Fandom: White Collar
Rating: NC-17 - Porn, OT3
Characters: Peter Burke, Neal Caffrey, Elizabeth Burke
Spoilers: Pilot, Home Invasion, Out of the Box
Warnings/Triggers: None
Word Count: ~2400
Summary: Trying to Arrange a Threesome is Hard Work. This story fills the gap between Minutes and Hours and Part III of Privilege
Elizabeth Burke never intended to fall in love with Neal Caffrey.
She had competed with Neal for Peter’s attention for too many years. She didn’t quite resent Neal, but she recognized how easily he could become a problem for her husband. Peter liked smart, and despite Neal’s unfortunate criminal tendencies, he was very smart. He challenged her husband in ways that she never could.
Peter thought that the first time she met Neal Caffrey was when he arrived at their front door shortly after he began his work-release program. Technically, this was true – it was the first time she spoke with Neal. She had seen him one time before – four years earlier. Unbeknown to her husband, Elizabeth went to see Neal Caffrey sentenced following his trial. Peter was there, naturally. She sat in the back of the nearly empty courtroom, at an angle that was hopefully in her husband’s blind spot. She watched her husband as the judge pronounced Neal’s sentence, but couldn’t read any expression in his profile. Then she looked over at Neal. The young man had an extraordinary amount of composure, but what startled her was the way he looked at Peter when the bailiff had turned him around to handcuff him. Elizabeth expected to see anger and resentment, but what she saw was respect, admiration and most surprisingly, affection. She slipped out of the courtroom before Peter got up to leave, and quickly left the courthouse, her husband none the wiser.
When the handmade birthday and holiday cards began to arrive, Elizabeth was reluctantly charmed. Peter would spend a few hours pouring over them, ostensibly searching for hidden meanings or plots or clues or whatever, then he’d tuck them carefully away in his personal Neal Caffrey case file – the one he kept at home, not the official one that resided in FBI archives.
When Peter came home and told her (1) that Neal had escaped, (2) that he recaptured Neal five hours later, and (3) that Neal was facing another four years in prison, Elizabeth was relieved and saddened. Relieved because it meant that Peter would not be chasing Neal again for another four years (in her mind, her husband chasing Neal again was inevitable, once Neal left prison) and saddened because someone so obviously smart could be so damn stupid. The night she came home to find Peter brooding over that personal Neal Caffrey file worried her. She loved Peter, but was not blind to his faults. He was too dogged in his beliefs about right and wrong – that he couldn’t believe that love would motivate anyone to take terrible risks. She was beginning to feel that she was losing the man she married to the professional paranoid. Fortunately, it didn’t take much for her to persuade Peter to finally accept Neal’s proposal.
Elizabeth would be lying if she denied that she was sexually attracted to Neal - you’d have to be dead not to feel a little spark of something when he turned on that charm. However, Elizabeth was never tempted to act upon that attraction until the day that Neal had called her and asked for help after jumping out the fourth story window in a judge’s chamber. It took more than a little derring-do to sneak Neal into the house when it was being watched by a half-dozen FBI agents. The exhilaration of outwitting the FBI paled in comparison to seeing the expression on Peter’s face as he talked to Neal, who sat behind the support column in the living room. Like a rebellious child, she hid on the second floor landing and watched Peter and Neal through the banisters. If asked, she couldn’t recall any substance of the conversation – she was too enthralled with the way Peter was eating up Neal with his eyes.
Then she really started watching Peter and Neal, and Neal and Peter, and Peter without Neal, but talking about Neal. It was all so obvious. Peter was in love with Neal, Neal seemed to feel the same for Peter and neither of them had a clue. It was all too lovely and delicious and frankly she wanted them both. Together, serially and simultaneously.
Being a goal oriented woman, Elizabeth approached the problem tactically. First thing was education. She understood the mechanics of anal sex – more than understood it. Peter loved her ass. While he was almost laughably bad at dirty talk during ‘vanilla’ sex, Peter became William fucking Shakespeare when he was sodomizing her. But Elizabeth wasn’t certain that she fully understood the act between two men. That meant research. Which meant porn.
There was no way she was going to look at homosexual pornography on the computer she used for her work. She knew that Peter had, on many occasions, looked at her internet browsing history – usually around her birthday, Christmas or their anniversary. She didn’t mind, and had used that knowledge to leave cookies that would plant gift ideas in his head. So she got herself a small netbook, took a crash course on anonymous browsing, and started looking at gay porn.
Unlike the movies that she watched with Peter, most of the stuff on line was pretty raw. Some of it hit bad buttons for her and she almost changed her mind. Elizabeth persevered, finding sites that catered to couples, rather than random suck and fuck encounters.
Armed with that information, she started delving into the mechanics of threesomes. That almost got her into deep and serious trouble. One Wednesday morning, she kissed Peter goodbye – he and Neal had an assignment in Philadelphia and they wouldn’t be back until Friday night. She canceled all her appointments and spent the day doing ‘research.’ Wednesday somehow melted into Thursday. She vaguely remembered pausing the video to feed and walk Satchmo, and grab another cup of coffee before heading back up to her third-floor office. The next morning, she found herself nearly glued to the comfy leather chair in her office, the Powerwand massager fitfully buzzing on the floor and the phone ringing. It was Yvonne. Elizabeth said she was sick and to reschedule everything for tomorrow. Her ‘research’ continued all day Thursday and may have even spilled over to Friday, except as she was surfing for fresh material, she heard the front door open. Peter was home early.
