Please help me!his mind cried out in desperation to whatever higher force might be listening.I don’t want to die! Please help me!
A sudden pressure seized Graham's body—wet, muscular, and impossibly strong—as something massive coiled around his torso like a living rope and propelled him upward. The lake water streaked past his face, moonlight fracturing through the churning surface before his head broke into the night air. Whatever had a hold of him kept its vice-like grip—a slick, rubbery embrace that felt both alien and strangely warm against his chilled skin. He coughed up water in violent spasms, his throat raw and burning while his chest strained against the constriction, desperate to pull oxygen into his waterlogged lungs.
What is this—what the hell is happening?!
The tentacle—slick and cool—loosened slightly, slithering around his body with undulating precision. Hundreds of small, fleshy suctioning mouths pulsed against him, leaving circular marks as they tasted the flesh of his back and stomach where his soaked shirt had ridden up. His abdomen quivered beneath the alien sensation, goosebumps erupting across his skin even as his panic escalated. Other tentacles of various sizes—some as thin as fingers, others as thick as his wrist—slid around his legs and worked their way inside his clinging pant legs, their gelatinous surfaces tickling his calves and shins with an almost curious gentleness and electric intimacy, burrowing further upward to his thighs with determined, probing curiosity.
“What…” Graham kicked his legs against the slick, muscular bindings—then suddenly went still, his chest tight as a drum, throat scraped raw from lake water. His wet jeans clung to him like a second skin, the denim heavy and restricting. The writhing tendrils filled his pant legs, their gelatinous surfaces plucking at his calf muscles like dozens of tiny, hungry mouths. He gasped,the air burning his throat, then held his breath until his lungs ached. Behind his clamped eyelids, kaleidoscopic patterns of red and black swirled as the invasive intruders slithered with determined purpose along his inner thighs, their cool, viscous secretions leaving trails of tingling warmth against his flesh.
A single explorer—no thicker than his pinky finger but impossibly strong—wriggled under the elastic leg band of his soaked cotton underwear and nudged the wrinkled skin of his ball sack with what felt like curious intent. Graham flinched, his alcohol-muddled mind hazy and not quite computing the alien sensation. This had to be a dream, he thought, as the tendril circled his testicles with methodical precision. Maybe he was already drowning, and this bizarre hallucination was just his oxygen-starved brain short-circuiting in its final moments.
The lone tendril slithered all around his dick like a living ribbon of warm silk, then coiled around the head and squeezed—not hard enough to be painful, but with a pulsing rhythm that sent electric jolts of pleasure up his spine. Graham shuddered, his mouth ajar in a silent gasp as his eyes slowly opened, head tilting back against the cool surface of the lake. The night sky spread above him, an endless canvas of midnight blue speckled with distant stars that blurred and sharpened with each throb of his erratic pulse.
His heart quivered in his chest while the tiny tentacle inside his shorts—slick and incredibly soft—pulsated around the crown of his cock, leaving trails of tingling warmth wherever it touched. To his shock and dismay, blood rushed southward, his flesh stiffening against the creature's embrace. Small shivers cascaded through his body like falling dominoes, fresh goosebumps rising on his alcohol-warmed skin as he squeezed his eyes shut, whispering to himself that this was just a dream—just a strange, intoxicated dream—the mantra “just go with it” repeating in his saturated mind.
A soft moan rolled up his throat, vibrating against his ribs like distant thunder. His cock throbbed with each rapid heartbeat, flushed and swollen, as the tendril began to flex around the engorged purple head—squeezing with gentle precision, releasing just enough to make him ache for more, then squeezing again in a hypnotic rhythm. The creature's slippery surface excreted a gelatinous lubricant that felt warm and electric against his feverish skin, like liquid static dancing across every nerve ending.
When the tapered tip of the tentacle slid up his sensitive piss slit, Graham's entire body jerked as if touched by a live wire, his toes curling inside his shoes. A desperate, animal whimper escaped from somewhere deep in his chest as it began to massage the frenulum with maddening delicacy, dipping just millimeters into the urethral opening before retreating, then pressing forward again, each intrusion slightly deeper than the last. His shaft began to pulse beneath the thin fabric of his soaked shorts, the head swelling impossibly larger as clear, viscous precum oozed from him, mingling with the creature’s secretions. The tendril quivered in apparent delight, its tip wriggling against his weeping dick hole with an almost reverent hunger, undulating as if savoring each salty drop it coaxed from his body.
Graham's throat constricted around a single, ragged“Fuck...”as his abdomen tightened into a washboard of tension. His scrotum drew up painfully close to his body, heavy and aching. The night air kissed his exposed neck as he tilted his head back, mouth falling open, while stars blurred above him, swimming in his vision like scattered diamonds. This was beyond any dream his subconscious had ever conjured—terrifying yet intoxicatingly erotic. The alcohol haze cushioned his mind from examining what this might reveal about his deepest desires. All that existed was the electric current racing through his veins,and the desperate, primal need for release that consumed every cell in his body.
His little dream visitor pulsated against his most sensitive flesh, each squeeze sending shockwaves of bliss that bordered on agony, each pulse of pleasure more intense than the last. His toes curled tighter inside his sodden shoes as hot, insistent pressure built at the base of his spine.
“Weirdest… fucking… dream,” Graham slurred through clenched teeth as his hips bucked upward involuntarily. His vision whited out at the edges as hot ropes of cum erupted from him, soaking through his clinging shorts in rhythmic pulses that seemed to drain his very life force, the warm stickiness mixing in obscene harmony with lake water and the creature's excretions.
