Po Lazarus
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This is the sixth in a series I will be writing and sharing here on the fiction forum. As the title suggests they are instances from my life that almost belong on the ‘True Stories’ sub-forum (My favourite TMF area), but which I cannot in good conscience put on there and claim verisimilitude: they are based on real people (Names changed) and often on real situations and conversations, but I have embellished certain details, some related to the tickling, some related to the set up or other aspects of the anecdote. Some are exaggerations of real tickling incidents, some are fantasies thrust into my brain due to real happenings which could have gone that way, if the stars had aligned more or I had had a bit less inhibition at the time. I will not reveal which to the reader, I will simply write them as I wished they had happened, and how I sometimes think of them on those lonely, sexually frustrated nights that we all experience (Which I am experiencing a deluge of at present, as due to unfortunate circumstances that I won’t go into, I am living separately from my fiancé, which has spurred me to take a renewed interest in the TMF, and in erotic writing generally. I guess if you enjoy the stories, my loss is your gain!). They will all be presented autobiographically, in short story form. I hope you enjoy them. Feel free to leave feedback of course, just remember to be as respectful to me as I would always strive to be to you!
January 2022 Update: I’m stuck living apart from my fiancé again (Long, pandemic related story), so have dusted the writing off and thought I might as well share it where it may be read and appreciated. I hope you enjoy it, and would appreciate any feedback – a one word review is more helpful than no review at all!
For anyone who’s read other entries in this series: I’ve found that as my writing develops and my stories get more fleshed out, I’m finding it prudent to split them into themed segments, and have done so here once again. Unlike the previous entry, however, this is not to discriminate between “True” and “Almost True” parts of the tale. This story is 100% “Almost True”. I hope you enjoy it all the same; I’m really enjoying getting back into the swing of things and writing these now.
Kim: The No-Nonsense Superior
As anyone who has read the earlier entries in this series can now attest, I’ve had a fair share of different jobs. Some have been good; some have been bad. But the worst, by far, was working for a well-known fast-food chain, in the relentlessly busy food court of an enormous shopping centre (‘Mall’). I’ll not kill the mood before I’ve even attempted to fire it up by going into detail about the pervasive smell, the heat, the unhygienic colleagues, the rude customers or the day it all got too much for me and I literally collapsed through sheer physical and mental exertion (On the back of a seventy-hour week in the damned place! In the emergency department at the hospital, after hearing about my working conditions, the doctor who looked me over gave his official medical opinion: “Fuck me, if I worked that many hours in a place like that, I’d collapse too!”). Let’s just say: “It sucked”. A reason to be thankful for doing it, however, was the incident I’m about to relay, which just about made all that backbreaking graft in the service of lining some distant shareholder’s pockets, just about worth it. Just.
In shitty jobs, often the only thing that gets you through the day is the camaraderie you share with your colleagues, if you’re lucky enough to get on with them. This was the case for me – for the most part – in this fast-food job, and in other low-wage jobs I’ve had before (This one was my last, thankfully). After starting this one, I quickly ascertained that I got on with most people, but I quickly struck up a friendship with a lad called Josh.
We gelled due to our mutual hatred for the job, our shared interests, the fact we discovered we lived near each other, and the reciprocal love we had for our post-work ritual of heading straight to one of the bars in the food court after we’d finished our shift and seeing how much cold beer we could cram inside us before we had to run for the last bus home. He became a good buddy and we began hanging out outside of work too, as we lived in the next town over from the shopping centre. As did another colleague: Kim.
Kim was the assistant manager of the ‘Restaurant’ (such as it was). She was your typical fast-food management type: working class background, level-headed, an above average capacity for hard physical work, and didn’t take any shit from anybody – superiors, subordinates or shitty, scornful diners. She wasn’t stupid, but wasn’t ambitious enough to want anything better for herself than being in a position of some responsibility in an environment she was comfortable and confident in. In her early forties, this was just going to be her professional life from now on, and she was content with that.
She showed the effects of the physical intensity of the job, too: she had the physique of a marathon runner, but had never set foot in a gym in her life; the job was all the exercise she needed, plus she alone chose not to take the company up on its dubiously beneficial offer of one free calorie-saturated meal per day. Equally, the effect of working in a job in which you didn’t see the light of day for twelve hours curiously hadn’t impacted on the natural bronze suntan she sported year-round. Blandly pretty, she had tight facial features, striking dark eyes, and was never seen without her dark brown hair pulled snugly into a bun, which she’d pull out of the back of her mandated baseball cap on entering the restaurant floor.
She had been single for a long time when I started, and this didn’t change for any of my sentence in the grease-soaked gulag, but I always felt this was due to a lack of interest on her part, as opposed to a lack of prospective interest in her due to any flaw in her looks. She could have had a man if she’d wanted one but just didn't seem bothered about it. I did wonder what her feet might look like as I had an inkling they’d be decent, but there was little chance of my curiosity being sated in that regard – we were all contractually bound to wear thick-soled leather boots whilst on the floor, to withstand boiling oil splashing onto our feet and burning us. Strangely we weren’t given any litigious protection from the brutal melting substance elsewhere on our bodies; I’m not sure why our feet were singled out for safeguards, but whatever the rationale, resultantly it diminished the chances of ever checking out the feet of any of the cute female staff, including Kim. Happily in her case, I would eventually be given the opportunity to right this atrocious wrong, and more besides…
Every job I’ve had in the service industry has usually featured these salt-of-the-earth type of managers, and I’ve usually had functional, if not warm working relations with them. Kim was no exception to this, although Josh and I would sometimes run afoul of her if we allowed the apathy we had for our roles to inspire us to approach our numerous cleaning duties with a lack of sufficient inspiration and/or perspiration. She was not averse to dishing out a tongue lashing if she felt we had warranted it, and Josh got it particularly badly as they knew each other outside of work, their family’s being close, which in Kim’s mind justified her coming down extra hard on him, probably to show there was no nepotism going on.
I can’t remember the exact detail of it, but he and her nephew were lifelong best friends, or something, and whilst this would lead to him getting an extra hard time from her at times, they had an otherwise great rapport and this led to certain advantages, like her giving us both a lift home after work to save us taking the bus (Meaning more post-shift time in the bar, where she’d join us and loosen up a bit, even whilst sticking to soft drinks as the designated driver), or letting us blast our own music on the shop floor after the shutters had come down at the end of the day, to soundtrack the ‘end of shift deep-clean’.
After a couple of months getting to know her, I came to realise that Kim was one of those “I’m all business, with a tough exterior, but I’m actually pretty cool once you get to know me” manager archetypes. If they had a recipe card, it would read “Decent human being – add a dash of familiarity to de-frost.”
Further familiarity was set to be obtained, not just with Kim, but with the whole workforce, after a staff night out was arranged. I had been working there for about six months at this point, and had started not long after Stu, the general manager, who wanted to keep morale up and get to know his team a bit better. A pretty bog-standard night out was arranged in the centre of the large city the shopping centre was in, and we all agreed to meet in a bar that everyone could get to.
Josh suggested to Kim and I that because we all lived in the same area, we should meet up in the centre of our town, and take the train into the city together, with maybe a cheeky drink on the train on the cards. We both agreed. I was offhandedly looking forward to it, but had I any idea what was going to happen, I’d have been counting down the seconds until it came.
Early Doors
On the day in question Josh and I met at the pub before we were due to meet Kim. We saw no harm in getting a head start, and wanted to get a few reasonably priced pints down us before heading to the more exclusive climes of city centre bars, with their extortionate prices. We had a couple of hours shooting some pool inside, smoking a couple of cigars outside, and enjoying decent value beer whilst we still could.
Around an hour before we were due to meet Kim, Josh got a text from her saying that she was ready to meet earlier, if we were, and so already slightly buzzed we walked over to meet her at the station. She was on the platform as we got there, and greeted us both with a hug. I could smell wine on her, and she admitted with a giggle that she’d already had a bottle to herself whilst she had been getting ready.
