The first few chapters of this story take place after the events of "Oddly Detached" and before "Mary". For the record, I've been married for 33 years, and holding hands with my husband never gets old.
000
"Oh, I'll tell you something
I think you'll understand
When I say that something
I want to hold your hand."
Lennon/McCartney
000
She sat across from him at the table and did not know where to look. She could not remember ever being this nervous before in her life. But sitting in Angelo's on their very first date, Mary Morstan was about as far from calm as she could be. After insulting John Watson by obviously avoiding him for over a year, how could she now make him understand how very sorry she was for the loss of time, and how very interested she was in getting to know him? Very, most intensely, interested.
The past two weeks had been the most exciting time of her life, as she trailed behind John and his detective friend watching them solve the ten-year-old mystery of her father's disappearance. She had learned that her father had been murdered, and the murderers had been caught; but more importantly, she had learned that all of the vicious gossip in the office about Dr Watson had been completely wrong. The more she got to know about the real John Watson, the more she wanted to know. She was sure he was the most extraordinary person she'd ever met.
"Not running away from me anymore then?" he had asked her that day in the office over lunch. He had been amused—she had been embarrassed. And he had been amazed to learn that he had a reputation at work as a thoroughgoing rake. He had asked her out to dinner—she had eagerly accepted. He had picked her up at eight. And here she sat feeling like a school-girl with a crush, suddenly unable to look him in the face without blushing. Her eyes lit instead on his hands, holding the menu.
His hands. She had seen those hands gently soothe frightened toddlers and elderly patients alike at the clinic over the past year. She had seen him save lives with those healing hands; bind up wounds, set bones, suture torn flesh. She had known he was an army doctor in a previous life; it had not occurred to her that he had been both a skilled surgeon and an equally skilled sniper. How many people, she wondered, owed their lives to this man's hands? How many lives had those hands taken? Oddly enough, she felt certain that she had fallen in love with John Watson during the wild chase on the Thames in a fishing yacht, when he had saved all their lives with an impossible shot of his service weapon, held in steady and competent hands.
"I'll have my usual," John said to Angelo cheerfully, handing over the menu.
"Um," Mary hedged. She had not once glanced at her menu, having been distracted by her thoughts. "I'll have what John's having."
Angelo looked disapproving, but whisked away to put in their orders. He had made it clear when he showed them to their table that he thought Sherlock Holmes should have been sitting in her chair. Mary hid a smile. Half of London seemed to believe that John was gay and Sherlock's boyfriend. The other half held the opinion that John was an incorrigible womanizer, fully living up to his army-given nickname of "Three Continents Watson." The truth, she was finding, was ever so much deeper, so much more complicated, so much more interesting than any rumour.
And what would it be like, she mused as she sampled the wine, to hold John Watson's hand?
