So I was lying on my back and my wife was lying on top of me
(So many of these stories start like this. Seems like we spend an unnatural amount of time reclining. Starting to think it's possible we're lazy people.)
and anyway, she had her elbow on my shoulder and her jaw perched in one hand, the overhead light glinting golden off the short soft hairs on the back of her hand and the backs of her fingers. Her other hand was playing lazily and affectionately along and across what it could reach of my body -- traveling unhurriedly along my shoulder, up my neck, along my jaw across my cheek over my nose, etc. She'd started doing it while we were talking but then we stopped talking and she just kept doing it, a pleasant aimless tactile gesture of affection.
Then the pad of her fingertip took a particular path up the side of neck, one that unwittingly awakened its ticklish reflexes, and I responded accordingly: involuntary grin, muffled snort, convulsive tilting of the head. A smile spread across her gorgeous face and she did it again -- same finger, same path, same twitchy ticklishness on my part only maybe a little more pronounced this time. Her smile got toothier and more delighted as she ran that finger up and down the same spot, provoking the self-evidently sensitive nerve endings into greater responses of giddy protest.
And -- have you noticed there's a difference between an accidental tickling and a deliberate one? When someone accidentally makes you spasm and giggle with an innocent touch, and then is motivated by your amusing reaction to repeat the maneuver and even though the stimulus superficially seems like it's exactly the same -- same finger, same spot, same motion -- the sensation is more acute, more irresistible, more intolerable? Doesn't seem like they've changed anything but they've added the element of intentionality and your ticklishness obliges by getting even more twiddly and uncontrollable in response?
That's what happened here. It was still the pad of her fingertip, still angled the same way, skating along the same achingly vulnerable path with the same degree of pressure, but now it was loaded with intentionality and my body was increasingly seized with infantile squirming and burbling giggles accordingly. And then the finger started to wander -- across my throat to the other side of my neck, up and down up and down, leisurely and merciless, up behind my ear and skimming down the back of my neck and then back to the other side again, wandering on a mission to trigger every ticklish spot available, all while I writhed under her weight and tried in vain to keep my merry whimpers of compulsory giggles from bursting forth.
And because she's my wife, and she's cheerfully merciless and dangerously knowledgeable, she kicked the intensity up a notch by sending that finger down to my collarbones, a spot where she knows my ticklishness is even more unruly, and started skimming along that area, back and forth, never pausing never relenting, skittering along the top of the collarbone then shifting below, seeming to derive energy from the way I was full-on laughing now, just helplessly cackling in response to my wife's maddeningly effortless attentions.
Then her hand was no longer propping up her face and both hands were deployed, all of her fingers paddling merrily back and forth against my collarbone area, deft and dextrous like she was improvising at a keyboard, sending my nonstop laughter into a higher and more desperate register.
Finally she stopped, clamping that adorable hand against her smile as though to protect me from the embarrassment of her unbridled amusement.
Thanks for sharing your experience here. 😀
