I have a Guilty Pleasure that I rarely indulge in, but after doing so once, I knew I could never turn back.

So when I give into it, I make certain that I am utterly alone, or am too entranced by something else (my violin, the ending effects of my nicotine patches, the dozing prior to sleep) to be noticed.

And then, simply, I take the leap.

I dive into my Mind Palace, winding through corridors and grand halls, past the Dungeon, and into the Catacombs, where all my secrets are hidden. The upper floors and rooms are all categories of collected data, trains of thought, and storage places for past cases and relevant facts and information gathered over the years through whatever media (like my experiments, for example). Some people have entire rooms, some cases have entire wings; it depends on the vitality of the case or person in comparison with whatever is fresh and in current priority.

There are, of course, skeletons in my Catacombs, and tombs for those skeletons. Some secrets I like to keep buried, repressed from myself or safely protected from others. (John made me watch a film called Inception, and from it, I have learned not to trust technology of the future, nor other people, because they might try to destroy or unlock my Mind Palace, and this is something I cannot allow to ever occur.)

In these Catacombs, I have a special chamber I like to lock myself in for periods at a time. This is my Imagination. It is vast and miniscule in equal parts; where it lacks in creativity, it makes up for in probability. It is like a power source for my deductions: it widens the range of perception and chance to help me narrow down the field to the Most Likely and the Most Definitely due to detail.

But it has other uses as well.

When I indulge in my Guilty Pleasure, this special chamber in my Catacombs beneath my Mind Palace become a sort of realm where I am free to live out any little fantasy I wish. Anything at all; probable, impossible, or in between. It is mine to play with and discover, and mine to dream.

When I dive this deeply into my thought process, it is like lucid dreaming for other people. I control all, and it feels relatively realistic, in that hazy way. It is amplified by drugs (opiates, cocaine, or high doses of caffeine and nicotine mixed together), but even without them, I can manage some feeling behind them. Enough that I am left tingling physically, and I can sigh with relief as all those pleasant chemicals are released in my brain: serotonin, norepinephrine, dopamine, oxytocin (something sociopaths are said not to generate, and yet here I am). It fills me with all the right things (joy, light adrenaline, etcetera), these images and vague sensations I create, and I can't help but to faintly smile when I bring them into being.

This Guilty Pleasure wasn't always something I had, something I did, something I used this portion of my brain for. It never occurred to me until relatively recently, and once I tried it, I became an addict. It's a peculiar and unhealthy indulgence, this pleasure, and that is why I deem it a guilty one.

Because, in this empty, moldable space in the crevasses of my mind, this is where I play out every single romantic fantasy I wish that involves my dear flatmate.

John would never approve of any of this. It began as an experiment, a little playful thought, almost a mockery, of all the things said about he and I by others. It was silly, and meant to be brief; but I quickly realized that I liked it. I enjoyed seeing John and I in this new light inside my mind. I took pleasure in exploring things I could try with Imaginary John, things the real John would never allow.

I try not to dwell on the why. Normally I would care about nothing except the why, but I can't afford to this time; too much is at stake. If I begin thinking about why I like these things, both intimate and sensual, both borderline platonic and heavily seen as romantic, then I might cross a line I dare not cross.

Because if I linger on all my reasoning behind picturing these things with John, I might become unstable, distracted. I could lose sight of the cases. I could become divorced from my work as a whole. I could accidentally blur the lines between Fantasy and Reality, risking my friendship with the real John. Everything could spiral out of control, and all because I stopped to foolishly think about why I fancy thinking, on occasion, of make-believe scenarios in which John and I are lovers.

(Because love is dangerous. Love is unkind. Love is messy. Love is destruction and union, and love is unscientific because it is irrational, in most instances, and utterly nonsensical in some others. Rarely does it have rhyme and reason, and even then, those reasons are so specific to the person experiencing it that it cannot be accounted for as a Sample of Population, and therefore isn't able to be recorded. I despise love for this reason.)

So there it is, in a rather elaborate nutshell: whenever I please, and whenever it is convenient, I slip into a semi-trance and experience any little thing I desire. And John is the hub of it all.

#

In one fantasy, I have a timeline full of events. Thus far, it includes John and I meeting as we had, but instead of declining his (non)advances, I consented to them. We ate together, chatted, made witty remarks, laughed. The case wasn't happening; I made it already solved, and we were celebrating our victory with a meal that wasn't as rushed as the Chinese we had afterward. We were at Angelo's, and he brought a candle to our table to make it more romantic, and John was shy but kind as always, and I made sure to be just as polite and focused on him as he was on me.

