Work Text:
It had been a couple days. Just a couple days but Sam was close to losing his mind. He should just go over and talk to him. Or invite him over. Or possibly resign himself to never seeing Lyle again because he wasn’t sure if he would be able to face the man (creature?) again without shriveling up in embarrassment.
He’d spent most of that day pacing back and forth in his room trying to figure out a course of action. Hellen had taken Sophie and Joel out to get resources while he and Dan watched the fort. It made him nervous to think of the two kids out there without him but reasonably if they were going to be out there with anyone, Hellen was a good pick. He also would have liked an opportunity to get out and fight some monsters if only to distract his mind, but they’d all agreed that it wasn’t a good idea to send everyone out at once. No use letting everyone die and all that.
He sat down on his bed, pressing his face into his hands. Memories of the other night kept flashing back to him. Lyle’s hands creeping up his sides, tickling like nothing he’d ever felt before, more than he even realized things could tickle. His taunting smile. The sound of his voice, breathy and nervous and yet somehow smug all at once.
Sam had never properly been tickled before. Sure, he’d thought about it. Spent most of his life fantasizing about it. Yet, even when he’d had partners, Sam had never felt brave enough to open up about that specific interest. It was just so childish. Grown adults didn’t fall to pieces over being tickled and they certainly didn’t ask for it to be done to them.
Though your interest in tickling is anything but childish.
Sam flushed to the tips of his ears, groaning audibly. Fuck. There was no way Lyle hadn’t noticed that. Especially considering how the spider man was practically sitting in his lap by the end of things. He probably thought he was a freak. Or a pervert. Or both. Or worst of all, a pathetic loser who was getting off to being tickled on what was only their second date.
Although Lyle’s involvement in everything was the other reason he was hesitating to talk to the other. After all, Sam hadn’t asked him to start tickling him. Lyle had jumped into that, and rather intensely, all on his own. He wasn’t sure what to make out of that. Sure, he knew tickling occurred in romantic relationships (not that what they had could be qualified as that quite yet), but it didn’t happen like that… did it?
Sam sighed. Enough was enough. Standing up, he pushed open the door, blinking at the harsh lights. Dan glanced up at him.
“Hey man! Glad to see your face, you’ve been cooped up in there all morning.” He grinned, lounging back against the couch. He was eating, noticeably, a sandwich out of what was the last of their current resources. “I’ve been out here all alone with nothing but this little guy to keep me company. And his lack of opposable thumbs is reallyyyy getting in the way of our gaming sesh.”
Rat Child, curled into themselves on the couch, glanced up at Sam with a bright, enthusiastic grin. They had a controller clutched in their hands though they didn’t seem to know what to do with it. “Sam.”
“Hey,” he said, smiling faintly. He could only say names right now, but even that level of language was enough to freak Sam out a little at times. “Sorry Dan. I would but I have some errands to run.”
Dan’s face fell. “Oh. Sure, sure. That makes sense. I guess we can keep trying. I’m not sure how much he understands me, but I can tell he’s trying. Don’t worry about us!”
As Sam headed out, he made a mental note to spend some time with Dan later. As much as he drove him up the wall sometimes, a Dan with a friend seemed much better than a Dan without one.
Lyle’s door was unlocked when he arrived. Sam knocked anyway, even Lyle had, somewhat enthusiastically, assured him he could walk in whenever he wanted. It took a few seconds and some strange clattering sounds before the door jerked open suddenly. Lyle’s eyes widened in surprise when he saw him.
“S-Sam!” he said, clicking his fingers together. “You’re here. I didn’t know you were s-stopping by.”
Standing before him now, in person, Sam’s heart raced wildly inside his chest. Memories of being strapped down to the couch, tickled till he was wordless, flooded his mind and he struggled to gather his composure for a moment. It didn’t help that Lyle looked so clearly excited to see him, though certainly fairly nervous as well. It was kind of cute how he couldn’t help but play his heart out on his sleeve.
“Lyle,” he said, hoping desperately that the blush on his face wasn’t too apparent. “Sorry for barging in like this. I thought it would be good to talk about the, uh… well, the other day.”
Lyle blinked a few times, eyes wide. “Oh! Yes. Of course. Uh, come on in.”
He scuttled in, allowing Sam to trail after him. Lyle’s apartment was strangely pristine compared to Sam’s with the exception of the pulsing flesh on one of the doors. Sam felt a slight stab of guilt. Even if it was the apocalypse he had become a bit of a slob.
