Triptych, An Erotic Adventure

by Krissy Kneen

  If Leda moved too quickly the creature would retreat in an inky cloud. She shifted her hand gently, so as not to stress him, kicked her legs and inched closer to the rock ledge. She took a deep breath, eased herself down and opened her eyes under the water. The octopus was always more perfect in real life than in her memory: each of its legs exquisitely formed, its suckers able to cling to anything.

  She knew the creatures tended to wait and watch the researchers, conducting their own study, or so it appeared. Perhaps this octopus had formed an opinion about her. They seemed to know the difference between the research students at any rate, racing out to play with the exuberant Ian, watchful with the prickly Jocelyn. Leda knew they were not afraid of her. Curious, perhaps: they often snaked a tentacle out to touch her gloved finger. Now, this one, the male, wrapped a second suckered leg around her arm.

  It was a medium-sized creature. Not a giant octopus of the kind used in horror movies or photographed on the decks of deep-sea trawlers, but big enough. This one could have wrapped its legs around her waist if it chose, but Leda did not feel intimidated by its size or strength. It would not release its ink unless it was threatened. It had no reason to drown her. She held her breath and let the spidery tentacle pull her closer, wondering anew at the balletic delicacy of all those elegant limbs. The Fisherman’s Wife would be feeling just such a strong but gentle tug, only in the woodblock print every inch of the woman’s skin was subjected to this sticky grip.

  Leda needed to breathe. Slowly, she touched the end of a tentacle and lifted it off her arm, feeling the suction cups release her one by one, leaving little red marks on her flesh. She kicked for the surface, took a deep breath and smoothed her hair back from her face. The cold water tugged at her nipples, crept up rudely between her legs. This was what she needed, the cold hand of the ocean draining the warmth from her body.

  When she took another breath and pushed herself down towards the hidden crevasse, the creature slipped a lazy arm towards her, touching her under the ribs with one leg, snaking another out towards her shoulder. It was curiosity, of course. She was too large to eat, too alien to desire. She was a length of mammalian flesh, and the octopus explored her stomach with the kind of scientific detachment the students themselves had brought to his rock pool.

  She thrust her chest out. Of course she wanted to know what it would feel like to have its legs caressing her breast. She imagined a suction cup placed on her nipple: it would feel as nice, the thought, as Rachel’s suckling mouth. But manoeuvre herself as she might, she could not make the creature touch her in that way.

  He placed one leg underneath her breast, reached out with another to pull at a tendril of her hair. When she took another breath and hovered close to his crevasse, her legs spread wide and the icy water breathing its tidal pulse through her pubic hair, the octopus retreated entirely.

  There would be no consensual giving or taking of pleasure. The octopus did not express its desire as a mammal would. There was too wide a gulf.

  Leda slid her hand between her legs. She touched her nipple with cold fingers, opened herself to the wash of the tide between her freshly parted and still-warm lips. She felt her desire spread through her body but was forced to push to the surface to take a breath.

  Breaking through into the air above she blinked and gulped down a lungful of grief. Paul in the sunlight and the scent of brine.

  When she took another breath and submerged herself completely, there was the sensual dance of the octopus limbs hovering close to her once more, the tantalising potential for an eight-armed entry in his suckered touch. Her desire surged again and she rubbed herself until she felt the need to breathe.

  It was impossible. She would die of desire, perpetually suspended on the edge of release, excited by the underwater stillness, repulsed by the world of air and light. After one more descent, one more disappointing breath of memory as she resurfaced, Leda abandoned her attempt to climax.

  The tide was turning. She pulled her naked body shivering from the water, spurred on by the swell of a wave pounding against the rocks, subsiding into her side of the cliff wall. She dressed awkwardly, dragging dry clothes onto wet limbs. She walked past the place where her desire was first consummated; up the narrow track that she and Rachel had run down each day with the dogs nipping at their ankles and leaping beside them.

