Five Gold Rings by Lifetime by AdmirableMonster  

---

Drifting

---

He wasn’t in a good mood when he finally, exhaustedly, opened the door to the apartment he shared with Melkor.  And he certainly wasn’t in a good enough mood to deal with his boyfriend’s immediate scowl, when he said, “Hey, babe,” and tried to head for his room.

“Why the hell haven’t you been responding to any of my texts?” Melkor demanded, standing up so violently he nearly knocked the chair over.

“Have you been texting me?”  Mairon rubbed a hand through his hair.  “My phone ran out of charge and I forgot the charger.”

“Of course I’ve been texting you.” Melkor loomed over him.  “Where the hell have you been?”

“Melkor, I’m very tired, it’s been a hellish day—few days—” Fuck, what a slip of the tongue.

“And I’ve been worried sick.  You didn’t text, you didn’t call—”

“I told you, my phone was dead and I was stuck—what did you expect me to do, call from a pay phone in the fucking empty train station when I didn’t have any change?” The rejoinder came out too irritable.  Melkor had every right to be concerned, but Mairon just wanted to sleep, and he didn’t like the way Melkor was now backing him against the wall.

“You’ve got quite the tongue in your head,” his boyfriend told him darkly, but it didn’t spark the same roiling desire in him that it once had.  Not now, not when he was so tired and could still feel Tyelpe’s soft hands on him—

“Look.  Can we give it a rest?” he asked flatly.  “I’m too tired.  I’ll fuck you tomorrow, okay?”

Melkor’s powerful hand encircled his wrist.  “Don’t you think you owe me something for the worry you put me through?” he asked.

Owe you? echoed Annatar’s voice in Mairon’s head.  No, I don’t owe you, if it hadn’t been for Tyelpe I would’ve been sleeping in a train station all night!

“Babe,” he said exhaustedly, instead.  “Please.  I’m just exhausted, I need—”  Melkor’s grip actually tightened, and he gasped with pain.

“That’s what you like, isn’t it?” Melkor asked thickly.  “Come on, precious, we’ll both feel better afterwards.”

He—he’d never actually tried to deny Melkor like this, had he? “I don’t want to,” Mairon said, the words choking and strange in his throat.  “I—”

“Yes, you do,” Melkor told him firmly.  “Stop being difficult.  I know what you want, just let me give it to you.”

Better than I do?  “Aman,” Mairon blurted out suddenly, the safe word he’d never once used before rising to his lips before he thought. “Aman, Aman, Melkor—Jesus.”

Melkor dropped his wrist and stepped back.  “You think you need a safeword outside the bedroom?” he asked.  “What, you expected me to fucking rape you?  What the hell is wrong with you?”

He left and shut the door behind him.  Mairon slid slowly to the ground, breathing hard, tears pricking the inside of his eyes.  What the fuck was wrong with him?

He stayed on the floor in a heap for a few minutes, exhausted, thoughts buzzing, and then he got up mechanically, dug out the extra phone charger, and plugged in his phone.  There.  One disaster remedied, at least.  He stared at it as it turned on slowly.  He should probably check his messages.  Most of them would be from Melkor, but there might be one or two others he should respond to.

Sure enough, as soon as the phone finished booting up, a slew of notifications filled the screen.  Mairon frowned in frustration, sliding open his texts and not bothering to actually read the increasingly frantic texts from Melkor.  Not much point, since he was home now anyway, and it would just stress him out and make him feel guilty.

As he’d suspected, there weren’t many others—just one question about doing a shoot for Vogue and one green unread notification from a number he didn’t recognize.  Frowning, he opened the conversation and his lungs seemed to seize up.

hey this is Tyelpe I got your note.  did you get home okay?

He had half a response typed out before he remembered he couldn’t.  Because it wasn’t a snow day anymore.  Mairon pressed his face into his arms and wept, the phone clutched tightly in one hand.

* * *

He kept getting texts.  He hadn’t responded to any of them, so why did he keep getting them?  And yet none of them even really seemed to require a response.

 

>I love my family but Thanksgivings are too big

>haha look at this turkey

[Image attachment of Fëanor himself frowning down at a very large and very burned turkey.]

>we went out to eat.

A few days later…

>look I made a snowman!

[Image attachment of Tyelpe taking a selfie with a lumpy snowman dressed in a too-long blue scarf with white Stars of David on it, fluttering in the wind.]

