She wasn't a tickler, but for me she made an exception (F/M)

[Wade1]

When I was dating her, Lauren was a law student. She had keen brown eyes and an adorably bewitching way of arching her eyebrow. She dimpled when giving a crooked smile, which was the only kind of smile she gave. Her hair was straight and brown and unassuming, usually thrown back in a no-nonsense ponytail, and she had this marvelously distinctive nose, full at the end and bumpy in the middle, which was a different shape depending on what angle you watched it from.

She had a sexy solid build, big-boned and well-muscled, fit and gorgeously curvy. Baby, as the kids used to say, had back. But I think the first thing I noticed about her was her arms: sandy-colored, shapely and muscular, with nice big smooth hands--elegant knuckles, strong pretty fingers. And when you looked closely in the sunlight her arms and wrists were flecked with short, delicate golden hairs that could melt your heart.

We had a lot of fun together, but she was often thoroughly serious; law school was a lot of work and she devoted a lot of hours to it. She studied every night and so we'd rarely get together before eleven p.m.

She wasn't a tickler, in the sense that folks around here would understand the behavior. I never saw her tickle anyone else and I suspect she didn't tickle her past boyfriends. She never discussed tickling; tickling was never a part of our sexual relationship. Indeed, when my ticklishness would emerge during moments of intimacy, as my abdominal muscles twitched or contracted under her mouth or fingertips, or a giggle escaped when she brushed my hip a certain way, it tended to annoy her. She never tickled me in public or enlisted her friends in tickling me the way other girlfriends have done. Generally tickling seemed to play no role whatsoever in her life.

Except.

She discovered, inevitably, how ticklish my feet were; she was giving me a foot massage, witnessed my tortured writhing and stifled giggles, and--being a bright and insightful law student who could weigh evidence and draw conclusions--discerned my weakness. At that moment, she realized that she could either keep trying to give me a massage without tickling me (very difficult) or abandon the massage and tickle me until I lost my mind (appealingly easy). She chose the latter and kept it up until I was a shrieking basket case.

And from that point on, tickling my feet became one of her hobbies, along with knitting and playing first-person shooter games. It wasn't something she did every day, or even every week. If she'd enjoyed tickling for its own sake she could have gone after my sides or my absurdly ticklish abdomen anytime day or night, but that would have been too much work: I would fight back and try to flee; whether she knew it or not I would always lose, but she didn't have the interest in expending that much effort. Instead she attacked sporadically, opportunistically, only when she had the opportunity to besiege my immobilized feet and even then only when the mood struck her.

When she had the opportunity, though, and when the mood struck her, I was inevitably a goner.

It would go something like this:

I'd be lying on the bed reading, and the next thing I knew she'd sprawled on top of my legs, pinning my ankles. Either my feet were bare or socked, or she'd pluck off my shoes and/or socks.

And she'd say something like "You know what happens next, don't you?"

I'd beg, of course. "No, Laura, no, don't, Laura, don't tickle, Laura don't tickle MEEEEEEEEEEEEEEE."

If she were a tickler there'd be more taunting. There'd be more manipulating of the pace, of my reactions. But she wasn't a tickler. She was just tickling. And I can still remember, vividly, the relentless feeling of her fingertips dancing briskly up and down my twitching wriggling feet and my own embarrassing howls of helpless laughter as I squirmed and thrashed under her weight. I can picture her smooth rounded tan wrists bent cheerfully over my flailing feet, her fingers delighting in their ability to drive me into hysterical paroxysms of forced mirth.

I remember her saying, once, "Thank you, God, for sending me a boyfriend with ticklish feet." It was a novelty to her, ticklishness--she certainly wasn't ticklish, and she'd probably never tried tickling her other friends and boyfriends, so as far as she was concerned, mine were the first and only feet she could torture like this, that she could compel to kick and wriggle and produce wild laughter, and as fun as it was, that was an opportunity she simply wasn't going to pass up.

Every single time she would tickle until I couldn't plead any more, until my ability to speak at all was swallowed up in the helpless laughter; I always knew she wouldn't relent any sooner than that, though I also always knew she would stop shortly thereafter. And she'd hop off and kiss my forehead and say something like "That's so awesome."