When you work a job that requires you to package yourself degradingly into a uniform each day, seeing your colleagues in plainclothes always takes you aback slightly. This was no exception. I took in Kim’s outfit, from head to toe, and saw that she had made an effort. Her hair was down for once and she was wearing a black and white long-sleeved blouse, with a black shawl draped over her shoulders, a black skirt and I realised – in a sight for deprived eyes – she had bare, freshly-shaved tanned legs and bare feet inside a cute pair of open-toed black flats.
As things stood, I couldn’t get a real quality look at her feet, but my inner ‘Zing!’ had gone off just the same, merely from the fact that they were finally freed from being hidden away in those stupid clodhopper boots she usually wore, and the night was still young. I noted that the nails on her hands and feet were a matching shade of deep, sexy red.
We boarded the train, sat down and cracked into some beers that Josh and I had picked up in the shop outside the station. We had a few tipsy laughs, and I discovered that Josh and Kim had an even closer relationship than I’d originally thought; he was soon ribbing her mercilessly about this and that, in the way one would with a favoured relative, and would occasionally get a playful slap to his arm or a barbed jibe. I also noticed that as Kim sat with her leg crossed, if she was especially engaged or amused with something in the conversation, her toes would flick, causing her flat to pop off her heel and swiftly back on again as she scrunched her toes back. It made a subtle flapping noise as she did it, the inside of the shoe clapping against her bare heel.
This gave me several chances to engineer a glance at her arch – and wow! The glances I could get were only sporadic, and I couldn’t risk openly staring with two people in such close quarters, but I could make out that there was an aesthetically pleasing arch in the shoe, as svelte as it was high. Combined with her naturally bronzed skin, it seemed to be a lovely foot. I wasn’t to know at that stage, but I would soon confirm this more tangibly.
The train pulled into the city centre, and we alighted, already feeling slightly drunk. We were early, but surmised that we might as well head to the bar we were meeting the others at. It was noisy and dark in there, with tinted windows; almost a cross between a club and a bar. The plan was to find a table big enough for the whole group and reserve it, but on entering we found the place busy and all the large tables taken. We checked out the groups sat at the large tables, and saw a rowdy set of students whose drinks appeared to be on the wane. They were sat in a semi-circle booth next to the wall, with a large round table in the middle of it. We made an educated guess that they would be finishing up soon and leaving, and took a small table nearby, ready to pounce if the table became free.
Josh joined the long queue at the bar, and I sat and chatted with Kim. I could see more shoe flapping under the table as I cracked jokes, and I had to take care just to keep it in my peripheral vision, and not just openly stare directly down under the table at her playful feet. But it was starting to really rev me up and I became more and more aware, possibly accentuated by the beer I’d already had, that Kim was actually pretty damn cute, and maybe was even putting a vibe my way.
I was – and still am – in a happy relationship, but as we talked, I mused inwardly over the fact that I had to accept that in my life, the majority of women have only pointed said vibe in my direction after I’ve settled down. And here it was, happening again. Just my luck. But I digress.
I was snapped out of my introspection by two simultaneous events: Josh bringing us the round he had bought, and the sound of glass smashing loudly behind me. The students we had been keeping tabs on had clearly been day drinking, and the associated clumsiness inherent with that carefree practice had caused one of them to knock their drink off the table, sending newly shattered glass and beer all over the floor.
This was fortuitous for our own intentions, as the dolt who had knocked his drink over had coincidentally been the only one who hadn’t finished his drink yet. Our original assumption was then confirmed as the group hurriedly got up to leave, evidently ready to move on and perhaps anxious to escape the scene of the crime of the smashed glass. Kim nudged me under the table with her toes. “Quick! Let’s get the table!”.
She jumped up and raced over to the table as the last student sheepishly made tracks. Josh and I followed behind and stood next to the table, waiting for Kim to sit down. Josh was still holding our drinks and he placed them down on the table ceremoniously, officially claiming it as our territory. Next came a racy moment (for me), as Kim looked under the table at the smashed glass and spilled drink, then pointedly down at her flimsy-looking flats, which looked anything but broken glass proof. She lifted an ankle, posing cutely for a second, as if inspecting the durability of her footwear. She looked at us teasingly and addressed us loudly so we could hear her over the thumping music.
“If we were at work now, I’d get you two to clean this up! I’d probably still cut my feet though, with the shitty job you two would make of it!” It hadn’t taken long for her to put her ‘boss hat’ on.
Josh shot back: “Well, we’re not at work, so I can tell you to fuck off!”
I consolidated: “Yeah, we do enough cleaning for you at work, we’re not doing it outside of work too! Let’s sit down, and grab one of the bar staff when they walk past. They can clean it up.”
Kim nodded. Then, to avoid stepping underneath the table and risk getting cut or wet, she backed into the end of the leather seat, placed the heels of her hands against the leather, and raised herself onto it backwards. Then she pushed herself back around the semi-circle in a boat-rowing motion, lifting her legs into the air as Josh quickly jumped on the seat next to her, and I followed, with Kim’s legs stretched over Josh’s knees, and her feet blessedly plopped right into my lap.
This had a propitious effect, as far as I was concerned - because Kim couldn’t lower her feet to the floor, making them effectively stuck in my lap. I think her ultimate plan was to keep shuffling backwards, and sit cross-legged on the seat, so she wasn’t stretched out over us. She was still pushing backwards along the leather when Josh and I caught each other’s eye. I’m not sure what happened, but we both had the same thought at the exact same time, and communicated it wordlessly with a devious look, lifting our eyebrows in unison and sharing a grin.
Kim was watching both of us, and seemed to telegraph our intentions, as she began rapidly withdrawing her feet from our orbit, but Josh was too quick for her. He quickly gripped hold of both of her ankles, pushing her feet back towards my accepting hands, and then held her knees onto his legs. I compounded this by holding her ankles, one in each hand. We were clearly far too strong for her, as even though it was arm strength pitted against leg strength, it was two-on-one.
There was a particularly loud song playing and so I couldn’t hear the protestations that Kim began yelling at Josh, or the reply he shouted down to her. But I got the gist of it as I saw him laugh mockingly at her, and her face fall, an increasingly panicky look on her face. Then he turned to me, and simply nodded, a knowing smirk on his face. We still hadn’t said anything to each other yet, but we didn’t need to. I knew what he wanted me to do and was happy to oblige. I took her left ankle and crossed it over the right, holding them both in place with my left hand. I noted with glee that the flats were flapping like never before as she struggled to fight off what was happening; her toes were struggling as her feet tried to flap their way out of their predicament. This was impossible, of course, unless she could detach them, and this thought amused me as I systematically deprived her feet of the protection of the flats with my right hand.
I slipped them off one by one, and keeping up the pretence that I wasn’t becoming increasingly aroused by this, and that like Josh, this was all hijinks to me, I placed my nose to the opening of the shoes and theatrically drew my head backwards, as if to say, “they stink!”. This got a laugh from both Josh and Kim, who burrowed her brow at me in mock-offense. In reality I was pleasantly surprised to discover that the only fragrance I could detect in them was a perfumed soap aroma, and took this to mean that Kim had moisturised her feet before coming out. I placed the flats neatly on the table in front of me, side by side. Kim looked at her shoes as they were put on the table, then her gaze refocused on me. She looked into my eyes pleadingly, shook her head and mouthed “Don’t!!!”
I did.
Killing Time
Starting with her heel, I strummed my fingers slowly and deliberately up the plane of Kim’s right foot, stopping when I hit the centre of the arch and going for it, speedily peppering the surprisingly soft flesh with multiple attacks. The foot trembled violently, but couldn’t escape. I kept this up for a minute or so, then spiralled around the ball, finding my way up to her toes and getting into them. I went to repeat the action on her left foot, but a problem then emerged. When she felt the sensations on her left foot it instinctively kicked up, temporarily freed due to having less force holding it down. This wouldn’t do.
