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Eliot Spencer knows exactly how many knives he has. He knows where they are, when he last cleaned them, every person he’s ever hurt with them. He knows his knives, and several of them are missing—three kitchen knives and two work knives. Not his favorites, but quality knives. Eliot doesn’t own anything that’s not quality.
This is not the first time something of his has gone missing. Parker and Hardison steal his things all the time, to the point where it’s become a part of their friendship. Parker steals his clothes all the time, she has for years. And lately, Hardison is too. They both show up to his house unabashedly wearing his shirts to watch soccer games with him (Parker doesn’t like football, but she likes the concept and the trappings of football parties, so they apply them to a sport all three of them enjoy). Parker walks around her and Hardison’s apartment in nothing but one of Eliot’s button-ups and a pair of socks when she knows he’s coming over. It’s not normal, even for Parker.
Hardison steals his computer and changes things about it—he updates the software and puts a new case on it and deletes applications that are only in Eliot’s way.
Parker steals his silverware for reasons he cannot even begin to understand.
They both steal his food, but only in very particular ways—only when he knows about it, so he could stop them if he wanted, and only when there’s more of whatever they’re stealing. He thinks it’s some sort of foster kid version of sharing.
All of this has been going on for a while. Lately, though, it’s been increasing and weirder things have been going missing. Things Parker and Alec have no use for.
It has to be them. No one else could get into his place without him knowing about it. Even they shouldn’t be able to—they must be working together. He’s used to not always understanding the ways of Parker, but this is weird and annoying and there is no reason for them to have taken his knives. Or his second-favorite guitar. Or his coffee cups. Neither of them drinks coffee and when they drink tea or eat obscene quantities of M&Ms, they like truly giant mugs, not normal sized cups intended for good Spanish coffee.
He’s decided to try talking to them about it. He doesn’t really do that much, but this has been going on for over a month and they keep giving him these looks and Eliot is a very strong man, but this is starting to make all of the things he finds relaxing rather stressful.
Sunday nights (because the brewpub is closed Mondays), Eliot goes over to Parker and Alec’s apartment for drinking and board games. They’ve been doing it for over a year. Sometimes they play new games, sometimes they play childhood games, sometimes they play foreign games, and sometimes they play horrific failed games that Parker has found out about and won’t let go.
This Saturday, Parker has requested that Eliot make candy cookies because they’re playing Candyland and a version of Candy Crush that Hardison’s hacked to make it a three person competitive game. Sometimes they have theme nights.
Eliot used to bake or cook or whatever at his place, but nowadays he just brings ingredients over so that they can hang out while he’s working. Parker likes to stir the ingredients in. Hardison likes taking pictures of them doing normal things. But tonight, they’re both kind of just standing there watching him. It’s weird.
It does, however, present him with an opportunity to bring up the stealing thing. He’s gearing up to when Parker hands him a scraper for the bowl and he sees that it’s his. “Parker, are you serious?!” he explodes. She looks at him with wide eyes. Hardison doesn’t say anything. “Why have y’all been taking my stuff? I know you’ve got my cups and my guitar and some of my knives and for some godforsaken reason my Christmas lights.”
They looks at each other guiltily.
“We didn’t know how else to…” Hardison trails off.
“How else to what? Piss me off? Confuse me? Because you can do that all on your own, I promise you that.”
“Make you love us,” Parker says without looking at him. “Well, make you realize you love us. Because you do.”
“We think,” hedges Hardison. “And we love you. Romantically, not just as our friend. I mean, as a friend too because friendship is a part of a good relationship and not ‘just’ as in implying that friendship is less important than romantic love, because it’s not. Uh, anyway, you do love us too, right?”
“What kind of a stupid question is that?” Eliot bursts out. Of course he loved them. He’d loved them for months, years maybe. Nearly as long as they’d loved each other. But it didn’t make sense that they were asking because they weren’t cruel enough to tease him and they were so right together that there’s no way they would actually want him to get in the way of that. They know about the good things and the bad things in life. They’re smart enough not to throw away the good.
Eliot’s smart enough too, so he takes a deep breath, grabs the scraper out of Parker’s hand, and gets back to his cookies. “Why are you asking me if I love you?” he asks into the bowl.
“Hardison just said,” Parker responded immediately, “We love you and you love us but you don’t know you love us so we’re fixing that part.”
“I know I love you,” Eliot corrects. He starts spooning the dough up and dropping it onto the good cookie sheets that he’d left there months ago. He doesn’t bake at home much anymore because he’s always over at their place, planning cons or playing games or just talking as they wait for his latest creation to finish. It’s possible he’s been letting himself become too comfortably ensconced in their life.
Being friends with a couple who you’re in love with and work with is a hard balance to strike. Mostly, he’s ok with it.
This time it’s Hardison who speaks up. “Well, if you love us and we love you…do you want to—be with us?”
“You’ve been stealing my stuff for weeks to ask me for a threesome?!” Eliot barks. This is weird even for them. And he wants them, yes, but not if he can’t have them for real. And he knows that he can’t. He’s known that from the beginning.
“No!” Hardison yelps.
At the same time, Parker says, “Yes!” She looks back at Hardison, confused.
“Babe, threesome is just sex, and usually just once,” he clarifies.