 

[CellarDweller]

Great story, Wade!

 

[MistressValerie1]

That was extraordinarily well-written ... I almost felt as if I were there 😉

 

[milagros317]

I do hope that you said, "Thank you, God, for sending me a girlfriend who tickles me breathless." :super_hap

Fine story, Wade. :redstar:

 

[Wade1]

That was extraordinarily well-written ... I almost felt as if I were there 😉

If you had been there, then I really probably would've been in trouble!

Thanks, guys. Your responses are appreciated especially since after rereading it I wasn't sure I'd really evoked very thoroughly the experience of having Laura's fingers scamper up and down my trapped feet; it's such a specific, all-encompassing, tactile experience, being tickled senseless, and yet so hard to capture in words.

 

[Onlyfornow]

Fantastic.

 

[Wade1]

Once Laura and I were sitting on the same sofa, me with my back against one end and her with her back against the other, her feet next to me and my feet next to her. We were both reading, and I guess I was idly caressing her foot with my finger. I sensed her looking at me and I looked up and met her unblinking gaze.

"Okay, do my foot like I do yours," she said. "Tickle my foot like I tickle you."

I started running my fingers up and down the sole of her bare foot. Her brows drew together a little with concentration as she watched me do it; her brown eyes narrowed, focusing on the sensory experience. She flexed her foot, toes curling, the sole growing taut, as if experimenting with the sensation, as if trying to find a way to make it even a little unbearable.

As I stroked her sole--something that would have some people in paroxysms of ticklish hysteria--she said, in her steady and skeptical voice, "Now, see, why does that make you laugh?"

"I don't know," I said.

"I mean, what does it feel like?"

"I don't know," I said.

"But describe what it feels like," she said.

"I don't know," I said. "It probably feels pretty much like this feels."

"But I'm not laughing or, you know, wiggling all around," she said.

"Well," I said, still running my fingers up and down her foot, "I don't know, then."

Then she was gripping my ankle with one strong hand. "Well, we need to figure this out," she said. Her crooked smile was back.

"No," I said. "No, Laura, we don't need to."

"Keep tickling my foot," she said, because I had stopped in my apprehension. "This is a test."

"We don't need to do a test," I said, but I did as she told me to and resumed. "Laura, you know how, y'know, how I, my uh, you know."

"Yes, I know," she said with a wicked lowered gaze. Her strong, pretty, sandy-colored arm developed smooth swells and furrows as it tightened its grip on my ankle. "But we have to do this test so I can figure out what you're feeling."

I tried to squirm free but we were hopelessly entangled on the sofa. I was about to protest some more but stopped as I watched her shapely right hand, tan fingers poised in the air in a sort of a loose claw position, fingers slightly and slowly fluttering in the air, her hand gradually drawing nearer and nearer to my bare foot.

"What are you doing?" I had an anxious catch in my voice. "Laura why are you, you know what's going to happen, Laura Laura don't...!"

Watching her hand approach my foot made it all worse, of course, but I couldn't look away; I watched my toes curl and my foot list away from her encroaching hand as if it were someone else's foot, under someone else's control. (Which I guess it sort of was.)

"Keep tickling my foot!" she demanded.

But then her fingers alit on my sole and I threw my head back against the cushion that was propped between me and the sofa arm; I released her foot involuntarily as my hands flew to my chest in fists; instantly I was giggling helplessly.

"Laura Laura please Laura please please NO...!"

"You stopped tickling me. How can we test if you're not tickling me?"

Though my eyes were squeezed shut I occasionally caught a glimpse--as a flailed and bucked--of Laura grinning her crooked grin, happy creases at the corners of her eyes, her strong latte-colored hand bent casually at the wrist as she calmly and steadily scampered fingers up and down my sole, then down along the side of my foot, across the top and up the bottom again, playing and wandering, wandering and playing as I shrieked and begged for mercy.

"Now how does this feel? Tell me, now how does this feel? Why are you laughing? Why is this making you laugh? Is this worse than this? Is this worse than this...?"