As soon as they were both seated on the couch, the weight of the conversation suddenly felt much heavier and loaded with expectation. Lyle couldn’t stop fidgeting and readjusting on the couch, his eyes darting all about the room. He was clearly uncomfortable, and Sam admitting that Lyle had just unknowingly engaged in some weird fetish with him probably wasn’t going to help that any.
“So,” Sam started, staring fiercely at his lap; he wouldn’t be able to get through this if he had to look Lyle in the eyes. “The other night. It obviously didn’t end how either of us expected it to.”
Lyle nodded, his legs bouncing anxiously underneath him. “Can I just say h-how sorry I am, I really didn’t m-mean to—”
“No, no, it’s fine.” Sam scrubbed a hand over his face. His whole body felt hot and sticky and prickly all over and he wanted desperately to take a cold shower and/or sink through the floor never to be seen again. “That’s actually what I wanted to talk to you about. I, um. Well. So. The t—” The word seized in his throat. He coughed, trying again. “The, uh, the t—”
“Tickling?” Lyle filled in helpfully.
The word out of his mouth sent a flush of something running down Sam’s spine. Yes, the tickling, Lyle, the tickling that I haven’t stopped thinking about, the tickling I wish you would be doing to me again right now. His mouth felt dry. “Yeah. That. I just wanted to say that it’s, uh, fine. Completely fine. I’m not mad at you or anything about it. I wasn’t trying to avoid you. It’s just a difficult subject for me to talk about.”
“The tickling, you mean?”
It slid out so easily when he said it, like the word wasn’t loaded with desire and anticipation and the feeling of the beginnings of a laugh first pressing at one’s lips. It wasn’t making this any easier to talk about. And as he watched Lyle, he began to notice that there wasn’t just nervousness in his eyes, but a glint of something else. Whatever it was made Sam shift in his seat. It was as though Lyle’s gaze was piercing through him to see something deeper underneath, something not even Sam was aware of. It was a strange feeling and one that made him cross his arms subconsciously.
For a moment they both sat in silence while Lyle waited for him to continue. But every time Sam started to get the words out, they jumbled up inside him and made it impossible to speak at all. When it became evident that maybe Sam wasn’t going to continue, Lyle stepped in for him.
“This m-may not be my place,” Lyle started slowly, a shy but eager look on his face. “But I couldn’t help but notice that y-you didn’t seem to mind the tickling. In fact, it almost seemed like you were enjoying it. A lot.”
Oh god. Oh god. So, Lyle did notice. Of course he did, why wouldn’t he? It wasn’t like Sam had been exactly subtle about it. And now that he was thinking about it, why the hell didn’t he stop it? Letting your neighbor you’d talked to only a few times before tie you down and tickle you for hours didn’t exactly qualify as normal behavior.
Though, then again, tying your neighbor you’d only talked to a few times before down and tickling them for hours wasn’t exactly normal behavior either. Sam had been dwelling on that part of the whole scenario on and off as well. Hadn’t Lyle been the one to offer to tickle him? And he’d done it for so long… surely that wasn’t normal
Almost as if reading his mind, Lyle rushed forward before he could say anything else. “I was only s-saying that I’d be happy to do it again. If you wanted, that is.”
Again. Excitement flooded through his system before anything more rational could come through. Getting tickled again. The first time had been unlikely enough he hadn’t allowed himself to really fantasize about the idea that Lyle would be willing. Though perhaps he just didn’t have all the relevant information.
“Lyle.”
“Yes?”
“It’s a fetish.” Sam paused. “A t—hmm. A t-tickling fetish.”
Lyle tilted his head. “I know. I-I-I only mean because of how you, y’know, r-reacted.”
Was he really so obvious? Sam exhaled slowly, unwilling to meet Lyle’s eyes. A giddy smile wanted to tug at his lips, but he forced it back, not wanting to seem too eager. “You really don’t have to. I mean we’re only just getting to know each other—”
“Do you want me to?”
Lyle was peering at him so intently it was a wonder he hadn’t burned a hole straight through Sam with his gaze. Sam coughed, shifting. His voice was barely audible when he spoke.
“…Yes.”
Lyle clicked his legs together anxiously before scooching closer on the couch, so they were nearly parallel. Almost clumsily, he jerked forward, grabbing Sam’s arms and pulling them over his head. He seemed to be breathing almost as heavy as Sam, as though this was just as hot for him as it was for the other. Sam couldn’t help but gasp as Lyle’s weight pressed onto him, pinning him onto the couch.
“H-How do you want me to tickle you?”
