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  Alphie

  Amy Bellows

  Copyright © 2020 by Amy Bellows

  All rights reserved.

  No part of this book may be reproduced in any form or by any electronic or mechanical means, including information storage and retrieval systems, without written permission from the author, except for the use of brief quotations in a book review.

  * * *

  Editing by Reese Morrison

  Contents

  Untitled

  1. Garrett

  2. Alphie

  3. Garrett

  4. Alphie

  5. Garrett

  6. Alphie

  Author’s Note

  Other Egg Preg by Amy Bellows

  Coming May 5th…

  Park

  Troy

  About the Author

  Untitled

  One day a year Alfie doesn't look like the other guys at Farell University...

  * * *

  He tries to go home for his spawning heat. But this year his dad doesn't show up to get him, and when your family lives on another planet, you can't simply take a plane home.

  * * *

  Garrett has a thing for his roommate. Unfortunately, he’s shy, and doesn’t have the courage to come on to his roommate. He’s given up hope that they’ll be anything but friends until Alphie's hands transform into long tentacles. Alphie suddenly becomes very affectionate... and explorative.

  * * *

  Sure, this isn't how Garrett pictured getting felt up by his roommate, but it's strangely hot. That may be because of the libido-enhancing gas Alphie's tentacles keep emitting. Who's to say?

  * * *

  Not Garrett. He's too busy enjoying the weirdest sex of his life.

  * * *

  Alphie is a short, shameless bit of tentacle erotica.

  1

  Garrett

  Alphie’s sitting next to me. Right next to me. My calculus textbook couldn’t fit between our knees. I steal glances at him as I knit. His wild blond hair looks like he’s spent the afternoon in the wind, not on the couch of our dorm room. His messy hair combined with his wrinkled T-shirt and jeans give him this perpetually rumpled appearance.

  I’m not sure why I find that so adorable, but I do.

  He pushes his glasses up the bridge of his nose before looping his next stitch. He’s knitting a long, gray scarf.

  I lean in to inspect his handiwork. “Oh, it looks like you were supposed to knit that row, but you started to purl.”

  He bites his lip, looking at me instead of the scarf. “Yeah?”

  I lean in closer, and point to each of the four rows of purl that are already there so that he can distinguish them. Our fingers “accidentally” brush as I pull my hand back. I wish I had the courage to touch him without the guise of helping him with his knitting. Alphie and I have been sharing a room for five months now, and I’m no closer to asking him out now than I was when he walked into our dorm the weekend before fall semester, with a single suitcase and fingers that constantly fidgeted.

  “I’m Alphinus. Well, Alphie is easier for most people. I’m your roommate.”

  I stood up and offered him my hand. “I’m Garrett. It’s good to meet you.”

  He stared at my hand curiously, but he didn’t shake it. He just kept on fidgeting. It was perfectly normal to be nervous on your first day, but we were in the senior dorms. I wasn’t sure what to think. Hadn’t he done the whole roommate meet and greet the last three years?

  “Sorry. I’ve traveled a long way. I’m just really tired.” He set his suitcase next to the bed and laid directly onto the bare mattress. His suitcase wasn’t big enough to have anything like blankets or sheets. Did he not have any?

  Alphie fell asleep almost immediately. Before I could think too much about how he might react, I pulled the extra blanket from my own bed and draped it over him. He sighed in his sleep.

  I stared at him for a long time. He seemed so vulnerable, so fragile. What kind of person falls asleep in front of someone they’ve barely met? I had no idea what he’d been through or what he needed. I just knew that I wanted to help him.

  That week was full of strange moments where I had to explain things to him he should already know. Like how to turn the pages of a book, the meaning of male/female labels on the public restroom doors, and the importance of peeling an orange before biting into it. I also taught him how to knit.

  I thought it would help with the fidgeting.

  “I’m not sure if I’m ever going to get this,” Alphie says, still staring at me instead of his scarf.

  “Fuck!” Marietta says. I forgot she was at the kitchen table working on her physics homework. She’s our roommate. The LGBTQ dorms at Farrell University are coed. Marie’s generally quiet, except when her girlfriend comes over. They giggle constantly when they’re together.

  Alphie doesn’t break eye contact with me. I hold my breath, and scoot just a little bit closer, until my knee presses against his. “You can just add an extra row and enjoy that your scarf doesn’t quite follow a pattern. Or, if you’d like, I can pull out the stitches for you.”

  He glances down at our knees, but he doesn’t move away. “Are you sure? I don’t want to be a bother.”

  That’s what he always says. When he woke up that first day underneath my blanket, and I told him he could keep it if he didn’t have a blanket of his own, he said it so quietly I almost couldn’t hear. When his parents stopped sending money, and I told him he could borrow my suit for job interviews, he said he said it with this sweet, sincere look in his eyes. And last week when I offered to drive him home from the pizza parlor where he works until two in the morning most Saturday nights, he said it haltingly, almost as if he wasn’t sure what he’d do if I retracted my offer. A student got mugged a few weeks ago walking home in the middle of the night, and Alphie gets anxious about stuff like that.