  In her bedroom she lay alone, cold now in the bed where the restless body of a German shepherd had kicked his dreaming feet into her back. She stared up at the two prints above her bed. Leda in the embrace of the swan. The Fisherman’s Wife, caught in the moment of her ecstasy, mouth and cunt both filled completely, her body entangled in a lavish, loveless embrace. She gazed up at the image. She rubbed at herself until she was sore but could generate nothing more than a warm glow, a little nod to the rapture of the Fisherman’s Wife.

  The idea came to her in a dream. The giant beast nestling its mantle between her wide-spread thighs, its great emotionless eyes staring up as if to examine the repercussions as it dipped its beak between her swollen labia. In the dream she saw another octopus swimming close by. She wanted to call it over but had no language. She wanted to take its hectocotylus arm into her mouth, swallow the packet of sperm it held, just as a female might take it into her mantle cavity.

  She cooed to the creature. She blew kisses. Her entreaties were greeted only by that blank alien stare. Finally, she opened her mouth and there was something under her tongue. She manoeuvred her tongue around the slippery little object and produced a bait-fish, which she held firmly between her teeth.

  The smaller octopus saw the silver glint and was upon her, wrapping its tentacles around her head, dipping its beak into her mouth to take the fish. She held tight and in a moment felt the snaking of a leg into her mouth, the sticky tentacles prising her jaws apart, easing her open as it would ease apart the shut-tight shell of a mollusc. The sensation was overwhelming.

  Leda woke with a gasp. She must have been holding her breath. She found herself panting, and when she reached between her legs she could feel the last spasms of her climax quivering in the muscles there.

  She sat up and looked straight into the great half-lidded eyes of Hokusai’s giant octopus. He seemed to be watching her, waiting for her to make her next move.

  Leda slipped out of bed and dressed for class. She had a morning lecture but after that she would be free to go down to the rock pools to conduct her research unhindered. She was keeping a diary, looking at the movement of the octopuses from one pool to another, their feeding, their social behaviour. She hoped to be there to witness the frantic activity of a mating season.

  She stood under the shower, washing the last of the dream from the slippery places inside her thighs. She could get fish from the shop beside uni. The science department could have provided her with bait but it was old, frozen and refrozen many times. The fish shop would provide her with a lure for her octopus fresh enough that she need have no concern for her health.

  She felt a shivery kind of excitement. She turned off the hot and stood under the cold water till she had brought her body back under control.

  The octopus was not in his hole. Leda felt a terrible disappointment. She had bought the fish and come down to shed her clothes at the edge of the rock pool. All this with her hands shaking and her breath coming quick and shivery in her chest. She had brought a mask and snorkel, which she now pulled off her face to stare out at the other rock pools carved into the cliffs.

  Not here, perhaps, but he would not be far away. Maybe he had moved to a different location, encouraged by a king tide to stray from his lair. She pulled herself up onto the rocks on the far side of the pool. The ground was sharp, great gouges of rock torn away in recent storms. She was careful not to cut her feet on the colonies of barnacles: another momentary nod to Paul. The care in his tongue, cleaning her cut feet. Lapping at her torn hymen, licking away the fresh blood.

  Leda peered into the second pool. This one was usually empty. Now she saw a tiny sc
hool of fish the size of her fingertips flashing one way and another. She dangled her feet into the water and slid down, clutching tight to her bag of fish, slipped the mask on, dipped her face and blew out the water from the snorkel. The fish flashed past, brushing against her chest like the tickly fingers of a human hand. She felt her nipples snap to attention. All the elements of the ocean seducing her, the chill of the water, the scent of brine, the tickle of an anemone snapping closed as it brushed her hip.

  No sign of the octopus in this pool either. But there was a slippery fur of kelp waving its streamers in and out with the push of the tide and Leda rested in its tickling arms for a moment, luxuriating in all the sensuous movement of the sea. She tracked the pattern made by the school of little fish, a figure-eight of infinity, and just by easing her body forward Leda could put her chest in their path, so that the little creatures would brush against her nipples. When she lay back against the fingers of seaweed and stretched her legs forward she could feel the tickle of tails and fins clip though the v of her legs.

