Page 9 of Beneath the Surface

12

The rhythm changed. The thick tentacle in Quinn’s ass, now buried to the hilt, flexed with a sinuous, rolling undulation, the ripples along its length working him from the inside out in a slow-motion wave. Each flutter pressed that sensitive spot deep inside, lighting him up with a surge of bliss that erased every last scrap of fear or shame. The slow, relentless pressure bloomed into a fullness so perfect, so exquisitely right, that all Quinn could do was shudder, blink back tears, and gasp in the sweet, aching flood of sensation. He was open, claimed, and so desperately needy he would have begged for more, but the tentacle had already become an extension of his own hunger. It rocked him, cradling his hips in the mud, lifting his ass into the air as it flexed in and out with the patience of an attentive lover.

He lost count of the orgasms. The tentacle in his ass seemed to know just when to slow, dragging out the spasms, then to hammer hard enough that Quinn’s vision went black at the edges, his toes curled, and his legs locked. Each time he thought he had nothing left to give, the creature’s grip shifted—another micro-adjustment, another angle, another impossible stroke—until his drained body flowered with sensation yet again. He was emptied, then filled, then emptied again in a cycle that felt both eternal and instantaneous, the passage of time warped by the intensity of what the creature was doing to him.

Even as he was being wrung dry, Quinn could feel the consciousness of the thing inside his head—soft as a planet’score, vast as the lake itself. It watched him, borrowed his pleasure, surged with every spasm. It wanted to know: what it was to be Quinn Michaels: nineteen, queer, thrown away by the world, and yet still capable of an incandescent, boundaryless desire. Why you? Why this pain, this joy, this exquisite, private agony? What made you so different, so delicious, so necessary? How did it feel to be seen like this? What did it mean to be cherished by something so utterlyOther?

It fed on him, yes, but what it took was not stolen. It was a communion—an exchange. He felt the echo of its loneliness, its raw gratitude, the longing that had haunted it for a hundred years beneath the silt and shadow. In the endless recursion of sensation, Quinn saw himself as the creature saw him: suspended in a web of feeling, a rare and precious filament, the bright, trembling intersection of two universes.

Quinn’s lips trembled around the tentacle, the pressure inside him building and building until he was sure he would shatter, reduced to atoms in the shallows of this alien lake. He came again, a dry, wrung-out orgasm that left his whole body humming, the aftershocks so intense they nearly hurt. Still, the tentacle did not let up. It fucked him through the comedown, extracting every last spasm of pleasure out of his exhausted nerves, refusing to let him close down or retreat to numbness. The creature wanted everything—every scrap of sensation, every secret pulse of need.

Quinn tried to answer its questions—not in words but in tremors, in the way his body arched and clung to the creature, desperate to maintain the connection. His memory bled into the creature’s vast, curious mind: the nightmares that weren’t just nightmares, the loneliness of his apartment, the brittle pride of a smart queer boy hiding in the woods, the secret stashes of muscle magazines, the risk and terror of desiring what he could never name aloud. Every moment of longing was a flavor,every hour of shame a spice. The entity licked and sampled his memories, savoring the raw, bright bursts of sensation, and in return, it poured gratitude and something like love into his bones… excretinghealingon something he thoughtcouldn’tbe healed.

The tentacle in his mouth began to withdraw, sliding from between his lips with a slow, affectionate reluctance. As it retreated, it trailed a final, shivering caress over his palate, leaving his mouth tingling with aftershocks of citrus and salt.

The tentacle in his ass had slowed, now stroking him with a steady, coaxing pressure. Each slow withdrawal made Quinn’s hole ache with emptiness, while every forward drive sent a pulse of fullness all the way up to his teeth. His hands, slick with mud and lake slime, found their way to his thighs, digging in, as if he could pull himself further down onto the tentacle, become more. He needed it. They both did. The lake’s consciousness braided tighter and tighter into his own, until Quinn felt himself dissolve into something neither entirely human nor wholly alien.