>my dad talked me into modeling again :/

 

[Image attachment of Tyelpe in a tailored suit, wearing a tapered coat that turns into artful sheer ribbons near the bottom.]  

 

Mairon’s breath caught when he saw that, and to his horror, he had his hand halfway down his jeans before he caught himself.  He couldn’t do that.  Tyelpe hadn’t consented to it.  Also, he thought, his brain catching up, Melkor would kill him.

What he could do, though, was sketch.  He scrambled over to the desk, grabbed his sketchbook, and put pencil to paper.

It was effortless.  It shouldn’t be effortless.  He hadn’t been able to design things in years, and Melkor had told him it was a waste of time anyway.  Maybe it still was, but Mairon found he wanted to, wanted to come up with something that would suit Tyelpe, that would make him look as beautiful as he did in this photo.  No, Mairon thought, with a surge of wild pride, fuck Melkor, fuck Fëanor, he might not be a better fashion designer than either of them, but he could design for Tyelpe.

He sketched and sketched, page after page, and fell asleep with the sketchbook under his pillow.

>brother’s boyfriend proposed, brother #2 is begging to write their song for the wedding and it’s just a madhouse around here

That made Mairon think of Tyelpe in a wedding outfit, and oh, he knew that was dangerous as hell, but he couldn’t stop himself from drawing it.  He could have red hair again.  He could put himself in a dress that trailed on the floor on one side and came up to reveal high thigh on the other, something created from stiff fabric and wire, white but with the suggestion of flames from the shape of the low top of it, which he’d probably secure with a corset, sheathing himself inside.

Tyelpe could wear—Mairon smirked to himself and smudged in a line of fur along the daintier, more traditional lines of the dress he was giving Tyelpe.  He opened the bodice more and made it dip down to the line of his stomach.  A barbarian outfit for a virtuous barbarian, or the suggestion of one.

He thought Tyelpe would like it, and he nearly sent a picture—he did snap a casual photo of it, but at the last minute he just saved it to his photo roll and shoved the notebook under his pillow.

Somehow, he caught himself adding to the sketches whenever Tyelpe sent him a text.  A text about an office disagreement at the water cooler made him pen a suit like the picture that Tyelpe had sent of his latest modeling foray, but he made the colors dark reds and browns and then somehow it turned into a kind of autumn fey king inspired piece.  A text about the Conan RPG crossover with one of the most popular trading card games—apparently something that had Tyelpe very angry indeed for reasons Mairon couldn’t quite discern—led to an outfit inspired by one of the main characters of said trading card game.  Damn, Tyelpe would look good in a cloak.

And he sent it.  Without thinking, after all his previous care, after months of silence, months of taking pictures to the camera roll, staring longingly at the texts, and doing nothing—he simply took the picture and pressed send.  As if it were nothing.  As if it were easy.  As soon as he had, he wanted to delete it, wanted to call back the moment before.  His hands were shaking, and his vision was blurred.  He stared at the phone for ten minutes, the damning picture just sitting there, the first indication that Tyelpe hadn’t had an entirely wrong number.

He put his phone away.  Perhaps Tyelpe wouldn’t respond.

His heart started to calm after half an hour.  After an hour, the cold sweat was starting to die down.  He wouldn’t do something like that again, he told himself, exhaling shakily.  

The phone vibrated, and he nearly jumped out of his chair, pulling it out.  It was probably Melkor.  Or someone texting about a delivery.  Or—

>It’s beautiful.

>Are you a designer?

No.  There were tears welling up in Mairon’s eyes for some reason.  He wasn’t a designer, of course.  His designs were nowhere near good enough for that.  He knew very well that he shouldn’t respond.  Up till now, he could chalk this whole thing up to one day and maybe some temporary insanity.  But if he responded…

>No.  Not really.  I just doodle in my free time.

>You should be.  If you want to.

Fuck.  Fuck.  

>I’m not good enough.

A long, long pause.

>I don’t really think it’s about good enough, but if we want to use it as a metric, yes, you are, and I would know.

He would, Mairon thought, and he found that his fist was balled up and pressed to his mouth.  He couldn’t keep the conversation up.  He certainly couldn’t look like he was fishing for something.

>Well, thanks.

>I’d love to see more, if you feel comfortable showing me.  Please don’t feel pressured, though.

He shouldn’t respond, Mairon thought again, hopelessly, but there was no way he could have stopped himself from typing, I might have some more for you later <3

There was a brief pause and then, <3.

It didn’t mean anything, Mairon thought—it couldn’t.  And he told himself firmly he didn’t want it to, either.

