Memories of Ink and Loss

He calls her beautiful.

Not in that lazy way men say it to open thighs or doors, but like it’s an act of devotion. As if he’s naming something holy. She flinches every time. In love, she softly offers a soul-deep warning—

“You will not like what is inside me.”

He thinks she means baggage. Trauma. A few hard years. A series of childhood events, abandonment or the wrong affection. That kind of darkness.

He’s read the books. He knows to stay. To hold space. To be gentle. Forgiving, accepting, not judging.

He thinks she means she cries in the shower.

She does not correct him.

Not yet.

---

They love quietly. Not passionless—measured. She allows him inside her but only so far, so deep—each time, she wonders how long she can keep him from seeing what else dwells within.

He doesn’t notice the tremors. The way her breath catches—not in ecstasy, but in hesitation.

He’s in the moment.

Distracted from his usual attentiveness by sensation and possession.

He doesn’t know that she sees herself from outside, even now. From the angles learned in shame. From the nights, long ago when she was told she was only worth what she could perform.

---

He is kind.

Too kind.

He tells her she makes him feel safe.

She wants to scream.

She knows she will hurt him. She can feel the betrayal waiting in her viscera like a knotted tentacle—one with teeth, or maybe claws. She wants to hold him, keep him close; doesn’t want to betray. She wishes she were better than she is. That’s what makes it worse.

The wanting to be other than she is.

She wants to love him cleanly.

Her love is always dirty. Smeared with her history. Soaked in the sodden guilt of every version of herself she was never allowed to be.

---

He finds a page ripped from a journal once. Just a phrase.

“There are things inside me that do not want to be forgiven.”

He doesn’t ask. She doesn’t explain.

But that night she says it again, not as warning, but as prophecy:

“You will not like what is inside me.”

---

He tells her:

“I don’t care.”

“I’m not afraid.”

“You can tell me anything.”

She believes him. That’s the problem.

She always believes when they tell her that.

She tells him.

All of it.

Not the details. Never the details. But the hunger she was given. The cruelty she feels like love. The things she’s done in the name of not being left. The manipulations. The lies. The soft betrayals of herself.

He doesn’t leave.

He just goes quiet.

A different kind of quiet.

---

Later, she finds his toothbrush gone. His drawers empty. A single note on the bed, unsigned.

It says nothing cruel.

Just: I don’t know who that was. I don’t know who I am now.

She doesn’t cry.

She opens her mouth to scream, but it isn’t a scream that comes out.

It’s something older.

Something clawed and soft and shaped like a voice from before she ever learned words.

---

“You will not like what is inside me,” she says now, to an empty room.

No one hears or cares.

No one ever did.

He hasn’t touched another person in seven years.

This isn’t, strictly speaking, a sentence. No court handed it down. No record has been scribed that bears his guilt. But people speak about him like someone who should be listed, catalogued, curtailed. Someone whose presence is tolerated the way one tolerates a tooth gone bad with rot: quietly, with regret and pain.

Trevor lives alone, because the town lets him. Near the shore. One of those houses past the industrial fence where the ocean used to matter. His name still exists on a few lists. Power stays on. Mail stopped. He eats. He exists. He is permitted.

That’s all.

He tells himself he doesn’t miss company. That’s a lie he’s learned to be good at.

What he misses is sensation. Not emotion—he has plenty of that. Shame, mostly. Grief. Remembrance. The heavy ache of air held too long in the lungs. Contact. Pressure. Resistance. The touch of something or someone outside him that makes him feel like he isn’t leaking into the ground. His body is still. Has been for years. Still enough that his guilt has moved into the muscles. Nestled in the hips. The wrists. It hums in his teeth.

His hands, once light with making, are now heavy and still. Thin skinned and tired.

The appendages come to him first in dreams.

Not in his nightmares—those have eyes and voices and they take. These are quieter, slower. Soft and cool, like an oceanic thought. Dream-pressure where there should be hands. Where no hands have tended. He wakes with the memory of being touched somewhere below the lungs.

He tells himself it’s just his body remembering itself.

That should scare him. It doesn’t.

His screens begin to change.

Not in the way of breaking, instead they synchronise with the ocean and the worlds it contains.

Ripples in the display when the tide comes in.

A flicker in the black bar of a terminal window.

A glow behind the screen when no light should be there.

He starts typing softly, as if his keyboard can feel the impact of his fingers upon its keys and it deserves his gentleness.

One night, an appendage slides out, emerging from between the keys of his keyboard.

He doesn’t move.

Doesn’t breathe.

It’s not slimy.

Not wet.

It moves like a polite suggestion.

He stares at it for eleven minutes as it maps the scar on his wrist.

He whispers I’m sorry, and it twitches like he’s hurt it.

He says nothing else.

---

They return.

Not daily. Not on command, not on response to longing, but often enough that he stops asking why. When. How.

Different shapes, different lengths, colours and seeming textures. None repeat. They’re curious, not invasive. They touch the skin just behind his ears. They press softly at the base of his throat where his voice once got stuck. One rests in the curve of his spine and just… waits.

He doesn’t tell them what he did.

They don’t ask.

He doesn’t think they care.

That’s part of what hurts.

---

He weeps, once.

Not from guilt. Not from fear.

He’s forgotten what caused it.

But he weeps because one of them cups the back of his neck, and he feels known. Not forgiven. Not exonerated. Just acknowledged. Seen in a way that no-one has ever seen him before.

It feels worse than judgement.

It feels like the comfort he long since lost, convinced him self he has grown beyond needing.

---

He no longer dreams of them, but he remembers the weight of them in the morning.

Sometimes he lays in bed, imagining the pressure behind his knees, against his ribs, pressing his hips.

Other times, he just lets his hand drift over the keyboard, waiting for the space between the keys to breathe.

They don’t come when he calls, but sometimes, they answer when he stops his silent asking.

---

Trevor still lives on the shore.

He still doesn’t touch people.

But the house isn’t empty anymore.

The silence has shape.

And the guilt doesn’t live behind his eyes now.

It spreads.

Into the body.

Into the soft places where the appendages rest.

Into the parts of him that remember touch without language.

And when it all becomes too much, when he thinks he might fall back into nothing—he feels one coil gently around his ankle.

Not to bind.

Just to remind.

Or to invite, or maybe to welcome.

It touched her first at the wrist—a cool, deliberate brush like a cool thought sliding across warm skin. The room was quiet and still, yet—strangely—pulsing, the lights flickering in rhythm with something older than shame or loss. Soft, supple and slippery but without moistness. She felt suborned and conspiratorial; charmed by its patient attentiveness.

She didn’t look down. She knew if she looked, looking would make it real.

Or make it disappear.

Another tendril found her collarbone.

It wasn’t flesh, not really. Not wet, not slimy. More like age-worn velvet laced with ancient intent. Like it had written sonnets in cuneiform, scribed them in salt. It didn’t clutch at her; there was nary a hint of threat in its inexorable movement towards her throat—it read her like she was made of Braille—pressing lightly to her throat, curious yet patient. A solitary sucker tasted her curiosity, pulling at her flesh and her restraint.

She inhaled—sharp and deep—like someone broaching the surface of a black ocean they thought they’d never reach.

The scent was oceanic, but also electrical. Like ozone, or a cathedral’s first breath. She felt it curl around the hem of her thoughts, spiralling gently into the folds of memory and unmet need.

And when it typed a single word—“Yes”—onto the screen in front of her…

…she didn’t recoil.

She just exhaled, and whispered: “Finally.”

The other tentacles started to move.