A hot flush of arousal coursed through Sam, and he squirmed under him, cursing his stupid body and his stupid fetish for making him act so unbelievably stupid about all of this. He met Lyle’s eyes and regretted it instantly. The other man looked so eager to please, his eyes wide and accommodating, his pupils dilated with desire of their own. And in that moment, Sam believed that if he had asked Lyle to tickle him and never let him go, Lyle would do it.
“As long as you want,” Sam croaked out. Goosebumps prickled over his skin, anticipation making even the gentle puff of the AC in the room feel like a tease. “Unless you know, I can’t breathe or pass out or something.” A memory, distant, of a video he’d watched came back to him. “I’ll say roach if I need to tap out.”
It was difficult to tell if he was even aware he was doing it, but Lyle’s fingers were subtly wiggling like his body was subconsciously prepping to tickle him to pieces. “W-Where do you want me to tickle you?”
This was too much. He had to be doing this on purpose, he had to know how much this was getting to Sam. Squeezing his eyes shut because he could not keep looking at him while saying this, Sam mumbled, “Anywhere. I don’t know. I don’t know where it works best.” But then again, there was the other night where Lyle had given him a good idea of at least a few spots. “M-Maybe my sides? Or feet?”
It was one of the only spots Lyle hadn’t tickled and honestly a spot Sam wasn’t even sure he was ticklish on. He had a gut feeling that he would be.
Lyle licked his lips, once. Dry lips, probably. Either way, it made Sam look at his lips and think about his lips and how they were doing this but hadn’t even kissed yet—not properly anyway.
God did Sam ever want to kiss him.
He was dragged out of his thoughts by a set of hands settling on his sides and wiggling. Wiggling a lot. Lyle wasted no time getting into it and so Sam was entirely unable to prevent the burst of embarrassing giggles that rushed out at the contact. It fucking tickled. He tugged at his arms instinctively, but they didn’t budge. Fuck. Since when had Lyle become so strong? He wiggled harder, the tickling crawling into his brain and screaming at him to get away, make it stop, curl up. The fact that he couldn’t made his nerves frazzle and his dick hard.
How was he hard already?
“S-Slow down!” he gasped, scrunching his face up as he fought to deal with it. Dammit why was he going at it so intensely? A quick look at Lyle’s face revealed narrowed eyes and a tilted head, as though Sam had turned into more of an object than a man. His eyes bounced around to Sam’s face, then his sides, between his legs, his arms which pulled insistently against Lyle’s. He seemed entranced by each and every reaction. It only made Sam squirm harder, his cheeks flushing as he fought to gain control of himself. “Christ ihihit tihihihickles!”
“Does it?” The way he asked made it sound like he really couldn’t believe it. Lyle pinched up his ribs and he yelped. “This is a l-l-lot of squirming. I’m barely even doing anything.”
That was a fucking lie. Sam went to point that out, but Lyle scribbled harder over his sides, and he could only cackle and kick his feet into the side of the couch.
“Your laugh is pretty cute,” Lyle said wonderingly. “You don’t ever laugh n-normally. I didn’t know you giggled before.”
Sam’s face went beet red and he squeezed his eyes shut because there was no way he could face Lyle after that. Was that true? There hadn’t really been much to laugh about in the apocalypse. Now he couldn’t stop laughing. Electricity sparked through his veins and a jittery need to escape that he was trying to ignore. There was something so much more intimate about letting himself be tickled instead of having it happen to him. And Lyle was freakishly good at this. This sparked a brief jealousy over how he was so good at this. He tried not to dwell on that too much, or on how little experience he himself had.
He jumped as Lyle’s hands wandered lower, trailing across his waistline. “It’d be easier with bare skin…” Lyle mumbled, pushing underneath his shirt. Sam wasn’t sure exactly what Lyle was anymore and therefore what his hands were meant to be, but they were much softer and therefore much more tickly than human hands. He gasped, sucking his stomach in as Lyle plucked at the sensitive skin there. He tugged hard at his arms, really trying to get them down now. Lyle’s grip only tightened without so much as a comment as though Sam’s desperate struggling was only a minor inconvenience.
He was babbling nonsense, please and no and stop alongside various explanations that it was going to tickle. Unfortunately, his protests only seemed to delight Lyle further and fuel the tickling. It was a personal hell picked right out of Sam’s own fantasies. In fact, every spot, every technique, seemed to match perfectly with his nightly routine of tickling himself. Later, Sam would find this suspicious. In that moment, he melted into the attention, even squirming into Lyle’s hands at times.
When he began squeezing at his waist and the little divot in his hips that seemed to be directly connected to his nervous system, Sam couldn’t help but squeal at the topic of his lungs, nearly folding in half. Lyle’s eyes widened, his other hands pausing nervously. He glanced over at the door, pursing his lips.