Following that basis, the fantasy continued to evolve. Small circumstances in which I reached for John's hand and grasped it in mine, fingers playing with the muscles in his hands, feeling the bones gently, and rubbing over the tendons. Memorizing his fingerprints with my own, sensory and analytical and chaste and with delicate care. And John, once I finished studying his hands, in turn took mine and inspected them, massaged them, and held them, and pressed his mouth to them, not quite a kiss.

And following that, I have a small string of events of stolen kisses in alleyways, behind policemen's backs, and in taxi cabs. Hidden moments of lips on lips, lips on hair, lips on knuckles, lips on necks, and lips on cheeks and jaws, in any place I knew we could get away with it.

Leading up with all of that, I let this particular fantasy build and build with each revisit to it until John and I were entangling our bodies for the first time, unsure and careful and infatuated and inspired. I worshiped his body, and he, in turn, was fascinated with mine, and at some point, it wasn't sex, wasn't "lovemaking," wasn't anything but keen interest in how the other's body was formed. Arousal gone, awe piqued, and trust at its fullest. I prefer this bit to sex, anyhow; it's less animalistic and more scientific. A study of skin, an experiment in texture and taste, and more often than not, when I picture these moments in this timeline, it is not sex with orgasms or keen pleasure, but instead a show of affection and appreciation and trust.

And in the end of this fantasy (where I currently have it left off), John and I are an item but not a couple, because we are an item in the Real World from my Mind Palace anyhow, except in this version, we share a bed and more contact on a daily basis.

#

In another fantasy of mine, I allude to an instance in which John and I meet accidentally and not through a third party. This fantasy is special, because in it, John and I do not have the same dynamic we do in the Real World. We are not the push-and-pull, yin-and-yan we are normally; instead, we are less of a balanced contrast and instead are more alike, and therefore, not as close.

Now, I like this one because it gives me a feeling for how my life would be without John the way he is to me. It's a world I use to remind myself, on occasion, why it is so essential that I never lose John as a friend in the Real World, because in this fantasy, I hardly know him, and we are colleagues, true ones, ones that do not live together, but are co-workers nonetheless. Friendly, but not friends. Allies, but not inseparable. Acquaintances, I suppose, but a bit more familiar than that, because we are on the same team, working toward the same goal, and if convenient, we do, in this fantasy, share a lunch or cup of coffee together.

This fantasy is one I don't indulge in unless I have angered John somehow in the Real World and require a good lashing for it. A personal lashing I give myself. I use this fantasy to say, 'Sherlock, do not be a fool. Make it up to him somehow, or else he will become how he is in this fantasy.'

And I don't want that. Because this fantasy is too simple, too empty, too boring. I don't like being distant from John. It's too close to how I lived before I met him, and in retrospect, I was nowhere near as content with my lifestyle then as I am now.

#

In yet another fantasy, John and I are married. Legally wed, rings and all. Domesticated. We have an adopted child, Caleb Hamish Watson-Holmes, whom John affectionately calls, 'Cale,' and whom I respectfully call, 'son.' In my fantasy he is usually a young boy, aged ten years or younger, and more often than not, I keep his hair brown and his eyes green, with or without scattered beauty marks, and always with pale skin like mine, but kind eyes like John's.

In this imaginary situation, I am a detective, a normal, dull one, and John is a doctor, a normal, dull surgeon. He never went to war, and I never used my abilities selfishly. I never used drugs, never smoked, and John never drinks. We are predictable, plain, and homey. We love our child, and our child loves us, and when he is bullied for having homosexual parents, he punches the lights out of his bullies, and when he is given detention for it, I argue against it, because I also have the mind of a lawyer.

And in it, Caleb is bright, nearly as bright as me, and generous, nearly as much as John. And he is my successor, and John's, because he was raised to be the best of both of us. He is clever enough to study hard and graduate University by age seventeen, if I let him be old enough in the idea, and he is a regular genius, but not quite of my eccentric nature.

I like this fantasy because it is pathetically overdone and human. And sometimes, I wish for normalcy like this. There are rare moments were I feel vulnerable enough, insecure enough, to actually want a life like this. So I live it out here, in the changing room of my Mind Palace, and I silently pray there is a child in the world one day who is like Caleb, because the world would benefit from someone who is perfectly all the best (and barely any of the bad) parts of John and I combined.

#

If I am in the mood, sometimes I will give way to a more carnal, basic human urge, and I will fantasize sex between John and I.

I have never thought much about sex, nor cared for it. As always, sex has been a good motivator for revenge/jealousy in crime, more often than not in cases of infidelity and rape surrounding homicide. And sex makes one's mind temporarily useless, which is something that sickens me. But with John…

Well, let's simply say that I would make an exception in my distaste for sex when it comes to John.