He felt his passage, stretched to exquisite fullness, pulse around the invading flesh with a desperate, hungry rhythm of its own. The tentacle did not retreat fully; instead, it lingered at the threshold, flexing and fluttering, coaxing aftershocks of pleasure with a patient, teasing insistence. A gentle, possessive squeeze answered the smallest tremor in Quinn’s hips, a reminder that he was wanted, that he was not alone.

The communion between them deepened. It was no longer touch but a second bloodstream; the thing in the lake had threaded itself through his nerves, his veins, the hollow of his bones. In the afterglow, when the pulses of climax faded to subtle tremors, the presence inside his skull grew clearer and more articulate. It was hunger, yes, but also ache. Not just the need to feed, but the need to be needed. The desperate, lonelyyearning of an intelligence spawned in cosmic exile, banished to water and darkness.

The world calmed around him. The air above the lake was glassy and still, the sky a vault of infinite blue. In the hush that followed, Quinn could hear the heartbeat of the creature—not a sound, but a pressure, a thrumming, felt in the marrow of his bones. It reverberated through him, a call and a response, echoing in the wet, bruised spaces of his body and the raw, open places of his mind.

The creature’s questions became more insistent—flashes of light, fractal images, the taste of tears and longing, and the wordless ache of a being that knew, at last, what it meant to be wanted. Quinn’s own need was a flare, but the entity’s was a supernova: it wanted him, needed him, more than anything above or below the surface. In the intricate tangle of sensation, it laid bare a secret hope: that he would stay, that this moment would stretch out forever, that the raw and perfect connection would never end.

He understood the ache, the terrible gravity of it, because it was his own. He knew what it was to be monstrous and beautiful and rejected, to crave nothing more than the endless loop of desire and connection. Quinn held the creature’s longing in his heart, not as a burden but as a kind of gift: to be wanted so absolutely, so without judgment, was a miracle he’d never dared to hope for.

13

The tentacle inside Quinn’s body finally relaxed, its writhing less a penetration than a gentle, coiling embrace. It lingered, filling him with a warm, silken fullness, and he understood, viscerally, that the thing’s pleasure had peaked and softened, like his own. For a long time, he lay there, half-submerged in silt and sun, the water curling coolly around his calves, the tentacle stroking him in slow, affectionate pulses. He could feel, in the distant reaches of the creature’s mind, a kind of cosmic satisfaction, an afterglow that radiated out across the entire lake.

He closed his eyes and let the sense of union expand inside him, flooding every cell until he felt as if he could breathe underwater, never surface again, never leave the arms that held him. The tentacle in his ass, still buried deep, began to pulse with a slow, reverberating rhythm, each undulation softer than before but more possessive. It milked the last echoes of pleasure from his body, as if reluctant to relinquish its hold.

It pulsed, gentled, and then, with a slow and sinuous grace, began to withdraw. The sensation was a sweet ache, a tightening in his gut as the fullness left him, replaced by the lingering, unignorable need for more. The smaller tendrils slid off his cock, draining the last dregs of his body’s spent desire, then curled lovingly around his hips and thighs before slipping away, releasing him to the mud and the thin, wavering sunlight above. The water, thick with the milky slickness of the creature’s secretion, eddied around his legs. He lay back, gasping, staringat the empty sky, feeling as hollow and luminous as the bones of a bird.

He did not weep. Instead, he lay in the murk, letting the chill of the lake percolate through his bones, drawing off the heat of orgasm and the shimmer of raw adrenaline as his trembling calmed and the world, impossibly, began to right itself. The water’s surface stilled, the sky’s blue sharpened, and the wind returned, feathering ripples across the lake as if nothing had ever happened. A faint stirring beneath him, a subtle shifting of the silt, signaled the creature’s withdrawal. The broad tentacle, having emptied him so exquisitely, lingered just outside his body, its tip brushing against his tender, gaping entrance with the delicacy of a farewell kiss.

