Here's the fourth and final movement of the current Dr. Smith quartet. If you want to see the previous episodes, here's the original trilogy:
http://www.ticklingforum.com/showthread.php?97720-A-Philosophic-Tickle-(m-f-teacher-student)
http://www.ticklingforum.com/showth...-Ticke-Secunda-Pars-(m-f-f-f-student-teacher)
http://www.ticklingforum.com/showth...Tickle-Tertia-Pars-(m-f-ff-f-teacher-student)
And here are parts one through three of this quartet:
http://www.ticklingforum.com/showthread.php?313714-Philosophic-Tickle-Cursus-Ruber-Prima-Pars-(m-f)
http://www.ticklingforum.com/showth...sophic-Tickle-Cursus-Ruber-Secunda-Pars-(m-f)
http://www.ticklingforum.com/showthread.php?313787-Philosophic-Tickle-Cursus-Ruber-Tertia-Pars-(m-f)
I think this one could stand alone if you're so inclined, so if you just want to jump in here, here you go!
However you read, be sure to leave a comment!
KI
Philosophic Tickle, Cursus Ruber, Quarta Pars
by
Kid Indy
Summer rain pounded outside, and through the chain bookstore’s large front windows the cars passing along the highway were a faint train of headlights and tail lights. Like so many other things in east Tennessee, the place had just ignored years of reports that bookstores were on the wane; people kept buying their books and drinking their coffee there, and so they just stayed open.
Smith sat and read a translation of Plato’s Symposium at one of the store’s coffee-shop tables. He had taught that text so many times that he could produce the outline and even some of the good lines from memory, but he needed a pretext to sit and watch a young woman at another table do battle with a laptop.
The stack of stapled papers on one corner of the table and the bulky textbook next to them told him that she was a graduate student, no doubt paying her rent teaching summer classes. She wasn’t Appalachian stock, at least not too many generations back: her long black hair, still luxurious even tied back and out of the way, offset the brown skin and the dark eyes of someone whose family had come from India. She was a beauty all the way down. She was not posing for anyone, but her long legs crossed under the table drew the eye, and her feet, shapely and drawing Smith’s eyes every time they flexed in their flip-flops, were sculpted from rosewood. He guessed that she was thirty, maybe thirty-two, and as she continued, absorbed in her work, he kept watching.
Her distracted manner told him that a dissertation waited somewhere, neglected in favor of the incessant needs of her summer students. Smith waited, watched, sipped his coffee, reread Agathon’s speech to the symposium. He finished his coffee, kept one eye on his page, one eye on the woman.
In a moment when nobody waited in line, she stood up and started to walk towards the coffee shop’s counter. He stood and followed. She spoke her order to the young white woman behind the counter, and when the total came up, Smith stepped up beside her.
“I’ll have a large coffee, and I’ll pay for her as well.”
She looked at him suspiciously. “That won’t be necessary.”
He nodded towards her empty table. “Summer classes?”
Her glare softened at the moment of recognition. “Yeah. Required math.”
“Then you don’t need to be paying for that tea.” Now a smile.
“Thank you, sir. I’m Charity.”
“That’s a very Augustinian sort of name.”
A suspicious look returned. “My father is a pastor of a church up in Boston. I’m American through and through.”
“All the way down to working in the gig economy, huh?”
Now a smile. “Well, I’ve got to pay rent while I finish my dissertation.”
“Math?” She nodded. “Pretty close to finishing?”
“If I had some time to work on it, sure. But I’m commuting here from Knoxville every day to teach adjunct classes, so that eats up some time.”
“You look like you’re grading finals, so that should free up some time.”
“For this term, sure. But then I start up another round that lasts until fall semester.”
Smith’s eyes squinted just a bit. “So another month of commuting?” She nodded.
Their drinks were served, and he followed her back to her table. “What if you could take the rest of the summer and the fall just to write?”
At this she laughed. “Yes, and I could go backpacking in Europe too. I’m sorry, but you don’t seem to understand. I’m an adjunct. I don’t have funding any more. I’ve got to keep working to stay in an apartment.”
Smith paused. “I was where you are not too long ago, Charity. So I’m always on the lookout for opportunities to help.”
She smiled at him, and she took a sip of her tea. “So you’ve got research grants ready to hand out? Is that it?”
“Yes.” Now she looked confused. “You see that section of books over there?” He pointed to a nearby shelf, filled with airbrushed covers of men with smooth bare chests and flowing hair. She nodded slowly. “You won’t find my books over there, but if you searched for them online, you’d find them on a few best-seller lists.”
“You mean you write romance novels for ebooks?”
“That’s exactly what I mean. So I keep working because I love teaching, but I’ve got money in reserve to help out people who need it.”
“Look, this is very sweet, but--”
“Five thousand up front, then another ten thousand when you finish your dissertation. You’ll need some cash to relocate once you’ve finished.”
She stopped sipping her tea. That was more than half a year’s fellowship, back before her funding ran out. “Who are you?”
“I’m an eccentric man who recently became an eccentric millionaire.”
“What do you mean eccentric?” Her eyes started to dart to all the people nearby, and he could tell she was getting scared.
“Look, I’m not going to make this offer a second time. If you take me up on this, you get the cash, I pay for a rental house here in Johnson City where you’ll have the next six months to do nothing but work on that dissertation. I’ll cover utilities and everything.”
Her eyes stopped glaring for a moment, and he could tell she was doing math. Fifteen thousand plus living expenses for one semester? This was shading into good post-doc money. And she’d be done with her dissertation to boot.
