I wake up in a bed, sandwiched between two furnaces.

My dreams are a blur of warmth and weakness, of vulnerability and closeness. I wake with my heart beating hard and slow, with a warmth filling me from finger to toe, and I can’t remember what they were about; all that remains, even seconds after waking up, is the sense of attention, of being attended to and having my own attentions be welcome.

Possibly relatedly, when I wake up, Zidanya’s hand is on my thigh with her breasts pressed up into my back, and my own arms are wrapped around Amber. One arm over her belly, the other tucked under her neck, my entire front is skin-to-skin with her back. My hands start to roam a little, as I bask in the closeness and intimacy of the moment, feeling the pulse of her heart and the hardness of her abdominals and core muscles moving with her breath.

I don’t consciously realize that my left hand has moved from cupping her breast to gently stroking her nipple until she murmurs contentedly and pulls my right arm between her legs. I trace circles around her clit and tease her folds until she clamps her legs down and hisses, trapping my hand where it can’t slide away, and I oblige her; my fingers trace circles again, but this time pressing in and down through her hood as she guides my touch to just the right spot. I smile into her shoulder as my hand threatens to cramp, reveling in the slick feel of her and the unambiguity of her desire, and my lips and tongue leave a line of nips and kisses across her shoulder to her neck, and right after I get to her ear she shudders, spasming.

She pulls me on top of her after her orgasm, kissing me before pushing my head down to her breasts. My hands and mouth are full of her, sucking her nipples into my mouth to run my tongue over and around them, and she bucks once against as I roll them, one and then the other, against my teeth. She wraps her legs around the backs of my knees, adjusting my angle with the hand not wrapped in my hair, and then I’m buried deep inside her and gasping in pleasure as well.

We rut, there on the bed, mouths and hands grasping and exploring. Soon, my hands anchor me at her shoulders and her legs pull me in on every thrust, and I can feel the tension building in my legs and back as her back arches and she wraps her hands in my hair.

Her climax, when it comes, milks mine out of me, and we’re both left shuddering and twitching, smiling at each other and trading slow kisses.

“Good morning,” Amber says huskily, the first words either of us has exchanged since I woke up. “You certainly slept well.”

“Yeah.” I rest my head on her breast, tongue flicking out to taste the way her natural smell mixes with the very light sheen of sweat we’d worked ourselves up to. “I’m pretty sure I had some very nice dreams.”

“Well, we might have helped.”

I look up at Amber, blinking a few times, then glance over at Zidanya, now awake, lying on her side with my pillow stacked on top of hers. She smiles at me, and my eyes track down her body, taking in the erect nipples pulling her areolas tight, the hand slipped between her legs, and the towel under her hips. On a hunch, or maybe following a motion of her eyes, I glance off the side of the bed, and giggle quietly when I see the two towels in a crumpled heap off to the side. “Then I’m glad.”

“Ah?” Zidanya’s eyes narrow a little at me, but they’re sort of fluttery, and that makes me giggle again, the feeling of euphoria and joy surging.

“Yeah.” I slide off of Amber’s chest and seem to surprise Zidanya by reaching out to her. “Want some company?”

“Come here.”

She grabs my shoulders and drags me over and down, and I go willingly, nose flaring to take in the heavy scent filling the air. My hands go before me, running up her thighs from dryness to sopping wet and spreading her lips for my tongue, and she runs her fingers tenderly through my hair to move a stray strand out of my face as I gently suck her clit into my mouth. My hands move upwards and cup her breasts, and I put my tongue to good use, reveling in the way her own hands clench and tighten, in the way her legs try to pull me in closer.

She’s practically convulsing only a few moments later, and once that passes, she tries to pull me up for a kiss. There’s usually almost as much strength in her arms as there is in Amber’s, but she tugs almost lazily at me, cueing me to do the work of moving myself as she splays herself out on the bed dramatically, loose and relaxed.

Our kiss is long and soft, and I pillow my head on her breasts afterwards, pulling Amber just that little bit closer as she wraps herself around my side. A moment later, a thought occurs to me, and I shift over to the side, and Zidanya murmurs happily as Amber moves in to cuddle up to both of us. We settle into the moment, breathing together, and I giggle as I beam at the two of them.