I looked at Josh, who looked back at me expectantly. Shifting my weight, I moved to my left slightly, and crossed my right leg over her ankles for extra restraint. For rigidity, I held my own foot against the cylindrical support of the table in front of us, which was nailed to the floor. It worked: her criss-crossed feet now stuck out from between my legs, held fast by the pressure between my thighs, which had become a natural vice. This freed up my left hand, and I set it to work, holding it next to the right foot and my right hand to her left, and exploiting the tickling potential of all ten of my digits at once.
I looked down the seat to gauge the response of this, and was instantly satisfied to find that Kim was losing it: she had grabbed the fabric of the seat either side of her, and her head was back, shouting her laughter into the hubbub of the bar. I remember thinking that it sounded similar to Halle Berry’s hooting in that immortal mainstream clip we all know and love. The music that was playing died in between songs, and the whole bar was temporarily deafened by Kim’s cackle, crescendoing up to the ceiling. Heads turned from all over the bar, and looks of general amusement came our way, particularly from other men. I noted a couple of nervous looking women, appearing sympathetic to Kim’s torment, but also mildly relieved, perhaps that they weren’t in her unenviable position.
Despite reeling off peals of laughter, Kim managed to communicate to Josh and I with her eyes that she was both embarrassed at having the attention of the whole bar brought to her, and annoyed with us for causing it. She couldn’t say this out loud, of course, because she was frantically ticklish, and the fact I had doubled the amount of fingers being used to probe her soles and toes was limiting her verbal output to increasingly maddened howls of primal laughter. I looked to Josh quizzically, as if to say: “Should I stop now?”. This was met with a vigorous shake of the head (“Fuck, no!”), a nod towards her feet (“Carry on!”) and as he turned to face Kim, a smug, mocking, derisive laugh as the music started up again and her tormented yells were again lost to the overwhelming noise (“Got ya!”).
This gave me free reign to appreciate how beautiful Kim’s feet were as I smothered them with tickling sensations. They were slender, with rounded, high arches and the edible combination of bronzed skin covering the top of them and naturally paler, light brown soles, augmented by the softness of the skin from the fresh pedicure that I deduced – after running my fingertips all over them for several minutes – she had treated herself to that afternoon.
Her toes were long, but not overly so, and the deep red polish she had applied looked stunning against the backdrop of her tanned skin. Having normally been denied the chance to clap eyes even momentarily on them due to the nature of our work environment, to not only be close enough to inspect and admire them, but to actually get to tickle them, was an astonishing surprise.
What seemed surprising to Kim was what an accomplished tickler I was. With us not being close, I had no idea of her ‘Tickling history’, but I would have been willing to bet that she hadn’t been forced to laugh quite as much from a foot tickling before, as she was being made to right now by my seasoned method. As the minutes went by, we entered into something of a repetitive sequence.
I’d deviate from the area or the technique I was pursuing (Say, migrating from scratching her heels, to wiggling in her insteps, or fingering her toe pads), she’d change from hooting with her eyes shut to looking at me desperately, start shouting things down at me and Josh, then fall backwards again, completely convulsed. I could never make out what she was saying due to the noise and distance, but it seemed to be along the lines of “Not there!!!”, “Stop it!!!” and “Not my toes!!!”.
Josh could hear her, and would respond to each remonstration with more verbal taunting and jeer-like s******s and scoffs. His enthused reaction to seeing someone he knew well get tickled, whilst ultimately a common one, was startlingly ardent, as far as I was concerned. I didn’t realise that he had it in him. I’d never talked about tickling with him (not that it’s a conversation topic regularly visited between drinking buddies) – our conversation was usually limited to video games, comic books or nerdy bitching about the differences in detail between that week’s Game of Thrones and whichever A Song of Ice and Fire book it was loosely adapted from/betraying (It still hurts!). So I didn’t know a tickle-lover resided within. But he was clearly enthralled, perhaps as one would be seeing a sibling tickled, and as Kim weakened from the physical ordeal of being tickled so constantly, could even afford to free a hand (Her legs not fighting as strongly) and sip his beer, looking like a spectator at a sports event.
As the song changed and the music again died down, I felt Kim should have a break, and not be subjected to the embarrassment of screeching at the whole population of the bar again. I removed my fingers from her feet, and inspired by Josh, took a long sip of my beer. Thirsty work. I looked down at Kim and saw that she was just lay back on the seat, eyes closed, her taut stomach thumping up and down as she caught her breath. After a few seconds she opened her eyes, leant up on her elbows and said something to Josh, and he passed her beer down to her, taking care, I noticed, to keep the pressure on her legs with his other hand – it seemed he didn’t want her freed just yet.
Once she had taken several glugs of her beer, she placed it back on the table as the music started back up. She then started remonstrating with Josh and pointing at her legs and feet, presumably asking to be released. Looking around the bar I could see we still had a sporadic audience: the people whose attention had been drawn from Kim’s initial screams were still taking an interest. I was aware of Kim’s embarrassment and because I didn’t know her that well, didn’t know when we would start crossing the line from annoyance into genuine anger. Also, I didn’t want to appear too into the tickling, so I decided to bluff Josh about my true desire to continue, and masquerade as the voice of reason.
“I think she’s had enough, man. Should I stop now?”
He shouted: “Nah, we’ve got time to kill. There’s nothing else to do. Carry on.”
“I don’t want her to get pissed off and take it out on us at work.”
“She won’t, or we’ll do it to her there too! Don’t worry about it, just get her again.”
No elaboration, or even particular justification for wanting to continue with the torture. He just told me to keep going. And that was fine by me. Kim couldn’t hear our conversation due to the fact the next song had started, but seemingly deduced from the fact that we hadn’t let go of her that her pleas were falling on deaf ears.
She began to struggle again, and rekindled her efforts to pull her legs free. It just wasn’t happening – we had her far too well trapped, and we held her legs and ankles down firmly just to cement this position. She stopped struggling as much, and resorted to hitting Josh in the arm, leading to a playful tussle between them. I then had a wicked idea.
I held the top of her left foot resolutely with my left hand, then took my keys from my pocket, held three of them between my fingers in a knuckleduster style, and decisively raked them up her defenceless sole. She bolted in her seat, pronged by the newfound perception of the sharp implements against her tender flesh.
I could see that Josh was having to hold her legs with some force again, due to her renewed desire to escape the novel but fiendish approach I had adopted towards the torment of her naked foot. I kept up the scraping, up and back down the sole, before manipulating the keys with my fingers so that they moved randomly, tickling totally erratically as neither Kim nor I knew which direction each key would alternately take.
The next time you pick up a set of keys, hold them in a fist with three keys poking between your fingers, flex your fingers and you’ll see what I mean about the way they randomly shift around. You have no control over it, and it was this spontaneity I desired: if I didn’t know which way the keys were going to move next, Kim sure as hell didn’t either. And that psychological trickery was giving me the edge in driving Kim to a newfound peak of ticklish despair.
After just a few seconds of this, she was in hysterics again. Her struggles and tussles with Josh were over and she threw herself back flat onto the leather seat, bellowing at the ceiling. I kept this up for the whole of the song, and was still going when it died down, drawing howls from Kim which revived the attention of the rest of the bar.
As the next song struck up, I furthered explored the uses of my new tool. I took a single, long door key and, grasping Kim’s foot by the heel, began to saw in between her delicate toes, the ridges of the cold steel vibrating mercilessly against the silky flesh in between them with every pass. Josh took a particular interest in my doing this, and I think at this point realised that he had paired himself with a tickler of supreme talents. He gave me a nod of recognition. I deserved it.
There is a fine balance to key tickling – given that you are using something hard, cold and sometimes sharp, one wrong move and you end up hurting the ticklee in an especially tender body part. It takes a skilled hand to apply the key with a lightness of touch that is subtle enough to tickle, but not so soft that your ‘Lee doesn’t feel its effects.