“I have to return to my own college in August, so for the next four weeks, while I’m here, you give me one hour of your time every night. And then an hour on weekends when I come back into town.”
Straight past the scowl into a threatening glare. “How dare you! I’m not some--”
Smith put his finger to his lips. “No sex. I promise that.”
Now confusion returned. “What do you mean an hour of your time, then?”
He leaned in. “Are you ticklish?”
* * * * * * *
Charity had lied to her roommates and friends in Knoxville, saying that she had taken on a well-paid Interim Instructor job at East Tennessee State University, and in a whirlwind week she had moved into a comfortable rental house not far from that school. Smith had been nowhere to be found, but three days after her address changed a cashier’s check for five thousand dollars arrived in the mail. The next day a letter from her landlord indicated that her rent up to 31 December was paid.
Still no Smith.
She communicated with the math department at ETSU that she would not be teaching any more that summer, then with her dissertation director that she should have a draft ready by the end of September. As fourth-of-July fireworks exploded across town she worked in the rental house’s second bedroom that she had made into an office on the upgraded computer that she had ordered online with Smith’s money.
A hand knocked on the door between distant explosions.
Charity went to the front room and peeked out the window. Smith stood on the porch. She looked down at her gym shorts and tank top and bare feet and took a deep breath. She opened the door.
He smiled as the door opened. “Good evening!”
“I wondered when I’d be seeing you again.”
“Good wondering or bad?”
Charity heard herself giggle in spite of herself. “You can come in if you want.” He followed her through the door and nodded in approval as he looked around the place. “Thank you again for all of your help. I was just talking with my dissertation director earlier this week, and it looks like I’ll be defending some time in early November.” She could hear her own feet as they moved from one room’s carpet to another’s wood, and her breathing got quicker in spite of herself. She had gotten her first pedicure in her life as part of this deal, and she thought she felt every fiber of the carpet on her newly-smooth soles.
Smith clapped his hands in approval. “That’s great, Charity! You should have a look at job listings here in the summer--there’s no need to wait until the big ones arrive in September. Colleges sometimes hire professors for the spring semester.”
She showed him through the house and chatted about her progress, and they came back to the living room. Smith’s smile got broader. “Shall we have a seat?” He gestured to her couch, and she swallowed as he sat on one end and she on the other.
“Are we going to do this here in the living room?”
“We can do this in whatever room you prefer. If you’re afraid that people will see in the window, have a futon sent here, and we can meet in the basement in the future. But for now, put your feet in my lap, please.”
Charity exhaled as she lifted one leg, then another, up onto his. This was really happening. His legs were warm, and she could hear another round of fireworks explode relatively close, perhaps in someone’s driveway.
“So tell me about your dissertation.”
She raised an eyebrow at him but ran with it--she had become quite accustomed to this ritual. “I’m working with combinatorial models in--” and then she screamed as his fingers began to tickle the bottoms of her feet. Her hands came up to her mouth in embarrassment as she started to laugh, and she felt a strong hand grab her ankle as her legs instinctively tried to bend and escape.
She had been thinking about this since the bookstore, but there he had only run one finger down her sole, watching her face, goosed her sides and chuckled at her squirming. This was something different: she was a grown woman, someone who taught college mathematics, very nearly a Ph.D, and in the moment she could not stop giggling as his fingers ran wild over her skin. Her free leg pumped on the couch, and her hands clenched into fists, then extended to cover her mouth again, then turned to cover her whole face in embarrassment. Smith kept tickling that long, gorgeous foot, torturing the smooth skin with hungry hands and enjoying every laugh that she released into the air.
He released his grip on her ankle, and she kicked both feet through the air. As she felt them land on the floor, his hands were on the move again, this time grabbing her legs above the knee and squeezing the mysteriously ticklish lower thigh. The melodic giggles from a moment ago gave way to a rising squeal, a fire truck’s siren with an Indian accent, and her hands grabbed in vain at his arms. When she finally did establish a grip on one of them, his right arm flew up towards the ceiling, around her back, and with a deft flex of the elbow, grabbed at her ticklish side so eagerly that her squealing twist away from the ravenous paw nearly threw her onto the floor. But he was ready for that: his left arm reached across her body at elbow height, tossing her back onto the couch as his own shod feet set themselves in a newly solid stance by the couch. His right hand, newly free from her movement, shot through space and grabbed her abdomen with a terrible five-taloned claw, and she screamed as he squeezed and wriggled. Every time her arms moved to cover one ticklish spot, his free hand found another, and she squirmed and flailed and squealed and laughed as the distant fireworks, unheard, subsided in the night.
* * * * * * *
The next day Charity ordered a full-sized bed for the small house’s basement--there would be no way to explain if a neighbor came by while that tickling was going on in the living room, and the special wasn’t much more than a futon. While she awaited its arrival, Smith arrived reliably as the sun was going down for a nightly couch-tickling, and Charity knew that he was learning all too quickly the spots and the motions that would take her breath away, make her beg, turn the woman of science and reason into a giggling mess of a girl.
When the mattress and box spring and frame did arrive, she set things up that day, in the basement, and she presented it proudly to Smith when he came over that evening. On that mattress undertook her daily ticklings there for the next few evenings. During the day she would be at the university’s library, reading mathematics journals and writing and exercising and getting her weekly pedicure. And in the evenings, Smith would show up, and he would tickle her, and then he would be done, and she would leave.
