by Delaney Rain
He looked up at him, big blue eyes shining. “I thought so.”
“I’m sorry. There are, uh—” How to explain the internet? “—legends about sea monsters doing things to people that I, um, shouldn’t have believed without letting you explain.”
Tyfodorus frowned at him. “I am not a sea monster.”
Eric rubbed at his mouth to keep from smiling at that cute, grumpy face. “Right. You’re not. What, um, are you, though?”
“Land dwellers have called us many things, like Octopus People, but we call ourselves Cecaelia.”
That sounded familiar, but Eric couldn’t place why he knew it. “Where do Cecaelia live? Like do you have underwater cities?”
Tyfodorus cocked his head at him. “There are communities throughout the oceans, but our origin on this planet is southwest of here.”
“This planet?” Eric shifted closer. “Are you saying Cecaelia are from another planet?”
“Yes, our origin planet and community are called Pacilona Nepthis.”
Eric sat down cross-legged in the grass. Tyfodorus was an alien mersquid. “And that’s here in the Pacific?”
“Pacific?”
“The name of this ocean,” he said with a sweeping motion to the water outside the lagoon.
Tyfodorus squinted. “You named the water?”
“Well, not me personally, but someone did. I don’t remember why it’s called the Pacific, but I want to say the Atlantic is named after Atlantis.” Eric sat up straighter and smiled. “Do you know about Atlantis?”
Still frowning slightly, Tyfodorus shook his head. “Is it another…legend?”
Eric grinned since, yeah, it was. “The story of Atlantis is all about the amazing culture and knowledge that these ancient people had. They were really ahead of their time, but something happened—a natural disaster or they angered the gods or something—and the whole city of Atlantis fell into the ocean, never to be seen again.”
Tyfodorus bobbed his head like he was considering something. “That sounds like our leaving tale, when a large faction of my people decided to abandon this planet and return home. A natural disaster in the form of shifting ground caused a great deal of damage to the community afterward. We have lost much of the knowledge they had in the millennia since.”
Was it possible his people were the origin behind a Greek myth? And Eric was somewhat aware of Hawaiian deities nowadays, which had a lot of ocean-dwelling beings. Could some of those stories have been inspired by Cecaelia?
“But wait,” Eric had to say as something occurred to him. “If you’re so advanced, what with travelling between planets and everything, why do you need hosts to breed?”
“Our experiments to host our own eggs have been disastrous.” He walked closer to the beach and seemed to sit on his hip at the water’s edge. “Our body temperature is too low, causing the eggs to harden and crack or break completely while still inside us. Getting all the pieces out has proven extremely difficult and what they could not remove caused a fatal toxicity.”
“Wow. That seems…really wrong on, like, an evolutionary level.”
He nodded, sighing. “Some speculate that we are of a lower class than those who left and that, perhaps, this was a way to control our breeding. That we needed permission to—”
“That’s terrible!”
“It is.” He looked off into the distance. “Our numbers decline every year, so there is an urgency to our breeding now. It is expected that all who can, will. I am now of an age when I must contribute.”
“So you don’t want to, but you have to.”
Tyfodorus smiled a bit. “I would welcome having my own hatchlings. Little ones to pass my memories on to, who will be my legacy and my joy.” His smile faded and he covered his eyes as though he was getting a headache. Eric took a guess as to the reason.
“You just don’t like that you’re supposed to hijack some poor animal to get it done.”
He shook his bowed head.
And Eric felt bad for him. He thought of the number of humans trying everything to have children. The billions of dollars spent in clinics or adoption agencies, parents willing to do anything for the chance to have kids. He’d even thought about becoming a father once.
“Tell me about being a host,” he said quietly. “Tell me everything.”
Tyfodorus gave Eric a small, hopeful smile and started talking.
