that had dimmed just perceptibly, nudging the clock toward late afternoon, enriching the lawns and houses with a light more gold than yellow. A few neighbors came and went, some of them waving as they got in or out of their cars. It seemed like a pleasantly integrated neighborhood, a far cry from the redneck suburbs that surrounded the city where I lived.
“It’s been years,” I said, “since I’ve seen a neighborhood this quiet.”
“It’s quiet all the time, too,” Granger said. He was wearing sunglasses now. “Even on weekends. No kids on this block.”
“And your house is soundproof?”
“Bet your ass.” Again that smile, not only confident but also anticipating something good.
“Was that the first thing you asked your real estate agent—whether anybody would hear guys screaming in this house?”
Granger laughed. “It wasn’t the first thing, but it was high on the list.”
I almost asked him then if I could see his eyes. But how do you ask that question? I was working to make every gesture and word project self-assurance, as if I constantly traveled to meet strangers for intimate encounters and this was just one more.
“Let’s go inside,” he said finally, as the sun came close to touching the tree line.
In the living room I accepted the beer he offered. He had switched on a lamp and as he handed me the beer I got my first good look at his eyes. They were light-colored, a hazel that was almost gray, but their size made up for their paleness—that, and the way they searched my face as if every part of me was to be found there. Eyes that could seek and find anything, with or without cooperation. Escape proof. I was close to picking up my bag and retreating while I still could.
“Sit down,” he said. “Let’s talk.”
Like many men I had known, Granger could talk about his erotic history the way others talked about their banking careers or hunting dogs. He took it for granted that I was an expert in homoerotics, had handled male bodies and let them handle me with a familiarity that bred an appetite for more. He assumed I had fucked myself raw, sucked cock till my face turned inside out, and jacked off dicks till my palms were callused. It was when he got to our mutual obsession that my heartbeat sped up and my dickhead stirred in my jeans.
He had learned at an early age that he could make other boys helpless by tickling them, and that it was almost unbearably exciting. As he grew up, reducing a boy to breathless laughter and eye-rolling panic became the central ritual of his life. It got him in trouble, the way he single-mindedly pursued his victims; but it also gave him an expertise in stimulation that few others were able to obtain in a lifetime. He explained this to me, not as a braggart but as a man who need make no apologies for what he has diligently earned. He couldn’t relate all of his experiences, but he told me enough so that, after a while, my tongue felt dry and swollen, and I realized I’d been sitting and listening to him with my mouth hanging open.
As he talked I watched his eyes, those all-encompassing eyes, and was somehow unaware that he’d moved from his chair onto the sofa beside me until his hand brushed my arm and I jumped. I was everything he wanted, everything that excited him, and the more I realized it the more I shrank away, as if I could retract my ticklish nerve-ends the way a turtle hides in its shell. I was certain that I couldn’t stand to be touched, not by him, not anywhere.
“Down at the end of that hall,” he said. “Get going.”
I sat and blinked at him. If just one of his large groping fingers touched my naked skin, I’d die.
“I said move!”
The bedroom had light green walls, small shaded lamps, and a double bed with an immaculate white spread. It was the kind of room you’d find in a B&B, comfortable and inviting, not threatening in the least. But my knees shook as I looked around, because the harmlessness of the setting seemed to add something threatening to it.
Granger grabbed the center of the bedspread with his fist, snatched it off the bed, rolled it up in a ball, and tossed it in a corner. From a drawer he took some cloth restraints—surgical restraints, he said, the kind they used in hospitals. He didn’t look directly at me as he spoke, as if he were speaking aloud to his obsession, stoking it with words. “Some tools,” he said, taking a box from a chest of drawers. I saw hairbrushes, regular and electric toothbrushes, feathers, some wicked-looking hair picks, thick pipe cleaners. I reached out to touch one of the brushes, one he had told me about the first time we chatted online. Called “the widowmaker,” it had steel bristles with rounded nylon tips, and was deadly on the soles of the feet.
