The Conduit

"There's a difference between choosing something and having your hands move without permission. I'm still trying to figure out which is worse—that it happened, or that part of me stopped fighting."

"Maybe you should get in the lagoon."

The words left my mouth before I could stop them, propelled by something that wasn't entirely me. Clivilius had its hooks in deep now, guiding my tongue, shaping my suggestions, using me as a puppet to achieve whatever end it sought.

Chris looked up from my wound, his expression shifting from concentration to confusion. "You think I should go for a swim? Now?"

The absurdity of the suggestion hung in the air between us. Here I was, torn apart by a shadow panther, barely able to move, and I was recommending recreational water activities. Even I could hear how ridiculous it sounded.

"Not a swim," I said, scrambling to make the suggestion seem reasonable. The words came easier now, as if Clivilius was feeding them to me, smoothing out the edges of my panic. "Maybe just wade up to your knees or something."

Chris considered this for a moment, his brow furrowed. I watched the thoughts play across his face — the weighing of options, the assessment of risk, the fundamental trust he had in me as a fellow survivor of this nightmare. He had no reason to suspect ulterior motives. No reason to think I was anything other than a wounded man making an odd request.

"I guess I could," he said finally, shrugging with that easy acceptance that seemed to define him.

He rolled up his trousers, the fabric bunching around his thighs, and stepped into the water. The lagoon accepted him without fanfare — no shiver ran through his body, no gasp escaped his lips. He waded out until the water lapped at his knees, then turned back to face me with a questioning expression.

Nothing. The water was doing nothing to him.

Why? I demanded of the presence lurking in my mind. Why doesn't it affect him?

No answer came. Just that patient, watching silence, the sense of something ancient and hungry observing from behind my eyes.

Chris stood in the lagoon like a man standing in any ordinary body of water, completely unaffected by the power that was currently turning my nervous system inside out. Every ripple he created sent waves lapping against my still-submerged legs, and each contact was another pulse of pleasure racing up my thighs, another assault on my rapidly crumbling defences.

I watched him with a fascination I couldn't explain, my eyes tracing the lines of his body with an attention that didn't feel like my own. He wasn't handsome — not in any conventional sense. Shorter than me, with a solid build that spoke of physical labour rather than gym work. His hair was thinning, his features unremarkable, his posture relaxed and unselfconscious.

And yet I couldn't look away.

It's just the water fucking with you, I told myself, forcing my eyes closed. It's not real. None of this is real.

But my body disagreed. My cock was iron-hard, straining against my shorts with an urgency that bordered on painful. Every breath I took seemed to feed the arousal rather than diminish it, oxygen stoking a fire that had been burning since my first contact with the lagoon.

Unexpectedly, Chris pulled his shirt over his head and tossed it toward the shore.

The movement sent larger waves cascading against my legs, and the pleasure that followed was devastating. It roared up my thighs like a freight train, crashed into my groin with the force of a physical blow, left me gasping and trembling on the sand like a fish pulled from water.

My eyes flew open against my will, drawn to the sight of Chris's exposed torso.

He wasn't toned. A softness clung to his midsection, the gentle curve of a man who enjoyed food more than exercise. Dark hair covered his chest, a forest of black with scattered threads of grey, trailing down his stomach and disappearing beneath the waistband of his trousers.

I shouldn't have been looking. Shouldn't have felt the stirring of interest that accompanied the visual, the way my gaze traced the path of that hair with something approaching hunger. I was straight. Engaged. In love with Brianne and only Brianne, had never once in my twenty-three years felt attraction to another man.

But my body didn't seem to care about any of that.

It's the water, I told myself again, more desperately this time. Just the fucking water.

I squeezed my eyes shut, tried to conjure Brianne's face, her smile, the way she laughed with her whole body. But the image wouldn't hold. Every time I reached for it, the pleasure pulsing through my legs scattered my concentration, replacing her features with static and sensation.

A warm, rough finger touched my right calf.

My cock throbbed so hard I nearly cried out.

Please stop, I begged silently, though whether I was pleading with Chris or Clivilius or my own traitorous body, I couldn't say.

