Work Text:
"Hey, Stranger."
"Hey yourself."
The atmosphere at Union Station was festive. The shops twinkled with Christmas lights and a smell of peppermint hot chocolate wafted out of a cafe.
Maggie hugged Jasper and he kissed her on the cheek. "Henry's definitely going to be here this year?"
"Tomorrow. He's got last minute atifact shipping to finish before break."
"You doing OK?" she asked. From Facebook, she knew Jasper was a bit down about his recent breakup with the young man he'd been seeing.
"Yeah well... It sucks getting dumped right before Christmas. Some days worse than others." Jasper shrugged.
"Thanks for picking me up at the train. I brought you a little something your father doesn't have to know about." She handed him a bottle of Glenmorangie Scotch.
Jasper's mouth quirker up in a grin. "Liquor stores in Boston aren't any more age-enforcing than the ones in New Haven, eh?"
"Not near campus." She grinned at him. "Merry Christmas."
"We have the house to ourselves until 6. Want to split some?"
"So long as we're not drunk when my parents come over to pick me up."
Jasper clutched the bottle playfully. "You don't get that much of it back."
They headed up to the room he and Henry had shared up until a few months earlier. A few additional boxes of files sat near the door, and a bag of golf clubs. Clearly the Dean had expanded storage into the boys' room while they were gone.
Still, it was mostly as she remembered it. The room smelled of hemp rope from the hammock. A flood of memories took Maggie by surprise.
Jasper took out the two shot glasses he had pocketed on his way upstairs, and distributed the amber-colored liquid. He handed Maggie a glass and took a sip. "Nice."
He nodded towards her. "Thank you."
They sipped in amiable silence for a few minutes. "How have things been for you?" he asked after a while.
"Good. Strange. I like the independence, I like the classes. I just miss -" she gestured, "the way it used to be."
Jasper smiled. "The excitement."
"Yeah. It's too quiet, too normal..."
"Without Henry around." He finished for her.
Maggie looked rueful. "Yeah." She nudged her glass back towards the bottle.
"Me too." Jasper refilled their glasses. Maggie sipped a bit more.
"Did you and he ever...?" Maggie waggled her eyebrows suggestively.
"No." Jasper snorted. "Not that I didn't think about it..."
"Yeah, same here."
"You thought about him and me, or him and you?"
"Both." Maggie admitted, finished this shot more quickly than the first. "My Mom gave me a 'back massager' for my birthday back when I started high school. It was reasonably obvious that she'd read in a parenting book that giving your daughter a vibrator would keep her a virgin longer."
Jasper gaped. "Really? Did that work?"
"Actually, yes. I knew girls who went crazy to get a guy, whereas I could think about whoever I wanted, get off, and have extra time left over for my studying."
"You're glad you got a vibrator so you could study more? Only you, Maggie."
Maggie shrugged. "And, well, you guys set a high standard. I could have you in my imagination, what did I need with some jock with a 12 word vocabulary?"
Jasper's cheeks burned. "Yeah, well... I had to wait until he was asleep to masturbate. I mean, it would have just been embarrassing, thinking abut him while he was right there, in hearing distance." He paused. "I thought about you, too," he chanced. She had no idea how much of a crush he'd had on her during high school.
Honestly, he let himself get dragged into a lot of Henry's danger-laden schemes just because it kept him around the two of them.
"Hey, I know!" Maggie said giggling, pouring herself a third shot. "We should tag team him!"
"Uh... what?"
"We should work together to get the unrufflable Henry Griffin into bed."
"Maggie, I think you've had enough." Jasper surrepititiously put the bottle away in a drawer. "What makes you think he wouldn't be totally offended? If he's straight, he's not going to be too happy to have me coming on to him."
"1., he's defintely bi. When he came through on his way back from North Dakota he was all excited about the winkte shaman he'd met, about how great it was that the tribe was so open about the 'two-spirited one.' And, 2, Henry doesn't get offended. He'll just make some comparison to another culture where this is perfectly normal."
Jasper shook his head. "You're crazy, Maggie."
"C'mon. We always made a great threesome."
Jasper's eyebrows wrinked. "You and I fought for his attention constantly."
"We're older now. We'll be better at sharing. Promise me you'll at least think about it."
"Um, yeah, sure. How about we go downstairs and get you some coffee?"
"That doesn't really sober people up, you know."
"No, but at least you'll smell like coffee when your parents get here."
~~~~
Jasper hadn't expected to think more about Maggie's suggestion, but he found his thoughts drifting inexorably back to it. At dinner, when his Dad was going on about capital improvements at the school, Jasper thought of the three of them together and had to bite the inside of his cheek to keep from making inappropriately enthusiastic facial expressions. Loading the dishwasher afterwards, imagining running his hand under Henry's waistband, fingers brushing smooth skin and curly hair, he almost broke a soup tureen.