He was getting out yet another bag of tools when the doorbell rang. He left to answer it. I was having trouble getting my excited breathing under control. I paced in the narrow space between the bed and the shuttered window, then moved out into the hall. Granger stood at the front door, talking to someone—a solicitor?—standing outside on the stoop. While they chatted I could barely take my eyes off Granger’s left hand. It was in constant motion, the fingers stiffening, then springing into claws, then wriggling ferociously—tickling, tickling the air. Was it a signal to me, or did that hand really have a mind of its own, independent from the judgment and will that normally made it run?
***
I lay naked on the cool sheet, my head propped up enough so I could watch Granger peel off his shirt and shorts in a couple of neat stripper moves. His dick—the kind of dick that can stop an argument—preceded the rest of him from then on, bobbing and swaying as he performed his bondage chores. He grabbed my ankles and easily pulled me down toward the bottom edge of the bed, where he tied my ankles together, first wrapping them in a towel so the black cord wouldn’t cut into the skin. A second length of cord led from my bound ankles to a fixture on the floor at the foot of the bed. Next he slid toe-rings over my big toes, metal rings that tickled as he fitted them snug, making me gasp. It wasn’t a good sign: if my toes were that ticklish, what kind of chance did I have? He tied cords leading from the rings to the cords securing my ankles, so I now had feet that couldn’t move up or down or side to side, soles that couldn’t flex, toes that couldn’t clench. By the time he had fastened the wrist restraints, stretching my arms to the limit, and blindfolded me with a tight dark cloth, I knew the utter helplessness of a victim, unable to fend off the merest threat.
He showed me how easy it was for him, reducing me to blind laughter within a matter of seconds—playfully, using a big soft feather on my nostrils, violating my nose, shoving tickling sensations up into my brain till I was begging him to stop. From there it was a short trip to my ears, feathering all in and around them as I felt them grow, my ticklish ears becoming all of me, then expanding into the room, the street, the city. The tickler and his feathers grew, too, keeping in step with sensation as my laughter, already hoarse, swallowed up all other sound.
I was half out of my mind, and so far he had only touched my nose and ears. He had a lot to teach me just by moving as far down as my neck, where the feathers had me giggling and sputtering like a child, twisting my head, exposing new spots, new angles to the torture. Now my body was a map of the known and the unknown, and I gasped as he reached each frontier, my shoulders, my upper chest….
When he reached my armpits I began to beg in earnest. His strong, quick fingers whirred like eggbeaters in those tender pockets, and I was twisting my head again, choking out laughter that rose in pitch and volume, then babbling whenever my breath could find room, an automatic string of stop-it-please-stop-it and don’t-do-it-don’t-do-it….
Then he jumped whole continents, moving from my armpits to my feet, and I realized how much power he had, how he could turn me into anything. I screamed as his strong fingers raked my soles over and over; it was as if it had been ordained long ago that these were the fingers that could tickle me to death. He paused only to soften up my feet with some kind of lotion. Catching my breath, I pictured that deadly brush—the widowmaker—heading toward my soles, and cursed my imagination for conspiring with the blindfold to scare me witless. But the scare was nothing compared with the actual moment when those stiff bristles ground into my arches. My head exploded. I screamed at him, said I was going to die if he didn’t stop. I spent my precious breath begging him, using every dirty promise, every filthy bribe I could think of, pledging to be his dick-slave, to jack him off, suck his cock, lick his balls, massage his prostate if only he’d stop tickling me. I promised him everything I could think of short of letting him fuck me in the ass, which I’d never let a man do. But my mouth could serve him, I swore I’d make him come like he’d never come before, honest to Christ, he’d never be sorry he took mercy on me….
“Mercy?” He laughed like hell as he scrubbed the flesh beneath my tightly stretched toes. When he finally paused just long enough to say, “Now I think I’m gonna work between your toes for a while,” I pictured again what he was doing, taking up a handful of thick pipe cleaners.