On a Thursday night in mid-July, Charity came home from the library and put some music on and started cooking herself dinner. As she danced to the pop tune and stirred the vegetables simmering in the frying pan, suddenly a pair of strong and familiar hands goosed her sides. She screamed and dropped her spatula, and she wheeled around to find Smith, in sock feet--that must have been why she didn’t hear him--behind her.
“When did you get here?”
“Not long ago. I didn’t want to interrupt you, but eventually I gave in to the temptation.” He picked up the spatula and walked it over to the sink and quickly washed it for her before handing it back. “Here, finish your supper. I’ve already eaten.” He wandered off into the front room, and Charity did finish cooking quickly and prepared herself a plate.
When she made her way to the same room, she found Smith sitting on the couch (the tickling couch, she found herself thinking) and reading a book. She finished eating and rinsed her plate off in the sink. As she placed it in the dishwasher, she called to him, “You’re a bit early tonight. Are we starting now, or do you want to sit a while first?”
She heard him stand and walk into the kitchen. “You’re so accommodating, Charity. I commend that. If you don’t mind, I would like to start early tonight. Shall we retire to the basement?”
Charity smiled at the formality of their conversation and followed him down. The tickling bed--that was really all this piece of furniture had ever been--awaited them, and she had already changed into some gym shorts and a cotton tank top before she started cooking, so she was ready to begin. Her feet were soft from her most recent manicure, and she was sure he was going to tickle them tonight.
“Let’s start with you sitting in the middle of the bed with your feet facing me, shall we?” She knew this position, and she knew as well that, once he had tickled her feet, his fingers did their cruel work even more intensely on the rest of her body. But she was also making more progress on her dissertation than she had for months, so she found herself smiling a strange kind of affection as she scooted herself down the mattress and he took up his stool that he sat on for this position.
“You know, you can lie down for this part if you want--I can still hear your beautiful laugh when you lie back. Would that be more comfortable?”
Charity realized that she had become so comfortable with this strange arrangement that she did not answer verbally when he posed that question--she just moved a pillow to rest her head and lay back, waiting for the tickling to begin.
She inhaled deeply as he did start. He was not moving fast at first, just taking two fingertips up and down her sole. She giggled as her thighs tightened, then relaxed. He stroked her heel lightly, then moved across her sole, made circles on the ball of her foot. She let herself giggle more at this light, sensuous stimulation, and she closed her eyes as she rode the wave that was coming up through her legs, then her abdomen.
Then the tickling stopped. She opened her eyes as she wondered what happened, and a new sensation greeted not her foot but her ankle. A fur-lined cuff closed over it, and as she sat up to see what was happening, she gasped as she saw Smith fastening latches to secure her ankle in a cuff connected by a rope to the leg of her bed’s frame.
“What are you doing?”
“Trying something new!” She sat up to reach for the cuff, but he caught her wrists and used his body weight to move her backwards. When she tried to bring her legs to bear, the secured ankle only gave him more leverage, and she screamed as he pinned her left wrist to the mattress and reached down past the corner of the bed. His body in the way kept her from seeing what was going on, but with a frightening efficiency she could feel him securing another cuff, also lined with fur, to her wrist. She pounded on his back, but he did not slow down, and when he sat up next to her, both her left wrist and her left ankle were cuffed. She reached across to attempt the latch on her wrist, and as her body twisted, his hands sprang into action, grabbing greedy handfuls of her sides and tickling with a renewed enthusiasm. Now this was the kind of full-speed tickling that brought her from squeals to laughter to breathless pleading, and she could not hold her torso in the twisted place that would allow her to unlatch her cuff.
When her laughter brought her back to a supine position, he planted two hands and a knee on the mattress and vaulted her midsection. She lunged again for the cuff, but this time he was behind her, and he grabbed her ticklish hips with every one of his fingers and thumbs. When he squeezed she bucked again, her arm flying wildly away from the cuff, and once again she was on her back. His hand pinned her wrist, and this time she watched as his other hand went down behind the mattress and came back with yet another cuff tied to the leg of the bed-frame. Even at her strongest she could not have moved him with one arm, and his early tickling had taken some of that strength away. Within seconds three of her limbs were secured. She kicked her right leg into the air in a vain protest, and at that Smith laughed out loud.
“You can have that other leg free for the moment, Charity. Right now I want to explore some spots up here that you always cover up when I’m tickling you. I have a hunch that you’re ticklish in some spots that I haven’t had a chance to try yet!”
“Where did these cuffs come from? How did you get down here?”
Smith grinned down at her. “Did you stop and think that I might have had an extra key made when I paid your rent in advance?”
“Let me out of these! You can’t do this!”
“Oh, I think I can. Now don’t worry--you’re still going to keep your clothes on, and I’m not going to touch you anywhere I promised I wouldn’t. But you’re about to find out just how ticklish you really are.” He held up one finger in front of her face and began to flex it, then extend it, a movement that made Charity inhale in terrified anticipation. He lowered it to her side and dug into the flesh just below her last rib, and her body bucked in futile flight. The thick finger jabbed and wriggled in her side, and her hair thrashed as she screamed and laughed and panted. Charity was begging within seconds, but his discipline did not waver as he kept tickling one spot with one finger for minute after grueling minute. When he stopped Charity was breathing heavily, sweating, looking at him in desperation.
“Please--just let me go!”
His hands--both of them this time--came to rest on her hips, where her tank top had pulled up to reveal her dark and wonderful skin. “What will you give me if I do?”