Thankfully for us, the tickling bullies, my experience in the practice was sound and I delighted in using the key to take Kim to a different place altogether. This had been my plan all along, as like any good ‘Ler, I take great care to scaffold any tickling I endeavour in. When she thought I’d pushed her to the edge, I’d find some way of pushing her even further and as I systematically harassed each of her toes, she found a new upper limit to her sensory agony.
She was really becoming quite spent now and her struggles had died down, her efforts focussed on burst after burst of what I knew was silent laughter – even though I’d not heard most of her laughter above the music anyway. I could tell by the way she was convulsing that that’s what she was doing, and as the music changed again this was confirmed through absence of the noisy guffawing she had previously treated the rest of the bar to. I looked at Josh. He read my mind, and shouted to me as the music kicked in again.
“Keep it up!” He simpered, looking at her triumphantly.
“She can’t even laugh now – her voice has gone!” Again, operating in disguise as being reluctant to continue, when in fact I was anything but.
“Don’t stop! Just think about all the time’s she’s given us shit for not cleaning properly!”
“Yeah, I know, but…”
“Hey, guys!!” I heard the shout in my ear, above the music.
A Pair of Interruptions
We both turned our heads. Our colleagues Olivia (a diminutive, dark-haired Italian student, who worked in the restaurant part-time whilst studying) and Prisha (South Asian, slim, young and pretty, a full-timer who had worked there almost as long as Kim; a confidante of hers) had come in and approached the table, standing slightly over my shoulder. Their entrance took both Josh and I slightly by surprise. I absent-mindedly kept up the sawing of the key in between Kim’s toes. Because she was lay down on the seat and so wrapped up in her feet being utterly bedevilled, she hadn’t noticed the girls yet, and they couldn’t see her behind Josh.
“Hi!” I said to Olivia.
“Hi. How long you been here?”
“A while. We were early. No one else is here yet.”
“Where’s Kim? I thought she was coming in with you…?”
“She’s here…”
I nodded down at the bare feet sticking out from between my legs, the key doing damage to the toes that the girls couldn’t yet comprehend. I flicked the three keys in between my fingers again, and started raking them up Kim’s right instep. The foot began to twitch and shudder as much as my firm grip would allow. The girls looked down in unison at what I was doing, and I thought I saw a nervous gulp from Olivia – was that ticklish empathy I saw in her eyes as she pieced together where Kim was, and what was happening to her?
Both Olivia and Prisha leant around and had a look at Kim. Pathetic, defeated, sprawled on the seat with her hands pressed over her eyes. They went to walk around the other side of the table, with a view I think to going and sitting next to Kim, but I held a hand up. “Be careful, there’s glass on the floor. Someone dropped their drink under the table.” I shouted. The girls came back to stand next to me, curiosity palpable on both of their faces.
Prisha shouted down to Kim “Oi, Kim! You alright there? You look comfortable!” She and Olivia laughed in unison.
Kim responded by weakly raising her hand, and holding up her middle finger. Then she clapped her hand on her forehead, still besieged by the assault of my keys on her soles.
“Rude!” Prisha then whispered something to Olivia, cupping her hand over her ear so that she could hear her. Olivia’s smirk was priceless, and she nodded. Prisha then leaned in to speak to me, tapping me on the arm.
“Can we have a go?”
“Sure.” I withdrew the keys, slipping them back into my pocket “But she’s been tickled half to death already, you might not get much from her. I think she’s all laughed out.”
“We’ll see…”
I uncrossed Kim’s ankles, and used a hand to hold each one individually, underneath my thigh. This held her even more strongly and gave the girls access to a foot each, as they moved into position at the end of the seat. Kim must have felt her ankles being uncrossed and held in a new position, and must have cottoned at what was going to happen, as she somehow summoned the strength to sit back up and shout down at the girls, waving her arms frantically at them to stop before they had started, even clasping her hands together in a pleading gesture, as she knew the girls couldn’t hear her protests.
This just egged them on, and I was now treated to a splendid visual feast as I saw both Olivia and Prisha’s shiny nails (Olivia’s a cute purple, Prisha’s a similar shade of red to Kim’s) begin to scrabble all over the abused soles, smiles wide on their faces as they discovered the unique satisfaction of legally causing a domineering workplace superior utter anguish and something very close to psychological pain.
I found myself in the leisurely position that Josh had been in when I was the tickler, and dreamily drank in the sight, doing what he had been doing and watching the girls’ chosen techniques at the ‘foot end’, then gauging the reactions they elicited at the ‘head end’. Prisha had elected to hold the top of the foot, and repeatedly ran her wiggling fingers devilishly up and down Kim’s arch, whereas Olivia had gripped the heel and was vertically fingering the underside of the ball.
It must have been significant that the identity of the tickler(s) had changed, because Kim was imbued with a new lease of life. She had gone from the silent laughter I had thrown her into, to flapping and flailing around next to Josh on the seat again. I could focus slightly more on what she was saying to Josh and I thought I heard her screech things like “Get them off me!!!”, “This is all your fault!!!” and “I’m going to fucking kill you!!!” before dissolving into full-throated spasms of mirth once again.
Because the girls were holding the feet themselves, I could even afford to free a hand and take another blissful draw of my drink. It occurred to me that I could have happily sat all night like this, drinking beer with tickle torture occurring before my eyes for my near-exclusive viewing pleasure. I don’t think I could have been any happier - or indeed more aroused - than I was then.
This was compounded by the fact that the girls knew what the were doing. Again, I wasn’t close enough to either of them to know anything about their ‘Tickling history’, but I knew both girls came from large families and both had younger sisters. Increasing the chances that they both knew how to tickle a restrained foot to the fullest degree when presented with the opportunity. It certainly seemed so.
Olivia particularly was seemingly possessed with a sense of purpose as she probed different sections of the foot under her jurisdiction, and I knew she was searching for the epicentre of Kim’s ticklishness. “She really hates it between her toes. Try there.” I suggested. I was rewarded with a beautiful Italian beam, and she set to work prodding her petite fingers into the crevasses.
I looked down at Kim and saw that indeed, this had the worst effect on her of any method yet employed to tickle her feet. Seeing the reaction it had caused, Prisha switched her current mode of operation to doing the same, and Kim was again being mercilessly vexed by the attentive, vigorous tickling of the uppermost part of her troubled appendages.
Another song change, bringing with it the customary brief lull in noise, and the bar’s patrons again had their attention drawn to our table as Kim was driven into cacophony by the girl’s slim fingers in amongst her toes. One woman in particular, who had been fleetingly looking over at us the whole time this had been happening, was now looking extremely sorry for Kim, with some of the humour behind her eyes that one normally observes in somebody witnessing tickling, tinged with a touch of genuine concern. We had been tickling her for a long time by this point, and it had just gotten worse: the girls had discovered they had no need to hold Kim’s feet, as I was holding them steady enough on my own, and so had taken ten fingers apiece to each of the soles.
As much as I had devastated Kim’s feet, it probably hadn’t been as bad as what the girls were now raining down on her poor soles, for the simple fact that I only have ten fingers, not twenty. As bad as the key had been, in terms of sensory overdrive it probably didn’t compare either, and the girl’s enthusiasm was only increasing as they both looked down and saw that they’d pretty quickly caused Kim to regress back into what I knew was silent laughter. She was back to lying on her back, her mouth agape, clutching her hands over her eyes in a bid to block out reality. Then, we were shaken from our mobbish torture session.
“That’s enough now, guys.”
We all turned to see Stu – the main boss – nursing a pint of cold lager.
“I’ve been watching you from the bar queue. I had to stop you, but I needed a pint first.” He laughed to himself. “I think she’s had enough now – look at the state of her!”