On the trip down, his depressed thoughts had been on Scott and the breakup; now those thoughts were driven out of his mind completely by thoughts of his best friends. For so long the two of them had been there, arousing to spend so much time with, yet placed out of bounds by the dictates of friendship. The winter break was suddenly starting to look up.
In bed, with the lights down low, he could appreciate the mental pictures more fully. He alternated between Maggie's sweet smile, her warm brown eyes... and Henry's bright blue eyes, his grin, contagious, expectant, full of adventure.
Then he pictured being with both of them. A three way kiss, their bodies pressed together. OK, running that image again naked, and with more wiggling. Yeah, definitely more moving around. Skin sliding over smooth skin, the warmth of being sandwiched between them. The squish of Maggie's breasts. Henry's cock poking between them. His hips rocked forward into his hand, reaching for their embrace. Jasper was surprised how quickly the images pushed him to the point of no return, and he was thrown beyond thinking by the intensity of his orgasm.
Afterwards, drifting off, he weighed the odds. Would Henry be totally offended and cut him off? Nah, that really wasn't Henry's style. Would Henry and Maggie only be interested in each, and would that hurt? That was a more likely problem. It would be depressing to be a third wheel to them for the week, but far less than it would have two or three years earlier. If it wasn't Henry and Maggie, it would be each of them with somebody else soon enough. They were going their separate ways already.
Even then, even if he would feel excluded, he would know Maggie had tried to include him. She could have just tried to seduce Henry on her own. It was one last chance to be the three of them, together in everything. He fell asleep thinking that perhaps he was as crazy as Maggie.
~~~~
They went to the airport together the next day to meet Henry's plane. The terminal was all glass windows and white walls, cold and light and soaring. There was a distinct draft as they stood waiting outside customs for the passengers from Peru to empty out the long corridor from customs. After what seemed like forever, Henry appeared in a colorful knit hat with long tie straps and something on top that looked suspiciously like a pom-pom. A leather knapsack was slung over the shoulder of his sheepskin jacket. He grinned and waved at them, oblivious to the slight blush on Jasper's face.
Maggie pulled them into a group hug. Jasper could feel the potential, the energy between them just under the surface. Maybe this could really work.
~~~~
Back at house, Henry unpacked his meager travel items: a new woven Native American hooded pullover, some small wrapped presents, a bag of tea, and some cups made from gourds. "Yerba Mate," he explained. "You've got to try this. Better than coffee. You drink it from a gourd, with this strainer-straw thing. Gives you lots of energy." He bounced a bit and gave them an infectious grin.
They followed him to the kitchen where he set up a pot to boil and distributed gourd-cups and strange metal straws with a paddle shaped strainer on the end. "Like the straws for Sloopies." he explained.
"Um, that's 'Slurpies,'" Maggie corrected automatically.
"So what have you guys been up to?" Henry asked. The pause was palapable, a missed beat somehow. Then Maggie started chattering brightly about physics classes and MIT student pranks and Henry forgot about it. They took their tea back upstairs.
They were on Jasper's bed, backs against the wall, gourds perched precariously on nightstand and bookcase, when Maggie looked over Henry's head with a wicked grin and suggested to Jasper, "You take that ear, I'll take this one." All thoughts of sophomore year anecdotes left Henry's mind. The sensation of warm, wet lips on both his ears at once, his - oh! - his friends' lips... and tongues...
Henry looked back and forth between them, for once unsure about a situation. Maggie squeezed his hand. "The three of us. We're a team, right?"
"Um, yeah... Is this one of those customs here I'm not aware of? Like a coming of age ritual, or homecoming or something?" Henry's brow furrowed.
"Yes." Maggie assured him, and Jasper smirked. "Definitely."
"Oh. Well then. I'm honored by your preparation of the ritual."
Jasper reached out for Henry's other hand, wanting confirmation that Henry wasn't talking to Maggie alone. Henry turned to look at him with a searing hunger and hopefulness that made Jasper's heart pound. "Both of you." He reached out to stroke the side of Jasper's face, then kissed him, tentatively at first. Jasper met his tongue and sucked, their lips moving warmly against each other, until Henry broke off and turned to Maggie. Their first kiss was long, soft and slow, Maggie's tongue delicate and fluttering. When they were done, Jasper reached across to Maggie with his other hand. Her eyes shining, she leaned in and kissed him then, and he thought he would melt, or cease breathing.
Just then a shout came up the stairs. "I'm home! And I could use some help making dinner before Maggie's parents come over! Remember those vegetables I asked you to have chopped?"
"Dammit!" Maggie whispered. "Tommorrow - we'll find some excuse why we need more time." She turned to them, "Love you both," then disappeared down the stairs.