***
Much later, when I was finally free and had had a chance to recover, and we were sitting on the red sofa in his living room, he called me on those promises. I pointed out that they had been pleas for a mercy I’d never received. His counter-argument was convincing, though: “You better get to work, or the next session will be even worse.”
To make his point he grabbed my feet and used his fingernails on my soles. That flipped a switch and I was instantly helpless, writhing and sputtering about how good I could make his dick feel.
“So do it,” he said.
I sank to the floor, took him in my mouth and, excited by the feel of his dickhead against my palate, sucked as if my life depended on it, which it probably did. I sucked and jacked his dick, licked his glistening balls, soaked his groin and navel with my tongue. He lay back, his eyes closed, moaning seriously. I sucked his achingly hard dick again till he was at the point of coming, then moved back to his balls. His moans were louder than ever. I spread his thighs wider, the more easily to reach down and manipulate his prostate with my fingertips. Unable to resist his hairy thighs, I let my fingers roam there too, stroking, then lightly squeezing. His moans grew shorter, sharper. As I continued working his dick with my mouth I let two fingers explore between his cheeks to find his asshole, prying and rubbing and rimming it.
When he was close to coming I started jacking his dick for all I was worth. His dickhead popped free from my mouth and he came in an explosion so long and hard that it left me sitting against the wall with my face, neck, and chest soaked with cum. I was so fucking wet, I thought his dick had literally blown up.
Then I got in his face. He seemed barely conscious, moaning and shaking his head in disbelief at what I’d made him feel. But I knew he was hearing me as I said to him, “Now here’s what I want you to do. Tie me up and tickle me, and keep it steady. Don’t stop for a second, till you’ve tickled me out of my mind. Make me your slave.”
In no time I was tightly stretched, tied down and blindfolded again. I knew whatever he had done to me before was now going to be ten times worse, but it turned out I was wrong. It was a hundred times worse. His tickling was relentless, keeping me in such steady laughter that I couldn’t speak. Even when he stopped to lotion up my feet for the widowmaker, I couldn’t beg for mercy because I was panting so hard. Those bristles dug into my soles again and I was screaming, a steady hoarsening wail that rose in pitch and intensity like a siren gone haywire, taking all my breath, threatening to burst my own eardrums. I screamed for what seemed like forever as he scrubbed my slickened feet all over with those bristles, and I was no longer tied to a bed but floating, suspended in endless space, held aloft by nothing but agony.
When that particular torture was over I had no time to recover, for he was at the rest of me again, from my neck to my knees, and my screams subsided into steady, hysterical laughter as his strong, quick fingers seemed to move everywhere at once. When I could get out a word, finally, one exhausted word, it was “Don’t!”
“Don’t what?” he asked. “Don’t what?” But of course he wouldn’t stop long enough to let me get out another word, I was off on another course of breathless laughter.
“Don’t!” I managed to say again, perhaps an hour later.
“Don’t what?” he asked again, jabbing my belly with all ten fingers, my laughter so shrill now that it sounded like the keening of a madman throwing himself against the rubber walls of his cell.
When the widowmaker came again I broke completely. The time when I thought he couldn’t totally break me belonged to ancient history, when the earth was flat. Now, with those bristles as merciless as fire on the center of my soles and beneath my toes, I knew, for the first time, what it was like to lose the will to survive. Through my struggling the cords had loosened enough so I could clench my toes a bit, but now, after another long, high-pitched wail, I relaxed them for the first time, allowing them to spread, surrendering them to him. Immediately bristles forced themselves where they couldn’t quite reach before. I was laughing, babbling, and wailing all at the same time.
After my feet had been totally destroyed, broken down into ticklish molecules and down again into nothing, he moved back to the rest of me, kneading, squeezing, pitilessly poking and pulling the lethally sensitized flesh from my neck to my thighs. I was reduced to panting with my tongue hanging out, drooling down my chin like an idiot.
The session lasted all night.
***
The next day, after we’d slept a few hours—I’d stayed on the bed, too weak to move from the sweat-soaked sheet—we had eggs and toast, sitting naked at the kitchen table with a pot of black coffee, then ended up on the red sofa again. I lay on my belly with my feet hooked over his thigh, which let him play with my soles with his right hand as he jacked himself off with his left.
