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Standing at the edge of the dock, I can’t bring myself to step from the dirt onto the wood. I stare at the small houseboat, a ramshackle of dull wood and rusting metal at the other end–my destination. My destiny, should I choose it. That grody place holds the answers to the questions that have been racking my brain.

A few weeks ago, when my girlfriend Nina and I were leaving a restaurant after a dinner date, the bartender said hi to her by name. Caught by surprise, I asked her how he knew her. I don’t think I sounded accusatory or judgmental, I was merely curious.

“He’s just an ex,” she said.

My adorable girlfriend’s ex is a tentacle monster. The shock was immediate but lingered for days. She dated him. Probably slept with him. A. Tentacle. Monster.

I didn’t consider myself a bigot, but clearly I had some unresolved bias to contend with. The assumptions baked into society that I was exposed to over time were rising to the surface, demanding my attention. I didn’t want to feel the sort of ugliness that I did, but I couldn’t get over the idea of Nina… with him.

I told myself that she is a good person and a good judge of character, which should say something about tentacle-havers, or at least about him. Frankly, that wasn’t much of an improvement in my perspective.

I wanted to know more. I needed to understand. And finally, days later, I asked her what happened with them.

“With who?”

“The… the bartender.”

“Oh. Eoghan? Uh…” Nina scrunched her face, looked around, and shrugged. “We wanted different things, I guess. It was a long time ago.”

I could only assume it was a part of the wild streak in her past that she’d mentioned once or twice. Maybe a tentacled partner was part of that exploration–that would make sense–and better to call him an ex than “a guy I fucked this one time in college”.

“We dated for like 8 months, but he was gone a lot–at sea. That was part of the problem.”

Eight months. We had only been together for five and living together for two. Eight sounded serious and not at all like an impulsive hookup or holiday fling.

“Why are you so curious about him?”

“I don’t know. It just surprised me. I’m trying to get my head around it.”

“Around what, exactly?”

Many things, honestly. All of it, really. I was dangerously close to revealing the worst of my complicated feelings, that I didn’t know she was into that, them, or any other phrasing that would reek of judgment and make us both cringe. I tried to remain vague.

“I’m just curious how that worked.”

Her eyes narrowed. Judging. “Don’t be stupid. It worked how it worked. It just does.”

I let it go, having reached my limit for vulnerability and awkwardness, but a more specific question gnawed at me. I’m nothing if not a curious person, which I felt was my only lifeline out of my narrow perspective. Without her to indulge me with answers, I tried to find them myself.

Later, when I was alone, I pulled out my laptop for a search. The yellow MonsterHub logo flashed on my screen. Thumbnails led to videos, and each of those to another video, but no more than a few minutes could have passed before I heard Nina.

“GRRROOOSSSS!”

“I… I was curious…”

“That stuff is awful.”

“But… uh… didn’t you… uh… with Eoghan…?”

“Yeah. Tentacle sex is beautiful. Sensual.” She seemed to lose herself in memory for the briefest of moments before reclaiming her outrage. “But this? This is fetishizing, turning it into a side-show of brutality for humans to gawk and point at. It’s disgusting.”

I understood where she was coming from, and she heard me out. I agreed that the spectacle of those videos only made me feel worse, explaining to her that I just wanted to understand the mechanics of it and that I still didn’t understand the appeal of tentacles in the first place.

I could have written it off as one of many things that wasn’t for me, but my brain simply couldn’t stop thinking about it, no matter how much I tried. It bothers me on a deep level when I’m not able to understand things like this, when I’m not able to build the mental schema for something in the world.

I didn’t tell Nina, fearing that bringing it up again would thin the ice further. It seemed like she forgot I had even asked, or was trying to.

Then she hit me with an offer. From Eoghan.

He-of-many-tentacles would let me watch him engage in the sensual art of tentacle sex. As long as that sex was with her.

”As a proof of good faith,” Nina told me.

That crusty boat didn’t just hold my answers. It held Nina. And him too.

The boat is stuffy and cramped. Dimly lit, with the faintest sway from the shallow waters.

It strikes me how comfortable she looks sitting on his bunk. Next to her, he rests in an egg-shaped chair that hangs from the ceiling. Aside from his aquarian face and the fact that his hands and feet are slimy, tapered nubs, his form seems relatively human under his clothes.

My seat is on the other side, though only a few feet away, on a sturdy table. I nervously hold the bottle of beer he handed me when I came onboard.

She promised nothing would happen until I arrived, that they’d simply “catch up” and “settle in” while they waited for me. But his “hand” is already on her knee. If that’s what it takes to get my answers, to understand the appeal and how it all works, to see what she wants to show me, so be it.

I’m still consciously avoiding any thought about her motives, but the fact was that this was all her doing. Any convincing she may have needed certainly didn’t come from me.

He is sickeningly gracious, thanking me for the opportunity and telling me how wonderful Nina is. As if I don’t know. But maybe he knows better-still. Eight. Months.