We all looked down to see Kim’s feeble, totally dominated shell. The girls withdrew their fingers, and Josh and I released Kim’s legs. There’s something about the head boss telling you to do something that makes you obey them, even if you’re outside of work. It was over. Kim was finally reprieved, and pulled her legs up over Josh, sat up and cradled her legs traumatically, her toes scrunched protectively into the leather. Once she had composed herself, she fully punched Josh in the arm as hard as she physically could. I heard him say “FUCK!”, before I got up, and said that I would go and get someone to clean up the broken glass under the table.
After I’d found someone, I queued up at the bar, and ordered a full round of shots, ordering an extra one by way of apology to my no-nonsense, but astronomically ticklish superior, who upon receipt was only too happy to down them both.
January 2022 Update: I’m stuck living apart from my fiancé again (Long, pandemic related story), so have dusted the writing off and thought I might as well share it where it may be read and appreciated. I hope you enjoy it, and would appreciate any feedback – a one word review is more helpful than no review at all!
For anyone who’s read other entries in this series: I’ve found that as my writing develops and my stories get more fleshed out, I’m finding it prudent to split them into themed segments, and have done so here once again. Unlike the previous entry, however, this is not to discriminate between “True” and “Almost True” parts of the tale. This story is 100% “Almost True”. I hope you enjoy it all the same; I’m really enjoying getting back into the swing of things and writing these now.
Kim: The No-Nonsense Superior
As anyone who has read the earlier entries in this series can now attest, I’ve had a fair share of different jobs. Some have been good; some have been bad. But the worst, by far, was working for a well-known fast-food chain, in the relentlessly busy food court of an enormous shopping centre (‘Mall’). I’ll not kill the mood before I’ve even attempted to fire it up by going into detail about the pervasive smell, the heat, the unhygienic colleagues, the rude customers or the day it all got too much for me and I literally collapsed through sheer physical and mental exertion (On the back of a seventy-hour week in the damned place! In the emergency department at the hospital, after hearing about my working conditions, the doctor who looked me over gave his official medical opinion: “Fuck me, if I worked that many hours in a place like that, I’d collapse too!”). Let’s just say: “It sucked”. A reason to be thankful for doing it, however, was the incident I’m about to relay, which just about made all that backbreaking graft in the service of lining some distant shareholder’s pockets, just about worth it. Just.
In shitty jobs, often the only thing that gets you through the day is the camaraderie you share with your colleagues, if you’re lucky enough to get on with them. This was the case for me – for the most part – in this fast-food job, and in other low-wage jobs I’ve had before (This one was my last, thankfully). After starting this one, I quickly ascertained that I got on with most people, but I quickly struck up a friendship with a lad called Josh.
We gelled due to our mutual hatred for the job, our shared interests, the fact we discovered we lived near each other, and the reciprocal love we had for our post-work ritual of heading straight to one of the bars in the food court after we’d finished our shift and seeing how much cold beer we could cram inside us before we had to run for the last bus home. He became a good buddy and we began hanging out outside of work too, as we lived in the next town over from the shopping centre. As did another colleague: Kim.
Kim was the assistant manager of the ‘Restaurant’ (such as it was). She was your typical fast-food management type: working class background, level-headed, an above average capacity for hard physical work, and didn’t take any shit from anybody – superiors, subordinates or shitty, scornful diners. She wasn’t stupid, but wasn’t ambitious enough to want anything better for herself than being in a position of some responsibility in an environment she was comfortable and confident in. In her early forties, this was just going to be her professional life from now on, and she was content with that.
She showed the effects of the physical intensity of the job, too: she had the physique of a marathon runner, but had never set foot in a gym in her life; the job was all the exercise she needed, plus she alone chose not to take the company up on its dubiously beneficial offer of one free calorie-saturated meal per day. Equally, the effect of working in a job in which you didn’t see the light of day for twelve hours curiously hadn’t impacted on the natural bronze suntan she sported year-round. Blandly pretty, she had tight facial features, striking dark eyes, and was never seen without her dark brown hair pulled snugly into a bun, which she’d pull out of the back of her mandated baseball cap on entering the restaurant floor.
She had been single for a long time when I started, and this didn’t change for any of my sentence in the grease-soaked gulag, but I always felt this was due to a lack of interest on her part, as opposed to a lack of prospective interest in her due to any flaw in her looks. She could have had a man if she’d wanted one but just didn't seem bothered about it. I did wonder what her feet might look like as I had an inkling they’d be decent, but there was little chance of my curiosity being sated in that regard – we were all contractually bound to wear thick-soled leather boots whilst on the floor, to withstand boiling oil splashing onto our feet and burning us. Strangely we weren’t given any litigious protection from the brutal melting substance elsewhere on our bodies; I’m not sure why our feet were singled out for safeguards, but whatever the rationale, resultantly it diminished the chances of ever checking out the feet of any of the cute female staff, including Kim. Happily in her case, I would eventually be given the opportunity to right this atrocious wrong, and more besides…
Every job I’ve had in the service industry has usually featured these salt-of-the-earth type of managers, and I’ve usually had functional, if not warm working relations with them. Kim was no exception to this, although Josh and I would sometimes run afoul of her if we allowed the apathy we had for our roles to inspire us to approach our numerous cleaning duties with a lack of sufficient inspiration and/or perspiration. She was not averse to dishing out a tongue lashing if she felt we had warranted it, and Josh got it particularly badly as they knew each other outside of work, their family’s being close, which in Kim’s mind justified her coming down extra hard on him, probably to show there was no nepotism going on.
I can’t remember the exact detail of it, but he and her nephew were lifelong best friends, or something, and whilst this would lead to him getting an extra hard time from her at times, they had an otherwise great rapport and this led to certain advantages, like her giving us both a lift home after work to save us taking the bus (Meaning more post-shift time in the bar, where she’d join us and loosen up a bit, even whilst sticking to soft drinks as the designated driver), or letting us blast our own music on the shop floor after the shutters had come down at the end of the day, to soundtrack the ‘end of shift deep-clean’.
After a couple of months getting to know her, I came to realise that Kim was one of those “I’m all business, with a tough exterior, but I’m actually pretty cool once you get to know me” manager archetypes. If they had a recipe card, it would read “Decent human being – add a dash of familiarity to de-frost.”
Further familiarity was set to be obtained, not just with Kim, but with the whole workforce, after a staff night out was arranged. I had been working there for about six months at this point, and had started not long after Stu, the general manager, who wanted to keep morale up and get to know his team a bit better. A pretty bog-standard night out was arranged in the centre of the large city the shopping centre was in, and we all agreed to meet in a bar that everyone could get to.
Josh suggested to Kim and I that because we all lived in the same area, we should meet up in the centre of our town, and take the train into the city together, with maybe a cheeky drink on the train on the cards. We both agreed. I was offhandedly looking forward to it, but had I any idea what was going to happen, I’d have been counting down the seconds until it came.
Early Doors
On the day in question Josh and I met at the pub before we were due to meet Kim. We saw no harm in getting a head start, and wanted to get a few reasonably priced pints down us before heading to the more exclusive climes of city centre bars, with their extortionate prices. We had a couple of hours shooting some pool inside, smoking a couple of cigars outside, and enjoying decent value beer whilst we still could.
Around an hour before we were due to meet Kim, Josh got a text from her saying that she was ready to meet earlier, if we were, and so already slightly buzzed we walked over to meet her at the station. She was on the platform as we got there, and greeted us both with a hug. I could smell wine on her, and she admitted with a giggle that she’d already had a bottle to herself whilst she had been getting ready.
When you work a job that requires you to package yourself degradingly into a uniform each day, seeing your colleagues in plainclothes always takes you aback slightly. This was no exception. I took in Kim’s outfit, from head to toe, and saw that she had made an effort. Her hair was down for once and she was wearing a black and white long-sleeved blouse, with a black shawl draped over her shoulders, a black skirt and I realised – in a sight for deprived eyes – she had bare, freshly-shaved tanned legs and bare feet inside a cute pair of open-toed black flats.
