Chapter 5
Marisol
Iwant to be clear about something: I had thought this through.
That morning on the dock, while Maro untied the rope and I stepped carefully into a boat that could charitably be described as cozy, I had run the full process.
You are getting in a small boat with a kraken to look at sea caves.
You have decided this is fine. You are doing it. I arrived at yes. I got in the boat.
What I had failed to adequately prepare for was the boat.
It was small. I want to be specific about how small: when he sat down across from me and picked up the oars, his knees were approximately six inches from mine.
He rowed and his arms came forward, came back, and I was directly across from all of it in a boat the size of a large dining table with nowhere to look that wasn't him.
The cliff face was on our left. I was looking at the cliff face. The cliff face was doing its very best.
The thing was, he was beautiful. In the direct sun, on the water, with his locs wet and pushed back and his hands easy on the oars and his tentacles resting at his lower back, visible above the waistband of his board shorts, he was the most beautiful thing I had ever been six inches away from, and I was doing an exceptional job of pretending to find the cliff very interesting.
"Twenty minutes," he said, reading the water. "Along the face and in through the arch."
"Great," I said. "Twenty minutes. Good."
He rowed.
I looked at the water instead, and that was when I saw the shadow.
Moving under us. Keeping pace with the boat — large in the way that the deep end of a pool was large, in the way that looking down from a great height was large.
Below the surface, through the clear green water, I could see the shadow of tentacles.
Many of them, moving in slow easy curls, dark and vast and entirely unhurried. The rest of him. What he actually was.
My body's response to this information was: yes, and?
I looked at the shadow — at the slow deliberate beauty of it, moving with us through the clear water, enormous and entirely at ease — and I felt something I was going to go ahead and name as fascination, which was adjacent to several other things, which I was also filing for later.
The cliff's shadow fell over us, cool and sudden, and I looked up and there was the arch.
I had pictured sea caves. I had not pictured this.
The arch opened into something like a cathedral — thirty feet of volcanic ceiling overhead, the walls curved in and smoothed by centuries of water, the air close and still and smelling like salt and deep stone.
The sound in there was something I had never heard before: close and amplified in a specific way, so that the boat bumping the wall came back twice as loud and my own breathing felt like it belonged to someone right beside me.
The water glowed. The light was being let it out slowly, cold blue-green, and everywhere something moved through it the glow bloomed outward and faded.
I trailed my fingers over the side and the water lit up around my hand, a soft spreading pulse of cold light, and I moved them back and forth slowly just to watch it happen.
"Oh," I said.
"Yes," Maro said. He dove in from the side of the boat, letting out a sigh of relief in the salt water.
I looked at him and I looked at the water and then I looked at him again, and here was the thing: in this light he was different.
On the beach he was blue and large and extraordinary.
In here he was correct — the right color for the place, like the cave had been made with him in mind.
His tentacles had drifted out under the boat and I could see them below the surface in the phosphorescent dark, moving in slow easy curls, and below them the deeper shadow of the rest of him, vast and unhurried, and I felt the thing I felt looking at the ocean at night: something so much larger than me that my scale simply stopped being relevant.
It was, without any qualification, gorgeous.
"You're beautiful," I said. "The whole of you," I said, because I had said it and I wasn't taking it back. "Down there. I know you probably don't—" I stopped. Started again. "I'd guess most people don't say that."
He looked at the water, at the shape of himself moving in the depths, and then back at me.
Something in his expression was doing something I hadn't seen on him before.
Not vulnerable, exactly, he was too old and too deep for that word, but open in a way he usually kept very locked. "No," he said. "They do not."
"Well," I said. "It's true."
I leaned over the side to put my whole hand in the phosphorescent water, because I wanted to see what it looked like around my full hand.
The boat tipped. His hands caught me at the waist — both hands, and then the tentacle, one curling warm around me from behind, much warmer than his hands, and suddenly his face was very close and we were not moving.
"I wasn't going to fall," I said.
"You were," he said.
"Okay. Maybe a little."
He started to pull back.
But, something in me that had used up all its interest in responsible distance said no very clearly.
"Don't," I said.
He stopped.
"Don't," I said again, quieter. Not complicated. Just true.
He looked at me for one moment that had a great deal of weight in it. Then he pulled me in instead of back, and his mouth found mine, and he kissed me with everything he had.
He was unhurried in a way that had nothing to do with hesitation.
He had all the time in the world, and he intended to use every second of it.
I felt that promise in his hands—warm, certain, and possessive on my hips—moving with the patience of a creature that had decided to ruin me thoroughly and was going to enjoy cataloging exactly how he did it.
The tentacle at my waist held me completely. It took my full weight effortlessly, wrapping me in smooth, living heat that pulsed faintly against my skin, slightly tacky where the tip curled under my ribs like it wanted to feel my heartbeat from the inside.
His mouth found my throat, teeth grazing, tongue tasting. His hands shoved my shorts down and off, and then I was bare against him in the cool cave dark. He looked at me for one long, devouring moment, his eyes bleeding fully black.
"Marisol," he murmured, my name low and rough, like he was tasting it. "Already so wet. I can feel your pulse right here." The tip of a tentacle brushed feather-light over my slick folds, and I jerked in his hold.