His body trembled in the aftershocks—spasms that wracked his spine and thighs, involuntary, half-painful, half-joyful. His mouth tingled from the memory of the tentacle’s taste, that sharp, alien tang lingering on his tongue. Inside him, the slick walls of his passage fluttered, as if his body was unwilling to release the last traces of the creature’s presence. Each pulse a reminder, a secret brand pressed into the core of his being.

Something small and delicate brushed his cheek. He opened his eyes and saw, hovering before his face, a fringe of translucent, hair-fine tendrils. They hovered in the air, tremulous and shy, hesitating at the boundary between water and skin. He raised his hand, still trembling, and the tendrils twined around his fingers—not gripping, but weaving in and out, like a child’s fingers seeking a parent’s grasp. The gesture was achingly familiar, and the meaning struck him with a force far greater than any orgasmic aftershock: the thing wanted to hold his hand.

He let it. He let the gentle filaments braid between his fingers, let them stroke the bruised knuckles and cradle the pads of his palms, let them linger at the soft webbing between thumb andforefinger. He turned his palm upward and felt the gossamer threads curl down, touching the scar on his wrist, then the half-moon bites where his own nails had sunk in during the worst of the seizures. The sensation, at once chaste and impossibly intimate, made his throat ache more than any lingering bruise.

He felt the creature’s gratitude as a pulse of golden warmth, a desperate, childlike affection that radiated from the tips of the filaments and up his arm, blooming in his chest. Here was a thing older than memory, a thing that had never known kindness, asking for the smallest, most human of comforts. Quinn’s breath hitched. He gripped the tendrils—delicate, trembling, but impossibly strong—and wove his fingers through them, refusing to let go. The filaments flexed and curled, testing the grip, then squeezed with a strength that surprised him, as if the creature needed reassurance that it would not slip away, not be abandoned to the silt and dark again. The creature’s thoughts coiled with his, an unspoken question trembling in the charged, electric air between them.

Don’t leave. Please.

It was not a command, not a demand. It was a plea, born of the same hunger that had driven it to devour and cherish, to punish and pet in one seamless cycle. It craved not only the taste of skin and salt, but the reassurance that some part of this—ofhim—could be permanent. That he would not slip away, back to some small, dry apartment and its echoing silence, leaving the bright communion of the lake a memory, a scar.

He squeezed back, his fingers compressing the drag of water and the fine, silken threads that passed for the monster’s hand. In that moment, he remembered every time he’d ever reached for something—someone—and found only emptiness. The void between himself and the rest of the world, the constant knowledge that even when he dared to touch, he risked only more pain. The thing in the lake had barbs and hunger and athousand ways to break him, but it knew this ache intimately. It had been alone, marooned, for so much longer than Quinn could fathom.

The gossamer tendrils held him there, neither pulling nor urging, only holding, a grip so uncannily gentle it made his teeth ache. He lay with the cool mud seeping into the small of his back and the sun stroking his eyelids, and for a moment, he was a creature suspended between two elements: half boy, half monster, all aching need. The water shimmered with the memory of violence and the hush of peace. Quinn felt the afterimage of those barbed, brutal tentacles—the way they’d ripped apart the men who’d tried to kill him, the way the lake had boiled with red as it devoured their hate. The monster’s revenge had been total, but now the water was glassy, the air above it trembling with the possibility of forgiveness.

14

He found his voice, at last, not as words but as a silent, surging promise, a current braided into the living circuit that linked them both. I won’t leave you, he thought—not to the silt and the dark, not ever again. He pressed the thought forward, not with the bravado of a survivor but with the naked ache of a boy who knew what it meant to be left behind.

The filaments tightened in answer, wrapping his hand in a net of cool, glimmering threads, refusing to let go even as the larger body of the creature began to withdraw. A shivering pulse radiated through Quinn’s whole body, and for a moment his vision shimmered with the afterimage of a hundred years of yearning: the empty lake, the slow drift of silt, the silent echo of touch denied. He saw it, felt it, became it. In that instant, the boundary between himself and the creature dissolved, and he was both: the boy on the shore, battered but unbroken, and the thing beneath, old as starlight, desperate for the warmth of another.

---