First up was the elixir. It was a secretion that the largest of his tentacles produced. Like the long ones on a giant squid, these tentacles resembled a spoon and could reach twice as far as the rest. When he wasn’t using them to hunt for his supper, producing the elixir was their other purpose. And it was pretty amazing stuff.
Apparently, it was supposed to make it so the host didn’t need to eat or drink anything else for their week-long stint as incubator. That was pretty key to those hosts who only had one opening into which to insert six to eight eggs—hint, hint.
“The eggs go in,” Eric said, “and nothing comes out until the eggs do.”
“Precisely.”
Based on the shape Tyfodorus made with their hand, he eggs themselves looked to be about the size of a plum. Eric was damn sure the host would be one hundred percent aware of six to eight of those being lodged in their guts for a week.
“Which is why the elixir also has properties to keep the host free of discomfort and…docile.”
“Drugged.”
“Comfortable.”
“Uh-huh.”
That was where Tyfodorus relied on his memories. Turned out the Cecaelia had something of a shared memory that passed from parent to child. While each Cecaelia made their own memories throughout their lifetime, some things—like what to expect when they were expecting—were accessed like a reference library. So Tyfodorus had the memory of his parent catching, subduing, and preparing the host that eventually bore him.
“Your host was a tiger?”
“Yes. My parent had to move us to a new area when we were very young because the tiger kept returning with the intention of killing them.”
Tyfodorus used gender-neutral terms like parent and them because Cecaelia were, literally, hermaphroditic. Inside Tyfodorus right now was the ability to produce simultaneously both eggs and sperm in order to procreate with another Cecaelia. They negotiated who got what, made the transfer, and went their separate ways. It wasn’t lost on Eric that it sounded like a transaction.
“So if you can’t host the eggs because they’ll break, what’s going on inside you right now?”
Some time ago, as the sun had been setting, Eric had gone to get citronella candles and put on some clothes before returning to the shallow side of the lagoon. Now he was back in his chair—though it was out of the water—and Tyfodorus was sort of curled up on a patch of sand at the water’s edge. They would occasionally use those longer tentacles to splash water on themself as though they needed to stay wet.
“The unfertilized eggs are in one chamber, while the sperm is in another. I will combine them by allowing the chambers to merge, which will fertilize the eggs and require immediate insertion into the host.”
“And since you received the sperm, you have to find the host. Why didn’t you let the other guy do it?”
“They had done so before.” They sighed. “I suspect they did not wish to experience it again, despite their close relationship with their offspring.”
“Will they be involved with this set?”
“No. At least not until such a time as we might reconnect, perhaps in Pacilona Nepthis, but that would be years from now.” They smiled a little dreamily. “No, the hatchlings will be mine.”
Eric wondered if Ty—as he’d started thinking of them—was lonely. As a reason to have kids went, that wasn’t so bad. Continuing the species wasn’t either. And Eric… Man, I’m getting really close to just saying yes.
He cleared his throat. “Um, tell me about the, uh, insertion process.”
Eric was glad for the low lighting to hide his
blushing as Ty talked very frankly about preparing the host’s anus, how the elixir made for a nice lubricant, and about their “insertion organ” that, if Eric wasn’t wrong, sounded like a big, egg-delivering cock.
“Eric?”
“Yeah?” he asked from behind the hand covering his eyes.
“Are you able to change your skin color at will?”
He stayed behind his hand. “It’s involuntary.”
“Has something disturbed you? Are there predators on this island?”
Eric lowered his hand. “I’m embarrassed. What you’re talking about sounds a lot like sex and that’s…embarrassing.”
Their eyes had a green glow in the candlelight. “Intercourse is embarrassing?”
“Well…” He shifted in his seat and cleared his throat. “It’s more like we don’t really talk about it like this. It’s, um, too intimate for, you know, casual conversation.”
Though some people might feel differently, he was not one of them and it probably had a lot to do with the fact he hadn’t really accepted himself sexually until a few years ago. And then he hadn’t even come out until last year. Involuntarily.