His “hand” slides further up her jeans, to her thigh then her waist. His arm unfurls from his shirt to reach as it snakes under her shirt. I watch it advance and curl and twist over her belly, her tight pink tee stretching to accommodate. Nina giggles and flashes her eyes at him.

His other arm was already behind her, but comes to rest against her back. Her shirt tightens and I watch her bra slide over her tits. The band makes a clear mark through the thin tee, then her nipples do, though one is quickly eclipsed by him. Her eyes close and she sighs warmly as the shape of him moves beneath the fabric, coiling around her tit and stroking it.

I can see everything and nothing, and I’m unsure which is worse.

With an arm around her lower back and the other up her shirt– and another on her shoulder with its tip grazing her neck– and another one on her thigh… wait. I trace all four back to the arm-holes of his shirt and wonder how many more he is hiding. They all work in concert, writhing, carrying her shirt over her head.

The sight of her topless is arousing of course, as long as I don’t think too much about the throbbing, glistening appendages groping her from waist to neck. She turns her head, leaning toward the tip stroking her jaw, and kisses it. Unlike how you’d kiss a forehead, or even a dick as a precursor to a blowjob; it’s slow and wet and sloppy, the tentacle curling and twisting against her lips, her tongue sliding along it, dancing with its tip. She sucks it a little and then it slides out over her curling tongue.

I feel like I’m starting to understand it, but lose it when he stands to strip.

As he did with her, his form oscillates in waves that push his shirt and pants off at the same time. Then I realize just how different he is–barely more than a head and small torso, with the bulk of his human form emulated by yet-more tentacles packed together in his clothes. They wriggle apart, half of them supporting him in his chair while the rest descend on Nina. He lifts her off the bunk and tentacles retreat with her jeans and lacy blue thong.

She looks at me, trying to decipher my reaction, my emotional state–an impossible task considering I can’t begin to decide that myself. I know I could stop this–so could she–but neither of us wants to.

She pulls one of the tentacles under her, squatting on the bed as he lets her down. I think it’s inside her, but it’s hard to tell with the shadows. The others snake around her, wrapping, grabbing every part of her naked body. Tips flick her most sensitive bits while their bodies throb against her. When one moves, bright red welts remain in its wake.

I can only see the whites of her eyes, and slivers at that, when her low moans start.

She begins bouncing on the one that is definitely inside her. It glimmers and swells in response. Soon he lifts her by the waist and her feet dangle limply as he pumps her up and down on himself. Her moans and the wet sounds of his penetration build while the tentacle continues to fatten to a worrying girth.

The tip she’s been kissing is now lost in her mouth, leaving a build-up of ooze across her lips. I swear I can see a bulge moving in her throat, which is something I never imagined she could handle, much less enjoy. Her moans are muffled by the mass, but I hear something new. Deep, resonating grunts. The kind that you can neither create nor suppress. The ones that emanate from a punch to the gut that displaces all the air from inside you.

The roving swell in her belly is undoubtedly the probing end of the girthy tentacle pumping her from underneath, now so wide it fills the entire space between her splayed thighs. If the visual is terrifying, the thought is worse. So much worse. No matter how much she appears to be loving it.

“Fuuuuuuck. Harder! STUFF ME!” she exclaims, gasping for breath.

I’ve never heard her like that either. Far beyond needy, she sounds ravenous. Insatiable.

My stomach drops. My mouth is dry. I sip my beer and my eyes blink like they’re a reset button. Yet, I can’t look away. I can’t even choose what I’m looking at, the scene owns my gaze. Every pump, every throb, every moan or grunt. The whimpers and gasps. The welts that will last for days and the slime cascading in slow motion down her body into the obscene pool below her.

The unrepentant pleasure is staggering. Staggering also is the realization that not only have I been cucked by a tentacle monster–I agreed to it!

Everything is a blur as he spins her onto her knees, effectively riding her as all his tentacles sprawl across her while he looks down from above. The care he took to not block my view of how wide he had stretched her pussy feels like an attack. Worse still, the corner behind the bunk acts as an echo chamber for her every euphoric utterance.

He teases her asshole with the tip of a tentacle and I tell myself she’d never, only to listen to her beg for it in no uncertain terms while his tentacles slap the backs of her thighs until she’s red from waist to knees.

“Fuck that tight little ass for me. Stretch it out and fill it!”

I grapple with the fact that I’ve never seen this side of her. Not even a whisper of it. The worst part is that I am into it; not just the idea of her being this way, but the act of it, even though it’s not with me.

My heart races and I feel the tightness of my pants, but suspense and dread take over when his tentacles tighten and her skin goes white around them. Her body is pressed flat to the bunk and I can hear him breathing. Throbbing.

He’s still buried in one hole, stretched disturbingly wide, and I hear him slither back into her mouth. She gulps around him, one last moan slipping out before his girth plugs her throat.

