Not sure how many months later the next chapter in this series happened, but it wasn’t too long before the end of the school year; sedentary inertia has settled in among a good chunk of the student body, including those of us who were, on this occasion, all lounging indolently around that same lounge, the very lounge that had been the setting of my undoing on each of these previous encounters. People were draped over beanbags and reclining on couches and squeezed two-or-three-to-a-chair or sprawled on the floor – lackadaisical college-aged sloth in every conceivable posture. I’d actually been meaning to peel myself off the floor and go back to my room to work on papers that I was egregiously behind in starting, but my motivation was low. I would come to regret this.
Matt and Travis were there, as usual, and they were part of a subgroup talking about how they wanted to go get beer but didn’t have the funds. They started bugging Maria to join them in their leisure drinking – because everyone knew Maria always had extra money – but she wasn’t interested. Partly because idle boorish drinking with Matt and Travis wasn’t necessarily her preferred mode of recreation, but also because she had some other excuse – dance practice later that evening, or something. People who’ve been paying attention will register that I should have taken note of where this conversation was likely headed and made my exit before it was too late. But I wasn’t paying attention; I was talking to another subgroup at the time – one that included Rachel and Lora, actually – and was barely cognizant of the beer crew’s side convo.
They’d moved on from trying to persuade Maria (and her money) to join them and were just beseeching her to lend them money, to no avail. When finally Travis spoke the fateful sentence “What if we tickle Wade to fucking death?”
A portentous pause, and then Maria sealed my fate with a single word: “Okay.”
The uttering of my name had pricked my ear and pulled my attention and I turned my head to see Matt and Travis each lumbering to a standing position.
“You better get out of here,” Rachel whispered and I clambered to my feet as well. But Matt and Travis were already positioned between me and the room’s exits. I was backing away, hands in front of me in a protective posture, stumbling as I backed into furniture and accidentally stepped on other people’s feet – “Oww, Wade, the fuck? Watch it!”
“Guys,” I said. “Don’t.”
“C’mon Wade,” Travis said, grinning like a merry imp. “We’ll make it quick.”
“Yeah let’s get this over with,” Matt said, and by the time I’d backed into the wall they were upon me, grabbing my arms, muscling my shoulders, wrestling me into the middle of the room and forcing me to the floor. Fleetingly as I dropped I caught a glimpse of Maria’s smug smile.
“Help,” I said. “C’mon, somebody help!”
“Thanks Wade,” Travis said, “but I don’t think we need any help.” Despite my struggling my shoulder was forced to the floor and I was flattened face-down on the carpet. “Think we’ve got this covered,” Travis said.
I was lying on my stomach, my arms clamped defensively to my ribs, as Travis pinned me there under his weight and started fluttering his fingers against my sides, the sides of my abdomen, those desperately ticklish soft pockets of defenseless torso, and immediately I was braying with helpless laughter, twitching and rocking helplessly from side to side and laughing my head off. And he, well, just kept doing that. Just kept tickling, his infernal fingertips frolicking unimpeded against my sides. It was just that easy. In maybe twenty or thirty seconds, Maria’s impromptu directive had been articulated and executed and now I was immobilized on the floor and Travis was torturing me, incessantly, unflinchingly, with the greatest of ease. It was literally no effort at all for him to do this and to keep doing this for as long as he felt like – or as long as Maria felt like, more to the point – as my nerve endings flew into hysterical high alert and the room filled with my wild heedless laughter. This could go on for hours, unchanging and uninterrupted, and there was nothing I could do about it. Matt wasn’t even helping out at this point and it didn’t matter – even one-on-one I was powerless to do anything to escape this ticklish crisis.
Except it seems Maria considered Matt’s uninvolvement in the project to be a violation of the terms of the deal. Even as I cackled uncontrollably I heard her protesting: “Both of you, I said both of you!”
“Oh for fuck’s sake,” Matt grumbled. Travis’s fingers briefly relented as I felt someone gripping each of my wrists and pulling. I cast a frantic look over toward the corner where I’d been peacefully sitting just minutes earlier; Rachel had her palm clasped over her mouth in morbid fascination, while Lora was just watching with what looked like open-mouthed delight. I resisted with all my might but I was no match for Matt’s gym-trained strength and he managed to tug both of my arms over my head with relative ease, at which point he pinned my wrists against the floor. Now I was in the same position as before but with my arms pinned over my head and the entirety of my sides completely defenseless. It was an unnecessary maneuver – Travis had me in helpless hysterics already, without the extra help – but it served Maria’s goal of maximum wickedness; if, before, the tickling had been a 15 on a ten-point intolerability scale, now it was gonna be more like a 29.
And indeed the next thing I felt were Travis’s fingertips – so deft, so dexterous, borderline delicate in their maddening finesse – dancing in the hollows of my exposed armpits, the ticklish person's forbidden zone, and I lost it, howling instantaneously with the kind of desperately ticklish laughter that sounds like shouting, like your body is trying to issue as loud and as definitive a protest as it can against the giddy torment. One of those AH-HA-HA AH-HA-HA kind of deals – urgent, unrestrained, and utterly mortifying in a social situation like this where casual onlookers are idly registering the observable phenomenon whereby the register of your laughter clearly communicates the relative ticklishness of your numerous weak spots. AH-HA-HA AH-HA-HA-HA! Travis’s flickering fingers were deadly, my underarms were piteously vulnerable, and the sensations showed no signs of stopping anytime soon; Maria was paying for a humiliating show, and the more readily my body provided that show the longer she was willing to keep it going. AH-HA-HA-HA-HA!