“It’s partly how I was raised,” he said while staring at his hands. “My parents couldn’t accept that anyone was born gay, so they taught us the same thing. When I started to realize that I was exactly like the people they hated, it was hard to get myself to a point where I believed I was allowed to love. That I deserve to be loved.”
“Your parents believed that you should not know love?”
Eric tried to explain—he really did—but gender, gender expression, sexuality, and prejudice was more than Ty could grasp. So Eric ended up saying that he was attracted to humans with anatomy like himself instead of humans with different anatomy, and that was a big problem for his parents and others like them.
“My anatomy is like yours.”
Eric looked Ty in the eyes, saw them grin, heard them giggle.
“Well… That’s good to know.”
Chapter Three
After a near sleepless night, Eric wandered down to the lagoon shortly after dawn. When he’d been awake, he’d wondered about whether he could be a host for Ty. He’d contemplated the moral implications of accepting or declining, what might impact his health, and whether he’d be allowed or able to participate in the lives of Ty and the hatchlings afterward.
And he’d thought about his past.
He knew he was hiding here on this island. He tired not to think about what had driven him here, all too aware of how depressed he’d been and how he never wanted to spiral that low again. But maybe a small part of him had thought that, after disappearing for a few years and letting the media attention die down, that his family might take him back. That they might forgive him for trusting a man he’d loved to keep their relationship a secret only to be outed in one of the worst possible ways. Though he didn’t follow any of the news anymore, he’d thought it might be possible he hadn’t completely destroyed his father’s political ambitions. With enough time and distance, maybe they’d forgive him.
But if he did all this with Ty, he couldn’t go back to that life. He already knew so much that no one else would ever believe. How could he become a…a surrogate for an alien without ever letting on that he knew anything about Cecaelia? He knew about these amazing, intelligent people living in the oceans. How could he ever go back to being one of the ignorant masses?
And then there was the fact that, when he’d been asleep, he’d dreamt about thick tentacles and long blue cocks. About himself massaged, stuffed, and fucked, even though it had been more like the stories he knew than anything like the shy, giggly Ty would probably do. He’d tried to resist when he’d woken up with a raging erection the first time. Tried and failed and had to cover his mouth to keep from making too much noise as he brought himself off.
He’d resisted less the second time it happened.
And now he was on his way back down to the water’s edge with the hope of not blushing too much as he focused on his health concerns. That seemed like the most important part of all of this, where he had the most questions, so they’d talk about that until Eric felt like he could make a decision.
Because, yeah, he was honestly considering just saying yes.
He paused as he got near enough to see the small beach closest to him. Ty had dragged Eric’s chair back into the water at some point during the night and they sat in it now while they opened and closed the umbrella like they were studying how it worked. With the sunrise just enough to illuminate the scene and the pink of the umbrella, Ty looked like they were purple this morning. Eric found himself smiling as he watched. Was Ty as curious about him as he was about Ty?
“Good morning,” he called as he continued toward him.
“Oh! Hello.” Ty slipped from the chair into the water and looked like they were thinking about places to hide the umbrella.
Eric chuckled. “It’s fine. You can explore my things. I don’t mind.”
Ty stabbed the umbrella into the sand beside them and expertly opened it. “I like this shade-maker. There have been times during my journeys where only the deep sea has provided a respite from the sun’s glare.”
“Well, I have more umbrellas, if you’d like to put them in different spots.”
Eric heard them whisper the new word before they said, “One moment while I put your chair back.” But it was obvious pretty quickly that it wasn’t easy, even with Ty using their upper body and largest tentacles.
“It’s fine there. Honestly, I usually sit in the water anyway.”
Ty stopped struggling. “But you said you do not like wet clothing on your skin.”
“I don’t normally wear clothes.” Eric felt a blush creeping. “I mean, when I’m alone.”
“I do not require you to cover yourself. I enjoy seeing your body.”
