Devilfish Annotated Read-Along · Chapter 24
Chapter Twenty-Four
Elliot leaned forward and touched Declan’s lips with his own. Declan immediately parted his and ran the tip of his tongue along the seam of Elliot’s lips. Elliot opened for Declan and then they were kissing, Elliot desperate to devour Declan. Declan gave as much as Elliot took, holding nothing back.
Elliot’s hands were in Declan’s hair, tugging him closer but still meeting only at their lips and tongues. Declan slid his arms around Elliot’s back, then stroked slowly down, splaying his knees wide and pulling Elliot’s body closer. His hands were firm as he slid them down the small of Elliot’s back, tugging Elliot’s lower body insistently between his knees. Elliot held his breath as Declan’s hands finally slipped past the line where his ass used to be.
“You’re so soft,” Declan murmured against Elliot’s lips. “Like velvet.”End Notes · 1I went back and forth on this line for a while, because "soft" is probably not the word most people reach for when they imagine touching an octopus. But I’ve read descriptions of people who have touched an octopus (sadly, I haven’t yet had the chance to myself) and they have described it as soft. An octopus doesn’t have a shell, or scales, or any bones underneath its skin, just muscle arranged in three directions at once. However, that same skin can change its texture in less a second, via its papillae—tiny muscular bumps they can raise and flatten to go from smooth to spiky and back, which is how they can disappear against coral one moment and sand the next. So Elliot's skin is velvet right now because Elliot is calm. Mostly.
Also, note what Declan does here—leading with touch instead of sight. He knows Elliot won't survive being looked at yet. He asks to see him only after he's already told him he's lovely.All end notes → His hands swept along Elliot’s new limbs, squeezing small handfuls and smoothing over every inch he could reach. “Let me see, Elliot, please,” Declan whispered.
Elliot flushed hot with shame and buried his face in Declan’s neck. His new skin tingled with every stroke of Declan’s hands, but it was another thing entirely to let Declan look at him while he was this way. As if he could read Elliot’s hesitation, Declan ran one hand up Elliot’s back, cupped the back of his head gently to keep it tucked against his neck, and slid the other hand underneath Elliot. He scooped Elliot’s lower half up enough to get his knees under and settled him on Declan’s lap.
“Christ, Declan, how can you want me like this?”
Declan dropped his hand in the center of Elliot’s lap, squirmed it between two thick tentacles, and ran it firmly down the middle tentacle tucked in between them. Elliot arched against Declan’s other arm holding him and moaned out loud, sudden heat pooling in his center. “Yeah,” Declan murmured, a smug smile audible in his voice. “I thought that one was your cock.” Elliot peeked through his own wet lashes at Declan’s hand sliding up and down the tentacle. The muscle lengthened and thickened, turning a deep red, just like Elliot’s cock did when Declan jacked it.End Notes · 2An octopus changes color using chromatophores—sacs of pigment in the skin, each ringed by muscles that pull the sac open or let it snap shut. In a real octopus, it's pretty much instantaneous, and it's under direct neural control, which means an octopus's skin is closer to a display screen than to a complexion. They flush dark red when agitated or aroused and go pale when frightened.
Scientists think that octopuses are almost certainly colorblind, because they have only one visual pigment. So, one of the most spectacularly colored animals on earth puts on a show it probably can’t even see. Elliot is doing sort of the same thing here—the deep red is mostly for Declan's benefit, since Elliot has his eyes shut.All end notes →
Elliot closed his eyes again and stopped thinking about anything for a minute. When Declan’s hand stopped, still wrapped around the thickest part of it, Elliot was breathing heavy and so was Declan.
“How could I not want you like this?” Declan asked. He shifted position under Elliot, pressing his erection up into the webbing where Elliot’s tentacles met at the center.End Notes · 3More real octopus anatomy here—it's called the interbrachial web, a sheet of skin and muscle connecting the arms near their base, deepest at the center where they all meet. Octopuses use it as a net, ballooning it out over a rock and trapping whatever's underneath in a technique called web-over hunting. It's also, being thin skin over muscle with the arms' nerve supply running through it, an extremely sensitive piece of tissue.
This isn’t how octopuses have sex, but come on, it was an absolute no-brainer for a half-human, half-octopus shifter.All end notes →
“It’s unnatural,” whispered Elliot, trying to resist the kisses Declan was trailing along his jaw. Declan pulled back a little, then burst out laughing.
“Unnatural?” he spluttered. He caught sight of Elliot’s expression, which must have looked hurt, and stopped laughing. He cupped a wet hand under Elliot’s jaw, forcing Elliot to look at him. “Elliot, everything we’ve ever done together is considered unnatural. Not to mention illegal.”
