When it's wrong…
It hurts like a stab to the eye, just as sharp and cruel, and it makes John remember how they say, "Sex can ruin a friendship." Because there are still impromptu violin concerts at four in the morning, and there are still days and days of silence, and still stupid fights over inappropriate body parts in the kitchen, or inappropriate behavior towards others, but now the fights hurt on a whole new level. The flat is too small to contain them. A fight it means stepping gingerly around one another in the kitchen when the smell of the other person is as familiar as one's own bed sheets. As familiar, because your bed sheets do smell of the other person and of both of you together. And the smell makes you want to bury your face in their neck and ignore it all and go back to bed, but that's not possible. When you're lovers it's impossible not to take it personally.
It's not that they're fighting right now, it's just…wrong somehow. Sherlock is distracted, unable to relax, leaping from bed at inappropriate moments like a spooked deer. He shoves John away, resisting even a touch in a way that is probably just frustration but feels, to John, like disgust. And he won't talk about it. Something is eluding him and he isn't sharing with John for John to help, and that too feels like rejection.
When they were friends, just friends, John might be hurt, but he could ignore it, ignore Sherlock. But as a lover, he can't ignore the way Sherlock looks or the way it makes him feel. John wants so much he can taste it, Sherlock's skin, on his tongue.
There is banging about in the bedroom—the bedroom they're not sharing—and then the sound of the bath being filled and sometime later more banging over the sound of the water running out. Oh, this is too much: Sherlock flouncing out of the bath with just the blue dressing gown flapping about him. Once it might have just been an annoying thing from an annoying flatmate with no idea of boundaries, but now it feels like Sherlock's being deliberately cruel.
Sherlock strides over to the chair, forcing John to look up at his naked glory. He's hard. His cock hangs in front of John's face, but he still won't say anything, won't ask.
John decides for the both of them, wraps his mouth around Sherlock's cock and is rewarded by a low groan in that velvet voice. Sherlock tastes and smells of soap and water, but as John presses his face in, takes more of Sherlock's penis down his throat until his nose is almost buried in the coarse, dark hairs at Sherlock's groin, he can smell the scent of musk and sweat growing with Sherlock's arousal.
Sherlock slides his fingers into John's hair and pulls roughly. It's hardly romantic, but John's not complaining. He relaxes his jaw and tilts his head so that Sherlock can thrust harder. There's no finesse. It doesn't matter.
Sherlock holds his breath, working towards his orgasm, seeking it as if it were a solution to a complicated puzzle. When he can't hold his breath anymore, he exhales in a rough gasp, then sucks in more air and holds it in until again he must breathe, again and again. There's one last moan and a second later, John tastes Sherlock's semen in his mouth. It's thick and Sherlock's hips jerk several times as he pulses, his orgasm made stronger by denial. John wonders if that will be all, if Sherlock will return to whatever has been pulling him away. But Sherlock straddles him instead: one knee on the seat, pressed against John's thigh, the other resting on the edge of the chair. It's an awkward fit for two grown men. It always has been.
Again, with no words, Sherlock pulls John's hands to his hips, to his buttocks, invites John to touch him, explore him. John pulls Sherlock's cheeks apart, massages their firmness, and when he touches, finds that Sherlock is open and slicked.
"He prepared himself for me," John thinks fuzzily. "In the bathtub, in the bathroom, he was preparing himself for my pleasure as well as his." John struggles to shove his own pajama bottoms down. On cue, Sherlock pulls a bottle of lubricant from the pocket of his dressing gown and slicks up John's cock. A few awkward thrusts and they both realize the futility of the position. John grips Sherlock's hips and lifts him bodily to the floor. Nothing romantic, nothing gentle, but hasn't that always been their way? Spontaneous, reckless, dangerous. "And here we are," John thinks as he thrusts hard and fast into Sherlock's ready body.
Sherlock's flushed and panting, and it's probably too intense to be pleasurable for him. John's knees hurt where they're rubbing on the carpet and he's quite certain that they're ruining Sherlock's dressing gown. He can still taste Sherlock in his mouth. He's chasing his own orgasm now, like chasing a suspect, running after Sherlock. Sherlock shifts. He has one leg draped over John's hip. The other foot presses into the floor to allow him to push back, to meet John's thrusts with his own. It changes John's angle, creating new sensation and John's so close now. He wants to kiss Sherlock's open mouth. He wants to say, "Where are you? Come back to me. I'm here for you, always," but he doesn't.
Sherlock reaches up to touch John's mouth with his fingers, to let John suck on them. "John," he whispers, "Please, I—," and John comes with one last hard thrust of his hips. He falls across Sherlock and only moves when Sherlock wriggles in discomfort.
They sit up. John pulls up his pajamas. Sherlock wraps himself back up in his dressing gown.
"John," he says again, "I…I don't know why you put up with me."
"Because…I love you, I suppose. In all your madness and your brilliance," John replies.
Because, when it's good, he doesn't say, it's better than anything I've ever known.