“Anything--just stop tickling me!”
“What if I only want to hear you laugh more?”
“Wait! Please!”
“No, I don’t think I’m going to wait any more.” He began to pinch with strong claws at her hips, and once again her body betrayed her. She wanted to protest, to shout her indignation, but his hands would only let her laugh, and they wanted more by the second. They followed her bucking as her bottom came off the mattress again and again. They tickled her when her back was arched and her shoulders pressed the mattress, and they tickled her when her cheeks returned to the sheets. And soon she could not feel her terror even, only those tickling hands and the giant ticklish network of nerves that now faced outward, betraying her laughter and her begging to the man without mercy, to those hands that knew just where to find the giggles under her skin.
When an eternity of tickling had passed, she felt his weight leave the mattress, and she did not kick or fight or protest as he attached the final cuff to the fourth bed post. She knew that he had paid his good money for pedicures so that her feet would be vulnerable to his relentless fingertips, and now she could only wait in vain for them to start their work. There would be no kicking away from him now, no escape, no surrender even. Just tickling.
But the tickling did not come to her foot. Instead she felt a scratching, then a rubbing on the insides of her upper thighs, and Charity exploded. This tickling wasn’t where he promised not to touch, but the electric pulses of ticklish energy traveled up beyond where his skin touched hers, and she screamed through her laughter as she tried not to moan. Somewhere, floating above her ticklish body, something knew that he would keep his word about where his hands would go, but as minute rolled by into minute, as she could not keep herself from moaning, that same sense knew that he did not have to take any of her clothes off to make her his prisoner with this devilish tickling. She moaned and gasped and laughed and squirmed, and she felt her hips start to thrust--without her leave--towards the basement’s ceiling. He tickled her thighs more, and she felt a spasm of pleasure pulse through her buttocks and hips. Her eyes flew wide open, and her mouth breathed in air that had never tasted this way before.
Smith relented and grinned once more.
As Charity panted, Smith took his place on his stool. The very air around her body felt ticklish, and she could feel his eyes fix on her left foot. His thumb and forefinger plucked her big toe as they might pick an olive, and they bent her foot gently backwards into an elegant arch, where she could feel it stretch for a brief eternity.
Then the tickling started again.
She knew, of course, that for the previous forty minutes that he had enlisted every inch of her ticklish skin as conspirators against her foot. But knowing and experiencing were worlds apart, and she cackled in ecstatic terror as she felt in her foot the seasoned, expert appetite of the most sadistic tickler she would ever meet. This was not the easy, airy teasing that she had anticipated for the night; his fingertips dug in where her nerves would most make her suffer, glided with horrific speed over her stretched nerves, touched and poked and stroked every part of her foot that could ever be ticklish over and over again. Charity had learned to let go and enjoy being tickled, but this was something different: some part of her wanted to fight, and that very part of her was front and center to witness her body’s complete loss of resistance. She laughed, and then she heard herself laughing, and by the time he was done with her, she was her laughter.
When Smith finished, his arms dropped to his sides as if he were an orchestra’s conductor, and Charity’s head fell back on her pillow, her mind absent and even that defiant part of her soul tired from laughing. With characteristic efficiency he walked to each of the bed’s four corners, unfastening the cuffs almost silently. Where Charity might have curled up and covered her ticklish skin on some nights, tonight she just remained on her back, limbs spread, looking up at the ceiling.
Smith put his shoes back on and left, locking the door behind him as the sun started to set.
* * * * * * *
EPILOGUE
A large thumb scrolled through work emails as he crossed the cold quad. From the president: I hope you had a good Christmas break. From the chair of humanities: please get syllabi to me by 17 January. From the academic dean: meet our new hires.
He scrolled past them. There was one email he wanted to read right now, and he found it as he reached the classroom building’s door: From the Promotion Committee.
He read as he walked, and he pumped a fist like a PGA ace sinking the winning putt as he learned that he was no longer Associate Professor. The money wasn’t going to be an issue--after all, the royalties checks from his novels would be coming well after the tastes of the bodice-ripping public moved to a new flavor of the month. But there was something good about reaching the top of his profession, even at his small college, and he could not help but grin. He pulled his office key from his pocket and began to open his office door.
As he turned it, he let out a yelp as two hands squeezed his sides. He spun in fury, and there, grinning as a cat might when the mouse knows it’s caught, stood Charity. She was dressed in the conservative jacket and slacks of a small-college professor, and she had the devil in her eyes.
“Good morning, Dr. Smith!”
“What…”
“I wanted it to be a surprise, but when you said that your colleague in the math department was retiring back in October, I put in an application.”
“But you never--”
“Come on, silly! I wanted to surprise you! And since I had my defense scheduled in December, I sailed right through the interview process.”
Smith looked one way, then the other down the hallway. Charity continued to grin. “Yes, with all those weekend trips to Tennessee, you would have thought that I would give something away, didn’t you?” She reached a hand up to Smith’s middle-aged midsection and poked a different spot with each word of “But here we are!”
Smith swallowed hard. He spoke quietly. “So what are we going to do now?”
Charity raised an eyebrow and leaned in. “I’m going to teach Mathematics. You’re going to teach Philosophy. And in a few months, rumors are going to start going around about us. And in a year or so, when we’ve married, we’re going to start some more far-fetched rumors, the ones that float around the Internet about you.”
“Wait. You mean… Like with students?”