I am emotionally attached enough to John to not feel as though the sex would be meaningless. Sex in which one person feels used and abandoned afterward is haunting. Irene Adler offered herself in such a way; lustful for me, asking for a one-night stand sort of ordeal in which she could fulfill some fantasy and use my body for her pleasure. There were some feelings attached, I know, but none I returned the way she meant them. She interested me because she was moderately clever and a schemer who could lead me closer to Moriarty, but other than that, sex with her would have been pointless and unsatisfying.

Sex with anyone, for me, would be like going through the motions, and I doubt I could even become aroused, and if I somehow did, I doubt I could maintain it, or climax. For this reason, this disinterest in procreation, I slapped the label of 'asexuality' on myself.

However.

There is much tension I feel when I am in too close proximity to John, and urges flare up every now and again in the form of whispered, half-baked ideas. Things like, 'touch him,' 'kiss him,' 'feel his hair,' 'sense his warmth;' among other things. They have come and gone through the forefront of my mind many times since the night he was captured by the smugglers during the case John wrote as, The Blind Banker, because something about him in danger triggered it within me, a new value for his life.

And so, here, in the expanse of this strictly sexual string of fantasies, I elaborate on those ideas, fully baking them into semi-being.

I imagine kissing John, open-mouthed, tongue overlapping tongue, lips swollen and mouths wet and jaws aching from all the pressure and heat and kissing kissing kissing, and my erection tight and nearly painful in my trousers, my hips instinctively gyrating against John's thigh or hipbone or his own clothed erection, and following that, all of the eager, hungry tearing of clothes and nipping and sucking of skin, lower and lower and lower, until one of us has the other's length in our mouths, slipped past the lips and teeth and gulping down the throat.

Sometimes I go further than that. There are fingers in entrances, mine or his, it depends on my mood, and there is thrusting and writhing and gasping and moaning followed by shrieks of pleasure as the prostrate gland is struck and rubbed and thoroughly examined until the one being teased comes violently and deliciously timed.

And then, sometimes, I feel John inside of me, or I take the role and am inside of him, and the joining of us is blissful and brinking on painful all at once, lubrication slippery, and members sliding in and out with or without condoms (I am not always precise with that; I get too lost in the fantasy to remember that they are needed and/or preferred during the act).

(And during those fantasies, I internally vibrate with the craving, feel my nerves hum with the secret wish, and I feel bitterly chilled and ashamed afterward, because sometimes the mental stimuli is enough to trigger physical effects, and I am left with the tedious need to change pants.)

The sessions of these purely sexual acts range from the minor to the graphic, and there is always as much touching as possible. Body alignments and particular positions and placements to make it so I can kiss John through it all, or hold him from behind, or have our bodies touch almost entirely from head to toe, or have him hold me up against a wall, my limbs clinging to him, his hands on my rear end.

Anything. I imagine anything that suits my fancy, because while I don't usually go straight for these more traditional concepts for 'fantasies,' I do like them on occasion, late into the night, because of some triggering event from the Real World or something or another that led me to such a risqué train of thought.

But almost in every one of these physical pleasure fantasies, there is something extra. Never dirty-talk; that is below me, and John is too polite for it. No, none of that. Instead, we are being bonded emotionally as well as physically, and sometimes, when I am lost in these moments…

I imagine us crying out the other's name upon orgasm, or us whispering an, "I love you," to the other post-orgasm.

And, somehow, it's these little slip-ups of my own mind that make me feel all the more guilty for having the fantasy in the first place.

#

And finally, there are the fantasies in which I do something to make John not awed by me, not proud of me, but happy because of me.

I don't think I have ever made him truly happy, not in the Real World. But in my Mind Palace, I am able to do more than make him smile or laugh; I am able to do more than take away his loneliness, and in some ways, do more than shower him with affection or admiration like his fleeting girlfriends.

Instead, I am able to do something in the fantasy in which John will look at me, cheeks pink or eyes soft or both, and his mouth speechless and his heart swelling visibly by the way he breathes in so slowly.

I make him happy to know me, to be my friend, to have me as a flatmate.

Sometimes I accomplish this by thinking of bringing him breakfast in bed when he is sick. Once, I made it so I reached this goal by massaging his back of all the tension he held in his sinews, and was able to work out every last worry, stress, and pain until he was utterly lax and asleep under my ministrations. And another couple of times, I made him happy by buying him something he wanted but would never spend the money on himself for, and something that, naturally, only I would know to buy for him because his girlfriends are unobservant and too short-lasting to get to know him well enough to buy it for him.