Elliot had never given more than a passing thought to the sodomy laws applying to them. They were discreet, and Declan had surrounded himself with men who either shared his proclivities or didn’t care about them as long as he was a decent captain.
“This is hardly the same.” He shifted his gaze over Declan’s shoulder to the waterfall, still having trouble looking Declan in the eyes. He gestured at his tentacles drifting lazily under the water, without looking down at them. One was twining around Declan’s leg, like it had a mind of its own and was ignoring Elliot’s effort to keep them contained and under control.End Notes · 4Oh, it 100% does have a mind of its own. An octopus has around half a billion neurons—roughly the count of a dog—but only a third of them are in the central brain. The rest live in the arms, something like forty million per arm, arranged in nerve cords that can process information and generate movement without checking in with the head office, so to speak. An arm can locate food, identify it, and pass it along toward the mouth while the octopus's brain is occupied with something else entirely. Severed octopus arms will still react to stimulus and still reach.All end notes → If he couldn’t shift back, how would he live the rest of his life? How long would Declan stay with something like him?
Declan was silent for a minute. “Did you know Joey was originally named Josephine?” he asked, apropos of nothing that Elliot could see. “It was Nance’s mother’s name, you know, and she wanted to name her only child after her mother.”
Elliot shook his head. “Joey?” He didn’t know why Declan was bringing Joey up now, but he’d take the change of subject over the thought of being stuck like this the rest of his life. “Why would Nance name her son after her mother?”
He tried to imagine Declan’s first mate enduring the ribbing from the crew for having a woman’s name. Joey was smaller than most of the other men on the ship and with his beardless baby face and yellow-blond hair, he got plenty of guff from drunk sailors in taverns. Elliot felt his brain stall.
“Wait. You mean Joey’s a woman?”
“Joey is a man,” Declan said firmly. “He’s known he’s a man since he was small.”
“I don’t understand.”
“Joey’s never felt like a woman his whole life. Caused no end of strife between him and Nance, that’s for sure. When she arranged for him to go to some fancy ladies’ finishing school back East, he ran away from home. I was in port when he took off and promised Nance I’d keep an eye out for the kid.”End Notes · 5I didn’t set out to draw comparisons between a trans person and a half octopus shifter, I really didn’t. But by this point, I knew there was a reason behind Joey’s resistance to going home to Nance and it really was while I was writing this chapter that I discovered that Joey is trans. Trans people have always existed and trans men in the nineteenth-century American West are actually better documented than most people expect. There was a man named Charley Parkhurst, California stagecoach driver, called One-Eyed Charley, who drove the Santa Cruz routes for decades and appeared on a Santa Cruz poll list in 1868 (back before women had the right to vote, so to be on a poll list, he would have had to have been recognized as a man). When he died near Watsonville in December 1879, the neighbors preparing his body discovered he'd been assigned female at birth, and the story went national—the New York Times ran it in January 1880 under the headline "Thirty Years in Disguise." That's around eight years before this conversation. Declan probably would have heard about him.All end notes →
Declan shifted a bit underneath Elliot but clasped his arms tighter around Elliot’s waist when Elliot tried to move off his lap.
“We’d already passed the entrance to Juan de Fuca Strait before he popped out of my hold and begged me not to take him straight back home. I would have—I got no interest in being on the wrong end of Nance’s ire—but I had a rendezvous with Father to bring an opium shipment through the San Juan Islands, and the weather had already made us late for it. Lucky for me it was my ship he snuck aboard and not someone else’s, as he turned out to be one of my best men. Promoted him to first mate within the year and never had a better one.”
Declan shook his head, smiling slightly. “Caused quite a stir explaining things to Nance when we came back around, though. She nearly shot my own manhood off and threatened to never do business with me or Father again.”End Notes · 6Hence the apology piano.All end notes →
Elliot couldn’t see what Josephine or Joey or even Nance had to do with him. “Why are you telling me this?”
“I shouldn’t be,” Declan admitted. “It’s not my secret to tell, and I’ll thank you not to mention that I did to Joey, nor treat him any different now that you know. It took Nance longer than it should have to come around. She’s mellowed a bit in the last year, and they’re finally starting to rebuild their relationship.”
When Elliot still looked blankly at Declan, he sighed. “I’m telling you because what makes Joey a man is knowing deep down that he is one.End Notes · 7The word “transgender” is a 20th century word, so it doesn’t appear in these books. It doesn’t have to, because Declan doesn’t need that specific word to understand who Joey is.All end notes → Whatever he has under his drawers is his business and that of anyone he trusts to get close enough.”End Notes · 8This whole series turns on this theme: that a body is not a verdict, that the people who get to know yours are the ones you choose, and that being known is a thing you survive rather than a thing that destroys you. Elliot has spent twenty-four chapters certain that if anyone saw what he really was, it would end him. Declan hands him a man who has been living the opposite proposition on Elliot's own ship for two years.