I squealed and giggled and it really was as if the giddily intolerable sensations that were throwing me into hysterics were completely unrelated to the sight of my girlfriend's fingers crawling cheerfully all over my immobilized foot, a spectacle that remained always cruelly within my field of vision.

"No LauraI can't Laura you KNOW I ca, ca, can't....!!"

By the time she finally stopped my torso had slid halfway off the sofa to the floor, my magazine was across the room. She serenely returned to her textbook, shrugged and said, "I think maybe you're just ticklish."

 

[linktext1]

These are top-notch stories. I rarely read F/M stories, unless they're really really good. This one is. Thank you for sharing with us. 🙂

 

[milagros317]

Fine additional story. I think she knew exactly what she was doing. :redstar:

 

[Wade1]

One night I was lying on my back on the bed talking on the phone to my supervisor from work, Jenny--a pale and statuesque, but also sort of brittle and humorless, brunette. I was about to go on a trip for work and whenever this was the case Jenny insisted on going over the presentations I’d be making. These conversations--lengthy and excruciatingly detailed--would often happen at work but if we ran out of time or Jenny also was on the road they’d wind up happening on the phone, usually at night or on a weekend, usually during one of those few and brief windows of time when Laura and I would otherwise be hanging out. Needless to say, Laura wasn’t a fan of my job, and was particularly disenchanted with Jenny.

I lay on the bed, zoning out. periodically saying “Uh-huh” or “okay” as Jenny laid out the details of the presentation I’d already made a dozen times before, and Laura wandered into the bedroom. It was when she flopped on the bed, using the weight of her torso to pin my ankles under her armpit, that I knew I was in trouble; when she peeled off my socks that only confirmed it.

Jenny continued droning on--“Accentuate what’s happening now,” she said, “not what we were doing five years ago”--and I was wildly gesturing at Laura, waving my hands at her, trying to say “cease and desist” with my gestures and my eyes. I held both my palms up at her and waved my hands back and forth, mouthing the words Don’t Do It. Don’t Do It. The bedsprings creaked under me as I strained to pull my legs from under her. Laura just looked at me and gave that crooked smile of hers and wrinkled her nose at me in an expression of girlish mischief I’d never seen from her before. Her left hand lay on the bed, hidden from me by my own pale naked foot; her other arm was propped up by the elbow, wrist bent, hand dangling in calm repose. Then she curled the fingers of that hand so that only her index finger was extended. And then she lowered that hand steadily toward my trapped feet. Jenny was still going on--“Numbers are big. Lean on the numbers”--and I was, believe it or not, still saying “Uh-huh, okay” even as my hand was pressed against my forehead and I braced with an expectant smile for impact.

Laura planted her one finger firmly on the sole of my foot. Wracked with anticipation, my whole body jumped as I stifled the impulse to cry out. Then she lifted the finger again and planted it on another spot of that sole. And another. And another. No actual tickling, but a merciless display of dominance: she could reduce me to helplessness without even tickling, and I was powerless not only to get away but even to say anything. I couldn’t even complain. All I could do was lie there uttering strangled “Okays” and “Uh-huhs” as my feet curled involuntarily each time her fingertip landed.

Then her finger was off my foot, and there was nothing. This was the first I realized I’d had my eyes closed, and I opened them and looked down at Laura. She was still there, still smiling sweetly, still pinning me down; her chin rested cheerfully on her right hand.

“What are you going to say about the rankings?” Jenny asked me at that moment. At the very moment that Laura had removed her chin from her palm, extended two fingers, and started spidering them prettily in the air, her great soft forearm muscles fluttering as she did so, lowering that hand inexorably toward my feet again. I shook my head again desperately; I cradled the phone against my shoulder and clapped my hands together in an abject pleading posture. “Please!” I mouthed. “Please!”

“Wade?” Jenny said.

“Oh,” I said tensely, Laura’s fingers now just centimeters from my cowering feet. “Just the usual spin. Long view, and so on.”

“Wade, are you all right?”