In these fantasies, I am usually thinking of ideas on how to keep John by my side in the Real World. However, I never act on any of them, save for the one time I did think to prepare tea for him in the afternoon after a long day of doing errands for me.

But I wish I could do these things. I wish I could make John happy. No one has ever been happy because of me, and if I were to choose anyone, I would want John to be the first and only. But when I think about it, truly and deeply think on it…

I know that I could never do any of these things.

John would think it too intimate. I might scare him off. He would see it as me making a move on him, not being the supportive and caring friend I want to come off being, because, as a habit, I am not this sort of person. I would never willingly (or unwillingly by gunpoint) perform a selfless act for someone else. I would never be considerate or touchy-feely enough to give someone – even John, my best friend – a back massage. I would never make someone a meal, be it soup or a breakfast or anything. I would not take care of someone. I would not waste my money on someone.

Because, in Reality, I am Sherlock Holmes, He Who Only Cares About Himself. And John knows that. Everyone knows that. I think too logically, and logically, it would be illogical to do something solely for the purpose of "making another contented in some way."

Normal people might do it, but they gain nothing from it, and I am all about purpose and gain. It's how criminals work, and even though I am not a criminal, I keep my mind working the way theirs do, because it is the only way to catch them.

So, in the end, I usually push off these fantasies to the side and never revisit them, because I would never actually carry one out, and John would never understand or allow it. He would think I was up to something suspicious, something secretly unkind and out for my own interests.

Because, sadly, even John wouldn't believe that I care about him enough to want to see him made happy by something I've done especially for him.

#

And there it is. Those are my fantasies, those are all my Guilty Pleasures: imaginary moments that I can never actually share with my dear doctor. John Watson will never be made aware of these imaginings of mine, and I will never see a day in which they are realized.

So in the vaults of my Mind Palace they will stay, buried along with my skeleton-secrets, under the floors and in the walls and down in chambers so dark and deep that no one will ever find them, save for me, when I want them.

#

Tonight, I think I will imagine a specific Guilty Pleasure in which I come to John. I will come to him in the middle of the night, find him asleep in my bed, and I will hang my coat up on the back of the door and I will watch him a short while, perhaps touch his face ever so gently, and brush the hair from his forehead.

And I will climb into bed with him, wrap my arms around him, feel the breath from his nose on my chest, the tickle of his fringe under my chin, and I will close my eyes and dream with him.

Because tonight, I am dead. I have been dead for a while by now, and John has finally made himself return to the flat, our flat, and he has, in some drunken stupor born of depression and too many drinks with his sister, he climbed into my bed, inhale the lingering fragments of my scent, and fell asleep with a tear or two leaking from the corners of his eyes, slipping over the bridge of his nose and falling to the pillow as he curls onto his side.

In Real Time, this is mostly true. I know John is depressed. I know it is my doing. I know I have hurt him, have left him behind, and I know that I had to leave in order to save his life.

I had to take the Fall, the dive from the edge, and not into the safe haven of my mind. Instead, I had to fake my death, and break the hearts of the few scattered souls in London who actually care that I am gone.

With this fantasy, I will myself not to cry outwardly, because I miss John so. I ache for his presence, his company, his choppy typing with his two or three fingers, and his blogging of my part in his life. I miss having him tag along with me, because I am lonely, I realize. I am lonely as I track down the web of criminals and assassins and hackers under Moriarty's employ and influence, and I understand, finally, how much I need John's help and instinctual protection.

So I imagine a moment where I return to him, feel him stir awake in my grasp, see me in the dim moonlight streaming from the parted curtains of my bedroom window, and see his face shatter and cry over me, his hands clinging to my person.

I fashion a sort of dialogue, something along the lines of, "I'm sorry…" and "You're alive!" and "Thank you for this one miracle," and "I owe you so much, too," and feather-light kisses like little exclamation points, followed by little gasps of air and sobs like little ellipses. And then, of course, a simple statement of our names. "Sherlock." "John."

And it would be enough, if I could have that. Just a moment, just a glimpse. An embrace in the shroud of night's blackness, a muttered apology, an acceptance, a discovery of a lie. A lie I had to make to preserve his life, but a lie I could gently undo by at least easing his pain, even if by merely a smidge.

Sighing, I wind my way out of my Mind Palace and open my eyes, lashes fluttering slowly. They are damp, but there are no tear trails on my face.

And tonight, I finally allow myself to lift the denial for a fraction of a moment to know, as a fact, that I am in love with John Watson, and that the fantasies may one day not be enough.

But I will cross that bridge when I come to it. For now, I have bigger, more dastardly fish to fry, the least dangerous of which being the fact that I have crossed that forbidden line I set for myself by growing a metaphorical heart.