Suddenly she changed direction slightly and increased her already brisk pace. She seemed to be walking towards a guy. He spotted her, smiled, and sauntered over towards us. In a matter of seconds they were face to face. They both stopped, leaving me with very few options. I would not allow myself to continue on past, yet I could not stop in formation without looking foolish. I veered off to the right, walked slowly past, then waited by the trunk of a tree. My worst fear was that this was her boyfriend, but I clung to the hope that he was only a friend.
The guy was a jock, to the bone. At least six two, broad shoulders, hard body, and what I would judge a great looking face. He was dressed in faded, beat-up looking sweat shorts, basketball sneakers that had played a few too many games, with gym socks crumpled down around his ankles. A similarly scruffy looking T-shirt covered his chest, but it had been hacked off with dull scissors halfway down, exposing a lean, rippling stomach. He could have been one of the stars on the Rainbow basketball team.
Whatever hope I held that she was much too classy for a guy like that evaporated when he bent down and planted a long, deep kiss on her lips. When it was over she was smiling with delight, and her eyes darted all around as she spoke excitedly about something. The two of them turned and continued in the direction she had been going in, side-by-side and so close together they were practically tripping each other.
I was devastated. My balloon popped. Run over by a steam roller.
The thing that kept going through my mind was that if that is what it took to get a woman like her I did not have a ghost of a chance. He was undeniably a hunk, and if I was right, a campus sports hero. I was a Howard Stern kind of a guy, not much to look at but brilliant. A Howard Stern without the fame and glory.
I had to go the same way to get to my next class, so I followed them. He was telling her some silly story about a friend who's car wouldn't start and how they had to push it. She kept looking up at him and laughing. Anger boiled up inside me, but in spite of my ill humor I could not help feeling a twinge of lust. Hearing her laugh, my eyes locked once more onto the spectacle of her clothes dancing around her. I finally let myself enjoy the sight of those wicked looking pants swinging wildly back and forth, shimmering and jiggling, sweeping out in front when she planted her foot and collapsing into a twisting swirl of blue when she lifted her back foot.
After strolling a bit, the hunk, who was to her left, reached out his right arm and brought it around her wait, drawing her even closer to him. She responded by nuzzling her head against his biceps. It would have been his shoulder except that despite her shoes she was so much smaller than he. It was a truly affectionate pose, and my heart ached with hunger to know the same demonstration of acceptance, from any woman, regardless of how she were dressed.
A few seconds later my rational self caught up with this emotional reaction, hurling the most extreme curses silently at the world around me, damning my bad luck at having never gotten close to a woman dressed in a way that thrilled me. It had been so long since I had seen a woman wearing something that moved me so much that I had begun to tell myself that such things did not happen in the adult world, that my infatuation was as substantial as believing in Santa Claus, a relic of my youth that I had to leave behind the way I had my Superman cape and my Davy Crockett cap.
Night after lonely night I took out what poor, inadequate examples of the clothes that excited me I had managed to find and breathed life into them with imagination, imbuing them with sensuous qualities well beyond their true ability, clinging to the belief that somewhere in the world there existed clothes that could light up a woman's skin in just the way I imagined, clothing that felt the same as my playthings only far more intense, and most important capable of inciting the same burning desire for sexual release as mine did to me. Now, in the past few months, women had started appearing in shimmering nylon jersey knits of the kind worn by this woman's two friends, but by then my girlfriend was gone. So far I had been able to console myself by noting that the fabric did not slither and jiggle the way I imagined it needing to, and that the cut of the dresses was always desperately cute.
That morning, every possible consideration had been stripped away. I was confronted by a woman who's appearance left nothing to be desired, dressed in clothes that likewise fulfilled every aspect of my fantasies. The only thing unknown was just how good her clothes felt against her body, but I had an unshakable believe, a profound, intuitive knowledge that her pants especially felt as cold and sensuous as anything I had dreamed about, and while not as ticklish as my wildest fantasies capable of inducing a high level of ticklish-like pleasure.
What filed me with rage was that all of this was being wasted on a lunk-head who had no appreciation of it. He was a jock, the kind of guy who saw woman only in terms of the degree to which they desired to accompany him and as a hole. It was for me worse than seeing a Porsche driven by a sixty year old man, or a Nikon F being used by someone who had only one lens for it. Such wasted potential is easy to accept if one is not suffering from a lack of it.