"We should go be helpful." Jasper said ruefully.
"There'll be time later," Henry said confidenty. "The Three Mouseketeers ride again, eh?"
"Uh, that's 'Musketeers'..." Jasper corrected as they left the room.
~~~~
It was a long evening with the luckily clueless parents before the young men got to turn in. Henry turned out the lights and settled in the hammock. A few minutes later he said, "I can't sleep. How about you?"
He could hear the grin in Jasper's voice. "Nope. Want to come over here and finish what we started this afternoon?"
Quick as lightening, there was a second person in the twin bed, pointed in the opposite direction. Jasper felt warm breath through his pajama bottoms, tracing tongue, and then, pj's yanked out of the way, warm wet heat surrounding his cockhead. He struggled to maintain control, make it last. He shimmied down Henry's flannel sleep pants and completed the circuit, pleasure sweeping from mouth to cock to mouth. They formed Ourorobus, the snake endlessly swallowing itself, silent except for the undulation of hips and soft wet noises of suction expertly applied. Henry slicked up a finger and began probing for the sensitive ring of muscle. When he found his target, Jasper choked down a cry, and shot, hard, repeatedly, until finally he was spent. He then turned his full attention to his cousin's cock. Henry moaned and writhed at the engulfing onslaught. His hands ran over Jasper's butt as his arousal built, steadily, until, with an explosion of heat he was pushed over the top, convulsively, his head thumping the mattress repeatedly as he came.
"Do you think Maggie will mind..." Henry motioned with his hand, as they cleaned up.
"Not if we tell her about it."
Henry's brows wrinkled. "Don't you mean 'Not if we don't tell her about it?'"
"Nope. Let me tell you how this all started..."
~~~~
At 10 am, bright and early, there was a knock at their door. "Anyone else still have Christmas shopping to do? There's an indoor flea market we could go to." Maggie suggested.
Twenty minutes later they were picking their way through tables filled with questionably valuable objects, in the hopes of finding buried treasure. Maggie was effervescent, and tried having her arms around both of them at once, but it made navigating the narrow isles difficult. They held hands intermittently, torn between assertion and embarassment. Still, there was a glow of a shared secret, an us-against-the-world quality uniting their little group.
"Hey, look at these!" Jasper exclaimed, pointing at a table on their left.
"Cylinders?" Henry's eyebrows furrowed.
"Edison wax cylinders." Maggie filled in. "They were the predecessor to records."
"Records?"
"Another piece of ancient history," Jasper explained. "But these were the first way to record music."
"People have preserved music throughout history by teaching it to others." Henry protested.
"Fifty bucks for the lot." the vendor chimed in hopefully.
"Thirty," Jasper counter-offered.
"Forty?"
"Ok, ok, sold." Jasper dug in his pocket. "My Dad will get a kick out of these. The museum has a player, you know."
"Of course. It'd be cool to hear them." Maggie agreed. "Isn't it in storage now?"
"Oh yeah, that's right, we helped re-crate it last year. What say we go check it out when we're done here?"
They wandered on to the food court, where they shared Samosas and batter-coated deep fried potato slices, dipping them in a little cup of cilanto-yogurt sauce. Maggie
leaned forward and licked a drip of sauce off Jasper's chin. He turned bright red.
"Is this another part of the ritual?" Henry asked hopefully, and Maggie obligingly smeared some sauce on her lips for him to lick off. Jasper spread some on Maggie's ear and licked it back off. Her breath hitched a bit. An older woman at an adjacent table cleared her throat and all three of them startled guiltily. They packed up their trash and headed on, surpressing giggles until they got a respectable distance away.
A scarf for Maggie's Mom, a backpacking stove for Henry's parents, and they were on the road, arriving at the museum with only minor traffic irritations.
"Here's the box," Jasper checked a tag against the computerized number. "Easy..." They lifted the cylinder playing Victorola out, first horn, then base.
"Looks like a morning glory," Henry commented. "Do you talk into that thing?"
"There are ones like that," Maggie said, "for making recordings. But most of them are like this, for listening to." She fitted one of the cylinders on. A big band played "Little Brown Jug" tinnily. Henry bounced his head in time to the music. The next cylinder was an upbeat "In the Mood."
The third cylinder, however, started out quiet and scratchy. A man's voice came on.
"Mary, this is Thomas. Please reconsider my offer of financial help in this difficult time. In case you ever need it, I have hidden the seeds of wealth in the little room at your house. You will need to take it to a man who will know what to do with it and treat you fairly for it. When you need it, take it to Mr. Guh--" Then a romping foxtrot started up and the man's voice was lost. They looked at each other wide eyed.
"'Thomas' as in Thomas Edison? and, 'the seeds of wealth'?" Jasper said over the music.