4
Graham regained consciousnessas sunlight burned his eyelids. He squinted into a pale blue emptiness above him, his mind struggling to process: sky, not ceiling. A rigid surface dug into his spine. The gentle rocking underneath finally registered—he was lying in the rowboat, its hull partially dragged onto the lakeshore.
The moment Graham leaned forward, a blinding pain stabbed through his head like someone had driven an ice pick between his eyes. His vision swam, stomach heaving as bile surged up his throat. He managed to drag himself to the edge of the boat before a violent stream of sour beer and lake water erupted from him, splattering onto the pebbled shore in a steaming puddle. He hung there, knuckles white against the weathered gunwale, chest heaving as his stomach contracted, each spasm producing nothing but thin strings of saliva that dangled from his clammy lips. He coughed wetly, the sound echoing across the still water, then spat a final glob of bitterness and wiped his mouth with the back of a trembling hand.
Graham's stomach heaved. “I'm never drinking again,” he mumbled, the words scraping his cotton-dry throat as he crawled awkwardly from the boat. His palms pressed into the damp pebbles, sharp edges digging into his flesh as he collapsed onto his hands and knees. The world tilted and spun, each throb behind his temples keeping time with his racing pulse. Sunlight stabbed his bloodshot eyes, intensifying the pounding againsthis skull. He wondered if he would have to crawl the entire fifty yards up to the cabin, because walking seemed as impossible as scaling Everest right now. Graham raised his head as he sat back on his heels, swaying like a sapling in a breeze, his eyes drawn to the lake—a mirror of flawless blue glass, calm and serene, not a single ripple disturbing its innocent surface.
His memory of last night flickered like a damaged film reel—bright flashes punctuated by periods of darkness. He recalled the wooden oars creaking against the rowlocks as he paddled out onto the glassy lake, the way his grandfather's ashes had billowed like a pale cloud beneath the water's surface, and the bitter alcohol sliding down his throat, bottle after bottle, until the stars blurred overhead.
Typically, his limit was two beers, their bitter foam leaving a film on his tongue that he secretly hated; he'd never been much of a drinker, even when hanging out with friends who had been sneaking warm, skunky cans from their fathers' refrigerators since middle school. By eighteen, they could pound six-packs without flinching while Graham nursed a single bottle, pretending to enjoy the acrid taste that made his nose wrinkle involuntarily. Yet he’d forced it down anyway, fingers white-knuckled around red Solo cups at parties, desperate to be seen as “one of the guys.”
The excessive drinking last night made more sense to him now; the alcohol had been a warm blanket thrown over the rawness of his grief. Each bitter swallow had temporarily filled the emptiness with liquid courage, dulling the edges of a pain too deep to face sober. “Smooth move, dumbass,” he mumbled, pressing his fingertips against eyelids that felt like they'd been scrubbed with sandpaper. His skull throbbed with each heartbeat, a relentless hammer striking an anvil directly behind his temples. “You almost drowned.”
He remembered falling into the water—the violent bubbling around his ears as he plunged beneath the surface—but couldn't recall how it happened, other than him being stupidly, recklessly drunk.
Something was in the water.
Graham pressed his palm against his throbbing temple, fingers digging into his scalp as he racked his brain for a coherent memory. The fragments that surfaced were kaleidoscopic flashes of slick movement beneath the water's surface, a sensation of being enveloped, held. But these images tangled with the dream's visceral details until he couldn't separate reality from fantasy. He shivered as a remnant of the eroticism lingered in his system like an electric current, a phantom touch that made his groin tighten involuntarily, disturbing him in ways he wasn't ready to examine.
Where the hell had that dream come from? Never in his life had he dreamed of getting jerked off by a…
Graham shook his head, the motion sending daggers of pain ricocheting inside his skull. He cleared his throat, tasting bile and lake water. His bloodshot eyes fixed on the glassy surface of the lake, searching for any ripple, any sign of disturbance. The Lochlan book with its faded illustrations of tentacled creatures—that had to be it. Those images, swimming in a belly full of cheap beer, had birthed the dream. Nothing more. Not some twisted desire he'd been harboring all along. Graham's jaw clenched as he refused to acknowledge how his body still hummed with the aftershocks of what was, undeniably, the most intensewet dreamhe'd ever experienced. With trembling arms, he pushed himself up from the pebbled shore, his soaked clothes clinging uncomfortably to his skin.
The book.He turned back to the boat; it wasn’t there.
The rowboat had flipped over in the lake.
No…
Graham's throat tightened when he saw the storybook lying open at the water's edge, its once-vibrant pages now swollen and bleeding watercolors onto the pebbles. “Fuck...” He stumbled forward, the world tilting with each step, and collapsed to his knees beside it. His trembling fingers lifted the sodden mass, paper pulp falling apart at his touch. Water dripped between his fingers as the binding tore, releasing a damp smell of ruined ink and memories. “No... no...goddammit.”His head drooped, bile rising in his throat as he squeezed his eyes shut against the hot tears threatening to spill. The weight of the book felt impossibly heavy in his hands.Why the fuck did you take it out on the water?
He sat hunched over, the ruined storybook pressed against his thighs, its waterlogged pages seeping color onto his jeans. His throat knotted as he traced the faded illustration with one finger. This had been his favorite Lochlan story… his grandfather’s, too. Now it was dissolving between his fingers, another piece of his grandpa slipping away.