  I give him the same reply I always do. “You’re never a bother. Please let me help you.”

  My mom taught me to knit when I was twelve, and I’ve been knitting ever since, so it doesn’t take long to help Alphie backtrack. I keep my knee pressed against his. I didn’t know my knee had so many nerve endings. It’s hard to focus.

  I wonder what he’d do if asked him out for coffee. Or to a movie. Would he tell me no? Would it ruin our friendship?

  Those questions haunt me day after day. I don’t want to give up what I have with Alphie. But I’d give anything to kiss him or hold his hand.

  When I hand back his project, I let my fingers linger on the needles longer than I should. But instead of waiting for me to let go, he covers my hands with his own. Then he clenches his jaw and moves away. “Sorry, Garrett. I’m sorry.” He stands up. “I should go. I need some time alone.”

  My heart drops. I pushed him too far. How could I be so stupid? Alphie’s never done anything to suggest that he sees me as anything but a friend.

  “Yeah. Sorry,” I say, keeping my eyes on the floor.

  “No, don’t be sorry. I shouldn’t. I can’t. It’s me.”

  Marietta looks up from her homework. “Alphie, are you okay?”

  His eyes dart from me to her, then back to me again. “I’m fine.” He rushes out of the kitchen, and down the hall. A door slams down the hall.

  Marietta turns around to face me. “Are you okay?”

  I shrug. “Yeah.”

  “So I didn’t just watch you try to play kneesies with him, and get rejected?”

  “What do you mean kneesies?”

  She sighs, and gets up to come sit next to me on the couch. “You know, when you touch your knee with someone else’s knee. Kneesies.”

  “I don’t think that’s a thing,” I say.

  “Yeah, it is. You know what? Never mind.” She stands up and again
and heads back to her homework on the table. “If you weren’t playing kneesies and getting rejected, then you don’t need me to commiserate with you. Even though I know you have an enormous crush on Alphie.”

  She sits back down in front of her textbook.

  “Well, I might need someone to commiserate with me slightly.”

  “How does one commiserate slightly?”

  “I don’t know. Never mind.”

  She picks up her pencil, and turns to the next page of her book. “He has an enormous crush on you too, you know.”

  “Wait, how do you know?” Alphie rarely talks to anyone but me.

  “Everyone knows, Garrett. You two are smitten with each other. I thought you would be fucking four months ago. Rowan thought it would happen three months ago. We took bets and everything.”

  I don’t know. Marietta and Rowan are wrong. All I did was touch my knee to Alphie’s, and he got spooked. After spending almost every day together for five months.

  “I guess you both lost then,” I say, picking up my own knitting project. It’s a panel for an aphgan that I planned to give to Alphie. He gets really cold at night sometimes, and trembles under the blanket I gave him. I think it’s too thin.

  “He’ll come around, Garrett. Just give him some time. Clearly, he’s been through something.”

  He has. I don’t know why his family stopped calling and sending him money, and I don’t know why he’s so nervous all of the time. I just know that I won’t try anything ever again. If Alphie doesn’t want me like that, I won’t push.

  2

  Alphie

  My father was supposed to pick me up four days ago for my spawning heat. But he was supposed to call every week, and send money every month too.

  I haven’t heard from him since the beginning of fall semester. It’s time to accept that he isn’t coming. He promised me he was fleeing to somewhere safe. Maybe he never made it.

  Maybe he’s dead.

  I can’t think about that right now. Not when I’m descending into my spawning heat. If he isn’t coming, I need to figure out what I’m going to do. I could ask Garrett to leave me alone in our room for a few days. I’ll just tell him I have the flu or something. I can lock myself inside somehow, and he never has to find out what I am.

  Garrett is all I have left. I can’t lose him too.

  I pace back and forth. Maybe he wouldn’t mind who I am. Garrett’s been so kind to me. If I tell him I’m a refugee from another planet, maybe he’d be more willing to let me have our room to myself for the next few days for my spawning heat.

  But if I tell him I’m a refugee from another planet, he probably won’t ever sit so close to me that I can feel his breath on my cheek, or the warmth of his knee against mine.

  The doorknob to our room twists, and Garrett slips inside. He’s tall and thin with knobby elbows and knees. Some of the guys call him a giraffe behind his back. I don’t think they’ve ever seen a giraffe run before. They’re breathtakingly graceful. When I was a kid, my dad used to beam us into the middle of the Savannah where giraffe mothers dashed through the grass with their children. They were always my favorite animals to watch.

  Garrett’s my favorite too.

  He wears baggy clothes to hide his frame, like he’s ashamed of it. If I were human, I’d trail kisses down his long spine and tell him he’s the loveliest person I’ve ever met. I’d hold his long, graceful hands that can make the most miraculous things with yarn.

  But I’m not human. So I can’t do any of that.

  “Hey, about what happened back there. I’m sorry, okay? I don’t want things to be weird between us,” he says.

  “Nothing is weird.”

  Unfortunately, that’s the moment when things do get very, very weird.