Then Travis's hands moved down – was reaching for my underarms a little too awkward a posture? Were you mildly physically uncomfortable, Travis, aw poor guy that’s a bummer? – and next Travis was tickling my defenseless ribs, scampering up and down and back and forth, my torso rocking and twisting in its desperate efforts to escape the sensations – which, of course, it could not do, not with Travis pinning me down and Matt holding my arms over my head. Every square inch of the real estate from my armpits to my waist is impossibly ticklish so this relocation was no relief, though my laughter adjusted from the braying HAs to a steady stream of girlish giggles – still frantic, but not as shouty.
Suddenly I realized that Maria was crouching next to me, one knee down, her fingers interlaced over her other one as she perched her chin on the backs of her hands. Travis’s tickling relented a little – though not entirely, so the embarrassing spectacle of my involuntary squirming and chirping giggles persisted – as she spoke to me: “Are you ever gonna mess with me again, Wade?”
This was of course profoundly unfair; I’d only ever messed with her once, and even that was Matt and Travis’s fault, but I wasn’t in a position to litigate. “No I’ll never mess with you again” I gasped through hiccuping giggles.
“Because who’s the boss around here Wade?”
“You’re the boss,” I squealed, as Travis’s fingers lingered maliciously on a particularly sensitive rib. “You’re the boss!”
“Sorry who’s the boss?”
“MARIA’S THE BOSS,” I bleated.
“And you’re a little bitch, yeah?”
“Maria,” I protested.
“Say you’re a little bitch,” Maria said.
I twitched and squirmed and burbled with involuntary giggles but I was clearly not saying what she wanted me to say.
“Travis,” she said. “Armpits.”
“NO OKAY DON’T,” I shouted. “DON’T! I’m a little bitch, I’m the little bitch—!”
But it was too late; Travis had received and acted on Maria’s instruction and his fingers were under my arms again and again I was howling, lost in a new burst of wild hectic frantic laughter.
“This is too evil,” I vaguely heard someone in the room say.
“Yeah, Maria, I think he’s had enough.”
She laid a hand on Travis’s shaggy arm and he relented. I was still pinned – and panting -- but this tickling had ceased.
“We good?” Matt said.
“I think I’m a satisfied customer," Maria said. But then, milliseconds before the dudes could release me, she said “Wait. You guys got his feet last time, right?”
There was a silence – I assume as Matt and Travis looked at each other, trying to remember how they were supposed to lie about this.
Maria made an outraged noise. “I can’t believe it! I specifically said get his feet last time!”
“We tickled the shit out of him,” Matt said.
“I’m not giving you anything,” Maria said. “In fact you guys owe me money.”
“Hang on,” Travis groaned, the long-suffering beleaguered laborer. He reached behind me and grabbed the cuff of my jeans, bending my right leg at the knee as he lifted my foot toward him and cradled my ankle firmly in the snug embrace of his brawny elbow.
I wriggled and flailed. “No! Maria! Travis! Don’t.”
I already wasn’t wearing shoes but I could feel Travis gripping at the toe of my sock, slowly but steadily tugging it off my immobilized foot.
“If I do this,” Travis said as the sock finally peeled off my bare foot and he tossed it aside, “deal’s back on?”
“I guess,” Maria said, affecting surly reluctance but I could hear the smile in her voice.
“Seriously is nobody gonna help me out here?” I cried.
“I don’t think the rest of us really care about this that much, Wade,” someone responded.
Matt had released my hands, since I was plenty helpless in this situation without his assistance, and I was banging my palms on the carpeted floor as if trying to summon sympathetic energy from someone, anyone. My whole body was electric with fluttery dread – I remembered how it felt to have Travis’s improbably nimble fingertips playing against the sole of one’s foot, the relentless frenetic dizziness of his scampery touch, and my whole system was thrown into an anticipatory panic of that onslaught being unleashed again on my captured, defenseless, deliriously sensitive foot. I didn’t want to launch again into crazed hysterics in front of this roomful of apparently unsympathetic peers, but I was so primed for a frenzy that there was no chance of even attempting restrained stoicism; I was on the verge of dissolving into giggles before he even touched my touched my touched my—
And there it was. His fingertips, again, dancing merrily up and down my immobilized foot, and the effervescent flood of laughter was upon me again, pouring out of me, filling the room, drenching the house in loud, bubbly, helpless mirth. My fists pounding the floor, my head shaking from side to side, every muscle in my body tensed for resistance even though there was nothing any of them could do, nothing I could do but laugh and laugh and laugh and laugh as his fingers traipsed up and down, up and down, up and down, my foot twitching and twitching, up and down and up and down, fingers dancing and scribbling and just laughter laughter laughter laughter--
Until it was over, finally over. My face cherry-red whether from exertion or embarrassment. Matt and Travis already gone with Maria’s money in their pockets, their purely mercenary mission completed, Maria smiling with sweet superiority from across the room, Lora shaking her head with her hand on her forehead out of – what? – pity? Sympathetic embarrassment? And I hear Rachel clear her throat and say
“Wade, here’s your sock.”