Don't resist Kain, or I will make your leg mine.

The reminder was unnecessary. I'd already surrendered, already given up the fight. But Clivilius seemed to want me to know — to understand with perfect clarity — that whatever happened next was the price of keeping my body intact.

"Shit!" The expletive burst from my lips as a second finger joined the first, both now tracing a slow path up my leg.

The touch was gentle, exploratory, nothing like the clinical contact of wound care. This was something else entirely. Something deliberate. Something that had shifted from medical assistance to territory I didn't have a map for.

A third finger. A fourth. And then a full hand, pressing firmly against my flesh as it travelled up my thigh with unmistakable intent.

I should have stopped it. Should have grabbed his wrist, pushed him away, demanded to know what the fuck he thought he was doing. But my arms wouldn't move. My voice wouldn't work. Clivilius had me pinned as surely as if it had physical hands holding me down, a prisoner in my own body while something I didn't choose played out around me.

The hand reached the hem of my shorts. Paused for a moment that stretched like taffy. Then slipped beneath the fabric, fingers travelling up the inside of my thigh with a featherlight touch that made my whole body shudder.

Fingertips grazed my balls.

The sensation was electric, a jolt of pleasure so intense it whited out my vision for a split second. I heard myself gasp — a desperate, needy sound that I would have been ashamed of if I'd had any shame left to give. My hips jerked involuntarily, pushing toward the contact rather than away from it.

Fuck. Why does that feel so good?

The fingers continued their exploration, mapping territory that no man had ever touched, finding nerve endings I hadn't known existed. My cock strained upward, desperate for attention, pre-cum already leaking from the tip in a steady stream that soaked through my shorts.

Then the hand withdrew.

The loss was devastating. I wanted to sob with the absence of it, with the sudden void where pleasure had been. My body ached for more, craved the continuation of what had started, needed something I couldn't name and wouldn't have asked for.

I should have felt relief. Should have been grateful for the reprieve, the chance to collect myself, to remember who I was and who I loved and why this was wrong. But the fog in my brain had grown too thick, the happy chemicals firing too fast and too hard. Thought itself had become impossible, replaced by a single driving imperative: more.

A shadow fell across my face.

I opened my eyes to find Chris hovering above me, his chest filling my vision, the maze of dark hair close enough to touch. Water dripped from his skin onto mine, each droplet a tiny explosion of sensation that made me twitch and gasp.

My hands moved without my permission.

They found his hips — solid, warm, real — and slid around to his back, my fingers pressing into the wet flesh with a grip that was part desperation and part hunger. I pulled him closer, drawn by a magnetism I couldn't resist, my body operating on instincts that had nothing to do with conscious choice.

The sound of a zipper cut through the haze.

I watched, disconnected from reality, as Chris's trousers parted and his cock emerged. It was thick, fully hard, the head glistening with moisture that caught the sunlight and turned it to diamonds. He was aroused. As aroused as I was, despite showing no reaction to the lagoon itself.

Help him feel my presence.

The command echoed through my skull, and suddenly I understood. Clivilius couldn't reach Chris directly — whatever immunity he possessed kept the entity at bay. But I was a conduit. A bridge. Through me, through my body, through whatever was about to happen, Clivilius could touch this man who had otherwise been beyond its reach.

I was being used.

The knowledge should have horrified me. Should have given me the strength to resist, to fight, to do anything other than lie here and let this happen. But the pleasure had eroded my will down to nothing, had stripped away every defence I'd ever built and left me raw and exposed and desperate for whatever came next.

Chris leaned toward my face.

Instincts I didn't recognise kicked into gear. My mouth opened — not because I wanted to, not because I chose to, but because something older and darker than choice had taken the wheel. Chris guided himself forward, the head of his cock pressing against my lips, and then he was inside.

The taste was salt and skin and something else, something that buzzed against my tongue like electricity. The lagoon's influence, maybe, transmitting through Chris's body into mine. Or maybe just the chemicals flooding my brain, turning every sensation into something transcendent.