Jenny’s question was the last thing I heard before Laura’s two fingers started crawling briskly down my sole and back up again. I clamped my mouth shut as my body surged with unbridled ticklishness. This was the occasion on which I found out that if you try not to make any noise while you’re being tickled, the suppressed frantic energy releases itself through an increased violence in your physical activity. My back arched so that I was practically facing the headboard, I rocked wildly from side to side, and Laura told me later she’d never seen my toes curl and flex so crazily or my feet twitch so madly. This didn’t inspire Laura to be merciful of course; instead, she added the spidering action of her other hand to my other foot

“Wade?” Jenny said again.

Speaking at all was an enormous risk; unclamping my jaws would surely unleash a torrent of helpless giggles that would be difficult to explain. But Jenny was waiting. Gripping the side of the mattress with my free hand I said “Let.” More shuddering as silent laughter gripped my body. “Me. Check,” I grunted. Clapped my hand to my mouth, shaking my head from side to side. Just one more... “MYNOTES!” Then more back arching as I pounded the sheets with my free hand and struggled to regain control. I squinted down at Laura at the end of the bed; she made an exaggerated facial expression to indicate she was impressed with my performance and gave me a hearty thumbs-up before returning both hands to the job of merrily tickling my feet.

“Okay,” Jenny sighed, sounding exasperated.

I held the phone away from my head and wriggled and writhed, giggles escaping my lips as strangled squeaks and high-pitched animal sounds. Finally, Laura stopped, covering her own mouth to keep from laughing out loud. I returned the phone to my ear and said, “Yeah, I was just thinking the usual spiel...”

And then all ten of Laura’s fingertips resumed dancing softly, swiftly, and intolerably up and down my feet. Her left hand scrambled up and down my right foot from where her arm lay on the bed; her right hand dangled over the top of my foot, wrist bent over my toes, as her fingers took longer scribbly paths up and down my left foot.

The surprise assault caught me off guard; I interrupted my own sentence with a noise something like “KUH HEE HEE” and rolled my face over into the pillow, counting on it to muffle my helpless guffaws. But Laura just wouldn’t stop and she wouldn’t stop and her fingers tickled and she wouldn’t stop and finally I struggled blindly to find the mute button on the receiver with my thumb and once I found it and punched it with a tiny beep I rolled back on my back, giggling full-throated and uncontrollably, begging incoherently through the helpless laughter “PLEASE PLEASE PLEHEHEASE!” After all that it was almost a relief just to give in to the ignominious hysteria of helpless ticklish laughter--“PLEASE CANTTAKEIT LAHAURA PLEASE”--and I giggled and giggled until I was hoarse and Laura finally stopped.

When Laura finally stopped I lay panting on the bed and started fumbling my thumb around to release the mute button, preparing to offer an excuse about phone problems. But before I could find the button I heard Jenny’s voice, tinny and annoyed, emanating clearly from the receiver: “Wade?”

I hadn’t pressed the mute button.

I’d pressed speakerphone.

“Wade?”

Swallowing, blushing furiously, ignoring the spectacle of Laura silently laughing herself silly at the bottom of the bed, I said, “I’m sorry, Jenny, I’m so sorry, she was tickling me.”

“Who?”

“My girlfriend.”

“Was tickling you.”

“Yeah.”

“Right now. While we were talking.”

“I’m sorry, Jenny.”

“You’re a very ticklish person then.” A strange remark, because it was uttered without the least indication of playfulness or teasing. It actually sounded belittling.

I was trying to figure out how one answers when one’s semi-evil boss says such a thing, and when I hadn’t answered for a while Laura finally piped up: “Yes,” she said. “He is.”

“Okay,” Jenny said. “Maybe we should finish this rundown after you’re on the road. Call me when you get to Portland.”

“Okay,” I said.”

She hung up without saying goodbye. Laura proceeded to laugh until she was breathless.

 

[Tickleslave83]

I'd love my feet to come into the clutches of a girl like Laura!:laughing: :super_hap :redface:

 

[Wade1]

Careful what you wish for!

There was another occasion on which Laura revisited her comparative "test" of the relative ticklishness of our respective feet; I'll share that here sometime when I get the chance.