* * *

It wouldn’t be polite to ghost Tyelpe again.  Particularly not after he hadn’t even said anything about the first time.  The time he hadn’t been supposed to find Mairon’s number (but then why had Mairon left it with him?) He was so damn persistent, but Mairon couldn’t keep himself from checking his texts, almost religiously.  A lot of them were still from Melkor.

Mairon hated the way his stomach tightened when he got a new text from Melkor.  He knew it was guilt, even though he wasn’t doing anything wrong, at least not anymore.  He’d made one mistake, taken one snow day away from everything.  But the texts he was exchanging with Tyelpe now—well, there were little hearts all of them, he admitted.  But that was just a thing you did with texts, you ended them in hearts.  Lots of people did it.  It was—it was flair.  Mairon used to end all his texts in hearts, before he started dating Melkor.

He and Tyelpe chatted about stupid, nerdy things.  A lot of Conan talk.  Tyelpe was apparently writing fanfiction, and he was embarrassed about it.  No, I won’t share unless it’s finished.  Mairon didn’t push.  It made warmth rise in his chest just to imagine a pink flush across Tyelpe’s gorgeous high cheekbones.

And Mairon couldn’t stop designing.  How had he ever stopped, he wondered.  So what if they were crap?  It filled him with an old, wild joy he’d nearly forgotten how to have.  Sketchbook on sketchbook piled up inside a shoebox in his closet, hidden underneath a pile of old photo albums.

Winter faded slowly.  He spent Christmas on vacation with Melkor in a fancy resort in the Caribbean.  It was bright and hot and sunny every day, and Mairon couldn’t stop the chill of guilt that went through him every time he woke and instinctively turned towards the window, wishing for snow.  Melkor paid for everything; Mairon spent his days modeling and looking pretty, his nights reading Conan fanfiction on his phone while Melkor slept beside him.  He was exhausted.  He told himself he wasn’t trying to find Tyelpe’s; he wouldn’t even know if any of it was Tyelpe’s.  But he was stalking the Thulsa Doom/Conan tag a little too thirstily, and he knew it.

If he was distant sometimes, Melkor didn’t seem to notice, and Mairon contented himself by deciding he was worrying over nothing.  He had just made a new friend, that was all.  It wasn’t as if he was swapping dick pics with the guy or anything.  And if he could still remember the way Tyelpe felt underneath him, melting into the bed, and if he maybe spent a little bit too much time there in his head when he was fucking Melkor, well—he was tired.

After Christmas, there was a whirlwind of different gigs.  Mairon always hated January.  It was grey and horrible, and this year it felt even greyer.  He felt like a zombie whenever he wasn’t on his phone.  Tyelpe sent him updates on his brother’s wedding; even he seemed kind of tired.

>They’re talking about eloping.  Dad is just impossible.

Mairon could imagine, and he smirked to himself at the thought of how Fëanor would lose his mind if his eldest son ran off with his boyfriend.  Mairon sighed.  He used, a little guiltily, to imagine getting married himself, but it wasn’t Melkor’s thing, not really.  And what would be the point?  None of his family would come.  Gay sluts like Mairon weren’t built for being married.

> I think Brother #2 might be seeing someone too

Mairon didn’t think before he responded.  > What about you?

He could have kicked himself.  There was a long pause.  > I’m not ready to date anyone right now.

Oh God.  Was he reading too much into that?  He almost certainly was.  It wasn’t like Tyelpe had said anyone else.

February spun away; March brought flowers and new growth.  Tyelpe’s brother’s wedding was set for August, which caused more drama.  Too close to the Big Four, Mairon supposed, though Tyelpe didn’t really say.  He knew he and Melkor would be going to the autumn one, probably to all four weeks, since they’d skipped the spring event entirely.

It just then occurred to him that Tyelpe would be there, too.  Or—no, no, he wouldn’t, would he?  He didn’t do the modeling thing for his dad much anymore.  Mairon couldn’t tell what was going on inside him.  He managed not to ghost Tyelpe again, but he spent the afternoon in the bedroom, curled up listlessly on the bed.  Why did it feel like his chest was about to crack open?  He didn’t want to see Tyelpe again.  He couldn’t see him again.

“Is everything all right?”

Melkor’s hand stroked across his hair, and he started upright.

“Just a bad day, I guess.  Sorry.”

His boyfriend sat down on the bed beside him.  “Can I get you something?  Do you want to go out to dinner?”