I watch her toes curl, soles wrinkle, when his tickling of her final hole turns to penetration. The noise that leaves her body is otherworldly and only gains intensity with each sucker that disappears inside her. With each swell of his appendage. With every wave and ripple he sends down it, deep into her body.

All three tentacles pump her in perfect sequence. One plunging, one retreating, and one testing just how far she can stretch, how much she can hold. It sounds like churning slush and smells like the wettest, saltiest sex you could imagine. His slime builds on her skin, sliding off her in thick globs, and her holes scrape more from his skin with every deepening thrust.

He leaves her mouth with a slick pop and we’re graced with the sound of moans and shrieks until she whimpers and begs him to fill her back up.

An inhuman noise builds. A buzz that’s loud enough to shake the room. His tentacles begin to vibrate and twitch. His tentacles press deeper, in unison now. The sounds of his suckers pushing through taut holes prick my ears and make my hair stand on end. I hold my breath without even realizing it.

And then everything stops. A split second of silence. Peace.

Fluid spurts from his every entrypoint, spraying the room with a mist of jelly.

It splashes against me and I don’t even react, I’m so numb.

I hear the deepest of moans echo back at me from her mouth. The kind that takes every muscle fiber to create. It tells me all I need to know about her experience today. And undoubtedly many from her past.

Eight. Months. Of THIS. It’s a wonder she survived.

His tentacles shrink and slowly begin to retreat.

She slumps to the bed. Flat and silent.

He pets her with several of his tips while the rest hang flaccid across her body. He coos like a dove, only much louder.

“All yours,” Eoghan says, snapping me back to reality.

I’ve been staring at her since he finished, looking at the creamy ring of fluids that frames her gaped pussy and wondering how I could ever fill it again. Even her asshole, that cute little pucker that she’s always shy about me seeing, hangs open like an imposing void. The noises she made echo in my head. How could I go back to the timid ones she makes with me after hearing the ones he summoned from her?

This is my greatest fear. Inferiority.

It’s also my answer. It’s the root of that nagging bias. The assumptions, that uncomfortable prejudice all come back to this fear.

“It’s your turn, but if you aren’t going to fuck her, then you should probably leave,” he says with a chuckle.

“Come here, babe,” she pleads. She’s exhausted and sounds drunk, but her tone is unusually needy. I’m not sure I’ve ever heard her sound desperate, but that’s exactly how she sounds.

Eoghan retreats entirely into his egg, but I can still see the iridescence of his eyes and skin.

In two steps, I’m by Nina’s side, kneeling on the bunk. I bend down to kiss her, tasting the sea and feeling the cold slime on her lips. My hands move over her jelly-slicked skin, bumping over the red rings he left all over.

“Did you like it, babe? Was I good for you?” she asks, her implication threatening yet-more assumptions I made long ago.

“It was… enlightening. You were as sexy as ever. Thank you.” The words are bitter in my mouth. The truth often is.

She smiles wide and looks up at me with cum-drunk eyes. “I wanna feel you.”

“I’m right here,” I say, wondering if she’s that burned out or if it has to do with the thick coating of jelly.

“No, silly. Inside me.”

It makes no sense to me. How could she have any need left? And how was I supposed to compete with what she’d just had? The sincerity in her face told me I was missing something once again.

Rolling her onto her back, I kiss her as I take my pants down. When I slide into her, I’m surprised how normal it feels. Sure, her skin is covered in slime and cool to the touch, but inside, she feels as good as ever. Her heat, the ridges lining her walls. The soft moan she lets out sounds like our morning sex.

“I can’t believe you have anything left,” I say.

“Always, for you.”

Her eyes flutter as I press deeper. Her arms dangle from my neck, legs circling mine, she’s tired but her presence feels intense. I feel our connection. I forget all about the tentacled man watching from over my shoulder. It’s just the two of us in the belly of this boat.

Our bodies slide over each other as I slowly thrust. The slime makes my skin tingle, an echo of his touch on her body. The sight and sound of him pleasing her floods my senses like I was part of it too. I can feel him and hear her and it’s overwhelming but not unwelcome.

Nina’s hips roll underneath me. I feel her whole self clench tightly around me. Arms and legs both, and every ripple of her walls too. She lets out of the loudest moan I’ve ever heard. Where she found the energy, I’ll never know. Everywhere on my body, I can feel her. Every part of hers grazing, rubbing, squeezing every part of me.

I realize that must be what it is, being with a tentacled lover–a dominating feeling that quickly burns your senses. It traces my nerves and sets fire to my core, building until it can’t anymore. I’m too full. And I burst. I pump desperately, frantically, as I feel the heat flow out of me and into her.

She moans again, more softly, a whisper humming against my neck. I go weak, kiss her neck and nuzzle it. I lose myself there.

Eoghan’s patience wanes. “Thank you for the show.”

I’m not sure if he’s thanking me or prompting me to thank him, so I respond in kind. “Uh, you too.”

With a chuckle, he tells me, “Anytime.”

And I wonder if he means it and how much.