The second tentacle slid warm and slick up my inner thigh. It moved slowly, deliberately, the thick length gliding over my skin until the smooth, tapered head parted me and dragged lazily upward, spreading my wetness.
I grabbed his shoulders, nails digging in. The sound I made echoed off the cave walls—filthy, needy.
He savored it. Then he did it again, slower this time, circling my swollen clit with the broad, slick head while he watched my face.
"Interesting," he said softly, almost clinical, but his voice was dark with hunger.
"That sound you make when I press here… your hips twitch before you can stop them.
And here—" He dragged the tip down to my entrance and pushed in just the smallest amount, stretching me open.
"Your cunt flutters. Like it’s trying to pull me deeper. Greedy little thing."
"Maro—" My voice cracked.
"More?" he asked, already knowing the answer.
"More," I gasped. "Please."
He gave me more.
The tentacle worked me open with devastating patience, thick and slick, curling and stroking every sensitive inch inside me while he studied me like a language only he could read. It found the spot that made my thighs shake and lingered there, rubbing firm, slow circles until I was panting.
"There it is," he whispered against my throat, voice laced with dark satisfaction.
"Your walls just clenched so hard around me.
You like it when I press up—exactly like this?
" He demonstrated, curling perfectly against that spot, and my moan came out broken and loud.
"Yes. That one. Your breathing changes. Your nipples get even harder. I’m keeping note of all of it, Marisol. "
A third tentacle, thinner and slicker, slid back between my cheeks and circled my tightest hole with slow, deliberate teasing strokes.
The smooth tip pressed lightly against the rim, not pushing in, just rubbing in warm, slippery circles while he watched my face.
"And this," he murmured, voice dropping lower, "makes your cunt squeeze even harder around me. So sensitive everywhere."
I was suspended in his hold, weightless, completely supported while he learned me. His hands roamed my breasts, pinching and rolling my nipples in time with the slow thrusts of the tentacle fucking into me. Another tentacle tip kept teasing my clit in tight, slick spirals.
The one at my waist tilted me back further, opening me wider for him.
"Look at you," he murmured, almost reverent. "Spread open, dripping down my tentacle. Every time I push deeper your cunt makes the wettest little sounds. You hear that?" He thrust in a little harder, letting the obscene, slick noise echo. "That’s you. Soaking me because you need to be full."
Both tentacles worked me now—the thick, relentless fullness stroking deep inside while the other tormented my clit—and I was making sounds that weren’t words anymore.
Every gasp and whimper fed him. His tentacles responded in real time, pulsing thicker when I clenched, tightening their grip when I cried out, easing only when my breath hitched too sharply.
"Maro," I managed, voice wrecked.
"Yes," he growled, mouth at my throat. "I have you. And you’re close already. Your thighs are trembling. Your pulse is racing right against my tongue. Come for me, Marisol. Let me feel exactly how hard this pretty cunt can squeeze when you fall apart."
He said my name when I came as my body locked down around the thick tentacle buried inside me.
The orgasm crashed through me in heavy, blinding waves, and he held me through every pulse and flutter, still moving, still studying, still murmuring soft, filthy observations against my skin about how beautifully I came for him.
When I finally went boneless, trembling and fluttering around him, the ink had bloomed everywhere—dark blue mapping my stomach, breasts, thighs, and wrists like living proof of where he’d claimed me. His own chest and shoulders had gone deep indigo.
I traced a shifting line of it with shaky fingers and he shuddered, pressing his face into my hair with a low groan. One tentacle kept lazily stroking over my oversensitive clit, gentle but relentless.
He pulled back just enough to look at me—flushed, dripping, covered in his marks, still impaled and twitching.
"Hi," I whispered, hoarse.
The sound he made was almost a laugh. "Hello, Marisol." His eyes flicked down to where we were still joined, then back to my face. "You’re still clenching. After all that… you want more already?"
"Maro."
"Yes," he said, and his mouth found the curve of my shoulder as another slick tentacle slid teasingly up my thigh, already analyzing exactly how I’d react to the next touch.
We stayed until the light at the entrance turned gold.
He went still in a specific way that meant now and we put ourselves back together in the manner of two people who were not embarrassed but who had a twenty-minute row between them and the dock and would like to be able to look at each other for it.
I could look at him. I checked. Yes. He looked back the same way.
The row out was different from the row in — quieter, in the way things were quiet after something real happened, the specific quality of a silence that had been earned.
The water outside the arch was the impossible blue again, afternoon on everything.
The shadow of him was still below the surface.
I watched it and didn't look away and he saw me watching and didn't pull it back.
We tied up at the dock and I stood and he was right there, one hand on the boat, looking up at me.
I looked at the cove.
I pressed two fingers to the ink still visible on the inside of my wrist. They were dark blue, soft at the edges, already beginning the slow fade, and I held them there.
Okay, I thought. So that happened. That was a thing that had happened and it was going to keep being a thing, and I had four more days on this island and I was not going to spend a single minute of them pretending I was a person who could walk away from this.
I was not walking away from this.
I was staying right here.