He didn’t want anything, but Melkor was trying so hard.  Mairon pressed his face into Melkor’s chest, his chest heaving a little as he tried not to cry.

“Hey.”  Melkor rubbed his back slowly, and Mairon’s stomach churned harder.  He felt like he’d forgotten how much Melkor cared about him somehow.  He felt like he was slowly drowning.

“Do you just want to lie here and watch a dumb romcom?”

Mairon nodded shakily, curling up next to him.

“I’ll put something on.”

They lay in bed, and Melkor put on that lesbian Christmas movie that Mairon remembered coming out sometime recently.  Mairon always approved of Kristen Stewart—he always got shy but straightforward vibes from her.  She reminded him a little of Tyelpe, and that made him shiver and cuddle closer to Melkor.

He was now remembering why he hadn’t watched this movie again.  He really wasn’t a fan of the relationship between the main characters, Harper and Abby.  Harper basically treated Abby like dirt, not even telling her that she wasn’t out to her family and then letting her family treat her like a damn chewtoy.

“She should have ended up with Riley,” Mairon said mulishly, leaning his head against Melkor’s collarbone.

“Riley?” Melkor snorted.  “It would have been a much worse movie.”

“They have actual chemistry!” Mairon protested.

“And we wouldn’t get to see a couple actually work through their problems.”

Mairon opened his mouth to argue again and then froze, his entire body going rigid.  Oh, God.  The room was suddenly too small, and he couldn’t breathe.

“Mairon?”

His heart was thundering in his ears so loudly he could barely hear Melkor.  He stared down at his hands, shaking.  At the covers.  His phone vibrated in his pocket.  Impeccable timing, of course.

Liar, someone said in his head.  Fucking liar.  

“I cheated on you,” Mairon blurted, squeezing his eyes shut against the pain in his throat.  “I’m sorry, I—I don’t know what I was thinking—I was so fucking tired, and I was—”

“What the fuck,” Melkor said blankly.

“I slept with someone else last winter.”

There was a long silence.  “When you got stuck overnight in Chicago and weren’t answering my texts,” Melkor said, finally.

Mairon nodded miserably.  “I’m sorry,” he whispered.

“What the fuck, Mairon?” The bed creaked as Melkor got up.  “And you had the gall to get mad at me for—”

“I know,” Mairon choked out.  “I know.  I’m sorry.”

“Fuck,” Melkor said heavily.  Then, “I need a cigarette.”  He left Mairon sitting in the bed with the damn Christmas movie still playing.  Mairon wondered bleakly if Melkor was going to break up with him, if he was going to have gotten thrown out of his house for being gay and then end up on the street because his boyfriend had dumped him.

His last therapist had called that catastrophic thinking.  But he couldn’t find another way for things to go.  What was he going to do, turn up on Tyelpe’s doorstep with another sob story?  Like he deserved that.  He lay back on the bed and stared up at the ceiling.  He half-wished there was a spider or something so that he had something to watch, but the apartment was clean as always.  Mairon himself generally made sure of that.

A while later, the door opened again, and the smell of cigarette smoke wafted in.  Mairon coughed.

Melkor sighed, sitting down on the bed again.  “That’s pretty fucked up,” he said.

“I know,” Mairon told him.

“Is that why you’ve been so distant lately?”

Fuck.  He’d thought he’d been doing such a good job of pretending everything was fine.  “Yeah.”  Tell him you’ve been texting the guy.  No.  It wasn’t like that.  And Mairon found that he was afraid to tell Melkor that, which was stupid, because he was a liar, and he wasn’t afraid of Melkor, he was just—it would upset him over nothing, he rationalized.  He knew he was rationalizing, but he couldn’t get it out of his mouth.

Melkor didn’t even seem angry, just sad, and that, if nothing else, made Mairon turn onto his side and reach out to touch him.  “I’m really, really sorry,” he said.  “It was a stupid decision.  I was exhausted.  I just…”

He trailed off, because Melkor was just looking at him sadly.

“What?” he snapped, then was horrified at himself.  He covered his face with his hands.  “That’s an excuse, isn’t it,” he mumbled.

“It is,” Melkor agreed, his deep voice somber and sad.  “I love you, Mairon, but this is…a lot.”

“Yeah.”  Mairon felt small and ugly and awful.  On the TV, the damn movie was still playing.  It had reached the end credits and there was a cheerful, happy beat playing.  There were bells.  He sighed.  “You said…you said you liked it when couples worked through their problems,” he mumbled in a small voice.  “I know.  It isn’t the same.  But…could we try?”

