For two years, a woman I was seeing had been putting her feet in my lap during movies and asking for massages. I usually obliged. Occasionally, I added a little tickling, an extra service nobody had requested.
She would pull her feet away, tell me to stop, then put them back so the massage could continue. This happened more times than I could count. Probably more than a hundred. Plenty of opportunities for me to develop a reputation.
I was 28, she was 29, and we had been on and off for a while. For the previous four months, we had kept things casual. Neither of us wanted a serious relationship. Apparently, this still left room for a long-term revenge project.
We had also experimented with restraints before, taking turns being the person in charge. So when she said she wanted to try something new, the proposal had some precedent. I just didn’t know which part of our shared history she intended to revisit.
We had smoked some weed, and she took charge. This time, the arrangement was more elaborate than usual: my wrists secured above my head, my feet together toward one corner of the bed, and additional restraints that left very little room to move. By the time she finished, I was stretched diagonally across the mattress.
Then she settled across my waist and covered my eyes with her top. I couldn’t see her expression, but I could hear her laughing. In hindsight, the laughter was useful information arriving slightly behind schedule.
“Now let’s see how ticklish you are,” she said.
Her fingertips barely touched my underarms and the sides of my ribs before I completely lost it. After all those movie nights spent acting like the occasional tickle was a charming bonus, I was suddenly available for a comprehensive demonstration.
I can’t exactly tell people I know about this. There isn’t an easy conversational opening for explaining how two years of foot massages led to my downfall. So I’m telling it here, where at least I don’t have to make eye contact.