“Patience, Dr. Smith. First you have to teach me how to do what you do. Then we’ll both have all the time in the world to have our fun.”
http://www.ticklingforum.com/showthread.php?97720-A-Philosophic-Tickle-(m-f-teacher-student)
http://www.ticklingforum.com/showth...-Ticke-Secunda-Pars-(m-f-f-f-student-teacher)
http://www.ticklingforum.com/showth...Tickle-Tertia-Pars-(m-f-ff-f-teacher-student)
And here are parts one through three of this quartet:
http://www.ticklingforum.com/showthread.php?313714-Philosophic-Tickle-Cursus-Ruber-Prima-Pars-(m-f)
http://www.ticklingforum.com/showth...sophic-Tickle-Cursus-Ruber-Secunda-Pars-(m-f)
http://www.ticklingforum.com/showthread.php?313787-Philosophic-Tickle-Cursus-Ruber-Tertia-Pars-(m-f)
I think this one could stand alone if you're so inclined, so if you just want to jump in here, here you go!
However you read, be sure to leave a comment!
KI
Philosophic Tickle, Cursus Ruber, Quarta Pars
by
Kid Indy
Summer rain pounded outside, and through the chain bookstore’s large front windows the cars passing along the highway were a faint train of headlights and tail lights. Like so many other things in east Tennessee, the place had just ignored years of reports that bookstores were on the wane; people kept buying their books and drinking their coffee there, and so they just stayed open.
Smith sat and read a translation of Plato’s Symposium at one of the store’s coffee-shop tables. He had taught that text so many times that he could produce the outline and even some of the good lines from memory, but he needed a pretext to sit and watch a young woman at another table do battle with a laptop.
The stack of stapled papers on one corner of the table and the bulky textbook next to them told him that she was a graduate student, no doubt paying her rent teaching summer classes. She wasn’t Appalachian stock, at least not too many generations back: her long black hair, still luxurious even tied back and out of the way, offset the brown skin and the dark eyes of someone whose family had come from India. She was a beauty all the way down. She was not posing for anyone, but her long legs crossed under the table drew the eye, and her feet, shapely and drawing Smith’s eyes every time they flexed in their flip-flops, were sculpted from rosewood. He guessed that she was thirty, maybe thirty-two, and as she continued, absorbed in her work, he kept watching.
Her distracted manner told him that a dissertation waited somewhere, neglected in favor of the incessant needs of her summer students. Smith waited, watched, sipped his coffee, reread Agathon’s speech to the symposium. He finished his coffee, kept one eye on his page, one eye on the woman.
In a moment when nobody waited in line, she stood up and started to walk towards the coffee shop’s counter. He stood and followed. She spoke her order to the young white woman behind the counter, and when the total came up, Smith stepped up beside her.
“I’ll have a large coffee, and I’ll pay for her as well.”
She looked at him suspiciously. “That won’t be necessary.”
He nodded towards her empty table. “Summer classes?”
Her glare softened at the moment of recognition. “Yeah. Required math.”
“Then you don’t need to be paying for that tea.” Now a smile.
“Thank you, sir. I’m Charity.”
“That’s a very Augustinian sort of name.”
A suspicious look returned. “My father is a pastor of a church up in Boston. I’m American through and through.”
“All the way down to working in the gig economy, huh?”
Now a smile. “Well, I’ve got to pay rent while I finish my dissertation.”
“Math?” She nodded. “Pretty close to finishing?”
“If I had some time to work on it, sure. But I’m commuting here from Knoxville every day to teach adjunct classes, so that eats up some time.”
“You look like you’re grading finals, so that should free up some time.”
“For this term, sure. But then I start up another round that lasts until fall semester.”
Smith’s eyes squinted just a bit. “So another month of commuting?” She nodded.
Their drinks were served, and he followed her back to her table. “What if you could take the rest of the summer and the fall just to write?”
At this she laughed. “Yes, and I could go backpacking in Europe too. I’m sorry, but you don’t seem to understand. I’m an adjunct. I don’t have funding any more. I’ve got to keep working to stay in an apartment.”
Smith paused. “I was where you are not too long ago, Charity. So I’m always on the lookout for opportunities to help.”
She smiled at him, and she took a sip of her tea. “So you’ve got research grants ready to hand out? Is that it?”
“Yes.” Now she looked confused. “You see that section of books over there?” He pointed to a nearby shelf, filled with airbrushed covers of men with smooth bare chests and flowing hair. She nodded slowly. “You won’t find my books over there, but if you searched for them online, you’d find them on a few best-seller lists.”
“You mean you write romance novels for ebooks?”
“That’s exactly what I mean. So I keep working because I love teaching, but I’ve got money in reserve to help out people who need it.”
“Look, this is very sweet, but--”
“Five thousand up front, then another ten thousand when you finish your dissertation. You’ll need some cash to relocate once you’ve finished.”
She stopped sipping her tea. That was more than half a year’s fellowship, back before her funding ran out. “Who are you?”
“I’m an eccentric man who recently became an eccentric millionaire.”
“What do you mean eccentric?” Her eyes started to dart to all the people nearby, and he could tell she was getting scared.
“Look, I’m not going to make this offer a second time. If you take me up on this, you get the cash, I pay for a rental house here in Johnson City where you’ll have the next six months to do nothing but work on that dissertation. I’ll cover utilities and everything.”
Her eyes stopped glaring for a moment, and he could tell she was doing math. Fifteen thousand plus living expenses for one semester? This was shading into good post-doc money. And she’d be done with her dissertation to boot.
