Malevoween Day 13: Candles & Fire

John has discovered he enjoys being stretched bound across a bed with Arthur.

There’s something about the sharedness of it. One of Arthur’s wrists and ankles, fastened on one side, and one each of John’s, fastened on the other. Together they’re imprisoned; they wouldn’t be captive at all if it were just one of them. It feels intriguingly whole.

Peter strokes a hand down John’s arm, held turned in the ropes so his sensitive inner arm faces up. “Ready?”

Yes, John says in Arthur’s mind.

“Yes,” Arthur says out loud.

John can see the candle Peter is holding over them, its pool of melted wax sloshing in the cup of it. Arthur can’t. And so Arthur whimpers faintly in something more than sympathy when John braces, hisses through non-existent teeth when it tilts and the first dribbles of it land, stinging, on his upturned inner wrist.

It’s shared anticipation. John’s noticed it before, the way that when they brace—when either of them braces—their entire body does. An instinct, rooted somewhere so deep in the brain that it’s twined into both of them.

John can see them coming, so he only flinches a little at the sting of each drop Peter trickles in a line up his arm, Arthur flinching along with him with swift, quiet little indrawn breaths. John gasps when they coat the inside of his elbow, so fucking sensitive. And as it passes there, moving up over his bicep, the parts of their body that are his tighten with delicious tension the closer it approaches to the place where they join.

Arthur can’t know what or when to anticipate, and so he gives a little startled yelp when the hot drips cross the invisible threshold of John’s body to strike Arthur’s.

That moment when it burns on both of them, falling on both of them in a single patch, John moans. Arthur’s moan rises in his wake.

Peter laughs, low and throaty, and lingers there, covering the seam of them, sealing them in together with the wax, till John can see their erection stirring.

It’s a visceral connection between him and Arthur, knowing that both of them feel the same thing at the same time. John wishes Peter could hear the sounds he makes the way he can hear Arthur’s. He wishes in particular that Peter could hear the way they sound together when they moan.

Finally Peter moves on.

Arthur can’t see, so he can’t know where to expect it next. Their body coils tight with his anticipation, and it does him no good. They jerk together with Arthur’s pained, startled little sound in his throat when Peter pours onto his collar bone.

The wax on John’s arm smarts and pulls at his skin with almost a sucking sensation as it hardens, tightening and shrinking, just as he knows it’s doing to Arthur.

John watches Peter straighten the candle carefully, swirling it gently to build up melted wax. Their body begins to tighten again with Arthur’s tension.

Not yet, John says quietly to him. I’ll tell you when he’s getting ready again.

Arthur hums his gratitude, so as not to give away their little cheat to Peter. He wouldn’t resent them for it, but some things are just for them.

Peter eyes them anyway, with a little smile. He knows them well by now. John flips him off. He laughs.

Ready, John murmurs to Arthur when Peter begins to move the candle again. Right arm.

And watches Peter pour a little pool of wax right over Arthur’s left nipple.

“You fuck!” Arthur shouts—and, shocked, John cries out with him. He didn’t expect to feel that. Didn’t expect the way it shoots straight up their body into their brain by ways that circumvent all the tidy pathways in Arthur’s central nervous system. John’s arm and leg strain against the ropes as Arthur’s back bows up off the sheets, their mingled cry turning wordless and high-pitched as the pain of it sinks in, ripens.

John catches the hunger in Peter’s face at their writhing, at Arthur’s gasping, and he thinks it must match the look in his own eyes.

Peter catches him watching, and winks.

Arthur. The warning slips from John without his intending it, because Peter has a devilish look in his eyes. He reaches out to set a hand to their sternum and push them flat against the bed, and then he leans down to catch Arthur’s other nipple in his teeth with a painful nip that makes them cry out together again, only for his tongue to lave it soothingly after.

Arthur… This time it’s a moan.

“John,” Arthur moans back. “Peter.”

“How are you two feeling?” Peter whispers in their ear.

Together they close their eyes and tilt their face up, lips parted, to beg for a kiss.