Work Text:
Grandma Phyl accompanies Reggie's first set of drip candles with the most intriguing line. "Your mother would kill me if she found out I gave these to you."
Reggie opens the box to find a full spectrum's worth of candles neatly arranged inside. "Candles?"
"Not just any candles. These are specially designed to drip. If you stick them inside a bottle, the wax will run down the sides."
"Neat." Reggie has an old bottle in the window, and she sticks one of the candles--the hot pink one--in the mouth. Grandma Phyl brings forth her lighter--she claims to keep it handy for any spontaneous incense occasions--and they watch as the candle releases its wax down the side of the bottle. It's messy, nothing like the well-behaved votives Joy always lights before her dates and before she shoos Reggie off to a slumber party. Messy and absolutely gorgeous, and Reggie knows that Grandma Phyl's box will be gone in no time, and it won't just be old glass bottles covered in wax.
Neither of them knows it then--and Grandma Phyll will never find out, but those candles start something.
Once Grandma leaves, Reggie takes a box of matches and teaches herself to make a rainbow.
*
Joy walks in on Reggie one day while the wax still runs down her arm. She reacts about as well as Reggie expects, which is to say not at all and on so many levels.
"What is it about?" Joy asks, after she rants about the mess, the hazards of putting hot wax onto bare skin and playing with matches. Then she demands to look at the candles to make sure that Reggie isn't raiding her supply of Yankee Candles.
Reggie doesn't tell her that the wax melts at a low temperature or point out that the piece of cardboard she's put under her work station to catch the drips that don't stay on her arm, or that the fact that her using a match to light candles is no less safe than when she does it than when Joy's does and that Yankee Candles are exactly not what she wants to use for this.
She just says, "I like it." No other explanation is necessary.
Joy doesn't seem to hear. "This is about George, isn't it? You're still not over her. Time has passed, it's okay to move on."
Reggie shakes her head. This has nothing to do with George. Not everything in this world Reggie does needs to revolve around the fact that she lost her older sister to a burning chunk of Soviet space toilet. "I said, I like it."
"I'll be back in five minutes and I want all of this cleaned up by the time I open this door again. And I want those candles gone."
Reggie doesn't instruct her on the finer points of cleaning wax off arms or even mentions that most of her drip candles are well-hidden and not even Joy on one of her organizing sprees is likely to find all of them. She dumps the cardboard in the garbage, stacks up the candles that she knows Joy saw, and spends the rest of the five minutes picking wax off her arms and savoring the accompanying rush.
*
At Raven's seventeenth birthday party, the girls go around the room playing a game--sex this time rather than death, what's your most secret fantasy?" They go around the room, bondage, bloodplay, blindfolds, whips, of course, and then it's Reggie's turn and she knows exactly what she wants to say.
"Hot wax." Reggie declares, and the girls lean in to hear more. "You'd tie someone down, or someone would tie you down, and then you'd take the candle and start dripping the wax on to their skin and watch it dribble down their body and harden on to the skin, or it would happen to you and you'd feel the heat of the wax as it lands on you and runs down you. And then, to get it off, you'd use ice to harden it completely."
When she stops, everyone stares at her. One of the others--Tabitha, Reggie thinks her name is--looks as though she savoring the idea of the sensation. She keeps that in mind, for future experimentations.
"That is so cool," Raven whispers. "Chrysalis, your turn."
"A strap-on," Chrysalis says and the game moves from there.
*
For a while, Reggie has a short series of vanilla boyfriends and girlfriends who know nothing about her supplies of drip candles or paraffin or exactly why she keeps a plastic tarp in her closet and who think her double boiler is for melting chocolate, and then she has her candle friends--starting with Tabitha, and then eventually Jamie, Mike, and an older lesbian couple who make their own candles.
None of them ask where her thing for candle wax comes from, and for that Reggie is grateful. If pressed, she might say she likes the mess they make, the temperature aspect, and her first experiments with Tabitha the weekend after the slumber party. They make a pretty and colorful enough story by itself, but she won't tell them of the first drip candles Grandma Phyl gave her and the first time she made a wax rainbow on her wrist.
This play is the history and patterns of wax, the beautiful and textured remains, but the very origins are the wick, vital to what happened before, but better to remain burned away from the experience.