Henry put down the cylinder he had been fiddling with. "I wonder who she was?"
Maggie picked up the cylinderical cardboard cover it had come out of. 'M. VanDoren, 127 Elm St.' was written on it. "Mary VanDoren, I guess."
Henry turned suddenly. "Did you hear that?"
"What?"
"Sounded like footsteps, then a door closing very carefully."
"You're imagining things Henry. Shall we check out the address on our way home?"
They circuitously swung by Elm St. "121, 125, 129.... It's not there." Henry said in disappointment.
"Nothing." Jasper agreed.
"I don't suppose there was any reason to assume the city was Washington DC." Maggie sighed. "Who was she, though, and What do you suppose he meant by, 'know what to do with it'?"
They were all silent. "Maybe she was his mistress?" Jasper suggested. "What sort of treasure could you hide in a small room? Gold? He had to tell her to go to a reputable pawn shop?"
"There are plenty of people who know what to do with gold." Maggie objected.
"Maybe it was the plans for a new invention." Henry said. "He had a ton of patents, maybe he had enough to spare one for his girlfriend."
"He made the earliest moving pictures. Do you think he could have hidden some porn for her to sell? Porn drives technology." Maggie said with a twinkle in her eye.
"College has changed you." Jasper said, shaking his head and tsking.
"Do you object?"
"Well.. not so long as we're the beneficiaries of your new knowledge."
She squeezed his knee and he smiled.
~~~~
When they got to Maggie's house, her parents were off at work. The fridge was soon a dozen eggs lighter, and bread and cheese were added to the shopping list on the door.
They wandered upstairs. With a room to herself, Maggie had had enough space to inherit her parents' queen sized bed when they got a water bed.
"You missed a good second round last night." Jasper teased her. She raised an eyebrow. "After lights-out Henry and I sucked each other off."
Maggie bit her lip and attempted to disguise what her hand was doing in her lap. "I want to see." She confessed.
Somehow the thrill of being watched heightened the sexual tension for both the young men. Henry had significantly less body modesty, after years of camp living. He slowly stripped, getting off on her appreciation of the show. When he removed his pants, she licked her lips, but did not moved to interfere. Jasper was feeling somewhat more shy about the whole nudity thing, but once Henry started unbuttoning him, he stopped worrying about it. The feel of Henry's mouth on his cock was an electrical storm of sensation.
Maggie got out her vibrator and lube, and hiked up her skirt. She watched Henry suck with abandon, playing to his audience with exaggerated motions. He fisted his own cock and moaned. Jasper, while clearly enjoying the sensations was looking a little self-conscious. Henry got up, kissed him, and led him to the bed. They moved into 69 position more comfortably on the larger bed, and were shortly focused on each other.
Their watcher slid two fingers inside her pussy while guiding the vibrator to her clitoris. Her vulva tingled and quivered from the turn-on. She had imagined this often enough, but the real-ness of it blew her away. With a pleased smirk she reminded herself that it might not have happened without her.
As the young men threw themselves into their pleasure with rising intensity, she sped up, matching them. Henry let out a primal whoop and came, thrashing, momentarily separated from his partner. Once spent, he lay panting. Jasper took up the task at hand, locked eyes with Maggie, grinning at the hungry way she was watching him, and the show she herself was providing, and they both came moments later. They fell asleep in a happy, sticky puppy pile... with an alarm set to warn of the time of returning parents.
~~~~
The next morning the Dean cornered the three of them at the Museum Cafe.
"The storage area was left in a bit of chaos," Dean Bartlett said sternly. "Do you three know anything about it?"
Henry, Jasper and Maggie looked at him in surprise. With anyone else, the Dean would have assumed this meant no involvement, but these kids had a lot of practice not telling him important details. "Stuff was knocked around a bit," he continued, "but all that was missing was a wax cylinder player." He thought he saw Maggie flinch a little. "Is there anything going on I should know about?" Three heads shook back and forth at once. The Dean sighed. He never got anything out of them until it was all over. The strangest thing was, it almost looked like Jasper had been blushing at that last question.
After extricating themselves from the conversation with Jasper's father, the trio hurried off to look for clues. "He's right, it's a mess, but nothing else is missing..." Maggie started to say, but Jasper cut her off. "Except my cylinders!"
Henry was paused attentively, looking up, while the others debated whether the cylinders had been in the drawer or on the table last, although they were now clearly neither. "Now I'll need to find something else for my Dad. Who would want to steal cylinders?" Jasper was asking.
"Duck!" Henry shouted, and backflipped over the desk in their direction, knocking them out of the way. "A bird?" Jasper started, but was interrupted by a blue crack of electricity, lightening hitting where Henry had been standing just moments before. "How did you know that was going to happen?"