“I have to return to my own college in August, so for the next four weeks, while I’m here, you give me one hour of your time every night. And then an hour on weekends when I come back into town.”
Straight past the scowl into a threatening glare. “How dare you! I’m not some--”
Smith put his finger to his lips. “No sex. I promise that.”
Now confusion returned. “What do you mean an hour of your time, then?”
He leaned in. “Are you ticklish?”
* * * * * * *
Charity had lied to her roommates and friends in Knoxville, saying that she had taken on a well-paid Interim Instructor job at East Tennessee State University, and in a whirlwind week she had moved into a comfortable rental house not far from that school. Smith had been nowhere to be found, but three days after her address changed a cashier’s check for five thousand dollars arrived in the mail. The next day a letter from her landlord indicated that her rent up to 31 December was paid.
Still no Smith.
She communicated with the math department at ETSU that she would not be teaching any more that summer, then with her dissertation director that she should have a draft ready by the end of September. As fourth-of-July fireworks exploded across town she worked in the rental house’s second bedroom that she had made into an office on the upgraded computer that she had ordered online with Smith’s money.
A hand knocked on the door between distant explosions.
Charity went to the front room and peeked out the window. Smith stood on the porch. She looked down at her gym shorts and tank top and bare feet and took a deep breath. She opened the door.
He smiled as the door opened. “Good evening!”
“I wondered when I’d be seeing you again.”
“Good wondering or bad?”
Charity heard herself giggle in spite of herself. “You can come in if you want.” He followed her through the door and nodded in approval as he looked around the place. “Thank you again for all of your help. I was just talking with my dissertation director earlier this week, and it looks like I’ll be defending some time in early November.” She could hear her own feet as they moved from one room’s carpet to another’s wood, and her breathing got quicker in spite of herself. She had gotten her first pedicure in her life as part of this deal, and she thought she felt every fiber of the carpet on her newly-smooth soles.
Smith clapped his hands in approval. “That’s great, Charity! You should have a look at job listings here in the summer--there’s no need to wait until the big ones arrive in September. Colleges sometimes hire professors for the spring semester.”
She showed him through the house and chatted about her progress, and they came back to the living room. Smith’s smile got broader. “Shall we have a seat?” He gestured to her couch, and she swallowed as he sat on one end and she on the other.
“Are we going to do this here in the living room?”
“We can do this in whatever room you prefer. If you’re afraid that people will see in the window, have a futon sent here, and we can meet in the basement in the future. But for now, put your feet in my lap, please.”
Charity exhaled as she lifted one leg, then another, up onto his. This was really happening. His legs were warm, and she could hear another round of fireworks explode relatively close, perhaps in someone’s driveway.
“So tell me about your dissertation.”
She raised an eyebrow at him but ran with it--she had become quite accustomed to this ritual. “I’m working with combinatorial models in--” and then she screamed as his fingers began to tickle the bottoms of her feet. Her hands came up to her mouth in embarrassment as she started to laugh, and she felt a strong hand grab her ankle as her legs instinctively tried to bend and escape.
She had been thinking about this since the bookstore, but there he had only run one finger down her sole, watching her face, goosed her sides and chuckled at her squirming. This was something different: she was a grown woman, someone who taught college mathematics, very nearly a Ph.D, and in the moment she could not stop giggling as his fingers ran wild over her skin. Her free leg pumped on the couch, and her hands clenched into fists, then extended to cover her mouth again, then turned to cover her whole face in embarrassment. Smith kept tickling that long, gorgeous foot, torturing the smooth skin with hungry hands and enjoying every laugh that she released into the air.
He released his grip on her ankle, and she kicked both feet through the air. As she felt them land on the floor, his hands were on the move again, this time grabbing her legs above the knee and squeezing the mysteriously ticklish lower thigh. The melodic giggles from a moment ago gave way to a rising squeal, a fire truck’s siren with an Indian accent, and her hands grabbed in vain at his arms. When she finally did establish a grip on one of them, his right arm flew up towards the ceiling, around her back, and with a deft flex of the elbow, grabbed at her ticklish side so eagerly that her squealing twist away from the ravenous paw nearly threw her onto the floor. But he was ready for that: his left arm reached across her body at elbow height, tossing her back onto the couch as his own shod feet set themselves in a newly solid stance by the couch. His right hand, newly free from her movement, shot through space and grabbed her abdomen with a terrible five-taloned claw, and she screamed as he squeezed and wriggled. Every time her arms moved to cover one ticklish spot, his free hand found another, and she squirmed and flailed and squealed and laughed as the distant fireworks, unheard, subsided in the night.
* * * * * * *
The next day Charity ordered a full-sized bed for the small house’s basement--there would be no way to explain if a neighbor came by while that tickling was going on in the living room, and the special wasn’t much more than a futon. While she awaited its arrival, Smith arrived reliably as the sun was going down for a nightly couch-tickling, and Charity knew that he was learning all too quickly the spots and the motions that would take her breath away, make her beg, turn the woman of science and reason into a giggling mess of a girl.
When the mattress and box spring and frame did arrive, she set things up that day, in the basement, and she presented it proudly to Smith when he came over that evening. On that mattress undertook her daily ticklings there for the next few evenings. During the day she would be at the university’s library, reading mathematics journals and writing and exercising and getting her weekly pedicure. And in the evenings, Smith would show up, and he would tickle her, and then he would be done, and she would leave.