As things stood, I couldn’t get a real quality look at her feet, but my inner ‘Zing!’ had gone off just the same, merely from the fact that they were finally freed from being hidden away in those stupid clodhopper boots she usually wore, and the night was still young. I noted that the nails on her hands and feet were a matching shade of deep, sexy red.
We boarded the train, sat down and cracked into some beers that Josh and I had picked up in the shop outside the station. We had a few tipsy laughs, and I discovered that Josh and Kim had an even closer relationship than I’d originally thought; he was soon ribbing her mercilessly about this and that, in the way one would with a favoured relative, and would occasionally get a playful slap to his arm or a barbed jibe. I also noticed that as Kim sat with her leg crossed, if she was especially engaged or amused with something in the conversation, her toes would flick, causing her flat to pop off her heel and swiftly back on again as she scrunched her toes back. It made a subtle flapping noise as she did it, the inside of the shoe clapping against her bare heel.
This gave me several chances to engineer a glance at her arch – and wow! The glances I could get were only sporadic, and I couldn’t risk openly staring with two people in such close quarters, but I could make out that there was an aesthetically pleasing arch in the shoe, as svelte as it was high. Combined with her naturally bronzed skin, it seemed to be a lovely foot. I wasn’t to know at that stage, but I would soon confirm this more tangibly.
The train pulled into the city centre, and we alighted, already feeling slightly drunk. We were early, but surmised that we might as well head to the bar we were meeting the others at. It was noisy and dark in there, with tinted windows; almost a cross between a club and a bar. The plan was to find a table big enough for the whole group and reserve it, but on entering we found the place busy and all the large tables taken. We checked out the groups sat at the large tables, and saw a rowdy set of students whose drinks appeared to be on the wane. They were sat in a semi-circle booth next to the wall, with a large round table in the middle of it. We made an educated guess that they would be finishing up soon and leaving, and took a small table nearby, ready to pounce if the table became free.
Josh joined the long queue at the bar, and I sat and chatted with Kim. I could see more shoe flapping under the table as I cracked jokes, and I had to take care just to keep it in my peripheral vision, and not just openly stare directly down under the table at her playful feet. But it was starting to really rev me up and I became more and more aware, possibly accentuated by the beer I’d already had, that Kim was actually pretty damn cute, and maybe was even putting a vibe my way.
I was – and still am – in a happy relationship, but as we talked, I mused inwardly over the fact that I had to accept that in my life, the majority of women have only pointed said vibe in my direction after I’ve settled down. And here it was, happening again. Just my luck. But I digress.
I was snapped out of my introspection by two simultaneous events: Josh bringing us the round he had bought, and the sound of glass smashing loudly behind me. The students we had been keeping tabs on had clearly been day drinking, and the associated clumsiness inherent with that carefree practice had caused one of them to knock their drink off the table, sending newly shattered glass and beer all over the floor.
This was fortuitous for our own intentions, as the dolt who had knocked his drink over had coincidentally been the only one who hadn’t finished his drink yet. Our original assumption was then confirmed as the group hurriedly got up to leave, evidently ready to move on and perhaps anxious to escape the scene of the crime of the smashed glass. Kim nudged me under the table with her toes. “Quick! Let’s get the table!”.
She jumped up and raced over to the table as the last student sheepishly made tracks. Josh and I followed behind and stood next to the table, waiting for Kim to sit down. Josh was still holding our drinks and he placed them down on the table ceremoniously, officially claiming it as our territory. Next came a racy moment (for me), as Kim looked under the table at the smashed glass and spilled drink, then pointedly down at her flimsy-looking flats, which looked anything but broken glass proof. She lifted an ankle, posing cutely for a second, as if inspecting the durability of her footwear. She looked at us teasingly and addressed us loudly so we could hear her over the thumping music.
“If we were at work now, I’d get you two to clean this up! I’d probably still cut my feet though, with the shitty job you two would make of it!” It hadn’t taken long for her to put her ‘boss hat’ on.
Josh shot back: “Well, we’re not at work, so I can tell you to fuck off!”
I consolidated: “Yeah, we do enough cleaning for you at work, we’re not doing it outside of work too! Let’s sit down, and grab one of the bar staff when they walk past. They can clean it up.”
Kim nodded. Then, to avoid stepping underneath the table and risk getting cut or wet, she backed into the end of the leather seat, placed the heels of her hands against the leather, and raised herself onto it backwards. Then she pushed herself back around the semi-circle in a boat-rowing motion, lifting her legs into the air as Josh quickly jumped on the seat next to her, and I followed, with Kim’s legs stretched over Josh’s knees, and her feet blessedly plopped right into my lap.
This had a propitious effect, as far as I was concerned - because Kim couldn’t lower her feet to the floor, making them effectively stuck in my lap. I think her ultimate plan was to keep shuffling backwards, and sit cross-legged on the seat, so she wasn’t stretched out over us. She was still pushing backwards along the leather when Josh and I caught each other’s eye. I’m not sure what happened, but we both had the same thought at the exact same time, and communicated it wordlessly with a devious look, lifting our eyebrows in unison and sharing a grin.
Kim was watching both of us, and seemed to telegraph our intentions, as she began rapidly withdrawing her feet from our orbit, but Josh was too quick for her. He quickly gripped hold of both of her ankles, pushing her feet back towards my accepting hands, and then held her knees onto his legs. I compounded this by holding her ankles, one in each hand. We were clearly far too strong for her, as even though it was arm strength pitted against leg strength, it was two-on-one.
There was a particularly loud song playing and so I couldn’t hear the protestations that Kim began yelling at Josh, or the reply he shouted down to her. But I got the gist of it as I saw him laugh mockingly at her, and her face fall, an increasingly panicky look on her face. Then he turned to me, and simply nodded, a knowing smirk on his face. We still hadn’t said anything to each other yet, but we didn’t need to. I knew what he wanted me to do and was happy to oblige. I took her left ankle and crossed it over the right, holding them both in place with my left hand. I noted with glee that the flats were flapping like never before as she struggled to fight off what was happening; her toes were struggling as her feet tried to flap their way out of their predicament. This was impossible, of course, unless she could detach them, and this thought amused me as I systematically deprived her feet of the protection of the flats with my right hand.
I slipped them off one by one, and keeping up the pretence that I wasn’t becoming increasingly aroused by this, and that like Josh, this was all hijinks to me, I placed my nose to the opening of the shoes and theatrically drew my head backwards, as if to say, “they stink!”. This got a laugh from both Josh and Kim, who burrowed her brow at me in mock-offense. In reality I was pleasantly surprised to discover that the only fragrance I could detect in them was a perfumed soap aroma, and took this to mean that Kim had moisturised her feet before coming out. I placed the flats neatly on the table in front of me, side by side. Kim looked at her shoes as they were put on the table, then her gaze refocused on me. She looked into my eyes pleadingly, shook her head and mouthed “Don’t!!!”
I did.
Killing Time
Starting with her heel, I strummed my fingers slowly and deliberately up the plane of Kim’s right foot, stopping when I hit the centre of the arch and going for it, speedily peppering the surprisingly soft flesh with multiple attacks. The foot trembled violently, but couldn’t escape. I kept this up for a minute or so, then spiralled around the ball, finding my way up to her toes and getting into them. I went to repeat the action on her left foot, but a problem then emerged. When she felt the sensations on her left foot it instinctively kicked up, temporarily freed due to having less force holding it down. This wouldn’t do.
I looked at Josh, who looked back at me expectantly. Shifting my weight, I moved to my left slightly, and crossed my right leg over her ankles for extra restraint. For rigidity, I held my own foot against the cylindrical support of the table in front of us, which was nailed to the floor. It worked: her criss-crossed feet now stuck out from between my legs, held fast by the pressure between my thighs, which had become a natural vice. This freed up my left hand, and I set it to work, holding it next to the right foot and my right hand to her left, and exploiting the tickling potential of all ten of my digits at once.