 

[Wade1]

Laura was another person to whom I forwarded that Facebook group's International Tickle Day event last week (or thereabouts), with a message along the lines of "Thought you might want to celebrate."

She wrote back, a cheerful and chatty message--how am I doing, she's great, work, family, etc.--but no mention of tickling. She didn't mention the tickle day thing at all except to joke about the crazy things people find the time to do on Facebook. It was almost as if she didn't know that there was a specific reason I'd sent her that event, as though she didn't remember tickling me half to death a couple dozen times or more.

Which maybe she doesn't. As I said, she wasn't a tickler by nature, as far as I could tell. Presented with the immediate opportunity offered by my particular feet, she apparently couldn't help but exploit it, but now, a few years later, with time and distance between us, she may barely remember that aspect of our relationship at all.

 

[sadi]

So... It seems as if your feet have been granted a slight reprieve from her truly curious fingers. :happy: Just hope you have another to send you into unbearable levels of enjoyment. 🙄 :evil:
Just wondering how your role under said worker changed afterward, if at all other than your slight tension around her. :laughing:

 

[alan7051]

Holy cow... dude, your stories are awesome. I am living vicariously through you.

 

[Wade1]

Just wondering how your role under said worker changed afterward, if at all other than your slight tension around her. :laughing:

I didn't realize I'd never answered your question, st! From that point on, Jenny was largely cold and distant and contemptuous toward me--which is pretty much as she'd always been before my phone-based humiliation at Laura's hands, so I didn't detect any difference. There was one time shortly after that incident when I found myself getting tickled in the office--a coworker named Jane had discovered my weakness and revealed herself to be a mischievous tickler, and was standing behind my chair in my cubicle , pinning me there, and tickling my sides, just long enough for my laughter and pleading to reach sufficiently embarrassing heights of pitch and desperation. Jane stopped, ruffled my hair and strode away, and I glanced across the room to see Jenny standing near a doorway, watching, looking very scornful.

She never said anything, though.

 

[Wade1]

Yikes!

I came here planning to write the long (long long long long) delayed followup to my last post in this thread, the one where Laura insisted on performing the "experiment" where we tickled one another's feet in exactly the same way... I had no idea it was one of the casualties of the semi-recent crash.

That'll teach me not to save a copy.

I'll probably try to reconstruct it, though, time permitting...

 

[Wade1]

So here's me reconstructing that recollection that disappeared...

Y'know, when you're intimate with someone, when you live with her or you're over there enough that you might as well be living there, you make yourself very vulnerable to that person. Let's say you happen to be very ticklish. And let's say the person you're intimate with happens to find the experience of tickling you to be very entertaining. There's nothing you can do about it; that person is going to have the opportunity and the freedom to tickle you, as frequently and as relentlessly as she wants. Because you're vulnerable; you can't be on guard against that all the time. It's going to happen; you don't hold any of the cards in this particular matter.

I had cause to reflect on such circumstances one afternoon, years ago, when I was dozing on Laura's sofa. I started to dream, as sometimes happens, that someone was tickling me: my feet were being tickled, I was writhing, I was giggling, I couldn't make it stop, and then I was awake and I was still writhing and laughing because someone was actually tickling my foot. I'd fallen asleep on the sofa by myself but while I slept there Laura had inserted herself on the sofa there with me, her head down by my feet, her feet up by my head, one of my legs wedged under her body, my other ankle firmly gripped by one hand, her other hand dragging a couple of lazy fingers up and down the sole of my immobilized bare foot.

Seeing that I was awake--and, you know, shrieking--she stopped, grinning broadly at me, while very pointedly not releasing my ankle. "Nice nap?" she said.

"Yeah, okay, Laura, c'mon, let me go," I said.

"You know, I was thinking about our little experiment earlier?" she said.

"I don't know what you're talking about," I said, squirming, trying to pull my foot free; I could feel her fingers grow tight and steely on my ankle.

"When I was touching your foot and you were touching my foot and we couldn't figure out why it tickled you but it didn't tickle me?" she said. She ran a fingertip up my sole, from my heel to my toes. "Remember?"