After a while he said, “Now I want your ribs,” and like the obedient tickle-slave I’d become I rolled over, got to my knees, and raised my arms above my head. The unspoken rules of engagement demanded that, if I wanted to get him to stop tickling my ribs, I had to beg him to tickle my belly; and in order to rescue my poor sore belly I had to beg him to tickle my armpits. “Please, master,” I said again and again, offering up my feet, then my lower back. Soon we were writhing together, slick with sweat and precum, and I had his dick in my mouth. It seemed even bigger today, as if it had swollen with use. He had to admit that he liked my dick too, showing it in his own way: no obliging hand jobs or sweet suckoffs, not without a lot of agonizing apple-polishing first. Did it make me more ticklish? Of course it did. Everything did—breathing the air, processing oxygen, replacing dead cells with new ones.
Sometime in the afternoon we got stoned. I was afraid at first, but fear had also become as standard as breathing. Being with Granger was all about fear, because I was so scared of being tickled to death and he was so ready to make it happen. The grass that we smoked was moist, as if he grew it himself in the backyard. Maybe he did; a hidden plot of marijuana was no more subversive than a torture chamber, which he did a pretty good job of improvising even if he didn’t have all the equipment yet.
Being stoned was dangerous. My buzzing brain kept losing track of my skin. There I was with my feet in his face, shoving them against his tongue and teeth; how’d that happen? And how did I ever allow him to wrap me in plastic like a mummy? Not that it was much work for him—he had only to spread the thick plastic sheet on the floor, have me lie down on it, grab an edge and roll. His work consisted of tying ropes to keep the plastic in place, making absolutely sure that I couldn’t move my arms, hands, or even fingers. As I lay on my back, completely helpless, he put toe-rings on my feet and secured them. I was breathing hard, out of panic. This was an advanced stage of bondage, much different from being tied spread-eagle to a bed, where it was at least possible to move enough to prove to yourself you were still alive. The only part of my body I could move at all was my head, and that not very much. It didn’t seem to count, anyway, when there was little my head could do but measure the devastation to come, like a seismograph.
“Granger?” I asked, just wanting to hear his voice. “Hey, Granger.” He wasn’t near my stretched, bound feet; where was he? Twisting my head to the left, I could glimpse the kitchen area, the light from the open refrigerator glowing on the tiles. Cellophane crackled, a jar popped its lid. The son of a bitch was making himself a sandwich. Pulling a chair over to the kitchen counter, he sat where I could see his bare feet as he ate, making plenty of slurping and smacking sounds but not saying a word. “Hey, Granger.” He was probably reading a magazine, too. “Granger, goddamn it!”
It was tough to appraise a situation where, thanks to pot, my senses lagged behind my observations. I was in deep trouble, its depth revealing itself slowly, like layers of a dream. While most of me could do nothing, my pot-sensitized feet perked up like a retriever’s ears, registering everything—air currents, particles of dust, sound waves from Granger’s squeaking chair. Idiot feet, bragging about how sensitive they were, as if to reassure me. “Hey, Granger?” I said. Maybe it wasn’t too late to call this off. “Granger.” I was growing warm in my plastic cocoon, my sweat seeming to tighten the sheath even more. “Granger,” I said, twisting my head toward his bare feet on the kitchen floor, all I could see of him. Unlike mine, his feet were confident, in control. Feet that would always land a man on his legs. What, what was I going to do? What could I do? The unacceptable nothing echoed through my mind in a voice very much like Granger’s. I shook my head vigorously, like a child throwing a tantrum, until I heard Granger’s voice again, for real this time.
“Here you go,” he said. As if he were handing me a glass of water, instead of fitting a blindfold over my eyes. “Here you go,” and there I went, into total darkness.