On a Thursday night in mid-July, Charity came home from the library and put some music on and started cooking herself dinner. As she danced to the pop tune and stirred the vegetables simmering in the frying pan, suddenly a pair of strong and familiar hands goosed her sides. She screamed and dropped her spatula, and she wheeled around to find Smith, in sock feet--that must have been why she didn’t hear him--behind her.
“When did you get here?”
“Not long ago. I didn’t want to interrupt you, but eventually I gave in to the temptation.” He picked up the spatula and walked it over to the sink and quickly washed it for her before handing it back. “Here, finish your supper. I’ve already eaten.” He wandered off into the front room, and Charity did finish cooking quickly and prepared herself a plate.
When she made her way to the same room, she found Smith sitting on the couch (the tickling couch, she found herself thinking) and reading a book. She finished eating and rinsed her plate off in the sink. As she placed it in the dishwasher, she called to him, “You’re a bit early tonight. Are we starting now, or do you want to sit a while first?”
She heard him stand and walk into the kitchen. “You’re so accommodating, Charity. I commend that. If you don’t mind, I would like to start early tonight. Shall we retire to the basement?”
Charity smiled at the formality of their conversation and followed him down. The tickling bed--that was really all this piece of furniture had ever been--awaited them, and she had already changed into some gym shorts and a cotton tank top before she started cooking, so she was ready to begin. Her feet were soft from her most recent manicure, and she was sure he was going to tickle them tonight.
“Let’s start with you sitting in the middle of the bed with your feet facing me, shall we?” She knew this position, and she knew as well that, once he had tickled her feet, his fingers did their cruel work even more intensely on the rest of her body. But she was also making more progress on her dissertation than she had for months, so she found herself smiling a strange kind of affection as she scooted herself down the mattress and he took up his stool that he sat on for this position.
“You know, you can lie down for this part if you want--I can still hear your beautiful laugh when you lie back. Would that be more comfortable?”
Charity realized that she had become so comfortable with this strange arrangement that she did not answer verbally when he posed that question--she just moved a pillow to rest her head and lay back, waiting for the tickling to begin.
She inhaled deeply as he did start. He was not moving fast at first, just taking two fingertips up and down her sole. She giggled as her thighs tightened, then relaxed. He stroked her heel lightly, then moved across her sole, made circles on the ball of her foot. She let herself giggle more at this light, sensuous stimulation, and she closed her eyes as she rode the wave that was coming up through her legs, then her abdomen.
Then the tickling stopped. She opened her eyes as she wondered what happened, and a new sensation greeted not her foot but her ankle. A fur-lined cuff closed over it, and as she sat up to see what was happening, she gasped as she saw Smith fastening latches to secure her ankle in a cuff connected by a rope to the leg of her bed’s frame.
“What are you doing?”
“Trying something new!” She sat up to reach for the cuff, but he caught her wrists and used his body weight to move her backwards. When she tried to bring her legs to bear, the secured ankle only gave him more leverage, and she screamed as he pinned her left wrist to the mattress and reached down past the corner of the bed. His body in the way kept her from seeing what was going on, but with a frightening efficiency she could feel him securing another cuff, also lined with fur, to her wrist. She pounded on his back, but he did not slow down, and when he sat up next to her, both her left wrist and her left ankle were cuffed. She reached across to attempt the latch on her wrist, and as her body twisted, his hands sprang into action, grabbing greedy handfuls of her sides and tickling with a renewed enthusiasm. Now this was the kind of full-speed tickling that brought her from squeals to laughter to breathless pleading, and she could not hold her torso in the twisted place that would allow her to unlatch her cuff.
When her laughter brought her back to a supine position, he planted two hands and a knee on the mattress and vaulted her midsection. She lunged again for the cuff, but this time he was behind her, and he grabbed her ticklish hips with every one of his fingers and thumbs. When he squeezed she bucked again, her arm flying wildly away from the cuff, and once again she was on her back. His hand pinned her wrist, and this time she watched as his other hand went down behind the mattress and came back with yet another cuff tied to the leg of the bed-frame. Even at her strongest she could not have moved him with one arm, and his early tickling had taken some of that strength away. Within seconds three of her limbs were secured. She kicked her right leg into the air in a vain protest, and at that Smith laughed out loud.
“You can have that other leg free for the moment, Charity. Right now I want to explore some spots up here that you always cover up when I’m tickling you. I have a hunch that you’re ticklish in some spots that I haven’t had a chance to try yet!”
“Where did these cuffs come from? How did you get down here?”
Smith grinned down at her. “Did you stop and think that I might have had an extra key made when I paid your rent in advance?”
“Let me out of these! You can’t do this!”
“Oh, I think I can. Now don’t worry--you’re still going to keep your clothes on, and I’m not going to touch you anywhere I promised I wouldn’t. But you’re about to find out just how ticklish you really are.” He held up one finger in front of her face and began to flex it, then extend it, a movement that made Charity inhale in terrified anticipation. He lowered it to her side and dug into the flesh just below her last rib, and her body bucked in futile flight. The thick finger jabbed and wriggled in her side, and her hair thrashed as she screamed and laughed and panted. Charity was begging within seconds, but his discipline did not waver as he kept tickling one spot with one finger for minute after grueling minute. When he stopped Charity was breathing heavily, sweating, looking at him in desperation.
“Please--just let me go!”
His hands--both of them this time--came to rest on her hips, where her tank top had pulled up to reveal her dark and wonderful skin. “What will you give me if I do?”
“Anything--just stop tickling me!”