I convulsed, fists clenching, stifling a giggle. "Yeah I remember," I said. "Not so confusing, just means you're not ticklish," I said. "How about you just let me..."

"But I realized," Laura said, "that our experiment wasn't perfect, because you weren't touching my foot in the exact same places and the exact same ways that I was touching your foot. So I thought we should try it again--"

"No!" I struggled again to wrench free. Her grip tightened further.

"--try the experiment again, more carefully, more systematically," Laura said, "really try to figure this out..."

"I said no," I said, reaching for something to leverage myself against. "We're not doing this."

Laura smiled coldly, placing her fingertips motionless against my sole. "We're going to try the experiment," she said, "or I'm going to sit here and tickle your foot until you wet your pants."

I relented. "Laura, seriously..."

"Now," Laura said, waggling her big smooth bare foot in front of my face. "You start and I'll follow your lead. Because frankly, no offense, if you tried to follow me I'm not sure you'd be able to do it because you don't seem to have a great deal of self-control."

I looked at her foot. "Laura, I don't want to do this..."

There were her fingers, warningly, on my foot again. "You start," she repeated, "and I'll follow your lead."

So whatever I did to her foot, she was going to do to my foot. I was going to be dictating how and where she tickled my foot. So that actually gave me a little bit of control here. I could try to avoid the places that were really bad. But I realized I had no idea which places were worse than others; I'd never given any consideration to which parts of my feet might be more ticklish than others. All I knew was that if someone's fingers were moving on my feet, anywhere on my feet, it drove me into hysteria. But some parts must be less bad than others. I was going to have to try to be strategic and careful--like mine-field careful--about this.

I placed my index finger--just one finger; one finger had to be less torturous than multiple fingers, right?--on the ball of Laura's foot, beneath her big toe. I felt her finger do the same thing on my trapped foot, and I fought the instinctive urge to cringe. Laura beamed at me, dimples deepening on her gleeful closed-mouth smile, her brown eyes positively twinkling. Waiting for me to dictate the next move.

So I moved my index finger straight down the sole of her foot, from the ball of her foot toward the heel. Somewhat firmly; I thought a lighter touch might be more than I could bear. But as I felt her finger doing the same thing on my foot I knew I'd miscalculated: my toes curled, my foot strained to pull away from her touch, my body shuddered with suppressed laughter. Laura, of course, was completely unmoved by the corresponding sensation on her foot.

"No, okay," I gasped, swallowing my words in a high-pitched gurgle and lifting my hand from her foot. "No no no."

"Ah, Wade," she said, starting to dance her fingers merrily all over my sole. "No stopping in the middle of the experiment."

"Okay OKAY," I squealed. "Okay!!" I put my index finger on her heel again. She did the same with her finger on mine. "Come on," I said, "this is a nightmare."

"If I can take it," Laura said smugly, "I'm sure a big strong fella like you can handle it."

I shook my head. Such a brat. I returned my attention to her foot, her toes flexing at me in a taunting fashion, sassy and eager to receive the treatment my own foot was dreading. Okay, the middle of the sole was a disaster zone, I had to stay away from there. So maybe around the periphery of the foot wouldn't be so bad?

I started running my finger up around the edge of her foot, along the outside curve of the foot up toward the toes. She did the same to me, watching me keenly with a constant smile. The feeling of her finger traveling along the outside of my foot like that was maddening; I struggled not to squirm and I pressed my lips together to keep from laughing aloud, but at least it wasn't sending me through the roof. (It was of course having no adverse effect on Laura whatsoever.) My finger traveled across her foot beneath the toes and she did the same to me--I squeezed my eyes closed and whimpered. "Okay okay that tickles that tickles quite a bit more!"

Laura shook her head. "See, it's not bothering me at all."

I hastened to finish that trip across the foot and started moving my finger down the side of her foot, along the concave inside curve, and as she did the same to me a yelp escaped from my lips. "No God why is that so bad," I squeaked.

Every time I tried something different, venturing away from the edge of her foot and hitting anywhere on the broad middle area of her sole, she didn't respond at all but it was all I could do not to yank my hand away from her foot and plead through giggles for mercy. Around the edge of the foot was bad but it seemed to be the least intolerable option, so I kept doing that, trying to hurry along the inner side and across the ball to minimize the torture there. Not surprisingly, after a while Laura got wise to my strategy.