And he couldn’t understand the sinking feeling in his stomach when Melkor put a hand over his and said, “If you’ll try, I will.”

* * *

“I’m sorry!”  Crack!  Mairon gasped and flinched.  “Melkor—” he choked out.  Crack!

“What did you call me?”

God, he’d slipped.  God, everything was falling apart.  He bit his lip.  “Master,” he gritted out.  “Master—you’re hitting me—”  Hard.  Too hard.  Harder than he’d ever hit Mairon before.  Hard enough that Mairon wasn’t, or maybe that was just the guilt that reverberated through him at every stroke.  He ought to be punished, he reminded himself.  They’d agreed on a punishment game for this.  Not a real punishment, but just—to bring them closer together.

After Melkor forgave him.

“A problem?” Melkor’s hot breath on his ear, and Mairon shuddered, then shook his head.  “You can be good for me, can’t you?”  Was he imagining the extra edge, Mairon wondered.  Would it be so strange if there were an extra edge?  The flogger cracked again, and he let out a pained gasp, unable to keep silent.  Hot liquid trickled down from his shoulder.  Sweat, surely.  Melkor wouldn’t hit him so hard he was bleeding.  That would be—it would be dangerous, when they hadn’t negotiated it in advance.  It would be—

He screamed as the whip came down again, then sobbed.  It didn’t feel like sex anymore, and somehow, he thought wildly, it had to be his fault.  For straying.  For fucking someone else.  He’d upset the balance between them, and Melkor was just trying to right it, wasn’t he?

“Shhh,” Melkor murmured.  “Can’t you be good for me?”

No, no, he couldn’t.  Somewhere in his mind he could picture Tyelpe’s shocked expression, and he didn’t know why.  He wasn’t Annatar.  He was Mairon.  He could take this.  If he couldn’t, he could safeword, and it would stop.  But he wasn’t going to safeword, because he couldn’t give up, couldn’t fail again, not after he’d already failed once.  

He shut his eyes and tried to count, tried to ride out the pain, and somehow he found himself slipping away, with the sight of whirling snowflakes out of a high balcony window his only companion.  It was peaceful here, and quiet.  Pain was muted.

Pain was—

But he was supposed to feel the pain, wasn’t he?  Wearily, Mairon pulled himself away from the vision and back to the present, back to where Melkor was patting his head and binding him to the bed, one arm on each of the posts, his agonizing back stretched and something hot and sticky trickling down it.

He was bleeding.  He should safeword, he knew, but he also knew quite well he wasn’t going to.  He couldn’t.  Melkor had given him back his trust, when he didn’t deserve it—couldn’t he just do this one thing for him?  Those big hands were pulling his thighs open, and for one moment his own hands tensed in their bindings, and he had to bite his lip to keep from making a noise.  Something like guilt or nausea swirled in his stomach.

I don’t want this.

Shut up, Annatar!  Fuck you!  You’re the one who got us into this!

He hadn’t used any lube, Mairon realized suddenly, eyes going wide, and now Melkor was running a hand along his quivering stomach, his erection poised, scraping along Mairon’s inner thigh.  He could hear his own harsh breaths in his ears.  This was nothing like any punishment game they’d played before.  This was—safeword, screamed Tyelpe’s voice in his head, safeword, safeword—

Melkor pinched the flesh at his thigh and said, “Hmmm,” in a tone of voice that Mairon couldn’t quite read, but which made him even more faintly panicked.  Everything was somehow wrong.  Everything was somehow off.  It felt like the floor was slowly tilting out from under him and he didn’t know how to get a grip.

He needed to relax, he told himself, but the more he tried, the less he could, and then Melkor was forcing himself inside and Mairon was making a noise, it was horrible to his ears but he couldn’t seem to stop it, and Melkor didn’t stop—

Of course he’s not going to stop, you idiot, you need to safeword if you want him to stop—

And then there was a hand over his mouth and Melkor’s voice, distant, faintly amused, in his ear, “Tight tonight, little flame.  Feels good.”

Feels good.  He shut his eyes.  He was doing well.  He’d make it up to Melkor.  He would.  He would.

But as Melkor started to move, with jagged lightning bolts of pain shooting up Mairon’s spine, he could not quite banish from his mind the image of concerned grey eyes, and a warm voice murmuring, it matters, Annatar, of course it matters.