I have a vivid recollection of when I was a senior in high school and on a family vacation with two of my cousins; I was in bed in my assigned room when they wandered in, bored, and eventually their attention turned to tickling me. They were tickling me through a sheet and a blanket, so the effects of their attack were muted and muffled, but still I was vulnerable enough to twitch and giggle, grabbing and swatting at their darting hands.
And I keenly remember my cousin Kathy brightening and uttering the devastating words. "Let's get his ribs under the covers!"
"No!" I shouted (even though I'd been trying to be quiet -- everyone else in the vacation house was asleep). The two of them burst into giggles and started clawing and tugging at the edges of my covers. I didn't want them to torture me, obviously -- but, even more importantly, because we were cousins close in age with all the competitiveness and rivalries that go along with that, I really didn't want them to win. My self-defensive impulses went into overdrive as I struggled to hold the covers down and fend them off, but I was outnumbered -- and besides, they quickly realized that one of them could work on invading the covers while the other one poked and tickled at my sides through the blanket, so I was pretty much doomed.
Indeed, before too long, as I was trying to seal off one stretch of the covers' edge, my border was breached elsewhere: I was startled by the sensation of nimble fingers scampering along my right side, targeting my ridiculously ticklish ribs. I was wearing a thin cotton T-shirt but nevertheless I still remember how this sensation -- the contrast of their previously rough and clumsy tickling through the covers versus the suddenly naked, quivery feeling of fingertips under the sheets against my ribs -- undid me completely; my previous efforts at quiet self-control dissolved and I threw me head back into my pillow emitting a loud and helpless (and unbecoming) HAW HAW HAW. My cousins doubled over with suppressed laughter at my response, and one of them pressed a hot palm against my mouth to keep from awaking everyone, but their assault never relented: my defensive lines overrun, their fingers crawled unimpeded under the sheets and wandered mischievously across my sides and abdomen; I plunged my face into the side of my pillow to muffle my peals of laughter -- as desperately as I wanted them to stop, I guess I wanted to awaken angry relatives even less. Worst of all was the way my arms were still on top of the covers, greatly inhibited from doing anything to stop or block the invisibly scampering fingers underneath. All I could do was endure as my body lurched and convulsed obligingly at my cousins' playful incursions, until they decided the spectacle had gotten repetitive enough to be boring and wandered away again, looking for more novel entertainment.
And it was kind of like what it's like to be tickled underneath one's clothes.
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