"Smelled it coming. I've been hit by lightning before, remember? Ayre's Rock. You get a sense for these things. Duck!"
This time Jasper threw himself down, as the arc of lightening went over the desk and scorched some floor just behind them.
"The bolts are coming from there." Maggie pointed. "Afterimage. I had my eyes open."
Henry darted out and knocked the device off the top shelf. It crashed with a sound of breaking machinery, but Maggie quickly disconnected it from the extension cord to be sure.
"Tesla coil." She pronounced. "Big one. I didn't know you could make these things into a weapon."
"But who'd want to hurt us?" Jasper protested, despite knowing from past experience that there would be an answer.
"Whoever wants those cylinders." Henry said grimly. "Those noises yesterday - someone else heard the message from Edison. Somebody else believes there's a treasure."
Maggie broke into a grin. "We have research to do."
"Hey, guys, what's this note on the floor?"
"I know what you're doing. Stop, or face the consequences." Henry read. "What's that mean?"
"Maybe someone's really not happy about us looking into this Edison treasure." Maggie shivered. "Maybe the Tesla coil was just a warning."
Maggie rummaged the laptop out of its bag and started it up. When the browser came up, she typed swiftly.
Henry said, "Are you going to that... Wicked peed ia thing?"
"It's not magic, Henry. It's reading. Even you can do that. Here, sit down and start reading. I can read over your shoulder."
They switched places, and Maggie began giving Henry a back rub by way of encouragement. Her fingers brushed over his Nehru collar and onto the warm skin at the back of his neck. An electric thrill went through her. Such a small thing, but so much meaning. They wouldn't have done this last year. Jasper, having learned some things in college, started giving Maggie a back rub. He could feel her body between them, distracted from the mental exercise. Her hips had a mind of their own. He slid up closer behind her, so that when she rocked backwards, she grazed the bulge in his jeans. She made a slight whimper and ground back more often. He took the chance of loosening his jeans' snap and fly, and rearranging upward, so that when she pushed backwards, only their underwear separated them.
His body tensed. The encyclopedia entry was long forgotten. She was nibbling on Henry's ear by now, and rubbing up and down as she pushed back. Jasper ventured a finger and found her very wet. He slid his briefs aside, barely breathing. Contact! His chest hurt from the breathlessness. It took great concentration to slow down enough to pull a condom out of his pocket and try to put it on with a minimal loss of contact. He wasn't sure she was on the pill, and besides, there was safe sex to consider.
Once it was on, he rubbed the tip experimentally between her labia and down to her clitoris. Definitely a positive response. He circled her clitoris a couple more times, then lined himself up for entry. Slowly at first, he eased his cock head into her slit.
He was fucking Maggie! He came too fast; he had hoped he could hold out longer. She wasn't far behind him, though, in a gasping climax. Henry turned back to watch them, with that look of pure love at their happiness that totally got to Maggie at how right they had been to start down this path.
An hour later, Henry was meditating, Jasper was playing a video game, and Maggie was still poking around on the computer.
"It says here, Edison's experiments with his flueroscope, an early x-ray machine, led to the death of one of his workers. Richard VanDoren volunteered to have x-rays taken..."
"but they didn't know about the dangers of too much radiation." Jasper sat up straight. "And Mary was Richard's wife?"
"I don't know, but it makes sense." Maggie clicked on the keyboard some more.
"What now?"
"I'm going on a geneolgy site and claiming to be Richard VanDoren's granddaughter." Click, click, click... "Bingo! My grandmother was Mary VanDoren, and when she died in 1951, she lived in Fairfax, VA."
"The address is in Fairfax!"
"What are we waiting for?"
~~~~
A dusting of snow was starting to fall as they reached Elm St. in Fairfax.
"123, 125, 127! Hey, it's been turned into a restaurant!"
"That's our ticket in, then. Who's hungry?"
Inside, the restaurant was dark, elegant, its old house background giving it a dignified air. They sat at a round table of dark wood. Most of the light came from a hobnail glass candle holder in the center of the table.
"So where do you think it's hidden?" Maggie asked. "The recording said 'in the small room', but as a restaurant it's all one big room now."
They eyed the menus as they pondered this.
"Maybe there's a turret room, or a root cellar or something?"
A shadow loomed over them that was not their waiter.
"Someday we'll get a candlelight dinner where no one's trying to kill us." Jasper muttered.
"A candlelight dinner for three... How romantic. Or is that, perverted?"
It took them a moment to recognize the man who stood over them.
"Raj? What are you doing here?"
"Trying to find out what the Dean's precious threesome are up to. And threesome is accurate, isn't it? For years you've been better than the rest of us, always making exciting discoveries. I worked in the DOUM room for two years before you arrived," he pointed at Henry, "and I still don't think the dean knows my name."
