A man at church told me about his fetish — now I fulfil his fantasy for £120 an hour

Church is a rather unconventional meeting spot for Melissa (Picture: Getty Images)

I first met the man who pays me to tickle him in church.

I was giving a talk about kink and Christianity (that’s another column, for another day).

He came to hear me speak, and while he was too shy to approach me at the pulpit, we got talking afterwards over email.

In due course, I discovered what he really wanted from me wasn’t a theological debate, but an hour of being tickled.

This was new for me. I’ve made a few tickling videos, where I or someone else gets tied down and assailed with feathers or fingers.

It’s quite fun. The giggling and shrieking is gloriously childish. It’s menacing someone without any actual menace, vastly different from my usual schtick of threatening someone with a cane. But I’ve never tickled someone in a session before. I couldn’t imagine what it would be like.

Melissa got some unexpected business when she visited church (Picture: Getty Images)

He rocked up at my front door looking anxious, just as they all do. After a few pleasantries (he’s local, and we’ve a fair few friends in common), I stripped him naked, tied him down and began a few exploratory strokes on his torso.

He’d sent me a list of his most tickly bits. Chest, torso, armpits, legs, feet and nipples… That was basically all his body, surely, unless I planned to tickle his eyebrows.

I’m rubbish at bondage. I was never a Girl Guide. There was a lot of Velcro involved. Quite soon I simply sat on him, which seemed to work as well as anything, and it pleased me too: I’m old, and enjoy sitting down.

He closed his eyes, squirmed very slightly, and only his quickening breath let me know I was having any effect whatsoever. The hour passed fast. It felt rather zen, for me at least. I drifted off into another world, with nothing to worry about but keeping my fingers moving, confident I was making someone as happy as he could be.

He began visiting weekly, paying £120 a time, and I found I looked forward to his visits. He has a lean, muscly body, and I enjoy playing with it, working my fingers over his torso as if it were a musical instrument.  

Unlike some of my spanking clients, he remains silent throughout, which means I can leave the windows open, a boon during the recent heatwaves. It’s meditative, restful and oddly bonding, spending a silent hour with another human.

He particularly enjoys having his nipples tickled, and tells me the sensations I engender can linger for days afterwards. He’s very clear about what he wants, while simultaneously wanting to surrender control over when the next touch comes. His job is to experience it. Mine is to decide where my fingers go next.

But why would anyone enjoy being tickled?

Melissa dominates men and women for a living (Picture: Getty Images)

Tickling sits in an intriguing territory between pleasure and discomfort. A light, unexpected touch can make us squirm, laugh, tense up and desperately want more, or desperately want it to stop, or both, simultaneously.

The uncertainty is part of the appeal. Our brains are very good at turning anticipation into its own form of stimulation.

And of course, we can’t tickle ourselves effectively. Our brains predict our own movements, dampening the sensation. But when someone else does it, we don’t know exactly where the next touch will land.

Every nerve ending is suddenly paying attention. This is true of spanking too, of course: another reason my job is safe for the foreseeable, even as the computers take over.

Kink is often misunderstood because we assume pleasure must look a certain way. But human beings are gloriously odd.

One person wants to be beaten until he bleeds; another wants to be tickled until he can’t think straight. I’m here for both.

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