“Oh,” she says. Parker likes adding new words to her lexicon. She turns back to Eliot: “No. We don’t want a threesome with you.”
Eliot’s almost done putting the cookies on the tray. He’s made too many and now he and Hardison are going to have to smuggle some out so that Parker doesn’t eat them all and make herself sick.
“What do you want, then?” Eliot asks. He’s just not sure and this is starting to hurt. He’s better at taking physical pain than this kind. He always has been.
“You.” Hardison says like that means anything.
Eliot doesn’t know what to do with that, so he opens the oven door and puts two sheets of cookies in.
“We want you to have sex with us and go on dates with us and be in love with us and be able to depend on us and let us depend on you—and I know we already do depend on each other, but this is different, it’s not more but it’s that plus this, you know?—and we want you to move in with us. Eventually. We don’t want to feel pressured, because you don’t pressure people about love,” Parker recites that last part like she’s quoting Sophie. She probably is.
“We want to date you. We want a relationship with you,” Alec pipes up.
“No, you don’t,” Eliot says gently. If they’re to the point where they’ve talked about this and enacted a cockamamie plan, they believe this is true—whether it is or not—and he doesn’t want to hurt their feelings.
“Yes we do,” Parker argues. “Why wouldn’t we?”
She doesn’t mean why shouldn’t someone love him. Eliot knows that. “Because you guys work. No reason to mess with that,” he says.
“Maybe we work better all three of us,” Hardison counters. “You ever thought of that?” Eliot shrugs his shoulders and checks on the cookies. “We love you. We want to kiss you and make love to you—“
“And fuck you!” Parker interjects.
“And fuck you,” Hardison confirms. “And go on dates. We are in love with you, both of us, and we are in love with each other.”
“You’re in love with both of us, right?” Parker asks. Eliot nods. “Then why can’t we both be in love with each other and you?”
Eliot opens his mouth, realizes he has nothing to say, and shuts it again. Hardison looks smug and hopeful at the same time, which makes his face look stupid. Eliot still wants to kiss him. Dammit.
The cookies are done. Eliot wraps a dishtowel around his hand—they don’t own any potholders and he still hasn’t gotten or brought over any—and takes them out to rest on the cooling racks.
“You’re both sure about this?” he asks, looking from one to the other. His hair is in the way like he’s some sort of schoolgirl, but whatever. They both look back at him, steady.
“We’re sure. We’ve talked about it. We’ve been talking about it for months,” Hardison assures him.
“And we’ve been taking your stuff for our plan for six and a half weeks,” Parker pipes up. “If we wanted to change our minds we could have.”
“You been taking my stuff for two month?” Eliot tries to keep from laughing, but it’s wasted effort. “Why?”
Hardison looks a little embarrassed. Parker looks proud. They’re going to be the death of him.
“It was the plan.”
“I get that, but what was the plan?” Eliot ought to take the cookies off the sheets so they’ll cool properly. Instead, he leans back against the counter and crosses his arms. He knows there’s a fond look on his face and at this point he doesn’t even want to stop it.
“We decided to steal ourselves an Eliot Spencer,” Parker declares. “And we figured we’d make the environment as conducive to you being happy as possible.” She’s been watching nature documentaries again.
“You wanted to steal me from me?” he grins. It’s just so very them. And the fact that they’re all grinning at each other like idiots over that fact just might mean something.
“You can steal us back, if you want,” Hardison offers.
Eliot thinks for a minute. “That sounds like it could work,” he ventures.
“You should stay over tonight,” Parker says. “We don’t have to have sex yet if you don’t want, but you should stay over and sleep with us in the bed and be grumpy in the morning and kiss us some if you feel like it.”
“I feel like it.”
“That is very welcome news,” Alec says, taking a step forward.
“Just how much of my stuff do y’all have?” Eliot asks. He would have said that they couldn’t have taken more than he’s noticed, but before tonight he also would have said that he couldn’t have missed them being in love with him back.
“You have two drawers in the dresser and a few shelves in the bookcase and part of the closet,” Parker confesses in a rush. “And half of the shelf-thingy behind the mirror in the bathroom—“
“Medicine cabinet,” Hardison mutters.
“—because Alec says you probably have hair stuff and manly beauty products.”
Hardison takes a step back. “I didn’t—you see, the thing that—“
“Does kissing him help stop the babbling?” Eliot asks Parker. She nods. “You should do that, then. I, uh, I’d like to see you two kiss.” For all the time they’ve been together, he’s barely ever seen them kiss. He’s walked in on a few, but they don’t kiss in front of him on purpose. He’s always been grateful for that, because it would have hurt before. Now, though…
Parker gives him a grin and goes up on her tiptoes to kiss Alec. “I do not babble,” Alec mutters after.
“Yes, you do,” Eliot and Parker say at the same time, and then they kiss. It’s nice. It’s very nice, even though it’s quick. When they break apart, Alec is right there, leaning down to kiss Eliot with both of their mouths tasting just a little bit like Parker. Eliot hasn’t had to lean his head back for a kiss in a long time. He doesn’t ever remember it being this nice.
Parker seems to think so as well. She claps when they’re done. “Do ‘at again,” she gets out around the entire cookie in her mouth. They can’t, though, because they’re both laughing and then so is she and Eliot isn’t even scared of how good this all feels.