Page 12 of Beneath the Surface (Tendrils of Love #1)
T he 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’s core, 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 utterly Other?
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…
excreting healing on something he thought couldn’t be 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, lonely yearning 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.