I looked down the seat to gauge the response of this, and was instantly satisfied to find that Kim was losing it: she had grabbed the fabric of the seat either side of her, and her head was back, shouting her laughter into the hubbub of the bar. I remember thinking that it sounded similar to Halle Berry’s hooting in that immortal mainstream clip we all know and love. The music that was playing died in between songs, and the whole bar was temporarily deafened by Kim’s cackle, crescendoing up to the ceiling. Heads turned from all over the bar, and looks of general amusement came our way, particularly from other men. I noted a couple of nervous looking women, appearing sympathetic to Kim’s torment, but also mildly relieved, perhaps that they weren’t in her unenviable position.
Despite reeling off peals of laughter, Kim managed to communicate to Josh and I with her eyes that she was both embarrassed at having the attention of the whole bar brought to her, and annoyed with us for causing it. She couldn’t say this out loud, of course, because she was frantically ticklish, and the fact I had doubled the amount of fingers being used to probe her soles and toes was limiting her verbal output to increasingly maddened howls of primal laughter. I looked to Josh quizzically, as if to say: “Should I stop now?”. This was met with a vigorous shake of the head (“Fuck, no!”), a nod towards her feet (“Carry on!”) and as he turned to face Kim, a smug, mocking, derisive laugh as the music started up again and her tormented yells were again lost to the overwhelming noise (“Got ya!”).
This gave me free reign to appreciate how beautiful Kim’s feet were as I smothered them with tickling sensations. They were slender, with rounded, high arches and the edible combination of bronzed skin covering the top of them and naturally paler, light brown soles, augmented by the softness of the skin from the fresh pedicure that I deduced – after running my fingertips all over them for several minutes – she had treated herself to that afternoon.
Her toes were long, but not overly so, and the deep red polish she had applied looked stunning against the backdrop of her tanned skin. Having normally been denied the chance to clap eyes even momentarily on them due to the nature of our work environment, to not only be close enough to inspect and admire them, but to actually get to tickle them, was an astonishing surprise.
What seemed surprising to Kim was what an accomplished tickler I was. With us not being close, I had no idea of her ‘Tickling history’, but I would have been willing to bet that she hadn’t been forced to laugh quite as much from a foot tickling before, as she was being made to right now by my seasoned method. As the minutes went by, we entered into something of a repetitive sequence.
I’d deviate from the area or the technique I was pursuing (Say, migrating from scratching her heels, to wiggling in her insteps, or fingering her toe pads), she’d change from hooting with her eyes shut to looking at me desperately, start shouting things down at me and Josh, then fall backwards again, completely convulsed. I could never make out what she was saying due to the noise and distance, but it seemed to be along the lines of “Not there!!!”, “Stop it!!!” and “Not my toes!!!”.
Josh could hear her, and would respond to each remonstration with more verbal taunting and jeer-like s******s and scoffs. His enthused reaction to seeing someone he knew well get tickled, whilst ultimately a common one, was startlingly ardent, as far as I was concerned. I didn’t realise that he had it in him. I’d never talked about tickling with him (not that it’s a conversation topic regularly visited between drinking buddies) – our conversation was usually limited to video games, comic books or nerdy bitching about the differences in detail between that week’s Game of Thrones and whichever A Song of Ice and Fire book it was loosely adapted from/betraying (It still hurts!). So I didn’t know a tickle-lover resided within. But he was clearly enthralled, perhaps as one would be seeing a sibling tickled, and as Kim weakened from the physical ordeal of being tickled so constantly, could even afford to free a hand (Her legs not fighting as strongly) and sip his beer, looking like a spectator at a sports event.
As the song changed and the music again died down, I felt Kim should have a break, and not be subjected to the embarrassment of screeching at the whole population of the bar again. I removed my fingers from her feet, and inspired by Josh, took a long sip of my beer. Thirsty work. I looked down at Kim and saw that she was just lay back on the seat, eyes closed, her taut stomach thumping up and down as she caught her breath. After a few seconds she opened her eyes, leant up on her elbows and said something to Josh, and he passed her beer down to her, taking care, I noticed, to keep the pressure on her legs with his other hand – it seemed he didn’t want her freed just yet.
Once she had taken several glugs of her beer, she placed it back on the table as the music started back up. She then started remonstrating with Josh and pointing at her legs and feet, presumably asking to be released. Looking around the bar I could see we still had a sporadic audience: the people whose attention had been drawn from Kim’s initial screams were still taking an interest. I was aware of Kim’s embarrassment and because I didn’t know her that well, didn’t know when we would start crossing the line from annoyance into genuine anger. Also, I didn’t want to appear too into the tickling, so I decided to bluff Josh about my true desire to continue, and masquerade as the voice of reason.
“I think she’s had enough, man. Should I stop now?”
He shouted: “Nah, we’ve got time to kill. There’s nothing else to do. Carry on.”
“I don’t want her to get pissed off and take it out on us at work.”
“She won’t, or we’ll do it to her there too! Don’t worry about it, just get her again.”
No elaboration, or even particular justification for wanting to continue with the torture. He just told me to keep going. And that was fine by me. Kim couldn’t hear our conversation due to the fact the next song had started, but seemingly deduced from the fact that we hadn’t let go of her that her pleas were falling on deaf ears.
She began to struggle again, and rekindled her efforts to pull her legs free. It just wasn’t happening – we had her far too well trapped, and we held her legs and ankles down firmly just to cement this position. She stopped struggling as much, and resorted to hitting Josh in the arm, leading to a playful tussle between them. I then had a wicked idea.
I held the top of her left foot resolutely with my left hand, then took my keys from my pocket, held three of them between my fingers in a knuckleduster style, and decisively raked them up her defenceless sole. She bolted in her seat, pronged by the newfound perception of the sharp implements against her tender flesh.
I could see that Josh was having to hold her legs with some force again, due to her renewed desire to escape the novel but fiendish approach I had adopted towards the torment of her naked foot. I kept up the scraping, up and back down the sole, before manipulating the keys with my fingers so that they moved randomly, tickling totally erratically as neither Kim nor I knew which direction each key would alternately take.
The next time you pick up a set of keys, hold them in a fist with three keys poking between your fingers, flex your fingers and you’ll see what I mean about the way they randomly shift around. You have no control over it, and it was this spontaneity I desired: if I didn’t know which way the keys were going to move next, Kim sure as hell didn’t either. And that psychological trickery was giving me the edge in driving Kim to a newfound peak of ticklish despair.
After just a few seconds of this, she was in hysterics again. Her struggles and tussles with Josh were over and she threw herself back flat onto the leather seat, bellowing at the ceiling. I kept this up for the whole of the song, and was still going when it died down, drawing howls from Kim which revived the attention of the rest of the bar.
As the next song struck up, I furthered explored the uses of my new tool. I took a single, long door key and, grasping Kim’s foot by the heel, began to saw in between her delicate toes, the ridges of the cold steel vibrating mercilessly against the silky flesh in between them with every pass. Josh took a particular interest in my doing this, and I think at this point realised that he had paired himself with a tickler of supreme talents. He gave me a nod of recognition. I deserved it.
There is a fine balance to key tickling – given that you are using something hard, cold and sometimes sharp, one wrong move and you end up hurting the ticklee in an especially tender body part. It takes a skilled hand to apply the key with a lightness of touch that is subtle enough to tickle, but not so soft that your ‘Lee doesn’t feel its effects.
Thankfully for us, the tickling bullies, my experience in the practice was sound and I delighted in using the key to take Kim to a different place altogether. This had been my plan all along, as like any good ‘Ler, I take great care to scaffold any tickling I endeavour in. When she thought I’d pushed her to the edge, I’d find some way of pushing her even further and as I systematically harassed each of her toes, she found a new upper limit to her sensory agony.