  The next pool was larger. This was where the female octopus lived. She was a pretty creature, slightly smaller than her suitor. Her tentacles, as she tiptoed on curling lacy feet from nook to nook, looked more delicate. She liked the darker recesses of the rocks and had rarely reached out to Leda when, during her hours of study, she would wiggle a gloved hand to tempt her with a little yellow worm.

  Leda secured the snorkel firmly, slipped under the awning of the rock ledge. There was a small breathing space above her and Leda made sure to hover at a level where her snorkel wouldn’t dip under the rise of the waves. She found the little girl, a pale grey tangle of limbs the colour of the sand that blanketed the hiding hole in the rocks.

  Leda took a fish out of the bag, waved it gently back and forth in front of the shy creature. The tide washed her closer to the rock wall and it was as if the ocean itself were offering encouragement. She moved closer. Held the treat between her fingers. Even the little sideways movements of the octopus’s tentacles seemed sexual to Leda. She wanted nothing more than to hold the fish between her teeth just as she had in her dream. But the female was less forward than the male. Leda would have to tempt it out inch by inch onto her skin.

  She felt the ocean with the whole of her body. It was as if all of her skin had become an erogenous organ, her excitement rippling out from slightly engorged labia to thighs, hips, stomach. Her breasts ached for just a touch of one suckered finger. Her mouth would abandon the snorkel and the practicalities of breath for a single tentacle snaking up behind her teeth, curling its suctioned surface around her tongue.

  When the fish was snatched from her hands she kicked back in surprise. There was a scatter of sand flung like fog into the sudden disturbance of water. The little female hadn’t moved an inch but remained curled shyly in her ledge of rock. Leda waited till the sand had settled and then she saw him, the male—darker, browner—spidering up on top of the female’s ledge. The fish had vanished, but Leda knew that he had taken it.

  She reached into the bag for another. She held the silvery morsel against her chest. Her nipples pulsed with blood, aching for some kind of touch. She swam forward, pressed her chest close to where the octopuses hung, one over and one under the dividing ledge.

  It was the male, of course, who snaked a tentacle out to catch it. Leda held the fish tightly between her fingers, pressed just under the hard protrusion of her nipple. The creature launched himself onto her suddenly, one tentacle curling up and around Leda’s arm, the other seven clutched around her ribcage, and, exquisitely, she felt the suctioned creep of a tentacle curling around a nipple.

  The thrill of that strange touch, half mouth, half finger, was almost too much for Leda. She relinquished the fish too quickly and the octopus climbed across her body and back to its position on the rock wall.

  Two more fish. Leda knew she would have to use them strategically. She felt that heady mix of pheromones making her body feel heavy and light all at once, the chill buoyancy of the water melding with the sleepy warmth of desire. She cinched her knees up towards her chest. She was wet with her own juices already: thicker, more viscous than the sea water, slicking the edges of her cunt with the slipperiness of seaweed, the briny reek of kelp.

  She carefully slipped the fish between her labia, a quick cold shock of slippery silver. She was careful to hold on to the tiny head. It was difficult to push her hips forward, offering herself to the octopus’s tentacles while keeping her head clear of the water. She managed to hook her toes onto the rock wall, her other hand paddling through the water like a fin of her own to keep her steady and upright. From this position she lost sight of them both; then a shiver coursed down her spine as she felt the weight of the male’s body slip comfortably over one of her thighs.

  Octopuses are clever. She had seen one open a screw-top flask with a quick curl of the leg. She felt a tentacle slip easily into the thatch of coarse hair around the lips of her vagina and, in an instant, popped the bait inside herself. She felt the tight lips close over the fish like a press-seal. Held her breath for a moment hoping that the octopus would not be deterred by its inability to see the reward.

  She felt the slow creep of the suckers, the tacky pull of them grabbing her flesh in little circular love-bites, the muscular tip of the tentacle searching for the opening, finding the place between her cunt-lips.