"I had just meant to follow you and find this Edison treasure before you, but in the process, I found out your dirty little secret. Think the Dean wants to know his precious son is a faggot? Or will CIA dad enjoy these pictures of his daughter making out with two boys at once? The possibilities are endless. Or you can find the treasure and turn it over to me."
"We don't know it's worth anything." Jasper protested.
Raj waved his hand. "If it's not worth money it'll be worth suck up points. I've seen you in action before. "
"Well, OK," Henry said brightly, favoring Raj with a smile. "If you heard the cylinder, you know we're looking for a 'little room'. What does that suggest to you?"
"I had thought it would be a turret room." Maggie suggested, while Jasper glared at both of them for being so unconcerned about Raj usurping their adventure. "But this house doesn't really have one," she finished, frowning.
Raj raised an eyebrow at Henry. "A bathroom," he said. "It's a euphemism."
Henry nodded. "That's what I think too. Shall we have Maggie check the women's first?" Henry asked.
Maggie returned a few minutes later, empty-handed. "The women's room is in a new-looking addition," she said. "The men's appears to be in the older part of the house. They're both upstairs."
"I'll go with you." Raj said to Henry. So, you don't try anything funny."
"Don't do anything we wouldn't do." Jasper spat at him, and got a glower in return.
This bathroom was in an older section, with wood planked walls. It was clearly a single, and in view of other diners. Raj had clearly taken the meaning of Jasper's insinuation to heart, and was not eager to appear to both be going in at once.
Three minutes later, Henry came back out with a dusty little bag, grinning. "At least let me show the others 'your' find."
Raj narrowed his eyes. "I don't trust you. What is it?"
"I don't know. I haven't opened it. I had to pick the lock on the plumbing access hatch and climb up to feel around in the ceiling. Shall we take it back to the table and check it out?"
Raj looked distrustful, but at that moment a middle-aged man came up and asked, "Is this the line for the bathroom?" Raj followed Henry closely down the stairs and slid in at the table.
"We ordered a round of appetizers to buy time." Maggie explained, gesturing at the plate of tomatoes, onion and basil on crostini. Jasper rolled his eyes. "Maggie's pick."
"Ooh, bruschetta," Henry said, "My favorite. We were on this dig once, in Sicily -"
"Enough stalling." Raj growled. "What is it?"
"Seeds." Henry said, peering into the bag.
"Seeds?"
"Edison was working on finding plants he could make rubber from!" Maggie exclaimed. "But it never quite worked out commercially. Do you think these could be...?"
"I have friends in botany. I'll find out. You don't have to worry your head about it. I'll just take these and be off."
Henry handed over the bag and watched the man leave. Jasper gaped. "That's it? You're just going to let him get away with it?"
"It'll be OK." Henry said absently. "he didn't get away with this." He fished a piece of folded, yellowed paper out of his pocket.
"A treasure map! Henry, I could kiss you!"
Henry raised an eyebrow. "I'll take you up on that later. Now, escargot?"
"Not if you want to take me up on that later. Besides, have you seen the price? For snails?" Jasper shuddered. "So what's the map say?"
"Looks like it's between two rivers, in a valley - these look like topo lines - where would thus be, though...?"
"Wait, Henry! See these numbers?"
"Er, yeah, what would numbers have to do with it?"
"They're coordinates! Like on a globe, or on -"
"A GPS! You're brilliant, Maggie!" Jasper exclaimed. "It's like, we've found the first geocache!"
The waiter circled over to them. They stared at the menu for a minute while the effect of the prices on their monthly allowances sunk in.
Maggie recovered first. "Our... friend... wasn't feeling so good...We should probably go look after him. Can we have the check please?"
They collected their coats and left for their car. Henry frowned. "This isn't right."
"Yeah," Jasper agreed. "Fifteen dollars for tomatoes on toast is ridiculous."
"No, these footprints. There's been a scuffle. And doesn't that car look familiar?"
"I've seen it at Smithson. It's Raj's?" Maggie hazarded.
Henry nodded. "He meant to leave right away. What - or who - stopped him? These footprints... a single person in sneakers wrestled him into a car. We need to rescue him."
"We do?" Jasper asked. "But how would we know where they went?"
"Looks like our kidnapper dropped something in the struggle. A pen... from the Brennan Inn in Rockville."
~~~~
"I still don't get it. He threatened us and took your big find. Why do we owe him anything?"
"He's a human being. And it looks like someone else is a bigger threat, and that he just walked into their trap for us... with a fake bag of seeds."
"What? Fake?"
"I thought we seemed to be being followed so I took the precaution of collecting some dry goldenrod seeds from the park during my morning jog. 'Seeds of wealth.' I thought I might be doing a one to one swap if I was guessing right, but it turned out to be a map instead." Henry said.
