There's a dark, furious storm on the horizon. Of course, the horizon is the rim of my glasses and the storm is just a tangle of riotous black curls. All the same, he is a storm of a boy.
I don't favour this age much, nor this time and least of all this place. There's no such thing as growing up, you just grow out of old things. Like fashion trends or internet crazes. Your school years aren't your best years, not by a long stretch. The college years aren't much better, mind you.
I'm seventeen and I'm just stuck here until next autumn. I'm a librarian, a college version of one, which is basically code for' likes to read books amongst people that judge you for reading books'. I thought I might as well get a title and kitsch little badge out of it. Being the social leper that is the college librarian, in this college; I figured that if I was going to Hell, I would go down kicking, screaming and swinging.
The whole premeditated hell of college is just regimented torture. You are taught to fix yourself to a set of standards whilst learning to break in, breakup, break out or break down. Carrying a bag that's full of books for 5 days a week, and pretending that you're interested eighty percent of the time, becomes an art after a while. A boring, laborious art, which you can't frame but you can still appreciate from a distance.
The most artistic piece in this gallery of statistics and distress always stands like a marble statue in a blazer. His smile is as rigid as his poise, but he is still art. He has the kind of beauty that even a scientist, like I, could see. His name is Sherlock Holmes.
I wouldn't quite have labelled it as attraction. It wasn't attraction, well, not to me. Of a sort, I supposed, but, by definition, no. It was definitely not a sexual attraction to begin with. It was more that he was something that caught my interest, like a diamond to a jewel thief, and I somehow caught him catching me.
We didn't even talk to each other. We spoke sometimes, out of social anxiety or expectancy, but we didn't talk. Talking displays a level of interest between the participants, I believe, even if it's phatic; it shows that both parties are at least trying. Speaking is heartless and contractual; a simple transaction of something that one party feels has to be said. It's not like talking. Speaking, I'd assumed, was right up Sherlock's street. And given my studious, 'college-watcher' impression of Sherlock, I'd imagined that to be a one-way street.
This week was much the same as any other, weeks became months and months slowly became the year, nothing ever really differed. Aside of one week, the third week into the start of my second year, that week was different. On the Monday of that week, out of the blue, he came over to me and started to talk. Sherlock talked to me, almost spontaneously, about books.
Before that Monday, I had liked to think that I was fairly smart, intelligent even, I knew what I did and I knew it well. I entertained the idea, whenever possible, that my mind was as sharp as the frame of my unforgivingly sharp glasses. It was just that, all of a sudden, I couldn't construct a cohesive sentence about books to save my life. He'd caught me off-guard about books. Evidently, the title of 'librarian' wasn't one that I was living up to.
He had smiled at me over the horrific, 'education-patented', plastic-rimmed desk, flashing his teeth with arrogance. Sherlock was sickeningly supercilious, even by appearance, but I rarely noticed. For years, I didn't even pay attention to his tempestuous existence. For most of my school and college life, I knew his name and I'd see his face sometimes but he was never anything to me.
"I am fortune's fool." Sherlock whispered. He had uttered his whisper with charm and a practised smile. I wasn't paying the slightest bit of attention. I was engrossed in the book that had fallen slack in my hands, but I wasn't reading it, I was far too preoccupied listening to the first sentence he'd spoken to me in years and contemplating the feel of his breath on my skin.
"Uhm-" It wasn't a word, it was barely a syllable. I'm still not even sure whatever I had uttered even qualified as a phoneme. It just sounded unintelligent and distracted. The quantity of my mumbling that was distracted was at least true.
"I am fortune's fool." He was a little more pronounced the second time, having cut the playful edge to his request. Why was he even in the library? For the majority of any student's time spent at college, very very little of it was spent in the library, and even then it was by a minority of students. Sherlock wasn't one of those students you'd expect to find in the library, unless he was to turn into a bat and fly up into the non-existent rafters.
"I'm sorry, what?" My mouth had taken on a fantastic, inebriated quality. I slurred my shambles of a question with the same grace that I'd dropped the novel in my hands.
"I, John, am fortune's fool." Sherlock literally spelled out what he spoke. There was a small redemption in the fact that I wasn't paying enough heart to the confusion that fell upon us to let it take control of my senses. My scientific mind was still stuck between why Sherlock was in the library and why he was here, talking to me. I had the brain for equations but I preferred science and the anatomy.