Declan is also, quietly, telling Elliot something about himself: I am someone you trusted to get close enough, and look, here I am, still here.All end notes →
Declan stroked both hands along Elliot’s side and caressed the skin from his waist to where his tentacles began. “It’s the same for you, Elliot. You’re not less of a man because you’re occasionally shaped differently.”
Elliot snorted without any mirth behind it. “You’re not seriously comparing swapping a dress for a pair of trousers and living as a man to what’s happened to me,” he said. He couldn’t keep a note of bitterness from his voice. “At least Joey still has the two legs she was born with.”End Notes · 9Elliot. Dude. Read the room.All end notes →
“He,” Declan corrected, a steel note in his voice, the same tone Elliot had started thinking of as his captain’s voice, when he was displeased by something one of his crew had done.End Notes · 10This is the only time in the entire book Declan uses his captain's voice on Elliot, and I put it here on purpose. Everywhere else in this scene he's coaxing, joking, gentling. Here he doesn't negotiate at all. One syllable, no discussion.
I know some readers would rather Elliot had gotten there on his own, or never slipped in the first place. But Elliot is a wealthy, sheltered, deeply conventional man having the worst week of his life, and a version of him who instantly says the right thing isn't a person, it's a caricature. I wanted to show a man being corrected by someone who loves him, taking the correction, and doing better.All end notes → “And no, I’m not saying that what’s happening to you is the same as what Joey’s gone through. Which you are never to bring up to him, Elliot, and I mean that.” He held Elliot’s gaze with a stern look, until Elliot nodded and dropped his eyes to his lap. He’d seen how Declan and the rest of the crew interacted with Joey on this voyage and if they could treat him like just another man on the ship, Elliot could too.
Declan’s hands resumed their stroking, bracketing Elliot’s ribcage and sweeping wide arcs from his shoulder to his waist. “I’m just saying that you’re still all the things you are—successful merchant, barely passable sailor.” His eyes were glinting bright green in the sunlight when Elliot looked back up at him. “Annoying stepbrother who used to drive me crazy with all your questions when you were a boy.” He waggled his eyebrows suggestively. “Who grew up to be the best cocksucker I’ve ever known.”End Notes · 11Elliot keeps trying to reduce himself to a single horrifying fact, and Declan will not let a single item stand alone—he buries it in an inventory of everything else that's also true. The joke at the end is the point. Declan finishes on something filthy because he needs Elliot's shoulders to come down before the next sentence lands.All end notes →
Elliot rolled his eyes at Declan’s attempt to lighten his spirits. He was definitely not the same man. Looking down at the tentacles where his legs used to be, he was barely more than half a man right now.End Notes · 12Elliot keep doing arithmetic on himself and he always subtracts. Declan does the same math a paragraph later and arrives at you've just got some new parts to enjoy. Nobody in this book is going to be able to argue Elliot out of his conclusion. Declan just keeps showing his work until Elliot starts checking it.All end notes →
But Declan leaned forward and kissed Elliot softly. His hands caressed Elliot’s skin while his tongue moved in Elliot’s mouth, the wide sweeps across Elliot’s ribs and flank matched with gentle strokes against his tongue, small circles with Declan’s fingertips echoed by tiny nips at Elliot’s lips. “Everything that makes you you is still the same,” Declan murmured as he kissed along Elliot’s jaw. He slid both hands between Elliot’s tentacles and ran them up and down Elliot’s cock until he shivered. “You’ve just got some new parts to enjoy, that’s all.”
Every place Declan touched felt lit from within. Tiny sparks danced along Elliot’s veins and he shifted under Declan’s hands, aching for more of his touch. He hadn’t quite believed that Declan really knew what happened last night and he’d never imagined that Declan would still want him once he knew what Elliot really was. But there was no mistaking the acquisitive explorations of Declan’s fingers or the insistence of the hard length Elliot was sitting on.
The same urgent need he’d felt last night washed over Elliot with the next wave. He rutted into Declan’s fist and squirmed against the hard length pressing up underneath him. He kissed Declan back, hard, and gasped into his open mouth as Declan squeezed and stroked him. It felt amazing, but it wasn’t enough. He needed to be inside Declan, moving in him where the dark heat gripped him tight, pushing and thrusting until he couldn’t get any closer. If Declan really was willing, Elliot wasn’t going to stop himself from taking anything he could get from him.
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