Chris groaned above me — a deep, guttural sound of pleasure that vibrated through his body and into mine. He began to move, slow and rhythmic, sliding in and out of my mouth with a controlled pace that spoke of experience I didn't want to think about.

A hand found my shorts.

Fingers hooked under the waistband, tugged the fabric down just enough to free my aching cock. The cool air hit my overheated flesh for just a moment before a grip closed around it — firm, confident, knowing exactly how much pressure to apply.

I moaned around Chris's cock, the sound muffled but unmistakable.

The hand began to stroke, matching the rhythm of Chris's thrusts, creating a feedback loop of pleasure that built and built and built toward something inevitable. I couldn't think. Couldn't breathe. Could only exist in this moment, this impossible confluence of sensation that was destroying me and remaking me in the same instant.

Let go, Clivilius whispered, its voice almost tender now. Let me in.

I didn't have the strength to refuse.

Chris's movements grew faster, more urgent. His groans came quicker, punctuated by sharp gasps that told me he was close. The hand on my cock matched his pace, pumping with an intensity that pushed me toward the edge of a cliff I could no longer see.

A thumb swept across the head of my cock, smearing the wetness that had gathered there.

That was all it took.

The orgasm hit me like a demolition charge, blowing apart whatever remained of my coherent self. I came in Chris's hand, my release pulsing out in waves that seemed to go on forever, my whole body convulsing with the force of it. Sound tore from my throat — would have been a scream if my mouth hadn't been otherwise occupied — a primal noise of release and surrender and something that might have been grief.

Chris followed seconds later.

He pulled back just in time, his cock sliding free of my mouth as his own climax overtook him. I watched through half-closed eyes as he spilled himself onto the Clivilian sand, rope after rope of ejaculate painting the dust in patterns that the wind would soon erase.

The hand on my cock continued its work, gentler now, milking the last drops of my orgasm while I twitched and shuddered beneath the touch. My own fluids were being rubbed into my still-pulsing flesh, a final intimacy in a cascade of intimacies I had never asked for.

Then it was over.

Chris released me. Pulled back. Collapsed onto the sand beside me, his breathing as ragged as my own, his chest heaving with exertion.

Silence fell.

The kind of silence that follows a catastrophe, heavy with the weight of things that cannot be unsaid, undone, unfelt. The lagoon lapped gently at the shore, peaceful and innocent, as if it hadn't just been the catalyst for something that would haunt me for the rest of my life.

I didn't look at Chris. Couldn't look at him. Couldn't face whatever expression he might be wearing — confusion, satisfaction, shame, desire. Whatever it was, I didn't want to see it. Didn't want to acknowledge that this had happened, that we had done this, that I had participated in something so far outside the boundaries of who I thought I was.

You better heal my fucking leg, I snarled at Clivilius, the thought sharp and bitter.

No response came. Just that patient, watching silence, the sense of something satisfied, something sated.

For now.

My elbows finally buckled, the last of my strength draining away, and I fell back against the sand. The sun was warm on my face, the sky impossibly blue above me, and I lay there staring at nothing while my body slowly stopped trembling.

Beside me, Chris's breathing gradually slowed.

Neither of us spoke.

There was nothing to say.

The warm sun began to dry my skin, evaporating the water, the sweat, the evidence of what had transpired. I closed my eyes and let the heat wash over me, let it bake away the tears that still leaked silently from beneath my lids.

I thought of Brianne.

Of our daughter.

Of the man I had been before I fell through that portal, the man who would have died before letting another man touch him, before opening his mouth to receive what I had received, before coming in another man's hand while a supernatural entity whispered encouragement in his ear.

That man was gone now.

I didn't know who had taken his place.

Sleep came eventually — or something like it. A grey fog that rolled in from the edges of my consciousness and swallowed everything whole, carrying me away from the shore of the lagoon, away from the man lying silent beside me, away from the choices I hadn't made and the consequences I would have to live with.

The last thing I felt before the darkness took me was the sun on my skin.

And the distant, satisfied hum of something ancient, something patient, something that had gotten exactly what it wanted.