"Romeo and Juliet?" I questioned more than stated. I felt like I was displaying an obvious conclusion with typical teenage wariness. My mind clicked together slowly, making me consciously aware to everything I was saying.
"The author, please, John?" His words slid from between Sherlock's smile with cocky, self-appreciatory ease. "I'm not pushing you too hard, am I, Librarian?" He was the kind of person who you couldn't ever think of as caring, aside of for himself. Who did he think he was?
Just because I appreciated his beauty, there was no obligation to like his personality.
He held an obvious superiority complex, as well as a passion for a good, old-fashioned power-play. Sherlock Holmes was genuinely byzantine and well known to be hurtful, he was both full of himself and simultaneously hollow, but that didn't matter because he had a heart. He had it in a glass jar in his room, in the bottom of a cupboard, underneath discarded sheets of violin scripture and scraps of chemical equations. He stood taller than I did, but not by far; the blazer painted his skin a snug and complimentary black, just as the curls crowning his genius head did. Both did a lot to add to his blade-like figure.
"William Shakespeare, Sherlock." There was something close to confidence growing in my voice. My throat was betraying me as per usual. The bite behind my words let slip rather obviously that I had taken umbrage to Sherlock's particular term of endearment. There were lines of hair in front of my eyes, masking the potent mixture of hurt and elation they held. The errant strands of my sand-coloured hair were moved by a smooth thumb that brushed from my forehead, around my jaw, and down to my chin. His hands were cold.
"Much appreciated, 'John H Watson'." Even though he knew my name, Sherlock proceeded to read my hideous and embarrassing name badge before uncertainly reading it back to me. "Thank you kindly." He grinned like a cat when he pushed my glasses back up to the bridge of my nose.
"No talking in the library, please, Mr Holmes. Thank you very much." My stomach twisted at the disgustingly cliché comment that I'd muttered. I wanted to become a doctor and that was as good as my acute brain could muster to combat his gloriously patronising genius.
Sherlock was a monster of sorts, carelessly destroying me with a swipe of his thumb and a few arrogant words. I was no less a monster, however, because I let him do it.
Without so much as a goodbye, Sherlock had gone. Although the mere idea that I'd expected a 'goodbye' all of a sudden, purely because we had talked and not simply spoken, was farcical.
The sound of clipped footsteps fell against the narrowed sound in the library. The serene, thick silence in my home from home was astonishing, particularly for a room with so few books; a third of what you'd expect in a normal college library. I picked up my book from where it was clutched between my feet. I'd lost my page.
"Goodbye." A brash and optimistic voice announced to me. I was besotted with my fallen, paperback love. Sherlock had startled me with his sudden reappearance and his arrow to the heart of peace and quiet. I caught sight of his lean, pale hand, brandishing outstretched fingers in an attempt to signal his departure.
I didn't have any more words for Sherlock Holmes for the rest of the third Monday of my second year at college. Sadly, words were a real struggle for the rest of that day, regardless of who they were directed to. I was preoccupied by thinking, by making Sherlock into an anatomy of his own that I then persisted in dissecting.
I worked off what I already knew of the 'man' and pieced that together with the 'myth' to create the 'legend' of the youngest Holmes brother. I only succeeded in creating a headache for myself that verged on a migraine and, subsequently, a reasonable excuse to omit my attendance at my Chemistry lecture.
I knew that Sherlock was the boy with no heart. He was not known around the college to be attached to anybody, but he had had relationships in the past. I remembered when we were much younger, that we used to be quite close for a while but we grew apart. Friends do, we did, it was inevitable. He'd found different friends or gained a girlfriend, I'd found new friends and remained single; nonetheless, we still fell apart and slowly lost each other from the engrossing, tailored fairy-tale that was childhood. He was very intelligent, didn't keep the company of many that I could name, and he was pretty well off. He was the classic 'rich, pretty-boy' syndrome in a nutshell. Sherlock was the iconic poster-boy of what boys wanted to be and girls wanted to be with. He had enough charm to make Cupid sick, but he was never sleazy. He was almost affectionate at times; I remembered that side of him with fondness.
He was a good friend. But the facts still remained that Sherlock Holmes was the boy with no heart.
It was then that I found myself wondering, how do you love a boy with no heart?
As if I had only just begun to wonder this same old, worn-out conundrum. This particular question of mine was years old.