Jasper burst out laughing. "You rock! You totally had him fooled."
They reached the hotel and parked. "How are we going to find which room they're in?" Maggie asked. They edged around the building.
"Follow our instincts, I guess. When I was in Burma once, we were tracking this wild boar... Shh! Look, there! A sneaker track that matches the one we saw! They must be in one of the two end rooms." They snuck around the side of the building and listened at the window. "It's this one!" Henry mouthed.
Cupping hands to their ears they heard a deep voice. "Still won't tell me what they found? I don't want to have to strip search you, but I will. The treasure rightfully belongs to me. Edison promised my great-uncle $50,000 and then reneged."
"Your... Great-uncle?" Raj managed.
"Nicola Tesla. I am Alexai Tesla. He solved the problem Edison had offered a reward for, but Edison then claimed that it didn't count because he wasn't a US citizen." The man said bitterly.
The three listeners exchanged glances. Maggie nodded slowly. "I've read that somewhere." They backed away from the bathroom window. "Do we give it to him?"
"No way!" Jasper protested.
A few minutes later...
"Housekeeping!" Maggie announced at the door, in a loud cheerful voice.
A snarl from inside. "Go away!"
Henry opened the lock-picked door and spun a kick at the man's gun hand. Maggie scrambled for the gun while Henry and Jasper tied the man up with his own rope supply.
She hurried over to cut Raj free with her Swiss Army knife.
"We'll make you a deal." Henry said. "We give you the map to the treasure, we take Raj out of here, and you never bother us again. Neither of you." He looked sternly at Raj, then leveled his gaze at Alexai. "It wasn't fair how your great-uncle was treated."
"Map!?" Raj shouted.
"Oh. Yeah. Well, we double-crossed you."
"If you double-crossed him, why should I trust you?" Alexai demanded.
"Because you're tied up, we're offering you something, and the alternative is we call the police? In case you haven't noticed," Jasper hissed, "My friend here is trying to be nice."
Their captive looked dubious. "What about the seeds?"
Maggie shrugged. "They're fake. Go ahead, Raj, you might as well give them to him." Raj scowled, but pulled the bag out of an inner pocket.
"OK, everyone," Henry said brightly. "We'll be heading out now. Go ahead, Raj." Raj continued to scowl, but inched out the door. "We'll be dropping this off with the police." He gestured to the gun in Maggie's hand. "They can check if it's registered, and if it is, you might want to go report it lost so you can get it back."
The man's expression suggested this was not the case. "OK, everyone else out. I'm going to untie him."
"What!?"
"We don't want him to report us."
When Henry was alone with the Tesla heir, he came over, cut the rope, and put his hand on the man's shoulder. "Sorry," he said, pinching a pressure point. "I also don't want you following us right away."
~~~~
They met in the pre-dawn blue light the next morning. Jasper grumbled, but accepted steaming coffee from Maggie's thermos. Henry was perky with some Yerba Mate.
They drove in silence to Gunpowder Falls State Park. As they crunched through the thin coating of snow, Jasper asked, "What if Alexai got here first?"
Maggie smiled. "Not likely. The coordinates on *his* map are for somewhere near Fort Meyers, Florida. We have *these*." She waved a thin cut-off strip of yellowed paper, then entered the numbers into the GPS she was holding.
They followed a trail through snow covered bushes until the numbers were close, then cut off-trail to a jumble of boulders. They all felt around crevices and hollows with chilled, reddening hands. Maggie gave a triumphant cry, and they pried up rocks until they could free the tin box she had found. They opened it gingerly, and found a small reel of film, much of it browned or blackened by years of exposure to the elements. Scrolling through it, they eventually found some almost identifiable pictures.
"Hah! It is porn!" Maggie cried.
"You're kidding." Jasper said. "Doesn't that look like Theodore Roosevelt? Would he have been an early porn star?" There was a pause as they thought about this.
"Would Edison have had blackmail photos?"
Maggie started laughing. "Well, so much for the treasure being still worth anything!" The laughter was infectious, and soon all three of them were collapsed on the cold ground, laughing their heads off, as the tension of the last few days was dispelled. They hugged and held each other. "And to think, Raj was going to blackmail *us* to get this."
"What shall we do with these?" Henry asked.
"How about we bring them home and, um, appreciate, them, then later come back here to bury then?" Jasper suggested.
"Agreed."
Together, arms around each other, they made their way back to the car as the sun crested the mountain and filled the valley with brilliant light.
~~~~
"Merry Christmas." "Merry Christmas." It was Christmas afternoon, the familial obligations fulfilled in the morning. Maggie came in and they sat around with mulled cider for a while, making small talk with Dean Bartlett.