  Two tentacles now, parting the flesh, and a sudden stabbing entry. The octopus leg slipped quickly inside her. She felt the curl of it grabbing at the fish that was lodged there, the finger becoming a fist as it wrapped around the little treat.

  Leda gulped at the air and then abandoned the idea of breathing, curling her body downward so that she could concentrate on the sight of the creature lodging there. The octopus was cradled at the top of her thigh, its limbs snaking out and around her leg, caressing the cleft between her buttocks. She could see the single elegant leg disappearing into her body, her thick lips parted; the muscular tentacle buried deep within her body. The knot of flesh felt bigger than the hardening in a dog’s penis.

  She watched as the creature retracted its arm, the lips of her vagina gaping so wide she imagined she might tear, the sticky slip of the tentacle retreating, curling back and up into the beak nestled at the place where all the tentacles met. The eyes stared towards her, expressionless. The mantle took in water, swelling, then exhaled like a lung gasping for air.

  Leda had never slept with a man, but there had been one excited night of fumbling with a first-year student that had ended quite abruptly as the boy, unable to contain his desire, ejaculated against her leg. The sight of the octopus swelling and contracting reminded her of the young man’s ball sack, which had fascinated her enough to kiss and lick it while the boy himself was fumbling with his condom.

  She felt a similar urge now. But it would be impossible. She watched the little muscular tube beside the octopus’s head suck water in and out and imagined her own clitoris caught in this kind of aquatic breath. She was on the edge and could plunge over it at any second. Leda felt her lungs burning, and kicked up towards the surface a fraction. She blew the seawater from her breathing tube and gulping down a lungful of air.

  One more fish.

  When she settled back under the surface she realised her companion had not let go of her thigh. He clung there, still breathing, still inflating and deflating. Still tight and muscular. Leda bit down on the mouthpiece as a jet of saliva spurted into her mouth. She imagined his texture on her tongue, the tentacle of her fantasy pressing at the back of her teeth. She reached into the bag and quickly slipped the fish inside her vagina. Come and get it, she thought and lay back, head tilted to catch the air in her snorkel, eyes on her own vagina, avid to watch the next tentacled entry.

  A grey scatter of sand: she would have gasped if she was able. The female, the shy cautious girl of the clan, had scooted forward and without preamble had shoved her small pale tentacle as far as it would go into Leda’s body. Leda felt the
entry like an electric shock, the curling of the suckers, rubbing against the sensitive inner walls of her vagina, the curl of the finger tightening on the bait.

  The octopus settled across Leda’s crotch, its beak directly above her slippery vulva, legs curled, some about Leda’s leg and one slipping up to tap at her navel as the wonderful suction of the underside clung to her clitoris. Leda felt the surge of her desire swell though her body, her whole being seemingly focused on the place where the two octopuses weighed her down. And then, just as her climax hit her, she saw the pale pink arm of the male snake out and settle into the female’s mantle. Her leg retracted suddenly and Leda’s body convulsed as the creature removed the thick tangle of fish and leg.

  Her eyes still wide, her body lost to the pulsations in her groin, she watched the female deposit the fish, thick with the mucus of Leda’s desire, into her beak. She felt the slow dance of octopus legs begin to scale her torso, the female, then the male, the pink leg still depositing its parcel of sperm inside the female’s cavity, the two locked together in their first coupling as they undulated over Leda’s breast. Sixteen legs plucking at her nipples, one suction cup at a time.

  She let the snorkel fall from her mouth. Her taut nipples ached under the plucking of the many-armed harpist, as the creatures continued their sensual motion across her face and over her hair.

  Leda raced for the surface. She gasped, groaned, the sound low and deep, half pain and half pleasure. She felt the slow balletic creep of the mating pair down her back, parting the cheeks of her arse, the sticky pull of a tentacle sucking at her anus briefly before they abandoned her body for the ocean floor.

  Leda grabbed for her snorkel. She was clumsy with newly won pleasure but she knew this opportunity would not be repeated. This was the first of many matings and then the male, that deep-brown, muscular instrument of her pleasure, would die.