"Okay, this isn't working, we're not learning anything here," she said as she continued to reproduce my maneuvers on her foot on my own foot.

"Okay," I said, trying to control my breathing, "so we're done?"

"No, I think we need to try a few other things," Laura said. "What you're doing right now definitely isn't tickling me."

"It's tickling me," I yelled.

"It's not tickling me," she said.

"Because you're not ticklish," I howled.

"Or because you haven't tried the right thing yet," she said. "Are you going to switch things up, Wade, or--" she showed me her five fingers, waggling devilishly in the air-- "am I going to have to start offroading?"

"Don't," I said. "Please. Okay."

"Try other parts of the foot," she suggested.

"Please no," I said.

"Maybe you'll find my ticklish spot," she cooed. "Maybe this is where the power dynamic totally shifts in our relationship."

"Yeah," I said skeptically. "Maybe." Grudgingly I moved my fingertip lightly across the middle of her sole. She did the same to me and I arched my back, driving my head back into the sofa cushions, emitting an embarrassing cascade of hee-hee-hees. Desperate, I changed direction and ran my finger up the middle of her foot toward the toes. She did the same to me and I rocked back and forth, laughing helplessly. I couldn't help but remove my hand from her foot.

"Oh, Wade," she said. "The experiment!" Fingers scampered lightly up and down my sole.

"NO PLEASE," I cried, putting my finger back on her foot.

"Try more fingers," Laura said.

"No!" I said. "Laura, you can't force me to inflict tickling on myself!"

"It's in the interest of science," Laura said. There were those fingers waggling nimbly in the air again. "You don't want to undermine the scientific method, do you?"

"Oh. My. God," I said. I walked two fingers up and down her sole, shrieking desperately as she did the exact same thing to me. I ran four fingertips rakelike across the bottom of her foot and yelped and giggled as the same thing happened to me.

This was just getting worse. I couldn't stop it from happening to me; my only hope was to maybe actually accomplish exactly what she thought I couldn't: my only hope was to find a genuinely ticklish place on her foot. Her entire sole was clearly invulnerable, but there was one remaining possibility, a hail mary, something that could surprise her, something that maybe she'd never yet discovered about herself. If it worked, I might be able to tickle her into submission and extricate myself from this helpless position. But it was a scorched-earth strategy; if it didn't work, I'd be destroyed. Even if it did work, I might be destroyed. But she wasn't leaving me much of a choice. A hail mary was all I had available at this point.

So I slipped my forefinger between two of her toes. Her brows furrowed; she cocked her head and looked at me quizzically. This she did not expect. I had a brief window of opportunity here; she was slow in following my lead. If this worked, maybe I could incapacitate her before she even got to my toes. So steadily, wickedly, I slid my finger back and forth between her toes and studied her expression.

She didn't crack. She didn't flinch. She didn't react at all.

Except when a sly, devastating smile spread slowly across her face. She slipped her finger between my toes just as I'd done to her. I confess I may have pleaded with her a bit with my eyes. But then she slid her finger back and forth just as I was doing.

And I cracked. I flinched. And I thrashed and giggled and held my fists at my chest and shrieked at her to stop STOP JUST STOP.

"The experiment, Wade," she shouted over my hysterical noises. "You're ruining the experiment!"

I flailed and wriggled and tried to lurch toward the edge of the sofa. "PLEASE STOP IT STOP!"

"Okay, Wade," she yelled. "You asked for it!" And there went her fingertips up and down and all over the bottom of my wriggling foot.

I tried to beg her to stop but I was laughing too hard. I found my shoulders had slipped off the sofa and I was sliding toward the carpeted floor--thank God, between gravity and the momentum I might be able to get away. But Laura was following me down to the floor, maneuvering her strong legs to keep me from crawling away. Next thing I knew I was lying on my back on the floor of Laura's apartment and she was sitting on my calves, her back to me, facing my two bare helpless feet. Whereas up on the sofa she'd had access to one foot with one hand, now she was free to assault both my feet with all ten fingers.