After the night he’d had, Eric’s body was keen to be seen. Did he dare? It would be nicer not have to raise their voices to talk while Ty bobbed around in the water, and Eric primly stayed on shore. And since Ty wasn’t embarrassed by Eric’s carnal reactions, why should Eric be ashamed?
He took off his t-shirt and dropped his shorts and briefs before wading into the water. It was warm and perfect against his skin as he sank into it up to his chest before his bare butt met the chair’s seat. Ty watched him, smiling.
Eric cleared his throat. “So, um, I was thinking that maybe we should test some things.”
“What do you wish to test?” Ty floated closer, some of their tentacles brushing against Eric’s leg.
“Well, the elixir mostly. Will it work as my only source of nutrition? How will I react to it? That sort of thing.”
“Because I have no memories of human hosts,” Ty said, nodding. “Yes, experimentation does sound necessary. What quantity will sustain you? Will you be able to ask for more, or must I learn the signs of your needs?”
Eric sat up. “Exactly what I was thinking, too. So, I didn’t have anything to eat or drink yet today and thought maybe I could have some of the elixir instead.”
“Oh, of course. Excellent idea.”
Ty raised one of those longer tentacles up out of the water and presented it to Eric sucker-side up. After a moment, the center began to fill with what looked like semi-set green gelatin. Not the most appetizing color or consistency, but it smelled like a sweet fruit. Eric dipped a fingertip in it and discovered it tasted like a generic fruit-flavored candy.
“Should I just…” Eric cupped the underside of Ty’s tentacle and mimicked drinking from it.
Ty nodded. “Go ahead.”
Eric slurped the elixir up and quickly discovered it had an alcoholic element to it because it warmed him from the inside as he swallowed it down. Oh, and he was getting a bit of a buzz, too. He chuckled as he sat back. “That was fast.”
“Do you feel an effect?” Ty came closer, some of their tentacles anchoring them to Eric’s left leg. “Good or bad?”
“Good. Definite
ly good.” He groaned and closed his eyes. “It’s like all the good parts of being drunk.”
“You appear very comfortable and receptive.”
“Receptive?”
“I do not wish for you to feel embarrassed.”
Eric opened his eyes and saw Ty pointedly glance downward. Eric didn’t look because, yeah, he was definitely feeling receptive. He covered his cock, but oh, did that not go as planned. Just that much touch had him gasping in pleasure. When he curled his fist around his cock without even thinking about it, he moaned and spread his legs.
“May I assist you?”
Eric went still and opened his eyes. Ty watched him earnestly.
“I’m sorry,” Eric said, but he couldn’t quite make himself let go of his cock. “Oh, god…” He wanted to stroke and make himself come so badly.
“Do not apologize, Eric. Remember, I do not find this embarrassing. I…I wish to participate with you.” They slid cool hands up Eric’s thighs. “May I pleasure you?”
Eric didn’t hesitate to nod. Didn’t even think about saying no or walking away. And when Ty’s hand covered Eric’s around his cock, it was easy to let go this time, to let Ty stroke him.
Everything felt heightened, like he could feel each molecule of salty warm water with every cell of his body. The slow stroke of Ty’s hand on his cock was almost too much and yet not enough. He thrust his hips, balls bobbing in the water, and nearly lost it when Ty’s other hand and maybe even all of their tentacles started to caress and fondle every bit of Eric that they could reach.
Eric couldn’t quite speak, but he kept trying, begging for Ty to keep going, to never stop. And each time Eric managed to open his eyes, Ty looked enthralled as they watched themself touch him. When Ty licked their full blue lips, Eric wanted nothing more than to kiss them, suck them, but that was when his orgasm came screaming up on him. His back arched, he gave a yell that came from his soul, and the whole ocean exploded around him.
When Eric next opened his eyes, he realized he was curled in Ty’s arms and sitting on some of their tentacles as if he was on their lap. “What happened?” he whispered.