  Taking human form is normally easy for me. It’s the state that feels most natural to me now. But during my spawning heat, everything is different. Right in front of Garrett, my fingers fuse together, and my arms transform into red limbs that extend out several feet. The suction cups on the inner side of my tentacles close in on Garrett, and I feel an intense desire to latch onto him—to make him stay with me.

  “Leave,” I rasp.

  “Alphie, I don’t understand. Please explain this to me. Your arms…”

  He stops speaking, because my tentacles are now brushing his cheeks. During my spawning heat I can’t always control them, I can just feel. Garrett’s cheeks are warm and smooth. His lips, so soft. But the horror in his eyes makes my blood run cold.

  He doesn’t want to be touched by a monster, and I’m sure that’s how he sees me now.

  The pressure builds and builds underneath the skin of my tentacles. I know what’s going to happen next. I should try to get away. I should protect Garrett from myself.

  Gas releases from my suction cups.

  Garrett’s eyes close, and his shoulders soften. The gas is part tranquilizer, part libido-enhancer. It’s the reason why my people were hunted and completely eradicated on the planet where I grew up. We kept implanting our eggs in unwilling hosts.

  That’s what my instincts tell me to do to Garrett. My entire body aches to give him my spawn. Maybe they were right to kill us.

  I crouch down, and with as much momentum as possible, I jump back, yanking my tentacles away from Garrett with the force of my body. “I’m sorry, Garrett. You need to go.”

  The gas will make him do almost anything I tell him to. Even leave me.

  His eyes snap open. “But… you were touching me.”

  “I didn’t mean—”

  “Please don’t stop.” His eyes are soft—pleading.

  It’s just the gas talking, but my spawning heat makes it difficult to concentrate. I want Garrett to be mine. No, I need him to be mine.

  He steps closer to me, holding out his hand. “C’mon, Alphie. Give it a chance. You and me. Haven’t you ever thought about it?” He grasps my right tentacle. I have to remind myself that the only reason why he isn’t terrified of me is because he’s drugged. His fingers feel so warm. I don’t want him to stop touching me.

  “I’m not human, Garrett.” As if I need to say that, while he holds my tentacle.

  He smiles. “That makes a lot of sense, actually. I always knew there was something different about you.” He brings the tip of my tentacle up to his cheek again.

  Tears well in my eyes because it feels so good. It would be so easy to let the gas do its trick. It’s building up underneath my skin again. Soon, I won’t be able to hold it back.

  “It’s my spawning season.” Maybe if I tell the truth, he’ll run.

  Maybe if I tell the truth, I can stop myself from doing something horrible to him.

  “I need to find a place to lay my eggs. A person. I need to lay my eggs inside a person.” My father promised to find me someone willing. He promised he wouldn’t leave me here.

  What happened to him?

  Garrett steps even closer until our bodies are only inches apart. “What does that mean?”

  My tentacles wrap around his back, forcing him even closer to me. “I have to lay them inside someone. They have to stay in a host long enough to absorb their DNA. A few hours, I guess. And then… well, then they come out.”

  The host who laid the egg I hatched out of was a human. My father promised me that the human enjoyed giving birth to me—that he wasn’t harmed. What would it be like to watch Garrett lay my eggs? What would it feel like to push them inside of him while he moaned in pleasure?

  “When you say lay them inside someone, you mean…” Garrett trails off, waiting.

  My right tentacle twists, until the suction cups are pressing against the skin of Garrett’s arm. “I penetrate them. With my… tentacles.”

  My suction cups lock onto his skin, and gently suck. His eyes close halfway. “So that’s how you have sex… with your…”

  “No. Just during spawning season. My body is just like a regular… I could have normal sex the rest of the time.” Why am I even telling hi
m this?

  My other tentacle slithers up his back and into his hair. He feels so good. I just want to take him to the bed, and…

  No. I can’t. I have to stop.

  I’m not sure I can.

  “I’m the only Fibropod with eggs left. The last of my kind.” I say, like that makes any of this okay. More gas releases from my skin. Garrett lets out a soft moan.

  “You need to leave,” I repeat, even though he can’t. He’s trapped within my coils.

  Garrett shakes his head, and leans into my touch. “You’re not a bother. Please let me help you.”

  Those words tug at my heart. He’s done nothing but help me all year, and somehow, he never seems to mind. But this is different.

  Garrett’s knees soften. The gas is finally taking hold. “Trust… you. Trust Alphie.”

  My tentacles wind tighter, holding him upright. This is happening, whether I want it to or not. If only there was some way I could communicate to him how much being close to him means to me, even without my spawning heat. So he doesn’t wake up from the gas and think I see him as nothing but a host.

  I pull him closer and press my lips to his. More gas releases into the room, drugging us both. It’s so thick it envelops us in a cloud.

  His lips slide to a languid smile, and he leans forward.

  “Kiss me,” he says.

  3

  Garrett

  In the back of my mind I’m aware of how insane this is. Not just Alphie being an alien. Not just the egg-laying thing. But how relaxed I am about the strangest thing that’s ever happened to me.