“What if I only want to hear you laugh more?”
“Wait! Please!”
“No, I don’t think I’m going to wait any more.” He began to pinch with strong claws at her hips, and once again her body betrayed her. She wanted to protest, to shout her indignation, but his hands would only let her laugh, and they wanted more by the second. They followed her bucking as her bottom came off the mattress again and again. They tickled her when her back was arched and her shoulders pressed the mattress, and they tickled her when her cheeks returned to the sheets. And soon she could not feel her terror even, only those tickling hands and the giant ticklish network of nerves that now faced outward, betraying her laughter and her begging to the man without mercy, to those hands that knew just where to find the giggles under her skin.
When an eternity of tickling had passed, she felt his weight leave the mattress, and she did not kick or fight or protest as he attached the final cuff to the fourth bed post. She knew that he had paid his good money for pedicures so that her feet would be vulnerable to his relentless fingertips, and now she could only wait in vain for them to start their work. There would be no kicking away from him now, no escape, no surrender even. Just tickling.
But the tickling did not come to her foot. Instead she felt a scratching, then a rubbing on the insides of her upper thighs, and Charity exploded. This tickling wasn’t where he promised not to touch, but the electric pulses of ticklish energy traveled up beyond where his skin touched hers, and she screamed through her laughter as she tried not to moan. Somewhere, floating above her ticklish body, something knew that he would keep his word about where his hands would go, but as minute rolled by into minute, as she could not keep herself from moaning, that same sense knew that he did not have to take any of her clothes off to make her his prisoner with this devilish tickling. She moaned and gasped and laughed and squirmed, and she felt her hips start to thrust--without her leave--towards the basement’s ceiling. He tickled her thighs more, and she felt a spasm of pleasure pulse through her buttocks and hips. Her eyes flew wide open, and her mouth breathed in air that had never tasted this way before.
Smith relented and grinned once more.
As Charity panted, Smith took his place on his stool. The very air around her body felt ticklish, and she could feel his eyes fix on her left foot. His thumb and forefinger plucked her big toe as they might pick an olive, and they bent her foot gently backwards into an elegant arch, where she could feel it stretch for a brief eternity.
Then the tickling started again.
She knew, of course, that for the previous forty minutes that he had enlisted every inch of her ticklish skin as conspirators against her foot. But knowing and experiencing were worlds apart, and she cackled in ecstatic terror as she felt in her foot the seasoned, expert appetite of the most sadistic tickler she would ever meet. This was not the easy, airy teasing that she had anticipated for the night; his fingertips dug in where her nerves would most make her suffer, glided with horrific speed over her stretched nerves, touched and poked and stroked every part of her foot that could ever be ticklish over and over again. Charity had learned to let go and enjoy being tickled, but this was something different: some part of her wanted to fight, and that very part of her was front and center to witness her body’s complete loss of resistance. She laughed, and then she heard herself laughing, and by the time he was done with her, she was her laughter.
When Smith finished, his arms dropped to his sides as if he were an orchestra’s conductor, and Charity’s head fell back on her pillow, her mind absent and even that defiant part of her soul tired from laughing. With characteristic efficiency he walked to each of the bed’s four corners, unfastening the cuffs almost silently. Where Charity might have curled up and covered her ticklish skin on some nights, tonight she just remained on her back, limbs spread, looking up at the ceiling.
Smith put his shoes back on and left, locking the door behind him as the sun started to set.
* * * * * * *
EPILOGUE
A large thumb scrolled through work emails as he crossed the cold quad. From the president: I hope you had a good Christmas break. From the chair of humanities: please get syllabi to me by 17 January. From the academic dean: meet our new hires.
He scrolled past them. There was one email he wanted to read right now, and he found it as he reached the classroom building’s door: From the Promotion Committee.
He read as he walked, and he pumped a fist like a PGA ace sinking the winning putt as he learned that he was no longer Associate Professor. The money wasn’t going to be an issue--after all, the royalties checks from his novels would be coming well after the tastes of the bodice-ripping public moved to a new flavor of the month. But there was something good about reaching the top of his profession, even at his small college, and he could not help but grin. He pulled his office key from his pocket and began to open his office door.
As he turned it, he let out a yelp as two hands squeezed his sides. He spun in fury, and there, grinning as a cat might when the mouse knows it’s caught, stood Charity. She was dressed in the conservative jacket and slacks of a small-college professor, and she had the devil in her eyes.
“Good morning, Dr. Smith!”
“What…”
“I wanted it to be a surprise, but when you said that your colleague in the math department was retiring back in October, I put in an application.”
“But you never--”
“Come on, silly! I wanted to surprise you! And since I had my defense scheduled in December, I sailed right through the interview process.”
Smith looked one way, then the other down the hallway. Charity continued to grin. “Yes, with all those weekend trips to Tennessee, you would have thought that I would give something away, didn’t you?” She reached a hand up to Smith’s middle-aged midsection and poked a different spot with each word of “But here we are!”
Smith swallowed hard. He spoke quietly. “So what are we going to do now?”
Charity raised an eyebrow and leaned in. “I’m going to teach Mathematics. You’re going to teach Philosophy. And in a few months, rumors are going to start going around about us. And in a year or so, when we’ve married, we’re going to start some more far-fetched rumors, the ones that float around the Internet about you.”
“Wait. You mean… Like with students?”
“Patience, Dr. Smith. First you have to teach me how to do what you do. Then we’ll both have all the time in the world to have our fun.”
