Page 13 of Beneath the Surface (Tendrils of Love #1)

T he 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, staring at 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 and forefinger.

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—of him —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 a thousand 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.