There are times when serendipity challenges our prevailing view of a largely disconnected world, and at that moment I experienced one, the kind that makes you wonder if there aren't spirits all around us eavesdropping on our thoughts. No sooner had the notion taken shape in my mind that the couple walking in front of me would make no use of the sensuous, ticklish quality of what the woman was wearing than the guy's arm slipped a few inches down from her waist His right hand had been out of sight, but as his arm dropped his hand came into view. His fingers were curved, the tips pressing into her soft flesh. In a flash his hand swept over her right hip, down to the bottom of her right buttock, following the tight indentation the pants made where the thigh joined her ass, then up over the middle of her buttock. The sunlight glinting off the surface of the fabric made it clear that his fingertips were pressing firmly into her flesh and not just brushing against her.
A squeal broke from the woman's lips well before his hand had completed its circumnavigation of her buttock. A single squeal can be many things, but hers was undeniably one of laughter. There was no "ha-ha" or "hee-hee" at that point, just one long shriek that swept up in pitch as it rose in volume.
The visual spectacle combined with the audible response made my hair stand on end. It was as if I had been walking along a path and suddenly looked down to see that the path had ended and I was stepping out over a bottomless pit. I knew that he had just tickled her on the ass, and it almost made me pass out.
Those same spirits that had conspired to prove me wrong were determined that I did not miss the point. After a split second of silence her voice sounded again, this time at a much lower volume. She was laughing. It only lasted a few seconds, but it was as lush and beautiful to hear as the rain falling outside on a balmy evening.
At the same time her body was reacting by trying to pull away from him. Her load of books, her platform shoes and her off-balance position from snuggling against him were not in her favor. She stumbled and almost fell, saved only by his strong arms grabbing her hips. As soon as she caught her balance she twisted away from him, bring her face into view. Her eyes sparkled with wicked delight, and her mouth was drawn back into the classic open mouthed grin a tickler finds so appealing. From there her expression transformed into a mockish pout, and she spoke words that to this day are branded into my memory. There was not the slightest trace of anger in her voice, only a breathless eagerness tamed almost to matter-of-factness.
"Not here!" she scolded. "You know what that does to me!"
He held out his arm to her and walked coolly up to her. Still sulking a little, she let him slip his arm around her waist again, turning her body so her back was again towards me.
I had slowed almost to a halt to keep from running into them. Fortunately the path was rather narrow at that point, lined on one side by a hedge and the other by a wall fronting a courtyard, so my failure to pass by them did not seem suspicious. When they were snuggled together again I was but three feet behind them, a position that allowed me to hear everything they said.
"You really are ticklish, aren't you?" he said.
"I told you so," she replied, her voice trailing off into a giggle.
My heart was pounding like a bass drum.
"I didn't even touch your bare skin," he said.
"I know. It's these pants."
"What do you mean?"
"I can't explain it. They feel so good to wear. And when you touch me, it's, . . . it's, well, I just can't describe it."
For the dozen yards we had covered during their exchange I had been careful to step at the exact same time the jock stepped. Apparently he had no idea I was so close behind, and either she had forgotten, didn't care, or was grateful I was there least something unpleasant ensue. At this point, however, I began to feel acutely uncomfortable. The conversation was clearly intimate. If she had forgotten about me and suddenly remembered, or if he realized I was there, I stood a good chance my ending up like a toy with some assembly required. I decided it was prudent to fall back out of earshot and content myself with looking at her from afar.
I had doubled the distance between us when I saw his right hand once again slip down over her hip. This time was different, though. She didn't scream, and he kept his fingers gliding up and down the side seam of the pants from her waist to her thigh. Her shoulders began to tremble. She brought her head closer to his chest, as if trying to bury her face. She began to mew, brief, high pitched moans leaking out from a woman struggling to remain silent. This went on for about ten seconds, then she again pulled away but not so far.
"Stoop!" she implored. "God but that tickles!"
From the tone of her voice and the radiant glow of her face there was no doubt that she was enjoying herself immensely. It was not really different than the excited, giggly state one frequently sees young women in, particularly when they are engaged in some horseplay.
Was their playfulness so different than what takes place thousands of times a day, all over the world? A couple of students getting frisky, one tickling the other, chasing each other while becoming infected with silliness and laughter. Were the eyes through which I watched them so distorted by twisted sexual desires that what for anyone else was non-sexual playfulness was to me the height of eroticism? Was I the only man in the world who looked at her and broke out in a sweat thinking about how ticklish the clothes she was wearing must feel, who ached for the chance to run his fingers over that smooth, glistening fabric and watch her jump around and laugh until she could hardly breath?
The narrow path we had been following opened out onto a small road. The couple in front of me turned left, but my route required me to turn right if I had any hope of getting to my next class on time. Realizing that the time had come to concede my loss I turned my back on them and went on my way, as heartbroken as any man can be.