What he did to my feet over the next hour should not have been done to anyone, ever. I would never know what he used on them, for he refused to tell me, even after he finally stopped. I assumed it was something from his kitchen, something that was never meant to be used on human flesh. It burrowed into the core of my ticklishness and multiplied like a corrosive virus, flaying my feet down to raw nerves. At each touch I howled a desperate laughter and the touching never stopped; he kept me on the brink of passing out but I never quite crossed over. When he finally stopped tickling me I kept howling, stuck in my hysteria till he grabbed my chin with one hand, turned my head back and forth. It was then I knew it was over, also realizing that my midsection had become unbearably warm and moist: I had pissed myself.
Something was different in me after that. For a long time I sat across the living room from Granger and looked at him looking at me. He sat with one bare leg hiked up, a forearm resting on his knee, a vaguely satisfied expression on his face, the look of a champion trying to appear humble. Even his dick, which I had rubbed and sucked raw over the past twenty-four hours, looked satisfied, lying on his belly as if it were taking a well-deserved nap. Still half-stoned and hardly sane, I began listening, almost against my will, to the tiny voice in that part of my brain that could still organize thought. The voice was telling me that somehow I was going to have to pull myself together. Somewhere the world kept turning, and I would have to join it again.
“You want anything to eat?” Granger asked.
I shook my head.
“Anything to drink? Water?”
I just looked at him. “How am I going to do this?” I asked.
“Don’t worry,” he said. “Just take it slow. Do you want to make a phone call?”
Yes, that was another thing that just came back to me: I wasn’t going to be able to make it all the way across the state tonight as I had originally planned. I needed at least another couple of hours before I would be in any shape to drive. I looked at my watch and figured out, with the time-consuming, roundabout logic of someone under the influence of too much stimulation, that David would not be home from his law office yet, even though it was Saturday. That meant I would get his answering machine. That was okay, I could handle being coherent enough to leave a message.
By my watch it was 8:15 when I left. Granger, still naked, saw me to the door. Even in the hallway the air reeked of sweat and cum and piss, and I felt I had his scent on me too—hard to describe, a clean but strong smell, like a no-nonsense soap. In spite of what they had done to me I was going to miss his enormous hands. And his dick, which I stooped down and took in my mouth one last time, clutching it with my tongue. He cuffed me on the shoulder as I picked up my bag and stepped outside. The late evening sun was surprisingly strong.
I was still feeling a little stoned, and drove with the kind of overcompensation that can be so amusing in someone who’s high—keeping twenty miles under the speed limit, braking far in advance of a red light. There wasn’t much traffic, though, on the quiet streets leading to the highway.
The interstate was a different matter, especially at the point where it merged with another major highway. Suddenly I found myself in the midst of eight lanes of stalled traffic—a thousand taillights flaring at random as brakes were lightly touched, no car moving more than a few inches at a time. Whatever caused the jam lay far ahead, unseen; I couldn’t spot even the flashing lights of a police car or ambulance. It seemed like a long time before traffic moved freely again.
The ugly, over familiar highway offered little to see but gently rolling countryside, flat and featureless. I kept to the speed limit, letting tractor-trailers and anxious SUVs rush by on my left. Alert now, I could see each step of the journey ahead: stopping at a cheap but adequate motel, catching seven or eight hours’ sleep and taking off again with a thermos full of coffee, finally reaching home around noon. Calling David, who would surely be at home then, reading the Sunday paper. I’d told him that I was visiting an “old friend.” He’d have no inkling of what I’d been through; if I tried to explain that I had been tied up and tickled to within an inch of my life he would only stare at me, wide-eyed and openmouthed, letting his Parade magazine fall to the floor.
Traffic grew sparse as I approached the center of the state. With no oncoming headlights or a clear radio station to keep me company, I reached into my bag on the passenger’s seat and found the cassette tape player. Granger had turned it on and kept it near me during our most intense sessions. As soon as I pressed the PLAY button my own raucous laughter, so sharp and clear in the dark of night, took my breath away. I was neither seeing him nor feeling him, but at that moment Granger seemed more alive than anyone I had ever known.