Eventually they made an excuse to go upstairs, claiming to want iChat friends from college.
They threw a comforter and some pillows on the floor.
Maggie hung up some mistletoe.
They hugged, all three together, and tried a threeway kiss, noses in the way, but lips mingling and tongues reaching out to meet in the middle. It was possible to lose track of whose tongue was whose, a heady, confusing muddle of sensual warmth.
Maggie turned to Henry and knelt over his lap. Maggie's skirt rode up, and she pressed against Henry's hardness through only a layer of silk panties over his pants fabric. She bit her lip and ground against him. She untied his drawstring and was not surprised to discover that he had gone commando. She shimmied his pants down enough to have only her underwear in between them. She felt dripping wet and expandingly large. She leaned over to kiss Henry, her hips moving constantly, as if of their own volition. Jasper unbuttoned and stroked himself. He was a little stunned. It was like being in a live porno with, like, his friends. Right there. They looked so hot together. He had expected to feel jealous, but they looked so good together, felt so right. And then he felt Henry's hand on his cock, then beckoning him closer, until he was within reach of Henry's mouth, warm and wet.
Maggie had unbuttoned her blouse now. She raised her hips a little and slid her panties over to touch, vulva to penis, sliding dangerously close. Henry fumbled for his backpack. Condoms. After a little fuss, they got the condom on, and Maggie slid onto the tip of Henry's cock. She went slowly, appreciating every inch of progress, of new territory, the brush of cock up the rippled walls of her vagina. She felt she must be gushing wetness around his prick. Finally she reached the hilt and started to ride, slowly at first, then building in speed, aiming him at her most sensitive spot, rocking pressure on and off of it. Henry's sucking synchronized to his thrusts. She felt herself filling up like a chalice, almost to overflowing. She reached around to finger Jasper's butt, and came, crying out and thrashing, coming what seemed to her like buckets. She was flooding and squeezing Henry, pushing him over the top as well.
There were a few minutes of exhausted silence. Maggie roused herself to go in the bathroom and rinse off.
Henry pulled himself up on his elbow and said to Jasper, "I want you to fuck me."
Jasper's jaw dropped. "You're a bottom?"
"I don't know. This shaman I met told me that the experience of being penetrated was one that should be experienced to fully understand the universe. Too many men don't get in touch with this side of themselves."
Jasper shrugged. "Okay. I always just did it because it feels good."
"Yeah, he may have said something about that too." Henry grinned. Maggie stood in the doorway, smiling at them.
Henry stacked up the pillows and leaned over them, ass in the air. Jasper fished for the condoms, suited up, slicked up, and positioned himself behind Henry. "Okay, you lean back onto me as much as you're ready for. Tense your muscles, relax them, then push back a little bit. If it hurts, you can go slower, or we can use more lube." He lubed up a finger and slipped it past the tight muscle, eliciting a moan and some rocking. After a minute, he substituted his cock.
Henry leaned back onto the snub nose of Jasper's manhood. As he tensed and released, he gripped the first half-inch of the cockhead. It took all of Jasper's effort not to buck forward and overwhelm him. The next couple of minutes were delicate torture, as Jasper attempted to stay still as the delicious warm hot tightness crept ever so slowly up his cock. Once over the rim of the glans, progress was quicker, until he was finally fully sheathed.
Hennry rocked back and forth experimentally. "Mm. Ok, you can move now." His erection was reviving with the full force of youth. Soon they were pistoning wildly, and Maggie had her 'back massager' on high. Henry was amazed at the intensity of sensation, the golden, tingling energy filling him, flowing forward into his cock.
When Jasper reached around to stroke him, it was almost more than he could bear. He rocked back and forth, from one excellent sensation to the other, in a cloud of bliss. There was a shared energy in the room, rising toward climax, in a feedback loop of knowing that they were sharing this, and seeing the reflection of it in each others gutteral noises. They hit the peak together, all three of them together, synchronized and focused and connected, gasping and convulsing and spurting. When it was over, they lay in each others arms.
"So, what are you two doing for summer break?" Henry asked.
"More of this?" Maggie hazarded hopefully.
"You think your parents will let us all share a tent again this year?" Jasper said with a grin. "This time we'll know what to do with it."
And visions of the future danced in their heads...
__________________________________________________________________________________________
Fact check:
Edison did have an employee who died of cancer brought on by the flueroscope experiments, Clarence Dally of West Orange, NJ. I don't know whether or not he had a wife, and didn't want to bring anyone real (other than Edison and Tesla) into the story.
Edison did renege on paying Tesla a reward offered for solving an engineering problem they were facing. I don't know Tesla's relatives, and hopefully haven't offended them, either.
I don't think Edison had any blackmail material, though. :-)