She just managed to get the netbook and the dildos and the massager shoved into a drawer when she heard Peter call out for the dog. This was going to be a problem. She hadn’t bathed in days and probably stank like a Hunt’s Point hooker. She could have feigned illness, but despite spending the better part of Wednesday and Thursday with the massager, the dildos and her own clever fingers, Elizabeth was horny for cock, and Peter wouldn’t dream of screwing her if she said she was unwell. Sometimes her husband was too much of a gentleman.
It was a close-run thing. She ignored Peter, who hadn’t (thankfully) realized she was home and had taken Satchmo out, and ran into the shower. She was lucky, when Peter came back in and upstairs, she was still in the shower. When he joined her, she climbed him like a ladder. Whatever he had done in Philadelphia hadn’t taken any toll on either his libido or his stamina. They fucked like minks from the bathroom to the bedroom.
The end-result of her two days of research into polyamory (other than the pleasant twinge of a well-used vagina) was that anything was possible with three willing participants. She thought about the best approach. Peter would be liable to completely freak out if she outright suggested a threesome. However, if given the right opportunity and a little indirect encouragement, they might act on their desires and then she’d join in.
Objectively, Elizabeth knew that this was crazy - to expect her husband of ten years to fall into the arms of (okay, to fuck) the beautiful young man he called his partner. For Peter, it wouldn’t be that Neal was a man - Peter had never hidden the fact that he had been actively bisexual before they met. It was the fact that Peter was legally responsible for Neal, and he’d probably feel that a physical and emotional relationship with the other man would cross the moral boundaries he lived within. So, her intention was to give Peter and Neal the opportunity, and to subtly let her husband know that she was more than okay with what they did - so long as she got a chance to play too.
The trick was now getting Peter and Neal together.
She had thought she had everything properly orchestrated. She convinced Peter that the wiring in their home needed to be redone, so she took Satchmo and went to her sister’s place, making sure that the house was uninhabitable. Peter was stubborn and insisted on staying in the same fleabag hotel that he had first put Neal in. When he came to his senses and headed uptown, he acted like a pig and Neal eventually threw him out. Of course, Elizabeth only learned this from Neal well after the fact, and then she forced a confession from Peter about how badly he behaved.
After that, Elizabeth just about gave up all hope using subtlety to get Peter and Neal together. Which broke her heart just a little bit. At first, getting them together had seemed an exciting sexual adventure. As time passed, Elizabeth came to the horrified realization that like her husband, she was in love with Neal Caffrey (except that she actually, consciously knew it), and she wanted something more than just a threesome. She wanted them all together, permanently and the odds of that happening were slim to none.
Eventually, even the opportunity for a threesome evaporated. Neal became too focused on getting the music box for Kate, and Peter was just as focused on preventing Neal from ruining his life. At one point, she toyed with the idea of a full-frontal attack on Neal, but chickened out at the last moment. It wasn’t that she wanted Neal, she wanted Peter and Neal. Then their whole universe was blown apart with an airplane on the tarmac by Hanger 4.
Both Neal and Peter were badly damaged by that disaster. Her strong husband, who had worked through the psychological trauma of September 11th, started having nightmares almost every time he fell asleep. Dreams that melded the terrorist attacks with the sabotage of the little jet that was supposed to carry Kate and Neal off to a new life. Almost worse, was the loss of intimacy in their marriage - he wouldn’t touch her. They lay side by side in the cozy queen sized bed, but there might have been a continent between them.
On the other hand, Neal never let the pain show; he was as polished and smooth as ever. Because she insisted that he spend lots of time in their home, Elizabeth saw the cracks and worried that he was going to fall down one day and never get up again.
After listening to her husband wake up screaming for the fourth night in a row, she dragged him downstairs and out onto the patio, hoping that the cool night air and the neutral environment would bring Peter some measure of peace. As she sat there, watching her husband stare off into the darkness, Elizabeth wondered how they gotten from teasing birthday cards to silly banter to deliciously unsatisfied sexual tension to three people on the edge of insanity.
Then Peter started to talk. His voice was harsh and halting. It was a confession she had never expected to hear.
“El. I don’t know how to make this right.”
“It wasn’t your fault, Peter. If you hadn’t gone after him, Neal would be dead. You did the best you could.”
“No. That’s not what I mean.” Peter turned and looked at her. The expression on his face wasn’t grief, it was fear. “El – I love him. I want him. I love you. I love both of you and I don’t know what to do.”
Elizabeth sat there, stunned. Peter must have taken her silence for anger or disgust. “I’m sorry – I’ll leave. I’ll find a hotel or something.” He got up abruptly, nearly tipping the patio chair over in his haste.
She grabbed him, stunned. “Peter – what do you mean?” Something blossomed inside her.
Peter stared at her hand clutching his arm, and the damn finally burst. “You want to know what I mean? When I’m not thinking about that goddamned plane blowing up, I’m thinking about fucking Neal Caffrey. I’m thinking about watching Neal Caffrey fuck you. I am thinking about you sucking him while my dick’s buried in his ass, or in your ass or your cunt. I am thinking about you fucking Neal with a strap-on, and my cock’s down his throat. And when I’m not thinking about us fucking, I’m thinking about how the three of us can make a life together without everything we’ve worked for turning to shit. I see him here and think, THIS is how we belong.”
Peter stood there, almost panting from the force of his words. He looked like a boxer that had taken too many punches, and was waiting for the one that would lay him out on the canvas. Elizabeth stood up and wrapped her arms around her shaking husband. At that moment, Elizabeth felt as inarticulate as Peter often seemed. She wondered how he would take a similar confession from her, since he seemed so unhappy about his own feelings. Ultimately, she decided that it would be better to risk everything than to let this pain continue. She whispered her own hopes and dreams about all of them, together, whole and happy.
Slowly, Peter wrapped his arms around her and they just clung together in the predawn light, finally feeling a bit of peace come back into their lives.
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