“Some source of mirth, Magelord?” Zidanya tries to go for a waspish tone, but she fails gloriously.

“Just… thinking about how lucky I am, I guess.” I smirk, not exactly at them, but in their general direction. “I feel like I shouldn’t feel this way, that this isn’t right and can’t be right until I’ve severed what I can of the ties that bind us, but…”

Amber’s hand starts to rub the small of my back, which is distracting and delightful. “Well, Adam?” Her voice is soft. “Don’t stop there, if you please.”

“Well, this…” I close my eyes, taking in the sheer physicality of the moment, reveling in it. “I’ve seen the bindings. I’ve done surgery on them, now, and I’m absolutely going to do to yours what I did to Sara’s, but I’m not worried about your … independence of personality, or your ability to say no. Either of yours.”

“Magelord, if ever you had a notion that I should do something I truly opposed, and tried to wield these bindings to suit, what think you would come to pass?”

“Zidanya, I’m pretty sure my brain would literally explode.” I open my eyes, grinning at her.

“Your soul, belike.” She snorts. “You’ve tiers and tiers to rise through before you could enforce your will upon mine, did I disdain to obey an order.”

“Yeah. That… helps, actually.” My head drops back down to her breast, and one of her arms snakes around my shoulders. Not to pull; it just wraps around me, there for the sake of touching. “And so does this,” I murmur quietly. “What was it you said, Amber?”

“Why disdain joy for its origin?”

“Yeah, that.” I smirk, possibly invisibly, given where my face is. “Not that I took up the automata on their joys. Some origins are… well.”

“I wondered if that was intended to be a temptation.” I look up at Amber; her face is creased with a sly smile, her expression considering. “Without you, the Lord Mayor would have taken the torturer’s offer. Was the other for you?” I can feel my face getting red, and it’s clearly visible, because Amber’s smile widens, broadens, and her voice goes husky. “Oh, my lord.”

“She was pretty, but talk about problematic.” I mumble it, more than say it.

“More than pretty.” Amber’s hand runs its way down my side, from mid-chest to my knee, and then back up. I shiver under her touch, wriggling a little. “Tell me, what was the draw?”

“Well, I mean. Physically? Did you see their tits, and the other one’s outfit? It was practically a collection of straps, like a perfectly constructed message of availability and desire.”

Amber tsks quietly, a sound that nestles down in my gut somehow. “Don’t be evasive, Adam.”

My face is flaming hot, and every sense I have is full of Amber and Zidanya; the sound of one, the smell and feel of both, and the lingering taste of the other. “There’s something about restraints that’s incredibly… that’s incredible, I don’t know why.”

“Applied to ones willing or unwilling?”

I don’t glance up at Zidanya; I’m too busy feeling something halfway between mortification and excitement, too busy reveling in the moment and in the gentle pressure from the both of them. “Both, but I’d never… the way she was spread-eagled, the tools and no doubt magic potentially involved, sure, it would have been fun to…” My voice fails me, more than my words do.

“To mix her pleasure with her pain, all against her will, until she was so helpless and lost as to finally beg you not to stop, broken in her entirety?”

“Yeah.” The words, and my admission, are like a lightning bolt through my spine. I wriggle against Zidanya’s soft warmth and the muscles underlying her curves, hands starting to explore her body as the heat builds inside me as we talk. “But I’d have only been okay with myself afterwards if I’d picked her side, and done that with… well, she was an automaton. The illusion of her consent, I guess.”

“And me, Magelord?” The words freeze me on the spot, and I look up, caught helplessly in Zidanya’s gaze. She smiles slowly, hungrily. “Think you that I might qualify as able to consent to such manners of struggle and yielding?”

Eyes still locked on hers, I reach up to run my fingers up her forearms. “I’ve never actually done anything like this,” I say, letting my hands encircle her wrists, watching the way that her body language shifts as I do so. “And there’s still a voice in my head saying no, saying neither of you can consent.

“But...” I cut off Zidanya’s emerging words by kissing her, pushing her wrists into the bed and shifting myself to straddle her hips.

I’m not sure, then or later, what else I was going to say, but in the softness and eagerness of her response, it stops mattering, and soon enough everything is one flavor of joy or another.