She was really becoming quite spent now and her struggles had died down, her efforts focussed on burst after burst of what I knew was silent laughter – even though I’d not heard most of her laughter above the music anyway. I could tell by the way she was convulsing that that’s what she was doing, and as the music changed again this was confirmed through absence of the noisy guffawing she had previously treated the rest of the bar to. I looked at Josh. He read my mind, and shouted to me as the music kicked in again.
“Keep it up!” He simpered, looking at her triumphantly.
“She can’t even laugh now – her voice has gone!” Again, operating in disguise as being reluctant to continue, when in fact I was anything but.
“Don’t stop! Just think about all the time’s she’s given us shit for not cleaning properly!”
“Yeah, I know, but…”
“Hey, guys!!” I heard the shout in my ear, above the music.
A Pair of Interruptions
We both turned our heads. Our colleagues Olivia (a diminutive, dark-haired Italian student, who worked in the restaurant part-time whilst studying) and Prisha (South Asian, slim, young and pretty, a full-timer who had worked there almost as long as Kim; a confidante of hers) had come in and approached the table, standing slightly over my shoulder. Their entrance took both Josh and I slightly by surprise. I absent-mindedly kept up the sawing of the key in between Kim’s toes. Because she was lay down on the seat and so wrapped up in her feet being utterly bedevilled, she hadn’t noticed the girls yet, and they couldn’t see her behind Josh.
“Hi!” I said to Olivia.
“Hi. How long you been here?”
“A while. We were early. No one else is here yet.”
“Where’s Kim? I thought she was coming in with you…?”
“She’s here…”
I nodded down at the bare feet sticking out from between my legs, the key doing damage to the toes that the girls couldn’t yet comprehend. I flicked the three keys in between my fingers again, and started raking them up Kim’s right instep. The foot began to twitch and shudder as much as my firm grip would allow. The girls looked down in unison at what I was doing, and I thought I saw a nervous gulp from Olivia – was that ticklish empathy I saw in her eyes as she pieced together where Kim was, and what was happening to her?
Both Olivia and Prisha leant around and had a look at Kim. Pathetic, defeated, sprawled on the seat with her hands pressed over her eyes. They went to walk around the other side of the table, with a view I think to going and sitting next to Kim, but I held a hand up. “Be careful, there’s glass on the floor. Someone dropped their drink under the table.” I shouted. The girls came back to stand next to me, curiosity palpable on both of their faces.
Prisha shouted down to Kim “Oi, Kim! You alright there? You look comfortable!” She and Olivia laughed in unison.
Kim responded by weakly raising her hand, and holding up her middle finger. Then she clapped her hand on her forehead, still besieged by the assault of my keys on her soles.
“Rude!” Prisha then whispered something to Olivia, cupping her hand over her ear so that she could hear her. Olivia’s smirk was priceless, and she nodded. Prisha then leaned in to speak to me, tapping me on the arm.
“Can we have a go?”
“Sure.” I withdrew the keys, slipping them back into my pocket “But she’s been tickled half to death already, you might not get much from her. I think she’s all laughed out.”
“We’ll see…”
I uncrossed Kim’s ankles, and used a hand to hold each one individually, underneath my thigh. This held her even more strongly and gave the girls access to a foot each, as they moved into position at the end of the seat. Kim must have felt her ankles being uncrossed and held in a new position, and must have cottoned at what was going to happen, as she somehow summoned the strength to sit back up and shout down at the girls, waving her arms frantically at them to stop before they had started, even clasping her hands together in a pleading gesture, as she knew the girls couldn’t hear her protests.
This just egged them on, and I was now treated to a splendid visual feast as I saw both Olivia and Prisha’s shiny nails (Olivia’s a cute purple, Prisha’s a similar shade of red to Kim’s) begin to scrabble all over the abused soles, smiles wide on their faces as they discovered the unique satisfaction of legally causing a domineering workplace superior utter anguish and something very close to psychological pain.
I found myself in the leisurely position that Josh had been in when I was the tickler, and dreamily drank in the sight, doing what he had been doing and watching the girls’ chosen techniques at the ‘foot end’, then gauging the reactions they elicited at the ‘head end’. Prisha had elected to hold the top of the foot, and repeatedly ran her wiggling fingers devilishly up and down Kim’s arch, whereas Olivia had gripped the heel and was vertically fingering the underside of the ball.
It must have been significant that the identity of the tickler(s) had changed, because Kim was imbued with a new lease of life. She had gone from the silent laughter I had thrown her into, to flapping and flailing around next to Josh on the seat again. I could focus slightly more on what she was saying to Josh and I thought I heard her screech things like “Get them off me!!!”, “This is all your fault!!!” and “I’m going to fucking kill you!!!” before dissolving into full-throated spasms of mirth once again.
Because the girls were holding the feet themselves, I could even afford to free a hand and take another blissful draw of my drink. It occurred to me that I could have happily sat all night like this, drinking beer with tickle torture occurring before my eyes for my near-exclusive viewing pleasure. I don’t think I could have been any happier - or indeed more aroused - than I was then.
This was compounded by the fact that the girls knew what the were doing. Again, I wasn’t close enough to either of them to know anything about their ‘Tickling history’, but I knew both girls came from large families and both had younger sisters. Increasing the chances that they both knew how to tickle a restrained foot to the fullest degree when presented with the opportunity. It certainly seemed so.
Olivia particularly was seemingly possessed with a sense of purpose as she probed different sections of the foot under her jurisdiction, and I knew she was searching for the epicentre of Kim’s ticklishness. “She really hates it between her toes. Try there.” I suggested. I was rewarded with a beautiful Italian beam, and she set to work prodding her petite fingers into the crevasses.
I looked down at Kim and saw that indeed, this had the worst effect on her of any method yet employed to tickle her feet. Seeing the reaction it had caused, Prisha switched her current mode of operation to doing the same, and Kim was again being mercilessly vexed by the attentive, vigorous tickling of the uppermost part of her troubled appendages.
Another song change, bringing with it the customary brief lull in noise, and the bar’s patrons again had their attention drawn to our table as Kim was driven into cacophony by the girl’s slim fingers in amongst her toes. One woman in particular, who had been fleetingly looking over at us the whole time this had been happening, was now looking extremely sorry for Kim, with some of the humour behind her eyes that one normally observes in somebody witnessing tickling, tinged with a touch of genuine concern. We had been tickling her for a long time by this point, and it had just gotten worse: the girls had discovered they had no need to hold Kim’s feet, as I was holding them steady enough on my own, and so had taken ten fingers apiece to each of the soles.
As much as I had devastated Kim’s feet, it probably hadn’t been as bad as what the girls were now raining down on her poor soles, for the simple fact that I only have ten fingers, not twenty. As bad as the key had been, in terms of sensory overdrive it probably didn’t compare either, and the girl’s enthusiasm was only increasing as they both looked down and saw that they’d pretty quickly caused Kim to regress back into what I knew was silent laughter. She was back to lying on her back, her mouth agape, clutching her hands over her eyes in a bid to block out reality. Then, we were shaken from our mobbish torture session.
“That’s enough now, guys.”
We all turned to see Stu – the main boss – nursing a pint of cold lager.
“I’ve been watching you from the bar queue. I had to stop you, but I needed a pint first.” He laughed to himself. “I think she’s had enough now – look at the state of her!”
We all looked down to see Kim’s feeble, totally dominated shell. The girls withdrew their fingers, and Josh and I released Kim’s legs. There’s something about the head boss telling you to do something that makes you obey them, even if you’re outside of work. It was over. Kim was finally reprieved, and pulled her legs up over Josh, sat up and cradled her legs traumatically, her toes scrunched protectively into the leather. Once she had composed herself, she fully punched Josh in the arm as hard as she physically could. I heard him say “FUCK!”, before I got up, and said that I would go and get someone to clean up the broken glass under the table.
After I’d found someone, I queued up at the bar, and ordered a full round of shots, ordering an extra one by way of apology to my no-nonsense, but astronomically ticklish superior, who upon receipt was only too happy to down them both.