Sam frowned. “What are you—mmH!”
A sweaty palm pressed against his mouth, silencing whatever he was about to say next. Sam muffled a protest, though his body definitely didn’t seem as against the makeshift gag as his mind was. Especially when Lyle dove right back into squeezing that spot with an even greater enthusiasm than before. Sam’s eyes widened and he shrieked into the gag, thrashing about violently on the couch to escape. Every squeeze made him want to jump out of his skin or at the very least slap Lyle’s hand away.
He wasn’t sure how long that technique continued before Lyle eventually relented to gentle scribbles over his stomach. It was still intensely ticklish, but light enough that Sam only needed to giggle helplessly into his hand. It did give him enough stability of mind to think about Lyle’s hand against his mouth and how his lips pressed up against his fingers. There was something strangely intimate about it that made Sam’s heart stutter in his chest. An impulsive part of him thought about licking Lyle’s hand, but luckily he had enough composure to block whatever train wreck that would have been. This was already weird enough, he didn’t want to scare Lyle off permanently.
After a while the tickling paused. Sam took the opportunity to regain his breath, especially as Lyle took his hand away. Lyle had also noticeably let go of his hands. There was a brief awkward shuffle as Lyle flipped around, slipping several legs under Sam’s to secure them tightly.
Then he felt his shoes being removed.
“I c-c-can’t actually hold you down from this angle,” Lyle explained, his breathing a tad heavy as if he was the one who’d just been tickled senseless. “So, you’ll just have to keep still.”
His shoes clattered to the floor, his socks following soon after. Not sure what to do with his arms, Sam wrapped them around himself. He stared at the ceiling, trying to steel himself. It was just tickling.
It started out light. Two fingers circling the center of his sole, a third scratching gently under the ball of his foot. Sam inhaled sharply, his face scrunching up in a tight grimace. His toes curled against his will, his foot twitching no matter how hard he tried to resist. Perhaps the most helpless aspect of tickling was the squirming, the way your body was forced to move and react no matter how you felt about it. It was both frightening and exhilarating.
When Lyle added in a fourth finger, Sam couldn’t help but giggle softly, pressing his hands against his face. It felt safer somehow with his face hidden. Christ. His legs twitched, but it was impossible to move them in Lyle’s grip. Only his feet could squirm around, and a fat lot of good that was doing them.
“Are your toes ticklish?” Sam couldn’t see Lyle’s face, but he could imagine the look on it and it was enough to send the red all the way up to his ears. “C-Can I try?”
Sam nodded, and then realizing he couldn’t see, warbled out, “Sure.”
Apparently they were ticklish—very ticklish. He yelped when five fingers curled under his toes, accessing nerve endings he had never considered before. How had he ever walked around barefoot before? How had he ever allowed himself to be so vulnerable? He couldn’t stop giggling after that, arching back into the couch and tugging fruitlessly at his trapped lower torso. There was just no way to protect himself like this and it was hell. A few times he almost reached forward to wrap around Lyle’s torso, but just barely prevented himself. Somehow, it seemed like it would cross a line for him to touch Lyle as opposed to the other way around.
In the end, Sam wasn’t sure how long the tickling lasted. He never got around to saying the safeword, and thankfully never around to passing out either. All he knew was at one point the tickling faded into the background, the ghost of a sensation that sat pleasantly at the edge of his memory. When he opened his eyes, Lyle was hovering over him. He was close. Very close. Sam would have guessed there were only inches between them. Their breaths intermingled in the space between.
Sam wouldn’t have ever imagined he would be brave enough to kiss him, but in the next instant his lips were crushing into Lyle’s, his arms cradling his head and catching in his cloak. Lyle’s lips parted easily under his own, immediately submissive. This was so much different than their first two kisses. He wasn’t sure what he had been kissing then, but it wasn’t this. For a moment, he was lot in heat and sensation and the urge to never let go, to devour Lyle whole as fast as he could.
Then there was the click of a camera and Lyle’s hands pressing into his chest as he yanked himself backwards. They were both breathing hard, staring wide-eyed at each other. Sam had never seen Lyle so red before or so cagey. He looked like he wanted to bolt and might have if it wouldn’t have created even more questions.
“Lyle—”
“You should go.” Lyle wouldn’t look at him, his hands and feet retracting into his cloak quickly. “For now, anyway. B-But we should do this again. Some time.”
Sam nodded wordlessly, unsure what was happening but knowing that Lyle needed some space. Still reeling from the tickling, he stood up and headed out the door. He heard distant muttering as he headed back to his room to try to piece together what the hell that was.