Which was what she promptly began to do: tickle tickle tickle, fingers fingers all up and down my twitching feet.

"STAHAHAHAHAHAHOP," I howled. I distinctly remember uttering "STAHAHAHAHAHOP" over and over again.

But she didn't stop. She had unfettered access to my sensitive feet and she was in the mood to do nothing at all with her time but exploit that fact.

"Thank you God," she said again, as she'd said before, "for giving me a boyfriend with ticklish feet."

I lurched, guffawing, into a seated position and seized Laura from behind by her shoulders. Pulled and shoved and tried to rock her off my legs. But to no avail: the constant tickling was completely destroying my focus, and besides: girl had a healthy center of gravity. I fell back into a prone position, squirming and writhing and thrashing and squealing, and her fingers just never stopped dancing merrily, incessantly up and down the soles of my feet.

"PLEASE," I cried hoarsely through the giggles. I distinctly remember making this sound too: "PLE-HE-HE-HEASE."

This is one of the things about being with someone who is 100% not ticklish: she really had no idea what it's like, the sensation of being relentlessly tickled. Laura knew that I was beseeching her to stop, but she also knew I was laughing, which made it all seem fundamentally unserious and lacking in urgency. She had no concept of the intensity or the intolerability of it, or the desperation with which one needs it to stop when one needs it to stop.

So she just didn't stop. Her fingers on the bottoms of my feet. My hysterics were amusing, and it cost her nearly no effort to keep them coming.

Through my wild laughter I was dimly aware of her running through a chirpy nonstop monologue: "Thank goodness you have ticklish feet. What in the world would we do with our time if you didn't have ticklish feet? How would we spend the net couple of hours, for instance? Watching TV? Lame. This is so much better. This is bonding. This is entertainment. I wish the other guys I'd dated had ticklish feet. Maybe they did, I have no idea. But good thing you do, huh? Thanks for bringing your ticklish feet to this relationship, honey. Really sweet of you."

I was pounding the floor with my palms; I really thought I was going to lose my mind. Didn't feel like I was going to pee and passing out didn't seem to be an imminent danger. Just the prospect of nonstop tickling at the hands of the woman who claimed to love me, on and on into the night.

"Want me to stop?" she said.

"YEEEEES!"

"Want me to stop?" she said.

"YEHEHEHEHEHES!"

"Sure you want me to stop?" (She wasn't, by the way, stopping, like, at all.)

"YESPLEASEYES!"

She stopped.

"Okay," she said. "I'll stop touching the bottoms of your feet."

"Thank you," I gasped, panting. "God, thank you."

She was still squatting heavily on my legs, though; this didn't necessarily bode well. "And thank you, by the way."

I blinked and squinted up at her. "Thank you for what?"

"For the present," she said.

"What present?"

She smiled and wrinkled her nose, that wicked wrinkling of her nose. "This present," she said, and I felt her finger sliding between my toes. My back arched again, fists clenching again, and again with the squealing. She explored the ticklishness between each pair of toes before she finally called it quits for the night.

And this story actually had an additional embarrassing coda: the next morning we were leaving together at the same time that Sadie, Laura's neighbor who lived in the apartment next door with her partner Linda, was leaving.

"So," Sadie said, "we were having a discussion last night, trying to figure out what was going on. We figured either you were watching a really funny movie, or: someone's really ticklish."

"That would be Wade," Laura said gleefully, reaching over as I locked her door, her fingers scrabbling roughly at my ribs, forcing me to flinch and yelp. (In retrospect I think that was the first and only time Laura ever tickled me anywhere but my feet.)

Sadie laughed merrily and clapped her hands. "It was you?" she said. "I thought sure it must have been her. But it was you. That's awesome. Linda's crazy ticklish too. We'll have to all get together sometime for a big tickle fight."

"Yeah," I said, the blood rushing to my cheeks as Laura, too, laughed and clapped her hands. "Let's definitely do that never."

 

[mandahhh]

Hahaha. "Let's definitely do that never."

That sounds like something I would say! 😛